One
To stare into the forest was to stare into the heart of time.
The darkness between those trees had not changed for centuries. Here had come no revolution, nor busy-handed Apt with their machines. The old ways still held sway in those green depths. The reclusive denizens lived by the bow and the spear, hunting and gathering what the forest gave up to them. Sometimes, in their season, they were hunted in turn by the great beasts they took their name from: Mantis-kinden, fierce and free.
And they fought. They honed their skills from the earliest age by practising against each other and against the world. Although the Apt kinden had shone their bright light across most of the Lowlands, here was a bastion of the old darkness that even the Ant-kinden had considered too costly to conquer. Generations of Sarnesh tacticians had turned their eyes to that brooding presence on their eastern horizon, then shaken their heads and turned away.
The forest itself was nameless, or else had a secret name as all the greatest of the Inapt things had secret names. The only labels the Apt ever recorded belonged to the two Mantis holds that held dominion within the trees: Etheryon to the west, Nethyon to the east.
They held to themselves, mostly, although a steady trickle of young Etheryen had broken tradition enough to take Sarnesh coin in exchange for the use of their skills. More recently they had gone to war, and the first tremor of change had disturbed the leaves of their forest. A conflict not of their own making: a war against the Wasp-kinden, because an Apt threat had finally arisen that would not just shake its head and go away.
If he stared into the trees long enough, Amnon felt that he could feel a faint connection, a path back to the same certainties he had once lived by, which had made him happy to serve, happy to lead, happy to know his place. . His homeland was a city by a river a thousand years ago, the past held in gentle stasis as the seasons turned, all the sons and daughters of Khanaphes busy at their allotted tasks. He had lived most of his life with no question in his head that could not be answered by, Because it is so.
Then the Empire had come, the world he had been born to overwritten in just a pitiful few days: all the certainties crumbling to the touch. He had not missed it, not then. Instead, he had despised the old ways because they had failed his people. He had seen his exile from Khanaphes as a badge of honour.
He wished he could go back, now, but there was nowhere to return to. The Khanaphes that was marked as a protectorate on Imperial maps did not resemble the home of his younger days.
There had been a woman of Collegium, a machine-handed and clever beauty, and, as long as he had her, the past could blow away with the desert wind for all he cared. Praeda Rakespear, her name had been, and he had loved her, and she him. And the Wasps had killed her, and left him marooned in this island of the harsh present with no way back and nowhere to go.
When he stared into the Mantis forest, he almost felt that the dark past those trees harboured was somehow also the past of his youth, and that the bright sun of Khanaphes was what cast those deep shadows. Surely all pasts eventually converged on one another, if you walked far enough back down that river?
But now the drone of a Sarnesh spotter orthopter intruded, boring into his ears and as impossible to ignore as a mosquito. The distant, certain past was wrenched away. At his back stood the Sarnesh camp — hundreds of those tan-skinned Ant-kinden bustling there, armoured in chainmail with their rectangular shields slung across their backs. They were all of them busy, the logistical weight of keeping an armed force in the field divided precisely across all their shoulders. They cooked, cleaned, sharpened, practised, patrolled, slept, relaxed, raised tents and stood watch, all with the exactness of clockwork, each in touch with the minds of their fellows, as content in their busy Aptitude as Amnon himself had ever felt back in Khanaphes. He envied them.
The Imperial Eighth under General Roder had already bested the Sarnesh once, toppling their fortress at Malkan’s Folly and rebuffing their ground forces at the same time. After that, the Wasps had made swift progress until they began to pass south of this forest, where skirmishing raids from the Mantids had brought them to a halt.
Unlike most Ant city-states, Sarn knew the value of allies. Hence this camp at the edge of the forest. Hence Amnon, arrived here from Collegium as the bodyguard of a Beetle diplomat, because nobody there could think of much else to do with him. The Ants and their allies were planning their next move.
‘Hey, big man!’
Thus warned, Amnon did not start as a small form dropped down beside him, the blurring wings fading away to nothing as the figure touched the ground.
‘You coming back to us any time soon?’ the diminutive newcomer asked him. Amnon was indeed a big man: the Fly-kinden barely came up to his waist.
‘Back to you?’ For a moment Amnon thought he meant something more, some meaning connected with the dark, unrippled past between the trees.
‘Only, herself is starting to fret again. All these Mantids about: I don’t know why she wanted to come, if she’s so weird about them. Or maybe the weird is the why of it.’ The Fly cast his eyes over the shadow-hung forest, the haunt of a thousand years of history.
‘Spooky, isn’t it,’ was his verdict.
On the journey up from Collegium Amnon had found the man a troubling travelling companion, his abrasive good cheer matching poorly with Amnon’s own thoughts. Troubling, mostly though, because remarks like that last one could still drag a smile onto Amnon’s face, whether he wanted it or not. ‘You have no heart, Laszlo. You’re too Apt.’
‘You’re just as Apt as me,’ the Fly countered. ‘Now, seriously, Helma Bartrer is getting that look in her eye again, and there’s that Moth-kinden about and, without your sober and overly serious gaze on her, she’s likely to do something stupid.’
Amnon grunted, and turned away from the pensive regard of the dark trees. There was a core of lead within him since Praeda had died, and sometimes he felt that he should just cling to it and turn his back on the rest of the world. But Laszlo seemed an antidote to that, and the only way to shut off the little man’s irrepressible talking would be to kill him. Or perhaps remind the Fly of his own troubles.
‘Any luck?’ he asked quietly, and for a moment the question did seem to decant some of his own seriousness into the Fly.
‘Not yet, but the Sarnesh skipper hasn’t shown yet, and I’m betting she’s still with him. Hoping so, anyway.’ Laszlo was part of the Collegiate delegation on utterly false pretences, as only Amnon knew. Not that he was a spy, or rather a spy for any party other than Collegium, but he had his own agenda.
They picked their way back into the camp, following a curious order of precedence. The Ants got out of their way smoothly, each tipped off by a dozen pairs of eyes in advance, and finding it simply more efficient to get clear of these clumsy, closed-minded foreigners. Laszlo and Amnon could have run straight at a dense mob of them and not jostled an elbow on the way through.
The Mantids were different. When their paths crossed, Amnon and Laszlo stopped to let the locals stalk haughtily by. True, the Etheryen were at least somewhat used to outsiders, given Sarn’s proximity, but this was their home and to cross them here was to challenge them. The formal alliance between the Inapt and Apt was very new; nobody wanted to test its limits.
They were tall and graceful, and every one of them armed, even the youngest and the oldest who had ventured from the forest. Pale and sharp-featured, most of them looked on all who were not their kin with arch condescension. They were the masters of battle whose steel had once ruled the Lowlands in the name of their Moth-kinden masters. That five centuries of progress had erased that world, beyond their borders, was not hinted at in their expressions.