Stenwold shrugged. 'The city of Khanaphes is a living, breathing city, rather than something consigned to the histories of the Inapt. That's no great surprise, is it? After all, the Moths left us with only the scraps from their table, academically speaking. No wonder, five centuries on, we're still rediscovering things that they have known all along. As for what you can mean with your "Something must be done" then it's simply one more field of study for the College geographers, unless you're now proposing going to war to wipe it off the map. It has been only recently added by the cartographers. The paint is probably still wet.' It was now two tendays after the incident at the mill, and Stenwold was feeling, at least, a bit more rested. Any good humour these days seemed to be fleeting, so he made any use of it he could.
'Sophist.' Drillen gave him a grin that was surprisingly boyish. 'You know why this is important.'
'Do I?'
'It's all the fault of the Solarnese, of course, all those squabbling little provincials huddled around the Exalsee – why are you laughing now?'
'Those "squabbling little provincials" have been teaching our artificers things we wouldn't have worked out for another ten years,' Stenwold said mildly. 'But do go on. You were blaming them for something.'
One of Drillen's servants arrived just then, having finally tracked down the right vintage in the Assembly's cellars, and the two statesmen took a moment to sip it appreciatively. 'The Solarnese,' said Drillen eventually, 'with their stupid names with all those extra vowels… what was that ambassador they sent? Oh yes, he wrote it as Caidhreigh, but then when you introduced him it turned out he was called Cathray. Anyway, everyone seems agreed now that they're some kind of stable halfbreed stock, Ant-kinden and Beetle-kinden combined. You can see it in their faces, and most especially you can see it in their Art, after we finally convinced them to talk about it. They're like those other fellows you were always banging on about.'
'Myna,' Stenwold agreed.
'Exactly. But they're obviously no relation because of their skin colour, and so the ethnologists started asking "Where did they come from?"'
'Nobody cared when it was just Myna,' Stenwold said.
'Two reasons, old soldier.' Drillen enumerated them on his chubby fingers. 'One: public attitudes were different back then. Two: Myna's within spitting distance of an Ant city-state – and not so very far from Helleron. No mysteries there, then. There are no Beetle-kinden around the Exalsee, and yet the ethnologists are adamant in their conclusions, so whence the Solarnese? Well, of course, we ask them that question, when politeness permits, and they show us their maps, and tell us their earliest word-of-mouth records say their ancestors came from Khanaphes. The Beetle-kinden city of Khanaphes, no less, just as some of our ancient-history fellows have been banging on about for ages. So now every scholar in that field is publishing his flights of utter fancy, saying that we came from there, that they came from here, all manner of lunacy. It makes you wish the Moths had been just a little more forthcoming with their menials, before the revolution. If there's one thing a man of the College hates it's feeling ignorant.'
'You are still a scholar at heart then?' Stenwold said. 'That amazes me. I happen to agree with you, but I'm surprised that a man of importance like yourself can still find time to concern himself with such abstruse academic matters.'
'There is more at stake here than scholarship,' Drillen said fiercely. 'You must be aware that people are looking at the world in a different way now, after the war. For me, I'd just as soon everyone went back to not really caring what lay east of Tark and north of Helleron, despite all the trouble that attitude has caused us, but it's too late now. Go into any taverna in the city and you'll hear scribes and guardsmen and manual labourers all talking about places like Maynes and the Commonweal and bloody Solarno, as though they were planning on going there tomorrow.' Drillen was becoming quite excited now. Stenwold sipped his wine and watched him with interest.
'And the romances!' the fat man continued. 'Have you any idea how many talentless clerks are writing "true" romances boasting of their supposed travels in distant lands? And still the printing houses can't get them to the booksellers fast enough to satisfy public demand. Everyone wants to read about foreigners, and I'll wager that not one of those people writing about them has so much as stepped outside Collegium's walls. It's all lies, but people are gobbling it whole. Foreign is fashionable. People are falling over themselves to be more misinformed than their neighbours about distant lands. And then there's Master Broiler.'
Stenwold pressed his lips together, locking away his automatic reaction to the very name. The fact that Broiler had always been his vocal political opponent was something Stenwold could live with: such free debate was after all the cornerstone of Collegium governance. However, he had his own suspicions about precisely who had bought the man's loyalties.
'What is Broiler doing now?'
'Courting public support, as usual, by pandering to the latest fashion.' Drillen reached into his robes and came out with a smudgily printed volume whose title proudly proclaimed Master Helmess Broiler, His Atlas of the Known World and His Account of His Travels Therein.
'The shameless fraud,' growled Stenwold, the historian in him genuinely shocked.
'Quite,' Drillen agreed. 'He's taken every damn map he could copy from the library, put them all together in no particular order, even the ones that are obviously made-up or wrong, and called it "The World". And he's written about his incredible adventures, this man who would get lost just walking from his house to the marketplace. I swear that Helleron appears in three different places in his so-called "Known World", and on at least one of the maps he's got the sea and the land the wrong way round. And you know what?'
'People are reading it?' Stenwold said.
'People are lapping it up,' lamented Drillen. 'They think Broiler's the best thing since the revolution. Stenwold, it's time for Lots soon enough, meaning all change at the Assembly. We have to do something before then.'
'We?'
'I have to do something,' Drillen corrected, 'and, unless you want to see Broiler as the new Speaker, so do you.'
'Where do I come into this, then?' Stenwold asked, thinking again about the Vekken and his final words. I am fighting for our future and my footing is being eroded like sand shifted by the sea.
'The people like you, Stenwold.'
'But the Assembly loathes the sight of me,' Stenwold pointed out. 'I remind them of how they were wrong.' It was a point of pride with him.
'Yes, but the people like you. Everyone out on the street there remembers how you won the war. They fought alongside you. They watched you go out and send the Wasp army packing. People – I'm talking about that majority without political aspirations – respect you. That's one reason why I'm going to be seen shaking hands with you in as many places as possible.'
'Why should I prostitute myself like that?'
Drillen's grin resurfaced. 'Because I make sure that you get what you want. I was almost the only person backing your Vekken initiative, when you put it forward, but I wrestled enough support to push it through. You're not as detached as you pretend, old soldier. You don't give a fig for power, but there are things you want done, and for that you need people like me. Which is convenient, because people like me need people like you in order to defeat people like Helmess Broiler.'