Eifre Quest

I.

“Marka? Wake up.”

She isn’t asleep. She is laying down, letting her legs relax, mind wandering free after so many actions, so many decisions. Objectively, official missions from the wardens had taxed her more — but she hadn’t come to Wentalel for a mission, and she deserves this moment of rest.

She expresses this all with a dignified, “Huhmphf.”

“I have soldier pills,” the botherer is saying. “I think you need them. Unless you’d rather sleep down here tonight?”

“No,” she says, meeting the tallowbane’s skeptical eyes. After a few attempts, she stands. “No.We have to get out of here.”

“Very well. Here.”

This ‘pill’ is more of a greasy rind. The center is a core of red fat, the shell made to be digested quickly.

“What are we gonna do about the — the two…?” Marka asks, her palps flinching from specifics. She’d think about it later. “Will we bury them? Attend their spirits?”

“There’s nothing to bury,” it replies. “And souls, spirits, it’s just mysticism. You know that. Mindless, lifeless waste enervate.”

“I guess.” Marka stretches, working her joints, readying up her relaxed muscles.

Wik points at the… remains of the two. It says,“We should retrieve their antennae​-​bands, though. You can confirm the kill with the Wardens.”

Marka nods, glancing at Wik’s hanging around its neck. A vesperbane’s antennae​-​band is fancy cloth sporting a plate of amalgam metal. Each is stamped with the insignia of the bane’s stronghold alliegiance. It’s not just a symbolic bit of engraving, though. Enervate circuits twist throughout every one. Hunter​-​banes all learn a certain umbral technique to check whether an antennae​-​band’s countenanced, and to whom. Of course, defects don’t want to be identitified, and Marka has heard certain rumors: of techniques that tracked, or even a technique, which if cast, could make a band explode — but it has to be uniquely signed by an overscourge.

Still, having a unique ‘I am a vesperbane, be afraid’ signal is useful, and antennae​-​bands did that. Thus, you have the tradition among defecting banes, of scratching across the antennae​-​band’s insignia with a knife or endowed claw, distrupting the circuits in the thin plate.

“Did you get a look at the Golden Lady’s band? I was — distracted,” Marka says, crossing the courtyard back to Wik. She carries Essi’s antennae band. It feels heavy.

“Yes. It was an old symbol for ‘dream.’ Not canonical, to my knowledge.”

“What is the Dream?” Marka asks. “I was raised Welkinist.” And kept a foreleg’s distance from heretical modernity — as much as one could, in a Panthecan city.

“I could tell.” Wik places Angwi’s band in its bag, and then Essi’s. “Well, then this is one blind mantis asking another about color. But to my understanding, the Dream is… equality. An end to all hierarchy. All needs met. For every kind and creature.” Wik meets Marka’s eyes. Its face seemed to be slipping, dripping more than usual now, after everything. It continues, “All the power and potential the vespers hold, for what? Mantids to kill and bind each other? Reduce everything to a static, bloody stalemate?” Wik runs a dactyl between an antenna, its tendrils still unbound and wriggling. “I sympathize with the sentiments, if not the mysticism.”

“So, making everyone exactly the same? Removing any reason to strive or better ourselves?”

Wik closes both raptorials, and lowers them. “It’s not my belief, Marka.”

“I just thought there’d be more to it. More than what every city nymph hears in the mandated lectures.”

“Perhaps there is. Neither of us are — can be — syndics.”

“Or night​-​prophets. They obviously have something to do with the Dream.” Marka looks at the tallowbane, cocks her head. “Why do you think the Lady being one explains everything?”

“Night​-​prophets are, hm, I had dismissed them as mysticism, until now. But annulling an oath is hard to fake,” it says. “That is, if it happened. We should check — but you are too inept, in that regard.”

“Sorry.”

“Nothing for it. I do not doubt much of it still is mysticism. Regardless, night​-​prophets, according to the most sober sources, are manipulators of arete, where most vesperbanes, even spellbrands, and even haruspices, are subjects to it. Bear in mind, historically, the Dream as a movement is a reaction to the overwelming hegemony of the clans in the wake of state after tyrannical state collapsing. Any true believer in the Dream would hate clans. And there’s a tendency to… sentientize vespers, project mantid​-​like minds onto them, and then see oaths as something imposing.”

Marka nods. A early part of her wardens instruction was cutting through the myths and superstition about vespers. Think of them like machines. Her father had supported her and her siblings by doing work with a punch​-​card loom, and sometimes as punishment, he had her work it. So when Marka learned to mold endowments, the practice held some familarity. Vespers followed precise instructions executed mindlessly.

Wik is still talking. “Spellbrands, of course, peddle oaths, and, while haruspices are less inclined, they appoint themselves speakers for vespers, often in the way soothsayers are speakers for tea leaves.” Wik pauses to stretch its palps, relax them. Then, “So, it’s clear why and how a supposed night​-​prophet could strip a clan of everything that makes it a clan. And you can easily imagine one objecting to spellbrands and haruspices ideologically. Or perhaps they were just the first likely to comprehend her presence and — whatever it is she’s doing. Does that cover everything?”

Marka nods. “What is she doing, do you think? Any guesses?”

After a moment, Wik shakes its head. There’s a texture to the silence – Wik no longer meeting her eye — that Marka is too tired to analyze. Not tired enough to miss it though, huh.

“An easy way to find out, I guess,” she says when Wik doesn’t reply, “is going to meet her. But then we might miss the percipient. And I should report all this to the wardens.” She sighs, then scratches her palps with a dactyl, then stops. She doesn’t like the taste of it.

Wik makes a bland affirmative sound.

“E’yama’s last breath,” she mutters. “Decisions, so many decisions. Today’s had more of them than all last month. We’re stuck at the bottom of a buried ruin, and apparently I’ve two different people above expecting to meet me tonight.”

“You are a busy lady,” Wik says. Something about the phrasing prickles her, but she’s not sure.

“Hm,” she sounds, as much with her spiracles as her twitching palps. “There’s no telling how much of what Alunyene’s said is true. And the Watching Lord — they sound ruthless and evil. Do you think they have something to do with what was wrong with Ress?” Wik doesn’t respond, so Marka continues thinking aloud. “Still, if they’re telling the truth, what if they are up to something that’ll save lives? At the same time, a percipient. Who wants to meet with me. That feels important? ‘Where I was supposed to be’ is surely the Church of Blue Welkin. And those answers… I–you understand why finally learning what was up with my mother is so tempting? I told you the story.” Marka breaths in. “That’s not all. Could we go back to Felme’s? The courtesan — he wanted to meet me tonight, and he seems to know things. I want to go everywhere. But I have only one body.”

“I get the impression,” Wik starts, “from you telling me all of this, that you expect me to accompany you, whichever you pick.”

“Yeah?”

“Why would I?”

“Why wouldn’t you? You have to get the sense something important is happening, right?”

“That’s exactly it.” Wik turns away from Marka, now regarding the courtyard. “Tell me, Marka,” it starts with the tone of rhetorical inquiry, “how many mavericks have you met today?”

“Felme, Angwi, Essi… you? Unless you still count as a Stewart somehow. So, three or four?”

“How many of them are dead?”

The conversation lurches here. Part of it is the reminder — mantids they’d seen, talked with, are dead, killed, and the death’s presence seemed to linger with them. Part of it is Marka seeing Wik’s game.

“Essi’s been here for a few months at best. And Angwi? I’d be surprised with a personality and methodology like that, if she could last a year, or three at most. Particularly when her very endowments spread from its users being killed. A malign incentive for vespers if there ever were one.” Wik pauses, long enough it could have said ‘but I digress’. It gives another look over the courtyard, then continues. “What happened today was extreme, but it was extreme in a very unexceptional way. Vesperbanes die everyday. But contrast those two with myself. I’ve been here for years. How do I do it? I stay away from big plays. And this has every indication of being a big play. I’m already too close, far closer than I’d like or need to be.”

“Then what’s one more step?”

“My work here is done, Marka. I appreciate your help greatly. And more than simply being compentent, you were a good mantis, one I at times even enjoyed working beside. But I won’t walk beside you into the inferno when it’s not necessary.”

Marka’s tarsi tighten, digging into the ground beneath her. It hurt. She’s grappled with Wik’s betrayal, and reminded herself of the good in the tallowbane, at length bringing herself to continue working with it.

Facing this — the only word for it was rejection — she realizes; it was never her decision to make.

“I suppose in the wardens, you grew used to bonds you’d die for, rather than mercenary partnerships.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not like that. The best of us, sure, are lucky enough to have consistent teams. The rest have assignments that can vary with the mission. The Wardens aren’t mere mercenaries. But we are mercenaries.”

“Ah. I concede the point.”

Marka gives the tallowbane another look. Her brain’s not entirely slow with exhaustion, and she latches on to something it had said. “Wait. Earlier. Did you say years? Didn’t you tell me you were countenanced by the stewartry, and they haven’t processed your defection yet?”

“The soldier pills should be kicking in, about now. We should start walking.” The misdirection is less graceful, more obvious, than something it might have managed earlier.

“I hate it when you do that. You change the subject and play rhetorical games. You’re slippery. Can you answer the question, Wik?”

A sigh. Wik looks back at her. “First of all, it wasn’t a defection. Defection is a crime. Second, you have to understand that the stewartry isn’t so regimented that a vesperbane going silent or being hard to reach is an immediate cause for alarm anymore. When you go missing, the stewartry pauses your pensions if any, and freezes your account in the interprovincial bank. But you’re not going to have anyone come after you, not unless you’re especially valuable. I wasn’t. It makes sense for my file to fade its ink at the bottom of an ever​-​growing stack of papers and case files.” A pause, which becomes significant as it is extended. “I may have used my skills to… ensure my case remained unresolved for unusually long.”

Her maxillae open just a bit, the lacinia dentition visible. “Was that so hard?”

“It’s nothing of your concern.” Wik walks path leading out of the courtyard, back to Marka. The warden starts after it.

“You know, Alunyene could absolve you of your oath to Felme…”

“Consider that for even five more breaths, Marka. Dissolving oaths is a neat parlor trick — impressive, even — but what do you think it actually accomplishes? The vespers may not mind, I suppose, but how will mantids react to you reneging on promised deals? No, I need to fulfill my obligations to Felme. Oath of blood and soul or none, a promise is more than just the arete it’s inscribed in. You know that.”

“Fine. But do you really want me meeting the Golden Lady and her master alone?”

“I’m not the only one making a decision here. You are choosing to fly antennae​-​out into danger. You still have the choice to not fight and die on a court too big for you. But you’d never make that choice, would you?”

II.

The city/ruins/cavern of old Wentalel is open enough that there comes no point that feels like leaving the courtyard. They pass where Alunyene had waited, and continue to the liberators’ statues.

Their party survived. Silenal, Obe, and Tlik waited here. Around them, other gangsters rest, some starting at the approaching vesperbanes. This contingent couldn’t include everyone who came from the pyramid, not by half.

“Hey, you lived!” Tlik says. “So, it’s over now? You won?”

“We won. I think.”

“Ress?”

“Fought us,” Marka said. It wasn’t quite true. Marka presses her palps to her face again, but doesn’t know how to continue. ‘Sorry’ seemed not enough for killing someone they’d known, worked for.

Marka stopped by the gangsters, but Wik walks on. With a glance at Marka, it stops, waiting for her.

“She had it coming,” Silenal says. “So–”

“The payouts,” Obe says.

“What about them?” Wik stands far enough away that it comes quiet, almost missed. But Obe is listening.

“We did what you wanted, kept our half of the deal. So, let’s figure out how we’re gonna split what the boss has in the safe.”

“You can discuss it among yourselves,” Wik says. “We don’t care. The safe will be left open. You can divide what we leave you however you like.”

With those words, Wik turns away again, resumes walking toward the lake.

Obe watches the bane leave, mandibles tight, antennae curling up. Marka sees her reach for the mace. Then she returns it to her side, thinking about it for a moment.

(Watching that whole exchange, Marka understands. Obe’s insistence that they don’t spare the enemy gangsters? Her encouraging other gangsters to turn back? It wasn’t cynicism on her part, but greed. They’d said something about splitting it between everyone — and if there were less of them at the end, that meant more for Obe, right? But coming long after the fact, this insight feels almost… pointless. Context for something that no longer mattered.)

Marka looks at Wik walking, and then at a frowning Silenal. “We’re in a hurry,” she explains. It was true — for only one of them, but it was true. She gives another look, then starts after it.

