Blood of the Mantis

*

Achaeos had been suspicious, which Tynisa attributed mostly to his distrust of Beetle-kinden merchant-lords. His own magic had failed to trace the box, though, and so he had at last given in with bad grace.

‘If things go badly,’ he had advised, ‘find your way to Nivit’s home. Gaved is there, watching over Thalric, and I understand that Nivit has people he can call upon to fight for him, insofar as these wretched little creatures ever fight.’

‘What about you?’ she had asked, seeing they had found him alone. Jons Allanbridge, it seemed, was airborne somewhere, testing out the newly repaired Buoyant Maiden.

‘I can hide as well as any Skater,’ said Achaeos. ‘They will not find me.’ He frowned, studying her closely. ‘There is something more to this?’

‘Oh, no doubt,’ she said. ‘But there’s only one way to find out what exactly, and that’s to take up Master Bellowern’s invitation.’

Now she was hurrying along behind Tisamon, heading for the grounded gondola that Founder lurked in, as evening slowly grew over the sky.

‘That Beetle is more frightened than he will admit even to himself. I wonder why,’ Tisamon remarked.

‘His rivals, no doubt,’ said Tynisa. ‘Perhaps they have joined forces against him.’

The Mantis shook his head. ‘More than that. No man becomes that great unless he can deal with the envy of rivals. It must be the box itself.’

‘Then what about that Spider girl?’

‘Perhaps she knows where it is?’ Tisamon said. ‘Perhaps he means for us to guard her.’ He stopped abruptly. ‘Perhaps that girl was Scyla the spy.’

Tynisa also paused, unsettled by this new thought. ‘We can’t rule it out,’ she admitted. ‘But, then, we can’t rule out that Founder himself is the spy. From what Achaeos said, she can look like anyone.’

‘So this is a trap?’

‘It could be a trap. Do you want to go back?’

Tisamon raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Why?’

She saw that he would rather that it was indeed a trap, something straightforward to turn his blade on. He was all anticipation.

‘The rooms inside that thing are going to be low and small,’ she warned him.

‘Let that worry them more than us. It negates their numbers,’ was all he thought of her concern. He set off again, faster, but Tynisa had felt a tickling sensation on her wrist. Inspecting it idly, she saw blood oozing there. Her mysterious scratch had opened up again, although she could have sworn that it was only shallow, a mere nothing.

‘What is it?’ Tisamon asked her. She shook her head, wiping her hand with a cloth, while keeping it from view. The scar seemed to have resealed itself rapidly. She had an uneasy moment, just a second of it, as though she was surrounded by a great chasm, yawning all about her, and she was about to topple into it.

‘Nothing,’ she replied hurriedly. ‘Nothing at all.’

They were admitted without delay into the gondola, heading up along a gangplank that two of Founder’s men lowered for them. The interior had fewer rooms than Tynisa had guessed, with higher ceilings and more light and space. If not for a faint slant in the outside walls, she would have taken this place for a real house, even a regular house in Collegium. With the windows shuttered and gas lamps flickering on the walls, it could have been the sitting room of any College Master: rugs on the floor, bookshelves and paintings, even a little gilded automaton standing on Founder’s broad desk, wound down and caught motionless in mid-step.

The Beetle magnate sat waiting for them behind the desk, and there were two guards already present in the room. Tynisa looked further, and sure enough found the Spider girl standing in the shadows of one corner, staring wide-eyed at the newcomers. There was no indication as to anyone here being Scyla.

‘You’ve taken your time,’ Founder complained. There was a broad-based decanter on the desk, but it was already mostly empty. ‘May I take it that your patron has released you?’

‘We’re all yours,’ Tynisa informed him. ‘Make what you will of us.’

He nodded. There was an edginess about his glance that she needed no great skill to notice. ‘You expect your enemies tonight,’ she observed.

Founder stood up reflexively, one hand reaching for something below the desk-top. ‘Don’t presume to know my business.’

