‘More than that. Nicely broken in, and playing for the crowd.’
Despite herself, she made herself sound impressed. ‘I should like to see that.’ Can it be this easy? she thought, and then, It cannot be him, not the man this Wasp describes.
She was all wide-eyed for him, and she was young, and he was a man who liked to impress. He hopped down from the wagon in a brief flurry of wings, holding his hand out. ‘Come and see what the Empire can accomplish,’ he told her, and she jumped down after him, knowing in her heart that it could not be him, just some other Mantis pressed into servitude here.
He led her across Asta, shouting at any soldiers that got in his way, and that told her a lot about him, more than did their conversation. They wove their path through the tents and the press of bodies and the machines, around the buildings that were already showing the wear and tear of their impromptu nature, until she came to an arena.
It was as temporary as the rest of the place, crates and boards nailed together, thrown up to enclose a circle no more than thirty feet across. Wasps stood at the railing or hovered above. Officers got to sit on stacked boxes and crates that formed the crudest kind of raked seating overlooking the fighting pit. She noticed a lot of soldiers in the enclosed helms of the Slave Corps.
The major was leading her straight to the stacked-up seating, saying, ‘I don’t suppose they even have this pastime where you come from.’
In Collegium? No. But she said, ‘Do you think we don’t know good sport in the Spiderlands, Major? I happen to have a fondness for it. Fancy a wager?’
That made him grin properly, as she had hoped. ‘A patron of the games, are you? Good. I don’t know what use you might be to the Empire, but it was the sergeant mentioning our Mantis that caught my attention. I don’t want anyone tampering with my prize.’
‘Your prize?’ she asked him, as he evicted a lower-ranking officer to make a space for her. She sat down uncomfortably close to him, and in the pit below she saw two Beetle-kinden, bare-chested and armed with swords, face a Wasp contestant with a spear. She could tell that neither of the Beetles was a warrior, as they stumbled about and waved their blades frantically. Only after a moment did she notice that they were bound together, wrist to wrist.
The Wasp constantly played with them, vaulting backwards and forth, wings a blur, until he put his spear through the chest of one, leaving it there and taking up the victim’s dropped sword. The surviving Beetle tried to back away, dragging at his companion’s fallen body as the Wasp stalked him, every slow move for the entertainment of the crowd. Tynisa made herself seem to enjoy it, cheering and shouting whenever the major did. Inside, as she watched the second Beetle eventually dispatched, she thought, Is this really how they like their victories? As simple and predetermined as this? How pathetic of them.
The major called down some question that she missed amidst the noise of the crowd, and one of the slavers called back to him.
‘You’re in luck,’ the major informed her. ‘He’s next.’
Tynisa steeled herself, but she did not feel she had it in her not to react, if it was him.
The audience of soldiers had now fallen silent, almost respectfully. She caught sight of fair hair as the new fighter was led in, and then he stepped into the rough ring. He was not wearing his arming jacket but was bare to the waist, like the Beetles had been, all his fighting history traced on his hide in burns and scratches. His claw gauntlet was on his arm – Tisamon the warrior, the Weaponsmaster.
‘It’s him, isn’t it,’ the major enquired. She could hardly deny it.
‘I’m amazed you caught him,’ she heard herself say. ‘He’s been a great deal of trouble for everyone.’
‘There’s little the Empire can’t do, when it sets its mind to it,’ he bragged.
From the far side of the ring to where Tisamon had taken his stand there came a sudden rattling and a scraping. They had a corral built there, and now they hauled up a slatted gate, and out came one of the desert scorpions, its tail and claws raised in mindless threat. A creature longer than he was tall, Tisamon watched it without moving as it explored its environment, first trying to climb up the wall and being prodded back by the spears of the slavers, all the while becoming more and more enraged.
At last it either saw or scented him. The creature’s pincers gaped wider, and she heard a shrill hiss emerge from it. Tisamon slowly, very slowly, fell back into a defensive stance. The soldiers grew murmurous with speculation, and by that she gathered quickly that he had fought for them many times before.
‘You’re lucky to have arrived when you did,’ the major said, his eyes fixed on the beast. ‘A couple of days and he’s leaving us, if he lives that long.’
‘For where?’ she asked.
‘Oh, he’s a commodity now,’ he said. ‘He’s too good for the provinces. If he’s going to get cut apart, let it happen before a more discerning audience.’
Lunging forwards, the scorpion struck, but Tisamon was already gone, and when it turned on him again it was missing a claw. It backed off a little until its tail touched the wall of the arena, and then rattled forwards again, and he lopped the stinger from its tail, but still did not kill it.
It is almost as bad as the last fight, Tynisa thought. How can he allow himself to become a part of this?
But now he drove in to finish the beast off, cutting half the remaining claw away, stepping within its impotent reach and then driving the claw-blade straight down into its eyes, not once but three times, until the wretched creature twitched its last and finally lay still.
And how they cheered him! He did not acknowledge it, merely stared down at the dead beast, and it seemed to Tynisa that he were wishing their positions were reversed.
‘He’s a valuable commodity,’ the major repeated to her, ‘so if you try to harm him, we’ll make a slave of you, too, no matter how useful you might otherwise be. He’ll cause you no more trouble, though. You can see that. He’s ours now.’
She forced herself to smile at him, though it proved her hardest deception. ‘I see that he has been punished more than I could ever hope for,’ she said, feeling her heart break at her own words.
She had assumed that the major would deal further with her, take her along with him. Instead the man was gone the next night, and his prized fighter too, and without a word to her. He feared I wanted to kill Tisamon. The man must have read something in her, the ferocity of her emotion. He had not wanted to risk her harming his prize.
She had made an attempt to follow them, a pack on her back, a lone Spider-kinden heading off into the depths of the Empire. Something of her foster-father Stenwold had rubbed off, though, to make her reconsider the idea. Alone in the Empire, they will make a slave of me, or I will shed enough blood resisting it that they will have to kill me.
Tisamon was being hauled off in chains, further and further away each moment, and yet she must now play a delicate game. She was in the Empire, where every pair of eyes belonged to a spy that could denounce her. She did not have the craft for this, nor was her kinden such that she could walk through them unnoticed. She had a bitter moment of longing for the skills of the face-changing Scyla, who could have gone anywhere and done anything, but who had squandered her gifts so meanly.
Tynisa had to wait two days before the right man came along. Until that time she slipped through the ordered commotion of Asta like a slim-bladed knife. She gave herself airs, behaving as though she was the agent of someone of status. She remembered the little she had gleaned from Thalric about the shadowy Rekef, so she let people believe by looks and omissions that she might be Outlander. To the officers she was a worrying enigma, because they did not really know if they wanted her. Nor did they know if they were allowed to be rid of her. She walked a tenuous line, staying out of the way of the highest ranks and bewildering the sergeants and lieutenants.