Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

Thalric dropped instantly. Without defences against the Moth’s assault, the blast knocked him instantly cold, and he fell to the floor in a clatter of armour. Tisamon had begun keening, hands clasped to his face, battering himself against the walls. Achaeos heard Tynisa scream in outrage and agony.

Palearchos was now dying, on the very threshold of that final all-consuming dawn, and he was doing his best to drag them all into the fire with him. Eyes bulging, teeth bared, his face was locked in a grimace of effort. Achaeos felt the man’s mental grip clawing at him frantically.

So much stronger than him, this man, but dying, his reserves drained. Achaeos mustered his will, fighting back in order to free himself. A moment’s liberty was all it would take. He caught a glimpse of Tynisa clutching at her arm, racked with agony. Tisamon was roaring, slashing the air around blindly with his spines, getting uncomfortably close.

I was never good at this.

In that moment Achaeos looked straight into the old man’s madly vindictive eyes and tried, not to oppose, but to twist. It was as simple as letting a stronger enemy’s sword fall askew by taking a side-step, where to simply block the stroke would be to have his own sword shattered. For a split second that crushing grasp slipped off him, and Achaeos lunged forward.

It was not his mind that he lunged with because, even dying, the old man’s defences would have swatted him down. He jabbed one hand forwards and struck the hilt of Scyla’s knife as hard as he could – driving it yet deeper into Palearchos’s body.

And the old man was no longer dying, but dead. A spasm of shock coursed through his body and then he was gone. Tisamon collapsed to his knees, one hand still to his head. Achaeos heard Tynisa’s ragged breathing behind him, saw Thalric begin groggily to stir.

We still live, but we have gained nothing but pain this night. He had wasted the chance the ghost had given him.

Outside, the bodies of Palearchos’s ghost warriors had been reclaimed by the shadows. Even the arrow that had decorated Thalric’s armour was gone. Nothing was now left of the old Moth exile but his corpse.

They limped over to Nivit’s place, to find Gaved keeping watch for them still. He was sitting with the pale Spider girl, who flinched automatically as they entered, her eyes constantly fearful. Achaeos had assumed it was Tisamon who incurred that fear, but she stared at all of them with the same blanket horror. She had never seen their kinden before, not Moth nor Wasp nor Mantis. Or so it was if her story was to be believed.

‘Nothing,’ Thalric spat in answer to Gaved’s look. He was in a foul mood and Achaeos knew it was because he did not understand, could not understand, what had been done to him. He had been talking already about suffering a sudden stab of pain from his old wound, inventing excuses for himself.

‘You didn’t get the box?’

‘No, we did not,’ replied Achaeos shortly. He was feeling tired, but worse he was feeling wretched. It seemed the task was beyond him, even when he was helped all the way.

‘We’ll just have to take it at the auction,’ Gaved suggested.

‘Oh, of course,’ Tynisa snapped at him. ‘Well, let us know when you actually finish your job, hunter, and track it down.’

‘A man could take offence at that,’ he replied, maddeningly calm.

‘So, take offence.’

‘Especially when he’d searched it out already.’

Achaeos could see that Gaved enjoyed the utter silence that his revelation brought. The Wasp hunter reached out and took Sef’s hand. As the girl looked at him, her face lost a fraction of its fear.

He is a professional , Achaeos reminded himself. His livelihood is information, tracking, and to do that he must be able to ask questions and gain confidence.

‘She knew all along?’ he said.

‘Founder Bellowern kept her close,’ Gaved explained. ‘So very close that she was right there when Scyla’s factor revealed to him the meeting place. Daft girl’s known it all this time.’

Odyssa was not going to miss this place.

For a city ruled by her own people, Solarno was too much like any city of the Lowlands for her taste: mimicking the grace and delicacy of the true Spider-kinden way of life and yet never achieving it: a raft of petty politics floating precariously on a sea of squabbling, uncontrolled natives. Oh, she knew that, for many in the Spiderlands, Solarno possessed great sentimental value, but Odyssa did not see the charm, and nor did the Aldanrael, the family she served. Solarno had become merely a gamepiece, and in any game some pieces were inevitably sacrificed.

The sky was dark with clouds scudding south and east across a scarred moon. She would not see it when it arrived, but she would hear it. It was only that sound she was waiting for, that last confirmation that she had served her part in the war. Nobody would know, of course, outside the secret councils of the Aldanrael, but that was how the game was played. She was not in it for the personal glory.

She would not even be here when the fighting started, and had no wish to present herself to the colonel for a full accounting of her activities. He was no fool, that man, for all that she had played him so effortlessly. Given a chance to make his own investigation, he might even begin to suspect how his hand had been forced. No, she would not be there to suffer his recriminations. Her stay in the Rekef was now over and, as soon as she had her confirmation, she would go home to Siennis.

She wondered briefly how the Solarnese would now cope: would the rival parties coalesce or merely fragment? What would the assassin Cesta do, or the pilots? How would the other cities around the Exalsee react?

She was not cruel, in terms of how Spider-kinden were measured, which meant that she had no qualms about consigning this city and its thousands of inhabitants into the hands of an angry Empire, but at the same time she had no great wish to see it. She would wait with interest for the news to filter west.

They, none of them, understand my kind , Odyssa thought, for they are all amateurs, playing in the shallows. Our webs are invisible to the best of them, Lowlands intelligencers and Rekef spymasters alike. The Ants think we do it for power, and the Beetles think we do it for money, and the Mantids think we do it from spite, but they none of them understand that we do what we do simply because it amuses us to live this way, and because we are jaded…

There was the sound she had been waiting for: a low, slumberous droning noise up high and distant in the sky, coming with the wind from the north, as though some insect of unheard-of size was making its patient way towards the coast of the Exalsee. It was not, despite imperial claims, the largest thing ever to fly. The Beetles of the Lowlands had larger that they used for transport and freight. It was the largest thing to fly solely for war, though. The Wasps were an unimaginative people, but their artificers sometimes had a spark of poetry in their souls, and thus they had named the thing Starnest .

To the north, the army would have already taken the mountain-pass trading post of Toek, scattering or cowing the Scorpion-kinden who used the place as bandit’s lair and toll-house. That was a mere diversion, an afterthought, however. She was hearing the vanguard of the true assault even now.

To think that one can brew war out of only a pair of Lowlander agents and a dead Rekef officer. But the Wasps were so predictable: prod their nest enough and they would sally out of it, raging for battle. She wondered how far the colonel would search for evidence of the great enemy plot to suborn Solarno for Lowlander purposes. Once he had secured his governorship, perhaps he would not even care.