Blood of the Mantis

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The sky was dark with clouds scudding south and east across a scarred moon. She would not see it when it arrived, but she would hear it. It was only that sound she was waiting for, that last confirmation that she had served her part in the war. Nobody would know, of course, outside the secret councils of the Aldanrael, but that was how the game was played. She was not in it for the personal glory.

  She would not even be here when the fighting started, and had no wish to present herself to the colonel for a full accounting of her activities. He was no fool, that man, for all that she had played him so effortlessly. Given a chance to make his own investigation, he might even begin to suspect how his hand had been forced. No, she would not be there to suffer his recriminations. Her stay in the Rekef was now over and, as soon as she had her confirmation, she would go home to Siennis.

  She wondered briefly how the Solarnese would now cope: would the rival parties coalesce or merely fragment? What would the assassin Cesta do, or the pilots? How would the other cities around the Exalsee react?

  She was not cruel, in terms of how Spider-kinden were measured, which meant that she had no qualms about consigning this city and its thousands of inhabitants into the hands of an angry Empire, but at the same time she had no great wish to see it. She would wait with interest for the news to filter west.

  They, none of them, understand my kind, Odyssa thought, for they are all amateurs, playing in the shallows. Our webs are invisible to the best of them, Lowlands intelligencers and Rekef spymasters alike. The Ants think we do it for power, and the Beetles think we do it for money, and the Mantids think we do it from spite, but they none of them understand that we do what we do simply because it amuses us to live this way, and because we are jaded . . .

  There was the sound she had been waiting for: a low, slumberous droning noise up high and distant in the sky, coming with the wind from the north, as though some insect of unheard-of size was making its patient way towards the coast of the Exalsee. It was not, despite imperial claims, the largest thing ever to fly. The Beetles of the Lowlands had larger that they used for transport and freight. It was the largest thing to fly solely for war, though. The Wasps were an unimaginative people, but their artificers sometimes had a spark of poetry in their souls, and thus they had named the thing Starnest.

  To the north, the army would have already taken the mountain-pass trading post of Toek, scattering or cowing the Scorpion-kinden who used the place as bandit’s lair and toll-house. That was a mere diversion, an afterthought, however. She was hearing the vanguard of the true assault even now.

  To think that one can brew war out of only a pair of Lowlander agents and a dead Rekef officer. But the Wasps were so predictable: prod their nest enough and they would sally out of it, raging for battle. She wondered how far the colonel would search for evidence of the great enemy plot to suborn Solarno for Lowlander purposes. Once he had secured his governorship, perhaps he would not even care.

  The droning was louder now, and she wondered how many in Solarno had woken to it, or paused in their nocturnal vices to listen. The sound of an airship was not so rare, hereabouts.

  She only hoped that Teornis had played his part as well. He had a more complex net to cast by far, and he was only a man, after all, for all his noble blood.

  It was close to dawn and she must leave now, or risk herself being caught in the web she had so carefully spun. Odyssa turned on her heel and headed for the city docks, where a small fishing boat was already waiting for her. Its captain had no idea how fortunate he was to be leaving Solarno right now for Porta Mavralis.

  Odyssa smiled at that. It was her gift, she supposed, to spread good fortune wherever she went.

  In Che’s dream she was by a very different lake, the details of which seemed to fade in and out of focus. From somewhere there was a terrible voice calling, and she felt a tug inside her every time it cried out. That tug was what bound her to Achaeos, and she knew that the great voice was calling for him, drawing him to it.

  In her dream, she was hunting desperately through hovel-lined streets, trying to find him before the voice did. The air was full of glittery little knives that she realized were raindrops, all held fixed in place. She had the sense of frantic movement all around her, as though parties unknown had broken into her dream, and were ransacking it for something they had lost.

  The terrible voice called out again, closer this time, and she caught sight of a grey-robed figure flitting ahead of her, drawn helplessly closer to the monstrous summons. She cried out his name, but the beckoning voice drowned her out with its wordless yearning.

