Empire in Black and Gold (38 page)

‘And?’

‘I remember . . . when I was in Helleron with Salma – the Dragonfly-kinden, although I’m sure you know that – when we were there, we saw a factory, and he said he had thought that we Beetle-kinden didn’t keep slaves. And I told him not to be so ridiculous, because they weren’t slaves. They were working for a wage. They were there of their own free will. But I couldn’t persuade him. Whatever I said, I couldn’t make him see that they were free. Perhaps that was because he was right.’

Thalric’s smile was still there, but bleak, very bleak. ‘Your point is elegantly made, Miss Maker.’

She put down her goblet, composed herself. ‘What will you do with me?’

He looked down at the scroll before him and ticked off a few items carefully with a scratchy chitin-nibbed pen. She thought at first he was only trying to make her squirm, but then realized that he really was thinking what might be done with her.

‘I will call you for another conversation – at Asta perhaps. Another chance for you to talk to me, before the artificers become involved, or your Dragonfly friend is hurt. Until then . . . let us hope the dreadful reputation of the Rekef suffices to stave off Brutan’s advances.’

‘You’re . . .?’ She didn’t want to ask it. She knew it would make her look weak. ‘You’re not going to . . . ?’

He looked up at her, face quite without expression. ‘Guards!’ he called suddenly, and then, more softly: ‘No, Miss Maker. I cannot see how that would serve any purpose. Not yet.’

He was so very smug behind that bland façade. He was so very in control that, as the soldiers came in, she did something very unwise, knowing it to be so even as she did it.

‘Whose children did you kill?’ she asked.

His nib snapped, its tip leaping across the tent. For a second he held himself very still, while she could see the great shadow of his anger pass across his face, and something else, too, some other emotion his features were not designed for. The soldiers had paused halfway towards her. She thought even they were holding their breath.

At last he let his anger out in a long sigh. ‘Take her back to the pens,’ he instructed, not looking at his men. The shadow of that other emotion was still there on his face.

Stenwold walked carefully into the firelight, and let her see him coming. Totho was still clattering about beneath the automotive, and the Moth’s eyes were closed in what Stenwold hoped was sleep. He sat down, not across from her, not next to her, but at an angle, a no-man’s land. She stared at him sullenly.

‘I think it’s time,’ he said, ‘that I told you some things. About yourself.’

‘You obviously know nothing about me,’ she told him coldly, ‘or you would have realized that I would follow you – you and . . . and him – when you went away to talk.’

The world seemed to die around him in that moment, like autumn arriving all in one day.

‘You followed?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you heard?’

‘Everything.’

‘This isn’t how I wanted it, Tynisa.’

‘I’m not sure you even know how you wanted it,’ she told him harshly. ‘Why, Stenwold? Why didn’t you tell me? Why did I have to find out this way? Why not ten years ago? Why not five years ago? Or even two?’

He felt terribly old now. ‘Tynisa, I didn’t tell you because I had not yet told Tisamon.’

‘But you . . .’ Her face twisted. ‘So you’d rather . . . So I . . .’

He held his hand up, and to her credit she let him speak. ‘If I had told you at twelve or fifteen that your father was a Mantis-kinden hired sword working out of Helleron, then I know you would have wanted to meet him, even if it was just to see the man who abandoned your mother. I would have forbidden it, but I
do
know you, and I know you would have found a way. And if you had confronted him, looking like you do, so like her, he would have killed you. That is nothing more than the truth.’ He rubbed at his forehead. ‘And so I made the resolution to say nothing. I might have broken that resolve, but . . . but you never asked.
Never
. You never asked who your parents were.’

Her expression showed pure betrayal. ‘I didn’t
need
to ask who they were. I thought . . .’ Her voice was starting to shake. ‘I thought that you . . .’

‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘you couldn’t have thought that.’ Because, of course, that was the gossip when he had arrived at Collegium with a motherless child in his arms: that she was the fruit of some indiscretion of his. It had been a minor scandal. The child’s pale skin had told its tale, though, and when the child grew, it became obvious to all that nothing so heavy and down-to-earth as Beetle blood was flowing in her, and the questions multiplied but the speculation died away, and he had thought
that
particular rumour must have been put in its grave long before now. But here it was again, and he was confronted with it from its very source.

‘What was I supposed to think?’ she demanded. ‘You raised me. You looked after me.’ The firelight showed tears of pain and frustration tracking down her cheeks. ‘You’re my father. Until last night, that was who you were, to me. I never thought . . .’ A sob, choked back. ‘Or if I did, I stopped myself thinking. And now you’re just . . . I’m just . . .’

‘I did everything I could for you,’ he told her sadly. ‘I did bring you up as if you were my own. It was my promise to Atryssa. I gave you the best start in life that I could think of, in Collegium. I even found a sister for you, so that you would always have company. I did everything but tell you the truth.’

She was silent, it seemed to him, forever, staring into the fire. He felt like a man walking a tightrope, Tisamon to one side and Tynisa to the other.
I was never meant for
such juggling
.

‘Tell me about her,’ she said at last. ‘How did it happen? What could have possibly gone wrong, to put me in the world?’

‘Please—’

‘Tell me.’

He settled back. ‘It’s a story you should recognize. We met in Collegium – at the College itself. I know it seems absurd that
he
,’ a nod towards the solitary Tisamon, ‘could ever have been a student, but he came to Collegium hunting I know not what, something he could not find at home. We were the strangest group. We fought in the Prowess. They were all so good and I was a liability, but they carried me with them.’ The memory hurt more than he would have thought: the sweetness of those innocent days stuck in his throat.

‘What was
she
like?’ That question, coming from the very mirror of Atryssa? This night did not feel real to him any more.

‘She stepped off a boat into Collegium with nothing but the clothes she wore. Everybody loved her and the city never knew what had hit it. She got everything she asked for. I think she was from one of the great Spider houses, the Aristoi they call them. But they had fallen on hard times, lost their footing in the dance. She didn’t speak much about it, never looked back. She was Spider-kinden, after all. She could do all the things that they do, intrigue with the best of them, but . . . she had a heart, and she was a friend, and I think we all loved her, just a little. Your mother.’ The sun had been so much brighter then, in his memories. It had shone every day. Debates in the chambers, duels at the Prowess, learning artifice from the masters. As a young man, with the world ahead of him and no worries, none.

‘As for Tisamon, he came from Felyal, where the real fanatics live. He hated her race. He hated her, at first. Even then he was the best fighter anyone had ever seen, but she herself was close on the second. They would duel together in the Prowess Forum all the time. Each one could find no other to challenge their skills. She gave him something no other could, and he came to love her even as they fought. Mantis-kinden! And when they love and hate, it is with all their being. And he hated himself, at first, because he thought he was betraying his own race. Oh it was a difficult business. And yet your mother worked on him, and broke his defences down.’ He reached around for his pack, opened it up. ‘I’ve something I should show you, I think, at this point. It’s been a long time waiting for you to see it. I’ve carried it to many places. Coming to Helleron, I thought . . . well, there was always a chance.’ He withdrew a flat leather wallet and opened it to reveal a canvas perhaps a foot across. With great care he folded it out so that she could see.

Two decades ago the fashion in painting groups was to have them surprised in some domestic scene. So it was that the five figures here were in a taverna somewhere, turning to look at the viewer as though suddenly interrupted in some drinking discussion. The paint had scuffed, in places, flaked and chipped, but the picture was still clear. Tynisa stared.

Seated left of centre was a young Beetle who could have been Stenwold’s son, save that he had never had one. Still stocky, slightly round at the waist. She looked from that cheerful, smiling face to the solemn one the fire now danced on, trying to bridge the chasm time had made.

