Heirs of the Blade (Shadows of the Apt 7)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Some time later, Gaved let their weary mount plod to a halt, swinging from the saddle to feed and water it.

  ‘Won’t they catch us?’ Tynisa asked him, her eyes seeking their airborne pursuers. The mist about them was so heavy that even the sun was just a brighter smear.

  ‘They won’t come here,’ Gaved said. ‘We’ve lost them.’

  ‘Then what’s wrong?’ she pressed, because it was obvious that something was amiss.

  ‘Just imagine,’ Gaved said, ‘that you’re in the house of someone very polite, but very dangerous. Behave as a good guest and we’ll be fine.’

  Tynisa glanced about, seeing only cane-striped mist. ‘What lives here?’

  ‘Oh, some fair-sized mantids, some spiders, centipedes,’ Gaved replied casually, ‘but people too, of a sort. I’ve come through here twice before, under similar circumstances, and I can’t say I’ve definitely seen any of them, but I’m told they’re here, and I believe it. The brigands don’t come raiding here and the nobles don’t hunt. This place is supposed to be Stick-kinden land.’

  ‘There are Stick-kinden?’ Tynisa demanded incredulously.

  Gaved held up a hand to indicate that she should keep her voice down. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen one. But you don’t, apparently. I heard that a travelling noble decided to pass through here with his retainers, and killed the animals and had his people burn the cane back. He got a five-foot arrow in his chest, while he was taking his supper, and nobody ever saw the archer. I heard that one of Siriell’s predecessors tried to use this place for launching raids from, and he and those few that got out of here talked like the forest itself had come to kill them. So we won’t draw any weapons, and we won’t make too much noise, because they prefer the silence. And when we’re done camping I’m going to leave a few thank-yous about the place, just in case.’

  He was as good as his word, though Tynisa never found out exactly what was in the pouch he left beside the ashes of their campfire. The rising sun made inroads into the mist, but never quite dispelled it, and it was easy to see the tall, thin shadows looming on every side as something more sinister. And probably there are no Stick-kinden, Tynisa told herself, for whoever heard of stick insects having a kinden? But she was far from home now, and many unthinkable things might turn out to be true.

  Towards evening when they were, according to Gaved, nearing the cane forest’s edge, she thought she saw one of the shadows shift and fall back between its brethren, giving her a momentary impression of a fantastically tall and attenuated figure carrying a staff that might have been a bow, and trailing a grey cobweb cloak off into the mist. Later she was sure that she had imagined this, as she imagined so much else, but by then they were clear of the cane and crossing the border into the next province.

  Leose was the princely seat of the Salmae, Gaved explained. Unlike Felipe’s family, they had not lost their stronghold to the Empire. The war had come close, chewing at the edge of Felipe’s great domain and gnawing away odd provinces, but in the end the Treaty of Pearl had put the Wasp-kinden territorial ambitions on hold.

  The Wasp spoke of his own people with a studied detachment, neither condoning nor apologizing for them. He was working hard at being someone in no position to have an opinion on Imperial affairs.

  They had now passed a number of smallholdings, isolated stretches of farmland where the hillsides had been amenable to step agriculture, with clusters of low buildings with sloping roofs on the hilltop above. The land here was both more rugged and more heavily forested than Prince Felipe’s southern holdings, and Gaved’s chosen path meandered wherever the clearest land went, avoiding the deep woodland. Those trees extended easily over the border of Leose province, he explained, and then into the lawless lands to the south which they had just escaped from. Those thick woods were known as ‘bandits’ roads’ by the local peasants. Sometimes, when the brigands were bold, they played deadly hide-and-seek games between the trees with the Salmae’s Mercers. At other times the woods were left for the peasants to herd their aphids through, or for the hunting excursions of nobles.

  They were obviously nearing the province’s heart, but they had seen few others travelling, and none following the same route as they did. There was none of the traffic Tynisa would expect, when approaching a town. ‘So how far to this Leose?’ she pressed.

