‘I didn’t say it was the only way, or even the final way.’ He surveyed his men and addressed them peremptorily. ‘Fighters, do me proud.’ No more speech than that. When the door was opened, there were eight of them went stepping into the street, and neither Sinon nor Barik was amongst them. The street was clear, or at least clear in front of the taverna. A safe distance either side, quite a crowd had gathered.
‘Did Barik say their
Sinon nodded. ‘That was the arrangement.’
‘But. . eight on one?’
He gave her a look that was not filled with optimism, and went to the doorway to watch.
A disturbance in the crowd showed people pressing away very hurriedly. Someone was coming who parted them just by word of his approach. Tynisa saw the eight Halfway House combatants tense, spreading out into a loose semi-circle to await his approach.
He stepped clear of the crowd at last: a tall Mantis-kinden, strangely dressed. She saw a green-dyed arming doublet, slit from wrist to elbow for his forearm spines; breeches and boots of darker green; a brooch pin of gold, a sword through a circle, ringing vague bells in her memory. He had no rapier, such as she would expect of a Mantis duellist. Instead there was a metal gauntlet on his right arm with a two-foot blade projecting from the glove.
He walked, very deliberately, until he was at the very centre of the circle his opponents had half-made. He stood with his arms by his sides, feet close together, looking slightly down.
‘A Weaponsmaster,’ she identified at last. ‘I didn’t think there were any left.’
Sinon just grunted, watching, and she still could not understand it: eight men against one, even a Mantis, even a Weaponsmaster, for what that was worth. They had shortswords, maces, offhand daggers; one even had a spear. She looked at them and saw they were not confident. Each was waiting for another to make the first move. The crowd had settled into a rapturous hush.
The Mantis drew his weapon arm up, crooking it across his body with the blade pointed downwards, folded back along his arm. He finally looked up.
One of the men shouted at him, a wordless yell, and they descended upon him at once, six coming at him from three sides, and two bursting into flight to take him from above. In the instant before he was eclipsed from her sight Tynisa did not even see the man react.
But react he did. Even as she lost sight of him two men were already reeling back. In a flash of green he wove between the remainder. The metal claw of his hand danced and spun in the air around him. She saw swords spark off it and the spear lopped in two. In an instant the Mantis had whipped it across the closest swordsman’s face, guiding a mace blow away, and slashed the wielder’s chain mail open, laying his chest raw. The blade lanced upwards to stab into the groin of a Fly-kinden arrowing down with sword and dagger. The short blade moved like a living thing, a flying thing itself. It led and its wielder followed, and he was not touched. His steps were so graceful, so sure, that it was as though he and his enemies had rehearsed this fight for the audience, performed each move a thousand times before this one bloody performance. He walked through the storm of their attacks and they did not so much as tear his clothing.
He put the spines of his arms down past the collarbone of a Beetle-kinden, twice and thrice before the man could react to the first blow. The blade lashed behind him, where the final assailant had been lunging. It cut aside the sword that came for his back, bounded around it, letting the attacker’s own momentum bring him straight onto it.
Seconds. It had been only seconds. Tynisa found that she had her hand clutching white knuckled on her sword hilt.
Eight men lay dead on the cobbles, who had been living and breathing moments before as they filed out of the taverna. The face of the Mantis-kinden was icy, no cruelty there but a bleak detachment. She fell back before he could look in her direction. His was a gaze she did not want to meet.
‘Well, that’s that,’ said Sinon unsympathetically. ‘Now the Gladhanders get the protection business all along Skulkacre.’ He came and sat beside her in the common room, with those others of his men who still walked.
‘Who is he?’ she asked.
‘Tisamon. They call him Tisamon.’ Sinon steepled his fingers. Outside in the street, agents of the Gladhanders were already carting off the bodies for stripping and disposal. ‘Now, dear one, I need you.’
She looked at him levelly. ‘You want me to kill the Mantis?’
She had caught him out. That she could see what she had seen and still make the offer, it was more than he had expected of her. He looked up at Barik and the others. ‘To the door, lads. Nobody else hears this.’
The Scorpion shepherded them away, leaving the lord of the Halfway House and his new recruit alone.
‘Not him, dear one. He’s just a mercenary. I want you to kill his employer. I’ve taken your measure, dear lady. Your face has two advantages over the faces of my regulars, namely that it doesn’t look like a bent boot, and that it won’t be recognized. Now, if you truly want to pay me all you owe, kill the chief of the Gladhanders for me.’
‘I thought this was how you sorted things out.’ She indicated the bloodied cobbles of the street outside.
‘As I said,’ he told her, ‘it’s not the final solution.’
After sundown, the attack picked up where it must have left off the previous night. Instead of being mute witnesses to its after-effects, Che and Salma were there this time: not at the mine site, but Elias, like most mine owners, had another house away from Helleron. Close by the mountains and just a few hundred yards from the rock face and shaft, it was a simple affair compared to his townhouse, just a single-storeyed, flat-roofed lump of a place with a stable block for messengers. It was barely staffed and not intended for visitors, but Elias had turned a servant out of his room to accommodate his new guests. Che felt somewhat guilty about that.
She had been deep in meditation, attempting once more to find the Ancestor Art within her, when she had heard the first explosion. It was a big one, too, for a faint tremor reached her even through the walls. Instantly Che was on her feet and even as she was running for the window she guessed that something had set one of the fuel sinks off. A lot of the mining machinery ran on mineral oil so there was a good sized cache out by the works, and now. .
She caught her breath as she got to the window, because there was a jet of flame a hundred feet high lighting up the walls of the quarry and the foothills of the very mountains themselves. Its faint roaring reached her, eclipsed anything else that might have been audible. There must have been a fearful alarm going on out there. She strained her eyes, looking beyond the dancing column of fire. Sure enough, she could see movement, a great panic of movement. Elias’s guards on the ground would now be swinging their repeating ballista round this way and that. Others would be loosing crossbows. She saw flecks and shimmers in the sky, airborne figures briefly silhouetted before the flames. The Moth-kinden were out in force.
They were barbaric raiders, she reminded herself. They were enemies of progress. As a good Beetle, that was how she should see them. If they had not been so fanatic, they would have been ludicrous, a pack of old mystics lurking in their caves.
She thought of Salma. He was her friend and she respected his opinions. Yet he did not see things as she did.
The door burst open behind her and she whirled round, hand to her sword, half-expecting some mad Moth assassin. Instead it was one of Elias’s two domestic staff.
‘You’re to stay inside the house, miss,’ the man said, as though she had been contemplating jumping out of the window.
‘They’re not going to come here, are they?’ she asked.
‘Nobody knows, miss,’ said the man, plainly himself in the grip of fear. ‘They could do anything.’
She returned her gaze to the window. The flames were lower now, the oil stocks burning dry. She thought she could see the shadowy bulk of one of the repeating ballistas being cranked round, spitting out a man-length bolt every few seconds. There would be guards out there with good crossbows, perhaps even piercers. They had strong armour there and she wondered what weaponry the Moth-kinden possessed to assault such a force with. Spears and stones, perhaps. Bows and arrows.
They had accomplished something already, though. Hundreds of Centrals’ worth of fuel had now gone and the mine works would be set back for days, at least.
