Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

After Salma had gone Che was left only with the bitter taste of the harsh words she had exchanged with him. The harsh words she had given him, in fact. He had smiled through them, shrugged them off.

She had told him what a foolish thing he was doing, going out into the city right under the eyes of the Wasps, actually seeking them out, and he had freely admitted it. She had pointed out that he hardly knew the woman: some short days of shared imprisonment, a few words and a chained dance. He had nodded amiably.

‘Do you think you’re invisible?’ she had shouted at him. ‘There’s a whole city full of Wasps out there!’

He had shaken his head maddeningly. ‘They are at the palace, and they are waiting for a Mynan rebellion. You heard what Kymene said. They will be watching the ground, not the air, and they will not be out on the streets in force if they want to tempt the Mynans to rise up.’

‘But they will be watching the ground from the air,’ she had insisted.

He had shrugged again, equally maddeningly. ‘And I shall see them before they see me, because I have better eyes, and I am a better flier than any Wasp alive.’ His expression suggested it was all so simple.

She had become angry with him, but it was only because she could not understand why he was taking such risks, such needless risks, just for Grief in Chains.

And at the end she had run out of words to throw at him, whereupon he just smiled and shrugged again. ‘It’s just something I have to do, so if it can be done, I’ll do it.’

‘You know this Aagen is a close friend of Thalric, that you’ll almost certainly run into Thalric himself when you go after him. Salma, we’ve only just been set free ourselves.’

‘That’s because we had friends who cared enough to come after us,’ he said, infuriating in his reasonableness. ‘Who does she have?’

‘Who do any of them have? You can’t set every slave in the Empire free!’

‘No, just one.’

And then he had gone. Wearing Mynan garb, and heavily cloaked, but still looking like nothing other than a Dragonfly noble from the Commonweal, off he had gone. She watched from the doorway of their hideout until he was out of sight, and then she watched some more in case the power of her gaze might, by some mechanics quite unknown to her, draw him back.

A hand fell on her shoulder and she knew, before she turned, that it belonged to Achaeos. For a moment she let it rest there, and then he said, ‘I can tell you why, if you wish, but you won’t believe me.’

She turned round, stepping away from him. ‘I suppose it’s magic.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and there was a slight smile on his face, so she was not sure whether he was mocking her or not.

‘I don’t. . I can’t believe in magic. There is always an explanation, always.’

‘And if magic is the explanation?’

‘Magic doesn’t explain anything. In Collegium there are papers, studies from years going all the way back to the revolution. They’ve done test after test and there’s no such thing as magic.’

‘That’s like a man who lives in a world without wind denying the existence of a sailing ship,’ Achaeos replied. With a great display of diffidence he seated himself beside the sentry at the door, who shuffled sideways and made more room for him than he needed. ‘It is because magic — the magic that I myself have grown up with — is blown by winds that your tests take no account of. Winds of the mind, I mean, like confidence, belief. Look, the sun is out, yet I have my cowl up because my people are not fond of it. If I were to tell you a story now of strange deeds and ghosts, or somesuch, would I scare you?’

‘That depends on the story.’ The sentry now had made enough room for her to sit down next to him. ‘Probably not.’

‘And then tonight, in the dark of the moon, when the world is quiet and yet full of odd sounds, you prepare to take your rest, and the story recurs to you, and you cannot sleep for the fears preying on your mind. Magic is like that. I simplify, of course, but magic breaks into the world where doubt leaves a gap for it.’

‘That doesn’t make sense. Not to me.’ Yet just for a moment the idea made her feel queasy, as though there were a chasm yawning at her feet.

‘Perhaps not, but your friend has been enchanted. This dancer was a magician — or at least the sort that the Butterfly-kinden have amongst them.’ He spoke the name with a certain distaste that, oddly, made Che feel better. She wondered if it was mere jealousy at this wondrous dancing woman that everyone seemed to like so much, or perhaps it was something more than that. Perhaps it was even what Achaeos was telling her: that the woman was a magician, that she had cast a spell on Salma.

She did not believe it, but at the same time she had to know.

‘So what has she done? Not that I-’

‘Not that you believe she has done anything, but what has she done?’ finished Achaeos with an arch glance. ‘She was desperate, I imagine. She was weak, surrounded by enemies. It is a simple charm that her people practise much, but it is one of powerful attraction. Her captors were proof against it because they already owned her. But then she saw your friend, and saw in him something that might help her. As a slave, with nowhere else to turn, she touched his mind. That is all. Perhaps some of it was just the Ancestor Art, for there are ways to catch the mind through that, but those charms fade. To last so long, through such separation, she used her magic.’

‘But I didn’t see her use any. . or do anything. . or. .’ Che stumbled to a halt with the sentence.

‘And you knew what to look for? She danced for him, yes?’

‘She danced.’

‘But in her mind she danced only for him. In his mind that was so as well. That was the incantation, no green smoke and no words of power. A dance is quite enough, and your friend was caught. Not unwillingly, I suspect, for I know Butterfly-kinden have charms of a physical nature.’

She caught that hint of derision again, and recalled: ‘She said, “Night Brother”, when. . when I woke from the dream. You have the same eyes, you and she.’

It was a moment before he spoke. ‘Yes, well, it is said that we were kin long ago. Children of the sun, children of the moon. And we hate them,’ he added, almost cheerily. ‘For their light and their wonder, we hate them.’

‘You hate all sorts of people,’ Che pointed out.

‘Oh, for all the wrongs done to us, we have hated your people for five hundred years. But the Butterfly-kinden, the weakest and most ineffectual people in the world, we have hated forever.’

He took one last look about these rooms, which he had rented so recently. He had experienced such a run of emotions here, he could almost feel them in the walls. What sights, what thoughts. Aagen shook his head but it would not clear. Instead it took him over to the balcony, where the open shutters were admitting the rain.

Thalric’s plans. Always a dangerous game and Aagen was still unsure of what his colleague had achieved, in the end. Thalric was an old friend, but he was Rekef too. It was known that the Rekef had no friends, not really.

Out there, lanced steadily by the rain, Myna lay quiet. Aagen knew the city was not expected to remain so. The resistance were gathering, their leader now returned to them. Thalric had said they were reckoned to strike soon. Aagen knew that of the men passing through Myna for the warfront, a good thousand were still close at hand, within reach of the city walls. There was going to be a great deal of killing in Myna very soon, or so the men at the top reckoned. Aagen was very glad that he would be out of it.