Blood of the Mantis

Twenty-Four

Lake Limnia at night, and the great expanse of moonlit water was chopped into a million pieces by the drizzle, blotched by swathes of reed, pockmarked by the shadows of Skater rafts and boats. It should have been nobody’s idea of a pleasant sight.

Tisamon stood by the shores of Lake Limnia and stared across the rain-dappled waters. Every so often the clouds grew ragged enough that a despairing slice of moon could claw itself free of them, and then its clean, pure light appeared in the lake itself as only a pockmarked, ruined reflection, a face given over to disease and ruin.

If I was a seer, what omens would I make from this?

Around him the Skater-kinden padded on their stilting errands and left him be. Of course there might be other travellers about tonight. Any moment a patrol of Wasps could troop down between the leaning shacks, with arrest or execution on their minds. In truth, he had hoped for that, but for once the Empire was maddeningly absent and his claw remained unbloodied.

He was alone with his thoughts, and he was finding that uncomfortable, because it meant they strayed from the business in hand: the mysterious box and the forthcoming auction. When his mind was let free, to coast like a kite in the gusting wind, it asked the same question, What is she doing now? It had been a long time since Tisamon had been plagued with such imaginings: seeing pearlescent armour, a long, straight sword held perfectly poised, the curving talons of her thumbs, the elemental grace of her fighting stance. Is even this place, even the great distance I have placed between us, not enough? He had hoped that she would recede in his mind, along with the miles that separated them, but he might as well have brought Felise Mienn with him.

She is so swift, so deadly! How close she came to killing me, when first we met. There had been no other, not for a long time, to challenge him so. There had only ever been one other who had set his blood racing in the clash of blades.

Atryssa, forgive me.

The spectre of Tynisa’s dead mother walked before him then, with accusing eyes. Mantids paired for life, it was well known, and many were those who then lived out long years as widow or widower. For life always, and he had bound himself to Atryssa, given her a child even, and now… this, her.

He tried to banish the Dragonfly duellist from his mind, but he could no more do so than he could defeat her, blade to blade. She danced and dodged, and was before him still. He felt like weeping, and then he felt like killing.

‘Hoi, Mantis,’ came a voice, and he whirled about, his claw raised to strike. Nivit had hailed him from a safe distance, though, the bald, angular little man regarding him cautiously.

‘Is it time?’ Tisamon demanded.

‘They sent me to fetch you,’ the Skater told him, his expression carefully neutral. ‘Anyone else looking out over the lake like that, I’d say there’s a girl in it, but you, I reckon you’re just thinking about cutting throats, am I right?’

‘Nothing other,’ Tisamon agreed shortly, and stalked past the other man towards the looming hulk of the grounded Buoyant Maiden.

Scyla had hidden her auction house the best way possible, by having it come into being only when she was ready to sell. Founder Bellowern and the other buyers had discovered only days before, through a succession of bewildered Skater messengers, where their prize could be won.

Bellowern was not the only one to have fallen by the wayside. It seemed that collecting the exotic was a hazardous business within the Empire. Nivit guessed that almost half the wealthy and the powerful who had come to Jerez in response to Scyla’s invitation were no longer there. Some, like Palearchos and Founder Bellowern, were dead. Others had been arrested by the Wasps in the Empire’s own futile attempts to find the box. More had simply decided that the stakes were not worth the gain.

Out on the lake, in the gathering dusk, Scyla’s gold now paid for a diligent team of Skater-kinden to piece together a great raft. They towed mats of reeds behind their row-boats or sailing dinghies, thus to haul the pieces of Scyla’s theatre into place. There were walls, too, a building as grand as any native home in Jerez taking shape entirely out on the water. Soon the buyers would congregate there, narrow-eyed in suspicion of each other. Soon Scyla would have to appear there too, from behind whatever mask she was wearing, and present them with the Shadow Box.

Achaeos and the others sat in Nivit’s office and planned. Jons Allanbridge had already gone to stoke up the Buoyant Maiden, now repaired in readiness for the anticipated getaway.

‘Out on the lake,’ said Thalric.

‘Of course out on the lake,’ Nivit told him. ‘Business on the lake’s standard practice hereabouts. I’d have thought you’d known that.’

