Blood of the Mantis

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She scrambled to her feet, but he already had one hand pointed at her.

  ‘Die, you mad bitch!’ he spat.

  He lurched up on to one knee to shoot, but abruptly a puzzled expression spread across his face, and he plucked at something on his neck. A moment later he swayed, and then collapsed altogether.

  Nivit stood in the doorway staring at her, a blowpipe to his lips.

  She looked around to find Tisamon was slumped in one corner, while Sef was still sprawled where she had been sitting earlier. The two Wasps, of course, were both down, Gaved shaking his head groggily . . . and Achaeos was lying in a pool of spreading blood.

  Just like the blood slicked on her blade.

  And there was someone else, though she could only just see her. It was a bent old woman with red eyes, and something, some small thing, clasped in her hands. She passed by Nivit on her way out, but it seemed as if the Skater did not notice her at all.

  ‘Nivit,’ she called out, raising her sword, and she felt something sting her just above her eye.

  ‘What?’ She slapped at it awkwardly, her hand coming away with a tiny dart in it. ‘Nivit?’

  Tynisa’s world shook and swayed. The last thing she saw, before she collapsed, was Tisamon’s eyes opening with a start, the Mantis leaping to his feet.

  Sykore hurried away from Nivit’s house as fast as she could, grasping the Shadow Box tightly to her, swathed by several layers of her robe. She dared not touch it directly. She dared not lose her purpose.

  I was right there amongst them, she thought. The Spider girl had seen her, she knew, but then the Skater had pricked her with his dart. I might have got hurt. The mere thought of physical violence, of that glutted rapier darting towards her, made her shudder, momentarily unsteady on her feet. She would never take such risks again, but the prize had been too great and Uctebri’s patronage too important.

  They had nearly been too strong for her. She had been ready for the shift, but she had nearly become as trapped in the Shadow Box’s little world as they had been. Uctebri’s power, she knew, had helped free her, so that she could continue to act in the physical world while they were all stupefied. That had left only the Wasp-kinden, and it took no great skill to hide herself from those who never so much as suspected magic.

  She had headed along the curve of the lake, looking for the swiftest way out of Jerez. Now she was bypassing the outlying hovels, out into the marshy grassland, lumpy and pitted through constant subsidence. She was well clear of the Lowlanders at least.

  A great sigh of relief escaped her. She had not realized how much the possibility of harm had terrified her: her people’s sense of self-preservation that routinely won out over common purpose or community. The Moth-kinden had always employed their Mantis guards to die for them, yet they had been willing to die themselves if it became ultimately necessary. Perhaps that was why they had triumphed, all those centuries ago.

  She glanced down at the cloth-swathed object she was clutching, feeling its pull. She would hand it straight to Brodan and he would take it to his masters like the docile animal he was. He would feel nothing from it, however. To him it would be just a box.

  ‘Turn,’ said a voice from behind her, and she did so, automatically, clutching the box to her and hissing in anger. There was a lean figure standing there with a metal blade jutting from his hand: the Mantis from the Moth’s retinue. Her memory brought up the name ‘Tisamon’.

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘You are no magician, Mantis, so how did you get here?’

  ‘Jerez is paved with mud and I need no magic to follow footsteps. I thought you would be Scyla, but you are not. Who, then, are you?’

  ‘You do not wish to know,’ she told him. ‘Now leave me, Mantis. You do not dare test me.’

  ‘You have cast an enchantment over Tynisa,’ he told her flatly. She noticed that he was slowly inching closer. ‘Why do you care what happens to a Spider?’

  ‘She is my daughter,’ he replied. She saw his claw tilt back for the strike, and she thrust a sharp-nailed hand out towards him, seeing him flinch away automatically. She bared her teeth in a needled grin.

  ‘So now you are here, but what will you do? I know your kind, Mantis. The Moth-kinden bred you well to serve them. But I am a magician, and you fear magic, do you not? And all the things it can do to you. You must know that to slay a magician is to bring a curse on you and all of yours.’

  ‘I have heard it said,’ he replied. He had stopped edging forward now and she knew she was right. A superstitious and ignorant race, the Mantids, for all their skill.

  ‘Then leave here before I strike you down,’ she warned him. ‘Do you really think I shall stay my hand? Or will you dare to face me?’

  ‘You are right of course,’ he said. ‘I shall not.’

  Her grin widened and just then a burning fist struck her in the small of the back, hammering her to the ground. She twisted round as she fell, still clutching the box to her, and saw a Wasp-kinden in a long coat landing to one side, a wisp of heat smoking from his hand.

  They were coming for her. They were coming for the box.

  Her strength was seeping away from her but she had one last trick, even though it was a mere apprentice’s sleight. Concentrating only on the box, she summoned her powers before they had drained into the earth with her blood.

  Looking up, she saw both Wasp and Mantis looming above her, the Wasp’s sword poised about to stab. She spat at them defiantly, seeing the Mantis reel back. Then the blade drove into her.

  Tisamon waited until the Mosquito was clearly dead – until Gaved had finished twisting his blade and pulled it out – before he reached for the box. He twitched the dead woman’s voluminous sleeves aside. He had seen it there, the angular shape of it hidden in her grip. He had felt it there.

  But it was gone. Her hands were crooked about its shape, but it was gone. He exchanged glances with Gaved, who could not understand. Swiftly the Wasp set to searching Sykore’s body from head to toe, but Tisamon just stepped back, knowing that, by her magic, she had defeated them in the end.

