Blood of the Mantis (42 page)

Somewhere out there was a presence not frozen in place, a presence waiting for him to find it.

This is a dream.
But there was no such thing as ‘just’ a dream for the Moth-kinden. They had dozens of categories: dreams serendipitous and dreams intentional, dreams prophetic and dreams malign. This, however, was a dream he had been seeking for many nights, for this was a
seeing
dream. He was trying to find the Shadow Box, but had already realized that it was a hopeless search. In Jerez he was just too close to it. Its power was everywhere, leaking out into the darkness, and he could not pinpoint it.

And now this, a proper seeing dream – but to see what?

Achaeos paced through the streets of Jerez, feeling the ubiquitous rain break across his skin and dampen his hair. When he stood still he could sense movement, others abroad this same night. He was not the only one to have this dream. That meant gates had been opened, tonight, that could not be easily closed.

Should I call out?
But how foolish would that be? He could not simply stand here, in this dream-Jerez, and start calling for help like a lost child.

But you called for help before.

He started in shock. That thought had not been his own.

He tried to work out whereabouts in the town he was. The lake lay to his right, its expanse of water suspended in frozen ripples, dotted near the shoreline with the further-flung natives, with great stands of reeds, with little boats that had set out on clandestine errands.

A movement again: he turned, and for a second he thought there was a woman there. He had a fleeting impression of bulging red eyes and a hunger-pinched face.

Nothing there. Only the night.

We heard you call us. We call you now.

‘Who are you?’ he whispered, but he already knew, and with that knowledge he did not want to meet the thing that called to him.

You waste your time. You have not come to us. You have not found us.
It was the voice of the Darakyon, but fainter, hollower. The voice of the Shadow Box.

They seek us, all of them. They are grasping even now for the line we throw only to you. Little seer, little neophyte, come to us.

‘Where are you?’ he demanded, louder, beginning to run through the frozen rain. He had another quick glimpse of one of his pursuers, a man of his own kinden wearing a silver skullcap, his face deeply lined.

Here.

And it was there.

He tried to stop, because to touch
that
would be to die, and he skidded, feet slipping from under him, so that he fell at its . . . where it rose from the earth.

There was a shape there resembling a woman, the lean frame of a Mantis-kinden warrior, except the reaching, grasping thorns and briars had pierced her a dozen times over, arcing and leaping back and forth through her flesh, that had sprouted darts and barbs like a Thorn Bug, and prickly leaves as well. Spiny brambles ran up and down her, and through her, and they twisted her skin, which was pale and human in places but elsewhere hard and shiny like the carapace of an insect. Her arms were simultaneously a Mantis woman’s with the Art-grown spines jutting from her forearms, and a mantis insect’s with great folding, raptorial hooks. Her face glittered with the facets of compound eyes, and scissoring mandibles worked inside a human mouth.

I would die . . .
There was no doubt of that. Achaeos scrambled back a few paces, staring. Even his eyes, which knew no darkness, could not quite take in that piecemeal, shifting figure, but he knew that it was ancient and mighty – and in pain.

‘Do you . . . have a name?’ he whispered.

The lips and the mandibles both worked together, but neither matched the voice that now reached him,

I was Laetrimae when I lived. You must find me, Achaeos.

‘Show me,’ he said. ‘Quickly, before the others get here.’

The creature nodded and strode off into the unnaturally arrested town, without another word. Achaeos choked to watch her, for it was the naked Mantis woman who took each step forward, but once her foot touched the earth the briars and vines thrust up through it to rake across her and impale her over and over, and her skin ripped open with the barbs and thorns, and healed over in the gleaming green-black exoskeleton of her kinden’s beast.

He got to his feet and hurried after her, after it . . . the spirit of a Mantis woman trapped between life and death for five centuries, constantly degrading and corrupting and yet still remembering her own name.

He knew that others, many others, were presently seeking him out. The other collectors and perhaps worse, all those who had the magical skill to seize upon this open portal and follow the thread. Laetrimae was pacing ahead sedately, but each step carried her such a distance that he was forced to run even to keep her in sight, and there was perpetually a flock of shadows behind him, squabbling over his tracks.

