Blood of the Mantis

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘I don’t need to.’ The Wasp smiled drily. ‘This is old spycraft for you: when you can’t go round the back, just walk in the front door as though you were meant to be there. Why is everyone punting out to this place, anyway?’

  ‘Because they want the box,’ Tynisa said, seeing where he was leading.

  ‘Well then, why not us? Only Scyla herself will know who’s genuine. There will be other buyers coming out of the woodwork that nobody else has guessed at. So let’s just walk in.’

  ‘And then?’ Gaved asked dubiously.

  ‘And then we take it,’ Thalric said. ‘You people want this thing, whatever it is? Then we take it. We kill Scyla, and we kill anyone else who gets in the way.’ His smile broadened in the pause that followed. ‘Squeamish, after all? Then be thankful you have someone of my profession here. This is nothing new to me. I’ll wager your Stenwold Maker would agree, and I see Master Mantis there is nodding. This is just an operation like any other. We have arrived, made our plans, gathered our information, and now the operation must be wrapped up, the objective recovered, and then we’re gone into the night. The Rekef Outlander do it every day.’

  ‘You’re a cold one,’ Tynisa said. Thalric’s smile only acknowledged her statement.

  ‘He’s right,’ said Tisamon. ‘This is how it must be.’

  ‘And if they won’t let us in armed?’ Tynisa asked. ‘I wouldn’t, if I were Scyla.’

  Thalric displayed his open hands to her. ‘When am I unarmed?’

  ‘You’re assuming that we’ll trust you with this business,’ she told him. ‘You’re not one of us, Thalric. You’re only here because your own people want you dead.’

  His smile withered. ‘And be glad they do, because you need me. I’m hard where the rest of you are soft, with your Collegium-bred philosophy and humanity! Not to mention the mystic, and the renegade who won’t face up to his own birthright.’

  At that, Gaved had a slight smile, a fighting smile. His fingers flexed, but Thalric sneered at him.

  ‘Tisamon’s got steel, perhaps, but he won’t stab a man in the back like I will, and right now you need a bastard like me.’

  He looked from face to face, challenging them to gainsay him. ‘I know, you don’t trust me. Do you think that wounds me? I’m Rekef, so I’m used to being distrusted.’

  ‘How happy you must be,’ Tynisa told him.

  ‘I’m not seeing many smiles in this room tonight, and if you have another way of doing this, just tell me. Will you have your Beetle pilot coast his airship in, and hope they mistake it for the moon? Will you swim beneath the raft and bore a tunnel up through it with your knife? Mine is the only way that gets us in safely, and it must be by my own choice of men or none at all.’

  ‘Your choice?’ Tynisa demanded.

  ‘This is a high-risk enterprise,’ Thalric said. ‘If there is an assault from without, Scyla will instantly flee, and you will neither catch her nor even recognize her. But if we are present there amongst the buyers, what can she do? To achieve her aim she must stand before them, she must present the box. At my signal we will strike. Speed and surprise will win the day for us. I shall take the box and fly to shore, while the rest will cover my retreat, and then make the best escape they can.’

  ‘One change to your plan,’ Tynisa interupted, holding his gaze.

  ‘Name it.’

  ‘Gaved takes the box. You fight your way out with us, Thalric.’

  ‘Agreed.’ He did not hesitate a moment. ‘You and the Mantis and Gaved are to be my cadre.’

  ‘I’m flattered,’ said Gaved acidly, and then Sef tugged at his collar.

  ‘Not on to the lake,’ she whispered. ‘You must not.’

  ‘It’s you they’re looking for, not us, these aquatics of yours,’ Thalric reminded her. She glared at him and, to Thalric’s obvious amusement, the other Wasp put a protective arm about her shoulders.

  ‘We won’t be away long,’ Gaved reassured her, ‘and he’s right. Just sit tight here.’

  ‘They are still searching for me,’ she said, biting her lip.

  ‘If you are so fearful of being caught, why have you not left already?’ Tisamon demanded harshly. He had never shown either interest or sympathy for the Spider girl.

  ‘Left?’ Sef breathed, as if there was a world of horror in that world.

