Salute the Dark

‘I…’ Stenwold shook his head. ‘I’d supposed she would fight if ever the Wasps get this far, but…’

‘Master Maker, there is no time,’ Destrachis said urgently, and Stenwold was surprised by the glint of tears in his eyes, whether of frustration or emotion, he could not tell. ‘Master Maker, I have a plan for you.’

‘More plans. My head is already full of them. No more plans, please, at this hour.’

‘In the morning, then. Promise me, Master Maker, that you will hear me as soon as first light dawns.’

An hour till then, two at the most. ‘All right,’ Stenwold said, ‘I promise. Now just… go, please.’ He cast a look at Arianna. She was eyeing Destrachis distrustfully.

‘I’ll go,’ Destrachis said, ‘but you must believe that I am right in this. It means life or death, Master Maker.’

‘Life or death in the morning,’ Stenwold said firmly, but before he could even close the door on Destrachis there was someone else running up, shouldering the Spider aside.

‘Sten!’

It was Tynisa this time. Stenwold stared at her helplessly, feeling his grasp of the situation slip further from him. He was wrong-footed by the impression that, whatever Tynisa was here about, Destrachis must already know of it.

‘What now?’ he asked, more harshly than he meant. He saw then that her face was blotched, her eyes red. Has the matter over Achaeos finally become too much for her? A sudden horror caught him. Is Achaeos dead? His voice now unsteady, he asked, ‘What is it?’

‘It’s Tisamon,’ she told him simply. ‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’ He held on to the doorframe, unable to keep up with events.

‘I don’t know but…’ She held her hand out to him, something glinting in her palm. ‘He’s really gone. Something’s happened to him. He’s left us. This was pinned to my door.’

In her hand was the sword and circle broach of a Weaponsmaster, which Stenwold had never seen Tisamon without.

They searched, of course, he and Tynisa together. First the Amphiophos, then Tisamon’s other haunts in the city, from the Prowess Forum outwards. In the last hour before dawn they ransacked the city for him, sensing they were already too late. He had pointedly left behind the symbol of his office. It was no mere errand he had departed on.

Then they came back, and found the long-faced Spider- kinden doctor again waiting for them, looking old and ill-used. In the sallow, early light they allowed him to finally explain to them what had happened between Tisamon and Felise Mienn, and the thing that Tisamon had done that had driven him away. Destrachis’ sad, tired voice related the story in measured tones, as though it was some medical curiosity, and yet it barely scratched the surface of the Mantis-kinden nightmare that Tisamon had become lost in.

‘Poor Tisamon,’ was Stenwold’s comment at last. ‘Oh, poor Tisamon.’

‘Poor Tisamon?’ Destrachis exclaimed. ‘Perhaps I have not explained things clearly enough.’

‘No, no,’ Stenwold stopped him. ‘I understand. So he went to her at last.’ He looked at his own hands, broad and scarred, resting on the table. ‘I should have seen it in him, but I have been so taxed with other matters of late.’

‘There was no sign in Jerez,’ Tynisa said softly. ‘But then he kept himself occupied, always.’

The conference was just the three of them: the Beetle War Master, his adopted daughter and the Spider doctor who had never looked so old as now. In the harsh light of morning Stenwold saw now that his hair was not just greying but grey, almost white at the roots, in need of further dyeing. Spiders aged gracefully, and so Destrachis must be old – older than Stenwold by ten years and more.

‘He went to her, then. He slept with her.’ Stenwold’s hands clenched into fists, almost of their own accord. ‘And, in the aftermath, he thought of… of her.’

‘Atryssa,’ Tynisa agreed, although her thoughts surely ran, my mother. Stenwold wondered if Tisamon had thought of his daughter as well, seen a second betrayal there, where Tynisa would surely have been happy for him. After all, she’s not one to be easily shocked. But of course Tisamon would not have seen it like that.

‘Mantis pride,’ said Stenwold. ‘Anyone else… anyone else, given that chance, would have held on to their luck and not asked any questions. Anyone else would have been happy. Anyone but a Mantis, of course. So he’s been putting himself on the rack about what he’ll see as a betrayal. A final betrayal. He betrayed his own kind, and then he betrayed her, after Myna, and now… Mantids pair for life, I know. They never do what he has done – or so they tell each other. And Tisamon believed it, too. Poor Tisamon.’

‘And Felise is abandoned by him now,’ Destrachis said. ‘And who wouldn’t, in her place, take the blame on themselves, or at least part of it? I know she has.’

‘How is she?’ Stenwold asked him.