Blood of the Mantis sota-3

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘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. Their 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.

  His reliance on his slaves and his refusal to travel without them had given him a reputation in the Empire for decadence and a willingness to impose his power on others. Of course, they did not know of his handicap, his burden and his joy, that made all this so necessary.

  I have been waiting for this moment for a score of years at least. Dare I call it fate? Perhaps I do.

  Major Tegrec made a gesture and Raeka opened the door for him, turning a wheel and swinging out the disc of metal-rimmed wood. He could hear the not-quite-silence of several hundred Wasp soldiers waiting for him and, beyond them, in silence absolute, the Moths…

  One of his Mantis bodyguards stepped out first, casting a suspicious eye over invaders and locals alike. He wore his clawed gauntlet, the blade folded back along his arm. Then it was Tegrec’s turn, and he paused in the gondola’s hatchway, seeing his invasion force snap to attention and salute. No need for any of you, it seems, he thought. Are you relieved not to have to go down into those tunnels and passageways to root them out? Or disappointed that there’s to be no rape and plunder? He made sure they had a good look at him, standing there with one foot on the rim of the hatchway, one hand on the circular door, his non-regulation blue cloak, secured by a golden brooch, billowing heroically in the wind. Tegrec the conqueror, the only major ever to be made a city governor. An unassuming figure, really, which was why he wore the cloak, the gold armlets and the torc, all to convey the image of a rather greater man. In truth his hair was starting to recede and he was thicker at the waist than a Wasp soldier should really be, and not quite as tall as most. No matter, his soldiers and the Tharen Moths would only remember this moment of his arrival.

  As he stepped down, his most senior captain came to salute before him. ‘No resistance, sir. None at all. Aside from knives and a few hunting bows, not even any arms to speak of. Of course, there may be others concealed further in.’

  ‘And what statement have they made? Do they wish to negotiate? Is this a surrender or merely a truce, Captain?’ Tegrec loved the sound of his own voice, a cherished vanity: it was smooth and supple, and made up for the lack of height and hair.

  ‘A woman speaks for them, sir,’ the captain said derisively. ‘She says they know they cannot resist our superior strength, therefore they will accede to the Emperor’s authority.’

  ‘And you don’t believe that,’ Tegrec noted. It was clear that this veteran soldier wanted his quota of violence. ‘It has been known, captain, that, whether through pragmatism or genuine enthusiasm, some communities succumb to the
Emperor’s legions with never a blow struck. Fly-kinden and Beetle-kinden, for example, all sensible and peaceable types. The Empire has, as yet, no Moth-kinden within it, but they are reckoned wise, so why should they not take the sensible course?’

  ‘Sir, they are also said to be clever,’ said the captain, as though this was the ultimate insult.

  ‘You expect an ambush in the dark? Well, it is possible.’ Tegrec had to keep reminding himself that it was entirely possible. The ground he stood on, the plans he had made, were all quite open to change. ‘However, we can torch their fields and besiege them, starve them out, destroy their carvings, even haul Mole Crickets up here to tear away their stone. They know this, captain, because they are not fools. I will parley with their leaders, and explain to them what the Empire shall require in terms of garrison, taxes and the like. I am otherwise willing to spare the Empire’s resources, and the lives of her soldiers.’

  The captain nodded, clearly still not convinced. ‘Their woman, she said that their leaders – she called them something but I can’t recall quite what – would be waiting to offer their formal surrender to you.’

  Skryres, Tegrec recalled, and the word made his heart race a little. ‘Very good, Captain,’ he said calmly, as Raeka stepped up beside him, bearing his sword for him. ‘I see no reason to delay, so lead me to them.’

  They brought him to the Tharen spokeswoman first, a slight, grey-skinned woman of close on his own age. She was dressed in the elegant robes that all Moths of a certain station seemed to wear. So colourless, all of them: grey stone and grey skins, grey robes and white eyes and dark hair. This one was attractive, though, in an exotic kind of way, and he had a reputation for lechery to maintain, both amongst his own people and the slaves he kept. Not Raeka, though, never her. She was too precious to him to use up and cast aside.