Blood of the Mantis

There was nothing but the rain and the shadows…

She had been standing here too long, because now she had three or four Skaters closely watching the foreign madwoman jumping at nothing. She hid the sword away and returned to her surveillance. At least there was still a lamp burning in the little round window, so someone was at home in the rundown shack Gaved had entered.

The rain, running over the roof sign made the painted eye weep. The sight seemed strangely mesmerizing. It seemed to look out over its people, those hateful spindly creatures, and know nothing but sorrow. She found her own eyes drawn back to it again and again… and all the time some part of her was screaming that there was someone standing right next to her.

Gradually her eyes lost focus. Even the Skaters passing by paid her no heed. Still less did they peer into the shadows beside her, their eyes as proficient in the darkness as Tynisa’s own, to see the hunched figure lurking there with its pale hand reaching out for her. The men and women of Jerez knew not to enquire into certain things. They had made their town a place where even the iron law of the Empire rusted, and such a place attracted certain interests that they did their best to forget about.

‘Tynisa?’

She snapped into attention. The rain was easing, and the lamp in the little round window was now extinguished. The cloud-mottled moon lent little light to the scene, but Gaved carried a covered lantern.

Gaved was standing before her, looking at her with an expression of genuine concern.

‘Tynisa?’

‘What…?’ She leant back against the slick wall, feeling oddly dizzy.

‘Are you… drunk?’ he asked.

‘No, not drunk, not… anything. I just… I must have dozed off…’

‘What are you doing out here…’ His voice tailed off as she raised a hand to brush her rain-plastered hair back out of her eyes.

In a moment he had made a grab for it, but she was faster still, even feeling as off-balance as she now was, stepping back and having the tip of her sword at his throat in an instant. His hand, which had been reaching, was now splayed open, directed towards her. For a second they stared at one another.

‘Your hand,’ he said, closing his own.

‘What about…?’ She looked down at it, saw the shallow gash that the last of the rain was still washing blood from. ‘How did I do that?’

She sheathed her blade once more, further examining the wound. It extended from her forefinger knuckle to the base of her thumb. The cut was slightly ragged and shallow, and she did not feel it at all. She sucked at it experimentally, tasting the salt of her own blood, which was already congealing.

‘Are you all right?’ Gaved asked slowly. ‘You came here to check up on me, I see. I suppose I can live with that. A friend of a friend saw you out here, and warned me someone had been watching the place for a very long time… I thought you might be Empire.’

‘You thought I might be Empire?’ she asked.

‘Why not? I keep telling everyone I’m not imperial, and you’ve no idea how hard I’ve fought for that to become even a token truth. Not all of us Wasps have much love for the Emperor.’

‘Gaved, when you came out, did you… see anyone else?’

She saw instantly that she had guessed right. A muscle twitched in his face, tugging at one corner of his mouth.

‘Just for a moment,’ he admitted. ‘Just a shadow.’ There was something more, something he did not want to say, but at this stage she was too cold and wet – and, she had to admit, frightened – to care.

‘Since I’ve now been found out,’ she said, ‘can I come inside?’

He nodded, still looking troubled. ‘I’ll have Nivit’s girl fix you something hot to drink,’ he said.

Eleven

Her name was Xaraea and she had been the first to see this coming.

That was the joke, really, because she was such a poor seer. Like any Moth-kinden of standing she had learned the mouldy principles of magic, but she had never had any particular gift for it. She lacked that specific kind of concentration that made it possible to pluck apart the weave of the world and then reknit it as she wished. She would never be a true magician, and that meant, in the hierarchy of Tharn, that there was a ceiling above which she could never fly.

Yet here she was and the future of her city – of her world – rested on her shoulders. She had her own talents, she had found: her own sort of concentration. While her peers had studied the workings of the universe, her lessons had been in human nature: politics, commerce, all the strings that bound each individual to each other. Xaraea had played the games of the Spider-kinden, even served as ambassador to them for three years, learning the trade of deception from the mistresses of the art. In short, she was Arcanum: the secret cult of spies and agents through which the Moth-kinden gathered their secrets, and feuded amongst one another.