Isendter reached out a hand to his master. ‘To me, my Prince – but slowly. Move as the girl moves, stop when she stops. Do not look back.’
Alain gritted his teeth, keeping his eyes only on Tynisa. She shifted forward three steps, and he crawled the same distance towards Isendter. Two cautious steps in, matched by two careful steps out. Behind and above Alain, the great forest mantis shifted again, its all-seeing eyes watching each of them simultaneously. Alain was still well within the range of its spined forelimbs.
Tynisa could sense something else now, the same presence that had caused the stag to turn at bay. It was not the predator – though that was surely up to making a meal of the huge beetle – but something beyond it.
‘Do your own people live here, Whitehand?’ she hissed at Isendter from the corner of her mouth.
‘Once they did,’ he replied, which was the worst answer for her to hear. She had known places before where the Mantis-kinden had once lived, but dwelt no more. Sometimes they remained there, even though their living bodies had departed. She had not expected to find such a place in the Commonweal.
Another few steps in and she had passed Alain, usurping his place within reach of the insect’s killing arms. As she held up her tiny needle of a sword, a subtle succession of sounds behind told her that Alain had made good his retreat, and was being drawn away by Isendter.
Which just leaves me, she thought. She heard the creak of the bow again, and knew it was Orian, and that the young nobleman was intending to do something noble and foolish. She thrust her left hand back towards him, palm out: Wait!
No arrow sped past, although the insect’s head was cocked to one side now, the mandibles twitching like knife-tipped fingers. Slowly she reached for her brooch, tugged it from her jacket and held it up at arm’s length. You recognize this, don’t you? her gesture said.
Its triangular head tilted further forward, and she somehow knew that it was regarding the Dragonfly-kinden arrayed behind her. ‘They are under our protection,’ she murmured, knowing that Isendter was still there and ready to back her up. The overarching mantis swayed again, as though trying to study the situation from all points of view.
Then it was picking its way backwards, with its killing arms still raised, until it reached a precise distance from her where their circles of influence no longer intersected. Whereupon it dropped down and moved off unhurriedly between the trees, a long, dark insect that was soon lost amid the confusion of trunks.
In its place, Tynisa now saw what she had known must be there. Twenty yards behind where the mantis had reared up was a circular clearing. It was not large, and the vegetation had made ample inroads into recolonizing it, but the weathered stump at its centre had been a totem once, such as she had seen far south of here on the same night she had earned the badge that was still clutched in her left hand.
A Mantis-kinden ritual site. Any questions she might have had about whether the Commonwealer Mantids were substantially different from their Lowlander kin were now answered. Blood had been spilled here, year after year, and though the Mantis-kinden had moved on, their legacy remained.
And then she saw him, hovering grey in the air above the ruined idol. Filmy and translucent he might be, but unmistakable. She risked a glance at Isendter, then at Alain, and it was clear that neither of them could see. Only she could preceive how, coalescing into view within the Mantids’ sacred place here, was her father. Not that bloodied walking corpse that had lurked at the edge of her vision since his death, its outlines rendered barely human by the hacking treatment the Wasps had inflicted. This was the man unwounded and whole, for all that the trees showed through him, and though she stared and stared, he did not vanish, but grew stronger, heartbeat to heartbeat.
There was a moment when her three imagined haunters encroached on her, looming at her shoulders – Achaeos with his load of guilt, Salma’s bright smile, slaughtered Tisamon. In contrast to it, though, they were faint echoes. She had known hardship and horror, loss and remorse. She had seen her father hacked to death, had lost her beloved, had dealt a friend a mortal blow, and small wonder that she had peopled her world with reminders. Only now did she realize that they had been merely her crutch, forever distracting her, forever swatting her mind away.
She appreciated how far she had been from being mad until now, for the momentary glimpses of those three dead men were nothing in comparison to this. My father. Tisamon.
He was gazing at her with that smile he sometimes wore as he fought. How hard he must have fought, indeed, to claw his way back thus from death. She wanted to drop to her knees, but instead she found that she was holding her stance, keeping her blade up ready to fight.
I do not believe in magic. But those words became a distant, waning refrain, banished utterly as soon as she heard his familiar lost voice inside her head.
My daughter, spoke Tisamon. I am proud of you. I have so much left to teach you.
He had his hand held out towards her, and she had a dreadful sense of vertigo, as though she stood at a cliff edge, with a fathomless void below her, and she was leaning out . . . and leaning out, and . . .
Surely this is a terrible mistake. The dead must stay dead. But he was her father, and she was far from home and lost, and more in need of help than she had ever been.
She reached and took his hand.
Twenty-Three
The fires would be seen for miles, making a statement that Dal had not quite wanted yet, but the fire-starters had intended just that, and he had not felt it politic to stop them.