Silenal’s following too. “Got anything to do with the hierophant​-​looking – she ain’t a hierophant, is she? — with who just walked in there?”

Alunyene. “Yeah.”

“We tried to stop her. She’s the one who snitched you out, before you got here, you know.”

“Three fucking swings,” Tlik says. “Three swings of that stick she had, and knocked down four of us. Thought there was no way. But she’s a veebee. Makes sense.”

“After that happened,” Silenal resumes, “a bunch tried to bolt, and did. We made sure they didn’t take your boat.”

“Thanks.”

Marka didn’t expect Wik to address them again. But they’ve reached the lake edge now, seeing three boats floating there.

“If there is nothing else, then we will leave.”

Silenal looks between the two of them, eyes lingering on Marka. But whatever she would say, she doesn’t find the words.

Wik turns back around and takes a step. To the gangsters, it says, “I’d say it was a pleasure working with you, but it was really just a convenience.”

Wik is first in the boat, then Marka.

“We have any nerve​-​crystals left?”

They did, which makes quick work of the lake. This time, Marka is dragging four bodies fewer, and no jugs of oil. The soldier pills’ in full effect, and she feels hundreds more calories available for techniques, a chemical well to draw on.

All this combines to make the second lake​-​crossing exhilerating freedom. Water splashes, forming mist in their wake. It hangs in the air for longer than usual, induced by the enervate blasting out behind Marka. Antennae trail out behind them, Wik’s tendrils waving wildly. There’s a wet sound, and she wonders if it’s the tallowbane laughing.

It’s a simple moment to enjoy, one of few today has had.

They return to the Snurratre temple. From what the gangsters had said, there were faster routes, but they knew this one. And two vesperbanes, unhampered by civilians, are quick enough.

The back of a large chamber had fallen away, and the room’s size and abundance of (overturned, half​-​collapsed, crumbling) perches suggest the site of large congregations.

Climbing in through the collapsed wall, something catches Marka’s eye. Part of it it’s the soldier pill — it must have stimulants — and part of it’s not having an approaching life or death fight weighing her with anxiety. All considered, Marka’s paying more attention, this time.

At the center, a stone slab sits, four items atop it, a pentagram of carved lines between them — one item missing?

There’s a clay tablet with words she couldn’t read and symbols not understood. But a picture at the center — and the thick line in it (the Wenta River!) pull the pieces together: it’s a map. There’s an hourglass beside it. Another spot has a long​-​dead lantern? Another, a small clay statue. Idol?

The empty spot is pointed to with broken lines, where all others aren’t. There’s a dark tinge there, and a very faint, old coppery smell. She thinks hemolymph.

The chamber is littered with husks clothed in rags, legs all curled up, the insides rotted away till only the exoskeleton remained.

Marka keeps looking. Between the darkness and the size of the chamber, she keeps finding more.

“Do you think it happened quick, or slow?” Was the end a surprise, or despair extinguished?

“I suppose it will be known soon. With this ruin discovered, the Stewartry will come in, catalog the evidence, and get a better answer than our guesses.”

“What if it’s not safe to? The rats? The infection?”

“I said the Stewartry. Believe me, they can handle it.”

They walk through the temple, slow for Marka staring at the bodies, wondering their story.

Outside, they aren’t alone.

Wik shines its light — three figures, mantid, huddled over, crawling forward on six legs. Unsteady, the way hatched nymph are. They are imagos.

Marka unsheaths and lifts her sword. The figures continue forward, unreacting. The sound through their trachea is wheezing or moaning.

The mantids approach. There’s a moment of recognition. Another moment to figure out why — oh. The rest spot. These are the sick mantids of the watchtower.

They near the vesperbanes, so unsteady even on six legs Marka isn’t threatened enough to stab.

The one in front has its antennae extended out, wildly swinging around. An antennae brushes against her — the touch leaving wet streaks on her armor — and they turn and get even closer. The behavior is more fitting of a roach. Tactile, in an unsophsticated way.

It makes a respiratory sound that is not wheezing or moaning. It’s not a sound a mantis should make, that a mantid trachea could make. Garbled or growling, complex and ever​-​changing.

“Who are you? Are you alright?”

It stops. Now they make a sound Marka would call speech. Foreign, with quick sweeps of the palps and clicking of the mandibles. It sounds like speech, in the sense it could be a language, but not one even a well​-​educated mantis has ever heard.

It stops. Now they speak again, she identifies it as ancient Pure Stride. She can make out few actual words — ‘brudeyama’, ‘Oosifea’, ‘metousiosis’ — but no meaning. She looks to Wik, whose antennae tendrils work in thought.

It stops. They try again. Old Imperial, now, less archaic. It sounds so similar, in structure as well as sound (Pure Stride is its mother), that they must be translating the same sentences into each language.

With this many examples, a pattern emerges. This is not how mantids talk. No articulation, no inflection. No steady pitch. She’s reminded of toys and instruments raked in the manner of scraper on file. Even when modeled after mantid pars stridens, it doesn’t sound real. It’s uncanny.

It stops once more. And silence takes them. Have they run out of languages to try? Why would gangsters know such near​-​forgotten languages?

(Behind them, the other two just stand there. Taking no action, making no expression, just swaying on six legs.)

Then the front mantis screams. They’re moving — writhing in pain. They rise from six legs to four, and forelegs go up to grip their head.

“Tha–” they start, and are cutoff by more convulsions in their body.

They speak, and it sounds wrong in a new way.

“Gratitude,” they slowly chitter. “Such Gratitude.”

“You’re… welcome?”

“Slumber… Unending. Centuries.” They scream again. Boils on their face shift and squeeze. Blood flows down, dripping down onto the ground.

“Vast.” One more scream. “Vast! Vast, vaaaaahhhh–” They fall to the ground. The other mantids — both moving at the same time — move to pick them up. They nod at the vesperbanes. Then they leave.

“What — what happened? What was that?” Marka looks around for Wik, and sees the tallowbane a few steps behind her.

“Madness induced by the infection, perhaps.”

“Madness that teaches you languages no mantis speaks?”

Wik has no response to that.

“I don’t think I want to stay down here.”

“Likewise.”

The fastest way to cover ground in old Wentalel is with Marka’s nerve bursts. But, without the boat, Marka can’t carry Wik. She recalls her performance at the chasm, and her bursts aren’t flight.

They settle for a quick​-​paced trot. It puts a not​-​unpleasant burn into Marka’s legs after a few dozen meters.

The rats are still out there.

They see them perching atop lone walls, peering from obscure holes. The rats all watch them.

They thin out the closer the banes come to the gate. Even so, there’s at least one mangled ball of fur wading through the waters by the catacomb.

Passing through that gate frees them from the ruins of old Wentalel, but the darkness is the same.

It’s seeing the outlines of those massive stone doors when she finally realizes.

“I did it,” she says. “I let it out. It’s my fault.”

“Hm?”

“I broke the chain that kept the door forced shut. I ruined the seal.”

Wik takes a moment to grasp what she means. It considers, then it says, “You couldn’t have known.”

“I could have read between the lines. The inscription Essi translated all but said it outright.”

“Should I have realized it, Marka? Do you think I was too stupid to understand the inscription?”

“No, it’s not you–”

“Then do not blame yourself. Even if it was clear the ‘plague’ literally existed — it wasn’t — plagues aren’t in the habit of surviving centuries entombed. Very few living things could.”

“What do we do, then? Shut it back and hope?”

“The gangsters are coming, so no. We can leave them a note — but best to report this to the Stewartry. It’s certainly dangerous enough to need them to solve.”

Wik was right that — whatever the gang had been made to do down here, was… well, ‘big play’ no longer seems half of it.

Wik was right that this was bigger than both of them.

Was it right that the best place to be was far away?

With a few clicks, Wik picks a padlock, removes it from cage door it was attached to, and begins shaping a wax key to fit it. It clicks the lock shut and tries the key. When the key works, it walks down the cages lining the wall, unlocking each. The dark forms don’t yet move out.

They had entered a room adjoining what must have been the mess hall. It smelt of rotting food, and was dark in a way that had to be deliberate.

When Wik starts whistling through its trachae, it’s the last confusion​-​piquing thing she can stand before saying something.

“Wik? What are we doing?”

“When I went with Silenal to recruit gangsters and restrain those we couldn’t recruit, I saw them chained up here, the gangsters tossing table scraps.”

A bristled and spike​-​lined leg reaches out of one cage for a step, and then a head emerges. Long antennae, oblong wrap​-​around eyes, head tucked in in a way that’d look shy and shamefaced on a mantis — this is a noble roach.

“There are regulations for the noncoercive cohabitation of mantis and roach, and this violates almost all of them. It’d probably only be worse if they were planning to eat them, but you can’t get away with that kind of savagery in a modern city.”

More of the roaches are emerging from the cages. One is larger than others — a mother, with teats visibly lining its abdomen.

Marka imagines if it were mantids instead of roaches — an empathetic exercise she’d been taught in the academy, part of efforts to remedy the lack of cross​-​species understanding that lingers even today.

“This is awful,” she says. The tallowbane glances over like it’s surprised she said it.

“Perhaps you now understand why I’d lack patience with the gang.” Wik is talking to her, and at the same time whistling with its trachae.

(The roaches are responding with the complex hisses of their language. Mantids simply could not make equivalent sounds, not if they want their utterances to sound any more sophisticated than the slurred speech of someone drug​-​addled to the point of near​-​unconsciousness. Nonetheless, it’s close enough to be interpretable with some practice and exposure; roaches are the species closest to mantids. Wik, and its biological flexibility, may have a further advantage.)

“Did you think of bringing it up to them?”

“And add more friction to our already dubious partnership? It would have been pointless. Better to wait until all the gang is out of the base or restrained — that is, right now — and resolve the issue as it should be.”

Marka has an objection, coming from the same old and unreasoned part of her as her distaste for lockpicking. She can’t think of way to give voice to it that won’t sound quite wrong.

“I’ll put it this way,” it continues, “the only satisfactory outcome with this is the roaches walking free. Either the gang wouldn’t agree – likely — and it would have led to a fight, or they would, and preempting them like this is at best a faux pas.”

A moment, and then Marka nods. “Where will they go now?”

“There are shelters for exactly situations like this. I’ve told them where to find one.”

“Are you worried that — would it be better to escort them, or something?”

“Roaches are free persons. Once they get to the streets, the danger is the same as any other person walking the streets. It’s danger I neither will nor can protect everyone from.”

Marka looks over the roaches. There are three larger females, and a few more males. Some are much smaller — nymphs. “What do you think they were doing with them?”

Some ideas Marka’s mind supplies immediately: kept for fighting or as some manner of guard​-​roach, kept as pets (the cages and chains would draw no second glances if these were hoppers or blue beetles, after all), or — and this fits with the gang’s former operations – conditions of debt bondange (which are legal) that sometimes get too close to conditions of undignified keeping of vinculated kinds (which is illegal).

“I don’t care to speculate.”

They leave the room after the tallowbane gives one of the mothers — who seemed to have some authority — a bag of claw pieces.

“Kind of you, to pay out of pocket like that.”

“Oh no, not my pocket.”

Marka leans her antennae forward for a brief moment, but a beat later it clicks.

After all, who else’s pockets could it have come from?

Luckily, the two of them would be far away when the gangsters realized.

“Consider it my wage for the medical services I provided.”

Wik slides the key into the black safe. One hum, two, three. Beep beep beepbeepbeep.

It unfolds, revealing emptiness, but it should. This was the compartment they’d taken the letters from.

“Marka, scanner ready? Let’s see how this multisafe works.”

The hums and error​-​sound fills the room in the next few moments. The orientation of the key when inserted mattered, but also the sequence of turns?

Marka understands now, what the letter meant when it said they compromised the lock — that part of it, anyway. In the others, there are enervate​-​flows Marka had never seen in action; they’d been damaged in the part of the lock they interacted with. There’s a timing mechanism that errored out if your turning took too long — they find this out when Marka tries to decipher the next correct twist in the middle of an attempt, staring too long at the scanner’s read out. And there are buttons on the base of the safe. They don’t want to even consider how those could complicate things.

The lines of enervate governing its logic twist and branch and defy complete understanding. Sometimes they go inside of themselves in a way that’s geometrically troubling.

It doesn’t take the safe long to curl up the leaves of its egg, so once they start finding the right combinations, it’s quick work to raid the other ‘compartments’.

At last, the loot that had justified this whole adventure! For real this time!

There are bone pieces. And there is jewelry. And there are what might be deeds to houses.

