Heirs of the Blade.

Tchaikovsky, Adrian.

For Doctor John Vandenbrooks, Arizona State University.

Summary.

The war against the Empire concluded in a troubled stalemate with the newly crowned Empress Seda dealing with those rebel governors who refused to accept her claim to the throne. Now the Empire has quelled its internal dissent and is rebuilding its power. Unknown to most, Seda herself has lost her Apt.i.tude and fallen victim to b.l.o.o.d.y and unnatural appet.i.tes.

In an attempt to come to terms with her own newly Inapt nature, Cheerwell Maker has travelled to the ancient city of Khanaphes and met with the immortal, subterranean Masters, who claim to be the first lords of mankind and the first great magicians. Having spurred them to defend the city above from the hordes of the Many of Nem (attacking with Imperial support), Che is now heading north with Thalric, intending to stand between her fugitive foster-sister Tynisa and the vengeful ghost of her father, the Mantis Weaponsmaster Tisamon.

The former First Soldier of Khanaphes, Amnon, has travelled to Collegium with his lover Praeda Rakespear, a Master of the College, but news of an open Imperial invasion of the old city have sent them both hurrying back to help Amnon's people.

Tynisa herself has been missing for some time, having fled Collegium shortly after the end of the war which claimed both her father, her close friend Salme Dien, and Cheerwell's lover Achaeos, the latter of whom died from a wound that Tynisa inflicted.

Part One.

The Recluse.

One.

She remembered how it felt to lose Salma, first to the wiles of the b.u.t.terfly-kinden girl, and then to hear the news of his death, abandoned and alone in the midst of the enemy.

She remembered seeing her father hacked to death before her eyes.

But of her murder of Achaeos, of the bite of her blade into his unsuspecting flesh, the wound that had sapped him and ruined him until he died, she remembered nothing, she felt nothing. In such a vacuum, how could she possibly atone?

The world was a wall.

The Barrier Ridge was what they called it. In Tynisa's College lectures she had seen it marked on maps as delineating the northernmost edge of the comfortable, known territories referred to as the Lowlands. Those maps, set down by Apt cartographers, had been hard for her to follow, and the concept of the Ridge harder still. How could there be a cliff so great as the teachers claimed, and no sea? How was it that the Lowlands just stopped, and everything north from there was . . . elsewhere? The Highlands, by logical comparison: the mysterious Commonweal which had, for a fistful of centuries, rebuffed every attempt by the Lowlanders to make contact diplomatic, academic or mercantile. Everyone knew that, just as everyone knew so many things which, when looked at closely enough, were never entirely true.

On those maps, the Ridge had been a pair of long shallow curves with regimented lines drawn between them, like a stylized mouth with straight and even teeth. The imagination had been given nothing otherwise to go on, and year after year of students had left the College with the inbuilt idea that the world, or such of it as was worth learning about, somehow came to its northern limit by way of a cartographer's convention. Now she looked up and up, seeing the heavens cut in two. To the south was a sky swirling with grey cloud. To the north, ridged and corrugated, rose a great, rough rock face that had weathered the spite of a thousand years and then a thousand more, that had cracked and split and had sloughed off whole fortress-weights of its substance in places, but which remained the barrier keeping the Lowlands and the Commonweal apart. Only the greatest of climbers could have attempted scaling it. Only a strong and confident flier would trust his Art to take him over it, penetrating the foul weather that traditionally boiled and clawed over the land's division.

To her back lay the northernmost extent of a tangled forest that housed two Mantis holds and too many secrets. The airship that had brought her this far had sailed high to cross it, far higher than weather or hostile natives might otherwise account for. Its pilot, Jons Allanbridge, had simply shrugged when queried.

'I don't like the place,' was all he would say on the subject, while beneath them the dark sea of trees remained almost lost in mist and distance. 'Now Sarn's behind us, I'll not make landfall before the Hitch.' Seeing her expression, he had scowled. 'Who owes who for this, girl? You're in no position to ask any cursed more of me. Got that?'

Which was true enough, Tynisa had to concede. The knotted, clenched feeling inside her had twitched at being balked in such a way, but she held on to it, fought it down. Her hand stayed clear of her sword hilt, and it, in turn, stayed clear of her hand, in a tenuous pact of mutual non-aggression.

It had been cold in the upper reaches of the air, but she had planned ahead for that, remembering their journey together to Tharn. She had packed cloaks and woollens, and still she shivered, crouching close to the airship's burner, while Allanbridge bustled about her. That voyage to Tharn had been in his old ship, the Buoyant Maiden, and Allanbridge's status as a war veteran had proved currency enough to finance his trading the Maiden for this much grander vessel. She had the impression that he was finding the craft difficult to run single-handed; not that she would have been able to help him even had he asked.

