Blood of the Mantis

They limped over to Nivit’s place, to find Gaved keeping watch for them still. He was sitting with the pale Spider girl, who flinched automatically as they entered, her eyes constantly fearful. Achaeos had assumed it was Tisamon who incurred that fear, but she stared at all of them with the same blanket horror. She had never seen their kinden before, not Moth nor Wasp nor Mantis. Or so it was if her story was to be believed.

‘Nothing,’ Thalric spat in answer to Gaved’s look. He was in a foul mood and Achaeos knew it was because he did not understand, could not understand, what had been done to him. He had been talking already about suffering a sudden stab of pain from his old wound, inventing excuses for himself.

‘You didn’t get the box?’

‘No, we did not,’ replied Achaeos shortly. He was feeling tired, but worse he was feeling wretched. It seemed the task was beyond him, even when he was helped all the way.

‘We’ll just have to take it at the auction,’ Gaved suggested.

‘Oh, of course,’ Tynisa snapped at him. ‘Well, let us know when you actually finish your job, hunter, and track it down.’

‘A man could take offence at that,’ he replied, maddeningly calm.

‘So, take offence.’

‘Especially when he’d searched it out already.’

Achaeos could see that Gaved enjoyed the utter silence that his revelation brought. The Wasp hunter reached out and took Sef’s hand. As the girl looked at him, her face lost a fraction of its fear.

He is a professional, Achaeos reminded himself. His livelihood is information, tracking, and to do that he must be able to ask questions and gain confidence.

‘She knew all along?’ he said.

‘Founder Bellowern kept her close,’ Gaved explained. ‘So very close that she was right there when Scyla’s factor revealed to him the meeting place. Daft girl’s known it all this time.’

Twenty-Two

Odyssa was not going to miss this place.

For a city ruled by her own people, Solarno was too much like any city of the Lowlands for her taste: mimicking the grace and delicacy of the true Spider-kinden way of life and yet never achieving it: a raft of petty politics floating precariously on a sea of squabbling, uncontrolled natives. Oh, she knew that, for many in the Spiderlands, Solarno possessed great sentimental value, but Odyssa did not see the charm, and nor did the Aldanrael, the family she served. Solarno had become merely a gamepiece, and in any game some pieces were inevitably sacrificed.

The sky was dark with clouds scudding south and east across a scarred moon. She would not see it when it arrived, but she would hear it. It was only that sound she was waiting for, that last confirmation that she had served her part in the war. Nobody would know, of course, outside the secret councils of the Aldanrael, but that was how the game was played. She was not in it for the personal glory.

She would not even be here when the fighting started, and had no wish to present herself to the colonel for a full accounting of her activities. He was no fool, that man, for all that she had played him so effortlessly. Given a chance to make his own investigation, he might even begin to suspect how his hand had been forced. No, she would not be there to suffer his recriminations. Her stay in the Rekef was now over and, as soon as she had her confirmation, she would go home to Siennis.

She wondered briefly how the Solarnese would now cope: would the rival parties coalesce or merely fragment? What would the assassin Cesta do, or the pilots? How would the other cities around the Exalsee react?

She was not cruel, in terms of how Spider-kinden were measured, which meant that she had no qualms about consigning this city and its thousands of inhabitants into the hands of an angry Empire, but at the same time she had no great wish to see it. She would wait with interest for the news to filter west.

They, none of them, understand my kind, Odyssa thought, for they are all amateurs, playing in the shallows. Our webs are invisible to the best of them, Lowlands intelligencers and Rekef spymasters alike. The Ants think we do it for power, and the Beetles think we do it for money, and the Mantids think we do it from spite, but they none of them understand that we do what we do simply because it amuses us to live this way, and because we are jaded…