Syale had gone ahead, yet another thing Tynisa was not happy with, but Che seemed to trust her to find whatever she was looking for. The rest had just kept plodding on, Tynisa and her deputies ahead, a block of Sarnesh loaned by Sentius bringing up the rear. Then Che had suddenly broken out of some reverie and announced that there was fighting, and that they had to get there.
So where is everyone? Tynisa was more than conscious that there might be thirty Nethyen ahead, hidden on their home ground and watching this Spider-looking girl intrude. No sign, though, and she could hardly stay here forever. The rest would probably have caught up with Maure already, and be closing on Terastos’s position.
Forward. If there was an ambush, let her flush it out. With sword in hand, she was ready for anything.
In her final dash forwards she realized that she was rushing straight into a Mantis hold: faint glimpses of round-walled, organic buildings on all sides, but woven in between the trees so that no line could be drawn between within and without. Except the Mantids would draw just such a line. To be in their home uninvited would be to draw sufficient ire that even Tynisa and her blade might not be able to fend it off.
She was part way through glancing back to signal Terastos, still moving forwards as she did so, when the rest of the scene around her began to register on her senses. She stuttered to a stop, hopelessly exposed to any archer who wanted her, while trying to match up expectation and discovery.
The smoke in her nose, the greedy buzz of flies, the smell of death, the corpses.
She had her blade ready, as though this sight itself was an enemy. There had been fighting here, surely, but not recently enough for Che to have heard any of it. The nearest buildings were charred; she saw the blackened foundations of the smithy — the only stonework the Mantids would have needed — and guessed that the fire had leapt from there, chewed through a handful of the nearest wooden homes and then wasted its guttering strength against the indomitable trees themselves. The true destruction had been in lives, not architecture.
Just as the inhabitants had not lived in a close-knit Apt village, so they had not fought an Apt battle. Instead, everywhere she looked there were Mantis dead, and when she looked beyond them, between the trees further away, more dead still. They were scattered as they had died, weapons mostly still to hand, strewn disjointedly in knots of four and five, the ragdolls of history. They bore their wounds with pride, she reckoned. Live by the sword.
At a movement behind her, she turned, already registering Terastos before her sword could threaten him. The Moth’s blank eyes were wide, head twitching from side to side as he took it all in.
‘Oh, this is wrong,’ he murmured, just loud enough for her to hear.
‘It’s war.’ Tynisa tried to sound hardened to it all.
‘No.’ The Moth shook his head. ‘No, this is not the way. Mantis-kinden, they don’t. . they wouldn’t. .’
Tynisa shrugged, still holding tenuously on to her composure. ‘The Wasps did it, then?’ Maybe the Sarnesh, but that was a thought she did not voice aloud.
Terastos stalked past her, looking from body to body. ‘I see arrows, blade wounds. . no stingshot burns, nothing from a snapbow bolt. They died fighting each other.’ As he looked back at her, centuries of hidden history were hiding behind those white eyes. ‘What have they been driven to?’ he whispered. ‘Between the Sarnesh and the Empire, they are going mad. This kinslaying. . Mantis has always shed the blood of Mantis, it is their way, but with respect and by consent.’
‘Consent. .?’ Tynisa stopped, because some pieces of the picture that she had been keeping at arm’s length were coming to her now, and refusing to be denied. She was standing by one of the larger sprawls of Mantis dead, and she could see now that more than warriors had died here. Many of the bodies were so small, thin limbs and faces surely too young to display such expressions of determination and defiance. Whoever had swept through here had been as mad as Terastos said. They had given no quarter.
‘Whose was this, Etheryen or Nethyen?’ she asked.
‘Does it matter?’ Terastos spread his hands. ‘I can’t say.’
Maure was approaching them now, and Tynisa thought for a moment that the sight would be too much for the other woman. She had forgotten the magician’s calling, though. The necromancer slowed as she neared them, and what her eyes registered there, in the heart of that dead hold, Tynisa did not want to know. Enough ghosts for a dozen lifetimes.
