Heirs of the Blade (63 page)

She crept close, closer than was wise, but she might as well have already cut out all their eyes. The armoured Mercers sat with the warmth of the fire at their backs and stared bleakly out into the darkness, unhappily waiting out the chill of the night with their breath pluming. A half-dozen others were huddled up close to the flames, and she picked out faces, builds, trying to identify her man. At the last she was forced to steal all around the site and approach it from further up the hillside, where the trees were denser, away from the main gaze of the watchmen. Their lax vigilance eventually allowed her to come all the way into camp, to stand in silence amongst them and mark each face.
I could kill them all right now
, and for a moment it was all she could manage to simply stand there without doing so.
They deserve it for such poor service. Alain merits better followers.
But her sword kept to its scabbard, and she had another matter to occupy her mind. Alain himself was not there.

The firelight let her read the ground, and she saw a recent scuffed track heading up the hillside. No doubt Alain, too, was sick of his idle retinue and had taken himself away from them. Perhaps he was even waiting for her somewhere. She pictured him in the moonlight, standing tall between the trees, smiling a greeting. And they would leave this place and make their own life, and to the pits with the Salmae and the Makers both. His princely virtue, her mastery and skill: together they would hunt down bandits and kill the enemies of the Monarch, he shorn of the ambitions of his mother, herself rid of the concerns of her sister. It would be perfect.

She left the camp, following his trail, each step a study in quietness, until she heard him up ahead.

He seemed to be murmuring to himself, which surprised her. She could just make him out, a crouching form in the darkness, hardly touched by the moon. And, yet, was there not a dim radiance there, from beneath him, that picked out his form in silhouette?

She waited until she was almost on his heels before she spoke.

‘Alain?’

He turned with a start. And she saw.

In that first moment she did not take in how the girl’s clothes were torn, nor the look of despair on her face. She saw only that Alain had been crouched over one of the Butterfly-kinden dancers, his robes open down the front, his abruptly shrinking genitals exposed to the cold night air.

Thirty-Eight

‘Beheading, isn’t it, in the Commonweal?’ the Spider-kinden Avaris asked.

‘Beheading is just for their own, nice and quick and dignified. They’ll weight our heels and string us up,’ said one of the Dragonfly-kinden, a hard-faced woman named Feass, dropping down from her ninth inspection of the grille. No flaw in its workmanship had turned up yet. The weights still pinned it down at each corner, and the brigands were still securely imprisoned in the dungeon pit of Leose.

‘Just count yourself lucky you’re on this side of the border,’ Mordrec the Wasp growled. ‘They’d use crossed pikes in the Empire, and in the Principalities, too.’

‘I always wondered about that,’ Feass said, frowning. ‘I mean, do they just leave you to starve, after tying you to the pikes? What’s to stop someone coming to cut you free?’

Mordrec gave her an odd look. ‘They don’t
tie
you to the pikes. They shove the pissing things in under your ribs, so the point of the pike goes right through your body into your arm on the other side, like so.’ He made a violent gesture for emphasis. ‘If they know what they’re doing – and it’s a valued skill, where I come from – then you hang there dying slowly for hours.’

‘Lovely relatives you have,’ Avaris remarked drily.

‘And things are better in the Spiderlands?’ Mordrec challenged.

‘Oh at least we have the benefit of variety. Hanging’s customary, but the local magistrate has free rein, you see. Anything goes: flayed alive, dismembered by machines, tied between four beetles and pulled apart, fed to the ant-lion, eaten alive by maggots, you name it. I once heard of a woman who had a wasp sting her – not your kind, just a little hand-sized one. Then, when they let her go, she thought she was the luckiest criminal in the Spiderlands. Of course a week later the grub starts eating her from the inside, and she’s history. So don’t you come your crossed pikes with me. We invented being cruel bastards. Your lot are just amateurs.’

‘You are so full of lies, you probably piss them,’ Mordrec retorted, but without much fire.

‘Have you not got some other topic of conversation?’ Dal complained, after that.

‘Of course, surely. So, what were you thinking of doing tomorrow, anyone? Because if the weather lasts I thought I’d go to the
theatre
,’ Avaris said, slumping down tiredly. ‘Or maybe a brothel, if it rains. I know this lovely place in Helleron, the Veil. You should come along. They cater for all tastes.’

