Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

They insisted on extracting the arrow before she rode for the camp. A solemn Grasshopper healer removed the protruding head, and then carefully eased the shaft back out. As she sat gritting her teeth, she felt all the pain that had not dared trouble her during the battle, now returning with a vengeance. She did not cry out.

When the healer had bandaged her, she rode on to the place where Salme Elass had decided to pitch her tents. There was a lamp burning in the princess’s pavilion, but she had not come to make her report to the matron of the Salmae.

She found Alain in his own tent, and he turned as she entered, still bloodied from the battlefield and with her sword at her hip. The tales that had already reached him would not have been silent about her own particular exploits: she had led the assault, she had taken the bandit leader. My gift to you.

She almost threw herself at him. In her mind she was duelling, and had beaten down his last parry, exposing him to her blade. It was now that balancing moment when one protagonist was utterly at the mercy of the other.

He caught her, as she reached him, and their lips met. The shock of it made her heart stutter, as that long-familiar face, that maddening smile, all of a sudden they were hers.

He drew her down on to his sleeping mat. ‘Salma,’ she whispered, when she finally could.

And, of course, he replied, ‘Yes.’

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.