‘Tell me,’ Terastos said, and Tynisa realized with surprise that he was deferring to the halfbreed like a student seeking the advice of the learned.
‘Despair, nothing but despair.’ Maure’s eyes were closed, her voice was barely audible. ‘Those who attacked here, they had been broken in the hands of the outsiders, sick of fighting the wars of others, sick of promises of a better future, sick of hearing the justifications of the Apt for why they must kill their own kin, sick of the doubt of their leaders. All they had left was their honour. Mantis honour, which always has one last resort left to it. And so they came home.’
Terastos and Tynisa were both staring at her. ‘Home?’ the Moth echoed.
‘To salvage what they could of their way of life. To protect their people from the outside world that had changed them.’ Maure’s voice was precise and calm. ‘To save their children from the future they had seen.’
Then the others began turning up, stepping cautiously through the trees and each one slowing as they realized where they were. Che was the only one to step past Tynisa, Amnon and Thalric trailing to a halt in her wake.
‘Che. .?’
But the Beetle girl was staring out into the trees, as if she had not seen any of it, as though her sight was focused entirely elsewhere.
The Sarnesh were now spreading out, searching for. . survivors? Clues? Tynisa could not guess.
They came home. Maure’s words kept going round and round inside her skull. Not a clash between Etheryen and Nethyen, but. .
‘Miss Maker!’ It came from one of the Sarnesh, rousing Che from her introspection, and Tynisa actually saw her glance about, clearly bewildered at where she was, and then seeing it as if for the first time.
The Sarnesh were clustered about one of the burned-out and broken huts, and Tynisa approached with trepidation, dragged unwillingly along at Che’s heels. There had been another faceless act of extinction here, she discovered. The victims who had holed up in that cramped space had been children, for all that they had plainly fought to the last with knives and teeth. One body stood out: the only non-Mantis there, lying convulsed across the threshold, pinned by the spear that had killed both her and the infant she held.
Syale had forfeited her neutrality.
Che stared at the corpse for a long time, and Tynisa was becoming more and more unsettled by just how little emotion was evident on her foster-sister’s face. The Che of old, that soft and insecure child of Collegium, would fly into fits of passion at just about anything. Now. . there was more expression on even Thalric’s face than on Che’s.
‘We need to move on,’ was all the Beetle woman said. Even the Sarnesh were looking uncertain now.
‘Che. .’ Tynisa gestured at the scene. ‘We can’t. .’
‘They made their choice. What do you think we can do?’
Tynisa flinched away, because there was something in Che now that frightened her badly, that had hold of her sister’s face and throat and made her say words that just did not belong to her. The worst was that Tynisa’s own ready and angry answer just died in her throat. She felt some clawing thing deep within her, closing off her voice. Fear. That same old Mantis fear of magic that had kept them as the Moths’ lackeys in the Days of Lore. But I can’t be scared of Che. . And in that moment she saw just how far her sister had travelled from their childhood. I thought I’d changed, but she is something different now. A magician of the Bad Old Days?
Then Maure hooked a hand about Che’s arm. ‘We cannot go yet. I have work to do.’
Che t
urned on her, and Tynisa could clearly see the balance of power — how the Beetle had become a vessel overflowing with it, ready to rain thunder on this halfbreed upstart — and how Maure, who had known magic all her life, was just a leaf on the wind before her.
I am thinking like the Inapt, Tynisa realized.
Yet the hand remained on Che’s arm, the channel for some revelation that Maure was willing Che to listen to, and a moment later the Beetle’s face practically disintegrated, all that fierce resolve falling away, and Che sagged, letting out a single ragged breath, and became the girl Tynisa recognized once again.
‘Of course. Do what you must. Do what you can.’ Che put a hand to her temple. Thalric stepped in, and for a moment she gestured him off as though she did not want to corrupt him with her touch. Then she was in his arms — and Tynisa turned away, supplanted and resentful, and mean-spirited for feeling so.
