For a long moment, with Arianna whimpering at the Mantis’s feet, they stared at one another. Tisamon’s offhand, as though it had a life of its own, had plucked a dagger from his belt. He had sought them out particularly, those daggers, after the fight at Helleron, and paid a heavy purse for them.
‘She is mine,’ Tisamon said. ‘I claim her.’ As he was speaking a Beetle-kinden pair, a man and a woman, stepped out into the alley, glanced from him to Thalric, and retreated hurriedly back indoors.
Thalric’s mind was at war with itself. This was the one confrontation he would normally have baulked at. He had come far too close to dying because of this man, and who knew whether his daughter was lurking nearby? He had a sense, as he was hunting Arianna down, that his were not the only feet on her trail. He had that sense again now, even with Tisamon before him. Who else is there and where are they?
He feared. A bitter realization that, but he feared.
Still, he was a soldier of the Empire. He took a step forward and spat a bolt from his palm at the Mantis.
Tisamon hurled himself aside, though the fire scorched his shoulder. But just as Thalric had loosed the bolt the Mantis’s hand had flicked forwards and he now saw the Wasp stagger as the dagger struck. A glancing blow, for Thalric had seen the silver flicker coming, but it had been flying straight for his face and, as he dodged, it cut a line across his temple, above his ragged cheek where Arianna had clawed him. He made to launch another bolt, but Tisamon had a second knife in his hand even now, sending the edged darts spinning out one after another, driving Thalric back, back, then up to a rooftop, almost to the limit of his sting’s range. Tisamon had a hand full of knives, little hiltless throwing pieces, and there was no way to tell how many he still concealed.
This confrontation could see both of us dead very easily. The thought was in Thalric’s mind, but he could see no acknowledgement of it in Tisamon’s expression. Thalric was more mobile, the Mantis’s eyes better in the darkness.
Stalemate. And Thalric knew that he could not squander his life here, when he was badly needed to further the Rekef plans in Vek. Then let this Mantis see if he could stand against the fall of a whole city.
Thalric’s wings blurred into life and he hurled himself into the sky, watching for that next knife at all times until he had put a building between them. Even then he could not have said whether his reason for flight was anything other than a way of disguising his fear.
Arianna felt a brief moment of relief as Thalric departed, but it withered as she looked up into the Mantis’s face.
‘Please don’t kill me,’ she begged. Tisamon regarded her impassively. Now the moment was upon him he had expected his earlier passion to be urging him to do it. To his distant surprise it was the other way round. A fickle current of feeling was trying to stay his hand even though his reason insisted he had to kill her.
He dragged her two streets further towards the river, to an empty, litter-strewn square where a body could have lain for a tenday without discovery, casting her down against a windowless wall. He knelt by her, and the flat of his blade was abruptly cold against her neck, a trick he had used often enough to put fear into others, not that this shivering Spider needed it. ‘Where are your friends?’ he growled at her.
‘They. ’ She swallowed, closed her eyes at the feel of the metal moving against her skin. ‘They’re dead, all of them.’
‘You lie.’ He twitched, just slightly, but she felt the tiny cut, a bead of blood blooming.
‘No, please! Thalric killed them. I’m all that’s left.’
He considered this. It should have seemed impossible, but she had been fleeing and Thalric had been chasing her. This was becoming ever more complex.
‘Please — please let me talk to Stenwold. ’ she started, and he hauled her up by her collar in sheer rage, slamming her back against the wall. His lethal claw was drawn back, and in that instant all his strength of will went into restraining it.
‘Do not even utter his name, traitress,’ he hissed. ‘You and I, we understand one another. We know the old ways and the old laws, but Stenwold doesn’t. He believes in things like conscience and forgiveness, but you and I know better. Some acts of betrayal have prices that must be paid.’
He wanted her to scream at him, to fight him. That would have made his decision easy for him, and he liked simplicity. Instead she just hung in his grip, shaking. She was, he decided, a wretched specimen. Atryssa would have held her in contempt.
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I need to tell someone. ’ And then her voice dried up, and he saw a reflection move in her eyes, which widened abruptly.
‘Watch out!’ she yelled, and he whirled around with claw raised high, and when the sword came down he caught it.
It was not Thalric, but a cloaked woman, some complete stranger. She gave him no chance to see more than that, because that sword was coming at him again. Two strong overhead swings, and then a lunge that nearly gutted him as he leapt back and back, turning each blow aside. The sword flashed in her hands, turning through each attack and never still, now gripped two-handed, now passed to her left or right hand, springing at him from all angles.
He had turned a dozen such blows before he gained the initiative, ducking under one swing and lashing at her midriff. She swayed aside, and the tip of his claw scraped against armour, then the pommel of the sword hammered down on him, and he caught it with the palm of his free hand, forced it aside and lashed out at her face with the spines of his arms.
She fell back, not even scratched, allowing him a better look at her. She was some kinden he did not know well but he thought he knew her race, if not her face. The cloak was mostly blown aside, and he could see she was wearing a full suit of armour — but what armour! He had never seen anything like it. Delicate chainmail overlaid with plates of metal that glittered darkly with greens and blues and prismatic metal tones. He nearly lost himself in staring at it, and backed up a dozen steps as she attacked again. Her style was new to him but she was swift even encased in that metal, dancing both with her sword and with him. He met her blade another half-dozen times, taking each blow on his claw or its armoured gauntlet.
The Spider traitress must have run by now, he realized. He would have to hunt her down again. He did not care. This was special.
He turned his next parry into an attack, and he was backing her up once more, his claw tracing lines of swift silver in the air, now sparking off the straight blade of her sword, and sometimes drawing the faintest scratch off that glorious armour when she did not move quite soon enough.
He sought out her face, golden-skinned, composed into perfect concentration, beautiful and fixed as a statue’s.
He was under her guard for just a moment, lashing beneath her breastplate. He severed a handful of mail links, cut a tear into the arming jacket underneath. Then she struck him with the guard of her blade, almost catching him with the edge. The blow took him in the shoulder Thalric had already burned and he hissed in pain and fell back. He saw her move after him without a thought.
He found he was grinning, because she was magnificent and he had not fought her like in many years.
Another series of lightning exchanges. Her blade was double-edged and needle-pointed, moving like sunlight and mirrors in her hands, each attack different from the last, without pattern or predictability. He shifted and spun with them, letting his reflexes take him where thinking could not keep up, divorcing his mind from the long-trained motions of his body, letting her advances exhaust themselves till he was driving her back in turn. Three times he struck and failed to penetrate her armour, and once he managed a shallow line of blood across her leg beneath the severed links of the mail.