Or, no, there had been one place, but it was gone.
Just now he felt he needed company: company that was not hers. For company could supply him with something to ease his pain, in exchange for the coins he had in his purse. That was the function of company, if it was not to be the company of his peers.
He saw mostly Bee-kinden there, some outpost of Dirovashni with a couple of piers extending into the Exalsee and a living based on fishing. There was a taverna, though. That was enough. It was a rough, unfinished sort of place – no tables and nowhere to sit but empty kegs. Three Solarnese were playing a game of cards in one corner, and a Spider sat by herself, clad in armour of silk and tarnished scales, a rapier sheathed at her hip.
The taverner was a squat Bee woman, blind in one eye, and she regarded Totho nervously, already sensing trouble brewing.
‘Wine.’ Totho threw a coin at her, close enough to make her duck. It was gold, though – a central from the Helleren mint. It would keep his bowl full for a while.
His halfbreed follower was still loitering at the door, but Totho was waving for a refill before she deigned to find a patch of ground to call her own. The taverner assailed her immediately – even the dirt on the floor was for paying customers only.
She had no coin. Perhaps she was someone’s slave, after all. That made so much more sense than anything involving Che. Just another halfbreed slave cast adrift on the shores of the Exalsee. He wanted her to have some commonplace unhappy story, and all the rest of it to be mere delusion.
‘Oi, woman,’ Totho waved another coin at the proprietor. ‘Let her drink. Why not?’ He was desperately hoping that if he treated Maure like a deranged beggar for long enough, she would turn out to be nothing more than that.
That settled that, and he took the chance to drain his bowl and hold it out again. He was not much of a drinker. He had never had the means when he was a student, and later there had always been his work. A drunken artificer was a creature of little use to anyone. Drephos, of course . . . oh, Drephos never touched a drop. He was . . . he had been drunk on his own brilliance.
Totho felt the cracks start, inside, where the armour could not protect him.
A beautiful abomination, Drephos had been: never to be repeated or to be equalled. A man who cared nothing for kinden or the purity of blood, but for merit only. He had put Collegiate Masters to shame with his egalitarian attitudes. If you could, if you were a brother or a sister of the engine and the gear train, the refining vat and the forge, then you had worth to Drephos, no matter what else.
And, in the end, even the Empire had broken its rules for him. Firstly in creating the rank that he had borne, and secondly in storming an entire city for fear of him.
Totho drank because he had been told that men drank to forget, or for consolation, or to dissolve away all those rational, soluble parts that knew guilt and regret. Each fresh mouthful only brought all those things to the fore of his mind, though. He found no oblivion waiting at the bottom of the bowl.
‘That’s fine armour you have there, friend.’
He looked up to see a trio of Bee-kinden there, soldiers from the look of them – all too similar to the vermin who had marched into the streets of Chasme and never marched out again. They had snapbows slung over their shoulders and axes at their belts, typical unimaginative sorts without an interesting innovation between them. He had no words for them, and his eyes slid back to his wine.
‘Where’d a halfbreed get armour like that, I wonder,’ the Bee went on.
‘Only one place, I reckon,’ one of his companions suggested.
Totho looked up at them again, recognizing that familiar mail of Dirovashni make, that industrious city that had nonetheless always managed to fall behind both Chasme and Solarno, never quite good enough.
‘Never quite good enough.’ Until he saw their expressions, he had not realized he had spoken aloud.
‘We’ve just come from a city, halfbreed,’ said their leader. ‘Plenty of halfbreeds there, or there were. A whole nest of them. Burned out now. If it were day, you could see the smoke from here.’
Totho shrugged.
‘Some of them got clear. Vermin always do escape. You have to hunt them down or else they breed.’
So, this is it, then. Totho reached within himself, feeling how unsteady he was. Even the prospect of action made his head swim. The unassailable confidence of the drunk seemed to have utterly passed him by. Perhaps it would be best if I just let this happen.
‘Pissing Iron Glove bastards,’ the Bee went on. ‘I lost too many friends to your kind when Chasme burned.’
And Totho lurched to his feet, empty handed, snapbow still on the floor with his overturned wine bowl. He was smiling as he said, ‘Not to my kind. To me.’
The Bee struck him, a mailed fist striking his cheek and knocking him back against the wall. Then the man had punched downwards, trying for his head again but bruising himself against Totho’s pauldron, the force still enough to knock Totho off his feet.
Then they were all on him, kicking and stamping, while he cradled his unarmoured head in his arms, feeling the Bees achieve a rhythm between them, unintentional but mechanical, almost comforting as they tried to destroy him, to stomp him into the dirt of the floor.
They could not hear beneath their own shouts and grunts, but he was laughing. He was laughing because he could barely feel the blows through his magnificent armour, kick as they might.
Then there was a new voice, and he realized to his dismay that the woman had got involved.
She was trying to call them off, and they turned on her, and she had no armour, but she too was a halfbreed. Foreign to Exalsee politics, she would not understand why that made her even more fair game than usual.
But she was speaking firmly, almost desperately, and Totho craned up and saw them listening. First she spoke to one of the subordinate Bees, words too soft for Totho to hear, but the man shook his head, frowning in bafflement, taking a step back. Then she was addressing the other, and he heard her say, ‘Would your mother have wished to see you like this? Was this what she meant when she said that she would always be proud of you?’
The look on the Bee’s face was stunned. ‘My mother’s dead,’ he got out.
‘And she would still be proud of you, if you let her,’ the half-breed woman declared.
She turned to the last man, their leader, her mouth open to speak, and he struck her across the face, then lunged forward to grab her even as she fell, hoisting her up and throwing her across the taverna, spilling her in amongst the gamblers. She came up with her shortsword drawn, one hand bloody at her mouth.
‘Now we’ll see what you’re made of, bitch!’ the Bee spat.
Then Totho said, ‘Hey, you.’
He had prepared himself better, this time. He had his helm on, his world narrowed to a slit, and he had his snapbow in his hands.
To his credit, the Bee was quick. He had his own weapon off his shoulder and aimed towards Totho even as he stumbled back. The whole taverna had gone horribly silent.
Totho had his weapon levelled, as did the Bee. The other two were frozen, reaching for their bows, eyes flicking between their leader and his former victim.
‘Go on,’ Totho got out, though his words sounded a little slurred even to him. He was aware that he was swaying slightly. ‘Go on, shoot me. We’ll make it a game.’