From face to face she looked in turn, seeing there her own fragile empire ready to set against her all-powerful brother – and against the unthinkable Uctebri.
She smiled at them warmly, and set about explaining precisely what they must do for her.
* * *
‘You’ve got another visitor,’ came Ult’s voice. Tisamon opened his eyes, his mind falling back from dream-tormented sleep to the gloomy confines of his cell.
‘Keep your visitors.’
‘What can I say? You’re a popular man.’ Ult grinned mirthlessly. ‘Never had a prisoner get so many visitors wanting to see him.’
Tisamon shrugged. ‘To the pits with them.’
‘Don’t be like that. You’re denying me a chance to make a fortune.’
Two nights ago, the Mantis had fought in one of the smaller private arenas, after which word had spread. This last day alone there had been over a dozen people escorted down into the gloom to see him, almost all of them women of good family. It was a tradition, Ult explained. So many menfolk were away with the army, it was only natural that their wives became bored. A little excitement, a little titillation, and of course most of the fighters were glad of the attention.
‘But not you,’ Ult noted. ‘We’d do well out of them, if you’d let them touch you.’
‘What if I killed them instead?’ Tisamon asked bitterly.
‘Then you’d be stung to death in your cell,’ Ult said with equanimity. ‘Don’t think that hasn’t happened. It’s all part of the thrill.’
Tisamon sat down with his back to the bars, his arms wrapped about his knees. ‘What is it they really seek, Ult?’
‘Death, Mantis. Surely you know that rich people love death.’
‘In Capitas perhaps.’
‘It’s because they live safe lives, the rich and powerful. Oh, some of them go off to the army, and that ain’t exactly safe for anyone, but there’s a load of people with rank and medals who just sit behind their desk and do their marching on paper. And there are the officers’ wives, of course, with all the time and money they could want, and nothing to do with it . . . And here you are, a bit exotic, a bit rough and dangerous, and not bad-looking for all that, and you move like you do – bound to catch their eye, yes?’
‘It’s disgusting.’
Ult laughed at him. ‘You got cursed high standards for a pit-fighter, Old Mantis. Look at your fellows here – they’d give a lot to be where you are. Think of it as a recognition of your skills, if you want, and the more people want to see you . . .’
The Wasp left the words hanging, but Tisamon heard the rest in his head: the more chance you’ll get what you want.
‘So who’s asking for me now? The queen herself ?’
‘Something a little different. Something you can say “no” to without me thinking you’re a fool for refusing. Got a fellow wanting the cell next to yours, just for a bit. He says he can point me in the way of some money in the city, if I do it. But it’s your call in the end.’
‘Another prisoner?’
‘He’d like me to think so,’ Ult sneered. ‘They reckon you got to be stupid, to work down here, but I seen most types. This fellow, he’s a spy. He’s got that look to him. He’s Rekef, more than likely. He’s here to take a look at you. Maybe the Emperor’s heard of you, and wants you checked out.’
‘Then bring him in. I’ll play the abject slave, shall I?’
‘You ain’t got it in you,’ Ult told him. ‘You carry yourself prouder than a battlefield colonel, you do. I’ll bring him over, though. If you end up gutting him through the bars that’s your business.’
Tisamon waited in the dark, listening to the other prisoners all around him. Am I so proud, still? Perhaps he should have given those Wasp women what they wanted: one more debasement, the last step in his descent. But she is out there, somewhere: Felise Mienn whom he would have to kill – or else she would kill him.
He did not even look up as Ult and a pair of guards returned, and his latest visitor was slung into the cell next to him, which had been empty since the previous evening.
‘What do you want?’ he growled.
‘Is that any way to greet an old friend?’ There was more weariness than humour in the voice, and it took a moment for Tisamon to place it.
‘Thalric?’
‘The same.’ The Wasp looked haggard and bruised. If he was a Rekef spy once more, he was certainly well disguised as a man to whom life had not been kind for some time.
