Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

‘My girl here can stop near enough anything,’ Balkus said proudly.

Destrachis sniggered. ‘You might get the chance to shoot at her, but you would never hit her. Then her sword would cut that piece of artifice of yours in half.’

He expected a quick rejoinder, but instead Balkus craned back at him, frowning. ‘It’s Sarnesh steel, this. She could cut my nailbow in half?’

‘That weapon of hers is one of the Good Old Swords, as we say, made in the old fashion that almost nobody remembers now, save amongst the Dragonflies, and perhaps the Mantis-kinden. A proper Commonweal noble’s duelling blade, no less. They don’t make them like that any more, but they don’t have to, because they last for ever.’

Balkus gave a rude snort. ‘If they’re so wonderful, everyone would be making swords like that still.’

‘Not everyone can devote so many years to crafting a single blade,’ Destrachis explained, silencing the Ant once more. When it seemed that he had given Balkus enough to think about, he added, ‘She’s changed, though. I travelled with her from Helleron to Vek, and I can’t remember her ever practising like this when she was hunting down Thalric. It’s as though it’s some new challenge she’s preparing for…’ His professional instincts were worried – that much he knew. Perhaps it was just the idea that Felise might become even better at killing people. In the Commonweal they believe that madness can gift someone with a skill and vision that sanity cannot touch, and here in her I see the proof of that, but now she is taking that madness and reforging it, and why?

‘And you’re meant to be a doctor,’ Balkus scoffed. ‘You want to know what this is about? I’ll tell you right off.’

‘And?’

‘She wants to impress someone. You know who I mean.’

Destrachis looked at Felise dancing, the utter precision of it, and at the same time the passion that drove it. Such a thing to overlook. ‘I cannot think so. She has been driven many miles by the death of her family. Surely…’ Or has this lump of an Ant-kinden struck the truth, after all?

‘She’ll be disappointed,’ Balkus added, ‘and I wouldn’t want to be around when that happens, either. I like my nailbow in one piece.’

‘Disappointed? In what way?’

‘You get to know a bit about the Mantids, growing up in Sarn, and besides, that one’s madder than most. Tisamon, he’s got a history. I picked it up in pieces, but that Tynisa’s his own daughter, which meant there was a mother. I never heard of a Mantis-kinden who paired off twice.’

‘I’ll freely confess that I don’t know too much about them,’ Destrachis said. There had been enough of them about in the Commonweal, but their Lowlander cousins’ hostile reputation against his kind had led him to keep his distance.

‘Shame, when you think about it. Both as mad as each other, both widowed,’ Balkus mused. ‘Do well together that pair.’

Destrachis sent him a stern frown, to make known his disapproval of such thoughts directed at his patient. Inwardly, his mind was spinning. Of course, Felise could easily know far more than he about the Mantids: as a Dragonfly, as a Mercer especially. The Spider-kinden doctor’s former uneasiness now had a focus at last. He remembered when Tisamon and Felise had fought, how perfectly matched they had been. How there had been a connection , in the dance of blades, that neither of them could ever have managed by speech or expression or anything civilized .

So, in her mind, they would fight again – and she would win him, or else she would kill him, or he would kill her.

Perhaps, he thought wryly, she was approaching it right. Perhaps that was what Mantis-kinden meant by ‘love’.

College engineers had restored the rail line between Sarn and Collegium within a tenday of the Vekken defeat, and the floods of returning refugees, mostly frightened-looking children, served to remind the people of Collegium that, although their Sarnesh allies had been able to send precious little armed support, they had yet played their part.

It was to be a time of confirming old alliances and, as Stenwold hoped, making new ones. The crisis point was reached, for the Lowlands must stand united now, or within the year to come the Wasps would roll over them, city by city.

It had been some time since he had visited Sarn, several years even. He suspected that the changes he now saw in the city were only months in the making, because Ant-kinden changed nothing that did not need it. They were a people of traditions, of set ways of doing things. Now someone had kicked over their nest.

It was easy to see how the Wasps had upset that familiar way of life. It almost seemed that a third of the walls of the city was spun in scaffolding, as though some great metal spider was saving the city for a later meal. The buildings along the road running beside the rails had all gone, demolished and then levelled to strip any enemy of cover, despite the fact that the main assault would most likely come from the air. The walls themselves were changing shape, from the original smooth curve that encircled the city to something spiky, with sloping, pointed buttresses jutting out to give defending archers more inroads into any besieging force, also battlements that curved up and out and then in again, so that sheltered crossbows could fire through slots above them at any airborne enemy. The summit of the wall was studded with siege engines and, as the rail-automotive drew closer, Stenwold watched an impossibly spindly crane winching one of these into position. Some were heavy-barrelled leadshotters, some repeating ballistae plated in steel. There were others still that were new to him – racks of tubes that must be the new serial scrap-shotters he had heard about, which would fill a space of air with enough loose metal to bring down anything flying through it. He saw the machines tilt and turn experimentally with hisses of steam leaking from their joints. All the wall emplacements were armoured with shields before and above to protect the engineers. Too heavy to be winched by hand, the engines were kept grinding back and forth by steam or clockwork.

They don’t really know what they’re doing , Stenwold decided, but it was still a hopeful sight. At least they were doing something . The Sarnesh, backed by the ingenuity of the Collegiate artificers, were preparing for a conflict with the Wasps that would come all the way to the walls of their city.

And he saw further emplacements beyond the walls, too: bunkers and entrenched weapons, that might or might not be connected underground to the city’s subterranean levels where the ant hive housed the working insects that the city used as beasts of burden. He hoped this activity would impress the others as much as it impressed him.

Across from him dozed a pale-skinned Ant. His name was Parops and he was from Tark, and normally a Tarkesh would be risking death merely by coming to Sarn. Tark was in the hands of the Wasps, however, and Parops had been almost eager to come along with Stenwold. The last chance for Tark would be the utter defeat of the Wasps, and he was willing to break centuries of xenophobia to achieve that. It was enough to give a man hope.

If we beat the Wasps , Stenwold reminded himself. ‘If’ was a poisonous word. Let’s beat the Wasps first. For, in fact, even welding together a unified front against the Wasps seemed to be almost impossible, for everyone was pulling in different directions. It was like trying to shoo flies out of a window: no sooner had you swept them into the open air than they were back again.

Aside from Parops, he had come with only two of his staff: Sperra, who was now sleeping curled along the length of one seat and quite oblivious to the roar of the engine and the rattle of the wheels, and Arianna. Looking a little queasy, she sat pressed up against him with her head resting on his rounded shoulder. Travel by rail was the fastest and most efficient way to get anywhere these days, but it was a rough experience for the Inapt.