Empire in Black and Gold (46 page)

‘She is?’

‘The Butterfly-kinden . . . it’s difficult to explain. Enclaves of them live within the bounds of the Commonweal, but they’re not really a part of our world.’ They came and went as they pleased, he recalled. He had never even seen one close to before, there were so few of them. They wanted for little, did not trade or toil. They had no need to. From the moment they were weaned from their mother’s milk the sun and their Art were enough to sustain them. They lived to dance, to sing and rejoice. They were special, life’s own chosen, and in the Commonweal they were respected. They went out into the world to perform, and for the love of performing, and they were gifted with fabrics and gems and applause. If they lived also beyond the Commonweal’s borders, he had not known it.

Except that those borders had changed. Some band of Butterfly-kinden somewhere must have greeted the dawn only to discover they were under the Empire’s shadow now.

He had heard others of his race speak about their fascinating beauty, their ethereal charms, but he had never credited it. Now he found his mind drawn back and back again to Grief in Chains. It was true she was new to him, so briefly arrived in his life, but as he sat here in darkness now, he felt the loss of her colours.

She had, he was beginning to realize, done something to him, touched him in some way. She had been trapped in chains, a slave. He had reached out to her. That had been consent enough for her to put her mark on him.

And Che was jealous, which amused him. His smile regained some of its life then, and Che remarked, ‘Now you’re laughing at me.’

‘Not at all,’ he said insincerely. ‘You’re right: we hardly spoke.’ But they had spoken. Whilst Che had dozed, as only a Beetle could in that thundering machine, Salma and Grief had sat close together. She had tried to paint her home for him but, depicted in her colours, he could not place it. Nowhere in his Commonweal was as bright as that. Afterwards, he had told her about himself: his family and his Kin-obligate, and his service to Stenwold.

He had promised that he would help her if he could, when he could not even help himself. He had somehow the feeling that this was an oath the universe would exact on him to fulfil. His people believed in oaths just like the Mantis-kinden, with whom they shared many traditions. Oaths were magic.

There was a rattle at the door, and he heard Che start up suddenly. The light that came in was cold lamplight, and two soldiers were silhouetted against it.

‘You,’ said one, pointing at Che. ‘Here, now.’

They took her to a room which had been some man’s study once. There was a large window shuttered on the east wall, and there were bare shelves and patches on the walls where tapestries had hung. Any original finery had been pirated for other rooms until the one adornment left to it was an ornate table. Behind the table stood Thalric, dressed only in a long tunic, with a knife but no sword at his belt. Her brief moment of hope died as she recalled that the Wasp-kinden never went unarmed, that their hands alone were weapons.

‘Leave us,’ he directed, even as the guards thrust her within. They backed out and closed the door on her. Thalric remained standing, arms folded, and he eyed her vacantly for a moment, in her grimy and haggard state. There seemed something different about him, some new tension or edge. He was clearly in the hold of some crisis that had little to do with her.

‘What do you want from me?’ she said, trying to find some courage in herself. Her voice quavered. It had been a long journey, a long time spent in the dark cell. She was hungry and tired and frustrated, not in the mood for this encounter, not remotely ready. She had an uneasy feeling, even then, that she did not have the emotional reserves necessary to deal with him – nor he with her. Still, he did not seem to register her defiance.

‘I’m here to listen to you,’ he said shortly.

‘Couldn’t sleep then? Do you want me to tell you a story?’ It was defiance born of a lack of any hope. Some part of her wanted it all over. She heard herself say the mocking words and braced herself, but he did not rise to them. He seemed curiously distracted, his mind partly elsewhere.

‘A story? Quite,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me I haven’t given you enough time to prepare.’ He sounded annoyed, as though
she
had summoned
him
here inconveniently in the middle of the night.

She folded her own arms, unconsciously mimicking his stance. ‘I have nothing to say. I’ve already told you, I won’t betray my friends.’

‘On the contrary, you have a great deal to say. Let’s start with Stenwold Maker’s plans, for example.’ Now he was finally rising to her words, but his ire was fuelled from something within.

