Of course, he must be seen to be deeply concerned. He had even brought an expert to speak before the council, which meant a double victory for him. Not only was he himself shown to be so committed to the Empire’s progress, but his witness was formerly in General Reiner’s camp, until she had seen the way the wind was blowing and come over to Maxin’s side.
She was a Spider-kinden named Odyssa, a Lieutenant-Auxillian in the Rekef, and she had been telling the advisers and the Emperor what she knew about the Spider military potential. The summary was that it varied.
‘The Spider ladies and lords prefer to hire or levy their armed help when needed. There are personal retinues but no real standing army,’ Odyssa explained. ‘The various cities of the Spiderlands all have provincial forces that can be called on and, as there is always plenty of work for mercenaries and fighting men in the Spiderlands, there is always a sizeable pool to draw on.’
‘Perhaps we should simply avoid these Fly-kinden places,’ one of the Wasp advisers said. ‘What glory or profit can there be in vanquishing Fly-kinden?’
‘Merro is a keystone in the Lowlands trade routes,’ one of the Consortium factors intoned drily. ‘Also a large proportion of black-market and underworld trade passes through the hands of the Fly-kinden. There is a great market at Merro in which, it is said, anything can be purchased for a price.’
‘Moreover,’ put in old Colonel Thanred, ‘we have no guarantee that the Spiders will not simply disrupt our supply lines and attack our rear, with or without the cooperation of these Ant islanders.’ Thanred was the nominal governor of Capitas, a ceremonial position accorded to a war hero, and his sole advisory role seemed to be to deride other people’s ideas.
‘Is that likely?’ an adviser asked, and Odyssa then explained to them about Spider politics, or at least so far as they could be made comprehensible to outsiders.
‘The Spiderlands,’ she said, ‘are like the Empire in that they have a fair number of subject peoples within them, although those territories, I would think, are more than twice the size of the current imperial holdings. Unlike the Empire there is no central rulership. Individual cities have families that vie for control, and so do whole regions, and then groups of regions and so on. And all these families are constantly working against each other, playing one another off, changing alliances or enmities. Spider-kinden, when engaged in politics, cannot be second-guessed. Therefore they may decide that General Alder’s army represents a threat, and thus attack, or instead they may not. You can only be certain that you will have no clue of what they will do before it happens.’
‘A load of good that information is,’ the Consortium factor grumbled.
‘What about that city beyond the Dryclaw, what is it called? Our recent find?’ someone asked.
‘Solarno,’ Maxin completed for them: a city that Wasp exploratory expeditions had contacted only months before, that seemed to represent the north-east corner of the Spiderlands. ‘It may repay long-term investment,’ he suggested. ‘Unfortunately it seems to have seceded unilaterally from the Spiderlands, with no attempt to recapture it. More politics, I suppose.’
‘Long-term investment?’ Thanred jeered. ‘We have an entire army sitting at the mercy of these backstabbers.’
The Consortium factor bristled. ‘And what if they do attack? We need Merro. It’s a prize second only to Helleron. So let’s fight the Spiders. What could they muster, realistically?’
‘If I could, mnn, speak,’ said the old Woodlouse Gjegevey. Maxin turned a narrow gaze on him, because he had not entered the debate until now.
‘I have not travelled in the Spiderlands, but have read, nonetheless, of their, mmn, kinden. There is record of a Spider lordling who mustered an army with the, ahm, intention of conquering at least part of the Lowlands – Tark and Kes and the Fly warrens at least. It came to, mnm, well, he was defeated by the machinations of his political rivals amongst his own kinden, but the, mmn, reports regarding the force he raised placed its size at over one hundred thousand soldiers.’
There was a thoughtful pause amongst the other advisers.
‘I cannot vouch for the quality of their troops, but you will understand that this was a single lord. If our precipitate, mnn, action should prompt a unification amongst such families, well . . .’
It was help from an unexpected direction, but Maxin would take it. He turned to the centrepoint of the advisers’ crescent of chairs and asked, ‘Your Imperial Majesty, what would you have us do?’
