What, then…? the old Mantis asked herself. What does this one want? And what do I do about it? The answer to that one came readily enough. I suppose I kill her. That’s how this usually goes.
Yet there was something disturbing about her, impossible to define, impossible to ignore. Ineskae reached out for her sword – not an act of the body, but of the mind – and yet her hand remained empty. Something was wrong.
She was too old and too sick of her own existence to know fear. More, there was nothing about this tatty-looking mercenary to strike awe into her. This was just some runaway with a Dragonfly blade, some hunter for hire. There was nothing.
But still her sword avoided her grasp and she slunk away. There would be a clean death in some other place. Better to die crossing swords with some ignorant brigand or fighting beasts in a Wasp pit. So many better ways to die.
Two nights later, and Ineskae could not even find herself a fight.
This was some wretched little village, barely a half-dozen wooden huts and some animal pens. She was not welcome. The locals feared her. She had been rattling at their doors demanding drink this last hour, but each family had closed and shuttered their homes, just as they would if the fierce winter wind were crying outside. Eshe had stood in the centre of the village, the still point she was orbiting around, watching her sadly.
She had no wish to be sober. Sobriety brought memory in its wake like a leprous beggar. Outside, under the keen and starless sky, Ineskae took her sword in both hands, but this was an enemy she could not fight.
Past midnight, feverish and trembling, the last veil of her drunkenness was stripped away and she could not stop herself remembering Aleth Rael.
Weaponsmasters were supposed to pass on their skills, but in all her long life she had trained only the one student: Aleth Rael, the swift, the laughing. She had loved him. She had ached to see him fight, or dance, or paint. When he had won his own badge, in the secret trials of their order, she had felt her heart swell until she thought it would break. He had been all the children, all the family she felt she would ever need.
And he had gone out into the world, and she had known that he was destined for great things. He was going to be a general, a diplomat, a man who could have forged a future.
And the Empire had come, and he had come home and gone to war, as all of them had gone to war. When she was drunk she could forget that he was dead.
That was what Eshe did not understand. He was so well meaning. He tried to keep the drink from her hands because he thought that would make things better. But when she had to remember that her student, her surrogate son, Aleth Rael was dead, it tore at her like no sword or claw ever had.
By morning the two of them were gone, she staggering off into the wilderness, Eshe silently dogging her steps, following the faded track to the next town. The cold would not take her, the wild beasts and the bandits avoided her. And so she ended up as she always ended up, seeking the oblivion of drink, because it was the only oblivion she could find.
Three days later she dragged her feet into some other no-name place with the rising sun, weary as death but still not dead. This time she did not even have the energy to beat on doors and make demands. She sat down in the cleared space that formed the centre of the village, kicking aside a detritus of spent candles and the charred ends of incense sticks. During the war, places like this had looked to their traditions when the Wasps came. They had placed their faith in all the comforting lies and rituals inherited from generations past. It hadn’t worked. Around her was the debris of a battleground where the present had slain the past.
How long she sat there in the morning chill, she could not say. Then she heard Eshe whispering her name, and a shadow fell across her. She reached for her sword, wherever she had left it, but her hands remained empty.
A boot nudged her knee none too gently. There was a stocky Dragonfly man standing before her, a cudgel in his hand. He was greying and leathery, and she guessed he must be the local Headman.
“What do you want?” she asked him.
“We want you to leave.”
“Give me a drink first.”
His face darkened. He could read the history of her descent in the stains of her robe. “Leave.”
“Fight me.” Abruptly she was on her feet, but the sword still refused to come. She had dropped it somewhere on the trail, but it would be in her hands the moment it knew she needed it. Apparently this was not one of those times.
“You want a fight?” the Headman spat, utterly disgusted. “Go to the garrison. They fight there. They fight and drink and turn our daughters into their whores. Go to the Wasps, woman. You’ll fit right in.”
“Sounds like paradise,” she croaked sourly. “Just point the way.”
“No, Weaponsmaster,” Eshe whispered with a tug at her sleeve. “Not the Wasps.”
“Well there’ll be hunters through here within the day, asking after me,” Ineskae snapped, slapping at the boy. “I wanted to fight them but you… wouldn’t let me.” It had been her sword and her badge, not the child, she recalled. Did the sword and badge object to her going to seek a blood match at the Wasp garrison? Apparently not. Fickle bastards, the pair of them.
The Headman was plainly glad to send her to the Empire, possibly because it would involve people he despised getting hurt either way. He said something to Eshe, too, and Ineskae thought it must have been an offer to find the boy a place.
Yes, say yes, she mouthed, but Eshe was proud. Eshe wanted to stay with her. She had no idea why. She should send him away.
With that thought, she felt a sudden cold emptiness within her, at not having the irritating child underfoot. He was no Aleth Rael, her golden protégé, but he was something. Why did she need something, in this ruin that history had made of her life? She could not say, and yet the need was there, insistent as her sword.
Where there were Imperial soldiers, there was fighting. Where there were soldiers there was drink. I should have thought of this a long time ago.
