Blood of the Mantis

Five

When Solarno came into sight it was as though a second sun had risen in the north. Che caught her breath and held onto the rail, seeing that field of white bloom and glow on the horizon, amongst the surrounding green hills.

So much else she had seen: the familiar streets of Collegium, where she had grown up; the avaricious energy with which Helleron’s grime and vice trampled over its own poor; the stark simplicity of Myna, bitterly waiting for its revolution; the steadfast order of the Ants of Sarn. She had even seen the Spiderlands: the walled elegance of Seldis and the sprawling, unbounded luxury that was Siennis: its wood-framed spires and minarets defying the laws of architecture to soar into the sky, its bazaars roofed with a fortune in silks. Seeing this city for the first time, though, she decided that Solarno was the most beautiful place she had ever laid eyes on.

‘I never grow tired of it.’ The Fly aviatrix, Taki, was at her elbow. ‘I’ve seen places, you know. I’ve travelled all about the Exalsee, and there’s nowhere to match her.’

The northern shore of the great lake was a gentle slope that plunged into the waters without beach or foreshore, and Solarno had been cut into it, tier upon tier, a broad but shallow band of the work of man extended against the rolling green of fields and pastures that rose steadily behind the city itself. Solarno was predominantly white stone with roofs of red and orange tiles, like surmounting flames, and it was brilliant wherever the sun struck it. Looking at it now, from the water, Che could discern its hierarchy at once: the great villas ranged closer towards the hills’ crests and the commercial district lining the waterfront. She could see the sprawling west side of the city, where the houses were smaller and shone less brightly, and the compact east where rose the stacks of factories that hugged the waterfront along the lines of two rivers, turning the great water-wheels that drove the machines inside.

She saw domes rising above the roofline, supported on so many arcades of columns that some lofty buildings seemed to have no solid walls at all. The markets were all crowded into warrens of streets, the awnings of stalls forming a second roof layer, whilst the open spaces were parks or, on the higher tiers, airfields.

From the waterfront that ran the entire length of the city, a network of piers and promenades reached out onto the lake, and she now felt the ship’s engine change pitch as it turned to move in on its dock. There were men there already waiting to receive them, more of the sandy-skinned Soldier Beetle-kinden, and also some Flies. Solarno was a Spider city, she had been told, but she saw precious few of their kind to begin with. She tried to remember what Stenwold had told her about the place, from what little information he had coaxed from Teornis. Solarno was not actually part of the Spiderlands, for only the western shore of the Exalsee had that honour. The rest of the littoral was split between the half-dozen communities that ringed the great lake, each supposedly independent. And yet Solarno was intrinsically a Spider city.

‘I’ll meet you on dry land shortly, Bella Cheerwell,’ Taki told her. ‘Only, if I don’t now send ahead for a hauler, then my poor Esca’ll sit on deck until morning, and we’re due rain before then.’

Che looked into the sky, seeing that there were indeed a few clouds gathering but nothing that would suggest a downpour. The winter chill of her journey eastwards had been left behind, and the Exalsee seemed to be basking in last summer’s warmth.

Taki’s wings blurred into sight and she lifted from the deck with a nimble control Che could only envy, skimming across the water towards the city, almost low enough to touch the waves. A flurry of motion beside her told of the arrival of Nero.

‘Keeping your distance?’ Che asked him.

‘She bites, that one,’ he grumbled. ‘Still, I’m not done with her, you’ll see.’ He displayed a ragged piece of paper for Che’s approval. It was a sketch, in charcoal and graphite, of none other than te Schola Taki-Amre, executed deftly and with the minimum of shading, and yet a match close enough that someone bearing only this picture could have picked out the pilot from a throng of other Fly-kinden.

‘For her?’ Che asked him, puzzled.

‘Nuts to her. For me.’ Nero looked at the bustle of the approaching wharves, and past it to the citizens taking their ease on the promenade. ‘This place isn’t quite what I guessed at, but I like it.’

With the engine backing up, the trade ship ground to a halt, and the dockhands began to moor it. Nero flew over the rails to hover over the quay, feasting his eyes on these new surroundings. Che herself waited until the gangplank was lowered, and then again until the Spider slaver, Miyalis, had assumed his due precedence and strode down onto the dockside to find his factor and consign his cargo. It gave her a chance to study the crowd some more, to pick out the different faces and kinden.