But…

“This is not enough. All told, perhaps a few hundred bone pieces? That is if we can find buyers for the jewelry. It’s likely stolen, or otherwise of unclear ownership.”

“Vesperbane are expensive, I guess.”

“You guess? You are one.”

“I just know what the Wardens pay me.” Marka picks up a coin, bringing it before an eye. It’s endowned bone, reinforced with metal as bats liked to do. “The gang is going to think we’re stinging them.”

“They should be happy we leave them anything.”

Marka picks through the claw and bone pieces. Ooh, there’s an antler piece! She quickly nabs that, but the glance Wik gives her means it saw. She smiles, and places it back.

Picking through the jewelry, she finds a certain pentagram necklace. She had expected something like that, right? The Snurratre male she met in the market seemed to be missing a necklace, and she was going to bring it back.

When she had run through all the things she might do tonight, she’d neglected the plan of returning anything to the male. Not because she’d forgotten, no. Not even just because it isn’t that important, compared to everything.

There had been a fatal flaw in the idea: where did the male live? How would she find him again? Perhaps if she had stayed with him, she’d have learned.

Reluctantly, she admits she’ll just have to be satisfied instead with meeting with the villain pulling strings behind gangs and renegades, or with one of the elusive minds from the shadows of the heartlands.

Marka looks at Wik. “So, mission complete? Is — is this where we part ways?”

“We can keep in contact. I might leave Wentalel — it seems best — but you don’t live here, do you? Perhaps I could follow you.”

“But not tonight,” she says. Then, not liking how much of a statement that sounds, “Right?”

A sigh. “We’ve had this conversation. I refer you to your memory, which, despite indications, has no reasons not to be functioning.”

With a matching sigh, Marka remembers.

She gives the tallowbane a long look, peering. Her fovea follows its features up and down, and she looks away.

A foreleg retrieves a timepiece, and the warden gazes upon her face reflected in the metal. (At first, she doesn’t recognize herself. Then she realizes it’s the wax. She’s still disguised.)

The warden looks between the mantis reflected, who doesn’t quite feel like Marka, even aside from the wax, and the tallowbane. The two vesperbanes differ. Wik isn’t one to look to honor and heroism as a cynosure the way Marka tries to. Its action are tinged with practicality like a stain. Yet the tallowbane knows right from wrong, and in somes ways, its adherence exceeds Marka’s.

In Wik’s eyes, survival and profit are always clear in view. It’s a practical mantis, and there is something lonely in that practicality. There’s some tragedy (and cowardice, a part of her contends) to avoid having the biggest impact, and distance yourself from big, important events, to live. To be a survivor, to survive, came in tandem, if only by the ghost of implication, with those who did not.

Who, and how many, had Wik lost before taking this lesson from it? (And what had the world lost, that it chose to burn half as bright?)

Marka has heard ‘erosion’ enough times the warnings had lost their urgency. She thinks instead to the old books she’s read. While the ancestors and descendents of Welkin, in the Pure Council and First Dominion, had condemned vesperbanes as corruption, even the wingless philosophers, whose songs inspired the Alliance and now live on in syndic theory, never did take a sunlit view of banes.

But, they had held that a hero is one who sacrifices. And the art of vesperbanes is certainly a path that exacts. Wik has been a bane longer than Marka, and it lived without the theca of the Church and then the Wardens supporting it, as Marka had. Was it more a hero for that?

Marka wants to give Wik a hug. She doesn’t think it would appreciate that. But she wonders if there’s a metaphorical gesture that — might – act as a kind of recognition, understanding.

Or perhaps — probably — this line of thought is a long, confused way of convincing herself.

Wik was a mercenary. Marka could accept that.

And she could use it.

She breathes in, curls her palps and then straightens them, and says, “Wik. It seems I’ve come into a bit of a windfall, and I’ve heard you call yourself a mercenary. What are your rates?”

The tallowbane looks up with a long​-​suffering look, antennae​-​tendrils twisting into knots. “Do I even need to guess what this is for?”

Marka smiles. Wik doesn’t, and her smile melts into a frown and cringe. “I’m not trying to get you tied into — whatever’s going on. We can negotiate what you’ll do. I just think… there’s a lot to do tonight, and I don’t want to do it alone. I promise I’ll do anything to leave you able to walk away at the end.”

“I’ll probably have to leave this city after this, no matter what. What do you propose? This isn’t a yes, but I need you to ask before I can say no,” it says. “Or yes.”

Marka asks.

And Wik gives its answer.

III.

A shadow passes before the red moon. Darkened eyes look up to the lunar body made hazy behind clouds. Light is hard to come by in this weather. Other than Inferna, the sky’s light comes from stars momently obscured or diminuted by enervate in the celestial umbrasphere.

On the roads of Wentalel, lamp​-​posts serve the role the sky so poorly does. Behind the glass of each, several bright orbs flutter and mingle: luciflies, bred by the stewartry. There were times, before the conception of ichor​-​birthed organisms able to breed was regulated almost to the point of illegality, and they were wild times.

A mantis walks the nighttime streets, pausing beneath a post, and clicking open a timepiece. The gesture changes little; plenty of time remained for their plans. Marka does this a lot, it’s her old habit.

Another glance upward, then toward the horizon. The destination could be seen, even from here. Marka wanted to head to the Church, and get her answers before sleeping. And in the end, Wik still did not want to go.

So the walk to the Church is lonely. While there are other mantids out, this side of town has gone to sleep. The furtive figures avoid the mantis with an antennae​-​band, and likewise. It’s a good thing; Marka didn’t want any trouble.

Walking around that pond where she’d begun this adventure, a reflection walks in parallel. The color of Marka’s chitin is muted and almost indiscernible in the dark. Good. Little of the orange exoskeleton is revealed; most is covered by robes and cloak. A cowl goes over head, hiding Marka’s features.

There’s a reason she had worn her helmet, even when expecting a meeting, not the fighting she got. Marka does not want her former friends and family to recognize her, ask the questions she knows they’d ask.

The Church is designed like a fortress, moat and all. The ‘drawbridge’ is down, and probably always is. After crossing it, though, there’s a gate, and it is closed.

Awkwardly, forelegs reach out, and rap on the metal.

If there was a percipient here, would they have left the gate shut?

Hopefully they — or someone — comes soon, rather than leaving their guest out like a fool.

A lantern swings into view, and the sudden brightness draws a flinch. Eyes pale in the new light, and soon the lantern​-​bearer can be made out.

No way this is a percipient. It’s certain.

This is a nymph, barely at the height of the shortest imagos. The face is unobscured, showing crooked mandibles and big, gangly palps.

Not the one who’d called Marka here, then. Worse, the face sparked recognition, if half​-​forgotten nymphhood memories and descriptions from discarded letters are guide enough. This posed a problem. The nymph might recognize Marka.

They don’t yet, though. The smile is friendly, unsuspicious. “Hullo! What brings you to this place of purity at this hour?”

You are not Marka, don’t act like Marka, the mantis at the gate thinks. Can’t let them know she’s been here before, that she’d any reason to know these mantids. She’s wanted this appointment to be something impartial, impersonal, only revealing herself to Remula. And now, she need not let anyone at the Church know she’s back.

The cloaked mantis has an odd tone of voice, quietly, nervously saying, “Just a traveler in the night.”

“Oh. Well, all are welcome in the grace of our ancestors! Do you wish to come in? We can offer tea and bread, and if you need to rest…”

“I — will not stay long. I do not wish to impose.”

“You’re fine. Let me get this gate… and come right in. You said you were a traveler?”

“I did.” The mantis steps in, pulling the cowl tighter. Making a show of looking around, as if the expensive paintings and ancestral idols in gleaming crystal were all new and wonderful.

“Where from?”

“Uh, north.”

“North? Like say, Sydfel?” There’s something in the tone of the question. It makes the other mantis anxious.

But it was an out, and easy to take. “Yeah.”

“Oh, nice!” And this places the tone: hope. “Beautious city, even with all the vesperbanes. Say, and this is bit of a throw, but would you happen to have met or heard of a girl — she’s probably teneral now – in your travels? Orange chitin, winged, Welkinly, but with some islander in her?”

It’s a feeling like standing above a pit. “Sounds… familiar…”

“Her name was Marka. Marka Ofronden. Though knowing her, she’s probbaly thrown away that name.”

What blackened luck. The traveler, who definitely is not Marka, who can’t act like Marka, should deny all association, and keep the lie clean. But the way this nymph sounded… “No, she’s kept it. I… yes, I am — I did meet her. She — she became a vesperbane.”

Their look sours. “Oh. Oh. How… is she? Alive? Well?”

“She… Hm. I’d say Marka is a fighter. She wants to help mantids, and she’ll go a long way, face a lot of danger, to do that.” How flattering. It’s almost enough to cringe, speaking this praise. But the nymph should hear something admirable. “She is a vesperbane. But… it’s hard to tell? She’s no mercenary.”

The nymph is nodding, some kind of smile blooming on their palps.

“Why do you ask?”

“She — is my sister.”

“Thecamate?”

“No.She’s older. I was too young to remember her well, so I grew up knowing her as this rebelious — traitorous? — shadow that no one liked to speak of. But she’s out there still… knowing that much, it’s – good. I hope she comes back, and comes back from the vespers. If, if you ever meet her again in your travels, could you tell her, tell her that she still has family?”

The traveler reaches out, twining a dactyl with the nymph. “I will.”

Palps are held close to the face to avoid grimacing. How would this nymph react to knowing a vesperbane stands in front of them? To seeing the forgotten face of their lost sister, returned to Wentalel at last?

“Thank you. And — sorry for all that?” Their other foreleg comes up, and runs along their antennae. “I’m sure you must be tired.”

“I’ll be fine. Are you alone? What’s a nymph like you doing awake, in a church, at this hour?” It wasn’t yet midnight, but it was past sundown.

“Oh, my family owns the church. And they say if I’m to inherit any part of it, I best be able to keep it in order. So I’m sweeping, polishing the idols, and keeping the blue flames lit! I can give you a tour if you’d like? I have to know this place well, you know.”

“I think — I’d like to explore this place.”

“Wonderful! And as for your first question, you, um, you ended up here at a… bad time, I have to say. I’m not alone there are vindicators awake and patroling and someone else. Someone — earlier today. Someone died.” The nymph’s stridulation grows irregular at this point, and the breathing’s faster.

The traveller reaches out to pat the nymph’s head.

“My — my sister used to pat me like that, I think,” they say softly. Then, “Someone — we found the body, just before service. They were saying it was soo– swe– they said that she took herself. But now they’re saying it was — murder? Why would anyone hurt Remula…”

“It’s okay, child.” The words have little effect. A beat, then: “What about that tour? Want to show me around? Explain what I see?”

“I — I can do that.” The nymph stands up straighter, and starts walking, gesturing with its lantern leg, and glancing backward to see the imago was following. “Do– What do you know about the Welkin?”

“Life after life, right?”

“And before life, yes.” The anxiety from before is disappearing, and in its place comes the enthusiasm of one who had listened intently, and now recapitulates. “The Welkin is the pure realm where we all lived before, together. Uh, but something went wrong, and we came to this impure realm to fix it, but in doing so, we forgot what we are. Corruption gnaws at the world, and there is a black, gaping maw that drains and disintegrates. It could swallow us, but the blue flames of Welkin keep away the black beyond, letting us remain pure, to bring order to this world, and remain intact for when we return.”

Their listener nods, making wordless noises within their trachea.

“I — maybe I got started in the wrong place. I’ll, maybe this is a better place to start. Do, well, do you honor the exalted ancestors? Have you heard of them?”

“I… have heard much, and I have many questions.”

Their face falls. “Well, I can’t mend your doubts. I’m no hierophant. Yet! But I can show you a little of their glory.”

The room the nymph takes them to is circular, dominated by a statue twice the size of a mantis, with wings outspread that, proportionally, exceed twice the brachypterous length of even the Welkin​-​born.

The traveler pauses in stride, signaling awe.

“Yeah. That’s Mother E’yama. You have to know her. Her honorable defection let all her children be free and unique. We’re all her children. Everyone’s grandma.” The nymph pauses, then looks around the room. The wall is lined with alcoves, and in each is a statue, but none comparable to E’yama. Most have blue flames burning in front of them, all about eye level with a kneeling mantis.

