They took him to a windowless room, lit by a dim gas-lantern fixed on the wall. For all he could see of the sun it could just as easily be noon outside as night.
It was an interrogation room. Not a room with that trade’s machines and artificers but a little booth of an office that, in the great scheme of questioning through excruciation, preceded the main event. A big man was standing there behind a desk, an officer from his bearing, but Thalric noticed no badge of rank. Sitting at the desk itself was a woman.
He was surprised at that because, in Capitas, even the Rekef – which elsewhere used whatever tool best fit the hand – was intrinsically a conservative force. Women were considered servants or perhaps clerks at best, but not put in charge, as this one clearly was. Even the officer, who had authority enough to be at least a colonel, was deferring to her.
She was young, fifteen or twenty years Thalric’s junior at least, and the dim light showed that she was attractive. Her hair was long and golden, tied back neatly. She wore clothes that suggested wealth – some rich officer’s wife? Her gaze was very steady.
‘Major Thalric of the Rekef,’ she began, but not as a question. The guards were still watching him narrowly despite having bound his arms painfully tight behind his back. He waited, understanding that this was not an opportunity to better his lot. He would just have to weather whatever came.
‘So you killed General Reiner,’ she noted.
Is she his wife? That would make sense. He had no other theory as to who she might be. She would make a very young wife for Reiner, though, surely? He had never thought of Rekef generals as being the marrying type, but then he himself was still married to a woman he had not seen in years. The Empire needed sons, but it was a duty only, and sentiment did not come into it.
‘Major Thalric… or perhaps just Thalric.’ Her smile remained bright and unreadable. In fact her eyes glittered with a hard-edged mirth, and if she was a widow there was little enough grieving in her. ‘General Brugan, here, has shown me your records.’
Thalric blinked, glancing up at the big officer. General Brugan? So the Rekef really was ready to take him apart, was it? But if that was the case, who was this wretched woman? Where was General Maxin?
‘A remarkable piece of patchwork, your career,’ the woman noted. ‘Remind me of it, General.’
Brugan stared bleakly at Thalric, like an artificer studying a broken machine. ‘Anti-insurgent work, after the conquest of Myna. Referred to the Rekef by Major Ulther, as he then was. Behind the lines during the Twelve-Year War with assassination squads. Then the Lowlands business, Helleron. The strike against Collegium by rail.’
The woman’s smile was cutting. ‘That didn’t go very well, did it?’
I was outmanoeuvred. The army gave insufficient support. My chief spy betrayed me. ‘No,’ Thalric said simply. If I am to be racked, let it be for my own failures. I will not die blaming others for my misdeeds.
‘Neither did the Vekken campaign,’ General Brugan added darkly.
Major Daklan was in charge of that, you bastard. A brief memory, of Daklan’s blade driving into him, made him twitch.
‘And then you went rogue, I’m told,’ the woman noted. Her face told him that she knew to the last detail all the circumstances, and that he would be able to use none of them in his defence. He did not feel up to singing the old tune: you sold me out before I sold you. It was not as though it would make any difference.
‘Collegium, Jerez, and then you turn up in Myna and kill General Reiner. And then you surrender to the army, who bring you here. Why, Thalric? Tell me why.’
‘Why to which question?’ he asked. ‘There is no one reason for all of it.’
‘What a complex man you are.’ All the humour was gone from her face. ‘So tell me why you killed the general, Thalric.’
A hundred flippant answers came to him and he brushed them all away. Let them kill me for the truth, why not? Let them rack me and crush me, and find in the end only what they had at the start. ‘He cast me off. He let them send men to kill me, simply because of politics,’ he told her. ‘I had always served the Empire faithfully, and yes, I have not always triumphed, but the Empire was all I ever cared about. He cast me off. He let them take me. Then, when I was caught in Myna, he took it all back. He gave me back my rank and my place, and said he needed me again, but not to serve the Empire, just for his own private schemes.’ The rush of emotion he felt now putting it all into words thoroughly shocked him. ‘And do you know what? He got on my nerves. All the things I had done for him, that at the time I thought I had been doing for the Empire. All those muddied waters, the children I killed and the friends I betrayed, and was it for Empire, or just for Reiner? I’d never know. I’d only know that Empire’s good and general’s ambition were not the same thing any more. And he sat there, taking it all back and about to give me orders, and I just couldn’t take any more of him. And so I did it, and I defy anyone to honestly claim they wouldn’t have done the same. He was an irritating man.’
General Brugan’s mouth twitched just the once.
‘I killed Colonel Latvoc as well,’ Thalric added, as though this was some obscure mitigation.
The woman’s hand waved, consigning Latvoc to the oubliette of history. ‘And you really expect us to believe you did it all for the Empire?’
‘Not for a moment,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t make it any less true.’
‘You’re a presumptuous man. For the Empire? Most would be glad enough to do it for a superior officer, for their general, for their own self-interest, for the Emperor even. The Empire is a large master to claim.’
‘That is why it is fit to be served,’ replied Thalric. The evident sincerity in his own tone surprised him.
The woman stood up, still looking at him.
He shrugged again. ‘What do you want from me? You may as well just take it. I’m in no position to stop you, whoever you are.’
‘I will have to think about what I want from you,’ she said, and stepped neatly from the room, leaving him for the guards to manhandle away. Only later, after he had been cast back into his cell, did some thought of who she might be occur to him.
It had been a long night, and sleep was slow in coming. Tisamon suspected that he was staving it off because of the unsettling dreams. In his dreams he saw Laetrimae in all her riddled detail. That was all the dream consisted of. He was made to stare and stare at her despoiled flesh, her hybrid carapace and the constant piercings of the vines. He was a prisoner even in sleep now, and the blood he shed in the fighting pits was more wholesome than the sight of that mangled but undying cadaver.
The failure of all our kinden. Laetrimae and he, they were well matched in that. They had both led ruined lives, bitter ones, twisting inwards and inwards until they stood face to face in this sunless cell. The only thing that stood between them was five hundred years of torment, but he felt as though he was rapidly catching her up.
They brought Thalric back to the cells eventually. The Wasp had no words for him, although his skin looked as intact as it had done when he was dragged away. Thalric could make out the long scar that Tynisa had given him in Helleron, but it was only one amongst so many. The world had done its best to kill Thalric. And he has survived, for this?
Ah, Tynisa. And was she captured yet? Dead yet? And, if not, then surely the sands were running out on her. She would come stalking into the palace to find her father, but she was not skilled enough, as Tisamon well knew, to survive it. He had taught her all he could, but it was an errand he himself would have died in attempting.