Empire in Black and Gold (25 page)

‘I don’t think I can stay in here,’ Salma said. ‘I’m going to wait over by the door where there’s light and air.’

‘Suit yourself,’ she said, nettled. He caught her gaze as he turned, though, and something must have communicated itself to her. Looking back across the room there was a moment, just a moment, when she saw the hundreds of labouring bodies and wondered: free will, yes, but how many of them had a family an eighth of an inch from starving? How many had come to Helleron to make their fortunes and now could not afford to leave?

At the far end of the factory were stacked bundles of crossbow bolts being carefully counted by an overseer. Each day this one factory shipped hundreds of them, made for a price nowhere in the Lowlands could match. Business was not good enough for Uncle Elias, though. Clearly some part of his grand machine was not keeping pace with the rest.

‘I don’t care how you do it,’ she heard him complain as she approached. ‘Hire more workers or get this lot to work faster, but we’re down almost five parts per hundred, and the orders just keep mounting up. I want next tenday’s turnover to be the same as the last, and the tenday after to be even better.’

The Ant foreman nodded glumly. ‘It will be done.’

‘Good.’ Elias turned to see Che. ‘How do you like my factory?’

‘It’s very impressive, uncle.’ She had begun calling him that, rather than cousin, because he was Stenwold’s age.

‘What does your friend think?’

‘I don’t think he’s really used to it,’ she said.

‘Well, the Commonwealers never were good customers. A bit snobby about their own craftsmanship, if you ask me.’ Elias shrugged. ‘It’s always the same with the Inapt: they want everything handcrafted to thousand-year-old techniques that take forever, and then wonder why everyone else has a bigger army.’

‘Did you ask the foreman about Tynisa and Totho?’

‘He’s seen nobody, but Helleron is a big place . . . Excuse me.’

A messenger had just flown into the factory, a young Fly-kinden with wings glittering red in the forgelight. He landed at a run and virtually threw himself at Elias’s feet.

‘Master Monger?’ The youth was quite out of breath.

‘That’s me. Is it from Tarhaven’s delegation?’

‘No, Master. From Officer Breaken at the north-west shaft.’ The Fly handed over a scroll and retired, chest still heaving.

Elias cursed quietly to himself and read the scroll by firelight. His face, when he looked at the messenger, was brutal, and Che thought he would strike the unfortunate man. ‘Is this it?’ he demanded. ‘Is this all the report Breaken knows how to make?’

‘He . . .’ The messenger flinched back. ‘He asks for you to come at once, with—’

‘I see what he asks for. Does he have any idea how much this
costs
?’ Elias’s hands wrung the scroll and the Fly-kinden stepped further back from him.

‘Uncle Elias?’ Che asked, as much to distract his attention from the wretched messenger as anything else. Staring at her, Elias forced on a smile for Che’s benefit.

‘Is something wrong?’ she prompted him.

‘Just . . .’ He let out a shuddering sigh. ‘Just business. Cousin Stenwold has no idea how . . . delicate things can be, here in Helleron.’ He looked past her at Salma, standing pale and wan in the forgelight. ‘Do you think your friend would enjoy a little mountain air, Cheerwell?’

She nodded cautiously. ‘Perhaps.’

‘This . . .’ He shook the mangled scroll at her. ‘I have some business north of the city, one of my mining concerns. Perhaps some clearer air would do you good. I’m told our local brand can have an effect on strangers.’

Che dearly hoped that Salma would find some more solace in the mountains, but, knowing what she did about the Helleron mines, she had an uneasy feeling about how he would react. She nodded cautiously, but it was to Elias’s back as he was already marching for the factory doors. The messenger scurried after him, and Elias called over his shoulder. ‘Get me another twenty men. I don’t care who you hire them from so long as they’re good for the work. Flares, crossbows. And a repeating ballista – make it two. I’m going to cut the heart out of this
now
.’

Che and Salma exchanged surprised glances. It seemed Uncle Elias was going to war.

