The building itself was not the point, though. The Justiciary was the basis for a fond tradition of the Empire, and thus the reason that Armour Square was a stopping point for anyone touring the city. Well-to-do Wasps brought their families there for entertainment, or their slaves as a warning.
The free-standing posts that lined each side of Armour Square, making a smaller square within the large, had been used once for displaying suits of mail, a relic of the Wasp-kinden’s tribal past when warriors had shown their readiness for battle by exhibiting their war-gear. More enlightened generations had found a better use for them. At noon, most days, almost every post had a prisoner hanging from it, hauled up high enough to make them balance on their toes, stripped naked for lashing if need be but, most of all, exposed for public ridicule.
There were guards, of course, for prisoners were a resource of the Empire and therefore not to be wasted needlessly. The citizens took the importance of tradition seriously. The Grasshopper-kinden three posts down from Thalric had just had three Wasp youths beat him bloody with staves, as the guards had watched with indulgent pride in such pranks and games.
Thalric shifted his weight again, despite his discovery that there was no easier position to find. Whoever had strung him up had known what they were doing. He tried to relax into it, but his body, which had put up with a great deal recently, was starting to fray. He knew from experience that he could be here for over a day before anyone decided what to do with him next.
Well, think of it as training for the artificer’s table. They would want to put him to the question, sooner or later, to find out why he had killed General Reiner and who had put him up to it. His own experience of operating on the other side of the table was not helping, either, and the mental pictures he recalled were too exacting and accurate for comfort. He had no illusions about being able to withstand such questioning. Nobody ever did. It was not some kind of competitive sport between the practitioner and the recipient. You could not win it.
Myna should be in arms by now. The thought sent an odd shiver through him, for he had taken a hammer to the Empire and cracked it. Myna would already be in arms, and then there was Szar… if Szar was still fighting, and Myna rose up, then where would the Empire choose to deploy its soldiers? And then it was not so far to the occupied Ant-kinden city of Maynes… Who could have thought that an Empire could be such a fragile thing?
‘Well, look at you,’ said someone next to him, and his first thought was, Time for a beating. When he identified the voice, his expectations did not alter. Painfully he shifted round to see her properly.
‘It is you, isn’t it,’ she said. She was standing beside him, quite free and unfettered, as though this was her city and not his own.
‘Tynisa,’ he got out.
The Spider girl examined him, seeing no doubt the latticework of scars across his naked torso, some of which were older than she was, and all set within the colourful backdrop of the recent bruises that had yet to fade. In turn, he saw that she was wearing the clothing of a well-off Capitas woman, with the cut modified by just inches to turn demure into sensual. If he had encountered her as a stranger, on any Capitas street, he would have taken her for an adventuress or even a prostitute, and probably taken her home with him for that matter.
‘I see,’ he said, ‘that you’re making yourself at home here. Thrown in the fight, have you? Or has Stenwold become a little optimistic about where he can plant his agents?’
‘On my father’s business.’
Tisamon? Thalric could not imagine the Mantis stalking about the city dressed in Wasp clothing and pretending… No, of course, he had run away. ‘Tisamon’s here?’ He craned about, looking at all the other posts. There were plenty of fellow sufferers but no Mantids among them.
She stared levelly at him. ‘That looks painful, Major Thalric.’
‘Well spotted.’
‘I’m allowed to strike you, I believe?’
He closed his eyes. ‘That depends on who you’re supposed to be, Tynisa. Go on, try it. We’ve been at daggers drawn long enough and you’ve not laid a straight blow on me yet.’ That was not, of course, true. She had nearly killed him outside Helleron. Furthermore, it was a foolish thing to say because she took his provocation in the spirit it was meant and punched a fist into his abused ribs hard enough that he felt them creak. He made a short, choked sound of pain, hearing some of the spectators murmur appreciatively. Needless to say, the guards just watched.
She leant close to him. ‘You’ve earned that, and more,’ she murmured, ‘but right now we’re in a position to help each other.’
‘Your negotiating techniques leave something to be desired,’ he grated.
‘Do they?’ Before he could say anything to stop her, she had stepped back, and then the back of her hand cracked against his cheekbone and whipped his head round. My mouth is going to get me killed. This time when she leant close, he said nothing.
‘That was for the crowd, Thalric. And for me, a little – but mostly for them. Now, listen. I’ve made some friends here in Capitas. Well, maybe friends isn’t the word, but a chain of people who’ll do things for me if I ask them nicely. What they won’t do, though, is let me down to the cells beneath the palace.’
‘The pit cells,’ Thalric recalled. ‘And that’s where they’ve got Tisamon, is it? Right place for him.’
He felt her tense, but she did not strike him again. ‘I can get you down from your post here this afternoon, instead of tomorrow, seeing that my friend of the moment is an overseer of your Justice place here. If I ask him very nicely indeed, maybe he’ll have you sent to the pit cells, just like Tisamon.’
‘If you lead him on, you mean.’
‘Jealous?’ There was a edge to her voice. ‘I can’t fight an entire Empire with my sword, Thalric. There are just too many of your wretched people. I could stab at your kin all day and still not get anywhere. So I use other weapons. I got here, didn’t I? I’m not proud of my methods, but they work.’
‘And if I’m really good, your methods will now see me condemned to the pit cells. Thank you very much.’
‘Just to hold you there, until they decide what to do with you. You’d rather be sitting in a cell than hanging from a post, I assume.’
‘And in return…?’
‘Take a message to Tisamon.’ Her hand was in his hair, abruptly, dragging his head back, to the further appreciation of the spectators. ‘Tell him I’m here for him, that I will find some way to get him out.’
He thought about that slowly, long enough for her to yank at his hair again. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘if he doesn’t want to get out?’
She went very still. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Yes, you do. How do you capture Tisamon, the Mantis-kinden Weaponsmaster? Either dead or not at all, surely, and yet you say he’s malingering in the cells beneath the palace-’
‘Shut up,’ she hissed at him. ‘Shut up or this crowd will see me put your eyes out, Thalric. That’s not your problem. That’s my problem and I… I’ll deal with it.’ She stepped back, and he braced himself for further injury.
‘Nod or shake, Major,’ she told him. ‘Do what I want now, or I’ll make sure you hang here for another three days before they work out where to send you.’
He let his head sag. It could be taken for a nod. Then she punched him in the kidneys, and this time he could not stop himself crying out.
‘You move too fast,’ cautioned one of the cowled shapes around him. Uctebri saw all his reflections in the polished walls nod and nod, out of time but in agreement. He bared his needle teeth at the speaker, stalking across the room and making the candles gutter, so that all that assembled host within the mirror-shiny walls momentarily bobbed and flickered.