  ‘Depends what you mean by Leose,’ Gaved replied. ‘Every part of Elas Mar within a few miles of the castle is Leose. There’s no town as such, just villages dotted about the place. Remember, Suon Ren’s almost the closest to a proper city the Commonweal has – after the capital. Most of the Commonwealers live spread out like this, making the best use of the land. What you’re looking for is Leose castle, and we’ll see that by tomorrow. That’s where the Salmae live, but their people are spread all over.’

  The castle, when they had sight of it, did not disappoint. They had been following the course of a canal for some hours before the edifice came into view, and Tynisa saw that it had been placed to command the watercourse where it had cut a deep valley between two hills. It was a broad, squat mass of stone surmounted by tapering battlements, held in place against the land by a half-dozen spidery buttresses, seeming as though it might at any moment pick itself up and walk away. Two of the arching buttresses spanned the river itself, forming narrow bridges leading from the far side to the castle’s very door.

  ‘So that’s where you live, is it? Very grand,’ Tynisa remarked.

  ‘Me?’ Gaved shook his head. ‘They wouldn’t let me past the door, believe me, but I’m useful enough that they found Sef and me a little abandoned place not too far away, and we do all right there. There’s a little lake you can see from the door. That’s important . . .’ He made an awkward face.

  ‘So what now . . .?’

  ‘Now I report to my betters,’ Gaved explained. ‘I’ll tell them how Siriell’s in a restless mood, anyway. Then perhaps some peace and quiet over winter? That would be nice.’

  The castle seemed to grow and grow as they approached, so that what had seemed a mere fort, at a distance, became a great architectural sprawl. Even the slender buttresses were revealed as a marvel, suspended impossibly against the universal pull of the ground. This arching stonework seemed to spring from utterly different hands to the light wooden walls of Suon Ren

  The great double doors were barred, and apparently unguarded, but there must have been watchers above, for Tynisa had a glimpse of flurried movement within, at a higher storey. Then again there was nothing, and little enough sign that the place was occupied at all.

  ‘So who lives here?’ she asked.

  ‘The Salmae and their retainers and, yes, they rattle about in there like dried peas when some other noble hasn’t come to guest with them. These castles, all of them, they’re built like they’re for people nine feet tall with a thousand servants each. Very few of them are even half used: the same way as half the land in the Commonweal seems like it’s given over to outlaws or beasts because there aren’t enough law-abiding folk to till the soil. Place isn’t what it was.’

  The doors opened then, before Gaved could expand on his theory. A pair of Dragonfly-kinden warriors, in full scintillating armour, scrutinized them uncharitably, before a slender, grey-clad Grasshopper woman hurried out to greet the newcomers. Behind her, Tynisa could see a courtyard of some kind, that was crossed by strange shadows.

  ‘Ah, Turncoat,’ she observed, ‘you come with news?’ At his nod, the Grasshopper inclined her narrow head. She was tall and sallow, like most of her kin, and her long hair was pulled back into a tail. Tynisa guessed that she was on the far side of middle age, but she had a straightness of bearing and lightness of step that belied it.

  ‘You’d better come in then, you and your . . . woman,’ the woman suggested frostily.

  The iron gaze of the guards still did not trust these arrivals in the least.

  Behind the gates, Tynisa saw that the courtyard had a roof of sorts, but one that was no more than a
lattice of sturdy timbers that would keep out neither enemy nor weather. She presumed that some manner of covers or hatches could be put in place if there was ever an assault on Castle Leose, or perhaps the courtyard was intended to be abandoned to the foe, who could then be penned in and shot at from the castle proper. In the end she was forced to admit that her grasp of siege warfare was lacking, and that whoever had gifted the Commonwealers with these edifices had been of a strange turn of mind.

  There were servants, though: Dragonflies and Grasshoppers who led their badly used horse off for feeding and grooming in stalls that were set into the castle walls to the left and right. Before them was another grand portal, this one inlaid with symmetrical patterns of brass, or perhaps gold. A smaller portal was set into a corner of one of the grand doors, and the grey-robed woman now sent a youth of her own kinden hurrying through it.