Helleron had been founded where it was because of the mountains. The Tornos range was a miner’s delight, and most of all it was shot through with the richest iron deposits in the Lowlands. What had started as a small foundry town four centuries ago was now the hub of all the Lowlands’ trade and mercantile ventures. Iron and steel were the body and bone of the city, consumed by it in vast quantities, refined in its organs, cast forth in a thousand shapes, and most of them warlike.

Salma had made a rough journey of it, a rigid passenger in the jolting convoy of steam automotives that clattered out from Helleron. It was the motion. It was the smell, it was, Che realized, the very fact of it. He had experienced none of this back in his distant home. Even in Collegium he had always flown or walked. Now he was travelling on a conveyance from another world, and it was making him ill. His golden skin had gone verdigris green by the time Elias called a halt in the shadow of the mountains.

It was not exactly the clear mountain air and scenic views that Elias had promised them. Salma still wore his smile like a shield against the world, but she could see the strain telling in his eyes. They had disembarked in a great quarry, where the stone of the foothills had been scooped away over decades. Gaping, propped-up holes in the sheer rock were the shallow mines, and above them a vast winch-and-pulley system creaked as its steam engine laboured to bring up the next load of men and ore from the utter depths. The quarry floor was laced with rails, and one wall formed the support for a lean-to as large as a castle, where the ore smelting took place. Elias had explained that it was cheaper to smelt it here and then ship the metal over to the city, or at least it had been ten years ago. In the light of recent developments he was having to rethink the profitability of his enterprise.

Elias had begun trying to explain the mine to them but there were a dozen different people with claims on his time, and in the end Che and Salma were left like two baffled islands in the middle of all the bustle. Something had gone wrong here, she saw, spotting a pair of big drilling engines that were obviously out of commission, and one of them blackened and burned. A team of artificers was furiously stripping them both, arguing over what had been done and how best to fix it. There were soldiers here, too: Beetle-kinden guardsmen in Elias’s employ, wearing chain mail and breastplates, and with crossbows to hand. They kept watching the sky, Che noticed. They were clearly nervous.

‘What do you think is going on here?’ she asked Salma.

‘Do you think I can guess? This is a world I have no dealings with,’ he told her, a little more life returning to him. ‘I was about to ask
you
.’

‘I’d guess some competitor of Elias,’ she mused. ‘I get the impression they take their business very seriously in Helleron.’

‘Never a truer word spoken,’ said Salma, heartfelt.

There was a hauling engine just setting off for the city, she noticed, with crates of iron taking up most of the flatbed behind the stacks of its wood-burning furnace. But it carried three long, shrouded burdens as well, surely nothing other than the corpses of miners or guardsmen. She had heard Elias giving orders to the driver a moment before, issuing instructions to bring back some artillery. Whatever had happened here, nobody believed it was over.

At last Elias turned back to them, still with a half-dozen menials waiting anxiously to report. ‘This is a wretched business,’ he said, twisting the rings on his fingers. ‘I sometimes wonder why I ever got into it.’

‘What happened here?’ Che asked him. ‘Who attacked them?’

Elias sighed. ‘This was going on when I first took to the factories, but then we made the treaty and everything went quiet. Ideal time to get into the mining game, you’d have thought. So look at me now: two days behind on deliveries and I don’t even want to think about the repair costs. It’s not as though Helleron’s ever packed with tramp artificers kicking their heels for want of work, and now there’ll be a half-dozen other mine owners bidding against me.’

‘But who did it? Someone wants to force you out and take over?’

He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Force me out is right, but not the rest of it. If they even wanted the workings here, then at least I’d understand. There’d be a basis for negotiation. I’d even sell up, for a price. But these bastards – excuse my language, Cheerwell – these wretches, they just want us gone.’ He saw her confusion and said, ‘It’s the Moth-kinden from Tharn. Just because they like to mooch around up there in their caves chanting and mumbling to themselves, they take offence if anyone actually wants to make use of the place.’

