Empire in Black and Gold (35 page)

‘You’re going to fight me?’ Tisamon asked her, and his tone, that clipped precision of speech Stenwold knew of old, indicated a man whose blood was up.

‘I’ve seen you fight and I know what this is about,’ she declared. ‘So I worked for the Halfway House. So what?’

‘For the Halfway . . . ?’ A frown passed over Tisamon’s face. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The fiefs, in Helleron . . .’ Now Tynisa was looking uncertain. ‘You were fighting for the Gladhanders. We destroyed them after . . . Isn’t that . . .’ His baffled stare was getting to her. ‘What is this about?’

‘Yes, Stenwold, what
is
this about?’ asked Tisamon, and that dreadful coldness of diction was still there.

‘I will tell you everything, but only you,’ Stenwold finally got out. ‘Let’s go up the hill and I will spare nothing of the truth. You have my word.’

‘That would have been a golden thing, only a moment ago,’ said Tisamon sadly, but his arm uncoiled by degrees. Stenwold winced as the spines withdrew from his back.

‘Someone had better tell me what’s going on,’ Tynisa suggested.

Stenwold nodded. ‘Let me talk to Tisamon first. This is going to be difficult.’

He began to trudge back the way he had come, though this time Tisamon did not walk beside him as a comrade, but with the wary distance of an antagonist.

Tynisa watched them go. ‘What?’ she said, to the night air as much as to anyone. ‘What is it?’ Tisamon had looked at her as though she had killed his own brother and danced on his grave. She turned round for some kind of support, but Totho was edging himself underneath the automotive, and there was precious little warmth to be gained from the Moth’s slyly superior façade.

To the pits with the pair of them
, she decided. In fact, to the pits with all of them. There was something going on, and it had led to a notable duellist drawing on her, and that meant she had a
right
to know what was going on.

As softly as she could, she began to follow in Stenwold’s path, letting darkness be her cloak.

On the other side of the hill, out of sight of the automotive, Stenwold suddenly stopped. It was a calculated risk, for if Tisamon’s temper broke again, he would be dead without the others even knowing. It showed a trust, though, and he so desperately needed to regain this man’s confidence. It also put them far enough from the camp that quiet voices would not carry, and harsh words might sound jumbled enough not to be understood.

Tisamon was watching him, blade still by his side, tucked back up the length of his arm.

‘Speak,’ he hissed.

‘I . . .’ Stenwold grimaced. ‘It’s difficult for me. It really is. Give me a moment to put my words in order.’

Tisamon bared his teeth. ‘Let me help you. Let me prompt you. She’s
her
very image. Souls alive!
She’s her very image!
’ Again it was not anger but a ragged horror that twisted him. ‘How . . . How . . .’ His stark frame was shaking, and Stenwold wondered if there was even a name for the emotion that had taken hold of him. ‘She’s
her
daughter. She must be.’

‘Yes, Tisamon. Tynisa is Atryssa’s daughter,’ Stenwold admitted wearily. Now the moment was upon him, he wondered if he had the strength for it.

‘How did you come to . . . No!’ Tisamon’s eyes narrowed. The blade of his claw flexed, hinging out and back in. ‘She betrayed us, Stenwold – at Myna. You know this. They knew your plans. They sabotaged your devices.
She
told them.’

‘Atryssa, Tisamon. At least speak her name.’

‘You think I can’t?’ Tisamon spat. ‘Atryssa
betrayed
us. Happier with that? She sold us to the Empire, and she left us to die there in Myna. And don’t forget that not all of us escaped alive.’

‘Oh, I remember Myna. I’ve never stopped thinking of it,’ Stenwold said. ‘But she didn’t betray us, Tisamon.’

‘She—’

‘Hear me out!’ Stenwold snapped. ‘Hammer and tongs, hear what I’ve got to say, and then if you still want to kill me, well, I’m all yours.’

Tisamon regarded him in silence.

‘You see, while you stayed in Helleron, I hunted her down. I wanted to confront her with what she had done. Only she wasn’t easy to find – no, let me finish – she was in hiding, yes, but not from us.’

He closed his eyes, calling back seventeen years in order to picture the scene.

‘Nero found her in the end. He was always a good man for the tracking. When we got there she was . . . hurt.’

