He could not tell her,
she knew, for it was forbidden. Mantis-kinden seemed to live their lives in
cages of air, held back at every turn by their own traditions. Tisamon had
broken free from that cage once, but he would bend no more bars of it now, not
here.
He was worried about
her, she realized. He had tested her as fiercely as he could, killed her a
hundred times in practice duel, measured her skill and her will to fight
against his own. He believed in her, but she was his daughter and he worried.
She, in her turn, could not ask him for reassurance, could not even speak to
him lest he hear her voice shake. That was pride, she realized, a refusal to
bend to the common demands of being human. It was
Mantis
pride.
Out there, in the
village’s centre, they were brewing something in a small iron pot hung over a
beach fire. The Moth that Tisamon had spoken to and an older Moth woman were
talking to one another in soft voices.
Are they casting
spells? Is this magic?
But Tynisa did not believe in magic, for all that
it seemed to turn the wheels of Tisamon’s life. Che, poor credulous Che,
believed in more magic than Tynisa could ever allow into her world.
Tisamon looked up. The
sky above the island had now graded into dusk, into darkness. Tynisa had barely
noticed.
‘It is time,’ the Mantis
said. He looked her over, noting her rapier, her dagger, her arming jacket. He
had told her to be ready for war.
When the time came to
drink, she baulked at first. Whatever they had boiled up over the beach fire
was thick and rotten-smelling. They waited patiently. They would not force her.
If she did not drink, she would fall at the first challenge.
She took the warm clay
cup from them, suppressing a revulsion that seemed more than rational, some
deep abhorrence that she could not account for or place.
As quick as she could,
she drank it. The liquid was shockingly sweet, both cloying and choking, and
she fought herself to swallow by sheer willpower. The reaction in her gut
doubled her over and she reached for Tisamon for his support, but he was out of
arm’s length already.
You are on your own from here.
Tynisa regained her
balance, wiped her mouth. Her stomach twisted sourly, and the two Moth-kinden
seemed to shift and blur in her vision.
‘What . . . ?’ she began
to ask, but they were already heading for the forest, so she stumbled after
them, the ground suddenly unpredictable. Tisamon was still near, but too far to
take strength from him. He did not even look at her.
The forest verge loomed
dark. The Moths had vanished, either into it or just away. She glanced once
more at Tisamon, but he would give her no clues. When she stepped forward she
felt the shadows as a physical barrier that she had to put her shoulder to and
force aside.
He was with her when she
stepped between the trees. He was with her but, as she forged her way through
the trees, he fell away and fell away, until she could not find him anywhere
near her. There was motion, though, all around. In the darkness that her eyes
could half-pierce, that motion showed her path to her. The rushing of others on
either side kept her straight. She caught glimpses. They were Mantis-kinden,
keeping pace with her, guiding her. They ran through the trees easily while she
struggled to keep up. They were always overtaking her, passing on into the
heart of the wood, whilst more were always rushing up from behind. She saw them
in her mind: young, old, men, women, familiarly or strangely dressed, or naked
and clad only in the shadows of the trees.
Real?
Or has their drug done this to me?
She had no way of differentiating,
for everything she saw
looked
real to her. Her
normal judgement had been stripped from her.
They were herding her.
She ran and ran, deeper and deeper, and knowing herself led like a beast, or
hunted like one. She could not be sure.
And at last she was
afraid.
It had taken its time,
that fear, stalked her all the way into the denseness of this forest, for which
there had to be some other word.
Jungle
was that
word, Tynisa realized, for this piece of another place and time that was hidden
away on the island of Parosyal.
It was dark now, and so
dark between the trees, beneath the knotted and tangled canopy, that even her
eyes could not penetrate it. She felt her way by touch as much as sight, and
still went on, knowing only that she was being led.
She had lost sight of
the ones leading her, or they had gone ahead or gone out of her mind. She was
alone, and yet she could sense they were still there. She was totally at their
mercy, lost in this torturous place.
