Blood of the Mantis

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The Mantis had no expression, merely cleaning his steel claw before walking off without waiting to see what Thalric would do. There was no telling what he might have seen or guessed.

  ‘Now what you got to understand,’ said Nivit, ‘is that there ain’t been no grand proclamation that anything big’s goin’ on around here. Right?’

  Gaved nodded, recognizing where the Skater’s circumlocution was going.

  ‘And also there ain’t been no invitations come my way, tellin’ me that anything like an auction might be held any day soon. Most ’specially there ain’t been any sign that some real expensive, real exclusive thing – of about yea big to each side – is being flogged off some time soon, somewhere near where we’re standin’. If you thought I’d heard that, Gaved, you’d be dead wrong.’

  The Wasp grinned despite himself. ‘And yet you’ve heard something.’

  ‘People are our business, Gaved,’ Nivit explained. His girl had meanwhile brought him out a little stack of tablets, and his long hands were sorting through them, apparently without his conscious involvement. ‘Now we always have odd fellas droppin’ in here lakeside, to buy, to sell, to hide, to seek, you know how it is.’

  ‘I do,’ Gaved agreed.

  ‘Only you can’t help noticing that in the last couple of tendays the calibre of them has gone up and up. All sorts of grandees from the Empire and elsewhere, all coming in quiet like and just waitin’. Now what happens is, a few days ago some factor comes knocking with a commission. You ever hear of a Founder Bellowern?’

  ‘I know the name Bellowern,’ Gaved confirmed.

  ‘Big Beetle dynasty, people all through the Consortium. Rich and powerful. Well, this Founder’s one of the elder sons, maybe the one who gets the whole pot eventually. So what’s he doing lakeside in Jerez? Keeping an eye open for the competition. His man gave me a list of names and faces to look out for and, what do you know – here they all are, if you look hard enough. A good twelve names, and each with a history. Some of them we’d seen here before but most of them, no. This has to be different. This is special. So, old friend, how about you do some talking now, and I can just shut up?’

  ‘Gladly.’ Gaved sank back carefully in the hammock-sling seat that Nivit’s girl had strung up for him. The very feeling made him curiously at home. Perhaps it was just that here, beside Lake Limnia, a Wasp could almost escape his birthright. ‘There is a box – some mumbo-jumbo thing from the olden days. My principal wants it.’

  ‘Him and the world, too. Rich fella, is he?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  Nivit made a derisive noise. ‘Then don’t even bother showing. These names I’ve worn my feet out in trailing, they’re rich enough each one of them to buy Jerez outright and the lake as well, or else they’ve got stuff to trade that makes that just about true. Take a look.’ Without Gaved having to presume on their friendship by asking, he passed over a tablet containing a shortlist of names that mostly meant little – but brief noted descriptions that soon gave him pause for thought.

  Here was the wife of a Wasp colonel, a man who Gaved had heard was now the Governor of Maynes; there were two Spider-kinden manipuli, as the Spiders called their arch-plotters and politicians; a Dragonfly noble who must surely be risking his life even to step inside the Empire; another Consortium baron, and yet another Wasp whose name had been mentioned in connection with the Imperial Court. There were others besides: Moth, Woodlouse, and a gang of factors acting for a buyer of unknown kinden.

  Gaved shook his head. ‘Word gets around.’

  ‘It certainly does.’ Nivit shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘Your fella’s out of luck then, it seems.’

  ‘Assuming he’s interested in buying . . .’

  ‘Dangerous words.’ But Nivit was grinning. ‘You’re thinking about the old times now, ain’t you?’

  Gaved was busy copying the tablet’s contents onto a scroll that was already looking damp at the edges. The marshes of Lake Limnia were unfortunately death to paper of all kinds. ‘Old times indeed, Nivit,’ he replied. ‘Back when we did more than just hunt down runaway slaves for the Empire.’

