Empire in Black and Gold

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Put that away,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘This is no time to play.’

  She dropped into her duelling stance, sword levelled at him. ‘Oh, you’re right,’ she told him. ‘And I’ve done playing.’

  He lifted the lantern slightly. His eyes held only a look of disdain, and he made to turn away.

  ‘If you turn your back on me now, I swear I’ll kill you. And believe me, I take my oaths every bit as seriously as you do.’

  With unhurried movements he placed the lantern on the walkway and turned the light up a little, narrowing his eyes against it. ‘Don’t be foolish,’ was all he said.

  ‘Foolish, is it? We have unresolved business, you and I.’

  ‘Have we indeed?’

  He would not even face it, nor did he look at her sword. Nothing in his stance suggested he believed in it as a threat. He would not fight her, would not even entertain the idea. He would not take her seriously.

  ‘I know what you’re afraid of,’ she told him.

  ‘Do you indeed?’

  ‘Oh, I know it’s not this sword,’ she said, inching closer. ‘I know it isn’t me. You’re the great Tisamon and you fear no fighter under the sky or beneath the earth.’ Even as she spoke she was in Collegium again, before it all started, baiting Piraeus into fighting her. Mantis pride, that was the key. They were all armour on the outside, but vulnerable, so vulnerable within.

  And I myself am of them – half of them.

  She made a sudden advance on him, but he contemptuously kept his distance. There was no fear in it, simply that he had no interest in fighting her. He would have taken the challenge of any wretch in the street, but not hers. She could chase him off into the darkness, but he would evade her and lose her.

  She prepared her barbed dart. ‘You are afraid,’ she told him. ‘You’re afraid of this face.’

  His stance changed, ever so slightly. Even now that same link worked between them, as though they were Ant-kinden of the same city, sharing thoughts.

  ‘You’re afraid of the past,’ she told him, ‘because you abandoned her. You wanted to believe she was a traitor, that she had seduced you and discarded you, rather than even go and find the truth. Much easier that way, wasn’t it? But you know now. You know that it was you who betrayed her. And that’s what you really can’t face!’

  And she lunged at him, but this time he did not give.

  She thought for a terrible moment that she was going to run him through, but she had forgotten who she had drawn sword on. The moment before the tip of her rapier pierced his arming jacket, his blade had swept it aside. She felt it scrape across the claw, across the armoured gauntlet.

  Then the claw unfolded and he was at her.

  She almost fell over her feet, turning her desperate lunge into a stumbling backstep. She nearly fell over the lantern in her next step, kicking it so that it was lying at the very edge of the walkway. She fell back ten paces without being able to stop herself, but he had pulled his advance up short, something catching in his face, and she got to the length of her rapier and drove in again.

  She had never fought like this before. It was not the Prowess Forum’s formal style, nor the street brawling she had espoused since then. It took all of her skill in every stroke, blade flickering faster than eye could follow. It was every ounce of her youth and effort and instinct against a master.

  Her thrust had been for his chest, but his blade was there before it. She bounded over it, driving forward, pressing on, keeping ahead of his circular guard, over and beside and under and always, always, pressing forward. The moment he took her blade aside she would be at his reach, and he within hers. His face, as he passed the lantern’s light, was set and deadly.

  She had forgotten his offhand. Even as she thought his blade was outmanoeuvred, he slapped her rapier out of line with his left palm, slinging her sword arm across her body, and the crescent of his blade was a bright line in the lamplight as it came to cut her throat.

  She swayed back, so far as to almost overbalance. She heard the passing of his blade, just an inch away, yet she had not given up her advance. She dragged her rapier back, sending the razor edge across his stomach, under his guard. His offhand caught it, palm-to-flat, and he twisted away, pushing her blade aside but exposing his left side to her. She thought she had him then. She flicked her sword from his grasp, brought the pommel past her chin to put the length of the blade between them, and speared it at his flank. Her target was gone, though. He had turned about on the instant, and the scythe of his claw was sweeping for her head.

