Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

‘You come here on a slave-shipper, yet you don’t feel comfortable with slaves.’

‘We just took the first ship out of Mavralis,’ Nero told her.

‘Where I was born, there are no slaves,’ Che said, with no little pride. She expected another lesson in Solarno history, stressing the necessity of the slave trade, but Taki merely nodded thoughtfully.

‘The Path of Jade Party are strongly against slaving,’ she said. ‘And more power to them, too, not that they’ll get anywhere with that.’

‘Which party are you with, then?’ Nero asked her.

Taki shook her head. ‘So long as they let me fly, I don’t care about any of it. The Wasps, on the other hand…’

At that point a Spider-kinden woman burst in. Che took her as quite young at first but, as she rushed across the room to sweep Taki up into her arms, it became clearer that much of that youth was applied in front of the mirror.

‘My clever girl!’ she said. ‘Don’t ever even think about another house! We’d simply fold without you. A purse from the Praedrael! Not that we really need their silver but it’s the keeping score, my dear, sweet girl!’

Che and Nero stared in awe, because, in their experience, Spider-kinden were graceful, reserved and elegant creatures, and would never dream of behaving in such an effusive manner. Yet this Spider woman spun Taki about for a moment as though she were a child, and then released her, leaving the Fly to catch her balance in the air with her wings, before turning to the other visitors.

‘And who are these?’ she asked.

Che looked into the woman’s face and saw a shrewd intelligence assessing her, despite the flamboyant show. Spider-kinden , she reminded herself. You can never take them at face value.

‘Domina Genissa of the Destiavel,’ Taki introduced her. ‘These are Bella Cheerwell and Sieur Nero, who have come from far away. From beyond the Porta Mavralis. Beyond the Spiderlands, apparently.’

‘You are welcome, welcome,’ Genissa gushed. ‘We adore having new faces come to stay here at the Destiavel. Are you seeking employment?’

At her elbow, Taki gave a slight nod and Che just frowned at the gesture. Nero was quicker on the uptake. ‘Indeed I am, great lady. May I present myself as Master Nero of Egel, an artist of the first water.’

‘A foreign artist?’ Genissa said. ‘How simply delightful. Have you tendered your services to any others since you arrived?’

‘Lady, you are the first.’ Nero swept a creditable bow.

‘Domina, shall I find Sieur Nero’s assistant some lodging?’ Taki interrupted, ‘while you take your ease with the great artist?’

‘Yes, yes.’ Genissa replied with a dismissive wave, regarding Nero with a rather predatory expression.

Taki tugged at Che’s arm to draw her out of the room, and out of earshot. ‘You have to be careful,’ she explained. ‘This business with the Wasps, well… I’m very fond of Domina Genissa, and she’s always good to me, but her politics lie with the Satin Trail Party, just like all of the Destiavel, and recently the Wasps have started wooing them. There’s no party line drawn out yet, but if the Reds fall into step with the Wasps, you’d soon hear about it the hard way if you were known to be an enemy of theirs.’

‘How do you know I’m an enemy-?’

‘Give me some credit,’ Taki snorted. ‘I assumed at first you were an escaped slave, but then I realized you’d come in from the wrong point of the compass. But you’ve got some problem with the Wasps, I can see. Why not tell me about it, seeing as I’ve got plenty of my own reasons for not liking them.’

Che stared at her, feeling that she was now on very unsteady ground, and with only this one small hand held out to her. But who else had she to trust, in this place, that might help her in her mission here?

‘My people have the best reason of all to hate the Wasps,’ she said at last. ‘We’re at war.’

Outside, the promised rain, which she had not quite believed in, began to fall.

Odyssa could have taken ship if she had wanted. If she had wanted, she could have even taken passage on the same slaver as the Lowlander agents, and they would never have guessed. Still, Odyssa had travelled more than most and knew there were more efficient ways of getting from place to place than the uncertainties of the water. It had been easy enough, back in Porta Mavralis, to wait for a flier with space for one passenger.

She had changed into clothes more befitting a medium-rank Spider-kinden going travelling, clothes whose tailor had taken her figure into account. The Empire had no idea how to dress a woman, indeed how to do anything with women. In her opinion, women were the Empire’s greatest unused resource.

She was a slender, attractive Spider woman, looking no more than in her late twenties after sufficient time before the glass. She had dyed her hair dark this season, against the fashion, since she felt it gave her a more sincere and serious look.

Although her Lowlander stooges had been given a long enough lead, the Solarnese pilot got her down before their slaver ship had even touched dock. Most of her kinden found flying uncomfortable but, after seven years serving the imperial Rekef Outlander, she was used to it. The Empire did not have so very many Spiders in its employ, so her services had been spread thin during these last few years in General Reiner’s employ.

Ah well, we discard all our toys in time , she thought, for the game changes, always. It had been an enjoyable education, working amongst the Rekef, but real games were played for higher stakes – and by Spiders.

Odyssa had precise enough directions to lead her straight to her contact, but that was not how the game was played. Instead she spent several hours wandering the streets of Solarno, feigning interest at market stalls, delivering bland messages to publicans which would trigger the rudimentary informant network of the recently installed Rekef presence so that the word would get back to her contact that she had arrived. Even so it took a surprisingly long time before a Fly-kinden messenger tracked her down and handed over a folded and sealed paper.

There had been little care in the encoding, the overt contents gibberish, an obvious fake. She tutted over such sloppy fieldwork. From long experience she solved the code automatically, drawing from it her directions and the meeting place. Still shaking her head, she took a sure path through the city, for all that she had only just arrived there.

Her contact met her on his own, although she knew that he had been accompanied moments before, dismissing his hired guards once he saw her arrive alone.

‘You must be Captain Havel,’ she said, eyeing a Wasp-kinden of middle-years, a thickset veteran of more than one knife-skirmish. He took the sealed orders from her, breaking them open with a thumb and leafing through them.

His mouth suddenly dry, Havel studied the Spider-kinden woman for a long time. The seals and signatures on the orders were genuine, beyond dispute, but that only made him even less happy with this encounter. ‘Your papers seem to be in order,’ he said finally, in a voice soft and hoarse from the scar across his throat, a memento of a botched negotiation with the Scorpion-kinden. ‘Good of the general to care about us. We thought we’d been forgotten, out here.’ He had been all of two years in Solarno, almost since the Empire had first taken an interest in the Exalsee. Havel had remained without orders for most of that time, and what had started as a routine of lying low and collecting information had gradually been corrupted by the very nature of the place. For he and his men had since found no shortage of opportunities to turn a profit on the shifting scene of Solarno’s politics.