Syale had gone ahead, yet another thing Tynisa was not happy with, but Che seemed to trust her to find whatever she was looking for. The rest had just kept plodding on, Tynisa and her deputies ahead, a block of Sarnesh loaned by Sentius bringing up the rear. Then Che had suddenly broken out of some reverie and announced that there was fighting, and that they had to get there.
So where is everyone? Tynisa was more than conscious that there might be thirty Nethyen ahead, hidden on their home ground and watching this Spider-looking girl intrude. No sign, though, and she could hardly stay here forever. The rest would probably have caught up with Maure already, and be closing on Terastos’s position.
Forward. If there was an ambush, let her flush it out. With sword in hand, she was ready for anything.
In her final dash forwards she realized that she was rushing straight into a Mantis hold: faint glimpses of round-walled, organic buildings on all sides, but woven in between the trees so that no line could be drawn between within and without. Except the Mantids would draw just such a line. To be in their home uninvited would be to draw sufficient ire that even Tynisa and her blade might not be able to fend it off.
She was part way through glancing back to signal Terastos, still moving forwards as she did so, when the rest of the scene around her began to register on her senses. She stuttered to a stop, hopelessly exposed to any archer who wanted her, while trying to match up expectation and discovery.
The smoke in her nose, the greedy buzz of flies, the smell of death, the corpses.
She had her blade ready, as though this sight itself was an enemy. There had been fighting here, surely, but not recently enough for Che to have heard any of it. The nearest buildings were charred; she saw the blackened foundations of the smithy — the only stonework the Mantids would have needed — and guessed that the fire had leapt from there, chewed through a handful of the nearest wooden homes and then wasted its guttering strength against the indomitable trees themselves. The true destruction had been in lives, not architecture.
Just as the inhabitants had not lived in a close-knit Apt village, so they had not fought an Apt battle. Instead, everywhere she looked there were Mantis dead, and when she looked beyond them, between the trees further away, more dead still. They were scattered as they had died, weapons mostly still to hand, strewn disjointedly in knots of four and five, the ragdolls of history. They bore their wounds with pride, she reckoned. Live by the sword.
At a movement behind her, she turned, already registering Terastos before her sword could threaten him. The Moth’s blank eyes were wide, head twitching from side to side as he took it all in.
‘Oh, this is wrong,’ he murmured, just loud enough for her to hear.
‘It’s war.’ Tynisa tried to sound hardened to it all.
‘No.’ The Moth shook his head. ‘No, this is not the way. Mantis-kinden, they don’t. . they wouldn’t. .’
Tynisa shrugged, still holding tenuously on to her composure. ‘The Wasps did it, then?’ Maybe the Sarnesh, but that was a thought she did not voice aloud.
Terastos stalked past her, looking from body to body. ‘I see arrows, blade wounds. . no stingshot burns, nothing from a snapbow bolt. They died fighting each other.’ As he looked back at her, centuries of hidden history were hiding behind those white eyes. ‘What have they been driven to?’ he whispered. ‘Between the Sarnesh and the Empire, they are going mad. This kinslaying. . Mantis has always shed the blood of Mantis, it is their way, but with respect and by consent.’
‘Consent. .?’ Tynisa stopped, because some pieces of the picture that she had been keeping at arm’s length were coming to her now, and refusing to be denied. She was standing by one of the larger sprawls of Mantis dead, and she could see now that more than warriors had died here. Many of the bodies were so small, thin limbs and faces surely too young to display such expressions of determination and defiance. Whoever had swept through here had been as mad as Terastos said. They had given no quarter.
‘Whose was this, Etheryen or Nethyen?’ she asked.
‘Does it matter?’ Terastos spread his hands. ‘I can’t say.’
Maure was approaching them now, and Tynisa thought for a moment that the sight would be too much for the other woman. She had forgotten the magician’s calling, though. The necromancer slowed as she neared them, and what her eyes registered there, in the heart of that dead hold, Tynisa did not want to know. Enough ghosts for a dozen lifetimes.
‘Tell me,’ Terastos said, and Tynisa realized with surprise that he was deferring to the halfbreed like a student seeking the advice of the learned.
‘Despair, nothing but despair.’ Maure’s eyes were closed, her voice was barely audible. ‘Those who attacked here, they had been broken in the hands of the outsiders, sick of fighting the wars of others, sick of promises of a better future, sick of hearing the justifications of the Apt for why they must kill their own kin, sick of the doubt of their leaders. All they had left was their honour. Mantis honour, which always has one last resort left to it. And so they came home.’
Terastos and Tynisa were both staring at her. ‘Home?’ the Moth echoed.
‘To salvage what they could of their way of life. To protect their people from the outside world that had changed them.’ Maure’s voice was precise and calm. ‘To save their children from the future they had seen.’
Then the others began turning up, stepping cautiously through the trees and each one slowing as they realized where they were. Che was the only one to step past Tynisa, Amnon and Thalric trailing to a halt in her wake.
‘Che. .?’
But the Beetle girl was staring out into the trees, as if she had not seen any of it, as though her sight was focused entirely elsewhere.
The Sarnesh were now spreading out, searching for. . survivors? Clues? Tynisa could not guess.
They came home. Maure’s words kept going round and round inside her skull. Not a clash between Etheryen and Nethyen, but. .
‘Miss Maker!’ It came from one of the Sarnesh, rousing Che from her introspection, and Tynisa actually saw her glance about, clearly bewildered at where she was, and then seeing it as if for the first time.
The Sarnesh were clustered about one of the burned-out and broken huts, and Tynisa approached with trepidation, dragged unwillingly along at Che’s heels. There had been another faceless act of extinction here, she discovered. The victims who had holed up in that cramped space had been children, for all that they had plainly fought to the last with knives and teeth. One body stood out: the only non-Mantis there, lying convulsed across the threshold, pinned by the spear that had killed both her and the infant she held.
Syale had forfeited her neutrality.
Che stared at the corpse for a long time, and Tynisa was becoming more and more unsettled by just how little emotion was evident on her foster-sister’s face. The Che of old, that soft and insecure child of Collegium, would fly into fits of passion at just about anything. Now. . there was more expression on even Thalric’s face than on Che’s.
‘We need to move on,’ was all the Beetle woman said. Even the Sarnesh were looking uncertain now.
‘Che. .’ Tynisa gestured at the scene. ‘We can’t. .’
‘They made their choice. What do you think we can do?’
Tynisa flinched away, because there was something in Che now that frightened her badly, that had hold of her sister’s face and throat and made her say words that just did not belong to her. The worst was that Tynisa’s own ready and angry answer just died in her throat. She felt some clawing thing deep within her, closing off her voice. Fear. That same old Mantis fear of magic that had kept them as the Moths’ lackeys in the Days of Lore. But I can’t be scared of Che. . And in that moment she saw just how far her sister had travelled from their childhood. I thought I’d changed, but she is something different now. A magician of the Bad Old Days?