‘You’ve come home, then,’ Tisamon observed, finding that the sight of the man raised no particular emotion in him.
‘The Emperor called for his errant son,’ replied Thalric, and leant carefully back, wincing in pain. ‘I’ve not been this comfortable for a while, believe it or not.’
‘Why are you here, Thalric?’
‘The consequences of a piece of fairly severe insubordination.’
‘I thought you’d left the army.’
‘Ironic,’ Thalric laughed. ‘They let me back in just beforehand. You’ve never trusted me, have you?’
‘Any reason that I should have?’
‘No.’ Thalric’s smile was small and bleak. ‘So in that case you can decide whether I’m faithfully passing on a message or merely taking pleasure in putting the knife in.’
Tisamon regarded him. ‘I don’t cut easily.’
‘Excellent. Well, your daughter is in the city and she wants to rescue you.’ Thalric closed his eyes. ‘For some reason she wanted me to tell you and, although I can hardly say that I’m ever as good as my word, here I am, and the words are said.’
There was a long silence, which gave Tisamon every chance to consider Tynisa’s likely fate if she attempted to free him, until eventually, eyes still closed, Thalric said, ‘Tisamon? You haven’t died, have you?’
‘Felise Mienn is here,’ Tisamon said, out of some obscure desire to strike back. ‘She will probably kill you, if she gets the chance.’
Thalric’s smile actually broadened. ‘Then tell her to stand in line.’ He gave a sigh, which ended up as a wheezing kind of laugh. ‘Don’t you love it when old friends get together?’
Thalric was asleep the next morning, when Ult came to fetch Tisamon. If the former Rekef man was playing a role now, he was playing it to the hilt. Even at rest his face looked haunted by past decisions.
‘Whose blood am I shedding?’ Tisamon asked.
Ult shook his head. ‘Not this time, old Mantis. This time you’re indulging me.’
‘Is that so?’
‘I want to see you fight her.’
Tisamon was on his feet instantly, and something caught inside him, like a hook. ‘Felise?’
‘The Dragonfly woman, right.’ Ult unlocked the cell and Tisamon stepped out. He felt unsteady, unsettled within himself. It was anticipation, he realized. The moment’s thought came to him, not of their sparring bouts in the Prowess Forum, but of their very first meeting when she had been trying to kill him for real, both of them tested to the very edge of their skill. He felt his heartbeat speed up just at the memory.
Ult led him to the practice ring beneath the palace, where a dozen Slave Corps guards were sitting around the periphery of the room. In the centre stood Felise Mienn. Ult nodded to her, warrior to warrior, as he came in, before heading for the weapon racks.
‘We generally use these for the comedy matches,’ he explained, weighing a short stave in his hand. ‘Good enough for practice, though. I want to see the pair of you go at each other.’
Tisamon did not even look at him. His eyes were fixed on Felise. They had not given her back her armour but, standing there with the three-foot length of wood in her hands, she had regained every semblance of the warrior.
‘Comedy matches?’ she repeated emptily, but her eyes were just as much for Tisamon. She spared no glance for their jailer, or for the Wasp soldiers that ringed this little private arena.
‘Oh, you know, half a dozen Fly-kinden up against a big scorpion, civ
ilians against the reaping machine, that kind of thing.’ Ult shrugged, looking between them. ‘I keep telling them that if I was allowed to properly train the prisoners I get down here, get them practising, the shows would become that much the better, but they don’t like the idea.’ It was clear that his mouth was simply making the words while his mind considered the problem these two represented. ‘Right then,’ he said at last, handing a stave to Tisamon. ‘Remember, this is just a friendly.’
Felise’s eyes narrowed and she dropped back into a defensive stance, weight on her back foot, weapon held low and forward. Tisamon found that his own stance came on him without thinking, the stick cocked back behind, one hand ready to beat aside her weapon, a stance that invited attack, yet not at all the best for dealing with her own pose.
