Heirs of the Blade

by Tchaikovsky, Adrian

  When the arrow struck, it was swift enough that Che had no sense of its passage, only the missile suddenly sprouting from the same archer’s jaw, the force of it knocking him back. She saw Thalric start aside at the last moment from a sword stroke, then step in to grapple the attacker, the two of them wrestling in near-pitch darkness but every movement clear to her. Another Dragonfly, a woman in partial armour, landed with a spear levelled, trying to get a clear strike at Thalric, but an arrow struck her breastplate, staggering her. Che craned back and saw newcomers, a little pack of vicious-looking men darting between the trees. Most had bows, though one was a Wasp, and, as she watched, his hands flashed with a fire that looked pure white through her Art-vision.

  A boot came down on her chest with shocking suddenness, and she saw another of the Salmae’s people standing over her, eyes narrowed as he drew back a spear, plainly intending to run her through and then escape while he could. She reached for the spear shaft, missed it and cut her fingers on the blade. Then a thin lance of steel had struck its way into her attacker’s armour, punching through as though it were made of eggshell, and he fell back, the spear clattering aside. Che looked up at her rescuer, and a jolt of mixed emotions ran through her.

  Tynisa.

  Forty-Two

  With Che an increasingly stumbling weight in his arms, Thalric took in very little of their new companions. It was all he could do to keep up, pelting ahead into the dark, through the trees. Che’s wings flickered in and out as she tried to keep weight off her injured leg. He could feel her tense each time, gathering her waning strength, and after the second blur of wings he timed his bursts of speed to coincide with them, staying just on the heels of the fleeing Spider-kinden man ahead of him.

  Abruptly he was alone, his escorts vanished like spectres. He skidded to a halt, Che crying out in pain, and someone tugged at his boot. He had a moment of fumbling Che’s weight, trying for a free hand, before he realized that there was a hollow here, excavated amongst the tree roots, where his guides had taken shelter.

  He dropped obediently down, then was suddenly tumbling forwards as the hole turned out deeper than he had thought. His wings slowed him partially, then Che’s weight wrenched onwards, so he ended up on his knees, with the girl clinging to him.

  For a moment all was dark, Che’s whimpering breath his whole world. Then he noticed a flicker of light, a familiar crackle that had him extending his palm into the dark, a single candle guttered into a wan glow. The Wasp who held it had just touched it to life with the slightest ember of his sting.

  That Thalric recognized him instantly came as no surprise now. It seemed that the Commonweal formed a web of strange chances, of elaborately intertwined destinies. No wonder the superstitious bastards believe so many stupid things. But he could not hold to such a dismissive thought with a clear conscience any longer. He had witnessed too much of the wrong side of the world. Give me a month in a sane man’s town, with automotives on the streets and gaslight at night, and I’ll recognize all this as a bad dream.

  ‘Mordrec, isn’t it?’ he recalled wearily.

  The other Wasp eyed him blankly for a moment, then cursed. ‘You . . . and the Beetle girl. Why not? Where are the others that were with you?’

  ‘Expected any moment,’ Thalric replied, although he felt a cold certainty that he would not see Varmen again.

  ‘We were just creeping out to take a look at the Salmae, see what the bitch had brought with her.’ Mordrec’s free hand was by his side, but Thalric sensed the threat implicit there. ‘And how come we found you setting fires and causing chaos?’

  ‘Because of her.’ Thalric nodded past the man’s shoulder. There was a whole cave nestling here, a rent in the earth left where the roots of some vast forest giant had withered and died. Towards the rear he could make out a huddle of figures lit by a further candle, a good ten feet away. Between the two lights, though barely touched by either, he could make out the figure of Tynisa.

  When Mordrec noticed her there, and saw her expression, he stayed well clear of them, ducking off to one side, holding his candle out like a talisman.

  Her blade was drawn, Thalric saw. He would almost have been disappointed otherwise.

  ‘What have you done to her?’ Tynisa hissed, the words he could have put in her mouth, given two guesses. He glanced pointedly at Che’s leg and saw, with a wince, that the arrow’s fletchings had snapped off at some point during their escape. ‘Yes, that’s right. Obviously I shot her myself. I’m that well known for my archery.’

