Heirs of the Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Now, tell me how things stand, up top,’ Allanbridge prompted.

  Ma Leyd stretched monstrously. ‘Well, dear heart, I hear the Prince-Major has yet to make any serious decrees likely to cause you problems, although his lackeys are all demanding justice from him regarding these terrible bandits and criminals that they see lurking in every shadow. Not just the Town in Rhael, either, but I hear half of Salle Sao’s gone rogue as well. All the princes-minor want action, but your man in charge there, he must want it to be someone else’s problem. After all, raising levies was what caused half the problems last time.’

  Allanbridge nodded, although Tynisa could make little sense of it. ‘I might have some more additions to your menagerie then, Ma,’ he considered. ‘Depends how bad it’s got. Tell me about the Town.’

  ‘Still there, such as it is. A year ago and I’d have a whole new list of names for who you should deal with, and those you should avoid, but it looks like Siriell has it straightened out now. The same faces as you met last time are all mostly still in place and not knifing each other. ’Cept for Hadshe, who’s dead, and Voren who left. Looks like the current order at Siriell’s Town is there to stay.’

  Tynisa glanced between Allanbridge and the massive woman, because whatever dealings were being spoken of were not what she had expected. I should have known better. Before the war, Allanbridge had been a smuggler, and it looked as though he had decided to take up his old ways on his visits to the Commonweal.

  ‘Now everyone says the Monarch won’t stand for it,’ Ma Leyd went on. ‘They say that Felipe Shah and his neighbours will get a rap on the knuckles, and a million Mercers will set the land to rights: peace and plenty, love and wonder, all that nonsense. But they were saying that almost a year ago and the Monarch does nothing, and frankly it seems even Shah isn’t exactly bailing his fealtor princes out like you’d expect. Mind you, that’s the Commonweal princes all over: dance and paint and hunt and write poetry and whatever the pits you like, except for actually doing something.’ Her leer dismissed all the lands extending above them with utter derision.

  ‘And what would you know about it?’ Tynisa snapped, the words bursting from her against her will. She knew about the Commonweal, for all that she’d never been there. She knew because the moral standards of the Commonweal – those strict, self-punishing demands that it made of its people – had driven to his death someone that she had loved dearly. He had been too honourable, and the world had not been able to live with him. So he had died. She found that to hear this bloated woman carp on about the shortcomings of the Dragonfly-kinden was more than she could bear. In her heart the poison was stirring restlessly.

  Ma Leyd’s expression became as stony as her home. ‘I saw all too much of the Commonweal, dear, when I travelled across it to find where the Empire had left my husband’s corpse.’

  ‘So you’ve seen the occupied principalities. That’s not the real Commonweal at all,’ Tynisa shot back, quite happy to take this woman on in whatever field of combat she preferred. She discovered that she was standing, though she had no memory of rising to her feet. Even so, she was forced to look up in order to lock eyes with the sitting Mole Cricket. Her hand itched.

  In measured stages, the enormous woman also stood. ‘You’d best not tell me what I know, dear.’ She was surely strong enough to tear Tynisa limb from limb, but the rapier’s whisper told her that speed would defeat strength always, so she tensed . . .

  ‘Enough!’ Allanbridge burst out, leaping to his feet as well. ‘You,’ he said, jabbing a finger at Tynisa, ‘you want to be on my ship tomorrow, you go outside and cursed well keep your mouth to yourself.’

  Tynisa stared mutinously at him, grappling with the frustrated anger within her, but already she was regretting her outburst. Her temper seemed to be a thing apart these days, something she had less and less control of. Her hand twitched again, belated and unbidden, near her rapier hilt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she forced out, and left Ma Leyd’s cave hurriedly, to find that a misting of rain was feathering down outside. It fitted her mood.

  Months ago the plan had been made, back in a city that had been home to her for so long. Now Collegium had changed, and she had changed. She was marked with blood, every bit as much as the Mosquito-kinden magician who had enslaved her in Capitas.

