Heirs of the Blade (22 page)

‘You think they’re going to rob your tombs before you can get to them?’ the Spider said somewhat disdainfully.

‘Know what?’ The Fly snorted. ‘I don’t know what in Waste’s name they’re after, but they’re after it with all their bastard hearts. And while it won’t be
my
business they’re muscling in on, they won’t want someone like me anywhere close by, I can tell you. Maybe it’s time I went and followed up some leads down Tsovashni way.’

‘And at last!’ The Spider woman stood up, as their missing fourth had finally arrived. ‘Someone who can give us the real story. Grab a chair, Emon.’

Praeda looked over, seeing a short, dark man, his greying hair cut almost to the skull: a Bee-kinden with an artificer’s toolstrip slung over a dark tabarded breastplate. Only when she saw the symbol on his chest did she start. A grey gauntlet embroidered on grey cloth, yet some trick of the weave made it catch the light differently, making it clear and distinct and ominous.

‘Iron Glove?’ she exclaimed. ‘I’d have thought you’d want to be well away from the city. Surely the Empire are shooting you people on sight.’

‘And hello to you too.’ The Bee, Emon, sat down and snagged a mostly empty jar of wine, draining the dregs of it. ‘Who are these?’

‘Travellers who want us to think they’re locals. Or the other way round,’ the Spider woman said wryly. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Perhaps not.’ The Bee then squinted and appeared to change his mind. ‘Or perhaps, yes. You’re . . .’ his eyes widened, staring at Amnon, and there was a tense moment in which revelations and violence hovered very close together. ‘Never mind,’ the Bee concluded. ‘None of my business.’

‘They fought on the bridge, they reckon,’ the Fly explained, watching the Iron Glove man carefully.

‘Oh, to be sure. I, on the other hand, fought on the river.’

‘The
Fourth Iteration?
’ Praeda pressed, for it was the name the Glove had given to their ingenious ship that had taken such a toll of the attacking Scorpions, until the Imperial artillery had finally silenced it.

Emon nodded. ‘A lovely craft it was, too, but in the end it was swim or fly, when sailing couldn’t keep us afloat any more. Not that many of us made it to shore.’

The Solarnese merchant had called for more wine, and the Bee accepted a jug gratefully. ‘So I can see why you’d think I was tempting fate by sitting here, but it’s not so. We’re just arrived, and here because we’re invited.’

That brought all the others leaning closer, waiting for the catch.
A trap?
was the plain thought on their faces, as if the Empress herself would go to such lengths to punish a cartel of weapons traders.

‘Himself’s shadow is here,’ Emon murmured darkly. ‘He’s not exactly talked it over with the crew, but word is that the Glove is about to shake hands with the Empire, after all this time. Over in Chasme, we’ve made some remarkable advances, they tell me,’ meaning the squatting little artificer town on the Exalsee that the Glove virtually owned these days. ‘A poor sailor-engineer like myself wouldn’t know where to start second-guessing Himself and his adopted son, but the Empire’s the biggest market in the world. Makes sense that we’d want to set things straight and makes sense that the Wasps would want to let us. Nothing but the best for the army, after all, and we surely do make the best.’

Himself’s shadow?
Praeda wondered. ‘But what if the Empire won’t talk . . .?’

‘It’s like I said,’ Emon explained, ‘the Empire asked first. I reckon we probably sent them a catalogue, like merchants do sometimes, when they have special goods for sale. I reckon the Imperial artificers just about must have had a fit when they saw what we’ve cooked up.’ He gave a crooked smile. ‘I reckon the world’s about to change in all manner of directions, I do.’

To Angved’s surprise, Varsec had proved surprisingly good company. The Engineer was used to always having to compete with other officers, and all too used to failing at it, too. He and the aviator were still prisoners, and yet still being treated in a curiously tentative manner by their captors, who were all from the Engineering Corps themselves. Angved had meanwhile got a look at the machinery that had travelled the dusty road south to Khanaphes ahead of them, and he now felt cause to be hopeful.

Of course, they might have decided they don’t need me to make it work, but why bring me along at all, in that case?
And if they needed Angved, having decided to roll the dice and gamble on his discovery, then the same seemed to be true of Varsec, who was housed in the same cell and given the same uncertain treatment.

