Blood of the Mantis

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘So let’s go.’ Tisamon pushed past him out into the night. He stopped right there, as if scenting the air. Tynisa came out after him, sensing nothing. Her hand was bleeding a little, she noticed. That wound was unusually stubborn.

  Achaeos had his bow ready strung, and he pushed past her, rushing off into the street and then looking left and right as if getting his bearings. For once the rain in Jerez was petering out, although the night sky was blotted with heavy-laden clouds.

  Then Achaeos was off, and at a fair pace, too. Tynisa instinctively moved when Tisamon did, and it was only after she heard the running footsteps behind them that she realized that Thalric had come with them after all.

  Useless, she decided. He can’t even see in the dark. But Thalric was keeping pace nonetheless, using what little light bled out from under the doors of drinking dens and brothels. Another one to watch for now. He was dangerous, and she could not trust him. He’d sell us all in an instant.

  Achaeos kept stopping for bearings, but most of the time he did not even look around him. Whatever guide he was consulting seemed to be entirely within his head.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked, but even Tisamon had heard nothing.

  ‘We aren’t alone.’ Achaeos stared back the way they had come, and Tynisa fought down a small sound of horror because there was a pale mark across his throat, like a jagged and irregular scar. His blank white eyes met hers for a second, and she merely shivered and shook her head. Then he was running again.

  As they took off after him, Tynisa was sure that something passed overhead, but when she glanced upwards, she saw nothing.

  Across the city there were others suddenly awake, but with nothing in their minds but disappointment. The young seer who had somehow merited such a guide had managed to lose then.

  Sykore the Mosquito-kinden was one. She had hoped to catch even a glimpse of the place, a street even, so that she could have Captain Brodan searching each house there, but the boy had been too fast for her.

  It did not matter, of course, so long as it was Achaeos who actually took possession of the thing. Sykore had her agent in the seer’s camp, unknown to all. The Blooded Ones of the Mosquito-kinden knew their trade, and they guarded secrets that even the Moth-kinden did not speak of.

  What concerned her most was that it might not be Achaeos’s hands that eventually closed about the Shadow Box. She had not been swift enough to follow, but she had a feeling that there had been one other who had. She had a sense of age and power, the musty taste in her mouth that spoke of her kind’s ancient enemies, the Moth-kinden that had driven them to near-extinction.

  His name was Palearchos, and he was old now, too old for this. He who had first flown at five years old – considered unthinkably early to develop the Art – he was finding it a labour now, and even more so when he screened himself in darkness so that even a Moth-kinden’s eyes could not see him.

  He had come from Tharn originally, but there were now five decades between him and the Tharen halls, and it hurt. Five decades of exile, and he had laughed at them when they cast him out.

  I am a Skryre, he had told them. The world is mine to shape. I do not need you. And he had departed for his adventures, his schemes and plots, and he had revelled in his freedom from their interference. He had travelled the world, and seen things that they had only read of.

  But now he was old, and he had been sick for a long time, sick for the company of his own kind and for the carved stone halls of home.

  This would be his lodestone, to bring him home. This would be his invitation, so that his bones could at least be laid in the deep sepulchres, and his name remembered. But only if he possessed it. The young seer, that appallingly untrained boy, could not be allowed to take it from him.

  And yet somehow it favoured him. Palearchos felt it keenly, this loss of faith. It was not just his own people had turned against him, but their whole world, too. He would therefore have to take it in both hands and force it to recognize him. How dare the box call out to this weak young stripling, and not to him!

  He was an old magician and, as such, he had spent years of his life in other people’s dreams. When the Shadow Box had at last opened, and thus compromised its hiding place, he had been deft enough to pick up that trail. When the dream had snapped shut, he had leapt from the window of his meagre lodgings and begun labouring flight. It would be a race, but he was in the air whilst the fool boy remained on the ground.

  But they ran fast and he was not the flier he once was. It would be close.

  I am too old to start this hunt again! He felt even older now, his wings stuttering on his back. Once he would have had disciples to seize the box for him, but they had all gradually fallen away, disillusioned with his outcast status. Now only his magician’s arts could furnish him with help. He tried to compose the tattered spells, born of an ancient discipline almost fallen into utter disuse these days. He reached out, seeking those wretched spirits he had bound to himself long ago, expending his dwindling strength in an effort to give them momentary form.

