Heirs of the Blade

Part Four
Broken Threads
Thirty-Three

Surveying the field from the forest’s edge made for a grim sight. The battle had not been large, compared with some that Che or the others had seen, but this aftermath had a particularly abandoned air. The bodies of, they assumed, the losers were strewn haphazardly all about, as a score or so individuals picked their way through them, hauling corpses aside into an untidy line. Others were digging a great pit, the final resting place that the dead here would all lie in together.

The winners had already departed, leaving these menials to assign the losers to the worms and the burying beetles. These undertakers moved without speed, hunched up against a chill wind that coursed unchecked across the open ground.

After pausing long enough in the trees, the four travellers set out again, plotting a path that would skirt the field of combat. Che saw Maure steel herself before moving on, and wondered what additional horrors a necromancer might witness in such a place.

‘We need news,’ Thalric decided. ‘I’d not expected to find this sort of slaughter in the Commonweal. A good few hundred fighters a side, surely.’

Some of the gravediggers glanced up at them, but looked away just as quickly, obviously wanting these wayfarers to be none of their problems. They spotted one man standing apart, though, leaning on his narrow-headed spade. He was a greying Grasshopper, the same kinden as most of the workers, but he regarded the travellers steadily as they approached him. As they drew near they saw that there was a dead man lying by his feet, another Grasshopper, with the arrow that had done for him standing up like a tiny standard.

If the old man had any fear that the newcomers might attack him, he did not show it. Perhaps he felt that even the Wasp-kinden could not make his current surroundings much worse.

‘Good day to you,’ Che called out, and then she grimaced, deciding that her words were poorly chosen. ‘Well… anyway,’ she continued vaguely. Closer to, she had ample opportunity to study the strewn corpses. They seemed a poor sort of soldier, badly armoured and clothed like the peasants seen on their travels, not like men and women for whom fate had chosen this violent end. ‘What happened here?’

The old man cast his eyes over the carnage, and then back at her, as if to say, Is it not obvious?

She nodded, waving his unspoken words away. ‘Who fought here? Who won?’

‘Was the Salmae fighting bandits, so they say. Salmae won.’ He shrugged. ‘Or we won, perhaps. They said it was for us, when they made us fight. Protect us against the raiders, they said.’

It took Che a moment to deconstruct ‘the Salmae’, and to understand that the man must mean Salma’s family. ‘Where did the winners go from here?’ she asked quickly.

‘North. Leose. They’ll have some great celebration there, no doubt.’ The gravedigger, looked underwhelmed by the thought.

‘Tell me, if you were fighting here, was there a Spider-kinden woman…?’ Che’s words tailed off as she noted a telltale tightening of the lips, a tensing of the way he stood. ‘She was here.’

‘Oh, she was here,’ the Grasshopper agreed, but said no more.

‘Come on,’ Thalric decided. ‘We can’t be far behind them, and we’ll move faster than their army.’

‘Why are you just standing here, old man?’ Maure asked softly. ‘Why linger by this body?’

He looked at her, and perhaps something about her told him what she was. ‘I knew him,’ he told her. ‘From my village, he was. Knew him all his life. He was never happy, him. He always said someone should take up a blade against the taxes and the nobles, and I was always telling him, “Life’s not that way.” There’s nothing a man like you or me can do, I’d say to him. Still, when men came from Rhael and offered him a blade, he took it, even so. Here’s a man that died of dreams. The arrow did him not half so much harm. But I won’t see him buried with the rest. I’ll keep with him here, and the least he deserves is his own hole in the ground, when all of this is done.’ They were philosophers, the Grasshopper-kinden, so Che had once heard. They might till the earth for their Dragonfly princes, but they were philosophers nonetheless.

Maure nodded thoughtfully, staring at the corpse. ‘Do you want to

…? I could see if he…’ Words failed her, as so often on the subject of her profession, but the old man was already shaking his head.

‘Don’t know what I’d say to him now. Don’t think I could tell him why I wasn’t fighting on his side.’

As they moved on, following the path the army had clearly taken, Varmen commented, ‘He didn’t seem too impressed with your Spider lass.’

Che nodded unhappily.

‘With what rides her, I’m not surprised,’ Maure put in. ‘I’ve come across nothing like it. Mantis ghosts, yes, and all of them hungry for blood – but this one has power.’

‘It has the power of the Darakyon, or what’s left of it,’ Che murmured, too quietly for any of them to pick up. That was the conclusion she had come to, after all her visions and insights. All Maure’s talk of ghosts only highlighted how Tisamon’s shade had gone beyond the normal petty limits that such spirits were bound by. He and I and the Wasp Empress are all of us bound together by the Darakyon, somehow. She could not quite see the link, nor did she have all the pieces, but she was becoming more and more sure of it.