  ‘It ain’t all imperial work these days,’ Nivit argued defensively. ‘Mind, I know what you mean, and I wouldn’t have thought you’d be the man for it, any longer. Thought you’d put that kind of work behind you.’ Stealing property was in a decidedly inferior league to tracking fugitives, but it had been a long time since Gaved had been so desperate. It sent a strange thrill through him, though, the thought of one last heist. He had never considered himself as a thief, just a recoverer of goods, a returner of lost property. The rest of the world had not been so indulgent with the labels.

  ‘You’ll help?’ he asked.

  ‘I ain’t doing the legwork,’ Nivit stated. ‘So long as there’s a cut for me, I’ll get you what you need to know, but you can go fish for the goods yourself.’

  ‘That’s all I need.’ Gaved smiled.

  It was raining again on Jerez, which seemed to be the rain capital of the Empire, and possibly even of the world. Tynisa, wrapped up in a cloak, had found an overhanging roof to shelter under but, the way the wretched Skaters seemed to build, it was like sheltering under a sieve.

  Yet they didn’t seem to mind the rain. She had quickly taken a distinct dislike to the people of Jerez. They skulked about all the time, or when they were not skulking they were stalking. Merely watching them now, seeing them pacing along with their long limbs, all cloaked and hooded as if off on some sinister errand, it gave her the shivers. Before he had gone off to meet his contact, and therefore before Tisamon had instructed her to follow the man, she had asked Gaved himself what in the world these sinister little people were good for.

  ‘Banditry, smuggling and covering up murders,’ he had replied, in all sincerity.

  Some of them glanced at her occasionally: she caught glimpses of their pale, narrow faces, all angles and edges, but at least they minded their own business. She gathered it was not healthy, in Jerez, to pry into another’s affairs.

  Which was precisely what she was doing, of course, because Tisamon did not trust Gaved in the least. Tisamon probably trusted only two people in the entire world, and the other one was Stenwold. Having to work with the Wasps sat badly with him, he who had been killing Wasps since before she was born.

  For herself, she couldn’t trust Thalric an inch, but she was not yet so sure about Gaved. The longer she had to stand out here dripping beneath the feeble shelter of a Jerez eave, the less she liked him, though. He had gone into a tiny little shed shored up against the side of a larger building and, given how long he had been inside, it was clear that the whole structure was like Scuto’s workshop in Helleron, where the internal divisions had not followed the lead that the external contours suggested. She was also becoming irritatingly aware that Gaved could have simply left by an alternative exit, and she would never have been the wiser.

  But what, though? She could hardly burst in on him, kicking the door down, just to ascertain that she was still in a position to spy on him without his knowledge. Tynisa had never realized that being a Weaponsmaster would entail this much cloak-and-dagger work. She recalled now what she had witnessed of the way the Mantis-kinden lived – her own father’s people. Primarily hunters and forest-dwellers, stealth and shadow were bred into them, so for Tisamon this stalking of Gaved was a natural extension to her training.

  A fair time had passed and he was still inside, if indeed he was there at all. The rain showed the same staying power, falling thickly across Jerez with monotonous patience and ruffling the surface of Lake Limnia into a maze of ripples that the water-walking Skater-kinden could skip over as if it were solid ground.

  It was also growing dark and, though her eyes were good for that, the stinging rain was making her job more and more difficult.

  She flinched suddenly, glancing to her left. She felt sure she had abruptly noticed a stranger standing there . . .

  Nobody in sight, so she frowned,
wondering if she had caught some instant Jerez fever and was seeing things. Yet the image had been so clear: a slight, robed figure, like Achaeos perhaps, save that she knew it could not be him. Too tall for a local, proportioned more like a proper human being, but . . .

  And in that instant she saw the figure again, standing just beside her. In an instant she had her sword out, whipping the narrow blade from beneath her swirling cloak.

  There was nothing but the rain and the shadows . . .

  She had been standing here too long, because now she had three or four Skaters closely watching the foreign madwoman jumping at nothing. She hid the sword away and returned to her surveillance. At least there was still a lamp burning in the little round window, so someone was at home in the rundown shack Gaved had entered.

