Blood of the Mantis (13 page)

Magic was a remedy for that – magic that shunned the waking, sunlit world, but whose chiefest currency was dreams and visions.

In his mind’s eye he had found her, Che, sleeping on a broad bed draped with silken sheets, curled up like a child with a slight smile on her face. His heart leapt to see her there. He had thought he felt her absence, before he tried this scrying, but he had not known just how much so until he bid her face appear in his mind.

‘Che,’ he said softly. ‘I know you are asleep. I have touched you before, like this, when the need was utmost. Now I have found you again so easily. It must be because I love you.’

He knew he had no guarantee that she would ever hear his words, even in her dreams, or that those dreams would be recalled on her waking, but he needed to talk to her, to touch her. Just looking at her made his heart ache, yet it was a love abhorrent to his entire kinden, seemingly against all reason, and despite that one that could not be argued with.

Che, I need to show you what I see, here. We have reached the town of Jerez, you see, which is like no place I have ever been to. I want to show it to you.

Her surroundings – the blur of them that he could make out – seemed almost palatial, with white stone, tapestries and rugs, a window with ornately worked shutters. It was a far cry from the heap of sticks in which he himself was spending the night, and which passed for a house here in Jerez.

He rose from the filthy mat of crushed reeds and went over to the doorway, looking out at Lake Limnia in all its sordid splendour.

I know your city lies by a lake or a sea, Che. Well, this is my lake.
It was blood-red with the sunset and, although a far smaller stretch of water than the Exalsee in the distant south, it encompassed his entire northern and eastern horizons. Lake Limnia’s edge was cluttered and uncertain, with stands of reeds ten feet tall springing from the mud, their tangle of brown roots sometimes sturdy enough to walk on and blurring the boundary between land and water. Torn from the lakeside but held together by their roots, similar reeds formed floating islands that scudded slowly across the surface wherever the wind took them. Some of the islands were large and stable enough to build on, for all that there was nothing but murky water beneath them.

Jerez squatted like a festering boil on the side of the lake, a haphazard collection of little buildings made from stick, mud and reed, hundreds of them ranging from single-room shacks to sprawling two-storey excrescences that were rickety, ugly and lopsided, increasing in number towards what was nominally the centre of the town. The only stone building stood in the middle, a fort the Wasps had built for their local governor. To Achaeos’ amusement it was already listing badly as the soggy ground set about the business of reclaiming it, year by year.

Many of the locals lived out on the water itself: some of them on boats, but more on houses built on rafts. Clearly the Skaters liked to be able to move about easily and the shores of Lake Limnia comprised a maze of channels, shifting islands and floating houses. Achaeos had already heard from Gaved that the black market – the Black Guild as it was known – was strong here, since the Skaters could transport almost anything around or across the lake in secrecy. North of the lake began the wild and hilly country of the Hornet-kinden, who were the Wasps’ barbarous kindred, untamed territories that were the gateway to many fabulous places beyond.

The Skaters themselves were still very much in evidence, and Achaeos studied them anew, for Che’s benefit.
Do you remember Skrill?
he asked her within his mind.
She was your uncle’s agent to Tark? I’d guess she must have been part-Skater.

They were a small folk, but almost grotesquely long-limbed. Every step involved a stalking, surreptitious and shifty motion. Though there were plenty of outsiders lodging in Jerez, the Skaters looked on them all with narrow-eyed suspicion, yet looked on their own kind with even more. They were blue-white of skin with long pointed ears, complementing pointed faces and pointed noses. Most of them wore drab, slightly ragged tunics that left much of the limbs bare, but some sported armour of tarnished metal scales. Almost all the adults seemed to be armed, and so far Achaeos had seen bows, slings, blowpipes, daggers, Wasp-pattern swords and even a few crossbows.

Watch them, Che. Watch how they set out.
He fixed his eyes on one skinny creature that might have been female, watching closely as the Skater stepped out onto the water, then simply ran, skipping over the shallow waves, leaving nothing but a series of ripples to tell of her passage. They could all do this from an early age, for it was the Skater Art, and it was the last nail in the coffin of any Wasp attempt to control their smuggling and banditry.

