Sixteen

Praeda awoke because of someone shaking her. For the briefest of moments she was unsure where she was, but the very air said Khanaphes even before her eyes had opened to the ancient city’s distinctive architecture.

Or to see Amnon, already clad in his battered, piecemeal armour of dark, fluted metal, with a snapbow over his shoulder and his sword ready at his belt.

‘What’s happening?’ she demanded.

‘Trouble,’ he told her. ‘We have to move.’

‘Trouble?’

‘The Wasps have gone mad,’ he said shortly, thrusting the snapbow at her and slinging a pack about his shoulders.

She dressed hurriedly. The snapbow felt strange in her grip, like handling a dangerous animal. Of course she knew the principles of its air battery – could have given a lecture and drawn diagrams if needed – but she had never used one before.

Amnon had reverted to his roots, though: he was always best with a sword. It therefore seemed that she would have to uphold the honour of the Apt, in whatever engagement he had now dragged them into.

‘Amnon, what have you done?’

‘I? Nothing. There are Wasp soldiers out on the streets. They say the Ministers are arrested. They say all foreigners are being arrested, too. The Marsh Alcaia is being raided and the ships in dock searched.’

‘Searched for what?’ Praeda demanded, dressed and ready in less time than she would ever have thought possible.

‘They say the Empress is missing,’ he spat.

The Empress? ‘Amnon, you didn’t . . .?’

‘No, I did not,’ he said, frowning. ‘But they will arrest us, if they catch us. Then they will discover you are a Lowlander, and they will kill you. We must leave.’

‘How do you know all of this?’

‘One of the Royal Guard remembered me fondly enough to bring me the news,’ he explained, and then the two of them were out of the room and down the stairs.

Two dead Wasps lay at the foot of the steps. One of them had been struck so hard in the chest that the plates of his armour were split apart.

‘You said you’d done nothing,’ Praeda snapped.

‘Nothing much,’ Amnon replied, slightly shamefacedly. ‘I did not think it was the time for details. Nor is this.’

Well, he’s right there. ‘Where are we supposed to go? You have a plan?’

‘Out of the city,’ he told her. ‘If the Marsh Alcaia is already taken then I know of no place to hide for certain. But in the marshes themselves the Wasps shall not find us.’

‘And your marsh-people, the Mantis-kinden?’

‘I do not know.’ He grimaced. ‘I do not see any other choice than to risk the desert itself, and their winged soldiers would see us far easier on the sands than in the marsh.’

She shrugged, arranging her cloak so that the snapbow was well hidden beneath it. ‘I can’t fault your logic. Let’s go.’

Had Amnon not known the streets of his own city so well, they might have fallen foul of the Wasp-kinden much sooner. His role as First Soldier had been more than a purely military one, however, and he had often gone out into Khanaphes to enforce the city’s laws against those who would disregard them. He had, he claimed, brought light into the shadows, which meant that he knew the shadows better than any.

The Imperial soldiers were out in force. Small groups of them hurried through the streets or coasted overhead. Any they found on the streets were stopped and questioned. Praeda saw doors kicked in, and soldiers flurrying into an upper storey through an open window. What can they hope to achieve? But it seemed they had lost their Empress somehow, and they were going mad trying to find her.

From elsewhere in the city could be seen the red glow of fire. She heard screams and cries in the night, from adults and children both. The two of them progressed through the city in fits and starts, hiding under awnings or in doorways, crouching on steps leading down to cellars hugging the walls at all times, because the skies were busy with the Light Airborne buzzing back and forth in search of . . . who knew what?

Abruptly Amnon hauled her around a corner of a building, holding his sword low, ready to ram it up into an enemy the moment a target presented himself. A moment later, a mob of Khanaphir stumbled past – men and women, old and young, dressed and half-dressed – with Wasp-kinden herding them, shoving and pushing and jabbing them at sword point. There was no hint of where they were heading, or for what purpose, or even suggestion that the Wasps themselves knew. Praeda had a horrible feeling that these soldiers were just doing something so that they could later say to their superiors that they had not stood idle in the Empress’s sudden absence. And if that something should include slaughtering the Khanaphir, then no moral qualms would outweigh their fear of the Wasp chain of command.

She half expected Amnon to move, because these were his people and she knew his fierce sense of duty, but he remained still, terribly still, holding his own feelings down. It was then she realized just how strongly he felt about her, because her safety was now the sole reason he was restraining himself.

