Heirs of the Blade (28 page)

I hope you know what you’re doing, Amnon.

The fires burning at the Marsh Alcaia cast a leaping and unreliable light over the Estuarine Gate, but they also inevitably drew the eye. Somewhere in that warren of stalls and tents there was fighting going on. Although Praeda could make out a fair few Wasps, they were all looking away from her, waiting for the denizens of the Khanaphir underworld to counterattack. Here, at least, they had found a substitute enemy to take out their anger on, in the absence of the Empress’s presumed kidnappers.

And what can have happened?
That the Empress would come here at all was frankly absurd, but for the most powerful woman in the northern world to have somehow vanished beggared belief. And yet the proof was all around them in the punishment the Wasps were now inflicting on Khanaphes.

Praeda dropped down and let him know what she had seen concisely, and Amnon squared his shoulders, plainly readying himself for some plan of action, more than likely a rash one.

‘Amnon,’ she murmured warningly, because the Wasps ahead of them were not so distracted that the two of them could just walk past. He was scanning the quays, though, and the various docked vessels. One ship was actually on fire, but the Wasps had evidently suffered a change of heart, maybe realizing that their vandalism could get swiftly out of hand. Even as she watched, the blazing two-masted Spider-kinden trader was cut loose from the docks, and airborne Wasps armed with long spears began trying to herd it further out into the river, where the current would take it swiftly away from the city.

‘We must act quickly,’ Amnon declared, and for a moment she thought he was proposing they get aboard the burning ship. With the city being stung so savagely all around them, the suggestion did not sound all that outrageous. Then Amnon had crept to the waterside, and was hanging his head over the edge of the docks, apparently inspecting the underside of the nearest quays.

‘Amnon, what––?’ she started, but then he grunted in satisfaction. ‘Can you swim at all?’

Childhood summers spent swimming in Lade Sideriti surfaced briefly in her mind. ‘Probably. I certainly used to be able to.’

‘That will make this easier. I cannot. See there?’

She followed his pointing finger, but it was a long while before she spotted them: a few small boats moored right underneath the arches supporting the jetties themselves. From her last visit here, she was familiar with their construction: narrow craft of wooden planks held together only with taut ropes, gathered at bow and stern into a raised carving that mimicked bundled reeds. Amnon was already creeping along the waterfront to try and snag one. It seemed that the Wasps must spot him at any moment.

With a curse she kicked off her sandals, hesitating a moment on the brink before letting herself down into the water. She had expected cold, but the sluggish river retained the day’s heat, and the flow was not so strong that she could not brace herself against the quay before kicking her way towards the nearest boat. It almost tipped over as she wriggled into it, scrabbling about inside it for an oar. In the end she gave up on actually paddling, but by pushing against the stonework she levered the craft to beneath where Amnon was waiting, and held it steady while he clambered down.

There followed the slowest and most agonizing minutes of her life, as Amnon took the slender boat out on to the river, just catching the swell created as the burning Spiderlands trader lurched past. There were Wasps darting overhead almost constantly, and if just one of them looked down, or if the eyes of their fellows on the shore had strayed from the blaze, then Praeda and Amnon would have been dead in short order. A ship on fire provided sufficient distraction, though, and Amnon was able to bring their tiny vessel into the hulk’s shadow, paddling until their two hulls scraped, and letting the river’s current then draw them sluggishly out past the Estuarine Gate, even as embers started drifting down about them.

That should have been the end of their difficulties, and Praeda never did understand why the Wasps had patrols flying out over the marshland, save perhaps that they were expecting some attack from the natives there. In any event, they were not quite out of sight of the city walls when the cry went up above them, and a moment later a sting sizzled into the water in a flash of gold.

Amnon was instantly paddling for the shore – on the water they offered too much of a target. Praeda scanned the skies but, with only a sliver of moon, she could not work out how the Wasps, as night-blind as she was, had ever spotted them. Stingshots came lancing down erratically, still off the mark but getting closer, and she could hear one high voice shouting instructions to the shooters, correcting their aim.

