Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [53]
Thalric shrugged. ‘I get twitchy in this place. Too many bad memories. I keep thinking that one of the locals is going to creep in here and cut my throat.’
Che and Thalric both had a curious relationship with the city-state of Myna. She had first come here as his prisoner, and while her uncle had been orchestrating her rescue, Thalric had been killing the aforementioned governor on Rekef orders. Later still, they had come back here together to try and foment revolution, and she had narrowly avoided being executed by the very resistance fighters who had helped rescue her in the first place; whilst Thalric had ended up as a prisoner of the new governor. Whom, she could hardly forget, he had also killed – an act that lit the flames of rebellion in the city, as a result of which Myna was currently free of Imperial rule.
They had been in the city now for two hard days and the first half-day had been spent in separate cells.
I had not considered we were fugitives, after all. Oh, being on the run from the Empire had become almost standard practice, and there had been no whiff of the black and gold here, but they should have entered Myna like war heroes. Instead they had been arrested: he for being a Wasp, she for being with him.
Che had told them a name, over and over: ‘Kymene’, and after the first hour or so she had begun to wonder whether there had not been some disastrous shift in Mynan politics, and that the woman who had led the city’s liberation had somehow been displaced, even executed. After about six hours, in which various blue-grey-skinned Mynans had asked her unsympathetic, suspicious and occasionally meaningless questions, she had started to think she might have simply dreamt the woman.
Then had come Kymene, looking anything but pleased to see Che.
‘So you’re back.’ They had been standing in that stonewalled, windowless cell lit by erratic gaslight, whose sporadic death and rebirth was more to do with the ongoing rebuilding effort than any attempt to disconcert the prisoner.
Kymene had looked older, and Che had wondered how much of the city’s current governance fell directly on her shoulders, how much of her strength she expended in fighting other factions. Myna had been united by Imperial occupation for all of Che’s life, and most of Kymene’s. Freedom demanded difficult adjustments that were slow in coming. The city had been at war, on each street, in each citizen’s heart, for too long.
‘We’re just passing through,’ Che had said urgently.
‘You and your Wasp.’
‘Thalric, Kymene,’ Che had told her, searching the woman’s hard face for any clues to his fate. For a moment there was nothing, and Che was abruptly sure that they had killed him. For that sliver of a second, the pain had been shocking, utterly unexpected.
‘I recognized him,’ Kymene had admitted reluctantly, and even that had provided no reassurance. How it must grieve her, to be beholden to a Wasp-kinden. ‘I’ve signed the orders to release both of you.’ The words were virtually spat out. ‘Cheerwell Maker, what do you want?’
There must have been some hurt and betrayal in Che’s face that got past Kymene’s armour, however, for the woman’s expression had shifted, a little ashamed perhaps, and a little defensive. ‘Maker, I’ve been all morning trying to keep this city together, to balance the warmongers and the cowards in the Consensus – if our government deserves to call itself that! – and then your name falls into my lap, you and your cursed Wasp both, and what am I to make of it? The last two times that man came here, he brought down the government. Is he going to make it a third?’
Che had almost laughed at that, save that Kymene was being so deadly serious. ‘We’re heading west.’ She was conscious of the Mynan woman burning to be elsewhere, anywhere else perhaps. ‘Heading into the Commonweal. I was hoping for your help in crossing the border.’
New suspicion