‘You’re serious?’ Totho queried, for those orders meant essentially shutting down their normal business. The Iron Glove stronghold was no fortress, and there was a limited amount of ordnance that they could call on at any time, most of their grander projects being built to order. Beyond their compound, Chasme was so loosely knit as to be indefensible, but at the same time it was full of hard lawless people at least nominally operating under Drephos’s banner. The more Totho thought about it, the more he couldn’t see the Empire making an attempt. ‘The Spiders would gut them,’ he pointed out. ‘Whatever line they’re walking in Solarno can’t last long, anyway, before they come to blows there.’
‘Get us ready, Totho,’ Drephos insisted, still staring north towards Solarno, towards the Empire.
And in Solarno itself, in a grandly appointed room of a townhouse in the Spider half of the city, Merva the governor’s wife was speaking to the enemy.
She and her husband Edvic had been so careful. Securing the governorship had been a joint effort, he fighting for elbow room in the upper echelons of the Consortium, she visiting the wives of senior officers and casting her net: bribes, threats, favours deployed as weapons to get them the jewel they were after. Solarno was considered the crown of the Exalsee; Edvic had taken the governorship, and there had been that accord with the Spiders, and everything had been golden.
Then it had all fallen apart, and for a while it looked as though Solarno was going to become the South-Empire’s prettiest war zone.
They had worked so hard, she and her husband and all the minor Aristoi who had become their opposite numbers. A battle for Solarno would serve nobody: not the Empire, not the Spiders, certainly not the Solarnese.
And then the Engineers – the Engineers! – had uncovered the plan, just as if they had been lifting the housing from some machine to see why it wasn’t working as expected. For a moment everything had begun unravelling around Merva, all her plans falling apart. Then smooth Colonel Varsec had told her simply that, yes, she and Edvic could keep it all, and why not? Except for one thing. The Empire was asking a price to avoid dragging Solarno into the fighting.
This was a large room made for elegant, mobile Spider gatherings, and right now it was almost full. Just across from Merva was a delegation of Spider-kinden – and not just factors and surrogates, but many of the little Aristoi who ran the lower reaches of Solarno. They were young and tough, all of them used to fighting to keep a social station that greater nobles would see as one step from the gutter. The elimination of the Aldanrael had suddenly given them their place in the sun, if they could only hold on to it.
Giselle of the Arkaetien headed their delegation, she was the one who had rescued Merva from Gannic before. She was a girl who seemed barely twenty, dressed in glittering bright armour of chitin and silks that should have made her seem a fop, and yet a simple change in the way she stood and she became a dangerous duellist, the rapier at her hip far more than just for show. At her back stood her peers, into whose uncertain care Solarno had been given when the alliance with the Wasps had met its grisly end. Nobody had expected anything from them save blood.
There were others there too: two or three Solarnese Beetles rich and influential enough to ape Spider fashions and mannerisms; a pair of well-dressed Fly-kinden merchant magnates; a handful of squat, plain-dressing Bee-kinden from Dirovashni; even a gaudy Dragonfly noble from Princep Exilla, one of Solarno’s traditional enemies. They had all just heard what Merva had to say. None of them had walked out. None of them had sneered. They exchanged glances, murmured amongst themselves. Evident in their many disparate faces was an admission of the possible.
‘Let me tell you what we think,’ Giselle stated. ‘We know of the Iron Glove. We know of Chasme. That place was a thorn in the side of our kin here in Solarno long before your Empire’s halfbreed traitor made his home there. The Solarnese have always dreamt of taking up arms against them.’ Some nods from the Beetles there. ‘Now you say your Empire, in the midst of its war with our people, has achieved some manner of civic responsibility concerning the pirates and renegades there.’
She smiled prettily before continuing. ‘I think you’re scared that they’ll sell to us. Or to the Lowlanders. I think they’re – what was it? – loose artillery. Who knows which way they’ll point with each shot? And, if I’m advised right, this man Drephos loves war and the Apt toys of war. A fight between Spiderlands and Empire on his very doorstep would let him sell his toys to all the children, and so make the fight that much the bloodier.’
Merva shrugged. ‘The Consortium and the Engineers want rid of him, I know only that much. But I think you’re right. He’s grown too great, too dangerous, and he cannot be controlled.’
‘And these merchants and tinkers can bind the Empire? I hear no mention of the Empress’s writ in this.’
The Wasp woman kept her face level. Given their facility with spies, the Spiders almost certainly knew by now that Imperial writ was suddenly in short supply. ‘These days the merchants and the tinkers represent a great deal of power at Capitas. There is no more of the Empire available to treat with but this. On the table now is the best deal that Solarno – meaning the Exalsee – is likely to get.’ She looked from face to face, and not just at the Spiders, seeing the wheels turning there, seeing the unexpected balance of power. Giselle was their spokeswoman, but there were a lot of interests represented in that room, none of whom had any wish to see the continued growth of Chasme as a new power on the shores of the Exalsee.
Ten
They came again to confront Tactician Milus, finding him this time on the walls of Sarn, apparently supervising the placement of artillery. It was a sham, of course. Linked to the artillerists, Milus could have directed and advised his soldiers perfectly from anywhere in the city. His presence there in person was intended to focus the minds of the Collegiates, and other malcontents, on the danger to Sarn.
Expressions did not come naturally to Ant faces but, when Milus looked down to see Eujen and Balkus at the foot of the steep steps, there was something that clearly had hold of him. Straessa reckoned it was probably amusement rather than pity. She had wheeled Eujen here in the chair, and he hunched there like an old man, no support save a simple walking stick clutched in his hands.
Well, Milus loves to put on a show, and there’s more than one way to make a point here. ‘You’re ready?’ she asked the pair of them.
Balkus was looking somewhat concerned at the climb, but Eujen just squared his shoulders, and even managed a small smile for her. And who would ever have thought he was such a fighter?
Behind her, Kymene shifted restlessly, wanting to be done with the talking so that she could act. The Collegiates wanted their home back, yes, but they were a habitually patient people, well used to waiting and planning. The Mynans, meanwhile, were virtually in outright revolt at being denied the chance to go off and shed Wasp blood. In contrast, the citizens of Princep Salma, as represented by Balkus, just wanted to go home, seeing that most of them were here in something disturbingly close to slavery at the insistence of their ‘allies’ in Sarn.
Straessa made an abortive attempt to take Eujen’s arm but restrained herself as he braced his hands against the chair arms and then levered himself to his feet.