Abruptly their boat was grating on mud, and Amnon leapt out, pulling her with him. They had beached on a mudbank with only a few gangly, spider-rooted trees for cover, and he was leading her towards deep marsh, into a twisted maze of ferns, horsetails and gullies that could swallow an army.

Two more blazing shots pursued them, still nowhere near, then a sharp
snap
that whipped the water almost at Praeda’s heels. She recognized that distinctive sound instantly, and whoever wielded the snapbow clearly had a much better idea of where they were.

They splashed on through clear, shallow water for a moment, then there was plantlife all around, more mud underfoot, and a fog of gnats that seemed almost solid. Amnon began slowing down, and Praeda only hoped that he had some destination in mind, rather than just charging blindly into this maze of mud and vegetation. She could hear the enemy voice shouting directions again, and sensed the Wasps coursing overhead, still searching.

There was no real silence in the swamp, for the stridulations of hundreds of nocturnal denizens kept up a constant racket, but still she felt that the enemy had lost their trail, their wings lending them too much speed and sending them ahead of their quarry.

‘Where now?’ she hissed.

‘Come dawn, we shall work our way back to the river,’ he told her. ‘If we see a ship, we shall warn them of the Wasps, and with luck they shall carry us to the stone town.’

‘To Porta Rabi, yes,’ she agreed. ‘And what about until dawn?’

She did not find out what his reply might have been, because that same voice above suddenly cried out, ‘I see them! Get the lamp on them!’

The swamp was abruptly on fire, or that was how it felt. A white light sheared over everything and, had Praeda been looking in that direction, it would have blinded her. The source was a mirrored lantern mounted on the shoulder of one of the Wasp fliers, the sort of device used by explorers heading underground. Its bearer hung well back, but the blazing light made stark silhouettes of his two companions, who were even now advancing. Praeda understood immediately how they had managed to follow a trail at night, for one of them was a Fly cradling a cut-down snapbow.

Amnon rushed at them with a bellow, drawing their attention. Praeda saw the Wasp’s sting flash off his breastplate, but then the snapbow spoke again, and punched Amnon off his feet. She shouted incoherently, lifting her weapon and pressing the trigger without even considering whether she had remembered to reload it. Plainly her hands had attended to that task without her recalling, for her shot slapped the closer Wasp off his feet, without a cry, and then she and the Fly were both busy trying to reload ahead of the other, while the lamp-man came rushing in clumsily under the offset weight of the lantern.

And then the light went out, as Praeda heard the glass break. Absolute darkness descended, but her hands kept following the motions: slotting a new bolt into place and winding up the pressure in the battery.

She wanted to call out to Amnon, but that would give the Fly something to aim at. She strained her ears above the monotonous sounds of the swamp, willing her eyes to reaccustom themselves to the night, take advantage of that sliver of moon.

She could make out a little more now, the faint glimmer of water against the deeper darkness of the plants, but of course the Fly’s eyes would be so much
better
than hers.

She heard his quiet sound of satisfaction at reacquiring her position, and she loosed in that direction at once, feeling certain that she had missed and that she might as well have shot blind.

There came a grunt not quite from the direction she had aimed her bolt towards, and she stared wide-eyed, trying to make sense of the shadow play before her with the unreliable assistance of the moon. At last it came to her that the shape over
there
must be the Fly, and the straight shaft protruding from it was therefore . . . an arrow.

‘Be very still,’ Amnon’s voice reached her, sounding pained. ‘They are all around us.’

Despite the grim news her heart leapt to hear him. ‘You were shot,’ she reproached him.

‘When the Iron Glove make armour, they make it well. The bolt pierced enough to draw blood, but the metal slowed it down,’ he murmured back. ‘Now be quiet and let me speak to them.’

She had absolutely no sense of there being marsh-kinden around them, those slender Mantis-kinden that called the Jamail delta their home. There could be ten or a thousand of them, silent and invisible, and she would never know for sure.

‘You know me,’ she heard Amnon announce. ‘You are bound by the old covenants. Let us pass.’

