The Prince

  By Adrian Tchaikovsky

  There were two other men in Cordwick’s cell. One was dead and the other was showing far too many signs of life

  When the Wasp-kinden had taken Maille Castle from the Dragonfly-kinden they had taken it mostly intact, and Cordwick was given to understand that the task of turning Commonweal fortification into imperial garrison had fallen to the engineering corps. He gleamed this by what the Wasps had done to the cellars, which spoke volumes of the lengths artificers would go to, to stave off boredom.

  They had converted the cellars into a prison, being Wasps. Their technical difficulty was that Maille Castle was constructed over a subterranean river. The ancient stones of the fort above formed an arch straddling nothing, a bridge over nowhere, each end soundly founded in the rock, and the middle suspended over the hidden watercourse. Architecturally, it was a piece of genius.

  Defensively it had been less than useless, and the Imperial Sixth had captured it in just a day.

  Now the war, that they were calling the Twelve Year War, was effectively done, and the border of the Empire had swept on far from Maille, and the place was a storehouse and a prison and a staging post for the Slave Corps.

  The aforementioned cellars were a great vaulted space buried beneath the castle’s arch, and floored only with dark water, where the river plunged ten feet into a roiling pool before coursing on between the rocks. Denied a conventional oubliette to store their captives in, the engineers of the Sixth had become ingenious.

  Of the men in Cordwick’s cell, the dead one had been Dragonfly-kinden. He had been wounded before he was lowered in and had died shortly after and, despite Cordwick’s vocal complaints, none of the guards had seen fit to remove him. The third man was the problem. The third man had been brought in bound, wrist and ankle, spitting death and vengeance. His legs were already free, and he was slowly working at the leather thongs pinning his hands, wearing them away against the rough iron of the bars, gnawing at them with his teeth. His eyes were fighting mad. He was itching to kill someone. The barbed spines of his arms, that had made such short work of his ankle-bonds, were twitching and fretting, demanding to be slaked with blood.

  The problem was that the cell itself was shackled shut, an impediment that was never going to yield to spines and teeth. The problem was that the cell they were in was an open lattice cage suspended over the inky waters of the pool below by a mere rope, which rope was attached to, by Cordwick’s estimate, a particularly fine example of a Shewner version 5 winding engine. The problem is that the only blood available for the raging, very-close-to-escaping prisoner to paint the bars with was Cordwick’s, and after that the prisoner would be free to do nothing but, by dint of some effort, sever the rope and send himself and the two corpses, one older, one fresher, hurtling to a watery tomb. The fact that Cordwick Scosser, fellow prisoner, soon-to-be-fresher-corpse and failed thief, would already be dead by this point did not rob the thought of any of its horror. Death by drowning was a terror to him, even at such a remove.

  Cordwick knew Mantis-kinden, or he’d thought he did. He knew the Lowlander Mantids, back closer to home, were brooding, sullen, backward thugs, and that was fine. He had thought that the Commonweal breed was different: quiet, ceremonial, unflappable and usually in service to some Dragonfly noble or other. His cell-mate was a Commonweal local but he seemed to be the exception to the rule. To be blunt, he seemed the sort of mad killer that even the Lowlanders would have felt was overdoing it.

  “Look, you Mantis-kinden like stories, don’t you? I know a hundred of them, heroic and tragic as you like,” he tried. The Mantis prisoner continued to worry away at his bonds, which were looking alarmingly frayed. Other conversational gambits that he had rebuffed included

  “Those Wasps are bastards, aren’t they?” and “So, what are you in for?”

  My mother always said it would end like this. It was an assertion that did not bear too much scrutiny. In telling the young Cordwick, on the occasion of his precipitate leaving of home,

  “You’ll come to a bad end, you’ll never amount to anything,” the old dear probably hadn’t been envisaging quite these circumstances, but Cordwick was willing to bet that she’d take the credit for prophecy, if she ever found out.

  There was a taut little sound that was leather giving way under great pressure, following by one that was a Beetle-kinden thief whimpering. He had tried calling for the guards several times already. Now he opened his mouth one last time as the Mantis turned to him, his hands free and on his face an expression of morbid delight. Cordwick’s voice died in his throat.

