This
confrontation could see both of us dead very easily.
The thought was in
Thalric’s mind, but he could see no acknowledgement of it in Tisamon’s
expression. Thalric was more mobile, the Mantis’s eyes better in the darkness.
Stalemate.
And Thalric knew that he could not squander his life here, when he was badly
needed to further the Rekef plans in Vek. Then let this Mantis see if he could
stand against the fall of a whole city.
Thalric’s wings blurred
into life and he hurled himself into the sky, watching for that next knife at
all times until he had put a building between them. Even then he could not have
said whether his reason for flight was anything other than a way of disguising
his fear.
Arianna felt a brief
moment of relief as Thalric departed, but it withered as she looked up into the
Mantis’s face.
‘Please don’t kill me,’
she begged. Tisamon regarded her impassively. Now the moment was upon him he
had expected his earlier passion to be urging him to do it. To his distant
surprise it was the other way round. A fickle current of feeling was trying to
stay his hand even though his reason insisted he had to kill her.
He dragged her two
streets further towards the river, to an empty, litter-strewn square where a
body could have lain for a tenday without discovery, casting her down against a
windowless wall. He knelt by her, and the flat of his blade was abruptly cold
against her neck, a trick he had used often enough to put fear into others, not
that this shivering Spider needed it. ‘Where are your friends?’ he growled at
her.
‘They . . .’ She
swallowed, closed her eyes at the feel of the metal moving against her skin.
‘They’re dead, all of them.’
‘You lie.’ He twitched,
just slightly, but she felt the tiny cut, a bead of blood blooming.
‘No, please! Thalric
killed them. I’m all that’s left.’
He considered this. It
should have seemed impossible, but she had been fleeing and Thalric had been
chasing her. This was becoming ever more complex.
‘Please – please let me
talk to Stenwold . . .’ she started, and he hauled her up by her collar in
sheer rage, slamming her back against the wall. His lethal claw was drawn back,
and in that instant all his strength of will went into restraining it.
‘Do not even utter his
name, traitress,’ he hissed. ‘You and I, we understand one another. We know the
old ways and the old laws, but Stenwold doesn’t. He believes in things like
conscience and forgiveness, but you and I know better. Some acts of betrayal
have prices that
must
be paid.’
He wanted her to scream
at him, to fight him. That would have made his decision easy for him, and he
liked simplicity. Instead she just hung in his grip, shaking. She was, he
decided, a wretched specimen. Atryssa would have held her in contempt.
‘Please,’ she whispered.
‘I need to tell someone . . .’ And then her voice dried up, and he saw a
reflection move in her eyes, which widened abruptly.
‘Watch out!’ she yelled,
and he whirled around with claw raised high, and when the sword came down he
caught it.
It was not Thalric, but
a cloaked woman, some complete stranger. She gave him no chance to see more
than that, because that sword was coming at him again. Two strong overhead
swings, and then a lunge that nearly gutted him as he leapt back and back,
turning each blow aside. The sword flashed in her hands, turning through each
attack and never still, now gripped two-handed, now passed to her left or right
hand, springing at him from all angles.
He had turned a dozen
such blows before he gained the initiative, ducking under one swing and lashing
at her midriff. She swayed aside, and the tip of his claw scraped against
armour, then the pommel of the sword hammered down on him, and he caught it
with the palm of his free hand, forced it aside and lashed out at her face with
the spines of his arms.
She fell back, not even
scratched, allowing him a better look at her. She was some kinden he did not
know well but he thought he knew her race, if not her face. The cloak was
mostly blown aside, and he could see she was wearing a full suit of armour –
but what armour! He had never seen anything like it. Delicate chainmail
overlaid with plates of metal that glittered darkly with greens and blues and
prismatic metal tones. He nearly lost himself in staring at it, and backed up a
dozen steps as she attacked again. Her style was new to him but she was swift
even encased in that metal, dancing both with her sword and with him. He met
her blade another half-dozen times, taking each blow on his claw or its
armoured gauntlet.
The Spider traitress
must have run by now, he realized. He would have to hunt her down again. He did
not care. This was special.