Their eyes met almost with a shock. She wanted to kill him, and she would do so unless someone stopped her, wooden stick or no. Dirt-smeared and haggard as she was, in that moment she was as beautiful as he had ever seen her.
She went for him, the defensive stance becoming something else without warning, a sudden darting lunge. They had bound leather across her back to stop her calling up her wings, but she seemed to fly at him anyway. A swift downward strike, which he avoided, was cover for a lunge at his midriff that clipped him, the slightest contact, perhaps the pinprick of a splinter from the stave. With a quick turn of her wrists, she spun the wooden blade in a circle to catch his inevitable counterattack, but it did not come; instead he moved back and back, weapon still poised to strike.
She halted, evaluating, watching, turning as he circled her. Something inside him had told him at the start that he could not strike at her. After all, he was the betrayer, so he had no right to fight to win. But as soon as the fight had begun, he had shaken that off. The old fierce fire came back to him, as though the whole of his recent past had never occurred. It was as though he had now stepped sideways into a different word: a pure, plain world of light and air and the uncorrupted elegance of combat.
He struck, a sudden whirling of the blade towards her to draw her out, but she just swayed back. Her own stave drove at his face, and he put it aside with his free hand, bringing his mock-weapon down on her shoulder. She caught it with her offhand, bending at the knees to absorb the force, and cast him off, and he spun away, dancing across the arena floor, every line become a circle within that closed space, so as to lead him back to her.
He took no pause, lashing down at her, and their sticks met a dozen times in a rapid patter, instinct taking over where the eyes were too slow. Then they were past each other, without a strike scored. He slung the stave back, arcing it at the back of her head, but she dropped to one knee and her own weapon skimmed his side and caught the cloth of his slave’s shirt.
They parted again, circling. Ult and his men might not even have been there. They now had their small and hermetic world entirely to themselves.
She was smiling – as he realized that he was, too. Their expressions must have seemed a perfect match.
She was at him then, striking down at his head, sideways at his neck, blows swift and hard enough to break bone if they landed. He skipped back, swayed aside, dragged the stave across the front of her body to slash her open as though it was a blade indeed, missing only by moments. Her own stick blurred overhead as he dropped down. She had struck one-handed, and her left hand came in, ripping a bloody line across his shoulder with her thumb-claw. He felt the pain only as a distant voice urging him on. His own arm-spines grazed her hip, and then cut at her stomach as she gave ground, and all the time his stave was moving, meeting hers again and again, as though they had practised the fight for months or even years. They were closer and closer together, well inside each other’s reach, the deadly work being done with the offhands, the useless staves only a distraction. She gouged his cheek, aiming for his eye. He raked three lines of red below her collar-bone, looking for her throat.
They broke apart, six feet of clear ground between them in an instant, poised in their perfect stances, waiting. Although she still gripped it like a sword, Felise’s stick had been sheared in half.
Ult made a small sound into the silence. The soldiers were on their feet in shocked silence, hands out and open ready to sting.
Tisamon looked at Felise, seeing the few lines he had managed to score on her, and feeling his own blood where she had drawn it. He met her eyes, took a step towards her. She cast the halved stick away, her thumb-claws flexing and out, while moving in towards him. Ult was saying his name, but he did not care.
Another step, and almost within reach of her hands. He knew now that, where his stick had been, his clawed glove was now buckled about his hand and forearm as though it had always been there, the short, deadly blade drawn back to strike. He had not even realized that he had called to it.
He looked into her face, golden and savage and beautiful, and, even as Ult called his name again, he said, ‘Forgive me.’
Even as she tensed to spring, her lips moved, and what she said was, ‘Of course.’
He let his arms fall to his sides, but she did not kill him. Instead, the soldiers had grabbed her, hauled her back, even as others were reaching for him, reaching to take away the weapon they had seen, but that was no longer there. He held her eyes, and felt at the same time a crippling joy and a wrenching bitterness that he should realize only now, at this waning end of their time together, that he loved her. It was only when they fought that he could see it clearly.
