Blood of the Mantis sota-3

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The terrible voice called out again, closer this time, and she caught sight of a grey-robed figure flitting ahead of her, drawn helplessly closer to the monstrous summons. She cried out his name, but the beckoning voice drowned her out with its wordless yearning.

  She saw, ahead, something that belonged only in dreams, and only in the worst of them, something that shifted and writhed with thorns, an abomination still recognizable as human. Achaeos was approaching it almost eagerly, and she screamed at him in warning and tried to run, but pain began to flower all about her. The raindrops had turned into wasps and they were stinging her, forcing her away. The combined hum of their wings had turned into a thunderous buzz…

  ‘Che! Che! Get up, now!’

  She jolted awake, staring into the darkness, forgetting for a moment that she could banish it with a thought.

  She banished it instantly. There was Taki standing in the doorway, her hair wild and uncombed, her canvas flight-clothes still unbuttoned after being so hastily donned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Che!’ the Fly-kinden shouted at her. ‘Get up. Get your stuff! Just do it, please!’

  Then she was gone, and Che could hear behind the Fly woman’s pattering footsteps the sounds of fighting: sword striking sword, the cry of someone in pain.

  Inside the building.

  Che was abruptly out of bed, wearing nothing more than a tunic, hearing the house of the Destiavel come under attack.

  More than fighting, though… what am I hearing? But the fighting itself was coming closer, and it blotted out whatever telltale sound she had caught. Hastily she grabbed her artificer’s leathers from the low table where the house servants had folded them, struggling into them as best she could, finding them suddenly too small, too starched, snagging her fingers in the arms. She thrust her head back into the open and began buckling the leathers at one side, the latches clumsily slipping in her grasp.

  She looked up as someone appeared at her door, and froze on realizing it was not Taki. This was a Solarnese man wearing a white tunic and trousers, with a slim curved sword in his hand. The dim light from the corridor showed that his sash and flat-topped hat were dyed blue: the Crystal Standard, Genissa’s political enemies.

  Bare-legged still, and with her leathers flapping loose, Che dived for her sword, snagging it off the table and wrenching at it desperately, hoping that it would simply slide smoothly from its scabbard for once. It did not oblige, and the whole baldric came with it. As she lashed it sideways to free the blade, she whipped the startled man across the face with the weighted buckle of the belt.

  She would never know what he might have done otherwise, but after that affront he came for her, rushing forward with his curved sword dancing in a flicker. With another great heave, she swept her own blade, sheath, baldric and all, in its way, and the strap tangled about his sword so that they were drawn in close, face to snarling face. As his hand went to his belt for his dagger, she finally drew her own sword from the tangled scabbard and ran it straight into his stomach.

  She remembered to keep good hold of the hilt this time, so that his own weight pulled him off the blade. She looked towards the half-open door and saw Nero standing there, still bandaged from his wound, and looking a little surprised.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she panted.

  ‘The politics hereabouts seem to have gone to the wastes overnight,’ he said, looking every bit as baffled as she was. ‘Taki wants us out of here,’ he added, and to Che that seemed to be as good an idea as any.

  She finished dressing hurriedly and the two of them got to the main atrium of the Destiavel house without meeting any other enemies, although they had seen plenty of bodies by then. That was when Taki found them, rushing up with Dalre and a handful of the house guards at her back. ‘We have to leave,’ the Fly girl urged. ‘Have to get out of the house, now.’

  ‘No argument here,’ Nero assured her.

  ‘What’s happened? Why is the Standard attacking you?’

  ‘The Standard?’ Taki was gaping at her in disbelief. ‘You think that’s what this is? That pack of clowns?’

  ‘Then what…?’ Che began, but Taki was already running ahead, shouting for them to follow her.

  There was still fighting at the main door, but Taki had found a side-door that was clear, and they got out into the street unmolested. Instantly three of their guards were dashing off around the side of the house, to catch the attackers at the front unawares. Dalre and a solid-looking Solarnese man stayed with them.

