Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

Time now to test other certainties, to see if they had rusted in the constant misting rain, for he had arrived at his destination. Of all the little shacks of Jerez this was perhaps the least prepossessing, barely more than an outhouse tacked onto the Cut Glass Export House, a Skater merchant cartel that specialized in buying in gems from the north and selling them on furtively to Consortium factors or imperial officers. Its clandestine associations with the regime were such that, even when posing under such an obvious name, it continued to operate within sight of the governor’s fort quite unchallenged.

The little outhouse was bigger on the inside than it looked, because it had bitten at least three rooms out of the neighbouring Cut Glass, with more space under negotiation the last time Gaved had been here. The Glass itself put up with them so long as prying eyes did not turn on the Export House itself.

There was a sign dangling haphazardly from the slanting roof, and Gaved saw approvingly that it had been repainted recently. The rains that came almost every other day to Jerez, that were slanting down even now, were ruthless on paint and ornament of any kind. Jerez signs eschewed words; even the advertising was underhand. The Cut Glass itself used a broken mirror, and the swaying, spinning piece of board that Gaved had sought out bore a simple eye, looking left. For those that had use for their services, it was enough.

Gaved pushed the door open and ducked inside, shaking the rain from his cloak. The first room was low-ceilinged enough to make him stoop, and empty save for the ubiquitous reed matting on the floor and a fitfully burning rush lamp hanging from the rafters.

‘Nivit!’ Gaved called out. ‘Customer!’

‘Come on in.’ A thin voice emerged from a doorway covered by just a tatty drape. The room beyond was much bigger and cluttered with half a dozen crates and a seven-foot statue of a robed Moth-kinden that Gaved recalled hauling in there, with some help, over a year ago. A lone Skater was perched on one of the crates, scratching inventories onto a slate. Nivit was bald and pallid, gaunt and hollow-cheeked even for his kind. His script was immaculate, the tiny characters crowding each other to make the most of the slate’s surface, but his writing pose was bizarre, with elbows and knees jutting out at all angles as he bent his long limbs to the task. The Skaters had clearly never been intended for literary folk.

‘Well look who it isn’t,’ Nivit crowed. ‘Himself, himself. Didn’t think I’d see you for another half-year at least.’

‘I always come back, sooner or later,’ Gaved replied.

‘Word said you pitched up in an airship. Going up in the world, is it? Or just up and down?’

‘I told them they’d not keep it a secret,’ Gaved admitted. Allanbridge had brought them down silently at night, pumped the gas out of the balloon and stowed it out of sight, the gondola abruptly transformed into a serviceable boat that they hauled through the mud of the shoreline until it was nominally afloat on the lake. Gaved had known that there was no such thing as a secret in Jerez, though. The Skaters saw everything. That was what he was counting on.

‘So tell me, chief, what’s the busy?’ Nivit put down the slate. With elaborate showiness he extracted a little bell from inside his tunic and rang it once. A moment later a young Skater, a girl as far as Gaved could tell, darted from somewhere still deeper inside the building and took the slate back with her.

‘ She’s new,’ Gaved noted. ‘Business is good, I take it.’

Nivit gave a shrug, which transported his bony shoulders over a remarkable distance. ‘So I get lonely.’ Gaved knew that in a further room there rose rack after rack of shelves carrying hundreds of slates, with every transaction neatly ordered and dated. Nivit’s powers of organization were the secret of his success.

‘I’ve got a commission for us both,’ Gaved informed him.

‘So long as Nivit gets his cut, lay it on me,’ the Skater said. ‘Who’s the mark?’

‘Not who, this time, but what. Something that’s come to Jerez just recently. Something specialist and valuable, imperial contraband – or at least the Empire will be looking for it. Whoever has it will be aiming to sell it, but the price will be steep as steep.’ It felt good to be back here, working with decent, honest crooks like Nivit rather than for the Empire. Not that there was any escaping the Empire here either, of course. Most of the work the two of them had previously tackled together had involved catching imperial runaways. As well as his hunting skills, that was what Gaved had brought to the partnership: an acceptable Wasp-kinden face for their imperial patrons to deal with.

Nivit nodded. ‘Well, now, luxury goods, is it?’ He smiled slyly. ‘Already got rumours coming in of some sort of auction, see. Nothing definite as yet save that it’s really, really by invitation only, but stay with me and I’ll pry out some details for you.’

This was, for Thalric, the acid test. Like a child who had been naughty, he was at last being let out on his own. Tisamon, he realized, would be sharpening the blade of his clawed gauntlet, not so much in anticipation of betrayal but in eager longing for it. There was a man for whom the last 500 years of history might as well never have happened.

The Mantis had wanted to go with him, of course, but Thalric had patiently talked and talked, and eventually convinced the man that he, Thalric, could go places alone in a way that a Wasp could not if he were tugging a belligerent Mantis bodyguard-jailer. Since he had been brought along as their imperial expert, they now had to let him get on with his job, or dispense with him.

He had phrased it just like that, waiting for that speculative look to come to Tisamon’s face. It had been a tense moment for Thalric, knowing that his wound would slow him too much, if it was death the Mantis decided on.

Instead he had read the man, a spymaster reading an enemy agent, and seen just a touch of confusion. Stenwold was not here, to give the word and endorse Tisamon’s bloodletting. Tynisa had gone tracking the wretched mercenary, and her father’s world was a simple one of black-and-white decisions divided by a blade’s sharp edge. Now they were actually here he did not know how Thalric could be put to best use.

‘I need to go out and gather information,’ Thalric had insisted. ‘I’m no use locked up here on the Maiden .’

‘Where he’d only get in my bloody way,’ pitched in Allanbridge, who had repairs to make to the gasbag, and so became an unexpected ally.

Tisamon’s spines had twitched along his forearms, and his lips had compressed thinly, but he had eventually nodded and let Thalric go.

And so here he was off the leash again, in Jerez, back in the Empire . A Wasp in civilian clothes it was true – but then that was nothing unusual here. Jerez had so far never resisted imperial rule. There had never been a Skater army lined up against the black-and-gold. There had barely even been a local leader when the Empire first arrived, since the Skaters had seemed to choose and dispose of their headmen virtually every tenday. They had welcomed the Wasps in as the only way to contain the constant infighting and feuding that were so ubiquitous amongst them. Or that was the story, at least. Since then, Jerez had become the eternal thorn in the Emperor’s side: a conduit for fugitives and contraband that the Imperial Army could not stopper. Worse, it was a corruptor of officers, for many previously honest men had seen the opportunity in using their power and rank to dabble in the black market and make themselves handsome profits. Added to all that, this loose, mobile town shifting about on the shores of Lake Limnia produced a bare pittance of tax revenue, tax gatherers who asked too many questions tended to disappear overnight, and any proper census of the town was just impossible. More than one governor had considered trying to wipe the place off the map, but then the Skaters would just pack up their possessions and creep over the lake to somewhere else.