Then it was over. Tynisa blinked. She had barely seen it, had to review the last few moves in her mind to see that, yes, the reason that the woman’s arming jacket was now flooding with red across her stomach was precisely that move of Tisamon’s, not his last move, but one three moves before, and nobody, not even his opponent, had realized.
His victim made a shocked sound, and doubled over, striking the ground heavily, but Tisamon paid no heed to her because the second challenger was upon him. This was a man a little over Tynisa’s age, driving for Tisamon with a short-hafted spear. Tisamon was already moving, even before the luckless woman struck the earth, lashing out with his claw, trying to close.
This fight was different again, a fight of space and distance, with the spearman trying always to keep Tisamon at the end of his reach, and Tisamon forever closing, forced to be the aggressor, sweeping the spearhead out of the way time and time again in his effort to step in, so that the whole contest seemed to happen backwards as the spearman retreated, step-perfect and never looking behind him, to keep away from the flashing edge of Tisamon’s claw. He never blocked, either, and Tisamon was the same. The two weapons seemed to exist in different worlds, meeting only when Tisamon struck at the spear itself. Always it was drawn back, the claw springing away from the head and not splitting the shaft.
Tynisa risked a glance at the other Mantids, and saw no hatred there. They did not cheer the fighters on, or wager, or discuss. Their entire attention was fixed on the battle, with nothing short of reverence.
And Tisamon caught the spear with his off-hand, just behind the head. The spearman had the chance for a moment’s surprise, started to drop the weapon and fall back, but Tisamon’s sweep cut the haft in two, and then he lunged forwards and the point of his claw caught the man outside the collarbone, driving deep into his shoulder so that the younger man’s already pale face went white with the pain and he fell back into the crowd.
Tisamon was already turning, claw crooked back again, as the third challenger came for him. She was armed with a rapier, and Tynisa saw that it was a match in style for the weapon she herself bore, down to the leaden-coloured, slightly shortened blade. Tisamon rose to meet her with an expression that was madness and ecstasy combined, a bloodlust and a joy in the fight that chilled Tynisa and called to her equally.
They were faster now, twice the speed of the first duel, as Tisamon changed pace to keep up with the flickering of the rapier’s narrow blade. The woman across from him was older than the previous two, but a good ten years his junior nonetheless, and she did not fence as Tynisa had learned, with careful feet and a rapid hand. Instead she flew, figuratively and literally. She made her sword into a lattice of steel about her, using the edge more than the point, letting its momentum lead her body where it would, and then the wings would explode from her back and carry her over Tisamon’s head, landing and thrusting or cutting even as he turned, and they were moving faster and faster, until Tynisa could not breathe.
She never realized that her own face had slipped into the same almost religious expression worn by all of the others, or that she had released her rapier hilt to clasp her hands over the brooch of sword and circle.
Tisamon ducked and drove in, trying to step inside the reach of his adversary’s blade, and she would not let him, and yet when he walked into the razoring steel of her guard, he stepped through it unscathed and she fell back as the spearman had, before driving him away again. Her eyes were almost closed. The patter of steel on steel was a constant staccato that had almost become music.
She took flight again, and this time Tisamon leapt with her, lashing out with his full reach, and they came down together, frozen in a single slice of time.
His claw was over her back, folded so that the point touched near her spine, but held just short, cutting her cuirass but not her skin. The spines of his right arm had drawn blood where her shoulder met her neck.
Her blade was along the line of his throat, his head tilted back so that the flat was against his cheek, the point running through his hair. Her off-hand and his were locked together, spines meshed with spines, between their bodies. Only then did Tynisa notice that the woman wore the same badge that Tisamon did – that she herself did.
The Mantis woman’s wings flickered and died, and they stood very still, both looking past her at the Loquae.
An almost crippling sense of vertigo hit Tynisa, because she recognized that look, recognized the moment. It took her back to the Prowess Forum, duelling some other student with wooden swords, and at the end of the pass they would look over at Kymon to see how they had done, to read his reaction.
