This night, as the advance force camped, the scouts seemed to have more positive information. They had already made up a lot of the lost ground, Che came to understand from the snippets of talk she overheard. Another day, or even less, and they would catch up with the brigands, and Tynisa. And then Salme Elass would have her revenge.
There were perhaps forty or fifty in the cavalry party, and they were the cream of the Commonweal, nobles and their retainers armoured in glittering shell and steel, skilled with bow and sword and lance. Che had glumly concluded that it didn’t matter how much help Tisamon’s ghost could lend to his daughter, Tynisa would not be able to triumph over her enemies this time, not even with a motley collection of brigands at her back. And she would not run for long, Che knew, for Tisamon would not have run. Perhaps Tynisa did not even think of her actions so far as escaping, rather than just escorting and guarding the villains she had freed. The moment she thought that she was running from something, then she would turn and fight. It was what Tisamon himself would have done, and the instinct had surely killed enough Mantis-kinden over the years. Che had a fairly strong conviction that Tisamon’s ghost had only one aim in its damaged mind: that Tynisa would die as a Mantis should die: bloody-handed and in company.
So, the ghost’s play had reached its endgame, and Che’s own had clearly failed. She was in no position to save Tynisa from anything, nor even herself.
She started as someone crouched down next to her, sitting back on his haunches. She recognized him as Isandter, the silver-haired Mantis-kinden. His eyes were wintry and cold, and Che knew well enough the sword-and-circle brooch he wore.
‘What do you want?’ she asked him.
He was studying her with a slight frown. ‘You are a noble of the Lowlands, a woman of importance?’
She almost laughed at that. ‘We don’t have an aristocracy. Bloodline won’t get you far on its own, where I come from. But my uncle Stenwold is a man of note, back in Collegium. I imagine he’ll take it personally if he hears that something bad has happened to me. Not that it’ll do me much good by then, of course.’
Isendter nodded soberly. ‘Maker Stenwold,’ he enunciated carefully. ‘That is the name of the Lowlander who spoke to the Monarch at Prince Felipe’s court.’
Che raised her eyebrows. ‘The very same, Master Whitehand. You’ve a good memory.’
‘It was much talked about, at the time. And you are important, then, so it’s a mistake to treat you thus.’
She waited, but the words were not a prelude to any attempt on his part to secure her freedom. Instead he surprised her by sitting down beside her, as though the two of them were simply exchanging pleasantries.
‘You know our ways a little. You learned that from your uncle, no doubt. You were right, in what you said: the girl is not in her right mind, not her own master. My lady has erred by setting herself on this course. No good will come of it.’ He spoke low, so that his voice would not carry further than Che’s ears. She had a sudden insight that he had come to speak to her because these words, prying their way out of him, were too dangerous to voice to any other.
‘If you’re looking for sympathy from your prisoner, you’ll find none here. She’s your mistress.’
‘Not by choice. I am the tithe paid by my people: the service of a Weaponsmaster in exchange for my kin to live untroubled in the deep places. I have served the Salmae most of my life.’
‘No doubt the prince was a better master, when he lived,’ Che suggested. For all her caveats about sympathy, she could not retain a stern face. The old man seemed oddly frail and vulnerable in thus confessing to her, for all that he was a Mantis-kinden killer and a master of the blade.
‘He was not.’ Isendter stared up at the stars. ‘He was thoroughly vainglorious, and he would not listen. He died in the war’s early years, leading a pointless charge against a superior foe, because he could not conceive of ever being wrong. He did not die alone.’ The Mantid’s expression was sour, hollow. ‘Others of the Salmae fell in similar ways, serving their Monarch, and yet giving precious little of value, until there was the princess and her son. Her sons. But, then you said you knew the boy, Dien.’
‘Very much so,’ Che agreed. ‘He was a good friend.’
Isendter let out a long breath. ‘Felipe Shah took him into his household, as kin obligate. It was a great honour, of course, but the Salmae would have refused it, if they dared. Prince Felipe thought he saw something in the boy worth saving, and took him to Suon Ren to raise as his own son. And he was right, it would seem.’
