When had the night grown so dark? She wondered if there was ever day in here. She had to force her way through the trees at times, through gaps a Fly would fight to negotiate, and at others there was a great cathedral of space about her, a cavern of twisted boughs and green air.
This was no natural place, and surely no place for her. She knew now that this had been a dreadful mistake. On whose part? On Tisamon’s, for certain, and he had gone. She had lost sight of him.
Because she was on her own now. He had told her as much. This she must do alone. He could not be there to hold her hand.
Father!
But what a man to have as a father – cold as ice, distant, bloody-handed. No, Stenwold was her father, in all but the blood. Stenwold the civilized, city-dwelling, scholar and philosopher. Stenwold the kind, the understanding. She had been raised in Collegium, studied in the white halls of the College itself. What madness had brought her here, into this maze of green and black?
She stumbled down a dip, splashed through a stream, took a second to look about her, but it was still no use. She had the sense of things moving, urging her on, but nothing came clearly to her eyes.
If she stopped now, she would be lost for ever. They would never find her bones.
The madness that brought her here was one she carried with her. It was the madness that took her when she drew a blade in anger. A cold madness like her father’s. Because she loved it: not killing for its own sake but killing to prove her skill. Killing to prove her victory. Blood? She was steeped in it.
With that same thought came the faintest glimpse of one of her escorts, a brief shadow between the trees, and she knew it was not human at all.
She rushed forwards to keep pace, struggling up the steep bank that the stream had cut, hauling herself up by the hanging roots it had exposed.
And she was there – and she saw the idol.
An idol? There was no other word for it. A worm-eaten thing of wood, taller than she was by at least two feet, with two bent arms outstretched from it, a great cruciform monument so worn by time that no detail of it could be made out clearly. Even the trees had been cleared from around it, or perhaps they had never taken root there.
This was it. She was at the heart of the Mantis dream, the centre of the island, the centre of the forest, of the kinden’s heartwood.
She approached the looming thing slowly, stepping over the lumped ridges of roots, feeling movement in the trees all around. They were watching her, and waiting. What was she to do? What was she to make of this . . . thing?
Close now, almost within arm’s reach. She had never believed in magic but something coursed from this crude and decaying image, some distant thunder beyond hearing, a tide that washed over her, lifting her and dragging at her.
She put out a hand to it. Would it be sacrilege or reverence, to touch this thing? What light the revenant moon could give her was shy of it, but her eyes hoarded the pale radiance against the darkness and she drew her hand back sharply. The idol was crawling with decay and rot. Worms and centipedes coursed through its crumbling wooden flesh. Beetles swarmed at its base, and their fat white grubs, finger-long, put their heads into the night air and wove about, idiot-blind. It was festering with voracious life, perishing even as she watched it. She saw then where new wood had been added as the thing fell apart, making good and making good but never replacing the dark and rotten heart of the effigy, so that whatever was jointed in was simply further prey for the rot, over and over, decade after decade.
And she saw that was the point, that the thing before her, a dead image, was also a living thing, a festering, fecund thing, life consuming death and death consuming life.
She took her knife from her belt. She had seen gouges where the thing’s breast would be, if the angled spars that jutted from it were arms. This was the test, was it? She raised the blade.
She felt the power, that invisible tide, as it rose to a peak about her. Above her thunder rumbled in a clear sky.
And she stabbed down.
She did not believe in magic, but lightning seared across the stars in the moment that her knife bit into the worm-eaten wood – and she saw the second idol, the glare of the lighting burned it on her eyes: the tall, thin upright, the two hooked arms.
The flash had blinded her, but she sensed it move ever so slightly, swaying side to side, and she froze.
Not an image, but the original. Even without sight, she saw it in her mind. That triangular head eight feet from the ground, vast eyes and razoring mandibles, and the arms, those spined and grasping arms. An insect larger than a horse, easily capable of snatching her in its forelimbs and crushing her dead, scissoring into her with its jaws. They killed humans, in the remote places where they still lived. They killed even people who came hunting them with bows and spears. Everyone knew this.
Was she supposed to kill it now? She blinked furiously, seeing only shapes, blurs, and she felt it move again, swaying slightly, fixing her with its vast, all-seeing eyes.
And she stood still and waited, the knife useless in her hand.
It was close. She could see the shifting motion as its arms flexed on either side of her. She was almost within its embrace.
Sister.
The voice came like a stab of pain in her skull.
Sister.
She could see enough now, the towering, swaying mantis before her. The voice seared through her, but she knew it was some latent Art awakening, just for this moment. The Speech – she had heard of this: Art little seen these days, but to command the creatures of one’s kinden was known. To hear their simple animal voices and to order them . . . but not this—
Sister, you have come far.
They were not human words. Some other intelligence was prying into her skull, forcing itself upon her, and her poor mind was forming the words as best it could.
You have come to prove yourself.
Had she? She had forgotten why she had come.
Turn, sister, the voice speared into her mind, and she turned and saw him there.
He was just a moving shape in the darkness, leading with the tip of a blade splashed pale silver by the moon. Her rapier had cleared its scabbard even as she saw him, and she felt the shock of contact, real as real, heard the scrape and clatter as the metal met.
