‘This… this is what you are working on?’ Totho asked.
‘We approach it, Totho. We do approach it,’ Drephos replied, then shook his head as though to clear it. What he might have said next was lost because just then a soldier pushed past Big Greyv and onto the gantry, with a scroll thrust out towards him. Drephos took it disdainfully and moved a little way off to read it. The reading took him a matter of seconds before he turned on the messenger with the word, ‘Impossible!’
‘Those are your orders, sir,’ insisted the messenger implacably.
‘I have work here,’ Drephos snapped at him, ‘and I am not finished. Go find someone else to do your dirty work.’
‘Not my work, sir. You see where this message comes from?’
Drephos looked back down at the scroll. The messenger would have noticed nothing, but Totho had known the halfbreed artificer long enough to spot a slight widening of his pale eyes.
‘So…’ Some of the fight had now gone out of him. ‘This is absurd. What do I know of such a business? There is no option, then?’
‘You have been commanded personally, sir,’ the sergeant replied smugly, and Totho knew that he was enjoying being able to snub this half-blood of superior rank. ‘And, if you note, you are requested to take your work along with you.’
The idea, however, did not seem to appeal. For a long time, whole minutes, Drephos stared down at the summons. His mind was elsewhere, charting webs of logistics, of numbers and calculations. Totho saw his lips twitch over and over, baring his teeth at whatever task was being forced on him. Kaszaat and Big Greyv looked as blank as he. Whatever had arrived from Capitas had come without a hint of warning.
Drephos bared his teeth to emit a long hiss. ‘Totho, find me a deputy from the engineering corps to take over here.’
‘Sir?’ Totho stammered out. Is it about me? Am I named in that note?
‘You’re coming with me. I’m taking the whole team, the projects, the lot. We shall also take the big freight automotives. I shall continue to work even on the way there. My work is much too valuable to disrupt.’
‘But where are we going, sir?’ Totho asked him.
‘Inform the others, too,’ Drephos said. ‘We are sent to Szar.’
Kaszaat’s face remained a mask. Totho could only guess at the turmoil beneath.
Twenty-Four
Lake Limnia at night, and the great expanse of moonlit water was chopped into a million pieces by the drizzle, blotched by swathes of reed, pockmarked by the shadows of Skater rafts and boats. It should have been nobody’s idea of a pleasant sight.
Tisamon stood by the shores of Lake Limnia and stared across the rain-dappled waters. Every so often the clouds grew ragged enough that a despairing slice of moon could claw itself free of them, and then its clean, pure light appeared in the lake itself as only a pockmarked, ruined reflection, a face given over to disease and ruin.
If I was a seer, what omens would I make from this?
Around him the Skater-kinden padded on their stilting errands and left him be. Of course there might be other travellers about tonight. Any moment a patrol of Wasps could troop down between the leaning shacks, with arrest or execution on their minds. In truth, he had hoped for that, but for once the Empire was maddeningly absent and his claw remained unbloodied.
He was alone with his thoughts, and he was finding that uncomfortable, because it meant they strayed from the business in hand: the mysterious box and the forthcoming auction. When his mind was let free, to coast like a kite in the gusting wind, it asked the same question, What is she doing now? It had been a long time since Tisamon had been plagued with such imaginings: seeing pearlescent armour, a long, straight sword held perfectly poised, the curving talons of her thumbs, the elemental grace of her fighting stance. Is even this place, even the great distance I have placed between us, not enough? He had hoped that she would recede in his mind, along with the miles that separated them, but he might as well have brought Felise Mienn with him.
She is so swift, so deadly! How close she came to killing me, when first we met. There had been no other, not for a long time, to challenge him so. There had only ever been one other who had set his blood racing in the clash of blades.
Atryssa, forgive me.
The spectre of Tynisa’s dead mother walked before him then, with accusing eyes. Mantids paired for life, it was well known, and many were those who then lived out long years as widow or widower. For life always, and he had bound himself to Atryssa, given her a child even, and now… this, her.
He tried to banish the Dragonfly duellist from his mind, but he could no more do so than he could defeat her, blade to blade. She danced and dodged, and was before him still. He felt like weeping, and then he felt like killing.
‘Hoi, Mantis,’ came a voice, and he whirled about, his claw raised to strike. Nivit had hailed him from a safe distance, though, the bald, angular little man regarding him cautiously.
‘Is it time?’ Tisamon demanded.
‘They sent me to fetch you,’ the Skater told him, his expression carefully neutral. ‘Anyone else looking out over the lake like that, I’d say there’s a girl in it, but you, I reckon you’re just thinking about cutting throats, am I right?’
‘Nothing other,’ Tisamon agreed shortly, and stalked past the other man towards the looming hulk of the grounded Buoyant Maiden.
Scyla had hidden her auction house the best way possible, by having it come into being only when she was ready to sell. Founder Bellowern and the other buyers had discovered only days before, through a succession of bewildered Skater messengers, where their prize could be won.
Bellowern was not the only one to have fallen by the wayside. It seemed that collecting the exotic was a hazardous business within the Empire. Nivit guessed that almost half the wealthy and the powerful who had come to Jerez in response to Scyla’s invitation were no longer there. Some, like Palearchos and Founder Bellowern, were dead. Others had been arrested by the Wasps in the Empire’s own futile attempts to find the box. More had simply decided that the stakes were not worth the gain.
Out on the lake, in the gathering dusk, Scyla’s gold now paid for a diligent team of Skater-kinden to piece together a great raft. They towed mats of reeds behind their row-boats or sailing dinghies, thus to haul the pieces of Scyla’s theatre into place. There were walls, too, a building as grand as any native home in Jerez taking shape entirely out on the water. Soon the buyers would congregate there, narrow-eyed in suspicion of each other. Soon Scyla would have to appear there too, from behind whatever mask she was wearing, and present them with the Shadow Box.
Achaeos and the others sat in Nivit’s office and planned. Jons Allanbridge had already gone to stoke up the Buoyant Maiden, now repaired in readiness for the anticipated getaway.
‘Out on the lake,’ said Thalric.
‘Of course out on the lake,’ Nivit told him. ‘Business on the lake’s standard practice hereabouts. I’d have thought you’d known that.’
Thalric sought out Sef, who was sitting close to Gaved. Despite rumours in town of strange hunters abroad at night, there had been no further attempt to take her. ‘The lake,’ Thalric said, ‘has become different to me now. What is the plan, then?’
‘Scyla will have guards,’ Tisamon said, ‘or lookouts, anyway. If nothing else, she has no guarantee that one of her genuine buyers will not try force. Water is not our element, not the best for employing stealth.’