‘Long-term investment?’
Thanred jeered. ‘We have an entire army sitting at the mercy of these
backstabbers.’
The Consortium factor
bristled. ‘And what if they
do
attack? We need
Merro. It’s a prize second only to Helleron. So let’s fight the Spiders. What
could they muster, realistically?’
‘If I could, mnn,
speak,’ said the old Woodlouse Gjegevey. Maxin turned a narrow gaze on him,
because he had not entered the debate until now.
‘I have not travelled in
the Spiderlands, but have read, nonetheless, of their, mmn, kinden. There is
record of a Spider lordling who mustered an army with the, ahm, intention of
conquering at least part of the Lowlands – Tark and Kes and the Fly warrens at
least. It came to, mnm, well, he was defeated by the machinations of his
political rivals amongst his own kinden, but the, mmn, reports regarding the
force he raised placed its size at over one hundred thousand soldiers.’
There was a thoughtful
pause amongst the other advisers.
‘I cannot vouch for the
quality of their troops, but you will understand that this was a single lord.
If our precipitate, mnn, action should prompt a unification amongst such
families, well . . .’
It was help from an
unexpected direction, but Maxin would take it. He turned to the centrepoint of
the advisers’ crescent of chairs and asked, ‘Your Imperial Majesty, what would
you have us do?’
Alvdan started from his
reverie. He had taken no part in the discussions, and Maxin knew just what it
was that so consumed him. What the Mosquito was offering him, impossible as it
sounded, far outweighed these mundane debates. ‘What would
you
advise, General?’ the Emperor responded eventually.
‘Perhaps an official
embassy should be sent to these Spider-kinden. No doubt they want something
from us, some recognition or tithe. We can buy them now and take back our gold
at our leisure. We have done it before.’
There were no strong
objections, and the Emperor put his seal on the plan. The Fourth Army would
stay put, and General Alder would fret, but Alder was Reiner’s man, Maxin knew.
The glory of the Lowlands would go to General Malkan when he took first Sarn
and then Collegium. But Malkan had always been one of Maxin’s retinue, and he
was the youngest and keenest general the Empire possessed.
Maxin was careful not to
leave in Odyssa’s company, for that would have raised too many questions. He
met her eyes, though, and nodded to show that he approved of her performance.
He gave a nod to old Gjegevey too, before he left.
As for Gjegevey, he made
a great show of being slow to rise and the last to leave, and when he left,
Odyssa was waiting for him.
‘I thought it must be
you,’ she murmured softly. ‘My message was that the Lord-Martial had a man
amongst the imperial advisers.’
‘As you yourself said,’
Gjegevey murmured, ‘any man who plays politics with the, hmm, Spider-kinden, is
liable to find himself caught in webs.’ He smiled. ‘What a pair of, mmn,
traitors we are.’
‘To who?’ she asked. ‘Do
you honestly think, O scholar, that you know where my loyalties lie?’
Even
speaking to her I feel myself ensnared
, Gjegevey thought.
Felyal had an uncertain
relationship with the sea, and held no firm borders. The wall of greenery their
boat coasted past was inundated now, the brackish waters reaching far inland
with the high tide. When the waters receded, the trees would be left suspended
on their spidery roots amongst a mudscape of burrows and discarded shells.
Outsiders used the name
and made no distinction, but Tynisa learned that ‘Felyal’ was the Mantis Hold,
and that ‘the Felyal’ was the wood itself, just as that other place far
north-east of here was
the
Darakyon. There had been
a Mantis hold there as well, once.
Their boat tacked closer
and then further away, the Moth-kinden fisherman shading his eyes and watching
the water carefully. At last he found a channel running into the wood, and
guided the boat twenty yards along it before throwing a line out to loop over a
branch.
‘This is as far as I can
take her,’ he explained. Tisamon paid him a handful of coins, and then stepped
out onto one of the arching roots, holding an arm back for Tynisa to clutch at.