  The rain, running over the roof sign made the painted eye weep. The sight seemed strangely mesmerizing. It seemed to look out over its people, those hateful spindly creatures, and know nothing but sorrow. She found her own eyes drawn back to it again and again . . . and all the time some part of her was screaming that there was someone standing right next to her.

  Gradually her eyes lost focus. Even the Skaters passing by paid her no heed. Still less did they peer into the shadows beside her, their eyes as proficient in the darkness as Tynisa’s own, to see the hunched figure lurking there with its pale hand reaching out for her. The men and women of Jerez knew not to enquire into certain things. They had made their town a place where even the iron law of the Empire rusted, and such a place attracted certain interests that they did their best to forget about.

  ‘Tynisa?’

  She snapped into attention. The rain was easing, and the lamp in the little round window was now extinguished. The cloud-mottled moon lent little light to the scene, but Gaved carried a covered lantern.

  Gaved was standing before her, looking at her with an expression of genuine concern.

  ‘Tynisa?’

  ‘What . . . ?’ She leant back against the slick wall, feeling oddly dizzy.

  ‘Are you . . . drunk?’ he asked.

  ‘No, not drunk, not . . . anything. I just . . . I must have dozed off . . .’

  ‘What are you doing out here . . .’ His voice tailed off as she raised a hand to brush her rain-plastered hair back out of her eyes.

  In a moment he had made a grab for it, but she was faster still, even feeling as off-balance as she now was, stepping back and having the tip of her sword at his throat in an instant. His hand, which had been reaching, was now splayed open, directed towards her. For a second they stared at one another.

  ‘Your hand,’ he said, closing his own.

  ‘What about . . . ?’ She looked down at it, saw the shallow gash that the last of the rain was still washing blood from. ‘How did I do that?’

  She sheathed her blade once more, further examining the wound. It extended from her forefinger knuckle to the base of her thumb. The cut was slightly ragged and shallow, and she did not feel it at all. She sucked at it experimentally, tasting the salt of her own blood, which was already congealing.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Gaved asked slowly. ‘You came here to check up on me, I see. I suppose I can live with that. A friend of a friend saw you out here, and warned me someone had been watching the place for a very long time . . . I thought you might be Empire.’

  ‘You thought I might be Empire?’ she asked.

  ‘Why not? I keep telling everyone I’m not imperial, and you’ve no idea how hard I’ve fought for that to become even a token truth. Not all of us Wasps have much love for the Emperor.’

  ‘Gaved, when you came out, did you . . . see anyone else?’

  She saw instantly that she had guessed right. A muscle twitched in his face, tugging at one corner of his mouth.

  ‘Just for a moment,’ he admitted. ‘Just a shadow.’ There was something more, something he did not want to say, but at this stage she was too cold and wet – and, she had to admit, frightened – to care.

  ‘Since I’ve now been found out,’ she said, ‘can I come inside?’

  He nodded, still looking troubled. ‘I’ll have Nivit’s girl fix you something hot to drink,’ he said.

  Eleven

  Her name was Xaraea and she had been the first to see this coming.

  That was the joke, really, because she was such a poor seer. Like any Moth-kinden of standing she had learned the mouldy principles of magic, but she had never had any particular gift for it. She lacked that specific kind of concentration that made it possible to pluck apart the weave of the world and then reknit it as she wished. She would never be a true magician, and that meant, in the hierarchy of Tharn, that there was a ceiling above which she could never fly.

  Yet here she was and the future of her city – of her world – rested on her shoulders. She had her own talents, she had found: her own sort of concentration. While her peers had studied the workings of the universe, her lessons had been in human nature: politics, commerce, all the strings that bound each individual to each other. Xaraea had played the games of the Spider-kinden, even served as ambassador to them for three years, learning the trade of deception from the mistresses of the art. In short, she was Arcanum: the secret cult of spies and agents through which the Moth-kinden gathered their secrets, and feuded amongst one another.

  They had found uses for her talents other than magic. She had a good mind for logic. She had intuition. She had a deft hand, too, that could be turned to many tasks. She had undertaken her first murder on her twentieth birthday. The victim had been another Moth who had never known that he had been judged and condemned. Such were the games of the Arcanum.

