Heirs of the Blade (6 page)

‘Will your prince not hear me?’ she asked, frustrated all of a sudden. She imagined briefly an infinite sequence of servants, each one demanding every detail of her tale before passing her into the hands of the next one, until her words grew stale and hard as month-old bread. The next words escaped before she could stop them: ‘Please, I’ve come so far . . .’

He sighed. ‘Forgive our poor hospitality. When our seneschal brought word of your arrival, perhaps it was natural to assume that Stenwold Maker was attempting to further his campaign against the Empire by some other means. We have not treated you as befits a guest, and certainly not as befits one on such a gracious and solemn errand. Please, tell me of Salme Dien.’

She stared at him, trying to recast him as something other than simply a Dragonfly man, not young and yet ageless, wearing clothes that were surely less fine than Lioste’s had been, but then, of course, he had been
travelling
, and these were clothes meant for the road.

‘Master – my lord – Your Majesty,’ she stammered, making him a College magnate and a Spider Aristos and finally an emperor.

‘Prince Felipe,’ he said quietly, ‘or “My Prince”, if you were a retainer. Or Shah, if you prefer. But please’ – and his voice shook just a little despite his iron control of it – ‘tell me of my kin, of my boy. Tell me of Salme Dien.’

And so she did. As he sat on the floor like a child, she told him how Salma had formed his own army, his own nomadic principality of the lost and the fugitive. She spoke of how the errant prince had won the respect of the Sarnesh Ants, and how he had led the assault on the Imperial Seventh Army, breaking their lines and destroying their siege engines, so that the Ant-kinden could make their assault.

She told him how Salma had died in that battle, but sensed that those were not the details he wished to hear. Instead she passed on to the city that Salma’s followers were building west of Sarn, to which they had given the name Princep Salma in his memory.

Of the Butterfly-kinden woman who had been Salma’s lover, she said nothing.

Felipe Shah listened in silence to every word, nothing of his thoughts showing in his expression, and his gaze remained clear when she had finished. ‘He met his destiny well. Would that we were all so lucky. My Salme Dien became a true prince of the Commonweal before he died, and that is something that many of us who bear the empty title never achieve. What would you have of me, Tynisa?’

The question caught her unprepared. ‘I’m not here to ask for anything.’

‘Nonetheless, I am in your debt. If you will not barter for my favour now, then return to seek it, or send word. You have done me a courtesy fit for princes, one that I would not have expected to come from the Lowlands, where such things are not understood. You have brought Salme Dien back to me.’

She felt embarrassed at the praise, not knowing what to do with it.

‘Prince Felipe, I seek nothing . . .’
I have nothing.
She now realized that she had come to the end of her road.
And what now? Walk on to Capitas and attack the Empress? Is all my life shrunk to this moment?
She thought of asking to stay in Suon Ren, but the idea of living as a recluse in the midst of all of these elegant, alien people, with nobody but Gramo and perhaps the prince to talk to . . . She would become a shadow, a nothing, waning and dwindling in the vacuum of their turned backs. ‘I . . .’ she began, but there were no more words.

‘I am a prince-major of the Commonweal, whose only master is the Monarch,’ Felipe Shah told her. ‘And I am in your debt, so you have but to ask.’ He stood up to go, and she tried to speak, tried to beg him for . . . but there was nothing, a void where the future had been.

He bowed, and took his leave.

That same evening found the seneschal, Lioste Coren, back at the embassy door, brushing aside Gramo Galltree and seeking out Tynisa.

‘The prince has spoken,’ he declared. ‘He advises you to leave.’

Tynisa stared at him open-mouthed, even though she herself had decided she could not stay. ‘He said he owed a debt . . . He wants me to go?’

A battle fought its way briefly across Lioste’s face. ‘Do not . . .’ he started, and then his dislike of her finally gave way before his duty to defend his prince. ‘He does not banish you. He does not cast you off. My prince has some small talent with the future, however. He sees only grief for you here. We are well aware that the Lowlander merchant is at Siriell’s Town. My prince advises you to leave his domain – to leave the Commonweal, to return home. He says you will be happier there. It is because he owes you a debt that he gives you this advice.’ The effort of being civil to her was plainly stretching him. ‘
Please
.’