  ‘The princess has been sent for,’ she explained. ‘She will come in her own time, as I’m sure you know, Turncoat.’

  Gaved nodded. ‘We can wait.’

  A jug of good honeydew was brought to them by another servant, whereupon Gaved simply seated himself on the ground in the middle of the courtyard, on a blanket he had already scavenged from his saddle.

  ‘You know her, I take it,’ Tynisa noted, nodding towards the Grasshopper woman, who was currently chastising one of the grooms over some point of detail. ‘She seems a barrel of laughs.’

  ‘She’s not so bad,’ Gaved said mildly. ‘Her name’s Lisan Dea, and she’s been seneschal to the Salmae since before the old man died.’

  Tynisa realized, with a vertiginous lurch, that ‘the old man’ meant Salma’s father, of course. Feeling suddenly off balance, abruptly too close, too soon, to the heart of things, she changed the topic with, ‘I’d get tired being called “Turncoat” all the time.’

  Gaved gave her a glance without expression. ‘I reckon they might have chosen something worse, so I’ll settle for it.’ A moment later he was scrabbling to his feet, as both of the grand and gold-chased doors swung open.

  A woman stormed through them, outpacing her retinue of attendants. She was tall, for a Dragonfly, and more imperious than a regiment of Wasp-kinden. Her heart-shaped face was perfect and, although she was clearly a peer of Felipe Shah, her cold beauty admitted nothing of her age. She wore high-shouldered formal robes in red and pale blue and spotless white, starched and edged with gold plates, and Tynisa caught her breath, because she had seen Salme Dien wearing just such a garment in Collegium.

  ‘Turncoat!’ the woman snapped. ‘Where is my son?’

  Gaved was down on one knee, but Tynisa hesitated for a moment, pride battling with propriety, before grudgingly doing the same.

  ‘He had set out on his Lycene for Leose before me,’ Gaved reported, staring down.

  ‘Feckless boy,’ the woman exclaimed, obviously not caring who heard her. ‘Probably having the run of every bandit camp and village from here to Tela Nocte. Idiot child.’

  Tynisa stole a glance at her, seeing her regarding Gaved with distaste. By now her retinue had caught up with her, somewhat raggedly. There were a dozen or so finely dressed Dragonflies, either privileged servants or attendant lords, but Tynisa’s eye was drawn away from them towards one particular figure. For a moment, as his presence impinged upon her, Tynisa took him for yet another hallucination, mimicking her father’s intensely focused poise at the noblewoman’s shoulder. Then Tynisa’s gaze lifted further, and she realized that this was a different man, a living man. It is getting hard to tell, she recognized unhappily. First Salme Alain and now this newcomer. There would come a time when she would no longer be able to trust her eyes, and then where would she be?

  The man was dressed in an arming jacket and breeches of pale grey leather, obviously far from new, and his boots were of a similar vintage, well crafted and just as well worn. Looking up furtively from her low vantage point, what caught her attention first was his utter stillness, for she had seen that particular brand of motionless calm before and she felt that this man was like a bow drawn back and ready to strike at any moment. She had known him for Mantis-kinden from the first glance. He was paler than the Dragonflies, and older than Tisamon had been when he died. This Mantis had hair gone completely white, and a hook-nosed face creased with lines of bitter experience. For all his years, Tynisa shivered when she saw him. A moment later her eyes picked out the brooch over his breast. The style of it was different, but she recognized the sword and the circle and knew him for one of the same order that she herself had been initiated into, and that Tisamon had been a master of.

  ‘My Princess, I have important news of the bandit communities to the south,’ Gaved added hopefully.

  The woman, Salma’s mother, dismissed that comment with a wave of her hand. ‘Tell it to my seneschal and my champion,’ she told him. ‘If you’ve no more news of my son, I am done with you.’

  ‘Alas, no, Princess,’ Gaved replied, but the woman had already turned and was about to walk away.

