Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

She noticed there was one man staring at her. He was not a local, nor of any kinden she recognized, perhaps some manner of half-breed. He was lean, russet-haired, neither tall nor short, dressed in a cuirass of bronzed scales and a shabby tan cloak. She could read absolutely nothing into his stare, as impersonal and distant as the stars, but he wore a bandolier of throwing blades and one of them – just one, mind you – was absent.

The thought made her stomach turn, but she went over to the dead Dragonfly and awkwardly withdrew the blade, a slippery and unexpectedly difficult task that had her hands slick with his blood. The stranger was still there, watching, when she straightened up. In the background Nero was swearing and wrapping cloth about his injured arm, demanding to know what she was doing.

She had expected the man to be gone, or to avoid her when she approached, but instead he stood his ground, and she saw that a couple of the militia had noticed him too, but were studiously pretending they had not. Someone who was known, then, and regarded with that particular brand of respect that had nothing to do with being liked.

Closer to, he was slighter of build than she had first thought: not much taller than Achaeos, though broader at the shoulder. His face was gaunt and weathered, impossible to put an age to, utterly unknowable.

She held the blood-washed blade out to him and asked merely, ‘Why?’

It was back in his hand in an instant, without her even seeing him reach for it. When he then smiled it was a window onto something truly alien to her – something ancient and sad and very dark. He reminded her, she found with a shock, of Tisamon. That same melancholy darkness was contained in both of them.

‘Why not, if it pleases me?’ His voice was nondescript, as undramatic as could ever have undone his air of mystery. Then he had turned, and was striding away without a backward glance.

Across the street, from one storey up, Captain Havel was watching the same chaos with Odyssa at his shoulder. He had started with a tight little smile, because if this came off he would be able to report a happy success to his masters, and not have to worry about the Rekef enquiring into his accounts. The streets of Solarno were deceptively dangerous places where brawls started all the time these days, what with control of the Corta Obscuri up for the taking. In such conditions a pair of witless foreigners might easily fall foul of all manner of local violence.

Seeing the fighting spill into the inn’s courtyard, he had become ecstatic, and careful to share such pleasure with his visitor, congratulating her on laying a good rumour trail.

The Spider woman’s hands had squeezed his shoulders, as she pressed in close behind him. ‘It’s easy enough to get these Solarnese to fight each other. Your agents are all in position?’

‘Agents?’ Havel had snorted. ‘That’s too grand a term, but in Solarno there’s no shortage of hired killers, either local or visiting. Princep Exilla practically turns them out as a national industry. But they’ll do their job,’ he had assured her, both as the man currently impressing the Spider maid and as the officer about to impress her distant Rekef superiors. He had been so cocky, just then.

They had watched the killers dart in, the death of the Solarnese man followed by the swift strike by the Dragonfly. Havel had even leapt to his feet with a hiss of triumph as the Beetle girl fell backwards, the killer stooping on her.

Then the man himself had toppled, and a sudden spreading gap in the crowd had announced the newcomer.

From his window-ledge vantage point, Captain Havel twitched back as though from something venomous. ‘That changes everything,’ he muttered, staring at the one unutterably still figure amid all the confusion, the one whose aim had just felled the Dragonfly assassin.

‘You know that man?’ Odyssa asked him.

‘How good are your eyes? Did you see the throw he made?’

‘There was too much going on,’ she claimed, although she had seen well enough. Let him salve his newly hurt pride by educating her.

‘A target on the other side of a street, and across a scattered mob of chaotics,’ Havel said numbly. ‘Oh, I know of him, yes. Cesta, they call him. Cesta the assassin. Quite the local celebrity, he is, though he doesn’t often put in a public appearance like that.’

‘Spider-kinden? I didn’t think-’

‘No particular kinden, some mix of blood. He’s almost a folk hero in this mad city, not because he does anything for anyone except himself, but just because he’s so very, very good at his profession. All the street children growing up wanting to be like him, you know the type I mean.’ Havel’s tone betrayed contempt for a mere outlaw risen above his station. ‘And he’s neutral, I’m told. All the factions have tried to woo him. Word was he’s taken to killing their emissaries to make them stop trying. I wish I knew what put him in that spot with the idea of protecting some clueless foreigner. Damn the bloody Solarnese.’

She read it all in his face, the game suddenly gone beyond the board, his little scams and takes overshadowed without warning by this Lowlander intrusion: an intrusion that was suddenly not just two clumsy agents but had roots somewhere in the heart of Solarno’s dark side.

He turned abruptly, putting Odyssa at arm’s length. ‘You’re going to have to carry a message for me,’ he declared, obviously regretting the words. Imperial priorities overrode even Havel’s own profiteering, though, and he had to act fast now to prevent an even bigger mess that he might be judged by. ‘Take a message for me back to Araketka Camp. They’d better know as soon as possible that the stakes have just gone up.’

After she had saluted like a good Rekef officer, she slung her pack and left. She travelled north through sufficient streets to check that she was not being followed, then doubled back towards the water, after reversing her coat, raising the hood, even changing her walk. This was all done without really thinking about it, letting the natural deception in her training and her bloodline take the reins.

She reached the low waterfront dive where she would wait for her man. Not my man , she chided herself. Thinking like that will only get me killed.

She consequently made her approach very cautiously, because it was quite true what they said: Cesta had killed potential patrons before, if he believed that they were trying to buy his political allegiance, rather than simply commission him to kill an enemy. By the time Odyssa saw him arrive and sit down at his customary table there it was already dusk. After the earlier downpour, when the wind had driven curtains of rain sweeping across its surface, the Exalsee was now a veritable mirror, a looking-glass for the moon and stars.

He sat alone at a table that gave him a good view of anyone coming in, and offered a swift leap into the water if he needed to escape. That same table had been conspicuously empty before, whether by the landlord’s instructions or simply because other customers knew that the assassin favoured it. She made sure he would see her as she approached. His instincts were, she was sure, like a bow drawn back. No sense in loosing them.

‘You,’ he began, as she approached, ‘are playing a very complicated game.’ Despite her careful measures to evade the spies of Captain Havel, Cesta had recognized her at once.

She sat down, looking out across that beautiful dark expanse of water, seeing a lone galley struggle out from the shore, oars labouring in the utter lack of wind. ‘I thought it was assassin etiquette not to question one’s employers,’ she said.

‘I never learnt many manners.’

She studied him then. His features seemed young, then old, as he tilted his head, shifting readily as the light caught them. Cesta was over forty, from her sources, but whatever his kinden, they aged as gracefully as her own. ‘You were late,’ she pointed out.