She never saw the assailant coming but instead she suddenly heard the sound of ripping fabric close at hand, and then swift motion beside her as Nero dropped through the awning and was abruptly perched on a man’s shoulders. The man, who had been within arm’s reach of Che a moment ago, was now staggering back as Nero clawed for his eyes with one hand, drawing his dagger with the other. The Solarnese tried jabbing his own long knife up at Nero, but the Fly kept shifting position, wings buzzing in and out of sight, and then Che herself lunged forwards and ran her potential assassin through the gut.
He convulsed and fell forwards, leaving Nero abruptly hovering unsupported as the man jack-knifed to the ground, taking Che’s sword with him. She felt a jolt of horror – how much blood had she seen shed, how little of it her doing – and then Nero cursed and spun out of the air, a spatter of red suddenly staining the white of his clothes. He had twisted aside, by sheer Art and instinct, as the blade came in, so it had gashed across his arm rather than into his ribs. As her companion hit the ground, Che found herself facing a lean Dragonfly-kinden, deeply scarred on both cheeks. In his hands he wielded a long-hafted sword, as much hilt as blade. In her hands was nothing.
He took a moment to note her vulnerability, his expression set, and then he lunged for her. None of the local posturing for him, he was in for a quick kill. She retreated hurriedly, her calves striking the low wall of the courtyard, and then her world went toppling backwards. He turned his lunge into a charge, wings flaring for speed, and she saw that slender, lethal blade plunge straight towards her – and then jerk to one side.
It drove itself into the ground right beside her face, as its wielder ended up with one knee on her chest, his expression bewildered. She gaped at him and tried to work out why he was not moving. Only as he toppled sideways did she notice the pommel of the short, hiltless throwing blade almost buried in his neck.
Che leapt to her feet, scanning the crowd. The size of the brawl had shrunk to something the militia were now happy to deal with, and they began to wade in and club the remaining contenders apart. Behind them, the more opportunistic of the Fly-kinden were busy making hurried assays of the pockets of the fallen.
She noticed there was one man staring at her. He was not a local, nor of any kinden she recognized, perhaps some manner of half-breed. He was lean, russet-haired, neither tall nor short, dressed in a cuirass of bronzed scales and a shabby tan cloak. She could read absolutely nothing into his stare, as impersonal and distant as the stars, but he wore a bandolier of throwing blades and one of them – just one, mind you – was absent.
The thought made her stomach turn, but she went over to the dead Dragonfly and awkwardly withdrew the blade, a slippery and unexpectedly difficult task that had her hands slick with his blood. The stranger was still there, watching, when she straightened up. In the background Nero was swearing and wrapping cloth about his injured arm, demanding to know what she was doing.
She had expected the man to be gone, or to avoid her when she approached, but instead he stood his ground, and she saw that a couple of the militia had noticed him too, but were studiously pretending they had not. Someone who was known, then, and regarded with that particular brand of respect that had nothing to do with being liked.
Closer to, he was slighter of build than she had first thought: not much taller than Achaeos, though broader at the shoulder. His face was gaunt and weathered, impossible to put an age to, utterly unknowable.
She held the blood-washed blade out to him and asked merely, ‘Why?’
It was back in his hand in an instant, without her even seeing him reach for it. When he then smiled it was a window onto something truly alien to her – something ancient and sad and very dark. He reminded her, she found with a shock, of Tisamon. That same melancholy darkness was contained in both of them.
‘Why not, if it pleases me?’ His voice was nondescript, as undramatic as could ever have undone his air of mystery. Then he had turned, and was striding away without a backward glance.
Across the street, from one storey up, Captain Havel was watching the same chaos with Odyssa at his shoulder. He had started with a tight little smile, because if this came off he would be able to report a happy success to his masters, and not have to worry about the Rekef enquiring into his accounts. The streets of Solarno were deceptively dangerous places where brawls started all the time these days, what with control of the Corta Obscuri up for the taking. In such conditions a pair of witless foreigners might easily fall foul of all manner of local violence.
