When it was done, he felt that he had vomited something up, purged himself painfully of a corruption that would only well up again in time.
He took it down to show the landlord, and the man and his daughter both stared at it for a long time.
‘I can’t look at it,’ his landlord admitted at last, still staring. ‘What is it?’
Raullo could only shrug.
‘Take it away,’ the man insisted, but he stopped Raullo when the artist tried to leave. ‘Hammer and tongs, what have you done?’
He hung it up in the taverna’s taproom two days later. He claimed he could not stop thinking about it. He even bought Raullo more canvas, without being asked.
Two days later the landlord knocked at the door of the garret. ‘Mummers, come out. There’s someone here.’ His voice sounded strained.
Raullo put his head round the door blearily — late rising and wine were two habits, at least, that had survived the ending of the war. ‘What is it?’
‘Someone wants to see you.’ There was a warning note in the taverner’s tone. ‘He wants to buy your painting.’
The taproom was silent, when Raullo descended. Those few drinkers still present would not look at him.
‘You are the artist?’ The man at the bar had been staring at his painting, but now he turned. The captain’s rank badge on his uniform flashed as it caught the sun.
‘Yes, sir,’ Raullo breathed raggedly. Everyone knew the correct way to address Wasps these days.
‘How much?’ the Wasp asked him. And Raullo was about to refuse to sell, or say something even more rash, but he looked the man in the face and saw what he had missed the first time: that gaunt, hollow expression about the eyes. Here was a man, of no matter what kinden, who had seen enough of what the artist had seen to understand.
Raullo named a sum.
Eujen Leadswell
When he awoke, there was a hand in his that he knew.
She screamed when he squeezed it, for all that it was a faint and pitiful motion, and was across the room from him, shaking and choking, staring at him as though. .
As though I’ve come back from the dead.
The eyepatch suits her. Such a random thought, at such a moment.
Later on she would tell him everything: how they were now in the Sarnesh Foreigners’ Quarter, which was thronging with Collegiate expatriates and Mynan exiles, all agitating to take back their own and each other’s cities; how Castre Gorenn was now calling herself the Collegiate Retaliatory Army, and she wasn’t the only one. She would tell him how the Mantids of the forest — the Netheryon it was now — had suffered some kind of radical change of policy, and were now negotiating with the Sarnesh high command.
She would explain how the Sarnesh had chased off the Imperial Eighth, but got a bloody nose in the bargain, and how a new force of Wasps appearing from Helleron had led to a complex chess game between the Ants and the Empire which neither side was ready to bring to an endgame, especially now that fighting had erupted between the Wasps and the Spiders down along the Silk Road. Seldis was ablaze, they said.
And about the raids, of course: villages not far from Sarn that had been found empty, with not a witness, not a body, only disturbed earth — so that people were talking about some terrible new Imperial weapon, save that some scouts had found Wasp camps similarly deserted.
And, at last, she would tell him that he had been lost to the world for almost three tendays, while the Instar fought against the injury within him, although she would never tell him how she had despaired, back in Collegium, and had abandoned him. And she would tell him of Averic, and Gerethwy, and all their other friends who had not left Collegium. And she would tell him that Stenwold Maker himself was believed dead, though nobody would admit to having seen a corpse. There would come a time for all these revelations.
But, for now. .
‘Hello, the Antspider.’ His voice sounded faint in his own ears.
‘Hello, Chief Officer Eujen.’ Her smile seemed the most fragile thing he had ever seen, himself included. ‘Where the pits have you been, eh?’
The Others
Across the Lowlands and the Empire and beyond, cracks had begun to show.
Tiny fissures, hairline fractures in stone, like the unexpected gap that those students had crossed to escape the doomed College. But they were deep. Look down into that sliver of abyss, and there might be distant lights, movement.
Sometimes the cracks were more than that, chasms rupturing wide into caves, the earth abruptly hollow. . and then things came out.
They took the living and the dead. They left no bodies. They cared nothing for Empire or Lowlands, Apt or Inapt.
They had been away a long time, but they had not forgotten.