The garrison itself had been some noble’s castle, built in the ancient days as four high walls surrounding a central courtyard. The ancient ways had not weathered well, which was why the structure was now just three walls and a low bank of rubble that the Imperial war machines had pressed down.
She took in the scene at a glance, guessing that the off-duty soldiers gathered in that space at nights, with with a half-dozen big fires bleeding their warmth out at the heedless sky. There was a raised stage made of piled stone carrion from that fallen wall. There were traders and vintners who were established enough to each have a patch of wall they made their own. When Ineskae appeared, she was immediately surrounded by a sour-looking mob in black and gold who thought she looked like a beggar. When she told them with exaggerated dignity that she was a Mantis come to fight, they let her through, no questions asked.
They had several matches lined up that night. It gave her plenty of time to get in the right state of mind. When Eshe would not fetch her a drink, she was not too proud to get it herself, and when she had found a Beetle-kinden selling the harsh, cheap spirits she was fond of, she saw no reason not to sit with him and give him money. In that way, the fights preceding hers passed in a blur: men against men, a man against a big tarantula, a gang of chained criminals against a Wasp soldier.
At her side Eshe huddled miserably, jostled by every passing Wasp. “We should go,” was all he would say.
“Why?” she demanded. “Look how we’re all getting on! You’d think there’d never been a war.”
“Weaponsmaster, if there are hunters, there’s a price. The Wasps love gold as much as any,” he insisted.
“Let them come,” she declared loudly, turning a lot of heads. The Beetle tapster was looking alarmed, holding off on giving her another filled bowl. She fixed him with a steel stare. “Try it, fat man. Just try and come between me and my love.” When the words were out, she did not know where they had come from. They seemed abruptly pathetic.
&nb
sp; Then someone was tugging at her sleeve again and she rounded on Eshe to snap, “I’m not leaving!” only to find it was a Wasp out of uniform. “What?”
“You said you were here to fight,” he boomed over the crowd. “Your moment’s here.”
“About damn time.” She got up, lurched, ended up clinging to him, then stumbled off into the crowd at a tangent, trying to set a course for the stone mound of the stage. When she got there, she rebounded from it painfully, and then someone unwisely tried to help her up, so she punched him to the floor.
The soldiers around her, with the exception of her bewildered victim, found this hilarious, whooping and cheering for her as she clambered up, her robe rucking about her knees. When she stood there, swaying, someone yelled out, “Did you forget something, grandma?” and another, “Where’s your sword gone?”
“She drank it!” called some wit, and she only wished it were true.
She thrust a hand into the air as though calling for silence, and for once the sword knew its cue and was there. She heard the expanding ripple of surprise, a crowd of Apt soldiers – for whom a Weaponmaster’s magic was just a story – hurriedly trying to rationalize what they had seen.
“Give me my fight!” she roared at them, as though expecting them to storm the stage and drag her down. “Come on, you sons of whores!”
But then someone was being shoved up to face her. Not a Wasp: somehow she had thought it would be one of their own.
It was a Dragonfly man in ragged clothes that had once been fine. She knew it was not Aleth, of course. Aleth was dead. This was some captured warrior or noble, hauled out to give the lads a bit of sport. When he stood before her, though, she could only see Aleth Rael in him. Her tear-blurred eyes would not focus on the reality. The drink betrayed her and let the memories pour in like the sea.
When he took up a stance against her, sword held high just as Aleth always preferred, she howled out her denials, staggering away but being jovially pushed back onto the stage every time.
“Come on!” her opponent yelled at her, and she knew that voice: it was the voice of desperation, of someone who wanted to die. She had heard it from her own throat often enough to recognize it now.
So she went. The sword wanted to fight. It wanted to put someone out of their misery and probably didn’t care which of them. So she went with a will, with a vengeance.
Eshe hunched himself down until he had his back to the Beetle-kinden’s barrels. Ineskae and her Dragonfly opponent had clashed three times, separating after each, long swords gleaming and leaping in the firelight. As always when fighting, the old woman was steady as steel: she was drunk but her sword was sober.
People thought she had taken him in for charity. They did not realise it was the other way around. He had grown up on stories of the Weaponsmasters. After the war, without family or home, those stories were all he had left of the world he had once known. Everything had been stripped from him but the dreams.
He had been begging when he saw her – that badge, unmistakeable. He had latched onto her not because she would save him, but because he might save her. He knew, miserably, that he was failing.
And then someone had sat down next to him and said, “Hello there,” as naturally as anything, and he looked, and it was the Wasp woman, the one hunting Ineskae. She was here, bold as day, surrounded by men of her own kind who would rape her and put her on crossed pikes if they realized what she was.
He tried to bolt, but she had his arm in a pincer grip.
“I’m Terasta,” she said conversationally. “What’s your name?” Despite the roar of the crowd he heard her words clearly.
He would not say, but then her grip redoubled and he gasped out, “Eshe!”
She nodded, her eyes on the fight. “Hello, Eshe. You know we’ve a mutual interest? I’d say ‘acquaintance,’ but we’ve yet to be introduced. We will be, though, and very soon.”
He wanted to cry out, to warn Ineskae, but there was no chance his voice would be heard and he was afraid Terasta would hurt him more.