Dal Arche had not known this village’s name before he arrived here, or at least he had not been sufficiently interested to find out. Sara Tela was the name they had later supplied to him, though a piece of knowledge growing fast obsolete. All the houses were alight by now, those nearest the storehouse just starting to catch fire, whilst the first couple to be torched were blazing skeletons, with their outer shutters peeled away, and the inner walls merely ragged strips of charred wood. The wholesale destruction was a little ahead of schedule, for sparks were already drifting on to the storehouse’s sloping roof even as his people were still loading up inside. There was food here, and wine, jars of kadith, bales of silk and cotton, all of it intended for onward barge to Leose. Unexpectedly there was also a small trove of old gold: inscribed lozenges dulled by time that had surely been pilfered by the local headman from some nearby ruin or mound. This discovery had put new heart into Dal’s men, who had been less and less enthusiastic about this particular plan.
‘Speed it up!’ he shouted, letting his wings whisk him on to the storehouse roof, stamping on a few embers as he landed. His watchman was already there, the lean Grasshopper-kinden named Soul Je, one of the three companions who had accompanied Dal Arche since before he came to resume this bandit life.
‘Any sign?’ Dal asked him.
The Grasshopper shook his head. He had kept an arrow nocked to his longbow, but his chief purpose was keeping watch. When Dal arrived here, he had anticipated the possibility of someone taking notice. With the smoke forming a pillar all the way to the sun, such attention was guaranteed.
For the last tenday, Dal had been just testing the waters of brigandage. First there had been a few isolated individuals: a crofter, a herdsman, Dal’s band making free with what little they possessed, slaughtering animals for meat, taking their food and drink. Dal had gathered around twenty men by that point and the pickings had been slim, even if their victims had been quick to surrender them.
Then there had been the attack on a convoy of pack-crickets led by a Dragonfly functionary bringing in some taxes. He had a quartet of Grasshopper guards escorting him, but Dal’s people had caught them utterly by surprise, leaping or flying from all around with bows drawn back. The tax-gatherer had sat glumly by and watched the bandits whoop and cheer as they salvaged this unexpected haul. When they were done, Dal had considered letting his people shoot the witnesses, as many had wished to, but had ruled against it. Word was going t
o spread in any event, and if he got a reputation that suggested surrender was useless, then a great many such fights might get a good deal harder to win.
He had taken his men to ground after that, let them enjoy the meagre spoils in the heart of a small wood while he planned his next move.
It reminded him of the way it had been after the war. The Wasps had changed his life, but he could not say whether that was for the better or not. Before the war he had been a woodsman, hunting and tracking game to keep his village fed, spending his days out of doors and his nights in a variety of beds – a loner, but not an outsider, and with more than a few admirers. It was a better living than many enjoyed, surely. The village headman had not bothered him, and the nearest noble had barely troubled the headman. It was a way of life that had been turning its slow circles for ever, and could have done so for ever more – or so it seemed to all concerned.
Then the Wasp Empire had mounted its grand invasion – a people and a nation that nobody in Dal Arche’s village had ever heard of, and originating so many miles away it might have been something out of a folk tale – until, that is, the prince’s recruiters came. There was to be a levy, and the headman had been given a quota: young men and women to be sent off to the war.
Some had volunteered, most had been put forward by others or decided by the headman’s fiat. The old man had even sent his own son, acting from faith or guilt. They had been supplied with spears and padded cuirasses, and Dal had brought along his little woodsman’s bow. And so they had gone to war.
Of those young men and women conscripted into the Commonweal’s grand army from Dal’s village, only Dal himself survived. The others had died, almost all together, charging the Wasp lines: scorched by stings, lanced by crossbow bolts, butchered by the sword. Only Dal, the archer, had lived, to be taken up by the princes and put into another force. He had been one of several such archers, but he had been a swifter flier and a better shot, and more than that, he had come to understand that few of the nobles directing the battles had the slightest idea of what they were doing. The Wasps had come against them with their flying machines and their automotives, their ordered formations, their ballistae and their stings. In return, the Commonweal had brought its massed ranks of spears, its vast, untrained and frightened peasant levy, within which, studded like gems, were the glittering retinues of individual nobles and princes.
Dal never went home again. He did not want to look into the faces of villagers he had grown up with, and see their eyes accuse him of the crime of being the only man to return. Nor could he go back to being a simple woodsman.
He had sworn that he would never be the subject of princes again.
After the war the Commonweal was a different place. The Monarch’s lands had already possessed their share of vacant provinces, gone to seed without a noble’s ruling hand and becoming a haunt for the lawless and the wild. The war had killed off many of the old families, and at the same time released onto the land far too many men who had known war, and would not take up the plough again.
Dal had thus become a bandit, and a leader of bandits. Then he had been caught, not by some aggrieved prince but by the Empire, near whose borders he had strayed. Escaping eventually from Imperial custody, he and three comrades had tried to make a living by hunting down fugitives, but business had been bad, and princes were poor paymasters. In the end it had been the free outlaw’s life again for Dal.
He remembered Siriell, and how she had been building her own principality in miniature: yoking together violent men like Dal and making them work in partnership, laying the foundations of a community.
So much for that.