Che was soon trying to decide what a typical Solarnese looked like, but the dock, as with docks anywhere, was a bustle of different races, so that was no easy task. The sand-coloured Soldier Beetle-kinden seemed most prevalent, resembling the people of Myna in feature, though so different in skin-tone. They dressed mostly in white, from the plain sleeveless tunics of the dockers unloading ships to the dazzlingly clean loose shirts and trousers of the men and women strutting along the promenade with curved swords at their waists. A few wore dark armour and stood about in bands like mercenaries, with small crossbows hanging from straps at their belts. Others advertised the fact that they were of higher class by dressing in Spider-fashion coloured silks, though never quite pulling it off. For each of the natives she examined, though, there were two others awaiting her inspection. The few genuine Spider-kinden progressed like aristocracy through the crowd, but without the effortless detachment of their western kindred whose every step was smoothed for them by the sweat of a host of slaves they seemed barely to notice. There were Fly-kinden too, a multitude of the little people. In the Lowlands they dressed soberly, but here their garments were gaudy and bright, and phenomenally tasteless, each one a riot of silks and sashes.

And of course there were the others. The Dragonflies with patterned tattoos on their arms and cheeks could have been siblings to the pirates who had attacked them out on the lake. Here, too, they walked armed to the teeth, looking a far cry from her civilized Salma. Ants with greenish skin loped through the crowds, clad in shelly hides and paint, or just bare-chested. There were kinden that she did not recognize at all.

She stopped and stared. There were Wasps. Not just any Wasps but soldiers of the Empire. A pair of them, standing right there on a street-corner, watching the Solarnese throng just as she had been.

Teornis had been right in his assessment of the situation at Solarno, it seemed.

As she set foot onto the dock she saw her first blood shed in the city. Without any warning there were two men shouting at one another, standing almost face to face and bellowing, and yet the exchange had a formal quality, the insults extravagant and convoluted. For a moment she was unsure whether it was not some kind of play. Then the blades came out, thin, curved steel whisking from scabbards, and it seemed they would cut each other to pieces right there. They were two of the sand-coloured Solarnese, dressed in near-identical white tunics, save that one wore a flat hat with a red badge and the other had hair shaved close to the skull.

Then they had stopped, and taken a few wary paces backwards, and the crowd was giving them what seemed to be a precise amount of room, retreating in a way that put Che right at the edge of this impromptu arena. The two men, who a moment ago had seemed incandescent with rage, brought their blades up to their shoulders and gave each other a stiff little bow, before assuming identical stances, offhand flung forwards, sword held high and back a little. Che saw that they both wore heavy gloves, metal plated over leather, on their left hands.

A duelling society, she realized, and of course she was familiar with that. She herself had done her time in the Prowess Forum at Collegium. Still, those swords they carried were far from practice-blades.

The two men circled, still crouched in their odd poses. Around Che there was money changing hands as a dozen opportunistic bookmakers gave odds. She soon gathered that the man in the hat was a narrow favourite.

Then they leapt forwards, blades flashing, and were past each other, each having palmed off the other’s sword with his armoured glove. Back to back, they glared at the crowd, and then spun on their heels and went back at each other. Che heard four separate clashes of the blades as they passed.

This time the man in the hat had a narrow wound across his right arm, and Che thought this would be the end of it, because she had accepted the violence as a formal duel, and in her experience those were not fatal.

In Solarno they fought by different rules, she now discovered. The men turned, and the first blood seemed to mark some milestone, because then they just went at each other, the shaven-headed man pressing his advantage, lashing at his enemy from all sides with swift, sweeping strokes that looked as though they would cut him into ribbons, driving him around the circle and shouting out wordless war-cries as he did so. The cheering crowd was rapt, devouring the spectacle for all it was worth.

Then the shaven-headed protagonist missed a parry, his enemy’s sword slicing across his forearm beyond the glove’s edge and, as he flinched, the man in the hat continued his motion, spun all the way about, and drew the curve of his blade across the other man’s throat.

There was a gasp from the crowd and then a great cacophony of whooping and yelling. Without warning there were armoured men pushing their way through the crowd, cuffing left and right with metal gauntlets to make room. They were more of the locals and they seized hold of the winning duellist, who seemed not a bit concerned, and also several members of the crowd, apparently at random. The newcomers wore hauberks of metal plates on a white leather backing, and flat-topped helms the same shape as the duellist’s hat.

Their officer called out something like, ‘Who agitates?’ which in retrospect Che realized might have been, ‘Who adjutates?’ because she had heard the title ‘adjutant’ used for the master of ceremonies in a duel. She had seen no one appointed, but a Spider-kinden came out of the crowd with a reassuring smile and, with a few words, put the soldiers at their ease. Satisfied, they let go of their prisoners and took a few respectful steps back. The winning duellist strutted over to the body and then looked around at the crowd, who were obviously waiting for something more. Che had a moment of horror when she thought he would mutilate the corpse, but then he pointed out two onlookers: a Solarnese woman, and Che herself.