  ‘Left for where?’ Gaved challenged. ‘She’s already on the brink – the very shore – of her world. Where does she know to go to?’

  ‘And the great hunter will look after her, will he? Bit of a career reversal, isn’t it?’ Thalric asked him.

  Gaved’s look was humourless. ‘I will do this job because I promised Master Maker I would. After that, Rekef, I’m gone, and if I take her with me, is it any business of yours?’

  Gaved had worked in and around Jerez long enough to learn how to row, and now he powered the little boat forward with heavy strokes, staring fixedly at the receding shore beyond Tisamon and Tynisa, his passengers.

  Sef he had entrusted to Nivit’s care. He did not want to even think of that but, of course, rowing freed the mind wonderfully for random thought. Nivit and I, we go back years. Nivit was primarily a businessman, though, and Gaved was being sentimental. We should sell her back to the lake-creatures and be done with it.

  He liked to think that, in his line of work, the people he hunted down were criminals, the wicked and the reckless, on the run from justice. Even when he knew that they were merely escaped slaves or fugitives from the torturing hands of the Rekef, he still liked to think that. He liked to feel he was in the right.

  Thalric, an uncomfortable presence in the boat’s bows at Gaved’s back, would see ‘right’ as identical to being in the Empire’s interest, or at least would have done so before his fall from grace. Gaved, however, had never quite been able to coax himself into that point of view, and that was why he had spent his life working twice as hard as any imperial soldier just to put a distance between himself and the Emperor.

  But I always came back, he reflected. It was hard for a Wasp to make a living alone. Somehow he had always found that the contracts he undertook bore the imperial seal somewhere upon them.

  At least Sef was no concern of the Empire. And I will not sell her to the lake-Beetles, and I must hope that Nivit is not tempted to do it. I must hope that our long friendship buys me that indulgence. He had even ceded Nivit all of the gold Stenwold had paid. Iam a fool in so many ways.

  Thalric stared out across the misty lake, seeing the occasional flurry as one of the locals skimmed across its surface on some private business. The dark seemed to bring them out in numbers, but then they were creatures best suited to shady business – and so was Scyla. She had always preferred to deal under cover of darkness, preferring to hide even her changeable features.

  He wondered if she could even recall what she truly looked like. Did she have to reassemble her own true face in the mirror first thing every morning, and did it then drift, from day to day?

  We shall have a reckoning, you and I, he decided. He had nothing personal against Scyla but such a reckoning looked very likely, and it should be himself, Thalric, who dealt with her. He, who had once run her as an agent of the Wasp Empire, should be the one to bring her down.

  The great raft was looming up and he saw several boats there already, with Skater-kinden men standing ready to take the painter line. He put a hand on Gaved’s shoulder to halt his rowing, and the little craft coasted the remaining feet until two Skaters captured its prow with their long arms and tied it up. He put a few coins into their hands, good Helleron Centrals that the Skaters preferred to imperial currency. With that evidence of his prosperity from Stenwold’s diminishing bounty, no further questions would be asked of him. It was exactly as he had hoped. Scyla had chosen this place for its advantages, but she must live with its drawbacks too.

  He stepped onto the raft, with only a flick of his wings to keep his balance, feeling the twinge of pain in his side still from where Daklan had stabb
ed him outside Collegium. He normally prided himself on healing quickly, but just now he was glad to have been able to heal at all.

  Scyla had miscalculated, of course, in her lust for secrecy. She thought she had her buyers where she wanted them. She believed herself safe from intrusion out here on the lake, far from any shore.

  Thalric smiled a little at that thought. He did not know how well Spider-kinden could swim but he knew that they could not fly. Let her squirm how she liked, there would be no swift escape for Scyla this time.

  The others were joining him cautiously on the raft, looking not like a rich buyer’s retinue but more like nervous thieves. Tynisa was pressing at her hand, and he saw that the narrow wound there had opened up yet again.

