‘The most successful
‘I used to be the only one, but now there are two more, which shows you how profitable the trade’s become.’
‘A milliner? You mean hats?’
Plius’s grin widened. ‘The way it was, you see, there weren’t any here, because Ants would wear helms or go bare-headed, but of course Sarn has a foreign quarter that covers almost a third of the city these days, and Sarn is half again as big as most Ant states. So there was a call for them, and business was good. And you know what? Now the Ants have started buying as well. Now they can see the foreigners having a good time, they themselves start to change how they dress and the like. They still all look like they’re ready for a funeral, but at least they’re not all dressed exactly the same.’ He turned his attention back to Scuto. ‘So what is it, then? What brings you back here for me?’
‘You know what,’ Scuto told him. ‘It’s happening, Plius. It’s time.’
‘Yes, well, I’ve heard the news.’ Plius spread his hands. ‘The Empire, which was your man Sten’s bedbug back in the old days, is away battering Tark even as we speak. Things may have changed in this city, but not that much. Nobody in Sarn’s going to lose sleep about the Tarkesh taking a few punches.’
‘We ain’t here to ask for Tark’s sake,’ Scuto said flatly. ‘It’s too late, anyway, by my reckoning. This lot’d never get there in time. Now I ain’t a diplomat or a pretty speaker, so I’ll put it plain as I can. Sure, you’ve heard about Tark. Well, soon enough you’ll hear about Helleron, too.’
‘What about Helleron?’
‘Soon enough,’ Scuto said again. ‘And probably Egel and Merro, once they’re done with Tark. Who knows where next? They’ll be marching up the coast towards Collegium, and from Helleron it’s not such a jump to take Etheryon. Or even Sarn.’
Che expected Plius to laugh this off, but something in Scuto’s tone, maybe his very lack of emphasis, had drawn the Ant’s face longer and longer. ‘You mean it, don’t you?’ Plius said. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Ain’t never been more,’ Scuto confirmed, sounding tired. ‘Look, Plius, I saw the start of it at Helleron, when they tried to get a thousand men by rail into Collegium to shake the place up. They’re not really after Tark. It’s the Lowlands they want. The whole of it, from Helleron all the way to Vek and the west coast. They’ve got more fighting men than five Ant cities put together, and a dozen slave-towns to pull more soldiers from. You know the Commonweal?’
‘Yes, I know the Commonweal,’ Plius said testily.
‘Well then you know they’ve spent the last dozen years carving out a great lump of that, and now they’re ready for us,’ said Scuto. Plius’s easygoing manner had evaporated entirely now, and he was looking a little stunned.
‘So what do you want?’ he asked, and Scuto replied, ‘We need to speak to the top, Plius. To the Royal Court.’
Plius let out a long breath. ‘If you’d asked that straight off I would have said you were mad. Now, though. I have some contacts. Not high-up contacts, but they’re there. I can try for an audience, but it’ll use up just about all my credit with them.’
‘What,’ Scuto said pointedly, ‘were you saving it for?’
On their arrival, Che’s first view of Sarn had been of a city split by the line of the rail track. As the automotive pulled in to the depot it had seemed to her that somehow — by Achaeos’s magic perhaps — there were two cities, as close as a shadow to each other, but each blind to its neighbour.
To the right was Sarn, the Ant city-state comprised of low, spartan buildings, pale stone and flat roofs without decoration. The people there moved briskly but without haste, and they did not stop to speak to one another or gather to converse. Everyone knew precisely where they were going. Soldiers were on hand to watch the automotive and make sure, she suspected, that only native Sarnesh alighted through the right-hand doors. Everything looked clean and orderly and the streets of the city ran at precise angles to one another, all in the shadow of the city wall.