  ‘Taki, will you please tell me what is going on?’ Che demanded. ‘Is this… is this just some other mad thing you people do every month, or something?’

  ‘Cheerwell, do you Beetles never look up?’ Taki asked of her sharply.

  Che did look up, and a moment later she fell to her knees, hearing Nero swear at the very same sight.

  There was an airship hanging over Solarno, a massive tapering thing with a rigid-framed airbag, supporting a gondola that ran almost its entire length. There was a whole constellation of lights along its sides, lamps hanging from cords that cast a surreal moon-like glow across the city, and up onto the bulging sides of the balloon itself.

  The gondola was riddled with holes, a not-quite-regular pattern of openings, and for a moment Che thought that Solarno would suffer the same incendiary fate as Tark. But this was no sophisticated bomber, and the Starnest had only one function in war.

  Things were dropping continually from the holes, and those things were fighting men, who opened their wings halfway down to glide earthwards into the city in squads of twenty and fifty. The airship was full of Wasp soldiers, who were now descending on Solarno in their hundreds.

  ‘And look there, our old friends,’ Taki said, pointing. Che recognized their outlines against the clouds: two other airships, which would have been huge if it had not been for the monster they were escorting, and each equipped with four pontoons for docking orthopters. Some of the flying machines had detached already, and begun gliding over the half-sleeping city.

  ‘But what are they doing?’ Che asked numbly.

  ‘They’re invading,’ Nero informed her. ‘They’re seizing the city.’

  ‘And they’ve scared the Crystal Standard into helping them,’ Taki added. ‘But if they keep dropping that many men from that ship for much longer, they won’t need any help from anyone. Come on.’

  ‘Come on where?’ Che asked.

  ‘What do you think they’ll do to you when they catch you, Lowlander?’ Taki demanded. ‘We need to get both of you out of here – to the Lowlands, to Princep, to anywhere.’

  ‘The docks?’ Che suggested. ‘A boat?’

  ‘No, the airfield, before it’s too late,’ Taki insisted. ‘Now follow me. Nobody knows a quicker way from here to the airfield than me.’

  Solarno was a city turned mad and thrashing. A hundred yards from the Destiavel house, another noble’s mansion was in flames, with fighting at its doorways so fierce that Che could not tell whether those inside were trying to escape or those outside only wanted to throw themselves into the fire. She saw no distinctive sashes on any of them, suggesting some private grudge meeting a settlement of opportunity. Everywhere the Solarnese were busy killing each other, and occasionally Wasps stood looking on, heedless of whether their supposed allies were winning or not.

  All those factions, all that talk about their ruling councils, and in the end it was just a barrel of firepowder waiting for the spark. The parties of Solarno had finally been galvanized, after the initiative forced on the Crystal Standard by the Wasps had broken the fragile balance. Left to themselves, Che guessed, it would have been a simple night of violence, and then stability would follow the sunrise. But this time the Wasps would fan the flames and, in the morning, Solarno would have become an imperial city. The people at each other’s throats would blink in the dawn light and realise that they were no longer free.

  Taki had been leading them swift and straight, sometimes running and sometim
es flying, but without warning she stopped, staring ahead of her. In front of them was some taverna or other, which did not seem to Che in any way special, except that it was being looted. The front door was broken in, with young men and women tearing up the interior in search of valuables. Che noticed the sashes of at least two parties involved, and guessed that this was again a private venture and not the work of political partisans.

  ‘Taki?’ she asked. ‘What is it.’

  ‘Just… you can’t understand,’ the Fly said. ‘It’s not ever going to be the same, is it?’

  ‘You can fight the Wasps-’ Che started.

  ‘It isn’t the Wasps. You really don’t know. You’ve only been here a few days. I’m Solarnese, and this is my home. That… that was where we all used to meet: me and Niamedh and Amre and the rest. That was where he died.’

  Her half-brother, Che recalled, killed by the Wasps. Now the very planks of her memories were being torn up.

  ‘Hey now, if we’re going to move we should move,’ said Nero edgily. He had a knife in his hand. ‘This is getting worse than at Tark.’