  To Lieutenant Brodan, it seemed clear that the murky waters of the lake were a metaphor for where his career was going. I must be mad, to be out here with this wretched woman. Certainly my men all think I’m mad. He could see it in their faces. They had followed him out here, in the rain and cold, but they were heartily regretting it. They had been kicking their heels amongst the reeds for two hours now, waiting in the dark. Occasionally a Skater would spot them as it padded across the choppy waters, and Brodan was sure they would all be laughing at the skulking Wasp-kinden.

  It’s just like the last time. He remembered many fruitless nights spent on or by this lake, trying to intercept contraband that seemed to be able to turn invisible at will. Pillaged loot from the Commonweal had been flooding through Jerez: whole libraries of books, armouries of mail and weapons, treasure beyond counting, yet Brodan’s investigators had found such a tiny fragment of it that he suspected the Skaters had given it up out of pity.

  And there she was, the source of all his problems. The wretched old creature was perched on a hummock and staring out at the water. She seemed to be whispering to herself and he wondered if she was actually mad, this whole business her private lunacy. That would explain a great deal.

  ‘I am losing patience,’ Brodan said through gritted teeth. ‘There is nothing for us in this.’

  ‘Losing patience? Were you ever gifted with that?’ Sykore said sharply, and Brodan unsheathed his sword in automatic response. She turned her head to stare at him, baring her pointed teeth in a hideous grin. ‘Oh, perhaps one day, Captain, but not on this night. You need me this night.’ Her red eyes fixed him to the spot. ‘They are out there now, as is the box – that and your renegade Thalric, and his Lowlander friends, all together.’

  Brodan looked back at his carefully picked handful of men, all of them crouching alongside him in the reeds by the lakeside. They were his strongest fliers, able to make the distance between here and the raft while keeping their strength for the fight. ‘Then what are we waiting for?’ he demanded. ‘If there is any chance you know what you’re talking about, then we should go right now. We take the box, we leave. And meanwhile we kill anyone who looks at us funny.’

  ‘And which is the holder of the box? You cannot tell and, while you decide, she will shift and change and lose you,’ Sykore told him flatly. ‘No, you have no chance until the box is revealed. I shall know immediately, and then you shall go and take it. Not until then, or it shall be lost in the mist. I am afraid, Captain, that you must swallow your impatience and wait.’

  ‘You go too far,’ he murmured, but he knew he would not follow up the implied threat.

  Sykore glanced back to the lake, baring her teeth in a derisive smile. She had seen into his mind, seen how desperate he was to bring back the box, not for any great purpose but for fear of failure. Like so many of these Wasp-kinden, Brodan lived a life entirely dictated by fear – fear of his superiors’ wrath, his peers’ plots and his inferiors’ ambitions. If only the conquered could see their conquerors as I have, they would rise up in revolt tomorrow, she thought. And they would die for it. Fear is the greatest motivator, fear can make a man fearless, so long as you make him fear you more than he fears any other.

  Sykore settled back, heedless of the cold and damp, waiting for that magical moment when the Spider-kinden magician would produce the box out into the chill air, whereupon she would send Brodan and his people across the waters.

  ‘They’re coming.’

  Nivit froze midway through checking an account, watching Sef’s head come up and scent the air like an animal. Something guilty twitched inside him. He had just been thinking about the lake-people and their promised bounty.

  ‘They ain’t coming,’ he said dismissively.

  ‘They are,’ she whispered. ‘I can smell them.’

  Nivit snorted. ‘Oh, right, what do these water-Beetles smell like, then? Other than rotting reeds and lakewater?’

  ‘They smell of the poisons they use in order to work their machines.’

  Nivit stared at her. ‘Girl, that almost made some sense,’ he said, and put the tablet down to approach the door.

  ‘I can smell them,’ her hollow voice continued, like dead leaves, ‘as they can scent me and, though I have done all my kinden know to hide myself, yet they have found me at last . . .’

  Now that she had mentioned it there was indeed the faintest whiff of something bitter and oily on the air, and Nivit tried to remember whether he had smelled the same when those lake-people actually had come to his door.

  ‘You . . . you stay away from the door, why don’t you,’ he ordered, and Sef obediently retreated away into the darkest recesses of his hut. Obediently, that was the key, and what made her story ring even a little true. She did exactly what she was told, like no Spider ever did, even a Spider that had been enslaved. This could be easier than I might hope for.