“And that one over there is Brillen, the fire​-​starter. Kinda there in the name. That’s Sof, the knowledge​-​hunter. She wrote the Pure Script. That’s Lurei, who… my parents won’t tell me what he did, yet. And Lakon, the protector. A vesperbane — but back then, the world needed vesperbanes. And these, err, people don’t like two these statues as much. And I don’t know what their story is.” They point to two idols about as far apart as two can get in this room. One isn’t that different from any other idol, but the other… where others have blue flames before them (except Brillen, who has orange, smokey fire), this one, and only this one, has before it a cauldron of red blood.

“One is Elder Snurratre, the ironclad matriarch. And the other one is Oosifea eternal.”

“Heresiarch, or God​-​Empress?”

“What?”

“Nevermind.”

“Oh okay. I don’t remember all the exalted ancestors, or even just the ones in this room, and I’m supposed to be changing the the fires, so… wanna watch me do that?”

The nymph had a bag full of rocks, half​-​crystal and half lump of coal, but in the manner of fusion, rather than mix​-​match.

“They say this isn’t really welkinflame, because it’s adulterated. Means it burns with heat too instead of just purity.” The nymph has walked over to a dwindling flame, and pours something which is not water over it, putting it out.

The imago stands a safe distance away as the nymph places the rocks in the brazier, and squeezes black nerve onto them and then sets it ablaze. The vesperbane in the room feels the flame. (Another reason it took so much (non​-​black) nerve for Marka to return here: she was full of enervate, and walking into a place blazing with blue fire? It’d hurt.)

“Hey, come over here! It feels nice. Cleansing. They say the sages used to bask in these things for hours, and learned hidden truths.”

“I’d rather not.”

“C’mon! Were you ever annointed? This is not as bad as that!”

The nymph scurries over and grips a leg — lightly — in raptorials, trying to drag the much larger imago over.

“Please, child.” There’s only so much you can do when you don’t want to hurt a nymph.

“Why are you scared? I lit the flames right!”

With every step closer, there’s a feeling — an umbral feeling — that grows. Flames normally have tongues, and crackling. But the blue fire is very still, flared uniformly upwards. As the vesperbane nears, it shifts, ripples breaking the stillness, and turning toward the biggest source of enervate.

Welkinflame is a thing no vesperbane really had a defense against. Of course, the cheap rocks a church uses to keep some small fires lit just for show are not a threat. But it could still damage.

“Wait, are you… a vesperbane!?” Their little antennae bounce out straight, then curl up. “These flame will cleanse you!” The nymph pulls with renewed determination.

“Enough.” It’s not the voice of the nymph, or of Marka. Someone else has entered the chamber.

No one needs to turn to know it is the percipient.

IV.

A shadow passes before the red moon.

Along the lucifly​-​lit streets, a mantis walks. In this part of Wentalel, throngs of bugs walk or linger. These crowds part around the mantis, some ignorant of why, until one errant ray of light or other reveals their antennae​-​band.

This mantis veers to the shadows, where the crowds’ eyes could see less. Where the distrust so clearly etched in too many faces doesn’t make every inch of the vesperbane feel shameful and impure.

A bit of wax drips from the face, and it’s wiped away, quickly, hoping no one sees. The antennae​-​band is put away.

The worst part is Marka, caught to some extent between worlds, can’t write off the attitude as some foreign, incomprehensible fact. Having been raised to be a vindicator, it’s a hatred her mind almost feels fitted for.

The vesperbane returns to the lit streets.

It’s not just mantids out tonight — in fact, there are more noble roaches than you might have seen earlier; they prefer the twilight hours.

The mantis observes the roaches more intently now, after what was seen in the gang’s base. These noble roaches, while not necessarily looking happy or completely at ease (who in the heartlands did?), lacked a certain guardedness, born of eternal fear that weighs one down. Marka thought she would recognize it; her least favorite wardens assignments had seen her visiting rural farming villages, where roaches knew they might find their end in a hungry mantis, a fate beyond their control.

There are places far from the coels of the Pantheca, where even the law is slow to reach, let alone ideals. But by the Dream, it’d be everywhere one day.

That thought stops Marka. She didn’t feel she fully understood what it might imply anymore.

Mentally listless, she wants to reach for a timepiece, but she doesn’t have it. She loathes to be without, but hers is not the part sensitive to timing. She’d reunite with it soon. The warden is without her armor, too, though not her sword.

It’s reassuring, as impotent has events have made her feel, to just rest a raptorial on the sword’s grille. She walks on.

They made good time out of the catacombs. Now, there’s still a long interval before midnight, and Marka decided to pursue a lead that’d stayed in her mind. She’s indulging curiosity, answering questions. But it’s not just curiosity driving her down the street where lamps are tinted red.

The mantis walks up and down Wetmoth street, uncertain she found the right place. Either the tavern’s sign is faded, or absent entirely. It’s near enough to the street sign that it’s not a stretch to imagine how it’d become synonymous.

Marka steps in. Most of the light comes from a blazing fireplace. Having spent so long seeing by Ngini’s light or lucifly​-​lamps, the sheer warmth of the light is bewildering.

More than that, the air’s filled with song, slow and sensual. Marka has to look to find the musicians, which has the music feeling intrinsic to the tavern.

Marka smells meat and sweet drinks, but the soldier pill’s nixed her appetite.

All throughout, servants walk and bow — some carrying food, some cleaning — and all of them are males, in dresses and ribbons.

Marka goes to the bar, but the tender’s busy, in a loud and involved exchange with someone further down. Marka wiggles her antennae while she waits.

A mantis perches beside her, and watches the warden. About Marka’s height, chitin bright red, almost pink, wings fluttering, Welkinmark visible in a way that could only be the result of painted, if not stained, chitin.

She’s looking at Marka’s bandages. “Nice scars. Hate to see what the other girl looks like.”

“She’s dead.”

A trachea​-​whistle. “Nice.”

“Can I help you?” Marka asks.

“Just wanted to chat, sister. I thought you’d appreciate it. I saw you walking here. Saw all the fools skirting scared, looking at you like you have anything to be ashamed about.”

“I am a vesperbane,” Marka says. Had the other mantis not realized?

“And there ain’t a thing wrong with it. They’re wrong to have forgotten it, to think the protected can judge their protector. They’ve forgotten, but you should remember. You’re strong. You’re good.”

“Um, thanks.” What is this mantis angling for?

She holds out a raptorials sideways. Marka looks, and tentatively extends her own, meeting hers, her spines interlocking with the other mantid’s.

“You ever feel like this land’s lost something?”

A world of vesperbanes fighting for money, not ideals? “Yeah.”

The pink mantis nods. “It has. It hurts, right? Seeing our nations falling, degenerating. Don’t you feel out of place, in this new world? This so​-​called ‘dream’ realized?”

Marka’s antennae fall back behind her. She peers at this mantis. “What do you mean?”

“You do see it, right? You were just out there. I mean our streets being overrun with roaches and the wingless. This city’s fallen once, and you think we’d have learned about letting in vermin from that.” The pink mantis gives a glance to the roaches in the tavern (who sit on smaller, specially designed rests). “We haven’t had a royal​-​blooded mantis on the throne for decades, and I think that says a lot.”

Marka frowns. “Why care? The throne of Wentalel is just symbolic. The Pantheca is a democracy.”

“A democracy? Where you can only vote for the Sn​-​ I mean Syndic party​-​approved candidates?”

It makes Marka tilt her head. “The syndic examinations are test of knowledge and aptitude, not party loyalty. Do you want a leader with no qualifications?”

“That’s what they say. Still, do you want those fools on the street picking your superiors?”

Or the fool in front of me? Marka wonders. She looks over to the bartender. Still in that argument, but is it winding down? Spare her from this, please.

“Eh, we’re getting off the point. Back to what matters.” The pink mantis leans in. “I’ll put it this way. The plains are full of weeds, and it’s about time for the gardener to come back.” She says this triumphantly and louder, like she sensed she’s losing Marka’s attention.

“The gardener?” the warden says, picking as few words as necessary. Would she get bored and leave? Deliver the speech she wanted, and be satisfied?

“Who else? The eternal empress herself, Oosifea.”

Marka decides to laugh. She’s done listening to this. “Do you really believe that? How many times have you impure, pteryist idiots not worth the label welkinist tried predicting that? Has it ever, ever happened? Your goddess is dust, and her empire’s never coming back.”

The impure, pteryist idiot smiles at that. Maybe she is grinding her mandibles or clenching her raptorials, but Marka didn’t expect her to keep her cool at all.

“You might think that, if all you’ve read is what they’d let you read. Can’t expect the Pantheca to allow anything that might wake mantids from the ‘dream’, can you? We could show you the truth. You deserve it.”

Oh. “You’re trying to recruit me. Which is it? The Kult of Kaos? Regardless, the answer is no.”

Now’s the other mantid’s turn to fake laugh. “The Kult of Kaos? That’s a joke. Do you really think anyone would call themselves a cult? No.We’re the real deal.”

“I said no. Now stop wasting my time.”

“Don’t you want your sisters beside you when it happens?”

“Nothing is going to happen.”

She just looks at Marka for a moment. “Fine. Refuse, then. Maybe, when you feel her wrath as black sin crawling out of your eyes and our queen’s blood is bursting from you betumored flesh, you’ll have a moment to regret believing the Snurrish lie.”

That gives marka pause. Could they mean… no, how? A coincidence?

Marka curls up her antennae. “Are you a vesperbane?”

“No.Not — I’m not.”

“Then take your own advice, and don’t question your protector,” Marka says. “Or, I can show you what I did to the lady who gave me these scars.” Her raptorial falls to her sword’s grille, but stops, deciding against it.

The other mantis stands from her perch. Palps work in frustration. The agitation in her palps has her almost unintelligible.

“Do you think I’m afraid of you? You queensdamned, roachfucked, pedipalp​-​licking –”

Marka punches her.

She runs out after that.

Then — finally! — the bartender arrives. He asks what would Marka like off the menu.

A moment of indecision and worry, and Marka opts to only orders a glass of water. She’s heard stories of places of similar repute, where one item on the menu is secretly a code for a living mantis, and she didn’t want to accidentally order a serving male.

The bartender nods, giving her an odd look, and turns, about to walk off.

Then Marka starts, antennae bouncing out. She almost forgot what she’s really here for.

“Oh, and, um.” Marka breathes in. “I’d like to see D.”

V.

“You’re who I’m here to meet? You’re a percipient?”

Robes of a dark silken amalgam drape the form of the small mantis, constrasting against a white face. The mask calls to mind the curved beak of some avians; but it is a blank, ceramic expanse, marked by an obscure symbol where some mantids have the welkin​-​mark. Tinted glass hides their compound eyes, and horn​-​like antennae guards rise between them.

If you met them, you would walk away. Something about them sets you off, and it’s not the severe dress.

They say, “Not quite yet. Call me an acolyte if you must. I’m only here to act as an intermediary for your sake; we believe you will find me more approachable, and communications between us will require less interpretive burden. I did, after all, write the letter.” After this, they turn and gesture for the vesperbane to follow. “Now, to answer what you did not ask: no, I am not Ciphersoul. But I will take you to her now.”

The percipient does not glide forward, but the robes go down far enough the rise and fall of their tarsi is an inferred thing. They walk in silence, and the vesperbane considers it, and doesn’t break it. If this isn’t Ciphersoul, if this isn’t (yet?) a percipient, there isn’t reason to suspect they could, or would answer the important questions.

The percipient leads deeper into the Church, where the number of armored vindicators spotted steepens. They regard the percipient with a reverent, fearful kind of respect, and that’s something that extends to the one following behind them, by all appearances a normal mantis. No vesperbane is used to a look like that from a vindicator.

A door in the cold basement of the Church opens at their approach, and no one stands behind it.

The percipient walks unperturbed, but their follower slows, in surprise, and then, with antennae waving, catching a scent, in apprehension. A deep breath, and then the necessary steps forward.

It’s not at the center of the room, but you might remember it as though it were. When stepping into the chamber, eyes immediately go to the etched marble slab pushed against the wall. Normally one where sick and troubled mantids went to lie and receive cleansing from a hierophant, it had been turned over to an entirely secular purpose.

A naked mantid body, dark of chitin, lays upon the stone bed, pinned with thin metal rods through the thorax and in each limb. The abdomen is torn open, in some places violetly jagged and melanized like the wound was old, while elsewhere split with fresh surgical precision befitting a recent vivisection. Folds of terga spread, revealing dissected viscera.

Atop all this, the head splits open, the brain removed to somewhere else.

It wasn’t hard to put a name to the body, given everything. Remula.

(The splitting doesn’t obscure the altered welkinmark. Like some islanders, she was by lineage welkin​-​born, but disowned, descendant of those declared deviationist.)