But notice
, he told Che in his head,
how they stay close to the lake-shore, amongst the islands and the reeds. I have heard stories of great beasts, fish and insects, out towards the centre. Also they say that the lake is haunted, with strange lights appearing sometimes, deep below . . . Perhaps it is just talk to keep the Empire at bay, though I cannot imagine the Wasps being frightened by talk of ghosts and lights.

He stretched and yawned. He must have been living with daylight kinden for too long. The night-time, when his own people were most active, was becoming the time he felt a need for sleep.
Be safe, Che
, he exhorted her, across the miles that now separated them.
Be safe and stay safe.

Morning brought little joy to Jerez, but a spark of it to Gaved. He looked out at the lake, now soiled by the dawn, at the stinking collection of hovels that formed the town, and he thought,
I’m home.

Not true, of course. He was a drifter by nature, with no home to speak of, but business had brought him here so many times that he had almost acquired a fondness for the sorry place, second hand and with no questions asked, the way one acquired anything in Jerez. And there were even a few dwelling here that he might almost call friends, or as near to friends as his trade allowed.
What’s a friend anyway? Someone to watch your back, and resist the temptation to put a knife in it.

He halted his step, still staring out at the lake, considering it. He had now seen a little of how the other half lived: Stenwold Maker and his extended clan of agents composed of all kinden; Tisamon and his daughter and their invisible bond; the joy of Stenwold’s niece when she had met again her Dragonfly comrade.

I’ll settle for the unknifed back and the freedom
, he told himself.

‘You’re sure you know your business?’ The Moth’s voice came from behind him.

‘Better than anyone. My contacts here will let us in on whatever’s going on. You can’t throw this sort of thing onto the waters without causing a ripple.’

The man’s blank, suspicious eyes tried to read him but, even before receiving the burn-scar, Gaved’s face had never been particularly expressive. The Wasp gave him a nod and set off down the crooked alleys of Jerez, thinking,
Trust always was hard to come by in this town.

Three streets further on he stopped a Skater child, murmuring to it as though he was merely asking directions. The skinny creature nodded, took his coin, and ran off. Gaved continued on his patient way, hands shoved into the pockets of his greatcoat. He looked as unassuming as a Wasp could get.

Two streets later and the same child returned, whispering to his ear, ‘A woman follows you: Spider-kinden, young, and very pretty.’ Gaved nodded sagely, handed over another coin, and made a change of direction as though acting on the child’s advice.

Well, no surprises. The girl reckons she can out-skulk the Skaters, but they were born for
that
game.
It almost felt like relief, this evidence of their lack of faith in him. It added a sense of certainty to his life.

Time now to test other certainties, to see if they had rusted in the constant misting rain, for he had arrived at his destination. Of all the little shacks of Jerez this was perhaps the least prepossessing, barely more than an outhouse tacked onto the Cut Glass Export House, a Skater merchant cartel that specialized in buying in gems from the north and selling them on furtively to Consortium factors or imperial officers. Its clandestine associations with the regime were such that, even when posing under such an obvious name, it continued to operate within sight of the governor’s fort quite unchallenged.

The little outhouse was bigger on the inside than it looked, because it had bitten at least three rooms out of the neighbouring Cut Glass, with more space under negotiation the last time Gaved had been here. The Glass itself put up with them so long as prying eyes did not turn on the Export House itself.

There was a sign dangling haphazardly from the slanting roof, and Gaved saw approvingly that it had been repainted recently. The rains that came almost every other day to Jerez, that were slanting down even now, were ruthless on paint and ornament of any kind. Jerez signs eschewed words; even the advertising was underhand. The Cut Glass itself used a broken mirror, and the swaying, spinning piece of board that Gaved had sought out bore a simple eye, looking left. For those that had use for their services, it was enough.

Gaved pushed the door open and ducked inside, shaking the rain from his cloak. The first room was low-ceilinged enough to make him stoop, and empty save for the ubiquitous reed matting on the floor and a fitfully burning rush lamp hanging from the rafters.

‘Nivit!’ Gaved called out. ‘Customer!’

