Then it was picking its way backwards, with its killing arms still raised, until it reached a precise distance from her where their circles of influence no longer intersected. Whereupon it dropped down and moved off unhurriedly between the trees, a long, dark insect that was soon lost amid the confusion of trunks.
In its place, Tynisa now saw what she had known must be there. Twenty yards behind where the mantis had reared up was a circular clearing. It was not large, and the vegetation had made ample inroads into recolonizing it, but the weathered stump at its centre had been a totem once, such as she had seen far south of here on the same night she had earned the badge that was still clutched in her left hand.
A Mantis-kinden ritual site. Any questions she might have had about whether the Commonwealer Mantids were substantially different from their Lowlander kin were now answered. Blood had been spilled here, year after year, and though the Mantis-kinden had moved on, their legacy remained.
And then she saw him, hovering grey in the air above the ruined idol. Filmy and translucent he might be, but unmistakable. She risked a glance at Isendter, then at Alain, and it was clear that neither of them could see. Only she could preceive how, coalescing into view within the Mantids’ sacred place here, was her father. Not that bloodied walking corpse that had lurked at the edge of her vision since his death, its outlines rendered barely human by the hacking treatment the Wasps had inflicted. This was the man unwounded and whole, for all that the trees showed through him, and though she stared and stared, he did not vanish, but grew stronger, heartbeat to heartbeat.
There was a moment when her three imagined haunters encroached on her, looming at her shoulders – Achaeos with his load of guilt, Salma’s bright smile, slaughtered Tisamon. In contrast to it, though, they were faint echoes. She had known hardship and horror, loss and remorse. She had seen her father hacked to death, had lost her beloved, had dealt a friend a mortal blow, and small wonder that she had peopled her world with reminders. Only now did she realize that they had been merely her crutch, forever distracting her, forever swatting her mind away.
She appreciated how far she had been from being mad until now, for the momentary glimpses of those three dead men were nothing in comparison to this. My father. Tisamon.
He was gazing at her with that smile he sometimes wore as he fought. How hard he must have fought, indeed, to claw his way back thus from death. She wanted to drop to her knees, but instead she found that she was holding her stance, keeping her blade up ready to fight.
I do not believe in magic. But those words became a distant, waning refrain, banished utterly as soon as she heard his familiar lost voice inside her head.
My daughter, spoke Tisamon. I am proud of you. I have so much left to teach you.
He had his hand held out towards her, and she had a dreadful sense of vertigo, as though she stood at a cliff edge, with a fathomless void below her, and she was leaning out… and leaning out, and.. .
Surely this is a terrible mistake. The dead must stay dead. But he was her father, and she was far from home and lost, and more in need of help than she had ever been.
She reached and took his hand.
Twenty-Three
The fires would be seen for miles, making a statement that Dal had not quite wanted yet, but the fire-starters had intended just that, and he had not felt it politic to stop them.
Dal Arche had not known this village’s name before he arrived here, or at least he had not been sufficiently interested to find out. Sara Tela was the name they had later supplied to him, though a piece of knowledge growing fast obsolete. All the houses were alight by now, those nearest the storehouse just starting to catch fire, whilst the first couple to be torched were blazing skeletons, with their outer shutters peeled away, and the inner walls merely ragged strips of charred wood. The wholesale destruction was a little ahead of schedule, for sparks were already drifting on to the storehouse’s sloping roof even as his people were still loading up inside. There was food here, and wine, jars of kadith, bales of silk and cotton, all of it intended for onward barge to Leose. Unexpectedly there was also a small trove of old gold: inscribed lozenges dulled by time that had surely been pilfered by the local headman from some nearby ruin or mound. This discovery had put new heart into Dal’s men, who had been less and less enthusiastic about this particular plan.
‘Speed it up!’ he shouted, letting his wings whisk him on to the storehouse roof, stamping on a few embers as he landed. His watchman was already there, the lean Grasshopper-kinden named Soul Je, one of the three companions who had accompanied Dal Arche since before he came to resume this bandit life.
‘Any sign?’ Dal asked him.
The Grasshopper shook his head. He had kept an arrow nocked to his longbow, but his chief purpose was keeping watch. When Dal arrived here, he had anticipated the possibility of someone taking notice. With the smoke forming a pillar all the way to the sun, such attention was guaranteed.
For the last tenday, Dal had been just testing the waters of brigandage. First there had been a few isolated individuals: a crofter, a herdsman, Dal’s band making free with what little they possessed, slaughtering animals for meat, taking their food and drink. Dal had gathered around twenty men by that point and the pickings had been slim, even if their victims had been quick to surrender them.
Then there had been the attack on a convoy of pack-crickets led by a Dragonfly functionary bringing in some taxes. He had a quartet of Grasshopper guards escorting him, but Dal’s people had caught them utterly by surprise, leaping or flying from all around with bows drawn back. The tax-gatherer had sat glumly by and watched the bandits whoop and cheer as they salvaged this unexpected haul. When they were done, Dal had considered letting his people shoot the witnesses, as many had wished to, but had ruled against it. Word was going to spread in any event, and if he got a reputation that suggested surrender was useless, then a great many such fights might get a good deal harder to win.
He had taken his men to ground after that, let them enjoy the meagre spoils in the heart of a small wood while he planned his next move.
It reminded him of the way it had been after the war. The Wasps had changed his life, but he could not say whether that was for the better or not. Before the war he had been a woodsman, hunting and tracking game to keep his village fed, spending his days out of doors and his nights in a variety of beds – a loner, but not an outsider, and with more than a few admirers. It was a better living than many enjoyed, surely. The village headman had not bothered him, and the nearest noble had barely troubled the headman. It was a way of life that had been turning its slow circles for ever, and could have done so for ever more – or so it seemed to all concerned.
Then the Wasp Empire had mounted its grand invasion – a people and a nation that nobody in Dal Arche’s village had ever heard of, and originating so many miles away it might have been something out of a folk tale – until, that is, the prince’s recruiters came. There was to be a levy, and the headman had been given a quota: young men and women to be sent off to the war.
Some had volunteered, most had been put forward by others or decided by the headman’s fiat. The old man had even sent his own son, acting from faith or guilt. They had been supplied with spears and padded cuirasses, and Dal had brought along his little woodsman’s bow. And so they had gone to war.
Of those young men and women conscripted into the Commonweal’s grand army from Dal’s village, only Dal himself survived. The others had died, almost all together, charging the Wasp lines: scorched by stings, lanced by crossbow bolts, butchered by the sword. Only Dal, the archer, had lived, to be taken up by the princes and put into another force. He had been one of several such archers, but he had been a swifter flier and a better shot, and more than that, he had come to understand that few of the nobles directing the battles had the slightest idea of what they were doing. The Wasps had come against them with their flying machines and their automotives, their ordered formations, their ballistae and their stings. In return, the Commonweal had brought its massed ranks of spears, its vast, untrained and frightened peasant levy, within which, studded like gems, were the glittering retinues of individual nobles and princes.