The light in the room is bright and white. Without warmth, the light feels as if it takes something from the image even as it provides illumination.

The vesperbane sees the body, and only looks away, in the process catching the eye of the acolyte. They nod, like this reaction is proof of something.

Curiosity wins out, and now the vesperbane looks around for the brain, and finds it floating in a tank, the thick smell of formalin and ethanol apparent even from the doorway. Needles and wires pierce the gray mushroom bodies. Someone is manipulating the wires, and the device they lead to — and it isn’t a mantis.

The acolyte has walked to a table not occupied by the autopsy effort, picking up a device with several silken threads running out of it.

They say, “What did you intend with this? This gruesome sight is an awful first impression for our guest.”

Now following the threads, it leads to a simpler device resting by the other occupant of the room, who begins deftly plucking the threads – responding?

Then things become clear.

Ciphersoul is a therid.

A therid has eight legs tipped with claws, six singular black eyes, a bauplan without a differentiated head and thorax, two sharp chelicerae beside their mouth, and a single pair of pedipalps.

A therid is a spider, but it’s inaccurate and unhelpful to call them spiders, when the same label could be just as well applied to salticids, tarantulas, mygalo hole fiends, sparassi beasts, or the venom gliders. Therids are the sapient, social species of spider, and that alone should be enough to bear distinguishing.

Ciphersoul, the therid, makes indecipherable motions with her pedipalps (their ends covered glove​-​like by silk), while claws on her legs’ tarsi pluck the strings of her communication device.

She’s wearing less than the other percipient, ceramic mask more of a helment, legs entirely uncovered. Her abdomen, though, is wrapped entirely in silk. Not uncommon for a therid, as it hides the mark of nobility (or, more colloquially, the brand of betrayal).

“Yes, this isn’t who we were expecting. It’s still a mantis. Do you think they’d take well to seeing conspecific in this state?”

The therid gives a few plucks in response. Would that translate to a monosyllabic answer?

“Vesperbanes are not completley insensitive. This one did not react poorly, but I refuse to believe you consulted the Perspective for something so minor.”

The vesperbane looks between the two of them. “This is a bit…” Whose idea of a secret Percipient meeting is two people bickering in different languages?

“Ah.” The acolyte turns to again regard their guest. “Forgive me. If you ask her, I yet lack the… maturity that befits a percipient. And Ciphersoul herself… I shall not be disrespectful.” There’s a pause here, and another mantis might have emoted with their antennae or palps, but theirs are obscured. They only glance back at the percipient. “I do regret this was not handled with more gravitas, but she is of the opinion we have already failed.”

A cocked head. “Why is that?”

“Events have played out in a predictable, if suboptimal manner. It… it is often inadvisable to make mantids aware of just how little their choices matter.” The silken threads vibrate as Ciphersoul speaks. “If you like, we can tell you what you have involved yourself in.”

“I came here for answers.”

“Then I will speak truthfully and concisely.” Their words are almost in sync with the vibrations of the threads, and one wonders whose words these really are. “Before dawn broke today, you were a fly caught in a web, yet ignorant of the extent. Let us tell you how this story was planned to go.

“A certain blackbane, estranged to a distant city, receives news that a certain friar in the Church of Wentalel is gone. He’s been gone for years, but it’s not coincidence she hears it only now. She returns to Wentalel.

“But she ultimately does not make her appointment here. Had she, she would have found her godmother dead.” The acolyte nods to the dissected body. “Seeming at first a suicide, she would investigate and notice pieces that don’t fit. It was a murder disguised. She would investigate throughout the city. She’d meet a certain tallowbane sleuth, who’d been told of Remula’s sudden demise, who had suspicions, who wanted answers.

“They say in mazes grown by weevils, all paths wind back to the same end. The two of you would have been capable of solving the mystery, finding who was behind the killing. Perhaps it would have ended with another confrontation with Ress, handled differently. It must have ended with the same offer from the Golden Lady, if you succeeded.

“Do you follow all of that?”

A nod. “Someone was behind all of this. It was just a game. A test?”

“A dance. The balance shifts back and forth, there are falls and releases, but all is controlled.”

“I don’t dance.”

“Then you may call it a game. But the pieces were not set up to fall, as you might think. They were set up, and allowed to fall, for the sake of other pieces. The gang is in ruin. But they served their purpose.”

“So, we are outplayed? What — what can we do? If this was a web, then who is the… spider?” This is said with a glance at the therid. Her chelicerae are wet.

“As one who aspires to honesty and truth, I have to tell you. By all indications, it is already too late. We cannot avert the worst that is coming. You cannot save her.”

“What?”

“You aren’t Marka, are you?”

A momentary pause, and then the tallowbane with Marka’s face opens its mandibles slightly, in an expression that was not a smile nor frown. “I suppose it was foolish to try and fool a percipient.”

“Marka has avoided every opportunity to return here. It was… unfortunately predictable.” The acolyte looks Wik up and down. “We understand that your augmentations make changing somewhat effortless. We doubt you prefer to wear the face of another. We will not be perturbed if you take a moment to alter yourself to… something more comfortable.”

Wik’s antennae extend at that. It glances at the therid. “By we, you mean the two of you?” It had the indirect feel of a request posed as an invitation for politeness. It would be rich, if the therid, who greeted it with a vivisected corpse, is bothered by its disguise.

“I… mean myself, in the sense you’re thinking. First person plural is more accurate to the reality of the Perspective. Our bodies are not something atomic, but a locus of certain thoughts and patterns.”

Wik shrugs. It has tendrils in more places than its antennae, which give it more precise control of its features.

Neither Wik nor the acolyte are very important topics tonight, so it redirects the conversation.

“Everything we did today was an unnecessary exercise, then? The end was predetermined?”

“No.You could have failed. You could, perhaps, have achieved your goals by some unimpressive, undramatic, unconventional means that would not have piqued the spider’s interest. Whether that would see them ignore or dispose of you — such scenarios were too unlikely to analyze.” The strands vibrate. “Not all endings involved Felme’s oaths, or the gang in the position they are in, or the fates of the two vesperbanes. But your last choice of the day would always be similar choice, though the exact options in detail and number, could have differed. Our analysis didn’t suggest that the two of you would split up for example — that was a surprise.”

“You mentioned it again. The spider. Is that” — a glance at Ciphersoul — “literal?”

“No.I am speaking for Ciphersoul, and the word she uses denotes ‘a sister’ or ‘a member of sisterkind’, but I believe spider, in our language, captures her meaning. And this metaphor allows a very natural extension: a very long time ago, some bats were in the habit of keeping therids on retainer, as they were… an excellent check on insect populations. Similarly, our metaphorical spider exists where they do, ostensibly pursuing their own ends, because it is useful for a still greater being.”

Big plays, and they only seemed to get bigger the closer you look. Wik would have simply left then, but it has a charge. So it asks, “What is your angle in all of this? What does the percipiency want? What does it do?”

“The Percipiency goes where the brain leads. We work in fields where an excess of information and cognition are helpful. We are privy to the secrets of all nine provinces, and as a consequence, cannot be beholden to any of them.” The strands start vibrating with a bit of force, Ciphersoul agitated, interrupting. “But you are concerned with the immediate. While cities have fallen before, and will fall again, the Percipiency is not the Pantheca, and we cannot divert resources to save every one of them. The fall of the Wentalel — it is slated to once more fall — is special. If events play out as they wont, it could intrude on the Perspective. This cannot be allowed.”

“The Perspective?” it asks, trying to match the stridulation of that word, what sounds like proper noun, one it has used before.

“The source of our power. Our equivalent to the vesperbane arts. It is an umbral network, if that brings you closer to understanding.”

“And the infection could… destroy this network?”

“No.Alter it, control it. This cannot be allowed. Our charge, as the Percipiency, as the deepest minds, is saving the heartlands. Thus the sanctity of the Perspective is the fate of every sentient.”

“This is not a light matter, then.” Would Marka blame it for leaving right then and there?

“Do not misunderstand. We are not deciding the fate of the world here, or more important beings could stand in our place and in yours. The worst case scenario is the loss of a city and a setback on the road to salvation, until vaster forces turn their attention here, and employ vaster solutions.” The acolyte glances at the therid. “Our goal is to be quicker, more delicate, more local than the biggest brains and the overscourges, and save them the trouble. Understand?”

“I think telling me I would be saving everyone would be more compelling.”

“A difference between us, vesperbane, is that we care about honesty and truth. Secrecy is not deception.”

Wik nods. “I get the impression, from your version of events, the Golden Lady is working for this ‘spider’. Do you have an opinion of the night​-​prophet? Can you attest to her legitimacy?” Is she misguided? Is she lying?

“The night​-​prophets’ goals are certainly noble ones, at least. And their means are cryptographically interesting, and distinct from those of haruspices. Have you heard of our predecessor’s cooperation with the Lucid Collective?” Ciphersoul waits a moment, before playing the strings more, and the acolyte says, “No, that’s perhaps not declassified yet.” The therid is watching Wik.

“I have to wonder if that’s a genuine slip, or you’re deliberately taunting me with secrets.”

“Yes.”

Wik peers at the acolyte. “Is that what she said?” It had seen the strands vibrate for far longer than seemed captured in that monosyllable.

The acolyte glances to the strings, following the tallowbane’s gaze. “Her response was not fully verbal, and the parts that were are… untranslatable.”

“Nonverbal in the manner of…?”

“I could say laughing, or growling, and be as close to the truth. Therids’ experience of amusement and frustration are intertwined.” Ciphersoul lifts a leg, and descend to give a single pluck of one string, with enough force Wik clearly hears the vibration itself. The acolyte flinches. “She doesn’t appreciate this digression.”

Ciphersoul resumes the usual, gentler plucking, and the acolyte continues, “Regardless, I must caution you nuance. Everything in the heartlands — night​-​prophets not excepted — is quite complicated, hiding excessive depth.”

“To hear the disciples tell it,” Wik says. “the Dream is an unadulterated good, and the night​-​prophets agents of that good.”

“The Dream is a symbol, invested with variant meaning by the many who gaze upon it. None in its service would disagree that the Dream is goodness, nor that they pursue it, but many will come to blows over the specifics. These variances can be extreme. We suspect the Joyous Mothers count a night​-​prophet among their numbers. Is that your idea of the Dream?”

The Joyous Mothers. S​-​class renegade threats. One of the many reasons vesperbanes are as much horrors as heroes. Media generally couldn’t (and wouldn’t) depict their consequences, and not for ideological reasons.

Divining a secret of such powerful defects is an ominous feat. “Just how powerful are percipients?” it asks, looking at the therid. Though it is the vesperbane, which of the two is really at the mercy of the other?”

“Hm. A precarious question. Power exists in many forms. Analogies may be our vice, but indulge us another. You’ve played card games, yes? Gold Dragon’s Gambit, say?”

A nod. “I’ve — some skill at it.”

“There are constructs insightful in analyzing such games. Two we call… a moment, please. We so rarely write in common; it does not suit our purposes.” The therid meets eye with the acolyte, and they stare at each other for a moment, silent. Moments later, they turn back to it and jumps into an explanation, “At any turn, given your cards, the cards you’ve seen, and the unknown cards in play, you can run the numbers. Tally the permutations, and calculate the best move. It would take a very long time, but your play would be superior to the oldest, wisest dragons and angels, the brightest of any mantid, therid, or euvespid. We call this the play of the perfect mind. Every percipient strives for this.”

“You mentioned two? What could be the alternative of perfection?”

“Not alternative. Superior, if you must, but they are not to be compared; that is not the point.” Another pause to wait for Ciphersoul’s input. “Suppose you were like a Brismati, able to see all cards in play, and those not dealt. Suppose, like the Shadow​-​crowns of myth, the minds of every player was yours to see, though not manipulate. Every planned strategy would be exposed. This would simplify the calculations greatly, and enhance your play: no unknowns, no calculated risks, just moves perfected beyond perfection. Pluperfect. But a better name is the play of the nemesis mind.”

“That would be…”

“Unstoppable, yes. In the space of all possibilities… there are many possibilities. A nemesis mind, even with the body of a nymph, could fight a vesperbane scourge, and likely win. One could change the minds of most with but a few words.”

“Like Karkel’s Scathing Remark.”

“A suitable example, though we doubt Karkel had the Perspective.”

The vesperbane has taken a step back, staring at the therid, wondering what possibilities there are with those sharp chelicerae, those clawed tarsi.