  She had been shipped back home like a slave, a calculated peace offering made by a Wasp named Thalric, who had been spymaster and turncoat in his time, and was now luxuriating in the title of Regent Consort, or some such – or so Tynisa was given to understand. Of all of them in that war, he had slipped through almost unscathed, to claim power and glory at the end of it. She loathed him, and perhaps she loathed him still more for thinking to bring her back. She had departed the Empire with only some slave’s shabby clothes and a pair of matching gold brooches, one hers, the other her dead father’s. Not even with the rapier: she had lost that when the Mosquito caught her. Its return would come later, inexplicable as dreams.

  Stenwold, who had raised her as his own daughter, had been waiting for her when she alighted from Thalric’s flying machine. His face had been all relief at seeing her alive, but deep in his eyes she had seen a condemnation of her failure. She had not done enough. She had gone to rescue a man, and brought back only an eyewitness account of his bloody end.

  Tisamon.

  And then the news had kept coming: the fallen leaves of war; the blood on her own hands become indelible. Each day some new word had come to trouble her, peeling away what little armour she had retained against the privations of the world, until she could not stay in Collegium longer, nor could she remain amongst those that she had failed, for all they told her it did not matter. She could not stay, yet she had nowhere to go.

  There had been one night when she had awakened, screaming, from her dreams . . . arm red with blood to the elbow – his blade running with it, the Wasp soldiers stabbing and hacking as though what they struck was a piece of butchered meat and not a man . . . his smile, always his smile, the last to fade . . . She had awoken from that dream and known that she had reached the end of her time in Collegium. Either she must flee or she must bring matters to a close. In the darkness of midnight, her hand had reached out, unbidden, to close about the hilt of her rapier.

  How had it come to be there, when it had last been consigned to adorn some Imperial collector’s wall or treasure vault? Had some agent provocateur read her mind, and placed it ready for her?

  She had never believed in the magic that her mother and father had sworn by, but at that same midnight, suddenly and inexplicably provided with the means to end herself, she wondered if this was not the voice of the universe telling her that it had no further place for her.

  With that thought, something of her old fire rekindled, and she took the blade in her hands, feeling blindly its old familiar weight and grace. Her father had won this blade to give to her mother, and then he himself had kept it for so many years, until their daughter was grown and had proved her skill against him. She chose to believe that he had sent it to her, from beyond the veil of death – from where Mantids went, when their time came.

  She had looked up and seen him for an instant, for the first time: the ravaged hulk of her father standing at the window, and then he was gone. A trick of her mind, a holdover of the dream, but she had understood the warning.

  I am losing my grip on the world, she realized. I have killed a friend once and I will kill again unless I do something to stop myself. The rapier, the agent of that murder, hung there in her hand, sleek and balanced. There must be work left to do that I can devote myself to, because, if I have nothing left to distract me, I shall go the last few steps and be mad indeed.

  It only remained for her to invent what work that might be. By dawn she had decided the goal, but had no means to accomplish it. How could she get herself to the notoriously isolated Commonweal?

  Jons Allanbridge had visited there, she knew. He had shipped Stenwold over there during the war, in a
failed attempt to enlist Dragonfly aid against the Empire. Amongst all the bad news, word had come to Tynisa that Allanbridge had since made a return visit or two, joining the many merchants who had tried to strike up a trade with that sprawling nation’s insular inhabitants. Still, Allanbridge was more persistent than most and, anyway, the Commonweal was not what it had once been.

  She had tracked the man down when he next arrived in Collegium. Now she had a goal, she could hold out in the face of her guilt and the accusing stares of others. She had sat down with Allanbridge over a jug of wine, and told him she wanted to go to the Commonweal.

  ‘I know that Spider-kinden live there,’ she had pointed out, for one of Stenwold’s companions, on his abortive mission there, had been such a man.

  Allanbridge had shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said carelessly, as though her entire future did not depend on his answer. ‘What does old Sten Maker say?’

