And there was a figure
kneeling by her now, a Mantis woman with silver hair, proffering an ornate
bronze bowl gone green in places over the years. She took it without
hesitation, sitting up to drink, and she knew it was rich mead mixed with the
blood of whoever or whatever she had slain before the idol, and the ichor,
freely given, of the great mantis.
And it was bitter and
sharp, and it burned her, but she forced it down, because it was strength, and
skill and victory.
And when she awoke
again, as dawn crept between the trees, there was something sharp cutting into
her closed left hand. A brooch of a sword and a circle: the token of the order
of Weaponsmasters.
*
Tisamon was waiting for
her on the beach, and when she saw his face she realized that he had not been
certain, despite all his promises to Stenwold, whether he ever would see her
again.
She now wore the badge
of his order on her arming jacket, and when the thought occurred,
Did I really fight . . .
she had only to touch the rents
that the unknown blade had cut there, almost through to the skin. She was left
only with the question,
What was it that I fought? What
blood did I drink?
The thought had come to
her of those shadow-creatures in the Darakyon forest that she had seen that
once when Tisamon led her through its margins. They had known his badge and his
office, and stayed their hands for him.
There was a darkness at
the heart of Parosyal, she understood, and it was best not to ask questions.
Tisamon’s eyes flicked
from the brooch to her face, and he smiled just a little. She knew he would
never ask, just as she could not ask him about his own experience all those
years ago.
‘There is a boat that
will take us over to Felyal before noon,’ he told her.
‘What do you hope to
accomplish there?’ she asked him.
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps
nothing, but I will see what can be done. It will not be easy for you.’
‘This will help?’ She
touched the brooch lightly.
‘It will keep them from
killing you out of hand,’ he told her, ‘but you may still have to prove
yourself to my people – as may I. With last night behind you, I have no doubt
that you can.’
‘You don’t strike me
quite as bandits,’ said Salma. ‘Or perhaps you’ve not been in the trade long.’
The brigand leader
shrugged. ‘There are two or three that have.’ He had given his name as Phalmes,
and the total of his band was fifteen men and one Ant-kinden woman. They had a
fire lit in a farmhouse that had been torched at least a tenday before, and the
band of refugees was huddled close together in their midst, watching them
suspiciously. Sfayot played pipe, though, keeping time on a drum with his foot,
and his daughters danced. It entertained the bandits, but Salma found it
lifeless compared to other dances he had seen.
‘Most of us are getting
out from under the Empire,’ Phalmes said. ‘Deserters like me and some slaves.
Others are rustics running away from home, or who’ve been burned out. The
Empire’s on the march and that pushes a tide of flotsam ahead of it. We’ve got
to live, and banditry’s as good a living as any.’
‘I’ve seen bandits,’
Salma observed. ‘It’s a wretched life.’
‘I imagine you have,
being from where you’re from,’ Phalmes agreed. ‘And I’d ask just what a
Commonwealer like you is doing so far from home. Not great travellers normally,
your people.’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘It’s going to be a long
night.’
‘Tell me a short one
first,’ Salma said. ‘How do you come to know the Commonweal?’
Phalmes just smiled
sourly, and Salma immediately understood. ‘You fought there?’
‘Five years of the
Twelve-Year War,’ the bandit agreed. ‘After they drafted me for their
Auxillians. I was apprenticed for a mason, before that. So much for the futures
we think we’ll have. So tell me, Commonwealer, tell me your long story.’
And Salma told him, the
bones of it anyway. He could not place any real trust in this man, he knew, and
so he held off the names and the details, but he told Phalmes about the College
and about his being recruited by a Beetle spymaster. He recounted his journey
on the
Sky Without
and their escape, and their
foundering in Helleron. He told of the betrayal and their capture by the Wasps.
Phalmes had listened
without interruption, but it was when the tale reached Myna that he held a hand
up. ‘How long ago?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘When was this?’
Salma counted back. ‘A
couple of months at most, since I was held there. Then my friends got me out –
and the governor was killed, I heard.’
