Destrachis, pausing at the door, smiled back at him. ‘She wants you to run, Master Thalric. She wants to feel her victory over you. She wants you dead, but she wants you to appreciate just why – and by whose agency – your death will occur. I can’t claim to understand it myself, but she wants satisfaction, and skewering a sick man while he’s dying on the ground is not apparently very satisfying. So, after chasing you all the way across the Lowlands, she ordered me to make you well enough to run again. Perhaps that makes some sense to an imperial mind?’

‘The Empire and I have parted company,’ Thalric muttered. ‘But she…?’

‘Her name is Felise Mienn,’ the Spider informed him. ‘A Dragonfly-kinden noblewoman. I have no idea why she hates you quite this much.’

Thalric slumped back heavily in the bed, feeling his strength drain away all at once at the very sound of that name. She had been hunting him. All this time, she had been hunting him, and he had never been aware.

The Commonweal during the Twelve-Year War… when the Rekef Outlander agents such as himself were moving ahead of the army, disrupting any resistance the Dragonfly-kinden could mount: raids, sabotage, rumours.

And assassination – dark deeds that he had performed gladly, knowing that the impenetrable shield of the imperial will kept him safe from guilt or blame.

‘I killed her children,’ he recalled hoarsely. ‘And I made her watch.’

‘Yes, that would do it,’ Destrachis said, quite unmoved by the thought, and left him there to reflect.

A

Thirty-Four

‘We’ve been seen,’ Tynisa said. The black shape in the sky had wheeled back past them and was now darting off.

‘Some time ago,’ Tisamon confirmed. ‘Fly-kinden, which tells us little because even the Empire uses them as scouts sometimes.’

They took refuge in a hollow that was carpeted with shoulder-high thorny bushes. Out here in the hill country east of Merro there was little enough cover.

‘Just a local, do you think?’

‘Any local would be keeping his head down, with an army on their doorstep,’ Tisamon remarked. Except, of course, that it wasn’t. By all reason and logic, the Wasp army that had sacked Tark should already have been all over Egel and Merro, and probably at the gates of Kes by now, but aside from those possible scouts, there was no sign of it.

Felyal had provided a boat, a little one-handed skiff that Tisamon had handled ably enough, with the air of a man for whom old skills came back easily. Mantis-kinden made swift boats, this one with such a broad sail and so little hull that Tynisa was constantly clutching at its mast for fear of the water. They had kept close to the coast, running easterly in good time, creeping past the lights of Kes one dark night and then beaching in a secluded bay, all the while looking for signs of the imperial advance.

From then on they had just been watching and waiting, but it was almost as if the Wasps had simply decided to head back north after taking Tark.

‘We couldn’t be behind their lines, could we?’ Tynisa asked.

‘If so, we’d know it. Wasp-owned land has a feel to it. And they’d be all over here, taking stock, taking slaves. No, they’re still ahead, and I can’t understand it.’

They rose from the hollow and soon put another two hills behind them. Lying flat on the crest of the second hill, Tisamon squinted into the distance.

‘Is… that looks like a camp. A big one.’

Tynisa joined him, spotting a dark blot on the horizon. The land was more wooded around here, patches of cypress and wild olives and locust trees that sketchily followed the lines of streams, with cicadas half the size of a man screaming like torn metal at irregular intervals. It seemed to Tynisa that the darkness Tisamon was pointing to could just be more of the same green, but he seemed convinced that it was an army.

‘And camped there, in broad daylight,’ he said. ‘And it’s just a field camp, a temporary pitch-up. No fortifications, nothing. The army’s just sitting there eating up its rations. So what is going on?’

‘The scout’s back,’ Tynisa noticed.

Tisamon risked a look upwards. They were both wearing green and earth tones, camouflaged against the dusty ground. So had he detected them again? Yes. The scout circled a moment and then seemed to be coming down.

Instantly, Tisamon’s claw was in his hand, but Tynisa murmured, ‘Wait.’

The Fly landed twenty yards away, glancing about cautiously. He was dressed outrageously, they saw, and certainly no imperial soldier.

‘Is that what they’re wearing in Merro these days?’ Tisamon wondered. The little man was approaching them nonchalantly, pretending that he was just meandering and had not seen them. As he passed by he let a paper drop from the hands clasped behind his back. He was actually whistling tunelessly as he stared out with apparent satisfaction across the hillside. Then he took a deep breath, exhaled it, and was in the air again, darting off eastwards.

‘What in blazes was that all about?’ Tisamon demanded, but Tynisa had plucked up the discarded message and was reading it curiously. It was elegantly written in a florid script, and seemed so familiar from her College days that she wanted to laugh.

‘It’s an invitation,’ she said. ‘Someone wants to speak with us. It says to come down to the big grove.’ She pointed. ‘They must mean that one way down there.’

Tisamon did not seem amused. ‘It’s a trap,’ he decided.

‘A long way to go for a trap.’

He shrugged. ‘Some people think like that.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘This is Spider-kinden work – the clothes, the details, I know it.’

‘I suppose we are a bit close to the border up here,’ Tynisa allowed. ‘Are we going to go down?’

‘We are – but with weapons drawn,’ he decided. ‘I don’t trust any of this.’

Approaching the grove they saw there was a sizeable body of people within it, and making no attempt to hide themselves. There was enough armour visible for them to see that none of it was in the Empire’s black and gold. They paused at the very edge of the trees, uncertain whether their stealthy approach had been observed or not.

‘Head west as fast as you can if this goes badly,’ Tisamon decided. ‘If it goes really badly, get yourself to Merro and send a messenger to Stenwold.’

‘Assuming Stenwold is in any position to receive one,’ Tynisa said, remembering the Vekken army.

Tisamon shrugged. ‘We must make that assumption.’ Then he stood up and walked forward openly, his claw folded along his arm. Rapier held loosely in her hand, Tynisa followed.

There was an instant stir amongst the guards on the perimeter, but they obviously knew to expect visitors. The Ant-kinden there drew a little closer at the sight of Tisamon, and the Spiders lounging beneath the sideless tent smirked a little, and murmured barbed comments to one another. But when Tisamon stood proudly before them, looking down his nose at them all, not one was willing to challenge him.

‘I believe someone wanted our company.’ Tisamon pitched his voice so as to carry to all of them. Tynisa looked about them, reading their stances, their faces. They were not expecting a fight, she noted. Not an ambush, then, or not immediately. She turned to see a richly dressed Spider-kinden stand up from amongst his fellows. He was a strikingly handsome man, neatly bearded and with a very white smile. Something about him sent a shiver through her, though, not one of attraction but of warning. If it was her Mantis blood that governed her battle instincts, now her Spider blood took over. This was a man to be reckoned with, she knew. He was Aristoi, therefore political through and through.

When he smiled at her, though, she liked him despite herself.

‘Won’t you come a little closer?’ he offered. ‘It would be crass of me to conduct my business at the top of my voice, but I’m loath to scald myself beneath this wretched sun.’