Just a game, she thought, but the woman he had fought first was dead, and the man badly injured, and now there was a razor edge to Tisamon’s throat, and yet he was looking calmly at the old woman to see how he had done.
The Loquae closed her eyes for a moment. She was clearly not happy, but something had been resolved. ‘You are one of us,’ she said at last. ‘What you have done is a heinous thing, but there is no denying that you still have a place here. What would you ask of us, Tisamon of Felyal?’
‘That you give my daughter the same chance to prove herself,’ Tisamon said simply, as the blade of the rapier was withdrawn and he stepped away from his opponent.
‘You should not have come back,’ the Loquae reproached him. They were in her home, a hut cut into two rooms by a wall pierced by a common firepit. ‘Whatever you have proved, to us, to yourself, today, it would have been better if you had never returned.’
Tisamon listened to the clatter and scrape of sword on sword, keeping a watchful eye through the doorway. ‘If it had just been myself, Loquae, you would not have seen me again. But I have a responsibility to her. She is mine.’
The Loquae made a scornful noise. ‘None of her looks.’
‘Watch her,’ Tisamon urged: Tynisa was fighting, rapier to rapier, against a Mantis youth of her own age. It was her third bout: the other two had ended with blood, almost to the death. She had taken two shallow cuts, to her shoulder, to her side. She had not deigned to acknowledge them.
‘The Spider-kinden woman that broke you must have been remarkable,’ the Loquae said drily.
‘She was not like others of her kind.’
‘You mean she was able to fool you,’ the Loquae said. ‘Be careful not to presume too much on our acceptance, Tisamon. You were given a fair and balanced chance to prove yourself. If I had decided to draw my own blade against you, matters would have been different.’
Tisamon nodded, conceding that point. For a moment the two of them watched Tynisa catching her opponent’s blade in hers and twisting it from his hand. The Mantis-kinden watching her wore expressions of loathing, but still they watched.
‘She can never be one of us. She can never be more than abomination,’ the Loquae reiterated. ‘Still, you have given her our skill, and she cannot be denied the badge.’ She sighed. ‘So, Tisamon, what do you want? I know you have not come here solely to flaunt your halfbreed daughter.’
‘I wish to speak to the elders,’ Tisamon said. ‘All of them. It is possible they will never hear a more important word spoken.’
They gathered in the hall that was the only building there built even partly from stone aside from the smithy. Stones that had been laid in the Age of Lore centuries before rose to four feet, and wood often replaced made a broad and sloping roof from there on up, so that, to be upright, all but the smallest had to stand along the central line. The Mantis-kinden spent much of their lives outdoors, beneath the trees, and they were not builders.
Nine of the Felyal elders had gathered there that night, seven women and two men. This was not all of them, but all of those who could be reached in such short time. Several of them wore the badge of the Weaponsmasters. Tynisa was kept outside, hunched by the door to hear, but barred from the council itself. She had not been perfunctorily slain, and she understood that she had reached the limit of Mantis acceptance thereby.
‘I am
come to speak with you of the Wasp Empire,’ Tisamon began. ‘You have heard of them, surely, these Wasp-kinden from the east?’
‘We have,’ said one of the elders, the youngest of the women there, though still a dozen years Tisamon’s senior.
‘You may also have heard then that they have attacked the Ant city of Tark,’ Tisamon said.
‘Tark is fallen, this we have heard too,’ said one of the men. ‘Those fleeing its destruction have passed our Hold. We have not heard more yet of Merro or Egel but it is possible that these too have fallen.’
This news shook Tisamon. ‘Then matters are worse than I had feared. They will come here.’
‘They have already come here,’ said the Loquae, who was an elder in her own right. ‘They have sent men to speak with us and make their peace.’