  A second later he screamed with fright and released tension as someone landed atop the cage. The Mantis lunged upwards instantly and had the newcomer been an incautious Wasp then things might have gone badly. As it was she was a Fly-kinden, and she was four feet up the rope on the instant, leaving the Mantis clutching at empty air.

  She was a neat little thing in a tunic that the hanging lanterns showed as black and gold.

  Her hair was cut short like a soldier’s, too, but something about her had already given the lie to that, to Cordwick. He was good at reading people nine times out of ten. Of course, the tenth time was always the important one…

  “Enough of that,” she snapped at the Mantis. “Evandter, yes?”

  The Mantis crouched below her, poised to spring as though there were not solid iron bars between them. “I am Evandter. Kill me or die, Fly, or go. You are of no interest to me.”

  The Fly-kinden studied him. “You’re the famous Evandter, are you? Scourge of a dozen principalities? Rogue and kidnapper, murderer, enemy of princes? Who’d have thought you’d end up in here, eh? I heard you were drunk when they brought you in. Drinking toasts to your own health, was it? Celebrating the fall of the Commonweal?”

  A shudder went through Evandter that Cordwick identified as sheer penned rage. Don’t antagonise the bastard! he thought frantically, but that would be stoking a fire that was already roaring.

  “My master has an offer for you,” the Fly said.

  “I want nothing from your master, Rekef bitch,” the Mantis hissed. Cordwick considered this, and decided he agreed. A cocky female Fly-kinden in imperial colours almost certainly led to the Rekef eventually.

  “He offers death by the sword,” she went on. “I won’t say it’ll give you a chance to regain your ancestors’ approval, because from what I gather you pissed on that a long time ago, but he reckoned you’d rather die fighting than on crossed pikes.”

  “And what do the Rekef-“

  “He’s not Rekef, neither,” the Fly said sharply, and then, more softly, “Piss on the Rekef, I say. I’ll have naught to do with them.”

  There was a pause in which her words echoed in the vaulted space. Cordwick craned about, seeking out the single doorway that led up to the castle proper. There were two guards there, always. They had been the object of his desperate pleas since Evandter had started on his bonds. Now they were gone, vanished away.

  Evandter’s gaze had obviously followed Cordwick’s because the Fly said, “Oh they think I’m Rekef right enough. They’re not expecting trouble, and I’m good with pieces of paper. When I call them back, they’ll come with the keys and you and I will walk out of Maille like old friends, Evandter. What do you say.”

  Cordwick saw the Mantis grin death up at her. “Call them,” Evandter said. “Set me free.”

  “Swear, first,” the Fly told him, calm as you please. “Swear by the health and life of Nysse Ceann that you will serve my master, not as slave but as sworn bonds warrior.”

  Evandter had gone utterly still as the name - a Dragonfly woman’s name, Cordwick assumed - was uttered. “So,” was all the Mantis said.

  “Swear,” the Fly repeated, “or I go, and you stay.”

  “You name me murderer and enemy of princes,” Evandter growled softly, “and yet you set your life by my word.”

  “I name you kidnapper, and my master says that by her name even your word is good, though it would not be worth a hair else,” she replied.

  “Then I so swear, and may you and your master regret it all the days of your lives.”

  “Good enough for me”, the Fly said, almost cheerily, and she dropped down to the cage.

  Evandter made no attempt to strike at her.

  “What about me?” Cordwick asked. There was a moment of bewildered silence as Fly and Mantis regarded him.

  “Who the spit are you?” the Fly asked eventually.

  “Cordwick Scosser of Helleron, procurer,” he told her, mustering what dignity he could in a cage too low to stand up in.

  “That mean pimp or thief where you come from?” she asked him.

  “Procurer

  of

  goods,” he stressed, as if pressing a claim to the aristocracy.

  “Well, thief, you’re not in my brief. You stay here.”

  Cordwick, who a moment ago would have been happy enough to share the cage with nothing more threatening than a corpse, suddenly felt the yawning chasm of dark water below him. “Please, you can’t just leave me here.”

  “Doing good deeds for the sake of it got put on hold after the Empire invaded,” the Fly told him, without sympathy.