Until the tortured Mantis-creature paused at a door, a lowly place near the lakeshore where a sprawling guesthouse sagged, its walls at conflicting angles. She grasped the doorframe with such force that the wood splintered, and thorns and creepers grew out from her into it, and split it further.

And then he knew. He looked wildly about him for landmarks. He had to remember this place, when he awoke . . .

And Laetrimae grasped him about the throat in a vice-like grip, killing spines razoring his skin, and he felt her thorny branches questing at his flesh, eager to drink his blood.

And she said only,
Remember
, and branded that place on his mind so that he would never ever forget it.

Achaeos awoke with a cry, startling Tisamon, who had been keeping watch outside. The Mantis almost kicked the door off its hinges just to get in. Beyond him, Achaeos saw that it was night still, and thus the best time to go to work.

‘I know where it is!’ he yelled. ‘We need to move now.’

‘Who’s we?’ Jons Allanbridge demanded, not a ready waker at this hour.

‘Myself,’ the Moth replied. ‘Tisamon, and Tynisa, and—’

‘And me?’ Thalric asked sardonically. ‘You brought me here, yet you’ve had precious little use of me yet.’

‘What about Gaved?’ Tynisa started.

‘No time!’ Achaeos insisted. The Wasp hunter was still at Nivit’s place, with the strange girl they had rescued. ‘Now – we go
now
. Allanbridge, you stay here. Can you get your machine ready to leave?’

‘It takes hours just to fill the canopy!’ the artificer informed him.

‘Well, just . . . do something,’ Achaeos said, almost hopping from foot to foot. ‘But we must go, please!’

‘So let’s go.’ Tisamon pushed past him out into the night. He stopped right there, as if scenting the air. Tynisa came out after him, sensing nothing. Her hand was bleeding a little, she noticed. That wound was unusually stubborn.

Achaeos had his bow ready strung, and he pushed past her, rushing off into the street and then looking left and right as if getting his bearings. For once the rain in Jerez was petering out, although the night sky was blotted with heavy-laden clouds.

Then Achaeos was off, and at a fair pace, too. Tynisa instinctively moved when Tisamon did, and it was only after she heard the running footsteps behind them that she realized that Thalric had come with them after all.

Useless
, she decided.
He can’t even see in the dark.
But Thalric was keeping pace nonetheless, using what little light bled out from under the doors of drinking dens and brothels.
Another one to watch for now.
He was dangerous, and she could not trust him.
He’d sell us all in an instant.

Achaeos kept stopping for bearings, but most of the time he did not even look around him. Whatever guide he was consulting seemed to be entirely within his head.

‘Did you hear that?’ he asked, but even Tisamon had heard nothing.

‘We aren’t alone.’ Achaeos stared back the way they had come, and Tynisa fought down a small sound of horror because there was a pale mark across his throat, like a jagged and irregular scar. His blank white eyes met hers for a second, and she merely shivered and shook her head. Then he was running again.

As they took off after him, Tynisa was sure that something passed overhead, but when she glanced upwards, she saw nothing.

Across the city there were others suddenly awake, but with nothing in their minds but disappointment. The young seer who had somehow merited such a guide had managed to lose then.

Sykore the Mosquito-kinden was one. She had hoped to catch even a glimpse of the place, a street even, so that she could have Captain Brodan searching each house there, but the boy had been too fast for her.

It did not matter, of course, so long as it was Achaeos who actually took possession of the thing. Sykore had her agent in the seer’s camp, unknown to all. The Blooded Ones of the Mosquito-kinden knew their trade, and they guarded secrets that even the Moth-kinden did not speak of.

What concerned her most was that it might not be Achaeos’s hands that eventually closed about the Shadow Box. She had not been swift enough to follow, but she had a feeling that there had been one other who had. She had a sense of age and power, the musty taste in her mouth that spoke of her kind’s ancient enemies, the Moth-kinden that had driven them to near-extinction.

His name was Palearchos, and he was old now, too old for this. He who had first flown at five years old – considered unthinkably early to develop the Art – he was finding it a labour now, and even more so when he screened himself in darkness so that even a Moth-kinden’s eyes could not see him.