A few days ago he had acquired another thirty men, the first batch that Mordrec and the others had recruited, so he had decided it was time to go hunting once more. They had found a barge heading for Leose and captured it – there had been no guards, for word of Dal’s activities was slow in spreading, and there had been little brigandage in these parts for years, thanks to Siriell’s moderating influence. Dal had thought the barge attack had passed without bloodshed, but then the barge’s master, for inexplicable reasons, had attacked one of the brigands as they were exploring the hold. In the fracas that followed, five of the barge’s crew of six had been killed, but Dal shed no tears for them. If it was useful to have a reputation that said those who surrendered would live, it was similarly useful to make it known that those who resisted would die. That was the code of wise robbers by land and sea all over the world. As a compromise, he had let the final bargeman go unharmed, just to spread the tale.
The barge had originally been heading here to Sara Tela, and Dal and a few companions had then seen it to its destination. On arrival the headman had come down to the quay with his servants and household, eager to get the goods unloaded and ready for the tax collectors. Sara Tela was a wretchedly poor place, Dal had noted, the houses small and shabby, the land around it half barren, the fields mean. He had grown up in just such a place, living on land that could barely support the people farming it, let along a hierarchy of increasingly distant nobles.
Even as the man approached, Dal had put an arrow into the headman, before the eyes of his family and followers. Some of the rest had fled, others had tried to fight, but the bandits outnumbered them, and had arrows already nocked. It had been a short and miserable piece of business, and most of the locals had not run, but simply watched, not remotely minded to step in to save their headman or his henchmen, and maybe curious as to what Dal would do next. They had gathered their children close to them and watched. We are poor, their silence seemed to say. Will you take that from us, too?
A ripple had gone through them when Dal had sent his Scorpion lieutenant, Ygor, over to the storehouse to force open the door. Barad Ygor was a showman at heart and, after severing the rope ties with his claws, he had thrown the door wide and stepped back dramatically.
Now Dal Arche’s followers were finishing up their looting, taking everything of value and loading it on the barge, before burning whatever was left behind. Those villagers who had fled would find all the days and months of their lives undone, and perhaps they would starve. Where would they go? Perhaps they would seek solace from their betters, begging at the steps of the nobility whose solemn duty was to provide for them and protect them. Dal did not rate their chances highly, for he had seen the face of the nobility, and by actions such as this he was going to hold a mirror up to it.
See what your rulers truly are, he thought. I have seen, and so shall you.
He would wager that the Salmae would be slow to offer succour to those he was now making homeless, but they would be quick to avenge this slight on their honour and this infringement of their feudal rights, just as they had not been able to leave Siriell’s Town alone and in peace.
Soul Je jogged him with an elbow abruptly. Company was approaching: a party of riders galloping alongside the canal towards the blazing buildings.
Dal squinted, and counted half a dozen. A quick glance at the sky showed no sign of dragonfly-riders up there, nor had there been time for cavalry to come all the way from Leose itself. This must be some band of Mercers who happened to be in the area, perhaps investigating Dal’s earlier misdeeds.
He kicked off from the roof and landed in the village’s heart, surrounded by the collapsing skeletons of houses and a flurry of glowing embers. ‘Get it stowed right away. They’re coming!’ he shouted, and his people, new and old, doubled their pace, practically throwing everything on to the barge. The draught-nymph was already in place ready to drag the bulky craft back the way it had come, though of course the riders could outstrip it easily.
There were Mercers and Mercers, Dal knew. If this little band turned out to be the Monarch’s own – those wandering hero-magistrates who kept the peace, helped the needy, defended the weak, and put people like Dal Arche in his place – then his plan was sunk even before it could get under way. The Monarch had such good intentions, Dal knew, and would be horrified to learn that a peasant
woodsman was gnawing at the fabric of Commonweal society in such a way. The Monarch was far, far away, though. The Monarch also, in Dal’s firmly held belief, reserved righteous indignation for the unruly peasants of this world, and turned a blind eye to the evils of the great and the good unless they ventured into outright treason.
The Monarch dispatched Mercers across the Commonweal to do her will, but the Commonweal was vast, and they were few. So it was that each noble house maintained its own elite, and called them Mercers for all that the title had never been earned. Dal was betting a great deal that these riders were locally grown. They would still be well trained and equipped, with glittering armour of steel and chitin, with bows and swords and majestic steeds. They would also be equipped with a thousand years of tradition telling them how much better they were than the wretches who dared offend against the natural order of the world.
Dal shrugged his recurved bow off his shoulder, one hand selecting an arrow from his quiver.
The Commonweal had always had brigands, like a beast had ticks. They had included disaffected peasants, criminals, the estranged and the misfits. They had preyed on good and honest folk, and the princes had hunted them down and brought justice back to the land. Everyone knew that, of course.
There were fewer stories about those times when a noble had gone bad: second sons and daughters not content to be left without an inheritance, the cruel, the mad, the feuding – those who rallied evildoers about them and set themselves up as petty tyrants. It was considered bad luck to tell stories about such fallen princes, in case their virtuous kin should take offence.
Dal watched as the band of horsemen galloped closer to the burning village, while sparks drifted either side of him or landed, stinging, on his skin. The now-empty storehouse would catch fire soon enough, completing his day’s work.
Heirs of the Blade (Shadows of the Apt 7) Page 30