Alvdan started from his reverie. He had taken no part in the discussions, and Maxin knew just what it was that so consumed him. What the Mosquito was offering him, impossible as it sounded, far outweighed these mundane debates. ‘What would you advise, General?’ the Emperor responded eventually.
‘Perhaps an official embassy should be sent to these Spider-kinden. No doubt they want something from us, some recognition or tithe. We can buy them now and take back our gold at our leisure. We have done it before.’
There were no strong objections, and the Emperor put his seal on the plan. The Fourth Army would stay put, and General Alder would fret, but Alder was Reiner’s man, Maxin knew. The glory of the Lowlands would go to General Malkan when he took first Sarn and then Collegium. But Malkan had always been one of Maxin’s retinue, and he was the youngest and keenest general the Empire possessed.
Maxin was careful not to leave in Odyssa’s company, for that would have raised too many questions. He met her eyes, though, and nodded to show that he approved of her performance. He gave a nod to old Gjegevey too, before he left.
As for Gjegevey, he made a great show of being slow to rise and the last to leave, and when he left, Odyssa was waiting for him.
‘I thought it must be you,’ she murmured softly. ‘My message was that the Lord-Martial had a man amongst the imperial advisers.’
‘As you yourself said,’ Gjegevey murmured, ‘any man who plays politics with the, hmm, Spider-kinden, is liable to find himself caught in webs.’ He smiled. ‘What a pair of, mmn, traitors we are.’
‘To who?’ she asked. ‘Do you honestly think, O scholar, that you know where my loyalties lie?’
Even speaking to her I feel myself ensnared, Gjegevey thought.
Felyal had an uncertain relationship with the sea, and held no firm borders. The wall of greenery their boat coasted past was inundated now, the brackish waters reaching far inland with the high tide. When the waters receded, the trees would be left suspended on their spidery roots amongst a mudscape of burrows and discarded shells.
Outsiders used the name and made no distinction, but Tynisa learned that ‘Felyal’ was the Mantis Hold, and that ‘the Felyal’ was the wood itself, just as that other place far north-east of here was the Darakyon. There had been a Mantis hold there as well, once.
Their boat tacked closer and then further away, the Moth-kinden fisherman shading his eyes and watching the water carefully. At last he found a channel running into the wood, and guided the boat twenty yards along it before throwing a line out to loop over a branch.
‘This is as far as I can take her,’ he explained. Tisamon paid him a handful of coins, and then stepped out onto one of the arching roots, holding an arm back for Tynisa to clutch at.
It was an awkward journey until they passed the high-tide mark, stepping half in muddy water and half on the projections of the trees, seeing the swirl of creatures moving in the murk, and slapping at mosquitoes that hung in the air as big as hands. They clambered and scrambled inland with best speed, walking from root to root, jumping channels that were thick with mud and motion. The air glittered with life. Dragonflies skimmed the waters for fish drawn in by the tide, and butterflies like ragged brown cloaks hunted through the canopy for the open blooms of flowers.
They reached land, at last, and if it was not dry it was at least solid, past the furthest intrusions of the sea. The trees progressed from the stilted marsh-dwellers to broader and more familiar breeds. There was a weight to them, an ancien
t crookedness, that returned errant thoughts of the Darakyon to Tynisa, and she shook them off uncomfortably.
‘What lives here, besides your people?’ she asked.
‘Our namesakes,’ Tisamon said briefly. ‘Beyond those two, there is nothing to worry you.’
‘No ghosts?’ she asked. ‘Spirits?’
Tisamon turned back to her. ‘The mystics teach us that there are ghosts and spirits everywhere,’ he said. ‘But no, this is not like that place.’
She would have asked more, but then the Mantis-kinden found them. She only knew about it when Tisamon moved, the metal claw abruptly in place and at the ready. She had the sense of sudden flight, the sound of metal on metal.
Everything stopped. She could see nothing, though her sword had leapt to her hand. Claw cocked back, Tisamon was standing before her, tense as a taut wire.
There, by his feet, was a broken arrow. It had been meant for her.
