Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

The road to Siriell’s Town was a matter of heading north-east as best she could: bridging the canals, and then heading over increasingly hilly country until she had made the subtle transition from land that still knew the hoe today all the way down through a gradient of neglect, to land that had not been sowed in a decade or more. She saw a few villages on the way, and avoided them by choice. There were no other travellers, no merchants or messengers, no flying machines overhead. The sense of the land was one of quiet desolation. She knew she would feel different if the Commonweal had accepted her in any way, but aside from Felipe Shah’s brief moment of openness, she felt more a stranger here than she had done when she arrived – and even the prince thought it would be best if she left.

Each morning, and sporadically throughout the day, she checked her bearings as best she could by Allanbridge’s landmarks, thinking, So I can’t miss the place can I, Jons? As if I believe that.

But when she came within sight of Siriell’s Town – having veered west some distance from her intended course – she found that Allanbridge had been telling nothing but the truth. It was indeed a town, or something resembling one, but at its heart was a castle upon a hill, and Tynisa saw instantly that it looked something like the exemplar of Felipe’s own. Complete, it had constituted a six- or seven-floored hexagonal tower, narrowing towards a point at the top. The walls were lanced with arrowslit windows, so that no attacker on the ground or in the air would have been safe from the defenders’ missiles. Tynisa, having observed the sturdy walls of Collegium and the Sarnesh fortifications, could see only absences here: nowhere to place artillery, not that the Dragonfly-kinden would know what to do with it; no reinforcing of the walls, so that catapult or leadshotter assault would hammer them down all the sooner. This was a castle that had been designed to hold off men from another age.

It would not even serve for that purpose, any more. One whole side of it had sloughed off and tumbled down the hill years before, leaving a teetering rotten tooth of a place latticed with the shorn-off stubs of internal walls. The hollow shell of the interior had been colonized haphazardly by its new masters, for there were tents and shacks and wood-frame structures not only about the walls and within the castle’s hollow footprint, but straggling up the walls themselves, as though growing there like mushrooms. A further shambles of makeshift dwellings had spread out from the castle’s collapsed side in a jumble of huts packed far closer than the homes at Suon Ren. The entire place looked foul and squalid to Tynisa.

There was a clear effort to try and farm some of the land around Siriell’s Town, with a hundred little plots scratched into the soil. Several of these had adults or children standing guard over them, as though protecting seams of precious metal. They stared at her suspiciously, as she passed between them on her way to the town proper. Drawing closer, she saw that the narrow streets radiating out from the broken face of the castle were cluttered with people, many of whom seemed to be drunk or unconscious, and a couple of whom were clearly dead. The air washing over Tynisa reeked of sweat and refuse, and resonated with arguments and shouting, the clatter of pots, singing, the odd scream and the roaring declamations of some kind of street entertainer.

Most of the resident scum were Dragonfly-kinden, she noticed, and it was plain that noble paragons such as Salma or Felipe Shah were only setting an example that many of their fellows failed to match. Most of the other outlaws were tall, lean Grasshopper-kinden, but there was a fair quota of halfbreeds and other kinden, including some Mantids and even a few Wasps.

A middle-aged Dragonfly in a ragged robe reached out to tug at her sleeve. ‘How much?’ he slurred. ‘How much for it?’

She slapped his hand away, and in that moment her rapier was a comforting presence, resting against the man’s neck. He seemed too drunk to quite understand, so she kicked him in the parts for good measure, rousing a murmur of appreciation, or sympathy, from some of the degenerates nearby.

She had not thought to find Wasps in the Commonweal, but their pale faces kept leaping out at her as she passed through this filthy town, and she could see that they were prospering here too. There were only a handful, but people got out of their way, and wherever they sat, each held court with a gang of local ruffians at his beck and call. Watching a few of them, and the craven way in which most of the locals bowed and scraped, she soon made the connection. The Empire had dealt the Commonweal the most savage beating in that nation’s history.

At the end of the Twelve-year War three whole principalities – perhaps a third of the Monarch’s domain – were under the black and gold flag, and the Imperial forces had only halted their advance because of an uprising in one of their subject cities back along the supply chain. Even though a treaty had been signed, pledging future peace, and even though the three captured principalities were now nominally free, following reversals suffered in the Empire’s war with the Lowlands, everyone knew that the armies of black and gold could return at any time. Their repeated defeats had wormed their way into the consciousness of the Commonweal, and even people who had not taken up arms knew that the Wasp-kinden were to be feared.

After that, she was looking out for each renegade Imperial, her fingers constantly hovering near her sword hilt, some part of her mind plotting her own glorious fall. To rid the Commonweal of Wasps? To rid Felipe Shah’s principality of the vermin of Siriell’s Town? What might she not set her blade to? To die in the pursuit of some grand and bloody ideal, was that not the Mantis way? There was no past she wished to face, no future she could conceive, but Siriell’s Town offered her an eternal bloody present: fighting as Tisamon had fought, and losing herself here just as he had sought oblivion in Helleron after her mother had died.

For surely the world has no better use for me, she thought and, even as she did, her eyes lit on a face she recognized – bold as the sun, a man she had never wanted to see again.

She had been fleeing Jerez, as much as Collegium, when she came to the Commonweal, but here was Jerez mocking her on the streets of Siriell’s Town.

Jerez had been the idea of doomed Achaeos. There was some box, he said, just a little thing that a man could grip in one hand, but the Moth insisted it was of vital importance. Somehow, in the middle of a war, Achaeos had talked Stenwold into backing an expedition to retrieve it, and Tynisa had gone with him, to nobody’s gain.

Tisamon had been with her, watching her back as she watched his; and Jons Allanbridge of course, to get them there. Then there had been the two Wasps. One, the arch-traitor Thalric, had subsequently escaped to become a big man away in the Empire – yet another sack of blood she had never quite managed to cut open, for all he deserved it. And then there had been Gaved, who claimed to be independent of the dictates of the Empire. Tynisa had long decided that if he was genuinely something other than a servant of the Emperor, then he was something even worse: a freebooter, a mercenary, a thief and a kidnapper. Like Thalric, though, and unlike Achaeos, he had come out of the business untouched, and had been the only one to make any kind of profit from the whole wretched expedition. While others had bled and died, Gaved had left Jerez with a Spider-kinden girl on his arm, and an eyewitness familiarity with Tynisa’s own crimes.

And here, on the stinking streets of Siriell’s Town, was Gaved himself, with his intolerable burden of knowledge practically shrieking out to her. She watched as he spoke to some halfbreed who seemed to be a taverner, passing over several trinkets in return for some information or other – then the Wasp was off down the street with that light and easy step only truly owned by the utterly guilty.