Achaeos’s blank eyes gave no clues. ‘Thank you, Servant of the Green,’ he said. ‘But we must arm ourselves in knowledge, first.’
‘What knowledge?’ Arianna asked him. ‘Who knows more, of this? Doctor Nicrephos did, but he’s dead. Surely he was the only one.’
‘There is one coming soon who also knows,’ Achaeos said. His words silenced them.
‘How…?’ Arianna’s voice petered out. She had spent a long time amongst the rational Beetle-kinden, but her roots lay with an older tradition. The Spider-kinden had their seers too. ‘You’ve seen…?’
‘Stenwold has snared a rare catch,’ Achaeos explained. ‘Fate’s weave favours us.’
‘Achaeos.’ Tisamon’s tone was flat, but Arianna detected the faint tremor there. ‘You were not… such a seer before, to have such gifted insights,’
‘Save me your tact,’ the Moth said harshly. ‘Oh, I am no great seer, to foresee all things. ‘“Little Neophyte”, they once called me. But now I am led by the nose. They see this. They feed me whatever is needed so that I will dance to their steps. You know who I mean.’
Tisamon flinched, a quick shudder passing through him. Oh, he knows, Arianna realized, and: I want nothing to do with this. This is Mantis magic, and there is no place in it for me.
‘There is to be an interrogation,’ Achaeos continued. ‘I can all but hear the echoes of the questions. Tisamon, I would have you on hand. In case our man proves reluctant.’
In any event it was a day’s waiting before Stenwold could make the arrangements. The locusts of Collegiate bureaucracy had descended on him almost as soon as he reentered the city walls. When the message came it was at very short notice, Stenwold grabbing a free hour and an unused room, and assembling as many as possible to hear what was hopefully to be revealed.
They had Gaved seated at a table in what had once been some administrator’s office. This should be conducted in some place better than this, Stenwold thought. We should have oppressive interrogation rooms, perhaps. But of course the worst Collegium could offer were the cells used by the militia, and rooms here within the College were more convenient. He and Che were sitting at the same table with the prisoner and would have looked like just off-duty academics except for Tisamon’s brooding presence and Achaeos standing as chief prosecutor.
Also except for the fourth man sitting at the table, whom Stenwold was trying not to think about right now.
‘You’re not denying you were part of this theft?’ Achaeos accused the prisoner.
The Wasp shook his head. ‘Your man spotted me right off,’ he shrugged, ‘so what can I say?’
‘You can tell us exactly what you thought you were stealing.’
‘I have no idea what it was,’ Gaved replied. ‘I didn’t even get a good look at it before your mob came piling in.’
Achaeos glanced at Stenwold, who spread his hands cluelessly.
‘Who wanted it?’ Tisamon asked. ‘You must know that.’
The Wasp shrugged. ‘We weren’t told. You don’t ask that in my line of work.’ So far as Stenwold could tell, he was not genuinely holding anything back. Gaved was simply a mercenary, a hunter of fugitives by preference. Stenwold, looking at him, saw a man who knew he was in serious trouble, but without that desperation he would expect of a captured enemy agent with Tisamon at his back. There was, so Stenwold guessed, no great secret that Gaved was holding close.
‘I can tell you what we reckoned,’ the Wasp added, unexpectedly. ‘It makes no difference to me now. The Empire wanted this thing of yours for someone important. Someone really high up, like a general, perhaps, or someone in the Imperial Court. The fellow who gave us our marching orders said as much.’
Achaeos bit his lip anxiously, leaning imperceptibly into Che, who sat very close to him. Their reunion had brought Stenwold more vicarious joy than almost anything else that had happened recently. It had been Che, too, who had unexpectedly spoken up for their captive, so that Gaved was sitting under guard but not bound.
‘Where were you supposed to take the box?’ the Moth asked.
‘Back to Helleron,’ Gaved replied promptly. ‘Believe me when I say I wish I’d never taken on this job. Helleron’s usually as far south as I make it, and I should have kept it that way. This was a fool’s errand: Phin and the Fly dead, and I didn’t even come away with the goods.’
‘Which brings us to your companion,’ Achaeos said carefully. He had already made his suspicions known to Che and Stenwold.
‘Oh, Scylis?’ Gaved said, in tones of disgust. ‘A treacherous bastard, he is. By now Scylis will be living it up in Helleron with all four helpings of our bounty money.’
At which point the last man seated at the table said, ‘Scylis?’
It was the first thing he had said so far. He was similarly unbound, but Tisamon stood close behind him, wearing his clawed gauntlet, and with a stance that said he was looking forward to any attempt at escape.
‘Thalric,’ Stenwold acknowledged his query. ‘The name means something to you?’
It had been an uncertain decision, whether to bring Thalric to this table, but, suspect as he was, he was their authority on imperial affairs, and they had a Wasp to interrogate. The initial reaction between the two men had been one of outright hostility. This was not Gaved hating the deserter but Thalric loathing the mercenary for, despite his turned coat, Thalric’s mind was still black and gold.
‘Oh, I once knew a Spider named Scylis,’ Thalric explained. ‘A very… able agent. Your niece, for one, should have cause to remember him.’
‘We all have good cause, Thalric,’ Stenwold informed him flatly, as Gaved merely looked on frowning. ‘We know something of what this Scylis is capable, and if anyone could walk out of Collegium in the middle of a siege and get all the way to Helleron…’
‘I had wondered,’ Thalric said, with a tinge of mockery in his voice, ‘if you would finally start believing. It took me long enough, but I suppose your Moth there must have helped to persuade you. Sometimes being credulous can be an advantage. If you decide to go after Scylis, little Moth, I would suggest you take care. When he came limping in after catching your arrow, he was not pleased with you at all. If I had provoked Scylis’s enmity I would not get within arm’s reach of anyone else, ever again.’ He smiled until Tisamon shifted slightly, the metal of his claw scraping on the tabletop, and the smile instantly went sour.
‘So Scylis will have passed the box once he got to Helleron?’ Che clarified.
Gaved nodded. ‘That was the original plan.’
‘Then the plan failed,’ Achaeos informed them, ‘for the Shadow Box did not go to Helleron,’ He unrolled a somewhat tattered map across the table. Stenwold studied it but could see little there: the colours and shapes made no real match to places and lands that were familiar to him. It was an old map, he knew, prepared by Achaeos’s own kinden when this city was still theirs. Just as Achaeos could not grasp how to fire a crossbow or turn a key in a lock, so Stenwold could not decipher the way the Moths represented distance and places on a page.
‘I have charted the course of this Scylis, or whoever holds the box,’ Achaeos explained, although of his audience only Tisamon could follow his markings. ‘Not to Helleron, in fact, but some severe detour. A detour north and then east, here to Lake Limnia.’
‘Jerez,’ Gaved said instantly.
‘You know it?’
‘I’ve done good business there,’ the Wasp hunter replied. ‘That’s Skater-kinden land: marsh and swamp, bandit and smuggler country. Imperial writ runs thin there and so that’s where the fugitives go, hoping to get into the Commonweal, or even escape over the northern borders.’
‘So tell me,’ Achaeos said, ‘why take the box there? Nobody would go into the Empire just to get out again. Scylis could have gone straight north from here and found a pass into the Commonweal.’