Corver lashed out at anything that came near him. The Mantis-kinden were dancing from tree to tree, moving swiftly, using every part of their forest home to hide them. He caught not a straight
glimpse of any of them, not a single face – just the murderous rushing movement as they lunged at him and then skipped away.
One darted past him – a momentary impression of hard, empty eyes, a sinuous form shrouded in grey – and Sandric went down, struck hard. He made a sound like a man dying, and Corver
had heard enough of them in his time. He stabbed at the attacker, then tried to bring his sting to bear, but the Mantis was gone.
They were all gone. Corver straightened up, feeling quiet return to the forest. As swiftly as they had struck, the Mantis-kinden had fled – some part of their game, no doubt.
One by
one, they’ll come for us, just like . . .
but then Sandric sat up, his head just clearing the ferns. He looked pale, his face washed out and drawn in the fickle light, but he was alive,
and Corver helped him up.
‘Hurts, sir,’ he said, but the leather of his pilot’s cuirass had turned the blow just enough.
‘We need to move,’ Vrant stated. ‘They’ll be back. Where’s—’ But Sterro had already made his reappearance.
‘Yes, yes,’ he snapped at the big man. ‘Don’t pretend you care.’
‘Sandric, go up and take another look.’ Corver glanced at the sky and saw to his surprise that much of the gloom around them was evening stealing upon them.
The pilot ascended wearily, clutching at his side where the Mantis had struck him, and the other Imperials crouched in the ferns and waited. Then Vrant let out a long, low hiss, hefting his
sword.
‘What is it?’ Corver asked him, tense as a wire and waiting for the Mantids to come back for a second sitting.
But Vrant just pointed. ‘There’s the bastard,’ he said.
Corver tried to follow the man’s finger, seeing it shake slightly. Still, Sterro saw it before he did, and only after a long time of staring did he pick out the shape of the beast that
Vrant had spotted: a praying mantis, and a big one, fifteen feet if it was an inch, poised like an executioner, arms drawn up in contemplation of its next victims. One eye was a charred and ruined
mess.
‘That was on the airship,’ Vrant grunted. ‘That brought us down.’
‘A mantis?’
‘
That
,’ the soldier insisted. ‘It was that.’
‘What are you saying, soldier? This
animal
followed us here?’ Corver growled. The lopsided look the mantis had turned on them was considering, reflective, anything but
bestial.
‘I’m not saying anything, sir. Look, can we move—’
Then Sandric had descended in their midst, which failed to startle Vrant but almost saw Corver kill the pilot by reflex.
‘We’re right on course,’ Sandric confirmed, pressing the compass into Corver’s hand and showing the direction, ‘but look, sir, I saw . . . hard to say but I saw
what looked like – I don’t know, buildings maybe? Or something.’
‘Buildings . . .’ Corver exchoed.
‘Or something,’ Sandric repeated, shrugging. Between us and the crash. And there was what looked like . . .’ His face twisted wretchedly. ‘Something bigger, a hall or
something, I could just make it out – something further in.’
Further off, surely
, Corver corrected for himself, but Sandric’s words seemed entirely and unwelcomingly appropriate. ‘We press on,’ he told them. ‘But watch for
any sign of construction, is all.’
‘Night soon,’ Sterro muttered. Nobody dignified him with an answer.
Vrant took the lead, chopping and shouldering his way, from time to time in the ever-waning light consulting the compass that Corver held. The physical activity strained his
abused ribs, but he was glad of it. In a long history of stupid assignments, this business was surely the worst. What was happening to the Imperial army these days? Surely things were simpler back
when they were fighting the Dragonflies?
Building
, the sergeant had said, as if anyone would really build anything in this place. Surely the Mantis-kinden slept in trees whilst their beasts roamed free and attacked innocent
Wasp airships.
And that was another thing he didn’t like. That
had
been the same mantis, bearing the scars of their previous encounter – but it had not attacked, and then Corver had been
all ‘press on’ and Vrant had lost sight of it. That it was still out there was no hard conclusion to reach, though.
Hunting us
, he decided, but they were already so lost and so
foreign to this louring place that he had to wonder just what sort of opportunity the monster was waiting for.