Seeing the fighting spill into the inn’s courtyard, he had become ecstatic, and careful to share such pleasure with his visitor, congratulating her on laying a good rumour trail.
The Spider woman’s hands had squeezed his shoulders, as she pressed in close behind him. ‘It’s easy enough to get these Solarnese to fight each other. Your agents are all in position?’
‘Agents?’ Havel had snorted. ‘That’s too grand a term, but in Solarno there’s no shortage of hired killers, either local or visiting. Princep Exilla practically turns them out as a national industry. But they’ll do their job,’ he had assured her, both as the man currently impressing the Spider maid and as the officer about to impress her distant Rekef superiors. He had been so cocky, just then.
They had watched the killers dart in, the death of the Solarnese man followed by the swift strike by the Dragonfly. Havel had even leapt to his feet with a hiss of triumph as the Beetle girl fell backwards, the killer stooping on her.
Then the man himself had toppled, and a sudden spreading gap in the crowd had announced the newcomer.
From his window-ledge vantage point, Captain Havel twitched back as though from something venomous. ‘That changes everything,’ he muttered, staring at the one unutterably still figure amid all the confusion, the one whose aim had just felled the Dragonfly assassin.
‘You know that man?’ Odyssa asked him.
‘How good are your eyes? Did you see the throw he made?’
‘There was too much going on,’ she claimed, although she had seen well enough. Let him salve his newly hurt pride by educating her.
‘A target on the other side of a street, and across a scattered mob of chaotics,’ Havel said numbly. ‘Oh, I know of him, yes. Cesta, they call him. Cesta the assassin. Quite the local celebrity, he is, though he doesn’t often put in a public appearance like that.’
‘Spider-kinden? I didn’t think—’
‘No particular kinden, some mix of blood. He’s almost a folk hero in this mad city, not because he does anything for anyone except himself, but just because he’s so very, very good at his profession. All the street children growing up wanting to be like him, you know the type I mean.’ Havel’s tone betrayed contempt for a mere outlaw risen above his station. ‘And he’s neutral, I’m told. All the factions have tried to woo him. Word was he’s taken to killing their emissaries to make them stop trying. I wish I knew what put him in that spot with the idea of protecting some clueless foreigner. Damn the bloody Solarnese.’
She read it all in his face, the game suddenly gone beyond the board, his little scams and takes overshadowed without warning by this Lowlander intrusion: an intrusion that was suddenly not just two clumsy agents but had roots somewhere in the heart of Solarno’s dark side.
He turned abruptly, putting Odyssa at arm’s length. ‘You’re going to have to carry a message for me,’ he declared, obviously regretting the words. Imperial priorities overrode even Havel’s own profiteering, though, and he had to act fast now to prevent an even bigger mess that he might be judged by. ‘Take a message for me back to Araketka Camp. They’d better know as soon as possible that the stakes have just gone up.’
After she had saluted like a good Rekef officer, she slung her pack and left. She travelled north through sufficient streets to check that she was not being followed, then doubled back towards the water, after reversing her coat, raising the hood, even changing her walk. This was all done without really think
ing about it, letting the natural deception in her training and her bloodline take the reins.
She reached the low waterfront dive where she would wait for her man. Not my man, she chided herself. Thinking like that will only get me killed.
She consequently made her approach very cautiously, because it was quite true what they said: Cesta had killed potential patrons before, if he believed that they were trying to buy his political allegiance, rather than simply commission him to kill an enemy. By the time Odyssa saw him arrive and sit down at his customary table there it was already dusk. After the earlier downpour, when the wind had driven curtains of rain sweeping across its surface, the Exalsee was now a veritable mirror, a looking-glass for the moon and stars.
