'I don't understand,' protested Totho.
'I think you do.' The man facing him now was a stranger, stripped of all the mild patience of the First Minister. There was no compromise at all in that face and Totho saw that Amnon was visibly frightened. He could snap the old man in half with one hand, but things didn't work that way, it would seem. What does this remind me of, that I have seen before? Mantis and Moth, that is what it reminds me of. The strong whipped into submission by the weak.
As they stripped the armour from Amnon, his expression remained resentful but cowed. Whatever power Ethmet held over him, it was something that the First Soldier would not provoke at any cost. Who exactly are these Masters of Khanaphir? Totho wondered. A fiction, Corcoran had assumed – some invention of the Ministers, to ensure their continuing power. Totho himself had not been sure, until now. Nothing but such a deception could allow this old man to get away with it.
'I had thought that the Honoured Foreigner might come on my hunt,' Amnon muttered, almost too quiet to be heard.
'It is not appropriate,' Ethmet replied, as though Totho was not there. 'Your hunt is for dignitaries, not for merchants.'
The two of them departed after that, the old man shepherding the huge warrior out of the Iron Glove factora, leaving Totho quizzing Corcoran futilely in an attempt to understand what it had all been about. Twenty-One The boat cut through the water at a surprising pace, its shallow draught moving cleanly and with almost no wake. Che huddled inside her cloak and felt miserable.
'I don't see why I have to join this circus,' she complained. Her last few days had been hectic – the Fir was still giving her occasional stabs of queasiness and she had not come to terms with meeting Totho either – so the last thing she wanted was to be dragged from her bed to go on some hunting expedition.
'It's in your honour,' Manny explained airily. 'Or perhaps our honour.'
'Berjek didn't have to come along.'
'Master Gripshod isn't the ambassador.'
Che shook herself irritably. The locals had come to fetch them two hours before dawn, which had been a surprise to everyone except Mannerly Gorget. Manny himself had been downstairs and ready, drinking hot spiked tea, having neglected to tell anyone else of the arrangements he had made. It had meant a bungled rush for Che and Praeda to get dressed, and then be bustled down to the docks. They had reached the river to see the first bare streaks of dawn kindling in the eastern sky.
The boat that awaited them there was not what Che had expected. For a start it had no mast, and it seemed very small. It was a long, slender craft that rocked alarmingly when Manny transferred his bulk on to it, little more than an oversized canoe. At both prow and stern the curving shape tapered and rose into a stumpy carving of something that Che could not identify.
There were two boat crew, standing fore and aft, and although they must already have been waiting an hour they did not show it. Che, cowled and half-asleep, did not get a proper look at them until they had cast off and were under way, each standing upright to paddle with great strong strokes, alternating left and right. Then, belatedly, she realized that they were not Khanaphir. They were slender, with silver-grey skins, and though they had shaved heads and simple tunics like Khanaphir servants, Che recognized their angular features instantly.
'Mantis-kinden?' she exclaimed, blinking herself wider awake.
'They call them the Marsh People,' Praeda informed her. 'They seem to be attached somehow to the city, under its control, though the relationship between them and our hosts seems complex. We're going out into the delta now, you see. It's their place.' She spoke distractedly, something else clearly on her mind.
They had just passed between the great pillars of the Estuarine Gate, and Che carefully did not look back at the morass of cloth that was the Marsh Alcaia. 'I didn't realize the Khanaphir had subject peoples,' she said. 'The city's not exactly cosmopolitan.'
'And more than just the Marsh-dwellers,' Praeda confirmed, 'but they keep to their places. I've been asking to go upriver, to see some of the other settlements. The Dominion of Khanaphes has at least four disparate kinden within it, I believe.'
'What keeps them in line?' Che said softly, almost to herself. She looked up again at the nearest Marsh-dweller, silhouetted against the lightening sky. The Mantis woman did not glance down, but kept paddling strongly, stroke after stroke. What do they get out of this servitude? Who can manage to hold Mantis-kinden in thrall?
The Moths could – Achaeos's people. The thought came automatically, and she knew she was touching the secret again, hearing the pulse of Khanaphes's hidden heart. The Moths were a sorcerous, Inapt race, whereas the Khanaphir were not… or at least that was the face they showed to the world.
The river beyond the gates was swathed in mist: white curtains of it rose from the waters, cloaking the banks and muffling the deep ratcheting of the crickets and the boom of a distant cicada. Abruptly they were within it, and the world had been left behind, only the pale and ragged sheets of the mist itself coursing over and around them.
'We're not just going out alone are we?' Che whispered. 'Aren't there supposed to be more of us?'
'They'll be waiting for us further out on the river,' said Manny, with slightly hollow confidence.
'Do we have any idea what we're supposed to be hunting?' asked Praeda. Even she sounded slightly nervous.
'Fishing,' Manny said dismissively. 'After all this, it's only fishing. So I intend to get a decent look at the local fauna while everyone is fooling about with nets and things.'
There was a slight sound from the forward Mantis, which might have indicated humour. Che looked up abruptly to see a definite smile being fought off the woman's face. Her stomach sank, knowing that Manny's research had not been as thorough as he thought.
Something loomed ahead in the clearing mist, and Che made out a greater boat, a broad barge that was ten times as long as their little punt, equipped with a bare mast and a canopy to keep off the sun that would soon be burning the mist away. Che saw several robed figures standing at the rail, watching them with polite interest. She recognized Ethmet and a few of the other Ministers, obviously come to watch the sport.
'Why aren't I on that boat?' she asked.
'Ah, well,' said Manny, in a tone that admitted guilt even while he was choosing his words. 'We were given the choice, of course, but I reckoned we'd see nothing from up there.'
'Manny, are we… participating in this hunt?' Praeda asked him.
'Well, not so much – not unless you wanted to. I just wanted to make sure we were close enough to the water to see what was going on, get a decent look at the wildlife.'
There were other boats now skimming along the side of the barge. Che saw that they were tiny, barely five feet long and with a single Mantis-kinden poling or paddling them, poised with impossible balance as they scudded across the river. Those craft were not of wood, but merely bundled reeds, and where the bunched reeds were lashed together, at front and rear, they formed the original of the wooden carving that her own boat was capped with. She turned to point this out to Praeda, but the woman was already bent over the boards of their own craft, examining its construction.
'Fascinating,' she said finally. 'You realize there are no nails in this boat at all?'
'Don't be foolish,' Manny sneered. 'What's holding it together then?' He shifted his place and the craft rocked alarmingly. The Mantis crew accommodated the movement with a slight shift of balance, as though it had all been rehearsed between them and Manny the previous day.
'Rope,' Praeda revealed. 'Just rope, passed round and through and round again. It must shrink in the water, to hold everything together. But it's perfect Inapt boatbuilding. The techniques must be centuries old.'