‘Stenwold,’ Arianna said, and when he turned to look at her, her eyes held a warning in them. ‘We’re being watched. I’m sure of it.’
He stood swiftly. ‘Some other Assembler, no doubt.’ But he did not believe that.
Then a voice came from amid the tangled undergrowth. ‘I could have put an arrow in your head, old man. Not that there’s much chance you’d notice.’
Stenwold reached for his sword and discovered that, yes, he still wore it at his waist, so familiar now that he donned it automatically. It slid easily from its scabbard. ‘How did you get in here?’
The sword was not all that was familiar. He knew the voice too, when it replied, ‘I got in here because I’m a Fly and your clumsy pack of kinden don’t even understand what ‘fly’ means.’
The speaker emerged: a bald-headed little man with his ugly face and knowing smile, and Stenwold said, ‘Nero?’ in tones of sheer disbelief.
‘It’s been a while, Sten. Who’s the lady?’
‘This is Arianna,’ and the awkward pause as he thought of how to introduce her obviously told Nero all he needed to know, for the mocking smile was even broader now. ‘And this is, Nero, the artist,’ Stenwold explained to her awkwardly.
Nero grinned at Stenwold. ‘You get bigger and fatter every time I see you.’
‘And you’re still ugly.’ Stenwold’s retort came without hesitation from twenty years away. ‘You’ve no idea how good it is to see you. Why are you here? Are you staying long?’
‘Just a messenger boy, me,’ Nero explained. ‘With a message from a friend of yours, though, and there’s a whole cartload of news, so you and your lady better sit back down and listen.’
In the darkness that she could now dismiss with a thought it had been remarkably easy to break away from the Wasp camp. With Totho watching, she had simply tiptoed past the occasional Wasp sentry, invisible in her uniform to men who saw Auxillians merely as slaves — ubiquitous and acceptable. When she had got in sight of the camp’s perimeter she had waited carefully until nobody was looking her way, then simply taken off, let her wings lift her high, over the ring of torches and sentries and out into the night.
Totho watched her leave and was torn, when she flew, between relief and guilt. His night’s work was not done, though. He turned and went back to the farmhouse, opened up the hatch and returned to the cellar with his shuttered lantern. He would replace the bars, close the tumblers of the locks. Give them something to wonder about.
He was just getting down to the task when a voice intervened: ‘Well now, what have we here?’
He turned, flicking the lantern shutters wider, but he already knew who he would see: the emotionless face of Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos, flashing pale and mottled from within the confines of his cowl.
‘A good artificer makes his plans carefully in advance,’ Drephos reproached him. ‘He does not need to come back and finish up, Totho.’
‘How.?’
‘I watched. Perhaps you forget that for me it is never dark. I watched and saw quite clearly. You came out with the girl, you let her loose. I watched because I thought it likely you might do so. Kaszaat warned me that you were acting strangely, and she was right. And so I came to see what else you might have been up to down here.’ He raised an enquiring eyebrow and moved closer. ‘So, what else have you done?’
‘Nothing,’ Totho stammered. Drephos was still advancing on him, but he knew he himself was the stronger, and the master artificer was not even armed.
‘She. she was my past, and I found I could not cut it loose so easily.’
Drephos laid his gauntleted hand on Totho’s shoulder. ‘And what else have you done? How else have you betrayed me?’ His voice was very soft, not angry, not even sad.
‘I swear-’
Drephos gripped him by the shoulder and Totho cried out in pain as the narrow fingers dug like pincers into his flesh. His entire arm was instantly locked, so he grasped Drephos’s wrist with his other hand and tried to pry it free. To his horror there was no movement at all, only an inexorable tightening of Drephos’s grasp.
‘What else, Totho?’ Drephos asked, as he still struggled and tugged. ‘Is there an explosive, perhaps? An incendiary planted? Or were you to kill me? Kill the general? Tell me, Totho. I won’t be angry, I promise.’
Totho was now whimpering, feeling the bones of his shoulder grind. Unable to shift those imprisoning fingers he slammed his hand up against Drephos’s elbow as hard as he could.
He struck metal, as hard and solid as any armour. With ragged breath he dragged at the sleeve of the man’s robe, until the shoulder seam gave way and he bared Drephos’s entire arm.
It was metal, all of it, not just armoured but an arm entirely of metal, and he could only guess at the delicacy of the mechanisms within that gave it life. Even in the extremity of his pain, something stirred in him at the sight, the artificer’s instinct in him that could never quite be denied.
‘It was a savage accident,’ Drephos explained conversationally. ‘And worse was having to devise this replacement one-handed. But I see you like it. I’m glad.’
He pushed, and Totho, all strength gone from him, fell back against the wooden bars. ‘Tell me what you have done,’ Drephos said. ‘I am a Moth, at least partly, and I can read it from your face. What is it you have done?’
‘I gave her the plans,’ Totho gasped, all resistance ebbing out of him. ‘The plans for the snapbow.’
Drephos stared at him for a second. And he laughed. Laughed and laughed and let go his grip so that Totho slid down the bars to the floor. And still Drephos laughed and laughed as his apprentice looked up at him, bewildered.
‘Oh that’s good!’ Drephos got out. ‘That’s very good. And I suppose you thought it was young love that made you do it, or nostalgia, or any of those other things that we’ll soon breed out of you! My dear boy, you gave her the plans, did you? Why that’s excellent!’
‘What do you mean?’ Totho demanded. His shoulder was still agony, but at least he could move the arm. Nothing was broken.
‘Don’t you understand?’ Drephos crouched before him. ‘What will they do with the plans? Why, they’ll build snapbows of their own. Can you imagine the look on Malkan’s face when he finds out they have his new secret weapon?’
‘This is just to spite the generals?’ Totho asked, baffled.
‘But what will the generals do, Totho, when that comes to pass? Who will they come to, and what will they ask?’
‘They’ll come to you,’ said Totho slowly, ‘and they’ll ask you to. ’
‘Build them something even better!’ Drephos crowed. ‘And the science advances one more step. Oh, you may have thought you had all kinds of airy motives, Totho, but in your heart you’re an artificer. You’re a man of progress just like I am. How hard would it have been for me, myself, to get that weapon into the hands of the enemy? Just think how much time you’ve saved me. The war goes on, Totho, back and forth, year to year, and how much better for us two that it does. If the Empire ever wins outright then will it continue to let us use its foundries and its workshops? Will it lend us further resources for our work?’ He then took Totho by the unhurt shoulder and hauled him to his feet. ‘Do you bind yourself to me, boy, truly? Once before I thought I’d read truth in your face, but I can be deceived.’
One last chance, Totho realized, for him to stand against the bloody flood, to reject the metal and choose the meat — to do something Che would be proud of.
‘I am yours,’ he said soberly. ‘I bind myself to you.’
Che had set off walking away from the camp and not stopped until dawn began to colour the eastern sky. She discovered she had been heading a little east of south. It occurred to her that she had no idea where she was, and that the food and water Totho had scavenged for her would not last for very long. The one building she came across was a barren shack that was possibly once some rich man’s hunting lodge, but it had been picked bare already.