‘The Bloat?’ Phalmes
said. ‘They killed him?’
‘Yes. And I met the
woman who is running the resistance there. She was freed at the same time I
was.’
‘She? What’s her name?’
‘Kymene. Do you know
her?’
Phalmes shook his head.
‘Heard of her, though. So
your
lot let her out.
Well, now, that’s bought you safe passage and a half, more than any song and
dance.’
The elder of Sfayot’s
girls came, then, and sat down next to Phalmes, who regarded her without
expression.
‘Your father sent you
here to me?’
She nodded, watching
him.
‘There’s a man with a
realistic view of the world,’ said Phalmes tiredly. ‘Your friend here has just
bargained your freedom, girl.’
She shrugged. ‘We knew
he would.’
‘And why’s that?’
Phalmes asked her, like a man humouring a child.
‘Because he is such a
man,’ she said. ‘My father has keen sight.’
Salma shifted uncomfortably.
‘It was nothing but chance.’
She shook her head
stubbornly, and then turned her attention to Phalmes. ‘What will you do?’ she
asked him. ‘Your men are unhappy. They fear the Wasps.’
‘Do they, now?’
‘They should,’ she told
him. ‘My father has seen it. They are just north of here. The great city of the
chimneys has fallen to them already.’
‘Does she mean
Helleron?’ Phalmes demanded.
‘It’s the first I’ve
heard of it,’ Salma said, and then reconsidered. ‘Or no, I’d heard that
northwards wouldn’t be a good destination. I hadn’t thought . . . Things are
moving fast, then?’
Phalmes nodded gloomily.
‘It’s looking as though this country won’t be good even for bandits any more.
There’s plenty of my lads here who need to keep themselves well out of the
Empire’s hands, and I put myself squarely in that number.’
The girl leant into him
unexpectedly, almost pushing him against Salma. ‘You’re not a bad man,’ she
said. ‘My father sees many things.’
Salma’s eyes sought out
Sfayot near the fire, and found the white-haired man looking at him with an
unnervingly clear stare.
‘I’m as bad as I need to
be,’ Phalmes told her. He seemed about to push her away, but then decided
against it. Salma could see that he was already worrying about what to do with
his followers next, because where could he lead them now?
‘You should come with
us,’ the Roach girl told him.
Phalmes stared at her
levelly. ‘Should I? And where are you all going that is such a wonderful
destination?’
‘I don’t know,’ she
said, and then looked over at Salma. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I’m not leading us
anywhere,’ Salma said, but realized, even as he said it, that this was not
quite true. They had been looking to him since he had driven Cosgren away,
because Cosgren had made himself leader, and then Salma had displaced him. That
was the way things worked.
And if he was leading
them. he should know where they were going, and why.
‘What else has your
father seen?’ he asked. Phalmes gave an amused snort, because magic was just a
word to him, but Salma had seen magic in his time and he believed in that
moment that Sfayot could indeed be a seer.
‘That you will find
something,’ the girl said. ‘You will find what you seek, perhaps.’
‘Does he know you’re
telling me all this?’
‘He wanted me to,’ she
said. She was close to his own age, thin and pale, with her white hair cut
short and ragged. She was pretty, though, and she looked at Phalmes with a
smile that he did not know what to do with. In that moment of awkwardness,
Salma saw him as though he had known the man all his life. A solid working man,
ripped from his trade, his family, his life, only to be driven further and
further as he fled the rolling borders of the Empire, and yet here he was,
still trying.
‘They made you an
officer in the Auxillians,’ he guessed.
‘So you’re a magician as
well now, are you?’ Phalmes demanded. ‘I was Sergeant-Auxillian, if you must
know.’
‘And you’re still trying
to look after your men.’
‘Just like you are,’
Phalmes confirmed, ‘but what of it? A man’s got to have some purpose in his
life.’
‘Yes, he does,’ Salma
agreed.
‘Why not come with us?’
the Roach girl asked Phalmes again.
He merely shook his head
tiredly.