There was the merest twitch in Tisamon. It gave Stenwold hope.

‘She had been trying to get to us, to keep the rendezvous, but the Wasps intercepted her – or some of their agents did. She had to fight them.’

That was too much for Tisamon. ‘So she would
fight
them! She was a skilled duellist. A handful of Wasp agents would not have slowed her down!’

‘Listen!’ Stenwold realized that he himself was finding it difficult to stem the anger he felt. This was an injustice long gone unsettled, and he now had it in his hands to put history right. The knowledge gave him the strength to say it: ‘She beat them. She did beat them, but she was badly injured, because of her condition.’

‘Her . . . condition?’

Stenwold actually mustered a smile, as hard-edged a piece of work as any he had known. ‘She was with child, Tisamon, when she fought them. It slowed her down.’

The Mantis stared at him blankly.

‘When Nero and I finally found her, she was near her time, but she was weak, very weak. She had been keeping low. The Wasps were still hunting her. She was in a Merro slum. There was no one else with her.’ He watched expressions fight to make themselves known on Tisamon’s face. ‘When she bore the child, she died, but the child lived.’

And he left it at that, let Tisamon’s unsatisfied questions fall into the pit of silence between them, then waited and waited.

‘What . . . ? But who . . . was the father?’ A mere whisper.

‘I don’t know. Who might have shared her bed last, do you think?’

Tisamon stared at him. ‘No . . . no.’

‘She spoke only of you, those few days we had. She had put aside her protections. It was her choice.’ Stenwold was aware that he was simply putting the knife in now, but it was a knife he had carried for a long time, which had weighed on him every day of it.

‘She’s . . . that girl is . . .’

Stenwold nodded.

‘But she looks . . .’

‘Oh, the looks she gets from her mother. There’s no doubting that. What she gets from her father has yet to reveal itself.’

‘She’s a halfbreed?’

‘I suppose she’d have to be,’ said Stenwold. ‘That’s how it works.’

Tisamon reached out as if to grab hold of his collar, stopped with his arm outstretched, head shaking slightly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Stenwold now held his gaze without flinching. ‘And what would you have said, at the time? What would your exact reaction have been, if I had sent a messenger with the word that the woman you hated most in all the world had borne you a child? You would have killed the messenger, I can tell you that for sure. And by anyone mad enough to take a message back, you would have given the order to have the infant destroyed.’

‘No . . .’

‘
No
, is it?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘A halfbreed, Tisamon? A
Spider–Mantis
halfbreed? That most vile of all abominations? That’s what you would have thought, isn’t it? Or can you deny it?’

‘You had no right,’ the Mantis said.

‘No right to keep her from you, or no right to let her live? What’s it to be?
I
had a choice then. Poor Atryssa was dead, and I could take the child as my own, my responsibility, or I could let her die, as you no doubt would have wished. I’m afraid that with a choice like that, mere Mantis pride doesn’t enter into it.’

‘Pride? How dare you—’

‘Pride! Is it
not
pride – the curse of your whole wretched tribe?’ Stenwold was aware he was going too far now, but unable to stop himself. ‘Hammer and tongs! In the College, you know, there’s an exercise they put students through: to decide why each of the kinden is great in its own way and what makes them special. Well here’s a new hoop for them to jump through. Why are we all such bloody broken things? You and I, Tisamon. Beetle complacency and Mantis bloody pride!’

‘You had no right to take that choice!’

‘Nobody else was going to take it!’ Stenwold got as far as reaching for the man’s arming jacket to shake him, but stopped himself fast before he made the mistake.

‘She’s an abomination.’ Tisamon sounded stunned. ‘She’s a halfbreed. A shame upon my race and family.’ His mouth formed the words very slowly. ‘My daughter?’

‘Yes, your daughter. And now you have to decide if you’re going to do now what you would have done then, or if you can – just possibly can – widen your mind enough to accept that she exists. And I warn you, if you act against her, not only will you not find it so bloody easy, but you’ll also have me to deal with, probably Totho too.’ He saw a harsh look come over the other man’s face and interpreted it as best he could. ‘Oh, I know, you wouldn’t break into a sweat over it, but don’t think that would—’

‘I would not . . . harm you.’ Tisamon sounded and looked a hundred years older in that moment, ashen and fragile as no Mantis that Stenwold had ever encountered had looked before.