Thalric sought out Sef, who was sitting close to Gaved. Despite rumours in town of strange hunters abroad at night, there had been no further attempt to take her. ‘The lake,’ Thalric said, ‘has become different to me now. What is the plan, then?’

‘Scyla will have guards,’ Tisamon said, ‘or lookouts, anyway. If nothing else, she has no guarantee that one of her genuine buyers will not try force. Water is not our element, not the best for employing stealth.’

Nivit’s expression said Speak for yourself, but he glanced about at the others, waiting.

‘Also, we cannot rely on magic,’ Achaeos remarked. Thalric snorted at that, and even Tynisa looked doubtful, but the Moth shrugged. ‘It matters not. There are other magicians, even Scyla herself. Believe in it or not, we cannot hide ourselves with magic.’

‘Nivit, can you get a boat?’ Thalric asked.

‘No problem there. We’ve all kinds of boats here. What’re you doing with it? My people can see better in the dark than you think. You’ll never get a boat there without them spotting you.’

‘I don’t need to.’ The Wasp smiled drily. ‘This is old spycraft for you: when you can’t go round the back, just walk in the front door as though you were meant to be there. Why is everyone punting out to this place, anyway?’

‘Because they want the box,’ Tynisa said, seeing where he was leading.

‘Well then, why not us? Only Scyla herself will know who’s genuine. There will be other buyers coming out of the woodwork that nobody else has guessed at. So let’s just walk in.’

‘And then?’ Gaved asked dubiously.

‘And then we take it,’ Thalric said. ‘You people want this thing, whatever it is? Then we take it. We kill Scyla, and we kill anyone else who gets in the way.’ His smile broadened in the pause that followed. ‘Squeamish, after all? Then be thankful you have someone of my profession here. This is nothing new to me. I’ll wager your Stenwold Maker would agree, and I see Master Mantis there is nodding. This is just an operation like any other. We have arrived, made our plans, gathered our information, and now the operation must be wrapped up, the objective recovered, and then we’re gone into the night. The Rekef Outlander do it every day.’

‘You’re a cold one,’ Tynisa said. Thalric’s smile only acknowledged her statement.

‘He’s right,’ said Tisamon. ‘This is how it must be.’

‘And if they won’t let us in armed?’ Tynisa asked. ‘I wouldn’t, if I were Scyla.’

Thalric displayed his open hands to her. ‘When am I unarmed?’

‘You’re assuming that we’ll trust you with this business,’ she told him. ‘You’re not one of us, Thalric. You’re only here because your own people want you dead.’

His smile withered. ‘And be glad they do, because you need me. I’m hard where the rest of you are soft, with your Collegium-bred philosophy and humanity! Not to mention the mystic, and the renegade who won’t face up to his own birthright.’

At that, Gaved had a slight smile, a fighting smile. His fingers flexed, but Thalric sneered at him.

‘Tisamon’s got steel, perhaps, but he won’t stab a man in the back like I will, and right now you need a bastard like me.’

He looked from face to face, challenging them to gainsay him. ‘I know, you don’t trust me. Do you think that wounds me? I’m Rekef, so I’m used to being distrusted.’

‘How happy you must be,’ Tynisa told him.

‘I’m not seeing many smiles in this room tonight, and if you have another way of doing this, just tell me. Will you have your Beetle pilot coast his airship in, and hope they mistake it for the moon? Will you swim beneath the raft and bore a tunnel up through it with your knife? Mine is the only way that gets us in safely, and it must be by my own choice of men or none at all.’

‘Your choice?’ Tynisa demanded.

‘This is a high-risk enterprise,’ Thalric said. ‘If there is an assault from without, Scyla will instantly flee, and you will neither catch her nor even recognize her. But if we are present there amongst the buyers, what can she do? To achieve her aim she must stand before them, she must present the box. At my signal we will strike. Speed and surprise will win the day for us. I shall take the box and fly to shore, while the rest will cover my retreat, and then make the best escape they can.’

‘One change to your plan,’ Tynisa interupted, holding his gaze.

‘Name it.’

‘Gaved takes the box. You fight your way out with us, Thalric.’