  He went sideways from the door over to one of his spyholes, peering out into the darkened street outside. Girl’s probably imagining the whole thing.

  Even as the thought came to him, he spotted a little pacing shadow, a long-legged, hunch-backed figure a little like a Skater, yet not to be confused with them. He jumped to another spyhole and found himself looking at a broad-shouldered form whose outline showed the armour plainly. Two other large figures were waiting in the shadows nearby.

  What had she called the man – Saltwheel? A good Beetle name, but these lake-dwellers were not good Beetles. Now Saltwheel, or whoever, was coming over.

  Coming about the bounty. Got the money on him, like as not.

  Nivit glanced back at the Spider girl, grimacing. Gaved was always too soft, and he’d taken a shine to Sef, but in time he would get over it.

  The Skater smiled bitterly. I am going to curse myselffor this in the morning . . .

  But it was very clear to him how the land lay just now. The lake-dwellers wanted her back, but not because she was their slave – a class uncared for and unmourned from what Sef had said. They wanted her back simply because she could tell people about them.

  And so can I.

  Once they had Sef, they would have no need of Nivit either, not to pay for his services, nor to suffer to talk.

  He rushed to the rear of the shack, grabbing Sef’s wrist and dragging her into Skrit’s room. Here was one of his secrets, and he saw Skrit staring up blearily at him from her bed, wondering what was going on. However Nivit was not interested in her but in the crank at the back.

  Most Skaters were not Apt: they were not a technical race, not given to artifice or machines. There was a minority that were, though, and this was growing, generation to generation, as Nivit’s kinden slowly underwent a transformation.

  Nivit himself was Apt, and he wound the crank as hard as his skinny arms could manage, till a hatch opened smoothly and silently onto a back-alley, even as a mailed fist rapped sharply at his door.

  He cocked his head at the new-gaping entrance, and Sef stared at him wide-eyed.

  ‘Go,’ he hissed, but it took Skrit pushing her forward before she realized what he meant. She looked almost more frightened to be forced to escape alone than on first scenting the lake-dwellers coming.

  Then Nivit was padding for the door to confront them, one hand close
to his knife-hilt.

  Sef shivered in the sudden cold outside, finding herself on an unfamiliar street in this horrible abscess of a community, alone out under the great dark sky. She was glad for the darkness, both because it would hide her from the servants of Master Saltwheel (although not the master himself, for he was proof against the dark) and because she had not yet adjusted to being exposed beneath the sun and her skin burnt red after only a touch of it.

  But here she was lost on the streets of this place called Jerez, and somewhere, somewhere close, there would be Master Saltwheel and his servants and slaves patiently groping through the dark for her, and she had nowhere to go. The Skater Nivit had just cast her out. The land-Beetle Bellowern was now dead, his floating palace sacked and his men slain. She was utterly alone.

  She had fled the lake because she had known that there was a world out there beyond its skin. She had never guessed how different it would be, though. So many times she had gone from the jewelled envelope of Scolaris up to the lake-top, to gather air and to spy on the busy, spindly-limbed surface dwellers. She had never guessed how difficult it would be to actually live out here, with the heat and the cold, the wind and the appalling void of the sky above. She wanted now to go home to the great arched chambers of Scolaris, but that was one place she could never return to. In the final analysis there was only one star in the sky for her to aim at.

  She must find Gaved. He could protect her from the great world and from Master Saltwheel. He had gone across the waters, though, with those others: the stern killer and his Spider-kinden student, and the angry one who hated everyone and himself as well. They had gone to get something that they needed.

  She looked down and found that her feet had taken her, without pause or thought, straight to the edge of the lake.

  Down there, in the fathoms of darkness, hung the bright cities of her people, stolen from them by the Beetle-kinden, but she was just one missing slave. With the precautions she had taken to mask her scent they would not realize at once that she had returned to the water. If she was swift, she could find Gaved before they detected her, and Saltwheel would still be searching the streets of Jerez, never guessing that she had returned to the waters.