“Relax. We are not prone to random violence. It would not secure us an understanding with you.”

Wik breathes in. Ask the questions Marka would want answered. “So, could you just walk up to the spider of this web, and destroy them? Make some unstoppable nemesis play?”

“We can’t, and that’s why we haven’t. Equivalently, we haven’t and that’s why we can’t. Simply killing the spider would not solve our problem, and would create more. So if we could, we would not. And because we would not, which is to say, because it is not optimal or viable as a solution, the Perspective would not allow us to see the path.”

“So, since you have the Perspective, or nemesis brain, or whatever the correct term would be, does that mean your side will win? That you’ll always find the winning path in the end?”

“Are you a religious mantis? Do you have faith in some infallible order, like the exalted ancestors, the Dream, or a palingenetic queen?”

“I avoid mysticism. So no, not at all.”

“Neither do we,” the acolyte says. “Nemesis play is something a percipient cannot achieve, only blindly approximate. Closely enough to scare most, but not enough to save the heartlands. Yet.” The acolyte taps their head. “Were we like you vesperbanes, we might mythologize, say the sages of old could view every step on a path to any outcome. But no, it was always an asymptote. So, put simply, the perfect mind is just more reliable. We avoid instantiating the nemesis mind if we can, because…” A long, semantic pause. “You need not know. Know that the Perspective nor the Pantheca required us to answer that question, so appreciate that you now know more about us than millions.”

Wik nods, filing away the knowledge for its own reflection. It returns to the grounding consideration: what would Marka want to know?

The tallowbane casts a glance around the room to gauge, and notices the therid has turned away, returned to fiddling with the device which outfits the brain.

Is she bored? “Do you object to how this meeting has gone?” After the initial shock, it became a sequence of questions and answers fit for a meeting between tutor and pupil. To find that demeaning would be understandable.

The therid, apparently, could strum the strings while doing others things with other legs. “This was always intended to be us revealing the state of affairs, though Marka should have come in your place. No, we must be forthcoming with information, how else could we expect you to trust or work with us?”

“I have plenty of questions to test that, then,” it says. “I suppose, before anything further, I should get this out of the way. Marka wants answers to a certain personal matter. You alluded to having them?”

“Yes, but not for your tympana. The matter of her mother shall wait for when — if — we meet.”

“Fine. You understand the irony of that being your response to the very next question I asked?”

The disorganized strumming sounds again, signifying that complex therid emotion, which to Wik may as well be simply amusement. Was this some form of joke, then?

“Marka will appreciate keeping the matter private, and you too will appreciate that we keep to matters of material importance.”

“The gang, then. You said they were a part of this… web? That they served some purpose?”

“Unearthing a specific artifact. The fragment of a shaman​-​touched heart. You have it? No, you have access to it.”

“Marka trusted it to me.”

“And you didn’t trust us near it?”

“Knowing what I do now — it did not matter, does it?” Wik waves a raptorial. “What is it for?”

“Mending an ancient prophecy that could save Wentalel.”

“But… if the gang was a tool of the spider, who will destroy Wentalel… why? Unless they want to have the fragment so it can’t be mended?” Wik walks the tree of logic a few branches back. “Unless… you never said the spider was the enemy.” Wik turns to stare at Ciphersoul.

Her pedipalps cross.

I am no lord, idiot mantis.

Wik remembers the words, but no one had spoken. It felt like it had spoken the words, but it did not. The timbre of the voice, the exact words used, shift and slide as Wik focuses on it. It’s fading like a dream.

Wik turns all around, looking for the source of the voice, despite seeing no new arrival in its all​-​encompassing periphery.

I remain visible in front of you, mantis.

Wik wishes to see an explanation for the illusion, but the thoughts have no auditory or spatial qualities.

“Impossible. Every brain is unique. No precise universal mental techniques exist.”

Not as unique as you may like. This conversation has lasted long enough I have glimpsed the relevant parts of your connectome.

“If this ability exists, why have I never seen it wielded?” Why hadn’t it heard of it, and prepared?

Vesperbanes are barred from the Perspective, and the vespers bar the Perspective.

Still, why hadn’t it ever heard of even percipients having it? No, it had heard of it, and dismissed it. Too much of extant percipient lore is speculation, diluted with myth and mysticism. ‘Reading minds’ is side by side with ‘wielding every vesperbane technique’ and ‘controlling destiny’ and ‘puppeteering every syndic’ and ‘being vesperbats in disguise’ and ‘being literally omniscient’. You could only trust official stewartry dossiers, but those their achieved accuracy by being nearly absent of information.

“Ciphersoul wishes for you to calm your mind so that she may speak.”

Interesting limitation, it thinks. It’s considering the implications deliberately, in conscious contradiction of the request. “Can she continue speaking through you? I prefer… she not continue in this manner. It’s intrusive.”

“Very well.” There’s an insistent strum. “She cautions you not to extrapolate from this that she can read your mind. Thoughts are faster, more chaotic than vocalizations. Particularly yours. She watched your brain as you spoke, not as you thought.”

“That’s a… specific denial. I had just been worrying about that.”

“Many in your place would.”

Wik curls antennae into spirals. “You were explaining the gang?”

“Ciphersoul wants her displeasure at being forced to speak through intermediates known.”

“Acknowledged. We were saying?”

Another strum comes, and the acolyte ignores it. “You were questioning why the spider, who is not our Ciphersoul, would seek what would avert the very end they precipitate. The first error in your thinking is assuming destruction is the wake of those with bad intentions. It often is not. The second, similar error is taking plans for outcomes. Do not forget the spider is not the only actor to analyze. Truth is, the most controlling flinch from the idea that they are themselves controlled. Recall the spider​-​keeper is a different, vaster danger than the spider.”

“I am weary of these metaphors. Who is the spider? Is Marka captured by them right now?”

“The metaphors are an indulgence, but also a mercy. Were you to know the identity of the spider, or the spider​-​keeper, your preferred option of remaining uninvolved becomes… morally complicated, and you are a mantis of morals. So, we suppose this is where we give you your out. Stay, learn the specifics, and work with us. Or remain safe and ignorant, and I will escort you out.”

Choose well, idiot mantis.

(The tallowbane takes out the warden’s timepiece, clicks it open. But it is stuck, and according to the legs, no time had passed since before this meeting begun. An artifact of the percipients’ art, or had proximity to the welkinflame damaged it? Regardless, the device is useless to it, and it closes the timepiece, glimpsing its resolute reflection.)

VI.

“Oh my, you look like you’ve crawled through the inferno to get here.”

Marka gives an awkward ‘heh’ of a laugh. “It feels just like I did,” she says. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“Don’t I?” the courtesan replies. “I think you’d be surprised.”

He stands lifting a curtain for Marka to pass through, leading her into a private room. He’s dressed differently now — robes draping his form, swaddled in lengths of cloth that encircle his limbs. Marka wouldn’t say she’s disappointed, but… She didn’t expect this.

Above the thorax, the courtesan still has that ornate eyecap over one compound eye, seamlessly integrated into his attire. He wears heavier paint on his chitin now, and the colors are dark purples and reds, regal shades. It gives him the look of a dark beauty — suffice it to say, something unconventional, most of the other males she’d seen in this building having looked sunny and approachable.

“Surprise me, then.” She walks by him, and he slips a foreleg around hers, walking alongside her.

“I think,” the courtesan says, a fluffy antenna extending toward her, his head tilting upwards knowingly, “you didn’t listen to my advice. No, even worse,” his tone turns to one of high​-​pitched horror, “you did the exact opposite! You went right at the danger I warned you about. You got hurt.” He leans over, giving her a close examination, frowning and running a ginger dactyl along bandaged spots on the warden’s head.

Marka’s hidden antennae and furtive, lowered palps give her away.

He tsks. “How do you stay in the wardens, if you’re so unheeding? So willing to get into this much trouble without even letting your superiors know?”

Marka hadn’t, but had she said that? Or is she just that easy to read? “Today was — unusual. I don’t always act like this.”

“Oh, what’s so unusual about it? Explain yourself~”

“It looked like someone was getting robbed in the market. I wanted to help. Everything escalated from there. I just wanted to help.”

“How noble. You really want to be some kind of wandering hero, don’t you?” He tugs on her midleg, pulling her over to fall onto a cushioned rest. “I never learned your name, did I? Although… would you mind if called you my knight? I think you’d like that.”

Marka looks away, though the flush in her eyes is hard to hide. She fidgets and adjusts her positioning on the cushions.

When she speaks, she doesn’t contradict him, she couldn’t. She says, “Should I call you my liege, then?”

He giggles. “No, no formalities. Just call me… Nammy is fine.”

Marka wordlessly nods. She’s melting into the cushioned surface, her trachae sucking in air deeply, and spiracles closing so the breaths are released with a contented hum.

In relaxation, her antennae fall behind her, but not without soaking in the scent of this room. Candles line the room, and heavy fragrance drifts throughout it, a balmy, gamy, musky smell.

The candles aren’t most of the light, though. A chandelier hangs above, shining through tinted glass. It doesn’t look like fire or luciflies – a filament light?

Marka casts her eyes around. It’s a small room, and the size would invoke bad memories if it didn’t serve as a way to focus on how close she is to Nammy.

She finds herself reflected in a mirror over a dresser — still disguised after all this time, just in case. Off to the side, she sees a small idol of ancestor Lurei, the faithful. Ironic.

He watches her for a moment, then leans in like he would tell a secret. “Would you like to see me dance? I’ve had a moment to prepare, and I suppose it’s what you came here to see…”

“I, um,” Marka starts. How eager could she sound before it became inappropriate? “I’m curious?”

“Curious?” He taps his labium with a dactyl.

Marka nods. He’s smiling. Is that look good​-​natured or mocking? Is he holding back laughter?

“Well then, allow me to sate you~” With a dactyl he touches her thorax.

Nammy pulls away from Marka with a twirl, a foreleg extending simultaneously so his touch lingers. The courtesan disappears behind a curtain. A moment later, the light above blinks away, and the room is all darkness, tiny candles smelt as much as seen.

A new light emerges, a wide beam that illuminates a figure returning. The light smoothly follows his movement. His robes slide off him as he enters with steps like leaps.

The lengths of cloth encircling his legs come undone one by one. With fluid swings, limbs fly out and each length of cloth trails, undulating with all the weightlessness of ribbons in wind.

Nammy is nimble and fast. Some motions Marka only catches between the soldier pill and her trained vesperbane reflexes. The show he gives is as much impressive as it is enticing.

And it is enticing. The light will shift this way and that to give focus to parts of his body. The colorful eyespots on his raptorials and wings. The curved, tanned lengths of his legs revealed once more, which could not look more perfect in form if they had been sculpted by a vesperbane.

The base of his abdomen shaking, and the middle, and…

It would be false to say Marka’s eyes flush, because in the dim of the room, they are already dark with pigment. But Marka looks away, wipes a wet palp on her robes.

“Aww. Please, my knight. How can I reward you for your trials if you avert your eyes?”

“I — I just don’t want to be crass.”

“You asked to see~ And I want you to see. Isn’t it rude to refuse now?”

When Marka turns her head, she sees Nammy standing before her. (That light shining elsewhere had given him stealth.)

He lifts her to a stand. Lifts her; the strength surprises her.

“I suppose I’ll have to make this more intimate.”

He guides Marka’s next positioning, and then her next move, and another. Correcting her balance, getting her into the rhythm.

“I’ve never really danced before.”

“You wouldn’t be the first time I was someone’s first time. Here, try to catch me.”

They continue. In the dark of the room, Marka can only see the mantis she dances with, feel his touch.

It goes on, but only for a few moves more. He accidentally stresses a sore leg, and Marka cries out.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I should have considered.”

“No, it’s fine. I — can take it. No harm.”

“I have some remedies for this. It will do you better than the ichortallow, for sure.”

And it was. He removes Marka’s bandages, and wipes the offending areas with a liquid feeling sharp and cool. The pain is banished. Nammy’s patting down the leg, rubbing and applying pressure. He makes it feel good instead of just not hurting. And then he’s moving up the leg, and Marka’s palps are still, afraid any word might have him realize he’s done, and stop.

He speaks first. “Was that nice? Aside from the accident, I mean. I’m a touch out of practice. Dancing isn’t much of my main work these days, though I felt like giving it an old try, while I was back in town, however briefly.”

“You don’t stay in Wentalel?”

