Heirs of the Blade (76 page)

‘Get out of the way, you stupid woman.’ A hand was on her shoulder and then she was abruptly slung aside. She heard the man grunt with pain as he did it, and recognized Mordrec kneeling at Tynisa’s side.

He’s going to kill her, so she doesn’t slow us down,
she thought. Thalric had a palm extended, but was hesitating, as Mordrec put his own hands flat on to Tynisa’s hip, wrist-deep in blood instantly. Maure was holding her back, pleading, ‘No, Che, no,’ as she tried to lunge at the man, to drag him off her sister.

Tynisa keened, with a high sound like a saw biting into iron, one arm flailing madly at the Wasp, then Che saw a stuttering glow between Mordrec’s fingers, and smelt burning. Burning blood, burning skin.

She wanted to cry out,
What is he doing?
but realization came to her even as she opened her mouth.

After Mordrec stood up, whatever blood Tynisa had left inside her would be staying there, and the imprint of his big hand was seared into her skin in a glossy burn-scar that would surely stay with her for as long as she lived – however short that looked likely to be.

‘I didn’t know Wasp Art could do that,’ she admitted weakly, glancing at Thalric.

‘Don’t look at me. Mine tends to the opposite direction. I’d have blown her leg off.’

She saw Mordrec’s pallid face, sheened with sweat from the effort. ‘We have to go,’ he rasped.

Dropping back down beside Tynisa, Che took her wound-cleanser and soaked bandages in it, using every last drop. Her sister writhed and fought as she applied it, and from personal experience she knew how it stung, but Collegium doctors had long known how the difference between a fatal and a trivial wound would be whether it turned to corruption or not. She swabbed swiftly and aggressively at Tynisa’s face, cleaning away the blood and trying not to look at the twisted line of the scar, and then did her best with what Mordrec had left of the major wound on her hip. Tynisa looked paler than Che had ever seen another human being, or at least one who was still alive. The loss of blood might still kill her, or the shock, or any number of other things. Impulsively, Che took her hand, and was startled by the faint squeeze back. Tynisa was still conscious, and not through any of it had she let go, perhaps fearing that a temporary darkness could become permanent all too easily.

In Che’s mind was a great deal of dread, a terror of a future that did not have this woman in it.
We came so far, and it cannot just have been to lose you now.

And: in the midst of her whirl of panicked thoughts,
I will not have it.

She blinked. For a moment she had seemed to feel the world shudder, just a little, around her – the air and the earth trembling minutely, out of step with each other. She found herself meeting Tynisa’s gaze.

‘We have to move,’ Che whispered urgently. ‘I’m sorry . . .’

Tynisa squeezed her hand again, stronger this time, and then Thalric stepped in without being asked and picked her up. Straightening with a grunt, he glanced towards the sky, where a flurry of white was blowing between the branches. The last echo of the Commonweal winter had picked this time to enter its death throes.

Soul Je suddenly arrived, a shape leaping and bounding between trees. In one hand he held his bow, an arrow clasped across it.

‘All kinds of shouting,’ he reported. ‘Princess is telling them to get moving. They don’t like it.’

‘It won’t last,’ Dal decided. ‘Some of them will be keen enough to retain her favour. It won’t be all of them, but frankly it won’t need many.’

Thalric began walking away, almost at random, and a moment later they were all on the move.

Dal squinted up at the white-grey sky. ‘The snow’s a curse when it’s light. We can’t hide our tracks. If it’s heavy, though, there’ll be no tracks. We might hide in it all the way to the border.’

‘If it’s heavy, the cold will kill her,’ Che chided him.

‘Then find a way to stop the snow,’ he replied with a shrug. When Che just halted, he carried on.

She looked up at a lattice of branches with the flakes flurrying through.

‘Maure.’

The magician glanced back. ‘Che, no.’

‘Then what good is it, any of it? Or is that the great secret of magic, that it’s dwindled to uselessness, and that’s why the armies of the Apt run roughshod over the world? Have I come so far just to join the losing side?’

‘Che, you’ve power, but you’ve no direction, no training, and the power you have, it’s . . . not native to you. It was never intended for a Beetle-kinden to use.’

