Heirs of the Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘I’d expected it,’ was all he said, and he plainly recognized the former First Soldier. ‘Inside, then, you might as well. Food?’

  ‘If you have spare,’ Amnon said with careful deference. He had to stoop some way to get under the lintel, Praeda trailing after him.

  Most of the house consisted of a single room, where a long table had already been set. A woman of the old man’s years was bustling about it now, rearranging the places to find space for two more. She glanced from Amnon to Praeda, her dark eyes unreadable. Praeda realized that she herself had never seen a peasant home belonging to the Khanaphir, what with living out of an embassy and being the honoured guest of the Ministers. She had assumed that the foundation on which Khanaphir rested must be crushed down by its weight, impoverished and sullen – deprived as they were of anything like Collegium’s enlightenment and standard of living. Instead, the inside of the farmhouse was surprisingly well furnished, chairs and table all finely carved and clearly ancient, and the walls liberally adorned with those baffling carvings. Even these Khanaphir peasants lived neck-deep in history, she saw, and they bore their servitude with stubborn pride.

  The Beetle-kinden they had seen outside now trooped in to take their places, and Praeda found that she and Amnon were directed towards the table’s head, sitting at the right hand of the old man. She guessed that it was the senior pair that owned and ran the farm, and the rest were hirelings and farmhands. The fare itself consisted of some kind of thick soup, flat bread, and some fish that had been pickled to within an inch of its life at some point in its distant past.

  There was little conversation around the table, and even Amnon said nothing, just ate dutifully as though he was only a labourer himself. Nobody commented that an ex-First Soldier had just turned up out of nowhere, with a foreign woman. Praeda suspected that they were all buzzing with questions, but that it was not in their nature to ask them, and the presence of strangers had killed off any other kind of talk.

  At last, as the meal was drawing to a close, Amnon grunted, ‘Need to get into the city. Going that way?’

  ‘What sort of question is that?’ The old man’s expression was openly disparaging. ‘Market, you well know. What of it?’

  ‘Room on the cart for two more?’ Amnon said, not even looking at the farmer.

  This was greeted by an exasperated sigh. ‘Then you’ll work, load and unload, for I need all the hands I have, and you’ll leave two men sitting idle here, if you have your way.’ Both his tone and expression stated, clear as day, that Amnon had been personally sent by the Masters to inconvenience him.

  Instead of rallying at this, Amnon’s head sank even lower and he shrugged, not in any way the man that Praeda knew. She looked about the table, but nobody met her eyes.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said at last, almost relishing the shocked silence that greeted her words, ‘but you do know this is the First Soldier? That he saved Khanaphes from the Many of Nem?’

  For a long while she thought that nobody would respond, that she had killed off all chance of anyone in this house ever saying anything again, but then the old man snorted with derision.

  ‘Was First Soldier. And who ever heard of such a thing as a man who was First Soldier, hm? And not such a great one even when he was. Now Thamat, before him, he was a great First Soldier. He’d never have let the Many get close to the walls.’ He shook his head, lamenting the youth of today, as any elderly College Master might – or any old man anywhere.

  The next morning the old man had some of his fieldhands load up a wagon and hitch it to a tired-looking draught beetle, all without Amnon actually making any further request that Praeda could see, or anybody suggesting a plan. On to the bed of the sturdy wagon went sacks of flour – that Praeda guessed must be hand milled – and some dried fruit, and a surprising number of jars of some kind of liquor.

  By that time the old woman had plucked up the courage to approach Praeda, though still saying nothing, but offering her the curved copper strip of a razor.

  For a moment she closed her eyes against the thought, reluctant because her long hair was such a part of the way she imagined herself, but reluctant even beyond that, for some obscure reason she could not name. If she was to creep into occupied Khanaphes, however, she would have to pass as a local, and if the Wasps looked closely then a mere headscarf would not serve.

  ‘Will you do it?’ she asked. The woman nodded, and in her eyes was a fair measure of sympathy – and perhaps a little awe at ever seeing an adult Beetle-kinden with a full head of hair.