For more than an hour, Maure sat amongst the ruins in the centre of a circle she had made from the weapons of the fallen, her head bowed and unmoving, and doing who knew what. Tynisa, who could no longer deny that fragments of the dead might be pinned to the world — things of raw emotion, anger and loss — hoped that the woman could accomplish something here, and did not envy her the task.
She tried to approach Che, meanwhile, but the Beetle girl would barely speak to her, fighting battles inside her head, mumbling to herself in a rambling monologue that abruptly stilled whenever Tynisa approached.
At last Maure was done, standing up smoothly and kicking at the ring of swords and spears to disperse it. The Sarnesh gathered themselves and, one by one, their expedition reassembled.
Che was the last, and something of that proud, hard look was back on her face, despite her best efforts.
‘We must move now,’ she told them. ‘I can feel her.’ Seeing their blank looks she elaborated. ‘The Empress — she’s close.’
Argastos had come to Seda last night, walking in past the vigilant Pioneer sentry to stand before her fire.
She had not seen him, quite — no more than a troubling of the darkness — but she had known him as that same shade that had reached out to her aboard the airship.
Oh, bravely done, had come a voice formed from the sounds of the forest itself. You have pierced the walls they built about me. You are truly the one.
She had taken this in her stride. ‘So walk out and greet me, old man.’
Surely he must have been off balance after that, but the roiling shadow had communicated nothing save its continued presence.
‘You are a prisoner, or whatever’s left of you,’ she had told him. ‘Play the great lord all you like. There is power where you are now, but you are not its master. You need me to come and rescue you.’
Again just silence from the spectre. A faint grate of metal indicated Tisamon moving, and she knew his helm would be turned towards this intruder.
Then: Please. . faint as a breeze.
‘Does the great Argastos beg?’ she had demanded.
It has been so long. And, with that distant utterance, a wave of emotion had passed over her, far more eloquent than mere words: abandonment, loneliness, frustration, injustice. For a moment she had been rocked, the feelings riding on her own emotions to strike behind her defences. Then she had shaken them off.
‘Oh I am coming to you, never fear,’ she had replied sharply, ‘but how I deal with you, once I have emptied your treasury, will depend on how you approach me. Keep begging, old Moth. Get used to being on your knees. I may find a use for you but, if you try to manipulate me, to pry at my mind with such weak games, I will leave behind not even memories of you.’
He had vanished then, snapped back to the inner forest where he was penned, and she had found herself gazing about the fire at her companions, meeting their uneasy eyes and forcing them to look away. They had heard every word she had said.
Only old Gjegevey understood, she decided, but his expression was anything but reassuring.
However, she had opened the way, now. After battering so long at the forest’s defences, the blood sacrifice had unbarred the door. The day after, and they were at last on their way inwards, and all she had to worry about was. .
A thorn pricked in her mind, even as she thought it, and her eyes flicked wide.
Her!
‘Faster!’ she snapped. ‘Move faster!’ For her twin was approaching, that hateful Beetle girl. For a moment, even as the Pioneers ahead picked up their pace, Seda was torn: Turn back and catch them, ambush them between the trees? One shot, one sting, to rid me of my rival? But the girl had grown in power since Seda had cast her down in Khanaphes, and this time she had strong allies with her — a Weaponsmaster, magicians, not to mention whatever mundane warriors she had mustered, Sarnesh or Etheryen or both. And there was always the chance that, during the fighting the Beetle girl herself might just. . slip away.
She hears the call as I do, and if she gets there first, she might. .
‘Major Ostrec, rearguard with the Nethyen!’ Seda yelled. ‘Hurry, they are almost upon us!’
The Red Watch officer snapped out orders, falling back. The handful of Nethyen Mantids who had been ever more unwillingly accompanying her went with him gladly. Something their small minds understand at last. At a thought, Tisamon dropped behind as well to shield her.
