Empire in Black and Gold (50 page)

That caught Thalric’s attention. ‘Lead on,’ he said.

It was a short walk. Ulther took him to the cells, and for a moment Thalric thought the trouble would start right then, but this was a different prisoner, another woman, a local.

‘Her name,’ said Ulther, as if savouring it, ‘is Kymene. But they call her the Maid.’

Thalric was instantly struck by her, less by her appearance than her manner. She had been resting on a straw mattress when they arrived, but she stood up instantly, waiting in the cell’s exact centre with a fighter’s poise. Her skin was the familiar blue-grey of all Mynans, and her hair was dark, cut clumsily short. Ulther had dressed her in a simple sleeveless tunic and breeches, giving her an almost boyish look. Except for a row of bars her cell was open along one side. Despite being kept on display like a wild beast, she stared straight into Thalric’s eyes. There was a challenge and a contempt there, and he felt something respond within himself. Defiance was a dangerous flag for a captive young woman to fly so plainly. Her eyes were steel, though. He felt a shock almost physical as he met their gaze.
No surrender
, they seemed to say.

‘What’s so special then?’ he asked the governor, trying to keep his voice casual.

‘Special? My dear Thalric, she
is
the resistance. She’s their adored leader, and a merry chase she led us, too. She was top of the wanted list for all of a year and a season, running the poor Rekef ragged trying to trap her. We tried everything. We infiltrated her followers; she killed our spies. We tortured family members; they lied to us. I’ve never known the like. To capture her in the end I had to turn to freelancers, the wretched scum.’

Thalric frowned. ‘You did well to catch her. When do you start her interrogation?’

Ulther laughed jovially. ‘Not so hasty, old friend. We’ve had her here two tendays so far. We’re breaking her down, piece by piece.’

‘Two tendays, and you’ve not put her to the question?’ Thalric heard the disbelief in his own voice, but Ulther blithely ignored it.

‘I prefer to break them slowly,’ Ulther told him. ‘No sun, no air, no freedom – and no privacy. We’ll rebuild her mind, my friend, piece by piece. Every dawn she is less the rebel and more . . . pliable. Soon, what will she not promise for a glimpse of the outside world?’

He wants her for his wretched collection
, Thalric finally understood, and it was a sourly amusing thought. The old man had been wise enough, before now, to confine his tastes to imported vintages. To invite this woman into his bed would be a death sentence for him, like as not. The amusing thing was that she had not seen it either. She held on to her pride so hard that she could not grasp the escape being offered to her.

Still . . . on meeting Kymene’s eyes, he could see what Ulther so desired there. She was not beautiful in any sense that Thalric usually understood. She was not the scintillating Grief in Chains, or even of the proper imperial proportions of the slave Hreya. In that look, so fierce with lancing disdain, she seemed unattainable, and that was somehow more attractive than mere beauty.

But Ulther was still playing a dangerous game. ‘Should she not have been interrogated immediately, though, concerning her fellows in the resistance?’ Thalric asked.

‘Time enough for that,’ Ulther replied vaguely.

Thalric saw the woman shake her head slightly with a cold smile, and he wondered,
Would she talk, even so?
Mere pain and the threat of it might be something she was proof against. She was armoured in her belief.

‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your new sycophant?’ Kymene spoke, and her voice was mocking. ‘You do love to parade them past me.’

‘My dear, this is Captain Thalric of the Rekef Outlander, and he was with me here when I first captured your city,’ Ulther told her. ‘You owe him a debt of gratitude almost as much as you owe me.’

She studied them both, and obviously found nothing to choose between them. ‘Then it shall be paid. Do you want me to curtsey now?’ she said. ‘Or perhaps I should get on my knees, I’m so honoured.’

A soldier came in then, and stood waiting to one side until Ulther went over to him. Thalric watched carefully, thinking,
And here it starts
. He realized Kymene was watching too. She was kept underground and behind bars, but she was looking out for anything that would help her. He liked to think that in her position he would do the same.