‘Where is your honour?’ Tisamon shouted out, genuinely angry. ‘Come forth that I may see what my kinden have become!’
There were five of them, three women and two men, all of them within a few years of her own age. They had bows, strings drawn back to the ear, and not the little bows of Flyor Moth-kinden, but bows as tall as they were, and they were all of them tall. They were fair too, as Tisamon was, and as she was also. Her features were Spider-kinden, though, while theirs were composed of the same angles as his: sharp-chinned, sharp-eared, narrow-eyed. A kind of austere grace, like a statue’s, was theirs, but without the warmth to make them seem human. They wore greens and greys, and one had a cuirass of black-enamelled metal scales.
Their leader stared at Tisamon with eyes narrowed. ‘What filth is this? What do you want here?’ she asked, regarding Tisamon without any love. Then her gaze passed to Tynisa and she spat at her feet. ‘No Spiders in the Felyal,’ she said. ‘We had thought that decree would not be forgotten.’ The other four arrowheads were directed unwavering at Tynisa’s head, waiting only for the nod.
‘Look again at her,’ Tisamon urged quietly. The Mantis woman shot him a hostile glance, but her eyes twitched over Tynisa, and came to rest on the brooch.
‘What is this?’ she demanded.
‘We must speak to the elders of Felyal,’ Tisamon said calmly.
‘And if they will not speak to you?’ The woman’s comrades were slowly lowering their bows, relaxing the strain on their strings. They could see, from that one badge, that this situation was more than they themselves could decide on. There was a wildness to their eyes, though. That the mark of a Weaponsmaster could be borne by a Spider was hateful to them, Tynisa understood. She saw also that they did not even consider that she might have acquired it by forgery or theft, that badge. That she sported it meant that she had earned it, and she wondered just what might happen to any unwise thief who tried to claim such a symbol undeservedly.
‘If they will not see us, then that shall be what they choose,’ Tisamon said. ‘I myself know the way, but if you wish to escort us, so be it.’
‘You, perhaps, but she may not come. She may live this time, but send her back to the sea,’ the woman snarled.
Tisamon shook his head. ‘You cannot deny that symbol, and don’t make either of us prove it to you.’
The Mantis woman looked rebellious for a further moment, her jaw stuck out aggressively. Then she signalled, and one of her band ran off into the trees.
‘We are watching you,’ she hissed at Tynisa. ‘If you try to run, we shall kill you.’
‘Why would I need to run?’ asked Tynisa, trying to muster icy disdain and meanwhile hoping her nerves did not show. She had always known this, how Mantis-kinden hated the Spiders. Everyone knew it and nobody knew why, but the grievance went back deep into the Days of Lore, the enmity’s roots impossible to tug out and examine.
And now she was here and amongst them, and they hated her. She could feel all four of them hating her, just patiently waiting for the word. The brooch she wore seemed a feeble object to hold up as a shield.
She hoped Tisamon knew what he was doing and, glancing at him, saw that he was by no means as certain as she had previously thought. His anxiety was now as much for his own sake as for hers. She was the abomination that he had produced, and thus they were guilty side by side.
He strode ahead, though, forcing the other Mantids to keep up with his pace. He was coming home, but it had been twenty years, and how much did he really know about the current regime? Or perhaps nothing ever changed here, in this deep pocket of the past.
And she realized that they were already within the Mantis community, the Hold, and she had not noticed. All around them lay a village, but the Mantids had not cleared any ground to accommodate it. Instead their houses were scattered around and between the trees, light structures of wood that barely touched the ground, with rounded walls and sloping roofs that funnelled upwards into openings that were both chimneys and doors. She could not count them, half-hidden in and out of the trees, but it seemed everywhere she looked there was another, situated further out between the distant trunks and branches, until she wondered whether the entire wood was riddled with them. So this was the Mantis-kinden, their idea of a town.
But of course, they could not live one on top of another. Basic lessons of economics were coming back to her from the College. Where were the farms? Where was the cleared land? Of course there was none, for Mantis-kinden were not farmers. They must hunt and gather their way through the Felyal. They could never form great compact towns or cities, and how many of them could even this wide-stretching forest feed? And how scattered they must remain, just to support themselves.
