Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

‘How is the new project?’ he asked her. His current duties meant that he was committed to actual manufacture, and had lost touch with the research and design that artificers coveted so much.

‘You don’t miss much,’ she told him. ‘You keep with your snapbows. The new work? He doesn’t even let me see it. Only him and a few others, all day and all night in that factory, three, four days at a time. Then they come out and they sleep, and he gets his back seen to. You know how it is with his back, when he works too long.’

Totho did indeed. Not so long ago he had found out why their master, the Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos, suffered as much as he did. It was a revelation personally horrifying but professionally intriguing.

‘So you’re all just kicking your heels waiting?’ he asked, quite relieved. He was not on the team for the new project. Instead, Drephos had given him oversight of the snapbow factories, and a strict quota to be met. When the Wasp army took the field against Sarn in the coming spring, it could be a new dawn for warfare, although Drephos alternated his enthusiasm with damning doubts about the imperial generals’ capacity to actually make use of what they had been given.

‘You want to go see?’ Kaszaat asked, and he glanced at her in surprise. Hidden somewhere in her closed expression was something close to mischief.

‘You’re not one to go against orders,’ he said.

‘No orders. Nobody has said, “Stay out while we’re gone.”’

‘He’s come out of there today, has he?’

She nodded. ‘You’re not curious?’

He realized he was, as he followed her down through the Consellar Chambers and onto the street.

Drephos had been the first ever Colonel-Auxillian. In fact they had created that rank purely for the benefit of Dariandrephos, the maverick half-breed master artificer. Endowed with that authority he had taken the imperial armies on to win wars and conquer cities. Totho had been impressed enough within days of meeting the man, but now, after seeing the fall of Tark and the routing of the Sarnesh army, he was convinced that Drephos could be the greatest artificer there ever was.

It was because he cared for absolutely nothing but his craft, Totho was sure. Drephos did not care about rank, save that it helped get his work done quicker. Similarly, they had chosen him as the first ever Auxillian to be named an acting-governor, but he had only pressed for that position because, as Governor of Helleron, he could turn the city’s industrial might to his own ends.

He had then brought his hand-picked team of artificers to Helleron to assist him. Totho was one of that team and so was Kaszaat, but there was only a single Wasp-kinden amongst them, and that was a moody old outcast who had spent more than ten years as a debt-slave. Drephos collected minds that could think in different directions. He had no need for time-servers and conventionalists.

‘This is the one,’ Kaszaat said. ‘Three days solid, nobody seeing any of them all that time. Came out this morning only.’ By now the oily rain was sheeting down on them, so they ran from overhang to overhang, trying to dodge the worst of it. Ahead of them was the factory she had pointed out, although it did not seem particularly remarkable to Totho.

‘Who has he taken in there with him?’ he asked, as they came up against the factory’s wall, taking what shelter they could.

‘The twins,’ she said, meaning the two Beetle-kinden in their team, who kept no company save each other, ‘And Big Greyv.’

‘The Mole Cricket?’

She nodded. Totho had never spoken to the man. That pitch-skinned giant had a sour look to him that did not encourage conversation.

Kaszaat unlatched the factory door, which was not even locked, and they quickly stepped inside.

Most of the interior was bare, which was the first surprise. The workbenches, the machines, all the paraphernalia of manufacture had mostly been stripped out, save for a series of complex presses intended to test the durability of materials under stress. Aside from that, at the far end of the empty space, there stood two great machines. Totho and Kaszaat approached them cautiously. The sound of the city was faint in here, for all the high windows were propped wide open to let the oil-pungent air in.

‘We must have the wrong factory,’ Totho decided, looking up beyond the machines towards an observation gantry. Had Drephos and the others been standing up there to watch… what exactly?

‘Fans,’ said Kaszaat wonderingly. ‘Just fans.’

That was all they were: huge-bladed fans positioned at one end of a great open space but, on looking at them, Totho suddenly experienced a shiver of unease. He did not believe in magic, he was no Moth seer to brag of visions, yet some part of his artificer’s being shuddered momentarily on seeing those stilled fans, and the emptiness all around them.

Thalric approached them without ceremony, simply dropping into a seat beside Brodan and saying, ‘At ease, Lieutenant.’ The general scuffle that followed had Brodan and his men half out of their seats, hands raised or already going for their swords.

There was a long pause, in which Brodan stared at him, surely trying to place him. Thalric leant back, waiting, looking as natural, as unconcerned, as could be.

‘Major Thalric?’ Brodan said at last, not quite sure. ‘The same. But do sit down, Lieutenant.’

Brodan did, and about them his men slowly relaxed, though not without a few puzzled glances.

‘Well, it’s been a while, sir,’ Brodan said. ‘Fetch a drink for Major Thalric,’ he ordered one of his men, who jumped to his feet and ran off into the rear of the grimy little Skater drinking hole. ‘I didn’t realize you were in these parts, sir. I thought your work took you out west more.’

Thalric smiled. ‘You know how it is when you do the work we do,’ he said. ‘One day in the Commonweal and the next in Capitas.’ Brodan, he was guessing, had never been to the capital. It was a good name to drop to get the man thinking of him as a superior officer, and so not to be questioned.

‘Of course, sir,’ Brodan acknowledged. ‘Can we help you in any way in Jerez, sir? Or are you here with your own people?’

Thalric studied the man’s face: blunt and honest, under a mop of dark hair, the look of a simple soldier, with a soldier’s powerful build. But Brodan was Rekef, and therefore more than he seemed. ‘A little of both, perhaps. Tell me, Lieutenant, what are your orders?’

He had expected the man to be cagey about them, but Brodan sighed. ‘Retrieval – some piece of contraband. You know how difficult it is to find anything in this place, though. I’m of a mind to just start executing the locals until someone feels ready to tip us off.’

‘No great loss to the Empire if you do,’ Thalric agreed. It was almost unbearable, this moment of cutting nostalgia. Here he was again, a Rekef major talking with his underlings. He felt his exile – his death sentence – like a weight about his neck. How could he not belong here still? ‘You have leads, of course, or you’ve lost what craft I remember of you.’

‘Precious few,’ Brodan grumbled. ‘Oh, there’s something going on, and some odd faces turning up, but getting to the truth in Jerez, well… Before I made the Rekef I did a stint on the smuggler run here. Night after night out on the lake in little boats, getting eaten alive by the midges and watching the lights. We were out here a month, and they reckoned the trade just got worse while we were. These little bastards, sir, they knew just where we were sitting and what we were there for.’

Thalric nodded sympathetically, hearing the rain patter harder around them. They relocated, by unspoken consent, to beneath the roof of the taverna, huddled in an odd pattern to avoid the leaks through the perished thatch.