He called this new vessel the Windla.s.s, which Tynisa thought reflected a lack of imagination on his part, but then he was her benefactor, and she the one who had so unfairly imposed herself on his conscience, and so she had said nothing.

They had been aloft many days now, with Allanbridge stoically rewinding the Windla.s.s's clockwork engine each day. He cooked their meagre meals and did incomprehensible things to the airship's mechanisms in response to changes in the Windla.s.s's handling which Tynisa was unable to perceive. He was not one for conversation so their days together pa.s.sed in silence. She slept in the hold, while he had the single cramped cabin that was the benefit of having acquired a larger airship than the little Maiden. This lack of talk, of any meaningful human contact, suited her very well.

Sometimes she had company other than Allanbridge, or at least her eyes twisted the world to make it seem that way. From the corner of her eye she would see a slender, grey-robed figure hunched at the rail, his posture twisted as if racked by illness, and she would think, He always did hate travel by airship, then close her eyes hard, before opening them to see the rail untenanted again. I killed you, she reflected, and she could not deny his ghost its place in her mind.

Or she would come up from below decks to see a familiar golden-skinned face, that d.a.m.nable smile that twisted in her heart, but he faded, he faded, so much less real than Achaeos's image had been. Salma, she cried silently, and she would have held on to him if she could. Where the murdered Moth put the knife in her with his presence, Salma rammed it home with his departure.

Then, again, sometimes it was Tisamon who she had actually seen die. When the vibrations of the airship denied her rest, when the other two hallucinations had been stabbing at her conscience, as she looked over the Windla.s.s's rail and could find no reason not to simply vault it and find briefly another kind of flight, then she would look along the length of the airship's decks and see her father, exactly as she had seen him last.

The sight calmed her. She knew he was not there, that her mind was breaking up and these images were leaking out, but he calmed her nonetheless. She knew that, if she looked at him directly, he would be gone, and so she would stalk him, sidle up on him, creep closer until she could sense him at her elbow: Tisamon the Mantis-kinden, Tisamon the Weaponsmaster, just as he had left the world: a tall figure dressed in blood, hacked and red from a dozen wounds, half flayed, swords and broken spears rammed into him where the Wasp soldiers had desperately tried to keep him away from their Emperor.

And she would stand there companionably beside him, leaning on the rail or holding firmly to a stay, and feel comforted by the riven and ruined corpse her mind had conjured up here beside her. It was almost all she had left of her father.

She was not sure what she intended once Allanbridge at last got her to her destination. The inner wounds that surrounded her motives were too painful to bear scrutiny. The one vague feeling that she huddled close to, as vital as the airship's burner in keeping her warm and alive, was that she should say sorry, somehow, to someone. Possibly thereafter she should accomplish her own death, and she had reason to believe that, for the people she intended losing herself amongst, this was a practice that they respected, and therefore would not interfere with. Her own people were not so understanding.

My own people! she had reminded herself dismissively, when that thought occurred to her. And which people are they? I have no people.

And now Allanbridge had set down at this place with half a sky, which was indicated as 'The Hitch' on his maps, and that in his own practical Beetle-kinden script. People actually lived here, where there was only half a sky.

Tomorrow, Allanbridge's airship would make that journey up, and although he antic.i.p.ated a jolting pa.s.sage, its physical dangers did not concern him. After all, he had made the same trip on four occasions before now.

'Why stop here?' she had asked him, as he began to lower the Windla.s.s earthwards, in the face of that appalling wall of stone.

'Morning crossing's easier,' he explained. 'There're tides in the air, girl. Just after dawn and they'll be with us, draw us up nice and soft, without breaking us on the Ridge or chucking us ten miles in any direction you please.' When her enquiring expression had remained unsatisfied, he added, 'Also news is to be had here, and I want you to think about whether you really want to do this, 'cos I reckon you think it's all light and flowers up that way but, let me tell you, it's no easy place to make a living if you're not born to it.'

Making a living's the last thing on my mind, she had considered, but for his benefit she had shrugged. 'The Hitch it is,' she had replied.