  She kicked backwards, and this time she fell. The blade swept over her and she was scrambling to her feet as fast as she could. He feinted towards her, stopped. Or at least she had thought it was a feint. The lantern was between them now and she could see the catch again, something holding his blade back.

  Her face. She should listen better to her own words. He had driven her back past the lamp so its light fell on her face. Each time it did there came that minute catch in his assault.

  She reclaimed her feet. There was a slice of time in which he was poised, staring at her face – at dead Atryssa’s face.

  Then he went for her, and she knew her luck was used up.

  The claw spun and swept, moving with all the fluid grace his wrist and arm could lend it, spiralling past her guard. Even so she got her blade in the way, hearing the two metallic sounds as she warded it off. Then she had lunged back at him, and he turned the thrust, but not effortlessly. For a second they were locked together, face to face, and then she dodged away and back before he could get his spines into her. He was dancing towards her again, a man who had fought since he was a boy, a man of forty years, and all bar six or seven of them spent with a blade in his hands. He was just a shadow now, the lantern light behind him as he forced her to back up, step after step.

  He was death.

  She swept away a lunge, tried to riposte into him. Her thoughts had ceased and she had no time for them. Her feet, her body, her blade, everything depended on her instincts, her reflexes, faster and faster. She took his blows and turned them into her own attacks, over and over. He was always there with a parry that led, as though some natural law compelled it, into another series of blistering attacks. He was faster still. He was picking his pace up, and her breathing was ragged. She had almost stopped using her eyes, long since stopped using her mind. The blows came out of blackness, and she heard them as much as saw them. She fended them off and fended them off. She had stopped attacking. He left her no room for it. Then her rapier blade was abruptly caught between his forearm and his claw, and as she tried to draw it back he rushed forward. She felt the hilt twist in her hand and held on to it hard, and he turned his arm and dashed it against the sewer wall, and her blade, her beautiful blade that Stenwold had bought for her, snapped at the guard, leaving not even a sharp stub.

  He was going to kill her.

  She cried out then. The link between them was enough, still, to let her know that he would strike.

  She was braced for it, with a dignity that surprised her in the face of death at her father’s hands. She felt the cold edge of his blade. It was at her throat, of course. He had his habits, as did any fighter. Her breath sobbed into and out of her lungs, and beyond it she heard his, too. She imagined him using all his control to hold back the killing stroke.

  But it was not like that. He was now still as still, no struggle. Her eyes slowly grew accustomed to the light within the very grey periphery of their lantern. His face was merely a faint pale outline on which no expression could be discerned.

  She did not trust herself to speak or make any sound at all, and he too was silent.

  Then the blade moved, and she forced herself not to flinch. It did not slide away, though. Instead she felt the flat of it against her cheek, cupping her face more towards him, then this way and that, his eyes straining to see her.

  And then it was gone from her, folding back along his arm. He turned, merely a silhouette, l
eaning against the sewer wall with one hand. She noticed the rise and fall of his breathing.

  She could have killed him, though she realized this only later, so glad the idea had not then occurred to her.

  ‘You are my daughter,’ he said finally. ‘And by my damned soul, you are hers.’

  The words struck her almost physically, as he never had. Something wrenched inside her, and she let her sword hilt fall from raw fingers. She approached him with faltering steps, feeling her breath catch.

  ‘Nothing you said was untrue,’ continued Tisamon. ‘I have lived with false betrayal for seventeen long years, and with the truth for only days.’

  She wanted to say something to him then, some damning condemnation of him, or even some words of sympathy, but she could manage neither. Sobs began racking her so hard they hurt.

  When he turned to her at last, she saw the kindred tracks of grief down his own face.

  She thought he would not be able to bear to touch her. The wounds were freshly reopened, the blood still redly flowing. Still, when she approached him he put a hand on her shoulder, at first as tentative as a man reaching for a nettle, then stronger, as the man who grasps it.

