Empire in Black and Gold

‘And at any attempt by us, right now, to make a rescue, the Bloat would clench his fist on the city like he did a few years back, when they had that uprising in Maynes.’

‘So you can get to her, but your people would suffer for it,’ Stenwold said. ‘For a revolutionary that’s a surprisingly responsible attitude.’

The look Chyses flashed him was savage. ‘On my own, Master Beetle, I would set the fires myself, if the smoke from it would drive this city’s people onto the streets,’ he said flatly. ‘However, she would not approve. I myself will not bow my head to either governor or emperor, but for Kymene. .’

‘I understand. And I see where your logic goes.’ Stenwold felt a flash of dislike for Chyses but reminded himself, We need this man. ‘Mynan resistance, red flags everywhere, and the administration comes down on you like thunder. But if a pack of foreigners is loose in the palace freeing prisoners, including your Kymene. .’

‘We understand each other.’ Chyses took his hand off his sword hilt, and Stenwold only then realized that the young man had been holding it. He still looked as if he wanted to kill people. Here was a man whose reserves of humanity had been drained. They need this leader of theirs soon. Revolution would not happen overnight in Myna, Stenwold divined, but neither would invasion happen overnight across the Lowlands. Give me an audience with this woman, this undisputed leader of the resistance. . Have we stumbled onto the weapon I have been looking for?

‘And you would provide. .?’ he probed.

‘Maps of the sewers, guides to go along with you, a few extra swords without livery to betray them. Hermetic lamps, an autoclef. .’

‘You’re a well-equipped lot, aren’t you?’

‘Hokiak keeps us well supplied.’ Chyses was humourless. ‘Kymene is more important to us than any of it.’

‘Well.’ Stenwold settled back. ‘I will have to canvass the others but I suspect we won’t get a better offer.’ He glanced up then, because Tisamon was approaching, and the Mantis looked sterner than usual. Tynisa stood up even as he arrived. The tension between the two of them was still there, the unresolved history, so much so that Stenwold could almost taste it.

‘I have been talking to Khenice and those who remember the conquest, talking to them about your plans back then,’ Tisamon announced.

‘And?’ Stenwold asked.

‘They do accept that — that none of us betrayed them.’ And only the briefest catch in Tisamon’s voice revealed how recently he had been forced to accept it himself. ‘We have been comparing memories. Totho?’

The artificer started. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘Tell them about Helleron. About the man you met there.’

Tynisa opened her mouth as if to speak, looked from Tisamon to Totho. The artificer glanced at her but Tisamon was waiting for his answer, and the Mantis plainly intimidated him more than Tynisa could. So, in his halting way, Totho gave the plain facts of what had happened to Bolwyn, and how it was that a dead man had met them in Benevolence Square. He could not keep the disbelief from his voice, but he spoke only the facts as he had witnessed them.

Chyses and the other Mynans appeared as sceptical as he himself was, looking to Tisamon for some explanation.

‘We have named all those who knew about the original plan,’ Tisamon said, ‘many of whom died in the conquest. We can find no weak link, and yet our plan was betrayed. I think that there was a spy, indeed, but he might have been wearing the face of another.’

‘But that’s not possible,’ Khenice said from behind him. ‘We knew them all intimately and you couldn’t disguise-’

‘This man could,’ Tisamon interrupted her. ‘You heard the story: a perfect likeness.’

They still did not seem convinced, and Stenwold could not blame them. His own rational mind told him that such things were impossible. He had travelled more than most, though, and in stranger company, and had been forced, in the past, to accept that there were things in the world he could not account for.

‘Where is this leading you?’ he asked the Mantis.

‘We may not be secure,’ Tisamon warned. ‘Even now we could be compromised.’

Stenwold put his head in his hands. ‘Anything is possible, Tisamon, but I can’t leave Cheerwell and Salma in their hands. I have to try.’

‘Then let me scout the way first, that’s all I ask. I will go now, with whatever directions our friends here can give me. There will be no time yet for a trap to have been set for me.’

Chyses stood up. ‘And one more thing.’ He and Tisamon faced one another with a kind of generalized mutual dislike, two aggressive men confined in a small space. ‘You can’t trust us, is what you’re saying. We can’t trust you, either. When you do go to retrieve your friends, then Master Stenwold here will stay with us as surety. If you don’t get Kymene back for us, then it will go badly for him.’

Stenwold sighed. Their relationship with the Mynan resistance was getting rockier by the moment. He nodded in response to Tisamon’s enquiring look. Besides, let them think I’m just a fat old man. He might surprise them yet, if this went sour.

‘Give me your best directions,’ Tisamon instructed. ‘I care nothing for your plans and drawings.’ Chyses bristled at the tone, but nodded, went across the cellar for the maps.

When Tisamon departed, Tynisa followed him.

Problem after problem. Stenwold felt them weighing heavily on him.

‘Master Maker,’ Totho spoke at his elbow.

‘I’ve told you, you don’t need to-’ The moments of his last conversation with the youth came back to him and he grimaced. ‘Yes, Totho?’

‘We still don’t know how the Moth knew that Che and Salma were here, sir.’

Stenwold frowned at him. ‘What are you saying?’

‘That it could be a trap, like Tisamon says. A trap because he’s set one.’

Stenwold glanced about the cellar, trying to find Achaeos. The Moth was almost hidden in the shadows across the room, sitting on his own in a nook of crumbling masonry.

‘If he wanted to throw us to the Wasps, he has had ample chance. He even warned us of the ambush, before Asta. I cannot say precisely why he has linked his path to ours, Totho, but I feel sure it’s not to sell us out, or not to the Empire.’

‘But. . I still don’t trust him, Master Maker. I can’t. Everything about him. .’

Stenwold looked into the boy’s honest face, that was itself stamped with a halfbreed taint others despised on sight. Is this what they have taught you, by hating you? But that was not the reason, he realized. Totho and Achaeos had loathed one another from the moment that they met, and Stenwold had no idea why.

Achaeos himself was finding it every bit as difficult to disentangle his motives. He had heard enough of Chyses’ plans to find them fraught with danger. The time had come to ask himself whether he should even be here, let alone accompany the others on this lunatic’s assault. The Mynan people — these Soldier Beetle-kinden as they called themselves — he found hostile and ill-favoured, and he had no faith in them or in their captured leader.

And yet he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was not able simply to sever his ties and fly away. It was not that he was already so deep within this Empire that the Wasp-kinden seemed to have built for themselves. He had no doubt he could find enough shadows between here and Tharn to cover his retreat. It was because he had, in his moment of madness, gone begging to the Darakyon. He had sought and received its help, and that had been for a purpose. He had told the things of the forest that he would rescue Cheerwell Maker. And, whilst riding their power, he had told her that he was coming for her. He had not meant to bind himself so irrevocably to this course but, now he came to recollect, he felt that he was indeed wholly bound.

Magic was a force that pushed: this he knew from his youngest days. What it pushed upon was a fabric that underlay the world, a weave beyond the weave. Perhaps the fabric was not so strong now as it once was, since the Apt minded and their machines were wearing it threadbare. Still, it was there, and