‘Call me out for my father’s blood as well as my mother’s, then,’ Tynisa told her flatly. ‘I am ashamed of none of it.’
For a moment the Mantis’s eyes finally stopped, narrowed as though she was trying to see into Tynisa’s soul. At last she said, ‘So,’ a single word crammed with venom.
‘Tynisa, this isn’t necessary,’ Che insisted, but her sister held up a hand to stop her.
‘In this, Che, I know better than you, and it would happen sooner or later. Let it be now rather than when we’ve more important things to concern us.’ Tynisa had not looked away from the Mantis woman, and those last words were pointed. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
Che opened her mouth a few times, as Tynisa limped away from their camp, moving closer to the trees. I have magic, she thought. They have to listen to me! But she was at the limits of her understanding, and whatever power had been invested in her, she was still growing into it. She only hoped the Empress found herself in the same position.
The others were watching her, but she could only shrug. Tynisa had taken up a stance, the elegant, Mantis-worked rapier in her hand levelled at her opponent. This would be the first time she had fought seriously, since taking her wounds. Another Mantis, another Weaponsmaster, had cut her up savagely in a duel in the Commonweal and, though she had won, the injuries had stayed with her, the scar-tissue stiffening her movements, making every day a trial of pain.
The Mantis woman had her own blade levelled, taking her place with an enviable, easy grace. For a moment the two of them stood motionless, the duel taking shape, silent and still, between them.
The Mantis struck first, darting in along the line of Tynisa’s blade and thrusting for her heart. The lightest of parries knocked the strike away, nothing of Tynisa moving but the wrist, There was no riposte, and the Mantis ended up out of distance as she stepped back to avoid the counter-attack that never came. Another poised moment fell.
A few feints followed, the Mantis’s sword flicking in from either side, testing her opponent’s defences. Each time Tynisa turned her enemy’s steel aside with a minimum of motion. Her arm did all. Her feet might as well have been nailed down.
Here it comes, Che thought, for the Mantis had got the measure of her opponent now and was gathering herself, the exploratory feints becoming more and more aggressive, her attacks fiercer and fiercer, and from more angles, stepping left and right to make her opponent move.
Tynisa moved. Abruptly she was dodging sideways to match the Mantis, and it was like a crippled beggar suddenly taking to his heels to avoid the guard. The limp, the stiffness, all were gone without trace, and Tynisa’s old grace was back with her, born of her varied heritage and her long practice, of her own perfect affinity with the fight. The Mantis fell back, trying to open some space in which to adjust, but Tynisa flowed with her, sword dancing, clattering and scraping as it stooped and clashed with the other woman’s blade.
What the others perceived, Che could not know, but her eyes saw the trick, the Weaponsmaster’s discipline that Tynisa drew on. It was almost as if her rapier was fixed in the air, moving of its own accord and lending its wielder the strength to move with it. The sword led and Tynisa followed, an equal partnership of its strength and her direction. If she let go of the hilt, Che felt that her sister would collapse like a puppet.
The Mantis woman hissed in fury and tried to reclaim the initiative, losing out to her emotions for only a moment: that this halfbreed, this abomination and trickster, was making a mockery of her people’s ways. In that moment Tynisa had shrugged past her guard, rapier point dipping past the Mantis’s quillons to gash her hand, to slice a thin line of red up her arm, to come to rest at the hollow of her throat. Now they were still again, just as they had started. For a long moment nobody spoke, nobody moved.
‘Finish it,’ the Mantis said quite calmly, as though the blade was pressed at someone else’s neck.
‘Cut your own throat, if you want,’ Tynisa answered carelessly, and abruptly she stepped back, sword lowering, and turned her back on her opponent. The access to speed and poise that had possessed her drained away, and it was plain that her next few steps pained her. The sword had done its work, and now abandoned her to the aftermath.
‘If you claim that badge, you claim our ways!’ the Mantis shouted at her retreating back.
‘I have lived by Mantis ways,’ Tynisa said flatly, not looking at her. ‘I have seen where they lead and I am amazed there are any of your kinden left alive. Save that I know that it is because nobody can live up to those iron rules you set yourselves. It is only by constant, concealed failures, day by day, that the Mantis-kinden can survive at all. I know this from my father and I know this from myself. And yet the badge is still with me, as is the sword, and I am worthy of both. Can you deny that?’ At last she turned, inviting challenge.
The Mantis woman bared her teeth and braced herself, twice seeming on the very point of leaping at Tynisa and recommencing the duel. At the last, though, she could not.
‘Che, we go into the wood tomorrow?’ Tynisa asked.
‘That’s my plan.’ Che did not even bother with the usual platitudes of, You don’t have to go with me. ‘The Sarnesh want to send soldiers in as well, so as to help the Etheryen counter the Wasps. It’ll make sense to travel with them at first, but we’ll need to go faster, and deeper, soon enough.’
‘Then tell them we are coming. Tell them a Weaponsmaster is coming. And tell them that all the rest, my blood, my face, none of it matters if I have earned this badge.’ And Tynisa stared at the Mantis woman until she had retreated back into the woods, looking baffled and angry but unable to deny it.
Eight
His name was Esmail. His name was Ostrec. He had two faces and two lives, one lurking invisible beneath the other, like a fish hanging in dark waters with its eyes fixed on the surface.
The waters ran deeper still, for that outer shell of Ostrec was itself a many-layered thing. Lieutenant Ostrec of the Quartermasters Corps: ambitious young officer, pushy, arrogant, competitive, all the virtues the Wasps so loved. No doubt his outmanoeuvred or fallen rivals had all wondered what his secret was. It was that behind the outer face of Lieutenant Ostrec lurked Major Ostrec of the Rekef, hunter of traitors. He had been on close terms with great men until recently, had Major Ostrec, but then there had been a culling amongst those grandees of the secret police, a sudden dying off of the Rekef’s leadership to isolate their General Brugan. His plots to control the Empress had gone awry, Brugan’s allies were dead, and the Rekef itself was lessened. And Ostrec? Major Ostrec had seamlessly transferred his loyalty to the Empress, and nobody in the know had been much surprised. Who would not have done so, under the circumstances?
Now he was Major Ostrec of the Red Watch, a company of the elite created by the Empress herself. Most assumed that its members were all ex-Rekef spies and killers, or similar terrors, but there was a stranger secret at the heart of it as the man behind Ostrec’s face knew only too well.
He knew the Empress was Inapt and a magician. She had hunted out Wasp-kinden with some faint touch of the old days in them — from mixed blood or some far-distant ancestor of power. These Wasps she had made her own, bound them to her by blood and named them her Red Watch. Each had a mere drop of magic in them, but together they fed their mistress by their deeds. Seda had come late to her power, by the slow decline of magic, but she was reinventing lost traditions at a frightening rate. She understood that darkness and fear and pain were not just tools of the arcane, they were weapons of statecraft.