Oh, curse the lot of them. With that, she brought the snapbow up, sighting her target in the moonlight – a Wasp standing furthest away from the group – and pressed the trigger. The sound of it, that infamous ‘snap’, seemed laughable, the jolt of the weapon in her arms hardly worth mentioning. The Wasp dropped with a brief bark of surprise, not even pain, but she realized that she had killed him.

It was a drastic way to grant him permission, but Amnon took her gesture for what it was and he was already rushing the remaining quartet of Wasps, swift and remarkably quiet, his mail just a susurration of metal.

They did not see quite what he was at first, as their stings flared off the planes of his armour. Then he was right amongst them, his sword making swift, ugly work of the nearest two, even as they tried to put their own blades in the way. Of the remaining two, one hopped into the air with a brief flash of wings, intending to drop on him, and the other fled.

Praeda had reloaded the snapbow, and the escaping man’s fast, erratic flight gave her one shot at him before he was lost over the rooftops. She missed, but in that time Amnon had dealt with the remaining Wasp, slamming him to the ground and lashing his sword’s edge across the man’s throat. He turned to the former prisoners, most of whom would surely recognize him.

‘Go. Run. Hide,’ he instructed them. Then Praeda was at his side and they were running themselves.

Trying to leave the city by any of the regular gates would be to chance Imperial checkpoints, and tonight it was plain that no amount of bribery or subterfuge would get them past the sentries. Quite possibly, anyone trying to leave at all would be shot on sight. Amnon continued moving through Khanaphes with a purpose, however, and Praeda could only trust his judgement. She realized that they were heading for the Estuarine Gate as its colossal pillars loomed close enough to blot out slices of sky and blot out the moon.

‘Can you climb?’ he murmured suddenly, and she stared at him in puzzlement before understanding that he meant using her Art. It was not exactly a dignified occupation for a College scholar, but her active adolescence had endowed her with a few advantages.

‘I need to know if the gate is up,’ he explained. ‘If so, we’ve come a long way for nothing.’

She nodded, glancing around to try to assemble a plan of the nearby buildings in her head: which of them was high enough, and which offered a useful vantage point. Then she had chosen her best prospect, and put her hands against the stone, feeling the contours of close-packed carvings underneath her palms. She kicked off her sandals, for the Art gripped just that little bit better with bare feet. Out of practice, for a moment she was just scrabbling at the wall, but then the familiar pull of the Art returned to her, and her hands and feet clung wherever she wanted, released when she bade them, allowing her to creep up the side of the building in a slow, deliberate crawl, keeping three points of contact with the stone at all times.

It was hard work, draining in a way more than merely physical, and in the end the only thing that got her to the top was the thought that she would be letting Amnon down if she gave up. At last she reached a window recess that was high enough for her purposes and hauled herself, gasping, onto the sill. There was a swift whicker of wings at that moment, and she froze as an unseen flier passed by, doubtless a Wasp on some scouting errand. A moment later she turned her eyes towards the river and the gate. It was a grand piece of machinery, as she already had cause to know, and absurdly old by all accounts. The Khanaphir had a vast, metal-shot gate buried in the river bed, that chains and drop-weights could haul up in order to block any attempt to leave the city by water. Perhaps the Empire did not know about it, or had not yet found the mechanism, because the gate was still sunk beneath the surface. One road at least was left for those wanting to leave Khanaphes.

She saw movement by the pillars, and beyond the gate something was on fire. Parts of the covered market known as the Marsh Alcaia had already been put to the torch, the city’s criminal element displaced by a more disciplined band of thugs entirely. There would be soldiers watching the river, too, and surely every boat at the nearby docks would have been seized or even sunk.

I hope you know what you’re doing, Amnon.

The fires burning at the Marsh Alcaia cast a leaping and unreliable light over the Estuarine Gate, but they also inevitably drew the eye. Somewhere in that warren of stalls and tents there was fighting going on. Although Praeda could make out a fair few Wasps, they were all looking away from her, waiting for the denizens of the Khanaphir underworld to counterattack. Here, at least, they had found a substitute enemy to take out their anger on, in the absence of the Empress’s presumed kidnappers.

And what can have happened? That the Empress would come here at all was frankly absurd, but for the most powerful woman in the northern world to have somehow vanished beggared belief. And yet the proof was all around them in the punishment the Wasps were now inflicting on Khanaphes.

Praeda dropped down and let him know what she had seen concisely, and Amnon squared his shoulders, plainly readying himself for some plan of action, more than likely a rash one.

