He stormed off, still with a trail of anxious clerks and foremen shadowing him.
Che turned to Salma. ‘You heard that?’
‘Every word,’ he said. ‘And I wondered, once these veins are exhausted, and if the Helleren started looking to the north of here, coming along with their rails and their engines — I wondered what my people’s reaction would be.’
‘You can’t be condoning this!’ she hissed.
He held a hand up, and took her aside to somewhere the miners and their watchmen could not overhear.
‘Until you have heard it from all sides, don’t be so quick to judge. My people could not endure to live with this on our borders, and if we refused them, how long before the Helleren found some excuse to come anyway.’
‘Salma, you’re talking about my people, my family.’ His words hurt her more than she would have thought, and she wondered if that was because she knew there was some truth in them.
‘Well,’ he said with a shrug, ‘it’s moot, as north of here isn’t Commonweal any more anyway.’ His smile cut her with its bitterness. ‘It’s Empire all the way.’
Thirteen
Scuto shambled back into his workshop. It had been the best part of an hour since he stepped outside for a whispered conversation with a young Fly-kinden, clearly one of his agents. Totho had spent the time disassembling one of his air-batteries and planning a few improvements to it. He could never just sit idle. His artificer’s hands needed work, to stop his mind from worrying. He jumped up as the Thorn Bug returned.
‘Well,’ Scuto said. ‘Whatever else happened to your friends, the Wasps didn’t get ’em. Looks like all three made a run for it. Shame they didn’t follow you.’
‘Any idea where they ran to?’ Totho asked.
‘In Helleron it’s like leaving tracks in water,’ Scuto said. ‘Still, I have my eyes and my ears, and looks like your girl, the Spider one, went places even I’d not go without an escort. She must have cut through two fiefs at least. People that way don’t like answering questions, but I’ll see what I can do.’ He shook his head. ‘You people, you’re such a mix of craft and cack-handedness. I can’t make you out.’ He settled himself across the workbench from Totho, who heard the scrape of his spines against the wood. ‘You give the Wasps the slip, which is good form, but then you got no fallback arranged, so the four of you just go gadding off through the city. What were you thinking?’
‘We weren’t expecting there would be trouble,’ Totho said. He tried to state it as a reasonable point, but it sounded weak even to his own ears.
‘You must always plan a fallback,’ Scuto told him. ‘Last year Sten sent me and some lads to Sarn. Safe enough, you’d think, what with the Ants there behaving ’emselves these days, but we fell real foul. If we’d not had some rendezvous arranged in advance I’d still be there looking for ’em all. Mind you, that was just pure bad luck and accident, ’cos we ran bang into some Arcanum business that had nothing to do with us.’
‘What’s an Arcanum?’
‘If you don’t know, you don’t need to know,’ Scuto told him, and promptly added, ‘Moth-kinden stuff, anyway. Loose cogs, the lot of ’em.’ He put a thorny finger into the workings of the air-battery.
‘Master Scuto, shouldn’t we be. . doing something?’
Scuto raised a thorny eyebrow. ‘Like what, boy? Want to go onto the streets and hand out fliers? Stand on a roof and shout their names?’
‘But-’
‘Sten really did send you out not knowing the half of it,’ the Thorn Bug continued sadly. ‘Boy, a good agent’s got to learn how to wait. My people are asking questions. All we’d do ourselves is get in the way, and maybe get you caught by the Wasps. Founder’s mark, boy, do none of you know anything about the trade? Who are you clowns anyway, really?’
‘Just College students.’ Totho shrugged. ‘Master Maker, I don’t think he meant it to come to this. Not this soon.’
‘That man uses the Great College like his own personal militia,’ grumbled Scuto. ‘You all artificers?’
‘We’re all duellists, I suppose. That was the link. Tynisa and Salma were good at it, anyway. And then there’s Che — Cheerwell, rather. She’s Stenwold’s niece.’ Totho looked at his hands. ‘I hope. . I hope she’s all right. She’s not as tough as the others.’
Scuto made an unpleasant noise that Totho realized was laughter. ‘Sounds as though you’re after the foreman’s daughter,’ he said. A suggestive leer from the Thorn Bug-kinden was worth three from anyone else.
‘I. . well. . A little.’ Totho did not know where to put himself. ‘But, I’m a halfbreed, you know, so. .’
‘So much for that,’ Scuto agreed. ‘Don’t need to tell me, boy. I couldn’t get myself into the worst brothel in Helleron even if I was made of solid gold with platinum clothes.’ He looked Totho over, sympathy sitting awkwardly on his nightmare face. ‘Let’s change the subject, take your mind off things, shall we? Let’s look at this air-battery of yours. Weapons, you reckon?’
‘Once the air pressure is high enough it can be directed out. The force of it is quite remarkable.’ Totho, too was glad to settle on less uncomfortable topics.
Scuto nodded. ‘You ever get your hands on a nailbow?’
‘Only models at the College, but I’ve seen them used. They did a demonstration.’ Despite the hollow, sick feeling in Totho’s stomach when he thought of Che all alone in Helleron, this simple talk of mechanical things was working to calm him.
The Thorn Bug grinned. ‘I love ’em. They work basically on the same principle as this toy of yours, only instead of air pressure they use a firepowder charge to send a bolt as long as your finger through steel plate. Bang! Noisy as all get out, and they jam often as not, and firepowder’s just asking for trouble. I heard that if the nailbow gets too hot, then it just blows itself apart and takes matey the operator with it. So you were thinking of using your bottled air to send a crossbow bolt?’
‘A smaller missile would be better, though. I see what you mean.’
‘Right, tell you another thing.’ Scuto’s grin broadened. ‘Last year this fellow Balkus came to me, kind of an off-and-on friend. Ant renegade from Sarn. He’s a nailbowman. Used to be in their army squad down there until he went rogue. He wanted me to make the thing more reliable. What I did is, I lengthened the barrel that the bolts come out of, and I machined a groove down it, in a spiral. Still jams like a bastard, but when it fires he can get half again as far, without much worry of missing. You reckon this business of yours here would benefit from the same deal?’
Totho turned the idea over in his mind. He could see the reasoning behind it falling into place, and felt strangely excited by it. Nobody at the College had ever taken his ideas seriously. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I absolutely do.’
‘Well, then, while Scuto’s little army is out tracking your friends down, why don’t you and I have a little brainstorming session and see if we can’t make this thing a reality?’
The Halfway House had been quick to accept her. She had been surprised, as she had expected reprisals for the man she killed. There was no comeback, though, even from his countrymen. The moment he had hit the ground he was nothing.
She could easily have forgotten him herself. In the round of greetings, introductions, boasts and invitations that followed, nobody seemed to recall that her new place at the table was still warm from another’s body. Sinon Halfway kept no empty seats. There were always hopefuls, coming off the street, wanting to sit at his table.
Later, he gave her two gold rings and a clasp in the shape of a centipede eating its own tail. ‘You should have these,’ he said laconically.