Empire in Black and Gold (49 page)

‘The more they tighten their grip on us,’ said Chyses, ‘the closer together they bring us.’ It was obviously a slogan that he was repeating. ‘This here is Toran Awe. She’s a sergeant-auxillian in the militia. Tell him.’

The Grasshopper-kinden gave Stenwold a brief bow. ‘There are not so many outlander prisoners being kept in the palace cells,’ she said. ‘Locals mostly, and anything else raises rumour. Three came in not long ago: a Beetle girl, a Commonweal Dragonfly and a dancer.’

‘I don’t know about the dancer, but the other two must be ours.’ Stenwold’s gaze twitched unwillingly to Achaeos, who was sitting cross-legged on a displaced block of masonry and staring straight back at him.

‘Then we can help you,’ Chyses said. ‘And you can help us. Because we need a rescue too.’

They had both ankles pinned down now, and one wrist, and she turned frantically to the man tugging at the buckle. She knew him: he was the man they had come to Myna with, the one Thalric had spoken to. Desperation brought his name to her, when nothing else could.

‘Aagen! You’re Aagen, aren’t you?’ She tried to keep her voice steady, instead hearing the ragged mess she made of it. He glanced at her briefly and pulled the strap tight.

‘Thalric said you were an . . . an artificer? Is that right? You’re not a soldier? Please listen to me. I’m an artificer. I studied mechanics. Please . . .’ She yanked at the strap but there was no give in it.

He was now giving her a pitying look. ‘Of
course
I’m an artificer,’ he said, and she went cold all over. Of course he was an artificer: for the Wasps, this was an artificer’s job – the same as repairing an automotive or making a pump, and no more or less worth the attention of a trained professional.

‘You’re going to . . . to torture me?’

He looked unhappy about it, but it was too small a concession to common humanity to do her any good. He was a Wasp of the Empire, and he was going to do it anyway, unhappy or not.

‘Good work, Aagen,’ said that hateful voice, as Thalric strode in and admired the handiwork. ‘I told you it would all come back to you.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

‘Oh cheer up.’ Thalric seemed to have abandoned his angst of the previous night. Now he was all energy. ‘You two can leave us,’ he told the attendant soldiers. ‘This is for our ears only.’

They looked a little put out at that. Perhaps they had been looking forward to the excruciation of a Beetle girl. Still, Thalric watched them stonily until they left, and then bolted the door behind them.

‘Thalric,’ Che’s voice was a little hoarse from the screaming, ‘you don’t have to do this.’

He cocked an eyebrow at her.

‘Thalric,
please
,’ she said. She could feel tears springing to her eyes. Aagen was – she shuddered – laying out a medical kit beside her, unrolling the pocketed strip of cloth to reveal the gleaming points of the probes and the clips and the scalpels. ‘Please don’t do this. You’re a . . . an intelligent man, a civilized man.’

Thalric was smiling at her now, in a terribly derisive way. ‘Has all that spirit dissipated through the drain in your cell, Miss Maker? What a loss that will be to humanity.’

‘Captain Thalric, this is . . . beneath you,’ she told him, but still her voice quavered, despite her best efforts.

‘So I shouldn’t use this expedience to get what I want from you?’

‘No . . . No . . .’

‘So you’re ready to talk?’

‘I . . .’ She swallowed. ‘Yes. Yes I’m ready.’

‘It’s a shame then that I’m no longer ready to listen,’ he told her. His eyes, above that smile, were ice. ‘Fire up your machine, Aagen.’

The artificer hesitated, just for a second, and for Che that meant a second more of freedom from pain and she could have blessed him for it. Then he strode across the room and started pulling levers. Somewhere below them there was a boiler room, where a head of steam had been got up some time before. The metal arms above her shuddered into life almost immediately with a great hiss and a rattle.

‘Louder!’ called Thalric. ‘I want to hear it roar!’

Aagen glanced at him wildly but did as he was bid, raising the pressure until Che would have had trouble answering any questions above it.
Maybe they just wanted to make her scream.

