The Captain sighed. ‘We can ill afford to lose three of our best men. But – yes. It’s your command. Any word from Jehan?’
‘His guides mislead him and he thinks it was done a-purpose. He killed one.’ Tom shrugged.
‘We could be so unpopular here, Tom.’ The Duke shrugged. ‘But Jehan knows what he’s doing. We need that wood.’ He looked up. ‘Any word from Sauce?’
‘She’s chatting with people; people she knew here.’ Tom shrugged. ‘She’s a strange one. She was a whore, here?’
‘Right here in this city,’ the Red Knight said.
‘Aweel. She’s off tonight to talk to an armourer. Says that this man witch was one of his father’s apprentices, fifty years back.’ Tom didn’t sound very interested. ‘She’s also found me some useful people.’
‘Paid informants?’ the Red Knight asked. ‘Spies? Whores? Tavern ruffians?’
Bad Tom nodded. ‘Aye.’
The Red Knight grimaced. ‘We are living in the very annals of chivalry, ain’t we?’
Chapter Eleven
The Sacred Island – Thorn
Thorn had been using the moths more and more – they were tough, agile, and very quick to breed. The spring of power, Deseronto, as the locals called it, now had so many moths and their larvae that the soft beat of their fragile wings was actually a noise when they were disturbed, and Thorn spent more time on them than on some of his more immediate projects. He told himself that they would all be useful in time, but the truth – a truth he admitted freely – was that he had fallen in love with the species and sought to redesign them to suit his many ends and for purely aesthetic expression.
He had a paradoxical thought that he had once hated moths, but he dismissed it.
In the centre of the open, unroofed chamber of natural rock from which both water and raw power gushed, he had placed a low marble table, and on it sat the two black eggs, which had altered in shape and size. They were now the size of a man’s breastplate, and the eggs had developed the ridges of a pumpkin and the warts of an aged animal. Things moved within them, almost visible against the tough elasticity of the shell, and still they grew, and the marble table groaned under their weight.
They generated an effect that was, itself, the cause for concern. All the moths that gestated near the eggs were born wizened and black, as if the eggs leached their essence before they ever had a chance to feed and form a chrysalis.
But because Thorn was a careful observer, he saw that in each generation of moth larvae placed close to the eggs, a few were of remarkable dimensions and weight. The larvae were the size of earthworms or larger, jet black, and without markings.
For three patient generations, he massacred the little ones and bred the large ones – some left close to the eggs, and some given a safer berth.
As summer fled to autumn, and leaves across the Sacred Island went to red and gold, and then began to wither and fall in the driving rains and sudden winds, the black eggs grew as big as witches’ cauldrons. And Thorn watched the first generations of Black Moths emerge from their cocoons – the size of a peregrine falcon, with a thousand matte black eyes and a single probiscus, like a misshapen unicorn.
He dominated them easily and sent them north. One fell victim to a windstorm. One he lost in the woods – possibly attacked by an owl. The remaining three descended on a Sossag village.
They were quick, their needle-like probiscae were deadly, their venom instantaneous, the paralysis and subsequent jellification of the victim magnificent in effect. But the Sossag were themselves agile and strong – a nine-year-old girl scored the first kill with her father’s snow snake, ripping a Black Moth from the air with a practised strike even as her mother’s bones disintegrated. Before he could withdraw his predators, they were dead.
Thorn reviewed their performance and decided that the Black Moths made a better tool of assassination than of terror. He worked on the second generation.
The use of insects as spies now took up a sizeable portion of his attention, but allowed him an unguessed-at level of knowledge. He could watch a person or an event from fifteen or twenty vectors, allowing him a godlike perspective on events. The effort involved was less than he had experienced with mammals but the diffuse creatures and directions required a level of minute adjustment that cost him in both power and time every day.
In return, however, he began to see things that he knew he should have ensured he saw before he attempted Lissen Carrak. The greatest limitations on his newfound powers of espionage lay in the old spells and workings built into the structures and palaces of the powerful – and even into some shepherds’ cots. It took a great warding to resist Thorn for even a moment, but it took only the will of the village witch to keep his ensorcelled insects from the door, and a new commercial hermeticism in Liviapolis – a warded amulet that prevented insects from entering a house, sold to goodwives and travellers by the University – was like to make every home in the Empire immune from his creatures.
But these were the elements that made the life and path of ascent Thorn had chosen so rewarding. That autumn he was challenged and delighted, and he worked hard to prepare his series of strokes.
Thorn waited, and watched.
He tried not to believe that he was a tool.
He watched as his eggs grew and matured, lit from within with a curious black fire that defied his own sorcery.
He watched four ships come up the Great River, their straight masts and round sides utterly alien in the world of trees. He saw them from a great height, circling as an owl, and later, as a raven with a sixty-foot wingspan. His powers had made a great leap forward, and his heart beat with renewed vitality. Once, he had been a man, and he made himself a new form. Now he could adopt many forms, and in adopting them his sense of himself altered.
It is happening he allowed himself to think.
He had access to unbelievable amounts of raw potentia. He swam in it – he bathed in it. He worked small things and great with reckless profusion, making tools for the future.
He went in various forms to the creatures on either side of the Inner Sea, and listened. A few he bound to his will, but now he preferred to whisper some words and let the sweetness of his suggestions work their own magics.
He watched Ghause. For every one of his sendings she destroyed he placed another, and another, until he could watch her all day, from many angles. Naked. Clothed. Working the aether or reading a book, rutting with her lumpen husband or preparing her revenge.
She fascinated him. Repelled him. But she was like the perfect tool, built to fit his hand. And he desired her, as a woman. It was many, many years since he had felt any such desire, and he revelled in it. It was not weakness, but strength, he told himself. He watched her work, naked, and he watched the intent rapture she displayed as she gathered potentia in the aether and cast great gouts of ops and he wanted her. His pale grey moths let him see her from nine directions as she rose on her toes, like a dancer, her belly moving faster and faster in her rhythmic chant-
I will take her, and have her and use her, and she will serve me. And in so doing, I will strike at the King, cripple the Red Knight, and destroy the Earl, and grow yet more powerful. And when I am tired with her, I will subsume her. And grow yet more powerful still.
He was in the body of Speaker of Tongues, and so he could smile.
He was still chuckling when the ambassadors from the Sossag found him.
They were strong men, warriors all, and they hated him. And feared him. He could smell their fear and their hesitation – indeed, he had felt their fear so far away that he’d had time to create a house in which to host them, and a table at which to sit with them, and a fire on a hearth – and to refine this body.