Now the Windla.s.s was anch.o.r.ed, and resting its keel lightly on the ground, the airbag half-deflated to make it less of a toy for the wind. She and Allanbridge had descended to find the local people clinging to the Barrier Ridge like lichen. Viewed from the forest's edge, the Hitch would barely have been visible. The collection of huts little a.s.semblages of flimsy wood that looked toylike in their simplicity lay in the shadow of the cliffs. And behind them, what seemed like deeper shadow became a regular arch cut into the rock itself. Glancing upward Tynisa saw a few holes higher up, too: entrances and exits for winged kinden perhaps, scouts' seats or murder holes. She looked away hurriedly once her gaze strayed too high, though. Mere human perspective could not live with that vast expanse of vertical stone, and it seemed to her that any moment it must tumble forward, obliterating the Hitch and the Windla.s.s and all of them.

Allanbridge had been checking the airship's mooring, and now he returned to her side. His expression was challenging; he knew enough, had been through enough with her, that he could guess at part of her mind. He did not approve, and did not believe that her resolve would last, and yet he understood. He had brought her this far, after all.

If he will not take me over the Ridge, she determined, I shall trust to my Art to make the climb.

'Who lives here?' she asked him.

'Fugitives, refugees,' he grunted, stomping off towards the shabby little strew of buildings, and making her hurry to keep up with him.

'But it's not the Imperial Commonweal above here, is it?'

The look he sent her was almost amused. 'More things in life to run away from than the Black and Gold, girl.'

She thought about that, seeing the ragged folk of the Hitch creep out to stare at her and Allanbridge, at the sagging balloon of the Windla.s.s. Her first thought was: Criminals, then? She had mixed with criminals before thieves, smugglers, black marketeers. A crooked trading post here between Lowlands and Commonweal, unannounced and half hidden, made a certain sort of sense. Wouldn't it look grander, though, if there was money to be made here? she considered, but then Jerez had been a mud-hole too, for all the double-dealing and the villainy . . .

But enough of Jerez. She was not yet ready to think of Jerez.

. . . imagining her hand on the sword's hilt, surely she had felt the indescribable satisfaction of driving it in? She had never liked the man, never . . .

She stopped, fists clenched, looking down until she was master of her expression again, forcing that image from her mind, driving it back into the darkness it had arisen from. Was that a flutter of grey cloth at the edge of her vision, the hem of a Moth-kinden robe?

Allanbridge glanced back for her, but she was already catching up.

And there are other reasons to flee the Commonweal, she told herself, desperate to move her imagination on. Their sense of duty, their responsibilities, that drive them to such madness, some surely must fail and seek to escape from the demands of their fellows.

She stopped walking then, ending up a step behind Allanbridge and to his left, as though she were his bodyguard or a foreman's clerk.

The people of the Hitch that had a.s.sembled to receive them numbered perhaps a score. At least half were Gra.s.shopper-kinden, tall and lean and sallow, with hollow cheeks and high foreheads and bare feet. There were a half-dozen Dragonflies as well, looking just as impoverished. They were as golden-skinned and slender as Salma had been, but if these were fallen n.o.bility, they had fallen very far indeed. There was a Roach-kinden couple, white-haired and stooped, and looming over them all was a single gigantic Mole Cricket woman.

Tynisa had encountered a couple of that giant kinden since the war, both of them Imperial deserters and both of them male. They had been half again as tall as a tall man, enormously broad at the shoulder, ma.s.sive of arm, with skin like obsidian, and in manner quiet and wary, although that might simply have been the escaped slave in them. This apparition before her was something again. The woman stood surely a foot taller than those two men she remembered, and her body fell in enormous curves of shoulders, b.r.e.a.s.t.s, belly and thighs so that beneath her brown woollen robe she looked like a melting idol shaped from mud. She had a riotous flow of silver hair and her face, many-chinned and broad, was beaming at Allanbridge with rapacious cheer.

'Why, it's my favourite Lowlander!' she boomed, loud enough that Tynisa feared for the solidity of the cliffs above them.

'Ma Leyd,' Allanbridge named her, making a brief bow. 'Always a pleasure.'

'This man's a friend,' Ma Leyd a.s.sured her followers, who were cl.u.s.tered about her colossal waist like children.

'He's the one with the trade boat?' one of the Gra.s.shoppers piped up.

'You see it there,' Ma Leyd replied cheerily, pointing out the Windla.s.s with a finger not much smaller than Tynisa's wrist. 'You're on your way up to Siriell's Town, Master Allanbridge?'

'If so advised,' the Beetle confirmed.

'Then I'll have some freight for you on your return,' she promised him. 'For now, come inside. Come talk, come drink.' The Mole Cricket's eyes flicked towards Tynisa. 'Got yourself a wife there, Jons?'