  Tynisa found herself on her feet so abruptly that the Mantis took a step in, to put himself between her and the princess.

  ‘My lady. Princess.’

  The Dragonfly woman turned and regarding Tynisa blankly. ‘What is this?’

  Gaved grimaced, and took a moment too long in deciding how to answer, and Tynisa declared. ‘My lady, I am come from the Lowlands.’

  From the Dragonfly’s expression, she might never have heard of such a place. ‘On what business?’

  ‘I was a friend of Prince Salme Dien,’ Tynisa declared, pronouncing his full name carefully.

  Salma’s mother stared at her for a long moment. ‘You are seeking employment – like this one?’ She threw Gaved the smallest nod imaginable.

  ‘No, my lady, I only wished . . .’ For some reason, though her mission to Felipe Shah had seemed utterly natural, before the cold gaze of this woman she faltered. ‘I aided your son Salme Alain at Siriell’s Town, and had hoped to meet him here. And I would speak with you of your elder son, if I could.’

  The princess’s expression, already cold, froze entirely. ‘As you have heard, Prince Alain is not here. As for Dien, no doubt there were many Lowlanders he was . . . familiar with.’ Then she had turned and, with her robe flowing behind her, was gliding back through the gold-chased doors, her retinue following her hastily. Tynisa had her mouth open, wanting to call the woman back, but was suddenly aware of the line of etiquette that would transgress. The Grasshopper seneschal’s stern frown did not encourage her to push her luck.

  Then the doors were closing again, and only Lisan Dea and the Mantis-kinden remained with them.

  ‘We passed through what they’re calling Siriell’s Town . . .’ Gaved started, but the Mantis was paying him no attention.

  Tynisa took a step back, to allow herself fighting room. Since she first saw the man she had been waiting for this. Mantis-kinden and Spiders did not get on, and it would make matters considerably worse if he found out she was not a pure-blood Spider at all. His face did not betray the kind of fierce loathing she had encountered in the Felyal Mantis-kinden, when she had travelled there with Tisamon, but nonetheless he regarded her sternly, and his eyes were like steel.

  ‘Show me your blade,’ he instructed her, and it was as though Gaved and the Grasshopper were simply not there.

  At first she misunderstood, taking the weapon half from its sheath, wondering whether this was some trick to disarm her, or whether he was a smith or a collector – or whether he just wished to satisfy himself that here was a Spider bearing a Mantis-crafted rapier, before he attempted to kill her. But something in his stance belatedly communicated itself to her, and she realized that his words were a ritual challenge.

  She dropped back into a defensive stance, blade out and levelled at his heart, along the straight reach of her arm, weight poised on the back foot. He had a leather and steel gauntlet on his left hand, she noticed, with a short, slightly curved blade jutting from between his fingers, but fold
ed back along his arm for now. That was a weapon she knew well. She waited for him to take up his own stance, the last formality before the inevitable duel, but instead he just regarded her.

  ‘Good,’ he said, at last, with a nod of approval reminding her of nothing so much as her old sword-master, Kymon of Kes, dead these several years past. ‘I see the Lowlands contains some virtue in it yet.’

  She blinked, surprised enough to straighten up from her guard. If he had struck at her then, she might not have been fast enough to parry him.

  Without warning she was abruptly conscious of her own badge. For all that it was hidden out of sight, the Mantis had marked it in some way. Weaponsmasters acknowledged their own, she now discovered, and she would have spoken further with him then, save that he had already turned to Gaved.

  ‘Report,’ the Mantis ordered, and Gaved gave a concise account of Siriell’s Town and its circumstances, numbers, factions, in a dizzying blur of information; names such as Pirett, Seodan, Ang We, Dal Arche; rivalries and alliances, and little of it meaning anything to Tynisa.

  ‘Nothing may come of it,’ the Wasp finished up. ‘Siriell wouldn’t manage to mobilize one in three of the fighting population there, and there will be a dozen contenders ready to take what she has away from her. If we were to strike there, it might cut off the centipede’s claws – or it might just stir them all up.’