Blood of the Mantis sota-3

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She threw the engine into a faster gear, and felt the cumbersome fixed-wing surge forward. At the same time the attacks fell off, becoming fewer and fewer, and she assumed that the Wasps must be throwing themselves out of the way. She peered cautiously through the damaged slot, hoping that she was still on course.

  To her astonishment the Wasps were all dead. She caught a glimpse of their scattered bodies, a good dozen of them at least, before they vanished beneath her view. There was only one man standing there, a gaunt silhouette against the lights of the landing field. As the Cleaver advanced on him, he boldly waited until the last moment before ducking under its wing, and it was then that their eyes met for just a brief moment.

  Cesta, the assassin.

  Could Tisamon have done that? Che wondered. Killed so many, so swiftly? She imagined those little throwing blades flicking out in twos and threes, the Wasps falling before they even realized they were being attacked.

  Thank you, Cesta, she thought, and then she was fully out in the open air, and she sent the much-abused fixed-wing over the airfield, putting everything she could crank into the engine, feeling the wheels lift from the earth just a moment before the Cleaver overran the edge of the field, teetering over the city of Solarno below, and then it flew.

  Axrad broke away from the spiral, casting his flier over the city in a long, broad arc that gave Taki plenty of time to see that he had begun the fight.

  Honour amongst Wasps, whatever next? She threw the nimbler Esca away from him, flitting back above the airfield, noticing the ponderous bulk of the Cleaver at last get airborne.

  Good, she thought. Now I fight. She thumbed the lever that uncovered the rotating piercer and then danced across the sky, looking for Axrad.

  He was above her already, swinging in from the sun, just as a good pilot should. She knew that he would do so and the Esca danced aside from the glittering lance of his repeating ballistae, and then ascended straight up without warning, as poised in flight as any insect, so that Axrad swept right past her, pulling furiously out of his dive even as he did. She put the Esca through three turns, spinning in the air, and shot at him, the piercer clunking over and over, sending its long bolts past his cockpit. But he was better than that, for he dropped his orthopter almost to street level, so that she had to stop shooting for fear of killing some innocent citizen. He then fell out of sight altogether, hidden momentarily by the roofs of Solarno, and no doubt terrifying anyone who happened to be passing beneath.

  Taki soared overhead, searching for him, and without warning his flier flurried up out of the city, repeater firing as fast as it could reload itself. A bolt tore a narrow hole in her wing before she rolled the Esca out of the way, and then they were chasing over the rooftops, him directly behind her, and Taki always keeping out of the line of his ballistae.

  She then saw that they did not have the sky to themselves. There were at least a dozen other vessels, of differing loyalties, flying above Solarno in this dawning light. Dragon-fighting! The phrase had reached Solarno from the people of Princep Exilla, who enacted the same kind of duels astride their insect mounts, but it was among the pilots of Solarno that the practice had found its true home.

  And amongst the Wasps, too, because Axrad was proving very, very good.

  In a moment the city was gone from beneath them, and Taki was skittering across the dawn-reddened expanse of the Exalsee. Can’t get too far from Che, she realized, and threw in one of her special tricks. It would normally be impossible in anything other than a heliopter, except that of course the Esca Volenti was special, endowed as it was with its little beating halteres that gave it more control and balance than any other man-made thing around that inland sea. With a single flip of her wings the Esca was simply facing the other way, for a moment speeding impossibly backwards, away from the city, until the wings wrestled the orthopter to a momentarily stuttering halt and then plunged, back towards Axrad.

  She held down the trigger, watching the piercer bolts flash towards him, striking sparks wherever they struck. His orthopter faltered in the air and seemed to drop, and then she had passed over it, and a craning look backwards showed her that he was gaining height again, holed but not damaged, swinging in behind her doggedly.

  She was enjoying herself now. Her city was being invaded, and her friends were fleeing it and needed her help and guidance, but it had been a long time since anyone had given her a run as good as this.