It was an awkward
journey until they passed the high-tide mark, stepping half in muddy water and
half on the projections of the trees, seeing the swirl of creatures moving in
the murk, and slapping at mosquitoes that hung in the air as big as hands. They
clambered and scrambled inland with best speed, walking from root to root,
jumping channels that were thick with mud and motion. The air glittered with
life. Dragonflies skimmed the waters for fish drawn in by the tide, and
butterflies like ragged brown cloaks hunted through the canopy for the open
blooms of flowers.
They reached land, at
last, and if it was not dry it was at least solid, past the furthest intrusions
of the sea. The trees progressed from the stilted marsh-dwellers to broader and
more familiar breeds. There was a weight to them, an ancient crookedness, that
returned errant thoughts of the Darakyon to Tynisa, and she shook them off
uncomfortably.
‘What lives here,
besides your people?’ she asked.
‘Our namesakes,’ Tisamon
said briefly. ‘Beyond those two, there is nothing to worry you.’
‘No ghosts?’ she asked.
‘Spirits?’
Tisamon turned back to
her. ‘The mystics teach us that there are ghosts and spirits everywhere,’ he
said. ‘But no, this is not like
that
place.’
She would have asked
more, but then the Mantis-kinden found them. She only knew about it when
Tisamon moved, the metal claw abruptly in place and at the ready. She had the
sense of sudden flight, the sound of metal on metal.
Everything stopped. She
could see nothing, though her sword had leapt to her hand. Claw cocked back,
Tisamon was standing before her, tense as a taut wire.
There, by his feet, was
a broken arrow. It had been meant for her.
‘Where is your honour?’
Tisamon shouted out, genuinely angry. ‘Come forth that I may see what my kinden
have become!’
There were five of them,
three women and two men, all of them within a few years of her own age. They
had bows, strings drawn back to the ear, and not the little bows of Flyor
Moth-kinden, but bows as tall as they were, and they were all of them tall.
They were fair too, as Tisamon was, and as she was also. Her features were
Spider-kinden, though, while theirs were composed of the same angles as his:
sharp-chinned, sharp-eared, narrow-eyed. A kind of austere grace, like a
statue’s, was theirs, but without the warmth to make them seem human. They wore
greens and greys, and one had a cuirass of black-enamelled metal scales.
Their leader stared at
Tisamon with eyes narrowed. ‘What filth is this? What do you want here?’ she
asked, regarding Tisamon without any love. Then her gaze passed to Tynisa and
she spat at her feet. ‘No Spiders in the Felyal,’ she said. ‘We had thought
that decree would not be forgotten.’ The other four arrowheads were directed
unwavering at Tynisa’s head, waiting only for the nod.
‘Look again at her,’
Tisamon urged quietly. The Mantis woman shot him a hostile glance, but her eyes
twitched over Tynisa, and came to rest on the brooch.
‘What is this?’ she
demanded.
‘We must speak to the
elders of Felyal,’ Tisamon said calmly.
‘And if they will not
speak to you?’ The woman’s comrades were slowly lowering their bows, relaxing
the strain on their strings. They could see, from that one badge, that this
situation was more than they themselves could decide on. There was a wildness
to their eyes, though. That the mark of a Weaponsmaster could be borne by a
Spider was hateful to them, Tynisa understood. She saw also that they did not
even consider that she might have acquired it by forgery or theft, that badge.
That she sported it meant that she had earned it, and she wondered just what
might happen to any unwise thief who tried to claim such a symbol undeservedly.
‘If they will not see
us, then that shall be what they choose,’ Tisamon said. ‘I myself know the way,
but if you wish to escort us, so be it.’
‘You, perhaps, but
she
may not come. She may live this time, but send her
back to the sea,’ the woman snarled.
Tisamon shook his head.
‘You cannot deny that symbol, and don’t make either of us prove it to you.’
The Mantis woman looked
rebellious for a further moment, her jaw stuck out aggressively. Then she
signalled, and one of her band ran off into the trees.
‘We are watching you,’
she hissed at Tynisa. ‘If you try to run, we shall kill you.’
‘Why would I need to
run?’ asked Tynisa, trying to muster icy disdain and meanwhile hoping her
nerves did not show. She had always known this, how Mantis-kinden hated the Spiders.