  If you want something doing . . . The strain of the flight thundered in his heart and lungs, but he kept going, with no time to lose. He was too old, too old . . .

  Scyla’s eyes snapped open in the certain knowledge that something significant had happened. She looked about the little low-ceilinged room and tried to work out what had changed.

  Nothing . . . nothing . . . but yes. She was no great magician but she had developed a little of that sense, and realized there was magic afoot. The damned box.

  It rested on the rickety little nightstand beside her. She could easily reach out and touch it, but she held back. She had the uneasy sense that it was not precisely where she had left it.

  The shadow figure was absent, at least, although the other shadows of the room seemed to bristle with briars and sharp-edged leaves.

  Damn you, Mantis-creature. She was a Spider, she reminded herself, and Spiders would always get the better of the warrior-kinden that so much hated them. She would take this tatty fistful of superstitions and sell it to the highest bidder, and thus make her fortune.

  She stood up, reaching automatically for her belt with its twin knives. These days she slept fully clothed because she could not bear to be naked in the same room as the box. It watches me.

  She allowed her senses to drift, listening out beyond the roof, the walls. For once there was no shroud of rain to drum on them.

  But there had nevertheless been a sound from above . . .

  Instantly she grabbed up her pack from the floor, and reached quickly for the box. Then there was a shape at the window, which came darting in. Her hand found her knife hilt and she had the weapon from its scabbard and flung across the room into the intruder in one smooth motion.

  Even as they came within sight of the low-built guesthouse, they saw the figure fall back from the window. It was a Moth-kinden in a grey hooded tunic just like the one Achaeos wore, now clutching at a knife buried hilt-deep in his throat. The body became lost in the shadows even as it fell, seeming to vanish there entirely. Then Thalric shouted out a warning and smashed his shoulder into Tynisa, knocking her sprawling on to the muddy ground. Achaeos and Tisamon were both running back towards them, and Tynisa had her rapier out, turning on the Wasp furiously, but the flash from his hands almost blinded her. She felt the heat of it, but it swept above and past her, and she heard a cry of pain. Then there was a second Moth-kinden spiralling down to land on hands and knees. Tynisa made to go for the injured man, but Thalric’s second sting hurled him ten feet away and, as he landed, the darkness consumed him and he was gone.

  She glared at Thalric and only then noticed the arrow that hung loosely at his shoulder, stopped from penetrating deeper by his armour. There was a clatter of blades at the doorway, and she saw that Tisamon was duelling.

  The figure that had come down to fight him was dressed in Moth-kinden greys, an open robe fluttering over a leather cuirass. She was no Moth but a Mantis like T
isamon, her features oddly shadowy and blurred, and she had a claw on her hand to match his. Tynisa made to intervene as they circled, but Tisamon made a hissing sound to warn her that it was his fight alone. Then they were in motion again, their claws a shadowy blur in the darkness, and the Mantis woman had driven Tisamon all the way across the façade of the house before he could take the initiative from her and drive her back. Despite her keen eyes Tynisa could not even follow the dance of metal and, after two abortive dashes forward, she realized that she would not get in through either the front door or the narrow window until Tisamon was done. Achaeos, meanwhile, took to the air, vaulting over the combatants and hurtling in through another window.

  The shack stood in a row along with its neighbours, wall adjoined to sloping wall, but there would be a back way in. She glanced at Thalric, who had obviously decided it was safer to stay with her, and then they were both running.

  Achaeos was inside, but he had not arrived first. As soon as he pushed into the guesthouse’s common room a surge of power confronted him, halting him as effectively as if he had walked into a wall.

  There was a robed figure standing in the middle of the floor: an old Moth-kinden man. Achaeos could just see the edge of the silver skullcap beneath his cowl.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

  ‘I?’ The old man smiled thinly. ‘I am Palearchos the Skryre, but who are you, boy, that this thing calls out to you? You are nothing. A pitiful magician, a lost cause, and yet it chooses you. Who are you, boy?’