‘What shall you do?’ Galltree asked her later, after she had listlessly picked at the late supper he had prepared.

‘Would you let me stay here even if the prince wanted me gone?’

Galltree twisted the silk of his robe wretchedly, and she held a hand up to forestall his crisis of conscience. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She took a deep breath. ‘This Siriell’s Town, it’s a rough place?’

‘Lawless.’ Galltree nodded emphatically. ‘Rhael Province – the family that ruled there under Felipe’s, they’re all gone, long gone, I think. In such places, others creep in, fugitives from the order of the Commonweal. These days, there are many such provinces, especially since the war.’

Her hand was on her sword hilt again, and she could sense the ghosts gathering close, waiting to hear her decision. ‘I’ll go,’ she said.
Home or die, and how convenient that both are to be found in the same direction. I don’t even have to choose right now.
She found that she had no intention of rejoining Allanbridge, if indeed he was not already on his way back to Collegium. Home held nothing but sharp edges for her now. She could not look Stenwold or Che in the face without seeing dead Achaeos reflected in their eyes – and how she felt him close and gloating with that admission – and she was being forced out of Suon Ren so very politely. How good of the world to provide a sink like Siriell’s Town to drown herself in.

She took out Allanbridge’s rough map, and looked Galltree straight in the eye. ‘Anything to add to this?’ she asked.

The road to Siriell’s Town was a matter of heading north-east as best she could: bridging the canals, and then heading over increasingly hilly country until she had made the subtle transition from land that still knew the hoe today all the way down through a gradient of neglect, to land that had not been sowed in a decade or more. She saw a few villages on the way, and avoided them by choice. There were no other travellers, no merchants or messengers, no flying machines overhead. The sense of the land was one of quiet desolation. She knew she would feel different if the Commonweal had accepted her in any way, but aside from Felipe Shah’s brief moment of openness, she felt more a stranger here than she had done when she arrived – and even the prince thought it would be best if she left.

Each morning, and sporadically throughout the day, she checked her bearings as best she could by Allanbridge’s landmarks, thinking,
So I can’t miss the place can I, Jons? As if I believe that.

But when she came within sight of Siriell’s Town – having veered west some distance from her intended course – she found that Allanbridge had been telling nothing but the truth. It was indeed a town, or something resembling one, but at its heart was a castle upon a hill, and Tynisa saw instantly that it looked something like the exemplar of Felipe’s own. Complete, it had constituted a six- or seven-floored hexagonal tower, narrowing towards a point at the top. The walls were lanced with arrowslit windows, so that no attacker on the ground or in the air would have been safe from the defenders’ missiles. Tynisa, having observed the sturdy walls of Collegium and the Sarnesh fortifications, could see only absences here: nowhere to place artillery, not that the Dragonfly-kinden would know what to do with it; no reinforcing of the walls, so that catapult or leadshotter assault would hammer them down all the sooner. This was a castle that had been designed to hold off men from another age.

It would not even serve for that purpose, any more. One whole side of it had sloughed off and tumbled down the hill years before, leaving a teetering rotten tooth of a place latticed with the shorn-off stubs of internal walls. The hollow shell of the interior had been colonized haphazardly by its new masters, for there were tents and shacks and wood-frame structures not only about the walls and within the castle’s hollow footprint, but straggling up the walls themselves, as though growing there like mushrooms. A further shambles of makeshift dwellings had spread out from the castle’s collapsed side in a jumble of huts packed far closer than the homes at Suon Ren. The entire place looked foul and squalid to Tynisa.

There was a clear effort to try and farm some of the land around Siriell’s Town, with a hundred little plots scratched into the soil. Several of these had adults or children standing guard over them, as though protecting seams of precious metal. They stared at her suspiciously, as she passed between them on her way to the town proper. Drawing closer, she saw that the narrow streets radiating out from the broken face of the castle were cluttered with people, many of whom seemed to be drunk or unconscious, and a couple of whom were clearly dead. The air washing over Tynisa reeked of sweat and refuse, and resonated with arguments and shouting, the clatter of pots, singing, the odd scream and the roaring declamations of some kind of street entertainer.