To the left lay the foreigners’ quarter, which presented a totally different world. To start with, its limits had begun outside the walls, with stalls, wagons and tents extending a hundred yards down the road that ran alongside the rail track. Inside the walls, it fairly bustled. Even the depot’s goods yard had suffered a hundred encroachments, with market stalls pitched ready to ambush the unwary visitor, peddlers and hawkers and dozens of kinds of traders converging or waiting or looking out for each other. There were a lot of Beetle-kinden amongst them, mostly Collegium-grown and many even College-educated: merchants and artificers and scholars all mingling, clasping hands, making animated conversation with frequent gestures, as though to compensate for the quiet world just across the track. There were others, too, especially Fly-kinden — dozens of them, from ostentatiously well-dressed merchants to grubby peddlers of trinkets, their eyes keen for a loose purse or dropped coin. There were also some from breeds not commonly found within the Lowlands: a Commonweal Dragonfly mercenary in piecemeal armour of glittering hues and a long-faced Grasshopper in College-styled robes discoursing with two Beetle scholars. Spiders, she saw, though not so many as Collegium regularly knew, and small wonder, for she had never seen so many Mantis-kinden in one place in her life. Some were in bands, lounging about and watched carefully by the guard. Many went singly, at the shoulder of some wealthy foreigner or other as a tactful and tacit warning to thieves and rivals. With their strongholds of Nethyon and Etheryon just north of Sarn, a lot of Mantis-kinden young bloods came down here looking for excitement, hiring themselves out as mercenaries or bodyguards.
The Sarnesh were to be found in the foreigners’ quarter as well, of course. She had expected their armoured men and women patrolling through the throng and keeping a careful eye on exposed weapons and their owners. She was struck, though, by the many brown-skinned Ant-kinden, robed or dressed in simple tunics, doing patient business with their visitors, or simply walking through the crowd, taking a vicarious interest in all the bustle that was going on within their walls.
Scuto had found them a taverna going under the sign of the Sworded Book, which suggested that its owner, past or present, had been a duellist at the Prowess Forum. Certainly it was decked out in Collegium style, with a great clock perched over the bar in imitation of the Forum itself. Now Che sat at a window and watched the foreign-quarter marketplace, a bizarre halfbreed venue that seemed wrenchingly close to home and yet completely distant. Meanwhile, only three streets away, the Sarnesh proper continued to hold their normal silent communion with one another.
‘I’ve never really visited an Ant city before,’ she admitted. ‘It’s not at all what I expected.’
Sperra, virtually sitting in her shadow, snorted. ‘This isn’t just any Ant city. Sarn’s different. I’ve been in Tark and Kes before and it wasn’t fun.’
‘But they have their foreign quarters too,’ Che recalled from her studies.
‘They do, only there’re guards watching every wretched thing you do, waiting for you to take a step out of line, and nobody talks any more than they have to, so’s to be like the locals. And if you’re Fly-kinden like me, you’re on double guard, because if something goes wrong and they don’t know who did it, they just hang the first person they don’t like, and they always assume it’s us. And, ah! The slaves. There are slaves everywhere, and what their masters overlook, the slaves’ll spot. And you just know they’ll tell their owners, because the Ants don’t have any use for slack slaves.’
Che grimaced. However bad Ant-kinden masters might be, a severity surely bred of frugality and efficiency, she had herself become a slave to the Empire, and she was willing to wager that was worse. ‘Your kinden don’t keep slaves — do you?’ she enquired. The Fly-kinden fielded no armies, nor had any great repute as artificers, scholars or social reformers. They tended to slip off the edge of the College curriculum.
‘Oh they’d tell you that in Egel or Merro,’ Sperra said disdainfully. ‘But don’t you believe them. It’s all about the money — families owing other families. And if your family can’t settle what’s due, they’ll sell you. Indenture, it’s called, only basically it’s slavery.’
‘Was that what happened to you?’
‘Would have done,’ the Fly replied, ‘only I was smart enough to skip out. Everyone thinks it’s so homey to be one of my kinden: all family and sticking together and everyone mucking in, all rosy cheeks and cheeky banter. If it’s so wonderful, why do you think so many of us are living anywhere but home?’
The two of them silently watched the ebb and flow of Sarnesh business for a little while, until Sperra added, ‘But here, I could like it here. No slaves here in Sarn, and out-landers seem to get a fair deal.’
‘If you’d come here three generations back, it would have been just like Tark and Kes,’ Che observed, and