But that wasn’t Thalric’s way. She narrowed her eyes, watching him. He was oblivious to her, now beckoning Aagen over.

‘The time has come,’ she heard him say, ‘when I need your services, Aagen.’

The artificer glanced at their victim, but Thalric shook his head impatiently. ‘Not as a professional but as a loyal citizen of the Empire.’

Aagen liked that even less, from his expression, but Thalric was beckoning him over to the far end of the room, and he came when called. With the rumble of the steam engine and the ringing of the suspended tool-arms filling the room, Thalric bent close to him and spoke carefully and clearly. There were patches that Che could hear, but patches only. It was enough to set her mind racing even so.

‘I want you to find a place . . .’ she made out, followed by, ‘. . . must know. Then go to the . . . waiting for you . . . in chains . . .’ By now she was craning sideways, trying to squeeze every word she could from Thalric’s murmuring.

‘. . . no one, not even me . . . let you know, if I can . . . not then . . . self scarce.’

She realized that even if there was someone listening at the door, or even from behind some false panel in the walls, they would hear none of it. To the outside world it would seem that Thalric had a prisoner in the torture room, and the machines themselves were drowning out the sounds of whatever evils he was enacting.

Thalric was obviously asking for some confirmation, and Aagen was nodding, unhappy still, voicing some objection that Che could not catch at all.

Thalric grinned wickedly. ‘. . . say I share the attraction . . . never know . . .’ He clapped Aagen on the shoulder, the same comradely gesture he had made before.

Finally, something Che heard all of, for all the good it did her. ‘Now dispatch it straight,’ Thalric instructed, and Aagen nodded, not a military salute but the nod of a friend with an errand to fulfil. Then he unbolted the door and left her alone with Thalric.

The Wasp captain wandered over to the steam engine and studied the levers. Che understood he was about to release the steam from the system and stop the noise, and that he was not entirely sure how to go about it. She saw the tool heads above her, shivering with steam-driven power, imagined a mechanized arm of one holding the drills dropping suddenly, unfolding like the sting of a scorpion, flicking its steel tip out into her . . .‘Thalric!’ she yelled desperately. ‘Thalric!’

He glanced over at her.

‘The one at the end! The red band!’

His lips twitched, and for a moment she thought he was not going to comply at all, but then he pulled the lever up, and she heard the steam venting from the system somewhere above.

The roar of the machine died away and soon the quiet in the small room was deafening.

His footsteps, as he came over to the bench, sounded like thunderclaps. For a long time, far longer than she liked, he stared down at her wordlessly, though his expression spoke volumes. He was perhaps considering just how much at his mercy, his personal mercy, she was.

In the face of that look, which disturbed her more than she could tell, she had to speak up, if only to disrupt the moody train of his thoughts.

‘So you’re sending her away?’

He raised an eyebrow at her.

‘Grief in Chains,’ she continued, and his expression became briefly irritated. Quickly hidden again, but she saw it there nonetheless.

‘You have keen ears, Miss Maker,’ he told her dryly.

‘I’m more used to having machines around me than you think, perhaps.’

He considered her again, but at least it was now an assessing look and not something darker. ‘I shall have to remember that when next torturing Beetles,’ he said.

‘You trust Aagen a lot, don’t you?’ she said, and for a fragile second there was a genuine smile on his face. Erased, again, but visible, for that brief second, on a face which surely could not belong to that fiend Thalric, agent of the Empire.

‘We go back many years, Aagen and I, so I can trust him with a great deal.’

‘Even with Grief in Chains?’ She could not entirely keep the bitterness out of her voice as she said it. ‘She seems to have an effect on men.’

‘I trust him even with her. He is a good servant of the Empire.’

‘I don’t understand you, Thalric.’ She was still very much at his mercy, but her curiosity overtook her.

‘I am not here to be understood,’ he snapped, but she persisted.