‘You will at least tell us who we are to fight,’ suggested Tisamon. Around them the guards were shuffling uncertainly, and Tynisa realized that they did not know either. Whatever hornet’s nest Founder had kicked over, it was something he had not shared with anybody else. Anybody except the Spider, that was. Founder’s new slave knew, Tynisa could tell. She knew, and she was terrified. Still, there was a raw, fragile look to her that suggested that everything frightened her. It was not a normal Spider-kinden look, but perhaps it could be used.

If he won’t say, perhaps she will.

‘I will tell you nothing,’ Founder said to Tisamon. ‘If they… If we’re attacked, just fight. That’s all you need to know.’

‘Perhaps we could carry the fight to your competitors,’ the Mantis suggested.

Founder’s laughter in response was fierce and desperate. ‘Oh, don’t promise what you can’t deliver, Weapons-master, so just stay close and keep your blades ready. You want anything, ask Bradawl there, but no forays outside, no time off. We now have our agreement.’ In a smooth motion he threw two pouches on to the desktop, heavy with coin.

With a smile, Tynisa scooped them up. It was, she reflected, a very large sum of money, the kind of money she had never dreamt of in her days back at the College. Perhaps there was something to be said for this trade after all.

She now hoped nothing would happen overnight to change that thought.

‘Which is Bradawl?’ Tisamon enquired.

‘Here.’ It was a broad-shouldered Beetle with a breastplate over leather armour. ‘Lieutenant-Auxillian Pater Bradawl,’ he announced and clasped Tisamon’s hand, wrist-to-wrist. ‘Hear you’re s’posed to be good.’ His accent was not Empire but the homely, familiar tones of Helleron.

‘Good enough,’ Tisamon agreed. He gazed at Tynisa, who threw another glance towards the mysterious Spider girl. ‘Perhaps we can talk, Bradawl,’ he added.

Bradawl certainly concurred, drawing Tisamon out of earshot of his master.

Founder was writing in a ledger now, turning up a gas lamp for better light to read by. A single menial came to refill his decanter, and Tynisa belatedly noticed that, of the big retinue the man had travelled with earlier, only the guards now remained. Most of his servants must be either elsewhere or dismissed for the night.

So as not to get in the way. It was an unwelcome thought. The two guards in the room were conferring with a third now, who just had come in from… Tynisa tried to work out the geography of the place, but it was impossible from the little she had seen so far: perhaps from the roof-deck? She caught a few whispered words of the man’s conversation: something concerning lights, and the lake. Founder’s pen scratched audibly, abruptly, to a halt in a scar of ink. He cursed to himself and began writing anew.

She stepped a little closer to the Spider girl, doing her best to keep an eye on her and at the same time on the others in the study. The thought of the face-changing Scyla was close to her mind.

‘So what’s going on?’ she whispered, hoping that another Spider face would be reassuring at least. The girl just stared at her.

‘It’s all right.’ Tynisa tried her best smile. ‘I’m not involved in any of this. You want to talk to anyone, you can talk to me. Are you from the Spiderlands? The Empire?’

‘I am from nowhere you know,’ said the girl, but the words were unnecessary, and Tynisa felt a chill go through her on hearing that soft, strange voice. Just as she had known Bradawl was raised in Helleron, or that Bellowern himself was an imperial Beetle rather than a Lowlander, she realized that this girl’s lilting and strange accent was utterly alien to her, more so than any she had ever heard in cosmopolitan Collegium or occupied Myna.

‘Tell me, quickly,’ Tynisa said.

‘They will kill me tonight,’ was all the girl said, and Tynisa could see that she did not want to be here within these walls, but that whatever was outside was worse.

‘You, Weaponsmistress!’ Founder snapped. ‘Over here!’

Tynisa cursed inwardly, but went over to the man’s desk.

‘You don’t talk to her,’ Founder warned. ‘Nobody does.’ Tynisa expected him to add ‘Except me’, but those words never came. Apparently, nobody at all talked to the mystery girl. ‘Now you stay close by me,’ Bellowern added, and there was nothing flirtatious in his voice. He took another swallow of wine, but it seemed only to leave him more tense.