He had come from Tharn originally, but there were now five decades between him and the Tharen halls, and it hurt. Five decades of exile, and he had laughed at them when they cast him out.

I am a Skryre
, he had told them.
The world is mine to shape. I do not need you.
And he had departed for his adventures, his schemes and plots, and he had revelled in his freedom from their interference. He had travelled the world, and seen things that they had only read of.

But now he was old, and he had been sick for a long time, sick for the company of his own kind and for the carved stone halls of home.

This would be his lodestone, to bring him home. This would be his invitation, so that his bones could at least be laid in the deep sepulchres, and his name remembered. But only if he
possessed
it. The young seer, that appallingly untrained boy, could not be allowed to take it from him.

And yet somehow
it
favoured him. Palearchos felt it keenly, this loss of faith. It was not just his own people had turned against him, but their whole world, too. He would therefore have to take it in both hands and force it to recognize him. How dare the box call out to this weak young stripling, and not to him!

He was an old magician and, as such, he had spent years of his life in other people’s dreams. When the Shadow Box had at last opened, and thus compromised its hiding place, he had been deft enough to pick up that trail. When the dream had snapped shut, he had leapt from the window of his meagre lodgings and begun labouring flight. It would be a race, but he was in the air whilst the fool boy remained on the ground.

But they ran fast and he was not the flier he once was. It would be close.

I am too old to start this hunt again!
He felt even older now, his wings stuttering on his back. Once he would have had disciples to seize the box for him, but they had all gradually fallen away, disillusioned with his outcast status. Now only his magician’s arts could furnish him with help. He tried to compose the tattered spells, born of an ancient discipline almost fallen into utter disuse these days. He reached out, seeking those wretched spirits he had bound to himself long ago, expending his dwindling strength in an effort to give them momentary form.

If you want something doing . . .
The strain of the flight thundered in his heart and lungs, but he kept going, with no time to lose. He was too old, too old . . .

Scyla’s eyes snapped open in the certain knowledge that something significant had happened. She looked about the little low-ceilinged room and tried to work out what had changed.

Nothing . . . nothing . . .
but yes. She was no great magician but she had developed a little of that sense, and realized there was magic afoot.
The damned box.

It rested on the rickety little nightstand beside her. She could easily reach out and touch it, but she held back. She had the uneasy sense that it was not
precisely
where she had left it.

The shadow figure was absent, at least, although the other shadows of the room seemed to bristle with briars and sharp-edged leaves.

Damn you, Mantis-creature.
She was a Spider, she reminded herself, and Spiders would always get the better of the warrior-kinden that so much hated them. She would take this tatty fistful of superstitions and sell it to the highest bidder, and thus make her fortune.

She stood up, reaching automatically for her belt with its twin knives. These days she slept fully clothed because she could not bear to be naked in the same room as the box.
It watches me.

She allowed her senses to drift, listening out beyond the roof, the walls. For once there was no shroud of rain to drum on them.

But there had nevertheless been a sound from above . . .

Instantly she grabbed up her pack from the floor, and reached quickly for the box. Then there was a shape at the window, which came darting in. Her hand found her knife hilt and she had the weapon from its scabbard and flung across the room into the intruder in one smooth motion.

Even as they came within sight of the low-built guesthouse, they saw the figure fall back from the window. It was a Moth-kinden in a grey hooded tunic just like the one Achaeos wore, now clutching at a knife buried hilt-deep in his throat. The body became lost in the shadows even as it fell, seeming to vanish there entirely. Then Thalric shouted out a warning and smashed his shoulder into Tynisa, knocking her sprawling on to the muddy ground. Achaeos and Tisamon were both running back towards them, and Tynisa had her rapier out, turning on the Wasp furiously, but the flash from his hands almost blinded her. She felt the heat of it, but it swept above and past her, and she heard a cry of pain. Then there was a second Moth-kinden spiralling down to land on hands and knees. Tynisa made to go for the injured man, but Thalric’s second sting hurled him ten feet away and, as he landed, the darkness consumed him and he was gone.