It only struck her then that this was something from another time, another world. Here was where the claws of the past had dug in and held tight. The revolution had never happened here, where the Days of Lore still dragged their timeless way along.
And here were the Mantis-kinden themselves. The advance messenger had drawn a fair crowd of them, perhaps a hundred or more. There were suspiciously staring children, holding wooden stick-swords that were not toys but practice blades, and there were some silver-haired old men and women, and there was a host in between, for the Mantids lived long and aged late. They surprised her, and mostly because of the amount of metal they displayed. Many of them had donned armour, either the leaf-shaped scales or curving, fluted breastplates and helms: the much-coveted carapace style that no other kinden had been able to duplicate. Black and brown and green and gold, and old, the armour and the weapons were the work of generations, handed down and handed down, and always keeping the past alive. She almost felt the ancient blade at her own side shift in sympathy.
One of the older women was stepping forwards. She walked as though she were young, with the same grace as all of them, and she had a beautifully sleek rapier hanging from a cord loop at her belt.
‘What do you want here?’ she asked. ‘Why have you come?’
‘My name is Tisamon, Loquae, and I have come home.’
Tynisa glanced at him and realized with a shock that she had never thought him afraid before, but he seemed so now. Moreover, he was revelling in it, feeding off it. It stretched his mouth into a taut grin as tension twanged through his entire body. He was as alive and alert as he had ever been, and unmistakably thrilling with it.
‘There was a man called Tisamon once,’ said the Loquae, for Tynisa knew this word was a title, not a name. ‘He left many years ago, hearing the call of the world. Perhaps he might have sought to rejoin his people.’ Her eyes were slits as she stared at Tynisa. ‘But he would never have brought a Spider here with him. By what right does she bear that badge?’
‘By the only right that anyone can,’ Tisamon said, his voice all calm, his stance all readiness. ‘And she is not a Spider. She is my daughter.’
The words speared through them like steel, like a wind lashing at trees and bending them backwards. There were blades in hand instantly, rapiers and long knives, and claw-gauntlets being buckled on.
Even the children hissed their disapproval at him, and the Loquae wailed, ‘What have you done? You have made an abomination! What have you become?’
Tisamon watched her, grinning still with pain and tension.
‘You cannot be one of us,’ the Loquae spat at him. ‘You are not one of us!’
‘Then I must be an intruder.’ He brought his hand up, and his gauntlet was on it now, though it had been bare a moment before, with the blade unfurling. ‘And you will have to kill me.’
Even as he said the words, three of the Mantis-kinden sprang forth to challenge him, and Tynisa assumed they would all set about him at once. By some signal or concord she did not catch, two of them stopped short and one just kept moving, her own clawed gauntlet slashing out at Tisamon’s face. He had no moment of confusion, for he was part of their world and had known instantly who his real opponent was. He was a step back before she had even completed her move, her blade passing uselessly between them.
There was no moment of breath, he was attacking instantly, and Tynisa saw what few outsiders had ever witnessed, the vicious, graceful dance of the mantis claws. Tisamon and his opponent shifted like dappled sunlight, moved like dancers, like insects skittering over the surface of a lake. Their claws were cocked back behind them, and then lashing forth in complex patterns, dancing and spinning, using every joint all the way to the fingers to make them pirouette and wait and stoop as though they were living things in their own right, like silver dragonflies hovering and darting, and their bearers nothing but an abstraction.
Tynisa kept her hand clutched tightly about the hilt of her rapier, and never realized that she did so. She had seen Tisamon fight so many times before, but until now she realized she had never seen him fight anyone so good. The Mantis woman moved with him and Tynisa could not tell who led and who followed. They fought as though they had rehearsed it, blades cutting air, striking against one another high and low, and their off-hands flashing too, the spines raised on their forearms, raking and cutting. They were far too close, not the distance of a rapier duel but almost chest to chest most of the time, constantly in one another’s shadow, and never touching, ducking and spinning past one another, and even when turned away each knew the other’s precise stance and position.
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