  Most of an hour later, and it was done. Amnon’s reaction was the worst, trying to adjust to her transition from the exotic to the familiar. I am still the same woman, she told herself, but she did not feel like it with her bare head cold and itching.

  Then they were on the wagon, and the old man flicked at the beetle with his crop until it began its weary plodding towards the city.

  There were indeed Wasp soldiers stationed at the gate, but Khanaphes was large, and not even occupation by a hostile military could keep its doors closed, not if the occupiers themselves wanted to eat. There was a steady stream of locals going in and out, the oil on the wheels of commerce. When their wagon reached the gates, there was a cursory search, the confiscation of a few jars of homebrew, a narrow-eyed squint at each of the passengers, especially the large figure of Amnon, but they were all Beetles in a city and a nation of Beetles, so the Wasps waved their wagon on without hindrance. That one of the sacks also contained all of Praeda and Amnon’s possessions, the Wasps never knew.

  Those few foreigners trying to enter or leave, they saw stopped and searched far more diligently, and most of them were turned back, either trapped inside or kept out.

  After that, they were within the walls. The old man just nodded once at Amnon, again with no need for a word between them, then the big man slipped off the wagon, pulling Praeda with him.

  ‘Where now?’ she whispered, resisting her hand’s natural inclination to drift up to her scalp.

  ‘I know places,’ he murmured. ‘Near the docks first, maybe. We’ll see how the Wasps are dealing with the river trade.’ He cast a single glance back at the old man and the wagon, before heading off.

  It was only three streets later that Praeda enquired, ‘Amnon, have I just met your parents?’ The thought had been absurdly slow in coming, and even then she was not at all sure until she saw his face. ‘Did you . . . did you not think to introduce me?’

  ‘I did. After you slept,’ he mumbled, looking awkward for a moment. ‘They liked you, I think.’

  ‘What . . . did you tell them?’ she demanded, but just then he pretended to spot a Wasp patrol and picked up the pace, leaving her glaring at his broad back.

  Then the city had encompassed them, and she was abruptly wrestling with memories of how she had seen the place last, before her return to Collegium. The western half had been occupied by the Scorpion-kinden then, as the Many of Nem ravaged the farmland up and down the riverbank seeking for a way across, while she and Amnon and the mercenary artificer Totho fortified the bridge against them. Beyond that, she remembered the still dignity enveloping the city before the Scorpions came: the austere calm of its ministers, the solid and elegant lines of its architecture, the noiseless bustle of its shaven-headed citizens.

  She remembered her colleagues who had died when the Wasps, and their Scorpion tools, had made their move. Seeing the black and gold now at every street corner made her clench her fists, wanting to lash out at them with all her tiny might. She remembered waiting after the battle, to learn if Amnon had lived or died.

  It was strange that she remembered Che most of all, for there was no reason that Stenwold Maker’s niece should serve as a linchpin in her memories of this city. The girl had been a dismal failure as an ambassador, going missing half the time and seeming almost deranged, fixated on strange parts of the city’s history even when the walls themselves were tumbling. She had even been absent during the fighting, had not contrib
uted to it at all, instead had gone off with the Imperial ambassador, who seemed to have gone rogue in the interim. Oh, Praeda had quite liked Che as a person but, still, the woman had hardly been an influential figure in the disaster that had been Praeda’s original visit to Khanaphes.

  And yet somehow she had been. Praeda could not account for it, or explain her feelings on the matter, but Cheerwell Maker had been the hub of the wheel, standing at the heart of all things. This fact was inexplicable and yet undeniable.

  Praeda suddenly stopped dead, so that Amnon went on another five yards before sensing her absence, and turning with a quizzical look. Praeda met his eyes but was not equal to the task of explaining, hiding her sudden shock by rushing to catch up with him.

  I did not just see Cheerwell Maker, she reproached herself. That face in the crowd, it could have been anyone’s. Except no Khanaphir woman had hair like that. I did not just see the crowd part, and Cheerwell Maker, in that inexplicably open space, staring at me and then gone the next instant. It’s the heat. It’s the stress. My mind plays tricks.

