She herself could not quite recall standing there with Stenwold when the Vekken came through the breach. It seemed something that a character in a play might have done, or perhaps in some garish Beetle romance. Had her life seemed so cheap to her, just then? Perhaps it had, for she would have been left with precious few options had Collegium fallen.
It was near evening when she finally got away from the Helfers, with promises to pass on their regards to Stenwold. To the ‘War Master’ as they still said, but she would do them the service of editing their words. It was a title Stenwold had always loathed.
Cardless was off on some errand, when she reached home. Technically her real ‘home’ was across town, a fictional separation she had devised for the peace of mind of Stenwold’s ailing niece. A selfless decision? No – for the niece’s peace of mind was Stenwold’s, and Stenwold’s was her own. Her position, comfort and opportunities in Collegium were irrevocably tied to him. Recently, the niece had been considerate enough to absent herself, so Arianna drifted between her own residence and Stenwold’s as the mood took her.
She wondered what mood she would find him in, being a man of more emotional layers than Beetles were generally accorded, by Spider reckoning. The College demagogue gave way to the clever spymaster, with the inspirational war leader waiting ever in the wings. She had met him, she reflected, at the best of times: he had been all these things.
Now the war had stalled, waiting on like a trained dragonfly up high, and the sharper facets of his life had been carefully packed away, oiled and padded against rust. The sober spymaster lurked behind the throne, while the frustrated statesman took his seat, ground down daily by all the minutiae of a world that was no longer under the immediate shadow of the black and gold. Stenwold the warmonger, they had once called him, and now she could almost feel him daring the Empire to bring back its armies, if only to rekindle that old fire.
She pushed open the door of his study, and stopped short.
He was hunched over the desk, and did not even look up at her. With a lens to one eye, he was poring over a single scroll with immense concentration. She felt a quickening in her heartbeat, out of nowhere, that took her back two years.
This was not the bored Stenwold reading Assembly minutes, nor the frustrated Stenwold sifting through correspondence from the ingratiating and the insincere. War Master Stenwold Maker, the intelligencer and hero of Collegium, had again taken up his old lodgings in the forefront of Stenwold’s mind. When he finally looked up, as she stepped into the room, she recognized it in his eyes, that unsheathed edge of a brain working to its fullest.
‘What do you make of this?’ He thrust the scroll towards her without preamble. The gesture made her smile. His squabblings with the Assembly, his reluctant arrangements with men like Jodry Drillen, he did not involve her in. It was not that she could not have helped somehow, but that he was ashamed of such dealings, ashamed of having to bend his own rules to get what he wanted. Now he was the spymaster again, and she was a spy, and he was including her.
She took the scroll, cast her eyes down the lines of crabbed handwriting, led by his annotations. ‘I was never a paper spy,’ she warned him. ‘They saved me for field duties, you know.’
The They was the Rekef, but neither of them needed to mention that name, and they had buried it between them before the war’s end.
‘Even so,’ he prompted, and she nodded.
‘This is Failwright’s grievance, is it?’
‘His notes, his summary. Ships out of Collegium heading east. Their captains, their cargoes, their fates, and…’
‘Their investors,’ she noted. ‘Who stood to lose money on the deal.’ It would not have been instantly visible, amidst Failwright’s baffling columns, save that Stenwold had marked it all out, name by name.
‘Are you sure you’re not just seeing a pattern where none exists? Or that Failwright wasn’t?’
‘No, I’m not sure at all,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘After all, the sea trade is an uncertain business. There are pirates, there are storms. Ships are lost, sometimes. Such information gets blurred by pure happenstance.’ He rubbed at the stubble on his chin. ‘But Failwright and his faction were taking it very seriously. Look, a few months ago they sent some ships out with mercenaries on board. Here, look… and here. Not touched, not touched, and… and then one lost utterly.’ Stenwold shook his head. ‘And, at the same time, three ships travelling without guard are boarded by pirates.’
‘What’s this column here?’ Arianna’s finger marked out one line of scribbled notes.
‘I think it’s weather reports. Here, where the armed ship was lost, I think he’s marked “no storm” but I’m not honestly sure. I need to speak to him…’ There was the sound of someone at the door, the neatness of its closing bringing the name ‘Cardless?’ to Stenwold’s lips. A moment later the servant found them.
‘What says Master Failwright?’ Stenwold asked him. ‘Delighted to receive the attention, no doubt?’
‘Unfortunately Master Failwright was not at home,’ Card-less reported.
‘You left my message?’
‘I did. However, it appears that Master Failwright is considerably overdue. He did not return to his house or his offices last night, and none of his associates knows of his whereabouts.’
Stenwold opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. His eyes sought out Arianna. Between them was that unspoken history: espionage, agents, sudden disappearances.
‘Make further inquiries,’ Stenwold directed, as if Cardless was one of his people left over from the war. ‘Arianna-’
There was a quick rap at the door and Cardless bowed his way out to go and answer it. Stenwold left the sentence unfinished as he waited. When a Fly-kinden messenger stepped into the room, looking flushed and out of breath, he was not surprised.
Stenwold took the proffered scroll and unrolled it. His face remained blank as he read.
‘Tell him I will be present,’ was his only response, and the Fly was off on the instant.
Arianna gave him a questioning look.
‘The Empire has taken Khanaphes,’ Stenwold revealed. ‘Jodry’s called the Assembly together. I have to go.’
Major Aagen had, to Stenwold’s understanding, two expressions only. He was late of the Imperial Engineering Corps, and possessed a zealous fervour for all things technical. He had learned more of Collegiate artifice by way of kindred enthusiasm than had all of the Rekef spying during the war. His other expression was one of stolid acceptance, and Stenwold guessed it would remain the same whether he was faced by a pitched battle or a room full of surly Assemblers.
He was standing even now, holding a scroll in his hands. He had never so far made a response to the Assembly that was not prepared by his shadow, Honory Bellowern, and it seemed mad to Stenwold that Imperial diplomacy should result in a guileless Wasp artificer mouthing statements prepared by a plotting Beetle-kinden handler.
Aagen nodded to Jodry Drillen, whose voice was still echoing a little within the Amphiophos chamber. ‘I can confirm,’ he read out, ‘that an Imperial force is currently receiving the hospitality of the Khanaphir administration.’ There was a surprising amount of angry muttering, but then the people of Khanaphes were Beetles themselves, recently popularized as Collegium’s backward cousins. Jodry had been capitalizing on his exploratory success, so the average Beetle-kinden in the Collegium street had become newly aware of his distant relatives, in a patronizingly protective way.
‘I should stress…’ Aagen continued. He had been a war-artificer, used to repairing automotives in the heat of battle, so a little shouting would not put him off his stride. ‘I should stress that the Empire is present there at the invitation of the Ministers of Khanaphes. You will be aware how the city has suffered recently from incursions by the desert Scorpion tribes, and is therefore in a considerably weakened state-’