Blood of the Mantis

Ten

Thalric approached them without ceremony, simply dropping into a seat beside Brodan and saying, ‘At ease, Lieutenant.’ The general scuffle that followed had Brodan and his men half out of their seats, hands raised or already going for their swords.

There was a long pause, in which Brodan stared at him, surely trying to place him. Thalric leant back, waiting, looking as natural, as unconcerned, as could be.

‘Major Thalric?’ Brodan said at last, not quite sure. ‘The same. But do sit down, Lieutenant.’

Brodan did, and about them his men slowly relaxed, though not without a few puzzled glances.

‘Well, it’s been a while, sir,’ Brodan said. ‘Fetch a drink for Major Thalric,’ he ordered one of his men, who jumped to his feet and ran off into the rear of the grimy little Skater drinking hole. ‘I didn’t realize you were in these parts, sir. I thought your work took you out west more.’

Thalric smiled. ‘You know how it is when you do the work we do,’ he said. ‘One day in the Commonweal and the next in Capitas.’ Brodan, he was guessing, had never been to the capital. It was a good name to drop to get the man thinking of him as a superior officer, and so not to be questioned.

‘Of course, sir,’ Brodan acknowledged. ‘Can we help you in any way in Jerez, sir? Or are you here with your own people?’

Thalric studied the man’s face: blunt and honest, under a mop of dark hair, the look of a simple soldier, with a soldier’s powerful build. But Brodan was Rekef, and therefore more than he seemed. ‘A little of both, perhaps. Tell me, Lieutenant, what are your orders?’

He had expected the man to be cagey about them, but Brodan sighed. ‘Retrieval – some piece of contraband. You know how difficult it is to find anything in this place, though. I’m of a mind to just start executing the locals until someone feels ready to tip us off.’

‘No great loss to the Empire if you do,’ Thalric agreed. It was almost unbearable, this moment of cutting nostalgia. Here he was again, a Rekef major talking with his underlings. He felt his exile – his death sentence – like a weight about his neck. How could he not belong here still? ‘You have leads, of course, or you’ve lost what craft I remember of you.’

‘Precious few,’ Brodan grumbled. ‘Oh, there’s something going on, and some odd faces turning up, but getting to the truth in Jerez, well… Before I made the Rekef I did a stint on the smuggler run here. Night after night out on the lake in little boats, getting eaten alive by the midges and watching the lights. We were out here a month, and they reckoned the trade just got worse while we were. These little bastards, sir, they knew just where we were sitting and what we were there for.’

Thalric nodded sympathetically, hearing the rain patter harder around them. They relocated, by unspoken consent, to beneath the roof of the taverna, huddled in an odd pattern to avoid the leaks through the perished thatch.

‘Of course,’ Brodan said, ‘eventually they reckoned someone in our company was on the take.’

Thalric let that hang there, still casual in his pose, every muscle taut as steel on the inside.

‘Unless it’s a secret, sir, may I know what you’re here for?’

‘Investigating a threat to the Empire, Lieutenant,’ Thalric replied. ‘As always.’

‘A threat to the Empire, sir, right.’ For a long time, Brodan and Thalric just stared at each other, and then Thalric smiled again, feeling a strange release of tension.

‘Your soldier’s not back with my drink, Lieutenant. That seems lax discipline. You shouldn’t stand for it.’

‘No, sir. I’ll have words with him.’

‘When he gets back from the garrison with the others, of course.’

Brodan’s smile was not entirely devoid of regret. ‘That’s right, sir.’

‘Well, I shouldn’t underestimate the speed with which bad news spreads, should I?’ Thalric was still slouching in his chair, quite obviously not the man for any sudden moves. The careless pose made them uncertain, and most of the soldiers obviously did not share Brodan’s up-to-date knowledge of recent Rekef reversals.

‘They made sure to get hold of anyone who used to know you, sir. They told us.’

‘I’m sure they did.’ Inside, he felt sick. So close! For just a minute he had been the man he used to be, and now… betrayal again. He seemed to be a magnet for it, either giving or receiving. He wondered what Brodan had actually been told.

Not that it mattered so much. Brodan was a good soldier and he would obey his orders. ‘They’ll probably make you captain for this, Lieutenant,’ Thalric remarked.

