'It ain't wine, it's water. And it's ours. You threw yours up in the hay like a naughty baby, didn't you?'
Dri smiled: the remains of a shattered bottle lay a few feet to her left.
The son was actually starting to cry. 'You despise me.'
'Now you're catchin' on.'
'Very soon you'll be sorry. When he is flesh again, and the Swarm explodes from the grey kingdom, you shall answer to my father. I will tell him and you will be crushed. You worms, you tiny insects, you — bullies.'
'What's this swarm you're always on about?'
But the Shaggat's son had lost the thread of his rant. 'Is it so much to ask, Warden? A good bottle and a bit of cheese? Even local cheese would do.'
Dri rose, stretched — and a flash of movement overhead sent her leaping, spinning, drawing her sword in midair, and the quickness of thirty years' training saved her life.
A hideous insect crouched before her. It was as large as Dri herself, double-winged like a dragonfly, with barbed limbs, green composite eyes and a long stinger like a wasp's curled under its body. That stinger had just stabbed the spot where Dri had lain a moment before.
She drew her knife as well. The creature made a sudden deep buzz, like a crosscut saw biting into a tree. It swivelled its black hairy head, fixed an eye on her, and launched itself into the air. Skies, it's fast. She couldn't see it: then it attacked again. This time she felt the brush of a leg. She struck, but her sword cut only air.
'Wine and cheese! Wine and cheese!'
'Shut up! Shut up!'
The thing was faster than Sniraga the cat. It dived a third time, vanished, dived again and missed her neck by a finger's width. Dri spun into battle dance, into the desperate pinwheeling that can hold off four humans at once. If I stop, I die. If I leap from the hay it will sting me before I land.
The room was a blur. In ecstatic dance she moved backwards through the shards of glass. There was a higher bale there; she could back against it like a wall, burrow into it if need be. If I have time. How many are there? Then the insect was on her and the stinger pierced her cloak beside her ribs, and knowing she had won before she struck Dri snapped the stinger in two with a twist of her body and plunged her knife-hand to the wrist into the insect's eye.
It was minutes in dying. Its gore and spittle burned her, head to foot, and a barb on its leg pierced her thigh. But at last its convulsions ceased. She threw the carcass down, bleeding, dumbfounded. What in the black Pits of woe had just attacked her?
'Will you fetch my bottle, please?' sniffed the Shaggat's son.
A Turach groaned. 'Fetch it yourself — the chain's long enough. Only I think you broke it, your daftness.'
Dri took a few staggering steps. The insect's bile stank beyond description. No one in Night Village was going to believe her. She should take back its head, or what was left of it. Then the hay bales moved.
She whirled. Pithor Ness was gaping at her, chin on the edge of the straw bale, not two feet away. One hand hung frozen above the broken glass. He was terrified.
'Guards,' he croaked.
'Careful! Careful, you blary-'
His hand withdrew. She saw his lips curl, forming another word, and then she flew at him, sunk her knife through his cheek, and using it for leverage stabbed down through his jugular with her sword. Blood struck her in a torrent: she was practically inside the wound. He made a sound that was not the word she feared, groped at the crimson straw, and watched her in disbelief as he died.
She leaped once more. He took four bales down with him, glass and all.
It was four in the morning when Diadrelu reached the ixchel stronghold. Men and women who had known her all their lives fell back in astonishment. Blood soaked her from head to foot; even her hair was stiff with it; yet her only wound was a minor cut on the thigh.
Taliktrum appeared, surrounded by his Dawn Soldiers, the shaved-headed fanatics he had inherited from his father. He questioned her in a sharp, peremptory voice. Was it the rat-king again? Or Sniraga? Was there danger to the clan?
'Yes,' she said.
'Of what kind, Aunt?'
She looked at him, the nervous young leader of Ixphir House. She did not know where to start.
'You must answer my questions the same as anyone,' said Taliktrum, almost shouting. 'We survive through clan cohesion. We are not threads but a woven fabric, and discipline makes the weaving strong. Let it fray in one corner and the whole cloth unravels.'
'You don't need to recite children's lessons to me,' said Dri softly. 'I taught them to you, by Rin.'
The soldiers tensed. Taliktrum looked from one to another. 'My aunt is very fond of invoking Rin,' he said with a nervous sneer. 'As often as she does Mother Sky, or the Wanderer, or any other ixchel figure.'
Dri shrugged. A part of her was screaming at his weakness, this ugly groping for standing and respect. 'The tradition's old,' she mumbled.
'And taken from the giants, like certain drugs and diseases. Tell me, Aunt: is Rin a god or a devil for you?'
She sensed the aggression in his words and was appalled. He was displaying her to his fanatics: 'Here is one unlike myself, one I have risen above, despite our kinship.' It chilled her to the core to imagine what such tactics implied for the future of the clan.
Suddenly her other sophister, Ensyl, rushed into the chamber. A thin reed of a girl with a prominent forehead, widowed before she could marry, Ensyl was quiet to the point of invisibility much of the time; but Diadrelu knew the iron at the heart of the reed. The girl elbowed her way through the Dawn Soldiers, shot one furious glance at Taliktrum, and led her mistress out.
In her own chamber, Dri let the girl tear off her ruined clothes, then sat as ordered in the herring tin that served as her bathtub. She did not speak as her sophister poured bucket after bucket of cold water over her, scrubbing fiercely at the blood and insect substances. The girl had to hack some of it from her hair with a knife.
After several minutes Dri wet her lips. 'Ludunte,' she murmered. 'Didn't he make a report?'
'He tried, mistress. Lord Taliktrum was in the High Loft and would not see him. Skies above, lady, there's glass in your hair!'
That broken bottle had been a godsend. As she crept away the guards were already debating whether the death was an accident or suicide.
'But it was neither,' Dri said aloud.
'What was neither, mistress?'
She looked up at her sophister. 'I killed a human,' she said.
The girl was quiet a moment, then nodded. 'I thought so.'
'He was afraid. I don't think he'd ever seen one of us.'
'If you did it, mistress, I know it was the right thing.'
Ensyl's faith stung worse than scorn. Dri hugged herself. Surely the word on his lips had been crawlies. What else did humans say at the sight of ixchel? Surely his death was unavoidable.
Given that she had let herself be seen.
She thought of Talag. His brilliance, the mad strength of his quest. Reveal our presence and you condemn us all. If you can't kill to silence a giant's tongue you're not fit to leave the shelter of a House. Stay in Etherhorde and be hunted. Do not follow us aboard.
The man she killed had spent nearly his whole life in chains.
'Mistress,' said Ensyl, wondering. 'You're… branded. There's a wolf burned into your skin.'
Dri nodded, covering her breast. Why was this happening, what was she doing here? How could she possibly keep faith with them all?
8