  ‘He doesn’t know. He must never know. I don’t want him coming after me.’ Her confession had come rushing out in a jumble of words.

  She had known that he must surely refuse her. She had fumbled away her one best chance of accomplishing the end that she had set herself. Allanbridge was an old acquaintance of her foster-father’s, so he would hardly agree to such deception.

  But Allanbridge had taken a long, deep breath, staring at her. ‘I hear your old man killed the Emperor, and paid for it,’ he had murmured at last. The truth was not entirely thus, but it was the story everyone was telling – even the Wasps themselves, it seemed – and Tynisa saw no reason to correct the historians. She had simply nodded, silently waiting out the long pauses the Beetle aviator had now fallen back on.

  ‘A shame,’ the man had grunted, ‘ only Mantis I ever got on with. But this is more than just him, right?’

  Another small nod from her.

  ‘I remember Jerez,’ Allanbridge had said, unwillingly. ‘A lot of bad business there – lots of stuff I don’t even want to understand. But I hear the news, since. I know what’s happened to . . . to the Moth. So maybe I see level with you.’

  She remembered that she had been holding her breath at this point.

  ‘Spit and sails, I don’t like dodging Sten Maker, but he wasn’t there,’ Allanbridge had continued sadly, a man finding an unwelcome duty at his door that he could not avoid. ‘I was there, though, so I can take you to the Commonweal and keep it quiet. That kind of shipping’s been my business for twenty years, after all. What you do to make ends meet after that is your own affair.’

  Now she sheltered in the Windlass until Allanbridge sought her out again. In the hold he sat down with a sigh, frowning at her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and sorry she was, not for the words spoken but because she had jeopardized her tenuous hold on his good will.

  ‘Commonweal hasn’t been open to men like me since forever,’ he pointed out gruffly, ‘so don’t you judge. Just so happens there’re people there who’ll trade with the likes of me now, only all right, it’s not the princes. There are no official channels open to a Lowlander, see? And it’s not as simple as you think. Ma Leyd keeps me informed. I need her.’

  Tynisa nodded. ‘And what does she ask in return?’

  ‘Those from the Hitch that want it, I carry free, when I head back south. Princep Salma’s an attractive second chance to some. Plus there’s some trade I do for Ma, but that’s the main thing. For years there’s only been pissant places like this for those that want out of the Commonweal but don’t know where else to go. Princep’s a little slice of the north in the middle of the Lowlands, and word of it’s spread.’

  She must have looked doubting, because he shook his head, standing up to go back above. ‘Tomorrow morning I’ll put you down close enough to Suon Ren for a brisk walk to get you there, and then you go off and . . . well, from there you’re on your own. I’ve a feeling that you won’t find the Dragonflies quite what you’re expecting, girl, but that’s none of my business, and the best of luck to you.’

  Two

  Salma, Prince-Minor Salme Dien: the only Commonwealer student to attend at Collegium in living memory. He had been sent there because the Commonweal had lost its war with the Wasp-kinden, and Prince-Major Felipe Shah had foreseen that the Lowlanders might become allies against a common enemy. The boy had come to Collegium in his grand finery, with his exotic manners and his golden skin and his inimitably mocking smile.

  That year at the College, he and Tynisa had danced around each other like two moths circling the same lantern, closer and closer and yet . . . always when she felt she could reach out and find his hand extended back towards her, he was away again. She wove her webs but never caught him. Always his dance took him away from her, until it was she who followed him, trying to match his steps.

  But she would have had him eventually, she knew. Given time, shielded from distraction, he would have been hers. This was an article of faith with her.

  But Salma had been distracted along the way by a Butterfly-kinden dancing girl who seemed to change her name every other day, but these days just called herself Grief, as though she had some kind of monopoly on that emotion. Tynisa had never believed in magic, but she found that she could readily concede that Salma had been enchanted by the glow-skinned Butterfly witch.

  Even then, she had known in her deepest heart that it would not last. Salma was a fighter, a flier, a man who lived his life without chains. He would need more in the end. He would come back to Tynisa, who alone could match him in all things.

