Blood of the Mantis

Gaved shook his head. ‘Word gets around.’

‘It certainly does.’ Nivit shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘Your fella’s out of luck then, it seems.’

‘Assuming he’s interested in buying…’

‘Dangerous words.’ But Nivit was grinning. ‘You’re thinking about the old times now, ain’t you?’

Gaved was busy copying the tablet’s contents onto a scroll that was already looking damp at the edges. The marshes of Lake Limnia were unfortunately death to paper of all kinds. ‘Old times indeed, Nivit,’ he replied. ‘Back when we did more than just hunt down runaway slaves for the Empire.’

‘It ain’t all imperial work these days,’ Nivit argued defensively. ‘Mind, I know what you mean, and I wouldn’t have thought you’d be the man for it, any longer. Thought you’d put that kind of work behind you.’ Stealing property was in a decidedly inferior league to tracking fugitives, but it had been a long time since Gaved had been so desperate. It sent a strange thrill through him, though, the thought of one last heist. He had never considered himself as a thief, just a recoverer of goods, a returner of lost property. The rest of the world had not been so indulgent with the labels.

‘You’ll help?’ he asked.

‘I ain’t doing the legwork,’ Nivit stated. ‘So long as there’s a cut for me, I’ll get you what you need to know, but you can go fish for the goods yourself.’

‘That’s all I need.’ Gaved smiled.

It was raining again on Jerez, which seemed to be the rain capital of the Empire, and possibly even of the world. Tynisa, wrapped up in a cloak, had found an overhanging roof to shelter under but, the way the wretched Skaters seemed to build, it was like sheltering under a sieve.

Yet they didn’t seem to mind the rain. She had quickly taken a distinct dislike to the people of Jerez. They skulked about all the time, or when they were not skulking they were stalking. Merely watching them now, seeing them pacing along with their long limbs, all cloaked and hooded as if off on some sinister errand, it gave her the shivers. Before he had gone off to meet his contact, and therefore before Tisamon had instructed her to follow the man, she had asked Gaved himself what in the world these sinister little people were good for.

‘Banditry, smuggling and covering up murders,’ he had replied, in all sincerity.

Some of them glanced at her occasionally: she caught glimpses of their pale, narrow faces, all angles and edges, but at least they minded their own business. She gathered it was not healthy, in Jerez, to pry into another’s affairs.

Which was precisely what she was doing, of course, because Tisamon did not trust Gaved in the least. Tisamon probably trusted only two people in the entire world, and the other one was Stenwold. Having to work with the Wasps sat badly with him, he who had been killing Wasps since before she was born.

For herself, she couldn’t trust Thalric an inch, but she was not yet so sure about Gaved. The longer she had to stand out here dripping beneath the feeble shelter of a Jerez eave, the less she liked him, though. He had gone into a tiny little shed shored up against the side of a larger building and, given how long he had been inside, it was clear that the whole structure was like Scuto’s workshop in Helleron, where the internal divisions had not followed the lead that the external contours suggested. She was also becoming irritatingly aware that Gaved could have simply left by an alternative exit, and she would never have been the wiser.

But what, though? She could hardly burst in on him, kicking the door down, just to ascertain that she was still in a position to spy on him without his knowledge. Tynisa had never realized that being a Weaponsmaster would entail this much cloak-and-dagger work. She recalled now what she had witnessed of the way the Mantis-kinden lived – her own father’s people. Primarily hunters and forest-dwellers, stealth and shadow were bred into them, so for Tisamon this stalking of Gaved was a natural extension to her training.

A fair time had passed and he was still inside, if indeed he was there at all. The rain showed the same staying power, falling thickly across Jerez with monotonous patience and ruffling the surface of Lake Limnia into a maze of ripples that the water-walking Skater-kinden could skip over as if it were solid ground.

It was also growing dark and, though her eyes were good for that, the stinging rain was making her job more and more difficult.

She flinched suddenly, glancing to her left. She felt sure she had abruptly noticed a stranger standing there…

Nobody in sight, so she frowned, wondering if she had caught some instant Jerez fever and was seeing things. Yet the image had been so clear: a slight, robed figure, like Achaeos perhaps, save that she knew it could not be him. Too tall for a local, proportioned more like a proper human being, but…

And in that instant she saw the figure again, standing just beside her. In an instant she had her sword out, whipping the narrow blade from beneath her swirling cloak.