‘If we could-’ she started, but he cut her off immediately.

‘Just kill them,’ he said. ‘When they arrive, kill them.’

She nodded, looking over to where Tisamon was sharing quiet words with Pater Bradawl.

The Mantis had expected Bellowern’s guard captain to be hostile and resentful at these overpaid newcomers, but the man was a Beetle, as pragmatic as they came.

‘I’m just glad we’ve got some replacement hands,’ Bradawl was saying. The darkness under his eyes spoke of missing sleep. ‘We lost three today.’

‘Lost to whom? How were they killed?’ Tisamon asked.

‘Just lost. Vanished off the streets,’ the Beetle explained. ‘Nobody saw a thing, so they claim, but then these Skater-kinden know when to keep their mouths shut. I told the chief that we should just get out of here, but he’s set on waiting for this auction. The girl was just an extra, an impulse, and now we’re paying for it.’ He stopped, realising he had said too much, and then deciding it did not matter anyway. ‘You and your woman had better be good.’

‘You don’t know who the enemy is? Or who the girl is?’

Bradawl shook his head. ‘Just that we ran into her one night, and the chief must have seen something in her. She’s really strange… and she’s on the run, I know, nothing surer than that.’

Tisamon glanced about. Despite himself, he found that the gondola’s confines were beginning to oppress him. It was all too artificial in here, with the flickering lamps and the bolted-down furniture. ‘The locals…?’

‘Know what’s going on, or something of it, right enough,’ Bradawl said. ‘They won’t talk, though. Whatever it is, they live with it and they’re scared of it, and they’re in no hurry to get in the way. We’re alone against it, whatever it is. We should just push that girl out of the hatch and be done with it, but the chief is fixed on her, wants to add her to his collection.’

‘A slave,’ declared Tisamon flatly.

Bradawl shrugged. ‘Mantis-kinden, what are you going to do about it? You’re in the Empire, and everyone’s a slave or a slave-master.’

‘What was that?’ Founder asked suddenly, loud enough to carry to them. They stepped back into his study to see him staring at his decanter.

‘Sir?’ Bradawl asked him.

‘Someone go up to the roof and make sure our men are still there,’ Founder ordered. ‘And make sure they’re armed and ready to fight.’

Bradawl looked briefly exasperated. ‘There are two repeating ballistae mounted on the deck, sir, and four soldiers as well. Anyone who sends men against us will get knocked back hard, whether from ground or sky.’

‘You!’ Founder pointed to one of the guards. ‘Go up there, now!’

The guard rushed out immediately, and they heard the sound of his boots clumping up wooden stairs. In the ensuing pause Tynisa sensed something occur, just a quiver in the floor and the walls. She looked across at Tisamon, who nodded. Founder was staring at the glass decanter still, as though it held some great secret.

The guard returned, reporting that the men up on deck were all present and alert, though Founder barely seemed to hear him.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Look.’

Tynisa saw it, then. There were ripples in the surface of the wine in the decanter, constantly quivering out inward from the glass sides. She could feel it now for certain, a thrumming in the wooden floor. Tisamon had his claw-blade already on his hand, and she drew her rapier thoughtfully.

‘The men above have seen nothing,’ Bradawl murmured. ‘So what is going on?’

There was a colossal snapping, twisting sound from below them, and the entire gondola lurched.

‘From below!’ Founder cried. He had snatched up a crossbow from beneath his desk. Bradawl signalled to his guards, and the three of them set off for ‘below’, wherever that was. There was no need, though, for below was coming to meet them.

One guard had preceded Bradawl through the door, and headed halfway down some stairs before he came flying up again, knocking his two fellows flat. A monster emerged after him. At least that was what Tynisa saw.

In retrospect she realized it was just a man, but a man such as she had never seen before, seven feet tall, with a head and waist both too small and narrow for those huge shoulders and the massive arc of bared chest. His hands were huge too, each boasting a great hooked claw, while together they held a short, brutal-headed pike.

