She was almost at the door when she saw him. He was still a hundred yards down the street, but she recognized him instantly. Thalric, in his long coat, with the sword scabbarded beneath it. He began to walk towards her in a patient, purposeful way.
She skittered backwards and took the next side-alley, aware that he was between her and the better parts of town. She was heading into that district where they had ambushed Stenwold, and it had been chosen because the locals cared little about any commotion. Certainly the death of a single Spider girl would excite no curiosity.
She picked up her pace. Glancing behind her she could no longer see him but she had a sense of motion, of being tracked. He was in the air again, she guessed, and could follow her easily, tracing her hurried dashing from street to street as he glided silently over the rooftops.
She stopped under the eaves of a run-down house. Her eyes were good in the dusk, but they seemed to have failed her now. They conspired with her ears and her mind, putting a hundred pursuers on her trail. Certainly she thought she heard the soft blur of wings above, so that he could even be on the very roof of this place, waiting for her next move. And yet surely was that not him, the shadow in the alley across the way? The whole city now seemed to be hunting her.
There was a distinct scrape from up above, and such imaginings fell away. Someone was above her, and who else could it be?
He might not know I’m here. He might not know I’m here. She hugged herself, trying to keep the panic in, but thinking only of Thalric’s careful, patient style. He would wait all night.
He might not know I’m here.
But then her nerve snapped and she bolted and, as she broke cover she heard the flash of his energy sting, felt the heat but not the hammering shock of it, as it scorched the muddy flags of the street over to her left. She was running blindly then, and knowing he could fly faster than she could run, but run she did, as fast as she could whip her legs to motion, until she could go no faster. Then she struck against something — something put hard in her path without warning — and she was thrown on the ground. Her head spun from the impact but she forced herself to look up and see.
And she saw his face, and it was the face of Tisamon, cold and utterly without mercy. His claw was over his hand, raised idly to finish her.
Arianna screamed, she could not stop herself, and she covered her eyes.
Tisamon was surprised at himself, because he had wished to see this, the traitress cowering at his feet, utterly defenceless, but now he had it, something drained away inside him.
There had been no fight. He had been expecting a fight.
As that thought came to him he looked up, and Thalric landed not ten yards away, sword drawn, and their eyes met. The shock of recognition was a physical thing, two-edged and cutting. Tisamon remembered the fire and pain, the injury he had still not entirely shaken free of. Thalric, for his part, remembered the wounds he had taken, the wounds he had given, and how Tisamon had simply refused to die.
For a long moment, with Arianna whimpering at the Mantis’s feet, they stared at one another. Tisamon’s offhand, as though it had a life of its own, had plucked a dagger from his belt. He had sought them out particularly, those daggers, after the fight at Helleron, and paid a heavy purse for them.
‘She is mine,’ Tisamon said. ‘I claim her.’ As he was speaking a Beetle-kinden pair, a man and a woman, stepped out into the alley, glanced from him to Thalric, and retreated hurriedly back indoors.
Thalric’s mind was at war with itself. This was the one confrontation he would normally have baulked at. He had come far too close to dying because of this man, and who knew whether his daughter was lurking nearby? He had a sense, as he was hunting Arianna down, that his were not the only feet on her trail. He had that sense again now, even with Tisamon before him. Who else is there and where are they?
He feared. A bitter realization that, but he feared.
Still, he was a soldier of the Empire. He took a step forward and spat a bolt from his palm at the Mantis.
Tisamon hurled himself aside, though the fire scorched his shoulder. But just as Thalric had loosed the bolt the Mantis’s hand had flicked forwards and he now saw the Wasp stagger as the dagger struck. A glancing blow, for Thalric had seen the silver flicker coming, but it had been flying straight for his face and, as he dodged, it cut a line across his temple, above his ragged cheek where Arianna had clawed him. He made to launch another bolt, but Tisamon had a second knife in his hand even now, sending the edged darts spinning out one after another, driving Thalric back, back, then up to a rooftop, almost to the limit of his sting’s range. Tisamon had a hand full of knives, little hiltless throwing pieces, and there was no way to tell how many he still concealed.