  Her narrow blade was lined up with his throat, the tip of it within his arm’s reach, but something about this woman had always brought out in him a need for bitter words, and he felt too tired to restrain himself.

  ‘I rescued her from the Salmae, who seized her for reasons I can’t guess at unless, as they’re hunting you, they wanted to use her as bait.’ He felt his Wasp temper slip its leash. ‘She says your father’s ghost sits on your shoulders like a cloak but, frankly, I don’t know. After my getting you out of Capitas after the war, bringing your sister halfway across the known world, and then snatching her from the Commonweal nobility, of fond memory, I don’t think even that bloody menace Tisamon would display quite such a level of ingratitude.’

  He tensed as he said it, his wings and sting both at the ready, but the light of Mordrec’s candle caught an unexpected look on her face: stricken and lost.

  ‘He wants to kill you,’ she whispered, and it seemed that she lowered her sword only by great effort of will. ‘He doesn’t remember gratitude. He doesn’t remember his friends even, or barely, but he remembers his honour, and the Mantis way – and his enemies. Keep clear of me, Thalric. I don’t know if I can stop him. I couldn’t before . . .’

  ‘Before what?’ he asked, suspiciously.

  ‘You killed their prince.’

  Both of them looked down at Che, now almost forgotten.

  ‘We killed him, both of us,’ Tynisa confirmed. ‘I don’t know where I end and Tisamon starts. You were right, Che, and your magician was right, too, and now . . . I missed my chance, and it’s too late.’

  ‘Not yet. Not quite.’

  They started, all of them, and Mordrec swore fiercely as Maure dropped down into the cave with a flurry of wings.

  I remember his face, Tynisa considered. In stories she had heard of berserking warriors from the Bad Old Days – after the fit left them they would recall nothing of what they had done. The climax of a dozen Mantis tragedies was when the hero discovers too late whose blood is on her blade. That would be a mercy, Tynisa decided. Let their fabled heroes weep and gnash their teeth. Remembering is worse than finding out second-hand. She recalled Alain’s expression as he had looked back and seen her there, the faintest shadow of guilt quickly brushed away, to be replaced by an all-too-ready smile. It was an invitation for her to forgive his dalliance, born from his confidence that he would talk her round, and that the world would continue dancing to his tune. He had mistaken her, though. He had thought that she was lovestruck, enamoured of him. He had never realized that she had loved him only for the image of his dead brother. Later, after the hunt, after Tisamon had lodged inside her like a poisoned arrow, she had not loved him at all. She had claimed him, made his approval the justification for her every bloody act, and he had used her, his mother had used her, and both of them had thought of her as a tame beast.

  The Butterfly-kinden girl had read Tynisa better than Alain ever did. As soon as he was no longer pinning her down, she had fled in a flurry of golden wings, holding her ripped garments to her. By then Alain was dead.

  ‘Do it. Make it go away,’ she instructed.

  ‘It’s not so easy, but if you really wish the ghost gone, that is half the battle,’ Maure replied.

  The brigands had spent an entire day without discovery, Dal Arche keeping them inside the hollow beneath the trees, while the scouts of the Salmae ranged far beyond them. That night they had crept out and made best time heading north, all t
he better to baffle the trackers. Out of the woods, across a stretch of open ground, and then into the decaying remains of a small village, barely a half-dozen houses, most with only three walls still standing at best. The flimsy-looking Commonweal architecture was surprisingly durable, however, and where the outer walls had fallen away, panels decaying and overgrown, the inner rooms often still stood, and the slanted roofs remained more intact than not.

  The Salmae search had already progressed further east, and Dal reckoned they had at least a day to catch their breath before the hunters realized they had been tricked. He was already hidden away with Soul Je and Mordrec, plotting their next move, working out the next cover between here and the border.

  Che, Tynisa and Maure had chosen one ramshackle hut as their own. After dressing her wound as best she could, Che had sent Thalric to keep watch on their doubtful allies. Maure’s exorcism would not be helped by a Wasp-kinden sceptic tutting over her shoulder.

