chain mail. ‘How do you know, Balkus? Are you sure of it?’
‘I saw the body.’ Balkus spoke jerkily, still catching his wind. ‘Arrow in her. They found her out on the slopes.’
‘The Moths have made their choice, then,’ Tynisa said calmly.
‘We don’t know that,’ Scuto insisted, but he was now looking hunted.
‘Che’s with them!’ Totho said. ‘
There was a rising current of concern among the dozen or so of Scuto’s people waiting for his instructions, and eventually their chief held his spiked hands in the air. ‘Shut up, the lot of you!’ His lips twisted over his teeth in frustration. ‘Speak to me, Balkus.’
‘Don’t know more than that. I was out in the Sarnesh quarter, trawling for rumours like you asked. That was the rumour I got. The guard had her down as just another dead Fly with no connections, but I knew her. A single shot, right up under the ribs. Someone must have got her in flight.’
‘Oh bloody loose wheels and knives!’ Scuto shouted at the lot of them, or maybe at himself. ‘Everyone get your weapons. Everyone who wears it get into armour. Now! Someone help me.’
He looked to Totho, but the halfbreed was obviously not inclined to be anybody’s arming squire and so it was Balkus took down a breast- and back-plate that had been cut and twisted, welded and burned until its ruined, punctured contours matched Scuto’s own deformities.
Tynisa, whose blade was always on her hip and who had no armour to wear, watched the men and women of Scuto’s service get themselves ready for war with the speed of long practice. Two Fly-kinden strung bows whilst another racked up the tension on a crossbow. A Beetle-kinden man and woman were strapping each other into matching suits of part-plate backed with tough canvas. Another brace of Beetles wore artificer’s heavy leathers. The one-armed Scorpion had looped something like an apron over his head, and a layer of metal and leather over his chest that left his back bare. There was a Dragonfly-kinden woman, only recently arrived, buckling on bracers and greaves, and then contorting herself to string a bow as tall as she was. Finished with Scuto, Balkus the Ant had slung on a baldric of wooden boxes, and began testing the action on a blocky, bulky thing she recognized as a nail- bow, whilst beside him another Ant from another city was shrugging into chain mail, taking up a shield whose device had been defaced with plain black paint. Tisamon stood ready from the moment Balkus had burst in, but there was a second Mantis with them now, an angular-faced woman who had so far kept her distance from him. Now she had a rapier in her right hand, and in her left another ground down for balance, with forward curving horns for trapping a blade.
‘What is going on?’ Tynisa demanded of Scuto, who now had his armour on, little more than slung over his shoulders and held in place by his own thorns.
‘There’s a lifespan to any band like mine in the information game,’ he said, checking the action on a repeating crossbow. ‘Don’t matter how good you are, things come to the crunch point sooner or later. The point where, no matter how careful you are, the enemy knows enough about your gang to make a move. When that happens, it happens all together. I’ve seen networks wound up in a day, a score of men and women disappearing, dead or captured or turned traitor.’
‘But this might just be-’
‘It might just be anything, miss,’ he said, although his eyes held no hope in them. ‘But we got to be ready ’cos if it’s coming, it’s coming right away.’
But when the door burst open at that very moment she saw that he had not meant ‘right away’ as in that very moment. He had meant sometime that day, or the coming night, or the next day.
There was a Fly child in the doorway, his face completely wild with fright. ‘Scuto! Scuto!’ he was bawling. ‘Men’s coming! Bad men! A whole load of ’em!’
‘Bows to the wall!’ Scuto snapped out as the child fled, door slamming behind him. ‘We’ll take their first charge and then we’re getting out of here. Rendezvous is the Merro on Shriek Street!’
He slammed the door closed and put his bow to one of the small windows. Other archers and crossbowmen were finding positions about the walls of Scuto’s workshop, some at ground level, others powering upwards with brief wing-flares to find vantage points in the sloping roof.