This confrontation could see both of us dead very easily. The thought was in Thalric’s mind, but he could see no acknowledgement of it in Tisamon’s expression. Thalric was more mobile, the Mantis’s eyes better in the darkness.
Stalemate. And Thalric knew that he could not squander his life here, when he was badly needed to further the Rekef plans in Vek. Then let this Mantis see if he could stand against the fall of a whole city.
Thalric’s wings blurred into life and he hurled himself into the sky, watching for that next knife at all times until he had put a building between them. Even then he could not have said whether his reason for flight was anything other than a way of disguising his fear.
Arianna felt a brief moment of relief as Thalric departed, but it withered as she looked up into the Mantis’s face.
‘Please don’t kill me,’ she begged. Tisamon regarded her impassively. Now the moment was upon him he had expected his earlier passion to be urging him to do it. To his distant surprise it was the other way round. A fickle current of feeling was trying to stay his hand even though his reason insisted he had to kill her.
He dragged her two streets further towards the river, to an empty, litter-strewn square where a body could have lain for a tenday without discovery, casting her down against a windowless wall. He knelt by her, and the flat of his blade was abruptly cold against her neck, a trick he had used often enough to put fear into others, not that this shivering Spider needed it. ‘Where are your friends?’ he growled at her.
‘They. ’ She swallowed, closed her eyes at the feel of the metal moving against her skin. ‘They’re dead, all of them.’
‘You lie.’ He twitched, just slightly, but she felt the tiny cut, a bead of blood blooming.
‘No, please! Thalric killed them. I’m all that’s left.’
He considered this. It should have seemed impossible, but she had been fleeing and Thalric had been chasing her. This was becoming ever more complex.
‘Please — please let me talk to Stenwold. ’ she started, and he hauled her up by her collar in sheer rage, slamming her back against the wall. His lethal claw was drawn back, and in that instant all his strength of will went into restraining it.
‘Do not even utter his name, traitress,’ he hissed. ‘You and I, we understand one another. We know the old ways and the old laws, but Stenwold doesn’t. He believes in things like conscience and forgiveness, but you and I know better. Some acts of betrayal have prices that must be paid.’
He wanted her to scream at him, to fight him. That would have made his decision easy for him, and he liked simplicity. Instead she just hung in his grip, shaking. She was, he decided, a wretched specimen. Atryssa would have held her in contempt.
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I need to tell someone. ’ And then her voice dried up, and he saw a reflection move in her eyes, which widened abruptly.
‘Watch out!’ she yelled, and he whirled around with claw raised high, and when the sword came down he caught it.
It was not Thalric, but a cloaked woman, some complete stranger. She gave him no chance to see more than that, because that sword was coming at him again. Two strong overhead swings, and then a lunge that nearly gutted him as he leapt back and back, turning each blow aside. The
sword flashed in her hands, turning through each attack and never still, now gripped two-handed, now passed to her left or right hand, springing at him from all angles.
He had turned a dozen such blows before he gained the initiative, ducking under one swing and lashing at her midriff. She swayed aside, and the tip of his claw scraped against armour, then the pommel of the sword hammered down on him, and he caught it with the palm of his free hand, forced it aside and lashed out at her face with the spines of his arms.
She fell back, not even scratched, allowing him a better look at her. She was some kinden he did not know well but he thought he knew her race, if not her face. The cloak was mostly blown aside, and he could see she was wearing a full suit of armour — but what armour! He had never seen anything like it. Delicate chainmail overlaid with plates of metal that glittered darkly with greens and blues and prismatic metal tones. He nearly lost himself in staring at it, and backed up a dozen steps as she attacked again. Her style was new to him but she was swift even encased in that metal, dancing both with her sword and with him. He met her blade another half-dozen times, taking each blow on his claw or its armoured gauntlet.
The Spider traitress must have run by now, he realized. He would have to hunt her down again. He did not care. This was special.
