And the void rushed up for him again, the void that had only been waiting in the shadows all this time. The hungry void reached out for him.
Someone plunged their hands into his wound and for a second the pain, which could never get worse, was much, much worse.
And then it was gone. There was something searing and burning through him, but it was distant, like thunder over far hills. And there was light.
He opened his eyes again, but it was still too bright after so long in darkness. He could not look at it.
The same hands were held to his wound, their warmth leaching into him, and he felt – it could be nothing else – the edges of the wound knit again, the blood cease to spill across his skin, and he felt the ruptured organs find peace and start to heal once more.
It was Ancestor Art, but he had never known anything like it before. He forced his eyes open, forced them to stare into the heart of the sun.
He thought he had gone blind, but it was just the sight of her. She stood over him like stained glass and crystal and glowed with her own pure light, and stared into his face with featureless, unreadable white eyes.
He was weeping, but he did not know it, looking up into the face of the woman who had once been Grief in Chains, and then Aagen’s Joy, and so many others in her time.
After they had lain together, they slept awhile. Partway through the night, she had woken and made to go, and Totho had caught her arm and held her there. For a moment he did not speak and she waited patiently, sitting on the edge of the folding bed they had given him in exchange for his straw mattress: the two artificers in darkness, the halfbreed and the Bee.
He had known, when she had come to him, that it was wrong, but she had been so forthright, so open. No wiles, no subtlety, merely an artificer’s practical seduction. Kaszaat, in stained coveralls, with smears of oil still on her hands, unbuckling her toolstrip belt in this partitioned space of tent they had given him.
And no woman before had ever offered herself to him. Seeing her there, inexplicably there, he had cursed his memories. He had cursed Cheerwell Maker for running off with Achaeos, and then he reached out for what he could have.
Now, too dark for him to see her deep brown skin, the curves of her body that was lean and compact with the workaday strength of her trade, he asked her, ‘Did Drephos make you do this?’
‘I am no slave,’ she said. ‘Drephos does not make me.’
‘But you are a soldier. You have a rank. He is your… superior, or whatever it is you would say.’ He did not hold his breath against her answer. He had no illusions.
‘He made a suggestion,’ she said after a pause, ‘but that was not the first time the thought came to me. When one placed above you asks of you something, to go to a man you are interested in already, it is by command? Or it is of free will?’ She made to leave again but he held her still.
‘Wait,’ he said, and then, ‘Please.’ She settled again, and then he felt her hand brush its way up his arm, trace his shoulder and then rest against his cheek.
He wanted to ask Why? but he could not disentangle his motive for the question. Self-pity – or was he seeking a compliment? The latter was another thing his life had been mostly empty of. Totho the halfbreed! Who would have thought it would take capture and imprisonment to bring this fulfilment to him?
He had not realized, until he grappled with her, that he was no longer the awkward, slightly gangling boy he had been at the College. He had not noticed how he had filled out, broad across the shoulders and strong. His Ant blood had made him strong, just as his Beetle-kinden side had allowed him to endure. Kaszaat had seemed small within his arms.
She settled down beside him again and he felt the warmth of her back pressing into his chest and belly. It struck him, and the thought surprised him, that she must feel even more alone than he did. Her city was so far, she had said, and she did not expect she would see it again. She must have been alone now for a long time, with only Wasps and Drephos for company. Perhaps in coming to him she was reaching out for the only contact that might not be a betrayal.
And if Totho accepted Drephos’s hand, that proffered gauntlet, would this become a betrayal for her, as if he was no more than a Wasp in truth?
He put an arm about her, his breath catching as it brushed beneath her breasts.
‘Once woken, I cannot sleep,’ she informed him, although she mumbled it sleepily enough. ‘You must talk to me, amuse me.’
So he talked to her. He told her of Collegium, and the Great College. He told her of the workshops there, and the Masters in their white robes. He spoke of the Prowess Forum, and he even spoke of Stenwold Maker, Tynisa and the Mantis Weaponsmaster, Tisamon. Of Cheerwell Maker he spoke not one word.
She left him before dawn, dressing herself in darkness. She explained that she had duties to attend to but he suspected that she did not want their liaison to be common knowledge. She feared the Wasps, more than anything, and she did not want them to think that she was free for the taking.
He dressed himself as the sun rose, in his artificer’s leathers, only hesitating as he began to buckle on the toolstrip that Drephos had returned to him. He was no artificer here, not yet. He was a prisoner of the Empire. If he emerged from this tent with his tools ready for use, would that suggest he had committed himself to the betrayal they were urging on him?
For it would be a betrayal of the cruellest kind. They were asking him to design weapons, as had been his dream throughout College. At Collegium his creations would have been graded and discarded. Anything made for the Wasps would be used.
They would be used on his own people.
But they would be used.
Something visceral rose up in him, thrilling at the very thought of the work: to undertake the work for the sake of the work, and never ask who it might be for.
When he did emerge there was a messenger waiting. It was strange to see Fly-kinden running errands just as they did back home. Amidst the Wasp army there was a whole cadre of them buzzing backwards and forwards wearing the gold and black of the imperial standard.
‘A message for you from the Colonel-Auxillian.’ The Fly was very young, perhaps only fifteen or so. ‘He’d like to see you in his tent.’
A chill went through Totho as he thought, Perhaps he will force a choice from me now, and if I refuse, as I must, surely I must, then I will be a prisoner indeed, and they will extract from me everything I know about the Lowlands and Collegium.
He went nonetheless, because he had no choice and no options.
He found Drephos lying back on the very chair that Totho himself had been secured to, when he first regained consciousness after the raid. It was a complex thing, that chair, and now it moved smoothly, the panels of the back pushing in and out with metal fingers, steam venting from the sides. Drephos had explained earlier how he suffered from particular back pains, so had been forced to devise his own relief. His first love remained the artifice of war but he was not slow in attending to his own comforts.
Kaszaat waited at the rear of the tent but did not meet Totho’s gaze.
Drephos opened one eye, and made a signal to the Fly, who darted outside again. The chair made a particularly complex sound and he groaned.
‘Bear with me,’ he said. ‘I am particularly out of sorts this morning.’
The man was not well, and indeed was not entirely whole. He limped when he walked and the arm he kept hidden behind metal must be injured in some way. Totho wondered which of his own inventions had turned on him, or whether this had been the work of his imperial masters.
‘You have a visitor,’ Drephos announced, although Totho could barely hear him over the chair and he had to repeat himself.
‘A visitor?’ Totho looked blank.
Drephos signalled to Kaszaat, who stepped over to the chair and drew the pressure from the boiler, sending steam venting out in hot clouds that forced Totho to stand well back. From that swiftly dispersing mist, Drephos finally emerged, pulling his hood up to shadow his blemished features.