Heirs of the Blade Read online

  For Doctor John Vandenbrooks,

  Arizona State University

  Contents

  Summary

  Part One: The Recluse

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Part Two: The Widow

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Part Three: The Huntress

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Part Four: Broken Threads

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Epilogue

  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 Aptitude and fallen victim to bloody and unnatural appetites.

  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 Butterfly-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 Windlass, 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 Windlass’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 Windlass’s handling which Tynisa was unable to perceive. He was not one for conversation so their days together passed 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 den
y his ghost its place in her mind.

  Or she would come up from below decks to see a familiar golden-skinned face, that damnable 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 Windlass’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 anticipated a jolting passage, 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 Windlass 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 Windlass was anchored, 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 assemblages 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 Windlass 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 Windlass. 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 assembled to receive them numbered perhaps a score. At least half were Grasshopper-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 nobility, 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, massive 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, breasts, 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 assured her followers, who were clustered about her colossal waist like children.

  ‘He’s the one with the trade boat?’ one of the Grasshoppers piped up.

  ‘You see it there,’ Ma Leyd replied cheerily, pointing out the Windlass 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 assured 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 Grasshopper-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 piss. 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.