The man-beast bellowed something and Founder’s crossbow bolt struck it in the shoulder, barely causing it to flinch. Bradawl took this chance to get to his feet again and lunged forwards with his sword, the buckler shield in his other hand pressing in to ward off the pike-head. The huge creature smashed him with the weapon’s shaft, knocking him back down, and then Tisamon had stepped in and slashed a long line of red across its chest, sufficient to gain its attention.

It lunged with the pike, and he hacked another line across its chest, while Tynisa hovered behind him, just waiting for an opening. She could hear the guards coming down from the deck above, shouting questions and drawing blades. Tisamon was buying them a little time.

The creature abruptly shouldered forward, as if stung from behind, and Tisamon dodged round it, driving his blade in-between its ribs in what was meant to be a killing blow. It shouted something at him again, with real words lost in a guttural accent, and then backhanded the Mantis with one hooked fist, sending him flying across the room.

It was already falling by then, but Tynisa lashed her blade across its throat just to be sure. Then she saw the next contenders appearing, and threw herself aside as their crossbow bolts punched up the stairway. She saw one of Bradawl’s men take a quarrel in the chest, which passed straight through him, armour and all, to embed itself right up to the fletching in the wood of the wall.

Two small men had darted out from below, hunchbacked and long-legged, frantically rewinding their massive double-strung bows, and even more frantically getting out of the way of whatever was following them. It turned out to be another of the hook-fisted creatures, its round head encased in a metal helm, and with no weapons other than its vicious hands. It thundered straight into the middle of the room. Bradawl put himself between it and his master, sword lashing out to cut it across the bicep, but it had already seen the Spider girl, and she was the one it was interested in.

Before it could take a step towards the girl, Tynisa had jabbed it in the back with her blade, sinking only inches into its leathery hide, and a pair of crackling blasts of stingshot had struck it across the chest from the Wasp soldiers now entering the fray. It charged them furiously, and Tynisa saw them raise their swords as they stood in the doorway that led to the deck. Founder meanwhile had loosed his crossbow again at some new target, and Tynisa whirled around to see.

The newcomer was a broad man, clad head to foot in pearl-sheened armour and brandishing some kind of slender lance. From his build alone, Tynisa would have thought him a Beetle. Bradawl lunged at him, his blade scraping off the unknown intruder’s mail. In the next moment, the narrow point of the lance had swept forwards to touch Bradawl’s waiting shield. There was a sharp crack and a bitter smell, and Bradawl was thrown back across the room as though he had been struck with a hammer.

Tisamon was on his feet again, approaching the newcomer cautiously. Founder was still crouching behind his desk, hastily reloading his bow. He looked up at the armoured man and shouted something that included the words, ‘She’s mine!’

The room was now getting very crowded, however spacious it had at first appeared. Tynisa cut across behind Tisamon to get closer to the girl, who was pressed as far into the corner as she could manage.

‘We’re leaving,’ she decided aloud. She saw that the Wasps had finished off the second huge man and were now taking cover behind furniture, trading shots with the little crossbowmen. ‘Tisamon!’ she shouted. The Mantis was still standing between Founder and the armoured man, and Tynisa realized that she did not know how far his honour would stretch when it came to fulfilling this supposed contract to protect the Beetle.

The doorway to the deck above was blocked with Wasps, although the monstrous crossbows of the small intruders were taking a toll on them. There was only one other exit from the room and it involved going out the way all their enemies were coming in.

Tynisa darted forward, forcing the issue. The armoured man turned clumsily as she approached, lunging out for her with the lance. Tisamon took the chance he had thus given her, driving his blade home at the shoulder joint of the man’s armour. It bit, but not deeply enough.

She ducked under the sweeping lance, saw its tip charring a line across the wooden wall. There was a leather pipe connecting it to the man’s back, she noticed, and with a flick of her blade she cut it in half.

