Kill Maker. It was that simple. Maker was a competitor and obstacle to Teornis’s ambitions, and therefore he should be removed. Sands could not understand what was staying the Spider’s hand. In Sands’s world, that curious world he had brewed for himself from academic philosophy and criminal brutality, there were the superior men, and there was the common swarm. The superior man recognized his own superiority, evidenced by his sophistication and his freedom of action – no chains of guilt or conscience, of ignorance or instinct, for him. The superior man was above the law, because the law was made to keep the swarm in place, not to check the aspirations of the few men able to master themselves. Stenwold Maker, in Sands’s view, was a man who had once had the potential to cross that barrier, but who had squandered his gifts on trying to improve the lot of his inferiors, which was like pouring water into the sands of the desert.
Kill Maker. Sands stood up. Teornis would not give the order? But Teornis had not forbidden it, even so. If Sands came to him with Stenwold’s blood on his hands, he could be sure that the Spider would smile at the sight. And perhaps it’s a test, after all, for the superior man knows when to go beyond mere orders. The superior man sees what is necessary. He went to the door of the Wayhouse, stepped out into the street, hands instinctively checking on the hilts of his knives. He examined his knuckles, let the poisoned needles of his Spider-born art slide in and out. After all, he knew Maker, but Maker would not recognize him. It would be easy, therefore, to find a good moment to send the old man to his final rest, and thus satisfy Teornis and Helmess, and the harsh requirements of philosophy.
When the Way Brothers had come here from Collegium to build their hostel, they had arrived with a Beetle-styled building in mind for themselves, which they would normally have built of stone. Stone was in short supply in Princep Salmae, however, so they had made do with wood, putting the whole thing up with beams and planking as best they could, but in the flat-roofed style of a Collegium inn. To keep the worst of the weather off the interior, they had constructed the Wayhouse with a space between the ceilings of the topmost rooms and the roof itself, an open-sided cavity only a foot in height where the moths roosted and the roaches crawled.
It was a tiny, shadowed flatland of a world, but it was just large enough for an enterprising Fly-kinden to take refuge there and hear a great deal of what was said below him. Laszlo now lay spreadeagled in this confined space, Teornis’s last words to Forman Sands still ringing in his ears, ready now to make his way to the front of the building for a quick escape and an airborne return to alert Stenwold Maker. He had heard enough, and he had even been able to peek between the boards of the ceiling below him, to catch fragmented glimpses of Teornis’ face, and that of the Beetle-looking man he had called Sands.
Laszlo hunched forward, and forward again, knees and elbows doing most of the work with a little sticking Art to give them purchase. He had almost suffered a heart attack when Teornis’s Dragonfly thug had burst out of the window below, surely after hearing an incautious movement of Laszlo’s. But the Dragonfly’s imagination was not a match for his senses, and he had soared straight up to the flat roof, to stalk about angrily immediately over Laszlo’s head, unable to locate his quarry.
Laszlo shuffled to the front edge of the building, peering carefully out of the long, narrow gap between wall and shingles that had given him entrance to this hiding space in the first place. The first thing he saw was Sands himself standing at the front doorway below. The man – some kind of halfbreed, Laszlo guessed, but mostly Beetle in his looks – paused briefly, hands going through a brief ritual as casual as if he was adjusting his clothing. A Fly’s sharp eyes, though, saw the hilts of the weapons whose presence Sands found so reassuring. The man then strode off into the streets of Princep Salmae, and Laszlo had an uneasy feeling about his intentions, despite all that Teornis had said. His course could be set for a variety of destinations in the city, it was true, but surely Stenwold was in that quarter too.
Laszlo bunched himself for a swift exit, knowing he would make better time through the air than the man walking the streets below him, and thus be able to warn Stenwold just in case. He reached for his Art, about to have his wings eject him from the dark space like a cork from a bottle, when the Dragonfly was abruptly before him, blotting Laszlo’s strip of light for a second before alighting on the roof again. Some movement, some shifting of balance on the Fly’s part, had been heard, and this time the man was obviously fighting mad, absolutely convinced that there was an eavesdropper, crossing back and forth about the roof, no doubt sword in hand ready to deal death to the intruder. Most often his pacing brought him to the very lip of the roof immediately above where Laszlo lay concealed.
The Fly all but held his breath, keeping deadly still. Of course, he could simply make a run for it the moment the Dragonfly’s back was turned, and under any other circumstances he would have trusted to his race’s famed agility and speed in the air to throw off pursuit in double time. With Dragonfly-kinden, though… if ever there was a race just as comfortable in the air as Laszlo’s own, it was they. When the Tidenfree had sailed through Spiderlands waters, they had met plenty of Dragonflies from various of the exile principalities that had budded off from the Commonweal centuries earlier. Those from Castilla were as paranoid as Ants, those from Magnaferra polite and elegant as Spiders themselves, and these clowns from Solorn, that Teornis had recruited, were savage and bloody-handed as Mantids, but they were all bad news to have as enemies, swift and sudden, skilled and agile, and utterly relentless. Probably I could outfly him, Laszlo told himself, but ‘probably’ might not be good enough. Those big swords the Dragonflies favoured could cut a poor Fly-kinden in half, given the chance.
The halfbreed was meanwhile out of sight across the city, and his path had looked very much as though it might intersect Stenwold Maker’s whereabouts at the airfield. Laszlo itched to go, but the cursed Dragonfly just continued hunting the barren square of roof above him, and would not give up on the scent.
Thirty-Nine
‘This is a gold Central, from the Helleron mints,’ Stenwold explained patiently. ‘That’s the price of a sword, traditionally. These in silver are Standards, ten to a Central. This,’ he held up a disc of clay divided into segments, ‘is a wheel of bits. You can break it into pieces, and there are,’ he squinted at it, ‘fifty bits to a Standard here. They fire these wheels locally. They’re no good outside the city they’re made in.’ He laid the coins down at the outdoor table he and Paladrya had commandeered earlier for their breakfast.
At first he thought that Wys was finding all this difficult to take in. Then he realized she was just having trouble believing it.
‘This… this is money?’ she asked him, holding up a Central. ‘But it’s gold!’
‘Probably no more than half gold,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘We don’t use paper for money, up here.’
‘I’m not surprised, since I’ve seen your paper. Spit on it and it turns to mush,’ she said derisively. She stuck out a thin arm, displaying a bracelet of finely interwoven golden threads. ‘This is money, then?’