Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

The droning was louder now, and she wondered how many in Solarno had woken to it, or paused in their nocturnal vices to listen. The sound of an airship was not so rare, hereabouts.

She only hoped that Teornis had played his part as well. He had a more complex net to cast by far, and he was only a man, after all, for all his noble blood.

It was close to dawn and she must leave now, or risk herself being caught in the web she had so carefully spun. Odyssa turned on her heel and headed for the city docks, where a small fishing boat was already waiting for her. Its captain had no idea how fortunate he was to be leaving Solarno right now for Porta Mavralis.

Odyssa smiled at that. It was her gift, she supposed, to spread good fortune wherever she went.

In Che’s dream she was by a very different lake, the details of which seemed to fade in and out of focus. From somewhere there was a terrible voice calling, and she felt a tug inside her every time it cried out. That tug was what bound her to Achaeos, and she knew that the great voice was calling for him, drawing him to it.

In her dream, she was hunting desperately through hovel-lined streets, trying to find him before the voice did. The air was full of glittery little knives that she realized were raindrops, all held fixed in place. She had the sense of frantic movement all around her, as though parties unknown had broken into her dream, and were ransacking it for something they had lost.

The terrible voice called out again, closer this time, and she caught sight of a grey-robed figure flitting ahead of her, drawn helplessly closer to the monstrous summons. She cried out his name, but the beckoning voice drowned her out with its wordless yearning.

She saw, ahead, something that belonged only in dreams, and only in the worst of them, something that shifted and writhed with thorns, an abomination still recognizable as human. Achaeos was approaching it almost eagerly, and she screamed at him in warning and tried to run, but pain began to flower all about her. The raindrops had turned into wasps and they were stinging her, forcing her away. The combined hum of their wings had turned into a thunderous buzz…

‘Che! Che! Get up, now!’

She jolted awake, staring into the darkness, forgetting for a moment that she could banish it with a thought.

She banished it instantly. There was Taki standing in the doorway, her hair wild and uncombed, her canvas flight-clothes still unbuttoned after being so hastily donned.

‘What?’

‘Che!’ the Fly-kinden shouted at her. ‘Get up. Get your stuff! Just do it, please!’

Then she was gone, and Che could hear behind the Fly woman’s pattering footsteps the sounds of fighting: sword striking sword, the cry of someone in pain.

Inside the building.

Che was abruptly out of bed, wearing nothing more than a tunic, hearing the house of the Destiavel come under attack.

More than fighting, though… what am I hearing? But the fighting itself was coming closer, and it blotted out whatever telltale sound she had caught. Hastily she grabbed her artificer’s leathers from the low table where the house servants had folded them, struggling into them as best she could, finding them suddenly too small, too starched, snagging her fingers in the arms. She thrust her head back into the open and began buckling the leathers at one side, the latches clumsily slipping in her grasp.

She looked up as someone appeared at her door, and froze on realizing it was not Taki. This was a Solarnese man wearing a white tunic and trousers, with a slim curved sword in his hand. The dim light from the corridor showed that his sash and flat-topped hat were dyed blue: the Crystal Standard, Genissa’s political enemies.

Bare-legged still, and with her leathers flapping loose, Che dived for her sword, snagging it off the table and wrenching at it desperately, hoping that it would simply slide smoothly from its scabbard for once. It did not oblige, and the whole baldric came with it. As she lashed it sideways to free the blade, she whipped the startled man across the face with the weighted buckle of the belt.

She would never know what he might have done otherwise, but after that affront he came for her, rushing forward with his curved sword dancing in a flicker. With another great heave, she swept her own blade, sheath, baldric and all, in its way, and the strap tangled about his sword so that they were drawn in close, face to snarling face. As his hand went to his belt for his dagger, she finally drew her own sword from the tangled scabbard and ran it straight into his stomach.

She remembered to keep good hold of the hilt this time, so that his own weight pulled him off the blade. She looked towards the half-open door and saw Nero standing there, still bandaged from his wound, and looking a little surprised.

‘What’s going on?’ she panted.

‘The politics hereabouts seem to have gone to the wastes overnight,’ he said, looking every bit as baffled as she was. ‘Taki wants us out of here,’ he added, and to Che that seemed to be as good an idea as any.

She finished dressing hurriedly and the two of them got to the main atrium of the Destiavel house without meeting any other enemies, although they had seen plenty of bodies by then. That was when Taki found them, rushing up with Dalre and a handful of the house guards at her back. ‘We have to leave,’ the Fly girl urged. ‘Have to get out of the house, now.’

‘No argument here,’ Nero assured her.

‘What’s happened? Why is the Standard attacking you?’

‘The Standard? ’ Taki was gaping at her in disbelief. ‘You think that’s what this is? That pack of clowns?’

‘Then what…?’ Che began, but Taki was already running ahead, shouting for them to follow her.

There was still fighting at the main door, but Taki had found a side-door that was clear, and they got out into the street unmolested. Instantly three of their guards were dashing off around the side of the house, to catch the attackers at the front unawares. Dalre and a solid-looking Solarnese man stayed with them.

‘Taki, will you please tell me what is going on?’ Che demanded. ‘Is this… is this just some other mad thing you people do every month, or something?’

‘Cheerwell, do you Beetles never look up? ’ Taki asked of her sharply.

Che did look up, and a moment later she fell to her knees, hearing Nero swear at the very same sight.

There was an airship hanging over Solarno, a massive tapering thing with a rigid-framed airbag, supporting a gondola that ran almost its entire length. There was a whole constellation of lights along its sides, lamps hanging from cords that cast a surreal moon-like glow across the city, and up onto the bulging sides of the balloon itself.

The gondola was riddled with holes, a not-quite-regular pattern of openings, and for a moment Che thought that Solarno would suffer the same incendiary fate as Tark. But this was no sophisticated bomber, and the Starnest had only one function in war.

Things were dropping continually from the holes, and those things were fighting men, who opened their wings halfway down to glide earthwards into the city in squads of twenty and fifty. The airship was full of Wasp soldiers, who were now descending on Solarno in their hundreds.

‘And look there, our old friends,’ Taki said, pointing. Che recognized their outlines against the clouds: two other airships, which would have been huge if it had not been for the monster they were escorting, and each equipped with four pontoons for docking orthopters. Some of the flying machines had detached already, and begun gliding over the half-sleeping city.

‘But what are they doing?’ Che asked numbly.

‘They’re invading,’ Nero informed her. ‘They’re seizing the city.’