‘Agreed.’ He did not hesitate a moment. ‘You and the Mantis and Gaved are to be my cadre.’

‘I’m flattered,’ said Gaved acidly, and then Sef tugged at his collar.

‘Not on to the lake,’ she whispered. ‘You must not.’

‘It’s you they’re looking for, not us, these aquatics of yours,’ Thalric reminded her. She glared at him and, to Thalric’s obvious amusement, the other Wasp put a protective arm about her shoulders.

‘We won’t be away long,’ Gaved reassured her, ‘and he’s right. Just sit tight here.’

‘They are still searching for me,’ she said, biting her lip.

‘If you are so fearful of being caught, why have you not left already?’ Tisamon demanded harshly. He had never shown either interest or sympathy for the Spider girl.

‘Left?’ Sef breathed, as if there was a world of horror in that world.

‘Left for where?’ Gaved challenged. ‘She’s already on the brink – the very shore – of her world. Where does she know to go to?’

‘And the great hunter will look after her, will he? Bit of a career reversal, isn’t it?’ Thalric asked him.

Gaved’s look was humourless. ‘I will do this job because I promised Master Maker I would. After that, Rekef, I’m gone, and if I take her with me, is it any business of yours?’

Gaved had worked in and around Jerez long enough to learn how to row, and now he powered the little boat forward with heavy strokes, staring fixedly at the receding shore beyond Tisamon and Tynisa, his passengers.

Sef he had entrusted to Nivit’s care. He did not want to even think of that but, of course, rowing freed the mind wonderfully for random thought. Nivit and I, we go back years. Nivit was primarily a businessman, though, and Gaved was being sentimental. We should sell her back to the lake-creatures and be done with it.

He liked to think that, in his line of work, the people he hunted down were criminals, the wicked and the reckless, on the run from justice. Even when he knew that they were merely escaped slaves or fugitives from the torturing hands of the Rekef, he still liked to think that. He liked to feel he was in the right.

Thalric, an uncomfortable presence in the boat’s bows at Gaved’s back, would see ‘right’ as identical to being in the Empire’s interest, or at least would have done so before his fall from grace. Gaved, however, had never quite been able to coax himself into that point of view, and that was why he had spent his life working twice as hard as any imperial soldier just to put a distance between himself and the Emperor.

But I always came back, he reflected. It was hard for a Wasp to make a living alone. Somehow he had always found that the contracts he undertook bore the imperial seal somewhere upon them.

At least Sef was no concern of the Empire. And I will not sell her to the lake-Beetles, and I must hope that Nivit is not tempted to do it. I must hope that our long friendship buys me that indulgence. He had even ceded Nivit all of the gold Stenwold had paid. Iam a fool in so many ways.

Thalric stared out across the misty lake, seeing the occasional flurry as one of the locals skimmed across its surface on some private business. The dark seemed to bring them out in numbers, but then they were creatures best suited to shady business – and so was Scyla. She had always preferred to deal under cover of darkness, preferring to hide even her changeable features.

He wondered if she could even recall what she truly looked like. Did she have to reassemble her own true face in the mirror first thing every morning, and did it then drift, from day to day?

We shall have a reckoning, you and I, he decided. He had nothing personal against Scyla but such a reckoning looked very likely, and it should be himself, Thalric, who dealt with her. He, who had once run her as an agent of the Wasp Empire, should be the one to bring her down.

The great raft was looming up and he saw several boats there already, with Skater-kinden men standing ready to take the painter line. He put a hand on Gaved’s shoulder to halt his rowing, and the little craft coasted the remaining feet until two Skaters captured its prow with their long arms and tied it up. He put a few coins into their hands, good Helleron Centrals that the Skaters preferred to imperial currency. With that evidence of his prosperity from Stenwold’s diminishing bounty, no further questions would be asked of him. It was exactly as he had hoped. Scyla had chosen this place for its advantages, but she must live with its drawbacks too.

He stepped onto the raft, with only a flick of his wings to keep his balance, feeling the twinge of pain in his side still from where Daklan had stabbed him outside Collegium. He normally prided himself on healing quickly, but just now he was glad to have been able to heal at all.

