Tisamon’s words of not so long ago came back to him. Stenwold had become what he hated, the Mantis had said. He had become a spymaster sending the young to die for him. Times had changed even since those words were spoken. The first blood had been shed by an imperial army in the Lowlands. Unity or slavery. These young men and women might be the first stones to precipitate an avalanche.
In his dreams, he saw flames erupting in the Collegium streets he knew so well, young men and women with blades and crossbows. Stenwold awoke with the sound of clashing steel fading in his mind.
The Wasps knew that Collegium must fall, for it was the key to the soul of the Lowlands. They had tried once. They would try again. Stenwold stared at the dark ceiling of his room, seeing through the slats in the shutters that dawn was still distant.
They would try again soon. Sands in the hourglass had become a constant hissing and hissing of lost time. It was an hourglass in a dark room, though, so he could not see how much sand was left.
He moved to turn over and realized that she was beside him. The last hours of the previous night fell back on him and he opened his eyes wide.
There had been cheering for him, at the warehouse: all those bright-eyed faces. Unity or slavery! He had left for his own rooms feeling ten years younger, buoyed up in spite of himself. He was not alone now, and neither was Collegium.
Back at his house there had been wine. Tisamon and Tynisa had not stayed long. They had been on their way elsewhere, some Mantis training session. He had found himself alone with Arianna, drinking wine and talking about old times. An old man’s failing, yes, although he still did not actually think of himself as old — though perhaps no longer young. An old man’s failing nonetheless, and yet she had listened. He had talked about his own College days, his travels; about Nero the artist, of whom she had heard; then, darkly, of the fall of Myna; the Wasp plans he had seen; his own personal experience of their ambitions.
How she had listened, and it had seemed to him that her eyes had shone more brightly than any of the other students’, and at the last he had convinced himself that there was more than simple zeal behind their gleam.
It had been a while since he had last slept with anyone — not that it was an excuse to say so. When he was a student himself there had been the usual ill-conceived liaisons, and after that a few tentative, short-lived ventures. Later there had been the occasional affection purchased on a commercial basis from a professional. His raising of Tynisa and Cheerwell and his crusade against the Empire had taken up all his time and his energy, until the latter endeavour had somehow led him to this place.
Well, there goes my place at the College. Or perhaps not, because he would not be the first by any means. He had always reserved his greatest contempt for Masters who preyed on their students in such a way, and now a clear pane of glass through which he could shine his judgement had become a mirror for himself.
But it wasn’t like that. But of course it was like that. He was a College Master and she a student. He had plied her with wine, until her judgement had been sufficiently afloat that a night with him had seemed irresistible, or at least grimly inevitable. True, that was not what his blurry memories of the previous evening were saying, but it must have been what happened, by any objective standard.
She shifted slightly, the curve of her back pressing against him, moving her feet, surprisingly cold, to curl about his ankle. Despite all he had just thought, he felt himself stirring. Oh, it was the dream, though, wasn’t it? The dream all young Beetle lads had, when coming to the College. For they were the sons of tradesmen and merchants and artificers, and they would go home to wed a respectable Beetle wife, most likely. It was ever the dream, to sleep with a Spider-kinden woman before you die.
And I could die any day now, he told himself. Some part of Stenwold that was still the custodian of his schoolboy ego was crowing, distantly, for all the immorality of it.
She moved again and then turned restlessly, as though she knew what he was thinking, throwing an arm across his broad chest, and hooking a smooth leg across his. He closed his eyes but the responses of his body were beyond his ability to master. He gently freed his arm and fed it around her shoulders, and she nestled closer to him. He was able to put off thinking about what her reaction might be when she fully woke.
Waking past midnight, with the bulk of Stenwold sleeping beside her, her thoughts had been bittersweet. She had now done what the job required of her. He had moved and groaned on top of her, and she had considered him analytically, like a whore not yet wholly jaded.
Beetle men! she had thought and, though he was strange for a Beetle, seeing further, thinking more, in this way he was just like the rest of them.
Arianna, with the stillness of the night about her, considered her options, for her brief from Thalric had not taken her this far. His instructions had been limited to the student meetings she had lured Stenwold to. She knew her trade, though: she was Spider-kinden, after all. For Thalric to instruct her would have been as pointless as her giving an Ant counsel on going to war.
And Thalric had not said to kill the man, but here was her chance, and there would never be a better one. Thalric might be planning Stenwold’s capture perhaps, his interrogation, but she knew with cold certainty that if she came to him with Stenwold’s blood on her hands Thalric would not turn her away.
She slipped from beneath the sheets without disturbing him. He had drunk a lot, last night, but Beetle constitutions were sturdy. It had certainly not hindered his later performance.
It would be the work of a moment to take up her dagger and put it through his ear. Forty years of life and learning brought to a certain point and then cut off.
Would he boast, she wondered, if he survived to see the morning? Would he tell his College peers of his prowess? Or that evil-eyed Mantis friend of his? She thought not, because even in so few days she had come to know Stenwold Maker.
With her bare feet she searched her discarded robe for the blade, feeling along the braided cord of her belt. The work of a moment to kill him, the work of another to slip from the window and vanish into the night. Thalric would be surprised but pleased.
But the dagger was not there. She narrowed her eyes so as to pick out her pale robe in the darkness. She knelt by it, feeling. She had shrugged the garment off for him, not in haste, measuring his reaction as she unfurled her bare skin piece by piece. She did not recall the weapon dropping away, so it must still be here.
She stopped, clutching the robe to her. She was suddenly afraid, but it was a moment before she could pin down the cause.
The door was ajar, just a sliver. The doors in this house were all kept ajar, she recalled. Of course they were. They were Beetle doors with complicated catches. She could never have opened them if they were fully shut. The locking mechanism, simple though it might be, would have baffled her.
As it would also baffle the Mantis, since they were similarly of the old Inapt strain who had been left behind by the revolution. Spider-kinden might bar their doors, or fasten them with hooks, but never some twisting turning thing like this device. And so the doors were all ajar, because of Stenwold’s household, and of her.
Knowing that, feeling across the floor for a blade that was not there, she abruptly knew. Standing, with the cool of the night on her skin, she looked across the room, seeing just a little in the faintest of moonlight from between the shutters. She and Stenwold were alone.
But he had been here and he had taken her knife. As tactfully and gracefully as that, because he was a Mantis and he did not trust her. She did not fear that he had broken her cover. It was all merely part of the loathing his kinden had for hers.