Nero paused at the door. ‘Freedom to ply your trade,’ he suggested pointedly.
‘Yes, but also just freedom. Freedom to live, to go where I want, to live how I want. The Wasps would stop that, for the Wasps mean control and laws. I could be a killer for the Wasps, Sieur Nero, but I would be their man if I did so. Bella Cheerwell was right about that. I am nobody’s man. I am free.’
Nero pushed open the door and stopped sharp, his heart plunging. After a moment he swore.
There were three dead Solarnese there, all wearing the blue sashes of the Crystal Standard. Beyond them there lay half a dozen Wasp soldiers, just as dead. Nero glanced back at Cesta, who remained expressionless.
‘As I said, you should be more careful,’ the assassin told him. ‘Now, having presented my credentials, what else can I do for you and your allies?’
‘My allies…’ Nero scowled at him. ‘My allies don’t like you, assassin.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Cesta’s smile was sad and genuine. ‘And where is the delectable te Schola Taki-Amre?’ At Nero’s stubborn silence, his smile grew. ‘You don’t need to answer, Sieur Nero. I can guess it.’
Chasme was like a dark boil on the south coast of the Exalsee. It was a perpetual blight on the Solarnese, who often spoke of taking a fleet and putting an end to it. Spider merchants from Porta Mavralis said the same, yet nobody did anything about it. The truth was there were plenty of Spider-kinden and Solarnese who had interests in the place. Chasme was all about money.
It was not quite a city. For that it was too small. It was a stopping point for those heading around the Exalsee: a cluster of heavy, humpbacked buildings, some built on sunken pilings on the land itself, and others on pontoons out to sea. Some of the buildings belonged to merchants and others to labourers, but Chasme was known primarily as a town of foundries. They churned out weapons and armour, and machines most of all. Chasme was the engine that provided flying machines and pilots to the Inapt Dragonflies of Princep Exilla, and to pirates and air-brigands all over the Exalsee. Chasme was the gateway for the wealth of the unexplored south, which arrived as slaves and carapaces and precious metals. Chasme was a rogue city, without law or morals, ruled by a handful of fantastically wealthy renegades.
Chasme was also beyond Wasp reach, for now at least, and that was why Taki had chosen it. Chasme, despite so many decades of antipathy, suddenly found itself in common cause with Solarno. Nobody wanted to see the Empire rooted on the Exalsee.
The people of Chasme were a baffling mongrel mixture. More than half of the citizens were halfbreeds drawn from a welter of Fly, Spider, Soldier Beetle, Dragonfly, Bee and a dozen other kinden. Amidst all that confusion, in a bar dug underneath one of the automotive factories, Taki’s little assembly blended in perfectly.
Here were her pilots, her friends and her adversaries: all that she might consider her peers. She sat them around three tables hauled in close together, and waited until they all had received drinks and had finished jockeying with each other for position and status.
Here then were the Solarnese: Niamedh, her expression made more stern by her shorn hair and eyepatch, also the bulky Scobraan in his gold-winged breastplate, together with a handful of other free aviators. Here was te Frenna, the only other Fly-kinden present, her face still bandaged from the glancing heat of a Wasp sting. Here were the local Chasme mercenary pilots, all of them tough and ruthless men and women: among them the taciturn half-breed known as the Creev and the infamous pirate Hawkmoth, an exiled Bee-kinden whose orthopter, Bleakness, was known across the whole Exalsee. Here were a dozen beast-riders out of Princep, with the arrogant and painted Drevane Sae at their head, a gathering of barbaric splendour in wooden armour, beads and tattoos.
‘It’s no secret why we’re here,’ Taki announced, as soon as they were finally settled.
‘Solarno needs bailing out,’ said the man called Hawkmoth. He was a vicious-looking specimen, almost as small as a Fly-kinden, bald and leathery with a fierce forked beard. ‘But what do most of us owe Solarno?’
Taki grinned at him, matching fierce for fierce. ‘Oh, if you really thought that, Sieur Hawkmoth, you’d not be here. You and I know each other: we have crossed paths before. Still, if you cannot see there is now an enemy greater than all of us, then there’s no point me staying longer.’
Some of the Dragonflies scoffed at that, and Scobraan stood up angrily, his big hands rocking the table. Taki had to shout at all of them to shut their mouths and just listen to her.
‘All right, you want me to shame you with the facts? I will then,’ she told them. ‘All right, Sieur Hawkmoth, let’s look at the freebooters of the Exalsee, shall we? Why are you still free and living, Sieur?’
‘I’m a better pilot that any man or woman here, is why,’ Hawkmoth growled.
‘And you never sleep? And your flier never needs to land? No, you’re free because the Exalsee is so big, and those who would hunt you down can never quite net you in. Do you think the Wasps would seriously want for men and flying machines, Sieur? Attack one of their ships or fliers and they’d search every island in the Exalsee until they had rooted you out of every possible hiding place – and once they’re established there will be no ship or flier that is not flying their flag! And you know it, and that’s why you’re here.’
Hawkmoth glowered at her for a moment, and then nodded slowly.
‘And you warriors of Princep Exilla,’ Taki went on, ‘you must see that your sovereignty’s days are numbered. What do you think the Wasps will do, on finding a city of Dragonfly-kinden on their southern doorstep? The Lowlander Cheerwell Maker once told me something, she told me about the Twelve-Year War – a conflict between the Wasps and your kinden.’
‘Those we left centuries ago,’ Drevane Sae said dismissively. ‘Those in the north. They are not our people any more.’
‘The Wasps won’t care,’ Taki insisted. ‘You are still their enemies. In fact, we’re all their enemies. And as for Chasme itself? You tell me, Creev.’
The Creev inclined his head. ‘They will either take us over or wipe us out.’
‘So what are you suggesting?’ Drevane Sae asked harshly.
‘Drive the Wasps from Solarno,’ Niamedh replied instantly, standing up.
‘So easily said? If it is so easy, then they are not a threat!’ Hawkmoth snapped. ‘If they are as you claim, it is like trying to hold back a tide. It cannot be done.’
‘Listen to me!’ Taki said again. ‘I have travelled a long way west – further than anyone present here, believe me. I have flown past Porta Mavralis to lands that half of you haven’t even heard of, but where they are also fighting the Wasps. I have come back in the company of a Spiderlands lord who, too, is looking to fight the Wasps. I even have a few hundred Spiderlands mercenaries stashed ready for my signal. The problem is that none of you, not one of you, has any sense of the world beyond the Exalsee. You don’t understand that the world – the whole wasting world – has been pulled into this war.’
She realized that, for the first time, they were absolutely, genuinely silent.
‘The Wasp invasion of Solarno is nothing, in the eyes of their Empire,’ she continued softly. ‘They reacted like a greedy child reaching out for something bright, for no other reason than because it is there. North and west of here, there are Wasp armies tens of thousands strong currently marching on other lands. The Wasps aim to conquer the whole world, a city at a time, so they are always fighting. And right now they are fighting a greater, stronger enemy than they have faced before, so their men, their machines and resources, are more and more being committed to this larger fight. If Solarno sits still under her shackles, then she shall remain a slave forever, and the Exalsee with her, but if she rises now, if we come to her aid now, then perhaps we shall throw the enemy off – because the Wasps have their swords primarily directed elsewhere. Otherwise we lose our chance, and the Exalsee shall become an imperial province, city by city, and every one of us will be lost even to the histories.’