  The Arcanum: it was a word merely whispered throughout the remnants of the Moth culture. Many other races had their spies and agents acting as their sword against treason and their shield from enemy eyes. The Dragonflies had their Mercers and the Empire its brutal Rekef, but the Arcanum was the oldest secret service of them all, so encrusted with traditions and exceptions that it barely qualified as such. It was a blade in the hands of any Skryre that cared to take it up, and it had been turned inward more often than not in the silent, secret struggles that the Moth elders waged upon each other, murder and blackmail and espionage based on prophecy and ancient philosophy.

  When the Wasp Empire had commenced its Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal, the Moths had finally begun to take notice. Not till then, nor even as recently as a month ago, had most of them considered that this extreme might come: Tharn at the Empire’s mercy. Xaraea’s patrons had shown more foresight, though. Out of curiosity and divination, they had set her the task of finding a shield against the Empire.

  Xaraea had gone into the Empire twice, masquerading as a slave, trying to understand this vital, bloody-handed new power emerging into the world. Her exit, with a faked death enacted each time to stave off their hunters, had brought back to Tharn more information than it knew what to do with. In the Days of Lore, her race had been noted for its understanding of the minds of others, but that faculty had atrophied ever since the revolution.

  She had gone into that Empire and studied its workings, and sought out contacts, and installed her agents amongst the slaves and subjects of the Wasps. She had put out her feelers delicately, seeking some solution to the grinding advance of the imperial armies that would come to Tharn sooner or later. Delicately, through intermediaries of intermediaries and by the most fallible means possible, Xaraea had constructed the faintest outline of a solution.

  How it had all come home now: Xaraea the intelligencer and spy, whose fragile plan would either save or doom her city.

  It was bright day outside but the city had not gone to bed. Instead she looked out of the window, shielding her eyes.

  The sky was full of airships. There were other flying machines, too, landing out in the fields, digging great ruts across them. Wasp soldiers swarmed in a cloud about them, and one by one they were dropping to perch on the countless balconies and the statues, or cling to the carved reliefs. T
heir hands were extended in open-palmed threat, but the people of Tharn stood patiently and offered them no harm, made no suggestion of resistance. Not a blade nor a bow could be seen. After all, what good would they be against the artificers’ weapons that bedecked the flying machines?

  Because it was her plan, Xaraea had to go down there to see if this desperate, infinitely unlikely clutching at fate could be made to serve them. She spread her dark wings and pushed off through the window, descending in a slow spiral to meet the rulers of the Wasps.

  The new Governor of Tharn was arriving.

  The Wasp felt a steadying as the airship’s painter-lines were lashed to whatever could be found to secure them. He supposed that meant statuary and embossed carvings. If there was a strong wind tonight then there would doubtless be a few headless effigies amid the friezes of Tharn in the morning.

  He was merely thirty years of age, and only a major. For one of his age and that rank, this honour was unheard of. True, he had been helped on his way, like a man boosted up over a wall by his fellows, but he had worked hard for it, too. He might have his handicaps, but they had taught him guile and craft until he had become as nimble a manipulator of opinion as anyone within the Empire.

  His name was Tegrec, and he had been given the governorship of Tharn.

  Of course that did not mean the Empire regarded Tharn highly, since the Moth hold was viewed as some kind of rustic appendix to Helleron, without industry, without wealth, without even a dependable source of labour, the Moth-kinden being a slim and feeble race. He had fought for this post, but had not had to fight too hard once his name was on the right lips. In that, he had been helped along.

  ‘All secured, Major,’ said Raeka, his body slave. Tegrec went nowhere without his slaves, most especially his constant attendant Raeka, a slight, dark-haired Wasp woman, not pretty but clever and loyal. Behind him stood his personal guards, a brace of Mantis-kinden he had bound to him by understanding and manipulating their system of honour. They were prepared to be his slaves simply because he had assured them that, whatever else the Empire believed, he would never treat them as such. With such a concession he had won their hearts and minds.