Read Online Heirs of the Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Free Book Online Page A

All wore a mismatch of armour, from leather and chitin to fragments of glittering noble plate and discarded Imperial war leavings. Several carried bows but, as their grounded infantry approached cautiously, she saw the bulk of them had spears, along with the occasional long-hafted sword. Some were lean and lanky Grasshoppers, but the bulk were Dragonflies, and she looked in their faces, feeling such a sense of waste . They were poised and elegant, but where they should have been beautiful, their harsh lives and harsher deeds had marked them with scars and filth and ugly expressions.
    ‘Now then,’ Gaved said quietly. He had his hands each directed at one of the archers, and in return most of the arrows were angled his way. Tynisa had attracted her share of the spears, but they were misreading her calm quiet and seeing her as the lesser threat.
    ‘You’ve got an invitation, Gaved,’ said one of the few swordsmen, thus helpfully identifying himself to Tynisa as the leader of this little rabble. ‘Siriell has a few more questions for you, about just what your business here is.’
    ‘Not a problem,’ the Wasp replied, his easy tone belied by his stance. ‘I’ll drop in on her when I’m next passing through. I always have time for Siriell.’
    ‘Now, Gaved,’ the leader demanded. ‘Tonight.’
    Their numbers should have been overwhelming, of course, but they hung back. They don’t want to hurt him? Want to keep him alive for Siriell? Tynisa wondered, but she noticed how they swayed back a little, whenever Gaved moved. It’s because he’s a Wasp, she realized. These cowards think he’s got the Light Airborne hidden in his pocket or something.
    ‘Take him,’ the leader snapped, with the confidence of a man who isn’t the one having to do so. Two spearmen stepped forward unhappily, weapons held aside as they reached as hesitantly for the Wasp as for a nettle. They stepped into the aim of the archers as they did so.
    ‘Enough of this,’ Tynisa decided, and let fly all the pent-up anger and frustration she had been nursing since before she ever reached Siriell’s Town.
    She ignored the leader, in that first moment, hoping he would prove a challenge later. There were two archers within reach and she impaled one through the eye – after slashing the throat of a Grasshopper spear-carrier to get there – and whipped her blade back to sever the other’s taut bowstring. Her momentum carried her past the archer even as the cut string lashed the woman’s face – then she was standing between two spearmen who desperately tried to drag their weapons towards her, but too cumbersome and too close. She let the razor-sharp edge of her blade open one up, feeling her steel keen through layered leather as though it was not there – a move that served to draw back her arm so that she could ram the point into the other spearman’s chest. She watched her blade hardly bend as it punched through chitin plate and then between ribs, before sliding out again like water.
    She heard Gaved’s stings crack and sizzle and knew, without looking, that his targets would be the other archers, the greatest threats towards him, who would now be turning to look for Tynisa in the spot where she had been standing just a moment before.
    Then she had spears all about her, their wielders fighting to keep distance, the long, narrow points trying to fence her in, so that for a few tense moments she almost lost the rhythm, batting them aside with blade and offhand, vaulting and stepping aside to keep out of their lancing approaches. She kept lunging at every gap, making individual brigands draw back, but without breaking the cage that enclosed her. Then an arrow flowered in the shoulder of one, providing the key that unlocked it all, and she was out from their midst – two Grasshoppers spinning bloodily away, to mark her exit.
    She felt it was time to engage the leader, who had been backing away since things had gone so very badly wrong. That she