‘That would be nice, sir.’ Brodan’s face remained without expression. There was, Thalric understood, no second chance here for him. Brodan was not the kind of man to let old times get in the way of duty. Thalric could remember a certain Rekef major very close to him who had been just like that, too.

The whole front wall of the taverna was open, just a mess of straw propped up on poles. Without tensing, without any motion to warn them, Thalric kicked the table over, leaping back in his chair with his wings flashing about his shoulders to fling himself backwards, out from under the roof and into the rain-lashed air.

The sting seared from his hand, and one of Brodan’s men was knocked over flat even as he got to his feet. Then Thalric dived away, streaking through the rain a few feet above the muddy ground, and knowing for sure that they would come after him.

A sting-bolt hissed through the rain just to his left, and he flung himself sideways, casting himself down one of Jerez’s wretched, rotten alleys and putting the thin barrier of a few inches of mud and twigs between him and his pursuers. Immediately he turned right again, trusting to the rain to cover him. He heard another crackle as one of them loosed a shot at him, but he did not even see the flash.

His wound was starting to tell on him now, slowing him down. Even as he flagged, one of his pursuers came bowling into him, and the pair of them tumbled end over end before splashing down into the mud, Thalric on his back, and the soldier kneeling beside him, blinking in surprise for a moment, but already extending his hand.

Thalric found inner calm, even as he raised his own open palm, knowing that he did not have time. When he saw the flash, he assumed that he had been shot, almost imagined the burning pain he should feel.

It was the flash of wet steel, not of searing energy, and the soldier’s head was cut cleanly from his shoulders, his body toppling aside in the clenched moment before the blood started.

Thalric clambered to his feet, looking into the eyes of his rescuer, his tormentor.

‘Tisamon,’ he gasped.

The Mantis had no expression, merely cleaning his steel claw before walking off without waiting to see what Thalric would do. There was no telling what he might have seen or guessed.

‘Now what you got to understand,’ said Nivit, ‘is that there ain’t been no grand proclamation that anything big’s goin’ on around here. Right?’

Gaved nodded, recognizing where the Skater’s circumlocution was going.

‘And also there ain’t been no invitations come my way, tellin’ me that anything like an auction might be held any day soon. Most ’specially there ain’t been any sign that some real expensive, real exclusive thing – of about yea big to each side – is being flogged off some time soon, somewhere near where we’re standin’. If you thought I’d heard that, Gaved, you’d be dead wrong.’

The Wasp grinned despite himself. ‘And yet you’ve heard something.’

‘People are our business, Gaved,’ Nivit explained. His girl had meanwhile brought him out a little stack of tablets, and his long hands were sorting through them, apparently without his conscious involvement. ‘Now we always have odd fellas droppin’ in here lakeside, to buy, to sell, to hide, to seek, you know how it is.’

‘I do,’ Gaved agreed.

‘Only you can’t help noticing that in the last couple of tendays the calibre of them has gone up and up. All sorts of grandees from the Empire and elsewhere, all coming in quiet like and just waitin’. Now what happens is, a few days ago some factor comes knocking with a commission. You ever hear of a Founder Bellowern?’

‘I know the name Bellowern,’ Gaved confirmed.

‘Big Beetle dynasty, people all through the Consortium. Rich and powerful. Well, this Founder’s one of the elder sons, maybe the one who gets the whole pot eventually. So what’s he doing lakeside in Jerez? Keeping an eye open for the competition. His man gave me a list of names and faces to look out for and, what do you know – here they all are, if you look hard enough. A good twelve names, and each with a history. Some of them we’d seen here before but most of them, no. This has to be different. This is special. So, old friend, how about you do some talking now, and I can just shut up?’

‘Gladly.’ Gaved sank back carefully in the hammock-sling seat that Nivit’s girl had strung up for him. The very feeling made him curiously at home. Perhaps it was just that here, beside Lake Limnia, a Wasp could almost escape his birthright. ‘There is a box – some mumbo-jumbo thing from the olden days. My principal wants it.’

‘Him and the world, too. Rich fella, is he?’

‘Not especially.’

