Blood of the Mantis

Nineteen

It had been a tiring day. His new responsibilities were making demands on him he had not expected. Totho had never seen himself as a factory overseer.

But that was not quite true, if he was being honest with himself. Every artificer who rose to the top of his trade should be guiding lesser craftsmen, having them work to his designs, delegating the burdens of his trade. Of course he had wanted that, but seen no chance of ever achieving it.

He had not wanted this, though. Drephos, Colonel-Auxillian of the Wasp Empire, had taken him on eagerly as an apprentice, but the folk of Helleron were not so open-minded. It all seemed insane to him, but that was only because he had done his best to forget his childhood, even his studentship spent at the College. A halfbreed was never popular. A halfbreed was cursed by his mixed blood. Collegium was a cosmopolitan city and even there Totho had never been allowed to forget the stain of his birth that was so plain in his features.

Here in Helleron, blood mattered greatly, and the local Beetles were hard on halfbreeds. People like Totho got given the worst jobs, or worked in the criminal fiefs, or else starved and begged. Then Drephos had come along and been made governor of all Helleron, and set Totho up as master of whole factories, giving orders to foremen and artificers who spat at him behind his back, and stared at him mutinously when he faced them.

It had affected their work. They had dragged it out and dawdled, and even turned out shoddy pieces in the belief he was not artificer enough to know the difference. For a tenday he had agonized over it, trying to understand how he could make them see he was not a bad man: how could he win them over to his side?

Today he had awoken with his answer: he could not. He could be the most generous and even-handed overseer the city had ever seen, and to them he would still be just a halfbreed.

So today he had gone in with a squad of Wasp soldiers. The Wasps cared for halfbreeds even less, if possible, but Totho was Sergeant-Auxillian now and he simply gave them orders in a calm, clear voice that was obeyed. They all knew he had Drephos’s ear.

He had not waited for the first slight to emerge. He knew just how it would have worked back at the College: the workers here would have behaved, good as gold, until the soldiers left. He had singled out three people that he hoped were the ringleaders.

He had ordered the soldiers to drag them before him, and he had hoped even then that a few words of warning would be enough. Their expressions had remained mulish and sullen, however, promising further mutiny.

They had been mulish and stubborn, he assured himself, in retrospect. It was not just my imagination.

He had ordered them to be whipped. So the soldiers had whipped them, and gone on whipping them until he had spoken loud enough to stop them. From that he had gained a large degree of fearful obedience from the workers and a small amount of surprised respect from the soldiers.

For the actual flogging they had been tied to machines inside the factory, where everyone could see. Totho had stood on the overseer’s gantry with the leader of the soldiers, gripping the rail and waiting for that wince-inducing moment when the lash came down.

It never came: the lash rose and then fell, but the wince never manifested, and there had been something changing inside him, something born in him when the first cry came up. Not remorse and not regret, but something like satisfaction.

You bastards have kept me down all my life, he had thought. Now see how you like it.

Once the whip had stopped cracking, he had told the silent factory floor – silent save for the whimpering of his victims – that any future failings would be punished by death, and at the time he had meant it.

Now he looked back on that, all of it, and tried to see it as Che would, tried to feel appalled by what he had done, but that was harder and harder the longer he worked for Drephos. He no longer asked himself what he was becoming, for he knew now that he had already become.

Kaszaat came to him that night, as she often did, moving her smooth brown body over his in rhythms that were a language older than talking. He did not know it but she could read his mood and his history from his love-making: the more gloomy and the more grim his day, the tighter he clutched at her and the fiercer his passion, seeking in her body what he could not find in the shadow-world he had come to inhabit.

This time, though, he found something different in her: a desperation and a need. She wept when the climax came, her nails biting into him, thighs locked about him in a furious grapple.

He thought she would turn away to sleep then, but still she lay upon him, trembling slightly, and he closed his eyes and let the sensation of his own skin explore the pressure of hers upon him.

‘Totho,’ she murmured at last, almost too softly for him to hear.

He made a questioning noise.

‘After the battle, what happened between Drephos and you?’

Immediately he tensed, feeling his stomach lurch. How he would like to forget what had happened then, his betrayal, and his later confusion in trying to work out just who exactly he had betrayed.

‘It was the prisoner girl, no?’ Kaszaat asked. ‘That Beetle girl they brought in. As soon as you heard of it, you were different.’

He said nothing.

‘Totho, I’m not stupid. You’re no Spider-kinden. I read you. You knew her.’

He sighed, heavily. When she received no more answer than that, Kaszaat jabbed him in the shoulder. ‘Curse you, you bastard! Just speak to me.’

‘Yes, I knew her,’ he said.

‘More than that?’

‘What?’ He sat up, half-displacing her. ‘What do you want?’

‘The truth,’ she said. ‘Because I, too, have a truth. I want to tell you a truth, but I need to trust you. Can I trust you?’

‘Can you trust me?’

Her eyes blazed. ‘Yes, Totho. You think you’re the only one with secrets? Nobody else has anything to hide?’

Well, yes. ‘I… What do you want to hear? I knew her from the College. I… liked her. I liked her very much. Happy now?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘More than like – you loved.’

Why is she doing this?