‘What do you mean, gone?’ Ulther suddenly demanded, gripping the soldier by the shoulder strap of his armour. ‘Who took her? Where?’

The soldier’s reply was low, but his glance in Thalric’s direction told it all. Ulther let go of the man suddenly. ‘Get out!’ he snapped, and then turned to his old friend with an expression of forced good humour.

‘Thalric, that fellow had a strange tale to tell me.’

‘Really?’ Internally, Thalric was bracing himself.

‘He said that my Butterfly, my dancer, has been taken from her room, and now nobody knows where she is.’

‘I know,’ Thalric said. ‘I ordered it.’

‘You ordered it.’ The governor let a slow breath pass before coming closer. ‘Somewhat of a liberty, Captain. And why, if I may ask?’

‘You’re right, she’s a remarkable specimen,’ Thalric replied blandly, ‘and it so happens that my future projects west of here could use just such an operative. You know how the Rekef Outlander needs all sorts, all skills. Helleron is in a delicate enough state just now, and she could tip it. I have therefore requisitioned her.’

Ulther’s control was admirable, and he even managed a smile. ‘
Requisitioned
, is it? I am governor of Myna remember, Thalric. You know this. You are an old friend, but under whose authority, Captain, can you go about
requisitioning
my possessions?’

‘I am a captain of the Imperial Army, but also a major of the Rekef. My work in the west is Rekef business.’

‘I know you’re bloody Rekef. I directed you at them, in case you’ve forgotten.’

‘Then you should understand. Imperial needs come before personal ones, Governor.’

‘But I hadn’t even . . .’ Ulther’s meaty hands crushed the air impotently, and Thalric mentally provided
had her yet
to finish the sentence.

‘I’m sorry, Governor,’ he said, affecting to sound both businesslike and bored, ‘but she’s quite unique, as you’ve obviously noticed. If I’m to take Helleron it’s a matter of hearts and minds as well as bodies and swords. You can see how she’d be of use to me.’

And he smiled. Ulther was staring at him as though he had turned into a venomous thing – which in a sense he had.

‘I don’t know you,’ the other man said.

‘Well, it has been a long time.’ Thalric met his gaze levelly. ‘You don’t grudge the Empire this small thing, surely?’

And Ulther smiled, although it did not reach his eyes. ‘Not at all,
Major
, although you . . . might just have asked. When, may I ask, shall she be returned to me?’

‘Returned?’ Thalric answered. ‘Impossible to say, although I think it likely that, by the time I’m done with her, she will know more than it is healthy for a slave to know. We must all make sacrifices, Governor, for the Empire’s good.’

Ulther nodded ponderously. ‘Ah, well, that I can understand, Major.’ And he kept the smile as he left to ascend again to the sunlit levels, but Thalric did not want to think what his expression might become after that.

And before he himself followed, he looked again at Kymene, who was studying him carefully. For a second, in her eyes, there was a look almost of complicity.
She enjoyed that scene.

He made himself follow Ulther, but he was aware of her eyes following him all the way.

‘Her name is Kymene,’ Chyses explained. Stenwold, who had heard a lot of Mynan names over the last half-hour, sensed from the way this one was said that it was special.

‘She used to run your cell?’ he guessed.
Che and Salma are the priority
, he reminded himself, but he was an intelligencer by habit, and thoughts were forming about Mynan resistance. The Empire’s reach was as strong as the platform it reached out from.

‘She is the beacon for the whole resistance,’ Chyses told him. ‘They were trying to catch her for well over a year. She invented the Red Flag: the symbol that strikes fear into the hearts of the Wasps. She is the best of us.’

‘How did they catch her then?’

Chyses smiled sharply. ‘Not with their thick-headed soldiers. The Bloat hired hunters from all over the Empire and one of them got lucky.’

Stenwold had gathered that the ‘Bloat’ was their name for the present governor. ‘And she’s been held for two tendays, now?’

Chyses nodded. ‘And well guarded, deep in the guts of the palace. They think we can’t get to her.’