  Then Axrad was soaring away, deliberately breaking off his pursuit, and she was instantly looking about her, towards all quarters of the sky.

  There they were: two more Wasp orthopters angling in, lining up on her. Axrad had given her the only warning that he could, and she now turned to aim at them, flying right in their faces with her rotary piercer blazing, firepowder spitting the bolts at them far faster than any ballista’s tensioned string.

  These were not Axrad, however, just Wasp pilots with basic training and no great skill. One of them dropped almost instantly, so swiftly that she must have struck straight through the cockpit and killed the pilot. The other swung wide of her, but she turned within his turn and her rotary raked the underside of his craft, scoring several hits but nothing that hampered him.

  The Wasp orthopter rocked again, as another craft flashed past before them, causing both Taki and the Wasp pilot to haul their fliers out of the way. It was a big, armoured fixed-wing, and Taki knew it at once for Scobraan’s resilient ship, the Mayfly Prolonged. She dropped aside and saw the Wasp pilot take the bait, pointing on the apparently ponderous ship and shooting. A few of the bolts stuck, but most simply rattled from the Mayfly’s armour, and the Wasp was getting so close, so very close. Taki herself would never have fallen for it, but then she was already wise to the tricks Scobraan kept concealed within the Mayfly’s plated hull.

  It was over before she knew it, the Wasp orthopter ripping into fragments without warning, as Scobraan’s incendiary struck it and exploded, and for a hundred yards the blazing wreck continued on its course before losing its integrity and dropping from the sky.

  Then the Mayfly Prolonged shook and shuddered, and Taki saw a line of holes being punched in its wing as Axrad dived on it from above. Scobraan threw the fixed-wing in a straight dash across the rooftops, trying to use his engine’s greater power to offset the nimbler orthopter, and Taki put the Esca pointedly behind Axrad, not shooting, but inviting attention. He broke off his chase of the Mayfly and made a surprisingly tight turn, so that they were for a moment heading straight at one another.

  Perhaps he thought that she would be the first to flinch, but they shot at the same time, repeating ballista against rotary piercer, bolts flashing swiftly between them.

  There were very few Fly-kinden amongst the fighting pilots, as the martial mindset did not sit well with their race. Those there were, though, were very good indeed. They were lighter than other pilots, so they could fly defter machines. Their reflexes were second to none.

  A bolt ripped into the Esca’s hull, ripping apart the canvas and narrowly missing the motor beyond. Another gashed the right wing, and a third shuddered to a halt somewhere amid the folded landing legs. She saw the impact of her piercer bolt even before the ensuing flash of flames, and knew that she had landed a successful strike in Axrad’s engine. Only then did she dart aside, pulling the Esca round in a steep turn to come back and check what she had done.

  She spotted Axrad’s machine by the smoke, as she came back to it, saw it falter in the air, and held off her attack. Before she had flown past, she spotted the man as he climbed out of his cockpit and jumped, wings flaring to catch him, and she found that she was glad he had survived.

  Another time, she told herself, and went to look for Che and Nero in the Cleaver.

  They found land at Porta Mavralis, the sole outpost of the Spiderlands situated on the shores of the Exalsee. Here Taki called on favours and raised credit in the name of the Destiavel, and obtained barrels of mineral oil for the Cleaver and a winding engine that th
e Cleaver could carry to retension the Esca Volenti’s clockwork engine.

  ‘We must fly to your home, you and I,’ Taki explained to them. ‘We have a common cause now.’

  ‘Ain’t you worried about what’s going on back home?’ Nero asked her.

  ‘I shall return to Solarno, but first I want to see your war. I want to understand what the Wasps are fighting. And perhaps I want to find help for us.’

  While she was waiting for her fuel, the battered bulk of Scobraan’s Mayfly Prolonged dragged itself into port, listing dangerously. The burly Solarnese had only bad news: names of the pilots killed or fled, the well-known buildings burnt, the imperial flag of black and gold unfurled over the houses of the great and the good.