  She saw, ahead, something that belonged only in dreams, and only in the worst of them, something that shifted and writhed with thorns, an abomination still recognizable as human. Achaeos was approaching it almost eagerly, and she screamed at him in warning and tried to run, but pain began to flower all about her. The raindrops had turned into wasps and they were stinging her, forcing her away. The combined hum of their wings had turned into a thunderous buzz . . .

  ‘Che! Che! Get up, now!’

  She jolted awake, staring into the darkness, forgetting for a moment that she could banish it with a thought.

  She banished it instantly. There was Taki standing in the doorway, her hair wild and uncombed, her canvas flight-clothes still unbuttoned after being so hastily donned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Che!’ the Fly-kinden shouted at her. ‘Get up. Get your stuff! Just do it, please!’

  Then she was gone, and Che could hear behind the Fly woman’s pattering footsteps the sounds of fighting: sword striking sword, the cry of someone in pain.

  Inside the building.

  Che was abruptly out of bed, wearing nothing more than a tunic, hearing the house of the Destiavel come under attack.

  More than fighting, though . . . what am I hearing? But the fighting itself was coming closer, and it blotted out whatever telltale sound she had caught. Hastily she grabbed her artificer’s leathers from the low table where the house servants had folded them, struggling into them as best she could, finding them suddenly too small, too starched, snagging her fingers in the arms. She thrust her head back into the open and began buckling the leathers at one side, the latches clumsily slipping in her grasp.

  She looked up as someone appeared at her door, and froze on realizing it was not Taki. This was a Solarnese man wearing a white tunic and trousers, with a slim curved sword in his hand. The dim light from the corridor showed that his sash and flat-topped hat were dyed blue: the Crystal Standard, Genissa’s political enemies.

  Bare-legged still, and with her leathers flapping loose, Che dived for her sword, snagging it off the table and wrenching at it desperately, hoping that it would simply slide smoothly from its scabbard for once. It did not oblige, and the whole baldric came with it. As she lashed it sideways to free the blade, she whipped the startled man across the face with the weighted buckle of the belt.

  She would never know what he might have done otherwise, but after that affront he came for her, rushing forward with his curved sword dancing in a flicker. With another great heave, she swept her own blade, sheath, baldric and all, in its way, and the strap tangled about his sword so that they were drawn in close, face to snarling face. As his hand went to his belt for his dagger, she finally drew her own sword from the tangled scabbard and ran it straight into his stomach.

  She remembered to keep good hold of the hilt this time, so that his own weight pulled him off the blade. She looked towards the half-open door and saw Nero standing there, still bandaged from his wound, and looking a little surprised.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she panted.

  ‘The politics hereabouts seem to have gone to the wastes overnight,’ he said, looking every bit as baffled as she was. ‘Taki wants us out of here,’ he added, and to Che that seemed to be as good an idea as any.

  She finished dressing hurriedly and the two of them got to the main atrium of the Destiavel house without meeting any othe
r enemies, although they had seen plenty of bodies by then. That was when Taki found them, rushing up with Dalre and a handful of the house guards at her back. ‘We have to leave,’ the Fly girl urged. ‘Have to get out of the house, now.’

  ‘No argument here,’ Nero assured her.

  ‘What’s happened? Why is the Standard attacking you?’

  ‘The Standard?’ Taki was gaping at her in disbelief. ‘You think that’s what this is? That pack of clowns?’

  ‘Then what . . . ?’ Che began, but Taki was already running ahead, shouting for them to follow her.

  There was still fighting at the main door, but Taki had found a side-door that was clear, and they got out into the street unmolested. Instantly three of their guards were dashing off around the side of the house, to catch the attackers at the front unawares. Dalre and a solid-looking Solarnese man stayed with them.

  ‘Taki, will you please tell me what is going on?’ Che demanded. ‘Is this . . . is this just some other mad thing you people do every month, or something?’