  ‘I am Achaeos of Tharn.’

  ‘And who is that?’ Palearchos remarked dismissively. ‘A nothing. A nobody.’

  Achaeos tried to reach for his knife but could not, his muscles now locked rigid. He had not even felt the spell fall on him.

  ‘Now,’ Palearchos said, and at that moment a Spider-kinden woman burst into the room, with a pack slung over her shoulder. Achaeos stared at her, seeing a middle-aged woman without either the cosmetics or the Art he expected from her kind, a woman worn by life, with deep lines on her face, caught in surprise by this unexpected scene.

  That is Scyla, Achaeos realized. He had seen her face before in what he had thought to be a death-rictus, after he had put an arrow in her outside Helleron.

  ‘And you must be the thief,’ Palearchos told her. ‘You have hidden this thing well, but not well enough. Now you will bring it to me, and, shortly after that, you will both be rid of me.’

  Achaeos saw the woman freeze and then her eyes and mouth tighten as she fought against the coercion of the old man’s magic. He thought that she would break away from it, at first, but then she took a heavy step towards Palearchos, and he realized that she had lost. He himself tried to shatter the old Skryre’s hold on him, but he could not. Palearchos held them both firm.

  From outside there was a woman’s cry of pain, and a moment later Tisamon burst into the room with blood smeared on his metal claw and on the spines of his arms. Palearchos rounded on him furiously, teeth bared, and Achaeos saw the Mantis flinch away from the magician’s power, stumbling back out of the doorway.

  We taught his kind well, to be afraid of our power, Achaeos reflected, but whilst he and the Skryre had both been distracted, someone else had taken advantage of the moment.

  Scyla hunched forwards, as if moving against a gale, and plunged her knife into Palearchos’s ribs with all her strength. Before the old man had even begun to fall she had kicked the rear door open and was running out into the night, leaving the blade still embedded in her victim. Achaeos felt the old man’s hold leach from him, and then he was running after her, wings blossoming darkly from his back.

  But she was gone. When he got into the night air, she was already gone. Scyla had evaded them yet again, and she was one whose trade was made for hiding. She was gone, and the box with her. He ran down street after street, searching frantically, but she was gone.

  Thalric and Tynisa had arrived when he returned. They and Tisamon were gathered about the old Moth, and Achaeos saw that Palearchos was just clinging to life.

  He knelt by the old man respectfully because, in spite of everything, they were kin, and furthermore Palearchos had been a Skryre. A renegade now, Achaeos guessed, but a Skryre once.

  He took the old man’s hand, and the white eyes, narrowing into slits of pain, sought him out.

  ‘You, boy . . .’ came Palearchos’s faint voice. ‘You are of Tharn, you said . . .’

  ‘I was,’ said Achaeos softly. ‘I do not know whether I am still. That will depend on the circumstance of my return.’

  ‘I had hoped to see Tharn again,’ said the old Skryre. ‘Here on the edge of the world . . . I had thought that, if I could bring this thing to them, this prize, then perhaps they would forget what I had done, the path I had travelled. So it ends, boy. Understand this, if you travel the same road as I.’

  Here was a magician of power, the strongest Achaeos had ever matched skills with, dying like a beggar on the floor of some filthy Jerez guesthouse. Is that my fate? The thought made something inside him squirm, as though it was a future he had already seen and hidden from himself.

  ‘They would not have taken you back,’ he whispered, whether to himself or Palearchos he did not know. ‘Not with the box, because it scared them. They want nothing to do with it. If you had come to them with it, they would have driven you away.’

  Palearchos let out a long, slow sigh. ‘So,’ he said. His blank eyes found Achaeos’s. ‘And you will have the box, will you?’

  ‘If I can,’ the young Moth confirmed. ‘And if it will have me.’

  The old man’s face twisted in what Achaeos took for pain, only recognizing it as rage when too late.

  ‘Unworthy!’ spat Palearchos, and his power seared its way into Achaeos’s mind, into all their minds, like red-hot metal.