Of course the Khanaphir expedition didn’t have a direct bearing on Varsec’s particular work, but he and Angved had already got past their initial caginess regarding their plans, and it was clear to both that the one could help the other. Aboard the airship – the
Empress’s
own airship! – they had taken every piece of paper they had been given and begun scrawling schematics and plans, diagrams of force and tension . . .

There had come a moment, far into the morning hours of a night that had slipped past almost unnoticed, when the two men had suddenly stared at one another, the plans spread out between them. Their shared gaze had spoken eloquently of a small part of the world changed for ever, the toothed wheels of progress moving on a notch.

They had called for the guard and demanded access to a messenger. The Fly-kinden who arrived was on the Empress’s own staff, as he informed them in extreme annoyance at having been woken at the whims of prisoners. He then refused to take their messages until Colonel Lien had been summoned and shown the schematics.

The Fly was on his way north almost immediately after that, dropping from the airship and speeding for the factories of Sonn, where some of Varsec’s initial ideas were already being worked into reality.
It must change. It must all change. It will be better.

Now the two of them had been transferred to a room inside one of the embassies, still not considered quite as dignitaries but not quite as prisoners either, without rank and yet treated with cautious deference. Varsec was sketching again, drawing wing joints in delicate detail. He had kept the beard, trimmed down neatly now that they had given him a razor, but still a departure from the Imperial norm, and if his clothes were the simple tunic and sandals of a slave, at least they were clean and intact. He seemed at peace with it, too, their curious half-life. Angved himself still felt the pinch of ambition, of his additional years and his lack of success.
I must be close, though, now.
Close to an end or a new beginning, anyway.
Khanaphes again, and I didn’t even need a leadshotter to get within the walls.

He had been ready for some time, when the message finally came. For the last few hours both he and Varsec had sensed the approach of it. Whatever they were here for, death or glory, it was coming.

Dusk had come and gone, as the messenger arrived, and Angved caught himself wondering what precisely they were being called to that had to be done under cover of darkness. The bland-faced, efficient Wasp-kinden come to fetch them had brought uniforms with him: tunics in the black and gold. ‘We need to make a good show,’ he explained, and neither of the prisoners asked for whom.

They were taken to a vast mass of stone shot through with small windows, encrusted with glyphs and friezes, fronted by vast colonnades. ‘The Scriptora,’ Angved guessed aloud, obscurely proud of having amassed some little local knowledge, even if it had only been for the purposes of knowing which parts of the city to knock down. From this gigantic mausoleum of an edifice, the Ministers governed their backward city. There were no Khanaphir in sight, though, only some Wasps guarding the entrance. The city’s leaders and their staff had been given the night off, it seemed.

As he was about to enter, Angved glanced back. In the centre of the square fronting the Scriptora was a truncated pyramid topped with an uneven ring of statues that resembled no Khanaphir he had ever seen. In the torchlight, their white stone took on a ruddy glow, and they seemed to dance a little, and even watch him, the flickering flames lending life to both limbs and eyes. Angved shuddered, obscurely unsettled, and hurried inside.

Bald, stern Colonel Lien was waiting for them, staring at the pair as though they were some faulty mechanism that might or might not be worth the fixing.

‘Stay behind me,’ he instructed. ‘Watch and learn.’

Angved was already watching. There were a half-dozen soldiers inside the Scriptora’s grand hall, but it was plain to his eyes that they were not simply the Light Airborne that their armour denoted. The way they stood, the nuances of their physiques, their ages: these were Engineers, and most likely men who had outranked Angved even when he had still been a lieutenant.
Whatever’s here, it’s not to be known outside the Corps
, he thought, and in that he was at once quite correct, and quite wrong.

There was the scrape of armour, and a handful of newcomers came striding into the Scriptora as though they owned it. Not the Khanaphir Ministers, though, but four men and a woman wearing a badge that made Angved twitch. The last time he had seen that open gauntlet, grey on grey, these people had been his enemies.

