Salute the Dark (13 page)

He raised an eyebrow at that, and she scowled at him. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘I do.’ He returned to his desk, where he had been sifting through papers, dozens of them, some rolled up and bound, some held open with polished stones. ‘Should I be flattered
by that?’

‘I can go, if you prefer,’ she said, and he was on his feet again, a strange expression on his face.

Is he lonely?
But it was not that. Instead it as the expression of a man with news, who needed to tell someone. Anyone.
We are well met, it appears.

‘What is it?’ she asked, sweeping some papers off a bench and taking a seat. It seemed strange to be taking the initiative with him, strange to find him appearing so shaken, here
amongst his own people.

‘What made you come here, now?’ he asked, but it was a rhetorical question. ‘Cheerwell Maker, how is it that you have not yet got yourself killed? You have absolutely no sense
of place or time. You just go blundering in wherever you please like . . . like a Beetle. I caught you that way in Helleron, and General Malkan caught you after the Battle of the Rails. You only
narrowly escaped Solarno, from what I hear, so why are you still amongst the living?’

She could not decide whether he was truly angry, and it seemed neither could he. His words made her think, though, and made her feel sad.

‘I’m not short of injured friends,’ she admitted. ‘Perhaps I’m just bad luck for others.’

‘A carrier of it, then, that never feels the ill effects,’ he said. ‘Cheerwell?’

‘Call me Che.’

He blinked at her.

‘If you’re going to call me anything more familiar than “Mistress Maker”, call me Che. Because you cannot imagine the burden of going through life with a name like
Cheerwell.’

For a long moment he just stared at her, then, uncontrollably, the corner of his mouth quirked upwards. ‘I suppose I can’t,’ he conceded.

‘Thalric . . .’ she started, then stopped and considered. ‘Thalric. I see you’ve found a niche here. If Achaeos gets healed, and he and I leave Tharn . . . there’s
nothing to stop you staying behind.’

The smile was gone, the tentative anger along with it. ‘Nothing except my own people.’ At last he sat down again, one hand idly knocking a few scrolls from the desk. ‘I have a
death sentence, Cheer . . . Che. Che, then. Eventually, quite soon even, I’m bound to meet someone who knows me. Someone from the Rekef, someone from the army, just . . . someone. I have
tried, I won’t deny it, to find my way back to them.’ His new smile was composed only of bitterness. ‘I tried that in Jerez. I tried to sell the Mantis and the others. I tried to
be loyal to the Empire. But the Empire didn’t want my loyalty. The man I approached recognized me and tried to kill me. That could have happened here. It still might with every new arrival,
or perhaps somewhere in the garrison here is a hidden Rekef Inlander agent who, any day now, will look on “Major Manus” and think the name
Thalric
. Do you know what I really am,
Che?’

She shook her head wordlessly.

‘I am a spymaster, a major in the Rekef Outlander. An imperial intelligencer, that is what I’ve spent my life being. Only now they won’t let me. And I was good, very good, at
my job. I’ve been sorting through all these reports, and thinking: “I must tell them this,” or “the next step should be that,” and realizing that I can’t. I
cannot tell them anything and, even if I could, they would not thank me. Instead they would have me on crossed pikes. I cannot use my skills on behalf of my Empire any more, so I’ve been
sitting here torturing myself with my pretending.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She expected him to sneer at that, but he nodded soberly. ‘You probably are, at that. However did you get yourself mixed up in all of this?’

‘I am Stenwold’s niece.’

He looked back at the desk, the papers, and she knew better than to interrupt him. Some train of thought was now running its course in his mind, some weighty decision that had been weighed up
delicately before she came in.

‘Szar is in revolt,’ he said at last.

‘I don’t—’

‘The city of Szar is in open revolt against the Empire,’ he told her. ‘Thousands of soldiers are therefore being diverted to put down the Bee-kinden with extreme force. Many of
them are soldiers that would otherwise be heading west even now.’

She nodded slowly. Her mind’s map was hazy on precisely where Szar was, but she appreciated the point he made.

Thalric took a deep breath. ‘The city of Myna, of fond memory, is on the point of insurrection as well.’

