And she stared at the face of her opponent, which shifted and blurred before her, and tried to read it, but it changed and changed again. Now she was fighting Tisamon, his blade the darting metal claw, and murder on his face as he tried to blot out the unforgivable crime of having sired her. Now it was Bolwyn, whose shifting visage masked the faceless magician who had betrayed them in Helleron. He was Piraeus, seething with hate for her, treacherous and mercenary but poised and skilled despite it. The blade cut close to her face, and then she felt it pluck at her arming jacket, not deep enough to draw blood, but close enough.
Always the figure was a fraction faster than her attacks, displaying Tisamon’s cold rage, or the face of Thalric with the fires of the Pride reflecting in his eyes. Her adversary was every man she had ever fought, every man she had loved or hated, one at once and all together, a shifting chimaera of faces and styles and blades. He was the half-breed gang-leader Sinon Halfways with his marble skin, and Captain Halrad who had tried to own her; beautiful Salma who she had yearned for and yet who had never given himself to her; Stenwold, who had hidden her past from her; Tisamon, always Tisamon.
And then, there was an instant in which the face was a woman’s, and she could not have said if it was her own, or that of her mother, and she lunged with a wild cry and felt the rapier’s keen-edged blade lance through living flesh.
She was lying on her side before the idol, and the world seemed to be fading in and out around her so that she could almost see through the trees. There was a whispering chorus in her mind, but no words, just a susurrus of constant, muddled thoughts. She was exhausted: every muscle burned and twitched with it. The rapier’s hilt was still tight in her hand, and she felt it almost as the clasp of a lover.
Her head swam, but she seemed to understand things she had not comprehended before, though she knew this knowledge would leave her when she regained her full wits. In that drifting but infinitely lucid state she saw how Tisamon must be able to call his blade to him, and how Achaeos had known where Che and Salma were being taken, and many other things.
And there was a figure kneeling by her now, a Mantis woman with silver hair, proffering an ornate bronze bowl gone green in places over the years. She took it without hesitation, sitting up to drink, and she knew it was rich mead mixed with the blood of whoever or whatever she had slain before the idol, and the ichor, freely given, of the great mantis.
And it was bitter and sharp, and it burned her, but she forced it down, because it was strength, and skill and victory.
And when she awoke again, as dawn crept between the trees, there was something sharp cutting into her closed left hand. A brooch of a sword and a circle: the token of the order of Weaponsmasters.
*
Tisamon was waiting for her on the beach, and when she saw his face she realized that he had not been certain, despite all his promises to Stenwold, whether he ever would see her again.
She now wore the badge of his order on her arming jacket, and when the thought occurred, Did I really fight. she had only to touch the rents that the unknown blade had cut there, almost through to the skin. She was left only with the question, What was it that I fought? What blood did I drink?
The thought had come to her of those shadow-creatures in the Darakyon forest that she had seen that once when Tisamon led her through its margins. They had known his badge and his office, and stayed their hands for him.
There was a darkness at the heart of Parosyal, she understood, and it was best not to ask questions.
Tisamon’s eyes flicked from the brooch to her face, and he smiled just a little. She knew he would never ask, just as she could not ask him about his own experience all those years ago.
‘There is a boat that will take us over to Felyal before noon,’ he told her.
‘What do you hope to accomplish there?’ she asked him.
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps nothing, but I will see what can be done. It will not be easy for you.’
‘This will help?’ She touched the brooch lightly.
‘It will keep them from killing you out of hand,’ he told her, ‘but you may still have to prove yourself to my people — as may I. With last night behind you, I have no doubt that you can.’
Thirty
‘You don’t strike me quite as bandits,’ said Salma. ‘Or perhaps you’ve not been in the trade long.’
The brigand leader shrugged. ‘There are two or three that have.’ He had given his name as Phalmes, and the total of his band was fifteen men and one Ant-kinden woman. They had a fire lit in a farmhouse that had been torched at least a tenday before, and the band of refugees was huddled close together in their midst, watching them suspiciously. Sfayot played pipe, though, keeping time on a drum with his foot, and his daughters danced. It entertained the bandits, but Salma found it lifeless compared to other dances he had seen.
‘Most of us are getting out from under the Empire,’ Phalmes said. ‘Deserters like me and some slaves. Others are rustics running away from home, or who’ve been burned out. The Empire’s on the march and that pushes a tide of flotsam ahead of it. We’ve got to live, and banditry’s as good a living as any.’
‘I’ve seen bandits,’ Salma observed. ‘It’s a wretched life.’
‘I imagine you have, being from where you’re from,’ Phalmes agreed. ‘And I’d ask just what a Commonwealer like you is doing so far from home. Not great travellers normally, your people.’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘It’s going to be a long night.’
‘Tell me a short one first,’ Salma said. ‘How do you come to know the Commonweal?’
Phalmes just smiled sourly, and Salma immediately understood. ‘You fought there?’
‘Five years of the Twelve-Year War,’ the bandit agreed. ‘After they drafted me for their Auxillians. I was apprenticed for a mason, before that. So much for the futures we think we’ll have. So tell me, Commonwealer, tell me your long story.’