The Beetle-kinden Pioneer dashed past her, snapbow halfway to his shoulder and face weirdly peaceful as he sought a target. At Seda’s side, Gjegevey was laboriously poling himself along with his staff.
‘Come on, old man,’ she urged, but she could see that he was doing his best. She grasped the haggard slave’s arm to encourage him. A curse on propriety. I am the Empress and I shall do as I like. ‘You’ve come with me this far,’ she told him. ‘You’ll see it through.’
He nodded raggedly, leaning on her as he let her drag him along.
Behind she heard the unmistakable sound of a snapbow, followed by the war cries of the Mantids.
One of the Sarnesh went down immediately, a bolt tearing through his mail. Tynisa doubled her speed, spotting shapes ahead. This time Che’s got it right. Rushing into a fight like this, with no clear picture of whom she fought or even where they were, reminded her of the Commonweal, when she still had been in thrall to her father’s ghost.
Oh, but those were fights, though. Before she had broken away from him, the pair of them had been something superhuman and undefeatable. And uncontrollable, too, possessed of a terrible, callous bloodlust, which was why she had declined that gift in the end. I will have to be enough on my own.
There were Mantis-kinden coming against her, she saw, and already the Sarnesh crossbows were loosing, their bolts springing between the trees. There was another crack — Amnon or someone shooting. She began hearing the sizzle of stingshot from both sides.
A fierce-faced woman of about her own age was suddenly lunging for her with a metal claw, spinning away from Tynisa’s instant parry to come back at her from the other side, twisting from her riposte at the same time. Tynisa conceded three steps, the very forest keeping her footing for her, even as it urged the Mantis on. Old bastard only wants its blood, doesn’t care whose. She snapped her arm out, drew a red line across the Mantis’s hip, then swayed back as the clawed gauntlet sliced past her eyes. The woman’s other arm came driving in, trying to jab her with those vicious forearm spines, but Tynisa batted it away with her off hand, then stepped past her assailant and tried to cut her throat on the way. She caught only air, and then they had parted, turning back against one another, the Mantis already trying to close the gap.
Another Mantis was coming in, spear in hand, but Amnon cannoned into him, both of them going down and then scrabbling to regain their feet. Beyond her opponent, Tynisa could see others retreating — a flash of pale hair — the Empress?
The distraction nearly killed her, as the Mantis’s blade darted towards her stomach, but her own sword knew its work and slipped in the way just in time, letting her dance backwards — losing ground
again. And she knew that right now she was losing their best chance to win the war, to defeat the Empire in one stroke.
So go. And she went, whipping her opponent’s steel aside, cutting just enough of an opening to get past her, kicking into a full run even as she did so, and be damned to the price that her hip would exact later.
A snapbow bolt spat past behind her, its author not adjusting for just how fast Tynisa was suddenly moving. Then there was a Wasp in the way, raising his hand to sting, but her blade was already in motion.
He was a dead man — just some Wasp soldier with red insignia — but somehow he put his raised hand in the way of her stroke. From the shock of impact, it seemed as though she had struck metal, yet when he fell out of her path, there was no blood, no sense that she had wounded him. And no time to wonder about it.
She had already realized that she was following the Mantis path to its logical conclusion. It was hard to see how she would survive this, success or failure, but she had to try.
She saw the Empress in front of her, with an old man who looked like a malformed corpse in tow. Just twenty yards — fifteen — then the Wasp woman was shouting out a word — a name — and someone else stood in the way.
Tynisa saw a man armoured head to foot in a style she knew only from old books and museums, armour as fine and elegant as ever a Commonweal noble wore, but crafted to an entirely darker, sharper aesthetic. She had never seen a full suit of Mantis-kinden carapace armour before.
It gave her pause, despite her entire attack plan being built on going forwards, and then the man was coming for her, his clawed gauntlet stooping like a hunting dragonfly — barely turned by her own sword — then back to guard, without leaving room for a counter-attack.
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