And so can I.
Once they had Sef, they would have no need of Nivit either, not to pay for his services, nor to suffer to talk.
He rushed to the rear of the shack, grabbing Sef’s wrist and dragging her into Skrit’s room. Here was one of his secrets, and he saw Skrit staring up blearily at him from her bed, wondering what was going on. However Nivit was not interested in her but in the crank at the back.
Most Skaters were not Apt: they were not a technical race, not given to artifice or machines. There was a minority that were, though, and this was growing, generation to generation, as Nivit’s kinden slowly underwent a transformation.
Nivit himself was Apt, and he wound the crank as hard as his skinny arms could manage, till a hatch opened smoothly and silently onto a back-alley, even as a mailed fist rapped sharply at his door.
He cocked his head at the new-gaping entrance, and Sef stared at him wide-eyed.
‘Go,’ he hissed, but it took Skrit pushing her forward before she realized what he meant. She looked almost more frightened to be forced to escape alone than on first scenting the lake-dwellers coming.
Then Nivit was padding for the door to confront them, one hand close to his knife-hilt.
Sef shivered in the sudden cold outside, finding herself on an unfamiliar street in this horrible abscess of a community, alone out under the great dark sky. She was glad for the darkness, both because it would hide her from the servants of Master Saltwheel (although not the master himself, for he was proof against the dark) and because she had not yet adjusted to being exposed beneath the sun and her skin burnt red after only a touch of it.
But here she was lost on the streets of this place called Jerez, and somewhere, somewhere close, there would be Master Saltwheel and his servants and slaves patiently groping through the dark for her, and she had nowhere to go. The Skater Nivit had just cast her out. The land-Beetle Bellowern was now dead, his floating palace sacked and his men slain. She was utterly alone.
She had fled the lake because she had known that there was a world out there beyond its skin. She had never guessed how different it would be, though. So many times she had gone from the jewelled envelope of Scolaris up to the lake-top, to gather air and to spy on the busy, spindly-limbed surface dwellers. She had never guessed how difficult it would be to actually live out here, with the heat and the cold, the wind and the appalling void of the sky above. She wanted now to go home to the great arched chambers of Scolaris, but that was one place she could never return to. In the final analysis there was only one star in the sky for her to aim at.
She must find Gaved. He could protect her from the great world and from Master Saltwheel. He had gone across the waters, though, with those others: the stern killer and his Spider-kinden student, and the angry one who hated everyone and himself as well. They had gone to get something that they needed.
She looked down and found that her feet had taken her, without pause or thought, straight to the edge of the lake.
Down there, in the fathoms of darkness, hung the bright cities of her people, stolen from them by the Beetle-kinden, but she was just one missing slave. With the precautions she had taken to mask her scent they would not realize at once that she had returned to the water. If she was swift, she could find Gaved before they detected her, and Saltwheel would still be searching the streets of Jerez, never guessing that she had returned to the waters.
She sloughed off the clothes they had given her, as she would need to swim swiftly tonight. She called on her Art, surrounding herself with a coat of air to sustain her.
A moment later she had sliced into the water in a smooth dive, carrying a silvery sheen with her, next to her skin. With a speed that no land-dweller could have matched she darted off into the water, heading further out into the lake.
‘My next lot, then,’ the Fly-kinden called, in a high voice cutting across the crowd. ‘A folio of plans and designs with alchemical notation dated to within fifty years either side of the Pathic revolution. Their condition is poor, but more than six in ten of the papers can be read. This item is believed to originate in what is now Collegium and represents the much-debated “Illuminate” school of semi-scientific thought.’
He strutted back and forth on his raised platform while a Skater-kinden servant carefully displayed a crumbling leather folder that rested on a silver tray under the cover of a parasol. To Thalric it looked like much of nothing, but there was a quickening of interest amid the small crowd of buyers and their servants. He had not considered that this would be an auction of more than one treasure, but he realised now that Scyla had been stockpiling a few choice acquisitions for just such an opportunity as this, and therefore perhaps many of the buyers now here would have no interest in the box whatsoever.
Scyla herself had made no appearance, or at least not that he could tell. Her proxy here was doing a fair enough job of managing the bidding, encouraging, jibing, pushing up the price, whilst she presumably waited around in the shadows somewhere, hiding behind someone else’s face.
Bidding on the mouldering documents was brisk, and Thalric wondered what truths they might contain, what secrets of the days when the artificer’s craft was just dragging itself out of the morass of mysticism. No doubt it would moulder afresh in the private collection of one of these plutarchs here. He saw a pair of Beetle-kinden bidding against each other stolidly, with single fingers lifted to advise the auctioneer, and a Wasp-kinden woman as well, elegant and grey, her eyes sharp. He wondered whether she was somehow wealthy in her own right, or whether she was merely acting as factor for another.
Probably the documents, however old they looked, were faked. That seemed more than likely, for few here had any idea just how easily Scyla could make herself disappear, so that there would be no direct repercussions for her.
The rain was starting up: the venue had a waxed canvas extended over the auctioneer’s podium to keep his wares dry, but the buyers themselves sat on benches out on the open deck. Thalric guessed that this temporary raft might not have supported the weight of a roof and, anyway, the Skaters were not known for the solidity of their architecture.
He had not noticed which, but one of the Beetles had become the lucky owner of the documents, so the Fly-kinden, dressed as elaborately as any servant to Spider-kinden princesses, now trotted out the next lot: an enamelled silver statue in the Commonweal style, beautiful in execution and pornographic in subject matter, with the acrobatic couple’s wings delicately picked out in gold lace.
Thalric passed his eyes over the audience for the hundredth time. There was no possibility of finding Scyla in it. He had thought that their association would have allowed him to spot… just something, some gesture, some stance, but she was as anonymous as a corpse on a battlefield, lost amongst the flesh of others. There were plenty of others, too, for nobody had been so trusting as to come here alone. Thalric’s little band had therefore attracted no comment.
The Fly continued his banter, up on his stage, the treasures of the world passing through his hands. Some of the bidders left, their one goal attained or thwarted. Most were staying on. There was a feeling – Thalric caught the scent of it – of anticipation, as if they had only been marking time for something greater.
‘My final lot, then,’ announced the Fly-kinden, and Thalric went cold within himself. It was not the proprietary tone, which the Fly had been using throughout, or the fact that the small wooden box had not been presented by a servant but plucked straight from a pocket. Rather it was something in the tilt of the head, that way of standing, that was familiar to Thalric. He was trained to recognize such things, to see through disguises.
But this? It was impossible, and yet he knew it for sure. His instincts were certain, absolute. He had seen her before in the shape of a Beetle, in the shape of a Wasp-kinden officer, in the shape of a Mynan woman. She had even infiltrated Stenwold’s people in the form of one of his own students, and yet Maker had not known.