Blood of the Mantis

If she had been more certain of her engine or her remaining ammunition, Taki would have dogged them all the way to the shore, but, as it was, she kept them under shot until they were committed to flight and the Ruinous had built up steam once again, and then she coasted the Esca Volenti back down, hoping for a landing on the vessel’s foredeck. She fumbled between her legs for her string of flags, finally finding the right signal, but had to make three further passes before an answering flag granting permission was flying from the Ruinous and they had cleared the deck sufficiently for her to land.

The Esca Volenti, coming in slowly and pitching back, with its wings beating furiously against its descent, almost managed to hover. It was a sharp divide between almost and actually, however, and she had to throw the control stick every which way to stop overshooting the deck and ending up in the sea. The blast of her wings buffeted every loose thing on deck before her, scattering papers and hats and baskets and anything else light over the side. Then the spring-loaded legs she had now deployed were scraping the Ruinous’s wooden deck and she finally stilled the wings, letting the clockwork grind to a halt, as the Esca made its ponderous settling.

Taki unbuckled and hopped over the side of the cockpit, her wings fluttering a moment as she undertook the drop to the deck. A slight little thing, even for a Fly-kinden; her kind always made the best pilots, because of better reflexes and less weight to drag at their machines, though few of them ever wanted to engage in such a dangerous profession.

There was a big Soldier Beetle approaching who must have been master of the ship. ‘You, boy,’ he was shouting, ‘you took your sweet time!’

Boy, is it? Well, in her overalls and still wearing her helmet and goggles, why not? She hinged up the smoked glass, squinting under the sudden glare, and then pushed the goggles themselves up over her forehead.

‘I came as soon as I saw the flare, Sieur. What losses?’

‘Four crew dead,’ he grunted. He was rather old for this line of work, cropped hair just a greying speckle against his sandstone-coloured skin, and she reflected how it was odd that older ship’s captains always drifted into the slave trade. ‘Two others wounded as won’t work their way to Solarno now,’ he added.

‘Then you’ll have to limp along like the rest of us,’ she replied without sympathy, thinking how those men injured in defence of his ship would get scant sympathy from him. ‘Your… cargo?’

‘Still below, where the bastards never reached,’ the ship’s master said.

‘Slaves?’

‘Slaves from Porta Mavralis,’ he confirmed. ‘Plus five passengers, three of whom had the grace to come raise a blade in their own defence.’

She nodded, fiddling with the buckle of her leather helm. ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting my mark, Sieur.’

His face darkened at that, and she smiled sweetly. What, you thought I’d forgotten?

‘Give it here, then. Which mob are you with?’

‘The Golden House of Destiavel wishes you a happy and prosperous journey to Solarno,’ she told him, handing him the token of her employers so that he would know who to pay the bounty to. ‘If it’s any consolation, you can claw back a little for giving me and poor Esca here a float home.’

‘Having you on my ship all the way? Some consolation. You know they’ll dock me my fee for this?’

‘Take it up with your Domina. Take it up with your guild,’ she suggested. ‘Just don’t take it up with me, for I don’t rightly care that much, Sieur.’

He scowled at her, four times her weight and almost three feet taller, and she armed with nothing but a knife because a pilot carried no more weight than need dictated. She just smiled at him, though, to let him know all the trouble he’d be in if he started down that course, and he stamped away to shout at his crew.

They were mostly Soldier Beetle-kinden too, that odd halfway house between Ants and Beetles, neither of whom had much influence in these parts. She knew Solarno was a strange kind of city – in fact all the cities of the Exalsee were strange. Those kinden who had lived here since long ago, since the Age of Lore, were not natural city-builders. Some of them did not even know how to work metal. Instead, a peculiar crop of exiles and visitors from the north and the west and the east had come shouldering the original natives aside to found a scattering of communities about the shores of this vast and glittering lake.

She finally tugged the buckle of her chitin helm loose. Passengers, she recalled the master just mentioning. If she was going to be ferried home at a snail’s pace by this tramp steamer then she could at least seek out better company than the master himself.