  Taki asked him to come with them, but he declined. ‘I’m for Chasme,’ he told her. ‘That’s where we’re mustering and gathering allies. We will strike back when time gives us our chance. I hear Niamedh made it out, was heading to Princep Exilla even. The sea…’ He stopped for a moment, shuddering with fatigue and emotion. ‘The whole cursed Exalsee will run red with blood before those Wasp bastards get away with what they’ve just done.’

  Taki nodded vigorously. ‘Hold out, then,’ she said. ‘Che and me, we’re going for help. Her people, who are fighting the Wasps already, they’ll see us right, I’m sure. It’s a long haul, but for a couple of fliers it’s not so very long. I’ll be back, Scobraan. So you just wait for me.’

  Che’s return to Collegium was so much faster than the sea voyage of her departure. The Cleaver might have been slow for a fixed-wing but it danced effortlessly down the coast, and Nero had found a hatch in the underside to peer from, and call out landmarks for navigation.

  ‘There’s Kes,’ he said at one point. ‘Looks like a navy gathering there. Wonder how far away the Empire is right now.’

  At last, and after many stops to refuel and rewind, they had sight of Collegium. Che was leading the way with the Esca following docilely behind, and Che wondered how Taki was taking it. She was so far from her home now, seeing more of the world in this frantic flight than she had witnessed in her whole life. The Exalsee and its independent cities lay far behind them now.

  There were more lines on Stenwold’s face than she remembered, and his greeting was full of simple joy at seeing her so well when others were not.

  ‘Uncle Sten, this is…’ Che paused to get the complicated name right, ‘te Schola Taki-Amre, an aviatrix of Solarno. Taki, this is my uncle, Stenwold Maker.’

  Taki squinted up at the bulky Beetle. ‘You’re the one who set her onto our city, are you?’

  ‘I am sorry for your loss, but you know we all fight the same enemy now,’ Stenwold told her. ‘The Wasps will acknowledge no borders or limits to their ambition.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I saw that all right,’ Taki said. She kept blinking about her at the buildings of the College, so very different from the red-roofed houses of Solarno. ‘Sieur Maker, I mean to return to my city soon, and I’d be glad of whatever you could spare me. Consider: the more trouble the Wasps get from Solarno, the more their attention is taken off you, right?’

  In reply to that, Stenwold took her to see Teornis, and Che explained haltingly that their mission had failed. Instead of allies they had found only another Wasp conquest.

  Teornis had merely nodded sympathetically.

  ‘It may not be so hopeless as you think,’ he said gently. ‘After all, Solarno is a Spider city – not Spiderlands, perhaps, but it has a sentimental place in the hearts of many of my people. If things get so very bad, they say to one another at home, there is always Solarno to retreat to. Solarno is a place where my people can play their games in miniature, for smaller stakes, so I rather think that there are some who might take its invasion poorly. Perhaps this will finally motivate some of the Aristoi families to take a stance on the issue of the Empire.’

  Stenwold had been watching him closely as he spoke and, with those last words, something seemed to break through on Teornis’s face, some little window onto the mind that lay within. Stenwold was not sure whether he had been shown it deliberately, or caught that rarest of things, an unguarded thought from a Spider mind, but it seemed to him that Teornis was privately delighted with the news that Che had brought.

  And then, five days later, while the Assembly was still collating news of Wasp military movements, the Buoyant Maiden was sighted drifting towards Collegium.

  They were all there to greet it, even Sperra, who had found herself able to fly a little the day before, just a dozen yards before exhausting herself. Jons Allanbridge’s airship touched down with unusual solemnity aboard, though, and the faces of its passengers were dour.

  Tynisa was first out, and it was to Che she went.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, trembling, almost falling into her foster-sister’s arms. ‘Che, I’m so very sorry.’