  ‘We must draw him out first,’ Maure explained. ‘When we attempted this before, he simply sat there in your mind like a beetle beneath a stone. With your help, though, we can startle him out, to where you can confront him and cut the bonds that hold him to you.’

  Tynisa glanced around them. ‘Che, you believe . . .?’

  The Beetle girl nodded soberly.

  ‘But the College, Collegium, your people . . . everything they taught us when we were growing up . . .’ Tynisa’s whisper was almost pleading. ‘The world can’t be like this? Can’t I just be simply mad?’

  Che took her sister’s hands, which were shaking. ‘Do you trust me?’ Despite her wound, despite everything, she seemed now more solid and grounded than even Stenwold had been, an anchor of stability.

  ‘I have no one else to trust,’ Tynisa said, in a small, scared voice. ‘Do it. Do it now before I change my mind.’

  ‘Right.’ Maure clapped her hands, businesslike, then hurried out of their wretched little hut to harangue the bandits. ‘I need candles – all the candles you have. Incense, herbs. Just lay it all out. Serious ghost business! Don’t make me put a curse on you. No stinting!’ She would not take no for an answer, would not give up, and, although the Wasps stared at her as if she was mad, the bulk of the brigands were Inapt and obviously took her extremely seriously. Within a few minutes she returned with a surprising haul, and began sorting through it, trying to duplicate all the artefacts of ritual that she had left behind at Leose.

  She first set out all the candles she had been able to scavenge, almost twenty stubs of varying sizes, and then had the Wasp Mordrec light them through his Art, which he seemed able to focus and control more than most of his kinden. In place of her firefly lamps, the little flames attracted dozens of insects that wheeled and circled about the tiny flames, before giving themselves to the pyre in brief, crackling sacrifice. Maure drew her circle in flour commandeered from some brigand’s provisions, and marked out symbols in splashes of liquor, those same Khanaphes pictograms that she herself could not read. She had sorted through what meagre herbs, medicines and spices Dal Arche’s people had donated, burning some, mixing others, in a ferocious magical improvisation, and doing everything she could with the makeshift tools at hand. Che watched it all but, more than that, she felt – understanding how Maure experimented to bring the circle to the right pitch of preparedness; until she could name the very moment when the necromancer had succeeded, that moment when the correct taste and strength of power had arisen, harsh, at the back of her throat.

  Tynisa had watched it all blankly, but now at last Maure turned to her. ‘Kneel,’ she said. ‘Kneel, for we are ready.’

  Grimacing, Tynisa did as she was asked, acutely conscious of her sword as she tilted it to keep the scabbard-tip from scraping the floor. Che had knelt as well, then winced and thought better of it, so ended up sitting awkwardly with her injured leg straight out in front of her.

  ‘We will now go into your mind, we three,’ Maure announced. ‘We will take you somewhere that your ghost cannot bear to be.’ Her long face, with all its diverse heritage, looked drawn and lean. ‘You will not relish that place either, but you must seize on to it, as if it were a thorn.’

  ‘You mean a nettle,’ Che said automatically. ‘Nettles don’t hurt if you grasp them, but thorns still do.’ For a moment she was again the pedantic student that Tynisa remembered from the Great College.

  Maure stared at her. ‘If I may continue?’ she asked, and Che nodded apologetically. ‘Close your eyes, please,’ the magician requested, ‘both of you. We are going to travel back a little way. I know enough about you, Tynisa, to find my path. Che has told me of the hooks your life is hung from, so we will go to see something of worth, I think. Che, you have wished to see this too, and there are answers here for you. Simply concentrate on my voice, nothing more. Eyes closed, and listen . . .’

  Sitting in that oddly peaceful ruin, with the bandits sufficiently involved in their own business not to intrude, Che felt oddly at rest, almost on the point of dozing. A moment later she jerked her head, sure she had missed some of Maure’s intonation. The woman kept repeating the same few phrases, changing the order but never altering her tone. The day was clear and still, though, and sunlight shafted through the cracks in the roof. This was surely no suitable time for magic, let alone necromancy.