And now I have another reason to find Tynisa, for she actually saw Tisamon die – she saw Tisamon kill the Emperor, and surely the Emperor’s sister was nearby…

‘Maure,’ she asked, ‘would you visit my sister and try to drive away her ghost again?’

The necromancer shook her head vigorously, for her previous attempt had left her sweating and trembling. She had professed success in prying Tisamon’s hold off Tynisa’s mind, but only for a little while. ‘Not again,’ she insisted. ‘He would be ready for me now, and he’d kill me. Put me before the woman, and I will try my usual rituals and incantations, but only from within my own body, where I’m safer. In dreams I’d not give much for my chances, now he’s ready for me.’

The two Wasps exchanged glances, but by now they had given up attempting to understand the strange world that these women inhabited. For Thalric, it was enough that the Beetle girl was walking and talking. Anything else he could learn to live with.

I’d love to think that this halfbreed was just conning Che, he mused, and that at the end of it there would be demands for money or such, but… He remembered the Twelve-year War and all the mysticism that the Commonwealers had laid claim to, and which the invading Empire had laughed at. Well, I’m loath to admit it, but perhaps this old lore of theirs has a few teeth left to it – not enough to turn back an army but sufficient to drive a mad Spider-kinden even madder than she was.

And following on that thought: Better that the Empire had taken the Commonweal entirely and wiped out all this mind-rotting mysticism. Reason enough for the conquest had it been fake, but all the more reason if there is some truth behind it. He knew Che would not understand, but she had never been a good arbiter of her own best interests. If I could take you away from this, then I would, but there remains a shard of it lodged inside you, wherever you go…

By evening they could see the Salmae’s army by its campfires, and it was plain that they would overtake it the following morning. They had a brief, divided discussion about whether to make contact meanwhile, with Thalric and Varmen both arguing that the victorious troops might mistake them for stragglers from the defeated brigands, so contact would be better made once their army had reached its destination and disbanded. Che would hear none of it, though. Tynisa was accompanying that force, and that was all that mattered.

Varmen insisted on taking the first watch, and even spent the time getting into the bulk of his armour to do it. The big Wasp had been growing more distant as they travelled, and it was clear to Che that whatever burden he had carried within him from Suon Ren was only growing, whether through time or distance. Still, he looked such a forbidding figure in all that weight of steel that she found that she did not quite have the courage to broach the matter. After Thalric and Maure had gone to sleep, she found herself still awake, staring at his plated form looming in the darkness which her eyes could pierce so easily, the black and gold of his mail dimmed to black and grey in her Art-sight.

At last his helm turned towards her, and he spoke. ‘If you’re not going to sleep, you might as well come over and keep me company.’ His voice sounded hushed and hollow.

Into the surprised silence that followed he explained, ‘Your breathing. I could tell from your breathing. People don’t realize how, if you spend a lifetime wearing this stuff, just how much you can see and hear and sense.’

Blankets wrapped around her, Che shuffled over to him. ‘Did you want to talk?’

‘You’re Beetle-kinden, and yet you understand all this magic business the Commonwealers talk about, right?’

‘Some of it, some of the time,’ she admitted.

‘Fate and destiny, that sort of thing.’ he added vaguely. ‘It’s just… I remember the war, and how we came through here, won our battles, took over their places, set up governors. We killed a lot of their people. I did myself. Pride of the Sixth, you know. Even then, there were moments… there was a girl, a Dragonfly girl, one of their nobles. We fought…’

‘You killed her?’

‘I never did. I liked her. Nice voice, she had. I like a nice-sounding voice in a girl. So I let her go. But then the Second bastard Army rolled through. I tried to find her, later… Stupid thing to have regrets about, eh?’

Che waited, watching him. He was no longer looking at her, just staring off into the night. At last he said, ‘I never before and never after had any second thoughts about what we were doing, except then, after that fight… She was brave, you see, and I liked her. And then they re-formed the Sixth, under General Praeter, and we marched off into the Lowlands, and there’s Malkan’s Stand…’ One gauntleted hand touched the rough-edged hole in his breastplate. ‘After that I don’t have an army, and even if I went back, and they took me back, I wouldn’t be what I was. No more Sentinels, eh? They’ve no use for Sentinels any more, not with snapbows ready to drill a hole in the strongest plate. A lifetime of training and being special, then it’s all down the drain. And what was I left with? When I sobered up, when I stopped trying to die… I was left with her. Crazy Dragonfly girl with the nice voice. I came back, you see. Hovering about the Commonweal border, plying some sort of useless bastard escort business. After all that, after getting shot through my mail, after the defeat, after losing it all… just her. Some dead Dragonfly girl that I’ll never find. The only thing left in my head, after all that, was remembering her.’

‘You’re still looking for her?’ Che asked.

‘She’s dead.’

