He sighed, heavily. When she received no more answer than that, Kaszaat jabbed him in the shoulder. ‘Curse you, you bastard! Just speak to me.’

‘Yes, I knew her,’ he said.

‘More than that?’

‘What?’ He sat up, half-displacing her. ‘What do you want?’

‘The truth,’ she said. ‘Because I, too, have a truth. I want to tell you a truth, but I need to trust you. Can I trust you?’

‘Can you trust me?’

Her eyes blazed. ‘Yes, Totho. You think you’re the only one with secrets? Nobody else has anything to hide?’

Well, yes. ‘I… What do you want to hear? I knew her from the College. I… liked her. I liked her very much. Happy now?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘More than like – you loved.’

Why is she doing this?

‘I don’t know.’ Honesty prompted him to add. ‘I thought I did. Perhaps I did, but I don’t know.’

‘You let her go.’

He said nothing.

‘You made a deal with Drephos. You gave him something in return for this girl’s freedom,’ she persisted. It was not true, of course, but not so very far off.

‘He…’ Why not let her in on the madness? ‘Drephos wanted the snapbow plans spread further, for his wretched march of progress. So he had Che… had the girl take them to the Sarnesh.’

All quite back to front, but it almost made more sense that way. He saw it was something she had never even considered, and he could hardly blame her for that.

‘So Drephos, he trusts you,’ Kaszaat remarked.

‘Does he?’

‘No,’ she told him. ‘I know, because he came to me. He told me to get what I could from you. To sleep with you, bind you to close me. He knows sex, knows how it is used. He does not understand, but he knows the purposes.’

He may not have the equipment left, Totho thought, considering the terrible accident that had stripped Drephos of so much. The notion that the man might have found a mechanical replacement was so horrifyingly incongruous that Totho nearly choked on it.

‘So, so why are you telling me this now?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why am I? Perhaps because of what they brought out of Drephos’s factory today – you have heard about that? The twins told me. They are cold, those two. They talk almost never, save to each other and Drephos. Yet they talked to me, then. They had to. It was too much to bear in silence.’

‘The corpses? I heard there were bodies.’

‘Forty-five dead, prisoners, all of them, from the fief-battles,’ Kaszaat whispered. ‘I heard their faces were black, with eyes popped almost out. Poisoned, that means – but that makes no sense.’

Totho felt something twist in his stomach, some artificer’s inner instinct trying to speak to him.

‘He has a new weapon,’ Kaszaat said softly. ‘Something even better than the snapbow, to use against the Sarnesh.’

They lay together for a long while, Kaszaat sliding off him to nestle under his arm, with her head resting on his chest. Would it feel like this with Che? He realized that he would never know. So Drephos had found a new way of killing people. Did it matter, though? Could Totho criticize, having done his own work so well?

‘What are we doing here?’ he murmured. ‘Why don’t we just leave?’

‘Because there is a sword,’ she told him, ‘And here we are on the right side of the guard…’ Her voice shook and she stopped.

‘What is it?’

She would not say, but she clung to him closer, she who had always seemed the more experienced of them, in all walks of life, older and wiser in so many things.

‘Kaszaat, please,’ he said. ‘I promise you I’m not spying on you for Drephos, or the… the Rekef, or whoever else you think.’

‘I don’t think that. Not you.’ She made a single painful sound of amusement. ‘Who would trust you to do that? You have only recently turned your back on the Lowlands, turned your weapons on your friends. You’re a spinning wheel and nobody knows where you’ll stop. Why else would Drephos point me at you?’

The cruelty of it cut him. He pressed his lips together and said nothing.

‘Oh Totho, I’m sorry,’ she said after a moment. ‘I’m sorry, but I am frightened – who can I trust? What do you think of me, you, who love this other?’

‘I don’t know. I… I like you a great deal…’

‘Totho…’

‘What? Tell me, please. I need to know-’

There was something cold now at his throat. A blade? It was the work-knife he had left beside the bed, as sharp as any artificer could desire.

He felt no fear at all.

‘Are you going to kill me, then?’ he asked her. ‘For what reason?’

Her hand was shaking, which worried him more than the knife itself. ‘How could you turn yourself on your own people?’ she asked.

‘You mean the Battle of the Rails? They weren’t my people. They were Sarnesh,’ he said, almost without thought, but the subsequent response he came up with was hardly better: I have no people. In the end he just continued, ‘You’ve worked with Drephos for how long, now? You can’t say you didn’t know what he was doing. You were up there with him – with me – watching them bombard Tark into ash. What did you imagine he wanted your skills for?’

He was getting angry, which was unwise considering the knife, but he could not see what the problem was, why she had suddenly broken out of her shell like this.

‘I am safe with Drephos,’ she whispered. ‘So long as I serve him, I shall never see his weapons turned against me. I need never fear.’

‘So?’ he prompted. Gently he reached up to take the knife but her grip on it was too tight.

‘They say there is trouble come to Szar,’ she said heavily. ‘They say the Queen is dead. They say there are soldiers now coming to my own city. They say that… there will be an uprising, and that it will be put down.’

‘And you think we’ll be sent there?’

‘I know it. I can feel it. Totho,’ she said. ‘But I can’t do it. Not my own. I’m not as strong as you.’

Strength? Is that what it was?

At last she released the knife, and he cast it aside, hearing it clatter against the wall.

‘Will you tell him about this?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said, shocked. What does she think I am, some kind of traitor…?

Quite.

‘Never,’ he insisted. ‘Trust me, please.’

‘Totho, I cannot find a way out,’ she whispered. ‘I have worked for him for too long. Now I will pay. He will kill me.’

He had nothing to say to that. He knew Drephos was a man devoid of most emotions, but that his march of progress was a mechanized inevitability whose wheels would grind up anyone who stood before it. Instead, he held Kaszaat close, wanting to reassure her that Drephos would not harm her, or that he, Totho, would protect her. Both statements stuck in his throat, and he could not get them out.

Twenty

Colonel Gan was, by his own estimation, the luckiest man in the Empire. Not only had his family connections ensured him a colonel’s rank at a very young age, but, for the last seven years, he had revelled in the governorship of the most profitable yet docile city in the Empire.

The palace at Szar was magnificent, larger even than the great eyesore that the old governor of Myna had installed. As the local Bee-kinden built either single-storey or underground, it easily overlooked the entire city of Szar, and if the Bee-crafted architecture was more elaborately carved, every wall finished with intricate frescos and designs, then still Gan believed that the sheer scale of his palace showed his kinden’s superiority over them.

Colonel Gan made a point of taking his breakfast each morning on a different side of his great multi-tiered edifice, surveying his domain. Sometimes he entertained his officers there, or imperial dignitaries passing through, also Consortium factors or men of good family, but once a week he allowed himself a special treat. He had observed, when he last visited in the capital, that the Emperor Alvdan II – a man whom Gan admired above all others – ate breakfast with the rather pleasant-featured Princess Seda once a week. Such fraternal devotion was much noted and debated in the courtly circles Gan preferred to move in and, though Gan himself had no well-born sisters, the city of Szar had nevertheless provided him with a suitable alternative. He considered that he was bringing a very imperial touch of sophistication to this city when he dined each tenday with its native princess, Maczech.