Blood of the Mantis

The rain in Jerez had stopped, literally. The water was suspended in mid-air, a field of shimmering droplets impossibly held in place, each one with a twisted reflection of the moon glimmering in its heart. When Achaeos stepped forward, they ran against his skin or broke against his robe in a myriad dark patches.

There were people abroad this night, of course, for the locals did not mind either darkness or rain. Here they were, frozen in place with the raindrops while going about their innumerable shady errands. He paused to examine the strange Skater physiology, distinctive for those freakishly long limbs, the narrow faces with their long, pointed noses and ears.

Somewhere out there was a presence not frozen in place, a presence waiting for him to find it.

This is a dream. But there was no such thing as ‘just’ a dream for the Moth-kinden. They had dozens of categories: dreams serendipitous and dreams intentional, dreams prophetic and dreams malign. This, however, was a dream he had been seeking for many nights, for this was a seeing dream. He was trying to find the Shadow Box, but had already realized that it was a hopeless search. In Jerez he was just too close to it. Its power was everywhere, leaking out into the darkness, and he could not pinpoint it.

And now this, a proper seeing dream – but to see what?

Achaeos paced through the streets of Jerez, feeling the ubiquitous rain break across his skin and dampen his hair. When he stood still he could sense movement, others abroad this same night. He was not the only one to have this dream. That meant gates had been opened, tonight, that could not be easily closed.

Should I call out? But how foolish would that be? He could not simply stand here, in this dream-Jerez, and start calling for help like a lost child.

But you called for help before.

He started in shock. That thought had not been his own.

He tried to work out whereabouts in the town he was. The lake lay to his right, its expanse of water suspended in frozen ripples, dotted near the shoreline with the further-flung natives, with great stands of reeds, with little boats that had set out on clandestine errands.

A movement again: he turned, and for a second he thought there was a woman there. He had a fleeting impression of bulging red eyes and a hunger-pinched face.

Nothing there. Only the night.

We heard you call us. We call you now.

‘Who are you?’ he whispered, but he already knew, and with that knowledge he did not want to meet the thing that called to him.

You waste your time. You have not come to us. You have not found us. It was the voice of the Darakyon, but fainter, hollower. The voice of the Shadow Box.

They seek us, all of them. They are grasping even now for the line we throw only to you. Little seer, little neophyte, come to us.

‘Where are you?’ he demanded, louder, beginning to run through the frozen rain. He had another quick glimpse of one of his pursuers, a man of his own kinden wearing a silver skullcap, his face deeply lined.

Here.

And it was there.

He tried to stop, because to touch that would be to die, and he skidded, feet slipping from under him, so that he fell at its… where it rose from the earth.

There was a shape there resembling a woman, the lean frame of a Mantis-kinden warrior, except the reaching, grasping thorns and briars had pierced her a dozen times over, arcing and leaping back and forth through her flesh, that had sprouted darts and barbs like a Thorn Bug, and prickly leaves as well. Spiny brambles ran up and down her, and through her, and they twisted her skin, which was pale and human in places but elsewhere hard and shiny like the carapace of an insect. Her arms were simultaneously a Mantis woman’s with the Art-grown spines jutting from her forearms, and a mantis insect’s with great folding, raptorial hooks. Her face glittered with the facets of compound eyes, and scissoring mandibles worked inside a human mouth.

I would die… There was no doubt of that. Achaeos scrambled back a few paces, staring. Even his eyes, which knew no darkness, could not quite take in that piecemeal, shifting figure, but he knew that it was ancient and mighty – and in pain.

‘Do you… have a name?’ he whispered.

The lips and the mandibles both worked together, but neither matched the voice that now reached him,

I was Laetrimae when I lived. You must find me, Achaeos.

‘Show me,’ he said. ‘Quickly, before the others get here.’