  “But I’ll be executed, or enslaved!” Cordwick insisted.

  “You’ll be in good company. It’s very fashonable these days. Everbody’s doing it.” She sto

od as tall as she could and called out “All right, sergeant!” in a voice that rolled and resounded across the cavern until the waters claimed it.

  “No no,” Cordwick said hurriedly. “Look, I don’t know what your master’s about or who he is or if he’s the Rekef or what, but I’m useful, I’m a good thief. I can get in just about anywhere, talking or lock-breaking.”

  “Yet you’re the one on the wrong side of the bars,” she pointed out. A Wasp with a lantern had appeared at the portal above.

  ” One mistake! Don’t let me rot here just because I slipped up once. Please, I’ll serve your master ‘til my dying day, please, please don’t leave me in here. Don’t leave me to the Wasps.” A sudden inspiration struck him. “You’re Inapt, or you’d have brought the keys yourself. The Mantis is Inapt. Your master, I bet he’s Inapt. Locks, machines, door-catches, incendiaries - you want them? I’m your man. Come on now, give me a chance.”

  Her solemn eyes regarded him, a weight of doubt that seemed to great for her small shoulders to carry. “If I say kill him, will you kill him?” she asked, even as the guard above took wing to come down to them.

  “I’ll kill him even if you don’t, like as not,” Evandter said lazily. “Better to tell me if you don’t want him dead.”

  The Wasp’s wings brought him up on the cage’s very edge, as far from Evandter as he could manage. “You’re done?”

  “I’ll take them both,” she confirmed and Cordwick felt like weeping in relief.

  “Papers only said the Mantis,” the Wasp muttered stubbornly, but it was clear he believed her Rekef credentials because he was already fumbling for the keys. Cordwick had never tried to pass himself off as Rekef but he had met a few of the Outlander recently, as he set about his one-man mission to get rich from the Commonweal invasion, and he knew that the regular army held them in utter dread.

  “You fly, Beetle?” the woman asked him, as he ended up crouched atop the cage, gripping the bars. She and the Mantis and their jailer were standing there quite happily, heedless of the drop and the water. Cordwick shook his head, and saw a suffering expression come to her face, already regretting springing him. Still, if she changed her mind now it would look odd to the Wasps. Just get me out of the castle, Cordwick thought, and then you never need see me again.

  “I’ll call for the winch,” said the jailer, clearly amused.

  There was nothing in the world so lovely as the sun, Cordwick decided as he was led out into it.

  Even in the stockade that the Wasps had bound about one arm of Maille, where men and machines and beasts jostled for space, the air was cool and fresh, the freedom and space intoxicating. He took deep breaths, turning his face to the sky and squinting against the light.

  When he next looked, the Fly was regarding him dubiously, seeing him in good light as a Beetle-kinden man in ragged clothes, just the right side of young, just the wrong side of thin -

  which still made him relatively slender for his kind - short, slope-shouldered, a mild, dark face and thinning hair. Beside him, Evandter looked like some olden-day personification of death, his dark hair worn long and half-shrouding his lean, angular face, his pale skin laced with random scars. The jagged barbs flexed and jutted from his forearms, as though possessed of their own bloodlust that was entirely separate from their owner’s.

  “Lieutenant.” A Wasp bustled up, followed by a Grasshopper slave who set down a little table with quill and ink, pilfered Dragonfly loot. The Fly-kinden made her mark on a few pieces of paper and the Wasp nodded. “You’re sure you’re safe with him,” he asked, nodding at Evandter and ignoring Cordwick entirely. “I can detail you some guards if you want.” He seemed genuinely concerned, but perhaps it was just that he wanted to do right by the Rekef.

  “Him?” she scoffed. “Have you heard how many nobles he gutted, the banditry, the raids?

  He’s done more harm to the Commonweal than half the fighting Seventh.” She didn’t quite claim that Evandter was a Rekef agent all along, but the implication hung in the air clear enough.

  When they had trekked far enough for the slopes of the Commonweal countryside to put them out of sight of Maille, the Fly-kinden turned to Cordwick. “You really can’t fly?” she asked him.