And Salma told him, the bones of it anyway. He could not place any real trust in this man, he knew, and so he held off the names and the details, but he told Phalmes about the College and about his being recruited by a Beetle spymaster. He recounted his journey on the Sky Without and their escape, and their foundering in Helleron. He told of the betrayal and their capture by the Wasps.
Phalmes had listened without interruption, but it was when the tale reached Myna that he held a hand up. ‘How long ago?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘When was this?’
Salma counted back. ‘A couple of months at most, since I was held there. Then my friends got me out — and the governor was killed, I heard.’
‘The Bloat?’ Phalmes said. ‘They killed him?’
‘Yes. And I met the woman who is running the resistance there. She was freed at the same time I was.’
‘She? What’s her name?’
‘Kymene. Do you know her?’
Phalmes shook his head. ‘Heard of her, though. So your lot let her out. Well, now, that’s bought you safe passage and a half, more than any song and dance.’
The elder of Sfayot’s girls came, then, and sat down next to Phalmes, who regarded her without expression.
‘Your father sent you here to me?’
She nodded, watching him.
‘There’s a man with a realistic view of the world,’ said Phalmes tiredly. ‘Your friend here has just bargained your freedom, girl.’
She shrugged. ‘We knew he would.’
‘And why’s that?’ Phalmes asked her, like a man humouring a child.
‘Because he is such a man,’ she said. ‘My father has keen sight.’
Salma shifted uncomfortably. ‘It was nothing but chance.’
She shook her head stubbornly, and then turned her attention to Phalmes. ‘What will you do?’ she asked him. ‘Your men are unhappy. They fear the Wasps.’
‘Do they, now?’
‘They should,’ she told him. ‘My father has seen it. They are just north of here. The great city of th
e chimneys has fallen to them already.’
‘Does she mean Helleron?’ Phalmes demanded.
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ Salma said, and then reconsidered. ‘Or no, I’d heard that northwards wouldn’t be a good destination. I hadn’t thought. Things are moving fast, then?’
Phalmes nodded gloomily. ‘It’s looking as though this country won’t be good even for bandits any more. There’s plenty of my lads here who need to keep themselves well out of the Empire’s hands, and I put myself squarely in that number.’
The girl leant into him unexpectedly, almost pushing him against Salma. ‘You’re not a bad man,’ she said. ‘My father sees many things.’
Salma’s eyes sought out Sfayot near the fire, and found the white-haired man looking at him with an unnervingly clear stare.
‘I’m as bad as I need to be,’ Phalmes told her. He seemed about to push her away, but then decided against it. Salma could see that he was already worrying about what to do with his followers next, because where could he lead them now?
‘You should come with us,’ the Roach girl told him.
Phalmes stared at her levelly. ‘Should I? And where are you all going that is such a wonderful destination?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, and then looked over at Salma. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I’m not leading us anywhere,’ Salma said, but realized, even as he said it, that this was not quite true. They had been looking to him since he had driven Cosgren away, because Cosgren had made himself leader, and then Salma had displaced him. That was the way things worked.
And if he was leading them. he should know where they were going, and why.
‘What else has your father seen?’ he asked. Phalmes gave an amused snort, because magic was just a word to him, but Salma had seen magic in his time and he believed in that moment that Sfayot could indeed be a seer.
‘That you will find something,’ the girl said. ‘You will find what you seek, perhaps.’
‘Does he know you’re telling me all this?’
‘He wanted me to,’ she said. She was close to his own age, thin and pale, with her white hair cut short and ragged. She was pretty, though, and she looked at Phalmes with a smile that he did not know what to do with. In that moment of awkwardness, Salma saw him as though he had known the man all his life. A solid working man, ripped from his trade, his family, his life, only to be driven further and further as he fled the rolling borders of the Empire, and yet here he was, still trying.
‘They made you an officer in the Auxillians,’ he guessed.
‘So you’re a magician as well now, are you?’ Phalmes demanded. ‘I was Sergeant-Auxillian, if you must know.’
‘And you’re still trying to look after your men.’
‘Just like you are,’ Phalmes confirmed, ‘but what of it? A man’s got to have some purpose in his life.’
‘Yes, he does,’ Salma agreed.
‘Why not come with us?’ the Roach girl asked Phalmes again.
He merely shook his head tiredly.
But the next morning, as the refugees set off westwards, Phalmes and his bandits were riding uncertainly alongside them. They were far enough apart to maintain their sovereignty, but they rode a parallel path, and took care not to get ahead.
Something was happening, Salma was aware, though he was not sure just what. In the meantime, as he waited for it to happen, his little band of fugitives lived day-to-day and relied on one another. When they were hungry, the land or the leavings of others sustained them. When they were weary they stopped and scavenged wood for a fire.
Then, one afternoon when they were in sore need of food and shelter, one of Phalmes’s scouts reported back that there was a small village ahead. They had been following the Sarn-Helleron railroad, and it was some little hamlet built around a rail siding. Passenger trains had stopped here, so there would be inns, farmland, an engineer’s workshop with a single enterprising artificer. But there had been little traffic of late, and most of the opportunists had headed away, looking for fatter pastures, leaving only a skeleton of a place, inhabited by those that could not or would not leave.
