‘It’s no secret Maker’s going north,’ Balkus said. ‘And someone’s got to watch over your woman there.’
‘I watch her,’ Destrachis said reasonably. ‘But perhaps you mean someone you can trust.’
‘We don’t know you,’ Balkus agreed readily. ‘Furthermore, Maker’s Mantis friend has taken a shine to her, but I really don’t think he’s taken one to you.’
Destrachis’s long face grimaced at that. ‘In Seldis and Siennis they tend to laugh at the Mantis-kinden and their grudges,’ he said. ‘Of course, the Mantids don’t come there much. And, as for the rest, I’m perhaps the only Spider-kinden who’ll ever admit to you that I cannot be wholly relied on. I’ve failed before.’
‘Haven’t we all.’ Balkus turned back to Felise Mienn, still engaged in her exercise, watching in silence for a moment as she spun and glittered. She was beautiful, there was no doubt, but it was a beauty that would be dangerous to approach. Her very presence set him reaching instinctively for his sword-hilt, and he fought off this impulse because it could be so easily misconstrued by a madwoman like her.
‘It’s something of a mystery, really,’ continued the careful voice of Destrachis. ‘Before it happened, she was never reckoned so good. She was trained, of course. She was a Mercer, and they’re not exactly slack with sword or bow, but this… this mastery just seems to have fallen on her like a mantle, after her family was lost to her.’
Balkus nodded, still trying to follow the shimmering movements of the Dragonfly-kinden, and finding that his speed of eye was not quite up to the task.
‘Well it’s all very pretty,’ he said, as dismissively as he could muster, ‘but I prefer my own manner of fighting.’ He patted the heavy bulk of the nailbow resting on the stonework beside him.
‘Nobody’s keeping you here,’ Destrachis pointed out.
‘Like you said,’ said Balkus. ‘Sten Maker left me here with an armful of jobs, and keeping an eye on that one there was one of them – in case she goes mad.’
‘A waste of your time,’ the Spider observed.
‘Says you. I’ve seen her and I’ve seen mad, and she’s it.’
Destrachis smiled, but it was a tired smile. Felise had been in Collegium for more than a month now without any sudden explosion of her madness. She had not even shown any inclination to charge off after Thalric. Yes, she was making every show of being sane now, and yet he knew it was not so. He felt like a man living in a tottering house that one night will collapse and crush him. ‘Oh, I’ll not argue with that, friend,’ he said. ‘Only that, when it happens, you’ll not be able to stop it.’
‘My girl here can stop near enough anything,’ Balkus said proudly.
Destrachis sniggered. ‘You might get the chance to shoot at her, but you would never hit her. Then her sword would cut that piece of artifice of yours in half.’
He expected a quick rejoinder, but instead Balkus craned back at him, frowning. ‘It’s Sarnesh steel, this. She could cut my nailbow in half?’
‘That weapon of hers is one of the Good Old Swords, as we say, made in the old fashion that almost nobody remembers now, save amongst the Dragonflies, and perhaps the Mantis-kinden. A proper Commonweal noble’s duelling blade, no less. They don’t make them like that any more, but they don’t have to, because they last for ever.’
Balkus gave a rude snort. ‘If they’re so wonderful, everyone would be making swords like that still.’
‘Not everyone can devote so many years to crafting a single blade,’ Destrachis explained, silencing the Ant once more. When it seemed that he had given Balkus enough to think about, he added, ‘She’s changed, though. I travelled with her from Helleron to Vek, and I can’t remember her ever practising like this when she was hunting down Thalric. It’s as though it’s some new challenge she’s preparing for…’ His professional instincts were worried – that much he knew. Perhaps it was just the idea that Felise might become even better at killing people. In the Commonweal they believe that madness can gift someone with a skill and vision that sanity cannot touch, and here in her I see the proof of that, but now she is taking that madness and reforging it, and why?
‘And you’re meant to be a doctor,’ Balkus scoffed. ‘You want to know what this is about? I’ll tell you right off.’
‘And?’
‘She wants to impress someone. You know who I mean.’
Destrachis looked at Felise dancing, the utter precision of it, and at the same time the passion that drove it. Such a thing to overlook. ‘I cannot think so. She has been driven many miles by the death of her family. Surely…’ Or has this lump of an Ant-kinden struck the truth, after all?
‘She’ll be disappointed,’ Balkus added, ‘and I wouldn’t want to be around when that happens, either. I like my nailbow in one piece.’
‘Disappointed? In what way?’
‘You get to know a bit about the Mantids, growing up in Sarn, and besides, that one’s madder than most. Tisamon, he’s got a history. I picked it up in pieces, but that Tynisa’s his own daughter, which meant there was a mother. I never heard of a Mantis-kinden who paired off twice.’
‘I’ll freely confess that I don’t know too much about them,’ Destrachis said. There had been enough of them about in the Commonweal, but their Lowlander cousins’ hostile reputation against his kind had led him to keep his distance.
‘Shame, when you think about it. Both as mad as each other, both widowed,’ Balkus mused. ‘Do well together that pair.’
Destrachis sent him a stern frown, to make known his disapproval of such thoughts directed at his patient. Inwardly, his mind was spinning. Of course, Felise could easily know far more than he about the Mantids: as a Dragonfly, as a Mercer especially. The Spider-kinden doctor’s former uneasiness now had a focus at last. He remembered when Tisamon and Felise had fought, how perfectly matched they had been. How there had been a connection, in the dance of blades, that neither of them could ever have managed by speech or expression or anything civilized.
So, in her mind, they would fight again – and she would win him, or else she would kill him, or he would kill her.
Perhaps, he thought wryly, she was approaching it right. Perhaps that was what Mantis-kinden meant by ‘love’.
College engineers had restored the rail line between Sarn and Collegium within a tenday of the Vekken defeat, and the floods of returning refugees, mostly frightened-looking children, served to remind the people of Collegium that, although their Sarnesh allies had been able to send precious little armed support, they had yet played their part.
It was to be a time of confirming old alliances and, as Stenwold hoped, making new ones. The crisis point was reached, for the Lowlands must stand united now, or within the year to come the Wasps would roll over them, city by city.
It had been some time since he had visited Sarn, several years even. He suspected that the changes he now saw in the city were only months in the making, because Ant-kinden changed nothing that did not need it. They were a people of traditions, of set ways of doing things. Now someone had kicked over their nest.
It was easy to see how the Wasps had upset that familiar way of life. It almost seemed that a third of the walls of the city was spun in scaffolding, as though some great metal spider was saving the city for a later meal. The buildings along the road running beside the rails had all gone, demolished and then levelled to strip any enemy of cover, despite the fact that the main assault would most likely come from the air. The walls themselves were changing shape, from the original smooth curve that encircled the city to something spiky, with sloping, pointed buttresses jutting out to give defending archers more inroads into any besieging force, also battlements that curved up and out and then in again, so that sheltered crossbows could fire through slots above them at any airborne enemy. The summit of the wall was studded with siege engines and, as the rail-automotive drew closer, Stenwold watched an impossibly spindly crane winching one of these into position. Some were heavy-barrelled leadshotters, some repeating ballistae plated in steel. There were others still that were new to him – racks of tubes that must be the new serial scrap-shotters he had heard about, which would fill a space of air with enough loose metal to bring down anything flying through it. He saw the machines tilt and turn experimentally with hisses of steam leaking from their joints. All the wall emplacements were armoured with shields before and above to protect the engineers. Too heavy to be winched by hand, the engines were kept grinding back and forth by steam or clockwork.