Four

She had never been in Siriell’s Town before, but instinct had taken over and she skulked along in Gaved’s wake, without any suggestion that he was aware of her. He seemed a busy man, too, with plenty of people to talk to: darting from hovel to shack, exchanging words, paying his way with what looked like some little cut stones. Sometimes she caught him looking over his shoulder, and she guessed she was not the only person here who wished him ill, something that seemed entirely understandable to her.

Twice she thought he was going to get into a fight. The first time, he was accosted by another Wasp and she heard angry words exchanged, the man accusing Gaved of some disloyalty – perhaps to the Empire that both had patently abandoned – but Gaved smoothed matters over with some joke, fending off the man’s anger. The aggressor looked more than a little drunk and Gaved was able to evade him quickly.

The second time a half-dozen or so Grasshoppers tried to accost him, and although his hands threatened them with Wasp Art they only kept their distance but did not disperse. They were armed with spears and staves and knives, and they clearly wanted Gaved to go along with them to some local tyrant or other. Tynisa watched, interested to see if she would have to save the man’s life in order to have the pleasure of killing him herself.

One of the Grasshoppers became too bold, reaching for the Wasp’s sleeve, even though his fellows were still holding back. A bitter expression crossed Gaved’s face briefly and Tynisa saw his hand flash fire, knocking the grasping man off his feet, still alive but with one leg scorched. In the next instant the Wasp had taken to the sky, his wings lifting him back over the adjoining buildings. The Grasshoppers cursed and gave chase, as their own Art sent them leaping and bounding along at rooftop level, determined not to let Gaved get away. The wounded man yelled after them, demanding aid that was not offered, and then he began to crawl away, weeping with pain.

Tynisa loped into action. She did not possess the Art to follow either the Grasshoppers or their prey, but she could see the net of his pursuers as it spread. Hurriedly, she climbed up to the creaking roof of the largest shack, spying them out, seeing who gave up soonest, who continued following a trail. She took only moments to make her guess, and then she dropped back down to street level and went hunting.

It felt good – and so little had felt good recently – to be moving swiftly and silently through the shabby streets, rapier swaying at her side like a faithful companion beast. This was more a taste of life than the world had afforded her in a long time now, since the war.

Sometimes people got in her way, but they got right back out of it once they noticed her expression, Wasps as well as locals, for she was not someone to stop, just then.

She slowed as she neared the wretched district her instincts had led her towards, and began to quarter it more subtly, street by street, her eyes not actively searching so much as taking it all in – letting the filthy sights and sounds wash over her while sifting them for familiarity. She encountered a few of the Grasshoppers, angry and frustrated at their failed search, turning back now to make their excuses to whoever had hired them. She paid them no mind.

As she shifted sidelong into the shadows beneath a shed’s sagging eaves she found a core of stillness, a Mantis’s watchful invisibility before the strike, as though the shade of Tisamon stood beside her, hand on her shoulder, lending her his kinden’s Art. The other ghosts had been left far behind.

There. She had him. The cloaked figure walking almost – not quite – like a Dragonfly, but a little too burly despite his best efforts. She watched as he slipped out from between two buildings, a little astray from where she had predicted, but close enough. There was a brief pale flash of Wasp skin as he glanced about, and then Gaved hurried off, not at the idle saunter of before, but like a man in a hurry to get somewhere.

She flowed after him, like a ghost herself, keeping up with him at a distance, street for street. When she saw he was heading out of Siriell’s Town her satisfaction only increased. She would be able to kill him cleanly and without interruption, before returning to this festering pit to begin earning her atonement in blood.

He made good time after that, but always on the ground, not wanting to take wing and be too visible. Shortly, he was at the outskirts, where Siriell’s Town petered out into the most wretched of slums, amid the utter squalor of those too weak to fight for something better. Shacks and hovels had become just makeshift tents, cloaks propped up on sticks. The stink was vile, with flies rising in whirling clouds from makeshift latrines, and from bodies.

