She gaped at him. 'But you don't mean … you mean that … the Ministers? You?'
'The sin of Profanity is profane only when committed by the unrighteous who seek to steal that which is given freely to those who deserve it.'
She clenched her fists, utterly lost now. 'Tell me what you're talking about,' she urged him. 'Just tell me … tell me something plainly, please.' She had joined him at the balcony's edge, but his gaze did not even flick towards her.
'You know,' he said. 'Am I plain enough in that?'
'But I don't-' She stopped and, at last, followed his gaze down to the tiled floor of the chamber. After a moment she said, 'Oh.'
The mosaic, the tiles of sepia and black and grey, swam before her eyes, and she felt Ethmet take her arm to keep her from simply pitching over the rail. What had been an abstract arabesque down below was suddenly recognizable, stylized but familiar. The floor was a map.
Khanaphes lay at the centre, she now saw plainly, but the extent of the map was large, the world stretching away on every side. She found the Sunroad Sea, and from that guessed at north, seeing nothing of the Empire, no Capitas, none of the centres of Imperial Power. But that city is where Myna stands today, and that other one for Maynes. Her eyes were drawn westwards: Darakyon was a living Mantis Hold, and west of that lay Tharn, but no Helleron. There were other cities marked, whose names she could not guess at, of kinden that perhaps she had never heard of. The edge of the Commonweal was picked out in a glorious detail beyond her own people's modern knowledge of it. She followed the unfamiliar lines of what should have been a familiar land. There was a coastal city there that she knew must be marked 'Pathis', for the name 'Collegium' was only five hundred years old. This map was from an age that made close cousins of the Wasp Empire and her own home city — and infant cousins at that. A map that had been scuffed by the feet of Khanaphir clerks for …
'How long?' she asked.
'I cannot say, save to say that the Scriptora was not young, when the Masters ordained that a map of their world should be placed within.' Ethmet's voice was soft and sad. 'O Honoured Foreigner, you see it plain, do you not?'
'I do,' she said. This was not a map as she had once been used to, drawn from the precise cartography of grids and measurements that the Collegium mapmakers taught. There was no regular scale down there, and the lands around the Jamail river were shown disproportionately large, but it all fell into place before her eyes. It gave up its secrets with barely a struggle.
'I have never seen it,' Ethmet whispered.
She could not drag her eyes from the map. 'What do you mean?'
'I know it as a map, for our older records speak of it as such, but I am not so blessed as you. I have a touch of the blood of the Masters — in truth, enough to pursue my duties as my fathers have done before me — but you are truly blessed.'
She turned to him at last, tearing her gaze away from the inlaid patterns. 'But the Masters are gone, aren't they? That pyramid out there is their tomb, their monument. That's what I …' Had anyone actually told her that? 'That's what I always thought …'
'Oh, it is indeed their tomb,' he whispered, and suddenly he stood uncomfortably close. 'But they are not dead. They shall walk their city once more, and in time they shall call for you — and you shall go to meet them.'
Twenty-Five
'There's post waiting with your lunch, sir.'
Totho nodded absently, brushing past the man. He was in a poor mood. He had spent a restless night thinking towards some way of reclaiming Che, but reaching no conclusions. He only hoped that Amnon was having better luck with his chosen Collegiate woman.
Of course he is, the little voice inside Totho — the one he had been born with, that had started speaking to him as soon as he had been old enough to realize what he was — piped up again. Amnon was big, handsome, charismatic. He would not need to do much to get the woman to notice him. Life had been kind to Amnon. Totho doubted the big man had ever had to work too hard at getting anything.
I have had to work, though. It felt bitter. Even in Collegium, which prided itself on its industry, the dream was to become rich enough not to have to work. That dream was inherited from the past, when Beetles had worked and Moth-kinden had spent their time in idleness, living off the sweat of their slaves. The dream was further honed by the effortless lives of the Spider-kinden Aristoi, who had nothing better to do in life than intrigue against one another. Whereas I have had to work for everything. Delivered to an orphanage by unknown parents, tinkering with mechanisms from the age of five, competing against dozens of others for a College place that would have been his for the asking, if only he had been some rich magnate's son. Yes, he had worked: to get where he was now, he had not only got his hands dirty, he had steeped them in blood to the elbows.
I rearmed the world, equipped it in my own image. I destroyed an army. I halted the Empire, drove them out of Szar. But he did not like to think of Szar. He was not yet ready for that. If I had been some magnate's son, I would have needed to do nothing, to secure my future. To come this far I have had to wade hip-deep in bad choices and bad deeds. And still she turns away from me.
Lunch was set out for him, but he spared it barely a look. There were some sealed documents beside it, and a roll of cloth tape — and a Fly-kinden man. 'You're post, are you?' He raised an eyebrow.
'Tirado,' the man confirmed. 'Message from Factor Meyr, your eyes only.'
'Well, get out until I've finished eating,' Totho snapped, deciding that cocky Fly-kinden annoyed him. Some of them seemed to think that rules and authority didn't apply to them. The Fly looked put out, but he stepped down from the table and flitted out through the door. Totho sat down, pushing the food away despite his recent words. The papers were all manifests, he could look those over later. He broke each seal, to be sure, then laid them to one side.
The tape was another matter, a little spark of daylight showing through the clouds that were on his mind. He reached into his pouch and took out one of the Iron Glove's newest artifacts. It was hand-sized, and looked mostly like a very small drum with a winding handle, as though someone had decided that even a drum was too complex to learn to play, and had therefore invented an automatic one. Where the handle joined the drum there was a spidery little arrangement of teeth and tiny pins.
Totho took the reel of cloth, a woven strip barely an inch across. It was an ugly piece of work, the threads jumbled together without pattern, looking like some clothier's reject remnant. With the utmost care, he fed the end of it into the teeth of the machine until it caught. He then wound it through a few inches, listening carefully. The sound that echoed from the drum was almost too faint to hear. Patiently, Totho fiddled with it, turning the clamps to increase the space inside the drum itself. In this small exercise of his skill, he had forgotten about Che or Amnon, or all the rest of it. The intricacy of the device itself consumed him.
He wound the cloth back, and then began winding it forwards again, letting the delicate pins brush against the rugged fabric, and their vibrations carry down to the drum itself. Into the room, small and distant-sounding, came a voice.
It was a voice Totho knew well, after two years' association and more. It was the voice of the senior partner of the Iron Glove, and the man after whom the entire enterprise was named.
'Hello, Totho,' said the scratchy tones.
'Hello, Dariandrephos,' Totho replied, even though there was nobody there to hear him. A sense of wonder still came to him, although they had been using these similophone tapes for two months now. It was the secret of the Iron Glove. Only he and Drephos possessed the drum-like similophone ears, and so far Drephos had the one weaver, the machine that took the sound of his voice and wove it into cloth. He was working, however, on a model that was portable.