‘You don’t know-’

Varmen’s helm had twitched towards Maure’s sleeping form, so Che understood when he repeated, ‘She’s dead.’

Che could have asked him, then. She could have asked, Did you speak with her? Or enquired what a long-dead Dragonfly noblewoman might have had to say to a representative of her murderers. She might even have asked if Varmen’s continued presence at her side was the result of some request or atonement demanded by this notional ghost. Or perhaps this duty was one that the Wasp had assumed himself, like another piece of ultimately ineffective armour.

But in the end she did not ask. Better that the man kept his secrets.

The Commonwealer force was still mustering by the time they reached it the next day, and even Che could see that this was chiefly because the bulk of it was anything but military. She was willing to wager that these peasants-turned-soldiers had been up at first dawn, but forming themselves into a marching column was clearly not part of their usual morning routine.

The arrival of the four of them caused a nervous stir amongst the common soldiery, their carefully constructed formations eddying and swirling aside as though to even be close to a Wasp-kinden was to invite extinction. Che expected this disturbance to swiftly attract the attention of the officers or the nobles in charge, but it quickly became apparent that there were few of their kind available. The small band of Dragonfly-kinden who eventually showed up spent more time staring at Thalric and Varmen than reordering their troops, and for a moment Che feared that the four of them, by their very presence, would somehow reverse the recent military victory and rout the entire army.

Then order was finally restored by the appearance of one man, and Che could see why. Her first thought was, Tisamon, but of course it was not. The dead Weaponsmaster had been in her thoughts so much that any Mantis of a similar bearing, and wearing the same badge above all, would have instantly brought him to mind. This man was older, with silver hair, and was wearing an arming jacket of pale grey leather, where Tisamon had favoured forest green. He seemed calmer, too, in a strange way. Che would never have described Tynisa’s father as agitated, but there had constantly been a high-strung tension to Tisamon, which this man had conquered. Here was Tisamon as he might have been, had he never loved Tynisa’s Spider-kinden mother, had he never become friends with Stenwold Maker.

‘What is your business here?’ he asked, not loudly but in a voice that could not be ignored.

‘Please, sieur,’ Che said, falling back on the Solarnese title for no reason she could think of, ‘we’re looking for my foster-sister, Tynisa.’

‘Tynisa?’ For a moment his face was blank, then something fell into place. ‘Ah, Maker Tynise. And you are her sister?’

‘Foster-sister,’ Che explained. ‘I’ve travelled a very long way, we all have.’

‘She’s left the column,’ the Mantis told her. ‘She’s flown off to Leose, along with most of the nobles.’

So close. Che sagged a little. A day gained somewhere and I’d have caught her. ‘You’re taking your soldiers to… Leose then?’ she asked, stumbling a little over the name.

‘I return there myself, so accompany me if you will.’ He was still studying Che’s face, without expression. She wondered how much he could read there of her recent history.

‘We’ll make better time on our own,’ Thalric suggested. The Mantis’s eyes flicked towards him sharply, a man with no love for Wasp-kinden, nor fear of them either.

‘You’ll do better to approach Leose with a friend to gain you admittance,’ Maure murmured. ‘The Salmae’s doors don’t open even as wide as Felipe Shah’s, I’ve heard.’ She wore a wry smile, no doubt thinking of her reception back at Suon Ren.

Che glanced between them, keenly aware of the Mantis’s gaze turning back to her. ‘Then, yes, we’ll travel with you, and gladly,’ she told him at last. ‘Cheerwell Maker of Collegium,’ she introduced herself, then named her companions in turn.

The Mantis’s name was Isendter, pronounced with a typical Commonweal flourish that Che found almost impossible to replicate. He was called Whitehand also, apparently, so she settled for that. As the day wore on, it became clear why he had set himself aside as the only one who would reach Leose. Little detachments of the makeshift soldiers were constantly abandoning the column, their ranks thinning and thinning as time wore on: the peasants were returning to their farms and villages, their herds and crops, Che realized, and clearly glad to be putting the military life behind them. It was spring, after all, and a farmer had better things to do than go chasing about with a spear. She thought of those soldiers of Collegium, who were re-purposed tradesmen, artisans and shopkeepers, yet had still accounted for themselves well enough during the war. Then she thought about the Empire, whose every male son was given a uniform and a weapon, and allowed no other trade but fighting.

How did we ever beat them? she asked herself, but then had to admit, We did not. They were not beaten: they just stepped back to deal with a little infighting. And they have since whipped their rebel governors into line, and they now have their new Empress, and surely I can hear the sound of a thousand thousand swords being drawn even now. What is to stop them?

‘Che?’ Thalric touched her arm and for a moment she wanted to run away from him and from his brutal birthright. Instead, she hugged him tight because he was surely proof that redemption was possible, even for the Wasp-kinden.