Gaved did not stop for any of this, and nor did Tynisa, although her stalking had become more careful as her cover diminished. She fell further back, changing her tactics from crowds and walls to using the curve and lurch of the land against him: creeping low, meandering left and right as the contours took her, but always managing to keep him in sight. His track took him through barren farmland in which some of the locals were trying to scratch a living, and she followed him field by field, crossing their boundaries, slinking along irrigation ditches and taking the occasional stand of stunted trees as a gift.

Dusk was on its way now, a bloated moon having already hauled itself clear of the horizon. Gaved had passed the last patch of farmland, too stony now for anything but a handful of scrawny sheep watched over by a Grasshopper youth, and his red and black beetle that circled the animals constantly in a vigilant trundle. One hill beyond, Gaved turned down into a sheltered defile, and there made camp.

Watching his quick, professional movements as he set a little fire beneath the overhang and hung a tiny pot over it, she almost forgot why she had followed him. Thinking himself alone out here, he had become an honest man, quietly competent and well able to brave the wilderness, seemingly more at home than he had been on the streets of Siriell’s Town. She watched for longer than she intended, out in the cold and the dark, as he cooked up something almost scentless to eat, over a fire that gave no smoke.

At the last, and shivering slightly from the chill, she drew her rapier in one smooth, silent motion. His wings and sting would give him all the advantages when at range, yet she could not bear to simply kill him from behind. This was not squeamishness: she wanted him to know the agent of justice before he died.

Even as she took her first step towards him, his voice called out, ‘About time. Now come out where I can see you.’ He was standing up, one hand out with palm open, but not quite looking at her – knowing that he was observed but unable to make her out in the darkness beyond his fire. She edged closer, in inches and steps, and he cast about, frowning and tense, but unwilling to flee from mere shadows. In her slow progress there was a fierce battle being fought, his eyes and the moon against her stealth, until she was almost within rapier’s reach. Then the firelight caught her, and he saw at last who she was.

His expression was almost all she could have wanted: utter shock at first, but swiftly replaced by an intense loathing that mirrored her own thoughts exactly. She had to kill him, because he was a reminder of all the things she was trying to forget. He, in that instant of recognition, had made a similar resolution – and quite possibly for similar reasons.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve got the whole of the cursed Lowlands! Why can’t you keep there?’ The immediate hostility was gratifying: no wheedling, no excuses, no feigned friendships, nothing to tempt any uncertainty; just a man who very plainly did not want to see her.

‘Perhaps I’m the new Collegiate ambassador,’ she said. ‘Why are you fouling the Commonweal, Wasp?’ And it was a release to be able to speak so frankly – and viciously – to someone, for a change. She was already calculating angles, distances. If he took wing, there would be a moment sufficient for her to rush forward and impale him. If he lashed out at her with his sting she would trust to her reflexes to read the motion, to be casting herself aside and in again even as he formed his intention to shoot. Poised on a knife-edge of reflex, his death within her gift, she could afford to talk, to make him understand, relishing his hatred and casting it right back at him.

‘No fool would make you ambassador,’ he told her. ‘Wait – this is where the airship visits. Did Maker send you here?’

When she neither confirmed nor denied it, he bared his teeth. ‘Just do what you came for and go back to the Lowlands,’ he told her. ‘I don’t want trouble. Just go.’

That was too much for her. ‘And how do you imagine I can just go back after what happened?’ she hissed, bunching herself to spring. His hand was slightly lower now, the talk taking him off his guard. In a moment, she would have him.

‘Oh,’ he said, almost to himself, ‘the Moth boy died, then.’

It froze her even as she was about lunge for him. The Moth boy died, then. For, of course he had. Not when she herself had run him through; nor even later in the Collegium infirmary. While Tynisa had been off chasing her father, the Moth had levered himself up from his sickbed to try and save his own people from the Empire and there, in the remote mountain fastnesses of Tharn, he had died. The delay had been just enough, after her terrible deed, to fool Tynisa into believing that she might not, after all, be the woman who had killed her half-sister’s lover.