He drove her before him, lancing and slashing in dazzling, half-seen patterns, a shadow-shape that she could not pin down. Her body knew the dance, though, or at least her sword did. Even as she felt the rapier vibrate with her parries, it was as though she was feeling its history, all the swift patterns it had ever moved through, as though the fight she was engaged in was running along grooves worn deep by centuries of use.
And she stared at the face of her opponent, which shifted and blurred before her, and tried to read it, but it changed and changed again. Now she was fighting Tisamon, his blade the darting metal claw, and murder on his face as he tried to blot out the unforgivable crime of having sired her. Now it was Bolwyn, whose shifting visage masked the faceless magician who had betrayed them in Helleron. He was Piraeus, seething with hate for her, treacherous and mercenary but poised and skilled despite it. The blade cut close to her face, and then she felt it pluck at her arming jacket, not deep enough to draw blood, but close enough.
Always the figure was a fraction faster than her attacks, displaying Tisamon’s cold rage, or the face of Thalric with the fires of the Pride reflecting in his eyes. Her adversary was every man she had ever fought, every man she had loved or hated, one at once and all together, a shifting chimaera of faces and styles and blades. He was the half-breed gang-leader Sinon Halfways with his marble skin, and Captain Halrad who had tried to own her; beautiful Salma who she had yearned for and yet who had never given himself to her; Stenwold, who had hidden her past from her; Tisamon, always Tisamon.
And then, there was an instant in which the face was a woman’s, and she could not have said if it was her own, or that of her mother, and she lunged with a wild cry and felt t
he rapier’s keen-edged blade lance through living flesh.
She was lying on her side before the idol, and the world seemed to be fading in and out around her so that she could almost see through the trees. There was a whispering chorus in her mind, but no words, just a susurrus of constant, muddled thoughts. She was exhausted: every muscle burned and twitched with it. The rapier’s hilt was still tight in her hand, and she felt it almost as the clasp of a lover.
Her head swam, but she seemed to understand things she had not comprehended before, though she knew this knowledge would leave her when she regained her full wits. In that drifting but infinitely lucid state she saw how Tisamon must be able to call his blade to him, and how Achaeos had known where Che and Salma were being taken, and many other things.
And there was a figure kneeling by her now, a Mantis woman with silver hair, proffering an ornate bronze bowl gone green in places over the years. She took it without hesitation, sitting up to drink, and she knew it was rich mead mixed with the blood of whoever or whatever she had slain before the idol, and the ichor, freely given, of the great mantis.
And it was bitter and sharp, and it burned her, but she forced it down, because it was strength, and skill and victory.
And when she awoke again, as dawn crept between the trees, there was something sharp cutting into her closed left hand. A brooch of a sword and a circle: the token of the order of Weaponsmasters.
*
Tisamon was waiting for her on the beach, and when she saw his face she realized that he had not been certain, despite all his promises to Stenwold, whether he ever would see her again.
She now wore the badge of his order on her arming jacket, and when the thought occurred, Did I really fight . . . she had only to touch the rents that the unknown blade had cut there, almost through to the skin. She was left only with the question, What was it that I fought? What blood did I drink?
The thought had come to her of those shadow-creatures in the Darakyon forest that she had seen that once when Tisamon led her through its margins. They had known his badge and his office, and stayed their hands for him.
There was a darkness at the heart of Parosyal, she understood, and it was best not to ask questions.
Tisamon’s eyes flicked from the brooch to her face, and he smiled just a little. She knew he would never ask, just as she could not ask him about his own experience all those years ago.
‘There is a boat that will take us over to Felyal before noon,’ he told her.
‘What do you hope to accomplish there?’ she asked him.
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps nothing, but I will see what can be done. It will not be easy for you.’
‘This will help?’ She touched the brooch lightly.
‘It will keep them from killing you out of hand,’ he told her, ‘but you may still have to prove yourself to my people – as may I. With last night behind you, I have no doubt that you can.’
Thirty
‘You don’t strike me quite as bandits,’ said Salma. ‘Or perhaps you’ve not been in the trade long.’
The brigand leader shrugged. ‘There are two or three that have.’ He had given his name as Phalmes, and the total of his band was fifteen men and one Ant-kinden woman. They had a fire lit in a farmhouse that had been torched at least a tenday before, and the band of refugees was huddled close together in their midst, watching them suspiciously. Sfayot played pipe, though, keeping time on a drum with his foot, and his daughters danced. It entertained the bandits, but Salma found it lifeless compared to other dances he had seen.
‘Most of us are getting out from under the Empire,’ Phalmes said. ‘Deserters like me and some slaves. Others are rustics running away from home, or who’ve been burned out. The Empire’s on the march and that pushes a tide of flotsam ahead of it. We’ve got to live, and banditry’s as good a living as any.’
‘I’ve seen bandits,’ Salma observed. ‘It’s a wretched life.’
‘I imagine you have, being from where you’re from,’ Phalmes agreed. ‘And I’d ask just what a Commonwealer like you is doing so far from home. Not great travellers normally, your people.’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘It’s going to be a long night.’
