There were also plenty of soldiers, for neither side was taking chances. Other rooftops played host to the Light Airborne, and Laszlo could spot a fair few groups in the crowd that were surely taking Spider-kinden pay, most notably several bands of huge Scorpions who would have no trouble shouldering their way forward if necessary.
After that, the leaders arrived. He saw the Imperial delegation coming first: a squad of armoured infantry with a handful of officers in their midst, but striding ahead of the soldiers was an old man bald enough to need a broad-brimmed hat against the Solarnese sun. He stood as straight as a spear and walked with a soldier’s confidence. If he feared Spider treachery, he did not show it.
One of the other Fly-kinden hissed between his teeth, muttering to his fellows. Laszlo inched over and parted with a few coins for the knowledge that this was reckoned to be none other than General Tynan, the master of the Gears.
Someone else was pointing back towards the docks, and Laszlo scuttled across the rooftop just in time to see Tynan’s opponents make their entrance. The escort here were all Spider-kinden: lean, beautiful men and women in light armour, bows over their shoulders, rapiers at their hips. As they reached the cleared square, a woman emerged from their midst, standing there regarding the assembled crowds as archly as any empress. She wore a cuirass of silver scales, and beneath that a copperweave hauberk, the mesh as fine as cloth, stronger than steel. For all that, Laszlo would bet she needed no better protection than her own invulnerable self-assurance. Even at this distance he could feel the faint touch of her Art, making her an object both of attraction and fear. Her hair was bright silver, richer than the jewelled torc at her neck or the glittering gilded wreath about her brow, and age had brought her only authority.
Seeing her there, and recalling descriptions given by Stenwold Maker, Laszlo was willing to wager she was the Lady Mycella of the Aldanrael, who had led an armada against Collegium only the year before.
The soldiers on either side were tense, expecting a fight or a riot. The Solarnese themselves were frightened, angry, ready for violence. There would be daggers and swords aplenty for the crowds to lay hands on. They had only cast off the Empire a couple of years ago, and now here the Wasps were again.
Laszlo was depressed to see that many were plainly looking to the Aldanrael to defend them. Solarno had been a sort of appendix to the Spiderlands for a long time, but a backwater beyond the rigours of intrigue and backstabbing that dominated the Spider-kinden cities proper.
Tynan strode forward, startling his own men. His face was professionally blank as he regarded his opposite number, who matched him, pace for pace.
He put his hand out, and they clasped.
The crowd had gone completely still and quiet, waiting for the catch: for the orders that would set the soldiers on each other, or on the people of Solarno. What they saw was a clerk scurry forward out of the Spider retinue, setting down a table. A scroll was produced that nobody there bothered to read, the real business of diplomacy already disposed of elsewhere and long before.
They signed it, Tynan and Mycella, as though they were being wed.
There was an announcement after that, but the crowd had begun to murmur and argue, so Laszlo could not catch much of it. The news became the talk of every taverna and gaming house, though, so he soon pieced it all together, the Lowlander spy coming to the table for the scraps of others.
Stenwold needs to know, he realized, but he could no longer fool himself that he was nothing more than Maker’s agent. The import of what he now knew shook him through and through. His family had tied its fortunes to those of Collegium, after all.
There had been a treaty at the end of the last war, the Treaty of Gold. Collegium had been a signatory, as had the Empire, the Aldanrael and their allies, as well as the Three-city Alliance and various Lowlander cities.
Last year, conflict had flared between the Aldanrael and Collegium, arising out of Spider piracy that Stenwold had met with some steel of his own. A son and a daughter of the Aldanrael had lost their lives, and Laszlo knew that there was little that the Spider nobility took more seriously.
The Empire had signed a pact with the Spiderlands, in the face of Collegiate aggression and in the wake of Collegium’s tearing up the Treaty of Gold. For too long, they said, had the world been the plaything of little powers, self-important city-states such as the Lowlands was crammed with, belligerent neighbours. Myna was mentioned, also Sarn, Collegium, the Mantis-kinden. There would never be peace or prosperity while history was at the mercy of such small thinkers. The Treaty of Gold had failed. It was time to redraw the map and, as the two greatest powers of the age, the Empire and the Spiderlands would wield the pen.
Solarno had been declared a free port, under the protection of both sides, retaining a notional independence. Already the gates had been opened, the wharves cleared for trade, the relief felt by the hungry citizens quickly blurring their memory of who had taken the bread from their mouths in the first place. Against that, the news that the Cortas would sit under the watchful gaze of Imperial and Spider-kinden advisers went almost uncontested. Having heard the rest of the news, the Solarnese reckoned that they might just have got themselves a good deal, after all. The first rumours were seeping in about Myna, and defiance was looking like an overrated quality.
The Second Army, swelled by Mycella’s own troops, would be moving west, and nobody had any doubt about their joint objective. Both General Tynan and the Aldanrael had unfinished business with Collegium.
When Laszlo got back to the surgeon’s house — flying at best speed all the way — and burst into Lissart’s room, he had one thought in mind.
She voiced it for him. ‘We have to leave.’
His thunder stolen, he gaped at her.
She misinterpreted his surprise as reluctance, sitting up in bed with a grimace, but doing her best to show that she was fit to be moving by now. ‘Listen to me — I don’t care if my legs fall off, we’re getting out of Solarno. I saw her.’
Laszlo blinked. ‘Her who?’
‘Garvan,’ she told him urgently, and hissed in frustration when he didn’t know who Garvan was. ‘The Wasp, Laszlo. The Wasp that stabbed me. Come on. ’
‘ Her? ’ he demanded, more shocked by this than almost anything else.
‘Yes, her. Why d’you think she stabbed me?’
‘Liss, this isn’t making any sense-’
With a sound more of annoyance than pain she levered herself out of the bed. The bandages across her abdomen, plainly visible beneath the cut away hem of her borrowed tunic, remained unspotted with fresh blood. The old surgeon knew his craft. ‘Listen, pirate, a Wasp here in Solarno will kill me if she sees me, and I am in no state to either escape or fight back. What part of “Let’s get out of Solarno” isn’t getting through to you?’
‘They have people on all the gates, and at the docks,’ Laszlo said. ‘Maybe after the armies leave, it’ll be easier.’
‘I’m serious; I saw her from the window, on this very street, along with soldiers…’ She trailed off. ‘Hold on: “armies leave ”?’
So he explained just why he himself wanted to leave the city too, which calmed her down quickly enough.
‘Right,’ she said, after a while. ‘Looks like I picked the wrong time to change sides.’ A spark came back with that thought. ‘And don’t think that means I’ve picked yours, Laszlo. When are the bastards moving out?’