Tisamon was being hauled off in chains, further and further away each moment, and yet she must now play a delicate game. She was in the Empire, where every pair of eyes belonged to a spy that could denounce her. She did not have the craft for this, nor was her kinden such that she could walk through them unnoticed. She had a bitter moment of longing for the skills of the face-changing Scyla, who could have gone anywhere and done anything, but who had squandered her gifts so meanly.
Tynisa had to wait two days before the right man came along. Until that time she slipped through the ordered commotion of Asta like a slim-bladed knife. She gave herself airs, behaving as though she was the agent of someone of status. She remembered the little she had gleaned from Thalric about the shadowy Rekef, so she let people believe by looks and omissions that she might be Outlander. To the officers she was a worrying enigma, because they did not really know if they wanted her. Nor did they know if they were allowed to be rid of her. She walked a tenuous line, staying out of the way of the highest ranks and bewildering the sergeants and lieutenants.
To the common soldiers serving below them she made herself something different. She could never be one of them, being the wrong kinden and the wrong gender, but still, she made herself their companion. She sat at their games of chance, joined their conversations, though it was hard for her: far harder than simply cloaking mystery about herself for the benefit of their superiors. She learnt a lot about the people she had been fighting and killing for the last year. She learnt about the intense rivalries between armies, between companies and squads within those armies. She learnt that they envied the engineers their pay and privilege, yet looked down on them for never getting their hands dirty. She learnt that they loathed the Slave Corps but joked about the Rekef in a way that their officers would never have dared. She learnt that many of them were here in the army just as much against their wishes as were the Auxillians they fought alongside. The sense she got of the Empire was frightening: that it fought because it could not do anything else. If the Empire ran out of enemies, it would tear itself apart.
Thus, between the officers and their men, she held an uneasy place: an intruder, a parasite, in their hive of dedicated activity. There was only one strange encounter, when a junior lieutenant caught up with her and talked in circles around her for the best part of an hour, strangely hesitant, oddly delicate, as though he was reaching his hand into a trap in order to draw some valuable thing out. Only later did she wonder if he had been a Rekef agent, and been trying to determine whether she was genuinely Rekef also. The encounter had left her with no answers, but something to ponder. So, the Rekef is not as unified as all that. Well, didn’t Thalric say that it was his own sneaks that tried to kill him?
After those two days, she at last found her mark. His name was Otran and he was almost universally loathed by officers and men alike. He was a major in the Consortium but, more than that, he was a tax-gatherer, a bureaucrat. He arrived in Asta, a small, angry Wasp-kinden man with an automotive and a squad of armoured sentinels as his guards, and then he took the Emperor’s cut of everything that had been gathered in from the Lowlands campaign so far. He was, she could see, keenly aware of the hatred with which he was regarded. After a little observation she could tell that he was highly upset by it too. He considered himself a serious military officer, given an unpleasant task, rather than the belligerent little moneyman that everyone saw him to be. In short, he was perfect for her.
She courted him. It was not difficult, either. Major Otran was a man who craved recognition, and he was snubbed at every turn by his own people. The presence of an attractive Spider-kinden was nectar to him. She even suspected that her swift association with the man only confirmed, in the eyes of others, that she was indeed Rekef.
Otran was going on to Capitas, that was the important thing. Capitas was where they had taken Tisamon, apparently, for there was an ever-hungry market there for fighting slaves. It was an important form of Wasp entertainment and that explained Tisamon’s value to them. The Mantis seemed to be willingly cooperating with their estimation of him, and she could not understand that. She could only hope that he had some plan, but that man she had seen bloody-bladed in the makeshift Asta arena had given no sign of it. He had been more a dead-eyed machine ready to cut apart whatever was set against him. Seeing him like that, she had no doubt that, if she had stepped into that ring, he would have killed her, too.
Otran’s machine pressed eastwards, and she went with it. His guards were suspicious of her, never letting her alone with the tax-money, though they cared not at all if she was left alone with Otran.
In her mind she was trying to imagine what she could say to that bleak-faced killer from the arena that would recall her father to her. Mantis pride! It was something she had not inherited and it was something she could not understand.
At night, when not closeted with Otran, she took out Tisamon’s brooch – the sword and the circle – and tried to find in it some clue to his present state of mind.
Twelve
She went by the name of Wen, and he called himself Jemeyn: both Solarnese of the Path of Jade faction and currently in hiding, but not so well that Nero had not been able to track them down.
Jemeyn fancied himself as a duellist. He was all for action, so long as it was the Satin Trail’s people he was leading into battle. The Path of Jade had suffered badly under the Wasp administration, ever since some of their members had set up a Corta-in-exile out of Porta Mavralis. A dozen of the Path’s high-rankers had since been arrested, and those arrested by the Wasps were usually never seen again. Popular rumour, which Nero guessed was well founded, said that such prisoners were sent north, past Toek, and into slavery.
Wen, on the other hand, was a long-term thinker. At first Nero had been worried that her ‘long-term’ would see them all dead of natural causes before the time seemed right to her to act. He then saw that she was exaggerating her stance simply to keep Jemeyn in check, and quite soon Nero and Wen were doing business. She was short for a Solarnese and darker than most, looking more like a Lowlander Beetle-kinden. When he explained that there was a move afoot, abroad, to liberate Solarno, and that she should start stockpiling arms and recruiting people to use them, she seemed confident enough that she could do it.
They had met in the back room of a singularly low dive in the alleys around the murkier end of the Solarno docks. After Wen and Jemeyn had left, Nero sat with his harsh wine half drunk and thought about his next move. He had made his contacts with Taki’s old employer Genissa and some others of the Satin Trail, who were at least paying lip-service to the Wasps and their Crystal Standard allies, and had avoided the worst of the persecution. Now he had the Jade under his belt, but Taki had given him more names to look out for: duelling circles, trade guilds, a half-dozen little unofficial collaborations that could be of use.
There was a clearing of someone’s throat and Nero jumped up sharply, ending with his feet on the table, ready to bolt. He saw a lean, russet-haired man leaning nonchalantly in the doorway, a baldric of throwing daggers slung across his belt. He was not of any particular kinden that Nero could name by sight, but Nero knew him nonetheless from one brief glimpse in the Venodor, and from Che’s detailed description.
He found that his hand had dropped to his knife-hilt. The man in the doorway smiled slightly, still lounging in his unconcerned way.