Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [65]
Small wonder the Empire didn’t approve of it, Che reflected. Sitting downstairs in the Wayhouse’s common room, she watched the Brothers curiously. It was not unknown for men and women with dubious pasts to seek the absolution of anonymity wearing the plain brown robes of a Way Brother – the title was used by both genders within the order. Certainly, several of the Brothers she could see looked as though they would know what to do in a fight, for all that their order was ostentatiously pacifist. She wondered about the nature of the individuals Varmen was meeting with upstairs, and hoped that Thalric would find a good vantage point from which to spy on them.
Szar itself had surprised her. She had already heard a certain amount about the place: ground under the Imperial boot for a decade and a half after the Empire had taken the Szaren queen into custody. She had heard a great deal more about the circumstances of the city’s liberation – a Wasp secret weapon had been triggered within the governor’s palace, wiping out thousands of soldiers, servants and slaves at a stroke, in an action now notorious wherever Szar was spoken of. She had expected to find the city wounded, half broken, grim and drab and as bitter as Myna. Instead the native Bee-kinden had since been working hard to reverse all those years of Imperial domination. Szar was becoming green. The local buildings were all low, little hexagonal cells, with far more investment in cellars than rooms above ground. Under the Wasp rule that was all there had been, but now they were planting again, and each little dwelling had its garden border, each roof its bright bursts of transplanted foliage. This greenery made the whole city seem lighter and more spacious, and Che knew that the place’s true glory would reveal itself only with the spring.
Thalric returned shortly, with time only for a nod of reassurance before Varmen himself rejoined them.
‘We’ll be heading south of Maynes,’ their guide explained. ‘The Ant-kinden are worse than the Mynans – barely any time for their own allies, let alone strangers. Let alone Wasps, ’spe-cially.’
Che nodded. ‘And yet here you are posing as our guide, Varmen.’
He gave her a big, uncomplicated grin. ‘Trust me, you’ll be glad of my services.’
Heading west, they merged with a respectable number of travellers going between Szar and its Ant-kinden allies in Maynes, despite Varmen’s words. As soon as they turned off the Maynes road they were nearly alone, however, and making their own way across an unforgiving country, too uneven for agriculture and with patches of close-packed pine forest sending them miles out of their way. Once or twice, when stopping to camp, they saw the lights of other fires, but Varmen’s advice was to avoid them. Travellers heading west from the Three-city Alliance seldom welcomed company.
Each night, Che hung up her little ring of copper, but her dreams were intermittent. Often there was no spider, and finding one and trying to coax it into place yielded no results. When she did recall her dreams, though, they were always of Khanaphes: not the place of her memories, however, but a city that time and the Empire had caught up with.
She had wanted to broach the subject of her dreams with Thalric, but she was not sure how much he would understand. He had seen plenty of the old magic of Khanaphes during the time the two of them had spent among the tombs beneath the city, but what would he admit to now, months after? Aptitude divided them.
But tonight he turned to her even as she was stringing up the dream-catcher, and said, ‘What is it?’
She tried to look baffled, but the look he gave her in response was just exasperation. ‘Che, for a tenyear I ran agents for a living. You were twitchy when we were in Khanaphes, and you’ve been twitchy ever since, but since we left Myna something’s changed.