Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

Nivit was out consulting with his sources but Gaved was supposed to be busy hiding people. He was nominally hiding Thalric, who was both an ungracious guest and an unwilling fugitive. The former Rekef man stalked about Nivit’s premises, prying into the information broker’s records and frightening Skrit. It was obvious that he would decide to leave soon, and then Gaved would get to find out whether he himself would decide to restrain the man, or even be able to.

When the knock on the door came, it was a relief to all of them. Gaved looked through the crack and then opened up hurriedly, bundling Tynisa and Tisamon into the room, and one more fugitive as well.

‘No time to stop,’ Tynisa declared. ‘We have some Wasps to mislead. They’re out searching for us and I don’t want them looking here. Take care of the girl until we get back.’ She looked from Thalric to Gaved, getting little response, and then she and the Mantis were gone, the door swinging shut behind her.

‘“Take care of the girl”?’ Thalric snorted. ‘Are we running a Helleron whorehouse now?’ The new arrival looked at him in alarm, and then turned to Gaved and instantly flinched away from him as well. He saw her face.

He took a deep breath, feeling his heart lurch, and wondered at the vagaries of fate. It was the same girl, of course, unmistakable from the portrait, the one that the strangers had offered such a high reward for. Here she was in the flesh.

His first thought was of the bounty and how happy Nivit would be with this catch. It was the automatic reflex in his trade. His second reaction was to actually look closely at this wretched creature that parties unknown were so desperate to recover.

She was definitely something like Spider-kinden, but Gaved had travelled widely enough to note subtle differences: her skin was remarkably pale, her hair an odd compromise between gold and silver, and her eyes almost the same gleaming colour. Just as with the picture that was so uncannily lifelike, he was forced to conclude that she was not quite like any Spider-kinden he had ever seen, any more than she suited the Beetle-kinden clothing she had been dressed in, that now hung sopping wet about her due to the rain.

And she was clearly terrified, wide-eyed and trembling, which in a Spider would have indicated a remarkable lack of control, and of course she was not painted or made up as Spider-kinden, both men or women, almost always would be. She was a mystery indeed, but he could not rid himself of the thought that she was a potentially profitable one.

Thalric had approached her with a slightly disdainful look. ‘And who are you?’ he asked her. She flinched back from him, and resisted his attempt to relieve her of her soaking cloak, wrapping it about herself even more tightly.

‘My name is Cap… is Thalric,’ announced the ex-Rekef officer, neither harshly nor kindly. ‘Tell me who you are, and why they brought you here.’

Gaved leant close, intrigued, seeing something in Thalric’s tone catch with her.

‘Sef,’ she said, and then repeated herself at Thalric’s frown. ‘My name. Sef.’

Not a Spider-kinden name, that, but I wasn’t really expecting one , Gaved decided.

‘So what significance are you in this, Sef?’ Thalric pressed. ‘Speak, now.’

‘I don’t know,’ the girl mumbled. ‘They took me and brought me.’

‘She’s a slave,’ said Gaved, and Thalric raised an eyebrow at him.

‘Oh yes?’

‘You’re talking like a master, she’s answering like a slave,’ the hunter explained. ‘She’s got the strangest accent I ever heard, but some things just don’t change wherever you go.’ Her accent is the same as her Beetle master’s, and I’d never heard the like of that from anywhere either.

‘The Empire’s a big place,’ Thalric said, studying Sef again. Her lips were pressed tightly together and she was trembling still.

‘You’d have to go a long way,’ Gaved told him, ‘to find an accent I didn’t recognize. Spotting the differences is part of my stock in trade. She’s certainly from nowhere near here. So whose slave are you, girl? Where did you run from?’ He could not quite match Thalric’s authority, and eventually the other man repeated his question for him.

The word she said, unfamiliar and spoken in her unusual accent, that stretched some vowels and clipped others, meant nothing to them, but Gaved translated it as something like ‘Scolaris’, which could conceivably be the name of some Spider city-state.

‘Where’s that, somewhere in the Spiderlands?’ Thalric asked her, and she shook her head mutely. Thalric hissed in annoyance and moved forwards – just a brief abortive movement – and Sef fell back, shielding her head as if waiting for a blow.

There was a long pause, Thalric considering her with contempt, then he shrugged. ‘We’ll wait for the Mantis and his get to come back. Then they can explain why they’ve foisted this simpleton on us.’

He stalked off to peruse some more of Nivit’s records and Gaved tentatively approached the girl, crouching down and then sitting himself close to her, his back resting against the rough-cast wall.

‘All right, then, Sef,’ he said softly, not looking at her. ‘So you’re a runaway slave. And your masters are after you.’

He had intended no more than to state the obvious, but he caught her look and it shook him. He knew the plight of the fugitive. He had lived the chase vicariously from following the trail of the hunted slave, the deserter, the thief. He knew the fear of capture, but the panic, the sheer terror on Sef’s face, cut into him like a blade. She gazed at him with horror, and she looked around Nivit’s hut with horror, and on the very ground and air as though it was a nightmare that she could not break free from. He had never before witnessed such cringing fear, until the moment her masters were mentioned, when it doubled and redoubled in her expression. She would be screaming now, he thought, if she dared, and so instead she was screaming inside.

He felt a sudden pang inside him – a brief moment of pain and regret. ‘They turned up here, you see, with your picture and a comfortable reward,’ he said, as gently as possible.

Something twisted within her, hunching her over so that her hair concealed her features. He could hear the violent shuddering of her breath.

‘You might as well know that I’m a hunter. I track people down for money. I don’t often get them delivered to me like this, but that’s what I do. So tell me what I should be doing next.’

He thought she merely shrugged, but then saw her shoulders quiver again, and caught a glimpse of tears on her half-hidden face. She was definitely not Spider-kinden, at least not of any breed he knew, for she would not have lasted a day in the Spiderlands.

‘But if you tell me just exactly what you are and where you come from, maybe I’ll come up with a reason to change my mind.’ He thought of what Nivit might say to that, and felt wretched for it. It seemed his curiosity had overmastered his habitual greed but, beyond that, the strangeness of her had got to him.

He gave her time, let her think, whilst Thalric cast occasional sharp glances at him, as though he was making her some kind of improper proposal. Probably thinks I’m letting the race down by talking to lesser kinden.

‘I come from Scolaris,’ Sef whispered.

‘That doesn’t help me, girl. I’ve never heard of it. How far? In which direction?’

‘It is down there.’ She gestured. ‘In the water. In the lake.’

Gaved felt his stomach suddenly twist with something like vertigo. In the tense and unpleasant silence that followed he remembered Nivit’s dark words about the lights beneath Lake Limnia. Impossible . He saw that Thalric had now stopped reading and was looking over at them, his expression frozen. Impossible. But he had already spent too much time here in Jerez and around the lake. Go to any of the Skaters’ wretched drinking holes, find a bandy-legged creature too drunk to stand upright. They would soon tell you about the lights in the lake, about the boats that went missing, the strange wreckage sometimes found, all the other stories that the Empire had long dismissed as yet more lies such as the Skater-kinden delighted in telling, for no other reason than that falsehood was in their blood.