She was never sure, thinking back, whether that was the right thing to have done, for she felt instantly as though she had been punched hard, and there came a flash of blue-white light that seared all other details of the room from her mind for a second. Then she was lying on the ground, her head spinning, and the palm of her sword hand was raw and burnt, even the grip of her sword blackened. The armoured man lay on his back across the room from her, already struggling to get up with the help of his small servants.

‘Come on!’ she shouted to the Spider girl, and she saw fear and desperation fighting in the girl’s expression, then desperation finally winning out. She dashed on past the armoured man in a sudden access of courage, but then a gauntleted hand closed on her ankle as she ran.

It was Founder who caught her, before she struck the floor, and Tisamon drove the point of his claw down into the gauntlet to break its grip, and then lashed a backhanded blow into the face of the man’s helm.

The helm cracked, not like metal but like a shell, and the face beneath it was pure Beetle-kinden, though pale as a drowned man’s and twisted in utter fury. The hollow voice emerging from behind the helm became recognizable words: ‘She is ours! You savages cannot take her!’

‘Go!’ Tynisa urged the girl, leading, the way to the front hatch. She had to pass the point where the intruders had come up through, and what she saw down there thoroughly frightened her.

A hole had been chewed in the bottom of the gondola, some machine or creature tunnelling up through the earth below to penetrate the wooden hull, but the tunnel was now entirely awash with water.

Even as she watched, there was a man down there, another of the huge, hook-handed creatures. As it half-swam and half-clambered to the surface, it was surrounded by a silvery nimbus that vanished as soon as it broke the water.

Tisamon was past her now, at the hatch, but he stared at it helplessly. It had been meant for Apt hands, and he could not manage the catches.

Founder literally pushed him out of the way. Behind them they could hear the last of his soldiers and guards being finished off.

He then had the hatch open, flinging it wide with a shout, as a bolt of energy struck him full in the chest, knocking him backwards to the ground, his face fixed in a rictus of shock.

There were Wasp soldiers gathered outside, not those in the pay of the Consortium but the sort Tynisa was more used to.

There was no time to check whether Founder was still alive. Tisamon simply leapt out through the opening, dropping the ten feet of space to land in the midst of them, lashing out at them even as he fell. Two of the Wasp soldiers spun away from him, wounded, while the others scattered, seeking for cover from which to shoot.

Tynisa grabbed the Spider girl, who looked utterly horrified, and slid down the sloping hull, trusting to her Art to slow her fall. Her burden was no help at all, just clinging to her as though she had never climbed a wall in her life.

When it was obvious the girl would not do anything as sensible as run for her life, Tynisa had to drag her three streets away to relative safety before turning back for Tisamon. He was already coming, though, running after them at top speed.

‘Where are the Wasps?’ Tynisa asked him.

‘They encountered our friends from inside,’ was all he said. He glanced away from her to the Spider girl, and Tynisa could see that he wanted to say that she would have been better left behind, but even so he was curious about her. Before he could speak, they heard shouting nearby, and the crackle of a Wasp sting.

‘Away,’ he decided, and they ran off into the muddy streets of Jerez, the Wasps taking to the air behind them.

Nivit was out consulting with his sources but Gaved was supposed to be busy hiding people. He was nominally hiding Thalric, who was both an ungracious guest and an unwilling fugitive. The former Rekef man stalked about Nivit’s premises, prying into the information broker’s records and frightening Skrit. It was obvious that he would decide to leave soon, and then Gaved would get to find out whether he himself would decide to restrain the man, or even be able to.

When the knock on the door came, it was a relief to all of them. Gaved looked through the crack and then opened up hurriedly, bundling Tynisa and Tisamon into the room, and one more fugitive as well.

‘No time to stop,’ Tynisa declared. ‘We have some Wasps to mislead. They’re out searching for us and I don’t want them looking here. Take care of the girl until we get back.’ She looked from Thalric to Gaved, getting little response, and then she and the Mantis were gone, the door swinging shut behind her.

‘“Take care of the girl”?’ Thalric snorted. ‘Are we running a Helleron whorehouse now?’ The new arrival looked at him in alarm, and then turned to Gaved and instantly flinched away from him as well. He saw her face.

