Arianna had reopened the door, and Failwright stumbled backwards through it, still stuttering sounds that were no longer words. The door slammed after him, leaving a moment of blessed silence.
Stenwold turned to his guests, then, and remembered where he was and what he had been doing. ‘I…’ he said uncertainly, still seething with anger that had nowhere else to go.
‘I think we should make our exit,’ Praeda decided. ‘Master Maker, please call upon us if you wish to know more, but it seems there is much your niece told none of us.’
I should tell them to stay. I am a poor host. They were right, though. Che’s news had broken the back of the evening and it would not recover.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘this has not gone as I’d hoped.’ Even as he said it he was thinking, Has it not, though? Aside from Failwright’s intrusion, did I not honestly expect this after Che failed to come back?
‘We understand,’ Berjek reassured him, and they left, quickly making their farewells. Amnon was the last to go, his gaze suggesting he had weighed up Stenwold Maker, and found something there of worth. Stenwold had understood that Khanaphes had little in common with Collegium, which suggested that the man must have been doing a great deal of catching up.
Arianna went over to Stenwold, her slender arms wrapping about one of his. ‘For the morning, all of it,’ she told him. ‘Enough of them, enough of all of them. Put down your duties, warrior, and come to bed.’
That reminded him of the actual war, when his duties could not be put down, when he had burned the oil night and day to save his city. And, even then, did I save it? The Imperial Second left us because Tisamon finally honed his gift for killing into regicide. What part did I play?
But the war was currently in abeyance, and long might it remain so. The duties could wait.
On his way to the stairs, he saw that Failwright had been evicted so fast that one of his scrolls lay part-unravelled on the floor near the door. Of all the competing claims on his attention, that was surely the least.
Four
When he came, he came dressed in plain colours, not in livery nor hooded like a conspirator: a middle-aged Beetle in a leather cap, such as artificers wore to keep their hair safe from sparks, or a soldier underneath his metal helm. His clothes were those of any well-to-do tradesman whose job occasionally required him to get dirty, and his frame was portly, prosperous-looking. The bodyguard was Wasp-kinden but not in uniform, all the trappings of a renegade for hire. There was barely a hint of black or yellow about either of them.
The door these two appeared at was not Helmess Broiler’s townhouse, rather a mid-town property he also owned. The line thus trodden was just sharp enough to make him sweat. Damn the fellow.
Helmess Broiler was a big man in the Assembly still, for all that Jodry Drillen had clawed himself a clear-cut lead in recent days. Popularity was like cupping water in your hands, forever seeping away. It will change. But, for now, Helmess had to accept that he had been wrongfooted. It was not a good time for this meeting, but no time would have been ideal, not after the war.
The servant who opened the door was a man who had been with the Broiler family two generations, with sharp eyes and a tight mouth. Inside, a modest table was already set. This was merely two Beetle-kinden talking business in civilized surroundings, had anyone asked.
‘Master Broiler,’ said the visitor, pushing the cap off his balding head and smiling with every appearance of cordiality, And he is enjoying himself, Broiler thought bitterly. We both took a fall, after the war, so how come he’s smiling and I’m not?
‘Master Bellowern,’ Broiler acknowledged. The bodyguard took up his place at a comfortable distance. He was not so evidently a soldier out of uniform as Broiler had feared, but that made it even worse. Paranoia duly raised the spectre of the Wasps’ hidden blade: the Rekef. Was this man a Rekef agent? Was Honory Bellowern himself a Rekef agent?
Of all the people in this city, I am one of only two who truly know to fear the Rekef, Helmess Broiler thought dourly, and the other is Stenwold Maker, who would not appreciate the joke.
And, on the heels of that: Maker, who put me in this intolerable position by having the bloody gall to be right.
Honory Bellowern had been a resident of Collegium for a few years now, neatly pre-dating the war itself. He was a model Beetle-kinden, well-mannered, genial, sophisticated and wealthy. One could forget so easily that he was no native, that he was in fact a servant of the Empire. He was not the Imperial ambassador, which role had gone, after the war, to a Wasp called Aagen. Aagen spent most of his non-ambassadorial time touring the factories and the College artificing workshops, and when he stood up to speak to the Assembly, Bellowern was always at his shoulder. Bellowern drew the charts that Ambassador Aagen steered by, and at the same time he was the acceptable face of Imperial policy, a friendly, corpulent statement that We are like you. People like Broiler already knew that the Empire was full of such people. Through their factors in Helleron there had been a fine old profit to be made, and that profit was magnified for those prepared to put themselves out a little for their trading partners.
And so it had been natural for Bellowern to have made some business contacts with certain Collegiate magnates. Bellowern had his hand in the coffers of the Consortium, which managed and massaged Imperial trade. Before the war, a lot of that trade had been flowing through Helleron and thence to Collegium, and Broiler had been one of the beneficiaries. Bellowern had not asked so very much, to secure preferential treatment. It was, after all, standard procedure within the Collegium Assembly, denied and decried and assiduously practised. If a citizen of Collegium wanted something done, then he courted those Assemblers most sympathetic. There were gifts and favours, it was how life had always worked. The Empire had become a very comfortable neighbour, and it had been no great sacrifice for Helmess to mouth their words at the Amphiophos. After all, Broiler had been speaking against Stenwold Maker’s lunacies, and Broiler had been trading affluently with the Empire, and so a closer working relationship seemed harmless enough.
And then it had all gone wrong, horribly wrong. Stenwold Maker had talked the Assembly into declaring against the Empire, and the Imperial Second Army had come ravening along the coast until it stood at the gates of Collegium itself, since Maker had talked the Assembly into committing Collegium to war.
Even then it had still looked hopeful, and more hopeful for Broiler and his peers than for any others. The Empire was a formidable military force, the Sarnesh had already been beaten once, and Collegium was still battered after the Vekken siege. An Imperial Collegium, with positions of responsibility handed to those the Empire could trust, would have worked out very nicely. And Stenwold Maker’s head on a pike.
But the Sarnesh and their Collegiate ancillaries had beaten the Empire at Malkan’s Stand, and then the Emperor had displayed the ferociously ill-timed gall to die, dragging Imperial stability with him. General Tynan’s Second Army had rushed from the gates of Collegium to secure the man’s political future, and Collegium somehow declared it a victory for the Lowlands. The Treaty of Gold was signed, and subsequently there was a peace in which the Empire was remembered as the aggressor and its friends as potential collaborators. Men like Broiler were soon busy erasing whole chapters of their own recent past.
All this could be read quite clearly in the avuncular eyes of Honory Bellowern, now sitting down to eat.
He left it until Broiler’s servants had brought out a dessert of honeyed custard, before approaching business. Honory Bellowern possessed a true Beetle appetite, ploughing with gusto through everything that was set before him. But finally he raised a hand, and Broiler’s heart sank.