‘Not in my orders, sir. I’m here to provide you with air defence as you march. More Farsphex are on the way, but.’ Her inflection closed the sentence firmly on that word.
‘But?’ Tynan pressed.
She exchanged a glance with Major Oski: this was something they had obviously discussed previously. ‘Rumour, sir.’
Tynan’s heavy gaze swung from face to face: the Bee, the woman, the little man who probably held the highest rank a Fly had ever attained in the Imperial army — assembled here as though someone had wanted to rub his nose in the changing times. ‘Someone say something,’ he growled.
‘Rumour, sir,’ Oski echoed, ‘but there’s something that’s been brewed up at home to solve the air war problem. Search me for what, but the engineers are keeping some strange company these days. There’s something planned, General, but it sounds as though you’ll have to take it on faith, if they want you to march.’
Tynan was silent as the seconds ticked by, feeling his thoughts inexorably swing towards: What option do I have?
Four
‘Your uncle’s been going spare,’ Balkus revealed to Che. ‘About both of you,’ he added, his nod picking out Tynisa as well. ‘He thought you’d gone off the edge of the map.’
‘Commonweal,’ Che told him, ‘so almost right.’ She and her fellows had retreated to the Princep camp after the duel between the Mantids, because nobody seemed to know what was going on and the Ants were in a state of high tension that Balkus wanted to get well clear of. The Etheryen Mantis-kinden had done their best to deconstruct the duel for outsiders. The Nethyen woman, the visitor, had made some statement that had resulted in her counterpart challenging her — apparently a spontaneous matter of honour so critical that nothing short of instant bloodletting would do. As the challenger was dead and her opponent gone, nobody was supposedly any the wiser, but the Mantids had retreated into the trees shortly afterwards, leaving everyone with the feeling that they knew considerably more than they were saying.
The Collegiate ambassador was still trying to ask questions, of Ants and Mantids alike, which nobody was giving answers to. Helma Bartrer could be seen shuttling about the camp, increasingly frustrated with her own ignorance despite the fact that it was the common property of everyone there. Amnon was constantly looming behind her, and Che reflected that this was just as well, because the woman was plainly starting to get on people’s nerves.
‘And him,’ Balkus was eyeing Thalric, who stared coldly back. ‘Old Sten Maker heard how you were carrying on with him. He sent me a letter asking me to keep a watch out. He wasn’t exactly keen.’
‘Thalric is a reformed character,’ Che replied. Her words should have sounded foolish, naive even, but she invested them with a certainty that warned Balkus off.
‘All right. Good luck selling that to your uncle, though.’ His gaze flicked to Tynisa, tracing the line of her scar. ‘I can see you’ve been busy.’
She did not even look at him, her own attention focused entirely on the forest, as it had been since the duel took place.
In light of that silence, Balkus turned to the fourth member of their merry band. ‘And where do you fit in?’
The halfbreed, Maure, blinked at him. Che knew the girl must make a strange figure and opened her mouth to excuse her, but Maure was already dissembling.
‘A traveller from the Commonweal,’ she said. ‘I thought, “Why not see the Lowlands?” and with Che on her way home, when would I get a better chance?’ She offered a bright smile to go with the words, quite out of character. Nothing was said about being a necromancer, making a living from dredging up ghosts and pieces of ghosts, counselling mourners and laying guilts to rest. Maure was a practical woman, for a magician, and Che guessed that she did not intend to practise her trade much, here in the Lowlands. Most likely, she was looking forward to spending time in some Apt city where nobody even believed in such skills.
‘Che,’ Tynisa murmured from the corner of her mouth. ‘Trouble.’
A figure was storming towards them from the Ant camp, slender and almost rigid with suppressed emotion: the same Moth they had encountered earlier.
‘You!’ he called out, and there was no doubt who he meant. Che stood up, feeling surprisingly calm, because ever since Tynisa had been well enough to travel and they had made their plans to leave the Commonweal, she had anticipated this. The old Inapt powers of the Lowlands were jealous of their lore, and they had no love of Che’s kinden at all. Of course the Moths would be shocked, when faced with what Che had become.
Whatever it is that I have become.
He had stitched together a little of his reserve, but the inscrutable Moth facade was still far from repaired. His hands clenched and unclenched as he stalked closer, and Che faced him squarely, hiding any uncertainties, because to a man of his kinden any weakness was exploitable.
And I may not be able to hide that well enough. In the Commonweal everyone believed in magic, and many practised it in a small and personal way, but they seemed to have no great magicians amongst them any more. Whether the Moths still did, she could not say, but they had whatever was left of magic in the Lowlands securely in their hands. Her odd and unasked-for status within the magical world might carry no weight with them. Or it might make them jealous to the point of telling their Mantis lackeys to cut Che’s throat.
She was expecting a personal challenge, even an assault, but when the Moth spoke it was to jab a finger back towards the forest and demand, ‘Is this your doing?’
She held his blank gaze, replying, ‘The Mantis-kinden killing each other? No.’ And then she continued to face him down, feeling his magic scrabble at her, feeling his Art trying to dominate her. He was no Skryre, though, no grand master of sorcery. She shrugged him off when he came with strength, and matched him move for move when he tried to creep past her guard. At last he took a step back, baffled and looking almost vulnerable.
‘I am not your enemy,’ Che assured him. ‘I am a daughter of Collegium who has been given an unexpected gift, that is all.’
‘That is not all,’ he hissed, but more to himself than to her. ‘You arrive here from — from where? — just in time for all my work to go suddenly awry.’
‘I have been in the Commonweal, and if my time there taught me anything it is that, amongst the Inapt, matters such as chance and coincidence are seldom entirely trustworthy,’ Che declared. She was aware of the subtext within her words: this was not how the Apt spoke, certainly not how any Beetle-kinden he had met would speak. She was presenting her credentials and showing him she was part of his world.
His feet did not move, but she sensed a second mental step backwards, another concession granted her. She was sizing him up now, trying to place him and then — almost vertiginously — she thought she might even have met him before. She had once been in Sarn on her uncle’s orders, contacting the Moth-kinden secret service known as the Arcanum, and there had been one brief meeting. . She could not say, so long after, whether this man had been present, but she thought he might have been — and not as their leader. A magician, perhaps, but an intelligencer first, and from his presence at this meeting of powers it took no great leap of the imagination to see what his work here had been. He had been supporting the alliance of the Treaty of Gold, and now something had gone wrong amongst the Mantis-kinden.
‘You are Cheerwell Maker, so they say,’ he observed, and even this was him trying for power over her, the power of names that his people put such stock in.