“Oh, I do. In fact, current circumstances aside, I’m usually stuck here. But I used to travel far more broadly. I suppose it shows, a bit.” He runs a tarsus down his fluffy antennae, and fingers the tiny ribbons extending them, that emphasize his masculinity. Marka’s eyes drift to the rest of his body. Shedding his robes after the dance, the clothing – if that is the word — he had underneath can be seen. Marka supposes, not being in public, the need for decency is less pressing.

It’s odd. The design of this revealing outfit seemed… uncharacteristic. Less fishnets than the rope​-​armor a warrior might wear.

“I’m flattered you find my fashion so eye​-​catching. Though you’re a bit remiss to forget we’re having a conversation.”

“Oh. Uh, sorry.” It galled Marka that she is the one flustered – it’s males who think less clearly when their… anatomy is engorged. Marka brings her palps together, then opts to mount a defense. “I did have a long day, though. And your offer was to relax.”

“Fair, very fair, my knight. My apologies.” While he says this he’s looking at her with a certain smirk, and leaning closer. Then, swiftly, he’s close enough to fill her frontward field of view. His maxillary palps reach out, and brush against hers for a moment, and then he pulls back. His taste was fresh, minty.

Marka’s silent, palps unmoving for a moment after that, her antennae extended out completely in surprise.

Nammy pats her on the head. It’s more comforting than condescending.

“What’s on your mind, Marka?”

It’s the prompt to bring her back into motion. “Well…” She’s wondering how you know her name, for one, when just earlier you said she never told. “I’m still thinking about your dance.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, not the dance. But how it started? I’m wondering about the light, how it tracked your movement. Was it a fixed pattern you practiced? Or…”

There are a lot of mysteries, complexities to this courtesan. It was curiosity that drove her here. There were reasons she could justify coming here despite the important matters at play. He is connected to today’s events, somehow.

“It’s better to leave a little mystery to my performance, no? I’ll let you wonder.” He tilts his head back, lifting into a superior look that exposes his maxillae. “But with that thinky look your face, I think you suspect something. I wonder — have you guessed who I am, yet?”

“You’re certainly more than a courtesan.”

“Come on. I showed you my cerci, the least you could do is show me your guesses.”

“You know more than you should. Maybe you’ve got connections to important people, due to… your work,” she says. “But I’m not quite sure.”

He frowns at this. Had she said something wrong?

He says, “Really? I’d thought the eyecap gave it away. That’s what everyone told me.” Nammy lifts his abdomen, and Marka flushes deeply, but it’s nothing untoward.

Tied around one of the last abdominal segments is a gilded warden’s antennae​-​band bearing the insignia of the Windborne Stronghold.

“My proper name is Dlenam. If you don’t recognize that name, I’m Arch​-​fiend of Wentalel, coordinator of the wardens. Are you surprised?” Arch​-​fiend Dlenam. The One​-​eyed Bastard. Of course.

“I– I’m sorry. I didn’t — should I not have –” Would she get a citation for this?

“Calm down, honey. If I expected you to treat me like the battle​-​queen (well, king) that I am, I wouldn’t pretend to be a lowly dancer.” He pats her head again. It’s more condescending than comforting. “Though I always found it curious how this role leads mantids to discount my status and importance. And it’s never the reaction I’d get were I some actor in the theater, or a dancer in some troupe. As if being intimate made it any less a performance, and skillful one at that.” Marka glances away. “Oh, but I’m not singling you out, my knight. You are delightfully and uniquely respectful, and I appreciate that.”

“Thanks.”

“Mhmm. You know, we’ve gotten a bit side​-​tracked — when you walked in here looking like that, I knew I had to ask just what happened in the not​-​half​-​a​-​day since I saw you hale and hearty in a suit of armor. And I still wonder just what happened — but oh no, it’ll feel like a debriefing now, won’t it?” He brushes a raptorial. “Tell me if you like, and do try to ignore that little fact I went out of my way to tell you.”

Marka reflects back over what happens, discerning what danger she might be in if she said everything.

“C’mon. You said someone was getting robbed, and then it escalated from there?”

“Well,” Marka starts, “it looked like that, but in hindsight I think that’s not quite it…” And, with Nammy — Dlenam — at rapt attention, she goes over her day. She introduces Wik as “someone who said they were Stewartry, but now I’m unsure.”

“I recognize them. They’ve been delinquent in their duties. Too slippery to catch, particularly when there are more pressing problems plaguing this city. But go on.”

She doesn’t get farther before she needs to consider the matter of Felme. Her strategy is to mention him — by name — but downplay his involvement, and omit the matter of the oaths. (Which, if Alunyene is to believed, there may be no evidence of.)

Nammy has a particularly sour look on his face when the spellbrand comes up, but lets Marka continue. Delving into the sewers. Fighting Angwi – he’s particularly captivated by recounting that fight.

“Mm, you’re such a mighty vesperbane. You can do better as far as intimfeinds go, though.”

Then recruiting the gang (“Interesting plan,” is all he said) and then picking the safe (“I’ve never had such luck with the termite’s contraptions.”), and the letter from the Watching Lord (Ciphersoul’s letter goes unmentioned), and then descending the catacombs.

“I’d heard — reports, of how bad it was down there. It’s why I’ve locked down the sewers until we can deal with whatever is going on. I’m glad you made it out of there alright. I think many vesperbanes — even your fellow wardens — wouldn’t have been able to survive. Have you thought about ascending to fiend? The trials would only be a touch harder.”

“It’s crossed my mind,” Marka says, noncomittal.

“Now, where were you? The story must be winding down, right? I refuse to believe much more could have happened in one day.”

The climatic battle with Angwi — she may have emphasized how close she was to winning legitimately before Wik’s intervention — and very much not climatic encounter with Ress. She pauses, and omits the heart fragment, and Alunyene.

“Is that all?” he asks, like he expected more to come.

“Pretty much. We just climbed back up, retrieved our riches from the safe, and parted ways.”

“I see,” he says, sill sounding odd.

Marka turns to look closer, and sees he’s taken out a knife. “I suppose I can’t fault you for keeping secrets, or omitting facts. But I’d like us to be more open with each — and for that, I suppose, I’ll need to be open first. Can you keep a secret?

“Um.” Marka’s raptorial falls to rest on the grille of her sword.

“Would you really pull a sword out on a poor tiercel with only a knife?” he asks, voice going high. “But no, the knife is only for show. To say I’m serious. If I meant to threaten you, I wouldn’t need it. I don’t think I’ll actually stab you. Unless you’d like me to?” Even as he gives more playful flourishes, he’s straightening up, flattening his palps. The carelessness characteristic of Nammy becomes harder to see, but still there. He’s still wearing fishnets, and his voice is still disarmingly high. “I mean it, though. What I’m about to tell you has stay between us. So again, can you keep a secret?”

“I already know you’re the arch​-​fiend?”

Dlenam sighs. “That’s not a secret, silly~” he says. There was something, simultaneously disarming and disconcerting about the arch​-​fiend of Wentalel lilting at her. “But I’ll take that as a yes. Hopefully you’re not so inured to surprises tonight that me mentioning a little someone named, oh, the Watching Lord won’t leave you unphased?”

It’d be a lie to say that puts her more on edge than the knife did. But there’s more to worry about here, more implications to dance around in her stimulated mind.

“Ah, that’s a nice reaction. I trust you, my knight, but if you’d use your words?” Nammy runs a tarsus down the middle of Marka’s abdomen, where hemolymph is pumping through her dorsal vein.

“I’ll– I’ll try to keep a secret, best I’m able.”

“Ah. Well, are you ready?” Nammy smiles at her, looking expectant. Marka nods. “You see, I’m also the Watching Lord.” He lets that hang, then follows it up. “I wasn’t, but I am now, you see? The real Watching Lord is rotting in an exclusion zone. But he has connections, and a name with weight, so wearing the title suits my purposes.”

Marka presses her palps to pars stridens, then lifts them, realizing her next question is stupid. But would Nammy judge her too harshly? She ventures, “What are your purposes?”

“I was — given the title of arch​-​fiend, and I excel at whatever role I need to play. I command the Wardens here, and our purpose is to protect the peace of the heartlands. Wentalel has declined in step with the decline of river​-​born trade. And while trade is beyond my station as a vesperbane, when that decline spawns mavericks and defects, those problem are within my role to solve!”

Marka has to be careful with her next words — she remembers her fuckup at Felme’s — but her connection to this matter was cut, and Nammy is well​-​intentioned and accomodating. “Wentalel’s… less reputable elements are already reeling.”

Nammy laughs. It’s not his earlier giggles, but a laugh with a mocking edge, like a warmaster making his final, truimphant moves. “If I thought it’d help to taunt them, I’d tell them this is only the point of the sword. But they’ll learn.”

“Speaking of them,” Marka’s pausing again, for caution’s sake. But what harm could it do? “It is a bit.. odd, that for all he was able to deduce and anticipate, Felme didn’t mention anything about a Watching Lord.”

“Meh, Felme. He’s not much more than a gold​-​digging secretary with far too high opinion of his intelligence. If he knew anything of what I was up to, I may as well tell the whole town myself, at that point.” He waves an open raptorial. “But enough about my plans. Let’s discuss our plans~”

Marka’s antennae jolt, and she looks away.

“Oh, not quite like that. Indulge me another revelation? Though you may have guessed this one. I know about your undisclosed meeting with the Golden Lady. You see, the Watching Lord is also the Golden Lady’s master! It’s all connected. But do note, this is not transitive. They are, but I am not; she is unaware of all my identities,” he says, leaning in toward Marka. “For that, it seems I trust you more, my knight~”

Marka glances down, palps working in thought, feeling out responses. Altogether, it couldn’t be too much of surprise. It all clicked together, with an inevitability that made it feel… obvious.

Dlenam pats her again. “Mm, now that you know everything — and since you’re already here — would you mind if we just started the meeting early?”

Marka quirks a palp, thinking. But if he really wanted, he could turn this into a meeting with the Watching Lord right now. “Do we still need a meeting?”

“It’s only proper to have the Lady there, and have our partnership be official.”

“Ah yeah, Alunyene.”

Nammy smiles at her. “Worry not. My heart’s only for you, my knight.”

He slips quickly back behind the curtain, and returns with a gown on, for something approaching decency. It covered him from prothorax to abdomen, though it didn’t extend over any legs.

“After you?” he says.

Marka pauses, thinking. This would complicate her plans with Wik. But she’s trying to read the subtext. Is this him asking to start the meeting early, or telling her they will? He is her superior — how much room did she have to question?

The warden leaves the room how she came in, and Nammy follows behind her.

They were expected.

A familiar face is over at one of the tables, and she has friends now. At a word, all four ladies get up, the pteryist kult recruit pointing at Marka.

They march forward, the pink mantis flanking a lady with a mean sneer and an eight pointed star stained on her head. The mantis behind the three wears dark robes.

“So, this is it. The simpering excuse for a vesperbane, who spat in the face of our kind invitation. And what’s this? Your whore?” She raises her raptorials and opens them, spreading her wings in full threat display. “I think we have an apology coming.”

“Sorry you’re all hateful idiots?”

Nammy’s tapping Marka. “What’s all this?”

“Kult of Kaos recruiter, I think , bothered me while I was trying to get to you. Didn’t like my refusal, I guess.” Marka bites a palp. She lied by omission about the real inciter — but maybe she shouldn’t admit to assault to the leader of the Wentalel wardens.

“We don’t appreciate being talked about like we aren’t right here,” she says.

“Mind you get out of our way?” Nammy’s saying, with more iron than she’d heard. “We have business you’re interrupting.”

When that’s said, the apparent leader looks from him back to Marka. “Says a lot about you, nymphy little vesperbane, that the aedeagus you rented has to stand up for you.”

“I ask again,” he says, still smiling despite being ignored, “that you have some sense. It will be best for you if you find better things to do. There are plenty in this very tavern, if you haven’t noticed.”

“No, I’m not interested in your filth. And I think I’m looking at the mantis without sense. We’ll just have to beat it into you!” She underscores this with a high cry from her spiracles.

The speaker has a weapon: a bifurcating tool used in sport. Another has wooden plates strapped to the inside of her raptorials, turning them into bludgeoning instruments. The pink mantis she met earlier is simply armed with the natural weapons.

“They said, to the vesperbane,” Marka replies. “Do you know how many civillians with more guts than you I’ve knocked out today? Killed?”

“You think we didn’t bring our own? Shini, show ’em!”

In the back, the robed mantis gives a grunt. They all hear the wet, sliding sound of wretched raptorials everted.

They are long, but there’s only two of them.

“Is it violence you want, then?”

The lead mantis only sneers.

