Empire in Black and Gold

Eighteen

Tisamon was waiting for them at nightfall, just as promised: a whipcord-lean figure caught in the sun’s last rays at the crest of a low hill, angular even under a cloak. His travel habits had not changed. There was a long bag slung on his back that must be his bowcase, and he wore a rapier alongside it that Stenwold had never seen him use. He might have been waiting there for ten minutes or for a hundred years.

Stenwold screwed the fragments of his courage together, halting the awkwardly lumbering automotive just before the hill’s incline and clambering down. It had not exactly been the most amicable of journeys so far. The machine itself was clumsy and long overdue for scrapping, while Totho and Achaeos had instantly developed an intense dislike for one another, making any conversation difficult.

‘They’re picking up company.’ Tisamon’s voice reached him as Stenwold ascended the hill. ‘Another half-dozen soldiers. Another score of slaves. It’s going to be interesting when we come to extract them.’

Extract them? Like a barber pulling a tooth? Stenwold looked at the mess of tracks Tisamon showed him, that held no secrets for his eyes.

‘I can go on tracking all night if you want,’ Tisamon offered, and briefly the spectre of hope, of another stay of execution, raised itself.

‘No,’ said Stenwold, more firmly than he had intended. ‘I don’t think our transport could manage to keep up in any event. There are parts of it that definitely need tightening before we go further.’

‘What is that monster, anyway? We’ve shared some grotesque mounts in our time, but that thing deserves some sort of award.’ Tisamon was never exactly merry, but there was a lightness to his tone that cut Stenwold to the bone.

‘Tisamon. I have to. . I have to. .’ How long had he been given to prepare the words, and now they were nowhere to be found. ‘I have to tell you something.’

They were fast approaching the automotive and its three silent passengers. Tisamon’s pace did not slacken, but something changed in his posture, his breathing, as Stenwold’s anxiety jumped across to him.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. They were now so close. The setting sun was behind the machine so that they were standing in its long shadow.

‘I. .’ But like a well in the desert, the words had dried up since he last visited them. ‘I have to. . show you something.’

Tisamon stopped at last. His face was blank.

‘Time to make camp,’ Stenwold called out to the automotive’s passengers. ‘Achaeos, can you make a fire?’

‘Are you suggesting that I might need Beetle ingenuity for that?’ said the Moth acidly, flitting down from the machine with obvious relish.

‘Tisamon, this is Totho,’ Stenwold said as the artificer climbed down. Tisamon barely spared him a nod. ‘Totho,’ Stenwold added, ‘would you take a look at the machine, make sure everything’s still in place.’

‘Good idea,’ agreed Totho, and he unslung his tools and crouched down between the automotive’s legs, but not without a backward glance at his mentor.

‘And. .’ Here we are. ‘This is Tynisa.’

‘Tynisa?’ Tisamon said, but it was the name alone, the Spider-kinden name, that had caught his ear. He was staring at her as she let herself down the ungainly machine’s side, and his eyes were fixed on her face when she turned to him.

Tisamon made a wordless sound, deep in his throat, like an animal at bay. In a moment he had dropped into his fighting stance, and his claw was raised and drawn back. Stenwold had not even noticed it on his hand a moment before. What surprised Stenwold was that Tynisa was already out with her rapier, and clearly every bit as ready to fight.

‘Tisamon,’ he shouted, ‘listen to me!’

‘What is this?’ the Mantis cried in a tone of pure horror. ‘What have you done?’

‘Tisamon,’ Stenwold began again. ‘I can explain.’

‘Explain?’ Tisamon’s eyes were like a strangled man’s. His teeth were bared, every muscle in his body bowstringtaut. The last rays of the sun touched the blade of his claw, caught the long line of Tynisa’s rapier. Achaeos and Totho remained utterly motionless, utterly at a loss.

‘Stenwold, what’s going on?’ Tynisa said tightly.

There was a moment in the very near future, seconds away only, when Tisamon would snap, and then blood would be shed. Stenwold could foresee it with complete clarity. In a normal fight this man was ice, but his own emotions were fiercer enemies than he could ever face down. He heard a hiss escape through the enraged man’s clenched teeth, and knew that the clock’s hands were down, the strike was here. He lunged forward between them, almost onto the point of Tynisa’s sword, seeing Tisamon dodge behind him and the claw sweeping down. He closed his eyes.

