Empire in Black and Gold (70 page)

Stenwold stared at him, thinking of Marius and Atryssa, so long dead now, but with him still, and he could almost see reflected in Thalric’s eyes some kindred loss, more recent but no less deep. He raised his bowl and clicked it against the Wasp’s own, and they drank.

Once Stenwold had gone, Thalric’s aide came to him, his face a mix of concern and disapproval. ‘Do you want me to follow him, sir? What was that all about?’

Thalric drained the last harsh dregs from his bowl. ‘It was an indulgence,’ he said, mostly to himself. ‘And we already know where he is going.’ He had held Stenwold Maker up enough, he felt. By the time the man arrived, it would all be over.

Stenwold’s head was spinning, but not from the strong drink. First his maddening conversation with Greenwise, highlighting that elusive cog missing from the machine he had been building in his mind.
Why were the Wasps here? What were they waiting for?
Then the baffling conversation with Thalric, a man racked by a confession he could tell nobody. The thought of Wasp fighting Wasp in Myna recurred to him and he could make nothing of it.

Greenwise Artector had confirmed only what Stenwold had already known. The Wasps were waiting, were looking elsewhere but Helleron. If so, why come here at all? Two thousand soldiers with vehicles and supplies was an investment the Empire would not make without reason. Was there some incursion they were here to put down?

In a few days . . .

Those were Thalric’s words, and not given as any revelation, just something said as a matter of course. Clock hands counting down, and yet for all this the Wasp had dropped no further clue. But there had been an apology, had there not? Unspoken, but there had been a heaviness to Thalric like a doctor coming to relatives with bad news. Something had been eating at the man. He had gone away with his bad news unsaid, and yet . . .

Stenwold was no Helleren, and he had come here expecting the city to be under attack, yet that was not the case. Thalric had been telling him, whether gloatingly or just unconsciously, that their move, when it came, would . . .

There was a queasy feeling growing in Stenwold’s stomach. The strong drink boiled there: not with any poison but a horrible suspicion, growing and growing. Here in Helleron there was one matter that the next day or so would bring to fruition. A commercial matter. A profitable matter. Something that would change the face of the Lowlands forever.

As soon as he had the idea, it put its jaws into him and shook him, and desperately he began to run, pushing through the streets of Helleron because he had questions, desperate questions, for Scuto.

He had to know more about the Iron Road.

When the Ant-kinden burst in it was a moment before he could speak, leaning against the door jamb of Scuto’s extended shack and gasping for breath. At last, and with everyone on their feet and staring at him, he got it out. ‘Marre’s dead.’

Scuto swore, baring pointed teeth. Totho, who had been carefully watching him at work, asked, ‘Who’s Marre?’

‘She was that Fly-kinden you sent to talk to the Moths, wasn’t she?’ Tynisa said to Scuto.

‘Yes she was.’ The Thorn Bug stomped over towards the newcomer, a big-framed Ant in plate-reinforced chain mail. ‘How do you know, Balkus? Are you sure of it?’

‘I saw the body.’ Balkus spoke jerkily, still catching his wind. ‘Arrow in her. They found her out on the slopes.’

‘The Moths have made their choice, then,’ Tynisa said calmly.

‘We don’t know that,’ Scuto insisted, but he was now looking hunted.

‘Che’s with them!’ Totho said. ‘
I knew it!
I told her not to go, and I told Stenwold not to let her go!’

There was a rising current of concern among the dozen or so of Scuto’s people waiting for his instructions, and eventually their chief held his spiked hands in the air. ‘Shut up, the lot of you!’ His lips twisted over his teeth in frustration. ‘Speak to me, Balkus.’

‘Don’t know more than that. I was out in the Sarnesh quarter, trawling for rumours like you asked. That was the rumour I got. The guard had her down as just another dead Fly with no connections, but I knew her. A single shot, right up under the ribs. Someone must have got her in flight.’

‘Oh bloody loose wheels and knives!’ Scuto shouted at the lot of them, or maybe at himself. ‘Everyone get your weapons. Everyone who wears it get into armour. Now! Someone help me.’