What’s eating at you, Captain?

‘He never told me any of them,’ she said. ‘For this very reason, I suspect. He didn’t tell any of us and I wasn’t even supposed to be leaving Collegium. If your thugs hadn’t burst into our house that night I’d still be there.’
Still be whining about not going, too, I suppose. Oh, what I didn’t know, back then.

‘What a loss that would be. And your companions, those that are still free – the Spider wench and the half-breed – you have a great deal to say about them, I imagine.’ He was leaning forward against the table, and she matched him across it, almost nose to nose. She had been a penned-up slave all day and she was not in the mood, whereas he was off balance already, and suddenly she found herself pushing.

‘You’ve found out as much as I could tell you,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you have agents at the College reporting back to you?’

‘Listen, girl, this is your one remaining chance to exercise your own free will in this business. Tell me what you know.’

‘What I
know?
I know some history, Captain, and applied mechanics, a little medicine and a bit of nature lore. I have nothing else to tell you.’ She could sense the coiled spring of his temper.

‘Miss Maker—’

‘What? I know they’re my friends, and they would help me if they could, and I hope they’re all right, and I’m glad you haven’t caught them because they’re my
friends
, and that’s how it is between friends. I care for them. I hope they care for me. That’s
friendship
.’

Some barb, some unknowing dart in her speech made him flinch as though she had drawn blood ‘Don’t play games with me, girl,’ he warned her. In a detached way she could see the anger rising in him was not anger focused on her, but had been in place before she was even brought in front of him. The entire conversation was taking second place to some other struggle in his mind. He had locked her up, then had her dragged here before him, and he wasn’t even paying proper attention save when some chance word got in the way of his thoughts.

‘Games? Who’s playing games? What’s this then, if not a game of yours?’ she got out. ‘I’m your prisoner. Am I supposed to forget that and just give you my life story? If anyone’s playing games it’s you, Captain. Your whole life must consist of them.’ She was stammering a little, choking on her own boldness. Something she had just said had touched a nerve, made him pause to think. He stared at her with almost desperate loathing.

She had taken enough. She could not stop herself. ‘What’s the matter, Captain?’ she asked, not quite believing that he was letting her get away with it. ‘Maybe you should tell me about it. Maybe that would help, because I have nothing to tell you.’

‘Now is a poor time to discover rebellion,’ he said, his voice taut.

‘Better now than not at all, I think—’

A muscle twitched in his face, and the table exploded. She was flung backwards across the room in a shower of wood shards, striking the wall hard enough to leave her breathless. She saw him stride towards her over the wreckage. The palms of his hands were black with soot, wispy with wood-smoke.

‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ he said, each word through clenched teeth.

‘You can’t blame me,’ she said, gasping, and knew he understood her but did not care.

‘And if I chose to take it out on you, who would stop me?’ he said. He was standing over her now, and his hands were still smoking.

‘What use would . . . what good would killing me do for your Empire?’ She had never been really afraid of him – not until now. He had spoken to her previously, and he had been civilized. Now that civility was gone from him. She peered into his Wasp soul with all its hard edges and hungry fires.

His eyes were so wide she could almost see his torment as a living thing. Sparks crackled across his fingers and she hid her face from them.

‘The Empire needs a happy Thalric more than an unhappy Thalric,’ he grated, each word snapped out with all the control he could muster. ‘And right now I think it might make me happier to make a corpse of a Beetle maid who will not
talk
.’

But he did not and, after a pause, she cautiously looked up at him. His face was still stern, remorseless, and there was no humour there when he said, ‘It is the scourge of my people, Miss Maker, this temper of ours. I have a stronger rein on it than most, but do not presume.’

With shaking hands she reached up, plucked a three-inch-long splinter from her hair. Her heart was still stuttering: he had been so close, was still so close to killing her. ‘Captain Thalric—’ She heard her voice shaking and hated herself for it, hated herself more for the next word. ‘Please listen to me. I don’t know anything you want to know. I don’t know Stenwold’s plans, or where he is now, or what he wants. I don’t know anything that can help you. Can’t you . . .’ She got a hold on herself before she actually said it.