‘And?’

‘I will not harm her.’ Something was building in Tisamon, and Stenwold saw that it was not even the shock of having a daughter that was crippling him.
Atryssa
. It was that Atryssa was dead, had died without him, had died with him believing her a traitor. It was an unwelcome conclusion that Stenwold should have come to a long time before, but he saw now that Tisamon had stayed in Helleron because he had never wanted to see Atryssa again – because he did not want to be the one to end her life. For a Mantis, he supposed, that was love. Stenwold stepped back, suddenly fearful that he had gone too far.

‘I need to think.’ Tisamon turned away, hiding his face.

‘I’m sorry. I should have . . . I should have told you before. Sooner.’

‘You are right in all you said,’ Tisamon stated. ‘I would not have understood, and it remains to be seen if I ever shall. I will . . . I will rejoin you at dawn, I hope. I need time and space to . . . I need to be alone.’

He made a slow progress away from that place, heading into the hills. Stenwold stood and watched him until darkness and the land put him out of sight.

He did not notice Tynisa’s expression, as he returned to camp. He was too concerned with his own woes.

It had been a sour day’s journeying. Stenwold sat hunched at the controls of the limping, lurching automaton wrapped in a dusty silence that nothing had relieved. Achaeos and Totho’s silent enmity seemed to somehow be growing in the vacuum of their mutual ignoring. At first Stenwold had thought it was because Totho was a half-breed. After the lad went to tinker with something in the back, making Achaeos’s disdain only increase, he realized it was because Totho was an
artificer
. This was a clash of world-views.

Tynisa, however, Achaeos seemed to regard with a wary respect. That reaction had sprung up after she had drawn on Tisamon. No, Tynisa’s problem was with Stenwold himself, for she had not said a word to him all day. She had glared at him if he even chanced to look her way. He supposed that she was still waiting for an explanation of Tisamon’s reaction to her, but he was wretchedly unable to give it. Tisamon himself had not returned. Until he spoke to Tisamon again, until Tisamon had sorted out precisely how he felt, Stenwold could not bring himself to explain to her. It just was another betrayal. He owed her more than he owed to the Mantis, and yet he could not wrench himself free of those bonds formed two decades ago.

The entire sorry business had gone from bad to worse, and he now was in danger of losing everything by it. He thought back to that moment of choice, by Atryssa’s deathbed, and wondered what he could have done differently that might have made this moment bearable.

He pictured coming to Tisamon with an infant and a story – or even a child of, say, six or ten. He pictured the wrathful reaction of the man. In seventeen years, time had dulled it a little, built over it like a coral, so that the shape of it remained but not the edges. Even so it had been a close-run thing between Tisamon’s self-control and his blade’s temper. No, if Stenwold had tried this trick ten years earlier, Tisamon would certainly have killed him, and killed the child.

Would he?
Was Tisamon a man to kill an infant, his own daughter still in swaddling?
Is that what I really believe of my old friend
?

With a heavy heart Stenwold acknowledged that, yes, Tisamon
was
the man to do it. It would have been done in rage, and perhaps he would have later mourned the loss, but his pride would have spurred him to it, even so.

At least Stenwold had been able to encourage himself by the fact that they were gaining on their quarry, even though he had no real plan for tackling the reinforced Wasps when he found them. Before dusk, though, the ground ahead changed, and it did not take a tracker to tell him that the slavers had new transportation. The land before them was scuffed and scarred with a great reticulated trail. Some large tracked vehicle, or more than one of them, was now shipping the slaves eastwards. Stenwold feared that, whatever this conveyance was, it would travel faster than their own jolting relic.

That night he faced the prospect of a joyless camp. He turned to Totho instead, as the only one of his companions he still felt comfortable talking to.

‘We need to go faster,’ he said.

Totho cast a sidelong glance at their automotive. ‘It’s not going to be easy, sir,’ he said, ‘and it might not survive it. I needed to tighten every joint as it is.’

‘I’ll help you,’ Stenwold suggested. ‘If the two of us work through the night, we might be able to wring a bit of extra speed out of this contraption. And you don’t need to keep calling me sir. We’re not at the College now.’

Totho shrugged. ‘Well, s— Well, Master Maker—’