Savrat came in just then, looking surly, with drinks. Arianna accepted one gladly, and Tynan sipped his thoughtfully. Savrat took the opportunity to stand next to the Spider girl, with a proprietorial air. No doubt he would be expecting a commendation for this.
‘Who were you working under, at Collegium?’ Tynan asked. An odd memory had come to him. Was there not some Wasp officer who had been disgraced there? What was his name?
‘Lieutenant Graf, sir,’ Arianna replied promptly, and Tynan relaxed. Whatever name he was thinking of, that was not it.
He yawned and stretched mightily, trying to rid himself of the last vestiges of sleep. ‘Well, tell me what cracks we can put the prybar into, Arianna,’ he continued. ‘And then let us get this siege over with as swiftly as possible.’ He upended his goblet of wine, draining it with relish.
Something cold touched him on the side of the neck even as he swallowed. It was recognizable enough that he kept the goblet held up, quite still, until she removed it from his hand.
Major Savrat was slumped on the spot where he had been standing. She had driven her blade into his throat with a brutal efficiency. Now that same blade was at Tynan’s own neck, still gory with the major’s blood. He looked into her eyes, expecting to see the certainty of his death there.
He saw almost blank fear instead: she was terrified. In a way that scared him more than seeing eyes of a cold killer. If an assassin had not killed him yet, there was still hope, but this nervous girl might stab at any moment out of sheer fright.
He began to move his hands very slowly upwards, but she jabbed him, drawing blood.
‘Keep your palms out and away from me,’ she stammered. ‘I’ve worked with Wasps, General.’
The knife she had was very keen. He felt a trail of warm blood from the tiny puncture on his neck.
‘So what now?’ he asked, slowly and carefully.
‘I really am Rekef,’ she got out. ‘Or at least I was. Only I left them. I betrayed them.’
‘That explains a great deal,’ Tynan said, trying to sound amiable and failing. ‘Major Savrat deserves his fate for his poor intelligence.’
‘I don’t imagine Major Thalric bothered filing a report about me before his own superiors tried to kill him,’ Arianna explained. He could see in her eyes the madly whirling thought: What do I do now? ‘Do you want to know why I have not simply killed you?’
‘The question has crossed my mind,’ Tynan replied. ‘I should have seen this coming. For Spider-kinden this tactic is standard, to try for the enemy leader – cut off the army’s head.’
‘But it works,’ she said. They had both remained almost motionless for a very long time, and one or other of them would not be able to keep it up much longer. The slightest move would destroy her advantage, and he would then be able to kill her with his sting.
‘It doesn’t work. The Commonwealers found that out years ago. An imperial army has a chain of command. If you kill me, I have capable colonels, they have experienced majors. Though I say it myself, a dead general causes minimal disruption in a well-run army.’
The knife twitched again and cut another little mark beside the first, moved by nothing more than her nerves.
He hissed involuntarily. How fast can I grab for the blade? How good are her reflexes?
‘This seems an odd display of bravado,’ he got out. Should I hope that a servant or one of Savrat’s people may come in? But they would be too surprised to act straight off, and if she kept her head she could still kill me in an instant.
‘Stenwold wouldn’t want me to kill you,’ she remarked pensively.
‘The Beetle general.’
‘Stenwold Maker,’ she replied softly. ‘He is a fat, bald, clumsy old man. Also, he is mine.’
The third cut on his neck was due to his own surprised reaction. He was becoming impatient, his Wasp temper rising, in a situation where impatience could prove fatal. ‘So, what?’ he demanded.
She doesn’t know.
But she was already saying, ‘I had wanted… wanted to try to talk to you, to convince you…’
He opened his mouth to say something, and just then a lieutenant of the watch put his head into the tent, mouth open to speak.
Arianna stabbed, even as Tynan tried to hurl himself off the bed.
Twenty-Eight
I can wait no longer.
Tynisa had been in the imperial city now for days enough to know that no magical voice would solve this one for her. She had distributed her affections among the groping hands of a half-dozen well-placed Wasps, each believing her a slave, or a whore, or a Rekef agent, depending on what role would best unlock their confidences. She could easily have brought Stenwold back a hundred of the Empire’s most guarded secrets.
But it was not enough to get her what she wanted, because she had run into an unexpected barrier. The Empire survived off its slaves, the living produce of its foreign conquests. Everywhere throughout the Empire all the menial work was performed by them. There was only one place where that was not the case: the imperial palace in Capitas, where Tisamon was currently being held.
She could not get inside. None of her besotted Wasps could get her in, for those very few slaves of other kinden that lived within the palace were there for specific reasons. There was no room for random and unaccompanied foreigners in this very heart of the Empire. So, unless she put herself forward as a pit-fighter, and thus sold herself into real chains, she could not hope to enter the palace with the Empire’s consent.
She had considered the situation very thoroughly, and she had no option but to assume that Tisamon wanted to be freed. Therefore if Tisamon desired to be free, yet was not free, it could only be because the pit-fighters’ cells held him so tightly he could not escape. In those circumstances she would become as much of a prisoner as he was.
So she would therefore rely on old-fashioned methods: the resources of her mother’s and father’s kin.
Tonight she intended assaulting the Emperor’s residence to get her father back.
Reaching the palace through the dark streets was challenge enough, for Capitas was an ordered city and only Wasps were allowed about after nightfall. It was a well-lit city, too, with gas lamps flaring at each street corner, so that the Emperor could look down after sunset and see himself at the heart of an almost geometric constellation.
She stalked the palace from the shadows, a tiny hunter approaching her monumental prey unseen. The nightly patrols and watchmen, with their pikes and lanterns, did not see her. She drew upon the Art inherent in her blood until she was right beside the palace walls.
There was too much light here, but she had no time to catch breath. The main door was impossible, but the Wasps erected their public buildings so that they rose in tiers, each succeeding step of the ziggurat narrower than the last. Somewhere up there, there must be an unguarded way in. She had to believe that.
What would Tisamon do in the same circumstances? And the answer was simple. He would just go, without all this deliberation. He would act.
She went skimming up the wall and on to the next tier in moments, her Art keeping her hands and feet close to the immaculately dressed stone, up the wall and over it, and down half that distance to the ground on the other side. It was a garden enclosed in a walled courtyard, she found: a low assemblage of shrubs and ferns that must be monstrously difficult to keep properly watered. There were doors at the far end of it and she skulked towards them.
Locked, of course, so she must still keep going upwards. Someone was bound to have left a balcony door open, a window unshuttered. She staved off the thought that the airborne Wasps would not necessarily lessen their security at a higher altitude, and that Tisamon’s cell would be deep below ground, and therefore that she was getting ever further away from him.