Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

He stared at her, feeling his innards twist.

‘My mother is dead,’ she told him. ‘The Queen of Szar is dead, and her funeral wake will see you burn.’

His mouth was open, lips moving, but at first no sounds came. Then finally he got out, ‘Then you are Queen! I declare you Queen now! You are still mine, so calm your people.’

Her smile cut through him, flayed him. ‘I am nobody’s,’ she announced, and the commotion started inside the palace itself.

‘I am Szar’s,’ she said, reaching out to touch his face. The acid of her Art seared him like a brand and he fell back, screaming. His guards started to lunge forward, but abruptly there were Bee-kinden everywhere – the palace servants, old men and old women, girls, even children: throwing themselves at the Wasp soldiers, literally hurling themselves on their swords, so that the Wasps were forced to cut them down, to burn them with their stings, or hack them to the ground with bloody blades. And meanwhile Maczech…

Maczech was at the balcony’s edge, and wings flowered from her back. Gan reached out an arm, hand opening to scorch her, but an aged woman grabbed at it, forcing his palm against her stomach, so that when he loosed his sting it tore through her. And Maczech was gone, already in the air and dropping towards the contested streets of her city.

Gan stood at the edge of the balcony as his soldiers killed the last of his servants, with the crisp red imprint of her hand vivid on his face, staring after her and shaking with fear and pain.

The rain in Jerez had stopped, literally. The water was suspended in mid-air, a field of shimmering droplets impossibly held in place, each one with a twisted reflection of the moon glimmering in its heart. When Achaeos stepped forward, they ran against his skin or broke against his robe in a myriad dark patches.

There were people abroad this night, of course, for the locals did not mind either darkness or rain. Here they were, frozen in place with the raindrops while going about their innumerable shady errands. He paused to examine the strange Skater physiology, distinctive for those freakishly long limbs, the narrow faces with their long, pointed noses and ears.

Somewhere out there was a presence not frozen in place, a presence waiting for him to find it.

This is a dream. But there was no such thing as ‘just’ a dream for the Moth-kinden. They had dozens of categories: dreams serendipitous and dreams intentional, dreams prophetic and dreams malign. This, however, was a dream he had been seeking for many nights, for this was a seeing dream. He was trying to find the Shadow Box, but had already realized that it was a hopeless search. In Jerez he was just too close to it. Its power was everywhere, leaking out into the darkness, and he could not pinpoint it.

And now this, a proper seeing dream – but to see what?

Achaeos paced through the streets of Jerez, feeling the ubiquitous rain break across his skin and dampen his hair. When he stood still he could sense movement, others abroad this same night. He was not the only one to have this dream. That meant gates had been opened, tonight, that could not be easily closed.

Should I call out? But how foolish would that be? He could not simply stand here, in this dream-Jerez, and start calling for help like a lost child.

But you called for help before.

He started in shock. That thought had not been his own.

He tried to work out whereabouts in the town he was. The lake lay to his right, its expanse of water suspended in frozen ripples, dotted near the shoreline with the further-flung natives, with great stands of reeds, with little boats that had set out on clandestine errands.

A movement again: he turned, and for a second he thought there was a woman there. He had a fleeting impression of bulging red eyes and a hunger-pinched face.

Nothing there. Only the night.

We heard you call us. We call you now.

‘Who are you?’ he whispered, but he already knew, and with that knowledge he did not want to meet the thing that called to him.

You waste your time. You have not come to us. You have not found us. It was the voice of the Darakyon, but fainter, hollower. The voice of the Shadow Box.

They seek us, all of them. They are grasping even now for the line we throw only to you. Little seer, little neophyte, come to us.

‘Where are you?’ he demanded, louder, beginning to run through the frozen rain. He had another quick glimpse of one of his pursuers, a man of his own kinden wearing a silver skullcap, his face deeply lined.

Here.

And it was there.

He tried to stop, because to touch that would be to die, and he skidded, feet slipping from under him, so that he fell at its… where it rose from the earth.

There was a shape there resembling a woman, the lean frame of a Mantis-kinden warrior, except the reaching, grasping thorns and briars had pierced her a dozen times over, arcing and leaping back and forth through her flesh, that had sprouted darts and barbs like a Thorn Bug, and prickly leaves as well. Spiny brambles ran up and down her, and through her, and they twisted her skin, which was pale and human in places but elsewhere hard and shiny like the carapace of an insect. Her arms were simultaneously a Mantis woman’s with the Art-grown spines jutting from her forearms, and a mantis insect’s with great folding, raptorial hooks. Her face glittered with the facets of compound eyes, and scissoring mandibles worked inside a human mouth.

I would die… There was no doubt of that. Achaeos scrambled back a few paces, staring. Even his eyes, which knew no darkness, could not quite take in that piecemeal, shifting figure, but he knew that it was ancient and mighty – and in pain.

‘Do you… have a name?’ he whispered.

The lips and the mandibles both worked together, but neither matched the voice that now reached him,

I was Laetrimae when I lived. You must find me, Achaeos.

‘Show me,’ he said. ‘Quickly, before the others get here.’

The creature nodded and strode off into the unnaturally arrested town, without another word. Achaeos choked to watch her, for it was the naked Mantis woman who took each step forward, but once her foot touched the earth the briars and vines thrust up through it to rake across her and impale her over and over, and her skin ripped open with the barbs and thorns, and healed over in the gleaming green-black exoskeleton of her kinden’s beast.

He got to his feet and hurried after her, after it… the spirit of a Mantis woman trapped between life and death for five centuries, constantly degrading and corrupting and yet still remembering her own name.

He knew that others, many others, were presently seeking him out. The other collectors and perhaps worse, all those who had the magical skill to seize upon this open portal and follow the thread. Laetrimae was pacing ahead sedately, but each step carried her such a distance that he was forced to run even to keep her in sight, and there was perpetually a flock of shadows behind him, squabbling over his tracks.

Until the tortured Mantis-creature paused at a door, a lowly place near the lakeshore where a sprawling guesthouse sagged, its walls at conflicting angles. She grasped the doorframe with such force that the wood splintered, and thorns and creepers grew out from her into it, and split it further.

And then he knew. He looked wildly about him for landmarks. He had to remember this place, when he awoke…

And Laetrimae grasped him about the throat in a vice-like grip, killing spines razoring his skin, and he felt her thorny branches questing at his flesh, eager to drink his blood.