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