'Not likely,' Allanbridge a.s.sured her. 'Just . . .' He looked at Tynisa as though suddenly unsure about her. 'Just an old friend who needs help.'

Ma Leyd lived in the cave at the back of the Hitch. Indeed, Tynisa guessed the big woman's hands had shaped it from the rock of the Barrier Ridge, using Mole Cricket Art to mould and carve the solid stone as she saw fit. Inside were high, groined ceilings, and oil lamps hanging from sculpted hands that reached out from the walls. The whole could have been one of the Great College's grander cellars, an impression reinforced by a small stack of casks at the back.

The lanterns had been dark, but Ma Leyd lit them with a steel lighter without even having to stretch, for all that they were well above Tynisa's head. The enormous woman then settled ponderously on to a threadbare cushion, and one of the Gra.s.shopper-kinden locals hopped in a moment later with a steaming pot, before ladling some of the contents into three bowls.

'Fortified tea,' Allanbridge identified the liquid. 'Not real Commonweal kadith, mind, because frankly that's something of an acquired taste the taste in question being gnat's p.i.s.s. This stuff is better.'

Tynisa sipped it, and used all her willpower to keep a polite expression. The fortification involved was plainly some type of harsh grain spirit, whose aftertaste destroyed any virtue in whatever it was fortifying, like a boisterous army sent to defend a small village.

'Now, tell me how things stand, up top,' Allanbridge prompted.

Ma Leyd stretched monstrously. 'Well, dear heart, I hear the Prince-Major has yet to make any serious decrees likely to cause you problems, although his lackeys are all demanding justice from him regarding these terrible bandits and criminals that they see lurking in every shadow. Not just the Town in Rhael, either, but I hear half of Salle Sao's gone rogue as well. All the princes-minor want action, but your man in charge there, he must want it to be someone else's problem. After all, raising levies was what caused half the problems last time.'

Allanbridge nodded, although Tynisa could make little sense of it. 'I might have some more additions to your menagerie then, Ma,' he considered. 'Depends how bad it's got. Tell me about the Town.'

'Still there, such as it is. A year ago and I'd have a whole new list of names for who you should deal with, and those you should avoid, but it looks like Siriell has it straightened out now. The same faces as you met last time are all mostly still in place and not knifing each other. 'Cept for Hadshe, who's dead, and Voren who left. Looks like the current order at Siriell's Town is there to stay.'

Tynisa glanced between Allanbridge and the ma.s.sive woman, because whatever dealings were being spoken of were not what she had expected. I should have known better. Before the war, Allanbridge had been a smuggler, and it looked as though he had decided to take up his old ways on his visits to the Commonweal.

'Now everyone says the Monarch won't stand for it,' Ma Leyd went on. 'They say that Felipe Shah and his neighbours will get a rap on the knuckles, and a million Mercers will set the land to rights: peace and plenty, love and wonder, all that nonsense. But they were saying that almost a year ago and the Monarch does nothing, and frankly it seems even Shah isn't exactly bailing his fealtor princes out like you'd expect. Mind you, that's the Commonweal princes all over: dance and paint and hunt and write poetry and whatever the pits you like, except for actually doing something.' Her leer dismissed all the lands extending above them with utter derision.

'And what would you know about it?' Tynisa snapped, the words bursting from her against her will. She knew about the Commonweal, for all that she'd never been there. She knew because the moral standards of the Commonweal those strict, self-punishing demands that it made of its people had driven to his death someone that she had loved dearly. He had been too honourable, and the world had not been able to live with him. So he had died. She found that to hear this bloated woman carp on about the shortcomings of the Dragonfly-kinden was more than she could bear. In her heart the poison was stirring restlessly.

Ma Leyd's expression became as stony as her home. 'I saw all too much of the Commonweal, dear, when I travelled across it to find where the Empire had left my husband's corpse.'

'So you've seen the occupied princ.i.p.alities. That's not the real Commonweal at all,' Tynisa shot back, quite happy to take this woman on in whatever field of combat she preferred. She discovered that she was standing, though she had no memory of rising to her feet. Even so, she was forced to look up in order to lock eyes with the sitting Mole Cricket. Her hand itched.

In measured stages, the enormous woman also stood. 'You'd best not tell me what I know, dear.' She was surely strong enough to tear Tynisa limb from limb, but the rapier's whisper told her that speed would defeat strength always, so she tensed . . .

'Enough!' Allanbridge burst out, leaping to his feet as well. 'You,' he said, jabbing a finger at Tynisa, 'you want to be on my ship tomorrow, you go outside and cursed well keep your mouth to yourself.'