Standing behind his chair was Tisamon: there was no doubt of that. The artist had caught him perfectly, down to the hostile expression on his sharp features, a threat to the intruder. His right hand, almost out of sight behind Stenwold’s chair, wore the metal gauntlet of his folding claw. In the far left of the picture, a bald, knuckle-faced Fly leant back in his chair, a bowl of wine tilted in one hand, seemingly on the very point of overbalancing. Across from him was a darkly serious Ant-kinden man, his back turned three-quarters to the viewer, the links of his chain-mail hauberk picked out in minute detail.

In the centre of the picture, sitting on the table with her legs dangling, was a girl whose face Tynisa had herself watched grow from a child’s to a woman’s, in daily mirrored increments. At that point – in the frozen piece of time the artist had preserved – it was as though it was she herself amongst those strangers.

The picture was signed, ‘Nero’, in small strokes.

‘Tisamon – and me, of course,’ Stenwold said, seeing even as he said it that there was no ‘of course’ about his younger image. ‘That’s Nero himself, the one with the wine. He had a trick with mirrors, to paint his own image in. Nero lives still, usually trawling around the south, Merro, Egel and Seldis. The Ant is Marius. He . . . died. And of course, that’s Atryssa. The most beautiful woman I ever knew.’ He found himself looking from the painted likeness to the living one. ‘I had thought that your father’s blood would show but, as you grew, year by year, you were more like her. No mother could give her child a greater gift.’

‘Except to stay with her,’ said Tynisa sadly. ‘Tell me the rest, Stenwold. I have to know.’

‘And we went our ways. Marius went back to Sarn and the army. I stayed at Collegium. Your mother and father made a living as duellists, out Merro way. I was early, perhaps even the first, to discover what was raising its head up east of the Lowlands. I followed my researches and they led me to the Empire. I called for my friends and they came, even though Marius had to leave his beloved city for me. We agreed to work against the Wasps. We saw some of their plans, and we knew that the Lowlands were just another point on the map for them, another place to conquer. You’ve heard of the city of Myna, and you know what happens next. It seemed destined to fall beneath the Empire’s boot, so we agreed to regroup there and see if the Wasps could be stopped before its gates. Nero dropped out – Fly-kinden always know the best time to make an exit. The rest of us . . . When we met, Atryssa wasn’t there. And then we were betrayed. The defenders of Myna were betrayed. It seemed that only one of us could have done it. And Atryssa wasn’t there. It broke Tisamon, or nearly. Because he had loved her, in spite of everything he believed about her people.’

For a moment Stenwold could not go on. The sound of a city dying was still in his mind. He remembered the citizens of Myna out in the streets, Wasp soldiers coursing overhead, the breaking of the gates: the bitter taste of failure and betrayal. He remembered the desperate fight on the airfield. Marius’s soldiers retreating, shields held high. Marius calling. Marius, dying in the orthopter. The grief and rage and loss that had become Tisamon’s whole world.

‘Marius died as we fled Myna, and if I hadn’t stopped him, Tisamon would have got himself killed as well.’

‘But she didn’t betray you?’

‘To this day I do not know who did, save that, after all this time, I know it was none of my friends,’ Stenwold replied. ‘But it was too late, then. Too late for Marius. Too late for Atryssa. Too late for all of us.’ The end of his golden days. The shadows gathering. Tisamon was right: Stenwold had become what he had despised. He had gone on to set himself against an Empire, and he had made his students his pawns, and some of them had suffered, and some of them had died.

‘What am I supposed to do now?’ Tynisa asked him. ‘Knowing this, with
him
? Help me, I feel like I’m losing my world.’

He reached out and she took his hand gratefully. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘what am I? I thought I was yours, and now I’m just some . . . mistake? Some cast-off ?’

‘No!’ he said quickly. ‘Tynisa, listen to me. Don’t ever think that you were not meant. She told me, close to the end. She told me of her last night with Tisamon, before we split up. Before Myna. She had her precautions, like any woman in her position, but that last night – she felt it might really be their last night. She let it happen. She loved him, and she wanted to bear his child.’