Scyla had miscalculated, of course, in her lust for secrecy. She thought she had her buyers where she wanted them. She believed herself safe from intrusion out here on the lake, far from any shore.

Thalric smiled a little at that thought. He did not know how well Spider-kinden could swim but he knew that they could not fly. Let her squirm how she liked, there would be no swift escape for Scyla this time.

The others were joining him cautiously on the raft, looking not like a rich buyer’s retinue but more like nervous thieves. Tynisa was pressing at her hand, and he saw that the narrow wound there had opened up yet again.

To Lieutenant Brodan, it seemed clear that the murky waters of the lake were a metaphor for where his career was going. I must be mad, to be out here with this wretched woman. Certainly my men all think I’m mad. He could see it in their faces. They had followed him out here, in the rain and cold, but they were heartily regretting it. They had been kicking their heels amongst the reeds for two hours now, waiting in the dark. Occasionally a Skater would spot them as it padded across the choppy waters, and Brodan was sure they would all be laughing at the skulking Wasp-kinden.

It’s just like the last time. He remembered many fruitless nights spent on or by this lake, trying to intercept contraband that seemed to be able to turn invisible at will. Pillaged loot from the Commonweal had been flooding through Jerez: whole libraries of books, armouries of mail and weapons, treasure beyond counting, yet Brodan’s investigators had found such a tiny fragment of it that he suspected the Skaters had given it up out of pity.

And there she was, the source of all his problems. The wretched old creature was perched on a hummock and staring out at the water. She seemed to be whispering to herself and he wondered if she was actually mad, this whole business her private lunacy. That would explain a great deal.

‘I am losing patience,’ Brodan said through gritted teeth. ‘There is nothing for us in this.’

‘Losing patience? Were you ever gifted with that?’ Sykore said sharply, and Brodan unsheathed his sword in automatic response. She turned her head to stare at him, baring her pointed teeth in a hideous grin. ‘Oh, perhaps one day, Captain, but not on this night. You need me this night.’ Her red eyes fixed him to the spot. ‘They are out there now, as is the box – that and your renegade Thalric, and his Lowlander friends, all together.’

Brodan looked back at his carefully picked handful of men, all of them crouching alongside him in the reeds by the lakeside. They were his strongest fliers, able to make the distance between here and the raft while keeping their strength for the fight. ‘Then what are we waiting for?’ he demanded. ‘If there is any chance you know what you’re talking about, then we should go right now. We take the box, we leave. And meanwhile we kill anyone who looks at us funny.’

‘And which is the holder of the box? You cannot tell and, while you decide, she will shift and change and lose you,’ Sykore told him flatly. ‘No, you have no chance until the box is revealed. I shall know immediately, and then you shall go and take it. Not until then, or it shall be lost in the mist. I am afraid, Captain, that you must swallow your impatience and wait.’

‘You go too far,’ he murmured, but he knew he would not follow up the implied threat.

Sykore glanced back to the lake, baring her teeth in a derisive smile. She had seen into his mind, seen how desperate he was to bring back the box, not for any great purpose but for fear of failure. Like so many of these Wasp-kinden, Brodan lived a life entirely dictated by fear – fear of his superiors’ wrath, his peers’ plots and his inferiors’ ambitions. If only the conquered could see their conquerors as I have, they would rise up in revolt tomorrow, she thought. And they would die for it. Fear is the greatest motivator, fear can make a man fearless, so long as you make him fear you more than he fears any other.

Sykore settled back, heedless of the cold and damp, waiting for that magical moment when the Spider-kinden magician would produce the box out into the chill air, whereupon she would send Brodan and his people across the waters.

‘They’re coming.’

Nivit froze midway through checking an account, watching Sef’s head come up and scent the air like an animal. Something guilty twitched inside him. He had just been thinking about the lake-people and their promised bounty.

‘They ain’t coming,’ he said dismissively.

‘They are,’ she whispered. ‘I can smell them.’

Nivit snorted. ‘Oh, right, what do these water-Beetles smell like, then? Other than rotting reeds and lakewater?’

‘They smell of the poisons they use in order to work their machines.’

Nivit stared at her. ‘Girl, that almost made some sense,’ he said, and put the tablet down to approach the door.