He took a deep breath, feeling his heart lurch, and wondered at the vagaries of fate. It was the same girl, of course, unmistakable from the portrait, the one that the strangers had offered such a high reward for. Here she was in the flesh.

His first thought was of the bounty and how happy Nivit would be with this catch. It was the automatic reflex in his trade. His second reaction was to actually look closely at this wretched creature that parties unknown were so desperate to recover.

She was definitely something like Spider-kinden, but Gaved had travelled widely enough to note subtle differences: her skin was remarkably pale, her hair an odd compromise between gold and silver, and her eyes almost the same gleaming colour. Just as with the picture that was so uncannily lifelike, he was forced to conclude that she was not quite like any Spider-kinden he had ever seen, any more than she suited the Beetle-kinden clothing she had been dressed in, that now hung sopping wet about her due to the rain.

And she was clearly terrified, wide-eyed and trembling, which in a Spider would have indicated a remarkable lack of control, and of course she was not painted or made up as Spider-kinden, both men or women, almost always would be. She was a mystery indeed, but he could not rid himself of the thought that she was a potentially profitable one.

Thalric had approached her with a slightly disdainful look. ‘And who are you?’ he asked her. She flinched back from him, and resisted his attempt to relieve her of her soaking cloak, wrapping it about herself even more tightly.

‘My name is Cap… is Thalric,’ announced the ex-Rekef officer, neither harshly nor kindly. ‘Tell me who you are, and why they brought you here.’

Gaved leant close, intrigued, seeing something in Thalric’s tone catch with her.

‘Sef,’ she said, and then repeated herself at Thalric’s frown. ‘My name. Sef.’

Not a Spider-kinden name, that, but I wasn’t really expecting one, Gaved decided.

‘So what significance are you in this, Sef?’ Thalric pressed. ‘Speak, now.’

‘I don’t know,’ the girl mumbled. ‘They took me and brought me.’

‘She’s a slave,’ said Gaved, and Thalric raised an eyebrow at him.

‘Oh yes?’

‘You’re talking like a master, she’s answering like a slave,’ the hunter explained. ‘She’s got the strangest accent I ever heard, but some things just don’t change wherever you go.’ Her accent is the same as her Beetle master’s, and I’d never heard the like of that from anywhere either.

‘The Empire’s a big place,’ Thalric said, studying Sef again. Her lips were pressed tightly together and she was trembling still.

‘You’d have to go a long way,’ Gaved told him, ‘to find an accent I didn’t recognize. Spotting the differences is part of my stock in trade. She’s certainly from nowhere near here. So whose slave are you, girl? Where did you run from?’ He could not quite match Thalric’s authority, and eventually the other man repeated his question for him.

The word she said, unfamiliar and spoken in her unusual accent, that stretched some vowels and clipped others, meant nothing to them, but Gaved translated it as something like ‘Scolaris’, which could conceivably be the name of some Spider city-state.

‘Where’s that, somewhere in the Spiderlands?’ Thalric asked her, and she shook her head mutely. Thalric hissed in annoyance and moved forwards – just a brief abortive movement – and Sef fell back, shielding her head as if waiting for a blow.

There was a long pause, Thalric considering her with contempt, then he shrugged. ‘We’ll wait for the Mantis and his get to come back. Then they can explain why they’ve foisted this simpleton on us.’

He stalked off to peruse some more of Nivit’s records and Gaved tentatively approached the girl, crouching down and then sitting himself close to her, his back resting against the rough-cast wall.

‘All right, then, Sef,’ he said softly, not looking at her. ‘So you’re a runaway slave. And your masters are after you.’

He had intended no more than to state the obvious, but he caught her look and it shook him. He knew the plight of the fugitive. He had lived the chase vicariously from following the trail of the hunted slave, the deserter, the thief. He knew the fear of capture, but the panic, the sheer terror on Sef’s face, cut into him like a blade. She gazed at him with horror, and she looked around Nivit’s hut with horror, and on the very ground and air as though it was a nightmare that she could not break free from. He had never before witnessed such cringing fear, until the moment her masters were mentioned, when it doubled and redoubled in her expression. She would be screaming now, he thought, if she dared, and so instead she was screaming inside.

