‘I need to go into the forest,’ declared Che, and Tynisa frowned, trying to work out whether the Beetle girl was wrenching the conversation off on a new path, or whether it had always been heading there.
‘That would seem sensible,’ Milus agreed. ‘You’re Maker’s niece, they say. You share his ideals, regarding the Empire?’ If his eyes flicked towards Thalric it was only for a moment.
‘These days I find myself opposed to the Empress most of all, and that of necessity,’ Che murmured. ‘For your purposes, though, the answer is yes.’
‘Then I will give you whatever you might need, whether it’s provisions or people.’ He stood smoothly, for all that he was a man in middle years and wearing full armour. ‘If there are Wasps in the forest, then I want to move my men in to counter them, and to aid our allies, but I need the Etheryen’s nod for that. Too risky, otherwise. Before you go, see if you can secure their cooperation.’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ Che agreed.
When the tactician had gone, Tynisa and Thalric both rounded on her.
‘Are you mad? We’re headed to Collegium,’ the Wasp pointed out. ‘Nobody goes into a Mantis forest — not without an army.’
‘You don’t have to come.’
He looked insulted. ‘You know I do, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a mad plan. You’re not doing it.’
Che glanced over at Maure, who was looking sorry for herself. ‘You heard what I said: there is something in there that the Empress wants. We could feel that naked desire very plainly. You know the Empress, Thalric. Do you really think she would go to such lengths for no reason? And do you want her to secure what she’s after? Whatever it is, whatever is at the heart of the wood, we need to get to it first.’
‘Another Darakyon,’ Tynisa found herself saying. The old dead forest west of Myna had once been a place avoided even by the most rational of the Apt. The histories of the Bad Old Days before the revolution were long and dark and bloody, and there was room for far more than one nest of atrocity there.
‘Not quite,’ Che said, after a moment’s thought. ‘Whatever is there has its own sense of. . bitterness, pride. . betrayal even, but power, too. Some knot of ancient power, the fulcrum between Etheryon and Nethyon. I must talk to the Moth, Terastos. There will be legends, even if they are not spoken of openly. I will make him tell me.’
‘Che.’ Thalric’s face had become closed. ‘When you say the Empress is here, and there’s something in the wood that she wants. . do you mean she’s going in after it? In person?’
‘Given what she is become, I do not think that whatever she seeks could just be retrieved by a squad of the Light Airborne,’ Che agreed.
‘Then she’s mad, too,’ Thalric decided, but his tone had changed. He did not add, and we can kill her in there, but Tynisa caught the thought from him like a disease. Yes, the Empress Seda would have soldiers and bodyguards but who could say what might happen in the heart of a Mantis forest?
It seemed irresistible to compare killing the Empress with Tynisa’s father’s fight before the previous Emperor. It would be as though she was continuing Tisamon’s work.
She broke off from her thoughts to find Che already striding off towards the dark wall of the forest. ‘Wait, you’re going now?’
‘I need to speak to the Etheryen, if I can find them, just as the tactician wanted.’
Tynisa hissed in frustration, limping awkwardly after her, pushing herself hard to catch up.
Close to the forest’s edge, Laszlo waited. A single tree stood here, split by lightning years ago and long dead, yet retaining some faint ghost of menace for all that. The Sarnesh logging concerns had been operating here as part of their cautious and constantly renegotiated agreements with the Etheryen over the years, but this tree they had left, so Laszlo guessed it had some significance to the locals.
This was where Lissart had said for them to meet, when he had managed to catch a moment with her. Even with his credentials as part of the Collegiate delegation, he had been pushing the tolerance of her Ant guards in getting that close.
He had not yet seen her alone here and, although Tactician Milus might just be solicitous for Lissart’s health, her position seemed to Laszlo more that of a prisoner than a trusted adviser. Of course, he knew better than most why that might be, since she had been working for the Wasps when he first met her. She had personally sabotaged Solarno’s defences so that it could be taken by the Empire and its Spider allies and, had she not had some falling out with her superiors there, she might even now be sitting in that other armed camp on the far side of the forest.