When had the night grown
so dark? She wondered if there was ever day in here. She had to force her way
through the trees at times, through gaps a Fly would fight to negotiate, and at
others there was a great cathedral of space about her, a cavern of twisted
boughs and green air.
This was no natural
place, and surely no place for her. She knew now that this had been a dreadful
mistake. On whose part? On Tisamon’s, for certain, and he had gone. She had
lost sight of him.
Because she was on her
own now. He had told her as much. This she must do
alone
.
He could not be there to hold her hand.
Father!
But what a man to have
as a father – cold as ice, distant, bloody-handed. No, Stenwold was her father,
in all but the blood. Stenwold the civilized, city-dwelling, scholar and philosopher.
Stenwold the kind, the understanding. She had been raised in Collegium, studied
in the white halls of the College itself. What madness had brought her here,
into this maze of green and black?
She stumbled down a dip,
splashed through a stream, took a second to look about her, but it was still no
use. She had the sense of things moving, urging her on, but nothing came
clearly to her eyes.
If she stopped now, she
would be lost for ever. They would never find her bones.
The madness that brought
her here was one she carried with her. It was the madness that took her when
she drew a blade in anger. A cold madness like her father’s. Because she loved
it: not killing for its own sake but killing to prove her skill. Killing to
prove her victory. Blood? She was steeped in it.
With that same thought
came the faintest glimpse of one of her escorts, a brief shadow between the
trees, and she knew it was not human at all.
She rushed forwards to
keep pace, struggling up the steep bank that the stream had cut, hauling
herself up by the hanging roots it had exposed.
And she was there – and
she saw the idol.
An idol? There was no
other word for it. A worm-eaten thing of wood, taller than she was by at least
two feet, with two bent arms outstretched from it, a great cruciform monument
so worn by time that no detail of it could be made out clearly. Even the trees
had been cleared from around it, or perhaps they had never taken root there.
This was it. She was at
the heart of the Mantis dream, the centre of the island, the centre of the
forest, of the kinden’s heartwood.
She approached the
looming thing slowly, stepping over the lumped ridges of roots, feeling
movement in the trees all around. They were watching her, and waiting. What was
she to do? What was she to make of this . . . thing?
Close now, almost within
arm’s reach. She had never believed in magic but something coursed from this
crude and decaying image, some distant thunder beyond hearing, a tide that
washed over her, lifting her and dragging at her.
She put out a hand to
it. Would it be sacrilege or reverence, to touch this thing? What light the
revenant moon could give her was shy of it, but her eyes hoarded the pale
radiance against the darkness and she drew her hand back sharply. The idol was
crawling with decay and rot. Worms and centipedes coursed through its crumbling
wooden flesh. Beetles swarmed at its base, and their fat white grubs,
finger-long, put their heads into the night air and wove about, idiot-blind. It
was festering with voracious life, perishing even as she watched it. She saw
then where new wood had been added as the thing fell apart, making good and
making good but never replacing the dark and rotten heart of the effigy, so
that whatever was jointed in was simply further prey for the rot, over and
over, decade after decade.
And she saw that was the
point, that the thing before her, a dead image, was also a living thing, a
festering, fecund thing, life consuming death and death consuming life.
She took her knife from
her belt. She had seen gouges where the thing’s breast would be, if the angled
spars that jutted from it were arms. This was the test, was it? She raised the
blade.
She felt the power, that
invisible tide, as it rose to a peak about her. Above her thunder rumbled in a
clear sky.
And she stabbed down.
She did not believe in
magic, but lightning seared across the stars in the moment that her knife bit
into the worm-eaten wood – and she saw the second idol, the glare of the
lighting burned it on her eyes: the tall, thin upright, the two hooked arms.
The flash had blinded
her, but she sensed it move ever so slightly, swaying side to side, and she
froze.
