‘Only justice,’ said Thalric dryly. ‘Anyway, the Spiders of the Spiderlands seem to be doing well enough for themselves, so this lot must have been an inferior breed.’
‘Or just lacking enough space to manoeuvre,’ Gaved said softly. ‘Cities beneath the lake, and not great cities, surely – where could they go, when their slaves rose up against them?’
‘You’re speculating.’
Gaved nodded. ‘And all we have is her word, and all that’s probably made of is whatever folk tales she’s cobbled together. Still…’ He sensed the lake outside, that great expanse of water stretching past the horizon, unplumbed, marsh-edged, a haunt of Skater bandits and monstrous creatures.
‘It’s nonsense and she’s mad,’ Thalric declared, though a little uneasily.
‘Please,’ Sef said, tugging again at Gaved’s sleeve. ‘they will come for me. They will take me back.’
‘You escaped all this,’ Thalric pointed out. ‘So it can’t be that difficult. But why haven’t we heard of this before.’
‘I was supposed to die,’ Sef said simply. ‘Master Saltwheel had us taken to his testing grounds, to his laboratory. We were supposed to die, to be killed by his weapon. But it ruptured the wall of the city. The others died, but I grasped the air and held it to me, and then I swam. The others died or were caught, but I swam and swam towards the light. We have escaped before. Into the lake itself, the caves or the deep water. They sniff us out, though. They always bring back the bodies, for everyone to see. There is nowhere safe between the walls of our world that we may hide from them. So I… I came up to gather air. I knew that Master Saltwheel would hunt me down, so I left that world.’
The Wasps were now staring at her, quite blankly. She bared her white teeth at them, shaking constantly with fear and desperation and sheer frustration.
‘To this horrible place!’ she suddenly cried out, words long held trapped below now forcing their way to the surface. ‘To this horrible empty place! This open place where there is no end to it, and no walls, and where everything weighs me down! And the surface is too far away overhead and too great, so great, and the light of it burns my skin by day! And my throat and eyes hurt all the time, and… and… and… They will catch me eventually and kill me with the long, slow death, and it would have been better if Master Saltwheel had killed me with his machines than I ever came out here.’ Her hands balled into fists that were pressed close to her face, a face contorted with an uncontrollable horror of everything within her sight and knowledge.
‘Saltwheel,’ Gaved repeated. Amidst this madness it was such an ordinary-sounding Beetle name that it chilled him all on its own.
‘Weapons testing?’ Thalric pointed out. ‘If any of this is true, how could they be Apt, operating underwater? You can’t have any artifice without something so basic as fire, surely?’ His eyes narrowed at Sef, who had fallen into a crouch, hands still raised to her face. ‘Answer me, slave!’
‘We have fire,’ Sef replied, sounding almost proud. ‘We have fire. We fill our cities with air. But the masters, they have engines that need no fire, no air.’ She inhaled a long breath. ‘I have told you all now. They will hunt me down and they will kill me, but I have told you.’
Gaved glanced at Thalric again, seeing that the other man’s scepticism was almost entirely shattered. No doubt he was thinking like a Rekef again, thinking about a possible future threat to the Empire he had supposedly turned his back on.
Lake Limnia is out there. Gaved could feel it, its watery chasms, its unplumbed mystery. If only I could see! He would never see it, of course – even if it was anything more than Sef’s imagination.
Best to hide her, though, just in case. He and Nivit could do that, if only he could convince Nivit to help. Best to hide her, whether this Saltwheel she mentioned was a Beetle of land or water.
The door rattled then and they all jumped, even Thalric. It was just Tisamon and Tynisa returning, though, pausing in the doorway at the sight of the pale and worried faces of the two Wasp-kinden within.
Seventeen
The key to this venture was calm, and Lyrus embraced calmness as a constant companion. Here he was in the Queen’s chosen audience chamber, which he and two other servants had set up and prepared not long before. Before fetching Maker he had held back to give the room one more look over. That was all the time he needed to ensure that the crossbow was properly hidden within the sombre drapes hanging to one side of the room’s two lofty windows. He had unbarred the shutters on the windows themselves, and he knew that nobody would check them. Even with the Empire now looming so large in their mind, his kin here still did not think in three dimensions. Within the Lowlands the military threat to an Ant city-state was from other states of their own kind.
It was now all in readiness, with Maker and his entourage waiting in the antechamber. Lyrus took his place at the back of the room, knowing that he would be easily overlooked, seen as part of it. To the visitors he would be merely a servant, possessing a servant’s customary invisibility, and to the Queen and her staff just one of their own people doing his job.
The Queen came in first, with only two guards. She would thus be making a show of her trust, as leverage for whatever she wanted from the Collegium ambassador. Lyrus caught the edge of the thoughts she conveyed to her warders, counselling patience but urging them to be ready if she decided to make her move.
For Lyrus it was a good sign. The more tension there was between Sarn and Collegium, the better this scenario would look.
The Queen stood waiting now: no round-the-table conference this. She had decided to try a new tactic. There was a fire burning in the grate as she stood there in her gleaming armour and long dark cloak, waiting for the Beetle to be summoned. This would be a heartfelt appeal, then, Lyrus judged.
The two guards had taken up position on either side of the door, and it occurred to him that he could kill her right now. The thought made his heart race and he fought to keep it out of his mind, so that not even a hint of his intentions might be picked up. This would be the culmination of his career. True, it could also be the end of him, but at least they would remember him. He would split Sarn asunder, one way or another. To kill the Queen! His masters would then admit that there was better blood in him than just tainted Sarnesh. The annals of the Rekef, the secret history of the Empire, would record him as a faithful son.
He was tired of living amongst these alien people who shared his face and skin, but the only way he could leave their house was through its rubble.
He found his fingers itching for the crossbow, but he stilled them. It must happen only with the Collegium man present. When he eventually made his move, anything might happen but, with only two guards to deal with, it seemed more than possible that Lyrus could be the only Sarnesh witness to the deed left alive, and who would the city more readily believe? If it was swift enough then even the last thoughts of the Queen and her escort could be extinguished before they betrayed him.
The Queen must have already sent the call, for the door opened and the fat Beetle came in, with a Fly-kinden and a Spider woman in tow. Lyrus scowled inwardly. This retinue complicated matters but Maker took his servants everywhere. They were all, of course, unarmed, for even her most honoured guests did not come into the Queen’s presence with their weapons still at their belts. The burly Beetle clutched a cloth-covered bundle, though, and Lyrus guessed this to be the new device recently stolen from the Empire.