I know, I know, came the thoughts of her wingman into her mind, and she realized that she had been sending at least some of her opinions across their mindlink.
He sent Halden and Lidrec out to sea a tenday ago, as if there was an army just treading water out there. Someone needs to do something.
She conveyed her agreement, but added, Except ‘someone’ means Tynan, and enough people believe this ‘Empress’s voice’ business that, if Tynan and Vrakir go head to head, it’ll be unhealthy for pretty much everyone else in the city.
You reckon he’s going soft?
She paused before answering, turning that thought over in her mind. Her wingman meant the general, of course, and he wouldn’t be the first to suggest it. Most of the Second were still fiercely loyal to their general, and some were even trying to match the tentative manner in which he was governing Collegium – treading around the locals as though they were as brittle as eggs. Do the Beetles even realize how pissing nice we are being to their snobby, jumped-up city? The muttering dissent was steadily increasing, though. There were always those who felt the hand of restraint as an unbearable weight on their shoulders.
But that sent them off toadying to Vrakir instead and, whilst Tynan might sit around moping, the Red Watch man was as crazy as a Moth mechanic.
None of that talk, she cautioned, aware that her long pause would lead the wingman to draw his own conclusions.
It’s because of that Spider he was poking, the man opined knowledgeably.
I said, shut it – look out! And she was sliding sideways in the air because suddenly she was under attack.
She had a brief glimpse of the orthopters as they dropped on her. They moved like lead in the air: bulky boxy machines with repeating ballistae spitting out bolts. There were four of them and, even with the advantage of perfect surprise, they had not touched her. She reached out for her wingman, found that he had been clipped but was still airworthy. Then the two of them were coordinating courses, outrunning the sluggish enemy, which had split up to follow them.
And yet she tracked their lines and saw how they worked together, pushing the limits of their technology, coordinating in the air as well as Bergild and her wingman.
Ant-kinden, she decided.
Sarnesh? asked her wingman.
If these are the Sarnesh, then we seriously over-estimated the threat their pilots pose. Those machines are ridiculous . . . and what would the Sarnesh be doing this far west along the coast? . . . Oh . . . oh stab me . . .
For a moment she and her wingman coasted in silence, after seeing what was below, matching it up with where they were. Oh, you can’t be serious! Vrakir was right?
Orders, sir?
We get out of here immediately, lose our Ant friends and get back to Collegium. Things just got interesting.
They kept te Mosca under lock and key for a tenday, confined down in the cellars of the counting house that the Rekef had appropriated for its own use.
They fed her erratically. They did not torture her, but sometimes she was taken out and up to the ground floor, where the business of interrogations and confessions had shouldered out that of money-changing and loans at interest. Shackled across her back to clamp down on her Art wings, she was left in a guard’s custody for up to an hour before being taken back down again, as though some missing piece of vital paperwork had inadvertently gifted her with another few hours of pain-free existence. She was wise enough to know that this was all part of the game to her captors: their standard procedure, without meaning and almost without malice.
She was not the only guest of the interrogators. She heard some of the others, for whom that piece of paperwork had most definitely come. Yes, the Imperial hand lay light on Collegium, by the standards of Myna or the half-ruin that was Tark. That meant that fewer were taken up, and perhaps even that more of those put under the machines had done something to occasion it. It did not excuse the methods that the Wasps had built into their culture for rooting out those they believed were their enemies.
And they only gain more enemies from it. Brave words, those, but they rang hollow in her head right then. Oh, she recalled the rhetoric of the College academics, about the inferiority of the Wasp way, how their violence would inevitably lead to instability and defeat, the uprising of their slave cities, the end of their oppression. A convenient line to take for those Beetle scholars not personally keen to cross swords with the Empire, but te Mosca had believed it. She had lived with the cold and distantly contemptuous Moths of Dorax, and she had seen the excesses of Beetle merchant magnates, but in her naivety she had fervently believed that the Empire was an aberration of history and thus could never last.
But here she was in Imperial Collegium, and the Empire’s rough vitality had survived civil war and insurrection and seemed only to grow larger and stronger, until she sat in her dark cell and wondered whether it was not Collegium itself that was the freak, the error that the Empire’s conquest was correcting.
At last they came for her and did more than just stand her about to watch the Rekef clerks mark up their scrolls. She was led across what she now thought of as the Imperial district, to where she had first stood before Tynan.
There were fewer officers in attendance there, and Tynan himself was not slouched and brooding, but on his feet and talking to a Fly-kinden officer wearing the insignia of one of their specialist corps. The trailing words of their conversation washed over her, technical details that she could not understand.
Tynan glanced around and saw her; a flick of his fingers dismissed the officer, who gave te Mosca a curious stare as he exited.
‘So, it’s you,’ the general grunted. His eyes passed over her, taking in the grime, the thinness of face, the eyes dark from lack of sleep.
‘Good morning, General,’ she responded politely. ‘I hope I find you well.’
He strode closer, searching for mockery. She was surprised to discover that she was not scared of him, nor of being thrown back in the cell, nor even of the Rekef’s machines. Instead she found, from somewhere, a mild and self-contained boldness that plainly baffled him. She had no idea where all that fear had gone.
Tynan opened his mouth, and just then another Wasp burst in, to the general’s obvious astonishment. The newcomer wore a uniform with red pauldrons and had some badge she didn’t recognize, but his mere appearance was nothing to the horrible feeling of wrongness that washed over her just to look at the man. With a small cry she stumbled away as he advanced on the general.
‘Major Vrakir, what can I do for you?’ Tynan growled.
‘I require a redeployment of the wall artillery . . .’ Vrakir trailed off under te Mosca’s horrified scrutiny. ‘Who is . . .? This is the seditionist, the Fly lecturer from the College.’
Tynan blinked slowly. ‘She’s being released.’
‘She’s been interrogated?’
‘She’s being released.’
Vrakir digested that, as Sartaea te Mosca shuffled back from the two men, lest the loathing between them cut her in half.