Gorrec shook the blood from the blades, and the next Mantis was on him without warning, following the steel course of her rapier blade directed at his throat. He fell backwards — the only move that would keep him out of the weapon’s path — and the woman had vaulted him, turned even as she landed, lunging back at his chest as he scrambled on his elbows to try and get out of the way.
Then she had pitched backwards, her deadly blade spinning from her hands, while Gorrec jumped to his feet, axes still in hand. Ten yards away, almost lost amidst the trees, the Beetle Jons Escarrabin was reloading his snapbow, hands working automatically as his eyes raked their surroundings.
Gorrec tensed, awaiting the next challenger, but there came nothing. Either the fight had moved on, or it had simply broken up. He and Escarrabin had the forest to themselves, save for the corpses.
Apparently satisfied, the Beetle Pioneer dropped to one knee by the closest body, essaying a quick search for anything of value. A moment later Icnumon sloped out of the shadows, sheathing his blades.
Just another day in the service, Gorrec considered, reaching into his pouch for his medicine kit, because he reckoned this was the sort of place wounds would turn bad fast, if you let them.
He put one axe down and issued his orders by way of hand gestures: You two keep watch, advance slowly, I’m falling back to report. I’ll catch up. Pioneers weren’t the talkative type.
I just hope Her Majesty has a free hand with the rewards, when we get back, was all he thought about it. Just because he had trained for this sort of work didn’t mean he had to like heading into the darkest depths of a Mantis hold. Even amongst the Pioneers that approached as close to suicide as any of them cared to tread.
She waved away the big Pioneer’s report as soon as he started to make it, simply saying, ‘I know,’ to his brutish, uncomprehending face. ‘I know it all,’ and she sent him back to his comrades, to continue breaking ground, to keep up with the rush of the Nethyen.
‘Majesty. .?’ Gjegevey queried uncertainly. He did not feel it, she realized. Neither did Tegrec, the Wasp in Moth’s clothing. They were both magicians in their way, but their power was wan and tepid, rusted from disuse in the one case, and newly minted and shallow in the other. Seda’s speculative gaze moved on, past Tisamon and Ostrec, until she met the blank eyes of Yraea, the Moth ambassador, and in that featureless gaze she felt some kindred echo. Of course, the Moths had ruled over the Mantids for millennia, and now she, Seda, was treading where once they had held sole dominion.
And she does not like it. Seda found herself reading that much into those white eyes. I wonder what orders she has been given by her Skryre masters? Find some way of taking my inheritance from me, and then down with the mistress of the Empire, no doubt. She knew from her own researches that the Days of Lore had not been filled with peace and brotherhood between the Inapt powers. They had fought, jostled for dominance, destroyed one another. By the time the Apt began to climb from the mud, their masters had already exhausted themselves.
A failure I do not plan to repeat. I may have to destroy the Moths, if I cannot find a way to rule them. The same went for the others: she would brook no rivals. Will I be safe only when I am the last magician left in the world?
But let me start with the Beetle girl. Perhaps when she is gone the world will dance to my liking. I will brook no rivals, but especially not her.
And the girl was close, Seda was well aware. Closer and closer, weaving through the dense and haunted trees of this place, and seeking out Argastos for the power that the old shade held. More, she must feel just the same as Seda felt, as the forest spoke to her, as its convolutions and depths made themselves known.
Just as a map of a mountain range can only hint at the complex creases and folds the real earth is twisted into, so the visible forest was a mere gloss over a tightly knotted magical landscape centuries old. Here the Mantids had begun, here they had stretched out their mailed and spiny arm to overshadow the Lowlands, at the Moths’ will. From here had sprung their poets and champions, Weaponsmasters, seers and heroes. Here they had shed blood, their own and that of others, offering by duel and feud so many delicious sacrifices to the wood’s dark and rotten heart. Here their idols stood, drinking the lives of the fallen. And here they had retreated, once the world had turned. In the last days of their power, here they were to be found, in this place that had been theirs, and only theirs. This was the unconquered past, the last sanctuary of their histories, and it spoke to her. The forest was like a vast, malevolent mind dispersed and parcelled out between the trees, the beasts, even the people. She could sense it, this great and ancient thing that did not acknowledge the progressive world without. When the Pioneers and the Nethyen had fought, she had known of it. When blood was shed, she had rejoiced and grown stronger with it.
She stared into the face of Yraea, sounding out how far that kinship went, and found that she had outstripped the Moth already. Moth-kinden magic was different, more refined, more cautious, ever playing the long game: a thousand pieces on a board that reached to infinity. The Moths had mastered their Mantis servants, but they had left them their sacred places, their savagery and their bloody-handed pride. Wasps knew all about that. We are the true inheritors of the Mantis-kinden, more than any other.
And her spread senses resounded to the encroachment of the Etheryen, already flanking the Pioneers, and she called out ‘To arms!’ Her little band of magicians jumped, startled and unsure, but Tisamon was moving, as were her Mantis bodyguards in their black and gold mail. And there were Wasps beyond them, soldiers who knew what to do when an order came.
She levelled her hand, feeling the swift flurry through the dark that was the approaching enemy, knowing them as a part of her, tied by the same cords to the vast sounding board of the forest. When her sting spat, the gold fire searing into the chest of the leading Etheryen warrior, that death was her gift to the forest, and she and her victim were enacting a ritual as old as time.
The Mantis band was small, no more than half a dozen, but they were very swift, and she guessed they had been hunting for her, trying to hack the head from their enemy. Tisamon cut two arrows from the air that had been loosed at her, and then her soldiers were rushing forwards to interpose themselves, even as her bodyguards engaged. Mantis fought Mantis with all the grace and ferocity of their training, claw versus claw. Seda simply stood and waited, watching that handful of them eddy and sway, seeing Tisamon strike and strike again, swift and deadly, but meeting a skill that had the same roots as his own. A handful of Wasps had run in also, and two were dead already, but they had killed off the momentum of the Etheryen charge. For a moment it seemed that nothing was left except for the killing, but then a silver-haired Mantis man broke free of the melee, dancing aside from Tisamon’s lunge with a young-man’s nimble step, and he was driving at Seda the next moment.