Blood of the Mantis

‘I’m not seeing many smiles in this room tonight, and if you have another way of doing this, just tell me. Will you have your Beetle pilot coast his airship in, and hope they mistake it for the moon? Will you swim beneath the raft and bore a tunnel up through it with your knife? Mine is the only way that gets us in safely, and it must be by my own choice of men or none at all.’

‘Your choice?’ Tynisa demanded.

‘This is a high-risk enterprise,’ Thalric said. ‘If there is an assault from without, Scyla will instantly flee, and you will neither catch her nor even recognize her. But if we are present there amongst the buyers, what can she do? To achieve her aim she must stand before them, she must present the box. At my signal we will strike. Speed and surprise will win the day for us. I shall take the box and fly to shore, while the rest will cover my retreat, and then make the best escape they can.’

‘One change to your plan,’ Tynisa interupted, holding his gaze.

‘Name it.’

‘Gaved takes the box. You fight your way out with us, Thalric.’

‘Agreed.’ He did not hesitate a moment. ‘You and the Mantis and Gaved are to be my cadre.’

‘I’m flattered,’ said Gaved acidly, and then Sef tugged at his collar.

‘Not on to the lake,’ she whispered. ‘You must not.’

‘It’s you they’re looking for, not us, these aquatics of yours,’ Thalric reminded her. She glared at him and, to Thalric’s obvious amusement, the other Wasp put a protective arm about her shoulders.

‘We won’t be away long,’ Gaved reassured her, ‘and he’s right. Just sit tight here.’

‘They are still searching for me,’ she said, biting her lip.

‘If you are so fearful of being caught, why have you not left already?’ Tisamon demanded harshly. He had never shown either interest or sympathy for the Spider girl.

‘Left?’ Sef breathed, as if there was a world of horror in that world.

‘Left for where?’ Gaved challenged. ‘She’s already on the brink – the very shore – of her world. Where does she know to go to?’

‘And the great hunter will look after her, will he? Bit of a career reversal, isn’t it?’ Thalric asked him.

Gaved’s look was humourless. ‘I will do this job because I promised Master Maker I would. After that, Rekef, I’m gone, and if I take her with me, is it any business of yours?’

Gaved had worked in and around Jerez long enough to learn how to row, and now he powered the little boat forward with heavy strokes, staring fixedly at the receding shore beyond Tisamon and Tynisa, his passengers.

Sef he had entrusted to Nivit’s care. He did not want to even think of that but, of course, rowing freed the mind wonderfully for random thought. Nivit and I, we go back years. Nivit was primarily a businessman, though, and Gaved was being sentimental. We should sell her back to the lake-creatures and be done with it.

He liked to think that, in his line of work, the people he hunted down were criminals, the wicked and the reckless, on the run from justice. Even when he knew that they were merely escaped slaves or fugitives from the torturing hands of the Rekef, he still liked to think that. He liked to feel he was in the right.

Thalric, an uncomfortable presence in the boat’s bows at Gaved’s back, would see ‘right’ as identical to being in the Empire’s interest, or at least would have done so before his fall from grace. Gaved, however, had never quite been able to coax himself into that point of view, and that was why he had spent his life working twice as hard as any imperial soldier just to put a distance between himself and the Emperor.

But I always came back, he reflected. It was hard for a Wasp to make a living alone. Somehow he had always found that the contracts he undertook bore the imperial seal somewhere upon them.

At least Sef was no concern of the Empire. And I will not sell her to the lake-Beetles, and I must hope that Nivit is not tempted to do it. I must hope that our long friendship buys me that indulgence. He had even ceded Nivit all of the gold Stenwold had paid. Iam a fool in so many ways.

Thalric stared out across the misty lake, seeing the occasional flurry as one of the locals skimmed across its surface on some private business. The dark seemed to bring them out in numbers, but then they were creatures best suited to shady business – and so was Scyla. She had always preferred to deal under cover of darkness, preferring to hide even her changeable features.

He wondered if she could even recall what she truly looked like. Did she have to reassemble her own true face in the mirror first thing every morning, and did it then drift, from day to day?