Living off the land, Destrachis considered, was a game for fools and peasants. And, inexplicably, for Dragonfly nobles.

He had watched her. With the cloak blunting the sound and shine of her armour she could freeze to near-invisibility while standing amongst trees or crouched against the scrub. She moved as though she was part of the landscape, and she would always come back with food. He himself was, he suspected, eating better than he had in the fiefs of Helleron.

When she came back this time he had to put the question to her. For all that questioning Felise was a dangerous game, it was time to air some facts

‘You were a Mercer, were you not?’

She looked at him as though she didn’t know who he was, which was always a possibility.

‘What do you know of the Mercers, Spider?’

He smiled. She scared him badly a lot of the time, but he knew he must never show it. ‘I have done my stint in the Commonweal. That was what attracted me to your cause in the first place. I therefore know the skills a Mercer needs in going about her business. There’s a lot of open country in the Commonweal: woods and farmland and marshland and hill country. Lots of villages but lots of space between them, and the roads not so good, and half the Wayhouses lie empty and rotted. Keeping the peace, tracking bandits, carrying the Monarch’s word: it means spending a lot of time in the wild, doesn’t it?’

‘It does that,’ she agreed, then she sat and dumped a bagful of roots beside the fire, together with some grain biscuits she must have taken from a farmhouse. He took out his smallest knife and began to peel, aware that she was looking at him with more curiosity than usual.

‘Destrachis,’ she said at last, and he allowed himself to relax, because when she could actually remember his name she was least likely to threaten him. ‘What was a Spider-kinden doing in the Commonweal?’

‘My question first,’ he pressed, carefully not looking at her.

‘Yes, I was a Mercer, when I was very young. I wanted to… but it changed when…’

He sensed a shift in her and said hurriedly. ‘I drifted north of Helleron years ago. Ended up in Myal Ren and then travelled a little, plying my trade, stitching and quack-salving.’

‘I saw him today again,’ she said, without warning.

His knife stopped for a second and then went on. Looking down onto the Vekken encampment, he had caught a glimpse of a couple of men in black and yellow armour, but her eyes were better than his and she now swore she had seen Thalric.

Her patience impressed and appalled him. She had been stalking this entire army for almost a tenday now.

‘So when are you going to make your move? Are you going in there after him?’

He had missed the change, but she had snatched her sword out. ‘So many questions,’ she said. ‘Why? What are you hiding, Spider? Who are you working for?’

‘You,’ he said, still peeling although his hands shook slightly. ‘Or, if you won’t have me, for myself. I’m not your enemy, Felise.’

‘No… you’re not.’ The sword was hovering just in the edge of his vision. ‘But I do not know what you are…’

Why did I ever agree to this? But he was here now and there was no getting away from it. He would rather cut his own thumbs off than risk becoming a target for Felise Mienn.

‘I will have my moment soon,’ she said. ‘Thalric cannot hide amongst the Ants for ever. Or perhaps I will go in and get him. We shall see.’

A

Thirty-Two

There was one matter only before the imperial advisers today. The tangled news of the Spiderland intervention in the progress of the Fourth Army had been flown to Capitas as fast as a chain of messengers and fixed-wing flying machines could fetch it. It had thrown them all but, while most were still reeling, General Maxin had been able to find his moment. After all, there were few setbacks for the Empire that he could not turn into his personal opportunities. Life was a ladder, and if he clung on when everyone fell back a rung, then he was inevitably closer to the top.

Of course, he must be seen to be deeply concerned. He had even brought an expert to speak before the council, which meant a double victory for him. Not only was he himself shown to be so committed to the Empire’s progress, but his witness was formerly in General Reiner’s camp, until she had seen the way the wind was blowing and come over to Maxin’s side.

She was a Spider-kinden named Odyssa, a Lieutenant-Auxillian in the Rekef, and she had been telling the advisers and the Emperor what she knew about the Spider military potential. The summary was that it varied.

‘The Spider ladies and lords prefer to hire or levy their armed help when needed. There are personal retinues but no real standing army,’ Odyssa explained. ‘The various cities of the Spiderlands all have provincial forces that can be called on and, as there is always plenty of work for mercenaries and fighting men in the Spiderlands, there is always a sizeable pool to draw on.’

‘Perhaps we should simply avoid these Fly-kinden places,’ one of the Wasp advisers said. ‘What glory or profit can there be in vanquishing Fly-kinden?’

‘Merro is a keystone in the Lowlands trade routes,’ one of the Consortium factors intoned drily. ‘Also a large proportion of black-market and underworld trade passes through the hands of the Fly-kinden. There is a great market at Merro in which, it is said, anything can be purchased for a price.’

‘Moreover,’ put in old Colonel Thanred, ‘we have no guarantee that the Spiders will not simply disrupt our supply lines and attack our rear, with or without the cooperation of these Ant islanders.’ Thanred was the nominal governor of Capitas, a ceremonial position accorded to a war hero, and his sole advisory role seemed to be to deride other people’s ideas.

‘Is that likely?’ an adviser asked, and Odyssa then explained to them about Spider politics, or at least so far as they could be made comprehensible to outsiders.

‘The Spiderlands,’ she said, ‘are like the Empire in that they have a fair number of subject peoples within them, although those territories, I would think, are more than twice the size of the current imperial holdings. Unlike the Empire there is no central rulership. Individual cities have families that vie for control, and so do whole regions, and then groups of regions and so on. And all these families are constantly working against each other, playing one another off, changing alliances or enmities. Spider-kinden, when engaged in politics, cannot be second-guessed. Therefore they may decide that General Alder’s army represents a threat, and thus attack, or instead they may not. You can only be certain that you will have no clue of what they will do before it happens.’

‘A load of good that information is,’ the Consortium factor grumbled.

‘What about that city beyond the Dryclaw, what is it called? Our recent find?’ someone asked.

‘Solarno,’ Maxin completed for them: a city that Wasp exploratory expeditions had contacted only months before, that seemed to represent the north-east corner of the Spiderlands. ‘It may repay long-term investment,’ he suggested. ‘Unfortunately it seems to have seceded unilaterally from the Spiderlands, with no attempt to recapture it. More politics, I suppose.’

‘Long-term investment?’ Thanred jeered. ‘We have an entire army sitting at the mercy of these backstabbers.’

The Consortium factor bristled. ‘And what if they do attack? We need Merro. It’s a prize second only to Helleron. So let’s fight the Spiders. What could they muster, realistically?’

‘If I could, mnn, speak,’ said the old Woodlouse Gjegevey. Maxin turned a narrow gaze on him, because he had not entered the debate until now.

‘I have not travelled in the Spiderlands, but have read, nonetheless, of their, mmn, kinden. There is record of a Spider lordling who mustered an army with the, ahm, intention of conquering at least part of the Lowlands – Tark and Kes and the Fly warrens at least. It came to, mnm, well, he was defeated by the machinations of his political rivals amongst his own kinden, but the, mmn, reports regarding the force he raised placed its size at over one hundred thousand soldiers.’