  Thalric dropped instantly. Without defences against the Moth’s assault, the blast knocked him instantly cold, and he fell to the floor in a clatter of armour. Tisamon had begun keening, hands clasped to his face, battering himself against the walls. Achaeos heard Tynisa scream in outrage and agony.

  Palearchos was now dying, on the very threshold of that final all-consuming dawn, and he was doing his best to drag them all into the fire with him. Eyes bulging, teeth bared, his face was locked in a grimace of effort. Achaeos felt the man’s mental grip clawing at him frantically.

  So much stronger than him, this man, but dying, his reserves drained. Achaeos mustered his will, fighting back in order to free himself. A moment’s liberty was all it would take. He caught a glimpse of Tynisa clutching at her arm, racked with agony. Tisamon was roaring, slashing the air around blindly with his spines, getting uncomfortably close.

  I was never good at this.

  In that moment Achaeos looked straight into the old man’s madly vindictive eyes and tried, not to oppose, but to twist. It was as simple as letting a stronger enemy’s sword fall askew by taking a side-step, where to simply block the stroke would be to have his own sword shattered. For a split second that crushing grasp slipped off him, and Achaeos lunged forward.

  It was not his mind that he lunged with because, even dying, the old man’s defences would have swatted him down. He jabbed one hand forwards and struck the hilt of Scyla’s knife as hard as he could – driving it yet deeper into Palearchos’s body.

  And the old man was no longer dying, but dead. A spasm of shock coursed through his body and then he was gone. Tisamon collapsed to his knees, one hand still to his head. Achaeos heard Tynisa’s ragged breathing behind him, saw Thalric begin groggily to stir.

  We still live, but we have gained nothing but pain this night. He had wasted the chance the ghost had given him.

  Outside, the bodies of Palearchos’s ghost warriors had been reclaimed by the shadows. Even the arrow that had decorated Thalric’s armour was gone. Nothing was now left of the old Moth exile but his corpse.

  They limped over to Nivit’s place, to find Gaved keeping watch for them still. He was sit
ting with the pale Spider girl, who flinched automatically as they entered, her eyes constantly fearful. Achaeos had assumed it was Tisamon who incurred that fear, but she stared at all of them with the same blanket horror. She had never seen their kinden before, not Moth nor Wasp nor Mantis. Or so it was if her story was to be believed.

  ‘Nothing,’ Thalric spat in answer to Gaved’s look. He was in a foul mood and Achaeos knew it was because he did not understand, could not understand, what had been done to him. He had been talking already about suffering a sudden stab of pain from his old wound, inventing excuses for himself.

  ‘You didn’t get the box?’

  ‘No, we did not,’ replied Achaeos shortly. He was feeling tired, but worse he was feeling wretched. It seemed the task was beyond him, even when he was helped all the way.

  ‘We’ll just have to take it at the auction,’ Gaved suggested.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Tynisa snapped at him. ‘Well, let us know when you actually finish your job, hunter, and track it down.’

  ‘A man could take offence at that,’ he replied, maddeningly calm.

  ‘So, take offence.’

  ‘Especially when he’d searched it out already.’

  Achaeos could see that Gaved enjoyed the utter silence that his revelation brought. The Wasp hunter reached out and took Sef’s hand. As the girl looked at him, her face lost a fraction of its fear.

  He is a professional, Achaeos reminded himself. His livelihood is information, tracking, and to do that he must be able to ask questions and gain confidence.

  ‘She knew all along?’ he said.

  ‘Founder Bellowern kept her close,’ Gaved explained. ‘So very close that she was right there when Scyla’s factor revealed to him the meeting place. Daft girl’s known it all this time.’

  Twenty-Two

  Odyssa was not going to miss this place.

  For a city ruled by her own people, Solarno was too much like any city of the Lowlands for her taste: mimicking the grace and delicacy of the true Spider-kinden way of life and yet never achieving it: a raft of petty politics floating precariously on a sea of squabbling, uncontrolled natives. Oh, she knew that, for many in the Spiderlands, Solarno possessed great sentimental value, but Odyssa did not see the charm, and nor did the Aldanrael, the family she served. Solarno had become merely a gamepiece, and in any game some pieces were inevitably sacrificed.