Ult was staring at him – indeed all the Wasps were staring at him, but Ult’s expression was different. He was the only one there not busy convincing himself that he had been mistaken. He signalled for some of his men to lead Felise away, and Tisamon watched her until she was gone. Only then did he turn to his keeper, expressionless.
‘If your badge got taken from you, I can get it back,’ Ult said, studying him. Tisamon raised his eyebrows, and the Wasp continued, ‘Oh, they had me in the Twelve-Year War, early on, so don’t think I don’t know your kind. We were fighting plenty of Mantis as well as Dragonfly back then, and I saw some pull tricks like you just pulled. Don’t assume I don’t know anything.’
‘I abandoned the symbol of my order by choice,’ Tisamon said. Because of her, and my own pride.
Ult nodded slowly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I reckon I was just quick enough to keep you alive until next time, Mantis. I just hope the Emperor will appreciate the pair of you as much as I do.’
* * *
It was the middle of the night, so far as he could judge, when they came for Thalric. Four guards opened up his cell, chained him up and hauled him off. He was conscious of Tisamon’s wry gaze on him as he left.
They took him to a windowless room, lit by a dim gas-lantern fixed on the wall. For all he could see of the sun it could just as easily be noon outside as night.
It was an interrogation room. Not a room with that trade’s machines and artificers but a little booth of an office that, in the great scheme of questioning through excruciation, preceded the main event. A big man was standing there behind a desk, an officer from his bearing, but Thalric noticed no badge of rank. Sitting at the desk itself was a woman.
He was surprised at that because, in Capitas, even the Rekef – which elsewhere used whatever tool best fit the hand – was intrinsically a conservative force. Women were considered servants or perhaps clerks at best, but not put in charge, as this one clearly was. Even the officer, who had authority enough to be at least a colonel, was deferring to her.
She was young, fifteen or twenty years Thalric’s junior at least, and the dim light showed that she was attractive. Her hair was long and golden, tied back neatly. She wore clothes that suggested wealth – some rich officer’s wife? Her gaze was very steady.
‘Major Thalric of the Rekef,’ she began, but not as a question. The guards were still watching him narrowly despite having bound his arms painfully tight behind his back. He waited, understanding that this was not an opportunity to better his lot. He wou
ld just have to weather whatever came.
‘So you killed General Reiner,’ she noted.
Is she his wife? That would make sense. He had no other theory as to who she might be. She would make a very young wife for Reiner, though, surely? He had never thought of Rekef generals as being the marrying type, but then he himself was still married to a woman he had not seen in years. The Empire needed sons, but it was a duty only, and sentiment did not come into it.
‘Major Thalric . . . or perhaps just Thalric.’ Her smile remained bright and unreadable. In fact her eyes glittered with a hard-edged mirth, and if she was a widow there was little enough grieving in her. ‘General Brugan, here, has shown me your records.’
Thalric blinked, glancing up at the big officer. General Brugan? So the Rekef really was ready to take him apart, was it? But if that was the case, who was this wretched woman? Where was General Maxin?
‘A remarkable piece of patchwork, your career,’ the woman noted. ‘Remind me of it, General.’
Brugan stared bleakly at Thalric, like an artificer studying a broken machine. ‘Anti-insurgent work, after the conquest of Myna. Referred to the Rekef by Major Ulther, as he then was. Behind the lines during the Twelve-Year War with assassination squads. Then the Lowlands business, Helleron. The strike against Collegium by rail.’
The woman’s smile was cutting. ‘That didn’t go very well, did it?’
I was outmanoeuvred. The army gave insufficient support. My chief spy betrayed me. ‘No,’ Thalric said simply. If I am to be racked, let it be for my own failures. I will not die blaming others for my misdeeds.
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