Lien must have expected some reaction from him, because he cast a warning glance over his shoulder. Angved was calm, though. Artificers were a practical, pragmatic breed, and he had not been deaf to the Corps rumour mill, even after being stripped of his rank. A look from Varsec suggested that Angved’s fellow prisoner was thinking just the same thing. The Iron Glove cartel had been working some remarkable miracles of artifice down on the Exalsee’s southern shores. Who they were, who led them, was a matter of some debate and of considerably more lurid speculation, but their credentials as artificers could not be denied, for all the Corps might wish otherwise. The Empire had never been shy of borrowing the inventions of other states and kinden for its artificers and, whilst this process usually resulted from armed conquest, trade was also an option wherever force would not yield results.

Still, what was this? The Glove and the Empire had been doing tentative business for a while now, but this piece of cloak-and-dagger promised rather more.

Four of the Iron Glove wore dark leathers, with blackened breastplates showing under their tabards, more like mercenaries than merchants. The woman and two of the men were Solarnese, the last man a thuggish-looking Bee-kinden. They were plainly no more than an honour guard, however, for the man in their midst was armoured head to foot in elegant, fluted plates – a perfectly machined carapace that looked as though it could withstand anything up to and including artillery. Angved held himself perfectly still, for he had witnessed just such armour in use, through a telescope, while he had watched the fighting on the bridge last time. It had been worn by the handful who had turned back the ambitions of the Many of Nem.

The armoured man took off his helm, and an uneasy ripple passed through the Wasp-kinden, for here was an insult, a slap in the face to Imperial doctrine – the Glove were being led by a halfbreed, a close-faced man who looked to be some mongrel of Ant and Beetle stock.

‘Colonel Lien, I take it?’ the halfbreed nodded to the lean, bald Wasp. ‘Here we are, as ordered.’

The chief of the Engineering Corps visibly steeled himself, before stepping forward to face the Iron Glove’s spokesman. ‘You have authority to negotiate for your cartel’s leader?’

‘You have the same for the Empire?’ the halfbreed shot back.

‘Believe me, what’s said here will bind the Empire. Of that you can be sure,’ replied Lien, with a heavy emphasis that caught both Angved and the Iron Glove man off guard.

What don’t I know?
Angved asked himself and then, quickly after that,
Who else is with us?

The halfbreed glanced about the hall, the same thoughts clearly on his mind, but then shrugged his armoured shoulders. ‘Then let’s get to it. Let us be blunt. We have what you want. We had a delegation from your Consortium guesting with us last month, and they made plenty of notes on what they saw. The Empire has completed its reunification, and you’re casting your eyes towards your neighbours again.’ He held up a hand even as Colonel Lien opened his mouth. ‘I’ll say no more. Feel free to pretend that I mean you’re concerned about
their
territorial ambitions. Maybe Myna’s going to make a strike for Capitas? Who knows? However, the sort of thing that your buyers want isn’t our normal stock in trade. We save that for
special
customers – so special, in fact, that we’ve yet to sell them to anyone. And then the Empire pays us a visit.’

‘And you start thinking of a price,’ Lien interrupted. ‘And you agree to meet us here, not quite Empire yet, and therefore safer for you, because you mistrust us. So tell me your price.’ The current of dislike in his voice could not be hidden, but both he and the halfbreed plainly understood that personal feelings – or even the prejudices of whole kinden – could not be allowed to get in the way of business.

‘Oh, money – lots of money,’ the halfbreed agreed. ‘You’ve seen the greatshotters in action, and your Consortium men took away with them the cost of those per unit. More, the artificers in that delegation were asking a lot of questions about improved war automotives and, after we’re friends again I’ve some plans to show you that will have you sending to the treasury all over again. But we have a few additional concerns – and that part about being friends again is one of them.’

‘You’re merchants,’ said Lien carefully, ‘isn’t that so?’

‘We’re being honest with each other. We’re artificers, we deal with realities. Let’s leave the pretences and the lies to the Inapt, Colonel.’

For a moment it seemed that Lien was going to press on with his prepared position, but then his narrow shoulders rose and fell. ‘Well, then . . . is it true?’ In that last word there was almost a note of pleading, although it was not clear whether he was seeking the halfbreed’s confirmation or denial.