Empire in Black and Gold (41 page)

The space within would clearly provide more room than they had been allowed for some time. Grief in Chains stepped in first, for all the world like a Spider-kinden princess escorted to her carriage, and then Aagen secured her chain to a ring on the interior.

‘Good job you’re coming with us, really,’ said the artificer. ‘If it were just me and the stoker alone with her, who knows? She’s quite a piece of work, isn’t she?’

Thalric looked unmoved, or at least affected to be. At a signal from him, Che and Salma were bundled inside. The Wasp looked at them critically: the bound Dragonfly, the awkward-looking Beetle.

‘Chain them anyway,’ he told the soldiers. ‘Necks to the wall, like the woman. I’m not a man for gambling.’

‘Will you look at that,’ Stenwold breathed, peering through his telescope. He had known, he should have known, what he would see here, but it still shocked and frightened him. All these years he had been preaching it, and now here was proof, but how much he would rather have been wrong.

‘Is that Asta?’ asked Tisamon, hunching over his shoulder.

‘If they still call it that.’

‘What’s Asta?’ Tynisa asked. Beside her, Totho stirred in his sleep. He had been working on the automotive the whole night through.

Tisamon went instantly quiet, and Stenwold sighed inwardly. To his knowledge neither of them had even tried to reach out to the other. Such reticence, at least, Tynisa had inherited from her father.

‘When we passed through here last, this was a tiny village, little more than a caravan stopover point. It was fairly cosmopolitan, more Beetle-kinden than anything else, though the name’s from the Scorpion. There’s an oasis there, you see. Northernmost one of the Dryclaw. Now . . . well, just look at it.’

They were now at the very bounds of the Lowlands. Whilst to the south and the west the Lowland world was bounded by sea, and to the north by the great landslip of the Barrier Ridge, the eastern edge of its expansion had been checked by the desert. The great barren waste of the Dryclaw stretched for hundreds of miles, and there were only two ways round. South of the desert lay the narrow coastal Silk Road that led to the Spiderlands, and north . . . well, north was here.

Passage north of the Dryclaw was never easy, but it had been easier in the past. The land had left its people only two roads. One led south of the Tornos mountains and north of the Darakyon Forest, a rocky and unappealing path of steps and leaps. The other ran south of the forest, where the land turned from wood to scrub, from scrub to desert, and here was Asta, this little caravanning town, the oasis.

Except that Asta was no longer little, nor was it trade that drove so much traffic between it and the eastern world. The original mud-brick buildings of the village were now surrounded by a great host of sheds and long, low halls, all with the appearance of having been hastily constructed. Beyond them extended a veritable tent city and all of it was rendered in black and gold. The Wasps had come to Asta and it was no longer a village. It was a staging post.

‘This is an invasion in the making,’ muttered Stenwold.
If only the old men of the Assembly were here with me now! If they could see this then how could they doubt me?
He was suddenly afraid for his home city, for poor blind Collegium with all its flaws. Would realization come to the Assemblers only when the Wasps were at their walls?

He silently watched the automotives and pack trains coming in, the dash back and forth of the flying sentries, and the thunder of the orthopters, the drilling squads of soldiers. Even for the Imperial Army there was a huge concentration of troops down there.

‘How are we going to find them, in all of that?’ Tynisa asked.

‘Nightfall,’ said Tisamon. ‘
I’ll
go.’

‘You’re sure?’ Stenwold asked.

The Mantis nodded. ‘In the meantime we have another problem. Any closer and they’ll see us. Especially in this device.’

‘We’ll leave it here for now,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘We can use the cover of the trees to get closer.’

He sensed a sudden change in mood behind him. Craning back to look, he saw that Tisamon was shaking his head slowly. ‘You forget,’ the Mantis said, ‘this is the Darakyon.’

‘Oh, not this again—’

‘It is not a place that we should go,’ Tisamon said implacably. ‘Any of us.’

‘I told you,’ Achaeos had been silent all day, hunched in the rear of the automotive with his hood up. Now he pushed it back, eyes narrowing in the sunlight. ‘My people know more of this than any of you, and they do not venture into the Darakyon without good cause.’

