Blood of the Mantis

‘Totho, I’m not stupid. You’re no Spider-kinden. I read you. You knew her.’

He sighed, heavily. When she received no more answer than that, Kaszaat jabbed him in the shoulder. ‘Curse you, you bastard! Just speak to me.’

‘Yes, I knew her,’ he said.

‘More than that?’

‘What?’ He sat up, half-displacing her. ‘What do you want?’

‘The truth,’ she said. ‘Because I, too, have a truth. I want to tell you a truth, but I need to trust you. Can I trust you?’

‘Can you trust me?’

Her eyes blazed. ‘Yes, Totho. You think you’re the only one with secrets? Nobody else has anything to hide?’

Well, yes. ‘I… What do you want to hear? I knew her from the College. I… liked her. I liked her very much. Happy now?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘More than like – you loved.’

Why is she doing this?

‘I don’t know.’ Honesty prompted him to add. ‘I thought I did. Perhaps I did, but I don’t know.’

‘You let her go.’

He said nothing.

‘You made a deal with Drephos. You gave him something in return for this girl’s freedom,’ she persisted. It was not true, of course, but not so very far off.

‘He…’ Why not let her in on the madness? ‘Drephos wanted the snapbow plans spread further, for his wretched march of progress. So he had Che… had the girl take them to the Sarnesh.’

All quite back to front, but it almost made more sense that way. He saw it was something she had never even considered, and he could hardly blame her for that.

‘So Drephos, he trusts you,’ Kaszaat remarked.

‘Does he?’

‘No,’ she told him. ‘I know, because he came to me. He told me to get what I could from you. To sleep with you, bind you to close me. He knows sex, knows how it is used. He does not understand, but he knows the purposes.’

He may not have the equipment left, Totho thought, considering the terrible accident that had stripped Drephos of so much. The notion that the man might have found a mechanical replacement was so horrifyingly incongruous that Totho nearly choked on it.

‘So, so why are you telling me this now?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why am I? Perhaps because of what they brought out of Drephos’s factory today – you have heard about that? The twins told me. They are cold, those two. They talk almost never, save to each other and Drephos. Yet they talked to me, then. They had to. It was too much to bear in silence.’

‘The corpses? I heard there were bodies.’

‘Forty-five dead, prisoners, all of them, from the fief-battles,’ Kaszaat whispered. ‘I heard their faces were black, with eyes popped almost out. Poisoned, that means – but that makes no sense.’

Totho felt something twist in his stomach, some artificer’s inner instinct trying to speak to him.

‘He has a new weapon,’ Kaszaat said softly. ‘Something even better than the snapbow, to use against the Sarnesh.’

They lay together for a long while, Kaszaat sliding off him to nestle under his arm, with her head resting on his chest. Would it feel like this with Che? He realized that he would never know. So Drephos had found a new way of killing people. Did it matter, though? Could Totho criticize, having done his own work so well?

‘What are we doing here?’ he murmured. ‘Why don’t we just leave?’

‘Because there is a sword,’ she told him, ‘And here we are on the right side of the guard…’ Her voice shook and she stopped.

‘What is it?’

She would not say, but she clung to him closer, she who had always seemed the more experienced of them, in all walks of life, older and wiser in so many things.

‘Kaszaat, please,’ he said. ‘I promise you I’m not spying on you for Drephos, or the… the Rekef, or whoever else you think.’

‘I don’t think that. Not you.’ She made a single painful sound of amusement. ‘Who would trust you to do that? You have only recently turned your back on the Lowlands, turned your weapons on your friends. You’re a spinning wheel and nobody knows where you’ll stop. Why else would Drephos point me at you?’

The cruelty of it cut him. He pressed his lips together and said nothing.

‘Oh Totho, I’m sorry,’ she said after a moment. ‘I’m sorry, but I am frightened – who can I trust? What do you think of me, you, who love this other?’

‘I don’t know. I… I like you a great deal…’

‘Totho…’

‘What? Tell me, please. I need to know-’

There was something cold now at his throat. A blade? It was the work-knife he had left beside the bed, as sharp as any artificer could desire.

He felt no fear at all.

‘Are you going to kill me, then?’ he asked her. ‘For what reason?’

Her hand was shaking, which worried him more than the knife itself. ‘How could you turn yourself on your own people?’ she asked.