  Awkwardly he took her in his arms, his daughter, and she clung to him, her face pressed into his chest, with his golden brooch cold against her cheek.

  Che woke slowly, fearfully. There was the rustle around her of people moving about, a murmur of low voices. She was lying on a hard mat of woven straw and a cloak was laid over her. There was an echo, but not the familiar tight echo of a small cell relieved only by Salma’s close breathing. This was some larger space, amid some multitude. She had no idea where she could be.

  And then it came to her with a leap of joy that she only needed to know where she was not.

  She was not in her cell. She was not in Thalric’s power.

  The pieces were falling into place.

  They had come for her. Tynisa and the Moth and the others.

  She was free.

  At the thought, Che sat bolt upright with a gasp of breath. The darkness around her resolved itself, dimmed into grey shades more penetrable to her eyes. Her Art showed her a vaulted, subterranean roof, other sleeping forms. At the far wall, where her gaze was inevitably drawn, was the robe-wrapped form of Achaeos, with his head slightly bowed. She realized that only she could see his gleaming eyes from within the cowl. To her they almost shone, where there would be darkness for anyone else. A moment ago she had not even recalled his name.

  She peered further around the room. There were almost two-score people sleeping here in rough ranks, and half a dozen standing watch, or perhaps just having woken before dawn as she had. Some crumbling cellar, this was. Probably she had seen it before when they came in but she had no memory.

  ‘Che,’ said a voice, soft from behind her, and she craned back to see Totho. He had been sitting at the head of her mattress almost like Achaeos’s opposite number. Instinctively she reached out to him, grasped his wrist, just to be sure that he was real, that it all was real.

  ‘I—’

  ‘You should try to sleep more. There’s a little while till dawn yet,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve lost all sense of time,’ she told him. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Some hideout of the resistance here. They got us into the palace to help you.’ He glanced about, his face darkening. ‘They didn’t do much more than that. They were more keen on finding this leader of theirs.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘So long as it worked, I don’t care.’ She looked around suddenly, panicking. ‘Where’s Salma? Did he—?’

  ‘He’s got the sense to still be asleep,’ said Totho pointedly. ‘He’s over there. He looked after you well, then?’

  ‘We looked after each other. It was complicated. I think it might have gone worse for us but the man who took us prisoner had some other business to deal with and he never quite got around to us.’ Her face hardened, enough to make Totho flinch. ‘Are we going back to Helleron now, Toth?’

  ‘No idea. Probably.’

  ‘I’ve got a message for my Uncle Elias.’

  He shook his head. ‘No point trying to deliver that. Tisamon killed him, Stenwold told me.’

  ‘Tisamon? The Mantis?’

  Totho nodded soberly. ‘He’s . . . To tell the truth he frightens me. Che . . . ?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I . . .’ His face, as usual, gave no clue as to his mind. He had grown up with the weight of mixed blood on his shoulders, and he had learned to hide himself deep. ‘I . . . I’m glad you’re safe.’

  ‘Not half as much as I am,’ she replied with feeling. ‘Totho, I want to see the sky again.’

  ‘The sky?’

  ‘I’ve been in wagons and in fliers and in cells for days and days now. I don’t care if it’s night. I just want to be outside. Just to stand in the doorway of this place will be enough. I’ll come back in straight away if anyone’s there.’

  She stood up awkwardly, stretching, and bundled the dark cloak about her. After a moment he took her hand and guided her around the main body of the sleepers, nodding reassuringly to any Mynans who were already awake, and nervously to Tisamon, who was over in one corner, carefully sharpening and oiling the blade of his claw.

  There were a couple of sentries outside, one lounging in the street like a homeless beggar, the other two floors up with a crossbow, watching down over the little square. The night was chill, the sky like pin-studded velvet, untroubled by clouds. They paused in the doorway, looking out, and in halting words Totho did his best to explain what had transpired since that fateful day in Helleron had separated them. He made most of it clear to her: Scuto’s intervention, Stenwold’s interview with Elias and the appearance of Tisamon, the hunt leading to Asta, and from there to the gates of Myna.