Che shrugged. ‘One thing about Beetles is that we adapt.’ And with that, she thrust her arms out into the chill air, directed back the way they had come, towards the invisible Salmae. For a moment nothing happened, and she could conceive of no possible way that she could affect the world. Magic was a fiction, of course, and all her early years of study confirmed that. Then she sensed the faintest catch, as though her fingers had brushed some kind of trailing veil, invisible in the air.

‘Masters of Khanaphes, you crowned me,’ Che murmured, less to herself than to the world at large. ‘You made me something new, me and the Empress – you gave us some mark or mantle of yours, made us your champions, however it works. After a thousand years of exile beneath the earth, you have
recognized
us. Does that mean nothing? Does that mean that when I speak to the wind, it just whisks my words away? What good is it all, then? What is the point of it all?’

She heard Thalric calling to her distantly, but the wind was picking up now, and she caught none of his meaning.

‘I am caught between two worlds,’ she considered, as Maure shifted from foot to foot beside her, keen to get away. ‘Child of the new, but scion of the old. Nobody could have intended that, but it has happened, and I refuse to let it become nothing more than a handicap.’ She was speaking quietly, calmly, but with that last word she summoned her will and pushed it through both hands, tearing at the sky with invisible fingers, clutching and dragging and
throwing
. . .

The wind changed direction with an audible
whump,
and was abruptly whistling past her, back towards the pursuers that were surely coming. She heard it keening through the trees, followed by the snow, thicker than it had been a moment ago, rushing to fly in the faces of their hunters, while obliterating all tracks.

She felt something go out of her, as if some great reservoir had been emptied all at once – expended in a flood of power sent to batter the very heavens into submission.

But had I been skilled, oh then . . .
For in that moment she saw that given a little application, a little care, she might have achieved the same result from so much less effort, and thus have something still in hand to deal with her enemies when they did finally catch up. For now, though, she felt leaden, hollowed out, and could only stumble behind Maure as the magician led her after the others.

The fierce snowstorm that would now be making their followers’ lives a misery was well behind her, and it stayed behind her as she hurried to catch up with Thalric. The air ahead and immediately around her remained crisp and still, the wind itself waiting for her to pass by before claiming another yard of ground.

Her progress was a mad lurch through the forest, the snow always building right behind her, gusting about her heels as though she was the harbinger of a second winter. Maure, helping to take Che’s weight, was shivering, the tips of her ears and nose turning blue with cold, but Che herself felt none of it.

Consequences,
she thought to herself.
I must be more careful whenever I try to move the world. My standpoint is more solid than I thought.
At the same time, though, the scholar in her was considering,
And though I believe I moved the weather, yet Thalric would simply claim that this snow was fortuitous. Magic must creep, now. It is not the fire and grandeur of the Bad Old Days.

She heard Dal Arche cry out from ahead of her, his words lost in the wind, but they could mean nothing good. Maure put on an extra burst of speed, without being asked, and a moment later Che saw Thalric, his hands outstretched, looking wildly around. Tynisa crouched at his feet, plainly awake and aware. Her eyes locked on to Che’s and she shouted hoarsely, ‘Look out!’

The snow had not been enough. Even as Tynisa called her warning, a horse thundered between them, close enough to nearly shoulder Che aside. Something whistled by her head, like a large insect, and she only realized afterwards that it was a sword blade.

The horse reared as its rider tugged at the reins to turn it back. Soul Je’s arrow nipped past him, clipping the armour on his shoulder. Then there were more of them. The snowstorm had stripped Salme Elass of most of her force, losing them in the labyrinth of trees and foul weather that Che had turned the forest into. They would have had other magicians, though, to cut a course for them through the wild wind, and now this handful of cavalry had found them, and there would soon be more to come.

Another rider bore down on Che and Maure, a spear couched in his arm, but Dal Arche’s arrow flowered suddenly from the horse’s neck, and the luckless animal rolled forward and over, its rider’s wings flourishing briefly to bring him down firmly on his feet. A moment later Thalric’s sting knocked him down, cracking his intricate armour like an eggshell. A further crackle of stingshot sounded further off, as Mordrec defended himself from more of the Salmae’s followers.