He heard Tynisa scream and felt a stabbing pain in his shoulder, and something very cold, the thinnest of thin lines, against his throat. Everything seemed to have stopped.

He opened his eyes very slowly. The first thing he saw was Tynisa before him, her face stricken, and for a moment he thought she must have stabbed him. Her arm was extended, and he followed its line as best as his current situation would allow. There was the hilt of her sword and the narrow blade. . and Tisamon’s hand was flat against it, and the rapier’s length caught between his palm and the spines of his forearm. Its point was frozen over Stenwold’s shoulder, trapped on its way directly towards Tisamon’s face.

Tisamon’s other arm, his right, was across Stenwold’s shoulders, the spines digging straight through the hardened leather and into his flesh. The folding blade of the Mantis’s claw was closed about Stenwold’s throat like a clasp-knife, and it was impossible for him to tell whether it had drawn blood or not. Beyond Tynisa he glimpsed Totho with a spanner in his hand, mouth hanging open; and there was Achaeos, somewhere further off, his dagger clear of its scabbard but pointedly not part of the conflict.

Stenwold heard his own ragged breath mixed up with that of the two duellists.

‘Let him go,’ said Tynisa, and Stenwold reckoned that making demands just then was not for the best.

‘You’re going to fight me?’ Tisamon asked her, and his tone, that clipped precision of speech Stenwold knew of old, indicated a man whose blood was up.

‘I’ve seen you fight and I know what this is about,’ she declared. ‘So I worked for the Halfway House. So what?’

‘For the Halfway. .?’ A frown passed over Tisamon’s face. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The fiefs, in Helleron. .’ Now Tynisa was looking uncertain. ‘You were fighting for the Gladhanders. We destroyed them after. . Isn’t that. .’ His baffled stare was getting to her. ‘What is this about?’

‘Yes, Stenwold, what is this about?’ asked Tisamon, and that dreadful coldness of diction was still there.

‘I will tell you everything, but only you,’ Stenwold finally got out. ‘Let’s go up the hill and I will spare nothing of the truth. You have my word.’

‘That would have been a golden thing, only a moment ago,’ said Tisamon sadly, but his arm uncoiled by degrees. Stenwold winced as the spines withdrew from his back.

‘Someone had better tell me what’s going on,’ Tynisa suggested.

Stenwold nodded. ‘Let me talk to Tisamon first. This is going to be difficult.’

He began to trudge back the way he had come, though this time Tisamon did not walk beside him as a comrade, but with the wary distance of an antagonist.

Tynisa watched them go. ‘What?’ she said, to the night air as much as to anyone. ‘What is it?’ Tisamon had looked at her as though she had killed his own brother and danced on his grave. She turned round for some kind of support, but Totho was edging himself underneath the automotive, and there was precious little warmth to be gained from the Moth’s slyly superior facade.

To the pits with the pair of them, she decided. In fact, to the pits with all of them. There was something going on, and it had led to a notable duellist drawing on her, and that meant she had a right to know what was going on.

As softly as she could, she began to follow in Stenwold’s path, letting darkness be her cloak.

On the other side of the hill, out of sight of the automotive, Stenwold suddenly stopped. It was a calculated risk, for if Tisamon’s temper broke again, he would be dead without the others even knowing. It showed a trust, though, and he so desperately needed to regain this man’s confidence. It also put them far enough from the camp that quiet voices would not carry, and harsh words might sound jumbled enough not to be understood.

Tisamon was watching him, blade still by his side, tucked back up the length of his arm.

‘Speak,’ he hissed.

‘I. .’ Stenwold grimaced. ‘It’s difficult for me. It really is. Give me a moment to put my words in order.’

Tisamon bared his teeth. ‘Let me help you. Let me prompt you. She’s her very image. Souls alive! She’s her very image!’ Again it was not anger but a ragged horror that twisted him. ‘How. . How. .’ His stark frame was shaking, and Stenwold wondered if there was even a name for the emotion that had taken hold of him. ‘She’s her daughter. She must be.’

‘Yes, Tisamon. Tynisa is Atryssa’s daughter,’ Stenwold admitted wearily. Now the moment was upon him, he wondered if he had the strength for it.

‘How did you come to. . No!’ Tisamon’s eyes narrowed. The blade of his claw flexed, hinging out and back in. ‘She betrayed us, Stenwold — at Myna. You know this. They knew your plans. They sabotaged your devices. She told them.’