‘Is that what this is about?’ Gaved asked Tynisa, seeing the struggle inside her. ‘You’re running away?’

Every instinct howled for him then, but her own guilt was like a grey anchor that held her back, so that she twitched for action but did not lunge, sending him two steps back with his palm directed squarely towards her forehead. She wanted so very badly to kill him, but something within her continued withering and shrinking away from her own thoughts.

‘Look,’ the Wasp was saying, ‘I’m doing all right here. I’m clear of the black and gold for the first time in my life. We’ve settled down. They don’t . . . know how it was, with me.’

His own past was surely sufficiently larded with bloody-handed deeds that the Commonwealers would want to be rid of him, if they knew. Probably he had turned his hunting talents upon them during the Empire’s war, and even Siriell’s renegades were unlikely to forgive that. Just as his reaction to her had mirrored hers to him, so might he have kindred reasons for seeking her silence.

Besides, he had said ‘We’, and that meant he was still with the strange Spider girl, Sef, he had taken from Jerez, and surely Tynisa bore that wretched woman no ill will.

I should have just killed him.

Suddenly there were repercussions and uncertainties, no matter how honest he was being with her, and an uncomfortable part of herself said that was because life was never as simple as she was trying to paint it.

But she had come this far, and she knew that, after killing him, she would be able to paint again, to interpret the result however she wished. What other witnesses were there to gainsay her? She realized that she was on the brink of a precipice within her mind, and to go one step further would be to lose some fraying but fundamental connection with the world.

She felt her body flow into line, taking up her fighting stance within herself, even though nothing showed outwardly, so that, when the attack came, she would be sublimely ready for it.

Gaved must have sensed something, too, for he exploded into motion that was a counterbalance for her poised stillness. His wings took him back, ten feet away from the fire, his hands outstretched, one before him, the other pointing upwards.

Already the Dragonfly-kinden were dropping down towards them. A half-dozen came sleeting down around the fire like random arrows, while Tynisa could hear at least a dozen more approaching from all round. In their bickering, she and Gaved had let them get perilously close.

That they were Siriell’s Town natives was clear enough: there was nothing of Prince Felipe’s court about them. All wore a mismatch of armour, from leather and chitin to fragments of glittering noble plate and discarded Imperial war leavings. Several carried bows but, as their grounded infantry approached cautiously, she saw the bulk of them had spears, along with the occasional long-hafted sword. Some were lean and lanky Grasshoppers, but the bulk were Dragonflies, and she looked in their faces, feeling such a sense of waste. They were poised and elegant, but where they should have been beautiful, their harsh lives and harsher deeds had marked them with scars and filth and ugly expressions.

‘Now then,’ Gaved said quietly. He had his hands each directed at one of the archers, and in return most of the arrows were angled his way. Tynisa had attracted her share of the spears, but they were misreading her calm quiet and seeing her as the lesser threat.

‘You’ve got an invitation, Gaved,’ said one of the few swordsmen, thus helpfully identifying himself to Tynisa as the leader of this little rabble. ‘Siriell has a few more questions for you, about just what your business here is.’

‘Not a problem,’ the Wasp replied, his easy tone belied by his stance. ‘I’ll drop in on her when I’m next passing through. I always have time for Siriell.’

‘Now, Gaved,’ the leader demanded. ‘Tonight.’

Their numbers should have been overwhelming, of course, but they hung back. They don’t want to hurt him? Want to keep him alive for Siriell? Tynisa wondered, but she noticed how they swayed back a little, whenever Gaved moved. It’s because he’s a Wasp, she realized. These cowards think he’s got the Light Airborne hidden in his pocket or something.

‘Take him,’ the leader snapped, with the confidence of a man who isn’t the one having to do so. Two spearmen stepped forward unhappily, weapons held aside as they reached as hesitantly for the Wasp as for a nettle. They stepped into the aim of the archers as they did so.

‘Enough of this,’ Tynisa decided, and let fly all the pent-up anger and frustration she had been nursing since before she ever reached Siriell’s Town.

