Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

‘I. .’ Her heritage, her Mantis heritage, was lurking behind this Spider face of hers, and with it all of its blood-greed, its oaths and promises, its ancient traditions and its long memory. All of this she was inheritrix to.

And it was terrible, to find that heritage inside her like a cancer, but when she met his eyes he looked as proud of her as nobody had ever been, and it was wonderful, then.

‘That sword does not fit you,’ he said. It was a Mynan shortsword she had borrowed, a heavy, inelegant thing.

‘It’s better than none,’ she suggested.

He knelt by his gear and gestured for her to do the same. She felt an odd shiver as she did so. She stood now on the far side of some barrier or threshold that he had long kept her from.

‘When we came to this city before, I had expected to meet your mother here, as you know,’ he said, not quite looking at her. ‘And I did not, and the truth of why that was so is recent for both of us. However. .’ He spread his hands, and she saw the spines on his forearms flex with this small motion. ‘I had meant. . I had thought, while we were apart. I wanted to make some gesture, to bind her to me, to bind me to her. Just something.’ A faded smile. ‘We could not wed. For my people it is a ceremony sacred, and they would slay me rather than see me united with her kind. For hers, however, their women may take many men, as they will. But I wanted to show what she meant to me. I am not good with words, as you can tell. So I found her a gift.’ One hand made a movement towards his rolled blankets and his pack, but he withdrew it. ‘And then she did not come. But I could not cast the gift away. It was. . important, valuable, to me. I have carried it ever since, wherever I went. I have put it above my bed and hoped that some rogue would steal it, and rid me of it, for it has always reminded me of her. And every night, when I came back to whatever low place I lodged in, there it still was. And now you are here, in this city, her daughter and her very image — and my own blood as well. And you have lost a sword.’

At last he looked her straight in the eye. ‘You don’t believe in fate,’ he stated.

‘I do not.’

‘You have a heritage. In truth you have two. You have been brought up by Beetles, surrounded by machines and ideas you cannot ever grasp. You try to think like them, but your blood says otherwise. My people believe in fate, and in many other things the Beetle-kinden do not teach, and your mother’s kinden likewise. I believe this is fate .’

And he lifted from behind him a rapier such as she had never seen. It was scabbarded in iridescent green that shifted and changed as the light touched it, bound with what she thought at first was brass, but then saw must be antique gold. It was shorter than her old blade, but when he put it into her ready hands she found it was heavier. The guard was crafted into interlocking shapes that might represent leaves or elytra, all in gold and dark steel and enamelled green. Her eyes seemed unable to stay still on it without turning to follow its twining lines.

She had taken it by the scabbard, which seemed to be finely worked chitin shell, and now she reached for the hilt but Tisamon stopped her.

‘There are formalities,’ he told her. His hand touched the sword’s tapered pommel, which ended in a curved claw. In an instant he had pressed his palm to it, drawing a raw red line beside the ball of his thumb. She saw a drop of his blood glisten on the gilt metal.

‘Now you,’ he said. She opened her mouth to protest and he told her, ‘This is important. I do not ask you to believe, only to believe that I believe.’

She gripped the scabbard just below its neck and stabbed the same metal thorn into her hand. It felt like the sting of a small insect just before the poison starts, a tingling pain. His blood, and my blood, both on my hands.

‘Now draw the sword,’ he directed, and she did.

When her hand closed about the textured wood of the grip something went through her, a shock as though she had just been stabbed. Her heart lurched and for a second she felt the sword in her hands as a living thing, newly awoken. The feeling passed almost at once but her sense of wonder returned in force as she slid the blade from the scabbard.

It was shorter than she was used to, as she had guessed from the sheath, and it did not seem to be of steel at all, but a dark metal lustreless as lead. It was thicker, too, than she had thought, tapering only in its last few inches. In her hands it was like an unfamiliar animal that might yet get to know her scent and be trained.

‘This is. . old ,’ she said slowly.

‘There are perhaps six or seven amongst my people who still have the secret of making such blades, but this one dates back to the Age of Lore, as all the best ones do.’

‘The when ?’ It was a term she had not heard in Collegium.

‘Before the Apt revolution,’ Tisamon informed her.

‘But that’s. . not possible.’ She looked at the weapon in her hands, gleaming only a little in the dawn light. ‘That was over five hundred years ago.’

‘And the forging itself occurred another hundred before that,’ he said. ‘Forged in an age before doubt. Forged in blood and belief and the purity of skill — all the things that make up my kinden. It is mine to hold and give because, though I prefer the claw, I have completed my mastership of this blade, which is the blade of your blood from mother and father both. I have undergone the rituals, stood before the judges of Parosyal and shed my blood there. One day, if you consent, I will take you there too.’

It took her a moment to realize what he was saying. The Island Parosyal was some kind of spiritual place for the Mantis-kinden, or so she had been taught. He did not mean some mere religion. He was speaking of the Weaponsmasters, the badge he wore, the ancient order so jealously guarded.

‘They would never accept me,’ she said. ‘I am a halfbreed.’

‘If I vouch for you, if I train you, and if you are sufficiently skilled , then there will be no human voice with the right to deny you,’ he told her. ‘It is your choice, Tynisa. I am a poor father to you. I have no lands, no estate, no legacy from four and a half decades, save my trade. So it is all that I can give you.’

And before she could cloud her mind with ‘but’s and ‘what if’s she said, ‘Yes.’

A silence fell almost the moment that Kymene entered the room. Even Stenwold, part-way through puzzling over the charts and accounts that Tynisa had given him, paused instinctively, looking up. He caught his breath despite himself.

He had seen her last night, of course, looking weary and dirty from the sewers. bruised from her captivity. More like a thin and underfed waif than the Maid of Myna.

She had used her time well since, and he had no idea if she had even slept, for now she presented herself to her faithful in the way they wished to see her.

She wore full armour, or a version of it. A conical helm and coif framing her delicate, unyielding features. A breastplate, a man’s breastplate, painted black with two arrows on it in red. One pointed towards the ground, the other towards the sky, and Stenwold read that as We have fallen. We shall rise again . She wore a kilt of studded leather tooled with silver, high greaves patterned after the breastplate, and gauntlets the same. She wore no shirt, no breeches, though, as an ordinary soldier might. Her arms and legs showed bare skin of blue-grey to remind them that she was no mere spear carrier but the Maid of Myna. Her black cloak billowed behind her as she entered.

There was no cheer as she arrived, and Stenwold bitterly thought she deserved one until he realized what attention such noise might call down on them. Instead the cheer was in their eyes, in their faces.