‘I take it Alain wasn’t of the same stamp?’
There was a long silence then, and Che assumed that the man’s unburdening had come to an end, but at last his voice emerged again, in barely more than a whisper. ‘Without honour, he was, and with no sense of a nobleman’s responsibility. Not one of the old nobility, like Felipe Shah or Lowre Cean, men who take their duty seriously. Instead, a boy who was denied nothing, who acknowledged no boundaries, around whom no woman was safe. Who bred vice instead of virtue, resentment instead of loyalty – and I am bound to avenge him, or die trying.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ Che asked him.
‘Because you alone here might understand, and who else would? I would have warned your sister, save that she was under Alain’s spell before I ever met her. I know Lisan Dea did her best to turn the girl away. This time, though, the boy took on more than he could manage. A Weaponsmaster, wounded in mind, unpredictable, fierce, a killer – that is your sister. He thought he could keep her spinning about him like a moth about a candle but, this once, he mistook who was the flame.’
‘She killed him,’ Che said flatly, ‘She killed your prince.’
‘She is a fugitive, a murderess, she has robbed the family of its cherished son.’ His brooding expression deepened. ‘Still, I can feel no grief in me that the boy is dead.’
Forty-One
First he donned his cap and arming jacket, their padded cloth now the worse for wear, still bearing all their old stains of blood and sweat like badges of honour. The hauberk came next, a long-sleeved coat of mail that fell to his knees. Not the heavy chain of an Ant-kinden line soldier but fine links that flowed like water, yet would bunch like solid metal under the impact of sword or arrow. The weight of it pressed on his shoulders, resting against the additional thickness of the arming jacket there, but it did not burden him. Instead, he felt lighter and freer with that comforting pressure about him. He donned his coif, a hood of the same delicate mail, shaking his head a little to centre it, tugging the collar straight.
Then came the breast- and backplates, fitted together and hinged shut to form the centre of his steel carapace. Both pieces bore a punched hole, the edges long since filed blunt, where a snapbow bolt had winged its way right through him, armour and all, and thereby ended the era of the battlefield sentinel.
The end of my world, thought Varmen, but then they did not have snapbows in the Commonweal.
All this he could do alone, from long practice, but it was easier with a companion to arm him. Back in the days when he had belonged to an army, he and his comrades had garbed each other, like a ceremony and a ritual before going into battle.
A belt strapped around the lower edges of the breast- and backplates to keep them closed, and then Thalric buckled on his leg armour, piece by piece: cuisses for the thighs, poleyns for the knee, armoured boots for the feet, and then greaves over them for the calves. The ex-Rekef man made a slow job of the work, having to be ordered and directed, segment by segment, but he grew more confident as he progressed. Had Varmen been on his own he would have had to start with the feet and work up; with the breastplate already on, he could not reach down that far.
A skirt of segmented tassets overlaid the cuisses to just above the knee, hooked to both breast- and backplates, and then Thalric had turned to the arms, fitting the same sequence of articulated, overlapping plates, defending from all angles and allowing only the bare minimum of gaps –
and those backed by the light mail – and yet none of it encumbering, none of it slowing Varmen at all, not after a lifetime spent encased in armour such as this.
About his neck was fastened a crescent-shaped gorget, denying his enemies the gap between the breastplate rip and his helm. He drew on his own gauntlets, as a point of pride, while Thalric laced and buckled on his pauldrons, three curved plates on each shoulder, with a vertical crest rimming the innermost to protect the side of his neck. He buckled on his swordbelt then, fingers still finding their way surely despite the steel about them. The heavy blade was a comforting presence at his side.
‘I’m ready,’ he proclaimed, and Maure brought his helm forward, her expression solemn. Varmen nodded to Thalric, who made a wry face and stepped back, giving the two of them their privacy.