  Nivit had sent for the best physician he knew, a grey-skinned creature named Doctor Mathonwy, who was seven foot tall, even with a pronounced hunchback, and had to bend double again just to get in through the door. He was now kneeling beside Achaeos, having just cut the Moth’s blood-slicked robe away. Arranged all about him were bunches of herbs, a tiny brazier, some delicate bronze tools. The medicine he was performing was some strange mix of old and new.

  Tynisa sat in one corner of the room, as though trying to push herself backwards through the walls behind her. She stared at the prostrate Moth, biting her lip. Her sword lay discarded nearby. She did not want to touch it. She did not even look up as Tisamon returned.

  He knelt down beside her, for a moment oddly awkward. ‘She is dead,’ he informed her, and when she made no response he continued, ‘The woman who enchanted you, she is dead.’

  ‘Does that help us?’ Tynisa whispered. ‘Does that heal him?’

  Tisamon grimaced. ‘You were not responsible. She had used her magic on you.’

  ‘I don’t believe in magic.’ she spoke almost too softly for him to hear.

  ‘Tynisa, you must. It is why we are here—’

  ‘I don’t believe it. I stabbed him. What will Che think? How could I do this to her?’

  Tisamon shook his head, baffled. ‘But the magician herself is dead. I killed her.’

  ‘That doesn’t help!’ Tynisa almost spat at him. ‘Killing things . . . it’s not the answer to everything, Tisamon. Is that your only way around any problem? To kill something?’

  She saw his hurt, confused expression, and only then did she remember how he had dealt with the betrayal, as he had believed it, of her mother, his lover. He had gone to Helleron and hired out his blade, and killed people, even people who had nothing whatsoever to do with his pain. He had quenched his hurt in blood on a daily basis.

  ‘Anyway, we’ve lost the cursed bo
x,’ Gaved said tiredly. ‘I swear I searched everywhere, from here to where we found her, but there’s nothing. She must have handed it on to someone.’

  ‘She sent it with her magic,’ Tisamon said.

  ‘Whatever.’ The Wasp shrugged. ‘She might as well have done, since it’s gone, and we’ve got no leads. And the Moth over there was the only one who seemed to be able to locate it.’

  Tynisa glared at him defensively but he was not accusing her, just thinking aloud.

  ‘We have to get Achaeos out of here,’ she said. ‘We must get him to the Maiden and . . . away to Collegium. They have many good doctors in Collegium.’

  The spindly Doctor Mathonwy raised his hairless brows at that, but continued to tend to his patient.

  ‘We’ve also attracted far too much attention,’ said Thalric. He was seated on Nivit’s bed now, having tied some bandages about his freshly opened wound. The look he gave Tynisa was less than loving. ‘Up until now all the attention we merited was because we were also after this box. Now they’ll be coming for us, so the girl’s right: we should leave with the dawn.’

  Tisamon stared down at Tynisa’s sword, and then bent forward to pick it up. Wordlessly he offered it to her.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ she said. Though he had cleaned it meticulously, in her eyes it was still reeking of Achaeos’s blood.

  ‘The sword is not to blame,’ Tisamon said softly.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t want it,’ she said.

  ‘Consider this,’ he told her. ‘Achaeos could not move or defend himself when you struck. You are not so poor a swordswoman as to let such an open target live.’

  At last she looked at him, red-eyed. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘That the sword did not slay him. Remember the provenance of this blade. It is no mere steel: it is a weaponmaster’s blade. It knew that you were not truly guiding it, not with your heart. If you had truly meant their deaths, then you would have slain them all: Achaeos, Nivit, the two Wasps. I have trained you, and I know that none of them could have stood against you had your heart desired to kill them. So take the sword. It has served you well.’

  ‘All delightful native colour, I’m sure,’ Thalric harshly interrupted, ‘but we have to be ready to leave.’ He stood up awkwardly just as Tisamon rounded on him.

  For a moment the Mantis glared silently, but then he nodded. ‘You are correct. I shall find the Beetle, Allan-bridge. We must get Achaeos back to Collegium or he will die.’

  The look that Doctor Mathonwy gave him suggested that this was more than just a possibility in any event.

  Brodan awoke in agony. Somehow he had fallen asleep, even here beside the dark lake. Now he was freezing, dew-drenched, and his wounds had stiffened so he could barely move. He groaned in pain, tried flexing his limbs, to be rewarded with pain shooting down his back and into his side.

  There was something unfamiliar in his hand. His fingers were locked about it hard enough for the object’s irregular edges to dent his skin. He opened his eyes against the light of morning. It took some prying with the other hand to release his frozen grip.

  It was the box. His breath caught as he saw it. He was holding the box. The very thing he had been so firmly instructed to recover.

  That brief future composed of recrimination and punishment, which had been facing him like a looming wall, suddenly shattered, and behind it lay a sunny prospect of promotion and privilege, because he had the box.

  With some effort, he rolled over onto his knees and then stood up unsteadily. He had to reach the garrison and secure transport immediately for the capital. Brodan was so invigorated by the discovery that he never paused to wonder what price others had paid, to bring the box to him.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Begin reading

  Author biography

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Contents

  Dedication page

  Acknowledgements

  Map

  Glossary