‘I take the numbers as a compliment,’ he said, mostly to himself. The door slammed shut behind him, and he heard the bar go down into place.
They moved in on him, rushing forwards directly or stooping from the roofs. He thrust his open palms towards them, summoning the Art of his people. The smile still had not left his face.
In the end they had been hampered by their need to take him alive. Thalric had made no scruples of abusing that advantage. In the quick, vicious scuffle, as they descended on him from all sides, and then as they wrestled to subdue him, he had killed five of them with his sting. It was an Art he was strong in. Putting his hand to a man’s chest, he could punch a fist-sized hole right through his victim. In a brawl it was better than any hidden knife.
He did not earn their love, for that. Their orders to keep him alive had not specified in what condition. By the time it was over he was bruised and bloody from the beating they inflicted.
He had awoken, not in a cell but a small billet, the kind of room where a sergeant or junior officer might live out his life. There was a guard just within the door, and as Thalric stirred the man passed the word to others waiting outside.
A prisoner now, and aching all over, Thalric found a strangely high mood on him. He realized that it was because, amidst all the pain and bruising, there was barely a stab from the deep wound that Daklan had inflicted on him outside Collegium, that had come so close to finishing him after his fall from Rekef favour. That wound, unlike the betrayal, was now consigned to the past.
So where in the wastes am I? There was a quick enough answer to that one, since the men who had jumped him had been Wasp soldiers. This spartan little room he was in could be in the barracks, or perhaps in the governor’s palace. There was a high window, suggesting his cell was probably on the level just below ground. He considered flying up there to look out, but decided that it was better not letting his captors know whether he could fly or not.
Of course, I can’t be sure myself. He seemed, nevertheless, to have come through the beating better than he might have done, but then he had always been a tough one to keep down. Captain Rauth, Ulther, Tisamon and Tynisa, Arianna, Daklan, Felise Mienn: they had all done their best, at one time or another, to put him out of this world. He wondered who would try next.
Lying on the hard bunk, with the guard eyeing him cautiously, he had to concede that his life so far seemed to have been a whole lot of effort to achieve a great deal of nothing. I would have stayed with the Rekef if I could. I have made a lamentable revolutionary.
But now what? He was not bound, so he could kill the guard now and make a run for it. He might get quite far, and he could certainly kill a considerable number of his captors before they were forced to re-evaluate just how alive they wanted him to be. Clearly he was being sent a message by someone confident he would be able to work it out: Wait. All is not lost.
Had he been intercepted by rebel elements within the palace? If there were still Mynan staff and slaves here, then the resistance would have its own people nearby. Perhaps Kymene or Che had… but then he did not even know if Che was still alive. It seemed quite possible that, after his explosive exit, Hokiak’s people might have butchered her – or that Kymene might have had her killed as a Rekef agent. Such irony!
And then, after a moment’s consideration, I am both betrayed and betrayer. The Empire’s rejection of him had turned a life of estimable service into one of perverse deceit, and when he had tried to go back over that path, to knit the wounds he had caused, he had only made everything worse.
He was not made to be maudlin, though. I am alive, he reflected. It was the first and best building block that he could work with.
Two soldiers entered the room without preamble. Their demeanour showed that they were fully aware of what their fellows – and their late fellows – had gone through to bring him here. They both loathed him and were frightened of him.
‘Well?’ Thalric asked them. ‘What now?’
‘Come with us,’ said one. His lips twitched, as if at a foul taste, when he added, ‘sir.’ The word struck Thalric like a blow. He almost toppled back on the bed, his legs suddenly weak at the power of a mere three-letter word. He had endured a long, harsh winter since anyone had truly called him that. The word was a whole life away for him: a door onto better days.
‘Sir, is it?’ he managed to get out, hoping that his face showed none of his surprise.
The man merely replied, ‘I have been ordered to request your presence, sir. You are sent for.’
And you don’t like it, soldier, but you’ll obey your orders. That was the underlying principle of the entire Wasp nation, who were by nature so quarrelsome and undisciplined.
‘Lead on, soldier,’ Thalric said it as casually as he could manage.
As soon as he got out into the corridor he knew that this must be the governor’s palace. He had no fond memories of it, for he had been through as much pain here as he had at any time before, and he had lost a good friend, too. The only luck thrown his way, aside from his continued survival, was that in the end it had not been his hand that had scorched out the life of Colonel Ulther, at the last. Mere chance, too, and he had no right to feel better over mere chance.
They took him up three levels and he applied his mind to drawing himself a map of the place as he recalled it. These were the quarters of important guests and higher officers, up here. He had even stayed here himself. There were public staterooms too, though he was already above the grand hall that Ulther had held court in. Wherever he was being taken, it was to be behind closed doors.
Do they imagine I know something, and wish to woo it out of me? Do I now turn informant against Stenwold and his people? And why not?
If they had wanted information, they needed only put him under the machines, for surely the ways and means had not softened so very much. But if I myself were in charge, would I not ask nicely first? Sometimes it is more efficient. Of all the hypotheses milling in his brain this seemed the most likely. He should not therefore get used to his current liberty. Which means I should exploit it as soon as the chance arises. Just give me a room with a decent-sized window.
And, obligingly, they did so. This palace, like most large Wasp-constructed buildings, was a ziggurat, and the room they brought him to even boasted a balcony, beyond which the blue sky stretched broad and inviting. He stayed put, though. He wanted to know where he stood, before he ran. There were two soldiers at the door, keenly watching over him, but they did not yet figure in his calculations. Five dead men could become seven soon enough. He had nothing to lose and it made him feel immortal.
The room itself had little of the garish style that Ulther had loved: the gaudy and overdone, the displayed loot from a dozen conquered peoples. This was Capitas-style Wasp: the long table devoid of ornament and a single frieze on the wall, in the local style but depicting the battle for occupation of the city itself, eighteen years before. Thalric wondered idly if he could pinpoint one of those images of triumphant, larger-than-life Wasp soldiers as his younger self. Perhaps one of them was Ulther, commanding the attack. He glanced from the frieze to the soldiers, young men both. They were not there, of course. They had probably not even fought in the Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal. It made feel him oddly lonely. He had now more in common with Stenwold Maker than with these men. In the end the burden of cultural identity did not weigh as much as the years.