Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [20]
Tynisa loped into action. She did not possess the Art to follow either the Grasshoppers or their prey, but she could see the net of his pursuers as it spread. Hurriedly, she climbed up to the creaking roof of the largest shack, spying them out, seeing who gave up soonest, who continued following a trail. She took only moments to make her guess, and then she dropped back down to street level and went hunting.
It felt good – and so little had felt good recently – to be moving swiftly and silently through the shabby streets, rapier swaying at her side like a faithful companion beast. This was more a taste of life than the world had afforded her in a long time now, since the war.
Sometimes people got in her way, but they got right back out of it once they noticed her expression, Wasps as well as locals, for she was not someone to stop, just then.
She slowed as she neared the wretched district her instincts had led her towards, and began to quarter it more subtly, street by street, her eyes not actively searching so much as taking it all in – letting the filthy sights and sounds wash over her while sifting them for familiarity. She encountered a few of the Grasshoppers, angry and frustrated at their failed search, turning back now to make their excuses to whoever had hired them. She paid them no mind.
As she shifted sidelong into the shadows beneath a shed’s sagging eaves she found a core of stillness, a Mantis’s watchful invisibility before the strike, as though the shade of Tisamon stood beside her, hand on her shoulder, lending her his kinden’s Art. The other ghosts had been left far behind.
There. She had him. The cloaked figure walking almost – not quite – like a Dragonfly, but a little too burly despite his best efforts. She watched as he slipped out from between two buildings, a little astray from where she had predicted, but close enough. There was a brief pale flash of Wasp skin as he glanced about, and then Gaved hurried off, not at the idle saunter of before, but like a man in a hurry to get somewhere.
She flowed after him, like a ghost herself, keeping up with him at a distance, street for street. When she saw he was heading out of Siriell’s Town her satisfaction only increased. She would be able to kill him cleanly and without interruption, before returning to this festering pit to begin earning her atonement in blood.
He made good time after that, but always on the ground, not wanting to take wing and be too visible. Shortly, he was at the outskirts, where Siriell’s Town petered out into the most wretched of slums, amid the utter squalor of those too weak to fight for something better. Shacks and hovels had become just makeshift tents, cloaks propped up on sticks. The stink was vile, with flies rising in whirling clouds from makeshift latrines, and from bodies.
Gaved did not stop for any of this, and nor did Tynisa, although her stalking had become more careful as her cover diminished. She fell further back, changing her tactics from crowds and walls to using the curve and lurch of the land against him: creeping low, meandering left and right as the contours took her, but always managing to keep him in sight. His track took him through barren farmland in which some of the locals were trying to scratch a living, and she followed him field by field, crossing their boundaries, slinking along irrigation ditches and taking the occasional stand of stunted trees as a gift.
Dusk was on its way now, a bloated moon having already hauled itself clear of the horizon. Gaved had passed the last patch of farmland, too stony now for anything but a handful of scrawny sheep watched over by a Grasshopper youth, and his red and black beetle that circled the animals constantly in a vigilant trundle. One hill beyond, Gaved turned down into a sheltered defile, and there made camp.
Watching his quick,