‘Atryssa, Tisamon. At least speak her name.’

‘You think I can’t?’ Tisamon spat. ‘Atryssa betrayed us. Happier with that? She sold us to the Empire, and she left us to die there in Myna. And don’t forget that not all of us escaped alive.’

‘Oh, I remember Myna. I’ve never stopped thinking of it,’ Stenwold said. ‘But she didn’t betray us, Tisamon.’

‘She-’

‘Hear me out!’ Stenwold snapped. ‘Hammer and tongs, hear what I’ve got to say, and then if you still want to kill me, well, I’m all yours.’

Tisamon regarded him in silence.

‘You see, while you stayed in Helleron, I hunted her down. I wanted to confront her with what she had done. Only she wasn’t easy to find — no, let me finish — she was in hiding, yes, but not from us.’

He closed his eyes, calling back seventeen years in order to picture the scene.

‘Nero found her in the end. He was always a good man for the tracking. When we got there she was. . hurt.’

There was the merest twitch in Tisamon. It gave Stenwold hope.

‘She had been trying to get to us, to keep the rendezvous, but the Wasps intercepted her — or some of their agents did. She had to fight them.’

That was too much for Tisamon. ‘So she would fight them! She was a skilled duellist. A handful of Wasp agents would not have slowed her down!’

‘Listen!’ Stenwold realized that he himself was finding it difficult to stem the anger he felt. This was an injustice long gone unsettled, and he now had it in his hands to put history right. The knowledge gave him the strength to say it: ‘She beat them. She did beat them, but she was badly injured, because of her condition.’

‘Her. . condition?’

Stenwold actually mustered a smile, as hard-edged a piece of work as any he had known. ‘She was with child, Tisamon, when she fought them. It slowed her down.’

The Mantis stared at him blankly.

‘When Nero and I finally found her, she was near her time, but she was weak, very weak. She had been keeping low. The Wasps were still hunting her. She was in a Merro slum. There was no one else with her.’ He watched expressions fight to make themselves known on Tisamon’s face. ‘When she bore the child, she died, but the child lived.’

And he left it at that, let Tisamon’s unsatisfied questions fall into the pit of silence between them, then waited and waited.

‘What. .? But who. . was the father?’ A mere whisper.

‘I don’t know. Who might have shared her bed last, do you think?’

Tisamon stared at him. ‘No. . no.’

‘She spoke only of you, those few days we had. She had put aside her protections. It was her choice.’ Stenwold was aware that he was simply putting the knife in now, but it was a knife he had carried for a long time, which had weighed on him every day of it.

‘She’s. . that girl is. .’

Stenwold nodded.

‘But she looks. .’

‘Oh, the looks she gets from her mother. There’s no doubting that. What she gets from her father has yet to reveal itself.’

‘She’s a halfbreed?’

‘I suppose she’d have to be,’ said Stenwold. ‘That’s how it works.’

Tisamon reached out as if to grab hold of his collar, stopped with his arm outstretched, head shaking slightly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Stenwold now held his gaze without flinching. ‘And what would you have said, at the time? What would your exact reaction have been, if I had sent a messenger with the word that the woman you hated most in all the world had borne you a child? You would have killed the messenger, I can tell you that for sure. And by anyone mad enough to take a message back, you would have given the order to have the infant destroyed.’

‘No. .’

‘No, is it?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘A halfbreed, Tisamon? A Spider-Mantis halfbreed? That most vile of all abominations? That’s what you would have thought, isn’t it? Or can you deny it?’

‘You had no right,’ the Mantis said.

‘No right to keep her from you, or no right to let her live? What’s it to be? I had a choice then. Poor Atryssa was dead, and I could take the child as my own, my responsibility, or I could let her die, as you no doubt would have wished. I’m afraid that with a choice like that, mere Mantis pride doesn’t enter into it.’

‘Pride? How dare you-’

‘Pride! Is it not pride — the curse of your whole wretched tribe?’ Stenwold was aware he was going too far now, but unable to stop himself. ‘Hammer and tongs! In the College, you know, there’s an exercise they put students through: to decide why each of the kinden is great in its own way and what makes them special. Well here’s a new hoop for them to jump through. Why are we all such bloody broken things? You and I, Tisamon. Beetle complacency and Mantis bloody pride!’

‘You had no right to take that choice!’

‘Nobody else was going to take it!’ Stenwold got as far as reaching for the man’s arming jacket to shake him, but stopped himself fast before he made the mistake.

