‘Spider, I should have slain you before,’ said Felise, still holding Thalric up on his toes, holding her perfect pose without the slightest tremor. ‘What is this Wasp to you?’
‘Nothing,’ Destrachis said. ‘I have never been the Empire’s.’
‘But you are not mine either,’ she said. ‘Who is it that pays you, Spider?’
Destrachis pursed his lips. ‘Must there be someone?’
‘You are no gangster from Helleron, and it was no mere chance that we met. Do not take me for a fool.’
‘Or I will be “next”?’ Destrachis wondered aloud. His voice was casual, but Stenwold could see how tight his face had become with controlling his expression. ‘But you’re right, of course. I spun my way into the fiefdoms of Helleron. I engineered it so that I would travel with you.’
Stenwold could see Thalric watching with the utter concentration of a man whose life is being extended by every word spoken.
‘Mantis warrior,’ Felise said. ‘If I asked you to slay that Spider there, would you do it?’
‘Without hesitation,’ Tisamon said, and Destrachis went pale all of a sudden, feeling a subtle change of stance in the man beside him. The claw was abruptly raised to hover over Stenwold’s back, the point pricking the nape of the Spider’s neck. Stenwold himself had gone very still. He had been about to protest, to remind them that they were in Collegium, in the very Amphiophos — but they were not. At least Felise and Tisamon and Destrachis were not. The place they shared was infinitely older, where such things as this were done.
‘If he gives me no answer, you may slay him,’ Felise decided. She was still staring into Thalric’s face, had not once taken her eyes off him. ‘Who has hired you to plague me, Destrachis?’
‘Arante Destraii, your aunt,’ Destrachis said, still holding tenuously on to calm. ‘Ask me no more questions, Felise.’
‘I do not believe that,’ she said. ‘Shall I tell the Mantis to kill you? Tell me the truth. Tell it all.’
‘Please, Felise, you do not-’
Thalric hissed in pain as her claws dug into him a little, and Felise got out, ‘Mantis-’
‘Wait!’ Destrachis got out. ‘You will kill me if I tell you, and have me killed if I do not. Is that justice?’
‘Why is it that only the unjust cry for justice?’ Tisamon said. His claw twitched, drawing a spot of blood.
Stenwold felt himself trapped in a world he suddenly did not understand. ‘What is going on?’ he asked.
‘Precisely, Beetle-kinden. Explain all, Destrachis.’
‘I am hired by your family,’ he said quickly, ‘and that is no more than the truth. Not your husband’s noble line, for the Wasps made sure no drop of his bloodline remained. Your own family was not great enough to be extinguished, so you were taken alive. Do you remember being a prisoner of the Empire, Felise?’
‘I was never a prisoner.’
‘Of course you were, and you were to be a slave, but the Arantes rescued you and. ’ He stuttered to silence.
‘Speak!’ she commanded.
‘You were. broken.’ He waited to see if the words would kill him. ‘You were not well, in your mind. So your own family took you into their house and hired doctors to make you well, but we. they could not. They tried so many ways, until eventually one used an ancient craft to bring your mind back to the place where it had snapped, and stitch that broken end onto the present day — or thus I can best describe it. Shall I go on?’
She remained silent, but Tisamon shifted behind him, and so Destrachis continued. ‘It did not go well. It was not well done. better not to have meddled, would be my opinion now. But you remembered, at least, the name and face of the man who had done those atrocities to you, and you determined you would have your revenge, whatever the cost. Your family were concerned. They. ’ And he stopped again, and Stenwold was surprised to see the Spider’s eyes glitter with tears. ‘Felise. ’
‘I remember,’ she said slowly. Thalric saw something surface then in her eyes, and she looked at him anew. ‘I remember you now. You are the man who slew my children.’
He could not nod, would not speak, but something in his face confirmed it.
‘I remember,’ she said again. ‘What have I done?’ She took her hands away abruptly, looking back at the bisected table, at the upright sword, as though they were quite strange to her.
Thalric, shifted, sagging an inch, and faster than Stenwold could follow she whirled back to him, thumb jabbing at his face. It raked a line of blood down his cheek, but that was all.
‘Why can I not kill you?’ she screamed at him. Her clawed hands hovered right before his face, twitching and shaking, but still she could not strike. In the echo of that cry her onlookers were silent. Stenwold saw, in sidelong glances, the same stricken expression appear on the faces of both Tisamon and Destrachis.
Thalric let out a long, slow breath. ‘Because I’m all you’ve got,’ he replied between gritted teeth. ‘I wondered that, when you had me before. How many chances do you need? I’m right here now, so why not just do it? If you want me, what better chance can you possibly look for?’
In a voice almost lost, in the utter silence that followed, she whispered, ‘Help me.’
Destrachis moved forwards solicitously, but it was Tisamon who pushed past to clasp her by the shoulders. Her claws twitched at him but never reached him, although he made no move to stop her.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘I shall find you some food and drink, then a bed.’ He looked back at Thalric. ‘This man shall die at your command, I swear it.’
He led her from the room, pausing only to look Destrachis straight in the face. The Mantis made no threats, though, and after a moment looked away.
They did not come for Che the day after that, either, and she was even provided with a scant meal of soup and broken biscuit. The Wasp army camp become slowly a more permanent affair. She heard the sounds of rough carpentry overhead and guessed that the farmhouse was being extended and fortified. She kept her ears open because, if she could somehow later speak to her friends, she wanted to have something to report to them.
General Malkan, she overheard from the guards, was not moving the army onwards. Though hot-blooded, he was no fool. The casualties the Seventh had sustained meant that they would stand little enough chance before the walls of Sarn, even if Sarn stood alone. What she learned hardly raised the spirits, but it did give some small sliver of satisfaction.
And Sarn was unlikely to be standing alone. Malkan and his officers must be concerned enough about that for the news to filter down to the lowest and the most luckless in their army and, through their bitter gossip, to Che.
Collegium was free of the Vekken, she also learned, and could therefore lend aid to Sarn if needed. Moreover there were fearful whispers of the Ant-kinden’s newest allies. Word was out about the Ancient League and the soldiers were rife with rumours of some age-old secret society binding all the Inapt of the west together, which the Empire’s presence had now brought into the light. Like all Apt races the Wasps had their dark past, when the old kinden had terrorized them with wizardry and nightmares, and some vestige of that remained even now. There was a current of fear running through the Seventh at the thought of having to confront such a thing as the Ancient League.
The more level-headed, however, put the problem as Malkan would see it: if, even with an army at full strength, he pitched against the walls of Sarn, the warriors of Ether-yon and Nethyon could simply swarm down from the north, catching him in a pincer movement. If he attacked them first, the Sarnesh would sally forth from their city. It was not the individual elements, but their combination, that concerned him.
I did this, Che thought to herself. Though she would meet her fate soon enough at the hands of the Empire’s minions, she would at least have the satisfaction of knowing that she had accomplished so much. Faced with the resistance she had helped to build, the Seventh was now going nowhere, merely waiting for another army to be freed to aid it and the Fourth in the conquest of the Lowlands.