As he watched, she rearranged her clothes, brushed the sharp flecks of wood from them. ‘Salma and I,’ she went on, her voice now almost steady, ‘we are just ordinary students of the Great College, and we have stumbled into something monstrous. What harm could we be to your Empire? You only . . . frustrate yourself, in this questioning. How would it hurt your Empire if you freed us, aside from saving it the cost of feeding us?’

He barked a laugh at that suggestion, but his face was still barren as the Dryclaw Desert, when she dared to look at it.

‘Miss Maker, you are Stenwold’s creature, and he is the Empire’s enemy. Whatever meagre help you could render to him, you would. Rather than let you loose to cause trouble I would have you killed without a thought. In fact, if there were even fifty-one out of a hundred parts of you that opposed the Empire I would thrust a knife beneath your chin rather than set you free.’ He turned away. ‘You are lucky, then, that you are still useful to us as a source of information.’

‘And after that?’ she said, forcing herself to her feet. ‘And what about after that? What hope have I then?’

At the word, ‘hope’ he laughed at her, shaking his head, half turning away, and the look on his face – of disdain, derision – was such that she attacked him.

She did not know how she did it, only that she believed him, then. She was a dead woman whether now or later, a woman totally without hope. Without any premeditation she went for his knife hilt and found her hand closed around it. Her other fist cracked against his jaw as she drew back to stab.

He had a hand on her knife wrist instantly, and for a second they swayed back and forth, as she used both hands to try and force the blade into him. He was far stronger than she was, however. She saw the muscles cord on his bare arms, and he was now pushing her back until she slammed into the wall. The knife fell from her fingers, ringing in her ears as it struck the floor, and he had a hand under her chin, where he had said he would stab her. She felt his thumb and fingers dig in there, and waited for the crackle and sear of the fire.

But it did not come. His temper, that had been only a scratch-depth from the surface a moment ago, had not stirred all this while. In fact, when she opened her eyes, he was even smiling slightly. She was horribly aware of how close he was to her, how strong.

‘Very good,’ he said, almost in a whisper. ‘And what then? My guards are outside the door. My people are all over the palace. My Empire
owns
this city. And what
hope
, you say? No hope whatsoever, even if you had it in you to kill me.’

‘Perhaps that’s all I hoped,’ she said, a whisper too, but there was something else in his eyes, now, and she wondered if she imagined that she saw respect there.

‘Hope only,’ he said, ‘that when we are done with you, the Empire can use one more live slave rather than one more dead Beetle. There is your
hope
, Miss Maker.’

‘Threats, still,’ she murmured.

He released her suddenly, as simply as that, reclaiming his knife from the floor and scabbarding it. ‘You’re right, of course,’ he said, the epitome of calm itself now. His demeanour admitted nothing of the smashed table, or her attack on him. ‘Threats oft repeated become dull edged with overuse. Enough threats, then. I’ll send you back to your cell now, and next time I call for you, I promise, there will be no threats.’

The guards took her back to the cell, where she found Salma sleeping fitfully, waking up and thrashing about, and then fighting for the blank respite of sleep again.

Tomorrow night they will do it
, she told herself.
I must be strong.

She wondered how strong she would have to be to resist the tortures of the Empire.
And I am such a very strong person, by nature. I have such famous reserves of strength and willpower
, she taunted herself bitterly.

She clutched at her knees and shivered, and could not sleep. When the tread of the guards outside signalled a new day, it gave her no joy, and when the vile food was passed in to them, she could not eat it.
When the night comes, they will come for me.

Salma tried to comfort her, but he had only hollow words. What could he say?

And, of course, they came for her in daylight. This was the Empire, and torturers were not skulking figures of moonlight and darkness but working men for the working day. She was hauled from Salma’s side in mid-morning, and she knew this time it would be different.