Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [31]
Then the doors were closing again, and only Lisan Dea and the Mantis-kinden remained with them.
‘We passed through what they’re calling Siriell’s Town . . .’ Gaved started, but the Mantis was paying him no attention.
Tynisa took a step back, to allow herself fighting room. Since she first saw the man she had been waiting for this. Mantis-kinden and Spiders did not get on, and it would make matters considerably worse if he found out she was not a pure-blood Spider at all. His face did not betray the kind of fierce loathing she had encountered in the Felyal Mantis-kinden, when she had travelled there with Tisamon, but nonetheless he regarded her sternly, and his eyes were like steel.
‘Show me your blade,’ he instructed her, and it was as though Gaved and the Grasshopper were simply not there.
At first she misunderstood, taking the weapon half from its sheath, wondering whether this was some trick to disarm her, or whether he was a smith or a collector – or whether he just wished to satisfy himself that here was a Spider bearing a Mantis-crafted rapier, before he attempted to kill her. But something in his stance belatedly communicated itself to her, and she realized that his words were a ritual challenge.
She dropped back into a defensive stance, blade out and levelled at his heart, along the straight reach of her arm, weight poised on the back foot. He had a leather and steel gauntlet on his left hand, she noticed, with a short, slightly curved blade jutting from between his fingers, but folded back along his arm for now. That was a weapon she knew well. She waited for him to take up his own stance, the last formality before the inevitable duel, but instead he just regarded her.
‘Good,’ he said, at last, with a nod of approval reminding her of nothing so much as her old sword-master, Kymon of Kes, dead these several years past. ‘I see the Lowlands contains some virtue in it yet.’
She blinked, surprised enough to straighten up from her guard. If he had struck at her then, she might not have been fast enough to parry him.
Without warning she was abruptly conscious of her own badge. For all that it was hidden out of sight, the Mantis had marked it in some way. Weaponsmasters acknowledged their own, she now discovered, and she would have spoken further with him then, save that he had already turned to Gaved.
‘Report,’ the Mantis ordered, and Gaved gave a concise account of Siriell’s Town and its circumstances, numbers, factions, in a dizzying blur of information; names such as Pirett, Seodan, Ang We, Dal Arche; rivalries and alliances, and little of it meaning anything to Tynisa.
‘Nothing may come of it,’ the Wasp finished up. ‘Siriell wouldn’t manage to mobilize one in three of the fighting population there, and there will be a dozen contenders ready to take what she has away from her. If we were to strike there, it might cut off the centipede’s claws – or it might just stir them all up.’
Lisan Dea nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘It will be the princess’s decision, of course,’ she said, but unhappily.
‘She will listen to her advisers, I am sure,’ Gaved remarked.
It was clear that the Grasshopper was far less certain of that, but the Mantis nodded briskly.
‘No doubt we shall call on you again, Wasp-kinden.’ He said the words without much relish, but to Tynisa’s ear Wasp-kinden sounded a great deal better than Turncoat.
Then, just as Lisan and the Mantis were turning for the gates, Tynisa spoke up: ‘What about me?’
‘You say you are an acquaintance of our young prince?’ the Grasshopper enquired.
‘I am, yes,’ Tynisa replied with some force, perhaps more to convince herself than the other woman.
‘When he returns, he may send for you,’ Lisan Dea suggested simply.
‘Can I not . . . wait for