  They were almost at the docks by the time Praeda’s heart had stopped hammering.

  Ten

  She awoke to darkness and a moment’s utter panic because the man who had awoken her, by slipping out of the bed and pacing across the room, was not Achaeos.

  Cheerwell Maker’s mind remained blank. Her dream, something wild and horrible, was now gone from her head, and nothing came to replace it – just the sound of someone, some unfamiliar body, confined within the same four walls.

  The thought returning to her first was that darkness was optional, given the Art that she had been blessed with, and so she banished it. The Mynan boarding-house room came into sharp relief, picked out in a whole other spectrum of greys, and with it came a fuller recollection of where she was and why.

  Over by the window, Thalric was peering out through the shutters, wearing only his breeches. She stared at his broad back, picking out each scar in turn to read his history there, whose gaps she filled in as he turned back to her.

  ‘You’re awake,’ he observed. ‘Your breathing changes when you’re awake.’

  She made a noncommittal noise. Here was the vertical line that Tynisa had drawn down his abdomen, that Che knew continued even to his thigh. There was one of the narrow jabs he had received from a former governor of Myna, in a fight he had told her about when they returned to this city and he got maudlin drunk on the memory, a curious lapse for Thalric.

  That, of course, was the near-fatal wound another Rekef man had dealt him, after the Empire had decided he was expendable, and close by it was the curious, puckered mark where a snapbow bolt had penetrated, after chewing its way through layers of metal and silk.

  Whatever else he had been, and all the different colours he had worn, Thalric was undoubtedly a survivor.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’ she asked him. ‘Conscience troubling you?’

  He smiled a little sourly. ‘It’s nearly dawn.’

  That surprised her, but she would have realized it herself after allowing her eyes to adjust. Her Art-sight, which cut through the dark, robbed her of the visual cues she had grown up with. ‘Today’s when Hokiak said to come back to him,’ she recalled. ‘I don’t imagine the old man gets up this early, though.’

  Thalric shrugged. ‘I get twitchy in this place. Too many bad memories. I keep thinking that one of the locals is going to creep in here and cut my throat.’

  Che and Thalric both had a curious relationship with the city-state of Myna. She had first come here as his prisoner, and while her uncle had been orchestrating her rescue, Thalric had been killing the aforementioned governor on Rekef orders. Later still, they had come back here together to try and foment revolution, and she had narrowly avoided being executed by the very resistance fighters who had helped rescue her in the first place; whilst Thalric had ended up as a prisoner of the new governor. Whom, she could hardly forget, he had also killed – an act that lit the flames of rebellion in the city, as a result of which Myna was currently free of Imperial rule.

  They had been in the city now for two hard days and the first half-day had been spent in separate cells.

  I had not considered we were fugitives, after all. Oh, being on the run from the Empire had become almost standard practice, and there had been no whiff of the black and gold here, but they should have entered Myna like war heroes. Instead they had been arrested: he for being a Wasp, she for being with him.

  Che had told them a name, over and over: ‘Kymene’, and after the first hour or so she had begun to wonder whether there had not been some disastrous shift in Mynan politics, and that the woman who had led the city’s liberation had somehow been displaced, even executed. After about six hours, in which various blue-grey-skinned Mynans had asked her unsympathetic, suspicious and occasionally meaningless questions, she had started to think she might have simply dreamt the woman.

  Then had come Kymene, looking anything but pleased to see Che.

  ‘So you’re back.’ They had been standing in that stonewalled, windowless cell lit by erratic gaslight, whose sporadic death and rebirth was more to do with the ongoing rebuilding effort than any attempt to disconcert the prisoner.

  Kymene had looked older, and Che had wondered how much of the city’s current governance fell directly on her shoulders, how much of her strength she expended in fighting other factions. Myna had been united by Imperial occupation for all of Che’s life, and most of Kymene’s. Freedom demanded difficult adjustments that were slow in coming. The city had been at war, on each street, in each citizen’s heart, for too long.