She ignored the leader, in that first moment, hoping he would prove a challenge later. There were two archers within reach and she impaled one through the eye – after slashing the throat of a Grasshopper spear-carrier to get there – and whipped her blade back to sever the other’s taut bowstring. Her momentum carried her past the archer even as the cut string lashed the woman’s face – then she was standing between two spearmen who desperately tried to drag their weapons towards her, but too cumbersome and too close. She let the razor-sharp edge of her blade open one up, feeling her steel keen through layered leather as though it was not there – a move that served to draw back her arm so that she could ram the point into the other spearman’s chest. She watched her blade hardly bend as it punched through chitin plate and then between ribs, before sliding out again like water.

She heard Gaved’s stings crack and sizzle and knew, without looking, that his targets would be the other archers, the greatest threats towards him, who would now be turning to look for Tynisa in the spot where she had been standing just a moment before.

Then she had spears all about her, their wielders fighting to keep distance, the long, narrow points trying to fence her in, so that for a few tense moments she almost lost the rhythm, batting them aside with blade and offhand, vaulting and stepping aside to keep out of their lancing approaches. She kept lunging at every gap, making individual brigands draw back, but without breaking the cage that enclosed her. Then an arrow flowered in the shoulder of one, providing the key that unlocked it all, and she was out from their midst – two Grasshoppers spinning bloodily away, to mark her exit.

She felt it was time to engage the leader, who had been backing away since things had gone so very badly wrong. That she would be confronting four or five of his followers at the same time was just grist to her mill. Gaved’s sting spat again, and she caught its flash in the corner of her eye. Another arrow picked off the last archer, striking him low in the gut and doubling the wretch over.

The spearheads flurried for her like fish, but she turned sideways to them, her sword point-down as she advanced, parting their little hedge of spines until she was right amongst them. Even then, they nearly had her, moving faster as individuals and more cohesive as a group than she’d expected. Two closed with her, their spear-shafts walling her in, whilst another two stepped back to gain distance. She felt one spear point graze past her cheek and another cut her biceps as she twisted away, putting a knee to someone’s groin to her left, and her sword’s jagged guard into a face over to her right. The trap opened up again, and she cleared the air about her with her sword, forcing them to retreat or fall.

Close, too close. But wasn’t this just the sort of death that she was looking for, after all?

For a bitter moment she thought their leader was going to fly off, but then he screamed in her face and went for her, bringing his long sword down in a vicious strike that would have cut her in two had it only landed. He was fast, though, wielding the sword two-handed with a nimbleness she had not expected, turning each attack into the next without overextending, so that he drove her before him in a mad blaze of steel.

She watched, and learned his patterns and his limitations, and understood that what she saw was all there was: speed and fury but no precision, no flexibility. When she moved with his strike, letting the sword chop to her left as she moved right, so that he was past her before he realized, he could not recover in time. She almost held off, in the fond hope he might have something more, but the rapier itself had decided to end it, and she pierced him under the armpit, where his armour left off, and dropped him in mid-yell.

That was enough for the survivors, who went flying, running and leaping away into the night, leaving a litter of bodies behind them. At least one more dropped, with an arrow in his back.

So whose arrows are those then?

Even as she thought it, the archer was approaching, stepping into the firelight while Gaved was brushing down his cloak and looking about him at the bodies. Tynisa turned to the newcomer – and her world stopped dead.

Her hallucinations had always been corner-of-the-eye things, melting before her direct stare as if unable to bear the weight of her attention. But here he was in plain view, the bow in his hand, as though he had never been killed by the Wasps after all. As though it had simply been some raconteur’s exaggeration to say that Salme Dien was dead.

She couldn’t breathe. She felt that her heart had ceased to beat. Her fingers twitched nervelessly, though her sword still clung within her grip.

‘Salma?’ she managed.

And the man before her, the Dragonfly-kinden with that oh-so-familiar, cocky smile, said, ‘Yes?’