‘Myna? That’s Kymene—’

‘Yes, it is. Myna teeters. The garrison has been weakened, with troops heading north-west for Szar. Still, the Empire has an iron hold on the city. So, do the Mynans risk everything with
another upheaval?’

‘What are you saying?’ she asked, because it was obvious that something else lay hidden behind his words.

‘I am saying,’ he said slowly, the words forcing themselves out of him, ‘that if some agents of the Lowlands were to find their way to Myna, and there tell the Mynans that they
are not alone, that the Lowlands struggled too, and Szar, and Solarno, that the imperial forces were stretching themselves thinner every day, then they would surely rise up where otherwise they
might not dare.’

She stood up slowly. ‘You’re suggesting that . . . what? I? We?
We?
Achaeos can’t possibly travel.’

‘Achaeos is at least safe here amongst his own people,’ Thalric said. ‘But yes,
we
could fly to Myna in that ridiculous barrel of yours and stir up the pot. Because, if
there’s nothing else on this world I can still do, I can play conspiracy with the best of them, and whilst the Mynans won’t ever trust me, they might trust you.’

‘I don’t want to leave Achaeos . . .’ But already the idea was growing on her. ‘I’ll have to speak with him,’ she ended lamely.

‘Of course,’ said Thalric. ‘But soon, as we must be swift. If the Mynans delay until after Szar is put down, it will all be for nothing.’

‘I will speak to him. Yes, I’ll speak to him
now
,’ she said, already reaching the doorway of the room. She looked back at him once, and he wondered what she saw there:
someone almost an ally, or just a burnt-out Wasp spymaster?

But I still possess the craft. Indeed I cannot keep it from working.
He was betraying the Empire every moment, with every breath, and yet he could look in the mirror and betray Stenwold
Maker just as easily.
I have now found my vocation. I have more faces than shape-changer Scyla ever had.

There had been a day and a night of sheer panic, as the fragile form of the
Buoyant Maiden
was hurled back and forth by storm winds the like of which Stenwold had never
known. He had now been given a full chance to get acquainted, though. As the only Apt passenger, it had fallen to him to remain on deck with Jons Allanbridge, tying off lines, strengthening stays,
doing what little could be done to stop the little airship simply flying apart, or the gondola parting company with the balloon and the machine ceasing to be anything but a collection of airborne
detritus.

‘Wouldn’t we be safer going down?’ he had shouted at Allanbridge.

The other Beetle, still winching doggedly, had yelled back, ‘What do you think I’m trying to do? I’ve let the gas go as far as I dare, but the wind’s still keeping us
up!’

Stenwold had wondered whether, if the storm succeeded in tearing them from the canopy, the gondola would have just gone sailing on, unsupported, as if tossing on an invisible sea.

Later on, Jons had been actively trying for all the height he could inject into his
Maiden
, generating new gas as swiftly as he could, because there had been a dark wall blotting out the
horizon, and it had been the Barrier Ridge, the colossal cliff-scarp that delineated the Commonweal’s southern edge.

Then, some time towards dawn, the winds had eased and Allanbridge had sent him below. He had collapsed beneath the hatch, bone-weary and aching in every joint, his hands raw, knuckles scraped,
and with a massive flowering bruise across his forehead where he had been thrown into the side rail which, thankfully, had been sturdy enough to restrain him.

Now he woke, to find the wind was gone, or gone enough that he could no longer hear it. The gondola was moving badly, however: not coasting on the air as it had done, but instead rocking and
swaying from side to side.

It seems we are not in the air any more.
He forced himself to go back up the ladder, pushing the hatch open. The sunlight that greeted him was bright, with a blue sky beaming through a
lattice of branches.

The balloon of the
Maiden
was up there too, he saw. Punctured by a few of the boughs, it had been pushed all the way over to one side on the straining ropes, but it still seemed to be
holding its shape. Stenwold hauled himself further up onto the deck, which was swinging gently from its cradle of branches.

‘Where in the wastes are we?’ he muttered, staring about him. The landscape was steeply hilly, but clearly something strange had happened to it in the past, because a great many of
the hills had been truncated, and their tops flattened, the sides stepping in tiers down towards the valleys.
Agriculture?
he wondered, though only grass and bushes grew there now, the
latter suggesting that a good many years had gone by since this land was ever farmed.