Everyone knew it and nobody knew why, but the grievance went back deep into the
Days of Lore, the enmity’s roots impossible to tug out and examine.
And now she was here and
amongst them, and they hated her. She could feel all four of them hating her,
just patiently waiting for the word. The brooch she wore seemed a feeble object
to hold up as a shield.
She hoped Tisamon knew
what he was doing and, glancing at him, saw that he was by no means as certain
as she had previously thought. His anxiety was now as much for his own sake as
for hers. She was the abomination that he had produced, and thus they were
guilty side by side.
He strode ahead, though,
forcing the other Mantids to keep up with his pace. He was coming home, but it
had been twenty years, and how much did he really know about the current
regime? Or perhaps nothing ever changed here, in this deep pocket of the past.
And she realized that
they were already within the Mantis community, the Hold, and she had not
noticed. All around them lay a village, but the Mantids had not cleared any
ground to accommodate it. Instead their houses were scattered around and
between the trees, light structures of wood that barely touched the ground,
with rounded walls and sloping roofs that funnelled upwards into openings that
were both chimneys and doors. She could not count them, half-hidden in and out
of the trees, but it seemed everywhere she looked there was another, situated
further out between the distant trunks and branches, until she wondered whether
the entire wood was riddled with them. So this was the Mantis-kinden, their
idea of a town.
But
of course, they could not live one on top of another
. Basic lessons of
economics were coming back to her from the College. Where were the farms? Where
was the cleared land? Of course there was none, for Mantis-kinden were not
farmers. They must hunt and gather their way through the Felyal. They could
never form great compact towns or cities, and how many of them could even this
wide-stretching forest feed? And how scattered they must remain, just to
support themselves.
It only struck her then
that this was something from another time, another world. Here was where the
claws of the past had dug in and held tight. The revolution had never happened
here, where the Days of Lore still dragged their timeless way along.
And here were the
Mantis-kinden themselves. The advance messenger had drawn a fair crowd of them,
perhaps a hundred or more. There were suspiciously staring children, holding
wooden stick-swords that were not toys but practice blades, and there were some
silver-haired old men and women, and there was a host in between, for the
Mantids lived long and aged late. They surprised her, and mostly because of the
amount of metal they displayed. Many of them had donned armour, either the
leaf-shaped scales or curving, fluted breastplates and helms: the much-coveted
carapace style that no other kinden had been able to duplicate. Black and brown
and green and gold, and old, the armour and the weapons were the work of generations,
handed down and handed down, and always keeping the past alive. She almost felt
the ancient blade at her own side shift in sympathy.
One of the older women
was stepping forwards. She walked as though she were young, with the same grace
as all of them, and she had a beautifully sleek rapier hanging from a cord loop
at her belt.
‘What do you want here?’
she asked. ‘Why have you come?’
‘My name is Tisamon,
Loquae, and I have come home.’
Tynisa glanced at him
and realized with a shock that she had never thought him afraid before, but he
seemed so now. Moreover, he was revelling in it, feeding off it. It stretched
his mouth into a taut grin as tension twanged through his entire body. He was
as alive and alert as he had ever been, and unmistakably thrilling with it.
‘There
was
a man called Tisamon once,’ said the Loquae, for
Tynisa knew this word was a title, not a name. ‘He left many years ago, hearing
the call of the world. Perhaps he
might
have sought
to rejoin his people.’ Her eyes were slits as she stared at Tynisa. ‘But he
would never have brought a Spider here with him. By what right does she bear
that badge?’
‘By the only right that
anyone can,’ Tisamon said, his voice all calm, his stance all readiness. ‘And
she is not a Spider. She is my daughter.’
The words speared
through them like steel, like a wind lashing at trees and bending them
backwards. There were blades in hand instantly, rapiers and long knives, and
claw-gauntlets being buckled on. Even the children hissed their disapproval at
him, and the Loquae wailed, ‘What have you done? You have made an abomination!
What have you become?’
Tisamon watched her,
grinning still with pain and tension.
‘You cannot be one of
us,’ the Loquae spat at him. ‘You are not one of us!’