‘You’re going to tell me what I know, now, are you?’ Laszlo locked eyes with the man, and mostly because he felt that the layout of their little table had changed slightly. The space between him and te Liss was greater. She had shifted to little closer to te Riel.
‘Boys,’ she said, holding out her hands. ‘Forget who’s not here. Grevaris is gone, who ran that brothel west of the Venodor. Just upped sticks and left. And I hear that clothier’s on Habomil is closed now, that I always — well, probably we all reckoned was a front for someone.’ She looked far more serious than she usually did, glancing from one face to the next. ‘Tervo’s gone, too — that fishmonger, remember? Left unpaid bills and a job lot of old fish.’
‘People are getting out of the game,’ said te Riel stiffly. There was the echo of a tremor in his voice, though, and the same feeling was running through all of them, of thin ice, of sands running down, storms on the move.
Breighl sighed deeply. ‘Te Rorvo — Tervo — was fished out of the harbour last night. I heard it from the militia. Whoever did him in didn’t even bother to weight the body.’ His gaze passed over the three Fly-kinden, judging them. ‘But I suspect one of you knew that already.’
Te Riel flushed although, in all honesty, Brieghl’s eyes had not especially fallen on him. ‘I am not,’ he insisted in a hushed voice, ‘for the Empire. I am a freelancer.’
‘Like all of us,’ said Breighl. ‘Like Tervo, for that matter. I reckon the freelancers are getting out of the city, those that can. For those that know too much… Solarno isn’t a city for freelancers any more.’
‘And yet here we all are,’ Laszlo finished for him. ‘True colours yet, anyone?’ He pinned te Riel with his glare. ‘Hover-fly?’
The man met and matched his hostility. ‘I am going to gut you one of these days.’
‘Enough,’ te Liss snapped. ‘No more of this.’ She pursed her lips for a moment. ‘We all know what’s happening. Let’s not bring it on any sooner by fighting. We all know that we’ll be at daggers drawn soon enough. I don’t care whether te Riel’s with the Empire or not. Not yet. Not now.’
Laszlo reached for her hand beneath the table, as he had sometimes before, but that extra distance between them suddenly seemed insurmountable. He felt she was drawing further away, even while sitting there before his eyes.
‘What I hear,’ said Breighl, in a overly casual tone, ‘is that the Empire might just be the least of it.’ He was watching them all carefully again, but they all did that when ostentatiously dropping a titbit of information into the ring. ‘I hear about interests from across the Exalsee, instead. Chasme has been getting very bold since their Iron Glove took over. And there’s the Spiderlands…’ He finished up looking directly at Laszlo.
‘What? I don’t work for the Spiderlands.’ The reversal of fortunes made him indignant.
‘Oh, no — just for some Aristoi family or other. I mean, who could work for the whole Spiderlands?’ te Riel put in.
‘I’m…’ A freelancer, but of course everyone said that, and nobody believed it, for all it must be true in many cases. ‘I’m not for the Spiders,’ he finished lamely. ‘Believe me, out of anyone who might have eyes on Solarno, I’m not for them.’
There was a shout from outside, and a Fly-kinden woman popped her head around the door, passing a quick word to someone at a nearby table. The Solarnese mob who had been drinking there bolted up immediately and were out of the door on the instant, and within moments the entire clientele of the Taverna te Remi had gone after them. Nobody knew why or what was happening, whether invasion or a militia raid or who knew what, but everyone was so jumpy that they were cramming the door in moments, clawing for the outside.
Two streets away, in a little square within sight of the Corta chambers, Laszlo and the others alit on the rooftops to watch a hanging.
Hanging was for traditional Spider-kinden executions, and Solarno was a Spider city at heart: a dozen militia in their plated white leathers had strung up a halfbreed in plain view. Spider-kinden, of course, could not fly, but it turned out that their victim could, and in the end the spectators were treated to the hideously incongruous spectacle of three soldiers hanging off the wretch’s legs like men trying to wrestle a kite down in strong winds. Their weight told, though, and abruptly the man’s wings were gone, and the snap of his neck was audible across the square.
Breighl was bold enough to make enquiries, trusting to his militia contacts to shield him. The dead man had been a spy, he was told. A spy for whom? Nobody seemed to know.
The crowed was dispersing rapidly, most especially those who had come out from the taverna. The square seemed an unhealthy place to be, and Laszlo looked about for te Liss, reaching for her arm. ‘Come on,’ he told her, envisaging a quick jaunt back to his lodgings: wine and safety and an attempt to forget.
That distance between them was still there, though, and a moment later she was inexplicably with te Rieclass="underline" on his arm, an inseparable part of him, as the man looked smugly over at Laszlo.
The Empire, Laszlo thought numbly. The Empire’s coming. A city-wide tragedy for Solarno, a personal tragedy for himself. Liss, like all freelancers, wanted to end up on the right side, after all.
Six
There was a wayhouse west of Skiel that was more than it seemed — not one of those disapproved-of-but-tolerated places run by the Way Brothers, but a proper army place, a regular stopover for soldiers and messengers and Imperial officials. Since the place had found its new purpose, just before the war with the Lowlands started, hundreds of Wasp-kinden had passed through and never realized that it was a trap.
The trap had remained unsprung all those years, until now.
When the Empire had mounted its invasion of the Commonweal it had gained the attention of the Moth-kinden in a distant kind of way. Most of the Skryres, the arch-magicians who ruled the Moths, cared nothing for the newly ascendant Apt race, but there had been a few concerned enough about the future to begin planning. Commonweal slaves had flowed into the Empire by the thousand, and some were recruited by the Arcanum, and some had already been agents, willing to risk the brutal life of a slave out of loyalty to their shadowy masters.
Before the war, Xaraea had worked tirelessly to prepare a few fallback places like this, taking her masters’ vague mandates and making them into hard reality. It had been foreseen, for example, that the Moths might one day need to capture an Imperial officer of some standing.
Esmail had made good time from the mountains of Tharn. He had not travelled like this for many years, but the habit had not left him. He passed through the countryside — whether Lowlander or Alliance or Imperial — like a ghost, taking what he needed, sleeping unnoticed in sheds and barns and warehouses, or out under the stars. The spring was cool, but the mountains had been colder.
He rode on an army automotive for much of the way once he had crossed the Imperial border: nothing but a ghost, unseen, unsuspected, listening to the idle chatter of the Consortium merchants and their slaves. They spoke of prospects and ambitions, the fortunes of common enemies, the free men and the slaves exchanging banter with a familiarity that they would have curbed instantly had any officer come near. They spoke of home and families, too, and when they did, Esmail stopped listening.
He did not know whether the Moths would keep their promise, to preserve his wife and children. He did not even know if they were capable of it but, if they had the power, they were still a subtle and treacherous people. They would dredge up crimes of his ancestors a thousand years old and call any punishment they exacted on him mere justice.
No choice, though. Not with her turning up without warning like that. Had he known what was coming, he might have risked the cold and the hunters to try and get his family away, but he had never been a seer. His magical talents lay in other directions.