‘That’s because your people are superstitious,’ Tynisa told him. ‘It’s just a forest.’

Tisamon did not look at her. ‘My people once claimed the Darakyon: a hold of we Mantis-kinden. No longer. Now no man may live there, and only fools travel its paths unprepared. You are all unprepared.’

‘What . . . what happened?’ she asked him, but he just shook his head, still turned away from her.

‘Don’t just—’ she started, but there was a sudden light touch on her arm. Achaeos’s expression had lost some of its aloof distance.

‘Crimes were done there,’ the Moth said, ‘by my people and his, together. After the revolution, when we feared to further lose our waning power. More than that is a secret held only by the Skryres, who know and see all. But this is known: those who did these terrible things, they have not left. They are still there and they do not receive visitors well. Why do you think the Mantis-kinden will not live here any more? Why do you think the Wasps or the Beetles have not already felled these trees for their furnaces? Time has been stilled within these trees for five hundred years.’

‘I . . .’ Tynisa wanted to mock him, but he so clearly
believed
what he said, and she could tell that Tisamon did as well. ‘This is ridiculous.’ She contented herself with that.

In the end, they made a compromise by clinging to the very forest edge. Even here the shadows lay heavily on them. Totho seemed oblivious to it all, but Stenwold cast a few anxious glances about him as it grew dark. Tynisa remembered his dealings with Dr Nicrephos in Collegium, and guessed that he was a Beetle of unusual experience.

They set the lowest of low fires, embers stoked merely to blunt the chill that seemed to hang about them. As the night approached, while the trees behind them seemed to draw the darkness to themselves like a mother summoning her children, Tisamon stood up.

‘Don’t take any risks you don’t have to,’ Stenwold warned him. ‘That’s not a town, it’s a military camp and they’re going to be watching.’

‘Don’t lecture me, O historian,’ said Tisamon, and Tynisa guessed he was eager for his skills to be put to use again.

‘I’m going with him,’ she told Stenwold.

A chill descended between the two older men.

‘I don’t think that’s wise—’ started Stenwold, but she folded her arms.

‘It’s my sister we’re going to find, near enough. She’s not even going to know who . . . who this man is, so I’m going.’

Stenwold grimaced, glancing at Tisamon, whose shadowed face was unreadable. Then, after a moment, the Mantis nodded curtly. No words, no encouragement, but at least that. A moment later he was gone, buckling his claw gauntlet to his arm. Tynisa took one more look at Stenwold, who was looking unhappier than ever, and then followed him into the gathering dark.

‘Well . . .’ he began, and had nothing to follow it with.

‘I’m sure that . . . Tynisa can look after herself,’ Totho said awkwardly.

‘I just feel there’s an explosion waiting between those two. I didn’t ever want to leave them alone.’

‘She’s right about . . . well, if the first thing Che saw was your man there . . . He’s not exactly . . .’

Stenwold conceded the point. ‘It’s an imperfect world.’ A moment later he frowned. ‘Where’s Achaeos?’

For the Moth had vanished.

Sitting with them in the shadow of those trees had taken courage he had not known he possessed. It had been the fat Beetle and the grease-fingered Totho that had been the spur. They had made their little camp, as happy as anything, and even Tynisa had joined in and had not cared. She was Spider-kinden and she should know better. It pained him to see how they had blinded her by bringing her up amongst the Beetles.

Oh, Tisamon knew, of course. This place must stir up more dread in Tisamon than even Achaeos could imagine. It was the cautionary story that Mantis fathers raised their children on – warning of the price of hubris, that ancient corruption. His hands twitched instinctively for his bones, but they were gone. He felt as though he had lost a sense.

Now the Mantis and the Spider girl had gone off, a ridiculous pairing, into the camp below to find Cheerwell Maker.
So let them find her, and let this be over with.
He took a deep breath to calm himself.
Prepare, magician
, he addressed himself. It was a title he had scant right to. He had never been a great champion of the lore of his own people. He knew enough of it, though, and it struck him now that if that same lore could do nothing to find Che, then the Beetles’ scepticism might as well be justified.

