She had not meant to. Her blade skidded and then dug in and she looked up into that furious white face, with its monstrous, tusked underbite. Another shortsword raked shallowly across the man's ribs and he roared, turning with axe raised high. As it went up, the second Vekken rammed his own blade into the Scorpion's armpit all the way to the hilt with effortless strength, and then the two of them were moving on, wordless in their teamwork.
The great scorpion had torn a gash in the Spider's tent, and her guards had taken up spears to keep it back. Abruptly there was a series of harsh snapping sounds and the monster recoiled, claws raised high in threat. Che turned to see the three Iron Glove men calmly reloading, slipping finger-length bolts into the chambers of their snapbows.
Snapbows?
There was no time to wonder. Another Scorpion-kinden thundered past, another giant. They were all at least seven feet tall for sure. She stumbled back, seeing the huge man take a sweep with his greatsword, catching one of the Dragonflies and almost cutting the woman in half. The Scorpion roared in defiance, and then his head snapped back, the fletchings of an arrow jutting from between his eyes.
Abruptly there was nothing to fight, and Che was wandering amid a trampled camp with her sword in her hands. The Scorpions and their monster had fallen back into the desert. She spotted them regrouping, assuming themselves unseen, two hills away.
A lot of people were looking at her, with expressions she lacked the strength to analyse. She sat down heavily, feeling drained.
Achaeos? She said it in her head, but there was nothing but the echo of her own thoughts. Achaeos, thank you, but can you not give me more? Thank you for saving us all, but … But I love you and it is hard for me, with you dead and so close.
She found that she was crying, the tears streaking down her cheeks. Without warning the cold struck her, making her shiver uncontrollably. The sword fell from her hand. The two Vekken ambassadors were nearby, watching her doubtfully. She did not care. It was all too much. Her sobs escaped whether she tried to stifle them or not.
Trallo draped a blanket round her. It was hours from dawn but nobody would be getting any more sleep. There were five bodies to bury, and as many dead Scorpions to move from near the water. She heard the Fly give a businesslike sigh, steeling himself to his task.
There was no answer within her. Achaeos — or his ghost or her madness — had done his work and left without a word. Oh, you have grown cold, since you died. She felt like screaming for him to either stay and let her know he still loved her, or leave her for ever — and who cared if the Scorpions killed her? It was hard, it was so hard.
Eight
She was a prisoner in her own lodgings.
There were no guards. She was not bound. The door was not locked. Still, Petri Coggen felt her confinement as keenly as if the manacle was around her wrist. She had felt a sense of doom weighing on her since they had brought her back from the Marsh Alcaia.
They had given her servants, for the Khanaphir had been solicitous of her comfort to the point of patronizing her. The foreign lady must have everything. The servants cleaned her rooms and brought her food, and would have dressed and bathed her if she had let them. They ignored her when she told them to leave her alone. Shaven-headed Beetle men and women with fixed faces, they glided in and out of her life like tidy ghosts.
They made no attempt to stop her going out into the city. She had tried to escape their attention, to get her letter out, but the servants had followed at a respectful distance. She had tried running, but when she had stopped, wheezing for breath, they had been there still, or others like them, standing patiently by. There was no reproach in their faces, only polite concern for the stranger. She had run until heat and exhaustion had brought her to her knees, but they had been waiting there wherever she had run to, with slight smiles at her odd behaviour.
As her last resort, she had gone to the docks. Khanaphes traded all down the coast and across the sea, so there were always ships.
The first she had approached was a solid Khanaphir trawler. She had climbed halfway up the gangplank, already reaching for her money, before she saw the expression on the captain's face. He knew her. He had been told about her. Standing there at the rail, eyeing her with the polite disinterest of his city, he informed her, without needing words, that there was no way she was leaving the city on his ship.
So she had then looked for foreign ships. Surely the sinister influence of the Ministers could not be absolute. There would be ships out of distant ports, and at this point she would take a berth for anywhere. Even the dubious hospitality of the Spiderlands would be preferable.
She found a Spider-kinden trader, all elegant swept lines. She looked around for the captain, and saw her in conversation with a mild-looking Khanafir man. The Spider glanced at Petri and gave a faint shake of her head. Petri stumbled away, ran back down the quays. She did not care who stopped to watch the crazed foreigner make an exhibition of herself.
There was a broad-beamed cargo-hauler at the very end of the quays. Its crew was a mongrel mixture, halfbreeds, Mantis-kinden, lean and sallow Grasshoppers. They looked as disreputable as anyone Petri had ever seen. She rushed up to them, noticing their hands drift instinctively for hilts and hafts.
'Please, I need passage out,' she gasped. 'I have money.' She felt as though she was throwing herself from the jaws of one monster into the pincers of another.
One of the Grasshopper-kinden shouldered his way forward and crouched at the top of the gangplank, elbows crooked over his bony knees. 'Come up,' he said. He had a scar, jagged and twisted, down the side of his long face. In other circumstances she would have been terrified of him.
She made it up the gangplank, the villainous crew watching, narrow-eyed.
'You haven't been in Khanaphes long,' the Grasshopper captain observed.
'Long enough. Months now.'
He laughed quietly, shook his head. 'The blink of an eye. You have the city's interest, little helpless one. We have heard. There is no shipman who does not know.'
She felt a shudder go through her. 'Please … I must leave.'
'Anyone who took you away from here, while you bear that mark, would never trade here again, or ever be welcome. They carve their memories in stone here. They never forget. I could pass my ship on three times, and neither she nor I could put in safely at this port again, nor my sons, nor theirs.'
With a wrenching despair she realized that the incongruous tone of this vicious-looking creature was only sympathy.
'They will kill me,' she whispered. 'Please …'
'They might,' he said. His shrug indicated that the incidence of death punctuated his life as regularly as meals and sleeping. 'Or they might vanish you. Or they might lose interest and let you go. But we cannot help you. You do not have the money to compensate us for what we would lose.'
She left his ship, with feet dragging. Her concerned retinue was already waiting.
At Porta Rabi, it felt like the edge of the world.
The desert petered out into a scrub of sawgrass and thorns, and then the land fell away completely in a tangle of vines. Stunted strees clung grimly to the cliff edge, leaning at mad angles over the rocks far below. The cliffs were relieved only the once, where the land slanted steeply down to a beach of broken stone. It was there the intrepid Solarnese had built Porta Rabi. They had used the pale grey stone of the cliffs, but the buildings were the same odd burlesque of Spider styles, all pointed arches, tapering columns, grillwork screens, but all looking slightly wrong. They had made a Solarno in miniature, a little stepped crescent of buildings gathered about two long piers that went far enough into the sea to allow big ships enough draught to moor there. Above, where the cliffs took over, there was a reaching scaffold of wooden floors and scaffolding, rooms and buildings suspended before the rockface, all of it looking open-plan and half-built. Che identified this as Dragonfly-kinden work. There was a sizeable presence of them here from Princep Exilla and, putting aside their normal rivalries, the two kinden worked together to keep the port open in this inhospitable corner of the world. Even so, Trallo warned them, the streets were not safe after nightfall. The merchants who ran Porta Rabi retired early to their well-guarded compounds, and everywhere else became lawless after dark.