He looked to Totho, but the halfbreed was obviously not inclined to be anybody’s arming squire and so it was Balkus took down a breast- and back-plate that had been cut and twisted, welded and burned until its ruined, punctured contours matched Scuto’s own deformities.

Tynisa, whose blade was always on her hip and who had no armour to wear, watched the men and women of Scuto’s service get themselves ready for war with the speed of long practice. Two Fly-kinden strung bows whilst another racked up the tension on a crossbow. A Beetle-kinden man and woman were strapping each other into matching suits of part-plate backed with tough canvas. Another brace of Beetles wore artificer’s heavy leathers. The one-armed Scorpion had looped something like an apron over his head, and a layer of metal and leather over his chest that left his back bare. There was a Dragonfly-kinden woman, only recently arrived, buckling on bracers and greaves, and then contorting herself to string a bow as tall as she was. Finished with Scuto, Balkus the Ant had slung on a baldric of wooden boxes, and began testing the action on a blocky, bulky thing she recognized as a nail-bow, whilst beside him another Ant from another city was shrugging into chain mail, taking up a shield whose device had been defaced with plain black paint. Tisamon stood ready from the moment Balkus had burst in, but there was a second Mantis with them now, an angular-faced woman who had so far kept her distance from him. Now she had a rapier in her right hand, and in her left another ground down for balance, with forward curving horns for trapping a blade.

‘What is going on?’ Tynisa demanded of Scuto, who now had his armour on, little more than slung over his shoulders and held in place by his own thorns.

‘There’s a lifespan to any band like mine in the information game,’ he said, checking the action on a repeating crossbow. ‘Don’t matter how good you are, things come to the crunch point sooner or later. The point where, no matter how careful you are, the enemy knows enough about your gang to make a move. When that happens, it happens all together. I’ve seen networks wound up in a day, a score of men and women disappearing, dead or captured or turned traitor.’

‘But this might just be—’

‘It might just be anything, miss,’ he said, although his eyes held no hope in them. ‘But we got to be ready ’cos if it’s coming, it’s coming right away.’

But when the door burst open at that very moment she saw that he had not meant ‘right away’ as in that very moment. He had meant sometime that day, or the coming night, or the next day.

There was a Fly child in the doorway, his face completely wild with fright. ‘Scuto! Scuto!’ he was bawling. ‘Men’s coming! Bad men! A whole load of ’em!’

‘Bows to the wall!’ Scuto snapped out as the child fled, door slamming behind him. ‘We’ll take their first charge and then we’re getting out of here. Rendezvous is the Merro on Shriek Street!’

He slammed the door closed and put his bow to one of the small windows. Other archers and crossbowmen were finding positions about the walls of Scuto’s workshop, some at ground level, others powering upwards with brief wing-flares to find vantage points in the sloping roof.

‘Tell me you’ve got a back door,’ Tisamon said.

‘Sure I do, but anyone putting their head out now is going to catch a whole load of crossbow.’

‘Give the word and I’ll go out there, open the way for the rest of you,’ Tisamon suggested.

Scuto spared him one look and saw he was serious. ‘Behind the bench. There’s a mechanism. Sperra!’

A Fly-kinden woman looked back from sighting down her crossbow. ‘Chief ?’

‘When I give the word, let this madman out,’ Scuto told her.

‘They’re on us!’ shouted one of his men.

‘Give them everything!’ Scuto bellowed, and the shack resounded to the sound of Balkus’s nailbow roaring. Tynisa staggered away from the man, seeing the firing chamber flare and flare as he loosed off his bolts with the sound of thunder. She could hear nothing of the bows and crossbows, nothing of the enemy, whoever they were, outside.

She tried to get to a free window, saw one higher up, and began to climb to it, hands flat against the cobbled-together wood and metal, her Art giving her grip. Even as she did, a hole was punched abruptly through the wall, a jagged knot of daylight appearing in the wood. Another came a moment later, and she caught the flash of a heavy-headed crossbow bolt, four feet long, as it powered across the room and knocked an identical hole in the far wall.