He felt a sudden pang inside him – a brief moment of pain and regret. ‘They turned up here, you see, with your picture and a comfortable reward,’ he said, as gently as possible.

Something twisted within her, hunching her over so that her hair concealed her features. He could hear the violent shuddering of her breath.

‘You might as well know that I’m a hunter. I track people down for money. I don’t often get them delivered to me like this, but that’s what I do. So tell me what I should be doing next.’

He thought she merely shrugged, but then saw her shoulders quiver again, and caught a glimpse of tears on her half-hidden face. She was definitely not Spider-kinden, at least not of any breed he knew, for she would not have lasted a day in the Spiderlands.

‘But if you tell me just exactly what you are and where you come from, maybe I’ll come up with a reason to change my mind.’ He thought of what Nivit might say to that, and felt wretched for it. It seemed his curiosity had overmastered his habitual greed but, beyond that, the strangeness of her had got to him.

He gave her time, let her think, whilst Thalric cast occasional sharp glances at him, as though he was making her some kind of improper proposal. Probably thinks I’m letting the race down by talking to lesser kinden.

‘I come from Scolaris,’ Sef whispered.

‘That doesn’t help me, girl. I’ve never heard of it. How far? In which direction?’

‘It is down there.’ She gestured. ‘In the water. In the lake.’

Gaved felt his stomach suddenly twist with something like vertigo. In the tense and unpleasant silence that followed he remembered Nivit’s dark words about the lights beneath Lake Limnia. Impossible. He saw that Thalric had now stopped reading and was looking over at them, his expression frozen. Impossible. But he had already spent too much time here in Jerez and around the lake. Go to any of the Skaters’ wretched drinking holes, find a bandy-legged creature too drunk to stand upright. They would soon tell you about the lights in the lake, about the boats that went missing, the strange wreckage sometimes found, all the other stories that the Empire had long dismissed as yet more lies such as the Skater-kinden delighted in telling, for no other reason than that falsehood was in their blood.

Do I really want to know this? ‘There’s… a city in the lake?’ Gaved enquired carefully.

‘Three,’ Sef said tonelessly. ‘Genavais, Peregranis and Scolaris.’

‘Spider cities,’ Gaved said.

‘Once,’ Sef confirmed in a whisper. ‘But not since the masters came.’

‘This isn’t making any sense,’ Thalric snarled, disgusted. ‘She’s mad. She must be.’

She could be mad. Gaved looked into Sef’s frightened face and decided he could believe that. It would be the easiest way to explain her, too… save for those others who were so desperate to regain her. Three cities that he had never heard of? Three cities in the lake…

He began to stand up, and she suddenly caught at the sleeve of his long coat, so that he froze halfway.

‘I want to tell you,’ Sef hissed urgently, ‘because they don’t want you to know. They will kill me just because they don’t want you to know.’

Gaved looked towards Thalric, but the ex-Rekef man simply shrugged and went back to his reading. Gaved slowly sat down again.

‘So tell me then,’ he said.

‘Ours. They were our cities,’ said Sef, keeping her voice very low, as though she was afraid that her pursuers would hear her from somewhere else in Jerez, or across the silent surface of Lake Limnia. ‘We tell ourselves, mother to daughter. They were our cities, and the masters were once our slaves, long ago.’

‘What masters?’ Thalric demanded. ‘What slaves?’

Gaved sent him an angry look, but behind it he was still pondering. ‘Beetle-kinden,’ he then said. ‘The man who came to us was Beetle-kinden, coming out of a wet night, all armour and no cloak… Well, if he’s from the lake he wouldn’t need to worry about getting rained on.’

‘Beetle-kinden…’ Thalric started off derisively, but then clearly thought about it, and Gaved guessed the path his mind was taking.

‘In the bad old days, the Apt races were nothing but slaves in many places, before the revolution.’

