He got them all into a Collegiate taverna, then cleared out the locals and the staff until he and his fellows had sole possession of the place. With one keen-eyed Fly sergeant on watch, the rest of them settled in with a few liberated bowls of wine and waited for Ernain to begin.
‘Any luck getting Oski transferred back east with me?’ was his first question. A man for practicalities, was Ernain. He was Bee-kinden from Vesserett, that grand old city that had just been winding itself up to become a power in the world when it had clashed with the nascent empire that the Wasp tribes had put together. Nobody had known it at the time, but history should have been holding its breath. There could easily have been a Bee empire locking horns with the Lowlands right now, if things had gone differently.
Or perhaps trading peaceably with the Lowlands, all sweetness and light, Oski considered, though personally he didn’t believe it.
‘Not a hope just now,’ a Beetle-kinden put in, a captain in the Consortium wearing informal robes with only a rank badge to separate him from the civilians. ‘Believe me, something weird’s going on back home. Trying to get any odd orders stamped is almost a lost cause. The Empress . . .’
There was a general mutter around the room, from men who all knew the same story.
‘Anyway, the upshot is that a Captain-Auxillian can probably move about, but the Second’s chief engineer? Stuck here for now, looks like.’
‘The situation here is still strong,’ Ernain told them. ‘No doubt that’s the official line, too, but this time it’s true. I hear that the southern front against the Spiders is stalling, though?’
‘Just so,’ confirmed their one Wasp, garbed as a lieutenant of the Engineers. ‘The usual – ambush, assassination, mass poisoning and broken supply lines. The whole business was stupidity from the start.’
‘But a gift to us,’ Ernain pointed out. Capital treason uttered, then and there, and they absorbed it and nodded cautiously. ‘We’ll get our moment,’ the Bee went on, ‘and we’ll get it soon, I hope. Sarn will break out, or else the Spiders. But we need to be ready, have everything in place. Tell me we’ll be ready.’
Some strong nods, some awkward expressions.
‘We’re still testing the water in Slodan and Dekiez, and there’s simply no ready way to interest the Delves,’ the Beetle started to summarise. ‘The Grasshoppers are all for it but basically don’t understand what we’re trying to achieve.’
‘And some of us aren’t convinced it can work,’ added another Bee, an older artificer also from Vesserett. ‘This is the Empire we’re talking about. It’ll end in blood, no other way.’
‘In that case, a great deal of what we’ve worked for will come to nothing, Tiberan,’ Ernain replied. ‘But, if you’re right, we need to have the sword ready to draw. We don’t bluff. I know you think this must end in violence,’ he remarked to his kinsman. ‘And I know that some of you don’t believe it ever will –’ and this time a look at the Beetle – ‘but the truth is, we must all be ready to fight, and not to fight. We must be ready for opportunity. When we make our move, the next pages of the history books will be blank, awaiting our writing. If we try to scrawl them out ahead of time, we’re fools and likely we’ll fail. Here, try this. The final version, I hope.’ He threw over a scroll to Tiberan, who ran his eyes down it, frowning.
‘I don’t like it,’ Tiberan grumbled. ‘Same reasons as before.’
‘I know. Are you still with me, though?’
The older Bee sighed. ‘You know I am, Ernain.’
‘And the rest of you?’
‘If we had to go today, just march up to the throne and throw down the gauntlet,’ the Beetle said, ‘then we’d have a chance of getting out with our skins. If we did the same next month then I think we might be just about as ready as we’d ever be.’
‘Margraf,’ Ernain addressed the Wasp, ‘are we still quiet?’
‘There’s nothing in my papers or the rumours I hear that suggests otherwise,’ the man replied. ‘Still, as we all know, things are on the move back home. Right now, it’s not my lot you should be looking over your shoulder for. This Red Watch, that’s the new name, and where it gets its information from, I have no idea.’ My lot meant the Rekef, and Margraf held a lieutenant’s rank in the Inlander service as well as his Engineer’s post. He was regarded nervously by the rest, but he had proved invaluable so far.
Ernain took a deep breath. ‘You’re the third group of our people I’ve met with now. I’ve met with men who were scared of the consequences. I’ve met with those who were too keen for blood. I’ve met with Inapt men who told me their omens said the time was right. I’ve met with those who thought that I was trying to raise the power of old Vesserett from the ashes. All these different people I have talked to, and secured their agreement. People from all across the Empire. People who have been talking and planning since the end of the last war with the Lowlands, since the time of the traitor governors. I want you to go back to your own cities, to your own followers. Tell them it will happen. Every day brings it closer: our new dawn. We’re all together in this.’
‘So long as we’re not together in the Rekef cells at the end of it,’ old Tiberan growled, but the mood in the room remained fierce, determined. Oski looked from face to face and hoped that he was seeing the future.
Tynan wondered if this was how a spy felt every day. For an Imperial general it was certainly a novel and unpleasant experience. Here he was, in the city he nominally controlled, creeping about like a conspirator.
Getting the message had thrown him: the name was one he knew, and there were certain words and references there that convinced him of the hand behind it. Still, a lot of time had passed since then. The instant thought: was this a trap, a prelude to assassination? No great imagination was needed to suspect it – lure the general off to a secluded spot, and next moment Vrakir is in complete control of Collegium and the Empress’s supposed will is being done without hesitation.
But here he was, nevertheless, and he knew himself well enough to understand that this lack of caution was a result of a dozen different caustic experiences wearing him down – Mycella’s death, the unwanted demands of governing, the friction with Vrakir. He was a blunt, plain-speaking man denied the chance to act like one.
So an old friend called, and here he was. He had brought a dozen of his most trusted men who had drawn sword alongside him for over a decade in the Second’s campaigns. Choosing them, aware that they were none of them now as close to him as they should have been, he had come to the painful recognition of how his rank and the toll of the years had distanced him. He had no colonel to rely on, no real old friends. I should bring that Collegiate Fly woman with me; she would serve just as well.
In this brooding ugly mood he had come to this taverna, cloaked like a stage villain and trailed by a belligerent retinue.
On seeing that it was the man himself, he felt less relief than he had expected. Perhaps he would have preferred a betrayal, if only to give him the moral high ground.
‘Marent,’ he acknowledged.
‘Tynan.’ This general of the Third Army had no business being in Collegium, still less sneaking in incognito aboard a messenger orthopter, but here he was. He was younger than Tynan, and when he had done his stint in the Second he had only been a major, but he was a soldier’s soldier through and through, a man who won his wars on the battlefield, not behind closed doors.