Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

Tynisa wasted no time. ‘Where is Alain?’ she demanded. ‘You know all the comings and goings of this place. Where has he gone?’

The Grasshopper-kinden stared down at her with a curious fascination. ‘And am I now obliged to answer to you?’

Tynisa’s hand was at her sword-hilt. ‘Or else I will kill you. I will cut you until you tell me, and then I will kill you. If you tell me now then you will live, but only then.’

‘Have we come this far?’ the steward wondered, showing no fear. ‘Is your metamorphosis complete, now? Just a killer and nothing else?’

‘I want Alain. Tell me.’ Suddenly Tynisa scowled. ‘Oh, I know, you look down on me because I’m not part of your precious nobility. You’ve always tried to stand between us two. You think you’re protecting him.’

‘Oh, not him,’ Lisan Dea corrected her. ‘But perhaps that which I thought I was protecting has already been corrupted. Perhaps there is no reason for me to stand between the pair of you any more.’ Abruptly the seneschal’s reserve disintegrated, and something welled up from behind her broken mask that made Tynisa flinch, savage as she was. Behind the meticulous steward there was something raw and vicious, something that must have been festering impotently a long time. ‘Now you’ve shown what you really are, why should I try to prevent such a blessed union? Alain’s gone west, just a day ago, with half a dozen attendants and a couple of entertainers. They’ll not have made much time, so you could catch them by tonight, if you ride hard.’

For a moment Tynisa stared with horrified fascination at the vitriol writ large across the woman’s face. Then her iron purpose reasserted itself: no matter what the woman’s motives, Tynisa knew what she needed to know.

She was going to find Alain. She was going to take what was hers.

‘Gone west,’ had been so vague that it should have taken her longer than a day to find Alain’s party, but whatever had given her skill enough to ride a horse had enabled her to find a trail, too. The Commonweal had few roads, and her eyes soon picked out a track that looked recently used, and by a medium-sized party making no efforts to hide their progress. Indeed, casting her gaze across the ground was just like reading a book, a library of information set out for her. She was astonished that she had never noticed such evidence before.

She pushed her horse to the limit, knowing she had a bad reputation amongst the grooms of Leose, after killing a half-dozen of the beasts during the war with the brigands, but then the dumb animals were there to serve. She could not understand how anyone could get too attached to them. A handful of dead mounts was a small price to pay for the destruction of Salme Elass’s enemies.

Alain would not be expecting her, of course, and she tried to imagine the look on his face. He would be glad to see her, and discover that she had come to take him away from the confines and restrictions of Leose. His retinue might not be so pleased, of course. They would have their instructions from the princess, so they would resist.

She considered simply killing them all, but suspected Alain might not take kindly to that and, besides, it seemed inelegant, like a prostitution of her skills. Better that she stalked them, then took Alain from them without their noticing. That would satisfy her more. And if they gave chase, well…

At the back of her mind were pangs of doubt that she had to quell from time to time. What would Che think? What about the things Salma said? Surely this is not what I meant? But she was now in the grip of a fierce and borrowed certainty: qualms could not touch her.

Evening had drawn on, and her quarry obliged her by revealing its location with a campfire, which made everything so much easier. Of course, the Dragonfly-kinden could see well in the dark but, huddled close about their fire, they would be spoiling their own night-vision. There would be sentries, of course, in case some scraps of the brigand army remained, but they would not notice Tynisa.

Their camp was situated in a hollow excavated into a wooded hillside, deep enough to retain the heat and stave off the cold. No doubt this was a place maintained by the local farmers and herders for just such a purpose. She approached sideways on, slipping from tree to tree, eyes picking out the individual members of Alain’s escort against the blaze.

She crept close, closer than was wise, but she might as well have already cut out all their eyes. The armoured Mercers sat with the warmth of the fire at their backs and stared bleakly out into the darkness, unhappily waiting out the chill of the night with their breath pluming. A half-dozen others were huddled up close to the flames, and she picked out faces, builds, trying to identify her man. At the last she was forced to steal all around the site and approach it from further up the hillside, where the trees were denser, away from the main gaze of the watchmen. Their lax vigilance eventually allowed her to come all the way into camp, to stand in silence amongst them and mark each face. I could kill them all right now, and for a moment it was all she could manage to simply stand there without doing so. They deserve it for such poor service. Alain merits better followers. But her sword kept to its scabbard, and she had another matter to occupy her mind. Alain himself was not there.

The firelight let her read the ground, and she saw a recent scuffed track heading up the hillside. No doubt Alain, too, was sick of his idle retinue and had taken himself away from them. Perhaps he was even waiting for her somewhere. She pictured him in the moonlight, standing tall between the trees, smiling a greeting. And they would leave this place and make their own life, and to the pits with the Salmae and the Makers both. His princely virtue, her mastery and skill: together they would hunt down bandits and kill the enemies of the Monarch, he shorn of the ambitions of his mother, herself rid of the concerns of her sister. It would be perfect.

She left the camp, following his trail, each step a study in quietness, until she heard him up ahead.

He seemed to be murmuring to himself, which surprised her. She could just make him out, a crouching form in the darkness, hardly touched by the moon. And, yet, was there not a dim radiance there, from beneath him, that picked out his form in silhouette?

She waited until she was almost on his heels before she spoke.

‘Alain?’

He turned with a start. And she saw.

In that first moment she did not take in how the girl’s clothes were torn, nor the look of despair on her face. She saw only that Alain had been crouched over one of the Butterfly-kinden dancers, his robes open down the front, his abruptly shrinking genitals exposed to the cold night air.

‘Beheading, isn’t it, in the Commonweal?’ the Spider-kinden Avaris asked.

‘Beheading is just for their own, nice and quick and dignified. They’ll weight our heels and string us up,’ said one of the Dragonfly-kinden, a hard-faced woman named Feass, dropping down from her ninth inspection of the grille. No flaw in its workmanship had turned up yet. The weights still pinned it down at each corner, and the brigands were still securely imprisoned in the dungeon pit of Leose.

‘Just count yourself lucky you’re on this side of the border,’ Mordrec the Wasp growled. ‘They’d use crossed pikes in the Empire, and in the Principalities, too.’

‘I always wondered about that,’ Feass said, frowning. ‘I mean, do they just leave you to starve, after tying you to the pikes? What’s to stop someone coming to cut you free?’

Mordrec gave her an odd look. ‘They don’t tie you to the pikes. They shove the pissing things in under your ribs, so the point of the pike goes right through your body into your arm on the other side, like so.’ He made a violent gesture for emphasis. ‘If they know what they’re doing – and it’s a valued skill, where I come from – then you hang there dying slowly for hours.’