  ‘Look!’ Che gasped. A flight of Wasp soldiers was feathering down 200 yards ahead of them, blocking their path. They fell from the sky in eerie silence, glimmering wings outspread, and as the first few touched down, a handful of others ran from a side-street to join them. One seemed to be giving hurried orders, pointing down alleys and indicating precise sections of the street. Che recalled Nero’s suspicion about there being Wasps in Solarno with a mindlink. How else could such a tidy operation be controlled?

  The Wasps were now advancing directly down the street, and as soon as they reached the looters they simply started blasting away with their stings, killing half a dozen and instantly scattering the rest. They were shouting something, and Che picked out the words, ‘Curfew!’ and then, ‘Everyone inside!’

  ‘We have to leave!’ she urged Taki, and saw with a shock the tears glinting on the Fly woman’s face. The expression itself remained resolute, though, and Taki glanced quickly about them and then chose a side-street that would lead them around and beyond the advancing Wasp squad.

  Che glanced up, as the rattle of an approaching orthopter grew loud, seeing the flying machine skim the rooftops as if keeping a watch on progress below.

  ‘Taki, if we take off, they’ll see.’

  ‘That they will!’ the Fly called back.

  ‘But they’ll come to try and stop us,’ Che told her. ‘They’ll fight us.’

  ‘They’ll fight me,’ said Taki grimly. ‘And so let them!’

  Further away, across the rooftops, a Solarnese fixed-wing, none that Che recognized, was making a tight circle, duelling with a Wasp orthopter in a complex tangle of loops that eventually took them both out over the Exalsee. The flying machine that had just passed overhead made a ponderous turn and set out to give its colleague aid, passing so low that it rattled the tiles of the roofs.

  ‘What about your mistress?’ Che suddenly realized. ‘What about Genissa? Shouldn’t you be looking after her?’

  ‘She’s off already,’ Taki replied. ‘She’s gone to rally the Satin Trail, and she’s got guards enough. You two are my responsibility.’

  There was a slight hitch in her voice, though, which told Che that this responsibility was self-imposed.

  Over them the bloated length of the Starnest hung like a great deformed moon, and still there were soldiers descending from it, like seeds drifting in the wind. In their squads they fell on the city, and wherever they landed they took control, killing any citizens who were under arms out on the streets, loudly proclaiming their curfew and then setting off to bring ever-greater sections of the city of Solarno under imperial rule. Despite their orders, and the mindlinked men who tried to coordinate them, they were Wasp-kinden soldiers still. With the city of Solarno now helpless against them, they broke down doors, they looted and raped. They put the brand of the Empire on yet another lesser people, and believed only that their ability to do so was all the right they needed.

  At the airfield Taki and her charges arrived at the hangar just before the Wasps did. Even as the aviatrix went rushing for the safety of the Esca Volenti, they were dropping onto the airfield beyond, their ready-drawn swords glittering in the hangar lamps.

  The three fugitives were not the only ones to seek sanctuary here. There were at least a dozen mechanics caught out by the airborne invasion, several others who were most likely pilots on the same mission as Taki, and some who were simply ordinary people of Solarno who had hoped that the elevated field might prove safer than the city below.

  There was at least a score of Wasps spiralling down outside. Taki paused, with the cockpit of the Esca half open, biting her lip.

  Che called out to her. ‘Where do we go now?’

  The Fly glanced back at them, and Che realized that, in the rush of relief at seeing her machine undamaged, Taki had almost forgotten about the people she was escorting to safety. The Fly boosted herself up onto the Esca’s hull and turned to look at the dozen other flying machines sheltering under the hangar’s roof.

  ‘That one!’ she pointed, and Che saw a squat, barrel-bodied machine, a four-vaned orthopter that could only be a cargo-hauler. It looked sturdier than the Stormcry had been, but also slower and surely destined for the same sorry fate.

  ‘Isn’t there something fleeter?’ Che demanded.