‘You can’t just live for an Empire. Everybody must live for himself as well. Your man Aagen’s not just a good servant of the Empire. He’s a friend of yours.’

‘Enough,’ he said, ‘or I’ll work the machines myself.’ Then he sighed and, with a few simple moves, loosened her straps, arm, leg, leg, arm. Wincing, she sat up, and let herself slide down to the floor.

‘Let me guess, it’s back to my cell now.’

‘Until the next time.’ He had obviously achieved whatever piece of subterfuge he had intended, and yet he still seemed less than delighted.

He escorted her back to the cell himself, and she guessed he did not want guards examining her too closely. She felt lucky because, if he had wanted to, he could easily have put enough marks on her to defy any scrutiny.

And she felt doubly lucky, in that case. While he was unbuckling her ankles, she had palmed a probe from the medical kit. She was no expert housebreaker, but the locks on Salma’s bonds were big and crude, and she possessed an artificer’s training, after all.

Outside her cell, Thalric turned to the guards – the same two he had brought all the way from Helleron. They took orders only from him.

‘Nobody is to see the prisoners except me,’ he told them. ‘If anyone insists on it, and won’t take my name as a warning, then you’re to kill the prisoners first, no mercy.’
The girl knows too much just now, and I have no time to finish with her.
He left them abruptly, for he had an overdue appointment to keep.

He went to meet Ulther in the war room. The place was a suitable testament to the old man’s sense of drama. He kept it on the same underground floor as the cells, to start with, away from the prying eyes of household servants, and it was coldly lit by blue glass lamps which put Thalric in mind of dark chasms beneath the sea. One end of the long table was choked with charts and logistics reports, while at the other was laid out a map, taking in all the terrain between Myna and Helleron. Wooden counters, like game pieces, picked out key locations across the intricately plotted countryside, whilst pinned-out ribbons showed marching routes and scribbled notes held down with tacks.

‘Your area, this, I think,’ Ulther said. ‘To tell the truth, I let them get on with it. One city’s quite enough for me to handle.’

Thalric nodded, welcoming this chance to update himself on where the Empire’s plans had so far taken them. Just seeing those place names made him long to be in Helleron again, where it was all
happening
. He had only intended a brief side trip to Asta for the interrogations, and then Colonel Latvoc had got hold of him and he had found himself drawn into
this
. His agents in Helleron must now be wondering what was going on.

He moved around the table, trying to pick out details in the undersea light. Behind him, but extending overhead and blotting the finer details of the map, was the suspended carapace of one of the great forest mantids, an insect that could rend a horse. It had been posed as if in mid-strike, its raptorial arms outflung to shadow the paper landscape below.

‘What do you think?’ Ulther asked him. ‘Another new acquisition. He’s for the throne room eventually.’

‘Is it really necessary?’ Thalric asked, taking an irritated glance at it.

‘You’ve never been to the North Empire, I take it? The hill tribes?’

‘My line of work hasn’t taken me there.’

‘It’s an education. The Empire hasn’t changed them much in three generations, thataway. In between calls from the tax collectors, they’re still cutting each other’s throats and running off with each other’s women.’

‘I’ve heard they’re still a pack of barbarians, if that’s what you mean,’ agreed Thalric. ‘Still, good to recruit for shock troops, I hear.’

‘They do have something we’ve lost, you know,’ Ulther remarked, and Thalric glanced up in surprise. ‘Oh yes,’ the governor continued, ‘they might be savages but they know how to
live.
Life is short and brutal there, so they take full advantage of it. You won’t find a chieftain amongst them without some trophy, like this fellow, behind his throne – to give him strength, to give him courage.’

‘Don’t tell me you believe all that.’

‘I don’t need to. When people come in, they’ll see my spiny friend here, and
they’ll
believe. That’s the point.’

Thalric made a noncommittal noise, but Ulther was smiling broadly. ‘When you’re done there, Captain, I have something else to show you. Another jewel in my collection. Perhaps
the
jewel.’