‘Tell me you’ve got a back door,’ Tisamon said.
‘Sure I do, but anyone putting their head out now is going to catch a whole load of crossbow.’
‘Give the word and I’ll go out there, open the way for the rest of you,’ Tisamon suggested.
Scuto spared him one look and saw he was serious. ‘Behind the bench. There’s a mechanism. Sperra!’
A Fly-kinden woman looked back from sighting down her crossbow. ‘Chief?’
‘When I give the word, let this madman out,’ Scuto told her.
‘They’re on us!’ shouted one of his men.
‘Give them everything!’ Scuto bellowed, and the shack resounded to the sound of Balkus’s nailbow roaring. Tynisa staggered away from the man, seeing the firing chamber flare and flare as he loosed off his bolts with the sound of thunder. She could hear nothing of the bows and crossbows, nothing of the enemy, whoever they were, outside.
She tried to get to a free window, saw one higher up, and began to climb to it, hands flat against the cobbled-together wood and metal, her Art giving her grip. Even as she did, a hole was punched abruptly through the wall, a jagged knot of daylight appearing in the wood. Another came a moment later, and she caught the flash of a heavy-headed crossbow bolt, four feet long, as it powered across the room and knocked an identical hole in the far wall.
She got to the window, putting as much of her body behind the protection of metal as she could. Outside was a scene of panic and confusion. In such a ramshackle part of the city there was no real open space. Instead the attackers were already on the hut and had made their charge from mere yards away. They had paid heavily for those yards, though. A dozen of the dead carpeted the mud and cobbles, their bodies studded with end-inches of crossbow bolts or the slender wands of arrows, or the exploded-looking holes that Balkus’s nailbow bolts made when they tore through flesh. There were more of them still alive out there, but they had taken what cover they could and showed no signs of pressing their attack.
Tynisa looked at the fallen. They were mostly Beetles, Ants, or halfbreeds of the two, wearing an ugly mismatch of metal and leathers. She knew the type. Sinon Halfway had kept plenty of them on his books: the lowest of Helleron’s mercenary classes, the strong-armers and thugs of which the city had an infinite supply.
And seeing that composition, and the hurried scowls of the others as they risked glances out from cover, she knew what they were waiting for. By that time, it was already on them.
One of the Fly-kinden, up at the roof, was suddenly jerking backwards, falling from his vantage point in a trail of blood. Tynisa saw the end of a blade drawn back through the arrowslit, and then there were iron hooks tearing at the workshop’s roof, ripping out a jagged section all of two feet across.
By now Tynisa was on her way herself, hands and feet gripping the irregular wall, moving up towards the slant of the ceiling.
A bolt of golden fire spat through the hole, scorching at one of Scuto’s Beetle henchmen. Then the first Wasp soldier pushed his way in. He was not in uniform, his armour painted over in other colours, but he was a soldier of the Empire nonetheless. Tynisa recognized that well enough.
Even as he cleared the roof he took a nailbow bolt directly in the chest, plummeting, spinning, to the ground a dozen feet below. There were more of them, though, and another hole soon gaped in the ceiling at the building’s other side.
‘Now, Scuto! Now!’ Tynisa was shouting, and Scuto obviously agreed.
‘Time to go! You, Mantis, head out the back! Everyone else, wait till he’s in action, then a serious barrage and we go. I’m rearguard with Balkus!’
The Fly, Sperra, flew straight across Tisamon’s face and spent a precious second hauling at the mechanism. A moment later half the back wall slid aside and, in the moment before it reclosed, Tisamon was gone through it.
Tynisa had reached the closest hole in the roof by then. Still clinging with her Art by one hand and both knees she dragged her rapier from its scabbard. The dark, heavy blade seemed to shudder in her hand, and when the next Wasp appeared, already putting his hand towards her, she struck.
She had been aiming for the armpit, where his armour ended, but the perspective tricked her. The narrow