The swordsman had now turned to ride down Soul Je, who kicked himself backwards in a long arc, fifteen feet of leap at least, loosing another shot even as he sprang from the man’s path. Then Che lost track of him, because an arrow drove deep into Maure’s arm, and she cried out in pain and sat down hard.

The archer was mounted, holding his horse still to improve his aim. Che saw him select another arrow from his quiver and nock it to his bow. His face, those pleasant, golden-skinned Dragonfly features, was dispassionate, almost bored.

She knelt over Maure and reached out for whatever magic she could find.

‘Go to her!’ shouted Tynisa, or at least she tried to shout, pushing Thalric away. He gave her an exasperated look, then was flying towards Che, but surely too late to stop the arrow. Tynisa ground her teeth together and stood up, clutching for the sword that she had left behind. The mounted archer sighted carefully, and then his hand flew open in release, the string invisible as it whipped the arrow straight at Che.

The fist of wind that buffeted them all at that moment had to be a freak of the unseasonal weather, Tynisa knew. She saw Che stagger under its battering, and the archer’s horse reared madly. Where the arrow went, she could not discern.

Then Thalric had reached him, grappling the man off his horse under the full speed of his wings, and Tynisa heard the hiss of his Art burning into the archer’s body from point-blank range.

There was a tremor in the ground, a flicker of motion, and Tynisa tried to cast herself aside, managing only an ungainly collapse, the pain roaring through her like a fire, just as the next horse passed by, hoofs inches from trampling her. Without looking up, she
knew
, and was already forcing herself upright, determined to meet her fate on her feet. The strength – borrowed from who-knew-where – ebbed and flowed within her, always on the point of running dry, and yet she found herself standing up again, swaying and shuddering.

Salme Elass stared down at her icily, a long-hafted sword resting on her shoulder. The moment seemed endless as she studied her prey, and it was all Tynisa could do to stay standing and return the woman’s gaze.

‘Child of the Lowlands,’ the Dragonfly princess said, ‘what brought you here to kill my son? Tell me it was the business of the Empire. Tell me I have an enemy in some Beetle city. Make me understand.’ Her hand flexed on the sword’s grip, and Tynisa could envisage the diagonal cleaving stroke as Elass leant forward in the saddle to hack into her collarbone and come near to decapitating her. The princess was a skilled horsewoman who had judged the distance precisely, her victim well within reach.

None of Tynisa’s comrades seemed to be close enough to intervene, this time. Thalric was still protecting Che, and the bandits were looking after their own.

Well, then, let it be this.

‘Alain made me his sword to use in war,’ she said simply. ‘But when it then came to peacetime, he was careless and so he cut himself. Do not blame the sword.’

Elass’s face contorted in fury and her blade whipped forward even faster than Tynisa had anticipated. She closed her eyes.

The sound of steel on steel came in a single ringing impact, and then she heard Elass’s horse whinny, and its mistress curse. When Tynisa’s eyes opened, Elass was on foot, thrown from her horse, and the animal running off with its bridle swinging. Between her and Tynisa stood a pale figure. In fact Tynisa had never seen a paler. It was not just the grey leathers, which were torn and stained, but he carried the bloodless pallor of a dead man. Isendter, named Whitehand, stood before his mistress with his claw upraised. He was breathing like a dying sprinter, the red on his lips vivid against his blanched skin, and the web of bandages about his wound was running with fresh blood.

‘Traitor!’ Elass screamed.

‘This is shameful,’ came Isendter’s reply, his voice as weak and ragged as Tynisa’s own. ‘I swore to defend your honour. She
won!
’

‘Traitor.’ This time the word was flat and ugly. Tynisa saw the blow before it landed, and cried out in warning, but Isendter must surely have foreseen it too. He made no move, did not dip his upraised blade by so much as an inch, accepting the rebuke of his mistress.

She ran him through, ramming the straight blade beneath his ribs, hard enough to lift him on to his toes. With a scream, Salme Elass wrenched her blade free from his body, and he dropped to his knees in the snow and keeled over. Tynisa needed only a glance to know that Isendter was dead.

Then Elass’s blade was in motion again, scything in a flat arc towards Tynisa.