She had not known much about the Eighth Army itself, but there was no reason why she should. He already knew she had been stationed in Solarno, a different operation altogether. In fact she turned out to know relatively little even about the Second Army that had set off from there — and only from her time spent hiding amongst them.
But she had been questioned for hour after long hour about Imperial Intelligence: everything she knew about their methods, their agents, their means of communication. She had not understood at first, because — like so many — she had not realized the scope of Milus’s ambitions, which were the ambitions of Sarn itself.
Milus was planning for the battle against the Eighth, certainly, but more than that he was planning for a war against the Empire, and he intended to take that all way to the gates of Capitas itself.
If Thalric had been plunged into this place during the last war, as the man he had then been — the hard-minded Rekef killer — he would surely have broken before now. It was the greatest expression of his not being the same man, that he could be surrounded by so much smoke and shadow, so little that made sense, and retain his mind intact. Not easy, no, but his world had been sliding away from the rational and the sane for long enough that he could keep his balance on the slope. Seda and her unwholesome appetites; the catacombs beneath Khanaphes; the Commonweal; Che.
That had been his first glimpse of Argastos but he had not doubted for a moment who the man was. The warlike Moth-kinden had appeared there without warning; just as suddenly he was gone, and where the gloom-hung wall had stood behind him, now there was a ragged, shroud-hung corridor that they were plainly intended to walk along. Thalric’s disbelief was in suspension, awaiting some more stable time when he might make use of it to begin covering over these memories and restoring his world view, but for now he was deep in the nightmare and clinging on.
And Seda. There had been a shock he was not prepared for. The woman he had fought so hard to get clear of, and who he had irrevocably made his enemy when he threw his lot in with Che, and yet he had not been able to kill her when given the chance, and now here she was again.
When she had found him, in this dark, shifting place. When she had found him, not Che, he had been ready for the explosion, the lash of vengeance. In the time since he had left her, surely the rapacious Empress would have driven out any sign of the girl he once knew, that fading spark in Seda’s eyes that had spoken of when she had been vulnerable, merely a pawn of her brother.
But she was still there, that girl. Her expression, when she found him, had been fond. There had been no recriminations, and for a moment he had been about to go to her as though he had never left, as though she had never become the creature she now was. The traitor thought had been there in his mind: How simple life would have been if only. .
For all that he had bitten it back, fought it down, it was there still. He had lived a long time as a servant of the Empire, and here was the Empire itself in human form.
He was therefore very glad when Che had turned up soon afterwards. Seeing the Beetle girl, almost absurd in her lack of the majesty and threat that practically radiated from Seda, grounded him back in reality, reminded him where his loyalties — and his affection — now lay.
‘Who’s that?’ Seda demanded sharply, and Thalric snapped back to the here and now. They had been making a cautious progress through the tunnel that Argastos had revealed, but now there was someone ahead of them, plainly visible despite the darkness, as though a lamp were shining only on her.
‘Is that. .?’ Tynisa murmured.
‘Mistress Bartrer?’ Che exclaimed.
Thalric looked again. Was it? He realized he had not paid much attention to the academic, but this apparition did seem to bear her face. She had shed her Collegiate robes, though, and was wearing something simpler but of an antique cut, a long sleeveless brown tunic, ornamented with delicate black stitching at every edge. There was also some lavish piece of gold at her throat, perhaps a torc.
Not a torc: a collar.
‘I’ve seen depictions of clothes like that in old books,’ Che said softly. ‘Slaves’ garments, from long before the Revolution. Maure, what are we looking at?’
‘Some trick,’ Thalric tried, but not sure whether he believed it.
‘No image, no ghost, just the living woman,’ Maure confirmed.
‘But how can she be here? How can you. .?’ Che walked forward to stand before the other woman. ‘Helma, can you hear me?’
The eyes swivelled to follow her, and abruptly Helma Bartrer’s face assumed an unexpected expression: pure spite. ‘Oh, I hear you, Maker,’ she acknowledged. ‘The master has sent me to bring you to his table.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ Che insisted. ‘Why are you here? How did you even get here?’
‘By hard work, by guessing, by faith in my master,’ Bartrer hissed. ‘By knowing my place and staying true to our betters.’
‘The Moth-kinden?’
‘Do you deny it now that you are here?’ Barter challenged her.
‘She’s Arcanum,’ Thalric guessed, speaking of the Moth intelligence service. ‘She has been all this time.’
‘More than that.’ Seda spoke from right beside him. ‘Your people were slaves once, Maker. Small wonder, then, if there’s some remnant cult who want those days back. Never underestimate how much some people want to be led.’
Helma Bartrer stared at the Empress. ‘Your kinden were slaves, too, Wasp girl, and they still are. It’s just that their taste in masters has deteriorated.’
‘Wait, you came all this way. . how could you even know this was going to happen?’ Che demanded of her.
‘Oh, I hoped.’ Again that ugly look. ‘Everything to do with the Moths, I tried to associate myself with. We have been faithful, generation on generation, waiting for this day when we could present ourselves to our masters. Perhaps all but I had given up any hope. But you!’ And the sudden venom was startling. ‘You had it all given to you, by mere chance! You’ve become something special, something that he’s interested in. . and how is that just, that you could blunder into such a thing when I’ve been loyal in my heart all my life?’ She would have gone on but something stayed her, a reprimand audible to her only snapping her head back. ‘Come with me,’ she muttered, and hurried off into the darkness, with that reflected light never quite leaving her, making the woman a beacon for them to navigate by.
It lit up nothing else, though, so they had arrived before they realized it. When the green-white lanterns sprang up around them, they all froze. Thalric felt meanly glad to see the same startled, fearful look on Che’s and Maure’s faces as he knew must have appeared on his own.
‘Please be seated,’ Helma Bartrer declared flatly.
There was a table there, its top a single slab of black-varnished wood, its edges uneven and ragged with the contours of the tree it had been hacked from. The chairs were little better, just slats and wands of wood twisted and grown together as though their maker, in striving to ape the natural, had finished up with something utterly unearthly. The walls pressed in on all sides, allowing barely room to drag the chairs back. Thalric could see them only dimly and, when he brushed one with his elbow, he felt angled metal there, and he shivered without quite knowing why.
It did not help that those corpse-light lanterns lacked sconces: just fitful, pallid flames guttering in the air.
At the head of the table, he saw one seat they were plainly not being invited to sit in. It was more a throne, intricately carved with intertwining briars, beetles and grubs, centipedes and woodlice and all things associated with decay, while its arms resembled the crooked claws of a mantis. As if that was not grand enough for their host, suspended behind it was the complete, hollow exoskeleton of just such a beast, battle-scarred and one-eyed, and long enough dead for the light to lend it a translucent glow.