An extract from Blood of the Mantis

Below her the two ships were still locked together, but
she had no chance to determine whether the crew of the
Ruinous was still putting up any resistance, or whether the
pirates had already begun their looting.

She flicked the smoked-glass lenses over her goggles
and looked towards the sun. Sure enough, the little heliopter
that was her other worry was trying to hide there, now
a stark silhouette against the sun’s muted sepia glare. She
continued executing her turn, dragging the stick back to
gain height. The fixed-wing craft in pursuit had cast itself
across the waters too fast for its own good, and was making
a ponderous business of turning itself around, arcing high
over the distinctive white-walled retreat of the distant isle
of Sparis.

The heliopter suddenly stooped on her, cutting its twin
rotors altogether to drop like a stone and then, as she sped
past, spinning the left blades a second before the right
ones in order to sling the machine onto her tail in a
remarkable piece of flying skill. A moment later she felt the
Esca Volenti shudder under the impact, but the heliopter
was a tiny thing, barely more than a seat and an engine,
and she had to trust that whatever crossbow it had
mounted before the stick would miss any vital part of her
own craft.

Thinking of her flier, Taki became aware of an ominous
clicking from the engine. Running down again – always at
the worst possible moment! The fixed-wing was now coming
back, fast, swooping low over the waters and then pulling
up hard, trying to barrel in for her. She climbed and
climbed, so that, with his rotary letting loose in a blaze of
wasted ammunition, he passed in a blur below her. They
had both left the heliopter well behind. Whilst it could
balance and hover on a gnat’s ball, as the saying went, it
had nothing for speed.

She had to wrap this up quickly and then get back to
the ships, but at the same time she had to do something
about the warning noises her engines were making. Time
to do the usual.

Taki yanked the stick back one-handed, so that for a
second the Esca was pointing straight at the apex of the
sky, and then she flipped the craft on its wingtip and
turned into a steep dive. She saw the fixed wing flash past
her again, unable to compete. After all, the Esca Volenti
was one of the nimblest machines over the Exalsee and she
could even give dragonfly-riders a run for their money on
the turns.

Releasing a catch, she felt the wood and canvas of the
flier shudder as the parachute unfurled. This was her
second, so if she didn’t close matters here before the engine
ran down again, then it would mean a forced landing at
best. Taki listened anxiously, above the rushing of the
wind, and heard the clockwork mechanism that sat
immediately behind her screaming with spinning gears as
the drag of the ’chute rewound it. Sometimes, not often,
that failed to happen, and at that point she really would
have had a problem, for the world before her eyes now
was already a sheer expanse of sea.

She pulled the stick back again, putting all her weight
on it, and heard the struts and frame of the Esca give all
their familiar protests. Another catch flicked and the ’chute
was gone, billowing away into the ether, and the Esca
Volenti levelled out over the Exalsee, no more than ten feet
over the wave tips, speeding past the jutting Nine Fingers
crags.

The flash of piercer bolts zipping past told her the
fixed-wing had found her again, and she led it sideways in
a turn easy enough for it to manage, banking left and right
erratically to avoid its aim, until, and too late for the fixedwing
to avoid it, they were heading straight for the wooden
side of the pirate vessel...And then the fixed-wing’s
rotary was punching holes in its own ally, both above and
below the waterline.

She pulled up, dancing past the white sweep of the sails,
and a glance over her shoulder told her that the fixed-wing
had flown wide of the ship’s stern. The Esca could turn
like nothing else in the air. Most orthopters around the
Exalsee had four wings, some had two, but she had her
secret: two wings and a little pair of clockwork halteres –
drumstick-shaped limbs whose metronomic beating kept
the flier under her control in even the steepest of arcs.

And now she was following the fixed-wing, which had
slowed down to match her speed to accomplish the turn.
She lined the Esca up directly behind it, with one hand on
the trigger of her rotary piercer, the weapon that had so
revolutionized air-fighting over the last ten years. Like an
infantry piercer it had four powder-charged barrels with
spear-like bolts, but these discharged one at a time, not all
together, rotating as they did so while the feeding gears
pulled through a strip of gummed canvas that fed new
bolts into the machine. It possessed the speed and power
of a repeating ballista fitted neatly below the nose of her
craft.

Bang-bang-bang, and the fixed-wing faltered in the air.
A moment later it was smoking, the mineral oil in its fuel
engine catching fire. She pulled out from behind it, seeing
it dip lopsidedly towards the waves.