I am a seer of Tharn
, he told himself.
So let me see
. Away from the fire again, and yet not deeper into those appalling trees, he felt about for the strands of the world around him. He had touched Che. She even had his blood on her hands from the wound she had healed. There was a cord that ran between them – oh was there not! The cord that would not let him walk away.

His awareness cringed from the tangled mass that rose behind him, but the Darakyon seemed quiet at least. The ancient wrongs that had been poured into the place were sleeping.

There was a host of thousands of souls in Asta, but they were chaff. They were Wasps or the slaves of Wasps. Here and there was a spark of quality, some luckless scion of an elder race held in imperial servitude. If he had wished he could have found Tisamon and Tynisa easily enough, just by their heritage: Moths, Spiders and Mantids, the ancient rulers of the world.

Che had no such Inapt heritage, but he felt for the cord that must have tied his fate to hers, through her ministrations –
linked through more than that?
He stamped on such thoughts. He reached out towards the makeshift town of Asta, the grey deadness of its machines, the legion of sleeping soldiers and slavers and artificers.
Che!

His powers were weaker even than he had thought. To find an acquaintance was surely not beyond them, not when he was as close as this. Was it all those machines that were confusing his magic? Or was he really such a poor seer after all and a burden on his people? He hunted, but there was no trail, not the faintest mark to lead him to her.

His heart lurched.
What is the first mark of the fool?
his people asked, and the stock answer came back,
That he listens to fools.
So it was that fools clustered together to make their plots and their machines, and so it was that Achaeos had been drawn into fools’ company.
Stenwold says they have taken her to Asta, but she is not there. Tisamon will waste his stealth, while we all waste our time.
The answer brought a rush of relief to him, that at least his powers were not so atrophied – and then another of despair.
So she is further, further than I can reach her, and I shall not be free.

As he stood and made to return to the fire, he felt the Darakyon at his back flex and stretch and come awake.

Oh we should not be here!
and he hurried back towards the fire, and saw that he was not the only one.

‘Maker! Halfbreed!’ he called out. But he saw them already springing up from the fire and both reaching for their weapons. ‘Get away from the fire, you fools!’ Achaeos yelled sharply, and they blundered towards his voice, in the darkness that blinded them and was nothing to a Moth’s sight. It was so clear to him: the trees and the buckled land, the fire and his two clumsy allies. Clear, too, the Wasp soldiers who had been silently approaching, drawn to the dim glow of the embers.

Stenwold and Totho were already into the pitch dark between the trees before the Wasps reached their fire. One of the intruders unshuttered a lantern instantly and cast the beam across the forest, till the others shouted at him to put it out. There were a half-dozen of them, Achaeos saw. One was kneeling to study the surrounding ground in the firelight. He heard, ‘I told you I saw a fire out here,’ and, ‘Smugglers, you reckon?’

‘Further into the woods,’ Stenwold murmured, ‘but quietly.’

‘No, not further into the woods . . .’ Achaeos began, but Stenwold and Totho were already retreating deeper into the Darakyon. All around them Achaeos felt the forest stir, not the trees themselves, but the blood that had been spilt there, the pain and terror of those who had died. He felt his breathing ragged, his heart racing. The Wasps were following after, though, creeping forward as silently as they could, listening for the crack of twigs.

‘Lantern now, then, and rush them!’ one whispered.

‘Fall back!’ Stenwold hissed, and they were ploughing deeper, running and stumbling away from the sudden light of the Wasps.

The light passed across Achaeos, the sharp beam of the lantern. There was a shout, and a sting crackled out, flashing fire past him. He fled, almost sobbing with the sense of the Darakyon stirring all around, and the Wasps gave chase with a savage cry.

He could see Stenwold and Totho ahead of him, staggering like blind men through a landscape Achaeos could see perfectly. He tried to catch them up. It should have been simple.

Achaeos tripped. Those vines had not been there a moment before. He staggered on, the Wasps shouting behind him, letting loose their stings and crossbow bolts. The dense, thorny undergrowth seemed always in his way. He tried to push through it, but it raked at his hands, tore his sleeves. He turned aside, searching for another way round. Stenwold and Totho were further off now, and he realized that their path was curving back towards the forest’s edge whilst his own was only going deeper.