Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

Alain himself was scouting aloft with a few other nobles, perched on their glittering insects with the countryside speeding past below them. Perhaps he would be at the village ahead, she hoped, feeling a familiar eagerness steal over her. She had wanted to ride with him, but inside her a voice had said, You must prove yourself first, then he will not deny you.

Let there be blood, she proclaimed to the world, for she had accepted the truth now. In nothing do you so excel, the voice said, as in the spilling of blood. It is your calling.

So she had joined up with Telse Orian and his followers, judging him a man who would not be slow in joining battle, and even now the smoke of a murdered village blotted the sky above them as they surged through the trees.

Abruptly, Telse Orian had put the spur to his mount, and all around Tynisa the rest followed suit, breaking into a charge as they passed the treeline, and leaving her behind. Her horsemanship, however acquired, was insufficient to keep up with them at a gallop, so all she could do was tag along behind, losing ground with every hoofbeat.

Ahead she saw the village itself, much of it ablaze and a crowd of men and women clearly setting the next house alight. Telse lowered a lance now, and Tynisa saw the brigands scatter left and right, or straight up into the air. Arrows were already skimming towards them, several of the Mercers drawing and loosing smoothly from the saddle, which was another skill Tynisa did not possess.

But the voice within told her, You will have your chance, and she trusted it implicitly, kicking at her mount to get all the speed from it that she could.

A half-dozen of the arsonists were down already. They seemed poorly prepared for the assault, getting in one another’s way even as they tried to flee. Telse left off the attack, circling his horse in the centre of the village even as another roof began to smoulder with burning embers. He was peering down at the corpses.

‘Hold!’ he cried, but most of his followers were too busy chasing down the enemy, and only Tynisa heard him say, ‘What kind of bandits are these?’

To her eyes, they were dead bandits, and the only shame was that she had not slain them herself. Telse Orian stepped from the saddle, though, and knelt down beside one.

‘No armour – not even armed…’ He stood, frowning. ‘Hold!’ he called again. ‘These aren’t bandits. I’ll wager these are the locals themselves.’

‘Then what are they doing?’ Tynisa demanded.

‘Perhaps they seek to deny the real brigands the use of their homes, and-’ Telse started, as an arrow slanted from the gleaming chitin of his breastplate, knocking him off his feet.

There was now a second band of men breaking from the trees, and they were a far more fearsome prospect than the fire starters had been. Most of them had bows, and Tynisa saw swords and spears, leather and chitin mail, and even a few battered pieces of armour that had surely graced some Mercer or noble scion once.

Telse sat up again, still winded, but his people were already reacting without any guiding plan. She saw two of them cut down from their saddles by bandit arrows, as the rest flurried and circled, some passing one way and some the other. The advancing bandits were loosing arrows at every target that presented itself. One shaft nipped past Tynisa herself, to bury itself in the ground.

Now, came the voice in her head, and she felt her father’s hands guide her as she whipped the reins and dug her heels in, her mount breaking into a gallop. She heard Telse Orian call her name, but he was irrelevant now.

There was some ground to cover before she reached the first of the brigands, but they could hardly fail to spot her. An arrow danced to her left, another to her right. She had her sword thrust out, and the next shaft, impossibly, struck the blade, its impact jolting all the way to her shoulder. She was close, then, levelling her rapier as though it was a lance.

They were a vicious-looking crew, she noted distantly. Dragonflies and Grasshopper-kinden, with a couple of other breeds too. One in particular stood out like a leader amongst them, a burly Dragonfly-kinden with greying hair. He had an arrow nocked at the moment she marked him, and it was loosed as soon as she saw it. She felt the impact shudder all the way through her horse, as the shaft plunged into the animal’s breast right up to the fletchings.

Another two strikes followed rapidly from other archers, but the luckless beast was already toppling forward, its forelegs giving way. For a moment Tynisa stood in the saddle, then hurled herself forward, landing on her feet and rushing the last few yards to the bandit leader.

He bounded backwards with a ten-foot leap, his wings briefly glimmering, then his next shaft, drawn and loosed with remarkable speed, struck the rapier’s curved guard even as she lunged forward, the sword seeming to guide itself as it defended her. She saw his eyes widen, then she was laying about left and right, catching two of the brigands neatly between the ribs, both as good as dead in the same instant. A Grasshopper spearman tried to get in her way but the tip of her blade made a ruin of his face with an almost leisurely flick.

Then the enemy were fleeing, and she could hear the drumming of hoofs behind her as Orian’s people finally rallied. Tynisa thought the brigands had broken at first, assuming that the horsemen would follow the enemy into the woods. There was a core of discipline to the bandits, though, enough of them turning at the treeline to shoot that Telse Orian called his people back. Tynisa stood firm, arrows skipping at her feet, but she was not touched.

I will remember you, she warned the bandit leader in her mind. Whether you are a captain or a mere lieutenant, I will remember you.

Che…

Behind her, the river Jamail flowed steady on its course, heedless of time or the deeds of mayfly humanity. The current chaos disturbing its slow waters, namely Amnon’s fish hunt, was a mere nothing, gone before the river could notice. It was just as irrelevant to Che.

Somewhere ahead of her, amid the moss-hung tangle of the trees, was the grey smudge that she told herself was Achaeos’s ghost, which had dragged her from her fellows to set off like a madwoman into the swamp. She had never been able to refuse him anything.

Some part of her knew she would discover, in time, that the apparition was not Achaeos at all. Instead, the parasite clinging to her mind was some fragment of Tynisa’s father, Tisamon, who had died destroying the Shadow Box. Somehow, the Mantis’s ghost had crawled from the very clutches of oblivion and into her head, then had lacked the strength to get out again.

So that was why she was here, as it led her a merry chase through the channels and mudflats and twisted greenery of the Jamail delta, impatient and demanding, and she followed gladly, because she thought it was Achaeos. Even though she knew that she was wrong, living through this a second time, she could not force herself to do anything different. There was a comfort in keeping her hand off the tiller and knowing the outcome, however painful it would be.

At last she had burst into the open, and found the little Mantis village: the reed-and-thatch circle of huts surrounding their sacred place of sacrifice. Even as she broke in upon them, the stunted Mantis-kinden of the delta were herding their latest two victims towards the wicker idol in the centre, its outstretched arms forever reaching for more blood.

Che had stepped forward, as she remembered, but realized there was now someone keeping pace with her. She glanced sideways, annoyed that the sanctity of her memories was being invaded, and saw a complete stranger, some halfbreed woman who looked as though she had Mantis blood herself. The intruder did not return her glance, but continued staring ahead at the two Wasp prisoners the swamp-dwellers had captured.