  And there she stopped him. ‘Tell me . . .’ It was a question she could barely believe she was asking, but there was a hook lodged in her mind, and its barbs were troubling her. ‘How did you know? How did you know where we were going?’

  Totho looked stubborn. ‘Tisamon and Tynisa went right into the Wasp camp there,’ he said, but he could not hide from his tone that there was rather more to it than that.

  She just waited in silence, trusting him to tell her the truth, and confronted with that trust he could do nothing else.

  ‘The Moth, he . . . just knew.’ Totho looked sullen. ‘I still don’t trust him. Either he’s been speaking to the Wasps or else he was just guessing.’

  Che shook her head. Her mind swam with the details of that inexplicable half-dream. Inexplicable? That was the very wall she was battering against. There is no way he could have known. There is no way he could have called to me, or that I could have heard. Impossible. Inexplicable. If the sun had been above them she would have shaken it off and found some glib sleight of mind to wish it away, but faced with the immensity of a dark and moonless sky, in this strange and intimidating city, she felt shaken by it, as if on the brink of some great irrational abyss.

  In the hold of the heliopter, in her dream, that had been more and less than any dream that had troubled her before, he had asked of her where she was bound, and she had said. She had told him.

  She should ask Totho about the precise times. She could then count the days back to that night when Aagen had grounded the flier within sight of Myna’s walls in order to repair it. Surely that would dispel any coincidence.

  Or strengthen it. She found now that she did not want to ask him. The possible answers lurked like childhood monsters in the shadows.

  ‘Totho, I . . . need to think. Just a little time to myself.’

  He had his stubborn look again. ‘You should go back and try to sleep, really.’

  ‘I’m as wide awake as I’ve ever been,’ she said, and it was true. ‘Please, Totho.’

  Reluctantly he left her, but she heard him murmur to the beggarly sentry to watch over her.

  After he had gone, she wondered about him. They had not been
apart so very long, but Totho had changed. She supposed they all had. They had been young and naive when they stepped aboard the Sky Without, but they were growing up fast now. It had been a time of harsh lessons. Totho still had that awkwardness about him, that shyness born of a tainted heritage, but beneath it was developing a core of steel. She would never have guessed him for a fighter, but he had been there ready with crossbow in hand when she had needed him, as had they all.

  ‘Come on,’ she said abruptly. ‘No sense skulking. I know you’re there.’

  There was an amused snort, and Achaeos fluttered down from the upper storeys on glimmering wings. Like the Ant- and Beetle-kinden they resembled, the people of Myna had never built for three dimensions. A deft, slight-framed man with Art-born wings had the run of the place.

  She looked at him cautiously. He had come down out of arm’s reach, and was regarding her with his arms folded within his robe.

  ‘Why?’ she asked him.

  ‘Who can say?’ She imagined there might even be bitterness in his voice. ‘But here I am.’

  ‘I’m glad of it. You . . .’ She could not say it. ‘I had a dream that . . . gave me comfort. At that time there wasn’t much comfort for Salma and me.’

  ‘A dream?’ Noncommittally.

  ‘Yes. A dream.’ She was defensive about it.

  He shrugged. ‘You Beetles,’ he remarked, but did not qualify it. ‘No matter. We’ll be back to Helleron soon enough, and then we two can be enemies again. I assume my debt to you is now paid?’

  ‘Debt?’ She took a step towards him. ‘The bandage? Those stitches? Your people need to fix a better rate of exchange, if this is all in return for that! You have done for me such . . . things that you had no need to do. But you did, and I don’t want to be your enemy ever.’

  She wanted to reach out to him, then. Through all his masks, he looked so baffled, so unsure of why he was there. In the cold night he just looked so alone.

  ‘We should not be enemies,’ she said. ‘If the Wasps come to Helleron, do you think they will not move against your people also? Believe me, their Empire makes no exceptions.’