Nivit made a derisive noise. ‘Then don’t even bother showing. These names I’ve worn my feet out in trailing, they’re rich enough each one of them to buy Jerez outright and the lake as well, or else they’ve got stuff to trade that makes that just about true. Take a look.’ Without Gaved having to presume on their friendship by asking, he passed over a tablet containing a shortlist of names that mostly meant little – but brief noted descriptions that soon gave him pause for thought.

Here was the wife of a Wasp colonel, a man who Gaved had heard was now the Governor of Maynes; there were two Spider-kinden manipuli, as the Spiders called their arch-plotters and politicians; a Dragonfly noble who must surely be risking his life even to step inside the Empire; another Consortium baron, and yet another Wasp whose name had been mentioned in connection with the Imperial Court. There were others besides: Moth, Woodlouse, and a gang of factors acting for a buyer of unknown kinden.

Gaved shook his head. ‘Word gets around.’

‘It certainly does.’ Nivit shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘Your fella’s out of luck then, it seems.’

‘Assuming he’s interested in buying…’

‘Dangerous words.’ But Nivit was grinning. ‘You’re thinking about the old times now, ain’t you?’

Gaved was busy copying the tablet’s contents onto a scroll that was already looking damp at the edges. The marshes of Lake Limnia were unfortunately death to paper of all kinds. ‘Old times indeed, Nivit,’ he replied. ‘Back when we did more than just hunt down runaway slaves for the Empire.’

‘It ain’t all imperial work these days,’ Nivit argued defensively. ‘Mind, I know what you mean, and I wouldn’t have thought you’d be the man for it, any longer. Thought you’d put that kind of work behind you.’ Stealing property was in a decidedly inferior league to tracking fugitives, but it had been a long time since Gaved had been so desperate. It sent a strange thrill through him, though, the thought of one last heist. He had never considered himself as a thief, just a recoverer of goods, a returner of lost property. The rest of the world had not been so indulgent with the labels.

‘You’ll help?’ he asked.

‘I ain’t doing the legwork,’ Nivit stated. ‘So long as there’s a cut for me, I’ll get you what you need to know, but you can go fish for the goods yourself.’

‘That’s all I need.’ Gaved smiled.

It was raining again on Jerez, which seemed to be the rain capital of the Empire, and possibly even of the world. Tynisa, wrapped up in a cloak, had found an overhanging roof to shelter under but, the way the wretched Skaters seemed to build, it was like sheltering under a sieve.

Yet they didn’t seem to mind the rain. She had quickly taken a distinct dislike to the people of Jerez. They skulked about all the time, or when they were not skulking they were stalking. Merely watching them now, seeing them pacing along with their long limbs, all cloaked and hooded as if off on some sinister errand, it gave her the shivers. Before he had gone off to meet his contact, and therefore before Tisamon had instructed her to follow the man, she had asked Gaved himself what in the world these sinister little people were good for.

‘Banditry, smuggling and covering up murders,’ he had replied, in all sincerity.

Some of them glanced at her occasionally: she caught glimpses of their pale, narrow faces, all angles and edges, but at least they minded their own business. She gathered it was not healthy, in Jerez, to pry into another’s affairs.

Which was precisely what she was doing, of course, because Tisamon did not trust Gaved in the least. Tisamon probably trusted only two people in the entire world, and the other one was Stenwold. Having to work with the Wasps sat badly with him, he who had been killing Wasps since before she was born.

For herself, she couldn’t trust Thalric an inch, but she was not yet so sure about Gaved. The longer she had to stand out here dripping beneath the feeble shelter of a Jerez eave, the less she liked him, though. He had gone into a tiny little shed shored up against the side of a larger building and, given how long he had been inside, it was clear that the whole structure was like Scuto’s workshop in Helleron, where the internal divisions had not followed the lead that the external contours suggested. She was also becoming irritatingly aware that Gaved could have simply left by an alternative exit, and she would never have been the wiser.

But what, though? She could hardly burst in on him, kicking the door down, just to ascertain that she was still in a position to spy on him without his knowledge. Tynisa had never realized that being a Weaponsmaster would entail this much cloak-and-dagger work. She recalled now what she had witnessed of the way the Mantis-kinden lived – her own father’s people. Primarily hunters and forest-dwellers, stealth and shadow were bred into them, so for Tisamon this stalking of Gaved was a natural extension to her training.

