Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

In his mind’s eye he had found her, Che, sleeping on a broad bed draped with silken sheets, curled up like a child with a slight smile on her face. His heart leapt to see her there. He had thought he felt her absence, before he tried this scrying, but he had not known just how much so until he bid her face appear in his mind.

‘Che,’ he said softly. ‘I know you are asleep. I have touched you before, like this, when the need was utmost. Now I have found you again so easily. It must be because I love you.’

He knew he had no guarantee that she would ever hear his words, even in her dreams, or that those dreams would be recalled on her waking, but he needed to talk to her, to touch her. Just looking at her made his heart ache, yet it was a love abhorrent to his entire kinden, seemingly against all reason, and despite that one that could not be argued with.

Che, I need to show you what I see, here. We have reached the town of Jerez, you see, which is like no place I have ever been to. I want to show it to you.

Her surroundings – the blur of them that he could make out – seemed almost palatial, with white stone, tapestries and rugs, a window with ornately worked shutters. It was a far cry from the heap of sticks in which he himself was spending the night, and which passed for a house here in Jerez.

He rose from the filthy mat of crushed reeds and went over to the doorway, looking out at Lake Limnia in all its sordid splendour.

I know your city lies by a lake or a sea, Che. Well, this is my lake. It was blood-red with the sunset and, although a far smaller stretch of water than the Exalsee in the distant south, it encompassed his entire northern and eastern horizons. Lake Limnia’s edge was cluttered and uncertain, with stands of reeds ten feet tall springing from the mud, their tangle of brown roots sometimes sturdy enough to walk on and blurring the boundary between land and water. Torn from the lakeside but held together by their roots, similar reeds formed floating islands that scudded slowly across the surface wherever the wind took them. Some of the islands were large and stable enough to build on, for all that there was nothing but murky water beneath them.

Jerez squatted like a festering boil on the side of the lake, a haphazard collection of little buildings made from stick, mud and reed, hundreds of them ranging from single-room shacks to sprawling two-storey excrescences that were rickety, ugly and lopsided, increasing in number towards what was nominally the centre of the town. The only stone building stood in the middle, a fort the Wasps had built for their local governor. To Achaeos’ amusement it was already listing badly as the soggy ground set about the business of reclaiming it, year by year.

Many of the locals lived out on the water itself: some of them on boats, but more on houses built on rafts. Clearly the Skaters liked to be able to move about easily and the shores of Lake Limnia comprised a maze of channels, shifting islands and floating houses. Achaeos had already heard from Gaved that the black market – the Black Guild as it was known – was strong here, since the Skaters could transport almost anything around or across the lake in secrecy. North of the lake began the wild and hilly country of the Hornet-kinden, who were the Wasps’ barbarous kindred, untamed territories that were the gateway to many fabulous places beyond.

The Skaters themselves were still very much in evidence, and Achaeos studied them anew, for Che’s benefit. Do you remember Skrill? he asked her within his mind. She was your uncle’s agent to Tark? I’d guess she must have been part-Skater.

They were a small folk, but almost grotesquely long-limbed. Every step involved a stalking, surreptitious and shifty motion. Though there were plenty of outsiders lodging in Jerez, the Skaters looked on them all with narrow-eyed suspicion, yet looked on their own kind with even more. They were blue-white of skin with long pointed ears, complementing pointed faces and pointed noses. Most of them wore drab, slightly ragged tunics that left much of the limbs bare, but some sported armour of tarnished metal scales. Almost all the adults seemed to be armed, and so far Achaeos had seen bows, slings, blowpipes, daggers, Wasp-pattern swords and even a few crossbows.

Watch them, Che. Watch how they set out. He fixed his eyes on one skinny creature that might have been female, watching closely as the Skater stepped out onto the water, then simply ran, skipping over the shallow waves, leaving nothing but a series of ripples to tell of her passage. They could all do this from an early age, for it was the Skater Art, and it was the last nail in the coffin of any Wasp attempt to control their smuggling and banditry.

But notice , he told Che in his head, how they stay close to the lake-shore, amongst the islands and the reeds. I have heard stories of great beasts, fish and insects, out towards the centre. Also they say that the lake is haunted, with strange lights appearing sometimes, deep below… Perhaps it is just talk to keep the Empire at bay, though I cannot imagine the Wasps being frightened by talk of ghosts and lights.

He stretched and yawned. He must have been living with daylight kinden for too long. The night-time, when his own people were most active, was becoming the time he felt a need for sleep. Be safe, Che , he exhorted her, across the miles that now separated them. Be safe and stay safe.

Morning brought little joy to Jerez, but a spark of it to Gaved. He looked out at the lake, now soiled by the dawn, at the stinking collection of hovels that formed the town, and he thought, I’m home.

Not true, of course. He was a drifter by nature, with no home to speak of, but business had brought him here so many times that he had almost acquired a fondness for the sorry place, second hand and with no questions asked, the way one acquired anything in Jerez. And there were even a few dwelling here that he might almost call friends, or as near to friends as his trade allowed. What’s a friend anyway? Someone to watch your back, and resist the temptation to put a knife in it.

He halted his step, still staring out at the lake, considering it. He had now seen a little of how the other half lived: Stenwold Maker and his extended clan of agents composed of all kinden; Tisamon and his daughter and their invisible bond; the joy of Stenwold’s niece when she had met again her Dragonfly comrade.

I’ll settle for the unknifed back and the freedom , he told himself.

‘You’re sure you know your business?’ The Moth’s voice came from behind him.

‘Better than anyone. My contacts here will let us in on whatever’s going on. You can’t throw this sort of thing onto the waters without causing a ripple.’

The man’s blank, suspicious eyes tried to read him but, even before receiving the burn-scar, Gaved’s face had never been particularly expressive. The Wasp gave him a nod and set off down the crooked alleys of Jerez, thinking, Trust always was hard to come by in this town.

Three streets further on he stopped a Skater child, murmuring to it as though he was merely asking directions. The skinny creature nodded, took his coin, and ran off. Gaved continued on his patient way, hands shoved into the pockets of his greatcoat. He looked as unassuming as a Wasp could get.

Two streets later and the same child returned, whispering to his ear, ‘A woman follows you: Spider-kinden, young, and very pretty.’ Gaved nodded sagely, handed over another coin, and made a change of direction as though acting on the child’s advice.

Well, no surprises. The girl reckons she can out-skulk the Skaters, but they were born for that game. It almost felt like relief, this evidence of their lack of faith in him. It added a sense of certainty to his life.