‘What am I supposed to do now?’ Tynisa asked him. ‘Knowing this, with him? Help me, I feel like I’m losing my world.’
He reached out and she took his hand gratefully. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘what am I? I thought I was yours, and now I’m just some. . mistake? Some cast-off?’
‘No!’ he said quickly. ‘Tynisa, listen to me. Don’t ever think that you were not meant. She told me, close to the end. She told me of her last night with Tisamon, before we split up. Before Myna. She had her precautions, like any woman in her position, but that last night — she felt it might really be their last night. She let it happen. She loved him, and she wanted to bear his child.’
When she folded herself into his arms, he held her and wondered if it would feel different if she had genuinely been his daughter.
‘And what now?’ she whispered.
‘He will not come to you,’ he told her, ‘because he does not know how. But that still means you can go to him when you are ready.’ And in response to her half-heard correction, ‘Yes, if. If you are ready.’
He had expected some burden to lift from him at this point, but the crushing weight of his responsibilities piled higher on him, and he knew he would never be free of them.
His place was always away from the fire. Moth-kinden were born and raised in cold places, and he did not need its light. Achaeos’s eyes, the blank white eyes of all of his people, knew neither night nor darkness.
The others were still arguing, the fat Beetle and his Spider girl. Achaeos had not even tried to follow their conversation. It was clearly some tawdry domestic business that had sprung up between them and the Mantis, and it was therefore beneath his notice. The other one, the loathsome machine-fumbler, would be either asleep or worshipping the stinking, groaning monster they were forcing him to ride in. Achaeos shuddered at the thought. The motion of it made him feel ill, the sight of its moving parts turned his stomach.
After the distraction of their bickering gave way to a need for sleep he reached for his bones and crouched down to cast them, as was the old habit. What did it matter what they said, when his destiny was out of his hands already? They had looked at him as though he was unsound, the Arcanum back in Helleron. He was drifting from them, from what they expected of him.
The bones fell amongst patchy grass. He grimaced and poked about, moving the blades aside to try to determine what pattern they made, but it had no sense to it. It seemed to be promising absurdly catastrophic things, far beyond ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or even ‘life’ or ‘death’. He decided that the uneven ground had fouled the divination and gathered them up again. With care he cleared a decent patch of ground, plucking the grass away, rubbing the ground flat. He was going to far too much effort now, just to satisfy his habit, but it had become a point of pride. He took a breath and cast the bones again.
For a long time he remained very still, studying them. It was a pattern he had never seen before, outside the books — the old books, that was. If he had not researched his pastime so keenly, he might never have recognized what the world was telling him.
They gave one word to it, in those old books, and that word was ‘Corruption.’ To the Moths it had its own meaning, as everything did. It did not mean the bribery and material greed of the Beetle-kinden. It meant the rotting of the soul, the very worst of the old dark magics.
He shook himself. He was a poor seer, no great magician he. He was in no position to make these dire predictions. I have misread the sign, or miscast the bones. He reached for them again, to gather them up, and drew his hand back with a startled hiss. They had burned when he touched them and, as he watched, they were blackening, pitting. The scent of decay came to him, and he finally knew what they had been trying to say.
He almost fell into the fire, he was so desperate to reach Stenwold Maker. The man was asleep, but Achaeos did not care. He took hold of a heavy shoulder and shook it, and heard a whisper as Stenwold began groping immediately for his sword.
‘What. . What is it? What?’ he muttered. ‘Are we under attack?’
‘I have to speak to you, now,’ Achaeos almost spat at him.
‘What?’ Stenwold paused and then stared at him. ‘I know it doesn’t bother your people, but it’s the middle of the night.’ He looked haggard, ten years older.
Achaeos looked around at the others, most of whom were at least half awake by now. Tisamon, truly on watch, was staring at him keenly, blade already bared. ‘Come away from the fire and talk,’ Achaeos insisted.
Stenwold cursed and got to his feet, bulging blanket wrapped around him, and his sword still in his hand. He looked just like a bad actor playing a comic hero. They removed from the fire enough that their talk would not disturb the others, though still under Tisamon’s harsh gaze.
‘You’re going east,’ Achaeos said.
Stenwold rubbed his eyes with the forearm of his sword hand. ‘Achaeos, that’s not exactly news.’
‘You do not know what is east, of here.’
‘The Empire’s east, Achaeos. Asta’s east. Szar’s east, and Myna, and then Sonn, and eventually you get to Capitas and you meet the Emperor. Of all the Beetles in the world, you don’t need to tell me what lies east.’
‘The Darakyon is east. East and close,’ Achaeos said urgently.
Stenwold just looked at him. ‘You mean the forest? What’s that to you? Your people don’t live there, do they? I didn’t think even the Mantis-kinden lived there.’
‘Nobody lives there. Nobody travels there who has any sense. The Darakyon is evil.’ Achaeos clutched at Stenwold’s blanket-cape. ‘Terrible things were done there.’ He sensed, rather than heard, Tisamon’s stance shift.
Stenwold continued to peer at him, tired and irritable and mired in his own difficulties. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said shortly. ‘I have other things to worry about than the beliefs of your people.’ He shook off Achaeos’s hand and returned towards the fire. The Moth watched him go with bared teeth.
So fly! he thought. Fly away from this fool and his mission. But he could not, and he almost wept in frustration at it, at the invisible chains that were keeping him here.
There was a seat for the driver at the front of each automotive, and room for just one more sitting beside him, beneath the shade of a rough canvas roof. Thalric was the extra one in the lead vehicle but he was reflecting that it was a remarkably uncomfortable way to travel even so. His own men and the slavers were sitting along the open sides of the vehicle, exposed to the dust, and he was beginning to wonder if the slaves, confined in their cage, didn’t have the better deal of it.
He considered his earlier conversation with Cheerwell Maker, and decided that he had lost control of it. It was not just her jibe at the end, however well aimed. He had indulged himself: he had wasted time in boasts about the Empire that he felt so fiercely about. Strutting before a young woman, honestly! Still, perhaps he had given her sufficient food for thought. They were nearly at Asta now. If she decided to stick, then there were people there who would loosen her.
Or perhaps he could pass her over to Brutan. He considered the slaver’s likely response to the gift and realized that he found it distasteful, but that was not for any reason that would have satisfied Miss Maker. As an individual, the slavers’ habits irked him primarily because they were running their operation for their own sordid enjoyment, and that was not the Empire’s way. As a servant of the Empire, however, he knew it all served, in the end. The Brutans of this world were most slaves’ first introduction to imperial policy, and that was a hard but necessary lesson. They had to be shown that they had no right and no appeal. Any slave who could say, ‘You can’t do that to me,’ was not a slave.