  The Empire had not given him the chance, though. Salma, because of who he was and the society that had given birth to him, had become a rallying point for the dispossessed and the refugees. He had led his makeshift army against the Imperial advance, and there, crossing blades with a Wasp general, he had died. And thus the adamantine cord of their joint destiny, which she was sure had been on the very cusp of drawing them close again, had been parted for ever

  She awoke with a start, baffled by the curving contours of the room about her, by the turbulent swaying of her surroundings. Most of all she awoke into the evaporating sense of Salma. Sometimes she dreamt of him rather than of the others, and those dreams were warm and bright. Waking from them cut as deep as any number of nightmares.

  He was there as she woke. She did not see him, but his presence was unmistakable, sitting on the edge of her bed and watching her sleep. She even reached a hand out and, in the uncertainty of waking, fully believed that she would touch his golden skin.

  The weakness came upon her which had oppressed her since everything had gone so fatally wrong. For a moment she could not move, could not stand, could not even bear to think. Some part of her tried its very hardest not to be.

  But the world would not oblige, and she understood that she was still aboard the Windlass, of course, and it was aloft. Catching her balance against the constant shifting motion, she went aloft to find Allanbridge at the wheel. Normally she would have been woken by the Windlass’s oil-drinking engine, but today the airship was moving under clockwork power alone, and using as little of that as Allanbridge needed to keep the craft steady. Instead, most of the work was being done by the burner hoisted up beneath the balloon. The aviator had tried to explain how it all worked, how there was some special gas in the canopy that pulled up, and how it pulled up more when it was heated, but none of it had made a great deal of sense to Tynisa.

  Now, though, whatever the gas was, it was pulling like a team of draught beetles, and the Windlass was ascending with all the ponderous grace of a Collegium matron taking to the air. The cracked and riven wall of the Ridge coursed past them to port, and it seemed that at any moment the airship would be dashed against it, its balloon ruptured and hull smashed to splinters, but Allanbridge knew his trade, and so the Windlass maintained her steady climb.

  ‘Suon Ren’s just over the edge?’ Tynisa asked him.

  ‘A little further than that, but close enough,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll put you down in sight of it.’

&nb
sp; Tynisa glanced up at the looming curve of the balloon above. ‘I thought you weren’t welcome there. If you’re in sight of the city, then they’ll be able to see that,’ pointing at the great swell of inflated silk above them.

  Allanbridge shrugged, his expression closed. ‘Your man there, Felipe Shah, he’s progressive, so if he looks out of the window and sees an airship, he won’t think the sky’s falling on his head – not unless it’s black and yellow, anyway. As for the rest of them, you’d be surprised what they can make themselves not see.’

  They cleared the crest of the Ridge shortly after, and suddenly the sky was whole again, the late autumn sun crisp and clear over them. Allanbridge made adjustments that sent the Windlass scudding over a rugged landscape of abrupt hills and heavy jutting outcrops of stone. It looked to Tynisa almost as if some great cresting wave of rock had been rolling forward with the intention of burying the Lowlands for ever, but here it had frozen in a rubble of stony foam.

  She watched shadows duck and bob as a trio of bees, bigger than she was, bumbled over the rough ground. ‘Where are the people?’ she asked. The land was green enough, but wild and devoid of human life.

  ‘Commonweal’s a big place, girl,’ Allanbridge told her. ‘Galltree told me that the locals reckon it drives you mad to live too close to the edge. Given most of ’em can fly, seems strange to me. Maybe the lords and princes and what have you spread that word, to stop people getting ideas about heading off elsewhere, eh?’

  Soon after, the Windlass was making her leisurely way over irregular fields ribbed by the plough. Some were deformed by the contours of the land, but a little further on the land had been cut to fit them, each hill stepped and tiered so that, from their lofty perspective, the land appeared as a series of concentric rings.

  ‘There,’ Allanbridge prompted. ‘See there?’