He had not expected to start to care about it all. He had not expected the spying game to get so personal, friendships and rivalries and muddied allegiances. He had not expected to become infatuated with a girl who might be working for anyone or nobody at all.
She had said she would meet him. Solarno was drawn tight as a wire. The Cortas were ordering arrests, exiling random foreigners, searching ships. Nobody went to the Taverna te Remi any more. The place had closed down three days before and its owner had either disappeared or been disappeared. The casual detente between the Solarnese agents had broken at last, like ice at the end of winter. And, of course, it could not have lasted, but Laszlo had loved it while it had. There had been a feeling there that people of his newfound trade could deal with each other in a civilized manner.
Now they were at each other’s throats, and Solarno had become a dangerous place to stay. They remembered the Imperial boot there. Before the war they had been a big fish, and the Exalsee a small pond compared to the world beyond. Now the Empire and the Spiderlands and the Lowlander powers were moving out there in the darkness: great slabs of plans grinding into place, fit to crush little cities to dust. And Solarno was not even the biggest fish around the Exalsee any more.
It was time to get out.
She had said she would meet him, had te Liss. The night after the Taverna te Remi’s closing they had made their pact. To the pits with loyalties and whatever wretched, desperate espionage Solarno was still a stage for. They were getting out.
So he had chosen this place — a dockside dive that catered for sailors, and few of them native Solarnese. It was one of the first places he had made contacts, drawing on his past.
Dusk, they had agreed, but he had come early to avoid any surprises. He had thought she might do so as well. Now he sat hunched at a table with a pair of other Fly-kinden, setting down cards grimly, heedless of strategy, calling every bluff and playing every hand, and watching the door and windows always. He was winning, to the disgust and annoyance of his fellows.
He saw them immediately as they came in: not Liss, but he had been expecting them anyway. They were dressed in long coats and scarves, a grab-bag of kinden and halfbreeds, but they did not walk like sailors and too many of them looked his way straight off. Some small part of him realized he had been betrayed right then. Some other part of him knew she had been caught, and they had ripped it out of her. The rest of him was already moving. Quick exits were a common event here, and they kept all the shutters thrown back for that very reason. Why else would he frequent the place?
In a moment he was standing on the table, even as the newcomers made for him. He saw glints of metaclass="underline" knives and a couple of the little crossbows that the Solarnese liked. They did not look like men with capture on their minds.
Stenwold Maker had been a grateful friend and a generous employer. Laszlo whipped out from within his own coat the parting gifts the Beetle spymaster had given him. The cut-down little snapbows had only recently made it to the markets, and at a ruinous price, but they were already starting to be known as ‘sleevebows’ by criminals and spies both, although they were still a little large for any Fly’s sleeves. Good models would hold their charge for hours without losing any power and, though they lacked the accuracy of a full-sized snapbow, Laszlo was unlikely to be more than five yards from anyone he intended to shoot. They were curved and elegant as spider fangs, and barely six inches long.
These men were not professionals, nor used to working together. Some of them leapt back immediately, seeking cover, a couple charged at him, and one loosed a crossbow bolt, in startled reflex, that went into the shoulder of a compatriot. Laszlo grinned and kicked off into the air, his Art wings humming about his shoulder in a flicker of light.
Someone grabbed for his ankle. He looked down at one of his fellow gamblers, already reaching towards his belt for… Laszlo never found out what for.
In Solarno he had played the quiet man, but his family had been pirates for generations, after all, and they would be so again. He felt a stab of reluctance, but none of it reached his reaction time as he shot the man through the chest, the harsh snap of his weapon barely registering in the commotion as the regular patrons rushed for the door or took off through the windows.
It was enough confusion. Free of the dead man’s grip Laszlo dodged through the nearest window himself, darting around another fleeing drinker, one weapon now discharged and the other hunting for targets.
Have they got her? Can I rescue her? If the first answer was yes, the second would likely be no — which didn’t mean he wouldn’t try. Stupid, stupid, but her face was clear in his mind, a beacon. He could not say he loved her — was there ever a more treacherous foundation to build love on? — but she had hooks in him that he could not tear out, and the thought of her in pain, in fear, or worse, tore at parts of him he had not known he possessed.
If she was free, where would she go? If, hypothetically, she was free and she wanted to keep to their pact, and knew the dockside place was compromised, then where?
She was the only person who knew where he lodged, that place near the hangars that Maker had secured for him somehow. He was not supposed to know where she lodged, but some very determined shadowing had uncovered it — and he had always thought, wished, hoped, that he had done so only because she secretly wished him to know. He had confessed the spying to her later, and she had been mock-outraged yet plainly delighted, her real motivation layered into unreadability.
But, if they were hunting her, she would hardly stay home and wait for a boot to kick her door in.
He was cornering across the city even as he thought about it, heading for his own room, hoping against hope that he would find her waiting for him there. And let her be a dozen times an enemy of Collegium if only she’s still alive!
He kept the shutters of his lodgings barred from the inside — too much of an invitation, otherwise, in a city filled with his own kinden — but there was a trick to them, one loose bar that could be prised open enough to flick the bar off its rests. He could have installed a lock, but he had worked out early on that Liss was Inapt, a rare thing in a Solarnese Fly-kinden, so he had been planning ahead in a vague and opportunistic way. He had considered that, when the game turned sour, she might come here and seek sanctuary.
He flurried down out of the darkening sky and came to sudden rest beside the window, clinging to the wall with his Art.
The bar was undisturbed, and she could not have picked the door lock. She had not been here. He almost turned away then, but the thought came that she could have left a message for him, detailing some other rendezvous, and so he hopped the bar himself and swung in, heading for the door, looking for that slip of folded paper that might give him hope.
There was nothing, but when he turned back for the window, there was a man there, a shortsword in his hand.
He was bigger than Laszlo by a foot or so, but small by most people’s standards. He wore a long coat; beneath it was a white cuirass plated with steel, Solarnese militia issue. His face was bleak and hostile, and it was that, rather than the dusk, that gave Laszlo a moment’s blinking pause before recognizing him.
‘Breighl?’ he said uncertainly. ‘ Painful? What are you doing here.’
‘The game’s up, Laszlo, or whoever you are.’ There was nothing left in the halfbreed of the man that Laszlo had drunk with, gambled with and mocked. The hand not directing a sword at him was at belt-level, half inside his coat, and Laszlo guessed at one of the little local crossbows there, already tensioned and loaded.
‘What’s going on, Painful?’ Laszlo let himself relax, wings vanishing from his back but ready to be called at a moment’s notice. He had not reloaded the spent sleevebow, but its companion was still charged, and he reckoned his reactions were better than Breighl’s at a pinch. ‘How did you find this place?’