‘Wait!’ Sterro’s voice hissed abruptly, from waist level. The little man had taken to travelling right at Vrant’s heels, to his great annoyance, mostly to take best
advantage of the path the Wasp was forcing through the undergrowth.
And since when did you ever get a forest like this – so much underfoot and yet so little sky above, eh?
‘Report.’ Corver’s voice sounded ragged.
‘Light, sir. A fire.’
Vrant glanced up, barely able to distinguish scraps of sky from the branches that barred it out. The fabled buildings were starting to seem less a threat and more of a promise.
Roof over our
heads wouldn’t go amiss, no matter how many Mantids we had to kill for it.
The Wasps squinted in the direction Sterro was pointing. Was there a faint suggestion of red there? Vrant couldn’t tell.
‘Move,’ Corver decided, and they muddled on another hundred yards – by then they could all see it – a sullen glow that outlined the low, curved entryway to a hut.
‘Hut’ was almost an overstatement. The thing seemed mostly woven from branches, and one side of it was just latched onto a tree trunk. Aside from the doorway the only external feature
was where the weave of its root projected up into an unpleasantly anatomical-looking spout, from which a light trail of smoke could just be seen as they approached.
Then Vrant looked to one side, and stopped, putting out a hand to halt the sergeant as well, with Sterro pattering on another few feet.
‘Sir, we’re surrounded,’ Vrant murmured, sword clearing its sheath in what he hoped was a subtle way. He waited while the others took stock and came to the same conclusion.
The hut was a Mantis hut, no doubt about that, but that was because they were in the middle of a Mantis village. Of course, unlike civilized people the world over, the wretched Mantis-kinden
didn’t deign to undertake such menial tasks as clearing the ground around where they wanted to live. Instead, Vrant and the others had been walking through the Mantis community for some time.
Now that they looked, they could see similar misshapen structures between and around and halfway up the trees in all directions, as though the forest had erupted in monstrous tumours.
There was not a sound save for their breathing, until Vrant finally said, ‘So where are they? Are they here?’ He had an open palm out, threatening the darkness.
Sterro had crept forwards towards the lit entrance. ‘Someone lit the fire. Place isn’t abandoned.’
‘Maybe it was someone like us. Doesn’t have to be locals,’ Vrant opined, ‘Hey, perhaps it’s people from the other crash come to borrow
our
balloon,
eh?’
Nobody seemed to think that was funny.
Sterro was at the entrance to the hut, the firelight reflecting on his pale features and making something corpselike of them. ‘Reckon it was locals all the same, though,’ he
muttered, and Vrant went over to argue with him.
Inside, the fire revealed itself as embers in a bronze bowl, the wood there more than half ash, with a faint scent of herbs or incense on the air. At the hut’s back wall, where it meshed
itself with the gnarled trunk of a tree, there was a thing. It was hunched and crooked, an abstract sculpture in wood, piece upon piece tied and pegged in place to give it form, and all of it
porous with rot, gnawed at by beetles and holed by their young. The sight of it sent a shudder through Vrant’s innards, disproportionate to any concrete property of the icon. Even when he
realized that the two branches were in fact crooked arms, that it was a representation of the Mantis-kinden’s own totem, it was still instinctively disturbing in a way he could not account
for.
‘Lovely,’ was his considered opinion. ‘Let’s not wait until they get back.’ He turned from Sterro to see Corver plainly keeping his distance, his face legible
enough in the firelight that Vrant could have read the man’s whole haunted history there had he cared to. ‘Sir?’ he prompted.
The sergeant snapped back to them visibly. ‘We move on,’ he agreed.
‘Sir, the place is empty. Couldn’t we wait for morning?’ Sterro pressed, although he was probably more motivated by the weight of gold he was dragging about than any actual
strategy.
Corver’s face froze for just a moment, his mind catching up with his senses.
‘Swords!’ he shouted.
They were surrounded. Vrant had the right of it after all. The Mantis-kinden had never left.
And yet some part of Corver’s mind was insistent:
They were gone. The village had been abandoned, save for this one fire. The very huts themselves were ragged and piecemeal, eaten away
by neglect!
It was too dark to see them clearly, but he could sense them, all around, Vrant had gone almost back to back with him, Sandric to their flank. Sterro was crouching at the hut’s edge,
caught in the firelight and yet trying to be unseen.
