Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

She moved on, trying to get an idea of the original scale. This had been a single building, not a community, and quite expansive, but with a curious outline that only made sense when she matched it with the contours of the hilltop. The stones were large and she thought she detected carving on some of them, but now blurred out of all meaning. Of course she knew nothing of the history of this part of the world, though this did not look like Spider-kinden work, either current or past. More like the style of the Moth architects who had first planned the city that later became Collegium, or built that ancient tower lying to the north of it. Not the work of Moth-kinden hands, exactly, but of a people who had once shared some skills and thoughts with them, before coming to this far-flung place to build, and then to die.

That thought rang a stangely familiar chord in her. Something Achaeos had once said…

She perched on a stone, looking around her. It was certainly a melancholy place. Without evidence, she was convinced that these stones had not succumbed to time alone. If she closed her eyes she could almost feel the ghost of the building as it had once been, invisible now but somehow tangible. One symbol had been repeated often enough on these scattered stones that even the legions of time had not quite defaced it, and it spoke to her from ancient pages and from dissenting histories of how the world had been.

She had been around Achaeos too long.

When she opened her eyes again, she was not alone.

A lean, russet-haired man in a tunic of metal scales, crossed with baldrics loaded with throwing knives, was now leaning against a man-high section of broken wall. His features were so kinless, without reference, that it was the knives she recognised first.

‘I know who you are. You’re Cesta,’ Che declared, because Taki had told her all about this man, or at least those scattered and damning facts that Taki really knew. There was a strange dread within Che now, because she had more sources to draw on than just Taki’s hostile recollections. Knowledge was now coming to her, piece after piece falling neatly into place. ‘How did you get here?’

‘I suppose it would be grand to say that I was waiting for you, all along,’ he replied in his colourless voice. ‘In fact I happened to be on Old Scol, three islands down the chain, when I saw the smoke. A meeting as fortuitous as our last, perhaps?’

‘And it won’t do me any good to ask who’s so interested in me that they employed you that time, either?’ Che said. If she had been feeling less battered, less lost, then she would have left her next words unsaid. ‘I’m told you’re only good for one thing – killing.’

‘More than that. I am not a killer. I am an assassin,’ he said with bleak pride, and the final piece fell, click, into place, and she knew . Not a halfbreed at all, this one, nothing so commonplace.

I must be wrong. But she was not wrong. The sudden knowledge was as certain as it was mysterious. It was as though the stones themselves had told her, whispering it in her ear. Oh, Achaeos, you taught me too much. Yet it was some instinct of her own that had made the connection, knitting the tangled snarls of Moth-kinden history to give a name to his unplaceable features in this fallen stronghold.

‘More than that,’ she echoed, ‘what if I said that I know what you are, and whose hands originally raised these stones?’

She had expected some arrogant sneering, but his entire face fell as slack as if she had stabbed him. He seemed utterly confounded.

‘And how,’ he asked, ‘do you know that?’

‘I am a scholar, a historian,’ she said. ‘And what my own people do not teach me, the Moth-kinden do.’ It had been a fraught time for them, setting her own histories against Achaeos’s, until they had hammered out some view of the world they could both live with. Learning had been part of her life for so long she could not have stood by and let him dismiss it all, whilst his kinden were all scholars, with their own secret lore and traditions that were not used to competition. It had not been the prejudice nor the physical differences, but the sheer clash of knowledges that had been the hardest thing to resolve. His rotes of ancient wars and grievances that her kinden had known nothing of, the lists of his people’s enemies, and a certain symbol – that jagged, angry mark – recorded for bitter posterity in Achaeos’s people’s archives.

‘Moth-kinden?’ he said tiredly. ‘So what tale do they tell?’

‘That long, long ago there existed a clever, bloody-handed people skilled in stealth and deception, disguise and death.’ She recounted the story as Achaeos had told it to her. ‘That this people pitted themselves against the Moth-kinden’s rule of the Lowlands, and turned their knives on the Skryres, who were the Moths’ leaders. But they failed, and they were smashed, their entire people driven away and scattered, hunted down and wiped out, save for some few who fled into the Spiderlands and were never seen again. Or is this not the true story?’

‘It will do.’ His earlier manner, that of the calm and inscrutable killer, had not recovered. ‘I may be the last of them for, aside from my father, I have seen no others of my kin. They did a fine job of dispersing us.’

‘Then you are a halfbreed?’

‘If we tended towards halfbreeds, we would have become diluted beyond all measure, gone beyond even history’s ken, but we breed true, the children born into the kinden of one parent or the other. We dwindle from generation to generation, but we cling on. Or perhaps only I, now. The last dregs of the Assassin Bug-kinden standing in the ruins of their last hall.’

‘Here?’

‘Our monastery once. But your story is incomplete, for the Spider-kinden could still not tolerate us – we who were violent and sly beyond even their ways – and so they came here to the last stronghold of my race, and slaughtered all they found with the help of their slave-soldiers. But some few must have escaped, as I myself am proof of. We are a stubborn stain on the world, one that will not wash out just yet.’

‘And… are you going to…?’ She clenched her fists. ‘Are you going to kill me?’

His sardonic look returned. ‘Are you yet dead? Then you may take the answer as no, for now.’

She put a hand out to him. ‘If I know you, you should know me. I’m Cheerwell Maker from Collegium.’

‘Yes, you are.’ He clasped her wrist in that same warrior’s affectation she had seen Tisamon use. ‘And you’re tougher than you look. And you’re here to fight the Wasps.’

‘To warn people about the Wasps.’

‘That may no longer be necessary,’ Cesta said.

‘Tell me, whose side are you on?’

‘That is one thing I can never tell you, because I have no side save my own and that of whoever pays me.’

‘And if the Wasps conquer Solarno?’

He shrugged, as if blithely unconcerned. ‘And do the Wasps have no need for a killer? Or else those that oppose them? Or I shall go to Princep Exilla – and if that falls there are lands more southerly still. My kind has passed from this world, Bella Cheerwell Maker. With the exception of yourself, and of the Moth-kinden who forget nothing, the world has forgotten us. Besides, we were always good at passing unnoticed. Even within the Spiderlands, no finger shall point at me and cry out what I am.’

‘So you don’t care,’ she said, disappointed. ‘You’re just a killer after all.’

‘Perhaps not even that. I am a shadow that the sun has not, for some reason, dispelled yet. I have sired no children. If I am truly the last, let my kind die with me. I would not wish my cursed blood on any other.’