Then Master Stenwold Maker had come along, taking up with a girl young enough to be his daughter and parading her around as though she were one of his war honours. Where there might easily have been a tide of disapproval and horror, instead there had been a strange kind of relief. Master Maker was a war hero, the people’s darling who could, just there and then, do no wrong. Keeping a young lover must be all right, therefore. This was, Helmess reflected, the one service the wretched old warmonger had ever done for his fellows.
‘Elytrya,’ he uttered her name, as she looked fondly down on him.
‘You keep them dancing,’ she observed, and took her time coming down the rest of the steps towards him. He could watch her for ever, he decided.
It was not that she was a Spider-kinden. It was that she was not a Spider-kinden, although she resembled them enough to pass as such. That she avoided other Spiders was not unusual, for Spider-kinden were their own worst enemies, so that many ending up in the Lowlands were fugitives from one political struggle or another. If her eyes were of a strange shade and larger than usual, her hair more elaborately curled, then they just assumed that Spiders, with their cosmetics, could do a great deal with their appearance. She was the best thing in Helmess’s life, and he loved her, because he loved power, and saw in her his chance to recapture it.
Honory Bellowern had been right: Helmess was much fallen from his former heights, and in no position to withstand a rumour campaign or slanderous accusation about his association with the Empire, especially if that accusation happened to be true. Being in possession of all the facts, the Empire might believe that it owned him. However, their facts were now out of date, for Helmess Broiler had been cultivating other friendships.
He had no idea how long she had been in Collegium before approaching him, how long she had spent adjusting to the differences, understanding what must have been a bewilderingly alien way of life. She had once let slip that her people, her faction, had kept agents in this city for generations, in readiness for what was due to happen so very soon.
When she had come to him first, with her flattery and her promises, she had played at being the Spider-kinden adventuress, whilst sounding him out. Physical attraction had lured him from the start, but she had gauged him well enough, and soon enough, to know it would not hold him. Instead she had appreciated that his working with her, with her unfathomable allies, represented a return to power for him, a power untainted by the Wasp Empire. She had made him an offer too attractive to turn down, and told him a secret truth that he was still trying to digest.
She leant in towards him, wrapping herself about his arm, resting her head on his shoulder. The invisible events of her plot, their plot, were beginning to unfold, in the far, dark places. She had only told him so much, but he could guess much more. The thought that he was the sole Collegiate man to be party to such an abominable act was as sexually exciting as the feeling of her warm body now pressed against him.
There was a knock at the door, but he had already briefed his servants and they let the man straight in. Helmess Broiler’s needs for this breed of agent were scant, but a successful merchant was occasionally forced to take decisive action. Forman Sands was always his first choice: not only was the man discreet and reliable, but there was no other paid killer in Collegium who managed to look like a respectable cartel clerk and could make educated after-dinner talk like a College scholar.
‘Master Broiler,’ Sands said, with a careful nod, first to his employer, and then to his employer’s mistress.
‘Your news?’
‘It’s done.’ Sands held out Failwright’s satchel, which Broiler accepted. It was bulging with scrawled scrolls, the last symptoms of Failwright’s fatal curiosity.
‘You’re a good man, Sands,’ Helmess remarked.
‘I like to think so, Master Broiler.’ Sands took the purse from Helmess’s servant almost as an afterthought, as though this wasn’t about the money at all.
When the killer had gone, Elytrya hugged Helmess close. Failwright and his annoying questions were done with.
‘Do you mean,’ he asked her softly, ‘to silence an inconvenient question, or to raise yet more? Members of the Assembly cause ripples, when they fall.’
‘Either will serve,’ she assured him. ‘We know that either will serve.’
Five
Is this any more honest than my time with the Rekef?
The copper magnate Brons Helfer and his wife were doing their best to be good hosts. Their spacious drawing room was painted blue, with frescos on two facing walls which Arianna had carefully complimented. They were in the ‘Seldis style’, which worked out as a bastard approximation of last generation’s Spiderlands artists, but hamfistedly rendered by Beetle copyists. Her compliments, not only insincere but downright false, had been gratefully received, for was she not the great Spider lady?
She was not, of course, and never had been. Her family had been hoi polloi of the coarsest character, but in the Spiderlands even the peasantry schemed and feuded. Her departure at a tender age had been prompted by the ruin of her parents, culminating in the death of her mother in a duel. At fifteen Arianna had nothing but her kinden to recommend her, as she scrounged and pilfered her way north up the Silk Road.
There the Rekef had found her, buying her from a fellow Spider, a slaver whose men had snapped her up one night. The Rekef had been explicit and detailed on what other interested parties might have acquired her, that night, what other fates could have befallen her – and might still, if she did not show how very grateful she was to them.
Thereafter she had been trained, and they had infiltrated her into Collegium with some fake recommendations, but always with a Wasp lieutenant holding her reins. She might be street scum, but she was Spider street scum, which endowed her with a kind of tarnished nobility in Collegium.
Darla Helfer was chattering to her energetically about something, the magnate’s wife in full flow as she tried to show their distinguished guest how sophisticated her hostess could be. The woman was plain, stout, wearing fine clothes without flair. Arianna could make homespun look like silk, whereas Darla accomplished the opposite and never knew it. Arianna had just enough self-knowledge, enough bitterness about her past, for her not to enjoy the contrast.
And yet these Beetles run the world and, as with their clothes, they never see themselves for what they are. On another wall there hung a small sketch, a copy of a Spider arabesque. It had been produced by some complex device that had rendered a perfect duplicate, line for line, in exacting strokes, the creation of some artificer nephew of the Helfers. The family connection was the only reason it was on display: no other attention was drawn to it. The Helfers plainly regarded it as a piece of mundane trickery, but to Arianna it was infinitely fascinating that these people’s machines could accomplish such a thing. It impressed her more than all the derivative clowning on display elsewhere in the room. If only they would learn to be themselves, what could they not accomplish? She wondered how much blame her own people should accept for that. The Spider-kinden’s very essence was to shine at the expense of others. It was easier to stand tall if you convinced everyone else to kneel.
She had made quite a comfortable home for herself amongst these people. She had backed the right man, becoming a war hero in her own right. People still remembered the moment she had turned up at the breach with her bow and arrows to fight for the city. Nobody seemed to remember that she had betrayed them all first, before turning on her fellow betrayers.