'You are ignorant,' she said, and it took him a moment to unpick her accent. 'You are from far away and know nothing.'
'I know that they will send people to look for me – that my absence will stir the city up, and my own people as well.'
'Do not threaten us on our sacred ground,' she warned him, voice still soft but the spines jabbing him briefly. 'The city shall not come here, and you were hunted here by other foreign hands. There shall be no search to find your bones. We have made our pact with the Masters: any that cross this far are ours. It is our right.'
Another bloody thing the locals could have told us: that their tame servants have murderous relatives just a short walk away!
'I will fight,' Thalric said. His understanding of even the Lowlander Mantis-kinden was limited, so he had little to work with. 'Let me fight for our freedom. Choose your best, if you will.'
The old woman smirked. 'Your death shall not be at our hands, foreigner. Your blood shall be drunk by the earth, and by the avatar. Your comrade first, though. We must shed his blood while he still has it.'
They were opening up the wicker casing of the effigy. Osgan had collapsed, all his limbs drawn in, shuddering and lost to his own terrors. And perhaps that's a mercy. Thalric made a sudden lunge back from the woman, feeling the barbs of her arm gash his flesh. He tried to put a hand out towards her, with some wild idea of holding her hostage, but someone struck him with a spear-shaft behind his knees as another glanced from the back of his head. He joined Osgan on the ground, reeling. Around them, the Mantis-kinden had begun a soft humming, barely audible save that they were all doing it, a slow tune, but a gradually building one.
'Osgan,' Thalric said, hunching closer. 'Osgan, snap out of it!'
The former quartermaster gave a great gasp, staring upwards at the latticed idol above them. 'We're going to die,' he said.
'Then die like an Imperial Wasp soldier, not like a Flykinden coward!' Thalric spat at him.
'You don't understand,' Osgan said hollowly. 'You didn't see.'
Thalric opened his mouth to make some harsh comment, but the Mantids had stopped humming.
Someone else had entered the clearing. As she walked into the village, Che barely saw the Mantis-kinden. The guttering, flickering grey fire of Achaeos was all that was worthy of her attention. Then her mind broadened to include the wicker idol and her mind was briefly racked with memories and images, some that she owned and some that were alien to her. This is the thing that Tynisa would never speak of. She saw it with Inapt eyes, and she saw it running with death, quivering with a thousand years of adoration and sacrifice. It spoke of skulls to her, it leered blood, so that she flinched back from it even as the ghost surged forward.
Then she saw the Mantids, brought into sharp focus as their leader pointed towards her. It was a Mantis woman standing before the idol, and Che did not notice the two Wasp prisoners before her, only that old woman silhouetted before the empty effigy's power.
'The land has been generous to us today!' the old Mantis cried out. 'Take her and bring her here!'
A dozen of the Mantis-kinden were instantly in motion, falling on Che with expressionless faces, with hungry eyes. She raised her hands to ward them off, and the old woman suddenly screamed.
Inches from laying hands on her, they stopped. She saw their reserve crack, surprise and shock taking hold, expressions not native to Mantis faces. They were looking back to see their leader on her knees, covering her face. Before her was Achaeos's blurred ghost.
The Mantis warriors could not see it, Che realized, but their leader could. Despite everything she had been through, the revelation hit her like a hammer blow. Che dropped to her own knees, staring at the old woman. The Mantis leader -priestess? the unfamiliar word came into her mind – was scrabbling at the muddy, bone-littered ground in front of the idol, trying to claw some distance between herself and the shuddering grey stain in the air. Her eyes were wide.
Give me your power.
Che heard the imperious command, and she thought of the old saying, Servants of the Green, Masters of the Grey, and how the Moth-kinden had always commanded, and the Mantids obeyed.
The old woman was well clear of the idol now, and the ghost flowed into its vacant frame, its trailing edges boiling and dissolving into the surrounding air.
'Che?' said someone, and she blinked down from the supernatural to the mundane to see Thalric and his comrade staring up at her.
What can he think? But she was too far removed from any world that Thalric might know. He would only see the Mantis-kinden backing off from her as though she was on fire, as though she was sacred. She held out a hand to him, and somewhere in the gesture it turned from an offer of help to a plea for it. She felt the world swimming, her eyes drawn relentlessly back to the ghost of Achaeos hanging within the idol as though it was caught on the bars.
Thalric and Osgan were crawling towards her, trying to avoid notice. The Mantids had no time for them any more. They watched only their leader and she watched Achaeos.
Within the prison of the idol, the grey smudge waxed and grew, forming shapes – hands, features. Che waited for him, waited to recognize those blank eyes, the sharp features. I set you free, she thought. Please, be free.
It was not working. The ghost billowed and surged within the prison of the canes, but she could see that this was not enough. She heard that same harsh voice again, this time almost spitting the words. Is this all? How many years and how many deaths have led to this? Has all your duty and reverence and labour been to give birth only to this nothing?
The old woman wailed, hiding her head, and if there were words there, Che could not catch them. The other Mantis-kinden were slipping away into the trees and the water, as if unwilling to witness the torment of their leader.
You wretched wasters of power! the ghost continued. You traitors to your past! There is nothing here, nothing! Betrayers of your kinden and your heritage! There was no trace in that raging voice of the man she had once known, and Che thought, He is going mad, tied to me, tied to this world. I do not know him any more.
The tirade continued, showing no sign that it might ever stop, and Che wanted to rush forward, to shout into the face of the idol that he should stop it, that it was doing no good – but she managed one step only. The sheer fury that rippled through the ghost's substance was too much for her. She had not known that he was capable of it. Perhaps it had taken death to bring it out of him.
'Che, we have to go,' said Thalric, sounding distant, and she knew from his tone that this was not the first time he had said it. He was barely audible over the ghost's rantings, but of course he could hear none of that. Only Che herself and the Mantis woman could. But I am not the only one, and I am not insane, and this is real. Something in her, some echo of her past, wailed that this was all impossible, but she found in herself an acceptance that the world was made of these things, that the world worked by such means. It was clear to her now, in the way that the workings of a crossbow or a lock would never again be.
'We must go,' she agreed, and turned to find Thalric holding up his friend, who was pale and shaking. He met Che's eyes: two harrowed gazes, each with its load of untranslatable grief. Then she too put an arm around Osgan, keeping clear of the crude bandages, and the two of them helped guide him off into the swamp towards the river. The going was hard enough to limit any further words until the boats found them and they became separated once again. Twenty-Three They sat in silence in their room within the Collegiate embassy, one standing by the window, the other one by the door: Accius and Malius, the Vekken ambassadors.