Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [18]
There was a clear effort to try and farm some of the land around Siriell’s Town, with a hundred little plots scratched into the soil. Several of these had adults or children standing guard over them, as though protecting seams of precious metal. They stared at her suspiciously, as she passed between them on her way to the town proper. Drawing closer, she saw that the narrow streets radiating out from the broken face of the castle were cluttered with people, many of whom seemed to be drunk or unconscious, and a couple of whom were clearly dead. The air washing over Tynisa reeked of sweat and refuse, and resonated with arguments and shouting, the clatter of pots, singing, the odd scream and the roaring declamations of some kind of street entertainer.
Most of the resident scum were Dragonfly-kinden, she noticed, and it was plain that noble paragons such as Salma or Felipe Shah were only setting an example that many of their fellows failed to match. Most of the other outlaws were tall, lean Grasshopper-kinden, but there was a fair quota of halfbreeds and other kinden, including some Mantids and even a few Wasps.
A middle-aged Dragonfly in a ragged robe reached out to tug at her sleeve. ‘How much?’ he slurred. ‘How much for it?’
She slapped his hand away, and in that moment her rapier was a comforting presence, resting against the man’s neck. He seemed too drunk to quite understand, so she kicked him in the parts for good measure, rousing a murmur of appreciation, or sympathy, from some of the degenerates nearby.
She had not thought to find Wasps in the Commonweal, but their pale faces kept leaping out at her as she passed through this filthy town, and she could see that they were prospering here too. There were only a handful, but people got out of their way, and wherever they sat, each held court with a gang of local ruffians at his beck and call. Watching a few of them, and the craven way in which most of the locals bowed and scraped, she soon made the connection. The Empire had dealt the Commonweal the most savage beating in that nation’s history.
At the end of the Twelve-year War three whole principalities – perhaps a third of the Monarch’s domain – were under the black and gold flag, and the Imperial forces had only halted their advance because of an uprising in one of their subject cities back along the supply chain. Even though a treaty had been signed, pledging future peace, and even though the three captured principalities were now nominally free, following reversals suffered in the Empire’s war with the Lowlands, everyone knew that the armies of black and gold could return at any time. Their repeated defeats had wormed their way into the consciousness of the Commonweal, and even people who had not taken up arms knew that the Wasp-kinden were to be feared.
After that, she was looking out for each renegade Imperial, her fingers constantly hovering near her sword hilt, some part of her mind plotting her own glorious fall. To rid the Commonweal of Wasps? To rid Felipe Shah’s principality of the vermin of Siriell’s Town? What might she not set her blade to? To die in the pursuit of some grand and bloody ideal, was that not the Mantis way? There was no past she wished to face, no future she could conceive, but Siriell’s Town offered her an eternal bloody present: fighting as Tisamon had fought, and losing herself here just as he had sought oblivion