She found she had faith left in him, though: that he had not forgotten her. It was a tenuous thread to cling to, especially as he was such a fool, but she had little else. Until now.
Now she had company. She might have preferred company that wasn’t a Wasp, but anyone was better than nothing.
He had been taken by force, judging from the bruises and the cuts, but he was wearing Lowlander clothes.
‘My name is Aagen,’ he explained to her. ‘I come from Princep Salma.’
She was enough of a rumour-gatherer that this name rang bells. There had been a Wasp who was ambassador to Collegium, but had perhaps been killed or perhaps deserted, and perhaps was right here in front of her.
‘That didn’t work out, then?’
‘It did until the Sarnesh walked in.’ He was bound as well, hands behind his back and strapped together to stifle his sting. ‘Who are you?’
‘Te Liss.’ She wasn’t sure why she had fallen back on her Solarnese name, but telling her real one never felt right.
‘You were . . . what? Why are you here?’
The official answer was, Because I was an Imperial agent. But she went with, ‘Because Milus is a bastard,’ which seemed truer.
‘I was supposed to be assisting the tactician. I told them that I did not flee to Princep because I wished to betray the Empire. I simply wanted . . . I wanted out. I wanted to be . . . somewhere they wouldn’t make me choose sides,’ Aagen told her.
‘Well, I know what that’s like,’ she agreed. ‘Just like I know that people like Milus don’t see things that way, whatever side they’re on.’
‘We’re on the Sonn–Capitas rail now,’ Aagen said softly. ‘That’s my home, ahead of us. A huge Lowlander army, moving east as fast as the automotives can haul them, a string of carriages a mile long, with thousands of soldiers, supplies, munitions, this deep into the Empire . . . It’s unthinkable. Where can this lead?’
‘I assume your presence here means that Milus wants your help with that question,’ she observed.
‘They just came and took me from the Princep camp . . . just grabbed me and marched me off. Nobody stopped them – it’s not as though the Ants have much use for us in Princep. I think Balkus would have . . . but he would have died. I’m amazed they didn’t take him as well, but Ants follow orders, and maybe Milus didn’t think to give that one yet. I didn’t think that Milus would . . .’
‘I think he’d do any cursed thing he wants,’ Lissart said. She was thinking rapidly, trying to find some use she could put this man to. If she used her Art to heat her gauntlets up, could they burn through the straps that secured his hands? Could he use his sting, then, to free her? Could she get out, with or without Aagen? Once she had regained the skies, the bulk of the Sarnesh army would cease to be relevant.
Then the carriage door opened, and Milus and a handful of his specialist artificers stepped aboard.
‘Now, Aagen,’ the tactician said mildly, ‘we were discussing the defences of Capitas. You’re an engineer, after all, so I’m sure you’ve got a useful professional viewpoint on them. Special focus on weak points, if you please.’
The Wasp took a deep breath. ‘I will not betray my own people.’
‘You already have, plenty of times,’ Milus told him. ‘This is no different.’
‘To me it is, Tactician.’
Milus smiled. Lissart recognized that smile, and in fact he glanced at her at the same time, as though automatically linking her with what he was about to do.
‘You’ll tell me,’ he said pleasantly to Aagen. ‘You’ll see that we Sarnesh are the coming kinden. Just as you Wasps picked up so much from your conquests, so we’re learning from you now.’ He patted the nearest machine, which was an interrogation rack taken straight from the Rekef chambers in Sonn. ‘It’ll be a taste of home for you.’
Paladrya was suffering from the sun, therefore spending most of her time below decks. Stenwold had been surprised that Rosander’s Onychoi soldiers could weather the land as well as they did. He remembered his first excursion with Paladrya and the Sea-kinden into Collegium and Princep. They had complained about everything – the food, the cold, the heat, the dry air.
Or, no, she had not complained, but she had suffered, just as she suffered now, her white skin reddening and cracking where the light caught it, so that she went about veiled and cloaked like a theatrical ghost.
Rosander’s people seemed far better able to cope, and eventually the Nauarch of the Thousand Spines had explained that their armour had been specifically designed for the land campaign. Stenwold had thought about that, and about how much warning the Sea-kinden had honestly received, after he had made his unexpected arrival at sunken Hermatyre to plead for their help.
Rosander had been about to invade the land once. Stenwold did not dare ask whether this armour, with its internal pockets and channels of water, had been left over from that attempt, or whether the Thousand Spines had simply never forgotten that dream.
In which case I am very glad I gave you this outlet.
Right now he stood at the airship rail along with Rosander and a handful of his men, watching their little fleet scud across the sky towards Myna. This was another memory made flesh. ‘You remember . . .’ he said, and the huge Onychoi nodded vigorously.
‘Oh, I do. You took me up into the skies and showed me your land world and said, “Will you conquer all this?”’ He laughed. ‘And of course I was shocked – whoever thought there was so much land, eh? But I tell you this, Maker – once I went home, to where life is sane and nobody’s in constant danger of falling to their deaths, I never forgot. I dreamt of horizons, Maker.’ Rosander grinned into the wind, showing neat yellow teeth. ‘And so here we are.’ He did not seem to care about the web of politics that had diverted them here to Myna, so long as there was a fight at the end of it – and that Stenwold could certainly promise him.
The airships had come from Helleron. Stenwold had tried to obtain them by negotiation and credit, but his separation from the main Collegium force had been very quickly known – Milus’s work no doubt – and his personal credit was less than nothing. The Helleren merchants had not even taken the time to meet with him.
So he had taken his force, Collegiates and Mynans and Sea-kinden all, and simply appropriated what he wanted from the Helleren airfields, acquiring a small fleet of airships to carry the soldiers and their supplies and as much water as could be loaded aboard. He directed any objectors to take matters up with Rosander. It was not exactly the finest hour of Stenwold Maker, diplomat and scholar, but by then he had run out of patience with the entire city of Helleron. And was running out of time as well.
Leaving Rosander at the rail, the former War Master of Collegium retreated below to the shrouded undersea gloom of his cabin to find Paladrya.
‘Myna will be in sight soon,’ he told her. ‘We’re almost there.’
She smiled at him, though a little uncertainly. She had said before that she felt that the Stenwold she knew was just one of many sharing Stenwold’s skull. The War Master was an intractable, intimidating companion, far from the man she had met once in the cells of Hermatyre. I think I liked you better when you were a fugitive, she had joked – or half joked.
He took her hand. ‘This is almost over, but I cannot abandon Kymene and Myna.’
‘You’ve told me: this was where it all started,’ she confirmed. ‘Your friends are fortunate in you, Stenwold.’