She was not trustworthy, therefore.
He had not felt sure that she would come to meet him, but here she was. Her manner was furtive, flying low to the ground, halting abruptly, a pattern of stop and go that made her invisible each time she froze. Laszlo had better eyes than any Ant, but even he had trouble following her. When she reached him, she fell into his arms without warning, dragging him down into a crouch amongst twisted, dead roots.
For a long moment they were both silent, and he could feel the rapid beating of her heart. Ever the opportunist, Laszlo tried for a kiss, and she pushed him away angrily. A moment later, her expression was almost desperate, like a plea for help.
And she’s unstable, he reminded himself, adding that thought to his earlier list of reasons for not being here. The only reason to be here, in fact, was currently holding herself at arm’s length, trying to read his face through the lens of her own fractured expression. I always did end up with the crazy ones.
‘Shall we skip the bit where you call me a fool for turning up, and talk about why you didn’t jump ship in Collegium?’
‘Why would I jump?’ And a small smile from her.
‘The Sarnesh seem like they’re clipping your wings.’
‘Am I not here?’
‘Should I shout that information out and see what they think of it?’ He was trying to be hard with her, but his voice caught on the last few words. ‘Let me help you.’
‘Why should I need help?’ She half turned away from him, her eyes on the neat ranks of Sarnesh tents. ‘It’s just a little change in our deal. Tactician Milus is better informed than I thought.’
‘You were trying to play him.’
‘I had valuable information to provide. We had a deal. We still do.’
‘Liss, who are you working for?’
‘Sarn,’ but she overplayed the innocence, a sign of her fraying confidence.
‘Is it the Empire?’
‘Is this your idea of an interrogation?’ Mock flirting, perhaps, but his expression got to her and she added. ‘I swear, not them. Not even after you killed Garvan for me, not them’
‘Then who? No, fine, don’t say.’ For a moment he wondered if she was actually working for Collegium, for Sten Maker even, and it was just that nobody had mentioned it. ‘Milus — he’s clever, dangerous.’
And he saw she was scared, but she said, ‘I’m on top of it. Like always.’
‘Like in Solarno?’ he tried.
‘Yes! I was in control, in Solarno. You were just some glorified skivvy.’
‘At least I was glorified.’ But she would not smile at that, either. ‘Tell me what’s going on, why don’t you’?’
‘Tell you. .?’ Indignant at first, but then her gaze softened, and she continued, ‘You are a truly awful spy. You are a disgrace to our profession, really you are.’
‘Good enough to know you’re in trouble,’ he pointed out and, when she did not deny it, he added, ‘So fly.’
‘With you?’
‘Right now,’ he agreed, without hesitation.
Her expression seemed balanced on a knife edge. ‘And the Collegiates — you’d abandon them, would you?’
‘Bartrer and Amnon? Like a shot.’
‘And Stenwold Maker?’
He made to speak, failed twice, then forced out the word, ‘Yes.’
A flame kindled in the palm of her hand, h
er Art guttering and dancing there, lighting up her face so that his breath caught. He was choked with memories of their time together travelling with the Spider-kinden baggage train, or trying to run for Collegium ahead of the advancing Wasps. ‘You are a master’s piece of work,’ he murmured, even as he became aware she was sabotaging her own chances of escape, showing every Sarnesh sentry exactly where she was.
‘And you are a fool, and you’d be as lost as I, with Sarn and Collegium both hunting us. And who would we sell ourselves to then? Who’s left?’ When he tried to speak her hand fell on his lips, the flame gone and her skin startlingly cool. ‘I know what I’m doing. Milus isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, and he won’t pin me down. No ties, remember.’ She was all confidence until her eyes left his to glance into the darkness. ‘And I have work to do here, before I get clear. But I could use a lift, maybe, when you go to report to your man Maker about his niece. Just a lift, maybe. It’s really not that important.’
‘Why not now?’ he demanded.