‘You must not believe them,’ Tisamon told them. ‘They will tell you that they only wish harm to others, perhaps even to our enemies, to the Spiderlands even, but they lie. They wish to conquer all of the Lowlands. They do not recognize allies or peers, only enemies and slaves.’
‘You have a good grasp of their talk,’ said the Loquae. ‘At least the talk of their second emissary. The first was slain on entering the Felyal, by one of our huntsmen who had no time for diplomacy.’
There was the slightest murmur of amusement at this. It was a Mantis joke, Tynisa realized, for what it was worth.
‘And the second?’ Tisamon asked.
‘He spoke the same words you just put into his mouth. He told us we were warriors and so were his people. He offered us respect, admired our blades. All the while, our seers were looking into his thoughts. He was thinking, “Savages, living in trees and hunting wild beasts. Savages, and ripe for conquest.” When he was here his eyes could never be still for trying to guess our numbers and our strength.’
‘You slew him,’ Tisamon said.
‘We let him return to his people. He could not tell our strength and what report he might give of it would merely weaken their understanding of us,’ said one of the other elders.
Tisamon took a deep breath, feeling in this strained diplomacy that he understood Stenwold a little. ‘You must not fall into the same error that he did,’ he told the elders. ‘The Wasps are rash and foolish, and they understand little, but they are strong, and there are more of them than anyone here can know. I have been into their Empire. I have seen how they storm cities. They have armies comprising more soldiers than there are women, men and children in all of Felyal. If they come here with swords and their Art-fire, then we will slay hundreds of them, and tens of hundreds, but they will still send more. They will burn the forest and bring close their engines of war, their flying machines, their artificer’s weapons. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘We understand, Tisamon,’ said the Loquae. ‘You tell us nothing we have not thought for ourselves.’
‘And they will come here,’ Tisamon went on, yet the emotional response he had been expecting was not evident. ‘They can tolerate no land that has not felt the stamp of their heel. We hate the Spider-kinden for many ancient reasons, but amongst those causes we hate them because they seek to control, and because they live off the sweat of their slaves. The Wasps have a lust to conquer and rule that the Lowlands have never confronted before, and they hold more slaves, and more wretched ones, than any Spider Aristoi. And when they come here, despite all our skill and speed, they will sweep Felyal away as if it had never been. You must understand how we cannot ignore them. We must act.’
‘Must we so?’ said the oldest of the elders, a woman whose silver hair fell past her waist, and whose face was lined deeply as the very old of other kinden were, and not simply become taut and gaunt as most Mantis became with the years. ‘We know all of this already, Tisamon, and yet we ask ourselves if we should resist. For what would be the good? We cannot hold back time any longer. It has been five hundred years since the Days of Lore and the greatness of our race. We have dwindled and withered since, and become a pale ghost of the warriors we once were. Look at us now with unclouded eyes, and you will see a dying people.’ She paused and eyed him before continuing.
‘Where once we were sovereign and unchallenged, now we become adulterated with every generation. Our young men set sail not for sacred Parosyal but for the harbours of Kes to sell themselves as mercenaries. They turn their backs on their homes for the touted wonders of Collegium, the grimy wealth of Helleron. The Beetles cut wood at the edge of our forests and poison us with their gold, which buys those parts of us we cannot sell. Their peddlers visit our Holds and bewitch our young with their toys and their gauds, and they take their gold back from us again, without ever returning to us what we sold. We are become their shadows, become the savages that they take us for. Each generation is less than the last, until soon we shall be nothing but beggars sitting before their tables, bartering thousand-year skills for what crumbs they deign to give us. Faced with that, Tisamon, can you not see that a good clean death at the hands of warriors might be preferable. Let the Wasp-kinden destroy us, and finish the work that all the years have been doing. At least we can then die as the brave die.’
Tisamon knelt before them with head bowed, and Tynisa, craning her head around the doorpost, thought he was defeated. She felt the weight of their words herself, and she did not even belong to these people. Tisamon had one shot left, though.