‘Come on in.’ A thin voice emerged from a doorway covered by just a tatty drape. The room beyond was much bigger and cluttered with half a dozen crates and a seven-foot statue of a robed Moth-kinden that Gaved recalled hauling in there, with some help, over a year ago. A lone Skater was perched on one of the crates, scratching inventories onto a slate. Nivit was bald and pallid, gaunt and hollow-cheeked even for his kind. His script was immaculate, the tiny characters crowding each other to make the most of the slate’s surface, but his writing pose was bizarre, with elbows and knees jutting out at all angles as he bent his long limbs to the task. The Skaters had clearly never been intended for literary folk.

‘Well look who it isn’t,’ Nivit crowed. ‘Himself, himself. Didn’t think I’d see you for another half-year at least.’

‘I always come back, sooner or later,’ Gaved replied.

‘Word said you pitched up in an airship. Going up in the world, is it? Or just up and down?’

‘I told them they’d not keep it a secret,’ Gaved admitted. Allanbridge had brought them down silently at night, pumped the gas out of the balloon and stowed it out of sight, the gondola abruptly transformed into a serviceable boat that they hauled through the mud of the shoreline until it was nominally afloat on the lake. Gaved had known that there was no such thing as a secret in Jerez, though. The Skaters saw everything. That was what he was counting on.

‘So tell me, chief, what’s the busy?’ Nivit put down the slate. With elaborate showiness he extracted a little bell from inside his tunic and rang it once. A moment later a young Skater, a girl as far as Gaved could tell, darted from somewhere still deeper inside the building and took the slate back with her.

‘
She’s
new,’ Gaved noted. ‘Business is good, I take it.’

Nivit gave a shrug, which transported his bony shoulders over a remarkable distance. ‘So I get lonely.’ Gaved knew that in a further room there rose rack after rack of shelves carrying hundreds of slates, with every transaction neatly ordered and dated. Nivit’s powers of organization were the secret of his success.

‘I’ve got a commission for us both,’ Gaved informed him.

‘So long as Nivit gets his cut, lay it on me,’ the Skater said. ‘Who’s the mark?’

‘Not who, this time, but what. Something that’s come to Jerez just recently. Something specialist and valuable, imperial contraband – or at least the Empire will be looking for it. Whoever has it will be aiming to sell it, but the price will be steep as steep.’ It felt good to be back here, working with decent, honest crooks like Nivit rather than for the Empire. Not that there was any escaping the Empire here either, of course. Most of the work the two of them had previously tackled together had involved catching imperial runaways. As well as his hunting skills, that was what Gaved had brought to the partnership: an acceptable Wasp-kinden face for their imperial patrons to deal with.

Nivit nodded. ‘Well, now, luxury goods, is it?’ He smiled slyly. ‘Already got rumours coming in of some sort of auction, see. Nothing definite as yet save that it’s really,
really
by invitation only, but stay with me and I’ll pry out some details for you.’

This was, for Thalric, the acid test. Like a child who had been naughty, he was at last being let out on his own. Tisamon, he realized, would be sharpening the blade of his clawed gauntlet, not so much in anticipation of betrayal but in eager longing for it. There was a man for whom the last 500 years of history might as well never have happened.

The Mantis had wanted to go with him, of course, but Thalric had patiently talked and talked, and eventually convinced the man that he, Thalric, could go places alone in a way that a Wasp could not if he were tugging a belligerent Mantis bodyguard-jailer. Since he had been brought along as their imperial expert, they now had to let him get on with his job, or dispense with him.

He had phrased it just like that, waiting for that speculative look to come to Tisamon’s face. It had been a tense moment for Thalric, knowing that his wound would slow him too much, if it was death the Mantis decided on.

Instead he had read the man, a spymaster reading an enemy agent, and seen just a touch of confusion. Stenwold was not here, to give the word and endorse Tisamon’s bloodletting. Tynisa had gone tracking the wretched mercenary, and her father’s world was a simple one of black-and-white decisions divided by a blade’s sharp edge. Now they were actually here he did not know how Thalric could be put to best use.

‘I need to go out and gather information,’ Thalric had insisted. ‘I’m no use locked up here on the
Maiden
.’