Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

Roven shot, but Skessi was faster, the bolt of fire streaking past him. The Fly launched himself for the campsite’s edge, towards the dark where Roven would not be able to track him, but he tumbled from the air even as he did so, ending up a crumpled heap at the edge of the firelight.

Roven, for whom the edge of the firelight was a good deal closer, lit his lantern with patient care. When he stood he had a hand facing me. I spread my own, showing that I had nothing. He jerked his head the way Skessi had gone.

The arrow that had transfixed the Fly was dead white, both the shaft and the fletchings that were made from shimmering moth scales. I knew where I’d seen arrows just like that not so long ago. So did Roven.

‘I get it.’ He’d grabbed me before I could step back, snagged a hand about my collar and hauled me close. His face was uglier than ever up close, and his breath stank. ‘I get it,’ he repeated, shaking me for emphasis. ‘Your mate, the turncoat ’Wealer.’

I shook my head, but he was shaking it for me pretty hard, anyway, so he probably didn’t notice. ‘I don’t know how he killed Merric,’ Roven growled, ‘but he surely won’t get me, or the treasure.’ With contemptuous strength he threw me to the ground and fixed me in place with the threat of his open palm. ‘And as for you,’ he said.

And stopped. He made a sound then that I had never heard from a Wasp: a little, broken sound deep in his throat.

He turned from me and ran for the animals, stumbling and almost falling into the fire. He got to the beetle even as I struggled to my feet. He was wrenching at the big creature, but it dug all six legs in and would not move. I could just hear Roven’s voice shrieking at it, see his mouth opening and closing. At last he just tugged at the sacks. One of them tore open, spilling the wealth of ages over the trampled ground of the campsite. The other came away whole and he shouldered it with a supreme effort and was gone soon, obliterated by the snow, lurching away under his priceless burden.

I crawled back to the campsite, for the fire’s warmth more than anything else. Even before I got there I heard him scream. And scream. It went on for some short while. I just took the time to gather my wits. The plan seemed to be going ahead full tilt, but in ways I hadn’t really imagined.

When I looked up, he was there: Galtre Fael in a cloak of blown snow, right across the fire from me. I nodded wearily and reached to start gathering up the spilt loot.

‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Avaris, listen to me. Do not touch the treasure, not even one piece of it. Just go, Avaris, go. Please listen to me.’

A cold feeling came to me, but it was disappointment, not fear. I stood slowly, sensing the end of what few good times I had known. ‘Fael,’ I told him, ‘don’t.’ I reached down for a piece of treasure, a brooch worked into the shape of a beetle with spread wings.

‘Avaris!’ he insisted. ‘Not one piece! Please!’

‘Don’t play that one on me,’ I told him. ‘Fael, I practically invented the ghost scam. There’s enough for both of us to live like Princes-Major. Don’t try it on me. There’s no need.’ But I felt sad because, whether he tried it on me or not, we couldn’t trust each other now. Our partnership had just been killed as sure as Merric.

‘Avaris,’ Fael said despairingly, and his friends turned up.

Pale shapes with grey wings, but I can do better than that. Ancient armour, hollow eyes, the military prime of the Commonweal’s early glories, pearly bows and white arrows, crescent-headed glaives and long-hafted swords with inscribed blades. Behind them, and mercifully half-lost in the snow, some taller thing, some greater figure, man-shaped but pale and regal and ten feet tall, armoured in mail that would put to shame a sentinel for bulk or a merchant-lord for precious stones.

‘Fael. .’ I remember very clearly my voice then, how it shook and twisted.

‘It’s too late for me,’ Fael said, ‘But they have let me intercede for you, for they were of my kinden once.’ His gesture took in the gaunt-faced warriors about him, but most definitely not the looming shadow behind.

And I fled then. I fled without ever having touched the smallest part of the greatest hoard I have ever seen, and I never saw Galtre Fael again, nor heard any word of him.

And I wonder, now. . well, at this remove, I’m sure you can guess what I wonder. I wonder whether my friend truly spent his last free moments, while facing absolute annihilation, bartering for my continued life and health. And, if so, I cannot measure what I owe him in all the world’s riches.

But I wonder, too, whether the second plan, the plan Fael and I had devised, which contained the first plan we had explained to Roven and the others, I wonder whether that second plan might not have been part of a third plan known only to Fael.

And I will never know.

‘Tell me again.’ Varmen could feel himself getting angry, which was never a good thing.

‘No sign.’ The little Fly-kinden kept his distance, for all the good that would do against a Wasp. ‘Not a single soldier of them. Nothing, Sergeant.’

‘They said-’ Varmen bit the words off. He was keeping his hands clenched very deliberately because, if he opened them, the fire within would turn this small man into ash.

‘They said they’d be right behind us,’ said Pellrec from behind him, sounding as amused as always. ‘Didn’t say how far, though.’

‘Right behind us,’ Varmen growled. He stomped back to the downed flying machine. The heliopter had been a great big boxy piece of ironmongery when it was whole. When it struck the ground the wood and metal had split on two sides. What roof was left, shorn of its rotors, would barely keep the rain off. A rubble of crates and boxes had spilled out of it, some of them impacting hard enough to cause little ruins of their own.

The pilot had not lived through the crash, and nor had two of the passengers. Lieutenant Landren was, in Varmen’s opinion, now wishing that he was in the same position. The bones of his shattered leg were pushing five different ways, and there was precious little anyone could do with them.

‘Oh, we love the imperial scouts, we do,’ Varmen muttered. ‘Bonny boys the lot of them.’

‘You should have seen what hit him,’ the Fly said. The tiny man, barely up to Varmen’s waist, was supposedly a sergeant as well, but he was happy to hand the whole mess back to the Wasp-kinden. ‘Cursed thing came right down on the props, like it was in love.’ The corpse of the dragonfly was in smashed pieces around them, along with what was left of the rider. Did he know? Varmen wondered. Did he bring them down deliberately? Probably the stupid bastard thought he could fly straight through, ’cos the rotors were going so fast he couldn’t see ’em.

The ground around here was as up-and-down as anyone could wish not to get holed up in. The Dragonfly-kinden could be anywhere, and probably were. The red tint to everything told Varmen that the sun was going down. The unwelcoming hill country around them was about to get more unwelcoming in spades.

‘Where are they?’

‘I said-’

‘Not our lot, them .’

‘Oh, right.’ The Fly’s face took on a haggard look. ‘Oh, they’re right all around us, Sergeant. They cleared out when you got here, but for sure they’re still watching us. You can bet, if we know the Sixth Army isn’t coming, then so do they.’

‘Get fires going,’ Varmen heard Pellrec saying. Pellrec wasn’t a sergeant, but Varmen wasn’t a planner. They had an arrangement. ‘The Commonwealers see cursed well in the dark. Your little maggots are therefore on watch.’