‘Because I’m not ready to. Because Milus is almost where I want him, and then I’ll know him, know the heart of him. And I’ll have something to sell, then: something to put me back in the game. Because, as long as I can creep away like this, he hasn’t won. And because it would hurt you.’
It was Laszlo’s turn to be silent.
‘I read you so well. I know every page. How you ever thought you’d be an agent for anyone taxes the mind.’ But her tone was cautiously fond. ‘I don’t want you carrying the weight of betraying this Stenwold Maker of yours. I won’t be struck with the blame for that. You promise too much in return for too little. I want you free of guilt.’
‘And you’re breaking with the Sarnesh?’
‘If I do, your man Maker had better be able to protect me. Or I swear I’ll go back to the Wasps. Just be ready for me, when the time comes for you to fly back to Collegium. Watch out for me.’ She leant in to him abruptly, lips brushing his cheek light as air, and then she was off, with the same jerky, stop-start flight, for all that they must have detected her by now.
Tonight was one for farewells.
The Etheryen had not responded to Che’s request to enter their domain. According to the Roach, Syale, the Loquae who led them were debating it even now, but the Mantids had only the loosest organization within the wood, and a response could come either tonight or in a tenday.
I would prefer not to go in uninvited. That would be classed as suicide by more resilient survivors than she, and she would be entrusting her life, and the lives of her fellows, to the nebulous strength of her own magical authority, a branch she did not want to put her full weight on just yet.
She would be walking in with the dawn, though, if the Mantids had sent no message meanwhile. The Empress would not hesitate, after all.
And what is it, that’s in there? What is she after?
Che was uncomfortably aware that Empress Seda already knew of her presence. Each of them was like a needle in the mind of the other, impossible to ignore. Her best guess was that she had sensed the Empress first, or at worst they had recoiled from each other at the same moment. But, if Seda had become much more accomplished in her divinations, it was possible that she had set a trap for Che here.
In fact, it was possible that the entire business here was a trap. It sounded like hubris to think so, but Che remembered her last encounter with the woman, the unbridled hatred revealed just because Che found herself sharing in the woman’s strange legacy.
Sharing was not something that the Empress was well suited for, Che had discovered. In that linked moment, Seda had nearly destroyed her mind out of reflexive fury, and that rage was still alive and well. Che could feel the heat of it.
But she could not afford to believe this was just a trap, because if the Empress unlocked some great power here, the entire world would suffer.
Thalric had laid a fire, and they were camping up near the trees, waiting for any word at all. The Sarnesh were keeping clear, but Balkus and his Roach girl had come to join them. Che had expected more remonstrations about her uncle, but the Ant stayed silent on that point. He himself was departing in the morning to take word to Princep.
‘I remember you in Helleron,’ she observed. ‘You weren’t half as serious, back then.’
His expression was a little hurt, a little sad. ‘War does that,’ he said solemnly, and then spoiled it by failing to suppress a smile. ‘No, forget that. Finding somewhere you care enough to want to protect, that’s what does it. I mean, anywhere that’s mad enough to have me basically running its defence, that place deserves keeping around just for the laughs, doesn’t it?’ His sigh was wistful, a moment’s requiem for the older, more carefree days. ‘I’ll pass word to Sperra for you: she always liked you. And Syale. .?’
‘I’m for the forest again,’ the Roach girl replied.
Balkus grimaced, but made no attempt to talk her out of it.
‘How?’ Tynisa said, abruptly. ‘I don’t understand. You’re. . what are you, to the Mantids? Why don’t they just kill you?’ The words probably came out sounding more hostile than she intended.