She got to the window, putting as much of her body behind the protection of metal as she could. Outside was a scene of panic and confusion. In such a ramshackle part of the city there was no real open space. Instead the attackers were already on the hut and had made their charge from mere yards away. They had paid heavily for those yards, though. A dozen of the dead carpeted the mud and cobbles, their bodies studded with end-inches of crossbow bolts or the slender wands of arrows, or the exploded-looking holes that Balkus’s nailbow bolts made when they tore through flesh. There were more of them still alive out there, but they had taken what cover they could and showed no signs of pressing their attack.

Tynisa looked at the fallen. They were mostly Beetles, Ants, or halfbreeds of the two, wearing an ugly mismatch of metal and leathers. She knew the type. Sinon Halfway had kept plenty of them on his books: the lowest of Helleron’s mercenary classes, the strong-armers and thugs of which the city had an infinite supply.

And seeing that composition, and the hurried scowls of the others as they risked glances out from cover, she knew what they were waiting for. By that time, it was already on them.

One of the Fly-kinden, up at the roof, was suddenly jerking backwards, falling from his vantage point in a trail of blood. Tynisa saw the end of a blade drawn back through the arrowslit, and then there were iron hooks tearing at the workshop’s roof, ripping out a jagged section all of two feet across.

By now Tynisa was on her way herself, hands and feet gripping the irregular wall, moving up towards the slant of the ceiling.

A bolt of golden fire spat through the hole, scorching at one of Scuto’s Beetle henchmen. Then the first Wasp soldier pushed his way in. He was not in uniform, his armour painted over in other colours, but he was a soldier of the Empire nonetheless. Tynisa recognized that well enough.

Even as he cleared the roof he took a nailbow bolt directly in the chest, plummeting, spinning, to the ground a dozen feet below. There were more of them, though, and another hole soon gaped in the ceiling at the building’s other side.

‘Now, Scuto! Now!’ Tynisa was shouting, and Scuto obviously agreed.

‘Time to go! You, Mantis, head out the back! Everyone else, wait till he’s in action, then a serious barrage and we go. I’m rearguard with Balkus!’

The Fly, Sperra, flew straight across Tisamon’s face and spent a precious second hauling at the mechanism. A moment later half the back wall slid aside and, in the moment before it reclosed, Tisamon was gone through it.

Tynisa had reached the closest hole in the roof by then. Still clinging with her Art by one hand and both knees she dragged her rapier from its scabbard. The dark, heavy blade seemed to shudder in her hand, and when the next Wasp appeared, already putting his hand towards her, she struck.

She had been aiming for the armpit, where his armour ended, but the perspective tricked her. The narrow blade struck the metal plate over his breast and pierced straight through it, punching a diamond-shaped hole with a seamstress’s precision and lancing him through the chest. It drew from the wound without resistance, and the Wasp died halfway through the gap.

Below her, the soldiers of Scuto’s army gave off their round of shot, and Tynisa knew that Tisamon was out there exercising his skills and teaching the thugs of Helleron why the Mantis-kinden had been feared since before the revolution. She saw Scuto kick open the door and his people flood through it. There were Wasps inside now, entering from the other roof-hole, and three of Scuto’s men were down already. Tynisa saw a pair of imperial soldiers dive, blasting with their stings at the fleeing men and women. Then one was abruptly arching away, the Dragonfly woman having put an arrow through his ribs. Tynisa braced herself, and leapt for the other one.

She had hoped to put her sword into him first, but instead the point passed him by, so she struck him bodily, one hand dragging back his hair, knees locked about his waist. He shouted out, and then fell from the air, his wings unable to keep both of them up.

They separated as they hit the floor, and Tynisa took most of the impact. Even as she sat up, holding her head, he was standing over her with sword in hand.

But the rapier was still with her and, stunned as she was, it took his blade aside and ran him through the thigh. She stumbled to her feet as he fell, and finished him with another lunge.