Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

They had called for the guard and demanded access to a messenger. The Fly-kinden who arrived was on the Empress’s own staff, as he informed them in extreme annoyance at having been woken at the whims of prisoners. He then refused to take their messages until Colonel Lien had been summoned and shown the schematics.

The Fly was on his way north almost immediately after that, dropping from the airship and speeding for the factories of Sonn, where some of Varsec’s initial ideas were already being worked into reality. It must change. It must all change. It will be better.

Now the two of them had been transferred to a room inside one of the embassies, still not considered quite as dignitaries but not quite as prisoners either, without rank and yet treated with cautious deference. Varsec was sketching again, drawing wing joints in delicate detail. He had kept the beard, trimmed down neatly now that they had given him a razor, but still a departure from the Imperial norm, and if his clothes were the simple tunic and sandals of a slave, at least they were clean and intact. He seemed at peace with it, too, their curious half-life. Angved himself still felt the pinch of ambition, of his additional years and his lack of success. I must be close, though, now. Close to an end or a new beginning, anyway. Khanaphes again, and I didn’t even need a leadshotter to get within the walls.

He had been ready for some time, when the message finally came. For the last few hours both he and Varsec had sensed the approach of it. Whatever they were here for, death or glory, it was coming.

Dusk had come and gone, as the messenger arrived, and Angved caught himself wondering what precisely they were being called to that had to be done under cover of darkness. The bland-faced, efficient Wasp-kinden come to fetch them had brought uniforms with him: tunics in the black and gold. ‘We need to make a good show,’ he explained, and neither of the prisoners asked for whom.

They were taken to a vast mass of stone shot through with small windows, encrusted with glyphs and friezes, fronted by vast colonnades. ‘The Scriptora,’ Angved guessed aloud, obscurely proud of having amassed some little local knowledge, even if it had only been for the purposes of knowing which parts of the city to knock down. From this gigantic mausoleum of an edifice, the Ministers governed their backward city. There were no Khanaphir in sight, though, only some Wasps guarding the entrance. The city’s leaders and their staff had been given the night off, it seemed.

As he was about to enter, Angved glanced back. In the centre of the square fronting the Scriptora was a truncated pyramid topped with an uneven ring of statues that resembled no Khanaphir he had ever seen. In the torchlight, their white stone took on a ruddy glow, and they seemed to dance a little, and even watch him, the flickering flames lending life to both limbs and eyes. Angved shuddered, obscurely unsettled, and hurried inside.

Bald, stern Colonel Lien was waiting for them, staring at the pair as though they were some faulty mechanism that might or might not be worth the fixing.

‘Stay behind me,’ he instructed. ‘Watch and learn.’

Angved was already watching. There were a half-dozen soldiers inside the Scriptora’s grand hall, but it was plain to his eyes that they were not simply the Light Airborne that their armour denoted. The way they stood, the nuances of their physiques, their ages: these were Engineers, and most likely men who had outranked Angved even when he had still been a lieutenant. Whatever’s here, it’s not to be known outside the Corps, he thought, and in that he was at once quite correct, and quite wrong.

There was the scrape of armour, and a handful of newcomers came striding into the Scriptora as though they owned it. Not the Khanaphir Ministers, though, but four men and a woman wearing a badge that made Angved twitch. The last time he had seen that open gauntlet, grey on grey, these people had been his enemies.

Lien must have expected some reaction from him, because he cast a warning glance over his shoulder. Angved was calm, though. Artificers were a practical, pragmatic breed, and he had not been deaf to the Corps rumour mill, even after being stripped of his rank. A look from Varsec suggested that Angved’s fellow prisoner was thinking just the same thing. The Iron Glove cartel had been working some remarkable miracles of artifice down on the Exalsee’s southern shores. Who they were, who led them, was a matter of some debate and of considerably more lurid speculation, but their credentials as artificers could not be denied, for all the Corps might wish otherwise. The Empire had never been shy of borrowing the inventions of other states and kinden for its artificers and, whilst this process usually resulted from armed conquest, trade was also an option wherever force would not yield results.

Still, what was this? The Glove and the Empire had been doing tentative business for a while now, but this piece of cloak-and-dagger promised rather more.

Four of the Iron Glove wore dark leathers, with blackened breastplates showing under their tabards, more like mercenaries than merchants. The woman and two of the men were Solarnese, the last man a thuggish-looking Bee-kinden. They were plainly no more than an honour guard, however, for the man in their midst was armoured head to foot in elegant, fluted plates – a perfectly machined carapace that looked as though it could withstand anything up to and including artillery. Angved held himself perfectly still, for he had witnessed just such armour in use, through a telescope, while he had watched the fighting on the bridge last time. It had been worn by the handful who had turned back the ambitions of the Many of Nem.

The armoured man took off his helm, and an uneasy ripple passed through the Wasp-kinden, for here was an insult, a slap in the face to Imperial doctrine – the Glove were being led by a halfbreed, a close-faced man who looked to be some mongrel of Ant and Beetle stock.

‘Colonel Lien, I take it?’ the halfbreed nodded to the lean, bald Wasp. ‘Here we are, as ordered.’

The chief of the Engineering Corps visibly steeled himself, before stepping forward to face the Iron Glove’s spokesman. ‘You have authority to negotiate for your cartel’s leader?’

‘You have the same for the Empire?’ the halfbreed shot back.

‘Believe me, what’s said here will bind the Empire. Of that you can be sure,’ replied Lien, with a heavy emphasis that caught both Angved and the Iron Glove man off guard.

What don’t I know? Angved asked himself and then, quickly after that, Who else is with us?

The halfbreed glanced about the hall, the same thoughts clearly on his mind, but then shrugged his armoured shoulders. ‘Then let’s get to it. Let us be blunt. We have what you want. We had a delegation from your Consortium guesting with us last month, and they made plenty of notes on what they saw. The Empire has completed its reunification, and you’re casting your eyes towards your neighbours again.’ He held up a hand even as Colonel Lien opened his mouth. ‘I’ll say no more. Feel free to pretend that I mean you’re concerned about their territorial ambitions. Maybe Myna’s going to make a strike for Capitas? Who knows? However, the sort of thing that your buyers want isn’t our normal stock in trade. We save that for special customers – so special, in fact, that we’ve yet to sell them to anyone. And then the Empire pays us a visit.’

‘And you start thinking of a price,’ Lien interrupted. ‘And you agree to meet us here, not quite Empire yet, and therefore safer for you, because you mistrust us. So tell me your price.’ The current of dislike in his voice could not be hidden, but both he and the halfbreed plainly understood that personal feelings – or even the prejudices of whole kinden – could not be allowed to get in the way of business.