‘Moth-kinden?’ Che couldn’t quite grasp it. ‘But I thought they were—’

‘A gaggle of hermits minding their own business?’ Elias suggested. ‘Think again, Cheerwell. We’ve always had problems with this lot because they’re as militant as they come. They just don’t want us anywhere near their precious sacred mountain, and every time we come to terms about our mining operations, give it just a few years and they’re back. Raids, thefts, murder, and sabotage! Don’t start me on the sabotage. Just because they don’t know what a cog does or how a lever works, it doesn’t mean they can’t find a way to break the most sophisticated equipment when they put their bloody minds to it.’

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to send a messenger to parlay with them?’

‘They’d probably kill anyone I sent to them,’ Elias growled. ‘They only talk when
they
want to. They come down to us when they’ve had enough. No, if I had my way, I’d get together with the other mine owners and put an airfleet together, sort them out once and for all. For now, though, I’m going to get some repeating ballista, some flarecasters and a squad more crossbowmen, and we’ll see if they’re stupid enough to come back tonight.’

He stormed off, still with a trail of anxious clerks and foremen shadowing him.

Che turned to Salma. ‘You heard that?’

‘Every word,’ he said. ‘And I wondered, once these veins are exhausted, and if the Helleren started looking to the north of here, coming along with their rails and their engines – I wondered what my people’s reaction would be.’

‘You can’t be condoning this!’ she hissed.

He held a hand up, and took her aside to somewhere the miners and their watchmen could not overhear.

‘Until you have heard it from all sides, don’t be so quick to judge. My people could not endure to live with this on our borders, and if we refused them, how long before the Helleren found some excuse to come anyway.’

‘Salma, you’re talking about my people, my
family
.’ His words hurt her more than she would have thought, and she wondered if that was because she knew there was some truth in them.

‘Well,’ he said with a shrug, ‘it’s moot, as north of here isn’t Commonweal any more anyway.’ His smile cut her with its bitterness. ‘It’s Empire all the way.’

Scuto shambled back into his workshop. It had been the best part of an hour since he stepped outside for a whispered conversation with a young Fly-kinden, clearly one of his agents. Totho had spent the time disassembling one of his air-batteries and planning a few improvements to it. He could never just sit idle. His artificer’s hands needed work, to stop his mind from worrying. He jumped up as the Thorn Bug returned.

‘Well,’ Scuto said. ‘Whatever else happened to your friends, the Wasps didn’t get ’em. Looks like all three made a run for it. Shame they didn’t follow you.’

‘Any idea where they ran to?’ Totho asked.

‘In Helleron it’s like leaving tracks in water,’ Scuto said. ‘Still, I have my eyes and my ears, and looks like your girl, the Spider one, went places even I’d not go without an escort. She must have cut through two fiefs at least. People that way don’t like answering questions, but I’ll see what I can do.’ He shook his head. ‘You people, you’re such a mix of craft and cack-handedness. I can’t make you out.’ He settled himself across the workbench from Totho, who heard the scrape of his spines against the wood. ‘You give the Wasps the slip, which is good form, but then you got no fallback arranged, so the four of you just go gadding off through the city. What were you thinking?’

‘We weren’t expecting there would be trouble,’ Totho said. He tried to state it as a reasonable point, but it sounded weak even to his own ears.

‘You must always plan a fallback,’ Scuto told him. ‘Last year Sten sent me and some lads to Sarn. Safe enough, you’d think, what with the Ants there behaving ’emselves these days, but we fell real foul. If we’d not had some rendezvous arranged in advance I’d still be there looking for ’em all. Mind you, that was just pure bad luck and accident, ’cos we ran bang into some Arcanum business that had nothing to do with us.’

‘What’s an Arcanum?’

‘If you don’t know, you don’t need to know,’ Scuto told him, and promptly added, ‘Moth-kinden stuff, anyway. Loose cogs, the lot of ’em.’ He put a thorny finger into the workings of the air-battery.