  Twenty-Six

  Night brought no peace to the shores of Lake Limnia. The slap and ripple of the water was underscored by the chirr and buzz of a thousand insects that raised a racket enough to drown out anything that had happened further out on the water.

  Every so often the water would take one of their chorus, either by the flier’s own clumsiness or through the predatory skills of some lake-dweller. There would be a deep plunk punctuating the nocturnal serenade, a few errant ripples not caused by wind or weather, then no more.

  Then something more substantial struck the water near its edge, raising a great sheet of spray that battered against the reeds. For a second there was nothing but the waves washing back and forth, and then something was crawling out of the shallows, dragging itself through the mud, tearing at the lakeside vegetation for purchase. The insect choir was joined by the gasping and choking sound of a man fighting for life.

  And then stillness, save for his ragged breath. His wings had failed him at the end, but close enough to shore that the water had not claimed him. He had stretched himself out there with his feet still in the lake, every muscle strained, his wounds burning with a slow fire.

  Lieutenant Brodan lay on the lakeshore and felt out the extent of his injuries. The Mantis had scored a long gash across his right arm and side, raking him with pain, but it had only sliced shallowly over his ribs and not cut into anything vital. He lay still and tried to breathe, wondering if life was even worth it now that he had failed the Rekef. Better to die, surely, than face whatever repercussions his superiors would dredge up for him.

  His men were dead, every one of them. Only a superior prudence garnered from experience had kept him alive, and that would prove a double-edged sword when the accounts came to be tallied.

  There was a rustle nearby and he craned his neck to see the shabby, shrouded form of Sykore picking his way towards him. He tried to stretch an arm out towards her, to burn her for her betrayal, but she hissed at him disdainfully, planting the end of her walking stick on his chest, causing an agony so severe that he nearly passed out.

  ‘Foolish,’ she said. ‘Foolish Wasp. Fool of a Rekef. Can you accomplish nothing by yourself?’

  He glared at her, furious but impotent. The haggard creature sighed and removed her stick from him, baring her pointed teeth in annoyance. ‘We must have the box. You only want it for your silly games, but my master needs it. He shall have it. I shall save you and your reputation, Lieutenant Brodan, since it falls to me.’ Sykore hissed. ‘I shall risk more this night than I would like to but, just as you, I must account to my superiors, and their punishments for failure throw the devices of your Rekef into shadow.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Brodan got out.

  ‘You would not understand,’ Sykore told him. ‘Nor would you believe.’ Inwardly, she steeled herself. Spying on the Spider-kinden girl was easy enough, thus seeing the world through the link of blood that she had forged. How much could she borrow, though? How far could she take it? Could she hold the Spider long enough to have her bring the box?

  She thought not. The link had become fragile and, besides
, the Moth seer would surely detect it if she borrowed so heavily.

  She needs must expose herself, her own body, to danger. None of her kind relished that, for by nature they were lurkers in the shadows. She was loathe to risk so many decades of precious life in such an attempt, but the tools available to her were now few. She had only her own hands with which to take the box.

  ‘Await me near here,’ she told Brodan. ‘I shall come to you with the box, if I can.’

  He stared at her sullenly, mistrustfully. She scowled at his ingratitude.

  ‘I shall save you, Lieutenant,’ she told him flatly, ‘both from your own stupidity and the wrath of your lords. Think simply of that.’ And with that she was hobbling off into the night.

  The Buoyant Maiden had received a few new scars from Wasp sting-shot, most notably a smashed steering vane that had made even their return to Jerez problematic, and so Allanbridge had taken her away for emergency repairs. The next morning would see them sailing for Collegium, leaving this sodden town behind them at last.

  They would not be sorry to leave it.

  ‘For me,’ Gaved informed them, ‘this is as far as I go. I won’t be on the airship with you tomorrow.’ Sef was cradled in one arm, wrapped in an ill-fitting robe that Nivit had somehow been able to procure.

  Nivit regarded his old partner doubtfully. ‘No way you can keep her here,’ he pointed out.