‘I can smell them,’ her hollow voice continued, like dead leaves, ‘as they can scent me and, though I have done all my kinden know to hide myself, yet they have found me at last…’

Now that she had mentioned it there was indeed the faintest whiff of something bitter and oily on the air, and Nivit tried to remember whether he had smelled the same when those lake-people actually had come to his door.

‘You… you stay away from the door, why don’t you,’ he ordered, and Sef obediently retreated away into the darkest recesses of his hut. Obediently, that was the key, and what made her story ring even a little true. She did exactly what she was told, like no Spider ever did, even a Spider that had been enslaved. This could be easier than I might hope for.

He went sideways from the door over to one of his spyholes, peering out into the darkened street outside. Girl’s probably imagining the whole thing.

Even as the thought came to him, he spotted a little pacing shadow, a long-legged, hunch-backed figure a little like a Skater, yet not to be confused with them. He jumped to another spyhole and found himself looking at a broad-shouldered form whose outline showed the armour plainly. Two other large figures were waiting in the shadows nearby.

What had she called the man – Saltwheel? A good Beetle name, but these lake-dwellers were not good Beetles. Now Saltwheel, or whoever, was coming over.

Coming about the bounty. Got the money on him, like as not.

Nivit glanced back at the Spider girl, grimacing. Gaved was always too soft, and he’d taken a shine to Sef, but in time he would get over it.

The Skater smiled bitterly. I am going to curse myselffor this in the morning…

But it was very clear to him how the land lay just now. The lake-dwellers wanted her back, but not because she was their slave – a class uncared for and unmourned from what Sef had said. They wanted her back simply because she could tell people about them.

And so can I.

Once they had Sef, they would have no need of Nivit either, not to pay for his services, nor to suffer to talk.

He rushed to the rear of the shack, grabbing Sef’s wrist and dragging her into Skrit’s room. Here was one of his secrets, and he saw Skrit staring up blearily at him from her bed, wondering what was going on. However Nivit was not interested in her but in the crank at the back.

Most Skaters were not Apt: they were not a technical race, not given to artifice or machines. There was a minority that were, though, and this was growing, generation to generation, as Nivit’s kinden slowly underwent a transformation.

Nivit himself was Apt, and he wound the crank as hard as his skinny arms could manage, till a hatch opened smoothly and silently onto a back-alley, even as a mailed fist rapped sharply at his door.

He cocked his head at the new-gaping entrance, and Sef stared at him wide-eyed.

‘Go,’ he hissed, but it took Skrit pushing her forward before she realized what he meant. She looked almost more frightened to be forced to escape alone than on first scenting the lake-dwellers coming.

Then Nivit was padding for the door to confront them, one hand close to his knife-hilt.

Sef shivered in the sudden cold outside, finding herself on an unfamiliar street in this horrible abscess of a community, alone out under the great dark sky. She was glad for the darkness, both because it would hide her from the servants of Master Saltwheel (although not the master himself, for he was proof against the dark) and because she had not yet adjusted to being exposed beneath the sun and her skin burnt red after only a touch of it.

But here she was lost on the streets of this place called Jerez, and somewhere, somewhere close, there would be Master Saltwheel and his servants and slaves patiently groping through the dark for her, and she had nowhere to go. The Skater Nivit had just cast her out. The land-Beetle Bellowern was now dead, his floating palace sacked and his men slain. She was utterly alone.

She had fled the lake because she had known that there was a world out there beyond its skin. She had never guessed how different it would be, though. So many times she had gone from the jewelled envelope of Scolaris up to the lake-top, to gather air and to spy on the busy, spindly-limbed surface dwellers. She had never guessed how difficult it would be to actually live out here, with the heat and the cold, the wind and the appalling void of the sky above. She wanted now to go home to the great arched chambers of Scolaris, but that was one place she could never return to. In the final analysis there was only one star in the sky for her to aim at.

She must find Gaved. He could protect her from the great world and from Master Saltwheel. He had gone across the waters, though, with those others: the stern killer and his Spider-kinden student, and the angry one who hated everyone and himself as well. They had gone to get something that they needed.

She looked down and found that her feet had taken her, without pause or thought, straight to the edge of the lake.