  ‘Cheerwell, do you Beetles never look up?’ Taki asked of her sharply.

  Che did look up, and a moment later she fell to her knees, hearing Nero swear at the very same sight.

  There was an airship hanging over Solarno, a massive tapering thing with a rigid-framed airbag, supporting a gondola that ran almost its entire length. There was a whole constellation of lights along its sides, lamps hanging from cords that cast a surreal moon-like glow across the city, and up onto the bulging sides of the balloon itself.

  The gondola was riddled with holes, a not-quite-regular pattern of openings, and for a moment Che thought that Solarno would suffer the same incendiary fate as Tark. But this was no sophisticated bomber, and the Starnest had only one function in war.

  Things were dropping continually from the holes, and those things were fighting men, who opened their wings halfway down to glide earthwards into the city in squads of twenty and fifty. The airship was full of Wasp soldiers, who were now descending on Solarno in their hundreds.

  ‘And look there, our old friends,’ Taki said, pointing. Che recognized their outlines against the clouds: two other airships, which would have been huge if it had not been for the monster they were escorting, and each equipped with four pontoons for docking orthopters. Some of the flying machines had detached already, and begun gliding over the half-sleeping city.

  ‘But what are they doing?’ Che asked numbly.

  ‘They’re invading,’ Nero informed her. ‘They’re seizing the city.’

  ‘And they’ve scared the Crystal Standard into helping them,’ Taki added. ‘But if they keep dropping that many men from that ship for much longer, they won’t need any help from anyone. Come on.’

  ‘Come on where?’ Che asked.

  ‘What do you think they’ll do to you when they catch you, Lowlander?’ Taki demanded. ‘We need to get both of you out of here – to the Lowlands, to Princep, to anywhere.’

  ‘The docks?’ Che suggested. ‘A boat?’

  ‘No, the airfield, before it’s too late,’ Taki insisted. ‘Now follow me. Nobody knows a quicker way from here to the airfield than me.’

  Solarno was a city turned mad and thrashing. A hundred yards from the Destiavel house, another noble’s mansion was in flames, with fighting at its doorways so fierce that Che could not tell whether those inside were trying to escape or those outside only wanted to throw themselves into the fire. She saw no distinctive sashes on any of them, suggesting some private grudge meeting a settlement of opportunity. Everywhere the Solarnese were busy killing each other, and occasionally Wasps stood looking on, heedless of whether their supposed allies were winning or not.

  All those factions, all that talk about their ruling councils, and in the end it was just a barrel of firepowder waiting for the spark. The parties of Solarno had finally been galvanized, after the initiative forced on the Crystal Standard by the Wasps had broken the fragile balance. Left to themselves, Che guessed, it would have been a simple night of violence, and then stability would follow the sunrise. But this time the Wasps would fan the flames and, in the morning, Solarno would have become an imperial city. The people at each other’s throats would blink in the dawn light and realise that they were no longer free.

  Taki had been leading them swift and straight, sometimes running and sometimes flying, but without warning she stopped, staring ahead of her. In front of them was some taverna or other, which did not seem to Che in any way special, except that it was being looted. The front door was broken in, with young men and women tearing up the interior in search of valuables. Che noticed the sashes of at least two parties involved, and guessed that this was again a private venture and not the work of political partisans.

  ‘Taki?’ she asked. ‘What is it.’

  ‘Just . . . you can’t understand,’ the Fly said. ‘It’s not ever going to be the same, is it?’

  ‘You can fight the Wasps—’ Che started.

  ‘It isn’t the Wasps. You really don’t know. You’ve only been here a few days. I’m Solarnese, and this is my home. That . . . that was where we all used to meet: me and Niamedh and Amre and the rest. That was where he died.’

  Her half-brother, Che recalled, killed by the Wasps. Now the very planks of her memories were being torn up.

  ‘Hey now, if we’re going to move we should move,’ said Nero edgily. He had a knife in his hand. ‘This is getting worse than at Tark.’

