Hokiak laughed out loud at that, genuinely if not pleasantly. ‘I have, have I? You sit down again, girl. You listen to old Hokiak for a moment.’
‘Sit,’ hissed Thalric, and she did so without quite deciding to.
‘Well, now,’ said Hokiak wearily, ‘Sten’s little niece is all growed up, is she? She’s in town again and wants to keep up with her old friends in the resistance. She don’t even care that the Wasps are here, ready to slam her back in the machine room? No, she don’t.’ He chewed on his pipe-stem for a moment. ‘So what a feller gets to wonderin’ is just what the girl is doin’ here with a Wasp-kinden handler. Bit obvious, maybe? Not very subtle, but these ain’t subtle times. You I remember, him I don’t. More, you won’t be the first to come out of the machine room with a change of heart. I hear they can be right persuasive in there.’
Che stared at him. ‘What are you saying?’
‘He’s saying he thinks you’ve been turned,’ said Thalric, with a certain satisfaction. ‘He’s saying he doesn’t trust you.’
‘What? But I’m Stenwold’s niece-’
‘And old Sten himself would know that doesn’t carry much weight with me… Oh, I forgot, he don’t know you’re here.’
Che looked from the Scorpion to his men. ‘But… what can I do to make you believe me?’
Hokiak shrugged. ‘Don’t have to make me believe you. I ain’t no more than a simple pedlar. All that happens now is who you get peddled to.’
‘So we’re your stock-in-trade now, are we?’ Thalric asked him.
Hokiak leered at him. ‘Man’s got to make a livin’.’
Che sensed the Wasp about to move, and she said hurriedly, ‘So sell us to the resistance. That’s fine. Kymene will know me. Just let me speak to her.’
‘Che-’ Thalric started, but she shook her head and went on.
‘I’ll go unarmed. I don’t care. Look, I’m not working for the Wasps, and Thalric here isn’t either. He’s gone renegade.’
Hokiak’s eyes narrowed. ‘Thalric? Ain’t the first time I heard that name.’
Thalric cursed and kicked over the table.
It was so without warning that he caught them, and Che, by surprise. The round surface of the table sprang up, toppling Hokiak backwards, still on his chair, slamming into two of the bravos and sending them stumbling. Thalric’s hand flared and the man closest to him was punched from his feet, to land heavily, his chest now a smoking ruin. The Wasp vaulted the tipped-over table with his wings coursing from his shoulders. Hokiak’s Fly-kinden flung a blade at him, but Thalric loosed his sting at the same time. The Fly ducked back, his aim going awry so that the hiltless blade skimmed Thalric’s scalp rather than taking him through the eye. Another man tried to get in the Wasp’s way and caught Thalric’s elbow in his face. The single leap had taken the Wasp halfway across the room.
Che went for her sword, feeling horribly slow and clumsy. The Mynan closest to her got his blade out of the scabbard first and tried making a stab at her, but too close to make a good job of it. The tip scored into her leather artificer’s coat and she fell back, reaching and grabbing his baldric as she did so, pulling the man on top of her. His sword thudded into the floorboards instead and the blade snapped.
Thalric did not wait for her, powering his way towards the door that would take him into the cluttered trading front of Hokiak’s Exchange. It opened before he reached it and he saw an old Spider there with a knife just clearing his belt. Thalric, with no time to scorch him, simply collided with him shoulder first, bowling him backwards with all the momentum his wings could give him. A moment later he was in the Exchange, and a moment after that he had vanished into the street.
‘Alive!’ Hokiak was shouting. ‘Take her alive, curse it!’
Che threw off the half-stunned man atop her, but before she could try to escape he had grabbed her ankle, bringing her down again. She scrambled to her hands and knees, and at that moment Hokiak’s cane gave her a ringing smack across the side of the head. She cried out, falling sideways, and then Hokiak’s man was forcing her face into the floorboards, dragging her sword from its sheath and casting it away.
‘You traitor!’ she yelled, fighting furiously, but utterly ineffectually, to get free. The point of Hokiak’s cane came back down into her range of vision.
‘One of my men’s dead,’ she heard the Scorpion say. ‘A moment ago I had me a choice to make, whether to do what you wanted, or to sell you. Now I ain’t choosing. Your friend there’s just gone and forced my hand.’
‘He’s a renegade!’ Che shouted helplessly at his feet and the ferrule of his cane. ‘He thought you were going to turn him in.’
‘Sure, I bet,’ sneered Hokiak. ‘I know, girl, I know that Thalric is Rekef. I know that name well enough. More fool you for spillin’ it, but then I reckon you ain’t been in the trade long enough to get things right.’
‘What are you talking about? I only wanted to see Kymene.’
‘And you’re goin’ to,’ he assured her. ‘Gryllis, how are you feeling?’
‘I’ve seen better nights.’ The Spider clawed at the door-frame to pick himself up, one hand pressed to the back of his head.
‘Send a message to the Flag,’ Hokiak said. ‘Tell ’em we got a Wasp turncoat all packaged for them. Girl, you’re now goin’ to find there are worse things than an Empire machine room, believe you me.’
There had been the one event that Tynisa could not explain, and which had brought her to this point.
At first news of her father Tisamon had remained scarce. He had not been hiding his trail so much as travelling so swiftly and surely as to leave none. At last, and after twice drawing blood in order to preserve herself, she had fallen in with some black marketeers. In a taverna on the Collegium riverside she had encounted an old halfbreed, Beetle and Ant-kinden mixed. Had he seen a Mantis-kinden man of just this description? As it happened he had, and in that very taproom, agreeing to take service with a package-shipper bound for Helleron.
Helleron? It had made perfect sense, of course. Where had Tisamon gone previously, to forget his past? Nowhere but Helleron, where people seldom asked about such trivial comings and goings. She should have thought of that sooner.
It just remained to get herself there and she decided to follow Tisamon’s own strategy. Despite the war, or because of it, there was a regular and shady trade between the occupied Beetle city and its free sibling. Tynisa then remembered the city of Myna, and Hokiak, and how the old Scorpion had claimed that the Wasps themselves liked to keep a little of the black market going.
She had therefore taken up with a Beetle-kinden smuggler by the name of Artelly Broadways, who ran a little airship catering for small and easily portable goods. He had himself and a Fly crewman on board, but he needed a couple of guards too, and Tynisa fought off two other hopefuls for the job without much effort.
The problem came when they were still two days from Helleron, blown east by inclement weather and with the balloon and gondola seeming equally rickety. Tynisa had realized by then that Broadways was a man whose confidence and optimism outstripped his ability, and that he was not nearly as experienced in the trade as he constantly assured her he was.
Shortly after that the Wasps caught them. It was sudden enough. A fixed-wing had come from out of the sun and danced contemptuously past their bows, throwing Broadways into utter confusion. A moment later there had been Wasp soldiers in the air all around them, darting past the stays to land, crouching with swords drawn, on the deck. Broadways’ one piece of wisdom had been to offer no resistance at all.
They had forced him to bring the airship down, to find more Wasps waiting there. In total there were barely a dozen of them, patrolling the Silk Road from Tark to Helleron with their flying machine in the air and a big docile spider, laden with packs and water bottles, on the ground. Tynisa had instantly started considering her options. She could probably not manage to kill them all, but she could eliminate enough to get away, but then they could still fly after her and shoot at her, and there was also the fixed-wing somewhere nearby to take into her equations.