She strode along the front row of her audience, her cloak unfurling behind her.
‘Which one of us does not know that our enemy possesses cunning as well as force? We have all felt it, I most of all when their mercenaries caged me! So why have they let us hear so soon that the Bloat has fallen? They have let us hear because they are waiting for us to act. They know that we are growing strong, and they wish us to become no stronger before we strike. They are waiting for us to go to the ordinary people, and then they will put us down with fire and blood. Because we
She had them utterly. They stared at her and Stenwold stared with them.
‘For many days, five tendays at the very least, there must be no murmur of resistance. They cannot stand waiting with sword raised forever. Some time they must lower the blade, and all that while we will grow stronger. Our time will come, but we must be more cunning than the Wasps in order to triumph. Strength alone will not avail us. This is why Chyses was wise to enlist these foreigners in my rescue. Those Wasps that saw them and lived, and there were few,’ a murmur of grim satisfaction at that, and several glances at Tisamon, ‘will say that it was merely some foreigners rescuing foreign prisoners. You shall pass the same story around, wherever the Wasps might overhear. Let them begin to doubt themselves. Let them lower their guard. Do nothing to hone their suspicions. You now all understand why this is?’
And they did. Kymene was a rare speaker, Stenwold decided. She cast her words into a room of disparate and divided people, and each one was drawn closer by them, until they were all standing together before her, and she was speaking to each one and all of them.
He still held out little hope for the Mynan revolution, but without Kymene he would have held out no hope at all.
After she had finished rallying her troops and had sent them back to their followers and their resistance cells with her instructions, Kymene still was not finished. With no visible sign that she had been locked in a Wasp cell until the small hours of that morning, she came over and sat before Stenwold, motioning for the other foreigners to join them. They filtered in slowly: Cheerwell sitting beside her uncle with Totho a little behind her; Tynisa and Tisamon sitting close together on his other side, she still holding the sheathed blade her father had given her; Achaeos a little further back, shrouded in his robes like a sick man on a cold day.
‘You are a remarkable revolutionary,’ Stenwold said, putting aside the stolen Wasp papers only with reluctance. ‘I’ve known a few activists in my time, but we call them “chaotics” in Collegium, and that’s as much a testament to their own lack of cohesion as their aim in causing chaos. I can’t think of any who, in your shoes, would have counselled such patience.’
‘I am just a woman who loves her native city,’ Kymene said. ‘I remember your name, Master Stenwold Maker. One still hears it on occasion. You fought the Wasps during the conquest. Or you ran from them, depending on the story.’
‘A little of both, I fear.’
‘Well, all records are rewritten now. I know you came here to rescue two of your own, and that freeing me was incidental to your plans, but because you have given me back to my city, to work for its freedom again, I owe you more than I can ever pay. What I can afford to give, though, you have only to ask for.’
Stenwold nodded tiredly. ‘Well, it would be a lovely thing to shake hands and say we are replete with what we’ll need, but I fear we must indeed call on you for help. No great demands, but help enough.’
‘Ask,’ she prompted.
‘I need a messenger, the fastest you can get, to fly to Helleron.’
‘It shall be done.’
‘I’ll have prepared a message in an hour’s time that must be taken to a man of mine there.’ He saw the worried looks of his prote?ge?s and continued, ‘I’ll explain all in a moment, but first let’s deal with what we need. I assume a flier’s out of the question.’
She actually laughed at that. ‘To steal one from the Wasps would be to break my own instructions to my followers, and there are no fliers outside their hands. I can get you horses, though.’
Stenwold weighed that up. ‘We ourselves have an automotive stowed outside town. Can you get us enough horses for a change of mounts halfway, and I’ll trade you the machine?’
‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘Your line of credit extends a while yet, Stenwold Maker. What else? Ask.’
‘A man to go to the city of Tark and gather information. I can brief him in detail. I have no agents there, and now I need some eyes.’
‘Agreed, though you may have to pay him.’
‘Not a problem. In addition we’ll need supplies for our journey to Helleron, and a change of clothes for most of us wouldn’t go amiss.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Then I think we’ll be in shape to leave you.’ He looked at his hands, bunched into fists in his lap. ‘There is one more thing, though. Not something I ask of you, but something that you should know.’
She nodded, waiting silently, and he thought she guessed already at what he would say.
‘The Treaty of Iron is rusting fast,’ he said. ‘The Wasps have recovered their losses from the Twelve-Year War and they are now ready to march again. I’ve seen their staging point at Asta, and I’ve read their logistics reports, and their next assault could be underway in a matter of tendays. Westwards — this time the might of the Wasp Empire will be concentrated west of here, their power brought to bear against the cities of the Lowlands.’
‘It would be a logical step for them,’ she agreed.
‘You do not need me to tell you that, when our enemy most exerts his weight elsewhere, that is the time any revolution might have the best hope of success.’
She smiled thinly.‘I think we understand each other,’ she said. ‘My people are not ready yet to throw off the Wasps, but they will be. May that turn out to be to your people’s good, as it will be to mine. Our revolution
‘I have one thing to ask, if I may,’ said Salma. He had been fast asleep the last anyone was aware of him, and now he sat down beside them even as he spoke. Even in his prison-grimy tunic and breeches, he looked vastly more the young man they remembered. Even his smile was back.
‘Ask it,’ Kymene said.
‘There was another prisoner of the Wasps. A Butterfly-kinden named Grief in Chains?’ the Dragonfly pressed.
‘I know of her.’ Kymene looked at him oddly. ‘Last I heard she was some kind of pawn in their little games.’
‘She was passed into the hands of an officer named Aagen. Che overheard them discussing it,’ Salma said. ‘I need to know where she is. There’s one rescue left to make.’
‘Tynisa did better than she knew in bringing these to me,’ Stenwold remarked. He had his fellows gathered before him like a class in Collegium, even Tisamon. Only Achaeos kept himself distant, as usual. ‘Of course these are only a fragment, but I have grown used to reading fragments these last ten years.’
‘I thought they must be plans. Invasion plans, perhaps?’ said Tynisa. ‘I had a look at them, on the way back. I. . didn’t understand them.’
‘Nothing so dramatic. Just quartermasters’ notes, logistics, accounts. The minutiae of an army’s organizing,’ Stenwold told her. When she looked crestfallen, he added, ‘But dearer than gold for all that, for they tell me where the Wasps have gone to, and in what numbers, and also with what provisions and equipment. If you know how to read them, then they’re as good as an annotated map of their progress.’
‘And what is the news then?’ Tisamon asked. ‘The fighters here have been saying that a lot of troops have been moving through, going west. We’ve seen some of that.’
‘They don’t lie.’ Stenwold nodded. ‘And neither do these reports. Remember Asta? That was just a staging ground, and now I know where they were staging for. Look here.’ He turned one of the sheets over, and took a stylus from his toolbelt, dotting on the places as he named them. ‘Myna here. Asta here. This,’ a scribbly blur, ‘is the Darakyon. Helleron here, beyond it. Here now is the Dryclaw.’ A dotted line delineated the shifting boundaries of the desert. ‘And here. .’ For a second he was indeed back in the classrooms of the Great College. ‘Anyone. .?’
‘Tark, sir,’ Totho said.