A fair time had passed and he was still inside, if indeed he was there at all. The rain showed the same staying power, falling thickly across Jerez with monotonous patience and ruffling the surface of Lake Limnia into a maze of ripples that the water-walking Skater-kinden could skip over as if it were solid ground.

It was also growing dark and, though her eyes were good for that, the stinging rain was making her job more and more difficult.

She flinched suddenly, glancing to her left. She felt sure she had abruptly noticed a stranger standing there…

Nobody in sight, so she frowned, wondering if she had caught some instant Jerez fever and was seeing things. Yet the image had been so clear: a slight, robed figure, like Achaeos perhaps, save that she knew it could not be him. Too tall for a local, proportioned more like a proper human being, but…

And in that instant she saw the figure again, standing just beside her. In an instant she had her sword out, whipping the narrow blade from beneath her swirling cloak.

There was nothing but the rain and the shadows…

She had been standing here too long, because now she had three or four Skaters closely watching the foreign madwoman jumping at nothing. She hid the sword away and returned to her surveillance. At least there was still a lamp burning in the little round window, so someone was at home in the rundown shack Gaved had entered.

The rain, running over the roof sign made the painted eye weep. The sight seemed strangely mesmerizing. It seemed to look out over its people, those hateful spindly creatures, and know nothing but sorrow. She found her own eyes drawn back to it again and again… and all the time some part of her was screaming that there was someone standing right next to her.

Gradually her eyes lost focus. Even the Skaters passing by paid her no heed. Still less did they peer into the shadows beside her, their eyes as proficient in the darkness as Tynisa’s own, to see the hunched figure lurking there with its pale hand reaching out for her. The men and women of Jerez knew not to enquire into certain things. They had made their town a place where even the iron law of the Empire rusted, and such a place attracted certain interests that they did their best to forget about.

‘Tynisa?’

She snapped into attention. The rain was easing, and the lamp in the little round window was now extinguished. The cloud-mottled moon lent little light to the scene, but Gaved carried a covered lantern.

Gaved was standing before her, looking at her with an expression of genuine concern.

‘Tynisa?’

‘What…?’ She leant back against the slick wall, feeling oddly dizzy.

‘Are you… drunk?’ he asked.

‘No, not drunk, not… anything. I just… I must have dozed off…’

‘What are you doing out here…’ His voice tailed off as she raised a hand to brush her rain-plastered hair back out of her eyes.

In a moment he had made a grab for it, but she was faster still, even feeling as off-balance as she now was, stepping back and having the tip of her sword at his throat in an instant. His hand, which had been reaching, was now splayed open, directed towards her. For a second they stared at one another.

‘Your hand,’ he said, closing his own.

‘What about…?’ She looked down at it, saw the shallow gash that the last of the rain was still washing blood from. ‘How did I do that?’

She sheathed her blade once more, further examining the wound. It extended from her forefinger knuckle to the base of her thumb. The cut was slightly ragged and shallow, and she did not feel it at all. She sucked at it experimentally, tasting the salt of her own blood, which was already congealing.

‘Are you all right?’ Gaved asked slowly. ‘You came here to check up on me, I see. I suppose I can live with that. A friend of a friend saw you out here, and warned me someone had been watching the place for a very long time… I thought you might be Empire.’

‘You thought I might be Empire?’ she asked.

‘Why not? I keep telling everyone I’m not imperial, and you’ve no idea how hard I’ve fought for that to become even a token truth. Not all of us Wasps have much love for the Emperor.’

‘Gaved, when you came out, did you… see anyone else?’

She saw instantly that she had guessed right. A muscle twitched in his face, tugging at one corner of his mouth.

‘Just for a moment,’ he admitted. ‘Just a shadow.’ There was something more, something he did not want to say, but at this stage she was too cold and wet – and, she had to admit, frightened – to care.

‘Since I’ve now been found out,’ she said, ‘can I come inside?’

He nodded, still looking troubled. ‘I’ll have Nivit’s girl fix you something hot to drink,’ he said.