‘Shut up,’ Dal told him sharply.

‘Well you’re the one who wanted to talk—’

‘No, shut up. We’re not alone.’

That silenced them all, and they peered upward into the gloom. There was just a single torch up there, shedding precious little light.

‘Is it time?’ Mordrec asked softly.

‘It’s night,’ stammered Avaris. ‘They’ll make it public. Won’t kill us at night.’

‘
Quiet
,’ hissed Dal Arche, and then, ‘So, come back to gloat some more, have you? Or is it remorse? An odd thing for someone like you to be losing sleep over.’

As he spoke, Tynisa’s pale face appeared above them, staring down. She said nothing, but would not quite meet the Dragonfly’s gaze.

‘Come on, out with it,’ Dal prompted. ‘What’s the bad news?’

She twitched unexpectedly. Perhaps only Dal’s eyes were good enough to spot it.

Tynisa backed away from the grille, out of direct view. A few grumbles of protest arose, but the bandit leader’s hiss silenced them. She put down her bundle and turned her attention to the nearest corner weight.

For a long while she just stared, even the simple mechanics of it evading her. The mechanism had been designed by the Inapt for the Inapt, though, and she had watched it in operation. Eventually something fell reluctantly into place in her mind, and she saw that if she moved this piece of wood
here,
it would free the counterweight to swing aside. She could not quite see how that would make this corner weight light enough to be heaved aside into the appropriate channel cut into the stone, freeing that quarter of the grille, but nevertheless that was what seemed to happen. Instead of trying to wrestle with cause and effect, she followed by rote what she had witnessed, as perhaps the jailers of Leose had done for generations, each in empty mimicry of his predecessor.

That done, she paused, and realized that she would have to repeat this performance for each of the corners in order to render the grille movable at all, after which she would then have to find some way of actually shifting it. She moved on, and now the bandits were watching her, wide-eyed and bewildered, but with a dawning sense that all was not as it should be, and that some opportunity might come their way. She glanced down at them, as she moved the second weight. The burly Scorpion-kinden was glowering at her still, murder burning in his deep-set eyes, but the rest had hope writ large on their faces, all save their leader, Dal Arche, who remained profoundly suspicious.

‘What are you doing, girl?’

‘You’re mine. I caught you, more than anyone did, and I had a purpose for you, at the time,’ she said tiredly, putting her back against the third weight, which grated heavily across wood and stone before it fell clear. ‘But now I’ve changed my mind. You’re mine, all of you, so that makes you mine to set free, if I want.’

She released the counterbalance for the final corner and, when she turned back, Dal was already crouching up against the grille, and others of his people were taking up position, too, using their wings or clinging to the walls, ready to jointly shoulder the confining bars out of the way.

‘That’s not it,’ Dal said patiently, as though he was not a prisoner, and she was not dangling his freedom in front of him. ‘What happened to all that truth and justice and the golden law of the Monarch? What happened to right and wrong? Or do you reckon we’re heroes, now?’

Tynisa paused and stared at him. ‘Oh, you’re murderers and robbers and bastards, the lot of you. But you know what? I realize now that I can’t judge you. The right and the wrong of it seem to have slipped away when I wasn’t looking, and I see clearly enough, now, to understand that I
can’t
see clearly enough to sit in judgement. And why should you suffer because of my blindness, and why should the Salmae benefit?’ She paused, staring down at their hungry faces. ‘I’m undoing it. I’m undoing it all – all my interfering. It’ll be as though I was never even here.’ Her voice trembled over the last few words, and she clenched her teeth.

‘Except for all the bodies,’ their Spider-kinden pointed out.

For a moment she went very still, fighting down a wave of nausea that rose up inside her, and she closed her eyes in case some spectre of her imagination should resurface, and plunge her back into that well of guilt she had only recently crawled out of. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, ‘except for the bodies.’ When she looked up she wore a hard, bleak smile. ‘You and the Salmae can go tear each other apart straight away, for all I care.’

‘Not likely. It’s south for Rhael Province, for us,’ Dal decided.

‘Not staying to kill Princess Elass in her sleep?’ Tynisa enquired, shifting the last weight.