Down there, in the fathoms of darkness, hung the bright cities of her people, stolen from them by the Beetle-kinden, but she was just one missing slave. With the precautions she had taken to mask her scent they would not realize at once that she had returned to the water. If she was swift, she could find Gaved before they detected her, and Saltwheel would still be searching the streets of Jerez, never guessing that she had returned to the waters.

She sloughed off the clothes they had given her, as she would need to swim swiftly tonight. She called on her Art, surrounding herself with a coat of air to sustain her.

A moment later she had sliced into the water in a smooth dive, carrying a silvery sheen with her, next to her skin. With a speed that no land-dweller could have matched she darted off into the water, heading further out into the lake.

‘My next lot, then,’ the Fly-kinden called, in a high voice cutting across the crowd. ‘A folio of plans and designs with alchemical notation dated to within fifty years either side of the Pathic revolution. Their condition is poor, but more than six in ten of the papers can be read. This item is believed to originate in what is now Collegium and represents the much-debated “Illuminate” school of semi-scientific thought.’

He strutted back and forth on his raised platform while a Skater-kinden servant carefully displayed a crumbling leather folder that rested on a silver tray under the cover of a parasol. To Thalric it looked like much of nothing, but there was a quickening of interest amid the small crowd of buyers and their servants. He had not considered that this would be an auction of more than one treasure, but he realised now that Scyla had been stockpiling a few choice acquisitions for just such an opportunity as this, and therefore perhaps many of the buyers now here would have no interest in the box whatsoever.

Scyla herself had made no appearance, or at least not that he could tell. Her proxy here was doing a fair enough job of managing the bidding, encouraging, jibing, pushing up the price, whilst she presumably waited around in the shadows somewhere, hiding behind someone else’s face.

Bidding on the mouldering documents was brisk, and Thalric wondered what truths they might contain, what secrets of the days when the artificer’s craft was just dragging itself out of the morass of mysticism. No doubt it would moulder afresh in the private collection of one of these plutarchs here. He saw a pair of Beetle-kinden bidding against each other stolidly, with single fingers lifted to advise the auctioneer, and a Wasp-kinden woman as well, elegant and grey, her eyes sharp. He wondered whether she was somehow wealthy in her own right, or whether she was merely acting as factor for another.

Probably the documents, however old they looked, were faked. That seemed more than likely, for few here had any idea just how easily Scyla could make herself disappear, so that there would be no direct repercussions for her.

The rain was starting up: the venue had a waxed canvas extended over the auctioneer’s podium to keep his wares dry, but the buyers themselves sat on benches out on the open deck. Thalric guessed that this temporary raft might not have supported the weight of a roof and, anyway, the Skaters were not known for the solidity of their architecture.

He had not noticed which, but one of the Beetles had become the lucky owner of the documents, so the Fly-kinden, dressed as elaborately as any servant to Spider-kinden princesses, now trotted out the next lot: an enamelled silver statue in the Commonweal style, beautiful in execution and pornographic in subject matter, with the acrobatic couple’s wings delicately picked out in gold lace.

Thalric passed his eyes over the audience for the hundredth time. There was no possibility of finding Scyla in it. He had thought that their association would have allowed him to spot… just something, some gesture, some stance, but she was as anonymous as a corpse on a battlefield, lost amongst the flesh of others. There were plenty of others, too, for nobody had been so trusting as to come here alone. Thalric’s little band had therefore attracted no comment.

The Fly continued his banter, up on his stage, the treasures of the world passing through his hands. Some of the bidders left, their one goal attained or thwarted. Most were staying on. There was a feeling – Thalric caught the scent of it – of anticipation, as if they had only been marking time for something greater.

‘My final lot, then,’ announced the Fly-kinden, and Thalric went cold within himself. It was not the proprietary tone, which the Fly had been using throughout, or the fact that the small wooden box had not been presented by a servant but plucked straight from a pocket. Rather it was something in the tilt of the head, that way of standing, that was familiar to Thalric. He was trained to recognize such things, to see through disguises.