‘I shall take a boat east along the coast,’ he announced.
‘For what purpose?’ asked the Loquae.
‘To see their army, and discover whether it is at Merro or Egel, or elsewhere,’ he said. ‘To see, that is all.’
‘And what then?’
‘Then I shall return,’ he said. ‘I will have a plan, by then, a proposal. Will you hear it?’
‘We can do no less,’ she said, ‘though we shall likely do no more. I imagine you will do what you think is right.’ Her eyes narrowed at the thought of where Tisamon’s judgement had led him in the past.
Thirty-Three
They made camp that evening in a half-burned Wayhouse, which seemed to Salma like a physical mirror to his own thoughts of late. There were a dozen charred corpses within that they hauled out and burned properly outside. It seemed likely that the destruction was Wasp work, for the Way Brothers kept rest-houses all over the Lowlands, and they turned nobody away and maintained only peace within their walls. Many a bandit had used them as a place of refuge, so they were seldom robbed or attacked by thieves either. The Wasps obviously had no such traditions, and Salma found it easy to imagine a scouting or foraging party descending on the place, killing, looting and then setting a half-hearted fire as they left. There was a Wasp army on the long road to Sarn, north of them, and Wasp soldiers were neither the most disciplined nor the most restrained.
It had pushed him to a decision, and before dusk he had lit some torches, and then stood on Sfayot’s wagon to address his followers.
They had gained well over four dozen since the defence of the village, so that Salma now had to pause before matching a name to a face for many of them. There were villagers that had actually followed after them, stout young men and women looking for something more than subsistence farming. Then there was the Fly-kinden engineer, and her whole extended family, who had fled Helleron before the Wasps seized it; the five Sarnesh crossbowmen who must have been deserters from some mercenary company; a lean old Spider-kinden archer and hunter who went on ahead each morning to stalk game; a Moth woman with a haunted face who had not given her name or said a single word to anyone since joining them.
He glanced at Nero, who nodded encouragingly, though the Fly did not know what he was going to say.
Salma was not entirely sure of that himself. What scared him was that they were now all listening, waiting for it. He looked from face to face: at the Fly gangers still clustered together, the escaped slaves, the bandits, their leader Phalmes with his arm about Sfayot’s eldest. The pair had slept together the night after the defence of the village, but Sfayot hims
elf had not seemed to mind. ‘He’s strong that one, in lots of ways,’ the Roach-kinden had said of Phalmes. ‘She could do worse for a while.’
‘You’ve followed me this far,’ Salma began to address them. ‘I didn’t ask you to. I didn’t ask to be your guide or your leader, but here we are, all of us, and it seems to me we cannot go on like this. We cannot just drift aimlessly and finally end up beached somewhere not of our choosing. We need direction. Thus far you have looked to me for that. So from now, if you will let me, I will accept the mantle you have offered. I will offer you leadership, purpose and direction. Let me tell you what direction I would be taking you, though. Then you may not wish to continue with me, but we will see.’
He left a pause there. How did this come about? He had no answer but, as he said, here they all were.
‘Sfayot,’ Salma indicated, and the Roach-kinden man nodded. ‘If we came across more of your family, you would want to help them wouldn’t you?’
‘Of course,’ the Roach said. ‘No question.’
‘Of course,’ Salma echoed, ‘because they’re your family. We all understand that. So tell me . . .’ He looked over at the Fly youths and singled one out. ‘Chefre, if we ran into more of your gang, you’d want to look after them, surely?’
She nodded cautiously, saying nothing. They were close-mouthed, that lot.
‘You would,’ Salma confirmed, ‘because there are ties and obligations. That is what makes us who we are. And Phalmes, I have spoken to you. I feel I know you. You cannot escape who you are or where you come from. If we met a Mynan on the road, a man of your city, you would aid him. You would have done so even before you fell in with us. Can you deny it?’
‘I cannot, nor would I,’ Phalmes said clearly, though wondering where this was going.
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