He turned his next parry
into an attack, and he was backing her up once more, his claw tracing lines of
swift silver in the air, now sparking off the straight blade of her sword, and
sometimes drawing the faintest scratch off that glorious armour when she did
not move quite soon enough.
He sought out her face,
golden-skinned, composed into perfect concentration, beautiful and fixed as a
statue’s.
He was under her guard
for just a moment, lashing beneath her breastplate. He severed a handful of
mail links, cut a tear into the arming jacket underneath. Then she struck him
with the guard of her blade, almost catching him with the edge. The blow took
him in the shoulder Thalric had already burned and he hissed in pain and fell
back. He saw her move after him without a thought.
He found he was
grinning, because she was magnificent and he had not fought her like in many
years.
Another series of
lightning exchanges. Her blade was double-edged and needle-pointed, moving like
sunlight and mirrors in her hands, each attack different from the last, without
pattern or predictability. He shifted and spun with them, letting his reflexes
take him where thinking could not keep up, divorcing his mind from the
long-trained motions of his body, letting her advances exhaust themselves till
he was driving her back in turn. Three times he struck and failed to penetrate
her armour, and once he managed a shallow line of blood across her leg beneath
the severed links of the mail.
Her eyes locked his and
he knew she would kill him if she could. He would have no choice but to kill
her in exchange. It was as it should be and either he would die or he would
remember this contest for ever.
Tisamon found he was now
breathing heavily, feeling the skin tight across his chest and side, the
healing burn where Thalric had caught him at the fight over the
Pride
. His seared shoulder throbbed in agony yet it seemed
distant and he could ignore it.
They had reached the
endgame. He still had no idea who she was but he would swear now that she was
no Wasp agent, for if the Wasps could call on such as this they would rule the
world already.
He fell back ten paces,
dropped into a new stance, claw held low but angled upwards. She fell into a
stance of her own, with that sword gripped double-handed and high, the point
aimed downwards. A perfect complement.
He waited for her to
come at him.
Whole ages seemed to
pass, with the two of them frozen in place, each waiting for the slightest move
from the other to set them off. He became aware that the Spider girl had not
moved after all, was still cowering back against the wall where he had left
her. There was another voyeur, too, a man watching from a doorway. It was all
immaterial.
And then she stepped
back out of her stance, as though they had simply been playing at a practice
bout and she now had other things to do. Tisamon fought the immediate instinct
to do the same, holding his pose, but she just stood there now, looking about
her, and he could have killed her at his leisure.
She spoke, her face full
of confusion. ‘Where is this place? This is not Shon Aren.’ She saw him there,
as though noticing for the first time. The sword in her hand seemed almost
forgotten. ‘Mantis-kinden? Am I in Y’yen, then? But why?’ She approached him,
quite without fear or hostile intent, and from the corner of his eye Tisamon
saw the man who had watched them darting forwards,
Instantly his claw was
in motion, bringing the stranger up short with the edge close to his throat.
The strange woman merely watched without alarm or recognition.
A Spider-kinden, Tisamon
saw – there had been far too many in his life recently. This specimen was a
long-haired man of middle years, his hands empty, teeth bared above the blade
that menaced him.
‘And who are you?’
Tisamon demanded. ‘Tell me quickly or I’ll have done with you. There are too
few answers tonight.’
‘Oh, I know of your
kind’s enmity towards mine,’ the man replied, as calmly as he could muster. ‘My
name is Destrachis and I’m with this lady here, whose name is Felise Mienn.’
‘Destrachis!’ the woman
exclaimed even as he said the name, although not with much love, and with no
sign that she saw the claw at his throat. ‘What . . . ?’
‘We are in Collegium,
Felise,’ Destrachis explained carefully.
‘Yes, you are,’ Tisamon
confirmed. ‘And someone had better explain to me exactly what we were fighting
about.’
‘You . . .’ She seemed
to see him again and her eyes narrowed. Instantly his blade was away from
Destrachis and he was falling back into his stance again.
‘I saw you with him,’
she said. ‘You must be one of his creatures. Tell me where he has gone.’
‘Where
who
has gone?’ Tisamon asked her.
She spat back, ‘Thalric!
Thalric the Wasp! Thalric of the Empire. Your master, is he not?’
