Blood of the Mantis sota-3

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  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 Tisamon, 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 facade 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 A
chaeos 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 sitting 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.

  The sky was dark with clouds scudding south and east across a scarred moon. She would not see it when it arrived, but she would hear it. It was only that sound she was waiting for, that last confirmation that she had served her part in the war. Nobody would know, of course, outside the secret councils of the Aldanrael, but that was how the game was played. She was not in it for the personal glory.

  She would not even be here when the fighting started, and had no wish to present herself to the colonel for a full accounting of her activities. He was no fool, that man, for all that she had played him so effortlessly. Given a chance to make his own investigation, he might even begin to suspect how his hand had been forced. No, she would not be there to suffer his recriminations. Her stay in the Rekef was now over and, as soon as she had her confirmation, she would go home to Siennis.

  She wondered briefly how the Solarnese would now cope: would the rival parties coalesce or merely fragment? What would the assassin Cesta do, or the pilots? How would the other cities around the Exalsee react?

  She was not cruel, in terms of how Spider-kinden were measured, which meant that she had no qualms about consigning this city and its thousands of inhabitants into the hands of an angry Empire, but at the same time she had no great wish to see it. She would wait with interest for the news to filter west.

  They, none of them, understand my kind, Odyssa thought, for they are all amateurs, playing in the shallows. Our webs are invisible to the best of them, Lowlands intelligencers and Rekef spymasters alike. The Ants think we do it for power, and the Beetles think we do it for money, and the Mantids think we do it from spite, but they none of them understand that we do what we do simply because it amuses us to live this way, and because we are jaded…

  There was the sound she had been waiting for: a low, slumberous droning noise up high and distant in the sky, coming with the wind from the north, as though some insect of unheard-of size was making its patient way towards the coast of the Exalsee. It was not, despite imperial claims, the largest thing ever to fly. The Beetles of the Lowlands had larger that they us
ed for transport and freight. It was the largest thing to fly solely for war, though. The Wasps were an unimaginative people, but their artificers sometimes had a spark of poetry in their souls, and thus they had named the thing Starnest.

  To the north, the army would have already taken the mountain-pass trading post of Toek, scattering or cowing the Scorpion-kinden who used the place as bandit’s lair and toll-house. That was a mere diversion, an afterthought, however. She was hearing the vanguard of the true assault even now.

  To think that one can brew war out of only a pair of Lowlander agents and a dead Rekef officer. But the Wasps were so predictable: prod their nest enough and they would sally out of it, raging for battle. She wondered how far the colonel would search for evidence of the great enemy plot to suborn Solarno for Lowlander purposes. Once he had secured his governorship, perhaps he would not even care.

  The droning was louder now, and she wondered how many in Solarno had woken to it, or paused in their nocturnal vices to listen. The sound of an airship was not so rare, hereabouts.

  She only hoped that Teornis had played his part as well. He had a more complex net to cast by far, and he was only a man, after all, for all his noble blood.

  It was close to dawn and she must leave now, or risk herself being caught in the web she had so carefully spun. Odyssa turned on her heel and headed for the city docks, where a small fishing boat was already waiting for her. Its captain had no idea how fortunate he was to be leaving Solarno right now for Porta Mavralis.

  Odyssa smiled at that. It was her gift, she supposed, to spread good fortune wherever she went.

  In Che’s dream she was by a very different lake, the details of which seemed to fade in and out of focus. From somewhere there was a terrible voice calling, and she felt a tug inside her every time it cried out. That tug was what bound her to Achaeos, and she knew that the great voice was calling for him, drawing him to it.

  In her dream, she was hunting desperately through hovel-lined streets, trying to find him before the voice did. The air was full of glittery little knives that she realized were raindrops, all held fixed in place. She had the sense of frantic movement all around her, as though parties unknown had broken into her dream, and were ransacking it for something they had lost.