‘Perhaps that’s all I hoped,’ she said, a whisper too, but there was something else in his eyes, now, and she wondered if she imagined that she saw respect there.
‘Hope only,’ he said, ‘that when we are done with you, the Empire can use one more live slave rather than one more dead Beetle. There is your hope, Miss Maker.’
‘Threats, still,’ she murmured.
He released her suddenly, as simply as that, reclaiming his knife from the floor and scabbarding it. ‘You’re right, of course,’ he said, the epitome of calm itself now. His demeanour admitted nothing of the smashed table, or her attack on him. ‘Threats oft repeated become dull edged with overuse. Enough threats, then. I’ll send you back to your cell now, and next time I call for you, I promise, there will be no threats.’
The guards took her back to the cell, where she found Salma sleeping fitfully, waking up and thrashing about, and then fighting for the blank respite of sleep again.
Tomorrow night they will do it, she told herself. I must be strong.
She wondered how strong she would have to be to resist the tortures of the Empire. And I am such a very strong person, by nature. I have such famous reserves of strength and willpower, she taunted herself bitterly.
She clutched at her knees and shivered, and could not sleep. When the tread of the guards outside signalled a new day, it gave her no joy, and when the vile food was passed in to them, she could not eat it. When the night comes, they will come for me.
Salma tried to comfort her, but he had only hollow words. What could he say?
And, of course, they came for her in daylight. This was the Empire, and torturers were not skulking figures of moonlight and darkness but working men for the working day. She was hauled from Salma’s side in mid-morning, and she knew this time it would be different.
Salma must have known as well. He actually tried to obstruct them. His arms were still bound, even though he could have flown nowhere. They had only untied him for a short space each day so as to leave him the use of them. Salma had charged them with his shoulder and they had knocked him down and kicked him until Che, through her own struggles, forced them to turn their attention to her.
Previously she had always been taken up, towards the sun. Now they just hauled her further along the corridor. She had a glimpse of several other cell doors like theirs, each with a hatch and a grille. Some were open, some locked against other prisoners or perhaps against no one. She had a brief glimpse of an airier cell, its bars all the way from floor to ceiling, leaving the occupant exposed to all passers-by. A woman watched her pass, a local girl, hands gripping the bars.
There was a single room at the end there, but with no hatch on the door. Che began struggling, but the two soldiers raised her almost off the ground, twisting her arms, and the way they manhandled her inside was effortless.
She could not see, for a moment, what it was all intended for. She thought at first it was a workshop, for the room was dominated by a big workbench, pitted and scarred with the use of years, edged with fittings for tools and clamps and vices. To her it seemed innocuous, something familiar from the College machine rooms, until she was dragged to the table and rolled onto it. Then she looked up, and she screamed and screamed and fought them, so that another man had to come and pull the buckles tight while the two soldiers devoted their entire efforts to pinning her down.
Yet it was nothing so much, out of context. This was a workbench, after all and, just as she would have expected, there were tools up there above her on the jointed arms that artificers preferred. Drills and saws, clamps and pliers and files — really nothing one would not find in any ordinary workshop. But they were poised right above her and the soldiers were clamping her to the bench.
Twenty-four
Hokiak’s Exchange was still there in the dingiest corner of the eastern plaza, just as Stenwold remembered it. Furthermore, so was Hokiak himself, although the intervening years had not been kind to him.
He was the oldest Scorpion-kinden that Stenwold had ever seen, perhaps the oldest there was. They were a ruthless, primal people in their desert home and a man did not live long amongst them once his strength began to wane, unless he possessed some edge over his fellows. Hokiak’s edge was a self-imposed exile. Even when Stenwold had known him, he had been too old to go home. Now he was positively decayed, his waxy skin folded into sallow creases and his once-yellow eyes faded to a dim sepia. His throat was as creased as a discarded shirt and the characteristic large frame of his breed had slumped to fat now, and even that was ebbing like a low tide, leaving his bare chest an unsightly ripple of wrinkles and old scars. One of his foreclaws was a jagged stump that had not regrown, and his jutting jaws revealed a ghastly thicket of rotting spurs on protruding gums. He sat on a wicker chair and smoked, and occasionally skewered candied insects from a box with a thumbclaw.
The Exchange itself was clearly faring better than its namesake. Stenwold and Totho pushed into a small room made smaller still by stacks of heaped boxes. The air was thick with spices, and the pungent, dizzying tobacco that Hokiak still smoked. His staff was hard at work prising the lids off crates, cataloguing their contents and then nailing them back. There were three youngsters engaged at the work: a pair of Fly-kinden around Totho’s age and a dark Mynan girl no older than thirteen. They were supervised by a Spider-kinden man who couldn’t have been much short of Hokiak’s own years. Spiders aged rather better, though. This one had long silver hair and a trace of an aristocratic demeanour, but was almost skeletally thin.
‘Stenwold, are you sure about this. . this looks like a pirate’s den,’ Totho whispered as he took a glance at the place. He was right, too. Most of the commodities that were hanging from the rafters, or being hurriedly boxed, were exotic plunder from far parts of the world, and Stenwold knew that there would be a back room with the real contraband in it.
‘Our friend Hokiak,’ he murmured, ‘was a black marketeer — and is one still, unless I miss my guess. Now the sort of people we’re looking for will have good use for someone who can smuggle goods in and out. It’s all about contacts, Totho.’
‘Don’t just stand there letting the dust in,’ Hokiak suddenly complained in a surprisingly deep voice. ‘In or out, Master Beetle.’
Stenwold closed the door behind him. With Totho dogging his every step nervously. ‘Well now, Master Scorpion, how’s about finding a little work for a tramp artificer and his boy?’
‘You any good?’ Hokiak blinked rheumy eyes at him. ‘Always can find work for a good ’un. You got references?’
‘There’s an old, old Scorpion-kinden I know who used to be able to vouch for me,’ said Stenwold. ‘His name’s Hokiak. You might even know him.’
The Scorpion squinted at him. ‘Windblast you! I don’t know. .’ His voice tailed off, and he scratched his withered throat with his remaining claw. The Spider-kinden man was now looking over, Stenwold noted, with a hand on a dagger’s hilt: not a threat, but just to be ready in case Stenwold turned out to be one.
‘Stenwold Maker?’ Hokiak said in a small voice. ‘Can’t be, surely. Stenwold Maker must be dead three times by now.’
‘If any of us is guilty of living beyond his time, old man, it has to be you,’ Stenwold told him. ‘I didn’t know whether I would still find you here.’
Hokiak had fumbled a stick to his hand, and it bent alarmingly under his weight as he heaved himself to his feet. He took a very close look at Stenwold, their faces only inches apart. ‘Blast and blow me, if it ain’t old Stenwold himself,’ he concluded, and the Spider removed his hand from his blade. ‘Didn’t ever figure I’d see you again. Now, Gryllis, this old boy and I did a load of business before the conquest.’