‘Amnon,’ she murmured warningly, because the Wasps ahead of them were not so distracted that the two of them could just walk past. He was scanning the quays, though, and the various docked vessels. One ship was actually on fire, but the Wasps had evidently suffered a change of heart, maybe realizing that their vandalism could get swiftly out of hand. Even as she watched, the blazing two-masted Spider-kinden trader was cut loose from the docks, and airborne Wasps armed with long spears began trying to herd it further out into the river, where the current would take it swiftly away from the city.

‘We must act quickly,’ Amnon declared, and for a moment she thought he was proposing they get aboard the burning ship. With the city being stung so savagely all around them, the suggestion did not sound all that outrageous. Then Amnon had crept to the waterside, and was hanging his head over the edge of the docks, apparently inspecting the underside of the nearest quays.

‘Amnon, what––?’ she started, but then he grunted in satisfaction. ‘Can you swim at all?’

Childhood summers spent swimming in Lade Sideriti surfaced briefly in her mind. ‘Probably. I certainly used to be able to.’

‘That will make this easier. I cannot. See there?’

She followed his pointing finger, but it was a long while before she spotted them: a few small boats moored right underneath the arches supporting the jetties themselves. From her last visit here, she was familiar with their construction: narrow craft of wooden planks held together only with taut ropes, gathered at bow and stern into a raised carving that mimicked bundled reeds. Amnon was already creeping along the waterfront to try and snag one. It seemed that the Wasps must spot him at any moment.

With a curse she kicked off her sandals, hesitating a moment on the brink before letting herself down into the water. She had expected cold, but the sluggish river retained the day’s heat, and the flow was not so strong that she could not brace herself against the quay before kicking her way towards the nearest boat. It almost tipped over as she wriggled into it, scrabbling about inside it for an oar. In the end she gave up on actually paddling, but by pushing against the stonework she levered the craft to beneath where Amnon was waiting, and held it steady while he clambered down.

There followed the slowest and most agonizing minutes of her life, as Amnon took the slender boat out on to the river, just catching the swell created as the burning Spiderlands trader lurched past. There were Wasps darting overhead almost constantly, and if just one of them looked down, or if the eyes of their fellows on the shore had strayed from the blaze, then Praeda and Amnon would have been dead in short order. A ship on fire provided sufficient distraction, though, and Amnon was able to bring their tiny vessel into the hulk’s shadow, paddling until their two hulls scraped, and letting the river’s current then draw them sluggishly out past the Estuarine Gate, even as embers started drifting down about them.

That should have been the end of their difficulties, and Praeda never did understand why the Wasps had patrols flying out over the marshland, save perhaps that they were expecting some attack from the natives there. In any event, they were not quite out of sight of the city walls when the cry went up above them, and a moment later a sting sizzled into the water in a flash of gold.

Amnon was instantly paddling for the shore – on the water they offered too much of a target. Praeda scanned the skies but, with only a sliver of moon, she could not work out how the Wasps, as night-blind as she was, had ever spotted them. Stingshots came lancing down erratically, still off the mark but getting closer, and she could hear one high voice shouting instructions to the shooters, correcting their aim.

Abruptly their boat was grating on mud, and Amnon leapt out, pulling her with him. They had beached on a mudbank with only a few gangly, spider-rooted trees for cover, and he was leading her towards deep marsh, into a twisted maze of ferns, horsetails and gullies that could swallow an army.

Two more blazing shots pursued them, still nowhere near, then a sharp snap that whipped the water almost at Praeda’s heels. She recognized that distinctive sound instantly, and whoever wielded the snapbow clearly had a much better idea of where they were.

They splashed on through clear, shallow water for a moment, then there was plantlife all around, more mud underfoot, and a fog of gnats that seemed almost solid. Amnon began slowing down, and Praeda only hoped that he had some destination in mind, rather than just charging blindly into this maze of mud and vegetation. She could hear the enemy voice shouting directions again, and sensed the Wasps coursing overhead, still searching.

There was no real silence in the swamp, for the stridulations of hundreds of nocturnal denizens kept up a constant racket, but still she felt that the enemy had lost their trail, their wings lending them too much speed and sending them ahead of their quarry.

‘Where now?’ she hissed.

‘Come dawn, we shall work our way back to the river,’ he told her. ‘If we see a ship, we shall warn them of the Wasps, and with luck they shall carry us to the stone town.’

‘To Porta Rabi, yes,’ she agreed. ‘And what about until dawn?’

She did not find out what his reply might have been, because that same voice above suddenly cried out, ‘I see them! Get the lamp on them!’

