The Bee’s eyes were very wide.
‘A game, you and me,’ Totho went on. ‘You shoot me, and then I’ll shoot you after. Give it your best. Go on. I lost friends in Chasme, too. I lost more than that. I lost everything. So let’s play our game.’
He shifted his aim slightly, down and to the side. The Bee’s teeth were bared, his hands shaking a little, suddenly on unfamiliar ground.
‘Shoot me, you turd!’ Totho screamed at him, and the man brought his snapbow to his shoulder and loosed it at a range of only a few feet.
He had been aiming for the throat but had hurried the shot. The bolt struck the cheek of Totho’s helm, snapping his head round and sending him reeling back into the wall for the second time.
He heard a jubilant yell from one of the other Bees that choked to nothing halfway when Totho did not fall, but just levered himself back on to his feet with his snapbow still levelled, one-handed, the barrel weaving enough to threaten just about everyone else there.
He had their full attention, all of them.
He felt he should say something arrogant and heroic, like My turn! or something similarly witty, save that he had known true heroes, men for whom killing was an art form and livelihood and reason for being, and they did not quip as a rule. Instead, the words that came from him were an artificer’s.
‘Not even a dent,’ he told them, and their eyes strayed helplessly to the fluted steel of his helm, the Iron Glove’s finest metallurgy and smithing in perfect harmony.
The man on the left broke first, barrelling for the door, and when the snapbow inevitably swung wildly to follow him, the others were running as well, and the rest of the taverna’s occupants after them, including the taverner herself. Only the halfbreed woman was left, well within the compass of Totho’s roving aim.
‘We should be moving,’ she suggested. ‘No doubt they have more friends, and you seem to be a wanted man.’
‘We? What we?’ he demanded of her. ‘Why are you doing this? Why won’t you leave me alone?’ He had a horrible moment of disconnection when he wondered if she was actually real, or just some guilt-spawned product of his mind. But the Bees were talking to her, weren’t they? Or were they?
‘I can’t tell you, because you wouldn’t – couldn’t – understand, and it wouldn’t make any sense to you. And, anyway, I’d have to mention—’
‘Che. Che who you can’t know.’
‘Her, yes.’
His hand twitched, but he managed to fight his finger away from the trigger. ‘Let’s go,’ he told her. ‘We’ll go. We’ll find somewhere.’ He wanted to take more wine, but the sheer logistics of trying to transport a keg defeated him. ‘You’ll tell me . . . I don’t care what. Just tell me. Tell me about Che.’
When Maure had finished the whole sorry story, Totho found himself just shaking his head. They were by the lakeside still, but well beyond the Bee village, amid a grove of willows with the light of a half-moon filtering through their branches.
He felt that if he had drunk less he would have made out more of her actual sentences, and yet still not have understood. It was as if someone had told him some bizarre old story, some ancient Moth legend, but substituted names he knew for its original mythical characters.
‘You make no sense,’ he complained weakly.
‘I told you that you wouldn’t understand.’
‘But you make no sense,’ he insisted. ‘How can there be some underground world that isn’t actually underground? How can a whole kinden, and all those others, just have been lost to history – and now come back? How was this Argastos . . . what was he? How can that possibly even be a . . . a metaphor, even? What does it mean?’
‘You’re Apt. I have no words that you will comprehend,’ she said sadly. ‘To think I used to seek out Apt men . . . but I never needed them to understand me before. All of it is a metaphor. None of it is a metaphor.’
‘Besides, Che’s Apt too.’
‘She’s not.’
He scowled stubbornly. ‘She’s Apt. She was . . . confused, in Khanaphes. She’d lost people, she wasn’t thinking straight. I know . . . knew her, though. She’s—’
‘A magician.’
At that he just laughed, hearing an edge of desperation in his own voice. ‘Don’t be stupid, woman. Fine, you obviously do know Che and Tynisa and . . . but you’re Inapt and you’re cracked. I don’t care whether you were born that way or fell on your head, but . . .’
‘She is a magician.’ And this time she was standing, staring down at him as he sat with his back to a tree.
He found one hand creeping towards his snapbow, for all that she could not possibly be a threat to him. ‘Sit down.’
‘She is the most powerful magician I have ever known, Totho,’ Maure insisted. ‘She says she was crowned by the Masters of Khanaphes, and I believe it. She is raw, untrained, but she has power . . . she had power.’
‘Khanaphes,’ Totho spat in contempt, and abruptly a vision came to him, a memory he tried to keep locked in darkness, of a great wall of water descending, obliterating an army, defying rational explanation. ‘She’s not . . . Che’s not . . .’ He stared into Maure’s face, recognizing utter certainty there, for all the gap in Aptitude that lay between them. Something clicked into place within him, an escapement that had been waiting for its moment for years. ‘He did it. He did it to her.’ His voice sounded very cold even to his own ears.
Maure backed up a step. ‘Who . . .?’
Abruptly Totho was on his feet as well, snapbow in hand. ‘The Inapt bastard . . . the Moth boy.’ For all that the boy had been older than Totho at the time. ‘He corrupted her somehow. He took her from me and he changed her so that . . . he spoiled her.’
‘I don’t think—’ Maure started and then the snapbow was directed at her face, its aim far steadier now than before.
‘Pissing Inapt!’ Totho snapped at her. ‘Always you pissing Inapt ruining my life.’ He knew he was still drunk, but here was that grand confidence in the rightness of his actions that he had always been promised. Here was the courage to do what must be done. ‘If I could – if I could invent a machine for it – I’d kill every pissing Inapt bastard in the world! Piss on the Bee-killer, I’d make a Moth-killer and I’d use it. And the world would be a better place!’
She was frozen, staring at the weapon.
‘And you know why? Out of your own mouth, that’s why!’ He was fighting to order the words. ‘Either you’re such pissing ridiculous liars that every word you say is suspect, or . . . can you imagine what I would have to think if I believed any of it? If any of it was true? How you Inapt have screwed the world over and over, fighting stupid wars, burying whole kinden, sitting around and turning into the living dead? Even if it were true, how much better the pissing world would be if we’d never had any of you!’
Eyes wide, she looked at him down the length of the snapbow. ‘I suppose that’s probably true.’ And then, after a strained pause: ‘Do you shoot me now?’
He blinked at the snapbow, which had seemed so very necessary a moment before. ‘It was just . . .’
‘A metaphor?’
He scowled down the tentative smile appearing on her face. ‘Don’t you joke with me. I am not in the mood.’ With that, he felt as though his strings had been cut, and he slumped down beside the tree again. ‘I should have brought that wine after all. Why me, eh?’ He hadn’t wanted to return to the question, but the mere mention of Che, her reintroduction into his life, even by proxy, had kindled a horrible spark in him, for all he tried to extinguish it. Sometimes hope became the worst enemy.