Not an image, but the
original. Even without sight, she saw it in her mind. That triangular head
eight feet from the ground, vast eyes and razoring mandibles, and the arms,
those spined and grasping arms. An insect larger than a horse, easily capable
of snatching her in its forelimbs and crushing her dead, scissoring into her
with its jaws. They killed humans, in the remote places where they still lived.
They killed even people who came hunting them with bows and spears. Everyone
knew this.
Was she supposed to kill
it now? She blinked furiously, seeing only shapes, blurs, and she felt it move
again, swaying slightly, fixing her with its vast, all-seeing eyes.
And she stood still and
waited, the knife useless in her hand.
It was close. She could
see the shifting motion as its arms flexed on either side of her. She was
almost within its embrace.
Sister.
The voice came like a
stab of pain in her skull.
Sister.
She could see enough
now, the towering, swaying mantis before her. The voice seared through her, but
she knew it was some latent Art awakening, just for this moment. The Speech –
she had heard of this: Art little seen these days, but to command the creatures
of one’s kinden was known. To hear their simple animal voices and to order them
. . . but not this—
Sister,
you have come far.
They were not human
words. Some other intelligence was prying into her skull, forcing itself upon
her, and her poor mind was forming the words as best it could.
You
have come to prove yourself.
Had she? She had
forgotten why she had come.
Turn,
sister
, the voice speared into her mind, and she turned and saw him
there.
He was just a moving
shape in the darkness, leading with the tip of a blade splashed pale silver by
the moon. Her rapier had cleared its scabbard even as she saw him, and she felt
the shock of contact, real as real, heard the scrape and clatter as the metal
met.
He drove her before him,
lancing and slashing in dazzling, half-seen patterns, a shadow-shape that she
could not pin down. Her body knew the dance, though, or at least her sword did.
Even as she felt the rapier vibrate with her parries, it was as though she was
feeling its history, all the swift patterns it had ever moved through, as
though the fight she was engaged in was running along grooves worn deep by
centuries of use.
And she stared at the
face of her opponent, which shifted and blurred before her, and tried to read
it, but it changed and changed again. Now she was fighting Tisamon, his blade
the darting metal claw, and murder on his face as he tried to blot out the
unforgivable crime of having sired her. Now it was Bolwyn, whose shifting
visage masked the faceless magician who had betrayed them in Helleron. He was
Piraeus, seething with hate for her, treacherous and mercenary but poised and
skilled despite it. The blade cut close to her face, and then she felt it pluck
at her arming jacket, not deep enough to draw blood, but close enough.
Always the figure was a
fraction faster than her attacks, displaying Tisamon’s cold rage, or the face
of Thalric with the fires of the
Pride
reflecting in
his eyes. Her adversary was every man she had ever fought, every man she had
loved or hated, one at once and all together, a shifting chimaera of faces and
styles and blades. He was the half-breed gang-leader Sinon Halfways with his
marble skin, and Captain Halrad who had tried to own her; beautiful Salma who
she had yearned for and yet who had never given himself to her; Stenwold, who
had hidden her past from her; Tisamon, always Tisamon.
And then, there was an
instant in which the face was a woman’s, and she could not have said if it was
her own, or that of her mother, and she lunged with a wild cry and felt the
rapier’s keen-edged blade lance through living flesh.
She was lying on her
side before the idol, and the world seemed to be fading in and out around her
so that she could almost see through the trees. There was a whispering chorus
in her mind, but no words, just a susurrus of constant, muddled thoughts. She
was exhausted: every muscle burned and twitched with it. The rapier’s hilt was
still tight in her hand, and she felt it almost as the clasp of a lover.
Her head swam, but she
seemed to understand things she had not comprehended before, though she knew
this knowledge would leave her when she regained her full wits. In that
drifting but infinitely lucid state she saw how Tisamon must be able to call
his blade to him, and how Achaeos had known where Che and Salma were being
taken, and many other things.