‘They arrived here, what, a tenday ago, bit by bit, and they’re still trickling in. As my lads can tell you, there was a real panic at first. The magnates all mobilized their retinues, and the Council hired every mercenary they could put their hands on. It was knife-edge stuff all the way for a day or so, but the stripeys, they just sat there outside, pitching their tents. Then word got out that it was something else they were here for, but not the fighting. Some news arrived from the south saying there was an army marching on Tark that made this bunch look like the boys who clean the dunnies. Then the word was that this lot were only here to buy. They had pots of gold, Helleron mint and their own tat coins, and they were after weapons, supplies, all sorts of kit. Some reckoned they were going north — to go kick the Commonweal again maybe. People was talking maybe like they could be hired, as a mercenary army. They wanted to send them against Tharn, and this lad’s folk.’
Achaeos, silent and pale, looked from Stenwold to Scuto’s grotesque features.
‘And that’s all I know and there they are. There’s been some fighting, mostly Tarkesh Ants having a go at them. They ain’t exactly shy about drawing blood, the Waspies, but they pay out in good coin when the Council of Magnates asks ’em to. And there they sit, making the city rich, and here we sit, wondering what the plague the buggers really want.’
‘I’m missing something here.’ Stenwold looked down at his fists. ‘We all are. There’s no help for it but I need to talk to the Magnates.’
‘It’s not like they’ll listen to a word you’ve got to say, chief,’ Scuto put in helpfully.
‘The Council as a whole, no, but there are a couple of them who know me of old. They owe me favours. I’m not saying they’ll take that as seriously as Tisamon here might, but it still counts for something, and information’s free to give. In the meantime, all of you, spread your nets as wide as you can. I want to know what the Empire is after. Helleron could depend on it. The entire Lowlands could depend on it.’
He turned to his own band as Scuto hopped off the bench and began giving out orders. ‘We still have our parts to play, now or later. So I want most of you to stay here, wait for me, until the picture’s clear.’
‘But you want me to go to my people?’ said Achaeos.
‘I do indeed. Will you speak for me?’
‘I will not.’ The Moth folded his arms. ‘I will speak for the truth, though, and that will serve you just as well. I am not your agent, Stenwold Maker.’
‘Then don’t do it for me, and certainly don’t do it for Helleron. Do it for the Lowlands, Achaeos. Do it for your own people, by all means, but the Moths were a wide-sighted people once and surely they can be so again. They must see that, piecemeal, we are all food for the Empire, to fall beneath her armies, be taken up by her slavers. There are a hundred age-old slights that draw their boundaries across the Lowlands. Your people hate mine. Tisamon’s hate the Spider-kinden. The Ant city-states hate one another. If we cannot stitch these wounds together, even for a little while, then we will fall.’
Achaeos, who had obviously had a snide remark already poised, thought better of it. ‘You are right, of course,’ he said. ‘I shall go to my people and tell them all I can. I am no great statesmen of theirs, no leader, but whatever I can move with my words, it shall be moved.’
And it seemed that he was finished, and Stenwold was turning away from him, until he said, ‘And I wish your niece Cheerwell to come with me.’
Scuto’s voice still sounded in the background, parcelling out wards and fiefs of the city to his men. About Stenwold and Achaeos, though, the Moth’s words echoed loudly.
‘No!’ Totho shouted. By sheer instinct he had his sword half out of his scabbard, and that changed everything. Tisamon was instantly on guard, his clawed glove on his hand, and Tynisa found she had half-drawn along with him. Stenwold was holding his hands up, aware that Scuto had stuttered into silence, staring at them.
‘It is out of the question,’ he said to Achaeos. ‘How could you even ask such a thing?’
‘Because it will help,’ Achaeos said. ‘Since I am to tell them that they must aid your folk for the good of us all, I wish to present her to the elders of my race, Master Maker. It will help. They must see her.’
‘You can’t even begin to think about it!’ snapped Totho. ‘Not Che, not any of us!’
‘They’ll kill her,’ put in Tynisa.
‘They will not,’ Achaeos said. ‘Do you really think we know nothing of hospitality? Do not judge us by the laws of this forsaken place. If I bring her to Tharn with me she will be safe. Welcome, I cannot guarantee, but safe she will be.’
‘The answer is still no,’ said Stenwold firmly. ‘No more debate on this. I will not risk my niece-’
‘Uncle Sten.’ At last Che’s voice broke in, and it had enough steel in it that they all stopped and looked when she spoke. ‘Do you remember the last time you tried to keep me from harm?’
He stared at her, thinking of that long chain of happenstance that had taken her from the Sky Without to the cells of Myna. ‘Are you saying that you. . want to go?’
Che swallowed, balling up her courage. ‘You have been a scholar, Uncle, among many other things. Tell me how many of our kinden have walked through the halls of the Moths? Do you know of any, in this day and age?’
‘Che, you cannot know, none of us can know, what might befall you there. Every place has rules of hospitality, and I mean no insult now when I say that every place breaks those rules from time to time.’
‘I trust Achaeos,’ she said. ‘And if I can do something to help, rather than just sit here and hide my head, I’ll do it. You don’t know, Uncle Sten, what I have been through since we parted at Collegium. I’ve been a fugitive and I’ve fought, I’ve been a slave and a prisoner. I’ve been on a torturer’s table and I’ve even struck Wasp officers. I’m not just Cheerwell the student who needs to be kept out of harm’s way. I’m going with him. I’m doing my part.’
Stenwold gave out a huge sigh that spoke mostly of the way the wheel of the years had turned while he had been looking elsewhere. He heard Totho insist, ‘You can’t let her!’ but even he knew that by then the matter was out of his hands.
‘Go,’ her uncle told her. ‘But take all care you can. You’re right. Though you’re still my niece, my family, you are a soldier in this war, and risk is a soldier’s constant companion.’
After nightfall Achaeos took Che out of the city by the quickest way, and then around its periphery, anxious to remain in Helleron’s shadow as little as possible. Soon they were passing the massive construction yards that were labouring over the last stretches of the Helleron-Collegium rail line — the Iron Road as they called it — which pounded out their metal rhythm every hour of day and night to get the job done.
Then they were heading towards the mountains. Outdoors, Che’s vision faltered after a distance, so that the ground before her feet was lit in shades of grey, but the mountains beyond still loomed as black, star-blotting shapes.
They had been on the move for some hours now, and they had no equipment with them for scaling such slopes. Even if Achaeos knew some secret path up to his home, Che was not sure she would be able to make it.
‘We may have to rest at the foothills,’ she warned him.
He did not seem to react at first, but seemed to be looking for some specific place in the scrubby, rising terrain. If she looked to the north and the east, Che could see the lights of the mining operations, Elias Monger’s amongst them no doubt. She wondered if Achaeos’s people would be raiding again tonight, and who had now inherited Elias Monger’s share.