Most of the resident scum were Dragonfly-kinden, she noticed, and it was plain that noble paragons such as Salma or Felipe Shah were only setting an example that many of their fellows failed to match. Most of the other outlaws were tall, lean Grasshopper-kinden, but there was a fair quota of halfbreeds and other kinden, including some Mantids and even a few Wasps.

A middle-aged Dragonfly in a ragged robe reached out to tug at her sleeve. ‘How much?’ he slurred. ‘How much for it?’

She slapped his hand away, and in that moment her rapier was a comforting presence, resting against the man’s neck. He seemed too drunk to quite understand, so she kicked him in the parts for good measure, rousing a murmur of appreciation, or sympathy, from some of the degenerates nearby.

She had not thought to find Wasps in the Commonweal, but their pale faces kept leaping out at her as she passed through this filthy town, and she could see that they were prospering here too. There were only a handful, but people got out of their way, and wherever they sat, each held court with a gang of local ruffians at his beck and call. Watching a few of them, and the craven way in which most of the locals bowed and scraped, she soon made the connection. The Empire had dealt the Commonweal the most savage beating in that nation’s history.

At the end of the Twelve-year War three whole principalities – perhaps a third of the Monarch’s domain – were under the black and gold flag, and the Imperial forces had only halted their advance because of an uprising in one of their subject cities back along the supply chain. Even though a treaty had been signed, pledging future peace, and even though the three captured principalities were now nominally free, following reversals suffered in the Empire’s war with the Lowlands, everyone knew that the armies of black and gold could return at any time. Their repeated defeats had wormed their way into the consciousness of the Commonweal, and even people who had not taken up arms knew that the Wasp-kinden were to be feared.

After that, she was looking out for each renegade Imperial, her fingers constantly hovering near her sword hilt, some part of her mind plotting her own glorious fall. To rid the Commonweal of Wasps? To rid Felipe Shah’s principality of the vermin of Siriell’s Town? What might she not set her blade to? To die in the pursuit of some grand and bloody ideal, was that not the Mantis way? There was no past she wished to face, no future she could conceive, but Siriell’s Town offered her an eternal bloody present: fighting as Tisamon had fought, and losing herself here just as he had sought oblivion in Helleron after her mother had died.

For surely the world has no better use for me,
she thought and, even as she did, her eyes lit on a face she recognized – bold as the sun, a man she had never wanted to see again.

She had been fleeing Jerez, as much as Collegium, when she came to the Commonweal, but here was Jerez mocking her on the streets of Siriell’s Town.

Jerez had been the idea of doomed Achaeos. There was some box, he said, just a little thing that a man could grip in one hand, but the Moth insisted it was of vital importance. Somehow, in the middle of a war, Achaeos had talked Stenwold into backing an expedition to retrieve it, and Tynisa had gone with him, to nobody’s gain.

Tisamon had been with her, watching her back as she watched his; and Jons Allanbridge of course, to get them there. Then there had been the two Wasps. One, the arch-traitor Thalric, had subsequently escaped to become a big man away in the Empire – yet another sack of blood she had never quite managed to cut open, for all he deserved it. And then there had been Gaved, who claimed to be independent of the dictates of the Empire. Tynisa had long decided that if he was genuinely something other than a servant of the Emperor, then he was something even worse: a freebooter, a mercenary, a thief and a kidnapper. Like Thalric, though, and unlike Achaeos, he had come out of the business untouched, and had been the only one to make any kind of profit from the whole wretched expedition. While others had bled and died, Gaved had left Jerez with a Spider-kinden girl on his arm, and an eyewitness familiarity with Tynisa’s own crimes.

And here, on the stinking streets of Siriell’s Town, was Gaved himself, with his intolerable burden of knowledge practically shrieking out to her. She watched as he spoke to some halfbreed who seemed to be a taverner, passing over several trinkets in return for some information or other – then the Wasp was off down the street with that light and easy step only truly owned by the utterly guilty.

And the irresistible thought came to Tynisa:
I can kill him. I can start by ridding the world of Gaved, right here, right now.
Because, although killing Gaved would be a pitiful gift to the world, at least it would give the drift of her life some meaning before the end.