But the next morning, as
the refugees set off westwards, Phalmes and his bandits were riding uncertainly
alongside them. They were far enough apart to maintain their sovereignty, but
they rode a parallel path, and took care not to get ahead.
Something was happening,
Salma was aware, though he was not sure just what. In the meantime, as he
waited for it to happen, his little band of fugitives lived day-to-day and
relied on one another. When they were hungry, the land or the leavings of
others sustained them. When they were weary they stopped and scavenged wood for
a fire.
Then, one afternoon when
they were in sore need of food and shelter, one of Phalmes’s scouts reported
back that there was a small village ahead. They had been following the
Sarn–Helleron railroad, and it was some little hamlet built around a rail
siding. Passenger trains had stopped here, so there would be inns, farmland, an
engineer’s workshop with a single enterprising artificer. But there had been
little traffic of late, and most of the opportunists had headed away, looking
for fatter pastures, leaving only a skeleton of a place, inhabited by those
that could not or would not leave.
Phalmes gave a signal
and the bandits began to ready their weapons.
‘What are you doing?’
Salma asked him.
‘We need food,’ Phalmes
said. ‘What’s more, there are roofs out there that we can make use of.’
‘There will be no
pillaging here,’ Salma told him. ‘There’s no need for that.’
‘You’re right, so long
as the locals there are sensible.’ The Mynan gave him a hard smile. ‘So long as
they understand that we have the power to take, all we need to do is ask.’
‘Let me at least talk to
them first,’ Salma insisted.
‘Whatever you want,’
said Phalmes with a shrug. ‘But those around you now are
your
people. They’re looking to you to provide, like my men look to me. They’re
short of everything and hungry each evening. What are you going to do about
that?’
Salma looked out at the
village and thought,
Was it Cosgren that brought me to
this?
It had to be something more, but he could not put his finger on
the moment when he had shouldered this responsibility. It was now on his
shoulders, nonetheless.
It did not turn out as
Salma had planned, none of it.
They had gone to the
village, all of his ragged band: the farmwife and her child, the Fly gangsters
and the escaped slaves, Sfayot and his daughters and – like a dark and brooding
tail – Phalmes’s deserters and brigands. The village would have no wish to play
host to such a pack of vagabonds, and yet the numbers Salma led in were great
enough that they could hardly resist.
Taking Phalmes and Nero
along with him, Salma had met with the village headman and bartered for food.
Some of his barter had been in coin, some in promised labour, or services. He
was aware that he had desperately little to offer and that, even with Nero’s
practised haggling, they should have been turned away immediately. Instead, the
headman made an offer that was generous by any means, and Salma understood then
how he was participating in banditry. Banditry of a civilized sort, but
Phalmes’s men were all well armed, and this village was small.
They would camp within
the village boundaries, Salma explained. They would chop the promised wood,
draw the promised water, all the other meaningless tokens of their agreement.
The headman tried to wave it away, but Salma had insisted.
He had not intended to
become a brigand, but it seemed that it was easier than he had guessed to slip
into that trade.
He had not intended to
defend the village, either, but nevertheless it had happened. He had less
control over his fate than he had ever imagined.
The real brigands had
come thundering down on the settlement at night, with swords and burning
brands. There were a score and a half of them and they were not here to make
deals, or even to threaten or intimidate. They came for quick loot, a handful
of whatever they could grab.
Instead they found Salma
and his followers. Even while the villagers were putting their children out of
the way, reaching for their staves and spears, Salma was rousing his band,
sending them out with blades and sticks and bows. He went out himself, too,
seeing by the slice of moon far better than the attackers, making savage work
with the staff that Sfayot had made for him, and then ultimately just with the
claws of his thumbs.
He discovered he was
strong enough to fly again, using his wings to leap into his enemies, kicking
and raking, and then jump back before they realized what was happening.
These were the sort of
mixed ruffians he remembered from Helleron: Beetles and rogue Ants and
halfbreeds, driven but disorganized. The fighting was fierce.