Empire in Black and Gold

‘I will tell you everything, but only you,’ Stenwold finally got out. ‘Let’s go up the hill and I will spare nothing of the truth. You have my word.’

‘That would have been a golden thing, only a moment ago,’ said Tisamon sadly, but his arm uncoiled by degrees. Stenwold winced as the spines withdrew from his back.

‘Someone had better tell me what’s going on,’ Tynisa suggested.

Stenwold nodded. ‘Let me talk to Tisamon first. This is going to be difficult.’

He began to trudge back the way he had come, though this time Tisamon did not walk beside him as a comrade, but with the wary distance of an antagonist.

Tynisa watched them go. ‘What?’ she said, to the night air as much as to anyone. ‘What is it?’ Tisamon had looked at her as though she had killed his own brother and danced on his grave. She turned round for some kind of support, but Totho was edging himself underneath the automotive, and there was precious little warmth to be gained from the Moth’s slyly superior facade.

To the pits with the pair of them, she decided. In fact, to the pits with all of them. There was something going on, and it had led to a notable duellist drawing on her, and that meant she had a right to know what was going on.

As softly as she could, she began to follow in Stenwold’s path, letting darkness be her cloak.

On the other side of the hill, out of sight of the automotive, Stenwold suddenly stopped. It was a calculated risk, for if Tisamon’s temper broke again, he would be dead without the others even knowing. It showed a trust, though, and he so desperately needed to regain this man’s confidence. It also put them far enough from the camp that quiet voices would not carry, and harsh words might sound jumbled enough not to be understood.

Tisamon was watching him, blade still by his side, tucked back up the length of his arm.

‘Speak,’ he hissed.

‘I. .’ Stenwold grimaced. ‘It’s difficult for me. It really is. Give me a moment to put my words in order.’

Tisamon bared his teeth. ‘Let me help you. Let me prompt you. She’s her very image. Souls alive! She’s her very image!’ Again it was not anger but a ragged horror that twisted him. ‘How. . How. .’ His stark frame was shaking, and Stenwold wondered if there was even a name for the emotion that had taken hold of him. ‘She’s her daughter. She must be.’

‘Yes, Tisamon. Tynisa is Atryssa’s daughter,’ Stenwold admitted wearily. Now the moment was upon him, he wondered if he had the strength for it.

‘How did you come to. . No!’ Tisamon’s eyes narrowed. The blade of his claw flexed, hinging out and back in. ‘She betrayed us, Stenwold — at Myna. You know this. They knew your plans. They sabotaged your devices. She told them.’

‘Atryssa, Tisamon. At least speak her name.’

‘You think I can’t?’ Tisamon spat. ‘Atryssa betrayed us. Happier with that? She sold us to the Empire, and she left us to die there in Myna. And don’t forget that not all of us escaped alive.’

‘Oh, I remember Myna. I’ve never stopped thinking of it,’ Stenwold said. ‘But she didn’t betray us, Tisamon.’

‘She-’

‘Hear me out!’ Stenwold snapped. ‘Hammer and tongs, hear what I’ve got to say, and then if you still want to kill me, well, I’m all yours.’

Tisamon regarded him in silence.

‘You see, while you stayed in Helleron, I hunted her down. I wanted to confront her with what she had done. Only she wasn’t easy to find — no, let me finish — she was in hiding, yes, but not from us.’

He closed his eyes, calling back seventeen years in order to picture the scene.

‘Nero found her in the end. He was always a good man for the tracking. When we got there she was. . hurt.’

There was the merest twitch in Tisamon. It gave Stenwold hope.

‘She had been trying to get to us, to keep the rendezvous, but the Wasps intercepted her — or some of their agents did. She had to fight them.’

That was too much for Tisamon. ‘So she would fight them! She was a skilled duellist. A handful of Wasp agents would not have slowed her down!’

‘Listen!’ Stenwold realized that he himself was finding it difficult to stem the anger he felt. This was an injustice long gone unsettled, and he now had it in his hands to put history right. The knowledge gave him the strength to say it: ‘She beat them. She did beat them, but she was badly injured, because of her condition.’

‘Her. . condition?’

Stenwold actually mustered a smile, as hard-edged a piece of work as any he had known. ‘She was with child, Tisamon, when she fought them. It slowed her down.’

The Mantis stared at him blankly.

‘When Nero and I finally found her, she was near her time, but she was weak, very weak. She had been keeping low. The Wasps were still hunting her. She was in a Merro slum. There was no one else with her.’ He watched expressions fight to make themselves known on Tisamon’s face. ‘When she bore the child, she died, but the child lived.’

And he left it at that, let Tisamon’s unsatisfied questions fall into the pit of silence between them, then waited and waited.

‘What. .? But who. . was the father?’ A mere whisper.

‘I don’t know. Who might have shared her bed last, do you think?’

Tisamon stared at him. ‘No. . no.’

‘She spoke only of you, those few days we had. She had put aside her protections. It was her choice.’ Stenwold was aware that he was simply putting the knife in now, but it was a knife he had carried for a long time, which had weighed on him every day of it.

‘She’s. . that girl is. .’

Stenwold nodded.

‘But she looks. .’

‘Oh, the looks she gets from her mother. There’s no doubting that. What she gets from her father has yet to reveal itself.’

‘She’s a halfbreed?’

‘I suppose she’d have to be,’ said Stenwold. ‘That’s how it works.’

Tisamon reached out as if to grab hold of his collar, stopped with his arm outstretched, head shaking slightly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Stenwold now held his gaze without flinching. ‘And what would you have said, at the time? What would your exact reaction have been, if I had sent a messenger with the word that the woman you hated most in all the world had borne you a child? You would have killed the messenger, I can tell you that for sure. And by anyone mad enough to take a message back, you would have given the order to have the infant destroyed.’

‘No. .’

‘No, is it?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘A halfbreed, Tisamon? A Spider- Mantis halfbreed? That most vile of all abominations? That’s what you would have thought, isn’t it? Or can you deny it?’

‘You had no right,’ the Mantis said.

‘No right to keep her from you, or no right to let her live? What’s it to be? I had a choice then. Poor Atryssa was dead, and I could take the child as my own, my responsibility, or I could let her die, as you no doubt would have wished. I’m afraid that with a choice like that, mere Mantis pride doesn’t enter into it.’

‘Pride? How dare you-’

‘Pride! Is it not pride — the curse of your whole wretched tribe?’ Stenwold was aware he was going too far now, but unable to stop himself. ‘Hammer and tongs! In the College, you know, there’s an exercise they put students through: to decide why each of the kinden is great in its own way and what makes them special. Well here’s a new hoop for them to jump through. Why are we all such bloody broken things? You and I, Tisamon. Beetle complacency and Mantis bloody pride!’

‘You had no right to take that choice!’