‘Guesswork after the fact,’ Stenwold protested.
‘Guesswork before the fact,’ Inaspe replied. ‘Once one has learnt how to converse with more abstract sources of information, one’s guesswork can become remarkably accurate.’
Stenwold felt a little shiver go through him. ‘I have known other people who believed in this. I too have seen things I cannot explain. But still, I cannot accept it.’
‘I have heard of those such as yourself in whose world the future is but darkness, while to us it is second nature to trust in prediction. To us you appear blind – and yet you are able to make such things, such metal creatures, and we are just as blind to your craft as you are to ours. How ingenious you are.’ The bleakness in her tone Stenwold ascribed to memories of the Twelve-Year War.
She had scooped something into her hand from a bag, and now she cast the whole handful on to the pattern of light before her. Straws, he saw, and most of them instantly blew away in the breeze. Only a few now remained: a random scatter of pale stalks dyed in all colours by the glass. He himself could see nothing there, no patterns, no significance. When he looked from this display to Inaspe’s face, though, something sank inside him. He saw there such a certainty of woe, as though a Fly-kinden messenger had rushed up to present her with it in writing. She met his eyes, and he saw how she would take it all back, her talk of prophecy, if she could.
‘Speak,’ he said. ‘For what it’s worth, speak.’
‘Perhaps you are wise not to credit prophecy,’ she said carefully, ‘for all your future is the shadow of the world’s own.’
Caught between doubt and dread, he forced himself on. ‘What have you seen?’
‘Do not ask me.’
His instincts were telling him that he should obey her in that, and leave his curiosity unsatisfied but, in the end, his heritage rose up within him, the practical Beetle impatient with such mummery, and he insisted, ‘Speak.’
She sighed. ‘Stenwold Maker, you are destined for great loss, to both yourself and those close to you. You are caught in the jaws of history, and its mandibles tear pieces from you.’
He shrugged. ‘It takes no prophet to foretell that.’
She looked up from the pattern to assess his reaction, as though the idle fall of sticks had produced such a clear picture that he should recognize it immediately. ‘Autumn leaves, Stenwold Maker, that is the future shown to me. It is not too late, not quite, for you to escape the vice of winter, but the leaves are already falling.’
Her hands passed over the sticks, and a slight cold breeze suddenly passed over Stenwold, and made him shiver. He heard the woman murmur. ‘A city by the lake sits beneath a rain of burning machines. Red hands, long dyed up to the elbows in the blood of others, plunge in one last time. The sky is on fire with the deaths of the brave. The slaves are being beaten. The hand that holds the whip is raised. I see a whole kinden on the brink of oblivion. A man with an iron fist reaches to snuff them out like pinching a candle flame. The proud one is in chains, and though he turns on his great master, he shall shed not one drop of his blood. The spinners’ webs are burning. The great plotter has out-thought himself.’
Her eyes were wide now, blazing with conviction. ‘They are fighting now, the warrior-breed, but there are flames around them. They are falling like moths in torchlight. So many, there are now so many rushing to their deaths.’
‘Enough-’ Stenwold started, but the rush of words did not heed him.
‘The machines of war are turned on your own people. Your friends are loyal to you, and they shall die for it, or be scarred through, and never to recover what they once were. Blood is born of blood, welling up between the trees, beneath the gold lightning. Ancient evils brought to light, the dead tradition of the life-drinkers remade, and armies marching under a standard of black and gold and running red. A pillaging of the past for power, so that even the worst excesses of the old times are dug up. The worms of the earth! I see the worms of the earth feasting on all our corpses. Autumn leaves, Stenwold Maker. So many that you shall not see again. They fall and fall, the leaves of autumn, red and green and black and gold.’
‘But can we win?’ he demanded, forgetting that he did not believe.
‘What is it to win? How much will you sacrifice for it, when victory is more costly than defeat?’
She took a deep breath. ‘Your future. All our futures. I am sorry.’
Felipe Shah was a man of indeterminate age. His face was that of a young man, but his hair grey above the ears. His princely court was open to the sky, a courtyard within the palace-castle that overlooked Suon Ren. He was like the rest of his kind to Stenwold’s eyes: slim and golden-skinned, dark-haired. He sat in the courtyard’s centre, on a blanket spread on the ground. The four figures standing round him, whom Stenwold had initially taken for soldiers, became statues of burnished wood when he looked closer. Felipe wore a robe of shimmering red and blue, with an edging of gold discs, very much like the robe in which Salma had first arrived in Collegium, wondering why everyone found him such a spectacle.
The rest of his court, about thirty other Dragonfly-kinden, sat about him in what Stenwold assumed was a precise pattern, not just before him but on all sides. Some sat in nooks up on the walls. Some held scroll and stylus, poised to write. Others were simply sitting there, not even paying any particular attention to Felipe Shah. They wore the usual loose, flowing Dragonfly garments, and Felipe Shah himself was by no means the most ostentatious. Like Spiders they managed to carry it off without seeming overdressed. If I had myself got up like that, I’d be vulgar, Stenwold conceded.
Stenwold himself now sat to Felipe’s left, and he had no idea whether this was a position of honour, of security, or what any of it meant. The precise patterns on which the Commonwealers so obviously organized their court were opaque to him. He wished Destrachis was still here to advise him.
Looking around, Stenwold spotted the fortune-teller, Inaspe Raimm, with three other Dragonflies seated in a shallow curve behind her. She did not glance at him, however, looking straight ahead only. There was something strange about the way she sat there, something in her positioning, that suggested things were not as he had understood them – but more than that he could not discern.
A whole life spent in the intelligence business and I’m now completely out of my depth.
There was a handful of Mercers present in their full armour, and now one stepped forwards to hand something to the prince. It was Salma’s letter, Stenwold saw: Prince Salme Dien’s message to Prince Felipe Shah.
The prince read it in silence and the court waited. Nobody had mentioned what this document was and yet everyone seemed to already know, as though they were Ant-kinden linked by a common mind. Stenwold increasingly felt that he was skimming the surface of a vastly complicated world. Of course the Commonweal is both vast and complicated, so I should expect this bafflement. Yet it is still hard to deal with, when matters are so pressing back home.
There had been no news, of course. For all he knew, Sarn could have fallen by now.
Prince Felipe Shah began to weep, and Stenwold started in surprise. He had not set eyes on Salma’s message, but he could not think of anything his former student might have written that would have sparked this reaction. Still the Prince wept silently, tears trickling down his face, unwiped, and falling to spot his robe. It was impossible, Stenwold realized, to tell what emotion was being displayed here, only the intensity of it. All around, the other Dragonflies were nodding silently, clearly approving whatever was going on. Stenwold ground his teeth in frustration at his inability to grasp it.