But this? It was impossible, and yet he knew it for sure. His instincts were certain, absolute. He had seen her before in the shape of a Beetle, in the shape of a Wasp-kinden officer, in the shape of a Mynan woman. She had even infiltrated Stenwold’s people in the form of one of his own students, and yet Maker had not known.

He leant back so that he could speak to the others without being overheard. They were all on edge from the moment the Shadow Box had been displayed.

‘This curiously carved casket,’ the Fly-kinden was saying, ‘of Mantis-kinden workmanship, very delicately done, and dating to around the time of the Pathic revolution, or very shortly thereafter, this item is believed to be of great ritual significance to the Inapt people of that period.’

‘It’s her,’ hissed Thalric. ‘The Fly is her, I swear.’

‘Her or not,’ Tisamon said, ‘it is time.’ His claw was already on his arm, without his having had any chance to buckle it on. It was a night of wild ideas and Thalric’s veins sang magic to him. Tonight he could believe in anything.

He turned back to the Fly – to Scyla – who was concluding her patter. They were all unarmed here aside from the Mantis, but he was a Wasp. He sensed Tisamon behind him, about to make his lunge.

Let the Mantis take the brunt, he decided, waiting for the man’s move.

It came, but not from Tisamon.

The Wasp-kinden woman, whose identity Thalric never discovered, suddenly shouted out a command and half a dozen men from various points across the room suddenly lurched forward. They had appeared to be there as independent buyers or their retinues, but abruptly they were as one and drawing knives, rushing for the stage.

Someone else wants to receive the prize without the price.

Thalric did not need to make a signal. Tisamon was already past him, knocking over a Beetle-kinden collector in his rush forward. His claw swept in and he caught the nearest knifeman in the back, without even slowing, vaulting the stricken man’s body. Another knife-wielder was wrestling with some other guard in the crowd, who had misinterpreted the move as an attack on his master. Three had gained the edge of the podium but one had already fallen, stabbed by one of Scyla’s hired locals.

The Fly-kinden, Scyla in poise but utterly otherwise in looks, surged forward as the first man, a Beetle-kinden, tried to jump on to the platform. Thalric only saw her hand go in, but there was a knife in it when it withdrew, and the man fell backwards. Then the Fly spotted Tisamon.

Thalric saw, actually saw, the shape of her face flicker, and he wondered whether she recognized who Tisamon was, or whether Spiders, for all their disdain, still had nightmares about the avenging Mantis warrior who might come for them one day.

Two of her Skaters tried to get in Tisamon’s way, with shortswords in hand and wearing cuirasses of metal scales, but he had killed the both of them swifter than Thalric could follow him. A third was struck down by Gaved’s sting as it lanced over the heads of the crowd, which was becoming more chaotic by the moment. The wiser collectors were making their exits, and others were trying to send their men against the stage itself, or against those who were trying to attack it. With hands and elbows, Tynisa was fighting her way through the crowd to take the box as soon as Scyla was brought down. Thalric used his wings to wrench him up from the throng, feeling a stab of pain for his efforts, but he needed a clear shot.

Abruptly the air itself was busy. He saw a dozen Wasp soldiers appear from over the lake, their crackling sting bolts already lancing the crowd. Some of these newcomers landed close to Tisamon on the stage, but he killed them even as they touched down and before they realized their error. Tynisa dispatched another one, lancing a borrowed knife between the armour plates covering the man’s back. Thalric felt his sting burning the palm of his hand in anticipation, but he held it back.

They are still my people, he thought, and besides he had other prey tonight.

Scyla had backed away, her outline shimmering slightly, until the wall that backed the auction house platform was at her shoulderblades. Trapped, thought Thalric, trapped by her own devices. A true Fly-kinden would not have left herself so helpless.

He watched Tisamon lunge for her. And she flew. Thalric almost fell out of the air himself, because she was most definitely Scyla, her Spider face shifting in and out amongst those Fly-kinden features, but she had stolen the Fly wings along with the face, darted over the startled Tisamon’s head and out into the night.

Thalric let out a shout of anger, at his own assumptions as much as at her escape, and Scyla turned to look round, despite herself. Their eyes met briefly with a shock of recognition.

