There was a thump on the roof of the cab, and a moment later someone put their head down into Thalric’s field of vision, annoying the driver beside him. It was a Fly-kinden man in the uniform of the Scout Corps.
‘Message for you, sir,’ the Fly reported.
‘Well?’
‘Care to join me up top, sir?’
Thalric narrowed his eyes, but the Fly was silhouetted against the outside glare and his expression could not be read. With a hiss of annoyance Thalric pushed himself out of the side of the cab, grabbing at rungs while flickering his Art-wings to keep him stable. The Fly was sitting cross-legged atop the wagon when Thalric reached him, forward enough that he was out of earshot of the other men.
‘This had better be important.’
‘You’re summoned, Major. Report to the quartermaster’s in Asta after sunset tonight.’
‘Summoned? Who by?’ Thalric caught up. ‘Major, is it?’
‘Yes, Major. I’ll look for you there, sir.’ In an instant the Fly kicked off into the air, letting the passing breeze catch him. His wings sparked to life and he was off.
Major? Major meant Rekef business. Thalric was a captain in the Imperial Army, but the Rekef gave out its own ranks. Despite the dust and the heat he felt a queasy chill inside him. Rekef Inlander seemed most likely — investigating him? He had done nothing wrong. He had been telling the truth when he professed to Cheerwell Maker his unbending loyalty. Still, he knew that, to catch all treason and malfeasance in the Empire, the Rekef machine had to grind small and thorough, and innocents would always get caught up in the teeth of the wheels. Of course he would make the sacrifice willingly, if the Empire demanded it. It was just that he would rather not have to.
Che could no longer dispute that they were approaching somewhere. Where there had been scrubby wildland, now there was a packed-dirt road that the slave wagons were churning up with their tracks. Che and Salma had been given some time now to watch the other travellers, those passing in the opposite direction and those the slave convoy overtook. The sight was not encouraging.
They saw squads of soldiers, mostly. Many were heading west. Others were returning patrols, slogging wearily through the dust with spears sloped against their shoulders. Occasionally a messenger would thunder past on horseback, or the shadows of flying men would pass over the prisoners’ cage.
‘Where is there, out here?’ Che wondered. The Lowlander cartographers had never been much for going beyond the borders of the lands they knew. It was part of the inward-looking mindset that was now giving the Wasps such free rein.
‘Commonweal maps don’t go into much detail here. Just “wildlands”, that kind of thing,’ said Salma. ‘Mind you, they’re mostly about a hundred years out of date at the least. It’s been a while since the Monarch’s Nine Exploratory Heroes were sent to the four corners of the world looking for the secrets of eternal life.’
‘The who sent for what?’ she asked incredulously. He grinned at her. She had noticed a difference in him, after her return from Thalric’s tent, and after his concern for her had been allayed. When she had pressed him on it, he had eventually admitted this gem of knowledge that he had mined in her absence.
‘Her name,’ he had revealed, ‘is Grief in Chains.’
And she had stared at him, and then remembered the Butterfly-kinden dancer who had so fascinated him. ‘What sort of a name is that?’ she had asked, nettled. She had always had a chip on her shoulder about her own name.
‘Oh, they change their names a lot, Butterflies,’ he admitted. ‘Still, don’t you think it’s nice?’
And there had been a little extra life in him, from then on, something his own chains could not drag down. Now he was grinning at her and she could not tell whether he was being truthful or not. ‘Three centuries ago the Monarch was very old, and he sent the nine greatest heroes of the Commonweal out into the unexplored parts of the world, because his advisors and wizards had told him that the secret of life eternal was out there to be found. Some went north across the great steppe, through the Locust tribes and the distant countries of fire and ice, and the ancient, deserted mountain kingdoms of the Slugs. Some went east where the barbarians live, and where the broken land is studded with cities like jewels, or to where the great forests of the Woodlouse-kinden grow and rot all at the same time. Some went west, and sailed across the seas to distant lands where wonders were commonplace and the most usual things were decried as horrors not to be tolerated. And some,’ and here his smile grew mocking, ‘went south across the Barrier Ridge, and found a land where no two people can agree on anything, and the civilized comforts of a properly measured life were almost completely unknown. And five of the Exploratory Heroes returned, with empty hands, but with tales enough to keep the Regent’s wise men debating for centuries.’
She was agog, just for a moment, waiting. ‘And? What about the others? Did they find it?’
He laughed at her. ‘Nobody knows. They never came back. Some people still say, though, that the last of the Heroes still wanders distant lands, living eternally, eternally young, trying only to get his prize back to a Monarch who died just two years after the Heroes set out.’
Che tried to appear unimpressed. ‘Your people are very strange. Are all those places real?’
He shrugged carelessly. ‘They’re on the maps, for what it’s worth. What about your maps?’
‘Oh, commerce. Merchants go everywhere and sell to everyone. Our maps have the caravan routes picked out in red. We have treaties and trade deals. We like pieces of paper with signatures on them. But most of all we expect people to come to us, since Collegium is the centre of the world as far as we’re concerned. I’ll tell you about Doctor Thordry,’ she said. ‘That should explain the Collegium attitude to explorers, anyway.’ And she did so, spinning the tale out for as long as she could, aware that the other slaves in the cage, piqued by Salma’s dismissive words, were all listening now.
Thordry had been an artificer of a century ago, around the very beginnings of man-made flight. He and his manservant had set out in a flying machine of his own invention and they had gone south, across the sea. It had been an ingenious piece of work, his machine. Che had seen it, even run her hands along the brass-bound wood of its hull in the Collegium Museum of Mechanical Science. An airship with a clockwork engine that Thordry and his companion had wound each day by letting out a weight on a cord, which they had then hauled in by hand.
Thordry had been gone and almost forgotten for five years when he had surfaced again. He came back with maps and stories of lands across the sea, none of which were believed and some of which were simply unbelievable. He had spent two years wandering as a self-appointed, itinerant ambassador for Collegium, and then set sail for home. His navigation skills, and ill winds, had landed him up in the Spiderlands, and he had spent a further year there as a fashionable talking point before seeing that his popularity was on the wane, and setting off for home.
But on his arrival, the triumphant explorer had not received the reception he had been expecting. He had not been laughed at, quite, but the Great College virtually ignored him, and to the populace he was a celebrated lunatic. His stories of distant lands were treated as just that, stories. When they were printed it was as The Marvellous and Fantastical Adventures of Doctor Thordry and his Man. His maps, that connected with no land known, were quietly shelved.
‘And that,’ Che finished, ‘is how Lowlanders treat explorers. Which is why we have an Empire on our doorstep that’s sharpening its swords as we speak, and yet everyone’s talking very loudly amongst themselves to block out the sound of it.’