‘He is
not
,’ Tisamon said firmly. ‘He is my enemy, as he clearly
must be yours. You seek his blood?’
She nodded, seeming more
lucid now.
‘Then if I knew where he
was bound I would tell you,’ he confirmed. ‘And this here is
your
creature, is he?’
She looked at Destrachis
coolly, but it was a moment before she responded. ‘He . . . I was travelling
with this man. He . . . Destrachis brought me here.’
Tisamon began to relax
again, until he heard Arianna’s voice calling them. All three of them turned to
her: a young Spider-kinden girl in a torn and muddied robe.
‘You really want to kill
Thalric?’ she asked hopefully, and Felise nodded in a single sharp movement.
‘He will leave Collegium
tonight,’ Arianna explained. ‘He is travelling to Vek.’
The name of that city
meant nothing to Felise, it was clear, but Destrachis murmured, ‘West of here,
along the coast.’
‘Then we, too, must go
to Vek,’ Felise said. ‘We must go now. We could catch him on the road.’
‘Vek it is,’ Destrachis
confirmed, somewhat wearily, casting a cautious glance at Tisamon. ‘All right
if we make our exit? Despite what just happened, we’re really not your enemies,
honestly.’
‘I see that,’ Tisamon
folded his claw back along the line of his arm.
‘I’ve seen her fighting
a few times, now,’ Destrachis said, ‘and I’ve never seen anyone walk away from
it.’
‘It was a pleasure and
an honour.’ Tisamon stared at Felise thoughtfully. It was as if the woman he
had been fighting had been rubbed away, suddenly replaced by this confused
foreigner, but to his surprise she turned and gave him a curt bow, bringing her
sword, point lowered, up to her breastplate. It was a token of respect he often
had used himself in the company of other Weaponsmasters, and he returned it
with a slight smile.
Destrachis was already
heading away and she followed him with a single backwards glance. Tisamon
stared after her, and even as Arianna approached, he waited until the woman
Felise was out of sight before he turned his attention to the Spider girl.
‘Please let me . . .’
She had stopped out of his reach but. having seen him fight now, she knew how
fast he could move. ‘I really do need to speak to – him. It’s about Thalric’s
plans. Please take me to him . . . in chains if you must.’
He felt the fire of
combat drain out of him, leaving him tired and bruised, more thoroughly
exhausted than he had felt in a long time. There was no desperate need to kill
within him, not now. It had been burned out of him during the fight with Felise
Mienn.
‘Stenwold himself will
decide what to do with you,’ he declared, and motioned for her to walk ahead of
him.
The Ant-kinden shot all
at once, the arms of their crossbows a vibrating blur with the force of the
bolts let loose. Salma saw half a dozen men drop, mostly shot in the head or
throat. Even with their targets lit up by the working lamps, it was a fine
display of shooting.
Basila and her people
were already moving. She took half her force forward with drawn swords, while
the others spun the wheels of their crossbows to recock them. Salma had a
moment’s hesitation before he went with them, catching them up with a flurry of
his wings and diving at once into the fray.
Most of the men they
fell on were Wasp-kinden artificers, unarmoured save for their working
leathers, and some of their slaves. There was no time to distinguish or apply
any mercy, though, and Salma knew that the Tarkesh had none to apply. Eight or
nine utterly surprised men were caught unawares, cut down where they stood, and
then two of the Ants were running on towards the nearest in the line of
towering airships.
There was another hollow
explosion from within the camp as Basila’s tactics of distraction continued.
One man, a suicide from the moment he set out, was running through the tents of
the Wasps and throwing grenades at random. Salma could only imagine the
confusion.
Other Wasp soldiers were
coming at them now. Most came running from the nearest rows of tents,
unarmoured, some barely clad, but there were already some in the airships only
now making themselves known. A second hail of crossbow bolts raked across the
enemy approaching from behind, taking all but two from their feet. Salma turned
to deal with those remaining two, who now hesitated, suddenly wrong-footed by
their comrades’ demise. Giving them no time to react, he stabbed one through
the throat and then planted his blade in the other’s bare chest. He glanced
around for the Ant crossbowmen and saw them advance down the line of airships,
loading as they did. Totho was still among them, he was glad to note, busy
slotting another magazine into his repeating crossbow.