He sat alone at a table that gave him a good view of anyone coming in, and offered a swift leap into the water if he needed to escape. That same table had been conspicuously empty before, whether by the landlord’s instructions or simply because other customers knew that the assassin favoured it. She made sure he would see her as she approached. His instincts were, she was sure, like a bow drawn back. No sense in loosing them.
‘You,’ he began, as she approached, ‘are playing a very complicated game.’ Despite her careful measures to evade the spies of Captain Havel, Cesta had recognized her at once.
She sat down, looking out across that beautiful dark expanse of water, seeing a lone galley struggle out from the shore, oars labouring in the utter lack of wind. ‘I thought it was assassin etiquette not to question one’s employers,’ she said.
‘I never learnt many manners.’
She studied him then. His features seemed young, then old, as he tilted his head, shifting readily as the light caught them. Cesta was over forty, from her sources, but whatever his kinden, they aged as gracefully as her own. ‘You were late,’ she pointed out.
‘On the contrary, I was in the nick of time. I always am.’
‘They nearly got killed,’ she said.
‘Yes. Nearly.’
‘Isn’t such drama counterproductive in your profession?’
He stared at her for a moment and Odyssa wondered if she had overstepped the mark.
‘Drama is all,’ he said softly. ‘Drama is the why of it. I would have thought a Spider-kinden would understand, you who live your lives just for show. I do not kill because I love killing. I do not kill because it makes me rich. I do not kill because I have some cause or ideology to propagate. I kill for the same reason an actor steps onto the stage, or a good athlete runs his race. Because, in the fleeting second of the execution, I am excellent. I am complete.’
She took her life in her hands with, ‘So why not become an actor, assassin?’
‘Because I am very bad at acting, and no other reason. I have only one talent in life. My heritage has left me just that, and no more.’
She dipped into her belt-pouch, seeing a minute buildup of tension in him that was instantly gone when all she came out with was a roll of coins.
‘You’re owed this, I believe, and I’m sure you’re a man who has few living debtors.’
‘Because of the insult,’ he said. ‘Not because of the money.’
‘Of course not.’ She slid the coins across the table top and without warning he pounced on her hand, pinning her to the wood with a pincer-like grip.
‘Do you think I live in a palace, Spider girl?’ he asked her. His voice was so soft she could barely hear it over the hammering of her own heart. ‘Do you think I eat off jewelled plates, or have a host of slaves to tend to me? Do you think that I, with who and what I am, could simply retire one day, to live like a Spider lord amid all the luxuries of the world?’
His grip was hurting her but she refused to show it, looking him directly in the eye.
‘I cannot risk sleeping in the same place two nights running,’ he said. ‘And, when I sleep, I keep one ear open for the footstep on the stair, the hand at the shutter. I eat when I can. I have no friends, nor any trust to spare for them. I have a thousand enemies who have good reason to want me dead, a thousand clients who would rather I was silenced. What I own, Spider girl, is what you see: the tools of my trade. I have no use for anything I cannot carry. I cannot be tied down, neither to people nor to property. I have these garments, these weapons, and my reputation. That, then, is the life of a great assassin.’
‘But you are a hero to the people,’ she got out.
‘To the people in general, perhaps, but I am an enemy to each individual one of them. Not one of them has so much as bought me a drink, and even if they did, I could not trust them far enough to drink it.’
‘But all that money – the amounts you ask?’
He smiled, and let go her hand, his fingers leaving stark white marks where they had gripped. ‘Perhaps I bury it. Perhaps I give it to beggars. Perhaps I invest in the spice trade. Perhaps I throw it into the Exalsee. When I am gone, no one will ever know.’ He regarded her doubtfully. ‘So much for me,’ he said, ‘but if I were an informed Solarnese, I would be more concerned about a Spider woman who is working with the Wasps, and yet attempting to preserve their enemies. What can be going on?’
‘Well that will have to be my secret,’ she told him, rising.
He made no move to stop her but, as she turned, he said, ‘I feel that Solarno may become a very crowded place in the near future. Why do I think that, I wonder?’
