Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [80]
Their masters, especially the Dragonflies, made a point of naming their home Landstower, as the occupying Imperial forces had done before the Empire’s borders had retreated so violently – after the death of the Emperor and the liberation of the Alliance cities. Thalric and Varmen were nodded to on the street, as though they had become people of consequence here purely because of their kinden.
‘This is insane,’ murmured Che. ‘It’s like they’re putting on a play, or we’re in . . . some kind of hallucination. A warped reflection.’
‘What are we doing here, Varmen?’ Thalric asked of their guide.
‘Taking another sounding,’ the big Wasp explained. ‘Believe it or not, the Principalities aren’t exactly the most stable of places. If there’s fighting westwards of here, I want to know about it. Also, we need supplies, and personally I could use a proper bed for just one night.’
Che caught Thalric’s gaze and her expression said clearly, I don’t want to stay here, but she voiced no actual objection.
‘So there’s an inn?’
‘Wayhouse,’ Varmen explained. ‘I like Wayhouses. Best thing the Lowlands ever exported.’
‘What on earth are the Way Brothers doing out here?’ demanded Che, still staring about them at this Empire in miniature.
‘Keeping a Wayhouse,’ Varmen replied, and then grinned at her exasperated expression. ‘I’m not saying the Empire was ever full of the little fellows, but they were always there. Beetles mostly, but a few of them were offshoots of decent family, enough clout to stop the places getting burned down. And the soldiers liked them ’cos, when you got to stop at a Wayhouse, you knew they wouldn’t rob you blind. ’Course, some of them got burned, all the same. You know how the army always is with cults and the like.’
Thalric nodded, remembering.
‘But they were like the Daughters – you know, those healer bints that always went trailing the pike. The men liked them and so the high-ups tended not to notice them so much, you see?’
The Wayhouse itself was one of the flimsy-looking Commonweal structures, to their surprise, and quite a sprawling one, clearly having been extended recently. The four Beetle-kinden men running the place wore the comfortingly familiar brown habits of the Way Brothers. That they had a staff of a dozen slaves was jarring to Che, but she decided, unhappily, that being a slave to the Way Brothers was probably doing relatively well, as a slave’s lot went.
The common room was already busy with travellers, and all of them sitting on the floor or on cushions – none of the tables and chairs that a Lowlander or a Wasp would have set out. Aside from a family of white-haired Roach-kinden bundled close together in one corner, the rest all seemed relatively well-to-do. There were several merchants – a Beetle, a Wasp and three Dragonfly-kinden – and one striking Dragonfly woman with a guard of four Mantis warriors. Then there were two important-looking Wasp-kinden with an entourage of a dozen men apiece, taking opposite ends of the room and pointedly keeping a no-man’s-land of strangers between their respective followers. In the Lowlands a Wayhouse catered to all travellers, down to the very poorest, but Che guessed that the truly poor in these parts did not get to travel very often.
‘Let me go and ask some questions,’ Varmen suggested. ‘Someone’s bound to have come from the west.’ He paused, considering. ‘Or else, you know, if nobody has, then we can probably guess it won’t be an easy road.’
Left to their own devices, Thalric and Che studied the varied throng.
‘We should do a little information-gathering of our own while we’re here,’ the former Rekef man decided. ‘No real news of this place was reaching Capitas when I was still there. The Principalities must be changing every day, and I want to know how this place has turned out like it has.’ Che could