The shock of the imperial invasion was still resounding through Porta Mavralis. Trade all about the Exalsee had been thrown into chaos, with the Wasps still trying to clench their fist on the city. They were turning most ships away from Solarno docks, impounding some, allowing a few others to trade freely, all decided apparently at random. Listening to this news, Taki formed the opinion that the Wasps themselves were divided, different officers ordering different strategies, and she further understood that the Crystal Standard party was still trying to assert itself as the new master of Solarno against the resistance of all the rival factions. There would be a reckoning for that pack of traitors, she knew, when they found out what kind of venomous creatures they had given their city over to.
Teornis had not sent her off with no help at all. He had given her a sealed introduction to his chief agent in Mavralis, and Taki met with her on the second day after her arrivaclass="underline" a lean, sly-looking Spider woman named Odyssa.
‘Refugees are still fleeing Solarno,’ the spy explained. ‘There’s almost a quarter of the Path of Jade’s members of the Corta Lucidi set up here in Mavralis, claiming to be a government in exile. Others have dispersed further around the Exalsee, to Princep Exilla, Ostrander, Diroveshni and Chasme. The Wasps are still fighting to lock down the streets and gain total control of the city. Their colonel has not even been able to proclaim himself governor and four or five of the top Crystal Standard collaborators are dead.’
‘By whose hand?’
‘Nobody knows,’ the Spider replied. Odyssa’s smile said that she had her own thoughts. ‘There’s enough general mistrust, though, that Wasp assassins are not so far from people’s thoughts.’
‘Good.’ Let them continue to fight amongst themselves, especially before their prize is secure. ‘I need to find out where certain individuals have gone, if you can help me.’
‘My Lord-Martial does not prohibit it, so give me a list of them and I will see what I can uncover.’ Odyssa slid a blank scroll over to her, with an inkpot and chitin quill balanced on it.
They may be all dead, Taki thought. Some of them will surely be dead. She was thinking of her fellows, her peers, the fighting pilots of Solarno and the Exalsee. My brothers and sisters of the air, my glorious enemies and closest friends. ‘What else are you allowed to give me,’ she asked, ‘or is it just information?’
‘By no means, for my Lord-Martial is not so parsimonious,’ Odyssa replied. ‘I myself am staying at the Cartel-House of the Craesandral family. Do you want to know who my fellow guests are there?’
Taki ground her teeth. ‘Forgive me, Bella Odyssa, but I am a pilot, not a game-player. My city is under the yoke, so please just say what you mean.’
Odyssa’s responding glance was pitying but Taki could live with that. ‘I have twenty Craesandral house-guards as company, and two hundred mercenaries from Iak.’
Taki blinked. ‘You will…?’
‘Make your plans, little one, and I shall help you as I may. When the time comes for blood-letting on the streets of Solarno, we shall be with you.’
Two hundred and twenty. Odyssa looked very pleased with herself but Taki was already seeing in her mind the mighty imperial airship Starnest and the hundreds of Wasp soldiers descending from it. And how many friends are left in Solarno that will fight? She needed her friends, her fellow pilots, and she needed a plan.
And she needed someone she could trust to go into Solarno on her behalf, and that someone was not Odyssa.
It would have to be Nero.
Six
There were certain businesses that did not stop even for the war. In fact there were some businesses that took on extra staff.
‘Small package work,’ the Fly-kinden smuggler had explained to Tisamon. ‘Messages in. Messages out. Weapons. People sometimes. Can fit a couple back there, at a pinch.’
The smuggling was accomplished via a single stripped-down automotive, with six high, narrow-rimmed wheels powered by an over-wound clockwork engine that ran almost silently, so that the vessel seemed to skate over the ground, and to fly when it vaulted a rise. The Fly-kinden drove it, and fixed it, and did his best to outrun any trouble, but now he kept a couple of guards on the payroll at all times, because he earned his high profit margins through danger and secrecy. The danger was attested by the vacancy that Tisamon had now filled.
It was as easy as that to get to occupied Helleron. Just short of two tendays, hanging from the scaffolding that was all the Fly had left of the automotive’s original shell, and they were then able to merge with the stream of travellers coming into Helleron from Tark and Asta, heading up the Silk Road from the south.
‘And from here on, we’re legal,’ the Fly-kinden had explained. ‘The Wasps might think they run the city, but it’s still a market and not a military camp. The Beetles know better than to turn people away, and there isn’t a magnate in the city who doesn’t make some coin for himself through the Black Guild. From what I hear, most of Wasp customs are on the take now, too. They learn fast, that lot.’
Helleron, a city devoted to the eternal cycle of building and decay, where today’s grinding wheel erased the tracks of yesterday: a city of machines that took in and spat out a hundred men and women a day who had come there to make their fortunes, feeding them to its furnaces. This was where he had come before, after Atryssa’s betrayal of him, after his own betrayal of her. This was Helleron, where he had been able to forget, in the unqualified shedding of blood, what had first driven him there. In a twisted, bitter sense he had fond memories of Helleron.
It had been only a short space of absolution, between his leaving this place and his return to it. Stenwold’s call had summoned him out of his exile, away from his meaningless round of street-fighting and the settling of quarrels. It was Stenwold who had given him the chance to redeem himself, to make himself the man he should be. For a brief span – fighting the Wasps here and in Myna, training his daughter, questing in Jerez – it had seemed that he would succeed in rediscovering himself.
Weak at heart. He should have stayed in the Felyal, remained true to his kinden, but he had betrayed them for a Spider woman, and thus had begun the road of failures which had led him here. Looking about him at the grimy bustle of Helleron, he smiled thinly. What better tomb for one such as he than this filthy warren of blackened metal.
The building he sought had not changed, the door’s plaque almost unreadable beneath the dirt of a year: ‘Rowen Palasso: Factor’. Once inside Tisamon gave his name and had no more than a minute’s wait before being shown to the third-storey office of the proprietor herself.
Rowen Palasso was a Beetle-kinden woman of middle years, probably not far from Tisamon’s own age. Her hair had been dyed red not too recently, and her face was baggy and lined. She was one of the middle-merchants of Helleron, who had worked at her trade all her life and never quite made the fortune and the success of it that she had planned, a type the city was full of. Her trade was a liaison for men and women of undoubted but clandestine skills: housebreakers and thieves, thugs and strong-armers, duellists and killers. In defiance of the darkened-corner conventions of her associates, her office was as domestic a place as Tisamon had ever seen, with cushions on the chairs and little embroidered pictures on the walls with homely mottos. In fact, it was calculated to put her patrons and her clients off their stride with its cosy banality.
‘Tisamon of Felyal, as I live and breathe,’ Rowen exclaimed. ‘And here was I thinking you’d given us the slip. They always come back to Helleron, though.’