  ‘Just get in it!’ Taki ordered her. The first crackle of a Wasp sting sounded outside. The engineers and pilots, and whoever else was armed, had formed up on either side of the hangar door. Several of them had crossbows, and Che saw Taki reach into the Esca’s cockpit and come out with a little double-strung bow of her own. Nero had already unslung and tensioned his bow, and now hopped up onto the hood of a half-dismantled fixed-wing, so as to get a clear shot at the enemy. Che noticed him wince with the effort.

  She hurried over to the heavy orthopter, on which the inspiring name Cleaver was painted in square, solid letters. It was fashioned of wood bound with iron hoops, just like a barrel, and it was bigger than she had first thought. The craft looked altogether too heavy to get off the ground. Doggedly she hauled herself up the metal rungs bolted into the side, and began to fumble at the catches.

  The Wasps were trying to force their way into the hangar but they had not expected the resistance and the first volley of bolts had cut four of them down. An enterprising pilot had even brought his craft’s rotary piercer about and got a volley of bolts off into the Wasps as they began to muster. In response the soldiers tried a sudden charge, hands blazing. Che saw at least two of the defenders fall back, seared with smoking wounds. There followed a brief moment of close-combat fighting, short-swords against knives and the curved Solarnese blades, and then the Wasps had taken to the air again, repelled. A ragged cheer went up from the hangar’s defenders but, even as their cries still echoed, there were more Wasps gathering outside, the survivors of the first assault and now a dozen more. Che was grimly certain that an alert had already gone down into the city itself, as the Wasps would want to subdue the airfields most of all.

  She had the round hatch open at last, and squeezed herself through, dropping abruptly into more space than she had expected. The Cleaver looked so heavy from outside, but it was almost entirely hollow, a dedicated freighter. A single wooden chair, looking like it had come from someone’s house, had been nailed into place behind the navigation stick, and Che saw that her only visibility would be the strips of sky viewed through two slots cut into the orthopter’s nose. She was no seasoned pilot but she had surely flown more elegant machines than this in her time.

  And unarmed again. Taki doesn’t trust me to survive an air fight. Not that the Cleaver could have managed that anyway. It must move through the air like… Like a Beetle, I suppose.

  She put her head out of the hatch to see where Nero was, and found him crouching atop the half-finished machine. At that moment he was loosing an arrow with great concentration, sending it winging out past the
defenders, only to skip across the empty ground between two Wasps. An artist he might be, she realized, but an archer he was not.

  If only Achaeos was here, she thought, and then, I hope he’s coping better than this.

  Taki shot off her crossbow, and then crouched behind the Esca to crank the arms back. The Wasps were making progress into the building now. Too many of the Solarnese were dead or lying injured on the ground, and the remaining defenders had fallen back to take cover behind the flying machines, allowing the Wasps the shelter of the doorway. To Che’s horror she saw another Wasp orthopter fly past by the hangar mouth, turning slowly in a course that would bring it into land.

  ‘Nero, come on!’ she yelled. ‘Taki!’

  ‘No use,’ said the Fly girl, slotting a new bolt into place. ‘We can’t get out past them. They’d destroy the Esca, destroy any machine that tried to escape.’ She sounded fiercely bitter, thus denied the sky.

  ‘Hold your shot!’ shouted someone from immediately behind the Wasp lines. ‘The next man to loose will be put on a charge!’

  Slowly the Wasps stopped shooting, still holding to the cover of the doorway. The defenders then cautiously followed suit.

  ‘Is Bella Taki-Amre within?’ yelled a voice, and Che recognized it as belonging to Axrad, the Wasp officer pilot. ‘What do you want?’ Taki called out.

  ‘I thought I might find you here. Here or in the air.’ Axrad appeared at the door, silhouetted against the lamps glowing outside. It was as if he was daring the defenders to shoot him. ‘We have unfinished business, you and I.’

  Taki slowly released the tension on her crossbow. ‘Are you asking me to take this outside?’ she asked.

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ Axrad replied.

  ‘And what about everyone else?’ she enquired.