‘You’ve seen the ghost about me, haven’t you?’ Varmen muttered.
Maure just nodded and the Wasp scowled.
‘I don’t believe in ghosts. No such thing.’ He took the helm from her and stared into its faceless visage. ‘A Dragonfly girl.’
‘Even so,’ Maure agreed.
‘So tell me, is she real? Or just in my head? I fought the girl once, one on one. I was trying to save my men.’ His face was blankly uncomprehending. ‘It’s stayed with me, all this time. She had a good voice, a beautiful voice: even when she was demanding our surrender and telling us we couldn’t win out. It’s odd what you remember.’
‘It doesn’t make a difference whether it’s a ghost from her death, or a ghost from your mind. It’s no less real,’ Maure told him. ‘Or no more real, seeing as you don’t believe in them.’
‘Not in the slightest,’ Varmen agreed. ‘You’re going to stay back, you hear? No getting in the way.’
‘I’m no warrior, me,’ she agreed. ‘I’d tell you all the ways in which I’ll be helping you, but you wouldn’t believe me in that, either.’
‘Probably not.’ He tried a smile, but it was a bleak and stillborn thing. ‘Back in the bloody Commonweal. I feel like this place has been waiting for me ever since the war ended. He took a deep breath that set the plates of his armour rising and grating against one another. ‘I should have died on the field with the Seventh, when their snapbows cut us down like wheat.’ Balancing the helm in one hand he touched the entry hole with an armoured finger. ‘But I’d rather have died fighting that girl here in the Commonweal. Then I’d not have had to see the end of us, the end of all of our ways.’ He glanced off into the darkness. ‘Just like all the old Commonweal magic, eh? They used to put such faith in us, and then one day… nobody believed in us any more.’
He reached up and placed the helm on his head, his world reducing to a slit, and yet he felt that he somehow saw more, sensed more, now that his armour was complete. He had regained a connection to the world, feeling all of its tricks and changes. He was something elemental.
‘Pride of the Sixth,’ he murmured, tugging the chinstrap tight. He swung the helm to find Maure, saw her expression. ‘Such a long road just to come back here,’ he said, his voice loud in his own ears.
Thalric stood waiting for him a short distance off. Varmen had dug out an old tunic for him, creased and stained but recognizable still in its colours. Varmen’s mail had once been immaculately painted in black and gold and, although it was chipped and scarred, the hues were still plain to see. It would take more battering than that to rub away the hand of the Empire.
Maure watched them go, and then set about her own work. It was nothing she had discussed with the two Wasps, for she thought they would not understand or appreciate it, and their scepticism would merely damage her efforts. Having exchanged those few words to Varmen, though, she wondered whether she had done the right thing in staying silent.
Their plan to rescue Che had been both simple and desperate. Just the two of them against a camp filled with Dragonfly warriors. They had almost ended up making their assault in broad daylight, for Thalric reasoned that the Dragonflies saw better at night, and so why bother relying on the stealth of it? In the end, neither of the Wasps quite had the nerve for that, but even at night their business seemed just a shaving away from suicide. They had only one advantage over the Commonwealers: they were Wasp-kinden, they were the Empire – they were the fear at the heart of a conquered people. That was little enough to even the terrible odds, but Thalric claimed that it would buy them enough time for a sudden strike: just grab Che and go.
Maure had heard him discuss it, and knew that he did not believe his own words, but he was now in a corner with nowhere else to go. She had not realized – perhaps he himself had not realized – his depth of feeling for Che, until she was taken from him this last time. He had reached the end of his wire, now, and action was his only release. Win or lose, the outcome was going to be bloody. Since Che had been lost to them, something else had surfaced in Thalric – or perhaps resurfaced. Maure sensed a kind of murderous capability in him, a man who would do anything to achieve his goals.