  ‘We’re just passing through,’ Che had said urgently.

  ‘You and your Wasp.’

  ‘Thalric, Kymene,’ Che had told her, searching the woman’s hard face for any clues to his fate. For a moment there was nothing, and Che was abruptly sure that they had killed him. For that sliver of a second, the pain had been shocking, utterly unexpected.

  ‘I recognized him,’ Kymene had admitted reluctantly, and even that had provided no reassurance. How it must grieve her, to be beholden to a Wasp-kinden. ‘I’ve signed the orders to release both of you.’ The words were virtually spat out. ‘Cheerwell Maker, what do you want?’

  There must have been some hurt and betrayal in Che’s face that got past Kymene’s armour, however, for the woman’s expression had shifted, a little ashamed perhaps, and a little defensive. ‘Maker, I’ve been all morning trying to keep this city together, to balance the warmongers and the cowards in the Consensus – if our government deserves to call itself that! – and then your name falls into my lap, you and your cursed Wasp both, and what am I to make of it? The last two times that man came here, he brought down the government. Is he going to make it a third?’

  Che had almost laughed at that, save that Kymene was being so deadly serious. ‘We’re heading west.’ She was conscious of the Mynan woman burning to be elsewhere, anywhere else perhaps. ‘Heading into the Commonweal. I was hoping for your help in crossing the border.’

  New suspicion had then clouded Kymene’s face instantly, but it had drained away to leave an expression that Che had become tiresomely familiar with: someone’s contempt at her naivety. ‘The Commonweal? You’re going west out of the Alliance?’

  That name was new enough to feature only on the most recent maps. Three former slave-cities, Myna, Szar and Maynes, had broken together away from the Empire after two decades of subjugation, and were fighting to hold on to their independence even as the Empire regained its old strength and ambitions. Che had assumed the Mynans must have plenty in common with the Commonwealers, whose conquered principalities must also have rid themselves of Imperial rule: the Alliance’s combined uprising had cut them off from direct contact with the Empire. Nothing in Kymene’s face had suggested that was the case.

  Do they fear that the Dragonfly-kinden will invade them, now? Do they trust nobody?

  ‘The border?’ she had repeated hesitantly.

/>   ‘There’s little can be done about that,’ the Mynan woman had told her. ‘Alliance relations with them are . . . strained. The border is patrolled on both sides, travellers are not being let through. If you wish to risk the crossing, I can give you papers to get past our troops, but as for the Principalities . . . I will not be able to assist you.’ For a moment her face had remained nothing but stern: the Maid of Myna, the woman who had unified the resistance and freed her city. Then came the tiniest twitch, an acknowledgement of old times. ‘But if you’re asking about crossing borders with goods or people, you know where to ask as well as I do.’

  Freed from the cells, their first look at the streets of free Myna had not been inspiring. Life under the Imperial boot had taught harsh lessons to the Mynan people, which would not soon be unlearned. There were plenty of weapons on display, and soldiers drilling with sword and crossbow, and even a few of the new snapbows that had made such an impact during the war. The red and black flag of Myna was displayed everywhere, as though people were afraid it might be taken away from them again. Non-Mynans were regarded on a sliding scale of suspicion. The Ant-kinden of Maynes and the Bees of Szar were tolerated, as they represented Myna’s neighbours in its Three-State Alliance. Others, like Che, were treated coldly, as though every one of them was suspected of being a Rekef infiltrator. Thalric had resorted to a hooded cloak, but was still stopped several times by guards, to be searched, questioned and insulted. The papers Kymene had provided were pored over, creased, frowned at. The Mynans would take a long time to grow easy with their new freedom, and Che only hoped that such time would be granted to them.

  Since their release they had found their own lodgings in the city. Thalric’s gold had sufficed to get them a room, but it was a dwindling resource that they needed to save for other tasks, and so this single chamber, this one bed, was all they felt able to afford.