‘But you can?’
And you can get to Che and Salma
remained unsaid, and yet Stenwold felt the thought must be so apparent it must be branded on his face.

‘They built that palace up so fast, just to show us we were conquered.’ Chyses slapped the fist of one hand into the palm of the other, a habit he indulged in a lot. ‘But they didn’t think much on what lay underneath. See this?’ He was indicating the decayed masonry, the lowest layer of stones of their sprawling cellar. ‘There was some city here before we built Myna, before the revolution, and nobody even remembers whose, but they liked their tunnels. The sewers beneath us were their streets. They go right under the palace, under everywhere. That will be our way in.’

‘Sewers?’ Stenwold glanced at Tynisa and Totho, who were listening close by. ‘Lovely.’

His sarcasm passed Chyses by. ‘Our problem is that without Kymene we’re vulnerable, fragmented. If the Bloat were to launch an assault on us now, if he got to know about enough of our safe houses and fallbacks, then we would . . .’

‘You’d have a job to hold things together,’ Stenwold finished.

‘And at any attempt by us, right now, to make a rescue, the Bloat would clench his fist on the city like he did a few years back, when they had that uprising in Maynes.’

‘So you can get to her, but your people would suffer for it,’ Stenwold said. ‘For a revolutionary that’s a surprisingly responsible attitude.’

The look Chyses flashed him was savage. ‘On my own, Master Beetle, I would set the fires myself, if the smoke from it would drive this city’s people onto the streets,’ he said flatly. ‘However,
she
would not approve. I myself will not bow my head to either governor or emperor, but for Kymene . . .’

‘I understand. And I see where your logic goes.’ Stenwold felt a flash of dislike for Chyses but reminded himself,
We need this man.
‘Mynan resistance, red flags everywhere, and the administration comes down on you like thunder. But if a pack of foreigners is loose in the palace freeing prisoners, including your Kymene . . .’

‘We understand each other.’ Chyses took his hand off his sword hilt, and Stenwold only then realized that the young man had been holding it. He still looked as if he wanted to kill people. Here was a man whose reserves of humanity had been drained.
They need this leader of theirs soon.
Revolution would not happen overnight in Myna, Stenwold divined, but neither would invasion happen overnight across the Lowlands.
Give me an audience with this woman, this undisputed leader of the resistance . . . Have we stumbled onto the weapon I have been looking for?

‘And you would provide . . . ?’ he probed.

‘Maps of the sewers, guides to go along with you, a few extra swords without livery to betray them. Hermetic lamps, an autoclef . . .’

‘You’re a well-equipped lot, aren’t you?’

‘Hokiak keeps us well supplied.’ Chyses was humourless. ‘Kymene is more important to us than any of it.’

‘Well.’ Stenwold settled back. ‘I will have to canvass the others but I suspect we won’t get a better offer.’ He glanced up then, because Tisamon was approaching, and the Mantis looked sterner than usual. Tynisa stood up even as he arrived. The tension between the two of them was still there, the unresolved history, so much so that Stenwold could almost taste it.

‘I have been talking to Khenice and those who remember the conquest, talking to them about your plans back then,’ Tisamon announced.

‘And?’ Stenwold asked.

‘They do accept that – that none of us betrayed them.’ And only the briefest catch in Tisamon’s voice revealed how recently he had been forced to accept it himself. ‘We have been comparing memories. Totho?’

The artificer started. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘Tell them about Helleron. About the man you met there.’

Tynisa opened her mouth as if to speak, looked from Tisamon to Totho. The artificer glanced at her but Tisamon was waiting for his answer, and the Mantis plainly intimidated him more than Tynisa could. So, in his halting way, Totho gave the plain facts of what had happened to Bolwyn, and how it was that a dead man had met them in Benevolence Square. He could not keep the disbelief from his voice, but he spoke only the facts as he had witnessed them.

Chyses and the other Mynans appeared as sceptical as he himself was, looking to Tisamon for some explanation.