The heliopter was right there, over the ships, puttering
towards her, and she saw the repeating crossbow loose and
loose again, its bolts falling short at first, and then flying
wide. It was jinking sideways, trying to throw her aim
off, and she missed with half a dozen shots before one, by
sheer chance more than skill, struck near the left rotor,
sending the wooden blades flying into pieces. The little
craft spun wildly for a moment, and she saw the Flykinden
pilot make a jump for it, darting off under his own
power and doubtless hoping she would not follow him.

Behind her a plume of fierce black smoke began to rise
from the waters where the fixed-wing had crashed.
She took the Esca right over the two ships, and noted
that there was still fighting on board the grappled Ruinous.
Slinging her machine into another tight turn, she opened
up with the rotary again, punching holes down the length
of the pirate’s decks. She had been trying for the foremast
and, as she pulled out of her strafing dive, she saw it sag
slightly against the stays. Down below there was confusion,
and then the pirates, with their aircraft downed and their
ship damaged, were fleeing from the Ruinous under archery
from the surviving defenders, cutting their grappling
lines and trying to get underway.

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 Flykinden;
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.

There was blood on Che’s blade. From a mortal wound
that she had inflicted? Impossible to be sure, but she
doubted it. Her recollection of the sequence of events
aboard ship was at best cloudy. She had decided that she
did not like fighting very much.

That decision had come after watching a battle, an
actual battle. She had read accounts of battles before, of
course, but those came in two distinct flavours. The traditional
romances painted them in vivid colours where
great heroes reared up, surrounded by their foes, and slew
tens on tens, or were slain heroically while holding a
bridge or a pass just long enough for their fellows to prepare
a defence. The second flavour was found in the history
books, dry as chalk dust, stating how ‘Garael with
her five hundred met the superior forces of Corion of
Kes by laying ambush at the pass, triumphing by guile
and surprise though losing most of her followers to the
fray’.

No mention, in either case, was made of all the blood.
She had seen enough of that by now, both as she had
performed her little best to assist the field surgeons, and
then later when she was led along the rails, through that
appalling litter of the dead and dying, with Wasp soldiers
stalking amid them and finishing off those that still lived in
a soldier’s final mercy.

Cheerwell Maker, known mostly as Che, shuddered,
and continued cleaning her blade. The pirates had outnumbered
the crew by two to one and so she had brought
her resisting sword from its sheath and cut and slashed,
drawing its edge across arms and legs, thrusting its point
into any part of the enemy that presented itself. The
routine moves had come naturally enough, just like in
those hours spent practising in the Prowess Forum. She
had, in that brief moment, put her thoughts aside like a
true swordswoman was supposed to.

Now she stood shaking slightly as one of the crew began
to mop at the deck, swabbing the blood from it. Another
man was heaving the bodies of slain pirates overboard,
only five of them and one shot in the back. The dead
crewmen were wrapped in canvas, gone from crew to silent
passengers in a sharp moment.

‘Well, damn me but look at her,’ said her companion,
moving up beside her. He had fled to the top of the
wheelhouse once the pirates had attacked, but had taken
a few shots with his bow from that vantage point. He
was Fly-kinden, but a particularly unsavoury specimen of
one, bald and coarse-featured and dressed in dark tunic
and cloak like a stage-play assassin. Now he was staring at
the approaching pilot whose aerobatics had apparently
defeated the pirates’ fliers.

The pilot was a female Fly even smaller than himself,
clad in an all-in-one garment of waxed cloth strapped
across with various belts and bandoliers. She seemed very
young, with a round, tanned face and smiling eyes, and
Che envied the light way she moved across the deck.
There were other passengers aboard, but only one had
come up on deck to help them fight. He was a tall, severelooking
Spider-kinden man, who gave the pilot a little nod
of acknowledgement as she approached.

‘So,’ he said, with a bitter smile. ‘The Destiavel, is it?’
‘My ever generous-hearted employers, Sieur,’ the pilot
confirmed, grinning at him. ‘And you are Sieur Miyalis of
the Praevrael Concord, unless I mistake a face. Your cargo
still safe in the lower hold, is it? A shame for you if they’d
been taken by pirates. Not so much shame for them,
though. A slave in Princep Exilla or a slave in Solarno, I
see no difference.’