He turned his next parry into an attack, and he was backing her up once more, his claw tracing lines of swift silver in the air, now sparking off the straight blade of her sword, and sometimes drawing the faintest scratch off that glorious armour when she did not move quite soon enough.
He sought out her face, golden-skinned, composed into perfect concentration, beautiful and fixed as a statue’s.
He was under her guard for just a moment, lashing beneath her breastplate. He severed a handful of mail links, cut a tear into the arming jacket underneath. Then she struck him with the guard of her blade, almost catching him with the edge. The blow took him in the shoulder Thalric had already burned and he hissed in pain and fell back. He saw her move after him without a thought.
He found he was grinning, because she was magnificent and he had not fought her like in many years.
Another series of lightning exchanges. Her blade was double-edged and needle-pointed, moving like sunlight and mirrors in her hands, each attack different from the last, without pattern or predictability. He shifted and spun with them, letting his reflexes take him where thinking could not keep up, divorcing his mind from the long-trained motions of his body, letting her advances exhaust themselves till he was driving her back in turn. Three times he struck and failed to penetrate her armour, and once he managed a shallow line of blood across her leg beneath the severed links of the mail.
Her eyes locked his and he knew she would kill him if she could. He would have no choice but to kill her in exchange. It was as it should be and either he would die or he would remember this contest for ever.
Tisamon found he was now breathing heavily, feeling the skin tight across his chest and side, the healing burn where Thalric had caught him at the fight over the Pride. His seared shoulder throbbed in agony yet it seemed distant and he could ignore it.
They had reached the endgame. He still had no idea who she was but he would swear now that she was no Wasp agent, for if the Wasps could call on such as this they would rule the world already.
He fell back ten paces, dropped into a new stance, claw held low but angled upwards. She fell into a stance of her own, with that sword gripped double-handed and high, the point aimed downwards. A perfect complement.
He waited for her to come at him.
Whole ages seemed to pass, with the two of them frozen in place, each waiting for the slightest move from the other to set them off. He became aware that the Spider girl had not moved after all, was still cowering back against the wall where he had left her. There was another voyeur, too, a man watching from a doorway. It was all immaterial.
And then she stepped back out of her stance, as though they had simply been playing at a practice bout and she now had other things to do. Tisamon fought the immediate instinct to do the same, holding his pose, but she just stood there now, looking about her, and he could have killed her at his leisure.
She spoke, her face full of confusion. ‘Where is this place? This is not Shon Aren.’ She saw him there, as though noticing for the first time. The sword in her hand seemed almost forgotten. ‘Mantis-kinden? Am I in Y’yen, then? But why?’ She approached him, quite without fear or hostile intent, and from the corner of his eye Tisamon saw the man who had watched them darting forwards,
Instantly his claw was in motion, bringing the stranger up short with the edge close to his throat. The strange woman merely watched without alarm or recognition.
A Spider-kinden, Tisamon saw — there had been far too many in his life recently. This specimen was a long-haired man of middle years, his hands empty, teeth bared above the blade that menaced him.
‘And who are you?’ Tisamon demanded. ‘Tell me quickly or I’ll have done with you. There are too few answers tonight.’
‘Oh, I know of your kind’s enmity towards mine,’ the man replied, as calmly as he could muster. ‘My name is Destrachis and I’m with this lady here, whose name is Felise Mienn.’
‘Destrachis!’ the woman exclaimed even as he said the name, although not with much love, and with no sign that she saw the claw at his throat. ‘What.?’
‘We are in Collegium, Felise,’ Destrachis explained carefully.
‘Yes, you are,’ Tisamon confirmed. ‘And someone had better explain to me exactly what we were fighting about.’
‘You. ’ She seemed to see him again and her eyes narrowed. Instantly his blade was away from Destrachis and he was falling back into his stance again.
‘I saw you with him,’ she said. ‘You must be one of his creatures. Tell me where he has gone.’
‘Where who has gone?’ Tisamon asked her
She spat back, ‘Thalric! Thalric the Wasp! Thalric of the Empire. Your master, is he not?’
‘He is not,’ Tisamon said firmly. ‘He is my enemy, as he clearly must be yours. You seek his blood?’