The swamp was abruptly on fire, or that was how it felt. A white light sheared over everything and, had Praeda been looking in that direction, it would have blinded her. The source was a mirrored lantern mounted on the shoulder of one of the Wasp fliers, the sort of device used by explorers heading underground. Its bearer hung well back, but the blazing light made stark silhouettes of his two companions, who were even now advancing. Praeda understood immediately how they had managed to follow a trail at night, for one of them was a Fly cradling a cut-down snapbow.

Amnon rushed at them with a bellow, drawing their attention. Praeda saw the Wasp’s sting flash off his breastplate, but then the snapbow spoke again, and punched Amnon off his feet. She shouted incoherently, lifting her weapon and pressing the trigger without even considering whether she had remembered to reload it. Plainly her hands had attended to that task without her recalling, for her shot slapped the closer Wasp off his feet, without a cry, and then she and the Fly were both busy trying to reload ahead of the other, while the lamp-man came rushing in clumsily under the offset weight of the lantern.

And then the light went out, as Praeda heard the glass break. Absolute darkness descended, but her hands kept following the motions: slotting a new bolt into place and winding up the pressure in the battery.

She wanted to call out to Amnon, but that would give the Fly something to aim at. She strained her ears above the monotonous sounds of the swamp, willing her eyes to reaccustom themselves to the night, take advantage of that sliver of moon.

She could make out a little more now, the faint glimmer of water against the deeper darkness of the plants, but of course the Fly’s eyes would be so much better than hers.

She heard his quiet sound of satisfaction at reacquiring her position, and she loosed in that direction at once, feeling certain that she had missed and that she might as well have shot blind.

There came a grunt not quite from the direction she had aimed her bolt towards, and she stared wide-eyed, trying to make sense of the shadow play before her with the unreliable assistance of the moon. At last it came to her that the shape over there must be the Fly, and the straight shaft protruding from it was therefore . . . an arrow.

‘Be very still,’ Amnon’s voice reached her, sounding pained. ‘They are all around us.’

Despite the grim news her heart leapt to hear him. ‘You were shot,’ she reproached him.

‘When the Iron Glove make armour, they make it well. The bolt pierced enough to draw blood, but the metal slowed it down,’ he murmured back. ‘Now be quiet and let me speak to them.’

She had absolutely no sense of there being marsh-kinden around them, those slender Mantis-kinden that called the Jamail delta their home. There could be ten or a thousand of them, silent and invisible, and she would never know for sure.

‘You know me,’ she heard Amnon announce. ‘You are bound by the old covenants. Let us pass.’

Praeda strained her eyes, trying to make out the swift, small forms of the Mantis-kinden. It was all too easy to imagine their flint-tipped spears, their arrowheads of poisoned bone.

‘We know you,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘You are Amnon, who was First Soldier, but you are exiled.’

Praeda had known Amnon long enough, now, to sense his stance even in the faint moonlight. He had been ready to prove himself to these people in some savage trial, or to bluff his way back into their good graces, or to threaten the wrath of the Masters of Khanaphes. What he plainly had not expected was that they should be so well informed of his current status, and therefore his lack of the Masters’ protection. For the first time in many years Amnon was without a plan.

She raised the snapbow again, realizing as she did so that she had not reloaded it since their skirmish with the Wasps. All around them she heard a faint creaking as a dozen of the Mantids’ savage little compound bows were drawn back.

‘The Loquae will be pleased with us,’ their leader remarked with satisfaction.

What happened next was something that Praeda would never remember clearly.

There was a gasp from the Mantis-kinden, one arrow leaping from its bow to skim directly between Amnon and herself. The Mantids already were backing away, all stealth forgotten, their circle widening and widening, and for no apparent reason, save that . . .

Praeda would later decide that the night’s exertions had begun to tell on her by then. She was hot and tired, and possibly poisoned by insect bites or marsh water. It would be easy, in such circumstances, to imagine things.

But she knew with an absolute certainty that there were three of them. She and Amnon were now standing a little further apart, because someone invisible was standing between them. No – not invisible, because the Mantis-kinden had already spotted whoever this third traveller was. They had seen it, and they recognized something in it that overawed and terrified them.

‘We will,’ the Mantis leader was promising. ‘We will lead them to the sea, we swear. We did not know . . . We could not have known . . .’

‘What is this? You recognize your oath to Khanaphes, after all?’ Amnon demanded.

‘There are other oaths,’ the Mantis replied, her voice trembling. ‘There are other loyalties. We did not know what you brought with you.’

Praeda was feeling light-headed by that point, for while she stared straight ahead at the shadowy Mantis-kinden, she could also glimpse a third figure out of the corner of her eye. It was someone she knew, someone who could not possibly be with them.

‘Che?’ she whispered.