Everyone was expecting her to do something and she had no idea what. Hands pushed at her from behind, thrusting her out into the ring. Her look of wild panic clearly passed them by and then the duellist had hold of her, taking her in a sweat-smelling embrace, before kissing her as close on the lips as he could manage.

Che shrieked and tried to struggle out of his arms, and then he had let her go anyway, so that she fell to the hard planks of the dock. He began kissing the other woman, who seemed more enthusiastic about it, then he grinned at the pair of them and, by his gesture, Che saw she was meant to take up the body.

Uncertainly she caught one arm and the Solarnese woman seized the other, and then they were lumping the bloody form out along a narrow pier that Che thought must be reserved for this purpose. It was a long strip of wood that extended further than the other jetties, and had no boats moored alongside. The duellist was coming behind them along with a couple of others who seemed to have some role in the ritualistic proceedings.

Someone passed her a ring of lead and a rope, which she accepted in a daze. She could not quite believe what was happening or understand what she had become involved in, but numbly she tied the rope about the dead man’s ankle. The other woman meanwhile was assiduously looting, first slitting the victim’s purse for a handful of silver coins, then taking a knife to pry a few opals from the man’s scabbard. She held out the booty to Che, saying, ‘Take your slice.’

Shaking her head, Che tried to back off, but the woman grabbed her hand and folded it over a few of the coins and a gem. ‘You want the sword?’ she asked, her words fast in the strong local accent. Che shook her head even harder and the woman seemed satisfied. Then they pitched the body into the water, and the lead sank it out of sight.

Once back on the dockside Che saw the duellist pay both the adjutant and the man who had provided the lead weight. Is that his entire livelihood? she wondered. Does he hang about in crowds with fistfuls of lead weights, waiting for people to die in formal brawl? Che looked at her own unwilling gains and saw, head swimming with the strangeness, that, alongside the fingernail-sized opal, the silver coins were all Standards, minted locally but recognizably copies of the Helleron-stamped currency she was used to seeing all over the Lowlands.

She saw Nero approach, a thoughtful look on his face. The whole experience had served her as a pointed object lesson, she decided: she was now a long way from anywhere she was used to or understood.

Taki found them shortly afterwards. When Che told her what had happened she merely shrugged, finding nothing remarkable in it.

‘Let me take you somewhere more civilized,’ she suggested. ‘Even you, Sieur Nero. My employers’ll put you up. They’ll be delighted with you.’

‘When the Spiders first came, you see, there was a war on,’ Taki explained. ‘The Solarnese were under attack from the ships of Princep Exilla, the Dragonflies. The Spiders were able to sort that all out – after they smoothed their way into the Prince’s court and then did for him, easy as you like. After that, everyone was glad enough to give them the run of the place. And to us, too – to my ancestors.’

The interior of the Destiavel Peace House was certainly Spider-kinden in style, a high-arched ceiling painted in blue and gold, decorated with delicate and intersecting arabesques, and the walls were scalloped with alcoves, each with its own casually displayed treasure. The ceiling was absurdly high, so that what Che had taken from outside for a four-storey building must have been only two, one rising behind the other in the ascending hillside.

‘You’re what, then? A servant, a slave?’ Nero asked.

‘What in the world do they teach you in your academies?’ Taki asked him incredulously. The lofty ceiling made strange play with the acoustics, amplifying whispers, muffling raised voices.

‘For a start, they don’t even teach us the name of your backwater city, Miss te Taki,’ Nero told her huffily.

She grinned delightedly at him. ‘When you get angry, Sieur Nero, your face is more of a picture than anyone could ever paint. Yes, I suppose we’re all too insignificant out here for you great foreign princes.’ Her gaze made a pointed contrast between their travel-stained clothing and the pristine surroundings. ‘When we first came here with our masters we were slaves, great Sieur, but we won out in the Day of the Three Concessions, as every child knows. Now I’m free to do whatever I feel like, but can you boast the same?’

‘The Day of the…?’ Che shook her head. She had spent a decade learning history and now none of it was remotely useful. ‘But you work for the Spiders. And the Spiders rule Solarno?’

‘Some of them do, some of the time. At the moment the Crystal Standard Party is in power, but that looks set to change even within the next few days.’

There had been banners, Che recalled, on their way to this palatial residence. They had passed groups of malcontents who stood waving flags and ribbons, some red, some blue, some green and gold, but none of it had made any sense to her. Taki had done her best to ignore all of them. The local situation was clearly extremely complex.

‘And where do the Wasps stand?’ Che asked.