Praeda strained her eyes, trying to make out the swift, small forms of the Mantis-kinden. It was all too easy to imagine their flint-tipped spears, their arrowheads of poisoned bone.

‘We know you,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘You are Amnon, who was First Soldier, but you are exiled.’

Praeda had known Amnon long enough, now, to sense his stance even in the faint moonlight. He had been ready to prove himself to these people in some savage trial, or to bluff his way back into their good graces, or to threaten the wrath of the Masters of Khanaphes. What he plainly had not expected was that they should be so well informed of his current status, and therefore his lack of the Masters’ protection. For the first time in many years Amnon was without a plan.

She raised the snapbow again, realizing as she did so that she had not reloaded it since their skirmish with the Wasps. All around them she heard a faint creaking as a dozen of the Mantids’ savage little compound bows were drawn back.

‘The Loquae will be pleased with us,’ their leader remarked with satisfaction.

What happened next was something that Praeda would never remember clearly.

There was a gasp from the Mantis-kinden, one arrow leaping from its bow to skim directly between Amnon and herself. The Mantids already were backing away, all stealth forgotten, their circle widening and widening, and for no apparent reason, save that . . .

Praeda would later decide that the night’s exertions had begun to tell on her by then. She was hot and tired, and possibly poisoned by insect bites or marsh water. It would be easy, in such circumstances, to imagine things.

But she knew with an absolute certainty that there were three of them. She and Amnon were now standing a little further apart, because someone invisible was standing between them. No – not invisible, because the
Mantis-kinden
had already spotted whoever this third traveller was. They had seen it, and they recognized something in it that overawed and terrified them.

‘We will,’ the Mantis leader was promising. ‘We will lead them to the sea, we swear. We did not know . . . We could not have known . . .’

‘What is this? You recognize your oath to Khanaphes, after all?’ Amnon demanded.

‘There are other oaths,’ the Mantis replied, her voice trembling. ‘There are other loyalties. We did not know what you brought with you.’

Praeda was feeling light-headed by that point, for while she stared straight ahead at the shadowy Mantis-kinden, she could also glimpse a third figure out of the corner of her eye. It was someone she knew, someone who could not possibly be with them.

‘
Che?
’ she whispered.

Seventeen

When Varmen had pulled ahead, Thalric found a moment to murmur to Che, ‘You look terrible. What’s wrong? You’re ill?’

‘Not ill,’ Che assured him. Her dream last night had stayed with her this morning with unwelcome clarity. When she had embarked on this business of pretending to be some kind of magician, she had perhaps anticipated some manner of prophecy, portentous images that she might decode after much thought, and no doubt riddle out too late to be of any use. Achaeos had always spoken of dreams thus, but then he had ranked low by the standards of Moth magicians. Only the fact that he had somehow attracted the notice of the spirits of the Darakyon had marked him out in any way. The ancient Mantis-kinden dead of that abandoned forest had used him as a tool, in their quest to recover the Shadow Box that had held their collective heart, and when he called, they had come.

Che retained the memory with perfect and unwanted clarity: Achaeos touching her mind whilst she fought in Myna and he undertook a ritual in Tharn. Achaeos borrowing strength from her, even as his own failed, and using that same strength to call out to the Darakyon.

And the Darakyon had invaded both their minds, cold and hideous and thorned, and Achaeos, still weak from half-healed wounds, had died.

She had felt every moment of his passing through the bond that had connected them.

She was beginning to wonder if the world of magic would do for her as well. She would have liked to convince herself that it was merely her own imagining that had put her back in Khanaphes, but she found she could not stretch credulity so far.

I cannot be seeing these events as they occur,
she complained to herself.
Sometimes it is day in Khanaphes, whilst I sleep here. But last night . . .

She had never intruded into the dream before, never been anything other than a bodiless observer, watching the Empress and Praeda and the others, and coasting on their thoughts, seeing pictures in their minds, dreams within dreams. But the Mantis-kinden had seen her, as though she had physically been standing between Amnon and Praeda. And then, just for a moment, Praeda had seen her too.