‘She’s an abomination.’ Tisamon sounded stunned. ‘She’s a halfbreed. A shame upon my race and family.’ His mouth formed the words very slowly. ‘My daughter?’

‘Yes, your daughter. And now you have to decide if you’re going to do now what you would have done then, or if you can — just possibly can — widen your mind enough to accept that she exists. And I warn you, if you act against her, not only will you not find it so bloody easy, but you’ll also have me to deal with, probably Totho too.’ He saw a harsh look come over the other man’s face and interpreted it as best he could. ‘Oh, I know, you wouldn’t break into a sweat over it, but don’t think that would-’

‘I would not. . harm you.’ Tisamon sounded and looked a hundred years older in that moment, ashen and fragile as no Mantis that Stenwold had ever encountered had looked before.

‘And?’

‘I will not harm her.’ Something was building in Tisamon, and Stenwold saw that it was not even the shock of having a daughter that was crippling him. Atryssa. It was that Atryssa was dead, had died without him, had died with him believing her a traitor. It was an unwelcome conclusion that Stenwold should have come to a long time before, but he saw now that Tisamon had stayed in Helleron because he had never wanted to see Atryssa again — because he did not want to be the one to end her life. For a Mantis, he supposed, that was love. Stenwold stepped back, suddenly fearful that he had gone too far.

‘I need to think.’ Tisamon turned away, hiding his face.

‘I’m sorry. I should have. . I should have told you before. Sooner.’

‘You are right in all you said,’ Tisamon stated. ‘I would not have understood, and it remains to be seen if I ever shall. I will. . I will rejoin you at dawn, I hope. I need time and space to. . I need to be alone.’

He made a slow progress away from that place, heading into the hills. Stenwold stood and watched him until darkness and the land put him out of sight.

He did not notice Tynisa’s expression, as he returned to camp. He was too concerned with his own woes.

It had been a sour day’s journeying. Stenwold sat hunched at the controls of the limping, lurching automaton wrapped in a dusty silence that nothing had relieved. Achaeos and Totho’s silent enmity seemed to somehow be growing in the vacuum of their mutual ignoring. At first Stenwold had thought it was because Totho was a half-breed. After the lad went to tinker with something in the back, making Achaeos’s disdain only increase, he realized it was because Totho was an artificer. This was a clash of world-views.

Tynisa, however, Achaeos seemed to regard with a wary respect. That reaction had sprung up after she had drawn on Tisamon. No, Tynisa’s problem was with Stenwold himself, for she had not said a word to him all day. She had glared at him if he even chanced to look her way. He supposed that she was still waiting for an explanation of Tisamon’s reaction to her, but he was wretchedly unable to give it. Tisamon himself had not returned. Until he spoke to Tisamon again, until Tisamon had sorted out precisely how he felt, Stenwold could not bring himself to explain to her. It just was another betrayal. He owed her more than he owed to the Mantis, and yet he could not wrench himself free of those bonds formed two decades ago.

The entire sorry business had gone from bad to worse, and he now was in danger of losing everything by it. He thought back to that moment of choice, by Atryssa’s deathbed, and wondered what he could have done differently that might have made this moment bearable.

He pictured coming to Tisamon with an infant and a story — or even a child of, say, six or ten. He pictured the wrathful reaction of the man. In seventeen years, time had dulled it a little, built over it like a coral, so that the shape of it remained but not the edges. Even so it had been a close-run thing between Tisamon’s self-control and his blade’s temper. No, if Stenwold had tried this trick ten years earlier, Tisamon would certainly have killed him, and killed the child.

Would he? Was Tisamon a man to kill an infant, his own daughter still in swaddling? Is that what I really believe of my old friend?

With a heavy heart Stenwold acknowledged that, yes, Tisamon was the man to do it. It would have been done in rage, and perhaps he would have later mourned the loss, but his pride would have spurred him to it, even so.

At least Stenwold had been able to encourage himself by the fact that they were gaining on their quarry, even though he had no real plan for tackling the reinforced Wasps when he found them. Before dusk, though, the ground ahead changed, and it did not take a tracker to tell him that the slavers had new transportation. The land before them was scuffed and scarred with a great reticulated trail. Some large tracked vehicle, or more than one of them, was now shipping the slaves eastwards. Stenwold feared that, whatever this conveyance was, it would travel faster than their own jolting relic.