Corver’s eyes raked the darkness. Hidden as they were, lost in the night and in their Art, he sensed them still. They stood before each hut, between the trees, tall and proud and armed,
regarding the trespassers in their midst. Slowly they let him see them: their ornate carapace mail, crafted with centuries of skill into elegant flutes and crests; their slender blades, the spines
of their arms; their haughty, autocratic features like the ghosts of kings.
‘Come on,’ he murmured, sensing the other two Wasps shifting their footing, readying themselves for the rush that must surely come. They were growing more and more tense, and he
could hear Sterro’s whimpering breath, the Fly a moment from bolting for some mythical safe place away from here.
Still the Mantis-kinden stood there, in all their antique grandeur – no tension there, but some feeling between them that Corver had no name for – some ineffable melancholy that had
been lost to the rest of the world before the birth of the Empire.
‘Come on,’ he said again, but they were not coming. These four specimens of the new were too trivial to hold their interest. They were fading away between the trees – not
turning, but simply evading his sight, falling back into history.
‘Did you see that?’ asked Corver eventually, when not a single Mantis remained in his sight.
Vrant let himself relax only very slowly. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see a cursed thing.’
In the end they pushed on for another fumbling, tripping, blind half-hour before Corver at last consented to let them stop. Then they rested for a few miserable hours, spending
more time keeping watch than sleeping. By that time the leaden light creeping into the forest suggested morning, and Corver ordered the march. He himself had barely slept at all, staring into the
darkness with Sandric whilst the other two dozed fitfully.
By mid-morning they came across the other crash-site.
Sandric gave out a whoop of triumph and began bounding through the trees towards it, with Sterro on his heels. Corver brought up the rear with Vrant, considerably more cautious. Ahead, in the
clearing it had gouged for itself, was the gondola of an airship a little smaller than their own. It had obviously been strongly made, for the bulk of its structure was still intact whilst the
trees it had come down on had given way. Its sloping deck was greened with moss, and vines had clutched their way up its curved side to colonize the railings. The keel was buried entirely,
invisible beneath accumulated soil and leaf litter.
‘This . . . can’t be the right one,’ Vrant said slowly.
Corver nodded, and doubled his pace, reaching the gondola’s near rail as Sandric was about to try the deck’s central hatch.
‘You say you saw this come down?’ he demanded.
The pilot opened his mouth to answer in the affirmative, and then glanced about him. A flicker of doubt crossed his face. ‘Must have been . . . another crash . . .?’ he started.
‘Another crash?’ Corver echoed.
‘What, and we got right to it with that compass?’ Vrant demanded. The big man was jumpy, sword out again, starting out into the trees.
‘The balloon’s long gone, anyway,’ Corver noted.
‘This is a Collegiate design,’ Sandric told him. ‘The Beetle-kinden are a practical lot. Probably they had a spare. Help me with the hatch, sir.’
Corver signed and hauled himself up and over the rail with some difficulty to join Sandric in prising the hatch open. Inside was far darker than the night had been. The morning sun illuminated a
jumbled, decaying rubble of wood, earth and a shocking flourish of fungus, showing that the hull’s underside had mostly disintegrated.
Rotting, like the idol
, thought Corver, before
he could stop himself.
They had not thought about making their own light overnight for fear of drawing the ire of the forest, but now Corver was cursing himself for not bringing a lantern from their airship. Still,
they had one superior pair of eyes amongst them. ‘Sterro, get down there.’
‘Me?’ the Fly-kinden demanded.
‘You. Get in there and look for a light, or if there’s no light just see what you can see.’
‘I’m not going in there.’
Corver practically shoved the palm of his hand in the little man’s face. ‘You’ll obey orders.’
Sterro’s lips drew back from his teeth in a furious grimace, but at the end he did not dare brave the sergeant’s temper. With a single backward glance, full of rage and fear, he
ducked into the hatchway.
I will have him kicked down to common soldier
, Sterro told himself grimly.
I will have him flogged. I will have him on crossed pikes.
Oh, not now, certainly.
Sterro’s current capacity for revenge upon Sergeant Corver was limited to wishing him the plague. Once they got back to camp, though . . .