‘Revolution, yes.’ Sef was looking from Gaved’s face to Thalric’s. ‘Our cities, that we made, that we wove and filled with air, but then they cast us down. We tell each other all of this, mother to daughter. They chained us with their machines and their weapons. They sat where we had sat, and cast us down to where they had once been.’

‘Only justice,’ said Thalric dryly. ‘Anyway, the Spiders of the Spiderlands seem to be doing well enough for themselves, so this lot must have been an inferior breed.’

‘Or just lacking enough space to manoeuvre,’ Gaved said softly. ‘Cities beneath the lake, and not great cities, surely – where could they go, when their slaves rose up against them?’

‘You’re speculating.’

Gaved nodded. ‘And all we have is her word, and all that’s probably made of is whatever folk tales she’s cobbled together. Still…’ He sensed the lake outside, that great expanse of water stretching past the horizon, unplumbed, marsh-edged, a haunt of Skater bandits and monstrous creatures.

‘It’s nonsense and she’s mad,’ Thalric declared, though a little uneasily.

‘Please,’ Sef said, tugging again at Gaved’s sleeve. ‘they will come for me. They will take me back.’

‘You escaped all this,’ Thalric pointed out. ‘So it can’t be that difficult. But why haven’t we heard of this before.’

‘I was supposed to die,’ Sef said simply. ‘Master Saltwheel had us taken to his testing grounds, to his laboratory. We were supposed to die, to be killed by his weapon. But it ruptured the wall of the city. The others died, but I grasped the air and held it to me, and then I swam. The others died or were caught, but I swam and swam towards the light. We have escaped before. Into the lake itself, the caves or the deep water. They sniff us out, though. They always bring back the bodies, for everyone to see. There is nowhere safe between the walls of our world that we may hide from them. So I… I came up to gather air. I knew that Master Saltwheel would hunt me down, so I left that world.’

The Wasps were now staring at her, quite blankly. She bared her white teeth at them, shaking constantly with fear and desperation and sheer frustration.

‘To this horrible place!’ she suddenly cried out, words long held trapped below now forcing their way to the surface. ‘To this horrible empty place! This open place where there is no end to it, and no walls, and where everything weighs me down! And the surface is too far away overhead and too great, so great, and the light of it burns my skin by day! And my throat and eyes hurt all the time, and… and… and… They will catch me eventually and kill me with the long, slow death, and it would have been better if Master Saltwheel had killed me with his machines than I ever came out here.’ Her hands balled into fists that were pressed close to her face, a face contorted with an uncontrollable horror of everything within her sight and knowledge.

‘Saltwheel,’ Gaved repeated. Amidst this madness it was such an ordinary-sounding Beetle name that it chilled him all on its own.

‘Weapons testing?’ Thalric pointed out. ‘If any of this is true, how could they be Apt, operating underwater? You can’t have any artifice without something so basic as fire, surely?’ His eyes narrowed at Sef, who had fallen into a crouch, hands still raised to her face. ‘Answer me, slave!’

‘We have fire,’ Sef replied, sounding almost proud. ‘We have fire. We fill our cities with air. But the masters, they have engines that need no fire, no air.’ She inhaled a long breath. ‘I have told you all now. They will hunt me down and they will kill me, but I have told you.’

Gaved glanced at Thalric again, seeing that the other man’s scepticism was almost entirely shattered. No doubt he was thinking like a Rekef again, thinking about a possible future threat to the Empire he had supposedly turned his back on.

Lake Limnia is out there. Gaved could feel it, its watery chasms, its unplumbed mystery. If only I could see! He would never see it, of course – even if it was anything more than Sef’s imagination.

Best to hide her, though, just in case. He and Nivit could do that, if only he could convince Nivit to help. Best to hide her, whether this Saltwheel she mentioned was a Beetle of land or water.

The door rattled then and they all jumped, even Thalric. It was just Tisamon and Tynisa returning, though, pausing in the doorway at the sight of the pale and worried faces of the two Wasp-kinden within.