And is that so bad? Because he had lived his entire life, surely, on similar terms. He had worked with the debased currency that his mixed blood could buy him. He had worked twice as hard as his peers, getting half as far. Men with less talent at their graduation than he had possessed from the start had walked straight from the College into prestigious positions of wealth and respect, whereas he, with only real skill to his name, had been accorded nothing. Even amongst Che and Stenwold and the rest he had been the fifth wheel that nobody really needed.
Well, at least here he was needed, and if he was to be valued merely as a commodity, at least Drephos had placed that value high enough to spare Salma’s life in exchange.
But that deal was done, and he had nothing left to barter for Che. I cannot save her.
A simple thing to say, and surprisingly easy.
I cannot just let her die, without a word.
And there was the barb that now caught him. Must he plunge a blade into his own guts by revealing to her what he had become? Or instead live with that emptiness inside him, that lack of a final meeting with her before the end? Or do I merely want her to see that at last I’ve made something of my life?
He clenched his fists, and his mind conjured up the last throes of the doomed Sarnesh charge, bright blood springing from sheared metal as the bolts drove home.
I am become the destroyer. What can I not do? What limits me now?
Che heard the hatch move, but no sun flooded in. Clearly night had come and she had not realized.
One man only, this time, with a covered lantern giving out a fickle light, but her eyes saw him well enough.
She could not be sure of his identity until he had stopped. It was a young man, broad-shouldered and sturdy-framed and marked by mixed blood, and she did not quite know him. She saw the trappings: a toolbelt such as he had always wanted and could never afford, black and gold clothes, a sword and a rank badge. She recognized none of that. It was only when he stood in the cellar, on the other side of the bars, that she was sure.
‘Totho.?’ Her voice emerged in a quaver, not quite believing what she saw. ‘Is it you? It can’t be you.’
He stared at her, and his features were harder than she remembered. Still, there had been harsh times for both of them since they last parted.
‘Totho, don’t just stand there. You have to let me out. You must know what they’ll do to me.’
His face tightened further. ‘I don’t have the keys,’ he muttered, and continued to stare.
‘Totho. what are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘You went off to Tark. why are you wearing that. uniform?’
‘Because it is mine,’ he stated, and she began to feel her brief surge of hope draining away.
‘You mean. how long?’
He realized that she was seeing their history together unravel backwards, trying to recast him as a spy during all that time, because poor Che didn’t realize that people changed.
‘Since Tark,’ he said. He found it mattered to him that she knew she had already cast him off before he had found his new calling.
‘But why?’ she said, still trying to whisper but her indignation getting the better of her. ‘They’re the enemy, Totho! They’re monsters!’
He felt his anger grow in him. ‘I did it to save Salma,’ he snapped, ‘because otherwise they would have killed him. Or don’t you think that was worth it? Perhaps I should have just died alongside him.’
‘But that’s. ’ She gaped at him. ‘But you’re free,’ she said, still determinedly marching up the wrong street. ‘You could run, surely, run to Collegium and tell them what happened here.’
‘You have absolutely no idea what happened here.’ He felt she was trivializing the sacrifice he had made, and suddenly he was on fire with it. He had never impressed her as a companion, as a warrior, most certainly not as a prospective lover, for all that she had once been life and breath to him. ‘Do you want to know,’ he asked her, voice shaking slightly, ‘what happened here?’
‘I don’t understand, Totho.’
‘I happened here, Che. That’s the simplest thing. Those dead Ants out there — I killed them. When the city of Sarn falls it is I who will break it. When this army or another like it is at the gates of Collegium, it will be me, do you understand? When the Lowlands becomes just the western wing of the Empire, then by rights my name should be on the maps.’
She was backing away from the wooden bars. ‘Totho?’
‘All my doing, Che.’ As she retreated so he had moved up to the bars himself, gripping them as though he were the prisoner here. ‘What your uncle dismissed as a toy back in Collegium, they have made into a weapon here. You remember how I always wanted to make weapons? Well now it’s happened, and my weapons win wars.’
Backing against the far wall of her cell, she stared and saw him at last, as not friend, nor lover, but enemy.
‘You?’
‘All me.’ Now he had her attention, his lust for recognition was leaching out of him, leaving only a hollow bitterness. ‘So I can’t just walk away from this, Che. I have become this. I have paid in blood, and none of it my own.’
‘Oh, Totho. ’
He waited for her condemnation that he surely deserved, the last gasp of her defiance before the interrogators pried it out of her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ And the expression on her face told him, beyond any shadow or suspicion, that her concern was purely for him, for her lost friend.
Something was building in him, that hurt worse than burning, but he clamped down on it. He was Drephos’s apprentice. There was no emotion he could not master. ‘Stop saying that.’ He heard his voice shake. ‘I’ve found my place now. There’s nothing to be sorry for. Feel sorry for yourself. You know what they’ll do to you.’ In his mind arose the words, from the depths of his own soul. What they will do to her is nothing, compared to what they have done to me.
She was moving back to the bars now, and one hand slightly extended, as if to touch his own. He suddenly felt that, if he was to feel her skin on his, he might die. He stumbled backwards, until he felt the incline of the steps behind him.
‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘Everything’s over.’ He tried to suppress the next words, but they forced themselves out anyway. ‘I’m sorry, Che. I’m sorry it turned out like this.’
She was standing at the bars when he left her, and the lantern’s last shine glinted on the tracks down her face, and he thought they would be the only tears ever shed for him.
And where is the damned box? was the thought of Uctebri the Sarcad, stalking the bounds of his comfortable cell. It had gone wrong. Not irretrievably wrong, but wrong nonetheless.
He had been at pains to keep his antennae out, groping around for the Shadow Box’s location. It had mouldered in Collegium for a long time, but the Darakyon itself was becoming restive. It had sensed his interest and there was always the chance that it would find some champion for its cause. Reaching so far into the Lowlands is dangerous, his own people would have told him, had he cared to consult them. The Moth-kinden have not forgotten us.
No, that was true. In some decaying archive of Tharn or Dorax would be found the name of the Mosquito-kinden, and the time when the Moths broke them, hunted them down, and tried their best to wipe his entire kinden from history. These days the Moths had other matters on their minds, though, so a clever old man might stretch his arm as far as Collegium and cause no alarm, sound no warnings, especially if that old man was working through an Empire blinded to the magical world by its own Aptitude.
But the Empire itself was being coy. They had not sent some squad of soldiers or Rekef men to retrieve the box. The political situation, the distances, had all militated against that strategy. Instead they had hired hunters.