‘I’ve seen bandits,’ Salma observed. ‘It’s a wretched life.’
‘I imagine you have, being from where you’re from,’ Phalmes agreed. ‘And I’d ask just what a Commonwealer like you is doing so far from home. Not great travellers normally, your people.’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘It’s going to be a long night.’
‘Tell me a short one first,’ Salma said. ‘How do you come to know the Commonweal?’
Phalmes just smiled sourly, and Salma immediately understood. ‘You fought there?’
‘Five years of the Twelve-Year War,’ the bandit agreed. ‘After they drafted me for their Auxillians. I was apprenticed for a mason, before that. So much for the futures we think we’ll have. So tell me, Commonwealer, tell me your long story.’
And Salma told him, the bones of it anyway. He could not place any real trust in this man, he knew, and so he held off the names and the details, but he told Phalmes about the College and about his being recruited by a Beetle spymaster. He recounted his journey on the Sky Without and their escape, and their foundering in Helleron. He told of the betrayal and their capture by the Wasps.
Phalmes had listened without interruption, but it was when the tale reached Myna that he held a hand up. ‘How long ago?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘When was this?’
Salma counted back. ‘A couple of months at most, since I was held there. Then my friends got me out — and the governor was killed, I heard.’
‘The Bloat?’ Phalmes said. ‘They killed him?’
‘Yes. And I met the woman who is running the resistance there. She was freed at the same time I was.’
‘She? What’s her name?’
‘Kymene. Do you know her?’
Phalmes shook his head. ‘Heard of her, though. So your lot let her out. Well, now, that’s bought you safe passage and a half, more than any song and dance.’
The elder of Sfayot’s girls came, then, and sat down next to Phalmes, who regarded her without expression.
‘Your father sent you here to me?’
She nodded, watching him.
‘There’s a man with a realistic view of the world,’ said Phalmes tiredly. ‘Your friend here has just bargained your freedom, girl.’
She shrugged. ‘We knew he would.’
‘And why’s that?’ Phalmes asked her, like a man humouring a child.
‘Because he is such a man,’ she said. ‘My father has keen sight.’
Salma shifted uncomfortably. ‘It was nothing but chance.’
She shook her head stubbornly, and then turned her attention to Phalmes. ‘What will you do?’ she asked him. ‘Your men are unhappy. They fear the Wasps.’
‘Do they, now?’
‘They should,’ she told him. ‘My father has seen it. They are just north of here. The great city of the chimneys has fallen to them already.’
‘Does she mean Helleron?’ Phalmes demanded.
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ Salma said, and then reconsidered. ‘Or no, I’d heard that northwards wouldn’t be a good destination. I hadn’t thought. Things are moving fast, then?’
Phalmes nodded gloomily. ‘It’s looking as though this country won’t be good even for bandits any more. There’s plenty of my lads here who need to keep themselves well out of the Empire’s hands, and I put myself squarely in that number.’
The girl leant into him unexpectedly, almost pushing him against Salma. ‘You’re not a bad man,’ she said. ‘My father sees many things.’
Salma’s eyes sought out Sfayot near the fire, and found the white-haired man looking at him with an unnervingly clear stare.
‘I’m as bad as I need to be,’ Phalmes told her. He seemed about to push her away, but then decided against it. Salma could see that he was already worrying about what to do with his followers next, because where could he lead them now?
‘You should come with us,’ the Roach girl told him.
Phalmes stared at her levelly. ‘Should I? And where are you all going that is such a wonderful destination?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, and then looked over at Salma. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I’m not leading us anywhere,’ Salma said, but realized, even as he said it, that this was not quite true. They had been looking to him since he had driven Cosgren away, because Cosgren had made himself leader, and then Salma had displaced him. That was the way things worked.
And if he was leading them. he should know where they were going, and why.
‘What else has your father seen?’ he asked. Phalmes gave an amused snort, because magic was just a word to him, but Salma had seen magic in his time and he believed in that moment that Sfayot could indeed be a seer.
‘That you will find something,’ the girl said. ‘You will find what you seek, perhaps.’
‘Does he know you’re telling me all this?’
‘He wanted me to,’ she said. She was close to his own age, thin and pale, with her white hair cut short and ragged. She was pretty, though, and she looked at Phalmes with a smile that he did not know what to do with. In that moment of awkwardness, Salma saw him as though he had known the man all his life. A solid working man, ripped from his trade, his family, his life, only to be driven further and further as he fled the rolling borders of the Empire, and yet here he was, still trying.
‘They made you an officer in the Auxillians,’ he guessed.
‘So you’re a magician as well now, are you?’ Phalmes demanded. ‘I was Sergeant-Auxillian, if you must know.’
‘And you’re still trying to look after your men.’
‘Just like you are,’ Phalmes confirmed, ‘but what of it? A man’s got to have some purpose in his life.’
‘Yes, he does,’ Salma agreed.
‘Why not come with us?’ the Roach girl asked Phalmes again.
He merely shook his head tiredly.
But the next morning, as the refugees set off westwards, Phalmes and his bandits were riding uncertainly alongside them. They were far enough apart to maintain their sovereignty, but they rode a parallel path, and took care not to get ahead.
Something was happening, Salma was aware, though he was not sure just what. In the meantime, as he waited for it to happen, his little band of fugitives lived day-to-day and relied on one another. When they were hungry, the land or the leavings of others sustained them. When they were weary they stopped and scavenged wood for a fire.
Then, one afternoon when they were in sore need of food and shelter, one of Phalmes’s scouts reported back that there was a small village ahead. They had been following the Sarn-Helleron railroad, and it was some little hamlet built around a rail siding. Passenger trains had stopped here, so there would be inns, farmland, an engineer’s workshop with a single enterprising artificer. But there had been little traffic of late, and most of the opportunists had headed away, looking for fatter pastures, leaving only a skeleton of a place, inhabited by those that could not or would not leave.
Phalmes gave a signal and the bandits began to ready their weapons.
‘What are you doing?’ Salma asked him.
‘We need food,’ Phalmes said. ‘What’s more, there are roofs out there that we can make use of.’
‘There will be no pillaging here,’ Salma told him. ‘There’s no need for that.’
‘You’re right, so long as the locals there are sensible.’ The Mynan gave him a hard smile. ‘So long as they understand that we have the power to take, all we need to do is ask.’
‘Let me at least talk to them first,’ Salma insisted.
‘Whatever you want,’ said Phalmes with a shrug. ‘But those around you now are your people. They’re looking to you to provide, like my men look to me. They’re short of everything and hungry each evening. What are you going to do about that?’
Salma looked out at the village and thought, Was it Cosgren that brought me to this? It had to be something more, but he could not put his finger on the moment when he had shouldered this responsibility. It was now on his shoulders, nonetheless.
It did not turn out as Salma had planned, none of it.