'Fly to Totho at Khanaphes, swift as you can,' he instructed. 'This information must be known.'
Twenty-Four
'The hunt …' Amnon wrinkled his nose. 'I thought it had gone well. Perhaps I was wrong.'
Totho watched him empty the dregs of a beer jug. The Iron Glove staff had brought in plenty, though, and then left the room at his command. Totho had assumed that the Khanaphir First Soldier was coming to talk business, but it turned out that Amnon was seeking something simpler, and at the same time more fraught: a sympathetic ear. And I'm the ear? There was a whole city of Khanaphir out there, any of whom would have been honoured to receive the First Soldier of the Royal Guard as their guest. But Amnon was out of sorts, Amnon had worries, possibly for the first time in his life, and he wanted to bare his soul. Perhaps that was not something the Khanaphir did with one another: their secretive, mirror-placid nature went deep. Somehow, Amnon had looked on Totho and seen a kindred spirit.
I'm willing to bet the Ministers don't know he's here either.
Iron Glove business in Khanaphes had not been good over the last few days, after Ethmet's displeasure had filtered into the city. Totho reckoned it was only a matter of time before they had to write this city off as unprofitable. They would have been leaving soon enough, anyway, denied an outlet to practise their true craft. Totho had no real interest in bulk orders for ordinary swords and arrowheads.
'We took four of the land-fish, one as large as any I have seen,' Amnon explained, and then sighed massively. 'I do not understand these Collegium women — are they not impressed with such prowess?'
Totho found himself wondering what Che must have made of it. 'They're a perverse lot,' he agreed, feeling a pang of the old bitterness. 'Believe me, I tried to …' And am I revealing this now, and to him, that I have kept to myself for so long? The beer and Amnon's blithe innocence encouraged him. 'I tried to help the girl I … tried to show her how I felt and what I could do. I even went halfway across the world to rescue her. For nothing.'
'So what do they want?' Amnon demanded, taking up another jug. 'Has she enemies I can slay? No, it is all diplomacy with them, and I am not allowed. How am I to show this woman?'
'They're very sentimental, Collegium women,' Totho told him. 'Sentimental to a fault. They read too much.' A sweeping statement, but he had just decided that it was true. Am I drunk? It seemed likely. The empty jugs littering the table between them were not entirely the fault of Amnon. Mind you, just because he had been drinking, it didn't mean that it wasn't true. 'They prefer a hollow gesture to all manner of sincerity,' he added. One touch of Moth-kinden mystery and she virtually forgot I was even there.
'So you think I should woo her gently?' Amnon said. It did not quite match with what Totho thought he had just said, but he let that be.
The big man was thinking. 'I had not wanted to seem too forward.'
'You'll get nothing by hiding your fire. They never notice, if you do that,' Totho replied sagely. 'And they don't care about what success you make of yourself either. You could be general of the world and suddenly it wouldn't matter.' And, in that case, what am I doing here? What is it I really want?
'I am observing this, with her,' Amnon agreed heavily. 'I must make a grand gesture — an unmistakable one.'
'Tell me, then,' said Totho. 'Tell me what she did, on your hunt.'
'She seemed not the least interested in anything of it,' Amnon reported gloomily. 'Even when I pulled her from the water with my own hands, she did not seem to see me.'
'No, no, not your Rakespear woman,' Totho interrupted. 'I mean Che — the ambassador.'
'Ah, that I cannot tell you,' Amnon replied ponderously. 'For she vanished for some time, strangely, leaving her companions very concerned. When our search parties finally found her, she was with the Imperial ambassador and his clown.'
I am not drunk any more. Indeed he felt abruptly, coldly sober. Totho wrestled a polite expression on to his face, glad that Amnon was being too introspective tonight to notice. 'Is that so?' he asked.
The big man nodded. 'It is not safe, to venture so far as she did,' he said.
It is not, Totho silently agreed. I was asking myself what I want here. What I undoubtedly want is to make sure that Che does not fall into the hands of the Empire. Surely that is what I want, and on the heels of that, came the wretched thought, And how many rescues will it take, to make her mine?
In her dream, Petri Coggen found herself standing at the door of the embassy, looking out at the Place of Foreigners. A breeze brought cool air from the river, but the sky above was almost cloudless.
This isn't right.
In the dream there was a strange feeling laid on her, of calm and acceptance. As it enveloped her like a blanket, she took three steps out towards the pond and its benches. Deep inside her something flinched. That part of her trying to wake was thrashing, fighting, but buried very deep. The numbing calm they had laid upon her was smothering it.
This isn't right. Still that note of discord. This is not the Place of Foreigners. There was enough awareness left to her to force her head around, to look closely at her surroundings. It was a dream, but she knew it was a dream, and that behind this dream there lurked something much worse. Somewhere, out beyond her sight, they were waiting. She could feel the leaden weight of their attention.
The statues in the garden of Honoured Foreigners were now watching her. As the moonlight caressed them, it touched not cold stone but cloth and flesh. Deep inside, a shiver of horror went through her — because if these statues could live, then why not others? — but her outer calm was barely cracked, staring at them.
They made no move, just stood in their places, but she saw them shift slightly, and their eyes tracked her as she crossed the garden. The Moth-kinden watched her with inscrutable patience, the Spiders with arch disdain. From his hiding place within the foliage, the eyes of the Mantis warrior gazed with narrow suspicion. Other kinden, some that she had never known in life, stared down on her, as their names were dredged from her memory: long-limbed Grasshoppers, hunchbacked Woodlice, poised and beautiful Dragonfly-kinden.
No Ants, no Beetles, not even a Khanaphir. But in the dream she understood that. It was because they were so very lowly: who would waste the fine white stone on a statue of Petri Coggen or any of her relations? They were the servants, the minions, the countless running hordes, whose myriad deaths and births passed unmarked season to season. These, here, were the nobility.
She turned away from their scathing looks and found herself facing the grand arch that led into the Place of Government, towards the Scriptora and the pyramid with its eternal watchers.
And tonight the statues have come to life. The struggling part of herself was rising to the surface fast now, howling for her to wake up. Here in her dream there were things that she did not want to see. Her feet were moving her forward, a pace at a time, with a sleepwalker's slow inevitability. She felt the collective gaze of the foreign ambassadors prickling against her back, but none made a move to help her.
Help me, and yet there was no help, and her traitor feet kept taking her, pace by pace, towards that arch ahead. She tried to close her eyes against it, but this was a dream and she could not block it out.
All I wanted to do was leave, she wailed in protest, and the answer, in crystal-clear tones, came back to her.
We do not wish you to leave.
But what about what I want? Except that was beyond the point. She remembered then that she was a slave, that all her race were slaves, and that this dream came from the far past, when what any Beetle-kinden woman wanted carried no more weight than a grain of sand.
But we have broken from all that! The revolution …
But it was a dream from the past, and the revolution had never happened, and besides: this was Khanaphes where her people carried their shackles inside their minds every day, and were joyful about it.
She was now at the arch and stepping into its shadow. The steps of the pyramid rose before her. If she craned her gaze upwards she could see the first hint of white stone.
No!
She made a sudden, furious effort to wrest herself away from the dream — and abruptly she was falling, lurching from her bed in a tangle of sheets, and striking the floor with a cry of panic that must have woken half the embassy. She stayed motionless but trembling, waiting for some revenant left from the dream to rise up from within her mind and recapture her. Then she heard footsteps, and people suddenly shocked into wakefulness were shouting at one another.
I must tell Che, she thought. She's the only one who might understand.