Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

‘I’m no assassin,’ the Wasp said irritably.

‘I know two governors of Myna who’d call you a liar,’ the Scorpion pointed out. ‘No wonder the Consensus is twitchy, if you’re back in town.’

‘What have you guessed?’ Che asked, annoyed at all this obfuscation.

‘Rekef from Capitas will be here looking for me – or they soon might be,’ Thalric explained. ‘General Brugan might not have given up. Which makes our business with you that much more urgent, Hokiak.’ He fixed the old man with a stern look. ‘Unless you’ve decided I’m merely a commodity again.’

Hokiak scowled, less the villainous broker and more – or so it seemed to Che – the put-upon merchant. ‘You flatter me, assassin. Those were the days, eh? Sell the resistance and the Empire to each other, and have both of them paying you for the privilege. Good times, good times. The current lot lost their sense of humour when they took over, I’ll tell you that straight. Her up top, Kymene, who I personally kept out of Wasp hands, she came down here after they chose her to run the Consensus. No more deals with the Wasps, she told me. No deals with the Empire. Keep your smuggling, your racketeering, your private work – but the moment anyone looking like a Wasp agent heaves into view, it’s pass them over to her, and I can whistle for a profit.’ The old man shook his head disgustedly. ‘So, tempted as I am, I wouldn’t be selling you to the Rekef, Master Assassin, even if I could find one with his neck kept short.’ The ruined smile returned. ‘Though I thank you for giving an old man credit.’ He looked from Che to Thalric, and back. ‘A man could wonder, it’s true, how come the two of you are still on the same road as each other, so long after, and whether there wasn’t something in all those suspicions we all had about the pair of you last time. But me? I stay out of politics these days. Consensus wants to interfere with my business, then I’m damned if I’ll go an inch out of my way for them.’

Che shivered, only now appreciating that narrow escape, for of course the Mynans had thought she and Thalric were Imperial agents last time, and Che herself had narrowly avoided being tortured or killed for it. And yet here the two of them were, together again, and it was bound to make Hokiak wonder.

‘We need a guide westwards,’ Thalric announced. ‘You must know someone. We have a little wherewithal.’

‘West?’ Hokiak grimaced. ‘West ain’t so easy these days, with troops on both sides of the border.’ Seeing their downcast expressions, he held up one hand. ‘But, yes, I do business with types whose work takes them that way. Easy enough to find one who’s willing to take a couple of friends over. There are a few kicking their heels in the city even now, waiting for a commission to take them back across the border. I’ll send word out, and you can just wait here. That’s it then, is it?’

‘Nothing more troublesome than that,’ Thalric started, but Che took a deep breath and added, ‘One more thing.’

Thalric plainly had not expected this from the look he gave her, but she pressed on valiantly. ‘I would like to speak to a…’ She could not form the word magician before the old Scorpion’s pragmatic stare. Thalric might just understand, after all they had been through together in Khanaphes, but Hokiak? ‘Somewhere in Myna there must be someone… a fortune teller, or a mystic, perhaps…’

But Hokiak’s expression was not encouraging. ‘Plenty of those where you’re headed, maybe, but in Myna? ’

‘Do you have anyone Inapt working for you?’ Che pressed, ignoring Thalric’s doubting expression.

Hokiak made an exasperated face, a feat in itself. He had one of his people run off, to return a moment later with a cadaverous old Spider-kinden in tow. Che recognized the man as Hokiak’s business partner.

‘Gryllis,’ the Scorpion said, sounding embarrassed to even be asking this, ‘you know any fortune tellers or quacksalvers or anything like that in this city?’ A thought obviously struck him. ‘Wasn’t there that deserter… what was her name, Wheezer?’

‘Uie Se,’ Gryllis pronounced it carefully, and Che reflected that there would be plenty more names like that to be found in the Commonweal. ‘She’s clinging on.’

Hokiak gave him a sidelong look. ‘You don’t ever go have your fortune told, do you?’

‘Old Claw, when you get to our age, money spent on a seer would be money wasted,’ Gryllis replied drily. ‘Who wants to know about Uie Se, then?’

‘ I do.’ Che interrupted. ‘Thalric, can you wait here for the guide? I won’t be long.’

‘So long as you know what you’re doing,’ Thalric cautioned her. ‘And so long as this guide of yours,’ he added to Hokiak, ‘won’t run a mile if they see a Wasp.’

‘Oh, I don’t reckon there’s a chance of that,’ the Scorpion replied, obviously finding the idea amusing.

Hokiak’s opinion of seers and magicians was sufficiently low that even he threw in this Mynan fortune teller’s whereabouts for free. Che learned also that the mystic had been one of the Auxillian troops the Empire had used to keep the peace in Myna during the occupation, that the woman had aided the resistance and then deserted once the Wasps were driven out.

It was an indictment of the current Mynan paranoia that all the risks Uie Se had taken on behalf of the locals had resulted in bare tolerance of her presence, rather than any true acceptance. She lived in a single room, in a house that had plainly belonged to a well-off family some time before the occupation, but was now falling to pieces a day at a time. The room itself was grimy, and the partitioning of the house’s interior had left the seer with a bare sliver of window, so that inside it was so dark that only by Art or magic could one see anything at all.

Che, whose understanding of magic was in its infancy, fell back on her Art, exchanging the darkness for a palette of greys. Uie Se, she saw, was a tall, lean and angular woman, a Grasshopper-kinden as all the other Mynan Auxillians had been. Her hair was kept long and tied back, and she wore a simple and much-darned smock reaching down to her bony knees.

The seer was staring at her bleakly. ‘You’ve come to the wrong room, Beetle,’ she said, her voice dry and hollow, and tried to close the door again. ‘Don’t bother me.’

‘Wait,’ Che said hurriedly. ‘I need your help.’

‘There’s nothing I can do for such as you.’ Abandoning her attempt to close the door, Uie Se turned and shambled back to sit down on a filthy straw mattress.

‘I have money.’ Meaning yet more of Thalric’s, and she suspected he would not approve, but her need was great.

‘Oh, then come in,’ said the Grasshopper, with a loose-jointed gesture, and Che realized that the woman was drunk. ‘Buy me a chair, so you can sit on it. What do you want, Beetle? Are you a scholar come to record stories of a vanished age? I will talk. I will talk all you want.’

Maybe this was a waste of time. ‘I want to talk about dreams.’

Uie Se was abruptly more still. ‘You have aspirations for the future, rich lady?’

‘No, dreams. I am having dreams that I know are important, but they never stay with me. I know how important dreams are to seers and magicians, so there must be some techniques to help me recall them.’

The Grasshopper eyed her edgily. ‘You have money?’

‘Some.’

‘You are…’ The woman could not bring herself say it, but her fascination was that of someone observing some bizarre freak of nature.

‘Inapt, yes.’ Che could say the word with equanimity now. The admission no longer hurt as it once had. Spending time away from the eminently Apt city of Collegium had helped. No doubt Uie Se assumed she had been born different, a throwback amongst her own people, but of course most of Che’s life had been spent amongst the technical elite, trained in mechanics and artifice and dismissing all those old stories of magic as deluded Moth-kinden propaganda. Then Achaeos had entered her life and touched her with his very real magic, coming to find her when she was captured by her enemies, and then taking her to that ghastly, haunted Darakyon and forcing her to witness its hideous ghosts.