  And yet closing her eyes allowed her a darkness that even her Art could not penetrate, and the droning cycle of Maure’s words seemed to throw layers and layers of distance between her and the rest of the world, as though she was receding in a direction she had no precise word for.

  And, unable to stop herself, she opened her eyes – or they were opened for her.

  By opening them, she let in a wall of sound. For a moment she could make no sense of the images, but the heaving, roaring bellow all around her seemed to take and shake her until her teeth rattled. There were surely a thousand Wasp-kinden all around, in tiered seats arranged in a huge ellipse about a pit of sand. She knew enough to recognize it as a blood-fighting arena, but she’d had no idea that they could be so large.

  Her attention was already being shepherded though, to a knot of fighting at the lip of the pit. For a moment the movement there was so swift and brutal that she could not make it out, but then she felt Tynisa invisibly with her, felt her sister’s horror as she attempted to squirm away from the sight, and she knew.

  Tisamon and his lover, the Dragonfly Felise Mienn, were fighting. Dozens of Wasp soldiers descended on them, throwing themselves in the way of the avenging pair, dying on their blades. For a moment Che could not see why the Wasps did not simply stand off and use their stings, but then she absorbed the greater picture and she understood. Tisamon and Felise were not simply shedding random blood: they had a goal in mind.

  Way above them, and yet so close, was the Imperial box, a cloth-walled chamber where cowered a crowned young Wasp who could only be the Emperor, Alvdan the Second. Beside him Che saw the unforgettable face of Seda, who would become Empress in his stead. She was not yet the imperious sorceress that Che had locked horns with, though. The aura of power that Che expected was absent, had yet to touch her. The girl was staring at the approaching pair with an expression of fascination and fear, but her fear was not for her own life, or at least not at the hands of Tisamon. There was a thread extending from her, invisible yet apparent to Che, that touched on a dark-robed man seated on the far side of the Emperor, a pinch-faced, emaciated old creature who held in his hands an ornate knot of wood that Che knew at once, though she had never seen it.

  For this was the heart of it all. This was the Shadow Box, born from the failure of a twisted and terrible ritual, the soul of the blighted Forest Darakyon and the prison of a thousand Mantis-kinden warriors and magicians over five long centuries. Achaeos had nearly died in failing to secure this box, and here was the man into whose hands it had come. Gazing upon it, Che was struck by the sheer dark power of the object, and it was a power she recognized, as she might know a poison the second time she tas
ted it.

  Felise was dead now, Tisamon still trying to battle his way onwards, but the Wasps threw themselves upon him in a storm of blood and vengeance. The Emperor gripped the arms of his throne, staring at the Mantis Weaponsmaster in terror. The withered old man, the Mosquito-kinden, invoked the Shadow Box, and Che saw a hideous creature flower in the Emperor’s shadow: a twisted hybrid of insect and woman and briar thorn. The Emperor died without ever knowing it, and his stolen power flowed into the box, and into the hands of the robed magician.

  There was another thread, which led away from the arena, and even by thinking of it her viewpoint pulled away so that she now saw the events around Tisamon as though lit by one candle, whilst another candle sprang up in the great night to show her a gathering of Moth-kinden atop a mountain. Tharn, she knew, and Achaeos was there, injured and weak, but charging a ritual to drive out the Wasp-kinden invaders from the Moths’ halls. She knew it, knew it well, because here, as she watched, he reached out for strength, and here was her younger self to lend it. Another thread.

  The Darakyon answered Achaeos’s call and she remembered, all too well, that bleak and icy grip in her mind as it seized on them both. Her younger self was screaming now, in Myna all those miles away, as the Moth ritual rose to a bitter, wrenching climax.

  And in Capitas, at the same arena, Tisamon broke away from the pack and struck down not the Emperor, who was already dead, but the magician who clutched the soul of the Darakyon. That bloody metal claw drove down and shattered the Shadow Box, and killed its bearer, and the great knot that was the Darakyon was abruptly undone, ebbing from the world. Achaeos was dead by now, the strain of enacting the ritual more than his body could bear, and Che’s younger image had gone mad, charging towards the Wasp lines, and never knowing that the spectres of the Darakyon were at her back, ready to engage in their last battle before the world was rid of them for ever.