‘Ah, well…’

But Taki cut the words off as a slave arrived. Slaves here, Che understood, had a metal band soldered about one arm, and this man was no exception. He was clearly a local, and Che wondered if he was a criminal or a debtor or simply unlucky. When he proffered a flute of wine to her she took it unhappily. Taki watched her reaction while sipping her own.

‘You come here on a slave-shipper, yet you don’t feel comfortable with slaves.’

‘We just took the first ship out of Mavralis,’ Nero told her.

‘Where I was born, there are no slaves,’ Che said, with no little pride. She expected another lesson in Solarno history, stressing the necessity of the slave trade, but Taki merely nodded thoughtfully.

‘The Path of Jade Party are strongly against slaving,’ she said. ‘And more power to them, too, not that they’ll get anywhere with that.’

‘Which party are you with, then?’ Nero asked her.

Taki shook her head. ‘So long as they let me fly, I don’t care about any of it. The Wasps, on the other hand…’

At that point a Spider-kinden woman burst in. Che took her as quite young at first but, as she rushed across the room to sweep Taki up into her arms, it became clearer that much of that youth was applied in front of the mirror.

‘My clever girl!’ she said. ‘Don’t ever even think about another house! We’d simply fold without you. A purse from the Praedrael! Not that we really need their silver but it’s the keeping score, my dear, sweet girl!’

Che and Nero stared in awe, because, in their experience, Spider-kinden were graceful, reserved and elegant creatures, and would never dream of behaving in such an effusive manner. Yet this Spider woman spun Taki about for a moment as though she were a child, and then released her, leaving the Fly to catch her balance in the air with her wings, before turning to the other visitors.

‘And who are these?’ she asked.

Che looked into the woman’s face and saw a shrewd intelligence assessing her, despite the flamboyant show. Spider-kinden, she reminded herself. You can never take them at face value.

‘Domina Genissa of the Destiavel,’ Taki introduced her. ‘These are Bella Cheerwell and Sieur Nero, who have come from far away. From beyond the Porta Mavralis. Beyond the Spiderlands, apparently.’

‘You are welcome, welcome,’ Genissa gushed. ‘We adore having new faces come to stay here at the Destiavel. Are you seeking employment?’

At her elbow, Taki gave a slight nod and Che just frowned at the gesture. Nero was quicker on the uptake. ‘Indeed I am, great lady. May I present myself as Master Nero of Egel, an artist of the first water.’

‘A foreign artist?’ Genissa said. ‘How simply delightful. Have you tendered your services to any others since you arrived?’

‘Lady, you are the first.’ Nero swept a creditable bow.

‘Domina, shall I find Sieur Nero’s assistant some lodging?’ Taki interrupted, ‘while you take your ease with the great artist?’

‘Yes, yes.’ Genissa replied with a dismissive wave, regarding Nero with a rather predatory expression.

Taki tugged at Che’s arm to draw her out of the room, and out of earshot. ‘You have to be careful,’ she explained. ‘This business with the Wasps, well… I’m very fond of Domina Genissa, and she’s always good to me, but her politics lie with the Satin Trail Party, just like all of the Destiavel, and recently the Wasps have started wooing them. There’s no party line drawn out yet, but if the Reds fall into step with the Wasps, you’d soon hear about it the hard way if you were known to be an enemy of theirs.’

‘How do you know I’m an enemy-?’

‘Give me some credit,’ Taki snorted. ‘I assumed at first you were an escaped slave, but then I realized you’d come in from the wrong point of the compass. But you’ve got some problem with the Wasps, I can see. Why not tell me about it, seeing as I’ve got plenty of my own reasons for not liking them.’

Che stared at her, feeling that she was now on very unsteady ground, and with only this one small hand held out to her. But who else had she to trust, in this place, that might help her in her mission here?

‘My people have the best reason of all to hate the Wasps,’ she said at last. ‘We’re at war.’

Outside, the promised rain, which she had not quite believed in, began to fall.

Odyssa could have taken ship if she had wanted. If she had wanted, she could have even taken passage on the same slaver as the Lowlander agents, and they would never have guessed. Still, Odyssa had travelled more than most and knew there were more efficient ways of getting from place to place than the uncertainties of the water. It had been easy enough, back in Porta Mavralis, to wait for a flier with space for one passenger.

She had changed into clothes more befitting a medium-rank Spider-kinden going travelling, clothes whose tailor had taken her figure into account. The Empire had no idea how to dress a woman, indeed how to do anything with women. In her opinion, women were the Empire’s greatest unused resource.

