‘Your Empire’s mad.’
‘It ain’t my Empire.’ Ult replaced the Dragonfly blades on the rack. ‘Fine, so you’re very good. Maybe I’ve not had anyone better down here. Doesn’t mean you’re good enough to kill the Emperor. They’ll just end up seeing another foreigner put down. Why not? It’s what they go see the fights for.’
Tisamon regarded him doubtfully, his clawed glove now gone from his hand. ‘You are an unusual Wasp.’
‘Not so much.’ Ult shrugged. ‘We ain’t all like what you’ve been dealing with – Rekef spies or army officers. You find after a while that it’s what you do, not what you are, that matters. When I did my time in the army, I had more in common with the rank and file of the other side than I did with the officers above me. Now I keep fighters for the pit, and I got more in common with them – and with you – than I have with them people who put me here. That’s why you ain’t going to kill me.’
‘I could,’ Tisamon said firmly, but his voice sounded hollow to his own ears, as though he was trying to convince himself. ‘It would not be easy, perhaps, but I could.’
‘Sure you could,’ Ult told him, seeming unconcerned. ‘But I know people like you.’
‘Put me in front of the Emperor,’ Tisamon said quickly. It was pleading, he knew, begging. He forced the next words out before his pride could intervene. ‘I must have come here for a purpose.’
‘World’s short on purpose, to my mind,’ said Ult, regarding the Mantis with sympathy. ‘I only get told what the Emperor wants to see. He doesn’t want to see any unbeatable Lowlander killing dozens of his men or hacking the legs off beasts. The anniversary fight is for him, for his pleasure, so if he don’t like it, it’s the end of me, far more than if one of the slaves takes a leap at him. What am I supposed to do, anyway – get you to fight yourself?’
Laetrimae, thought Tisamon. Since sending him here, that shadowy and tortured woman had not reappeared to him. Could she have abandoned him? It seemed entirely possible, for perhaps she had simply sought to punish him for his pride. Laetrimae, you brought me here, and it must have been for this purpose or none at all. If you wish me to accomplish anything, you must give me the means.
The thought echoed in silence.
I care not how. He felt, abruptly, the oppressive weight of stone above, the walls around them, the fact that he was a prisoner, of his own making. He had put himself in the hands of fate, and it had let him fall.
‘Take me back to my cell,’ he said quietly. Ult nodded, saying nothing. His old face was all understanding.
It was on the way back to his cell that Tisamon saw the key that fate had provided, but instead of triumph it plunged him into the depths of black despair. He was still reeling from the sight as Ult got him to the door of his cell, but there he stopped, unwilling to step inside.
‘Ult…’
‘What is it?’ The Wasp trainer’s eyes narrowed, aware that something was wrong.
‘Your new prisoner…’
‘Which one? We’ve all kinds of new faces here.’
‘The Dragonfly woman,’ said Tisamon, feeling something hollow in his chest.
‘Oh, the mad one,’ Ult replied dismissively. ‘What about her?’
‘Let me see her,’ Tisamon requested, and his voice shook.
Ult stared at him suspiciously. ‘What’s got into you?’
‘I… know her. Let me see her,’ Tisamon insisted.
‘You know her? I don’t like this,’ the Wasp said. ‘How can you know her? Unless this is some kind of trick?’
‘No trick,’ Tisamon said. ‘It may not even be coincidence. She may have tracked me here, followed me. She’s good at that. I must speak with her.’ Suddenly he felt himself genuinely a prisoner, being denied this one request. Up until then the bars, the guards, the tasks, none of it had really confined him, because he had no wish to be elsewhere or do otherwise. Now he had a desire that only Ult could grant, and he was a prisoner.
Ult let his breath out. ‘Not in the same cell, and not alone. I’ll be there too. You want to speak with her? You do it so I can hear. I’ll put you in the cell next to hers.’
‘That will suffice,’ stated Tisamon, as calmly as he could. Something was turning over in his stomach, though. I am being brought to trial, at last. It was his own doing, of course. He was the master of his fate, and his hand alone had piloted his life on to these rocks. Even now he could have ignored this grotesque turn of events, but he had already put his hand into the jaws of the machine, waiting for it to bite. Why spare himself now?
She did not look up as they reached the cell beside hers and Ult unlatched the door. The current occupant, a scarred Ant-kinden man, was taken out. He stood tensely, looking down, like a mount being readied for riding. Tisamon stepped into his place, holding to the bars that separated this small piece of captivity from hers.
They had taken her armour from her, and her blade, and instead they had dressed her in slave’s clothes just as they had with him. He wondered if she had submitted to it so readily. Why was she here?
‘Mienn,’ he began, and then again, ‘Felise Mienn.’
From beyond the bars, in that part of this underground realm that was nominally free, Ult watched them both. It was a long time before the seated figure looked round but, even when she glanced back over her shoulder, she said nothing. She did not need to. Her expression was wounding enough.
‘How did they catch you?’ Tisamon asked her softly. He forced himself to meet her gaze, and knew that her imprisonment had been by her choice just as it had with him. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked her. ‘Why did you let them take you?’
The slightest, bitterest smile touched her lips, and she said, ‘You think I came here after you?’
He had been so ready to now take responsibility for her that it was as though he had suddenly stepped into thin air. He held on to the bars to keep on his feet. ‘But… why? If not that, why?’
The smile was widening, like something tearing. ‘Why, Tisamon, because I had nowhere else to go. I cannot be with my own people. I have been told as much from the highest authority. I would have gone to the Lowlands, but… what have I left to me there?’ Her voice shook while uttering the last few words. Abruptly, she was on her feet and facing him. Her beauty, her grace of movement, stunned him as on the first time he saw her.
‘I know what I am,’ he said. ‘You cannot understand… I have betrayed so many…’
She cut him off silently with just the slightest movement that, for a moment, he could not identify. Then he realized that her thumb-claws had flicked out, ready to fight.
‘Do you think I care about your history of self-indulgence?’ she asked him quietly. ‘Do you think anybody cares, apart from you? Do you expect me to understand? Yes, I know – you lay with some Spider-kinden, and then she died. How is that my burden to bear? How am I now the victim of your desires?’
‘I know what I am,’ he heard himself say, again.
‘You do not know what you are,’ she spat at him, approaching the bars that separated them. ‘You are beautiful, Tisamon, you are beautiful and deadly and bright, but you are cold and barbed like an arrow, that hurts most when it’s drawn out.’ She was so close that he could have touched her, had the bars suddenly lifted away.
Oh I have done this badly, he reflected, and for just one moment the mists of his own pride lifted and he saw how he could have been quite happy, just in staying by her side. Atryssa would not have understood, but of course Atryssa, being dead, would have made no comment.
‘You wish to fight with me again,’ he said, and it fitted so neatly into the plan that he looked around for that other woman who had entangled herself inextricably with his life.