did for the army of Lascanne. Mallen had said as much.
‘Can you . . . untie me?’ she whispered to them, hoping no Denlander was close enough to eavesdrop. ‘Please, untie me. Bite through the ropes or something.’
There was a little hissing between the two or three indigenes, but nothing that suggested they understood her. Mallen had always spoken to them in their own tongue. She did not even know if any of them spoke a human language.
‘Please . . .’ she said, but it seemed utterly hopeless.
But there had been one word that seemed common to both races, she recalled. One solitary word with a world of meaning.
‘Mallen,’ she said to them. ‘Mallen. You understand me? Go and get Mallen, please. Tell him I’m here. Mallen, Mallen, Mallen.’
They made little noises at each other, but she did not hear the word ‘Mallen or anything close to it, and eventually they moved off. She could not say whether they had any comprehension of what she had tried to communicate.
And she had no knowledge of Mallen’s fate either. Even before she had been taken, it had been some while since she had heard his whistle. The swamps he loved so much could have reclaimed him at last. It would be, she guessed, how he wanted it. No gravestone and church plot for him.
She sagged back against the ropes and tried desperately for some semblance of sleep. Tomorrow would bring its own trials, and she needed all her strength for those. She might break eventually, but she was damned if she would break quickly.
23
Dear Mr Brocky,
I have turned Ms Belchere back as soon as her feet brought your missive to Chalcaster, and I was able to scratch out this reply.
Mr Brocky, you seem to me a reasonable man. I am a wealthy one. My private fortune is large, my access to public funds far larger.
I promise you, if you are able to locate news of Sgt Marshwic, then neither you nor the man who finds that news will be the poorer for it. If I were a hero, I would set off myself. If I were a soldier, I would take up a musket. If I were a wizard, I would spark fires enough to burn the forests to the ground until I found her. I am not. I am a man of finances. I use the tools at my disposal.
Find her, find my gratitude and largesse.
Yours sincerely,
Mr C. Northway, Mayor-Governor of Chalcaster.
The undersea light penetrating beneath the canopy woke her by degrees, aching and still spreadeagled across the frame. All around her she heard the muted sounds of several hundred Denlanders packing up camp. Few of them spared her a glance, each engrossed in his own tasks.
She saw then that this was a larger proportion of the Levant army of Denland than she had realized. Parties had surely arrived here during the night. Others were already setting off. This was their headquarters, but it was mobile. Every few nights, Doctor Lammegeier must find some new spot for his soldiers to billet in, to make the Lascanne task that much harder. He had learned some lessons from Colonel Resnic’s Big Push.
And what would today hold for herself? One thought stayed with her from Doctor Lam’s lies the previous night. In the midst of his story had been a solitary nugget of truth, but she would take no comfort from it. The assassin’s master, he had said, had been made to tell of his employer. How so? By sitting down at a low table and offering him tea? Emily did not think so. For all their civilized talk, the Denlanders were a people at war. She dreaded to think of that care and attention to detail being applied to the business of forcing knowledge from her. They would not be malicious, perhaps. They might not enjoy the cruelty, as Lascari had done. They would do it, though. They were a practical people. They would not let mere scruples stand between them and the things they needed to know.
The next time they came for her, they would probably not even remove her from the frame.
But they did, half a dozen of them taking her down with practised precision, and she realized the whole camp was on the move. There was nothing, even Doctor Lam’s table, that could not be disassembled, packed up and made ready to move. Squads and detachments of men were already moving out on their own, providing an advance screen against