The Spider-kinden slaver narrowed his eyes. ‘Then I
advise you not to meddle in the trade, little pilot,’ he
snarled, and stalked away.

‘Superb,’ the Fly pilot said vaguely, before gazing
brightly at Che. ‘Let’s see if I can piss you off too, just as
quickly.’ She took a second look at the woman she was
talking to. ‘You’re a foreigner – in fact you both are, by
your dress.’ She pulled the chitin helmet from her head,
unleashing an improbable cascade of chestnut hair. There
came a low whistle from beside Che and the pilot fixed the
bald man with an arch stare. ‘What’s wrong, Sieur? Is it
your daughters I remind you of, or your grand-daughters?’

‘Nice, very nice,’ he replied sourly. ‘Well, lady aviatrix,
my name is Nero, the artist.’ Che caught the moment’s
pause as Nero recalled just how far they now were from
his usual haunts where his reputation might carry some
weight. ‘And this is Cheerwell Maker, a scholar of Collegium.’

‘Collygum?’ the pilot echoed, mangling the name somewhat.
‘Spider Satrapy, is that?’

‘Not within the Spiderlands at all, Madam Destiavel,’
Che informed her, whereupon the pilot looked suddenly
interested.

‘You don’t say? Look, I’m not Destiavel – they’re just
the house that pay my way so I can afford to keep my Esca
Volenti in the air. The name’s Taki, and you’re well met. If
you’ll tell me more about where you come from, I’ll stand
you a drink on the Perambula when we touch land. Maybe
even find you a place to stay. I take it you’re on business?’

‘Of a sort,’ Che admitted, conscious of how suspicious
she sounded. Of course, their current business was not the
sort to be discussed with just any stranger, but this Taki
seemed their best chance of finding their feet quickly in
Solarno, about which Che knew almost nothing.

‘How comes you’ve got a boy’s name then, Miss Taki?’
Nero asked, still looking a little stung by her earlier comment.
It was true though, Che decided: he was old enough
to be the girl’s father.

‘Well, old man, strictly speaking it’s te Schola Taki-
Amre, but most people lose interest by the time I get
through all that.’ She grinned, and Che had to admit that
she was really very pretty.

‘Te Schola, is it?’ Nero replied, clearly nettled. ‘Well if
it’s noble blood, I can’t compete with that.’

She looked at him strangely, and then grinned once
more. ‘Sieur, such a name’s no rarity in Solarno. As for
you, why, surely you can’t merely be known as “Nero” in
whatever port you hail from? That would seem just dreadful.’
Her grin seemed to feed off his scowl. ‘When they
came to Solarno, the ladies and lords of the Spider-kinden
brought with them the chiefs of their servants to provide
for them but, as we tell it, they had left their homes in
more of a hurry than was wise, and so the chiefs were the
only ones who made the journey. My grandmother assures
me that we were all little ladies and lords of our own people
back then, and only came with our own mistresses out of
love. Take that how you will.’ Taki now leant on the rail,
looking north to where a distant shadow on the horizon
must surely be the coast of the Exalsee.

‘Where I come from we’re a bit choosier about who we
give the honorifics to,’ Nero told her.

‘And do you merit one, Sieur Nero?’

He glowered at her and remained silent.

‘We have a lot to learn about Solarno,’ Che intervened.

‘In return you’d like to hear about my home, and Nero’s?’

‘Very much.’ Taki grinned up at her. ‘If you’re proposing
a deal, Bella Cheerwell, you have my hand on it.’

Che took that hand, so much smaller than her own. ‘I
must ask one thing first, though.’

‘Ask away.’

‘Have you...Are you familiar with the Wasp-kinden,
or their Empire?’

Something tugged briefly at Taki’s expression. ‘Ah,
them,’ she said, and there was suddenly a distance between
her and Che. ‘I apologize but I hadn’t realized you were
one of theirs.’ The next words seemed almost forced out
of her: ‘If you’re an ambassador, I’ll point you towards the
Corta. They can deal with you.’

Che chose her own words carefully. ‘I’m not “one of
theirs”. In fact...’ It was the crucial moment, to trust or
not to trust. ‘I am no friend of theirs at all.’

In Taki’s eyes the same caution was reflected. ‘Well
then, Bella Cheerwell...’ the Fly said slowly, ‘perhaps we
have something in common after all.’