‘Tynisa?’
She snapped into attention. The rain was easing, and the lamp in the little round window was now extinguished. The cloud-mottled moon lent little light to the scene, but Gaved carried a covered lantern.
Gaved was standing before her, looking at her with an expression of genuine concern.
‘Tynisa?’
‘What…?’ She leant back against the slick wall, feeling oddly dizzy.
‘Are you… drunk?’ he asked.
‘No, not drunk, not… anything. I just… I must have dozed off…’
‘What are you doing out here…’ His voice tailed off as she raised a hand to brush her rain-plastered hair back out of her eyes.
In a moment he had made a grab for it, but she was faster still, even feeling as off-balance as she now was, stepping back and having the tip of her sword at his throat in an instant. His hand, which had been reaching, was now splayed open, directed towards her. For a second they stared at one another.
‘Your hand,’ he said, closing his own.
‘What about…?’ She looked down at it, saw the shallow gash that the last of the rain was still washing blood from. ‘How did I do that?’
She sheathed her blade once more, further examining the wound. It extended from her forefinger knuckle to the base of her thumb. The cut was slightly ragged and shallow, and she did not feel it at all. She sucked at it experimentally, tasting the salt of her own blood, which was already congealing.
‘Are you all right?’ Gaved asked slowly. ‘You came here to check up on me, I see. I suppose I can live with that. A friend of a friend saw you out here, and warned me someone had been watching the place for a very long time… I thought you might be Empire.’
‘You thought I might be Empire?’ she asked.
‘Why not? I keep telling everyone I’m not imperial, and you’ve no idea how hard I’ve fought for that to become even a token truth. Not all of us Wasps have much love for the Emperor.’
‘Gaved, when you came out, did you… see anyone else?’
She saw instantly that she had guessed right. A muscle twitched in his face, tugging at one corner of his mouth.
‘Just for a moment,’ he admitted. ‘Just a shadow.’ There was something more, something he did not want to say, but at this stage she was too cold and wet – and, she had to admit, frightened – to care.
‘Since I’ve now been found out,’ she said, ‘can I come inside?’
He nodded, still looking troubled. ‘I’ll have Nivit’s girl fix you something hot to drink,’ he said.
Eleven
Her name was Xaraea and she had been the first to see this coming.
That was the joke, really, because she was such a poor seer. Like any Moth-kinden of standing she had learned the mouldy principles of magic, but she had never had any particular gift for it. She lacked that specific kind of concentration that made it possible to pluck apart the weave of the world and then reknit it as she wished. She would never be a true magician, and that meant, in the hierarchy of Tharn, that there was a ceiling above which she could never fly.
Yet here she was and the future of her city – of her world – rested on her shoulders. She had her own talents, she had found: her own sort of concentration. While her peers had studied the workings of the universe, her lessons had been in human nature: politics, commerce, all the strings that bound each individual to each other. Xaraea had played the games of the Spider-kinden, even served as ambassador to them for three years, learning the trade of deception from the mistresses of the art. In short, she was Arcanum: the secret cult of spies and agents through which the Moth-kinden gathered their secrets, and feuded amongst one another.
They had found uses for her talents other than magic. She had a good mind for logic. She had intuition. She had a deft hand, too, that could be turned to many tasks. She had undertaken her first murder on her twentieth birthday. The victim had been another Moth who had never known that he had been judged and condemned. Such were the games of the Arcanum.
The Arcanum: it was a word merely whispered throughout the remnants of the Moth culture. Many other races had their spies and agents acting as their sword against treason and their shield from enemy eyes. The Dragonflies had their Mercers and the Empire its brutal Rekef, but the Arcanum was the oldest secret service of them all, so encrusted with traditions and exceptions that it barely qualified as such. It was a blade in the hands of any Skryre that cared to take it up, and it had been turned inward more often than not in the silent, secret struggles that the Moth elders waged upon each other, murder and blackmail and espionage based on prophecy and ancient philosophy.
When the Wasp Empire had commenced its Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal, the Moths had finally begun to take notice. Not till then, nor even as recently as a month ago, had most of them considered that this extreme might come: Tharn at the Empire’s mercy. Xaraea’s patrons had shown more foresight, though. Out of curiosity and divination, they had set her the task of finding a shield against the Empire.
Xaraea had gone into the Empire twice, masquerading as a slave, trying to understand this vital, bloody-handed new power emerging into the world. Her exit, with a faked death enacted each time to stave off their hunters, had brought back to Tharn more information than it knew what to do with. In the Days of Lore, her race had been noted for its understanding of the minds of others, but that faculty had atrophied ever since the revolution.
She had gone into that Empire and studied its workings, and sought out contacts, and installed her agents amongst the slaves and subjects of the Wasps. She had put out her feelers delicately, seeking some solution to the grinding advance of the imperial armies that would come to Tharn sooner or later. Delicately, through intermediaries of intermediaries and by the most fallible means possible, Xaraea had constructed the faintest outline of a solution.
How it had all come home now: Xaraea the intelligencer and spy, whose fragile plan would either save or doom her city.
It was bright day outside but the city had not gone to bed. Instead she looked out of the window, shielding her eyes.
The sky was full of airships. There were other flying machines, too, landing out in the fields, digging great ruts across them. Wasp soldiers swarmed in a cloud about them, and one by one they were dropping to perch on the countless balconies and the statues, or cling to the carved reliefs. Their hands were extended in open-palmed threat, but the people of Tharn stood patiently and offered them no harm, made no suggestion of resistance. Not a blade nor a bow could be seen. After all, what good would they be against the artificers’ weapons that bedecked the flying machines?
Because it was her plan, Xaraea had to go down there to see if this desperate, infinitely unlikely clutching at fate could be made to serve them. She spread her dark wings and pushed off through the window, descending in a slow spiral to meet the rulers of the Wasps.
The new Governor of Tharn was arriving.
The Wasp felt a steadying as the airship’s painter-lines were lashed to whatever could be found to secure them. He supposed that meant statuary and embossed carvings. If there was a strong wind tonight then there would doubtless be a few headless effigies amid the friezes of Tharn in the morning.
He was merely thirty years of age, and only a major. For one of his age and that rank, this honour was unheard of. True, he had been helped on his way, like a man boosted up over a wall by his fellows, but he had worked hard for it, too. He might have his handicaps, but they had taught him guile and craft until he had become as nimble a manipulator of opinion as anyone within the Empire.