‘You’re a bloody-handed sort, aren’t you?’ At Dal’s signal, his people braced themselves to shunt the grille two feet aside. That gave enough room, and moments later they came crawling out into the dubious freedom of the prison chamber. Tynisa calmly picked up her bundle again.

Dal was staring up the ramp that led to the courtyard. ‘Trust the Salmae to want to keep their prisoners nicely out of the way of their spotless private chambers. If we can make the courtyard, we’re free.’

Tynisa knelt down and unfurled her burden, revealing a random collection of knives and swords, whatever she could take easily from the little armoury she had found. Dal knelt down and took up the shortbow she had found.

‘Just the one?’

‘Don’t complain,’ she snapped.

He shrugged, and she assumed he would keep the weapon for himself, but he passed it, along with the slender quiver, to one of his Grasshopper-kinden. ‘Soul, you’re the best shot. You take it.’

‘You didn’t happen to find a replacement nailbow on your travels, did you?’ asked the Wasp-kinden.

Tynisa gave him a narrow look. ‘You’ll just have to make do with shooting fire from your damned
hands
.’

The Scorpion-kinden reached down and took up a short-hafted spear. When he straightened up, his pose had subtly altered, and she took a swift step back, whisking her sword from its sheath.

‘You killed my wife,’ the man rumbled through his tusks.

The words threw Tynisa completely. ‘Your
wife
? I remember killing your nasty little pet.’

‘Where he comes from, you’re not considered a grown man unless you’ve a companion like that,’ murmured the Grasshopper, Soul. ‘They call them wives, because it’s a partnership for life.’

‘You killed my wife,’ repeated the Scorpion, his hands clenching the spear shaft.

‘Ygor, not now—’ Dal started, interposing himself between the pair.

‘Out of my way, Dala.’ The Scorpion hunched his shoulders, as if readying himself to rush at Tynisa.

‘No, not now,’ Dal insisted. ‘Look, she’s not running from us, and she’ll be happy to hack it out with you any other time. Right now we need to get
out
. Later, Ygor, later. She’s up for it, that I guarantee, but not now.’

For a moment it looked as though no amount of calming words would do, but then something went out of the belligerent Scorpion-kinden, with a long hiss of breath. ‘Then let’s move,’ he snarled.

‘There’s some way of getting out front?’ Dal asked.

Tynisa glanced at the doors to the courtyard, barred on the outside of course. She herself had come here via the narrow stairwell leading from the guards’ quarters. In truth her planning ended here: free the prisoners, undo the results of her meddling, then leave. She had not thought it through. Indeed thought barely came into it.

Something in her said
fight
. Rouse the guards, slay the Salmae,
avenge the insult
. But surely she had done enough avenging already, enough for a lifetime and a half.

‘I will go out and open the doors. Just stay here, and be quiet.’

‘Oh, no,’ Dal told her straight away. ‘You think this makes us your followers, to stay or go at your say-so? And what if this is just some game of yours, or of the nobles? You slip out of here and suddenly they come down on us, catch us trying to escape, have a little sport?’

The Scorpion, Ygor, rumbled deep in his chest, and she sensed the brigands weighing up the odds, a pack of them against her, their stolen blades crossing with a single rapier. She felt her smile grow, and was helpless to stop it.
Why not? Free them, kill them – what’s the difference? Be but true to your own nature, wherever it takes you, and then you need bear no guilt nor blame.
She suppressed the insidious feeling, but something of it had communicated itself to the brigands, and none of them made a first move.

‘Soul, you go with her,’ Dal directed. ‘Besides, the bar on these doors is huge, a two-man job at least.’

Tynisa looked the Grasshopper up and down. He was a tall, lean specimen with his kind’s usual lanky frame, but there was a stillness to him that marked him out as dangerous. He nodded to her and, when she ascended the stairs, he fell into step so naturally that it was as if they had worked together for years. He was silent too, padding past the sleeping guards with barely a scuff of his bare feet. The one sentry still awake saw Tynisa coming, recognizing her and not challenging her, just as he had let her pass through on the way down, no doubt imagining her to be on some errand of the princess’s. This time Tynisa made herself nod, forcing a smile, while Soul Je crept past unobserved, as though the pair of them had spent an hour planning the move.