The artificer started. ‘Yes, sir?’
‘Tell them about Helleron. About the man you met there.’
Tynisa opened her mouth as if to speak, looked from Tisamon to Totho. The artificer glanced at her but Tisamon was waiting for his answer, and the Mantis plainly intimidated him more than Tynisa could. So, in his halting way, Totho gave the plain facts of what had happened to Bolwyn, and how it was that a dead man had met them in Benevolence Square. He could not keep the disbelief from his voice, but he spoke only the facts as he had witnessed them.
Chyses and the other Mynans appeared as sceptical as he himself was, looking to Tisamon for some explanation.
‘We have named all those who knew about the original plan,’ Tisamon said, ‘many of whom died in the conquest. We can find no weak link, and yet our plan was betrayed. I think that there was a spy, indeed, but he might have been wearing the face of another.’
‘But that’s not possible,’ Khenice said from behind him. ‘We knew them all intimately and you couldn’t disguise-’
‘This man could,’ Tisamon interrupted her. ‘You heard the story: a perfect likeness.’
They still did not seem convinced, and Stenwold could not blame them. His own rational mind told him that such things were impossible. He had travelled more than most, though, and in stranger company, and had been forced, in the past, to accept that there were things in the world he could not account for.
‘Where is this leading you?’ he asked the Mantis.
‘We may not be secure,’ Tisamon warned. ‘Even now we could be compromised.’
Stenwold put his head in his hands. ‘Anything is possible, Tisamon, but I can’t leave Cheerwell and Salma in their hands. I have to try.’
‘Then let me scout the way first, that’s all I ask. I will go now, with whatever directions our friends here can give me. There will be no time yet for a trap to have been set for me.’
Chyses stood up. ‘And one more thing.’ He and Tisamon faced one another with a kind of generalized mutual dislike, two aggressive men confined in a small space. ‘You can’t trust us, is what you’re saying. We can’t trust you, either. When you do go to retrieve your friends, then Master Stenwold here will stay with us as surety. If you don’t get Kymene back for us, then it will go badly for him.’
Stenwold sighed. Their relationship with the Mynan resistance was getting rockier by the moment. He nodded in response to Tisamon’s enquiring look. Besides, let them think I’m just a fat old man. He might surprise them yet, if this went sour.
‘Give me your best directions,’ Tisamon instructed. ‘I care nothing for your plans and drawings.’ Chyses bristled at the tone, but nodded, went across the cellar for the maps.
When Tisamon departed, Tynisa followed him.
Problem after problem. Stenwold felt them weighing heavily on him.
‘Master Maker,’ Totho spoke at his elbow.
‘I’ve told you, you don’t need to-’ The moments of his last conversation with the youth came back to him and he grimaced. ‘Yes, Totho?’
‘We still don’t know how the Moth knew that Che and Salma were here, sir.’
Stenwold frowned at him. ‘What are you saying?’
‘That it could be a trap, like Tisamon says. A trap because he’s set one.’
Stenwold glanced about the cellar, trying to find Achaeos. The Moth was almost hidden in the shadows across the room, sitting on his own in a nook of crumbling masonry.
‘If he wanted to throw us to the Wasps, he has had ample chance. He even warned us of the ambush, before Asta. I cannot say precisely why he has linked his path to ours, Totho, but I feel sure it’s not to sell us out, or not to the Empire.’
‘But. . I still don’t trust him, Master Maker. I can’t. Everything about him. .’
Stenwold looked into the boy’s honest face, that was itself stamped with a halfbreed taint others despised on sight. Is this what they have taught you, by hating you? But that was not the reason, he realized. Totho and Achaeos had loathed one another from the moment that they met, and Stenwold had no idea why.
Achaeos himself was finding it every bit as difficult to disentangle his motives. He had heard enough of Chyses’ plans to find them fraught with danger. The time had come to ask himself whether he should even be here, let alone accompany the others on this lunatic’s assault. The Mynan people — these Soldier Beetle-kinden as they called themselves — he found hostile and ill-favoured, and he had no faith in them or in their captured leader.
And yet he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was not able simply to sever his ties and fly away. It was not that he was already so deep within this Empire that the Wasp-kinden seemed to have built for themselves. He had no doubt he could find enough shadows between here and Tharn to cover his retreat. It was because he had, in his moment of madness, gone begging to the Darakyon. He had sought and received its help, and that had been for a purpose. He had told the things of the forest that he would rescue Cheerwell Maker. And, whilst riding their power, he had told her that he was coming for her. He had not meant to bind himself so irrevocably to this course but, now he came to recollect, he felt that he was indeed wholly bound.
Magic was a force that pushed: this he knew from his youngest days. What it pushed upon was a fabric that underlay the world, a weave beyond the weave. Perhaps the fabric was not so strong now as it once was, since the Apt minded and their machines were wearing it threadbare. Still, it was there, and the cunning man learned to pull its threads and to twist the way it hung. That was the secret of their spy, of course: that had been an honoured calling back in the Days of Lore before the damned revolution. It surprised Achaeos to find that there was a practitioner left, but what other trade could so effectively hide itself from the world?
He cast his gaze, that knew neither shadows nor masks, across the assembled rebels and their uneasy guests. He felt there no tuggings at the weft of magic, but if such spies were as good as their legends, he probably would not anyway.
He saw the halfbreed artificer glaring at him. No love lost there and yet Achaeos was not entirely sure why. He had plenty of cause to hate back, of course. The Apt were driving his people into cultural, even physical extinction, so it should be he who nurtured a grievance. Instead, it was this young man with the world apparently in his hands, and Achaeos wondered what it was he was missing.
If he was honest with himself he felt he already knew, but he was not ready to be honest with himself. Honesty — now there was a wound that was slow to heal.
It was going just like before, and Tynisa was losing patience.
Within minutes of leaving the resistance cell she had virtually fallen into step with him, just like their scouting of the Asta slave pits, just like their entry into Myna and their ambush of Chyses’ people. He had instantly adjusted to her and, without any signal, any conversation, they were become a hunting pair. Every move he made was informed by her own, as hers was by his. He did not need to look at her, to signal to her, to wait for her. Some part of him trusted her implicitly to be in exactly the right place, to do the right thing.
Yet when they were back with the others, she knew it would be gone again, this link she was now sharing with him. Not only gone, he would not admit of its existence. He would blot her out, refuse to deal with her.
She had a hook inside her now, and it had been pulling at her ever since she had discovered the truth. From the comfortable illusion of being Stenwold’s daughter, however implausible that might have been, she had been thrust straight into another world. It was a harsh-edged world, and it gave her a mother long dead, and this man, this distant, impossible man, as a father. She needed to confront it, but he would not let her. Tisamon simply retreated from it.