She nodded, seeming more lucid now.
‘Then if I knew where he was bound I would tell you,’ he confirmed. ‘And this here is your creature, is he?’
She looked at Destrachis coolly, but it was a moment before she responded. ‘He. I was travelling with this man. He. Destrachis brought me here.’
Tisamon began to relax again, until he heard Arianna’s voice calling them. All three of them turned to her: a young Spider-kinden girl in a torn and muddied robe.
‘You really want to kill Thalric?’ she asked hopefully, and Felise nodded in a single sharp movement.
‘He will leave Collegium tonight,’ Arianna explained. ‘He is travelling to Vek.’
The name of that city meant nothing to Felise, it was clear, but Destrachis murmured, ‘West of here, along the coast.’
‘Then we, too, must go to Vek,’ Felise said. ‘We must go now. We could catch him on the road.’
‘Vek it is,’ Destrachis confirmed, somewhat wearily, casting a cautious glance at Tisamon. ‘All right if we make our exit? Despite what just happened, we’re really not your enemies, honestly.’
‘I see that,’ Tisamon folded his claw back along the line of his arm.
‘I’ve seen her fighting a few times, now,’ Destrachis said, ‘and I’ve never seen anyone walk away from it.’
‘It was a pleasure and an honour.’ Tisamon stared at Felise thoughtfully. It was as if the woman he had been fighting had been rubbed away, suddenly replaced by this confused foreigner, but to his surprise she turned and gave him a curt bow, bringing her sword, point lowered, up to her breastplate. It was a token of respect he often had used himself in the company of other Weaponsmasters, and he returned it with a slight smile.
Destrachis was already heading away and she followed him with a single backwards glance. Tisamon stared after her, and even as Arianna approached, he wai
ted until the woman Felise was out of sight before he turned his attention to the Spider girl.
‘Please let me. ’ She had stopped out of his reach but. having seen him fight now, she knew how fast he could move. ‘I really do need to speak to — him. It’s about Thalric’s plans. Please take me to him. in chains if you must.’
He felt the fire of combat drain out of him, leaving him tired and bruised, more thoroughly exhausted than he had felt in a long time. There was no desperate need to kill within him, not now. It had been burned out of him during the fight with Felise Mienn.
‘Stenwold himself will decide what to do with you,’ he declared, and motioned for her to walk ahead of him.
Seventeen
The Ant-kinden shot all at once, the arms of their crossbows a vibrating blur with the force of the bolts let loose. Salma saw half a dozen men drop, mostly shot in the head or throat. Even with their targets lit up by the working lamps, it was a fine display of shooting.
Basila and her people were already moving. She took half her force forward with drawn swords, while the others spun the wheels of their crossbows to recock them. Salma had a moment’s hesitation before he went with them, catching them up with a flurry of his wings and diving at once into the fray.
Most of the men they fell on were Wasp-kinden artificers, unarmoured save for their working leathers, and some of their slaves. There was no time to distinguish or apply any mercy, though, and Salma knew that the Tarkesh had none to apply. Eight or nine utterly surprised men were caught unawares, cut down where they stood, and then two of the Ants were running on towards the nearest in the line of towering airships.
There was another hollow explosion from within the camp as Basila’s tactics of distraction continued. One man, a suicide from the moment he set out, was running through the tents of the Wasps and throwing grenades at random. Salma could only imagine the confusion.
Other Wasp soldiers were coming at them now. Most came running from the nearest rows of tents, unarmoured, some barely clad, but there were already some in the airships only now making themselves known. A second hail of crossbow bolts raked across the enemy approaching from behind, taking all but two from their feet. Salma turned to deal with those remaining two, who now hesitated, suddenly wrong-footed by their comrades’ demise. Giving them no time to react, he stabbed one through the throat and then planted his blade in the other’s bare chest. He glanced around for the Ant crossbowmen and saw them advance down the line of airships, loading as they did. Totho was still among them, he was glad to note, busy slotting another magazine into his repeating crossbow.
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