She was a slender, attractive Spider woman, looking no more than in her late twenties after sufficient time before the glass. She had dyed her hair dark this season, against the fashion, since she felt it gave her a more sincere and serious look.

Although her Lowlander stooges had been given a long enough lead, the Solarnese pilot got her down before their slaver ship had even touched dock. Most of her kinden found flying uncomfortable but, after seven years serving the imperial Rekef Outlander, she was used to it. The Empire did not have so very many Spiders in its employ, so her services had been spread thin during these last few years in General Reiner’s employ.

Ah well, we discard all our toys in time, she thought, for the game changes, always. It had been an enjoyable education, working amongst the Rekef, but real games were played for higher stakes – and by Spiders.

Odyssa had precise enough directions to lead her straight to her contact, but that was not how the game was played. Instead she spent several hours wandering the streets of Solarno, feigning interest at market stalls, delivering bland messages to publicans which would trigger the rudimentary informant network of the recently installed Rekef presence so that the word would get back to her contact that she had arrived. Even so it took a surprisingly long time before a Fly-kinden messenger tracked her down and handed over a folded and sealed paper.

There had been little care in the encoding, the overt contents gibberish, an obvious fake. She tutted over such sloppy fieldwork. From long experience she solved the code automatically, drawing from it her directions and the meeting place. Still shaking her head, she took a sure path through the city, for all that she had only just arrived there.

Her contact met her on his own, although she knew that he had been accompanied moments before, dismissing his hired guards once he saw her arrive alone.

‘You must be Captain Havel,’ she said, eyeing a Wasp-kinden of middle-years, a thickset veteran of more than one knife-skirmish. He took the sealed orders from her, breaking them open with a thumb and leafing through them.

His mouth suddenly dry, Havel studied the Spider-kinden woman for a long time. The seals and signatures on the orders were genuine, beyond dispute, but that only made him even less happy with this encounter. ‘Your papers seem to be in order,’ he said finally, in a voice soft and hoarse from the scar across his throat, a memento of a botched negotiation with the Scorpion-kinden. ‘Good of the general to care about us. We thought we’d been forgotten, out here.’ He had been all of two years in Solarno, almost since the Empire had first taken an interest in the Exalsee. Havel had remained without orders for most of that time, and what had started as a routine of lying low and collecting information had gradually been corrupted by the very nature of the place. For he and his men had since found no shortage of opportunities to turn a profit on the shifting scene of Solarno’s politics.

But now the Empire was suddenly interested again and Havel rapidly decided to present himself as a model officer of the Rekef Outlander because, so long as he was left in charge here, any indiscretions, bribery, sedition and mercenary work might stay unnoticed.

‘The Empire’s relationships with my kinden have suffered a blow just recently,’ said Odyssa a little later. The Spider-kinden was now reclining elegantly on a couch and looking slyly attractive even in her dusty travel-garb. He would have been bragging and flirting with her had she been anyone else, but this was a Rekef lieutenant who, from her papers, seemed to have just crossed the infamous Dryclaw on her own, and that put him off. Like many Wasp men, he found very capable women disconcerting.

‘So what’s the deal?’ he pressed. ‘You want us to step up the operation here?’

‘You may have to eventually,’ she told him. ‘For now, though, be aware that there are Lowlander agents in Solarno, or shortly to arrive. The Lowlanders have decided to bring their war all the way out to the Sea of Exiles, and it’s up to you to deal with them.’

‘That’s easy enough. Any idea who they’ve sent?’

‘Every idea, Captain.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘A Beetle-kinden named Cheerwell Maker, and a Fly named Nero. She is like most of her kind, too short and too fat. He is bald and really quite ugly. General Reiner would like this situation taken care of personally.’

‘I’ll send him their heads packed in salt if he wants,’ Havel offered. Already he was beginning to relax. What had seemed like an unwelcome intrusion on his authority was now a chance to reassure his superiors that everything was going according to plan. Two dead Lowlanders and his position would be secure again. With that settled in his mind he relaxed more comfortably opposite her, his smile becoming more genuine. ‘Are you staying long in the city, Lieutenant…?’ He glanced at the papers but she forestalled him.

‘Odyssa,’ she said. ‘And only overnight. Then I must return for further orders. However, if you have a place for me to stay in a safe house… or perhaps even just a bed?’

Although well used to dealing with Spiders, Havel felt his heart skip as she gazed at him, and he called out for a slave to bring them more wine.

Wasp-kinden! Odyssa laughed inwardly. Their Empire was the greatest power in the world, and yet they were such children. A little touch of her Art on this one and she could have him strip naked and let her ride him all around the outskirts of Solarno.

Teornis of the Aldanrael would be delighted when he received her report.