That took her by surprise. 'When?'
'In Myna, for example.'
'Sten, they nearly killed me there as a traitor.'
He smiled slightly at that. 'Same here … and with death, it's all about the "nearly". The way I hear it, you finally got their rebellion inspired to the point where they could throw off the Empire.'
'It wasn't like that,' hearing in her voice an echo of his own words.
'Tell that to my agents. Tell that to the Mynans. Che …' Staring at his hands as he always did when he sought inspiration. 'You need something to do …' One hand rose, quickly, to cut off her objection. 'I know, I know it won't stitch the wound, and it won't make everything better, just to be doing something, but you need time to heal, and at the moment it's just you and the wound, and nothing else. I have a job I need doing, and you need something to do — and you're good at it.' When she just stared at him he continued, 'I need an ambassador. An official ambassador representing Collegium, bearing the seal of the Assembly and everything.'
For a moment she continued to stare, then she laughed at him incredulously. 'You can't be serious.'
'Why not? You've already proven your worth: in Myna, in Solarno, in Sarn. This isn't just Uncle Sten finding jobs for his family. You've shown you're more than equal to the task, and-'
'And it would give me something to do,' she finished sourly. 'And where, pray?' A thought struck her. 'The Commonweal?'
'Not the Commonweal,' he said. 'We're being … very careful there. They're a strange lot, up north. They don't really seem to understand yet why ambassadors are necessary. We may even have to buy into their "kin-obligate" business, not that we really understand it.' He waved his hand impatiently. 'No, it's a place called Khanaphes.'
She stared at him, which he interpreted, incorrectly, as ignorance.
'The Solarnese know a path to reach it. It's east of the Exalsee, a long way off any Collegiate trade route.' He left the appropriate pause before revealing, 'A Beetle-kinden city, Che.'
Since her return from Tharn she had been deep in the old tomes of the Moth-kinden. She had been immersing herself in the world that the revolution had shattered, in an attempt to find some cure for her own affliction. In the very oldest of the books and scrolls remaining to the College, amid the most impenetrable shreds of ancient history, there had been a city of that name. It was a relic of the forgotten world that the Beetles had shrugged off in order to become what they were now.
'Think about it, please.' Stenwold took her silence for reluctance. He wanted to tell her that it was a golden opportunity, that she should look to her own future, capitalize on the respect she had won in the war. He wanted to tell her, in short, that no mourning could be for ever. He knew better than to say it. 'Just think about it. You are a student of the College after all, and the possibilities for scholarship alone are-'
'I'll think about it,' she said, a little harshly, and he nodded, standing up to go. 'Another thing,' she began, her voice sounding strained. 'You …' She paused, gathered her courage together. 'Please tell the new man about the doors again. He forgets.'
Stenwold stared at her, a welter of different emotions momentarily at war across his broad face.
'It's not just me … it's … I'm thinking about Arianna as well.' Che's voice shook under the sheer humiliation of having to say it.
'Of course I will,' he said. 'Of course. I'll have a word with him when I go back downstairs.'
The expedition was approved by the Assembly, despite anything that Broiler and his supporters could say against it. The Town vote, comprising the merchants and magnates, scoffed at the expense, but the Gown vote of the College masters was mostly for it, and Drillen's promise to secure funding without troubling either College or Assembly coffers sealed the matter neatly. There was no suggestion that the proposal had been stage-managed from the start.
The very night of the Assembly meeting, however, found a clerk working late. Drillen was a rigorous employer who demanded results from the least of his underlings, so candlelight in the late evenings was nothing unusual. This clerk, a young man who had hoped to make more of himself, and had lived beyond his means, was just finishing his last missive. The letters seemed nonsense, strings of meaningless babble, but an informed eye would have deciphered them as:
Urgent. Codeword: 'Yellowjacket'. You told me to keep an eye on all dealings of Stenwold Maker, so this should interest you: the expedition being launched to Canafes (sp?) is not as it seems. JD and SM met twice beforehand re: this matter. Unusual secrecy. Believe JD and SM have their own purposes aside from those stated. Thought you would appreciate knowing.
He folded the note over, and went over to his rack of couriers. Drillen used these various insects as missivecarriers across the city. They rattled and buzzed in their tubes, each tube with its label to show what place the creature was imprinted on. The clerk, whose responsibility these carrier-creatures were, selected one carefully: a fat, furry-bodied moth. It bumbled out of its tube and crouched on his desk, cleaning its antennae irritably as he secured the message to its abdomen. He had no idea where it went, or to whom, save that it would not be the man who had originally recruited him into this double-dealing. He only knew that the insect would be returned safe, along with a purse of money, to his house. This told him two things: that his shadowy benefactors were wealthy, and that they knew where he lived.
The insect whirred angrily off into the night, swooping low over the streetlamps but impelled by an inescapable instinct to return home. Before morning the Rekef operatives in Collegium, placed there with exquisite care after the close of the war, had something new to think about, and other, grander, messengers were soon winging their way east.
Four
She was dreaming, and she knew she was dreaming. The problem was that it was his dream. Worse still, she knew that the things that she was witnessing through his eyes were real.
Her mind was full of chanting voices, overlapping and blurring together. She heard no distinct words, just the ebb and flow of the sounds interfering with each other until it was like a great tide, rolling in towards her endlessly.
And she saw robed shapes …
She saw robed shapes. They were atop a mountain, and the air around them was bending and fragmenting under the strain of what they were doing. She could not tell which one of them was Achaeos. Because it was also her dream she rushed from one to another, to find him. She never could. Their pale, grey Moth faces, their blank white eyes, were all transfigured, so that each face looked the same. The ritual had gripped them with an identical hand. She shouted at them and tried to shake them. She warned them that he would die, if they kept tearing at the world like this. Because it was his dream, and she had not been present, they ignored her.
She knew that she was running out of time. It was not his time, not the time remaining until the barbed peak of the ritual, when the power they invoked would come thundering down through the city of Tharn, and his fragile body would be unable to take the strain. Instead it was the time until the other arrived.
It had always been there beside them, although she had been blind to it for so long. From the very first moment their minds had touched, he venturing among the ghost-infested trees, she imprisoned in the hold of a Wasp heliopter, it had been with them. Now she felt it rising from beneath them, through the warrened rock of the mountain, through the very weave of the world. It was surging upwards at a fierce, relentless pace, but it was still a good distance off because it was pursuing from five hundred years ago.