Phalmes gave a signal and the bandits began to ready their weapons.
‘What are you doing?’ Salma asked him.
‘We need food,’ Phalmes said. ‘What’s more, there are roofs out there that we can make use of.’
‘There will be no pillaging here,’ Salma told him. ‘There’s no need for that.’
‘You’re right, so long as the locals there are sensible.’ The Mynan gave him a hard smile. ‘So long as they understand that we have the power to take, all we need to do is ask.’
‘Let me at least talk to them first,’ Salma insisted.
‘Whatever you want,’ said Phalmes with a shrug. ‘But those around you now are your people. They’re looking to you to provide, like my men look to me. They’re short of everything and hungry each evening. What are you going to do about that?’
Salma looked out at the village and thought, Was it Cosgren that brought me to this? It had to be something more, but he could not put his finger on the moment when he had shouldered this responsibility. It was now on his shoulders, nonetheless.
It did not turn out as Salma had planned, none of it.
They had gone to the village, all of his ragged band: the farmwife and her child, the Fly gangsters and the escaped slaves, Sfayot and his daughters and — like a dark and brooding tail — Phalmes’s deserters and brigands. The village would have no wish to play host to such a pack of vagabonds, and yet the numbers Salma led in were great enough that they could hardly resist.
Taking Phalmes and Nero along with him, Salma had met with the village headman and bartered for food. Some of his barter had been in coin, some in promised labour, or services. He was aware that he had desperately little to offer and that, even with Nero’s practised haggling, they should have been turned away immediately. Instead, the headman made an offer that was generous by any means, and Salma understood then how he was participating in banditry. Banditry of a civilized sort, but Phalmes’s men were all well armed, and this village was small.
They would camp within the village boundaries, Salma explained. They would chop the promised wood, draw the promised water, all the other meaningless tokens of their agreement. The headman tried to wave it away, but Salma had insisted.
He had not intended to become a brigand, but it seemed that it was easier than he had guessed to slip into that trade.
He had not intended to defend the village, either, but nevertheless it had happened. He had less control over his fate than he had ever imagined.
The real brigands had come thundering down on the settlement at night, with swords and burning brands. There were a score and a half of them and they were not here to make deals, or even to threaten or intimidate. They came for quick loot, a handful of whatever they could grab.
Instead they found Salma and his followers. Even while the villagers were putting their children out of the way, reaching for their staves and spears, Salma was rousing his band, sending them out with blades and sticks and bows. He went out himself, too, seeing by the slice of moon far better than the attackers, making savage work with the staff that Sfayot had made for him, and then ultimately just with the claws of his thumbs.
He discovered he was strong enough to fly again, using his wings to leap into his enemies, kicking and raking, and then jump back before they realized what was happening.
These were the sort of mixed ruffians he remembered from Helleron: Beetles and rogue Ants and halfbreeds, driven but disorganized. The fighting was fierce.
When they were finally chased away, at least half their number struck down, Salma walked amongst his own people to assess the damage. Two of Phalmes’s men were dead, and one of the Fly-kinden youths. Others were wounded, and Sfayot and his daughters did what they could with charms and herbs and bandages made from torn and boiled cloth.
Then Salma went to face the hea
dman.
‘We did not bring them down on you,’ he said because, all through the fight, that had been his thought, of what the villagers must surely believe.
‘I did not believe you had,’ said the headman, a Beetle-kinden, like most of the villagers. There was a cut across his balding scalp that one of his own people had bandaged. ‘Why did you come here?’
Salma shrugged. He was feeling haggard and worn down and his wound ached. ‘We saw your houses and we were hungry.’
‘Take the food,’ the headman said. ‘I have some money, too. We have done well here until the troubles.’
Salma wanted to refuse, but he thought of Phalmes and knew that he had at least that much responsibility — even to bandits and deserters.
The dawn brought a sight that made him shiver. Without ever discussing it, his followers had taken the arms and armour of the slain bandits. The Fly-kinden had swords and daggers now, and the Beetle-kinden farmwife had a crossbow. The three slaves had covered their tunics with studded leather hauberks. Sfayot’s eldest daughter had a short-hafted axe thrust through her belt. She had accounted for herself well with slung stones, the previous night.
Phalmes approached Salma and held a shortsword out to him, hilt first.
‘I saved this one,’ he said. ‘I know a bit about swords and here’s a good one. Helleron-made, and they know their business there.’
Salma accepted it gratefully. The balance was good, better than the Wasp-kinden weapon he had carried for so long. It felt good to have a proper sword in his hand again.
Two nights after the village he dreamt of home: riding out of the elegant palace of Suon Ren in the Principality of Roh, and seeing the landscape spread out before him in gentle tiers that centuries of careful cultivation had made into a picture of perfect beauty: the green and gold of the fields under the blue of the sky. It was autumn, near harvest, and the cold breeze that was blowing promised an early end to those warm days. The northern landscape revealed more snow on the mountaintops than a tenday ago. The Lowlanders knew nothing like this in their dry land of bronze and dun and yellow.
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