  ‘Look!’ Che gasped. A flight of Wasp soldiers was feathering down 200 yards ahead of them, blocking their path. They fell from the sky in eerie silence, glimmering wings outspread, and as the first few touched down, a handful of others ran from a side-street to join them. One seemed to be giving hurried orders, pointing down alleys and indicating precise sections of the street. Che recalled Nero’s suspicion about there being Wasps in Solarno with a mindlink. How else could such a tidy operation be controlled?

  The Wasps were now advancing directly down the street, and as soon as they reached the looters they simply started blasting away with their stings, killing half a dozen and instantly scattering the rest. They were shouting something, and Che picked out the words, ‘Curfew!’ and then, ‘Everyone inside!’

  ‘We have to leave!’ she urged Taki, and saw with a shock the tears glinting on the Fly woman’s face. The expression itself remained resolute, though, and Taki glanced quickly about them and then chose a side-street that would lead them around and beyond the advancing Wasp squad.

  Che glanced up, as the rattle of an approaching orthopter grew loud, seeing the flying machine skim the rooftops as if keeping a watch on progress below.

  ‘Taki, if we take off, they’ll see.’

  ‘That they will!’ the Fly called back.

  ‘But they’ll come to try and stop us,’ Che told her. ‘They’ll fight us.’

  ‘They’ll fight me,’ said Taki grimly. ‘And so let them!’

  Further away, across the rooftops, a Solarnese fixed-wing, none that Che recognized, was making a tight circle, duelling with a Wasp orthopter in a complex tangle of loops that eventually took them both out over the Exalsee. The flying machine that had just passed overhead made a ponderous turn and set out to give its colleague aid, passing so low that it rattled the tiles of the roofs.

  ‘What about your mistress?’ Che suddenly realized. ‘What about Genissa? Shouldn’t you be looking after her?’

  ‘She’s off already,’ Taki replied. ‘She’s gone to rally the Satin Trail, and she’s got guards enough. You two are my responsibility.’

  There was a slight hitch in her voice, though, which told Che that this responsibility was self-imposed.

  Over them the bloated length of the Starnest hung like a great deformed moon, and still there were soldiers descending from it, like seeds drifting in the wind. In their squads they fell on the city, and wherever they landed they took control, killing any citizens who were under arms out on the streets, loudly proclaiming their curfew and t
hen setting off to bring ever-greater sections of the city of Solarno under imperial rule. Despite their orders, and the mindlinked men who tried to coordinate them, they were Wasp-kinden soldiers still. With the city of Solarno now helpless against them, they broke down doors, they looted and raped. They put the brand of the Empire on yet another lesser people, and believed only that their ability to do so was all the right they needed.

  At the airfield Taki and her charges arrived at the hangar just before the Wasps did. Even as the aviatrix went rushing for the safety of the Esca Volenti, they were dropping onto the airfield beyond, their ready-drawn swords glittering in the hangar lamps.

  The three fugitives were not the only ones to seek sanctuary here. There were at least a dozen mechanics caught out by the airborne invasion, several others who were most likely pilots on the same mission as Taki, and some who were simply ordinary people of Solarno who had hoped that the elevated field might prove safer than the city below.

  There was at least a score of Wasps spiralling down outside. Taki paused, with the cockpit of the Esca half open, biting her lip.

  Che called out to her. ‘Where do we go now?’

  The Fly glanced back at them, and Che realized that, in the rush of relief at seeing her machine undamaged, Taki had almost forgotten about the people she was escorting to safety. The Fly boosted herself up onto the Esca’s hull and turned to look at the dozen other flying machines sheltering under the hangar’s roof.

  ‘That one!’ she pointed, and Che saw a squat, barrel-bodied machine, a four-vaned orthopter that could only be a cargo-hauler. It looked sturdier than the Stormcry had been, but also slower and surely destined for the same sorry fate.