“Look at her fight,” the woman breathed, eyes gleaming as she stared at the stage. “Magnificent, isn’t she?”
The duel had intensified, both of the combatants striking faster, blades scraping and rebounding from each other. Ineskae’s face was set into an expressionless mask, every part of her bitter, sodden personality purged in the moments of the fight. Eshe was unhappily aware that this was what she sought, to be taken from herself. Simply being Ineskae was her own private hell.
“It looks as though things are about to become busy here,” Terasta observed. She pointed out a band of Wasps who were forcing their way laboriously through the crowd. Unlike most of the off-duty audience they were in full armour, and it was obvious they were making for the stage.
“Why?” Eshe whispered, and somehow she heard him.
“The reward that has motivated my band of cutthroats is a powerful incentive to the army’s more venal elements. Now…” And she was standing, dragging Eshe to his feet. “Time to get her attention.”
For a blessed second her hand was gone and Eshe bunched to run, but then she had stooped and picked him up effortlessly. Almost like a proud mother, she hoisted him up into the air, holding his struggling form over the heads of the crowd.
Eshe did not think Ineskae would see. He did not think she would care. A moment later, though, she had swayed aside from a strike, failing to counterattack, and her eyes met his.
He would not cry for help. A Weaponsmaster would not. He kicked and scratched, and got nowhere, the Wasp just shifting her grip easily, anticipating every move. Then she was taking him away, and the uniformed Wasps were reaching the stage, and he did not see what happened next.
Ineskae was fighting Aleth Rael. The memory was stronger than her actual duel with the ragged Dragonfly nobleman. She had sparred with her beloved student so often, in those golden days before the fall. To relive those lost fights was far more satisfactory than to admit the truth.
Beyond the decaying vistas of her imagination, the Wasp crowd hooted and cheered as they danced, blade to blade. Who could have expected such a good show from a pair of old relics like this?
She could not know what her opponent was thinking, but when she crossed sword with him, when they tried ardently to kill each other with the razor edges of their shared steel, he played her game. It was as if she had asked him to wear her student’s face, just as a favour for the woman she had once been.
And she knew it was all in her mind. She knew that she was fooling only herself. Tears drew their lines down her withered cheeks even as she fought. But while the fight went on she could pretend, and remember being happy.
And then there was a wrong note, and she fell from her killing reverie and opened her eyes.
The child: the annoying, unwanted, useless child who dogged her every footstep for no reason she could divine; the child was in trouble.
There was that Wasp woman, the hunter. She had Eshe struggling in her grip. She was taking the child. Why was she –?
The crowd had not noticed her distraction. Her sword had not stopped its dancing. Abruptly, though, she had somewhere else to be.
She changed her pattern and, to her joy, her opponent followed, his own sword leading him to her plan, enemy become accomplice. She went into the crowd, and he went with her.
She saw black and gold armour and heard a Wasp voice shout her name. They were arresting her. What did that mean? Arrest means to stop, she considered very calmly, as her sword lanced forwards. I can’t be doing with that.
The lead Wasp, the officer, took her blade through his open mouth. By then there were already half a dozen brawls as other Wasps objected to the interruption.
Ineskae plunged into the crowd, running on heads and shoulders, hacking at arms, weaving from stingshot. Behind her, her opponent stopped and fought, buying her time though he owed her nothing.
Ahead, the Wasp woman was already out of sight, and Eshe with her.
&
nbsp; The Wasp woman had near two-score villains assembled here, in tents and around fires. This land, a good mile from the garrison where Ineskae had been fighting, was broken and rocky. The hunter-brigands were strewn about wherever offered shelter from the cold wind. A handful were notionally on watch, and a Dragonfly man went from one to the other, kicking them if he found them asleep.
“You think they’ll beat Ineskae,” Eshe divined.
Terasta snorted. “They’d barely slow her down.”
“Nobody can beat her. She’ll kill all of you.”
He expected her to slap him, or at least to sneer. Instead, her expression was thoughtful. “Could she?”
“You know the badge she wears!” Eshe snapped fiercely.
Terasta nodded. “Better than you’d believe. And I know that she has fought the desperate and the doomed in every pit across the Commonweal. And she was cut, back in Te Sora, and again in Mian Lae. Can you imagine? One of the Weaponsmasters, the ancient order, losing blood to some thug swordsman in the back of an army drinking den.” She did not sound mocking, anything but.
“I hope the reward makes all your deaths worthwhile,” Eshe hissed.
“Oh, my men want the reward, and we have fought off three other packs of hunters who sought it. Why else would I need scum like this? But that’s not it. Not for me …”
Then there was a yell from one of the lookouts, and a moment later the gang of villains was scrabbling for weapons, leaping up as the spitting light of a chemical lantern heralded the Imperial army.
“Time for the scum to earn their keep one last time,” Terasta murmured.
The soldiers who marched up were perhaps half the strength of her hunters but their faces showed only contempt for their lessers. “Who commands here?” their officer said. Eshe guessed they were the same mob who had crashed the fight back at the garrison.
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