We were going north
, he recalled.
We had passed Dorax and Mount Hain, and I saw . . . I’m sure I saw the Barrier Ridge. What else could it have been? So are we in the Commonweal
now, or were we blown aside?
He turned about, clambering up the sloping deck to see if any familiar landmarks were still in view, but the storm must have carried them further than he thought.
Their tree was one of about a dozen bare-limbed giants, lofty enough to have the
Maiden
’s gondola dangling from its lowest branches, and yet still a good ten feet in the air. There was
the dense line of a forest on one horizon, but he could not tell if it was composed of the same monsters or of lesser trees.

What he did see, though, was . . .

He was familiar with the concept of them, of course, but they were simply not found in any of the lands he knew. The Lowlands had its fortified city-states, walled villages or military outposts,
palisades and armed camps. What it did not have were castles, though. The Ant-kinden model of fortification, which informed all of Lowlands military design, was calculated to protect the whole
community, not just provide a defensible centre surrounded by an open settlement. Nor was there ever an isolated bastion rising out of the wilderness. But here was a castle, soaring six storeys
high, constructed of white, featureless stone, with a jaggedly asymmetrical crown of turrets that closed in on the centre, so that those within could not only see clearly over all the surrounding
landscape, but could protect themselves against airborne attack.

The structure stood about half a mile away, Stenwold guessed, but it was hard to tell, for the scale of it troubled him. He had no idea how big such edifices were supposed to be.

Of course the Commonweal was huge, and all subject to a single monarch. Such an absolute ruler would perhaps need castles to control those broad holdings.

‘All right, Maker?’

He jumped at Allanbridge’s voice. The aviator was descending the ropes from the balloon.

‘How bad is it?’

‘A day or two to patch her, add another one for the three days it’ll take to generate the gas to refill her.’

‘I’m sorry about the
Maiden
,’ Stenwold started, but Allanbridge shrugged it off.

‘We’ve had worse, she and me.’ He looked bag-eyed and tired and Stenwold realized he had not slept at all since the storm started. ‘I never did the Commonweal run before,
and I should have listened more to them that had. They told me that, around the Barrier Ridge, the weather got choppy.’

‘Choppy,’ Stenwold echoed – and then: ‘We’re in the Commonweal, are we?’

‘We are indeed,’ came Destrachis’ voice. Stenwold turned to see the Spider climbing up through the hatch. He had a bandage about his head, showing that even those below had not
come through the storm unscathed. Felise was already on deck ahead of him, standing at the rail but disdaining to hold to it, and looking out over the landscape.

‘I don’t suppose you know where we are, exactly?’ the Spider doctor asked. ‘The Commonweal’s rather a big place.’

‘None of this looks familiar to you?’ Stenwold asked him.

‘The Commonweal’s at least half as big again as all the Lowlands put together, Master Maker. I can’t claim to know more than a fraction of it by sight. All I can say is that we
can’t be too far north, because there’s no snow on the ground still – but that’s hardly helpful news.’

‘You’ve got time enough stranded here to ask the locals,’ Allanbridge pointed out. ‘After that, if you could bring some of them back here to help us out of the tree, it
would make my life a lot easier.’

Stenwold nodded, looking over at the castle, wondering who it had been defended from and whether its inhabitants had even heard of the Lowlands. More to the point, whether the inhabitants had
spotted the pale balloon of the airship caught, like an errant moon, in the tree, and what they might think if they had.

‘We’ll go down,’ he confirmed. ‘We need to know how much further to Suon Ren, and whether we’re even still on course. Jons, I’ll leave you alone to make your
repairs. Destrachis and Felise, it’s now time to earn your keep.’

‘They don’t make their terrain easy to walk over, in the Commonweal,’ commented Stenwold, after he had hauled himself up yet another series of weed-infested
steps. The Commonweal plants growing here amidst the unruly grass all bristled with little hairs that brought him out in a rash, so that he had to wear his heavy artificer’s gloves to pull
himself up the tiered slope.

They seemed no nearer to the castle than before. As seen through his spyglass, of course, it had not seemed so far.