He felt the blast of his sting searing his palm as it departed, saw it strike the Fly-kinden body, that became abruptly a Spider-kinden body, and send it spinning, unfit for the air, doubled over about the charred hole he had torn in her. The box dropped out of her fingers, and he was instantly rushing for it, aware that Gaved was on the wing too, the pair of them converging and yet too slow, both of them already too late.

The impact of his shot had knocked her past the rear wall of the auction place, beyond the edge of the raft. Thalric saw Gaved pass in front of him, watched Scyla’s body tumble from the borrowed air into the water, to vanish into the darkness.

And the box went too and, although it was wood, it was gone in seconds, as though whatever it contained was as heavy as stones.

For a second, Thalric was tempted to dive after it, into the chill of Lake Limnia, but he and Gaved both pulled themselves up before breaking the surface.

Thalric swore to himself. He did not care about the box itself, but failure cut deeply. He circled back over the auction raft, which was rapidly emptying, and saw Tisamon and Tynisa finish off a handful of patrons who had decided that the pair were to blame for whatever had happened.

He was just returning back over the wall when he heard Gaved cry out in astonishment. Looking back, he saw something emerging from the water – something that was slender and pale.

It was an arm. Out of context, it took him far too long to realize that. It was an arm and hand, and the hand was clutching the Shadow Box. It was Sef, reaching out from the water as one born to it, her hand, her arm, then her head sliding out into the air till she was exposed up to her waist in a shock of spray. She cried something wordless – or a word the Wasps did not know – and Gaved dipped in the air towards her.

There was something beneath her, Gaved saw. Although it was dark, he saw a great pale bulk rising beneath her. He had no way of knowing how huge, how far away, but it seemed to have scythe-like jaws, and it loomed larger and larger as it rushed upwards to pluck her from the water’s surface.

Gaved dived down without a second thought, and she held out the box to him, her eyes wide with terror.

‘Yours!’ she cried to him, and he pitched lower, almost skimming the surface, and caught at her arm near the elbow. She was slippery with lake water, but he locked his fingers into her flesh and wrenched her upwards, his wings powering as hard as they could. He was a good flier, Gaved, since his profession demanded it, chasing fugitives for miles at a time, but he was not so good as to be able to drag her entire from the water. Still, he fought to do so, hauling her up and up, fighting against her weight, as she cried out from the ferocity of his grip. The Shadow Box teetered in her hand.

She was now out past her hips, then her knees, and he felt his lungs straining, the constant beating of his wings sapping his strength. Then she was clear, toes leaving the water’s meniscus, and he strove for height – enough height to escape the monstrous thing that was coming behind.

Abruptly she felt lighter and he was climbing rapidly. For a mad second Gaved feared that the thing in the water had scissored her in half, but then he saw that someone else had caught at her other arm. To his lasting surprise he saw Thalric, face white with the effort but flying upwards and upwards, staring fixedly ahead as if at some goal.

Gaved followed his line of sight and saw the most beautiful thing he could have wished for: Jons Allanbridge’s Buoyant Maiden bobbing over the lake like a second moon, with a rope ladder already unreeling towards them. He saw Achaeos at the rail, a drawn bow in his hands, the arrow leaping past him to dart down at the surface of the lake – only to be intercepted by one of the Wasp soldiers who had been swooping in behind. The man howled, not badly hurt but knocked aside by the impact, dropping in a moment of shock towards the broken water.

Looking back, Gaved saw the giant thing from the lake break the surface briefly, beside the auction raft, and he would never know whether it was some colossal insect or perhaps – just perhaps – some device of the lake-dwellers below. The question would remain to haunt his nightmares.

Then they were at the ladder, and Sef grasped for it with her free hand and scrambled up it as swiftly as she could. Gaved cast himself up, too, and over the rail, falling to his knee, utterly drained. Thalric dropped down beside him, clutching at his side and grimacing in agony.

‘Thank you,’ Gaved said to him.

‘She had the box,’ Thalric replied flatly, through pain-gritted teeth.

Down at the auction raft, Tisamon and Tynisa had made bloody work of Brodan’s soldiers, and anyone else who tried to challenge them. Most of the buyers had now fled, by boat or by air, so when the Buoyant Maiden steered herself ponderously over the raft, with ladder unfurled, there was none to contest their exit.