  “My people aren’t known for it,” he replied, in understatement.

  “Then let your feet take you where they will, thief. I can’t see you’re much use,”

  A wave of glad relief washed through Cordwick, only to crash against the intractable wall that was Evandter.

  “No,” the Mantis said, and when the Fly quizzed him he said, with relish, “the Beetle paid the same price I did for his freedom. If he walks free, then so do I. Otherwise he’s bound to the Prince’s purpose as I am. Or I’ll open his throat now, if you don’t want him slowing us down.” He had Cordwick’s collar instantly, without his arm seeming to move, dragging the Beetle close and putting razor-edged spines to his neck. For a horrifying moment the Fly hesitated, then: “We walk,” she said, disgusted either at the Mantis, Cordwick or her own soft-heartedness.

  After they had gone a mile or so in stony silence Cordwick judged that her ill temper had ebbed sufficient for him to prompt, “I’m Cordwick Scosser, of Helleron, by the way.”

  “Yes, you said.” She frowned as Cordwick pointedly stretched the silence. “Tesse,” she told him shortly.

  “And you work for some prince, the Mantis said,” he proceeded carefully. Evandter snorted with derision.

  This time Tesse’s look at him was cruel. “Prince Lowre Darien,” she pronounced carefully, and, “Heard of him, I take it?” as Cordwick choked.

  Lowre Darien was a name known to a lot of people, mostly imperial soldiers, but the stories had filtered down even to such as lowly thieves trying to filch war-plunder from its rightful conquerors. Prince Lowre Darien, who had led the coalition of principalities that had smashed the Sixth Army, and who had fought the Empire to a brief standstill outside Shan Real.

  In a war that was a catalogue of defeats and retreats he was one of the only Commonweal leaders to boast even a halfway success. More stories were told of his personal courage than his military acumen, though. He was the man who could walk in and out of imperial camps like the wind. He freed slaves and killed enemy officers, and Rekef men, especially Rekef men. The Empire had been after him forever, assassins and freelance hunters and the cream of the Outlander, but his name refused to go away and, even now the war was over, word of his exploits kept coming. The Monarch had signed the Treaty of Pearl in craven surrender but Prince Lowre Darien had not been a signatory and for him the war was still raging.

  From death sentence to death sentence, thought Cordwick, because anywhere near Lowre Darien - or even someone pretending to be Lowre Darien - sounded like a mighty unhealthy place to be, but at the back of his mind was a spark of curiosity. To set eyes on the Wasp-killer, the hero of Masaki, the man who stung back: that would be worth a little risk. That would be something to regale his fat, rich friends with, when he was fat and rich himself, and stealing like a merchant steals, rather than like a poor and honest thief.

  Whatever Cordwick was expecting, the army of enamel-armoured Mercers, the castle hidden in a wood, the golden splendour of a Commonweal warrior-lord, none of it was there. The tangled stretch of trees that Tesse led them to was in a hollow so rocky that even the locals hadn’t tried to step it and plough it, let alone build a secret fort there. Instead of a hundred sworn champions, ready to drive the Wasps from Commonweal soil in fulfillment of their destiny, there was one man and one woman, and Cordwick looked at the man two or three times before realising that this was it. This was the man himself.

  Prince Lowre Darien was lean and slight of frame, like most Commonwealers, although perhaps a little taller than most. His dark hair was raggedly cut, as by a man with a knife and a mirror, and Cordwick reckoned he could see a little grey over the ears. His golden skin was smeared with grime, that made him seem older. Instead of a Mercer’s scintillating armour or the gold-heavy robes of a nobleman he was dressed like a successful bandit, hardwearing leather backed with coarse silk that was either dirty or dyed mottled, with a long hauberk of cloth-backed chitin scales, and shoulder-guards of the same. Beside him, on the rock he sat on, was a worn pack and a quiver of arrows. The bow was in his hand, a servicable recurved shortbow, not the elaborate man-high weapon of a noble but that of a bandit who must fight and run. His eyes were the only part of him that convinced Cordwick of who he was. They were the colour of amber, and they held all the noble fire and mastery that every other part of him had been stripped of.

 

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