She took a deep breath. All her life she had used her skills sparingly, as she had been taught. A Moth Skryre or some such grand magician would think of the practice as accumulating power, but she had been taught that she was accruing credit with the world, especially with the world of the dead. Every spirit she helped to its destination, every ancestor who could share a few posthumous words with a descendant, every legacy passed on, it all added up; and though the coins were small, yet she had a lot of them by now. She was not powerful, as magicians measured themselves, but she had a deep well to draw on, now that she needed it.
Setting a ghost to haunt someone was an old necromancer’s trick, both risky and difficult and seldom worth the effort. Each person had their own weaknesses, each vengeful spirit its own small remit. Such skills would be little use in confronting the numbers that Thalric and Varmen now went to confront.
But they had provided her with the answer, of course. Thalric’s plan was better than he knew.
She took a deep breath. None of the mummery of before, involving candles and circles. She did not want to pacify these ghosts, and indeed she was not sure that calm was even in their nature. She wanted them fighting mad.
They would be drawn from the minds of the Salmae’s followers, from each and every one, either from personal experience or from second-hand fear brought on by the stories they would have heard.
She closed her eyes and concentrated upon the black and gold.
Thalric and Varmen: representatives of the Rekef and the invincible Imperial army, those spectres that had poisoned the Commonweal over twelve years of bloody warfare, that had left fearful ghosts in every mind: that had even replaced blood-drinking Mosquitos as the terrors invoked to caution children with. Terrors that any moment could march back across the border to continue their slaughter. Terrors of the machine-handed, the disciplined, the cruel, slavers and butchers, rapists and child-killers.
The ghost she raised and sent to follow Thalric and Varmen was the nightmare that troubled the sleep of the entire Commonweal. The two Wasps themselves would never know, never see, but they were trailed by a wake of black and gold shades with flaming hands and red swords.
The Salmae’s warband had entered dense forest now, following the recaptured trail of the fugitives. Under such cover, Thalric’s party had been able to move far closer than they could while pursuing the Salmae through hilly open countryside. Now he hoped to use the same cover to get within sting range before he was spotted. There must be sentries, he knew, for nobody was fool enough to hunt brigands through woodland without setting plenty of watchmen. Still, he was already within sight of the camp’s edge, a chaotic gathering of tents spread out in a maze of canvas between the trees, and he was just beginning to think that he should have left Varmen behind. It seemed entirely possible he could sneak into this place, find Che, and get her out again, all on his own.
Then a scout dropped from the branches above, her bow already bent back. Thalric could not see the woman’s expression, but he was sur
e she was next to laughing at him: just one man come to storm half a hundred of the Commonweal’s finest. He tensed himself to dive aside behind a tree, his hands warming to sting. Then Varmen caught up with him.
The archer swung the arrow towards the newcomer and then recoiled away, her back rebounding from a tree trunk and her arrow skipping off one of Varmen’s pauldrons. She tried to shout something, but for a moment nothing emerged but jabber, the terrified stutter of a warning as she fumbled frantically for another arrow. The flash from Thalric’s outstretched palm struck her down, and then the two were moving again.
Just the two of them, because Thalric knew that there was only himself and Varmen in this raiding party. But as he rushed past the first tent, it seemed that the forest all around was alive with running feet, the rattle of armour, even the distant sounds of heliopter engines. For a moment, this chill Commonweal night intermeshed with one from his memories, and this was no longer a doomed rescue but the inexorable weight of the Empire’s military might descending to crush yet another disorganized Commonweal force.
He saw armoured men and women ahead, spears and swords glittering in the firelight. An arrow lashed past, far to his left. He let his hands speak for him, taking any target that presented itself. He knew that the scintillating Commonweal mail could scatter stingshot from itself at the right angle, but it did not seem to matter. He and Varmen had become an unstoppable force, and the Dragonflies did not even try to resist. They scattered right and left or straight up, a few falling to Thalric’s sting, but none staying to chance Varmen’s sword. Then the two Wasps were charging through the heart of the camp, trees looming on all sides, Dragonfly-kinden came rushing half-dressed from their tents, to stare or flee at the sight of Varmen’s armoured form,
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