‘I don’t know.’ Honesty prompted him to add. ‘I thought I did. Perhaps I did, but I don’t know.’

‘You let her go.’

He said nothing.

‘You made a deal with Drephos. You gave him something in return for this girl’s freedom,’ she persisted. It was not true, of course, but not so very far off.

‘He…’ Why not let her in on the madness? ‘Drephos wanted the snapbow plans spread further, for his wretched march of progress. So he had Che… had the girl take them to the Sarnesh.’

All quite back to front, but it almost made more sense that way. He saw it was something she had never even considered, and he could hardly blame her for that.

‘So Drephos, he trusts you,’ Kaszaat remarked.

‘Does he?’

‘No,’ she told him. ‘I know, because he came to me. He told me to get what I could from you. To sleep with you, bind you to close me. He knows sex, knows how it is used. He does not understand, but he knows the purposes.’

He may not have the equipment left, Totho thought, considering the terrible accident that had stripped Drephos of so much. The notion that the man might have found a mechanical replacement was so horrifyingly incongruous that Totho nearly choked on it.

‘So, so why are you telling me this now?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why am I? Perhaps because of what they brought out of Drephos’s factory today – you have heard about that? The twins told me. They are cold, those two. They talk almost never, save to each other and Drephos. Yet they talked to me, then. They had to. It was too much to bear in silence.’

‘The corpses? I heard there were bodies.’

‘Forty-five dead, prisoners, all of them, from the fief-battles,’ Kaszaat whispered. ‘I heard their faces were black, with eyes popped almost out. Poisoned, that means – but that makes no sense.’

Totho felt something twist in his stomach, some artificer’s inner instinct trying to speak to him.

‘He has a new weapon,’ Kaszaat said softly. ‘Something even better than the snapbow, to use against the Sarnesh.’

They lay together for a long while, Kaszaat sliding off him to nestle under his arm, with her head resting on his chest. Would it feel like this with Che? He realized that he would never know. So Drephos had found a new way of killing people. Did it matter, though? Could Totho criticize, having done his own work so well?

‘What are we doing here?’ he murmured. ‘Why don’t we just leave?’

‘Because there is a sword,’ she told him, ‘And here we are on the right side of the guard…’ Her voice shook and she stopped.

‘What is it?’

She would not say, but she clung to him closer, she who had always seemed the more experienced of them, in all walks of life, older and wiser in so many things.

‘Kaszaat, please,’ he said. ‘I promise you I’m not spying on you for Drephos, or the… the Rekef, or whoever else you think.’

‘I don’t think that. Not you.’ She made a single painful sound of amusement. ‘Who would trust you to do that? You have only recently turned your back on the Lowlands, turned your weapons on your friends. You’re a spinning wheel and nobody knows where you’ll stop. Why else would Drephos point me at you?’

The cruelty of it cut him. He pressed his lips together and said nothing.

‘Oh Totho, I’m sorry,’ she said after a moment. ‘I’m sorry, but I am frightened – who can I trust? What do you think of me, you, who love this other?’

‘I don’t know. I… I like you a great deal…’

‘Totho…’

‘What? Tell me, please. I need to know-’

There was something cold now at his throat. A blade? It was the work-knife he had left beside the bed, as sharp as any artificer could desire.

He felt no fear at all.

‘Are you going to kill me, then?’ he asked her. ‘For what reason?’

Her hand was shaking, which worried him more than the knife itself. ‘How could you turn yourself on your own people?’ she asked.

‘You mean the Battle of the Rails? They weren’t my people. They were Sarnesh,’ he said, almost without thought, but the subsequent response he came up with was hardly better: I have no people. In the end he just continued, ‘You’ve worked with Drephos for how long, now? You can’t say you didn’t know what he was doing. You were up there with him – with me – watching them bombard Tark into ash. What did you imagine he wanted your skills for?’

He was getting angry, which was unwise considering the knife, but he could not see what the problem was, why she had suddenly broken out of her shell like this.

‘I am safe with Drephos,’ she whispered. ‘So long as I serve him, I shall never see his weapons turned against me. I need never fear.’

‘So?’ he prompted. Gently he reached up to take the knife but her grip on it was too tight.

‘They say there is trouble come to Szar,’ she said heavily. ‘They say the Queen is dead. They say there are soldiers now coming to my own city. They say that… there will be an uprising, and that it will be put down.’

‘And you think we’ll be sent there?’

‘I know it. I can feel it. Totho,’ she said. ‘But I can’t do it. Not my own. I’m not as strong as you.’

Strength? Is that what it was?

At last she released the knife, and he cast it aside, hearing it clatter against the wall.

‘Will you tell him about this?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said, shocked. What does she think I am, some kind of traitor…?

Quite.

‘Never,’ he insisted. ‘Trust me, please.’

‘Totho, I cannot find a way out,’ she whispered. ‘I have worked for him for too long. Now I will pay. He will kill me.’

He had nothing to say to that. He knew Drephos was a man devoid of most emotions, but that his march of progress was a mechanized inevitability whose wheels would grind up anyone who stood before it. Instead, he held Kaszaat close, wanting to reassure her that Drephos would not harm her, or that he, Totho, would protect her. Both statements stuck in his throat, and he could not get them out.