He put the spines of his arms down past the collarbone of a Beetle-kinden, twice and thrice before the man could react to the first blow. The blade lashed behind him, where the final assailant had been lunging. It cut aside the sword that came for his back, bounded around it, letting the attacker’s own momentum bring him straight onto it.
Seconds. It had been only seconds. Tynisa found that she had her hand clutching white knuckled on her sword hilt.
Eight men lay dead on the cobbles, who had been living and breathing moments before as they filed out of the taverna. The face of the Mantis-kinden was icy, no cruelty there but a bleak detachment. She fell back before he could look in her direction. His was a gaze she did not want to meet.
‘Well, that’s that,’ said Sinon unsympathetically. ‘Now the Gladhanders get the protection business all along Skulkacre.’ He came and sat beside her in the common room, with those others of his men who still walked.
‘Who is he?’ she asked.
‘Tisamon. They call him Tisamon.’ Sinon steepled his fingers. Outside in the street, agents of the Gladhanders were already carting off the bodies for stripping and disposal. ‘Now, dear one, I need you.’
She looked at him levelly. ‘You want me to kill the Mantis?’
She had caught him out. That she could see what she had seen and still make the offer, it was more than he had expected of her. He looked up at Barik and the others. ‘To the door, lads. Nobody else hears this.’
The Scorpion shepherded them away, leaving the lord of the Halfway House and his new recruit alone.
‘Not him, dear one. He’s just a mercenary. I want you to kill his employer. I’ve taken your measure, dear lady. Your face has two advantages over the faces of my regulars, namely that it doesn’t look like a bent boot, and that it won’t be recognized. Now, if you truly want to pay me all you owe, kill the chief of the Gladhanders for me.’
‘I thought this was how you sorted things out.’ She indicated the bloodied cobbles of the street outside.
‘As I said,’ he told her, ‘it’s not the final solution.’
After sundown, the attack picked up where it must have left off the previous night. Instead of being mute witnesses to its after-effects, Che and Salma were there this time: not at the mine site, but Elias, like most mine owners, had another house away from Helleron. Close by the mountains and just a few hundred yards from the rock face and shaft, it was a simple affair compared to his townhouse, just a single-storeyed, flat-roofed lump of a place with a stable block for messengers. It was barely staffed and not intended for visitors, but Elias had turned a servant out of his room to accommodate his new guests. Che felt somewhat guilty about that.
She had been deep in meditation, attempting once more to find the Ancestor Art within her, when she had heard the first explosion. It was a big one, too, for a faint tremor reached her even through the walls. Instantly Che was on her feet and even as she was running for the window she guessed that something had set one of the fuel sinks off. A lot of the mining machinery ran on mineral oil so there was a good sized cache out by the works, and now. .
She caught her breath as she got to the window, because there was a jet of flame a hundred feet high lighting up the walls of the quarry and the foothills of the very mountains themselves. Its faint roaring reached her, eclipsed anything else that might have been audible. There must have been a fearful alarm going on out there. She strained her eyes, looking beyond the dancing column of fire. Sure enough, she could see movement, a great panic of movement. Elias’s guards on the ground would now be swinging their repeating ballista round this way and that. Others would be loosing crossbows. She saw flecks and shimmers in the sky, airborne figures briefly silhouetted before the flames. The Moth-kinden were out in force.
They were barbaric raiders, she reminded herself. They were enemies of progress. As a good Beetle, that was how she should see them. If they had not been so fanatic, they would have been ludicrous, a pack of old mystics lurking in their caves.
She thought of Salma. He was her friend and she respected his opinions. Yet he did not see things as she did.
The door burst open behind her and she whirled round, hand to her sword, half-expecting some mad Moth assassin. Instead it was one of Elias’s two domestic staff.
‘You’re to stay inside the house, miss,’ the man said, as though she had been contemplating jumping out of the window.
‘They’re not going to come here, are they?’ she asked.
‘Nobody knows, miss,’ said the man, plainly himself in the grip of fear. ‘They could do anything.’
She returned her gaze to the window. The flames were lower now, the oil stocks burning dry. She thought she could see the shadowy bulk of one of the repeating ballistas being cranked round, spitting out a man-length bolt every few seconds. There would be guards out there with good crossbows, perhaps even piercers. They had strong armour there and she wondered what weaponry the Moth-kinden possessed to assault such a force with. Spears and stones, perhaps. Bows and arrows.
They had accomplished something already, though. Hundreds of Centrals’ worth of fuel had now gone and the mine works would be set back for days, at least.
And what is the point? The industrialists of Helleron were not going to go away. They would only return with more soldiers, better protection. One day, perhaps, they really would muster a fleet of fliers and airships and attack the Moths at their very homes, if that was the only way to stop their raiding.
And would that be the answer? She had the uncomfortable feeling that she had been assigned a role in this conflict without ever being asked. There had been a few Moth-kinden at the College, she recalled: strange reserved creatures like Doctor Nicrephos. She had not spoken to any of them but she knew the history. Before the revolution the Moth-kinden had held most of the Lowlands in chains. With the Mantids acting as their strong right hand, they had terrorized the other races with their superstition and charlatanry, or so the history books now claimed. Then the revolution had come: the rise of the Apt, the fall of the old ways before the forge-fires of innovation. It had all started in Collegium, which had been called Pathis when the Moths ruled. The revolt had then burned its way to every corner of the Lowlands, leaving only a few Moth haunts and Mantis holds untouched.
Surely they can see progress.
She thought of the way Salma had reacted to the factories, the mine workings, how it had struck him almost like an illness. He had kept his smile hoisted for all to see, but she knew the sight had appalled him. After all, they were not enlightened people in his Commonweal. They still thought magic existed. No factories, no artificers, no machines.
And, of course, to the east the Wasp-kinden were stoking their own furnaces to turn out weapons of war. Those they had not bought from the clever smiths of Helleron, that is.
After such thoughts she could not watch any longer, and went to join Salma in the main room of the house. Elias had locked himself in his study, so as best they could they played a few hands of cards with the trembling servants, everyone endeavouring to ignore the continuing sounds from outside. Even when the commotion was right at the outer walls, with soldiers running past, the harsh clack of crossbows loosing, they shuttered the windows and pretended not to hear.
In the morning it was all over. She awoke and spent a moment regarding Salma, in the next bed, still smiling slightly even in sleep. She rose, dressed, and went into the dining room to meditate again.