‘Tell me a short one first,’ Salma said. ‘How do you come to know the Commonweal?’
Phalmes just smiled sourly, and Salma immediately understood. ‘You fought there?’
‘Five years of the Twelve-Year War,’ the bandit agreed. ‘After they drafted me for their Auxillians. I was apprenticed for a mason, before that. So much for the futures we think we’ll have. So tell me, Commonwealer, tell me your long story.’
And Salma told him, the bones of it anyway. He could not place any real trust in this man, he knew, and so he held off the names and the details, but he told Phalmes about the College and about his being recruited by a Beetle spymaster. He recounted his journey on the Sky Without and their escape, and their foundering in Helleron. He told of the betrayal and their capture by the Wasps.
Phalmes had listened without interruption, but it was when the tale reached Myna that he held a hand up. ‘How long ago?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘When was this?’
Salma counted back. ‘A couple of months at most, since I was held there. Then my friends got me out – and the governor was killed, I heard.’
‘The Bloat?’ Phalmes said. ‘They killed him?’
‘Yes. And I met the woman who is running the resistance there. She was freed at the same time I was.’
‘She? What’s her name?’
‘Kymene. Do you know her?’
Phalmes shook his head. ‘Heard of her, though. So your lot let her out. Well, now, that’s bought you safe passage and a half, more than any song and dance.’
The elder of Sfayot’s girls came, then, and sat down next to Phalmes, who regarded her without expression.
‘Your father sent you here to me?’
She nodded, watching him.
‘There’s a man with a realistic view of the world,’ said Phalmes tiredly. ‘Your friend here has just bargained your freedom, girl.’
She shrugged. ‘We knew he would.’
‘And why’s that?’ Phalmes asked her, like a man humouring a child.
‘Because he is such a man,’ she said. ‘My father has keen sight.’
Salma shifted uncomfortably. ‘It was nothing but chance.’
She shook her head stubbornly, and then turned her attention to Phalmes. ‘What will you do?’ she asked him. ‘Your men are unhappy. They fear the Wasps.’
‘Do they, now?’
‘They should,’ she told him. ‘My father has seen it. They are just north of here. The great city of the chimneys has fallen to them already.’
‘Does she mean Helleron?’ Phalmes demanded.
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ Salma said, and then reconsidered. ‘Or no, I’d heard that northwards wouldn’t be a good destination. I hadn’t thought . . . Things are moving fast, then?’
Phalmes nodded gloomily. ‘It’s looking as though this country won’t be good even for bandits any more. There’s plenty of my lads here who need to keep themselves well out of the Empire’s hands, and I put myself squarely in that number.’
The girl leant into him unexpectedly, almost pushing him against Salma. ‘You’re not a bad man,’ she said. ‘My father sees many things.’
Salma’s eyes sought out Sfayot near the fire, and found the white-haired man looking at him with an unnervingly clear stare.
‘I’m as bad as I need to be,’ Phalmes told her. He seemed about to push her away, but then decided against it. Salma could see that he was already worrying about what to do with his followers next, because where could he lead them now?
‘You should come with us,’ the Roach girl told him.
Phalmes stared at her levelly. ‘Should I? And where are you all going that is such a wonderful destination?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, and then looked over at Salma.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I’m not leading us anywhere,’ Salma said, but realized, even as he said it, that this was not quite true. They had been looking to him since he had driven Cosgren away, because Cosgren had made himself leader, and then Salma had displaced him. That was the way things worked.
And if he was leading them. he should know where they were going, and why.
‘What else has your father seen?’ he asked. Phalmes gave an amused snort, because magic was just a word to him, but Salma had seen magic in his time and he believed in that moment that Sfayot could indeed be a seer.
‘That you will find something,’ the girl said. ‘You will find what you seek, perhaps.’
‘Does he know you’re telling me all this?’
‘He wanted me to,’ she said. She was close to his own age, thin and pale, with her white hair cut short and ragged. She was pretty, though, and she looked at Phalmes with a smile that he did not know what to do with. In that moment of awkwardness, Salma saw him as though he had known the man all his life. A solid working man, ripped from his trade, his family, his life, only to be driven further and further as he fled the rolling borders of the Empire, and yet here he was, still trying.
‘They made you an officer in the Auxillians,’ he guessed.
‘So you’re a magician as well now, are you?’ Phalmes demanded. ‘I was Sergeant-Auxillian, if you must know.’
‘And you’re still trying to look after your men.’
‘Just like you are,’ Phalmes confirmed, ‘but what of it? A man’s got to have some purpose in his life.’
‘Yes, he does,’ Salma agreed.
‘Why not come with us?’ the Roach girl asked Phalmes again.
He merely shook his head tiredly.
But the next morning, as the refugees set off westwards, Phalmes and his bandits were riding uncertainly alongside them. They were far enough apart to maintain their sovereignty, but they rode a parallel path, and took care not to get ahead.
Something was happening, Salma was aware, though he was not sure just what. In the meantime, as he waited for it to happen, his little band of fugitives lived day-to-day and relied on one another. When they were hungry, the land or the leavings of others sustained them. When they were weary they stopped and scavenged wood for a fire.
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