‘You fool, you are bound to this! You have nothing but this!’ hissed Uctebri, but Seda was no longer even looking at him. She was abruptly retreating, staring past him.
He looked around instinctively. He could not, in that moment, help himself.
Out of the tangle of fighting Wasp soldiers a single figure had fought clear. It was drenched head to foot in blood, with one hand gone, a spear’s broken shaft jutting from its leg. Even as it burst forth, a soldier drove a sword into the apparition’s back and lost his grip on the slick hilt. The bloody, mangled thing was then free to hurl itself up the tiered seats, keening a battle-cry.
Your prey is already dead, Uctebri thought, seeing the drained corpse that had been Alvdan the Second, Emperor of all the Wasps. It was still his thought as Tisamon reached him with that fearsome claw drawn back.
For a split second Uctebri fought to assemble his magic to overwhelm the susceptible mind of the Mantis who had been his tool for so long. Tisamon’s mind was all pain and fury and ravaged love, so slippery with blood that the Mosquito struggled for purchase on it. For a second he had the man again in his power, but then something lanced through Uctebri’s leg, tearing his robe, laying his flesh open with dreadful pain from the calf downwards to pin his foot to the ground. He experienced a second’s horrified realization that the blade that now shed his precious blood was the dagger that Seda had knocked from his grasp – and that its new wielder was Tynisa.
Her hands gripping about the dagger hilt, Tynisa watched a Wasp soldier, his own face slashed open by Tisamon’s claw, slam his blade up to the hilt in Tisamon’s back, alongside the sword already lodged there, and Tisamon shuddered, crying out something, a word or a name. It could have been Felise.
The claw descended and Uctebri screamed, holding out the only thing he had left to defend himself.
Tisamon drove his blade into the Shadow Box, still howling that formless name, so that its wooden sides, with all their distorted carvings, flew apart like kindling, and for a moment there was a boiling, evaporating rip in Uctebri’s hands, but shrivelling and dying even as Tynisa watched it.
Uctebri heard the triumphant cry in his head, the voice of his slave Laetrimae, and of all of her kin, of the entire doomed place of the Darakyon, as the anchor that held them to the world was suddenly gone, the snarl in the world’s weave unravelling.
Tisamon’s claw buried itself deep in the Mosquito’s narrow chest, and the Sarcad’s own blood washed across the floor, to become lost in the stolen glory of the Emperor’s.
Thirty-One
She had seen the Bleakness go down.
Even as the corpse of the Starnest was settling on Solarno, the Wasp fliers had been attacking. They had been mad, then, almost jostling each other out of the air for a piece of him. Hawkmoth’s ugly, armoured vessel had turned back over the city but they had been putting bolts into him already, and Taki could do nothing. She had hung in the air, naked, unshelled, a poor Fly-kinden girl with nothing but a knife, watching the end of the most notorious pirate of the age.
In a flurry of yellow and black orthopters he had gone, the Bleakness thundering out over the Exalsee as if Hawkmoth was seeking to return to one of his island hideouts. The shrapnel throwers had shredded the air to either side of him, and at least two of the Wasp machines had been knocked out of the sky, spinning over and over on suddenly ragged wings before tumbling away. But there were a half-dozen others still strafing him, passing back and forth and pounding the Bleakness with everything they had.
She had watched the Bleakness begin its long dive towards the cold waters of the Exalsee, with the Wasps chasing it still.
And now she sat on the ground in the silence that followed, and wept.
It was not truly silence, since so much of the city had burnt, and some was burning still. There were a few knots of Wasps still holding out, in this quarter or that. To her it seemed a silence though, being without the sound of engines and the rush of the wind.
They had won, apparently.
Scobraan was dead, she knew. She had felt it in the way the handling of the Mayfly Prolonged had suddenly changed, known that within that metal and wood casing he was dead, his hands slack on the controls. The Creev was dead, and Hawkmoth too, he who had borne the Solarnese no love but had come to help them fight the greater enemy. Te Frenna, who had been more of a dandy than a duellist, was dead. With them had fallen dozens of others: Solarnese pilots, pirates of Chasme and the Exalsee, dragonfly-knights from Princep Exilla, and hundreds of citizens of Solarno who had turned out on to the streets to fight the Wasps.
Nero was dead, too. He would paint no more. Cesta, bloody-handed, a name feared and hated and courted, Cesta also was dead. She could not imagine a world without his loathsome shadow.
She did not weep for them, though she had cause. Her loss cut keener than even her own brother’s death had cut. Her Esca Volenti was gone, smashed on the streets of Solarno along with Axrad’s flier, and probably Axrad himself. There would be other orthopters, she knew, but never one like that, so perfect, so loyal. In the midst of so much death she wept, like a child for a lost mother, over a machine.
A footstep nearby made her look up, red-eyed. Niamedh crouched beside her, put a hand on her shoulder. Her Executrix had come unscathed through the fire, one of very few. Niamedh understood, though. Behind her stood the Dragonfly lord, Drevane Sae, leaning heavily on a staff with his leg splinted. His painted face was drawn and his expression grim. His mount, carefully nurtured from the egg as they all were, had been shot from beneath him. He also understood her grief.
There would be work to be done, and soon. Those citizens who were not mourning, or rescuing their possessions, or putting out fires, were already looking northwards. There was an Empire out there that they had barely guessed at, and the same thought occurred to all of them: What if it comes back?
It would definitely come back if it could. Unless Che and her friends could strike enough of a blow, then this triumph would be nothing. The victory that had cast the invader out of Solarno was just a stone bouncing off armour-plate to the Empire. It would not leave any dent in history, unless so many stones were thrown at once that even the Empire would have to pause, step back, raise a shield.
Taki found that she did not even care. The way she felt at the moment, Solarno was hardly her home. So much that she genuinely cared for here had been cut from it.
‘They’ve cleared out the last of the Wasps,’ Niamedh informed her. ‘They surrendered, I think. They’re going to be sent north with some suitably defiant message.’
‘Suitable?’ How about ‘Please don’t kill us?’ But Taki did not voice it. ‘So what now?’
‘Ceremonies,’ the other pilot said drily. ‘You know how we Solarnese are about such things. They’ll want to give you something in reward, probably. I thought I’d let you know in case you wanted to dodge it.’
‘Let them give me a new machine,’ said Taki hollowly. ‘Then let them let me go.’ Right now she wanted none of it. She was sick of it all.
The princess stood up. The crowd seated about the arena was in seven stages of panic and confusion. They did not know what was going on. Perhaps she was the only one who did.
Seda looked upon the body of her brother and, for the first time in her life, she felt sorry for him. He sat rigid in his chair, but twisted sideways, his skin bleached and on his face an expression of the most abysmal horror.