Blood of the Mantis

From the waterfront that ran the entire length of the city, a network of piers and promenades reached out onto the lake, and she now felt the ship’s engine change pitch as it turned to move in on its dock. There were men there already waiting to receive them, more of the sandy-skinned Soldier Beetle-kinden, and also some Flies. Solarno was a Spider city, she had been told, but she saw precious few of their kind to begin with. She tried to remember what Stenwold had told her about the place, from what little information he had coaxed from Teornis. Solarno was not actually part of the Spiderlands, for only the western shore of the Exalsee had that honour. The rest of the littoral was split between the half-dozen communities that ringed the great lake, each supposedly independent. And yet Solarno was intrinsically a Spider city.

‘I’ll meet you on dry land shortly, Bella Cheerwell,’ Taki told her. ‘Only, if I don’t now send ahead for a hauler, then my poor Esca’ll sit on deck until morning, and we’re due rain before then.’

Che looked into the sky, seeing that there were indeed a few clouds gathering but nothing that would suggest a downpour. The winter chill of her journey eastwards had been left behind, and the Exalsee seemed to be basking in last summer’s warmth.

Taki’s wings blurred into sight and she lifted from the deck with a nimble control Che could only envy, skimming across the water towards the city, almost low enough to touch the waves. A flurry of motion beside her told of the arrival of Nero.

‘Keeping your distance?’ Che asked him.

‘She bites, that one,’ he grumbled. ‘Still, I’m not done with her, you’ll see.’ He displayed a ragged piece of paper for Che’s approval. It was a sketch, in charcoal and graphite, of none other than te Schola Taki-Amre, executed deftly and with the minimum of shading, and yet a match close enough that someone bearing only this picture could have picked out the pilot from a throng of other Fly-kinden.

‘For her?’ Che asked him, puzzled.

‘Nuts to her. For me.’ Nero looked at the bustle of the approaching wharves, and past it to the citizens taking their ease on the promenade. ‘This place isn’t quite what I guessed at, but I like it.’

With the engine backing up, the trade ship ground to a halt, and the dockhands began to moor it. Nero flew over the rails to hover over the quay, feasting his eyes on these new surroundings. Che herself waited until the gangplank was lowered, and then again until the Spider slaver, Miyalis, had assumed his due precedence and strode down onto the dockside to find his factor and consign his cargo. It gave her a chance to study the crowd some more, to pick out the different faces and kinden.

Che was soon trying to decide what a typical Solarnese looked like, but the dock, as with docks anywhere, was a bustle of different races, so that was no easy task. The sand-coloured Soldier Beetle-kinden seemed most prevalent, resembling the people of Myna in feature, though so different in skin-tone. They dressed mostly in white, from the plain sleeveless tunics of the dockers unloading ships to the dazzlingly clean loose shirts and trousers of the men and women strutting along the promenade with curved swords at their waists. A few wore dark armour and stood about in bands like mercenaries, with small crossbows hanging from straps at their belts. Others advertised the fact that they were of higher class by dressing in Spider-fashion coloured silks, though never quite pulling it off. For each of the natives she examined, though, there were two others awaiting her inspection. The few genuine Spider-kinden progressed like aristocracy through the crowd, but without the effortless detachment of their western kindred whose every step was smoothed for them by the sweat of a host of slaves they seemed barely to notice. There were Fly-kinden too, a multitude of the little people. In the Lowlands they dressed soberly, but here their garments were gaudy and bright, and phenomenally tasteless, each one a riot of silks and sashes.

And of course there were the others. The Dragonflies with patterned tattoos on their arms and cheeks could have been siblings to the pirates who had attacked them out on the lake. Here, too, they walked armed to the teeth, looking a far cry from her civilized Salma. Ants with greenish skin loped through the crowds, clad in shelly hides and paint, or just bare-chested. There were kinden that she did not recognize at all.

She stopped and stared. There were Wasps. Not just any Wasps but soldiers of the Empire. A pair of them, standing right there on a street-corner, watching the Solarnese throng just as she had been.

Teornis had been right in his assessment of the situation at Solarno, it seemed.