Tynisa stared mutinously at him, grappling with the frustrated anger within her, but already she was regretting her outburst. Her temper seemed to be a thing apart these days, something she had less and less control of. Her hand twitched again, belated and unbidden, near her rapier hilt.

'I'm sorry,' she forced out, and left Ma Leyd's cave hurriedly, to find that a misting of rain was feathering down outside. It fitted her mood.

Months ago the plan had been made, back in a city that had been home to her for so long. Now Collegium had changed, and she had changed. She was marked with blood, every bit as much as the Mosquito-kinden magician who had enslaved her in Capitas.

She had been shipped back home like a slave, a calculated peace offering made by a Wasp named Thalric, who had been spymaster and turncoat in his time, and was now luxuriating in the t.i.tle of Regent Consort, or some such or so Tynisa was given to understand. Of all of them in that war, he had slipped through almost unscathed, to claim power and glory at the end of it. She loathed him, and perhaps she loathed him still more for thinking to bring her back. She had departed the Empire with only some slave's shabby clothes and a pair of matching gold brooches, one hers, the other her dead father's. Not even with the rapier: she had lost that when the Mosquito caught her. Its return would come later, inexplicable as dreams.

Stenwold, who had raised her as his own daughter, had been waiting for her when she alighted from Thalric's flying machine. His face had been all relief at seeing her alive, but deep in his eyes she had seen a condemnation of her failure. She had not done enough. She had gone to rescue a man, and brought back only an eyewitness account of his b.l.o.o.d.y end.

Tisamon.

And then the news had kept coming: the fallen leaves of war; the blood on her own hands become indelible. Each day some new word had come to trouble her, peeling away what little armour she had retained against the privations of the world, until she could not stay in Collegium longer, nor could she remain amongst those that she had failed, for all they told her it did not matter. She could not stay, yet she had nowhere to go.

There had been one night when she had awakened, screaming, from her dreams . . . arm red with blood to the elbow his blade running with it, the Wasp soldiers stabbing and hacking as though what they struck was a piece of butchered meat and not a man . . . his smile, always his smile, the last to fade . . . She had awoken from that dream and known that she had reached the end of her time in Collegium. Either she must flee or she must bring matters to a close. In the darkness of midnight, her hand had reached out, unbidden, to close about the hilt of her rapier.

How had it come to be there, when it had last been consigned to adorn some Imperial collector's wall or treasure vault? Had some agent provocateur read her mind, and placed it ready for her?

She had never believed in the magic that her mother and father had sworn by, but at that same midnight, suddenly and inexplicably provided with the means to end herself, she wondered if this was not the voice of the universe telling her that it had no further place for her.

With that thought, something of her old fire rekindled, and she took the blade in her hands, feeling blindly its old familiar weight and grace. Her father had won this blade to give to her mother, and then he himself had kept it for so many years, until their daughter was grown and had proved her skill against him. She chose to believe that he had sent it to her, from beyond the veil of death from where Mantids went, when their time came.

She had looked up and seen him for an instant, for the first time: the ravaged hulk of her father standing at the window, and then he was gone. A trick of her mind, a holdover of the dream, but she had understood the warning.

I am losing my grip on the world, she realized. I have killed a friend once and I will kill again unless I do something to stop myself. The rapier, the agent of that murder, hung there in her hand, sleek and balanced. There must be work left to do that I can devote myself to, because, if I have nothing left to distract me, I shall go the last few steps and be mad indeed.

It only remained for her to invent what work that might be. By dawn she had decided the goal, but had no means to accomplish it. How could she get herself to the notoriously isolated Commonweal?

Jons Allanbridge had visited there, she knew. He had shipped Stenwold over there during the war, in a failed attempt to enlist Dragonfly aid against the Empire. Amongst all the bad news, word had come to Tynisa that Allanbridge had since made a return visit or two, joining the many merchants who had tried to strike up a trade with that sprawling nation's insular inhabitants. Still, Allanbridge was more persistent than most and, anyway, the Commonweal was not what it had once been.

She had tracked the man down when he next arrived in Collegium. Now she had a goal, she could hold out in the face of her guilt and the accusing stares of others. She had sat down with Allanbridge over a jug of wine, and told him she wanted to go to the Commonweal.

'I know that Spider-kinden live there,' she had pointed out, for one of Stenwold's companions, on his abortive mission there, had been such a man.

Allanbridge had shrugged. 'Maybe,' he said carelessly, as though her entire future did not depend on his answer. 'What does old Sten Maker say?'