‘Perhaps you should take up travelling and spread that reputation of yours wider,’ she said.
‘Oh, I rather think that my skills will still be needed here,’ he said. His look at her, in that moment, was entirely predatory. ‘You are very elegant, Spider girl, very clever and complex. Do not slip in your web-making. I would not like to hear some other give me your name some day soon.’
Eight
Balkus leant back along the raked seats of the Prowess Forum, watching as the Dragonfly-woman danced through the air. The sunlight that broke from the chamber’s four doorways glittered on her armour so that she seemed to be clad in rainbows. The long-handled, short-bladed sword was a blur, passed from hand to hand, or sometimes held in both, but never still.
Felise Mienn was at her daily practice.
‘He set you on her, did he not?’
Balkus looked over at the Spider-kinden, Destrachis, seated a few rows further up. He was a mystery, and that was something Balkus had no time for.
‘He being who?’ the Ant asked.
‘He being Master Maker,’ Destrachis said. He was old, or at least looked it, for his long hair was greying. Instead of the easy grace his kinden usually moved with, he had retreated to a delicate, measured patience. Of course, as he was a Spider, it could all be an act, to put those around him off their guard.
When Balkus made no reply, the Spider-kinden continued, ‘Because he’s going away.’
‘It’s no secret Maker’s going north,’ Balkus said. ‘And someone’s got to watch over your woman there.’
‘I watch her,’ Destrachis said reasonably. ‘But perhaps you mean someone you can trust.’
‘We don’t know you,’ Balkus agreed readily. ‘Furthermore, Maker’s Mantis friend has taken a shine to her, but I really don’t think he’s taken one to you.’
Destrachis’s long face grimaced at that. ‘In Seldis and Siennis they tend to laugh at the Mantis-kinden and their grudges,’ he said. ‘Of course, the Mantids don’t come there much. And, as for the rest, I’m perhaps the only Spider-kinden who’ll ever admit to you that I cannot be wholly relied on. I’ve failed before.’
‘Haven’t we all.’ Balkus turned back to Felise Mienn, still engaged in her exercise, watching in silence for a moment as she spun and glittered. She was beautiful, there was no doubt, but it was a beauty that would be dangerous to approach. Her very presence set him reaching instinctively for his sword-hilt, and he fought off this impulse because it could be so easily misconstrued by a madwoman like her.
‘It’s something of a mystery, really,’ continued the careful voice of Destrachi
s. ‘Before it happened, she was never reckoned so good. She was trained, of course. She was a Mercer, and they’re not exactly slack with sword or bow, but this . . . this mastery just seems to have fallen on her like a mantle, after her family was lost to her.’
Balkus nodded, still trying to follow the shimmering movements of the Dragonfly-kinden, and finding that his speed of eye was not quite up to the task.
‘Well it’s all very pretty,’ he said, as dismissively as he could muster, ‘but I prefer my own manner of fighting.’ He patted the heavy bulk of the nailbow resting on the stonework beside him.
‘Nobody’s keeping you here,’ Destrachis pointed out.
‘Like you said,’ said Balkus. ‘Sten Maker left me here with an armful of jobs, and keeping an eye on that one there was one of them – in case she goes mad.’
‘A waste of your time,’ the Spider observed.
‘Says you. I’ve seen her and I’ve seen mad, and she’s it.’
Destrachis smiled, but it was a tired smile. Felise had been in Collegium for more than a month now without any sudden explosion of her madness. She had not even shown any inclination to charge off after Thalric. Yes, she was making every show of being sane now, and yet he knew it was not so. He felt like a man living in a tottering house that one night will collapse and crush him. ‘Oh, I’ll not argue with that, friend,’ he said. ‘Only that, when it happens, you’ll not be able to stop it.’
‘My girl here can stop near enough anything,’ Balkus said proudly.
Destrachis sniggered. ‘You might get the chance to shoot at her, but you would never hit her. Then her sword would cut that piece of artifice of yours in half.’
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