Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

As his comrade vanished, the first assassin swore and hurled Che away from him. She hit the passage floor hard, but kept hold of her knife, desperately turning to menace him with it. He paused, catching his breath for a heartbeat, as swords scraped and rattled below them.

‘You!’ bellowed Stenwold, from the doorway of his room. The assassin turned swiftly, and froze.

The reason was that Stenwold held a weapon levelled. It was a crossbow without the arms, a great, heavy four-barrelled thing with a quartet of broad metal bolts jutting aggressively out at the world, resembling javelins more than anything else. Che knew it as a piercer, and that there was a prodigious firepowder charge just waiting for the touch of a lever to explode.

The assassin remained poised, and Stenwold studied him levelly, despite the blood soaking his own arm. ‘Sword on the ground, and perhaps-’

Che noticed the man about to spring, hoping to catch Stenwold in mid-sentence, and she stabbed down with the knife hard enough to pin his foot to the floor. At that moment Stenwold pulled the trigger. It was as if the sound swallowed up every inch of the house, as a double charge of firepowder erupted in the confined space of the piercer. The assassin was punched off his feet, flung all the way down the landing and pinned to the far wall by three of the bolts. The fourth, without any human obstacle to travel through, rammed itself so far into the bare wall itself that its tip must have been visible from outside.

The quiet that then descended, laced with the acrid smell of the spent powder, was absolute.

‘Where’s. . Tynisa?’ Stenwold asked heavily. Che pointed mutely downwards.

They got to the broken rail and looked down to see her standing with the second assassin splayed like a doll on the ground before her. As she stood, head bowed, looking at the first man she had ever killed, the blood-shiny rapier was still in her hand.

Che heard her uncle suck in his breath. ‘Hammer and tongs,’ he murmured. ‘It’s her .’ Che caught a glint in his eye, some token of recognition that had nothing to do with Tynisa. The surroundings must be different, as must the dead man below, but this very tableau, this moment of stillness and contemplation, had caught him off guard. For just a second he was twenty years younger and elsewhere, seeing and wondering about some event long past.

And then Tynisa looked up at him, pale and staring. He hurried down the stairs and took her in his arms. The first death , he thought. There came to him the image of an orthopter’s cabin in Myna with that Wasp soldier falling back. The first death by our hands is always hard. She would survive it, though, he knew. It’s in her blood.

A moment later Tynisa pushed away from him and went over to Che, taking her foster-sister’s hand.

‘You’re not hurt?’ she said. ‘I thought he had you.’

Che blinked at her. ‘Uncle Sten killed him.’ She had not expected such sympathy.

‘I need you to do something for me,’ said Stenwold to them both. He was now sitting on a nearby couch, the dead man at his feet. ‘One of you go and get Doctor Nicrephos for me, quick as you can.’

‘Doctor Nicrephos?’ Che asked in surprise. ‘But you want a proper doctor, surely?’

‘He’s an old charlatan, that one,’ Stenwold agreed. ‘But he knows his poisons, though. These killers. . weren’t using clean blades.’

Tynisa was out of the door in an instant, leaving Che gaping at him, feeling suddenly cold.

‘But you. . You can’t. .’

Stenwold managed a smile. ‘Oh, I’m an old Beetle, remember, Cheerwell. My insides are made of leather. Take more than some street-corner thug’s blade-spit to floor me. Still, maybe you should reload the piercer. Spare bolts and powder are in my room.’

She fairly flew back up the stairs, leaving him for a moment with his thoughts. He peeled the cloth from the face of the assassin there, recognizing the stamp of a halfbreed’s features: a blend of Spider, Beetle and Ant-kinden. The other one had been pure renegade Ant, so Cheerwell had done well to even stave the man off. ‘Local talent, these two,’ he said to himself. Not Wasps, and nobody the Wasp Empire would either own or be connected to. The game had clearly changed.

Che came back down the stairs, stuffing heavy bolts into the piercer’s muzzles. ‘Will Salma and Totho be in danger too?’ she asked.

‘Tonight? I don’t think so — but tomorrow is anyone’s guess. Cheerwell, I’m changing my plans.’

‘Changing them how?’

‘I have four seats reserved on the Sky Without for tomorrow. You’re going to be on it too. All of the Majestic will.’

‘But you said-’

‘Plans change. Now I need to stay here long enough to close my books, so I’ll join you when I can.’ Seeing her about to protest further he held up a hand. ‘And I don’t mean that as some kind of euphemism for “I’ll never see you again”, Cheerwell. I never was a death-or-glory boy. I’ll catch up with you all in Helleron, but for now, as I said, I want to keep you safe. It’s a mad thought, but I think you’ll be safer with my people in Helleron than here alone with me.’

Tynisa was back now, pulling in her wake a stooped, grey-skinned figure. Che stood back as the old Moth-kinden entered. She recognized him from the College but he taught the sort of disreputable classes that sensible young Beetles did not choose to attend. He was the very picture of a storybook wizard, with his long hair gone a dirty grey, and his slanted eyes blank-white, without iris or pupil.

‘Master Nicrephos,’ Stenwold began. ‘I have need of your services.’

The Moth laughed between his teeth. ‘A believer at last, are you?’ he replied in almost a whisper. ‘No? Well, no matter. This morning I was your debtor. Tomorrow I shall not be, hmm?’

‘Just come and shake your bones or whatever,’ Stenwold grunted. ‘And then consider all debts paid.’

Stenwold had gone out somewhere before Che was even up, leaving her with a clutching feeling of anxiety. The events of the previous night came back with a jolt at the sight of the ruined banister.

The world has gone mad.

She had watched while Nicrephos had ostentatiously tended to Stenwold’s wound, and had ground her teeth in frustration at it. This was no doctoring. Nicrephos had muttered charms over the wound, burned a few acrid herbs and tied a little bag of something about the Beetle’s arm. Stenwold had just sat there patiently, his dark features gone grey with pain or poison, leaving the quack to go about his mummery — even thanked him when he had finished.

After the Moth had gone, Che had rounded on her uncle. ‘What was that all about? You can’t tell me you believe in that nonsense, like some. . credulous savage ?’

Stenwold shrugged. ‘I can’t pretend it makes any sense to me, but I’ve seen Doctor Nicrephos bring back from death’s doorstep a man that all the real doctors in this town had given up on.’

‘But he barely even touched the wound!’

Stenwold shrugged — then winced. ‘It’s easy, once the lamps are lit, to scoff at shadows,’ was all he said, and then he had retired to bed.

And this morning he was gone already to bustle about the town, but at least he had scribbled Tynisa and Che terse instructions.

The back room of the Taverna Merraia, third hour after dawn. Be packed. And that was all it said.

The girls walked there together, and close together, for there were a lot of foreigners about on the streets during the Games. Some were simply merchants and artisans but others had a darker look. More was bought and sold during the tenday of the games, of all commodities, than in the entire month beforehand. As was their way, Beetles never let such a gathering go to waste. In the simple walk from Stenwold’s villa to the taverna they encountered a band of renegade Vekken mercenaries, all swagger and glower. They saw a Tarkesh slavemaster in conference with two Spider buyers, because whilst one could not own a slave within Collegium’s walls, one could sell them on paper — a neat distinction. There were men who looked like brigands here to tout their loot, Spiderland nobles and their cadres of followers, Mantis-kinden killers-for-hire with their bleak stares. . It was a relief to simply reach the taverna without some new assailant dashing at them from the crowds, and both of them had hands close to sword hilts. Tynisa might have her customary rapier, but this time Che wore a proper shortsword, Helleron made. When the killers next came hunting her, she would provide them with a real fight.