‘Some girls just expect flowers.’ She examined the pieces critically: heavy and crude, like most of the affectation the Halfway House favoured.
Sinon relaxed back on the pillow next to her. ‘They’re not love tokens, my devious lady. They’re your share of Pallus’s stake, after I took what he owed me.
She tried to see the trinkets in a different light, to attach some emotional significance to them, the estate of a dead man, but she could not. They were also worth more money than she had personally ever held before, even at black-market prices.
Since sitting at his table she had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Sinon to discuss her alleged indebtedness to him. She knew the moment was coming, but it was a day and a night now since she had killed the Ant — Pallus, as she had just discovered. She had taken her chances then, sitting high at the table, turning her College games to a deadly serious business. And I did it for Che, and the others, and she could tell herself that as often as she liked.
And Sinon had asked her to his bed. He had not demanded: it was not some tithe he exacted from all the women of the Halfway House. He simply let her know that he had an interest, and in the end she had agreed. She needed to cement her foothold within the fief, and she would have more leverage with him after she had lain with him. Also she had wanted to see him, see the whole of that marbled skin spread out before her. He intrigued her, so unlike the pariah halfbreeds she had previously known. He was a more exciting lover by far than those — fewer than most thought — that she had taken at the College. Exciting because he was older than her, and sly, and exciting because he was dangerous. He was a gangster and a killer and his will now shadowed her life. In lying with him she took hold of some of that power and controlled it. It was an old game.
And yet, as they grappled, the thought had come to her, Is this what it would be like with Salma? and she had tried to see that storm-sky skin for a moment as bright daylight gold.
Now they lay together in the room of a taverna Sinon had picked out, with a dozen of his heavies on watch in the common room below, and he tilted his head back and closed his eyes, the dead man’s gold now off his hands. She could have slit his throat there and then, or perhaps he was secretly tensed, just waiting to see if she would turn on him. Spiders, after all, had a certain reputation.
‘You owe me,’ he said.
‘And was that part of the payment?’
His eyes flicked open. ‘That was something between us, was it not? A mutual benefit?’ To her surprise he sounded just a little hurt. Men and their egos. She smiled at him.
‘So I owe you?’
‘Tynisa, dear lady, you’re someone who gives the impression that you won’t be with us for long, one way or the other. You have your own path and I’d not begrudge you that.’
She raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘No,’ he said. ‘But you owe me and debts must be paid. If I do not enforce that rule, I’m nothing. You owe me for Malia’s dead man, and you owe me for the help you’ve asked of me. But it’s your choice whether you pay that off all at once, or break it up into pieces.’
‘All at once, if I can,’ she said instantly. ‘No offence.’
‘Honesty never offends me,’ he told her. ‘Which is not to say that I haven’t had men killed for it.’ His expression was infinitely mild, infinitely truthful. ‘I will have a job for you, I think, that will make us quits, and once you’ve done it I already have a lead on your friends.’
Her heart leapt. ‘Stenwold’s family?’
‘No, we tried there but they’ve seen nobody. Another lead, but a good one — only when we’re quits.’
There was a gentle knock on the door.
‘Chief,’ said the voice of the white-skinned giant. ‘It’s starting to move down here.’
‘We’ll be there,’ Sinon called back, and slid out of bed, slipping into his clothes. Tynisa followed suit, taking one more look across the streaked skin of his muscled back before it disappeared beneath his tunic.
‘So what’s this job you want from me?’ she asked.
‘It will depend on how this goes now,’ he said, but from his tone she guessed there was little argument about it.
Down below, his men were all on their feet, tense. The white giant was marshalling them with curving gestures of his huge claws. He was Scorpion-kinden, she understood, exiled from the Dryclaw Desert south of Helleron. They called him Akta Barik.
‘All ready to go, chief,’ he said. His voice was quiet and he spoke slowly and with great precision, to avoid mumbling through those jutting fangs. ‘Just got word: their man’s on his way.’
‘So what is this?’ she asked.
‘Just a formal way of settling the disputes, so that everyone can see how it falls out.’
‘Sounds a bit above board for your types,’ she said. He threw her an amused look.
‘I didn’t say it was the only way, or even the final way.’ He surveyed his men and addressed them peremptorily. ‘Fighters, do me proud.’ No more speech than that. When the door was opened, there were eight of them went stepping into the street, and neither Sinon nor Barik was amongst them. The street was clear, or at least clear in front of the taverna. A safe distance either side, quite a crowd had gathered.
‘Did Barik say their man?’ Tynisa asked. ‘Just one?’
Sinon nodded. ‘That was the arrangement.’
‘But. . eight on one?’
He gave her a look that was not filled with optimism, and went to the doorway to watch.
A disturbance in the crowd showed people pressing away very hurriedly. Someone was coming who parted them just by word of his approach. Tynisa saw the eight Halfway House combatants tense, spreading out into a loose semi-circle to await his approach.
He stepped clear of the crowd at last: a tall Mantis-kinden, strangely dressed. She saw a green-dyed arming doublet, slit from wrist to elbow for his forearm spines; breeches and boots of darker green; a brooch pin of gold, a sword through a circle, ringing vague bells in her memory. He had no rapier, such as she would expect of a Mantis duellist. Instead there was a metal gauntlet on his right arm with a two-foot blade projecting from the glove.
He walked, very deliberately, until he was at the very centre of the circle his opponents had half-made. He stood with his arms by his sides, feet close together, looking slightly down.
‘A Weaponsmaster,’ she identified at last. ‘I didn’t think there were any left.’
Sinon just grunted, watching, and she still could not understand it: eight men against one, even a Mantis, even a Weaponsmaster, for what that was worth. They had shortswords, maces, offhand daggers; one even had a spear. She looked at them and saw they were not confident. Each was waiting for another to make the first move. The crowd had settled into a rapturous hush.
The Mantis drew his weapon arm up, crooking it across his body with the blade pointed downwards, folded back along his arm. He finally looked up.
One of the men shouted at him, a wordless yell, and they descended upon him at once, six coming at him from three sides, and two bursting into flight to take him from above. In the instant before he was eclipsed from her sight Tynisa did not even see the man react.
But react he did. Even as she lost sight of him two men were already reeling back. In a flash of green he wove between the remainder. The metal claw of his hand danced and spun in the air around him. She saw swords spark off it and the spear lopped in two. In an instant the Mantis had whipped it across the closest swordsman’s face, guiding a mace blow away, and slashed the wielder’s chain mail open, laying his chest raw. The blade lanced upwards to stab into the groin of a Fly-kinden arrowing down with sword and dagger. The short blade moved like a living thing, a flying thing itself. It led and its wielder followed, and he was not touched. His steps were so graceful, so sure, that it was as though he and his enemies had rehearsed this fight for the audience, performed each move a thousand times before this one bloody performance. He walked through the storm of their attacks and they did not so much as tear his clothing.