Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

‘How happy you must be,’ Tynisa told him.

‘I’m not seeing many smiles in this room tonight, and if you have another way of doing this, just tell me. Will you have your Beetle pilot coast his airship in, and hope they mistake it for the moon? Will you swim beneath the raft and bore a tunnel up through it with your knife? Mine is the only way that gets us in safely, and it must be by my own choice of men or none at all.’

‘ Your choice?’ Tynisa demanded.

‘This is a high-risk enterprise,’ Thalric said. ‘If there is an assault from without, Scyla will instantly flee, and you will neither catch her nor even recognize her. But if we are present there amongst the buyers, what can she do? To achieve her aim she must stand before them, she must present the box. At my signal we will strike. Speed and surprise will win the day for us. I shall take the box and fly to shore, while the rest will cover my retreat, and then make the best escape they can.’

‘One change to your plan,’ Tynisa interupted, holding his gaze.

‘Name it.’

‘Gaved takes the box. You fight your way out with us, Thalric.’

‘Agreed.’ He did not hesitate a moment. ‘You and the Mantis and Gaved are to be my cadre.’

‘I’m flattered,’ said Gaved acidly, and then Sef tugged at his collar.

‘Not on to the lake,’ she whispered. ‘You must not.’

‘It’s you they’re looking for, not us, these aquatics of yours,’ Thalric reminded her. She glared at him and, to Thalric’s obvious amusement, the other Wasp put a protective arm about her shoulders.

‘We won’t be away long,’ Gaved reassured her, ‘and he’s right. Just sit tight here.’

‘They are still searching for me,’ she said, biting her lip.

‘If you are so fearful of being caught, why have you not left already?’ Tisamon demanded harshly. He had never shown either interest or sympathy for the Spider girl.

‘Left?’ Sef breathed, as if there was a world of horror in that world.

‘Left for where?’ Gaved challenged. ‘She’s already on the brink – the very shore – of her world. Where does she know to go to?’

‘And the great hunter will look after her, will he? Bit of a career reversal, isn’t it?’ Thalric asked him.

Gaved’s look was humourless. ‘I will do this job because I promised Master Maker I would. After that, Rekef, I’m gone, and if I take her with me, is it any business of yours?’

Gaved had worked in and around Jerez long enough to learn how to row, and now he powered the little boat forward with heavy strokes, staring fixedly at the receding shore beyond Tisamon and Tynisa, his passengers.

Sef he had entrusted to Nivit’s care. He did not want to even think of that but, of course, rowing freed the mind wonderfully for random thought. Nivit and I, we go back years. Nivit was primarily a businessman, though, and Gaved was being sentimental. We should sell her back to the lake-creatures and be done with it.

He liked to think that, in his line of work, the people he hunted down were criminals, the wicked and the reckless, on the run from justice. Even when he knew that they were merely escaped slaves or fugitives from the torturing hands of the Rekef, he still liked to think that. He liked to feel he was in the right.

Thalric, an uncomfortable presence in the boat’s bows at Gaved’s back, would see ‘right’ as identical to being in the Empire’s interest, or at least would have done so before his fall from grace. Gaved, however, had never quite been able to coax himself into that point of view, and that was why he had spent his life working twice as hard as any imperial soldier just to put a distance between himself and the Emperor.

But I always came back , he reflected. It was hard for a Wasp to make a living alone. Somehow he had always found that the contracts he undertook bore the imperial seal somewhere upon them.

At least Sef was no concern of the Empire. And I will not sell her to the lake-Beetles, and I must hope that Nivit is not tempted to do it. I must hope that our long friendship buys me that indulgence. He had even ceded Nivit all of the gold Stenwold had paid. Iam a fool in so many ways.

Thalric stared out across the misty lake, seeing the occasional flurry as one of the locals skimmed across its surface on some private business. The dark seemed to bring them out in numbers, but then they were creatures best suited to shady business – and so was Scyla. She had always preferred to deal under cover of darkness, preferring to hide even her changeable features.

He wondered if she could even recall what she truly looked like. Did she have to reassemble her own true face in the mirror first thing every morning, and did it then drift, from day to day?

We shall have a reckoning, you and I , he decided. He had nothing personal against Scyla but such a reckoning looked very likely, and it should be himself, Thalric, who dealt with her. He, who had once run her as an agent of the Wasp Empire, should be the one to bring her down.

The great raft was looming up and he saw several boats there already, with Skater-kinden men standing ready to take the painter line. He put a hand on Gaved’s shoulder to halt his rowing, and the little craft coasted the remaining feet until two Skaters captured its prow with their long arms and tied it up. He put a few coins into their hands, good Helleron Centrals that the Skaters preferred to imperial currency. With that evidence of his prosperity from Stenwold’s diminishing bounty, no further questions would be asked of him. It was exactly as he had hoped. Scyla had chosen this place for its advantages, but she must live with its drawbacks too.

He stepped onto the raft, with only a flick of his wings to keep his balance, feeling the twinge of pain in his side still from where Daklan had stabbed him outside Collegium. He normally prided himself on healing quickly, but just now he was glad to have been able to heal at all.

Scyla had miscalculated, of course, in her lust for secrecy. She thought she had her buyers where she wanted them. She believed herself safe from intrusion out here on the lake, far from any shore.

Thalric smiled a little at that thought. He did not know how well Spider-kinden could swim but he knew that they could not fly. Let her squirm how she liked, there would be no swift escape for Scyla this time.

The others were joining him cautiously on the raft, looking not like a rich buyer’s retinue but more like nervous thieves. Tynisa was pressing at her hand, and he saw that the narrow wound there had opened up yet again.

To Lieutenant Brodan, it seemed clear that the murky waters of the lake were a metaphor for where his career was going. I must be mad, to be out here with this wretched woman. Certainly my men all think I’m mad. He could see it in their faces. They had followed him out here, in the rain and cold, but they were heartily regretting it. They had been kicking their heels amongst the reeds for two hours now, waiting in the dark. Occasionally a Skater would spot them as it padded across the choppy waters, and Brodan was sure they would all be laughing at the skulking Wasp-kinden.

It’s just like the last time. He remembered many fruitless nights spent on or by this lake, trying to intercept contraband that seemed to be able to turn invisible at will. Pillaged loot from the Commonweal had been flooding through Jerez: whole libraries of books, armouries of mail and weapons, treasure beyond counting, yet Brodan’s investigators had found such a tiny fragment of it that he suspected the Skaters had given it up out of pity.

And there she was, the source of all his problems. The wretched old creature was perched on a hummock and staring out at the water. She seemed to be whispering to herself and he wondered if she was actually mad, this whole business her private lunacy. That would explain a great deal.