‘With the Mantis-kinden, there is only ever one reason,’ Syale told her, rising to the challenge enough to look Tynisa in the eye. ‘Why do they obey the Moths? Why do they hate your kinden so? History. Even if they don’t remember the reason, they remember that it was thus in the Days of Lore, and so it cannot be any other way now. They have only their traditions left. Everything else has been stripped from them by time. If you don’t understand that. .’ ‘Then you’ll die in there,’ was plainly on the tip of her tongue, but the words never came, the girl’s eyes flicking to Tynisa’s brooch: the sword and circle of the Weaponsmasters. ‘You do understand that, even if you don’t know it,’ she said instead, frowning at Tynisa now. ‘Enough to know that we were their friends and kin, long ago, and even if they’ve forgotten how or why, they have not forgotten that it was so.’
‘We do not forget,’ a new voice agreed, ‘but nor do we submit. Even the Moths must learn that lesson sometimes.’ A Mantis woman was suddenly there beside their fire, springing startled oaths from Balkus and Thalric. She studied them, the Ant’s drawn sword and the Wasp’s out-thrust palm, and dismissed them as irrelevant. She was a lean, hard figure clad in dun and russet leathers, with a cuirass of chitin scales. Her pale hair was bound back tautly against her skull, and her features could have been carved from white wood, so immobile were they even when she spoke. Her yellow eyes moved constantly between the people about her as though looking for a victim, and the intelligence burning there seemed to belong to something other than human. ‘You would be wise, Roach girl, to remember that our history recounts its share of those outsiders who went too far.’
Syale shrugged, doing her best to seem calm, but Che noticed her swallow.
Time to see what their price is, I suppose. She hauled herself up to face the Mantis woman across the fire. ‘You’ve been sent to me?’
That cold, yellow gaze flicked towards her, then away. ‘No.’ The slender length of a rapier blade gleamed in her hand, and Che could not have said whether it was there a moment before. ‘To her.’
She did not even need to indicate whom she meant, for Tynisa was already levering herself to her feet.
‘Your people sought this already,’ Che insisted. ‘I forbade it then and I forbid it now.’
The Mantis spared her barely a moment’s regard. ‘We do not know what you are. We do not know from where your authority stems. I say to you what I said to the Roach. You, too, can go too far. Enter the woods with this one at your side, untested, and you will never be safe from us, nor will we ever be your allies. We call her out for bearing that badge and wearing that face.’
‘Call me out for my father’s blood as well as my mother’s, then,’ Tynisa told her flatly. ‘I am ashamed of none of it.’
For a moment the Mantis’s eyes finally stopped, narrowed as though she was trying to see into Tynisa’s soul. At last
she said, ‘So,’ a single word crammed with venom.
‘Tynisa, this isn’t necessary,’ Che insisted, but her sister held up a hand to stop her.
‘In this, Che, I know better than you, and it would happen sooner or later. Let it be now rather than when we’ve more important things to concern us.’ Tynisa had not looked away from the Mantis woman, and those last words were pointed. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
Che opened her mouth a few times, as Tynisa limped away from their camp, moving closer to the trees. I have magic, she thought. They have to listen to me! But she was at the limits of her understanding, and whatever power had been invested in her, she was still growing into it. She only hoped the Empress found herself in the same position.
The others were watching her, but she could only shrug. Tynisa had taken up a stance, the elegant, Mantis-worked rapier in her hand levelled at her opponent. This would be the first time she had fought seriously, since taking her wounds. Another Mantis, another Weaponsmaster, had cut her up savagely in a duel in the Commonweal and, though she had won, the injuries had stayed with her, the scar-tissue stiffening her movements, making every day a trial of pain.
The Mantis woman had her own blade levelled, taking her place with an enviable, easy grace. For a moment the two of them stood motionless, the duel taking shape, silent and still, between them.
The Mantis struck first, darting in along the line of Tynisa’s blade and thrusting for her heart. The lightest of parries knocked the strike away, nothing of Tynisa moving but the wrist, There was no riposte, and the Mantis ended up out of distance as she stepped back to avoid the counter-attack that never came. Another poised moment fell.
A few feints followed, the Mantis’s sword flicking in from either side, testing her opponent’s defences. Each time Tynisa turned her enemy’s steel aside with a minimum of motion. Her arm did all. Her feet might as well have been nailed down.
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