That night he faced the prospect of a joyless camp. He turned to Totho instead, as the only one of his companions he still felt comfortable talking to.

‘We need to go faster,’ he said.

Totho cast a sidelong glance at their automotive. ‘It’s not going to be easy, sir,’ he said, ‘and it might not survive it. I needed to tighten every joint as it is.’

‘I’ll help you,’ Stenwold suggested. ‘If the two of us work through the night, we might be able to wring a bit of extra speed out of this contraption. And you don’t need to keep calling me sir. We’re not at the College now.’

Totho shrugged. ‘Well, s- Well, Master Maker-’

‘Totho?’

‘Well.’ Totho cut the honorific by dint of extreme effort. ‘I’m game if you are.’

It had been a good idea of his, Stenwold allowed, but he had not anticipated the problems with its execution. The chief problem was that Stenwold had been teaching history and busying himself with politics for the last decade, and Totho was fresh from the College and sharp with it. It was a short while before Stenwold realized that he simply did not understand some of the more technical points the boy was making. After that, he became reluctantly convinced that he himself was just getting in the way. Still a stubborn pride that would have befitted Tisamon kept him sweating and slaving away by the sputtering gas lamp that Totho had rigged up, until eventually the youth said, ‘If we both work. . if we both work all night, sir, then neither of us will be in any shape to. . to drive it in the morning.’ This awkward display of tact was shaming. Stenwold had never ceased to think of himself as an artificer, despite his lack of practice, but it seemed the rest of the world had stopped considering him one a long time ago.

When I get back to Collegium, I will have to brush up, he vowed. He slid himself out from under the automotive, confessing openly that this was a good idea, and in that case why didn’t he get some sleep now. He felt old and wretched.

When he approached the fire he found Achaeos was asleep, but Tynisa was not. Whether she was keeping watch or just waiting for him he could not say, but her hard stare fixed him as he approached the circle of firelight. Her gaze was filled with a slow-burning anger that, he reflected sadly, she must have inherited from her father. Faced with that, he paused at the edge of the camp, knowing that it was his duty, as her guardian, as a human being, to say something, to explain.

He could not. Wordlessly he turned away, and built up a meagre fire on the other side of the automotive. That was where Tisamon eventually found him.

He heard the tread before he saw the man, and then the lean, tall figure was striding out of the night to sit, silently, across the small fire from him. The guttering light chased shadows across the Mantis’s angular face. For a long time neither man trusted himself to speak.

‘We are neither of us the things we would have wanted to be when this day came,’ Tisamon said softly at last, without looking at him. ‘Look at us. What are we? You have become the meddling intelligencer, sending the young to their deaths. I am a sell-sword who has not cared, these last years, whose blood was on my blade. You said to Monger that I fought for honour, but until you called for me that had not been true for a long time.’ A heavy pause. ‘We did not think, when we were young, that we would end up here.’

‘We did not,’ replied Stenwold, heartfelt.

‘I. .’ Tisamon stopped, stirred the fire with a stick. His lips moved, but for a long time there was nothing. Stenwold gave him his time. It was not as though he himself had anything to say.

‘Thank you for raising my daughter,’ said Tisamon, and seemed visibly relieved to be rid of the words. Stenwold stared at him, not quite sure he had heard them.

‘I have been thinking,’ the Mantis said. ‘At first, I decided that you had done me a great wrong, but then I could not describe to myself, precisely, what that wrong was. We believe, my people, in defining our grievances. How else could we hold on to them for so long? And so I realized that if you had not done me a wrong, then the whole of my world must turn inside-out, and so instead I find that I owe you a debt. Such a debt that a man can never truly repay.’

And your people take your debts just as seriously as your wrongs, Stenwold reflected. Tisamon would still not meet his gaze, had still not wholly come to terms with it all, but he had found a way to paint the past in colours that he could at last understand. It was a matter of honour, and he could live with that.

And at last the Mantis looked up, and the corner of his mouth twitched up too. ‘Do you remember, all those years ago, when you would talk and talk, and I would say nothing at all? How we have changed.’

And Stenwold laughed at that, despite himself, despite it all. He laughed and laughed.

And afterwards he said, ‘I’ll have to tell her, now. I’ll have to speak with her. You know that.’

‘Then tread carefully,’ said Tisamon, still smiling sincerely. ‘If she’s her father’s daughter, she might not take it well.’