Step by step, they came to Bor’s Pit, and by that time Eujen’s painful progress had drawn a lot of attention. He had become a symbol, she knew. He had been a student agitator back home, then a military leader and briefly a rebel standing up against the Wasps. A great many people looked up to him, despite his young age.
Watching him making his way, though, most of them were fighting to hide their expressions.
The two of them were almost the last to enter the Pit, but someone would always find a seat for Eujen, one by the aisle, and Straessa stood beside it.
There was a constant roll-call of names, personal messages from family and friends under the Wasp yoke back home, but if that was what this was about, there would have been no need for the Pit, the stage and auditorium. There would also be a stack of messages marked for public consumption, those who had stayed telling their stories for those who had departed. This is how it is now. Remember us. There would be the latest instalment from the Spider writer, Metyssa – a hunted fugitive still hiding in Collegium – dramatizing the occupation, telling her tales of small courage, humour and tragedy from under the Imperial boot.
‘Willem Reader!’ came the call from Bor, the theatre owner, and then a pause to see if he was there. Collegium’s premier aviation artificer was absent, though, still working on the Storm-readers being built for the Sarnesh. One of his colleagues took custody of the letter.
‘Jons Hallend! Pella Mathawl!’ And more: each name finding a willing recipient until all the private missives had been handed out and the main show was ready to begin.
‘First on the bill, from Mistress Sartaea te Mosca, Associate Master of the College.’ Bor had been an actor once, and his voice filled the auditorium, so very different from that of the quiet Fly woman whose words he would be interpreting. Eujen squeezed Straessa’s arm at the name, eager for word from one of their friends. Even bad news might be better than the long agony of no news at all.
Sartaea te Mosca moved like a thief through the streets of her own city.
Or perhaps not quite her own city. She had been born in a little place close to the Etheryon, a logging post, but most of her life had been spent amongst the Moths of Dorax, possessed of just enough magical ability to make training her worthwhile. They had looked down on her, turned her out eventually, but more because she had not become the magician they had expected than because of her kinden.
Collegium had been her home now for some years, and when the Inapt studies post had come up at the College she had not exactly had to beat off much competition for it. The College Masters had not cared how meagre a magician she had been, given that they believed in none of it anyway. She had moved into her tiny classroom and begun teaching, without much facility, to students without much interest. The life had suited her well, letting her make friends and host parties.
She no longer taught at the College. All the lecturers were now under scrutiny and, whilst she had hoped that her esoteric subject might pass beneath their notice, the Wasps had Moth allies as well, and they had driven her out by their suspicious regard and by her own knowledge of her inadequacy. Now she stayed on as staff, a house-master presiding over a handful of student dormitories, doing what she could to protect her charges from the harsh world they found themselves in.
She had stayed out too late tonight and there was still a curfew in place. After dark, the streets were the official domain of Wasp soldiers and others bearing their writ. General Tynan – acting governor until someone arrived to replace him – rested a light hand on the city, those under his command were often spoiling for any excuse to display their power. There were plenty of arrests still, and some citizens disappeared or were shipped out east for further questioning and never seen again.
It could have been so much worse, and any day the general might break from his introspection and remember that he could make it so. Sartaea should have stayed behind closed doors, but she had urgent visits to make. It was important to her. There would always be people who wanted word sent out of the city, and she had taken the duty upon herself to help them. After all, she was a tiny speck of a woman, nimble in the air, treading lightly on the ground, and with eyes honed by decades of Moth darkness. The Imperial patrols were a risk she felt qualified to run.
And if she were caught, well, she had made a point of getting to know a few officers in the garrison. There were a dozen sergeants who knew that they could stop at her kitchen in the College and get something hot to eat or drink. She had to hope that those fragile bonds might bear the weight of a Fly-kinden life if the worst came to the worst.
The Reader house was near the College – a good first stop – and she rapped at the shutters of an upstairs window until Jen Reader let her in. The College’s librarian would have word destined for her artificer husband, who had been evacuated to Sarn.
After that, there was Poll Awlbreaker the engineer, whom the Wasps had working for them in their commandeered factories, and whose back, Sartaea knew, bore the trace of the lash to testify just how that arrangement had been brokered. His forced collaboration had bought him some concessions from the Empire, though. His house was unlikely to be searched so long as he kept the work up.
‘Any word?’ she asked him as he let her in.
He nodded, took a good long look out at the street and then closed the shutters. He was a strong-framed man in his prime, made broad and powerful by artificing work and fighting with the Coldstone Company during the war.
‘We’ve got papers for a single airship heading out for Helleron,’ he confirmed to her. ‘Space for two passengers and as many letters as you’ve got. Courier’s all set to take them.’ Only the courier herself would know the precise detour the airship would need to make in order to drop off its illicit cargo for onward transmission to Sarn.
‘Is Metyssa going?’
He made a face and then shook his head. ‘I told her she should, but she won’t. Two other Spiders, though. They’re going freight, nailed up in crates. It’s getting harder to pull this business off.’
Sartaea nodded. Being Spider-kinden in Collegium – or anywhere under Imperial control – was a death sentence ever since the inexplicable falling-out between the Second Army and its erstwhile Aldanrael allies. Whatever had happened, a whole second front had opened up down the Silk Road, draining Imperial manpower and resources. However advantageous this was for those fighting the Empire, it had resulted in the summary execution of hundreds of Spiders who had already fled the Spiderlands to make a new life elsewhere.
Metyssa was one such fugitive, Poll’s lover and fellow soldier. Her presence, hidden behind a false wall in his cellar, had been more persuasive than the whip in getting him to work the Wasps’ machines.
‘Has she written anything?’ Sartaea asked.
‘Oh, you can be sure. For someone who doesn’t get out much, she’s certainly got a lot to say,’ Poll remarked with a strained smile. ‘Nothing to the purpose, as usual, but it makes for good reading.’ Metyssa had made a living writing sensational stories for the Collegiate presses before the city had fallen. Now she was working on her own vivid account of the occupation, and Sartaea always had to scribble onto it the caveat that none of it was strictly true before passing it on to the courier. It was popular over in Sarn, she understood: each chapter eagerly awaited.
She dearly hoped that Metyssa would have a chance to finish the account. A Spider-kinden man had been unearthed only two days before and shot dead when he tried to run, and the family that had sheltered him had been arrested, their subsequent fate uncertain.