Marka doesn’t even have time to unsheath her sword.

Having watched him dance, Dlenam’s speed and flexibility are familiar in an unfamiliar context.

He leaps forward, one moment at Marka’s side, the next in the air coming at the wooden plate mantis, legs first. She’s forced back. But four legs on the ground, abdomen curled up, she holds on to balance.

So in his other midleg, he grasps a cloth ribbon. Swinging out with it, the length wraps around his foe’s leg. Enough that when he pulls back, the leg folds, even as the cloth unwraps. With one leg down, and the weight of the male coming down on top of her, she folds too.

Dlenam hops off her and kicks her head, and she goes limp in unconsciousness.

This happens quickly enough the ladies are still reacting, exclaiming. Dlenam flies like an arrow at the next nearest opponent. It’s not his full speed, and doesn’t need to be. Still, she has time to pull back and start a swing of her sports weapon.

Dlenam catches the blow with a knife, the tiny blade eating into the wood as he doesn’t budge. Where did he keep the knife?

She yanks back her weapon, and Dlenam lowers his.

And he leans in, as if for palp fingering, but bites her palp instead, and when he pulls back, they readily mirror it, to avoid pain to the sensitive appendage. He grabs them, and throws them to the ground.

Then he stabs a thick leg joint, and leaves the blade there.

Slowly, he turns and walks to the last civilian.

The recruiter is slowly stepping back.

“Yes, run. It’s good for your health.” Dlenam turns back around.

That’s when the recruiter lunges. She’s still in his sight, but in that moment his options are limited.

So he lifts a hindleg, and stops her in the air.

Marka thinks she hears mesothoracic chitin crack.

This time, he budges, his leg being pushed back by her weight.

It’s so that he can kick out now, sending her flying. She lands hard against a table, food squishing and staining her clothes.

After that, Dlenam doesn’t need to turn to keep walking toward the final opponent. He stops by the second, kneeling to retrieve his knife. A gout of hemolymph gushes up, and the mantis moans in pain.

The arch​-​fiend stands and flicks the green liquid from the blade.

The enemy vesperbane had watched all this with ever​-​tightening antennae, probably suspecting he’s a vesperbane.

But while he’d kneeled, she circled around, moving behind the knife​-​wielding courtesan.

For all the good that did the last one to try, Marka thought.

Dlenam crouches again with the bane to his back, and jumps, backflipping through the air, spinning at the same time to correct his orientation.

The showy gesture opens him up for a hit to catch him landing. Even an arch​-​fiend can only do so much to react while somersaulting midair.

The bone​-​spiked red limb is swinging at his abdomen. A good place to aim, Marka thinks. Vital, and an easier target than the head.

Dlenam can only lean with the blow.

Still, it connects. The only hit to land this entire fight.

It manages to cut up his abdominal garments.

“Oh honey,” Dlenam’s stridulation is high, “I don’t give free shows, I’m sorry.”

While saying that, while that raptorial is pulling away, Dlenam goes for the other. He swings down the knife powerfully, hacking and in a few moments — his foe begins to scream — the raptorial has been messily severed.

Was that inspired by Marka’s retellings?

Blood is pouring from the stump. Dlenam aims for the other, and the bane quickly flinches back. But it’s a feint. He jumps again, doing another showy roll through the air. This time, he lands on her back.

It’s a… suggestive pose. But the two banes are deadly serious. The raptorial reaches back for him, and he stabs the base of the thing, running through the limb, then dragging the blade, with every tearing sound of cutting tough meat, with every wet sound of red blood freed to run and drip, with every sound of agony, he cuts a long hole through the middle. Then, with a quick and final upward swipe, he punctuates it all, messily splitting the limb in two.

Dlenam now brings the knife to their throat.

“Your countenance, dear?” he asks sweetly.

The sound is at first fighting for breaths between screams. Then, “I – I — I — don’t –”

“Warden?” he asks, pressing the knife closer. “Stewart?” he asks. Her breath hitches like the knife had bit in. “Ma​-​ver​-​ick?” he asks, palps dancing across every syllable, the word an accusation. Greenish liquid beads on the blade now.

“I — I’m not –”

“Renegade, then.” He says it with finality.

The arch​-​fiend drives the blade all the way in, and releases her to fall. Green tinged with red pours down their lifeless prothorax.

A few moments with an arch​-​fiend, with no preparation and no techniques, and this is the result. The decisive, fatal violence has Marka bit her palp, recall darkly the things she’s done tonight. But a renegade? In Wentalel? With a hateful cult? It — it was justice.

He stands, spitting on the corpse. “As ever, with defects.”

Then he looks behind him, noticing the torn​-​open abdomen covering. Eyes lightly flushing as if embarrassed, a forelegs goes back to pull the split cloth together. He dashes over to Marka, a slight smile present.

“We, ah, we should get going before this becomes more of a scene.”

Marka gives the four scattered bodies another look.

“Good… good work?”

“It was nothing.” His two antennae bend in different directions. “I’m sure you could have done it yourself~ Didn’t need me.”

“It’s still appreciated.”

But Marka’s effectively cut off by another male walking up to the courtesan. He asks quiet questions, and Dlenam scrapes out some directions, points at the bodies and the blood. Then at Marka, after which he breaks away to rejoin her.

“I’ve made a bit of a mess. But it will be handled.”

At his urging, Marka begins walking. He’s leading now, which honestly made more sense.

“Why the civilians, I wonder. If they knew I was envespered, I mean.”

“Citation baiting. That’s my guess. If you went hard enough against them, they might raise concerns of assault with endowned ability. I’d never let it past my desk, of course. You can trust me, my knight~”

The lilting feels different now, coming from someone she could fight in full armor, sword out, black of soul, while he was half naked with a knife, and she couldn’t expect to win.

What did the arch​-​fiend of Wentalel want with her?

VII.

It was a welkintower. Was ​-​ it dates to around when the rebuilding of Wentalel had been underway. Zoning had been different, and the city smaller. Its placement made sense, back then — rather than just entertainment district, when the welkintower was erected this district had been most of Wentalel.

This had changed after the arrival of the Church. With it came vindicators that made feasible expensive, but modern wards against nerve storms.

It had been neglected, repurposed, changing owners with the seasons. Marka knows not who’s it is now, or what they planned for it. Maybe Dlenam himself owns it (by proxy, of course). Or he just knows the real owners won’t care.

Marka walks toward the abandoned tower, alone. Dlenam had left several blocks back, knowing Marka could find her way to the big landmark. He needed to change clothes, and they really shouldn’t arrive together, for appearance’s sake.

The door isn’t locked. Inside, level upon level of railed platforms jut from the wall, and tarsholds line the space between them, the whole thing like a tree turned inside out.

Above, the warm glow of firelight illuminates a platform almost at the top. Marka climbs up towards it.

Her first glimpse awes her into brief silence.

The beauty of gold light by flame — it suits Alunyene.

She sits facing the flame, legs folded beneath her. Eyes pale in deep meditation or sleep.

Around her, orbs dance as though she were a sun. Some are the black of enervate (Marka can sense them undergoing fission and calcination), and some are blood, blooming patterns she’s seen in petri dish cultures.

Marka watches the brown mantis’s eyes pigment as the warden approaches with quiet steps.

“Ah, again we meet.”

A nod. Marka searches for a politeness to ground the conversation. The staff lies on the ground, parallel to her. To the side, a pile of empty shells for probably​-​devoured snailflies. Windows lie beyond her, overlooking all of nighttime Wentalel. She settles on that.

“Pretty sight, isn’t it?”

“I sought a vantage, expecting to find and guide you here.”

“That’s how this would have gone? You’d have spotted me? This city – this district, even — is big.”

“I can sense you and yours,” she says. By now, she must have emerged fully from what cogitation trance she’d entered, and turns to meet eye with Marka. “It would ward against stunts you may have attempted. If you had allied with the arch​-​usurer, I would not be caught unawares.”

Arch​-​usurer? Ress? No, probably Felme. “I wouldn’t,” Marka says.

“Many would, after learning who I am, and what I am.” She waves for the warden to come sit. “Speaking of him and his ilk, where is your partner? They have not joined you.”

“It will come. We uh, are taking caution. If you have ill intentions, well, I’ll suffer them and Wik can save me or avoid it.” A plan complicated by Dlenam rushing the meeting.

Wik had theorized the most likely rooftop for them to meet lay above some pawn shop with ‘eye’ in the name. A dead end, ultimately, and Marka detoured to leave it a note to find the real meeting location.

“It is a tricky type, fond of complex, secretive plans. Do not trust it.”

“It’s saved my life.”

“Reflect on this question: do you believe it saved your life for the inherent value of life, or because it stands to profit if you live?”

“I mean, profit and value are intertwined? If you care about mantids, then you profit from saving them, because you’ve saved a valuable thing?”

Her head inclines. “Morality cannot be measured in an accounting book. That is a mistake one who works so closely with the arch​-​usurer would make. Do not yourself make it.”

“Hm.” Marka quirks a palp. “Speaking of morality, I have some questions for you.”

Alunyene arches one antenna. Lifting a tarsus to catch an orb floating around her, letting the black nerve flow back into her, she says, “My answers are contingent on good faith. If your questions are traps of petty logic to bind or attack me and my truth, I have only silence to offer you.”

“Okay. Should I… I don’t know how much patience you have, but I think it’d help to know what exactly you are, before questioning what you’ve done.”

“I don’t mind answering simple questions.”

“Well, what is the Dream?”

The Golden Lady gives the warden another look, but it’s not one of exasperation. Her antennae curl upwards, and the tone of her stridulation implies curled palps.

“The Dream… is the last covenant,” she says. “The first covenant joined vesper and bat, a gift they misused. The second extended this to mantis, for they saw potential in us. The third… its content, what circumstances surround it, are lost, obscured in arete​-​record. These three covenants are upheld by all vespers. The fourth and final covenant is the Dream, and will be an equally dramatic restructuring of relations.

“What is it, you ask? When the Pantheca abolished slavery by inter​-​provincial decree, when it makes efforts so that even the poorest might have options for food, shelter, education — all that is in service of the Dream. But vespers are curiously neglected by these efforts.

“The Dream is not law. It is neither codified nor binding.” — the word’s spat as a much as said — “Is it law that you help those in need? No, it is deeper. Society shapes you such that you prefer it. The Dream… is that we reshape society for the dignity of the vespers that have given us everything. This Pantheca has forgotten that.

“Is that enough of an answer?”

“Much more than I could get from anyone else.”

“Few understand the Dream, and vagueness allows that lack understanding to not embarrass them.”

“I assume night​-​prophets are involved in this reshaping?” A simple nod from Alunyene. “How do you become one? Could you…”

“Could I awaken you as a night​-​prophet? Grant you any of our fabulous powers? With a motivation like that, surely not.” The Golden Lady glances out over the city. “Tell me. How do you tell if one is a syndic coordinator?”

“You can look it up in the administrative index. Or see if they’re wearing the robes,” Marka says. Wondering if the random question is setup.

“What if I wrote my name in the index? Stole and donned the robes myself?”

“You still wouldn’t be one. No one will have voted for you.”

“Or, put another way, it’s not something you do, or something you have, but something others recognize within you.” She smiles, and it feels profound. “A night​-​prophet is one recognized as such, and that is all.”

Marka nods. Her palps move for her next questions, then pause. She looks away, then back again. She’s quiet. “How does killing haruspices help reshape society?”

The smile is gone. “This is the sort of question I meant,” she says with rough stridulation. “It is thorned.”

“Sorry? But I do wonder.”

“To give you more charity than I was extended, I will answer as though that were an honest question.” (She lands another orb on tarsus now, a red one that crawls down her leg like a slug.) “I did not ‘kill’. I lifted no leg against them. I merely gave their vespers choice.”

“Just a choice? Nothing more?”

The Golden Lady looks away, gazing out at the city, and makes the gesture not look furtive. “The offer of joining me was clearly preferable.”

Marka looks away now, eyes cast down. But her gaze is drawn back, morbidly. “What would my vespers choose…”

“You are not an unkind host, or I would not have allowed your selection,” she replies, but adds, “Though you could stand to feed them more.”

Marka sighs out relief, palpls curling up. “I’m glad.”

“Do not be proud. You are merely smouldering in a world ablaze.”

Marka takes the admonishment with tightening antennae. She nods. And then she starts, “Oh and um, one more. I’ll try to be less thorny with this one. About the clan–”

Alunyene stands up.

“Did I…”

“You did not. The Lord gave the signal. It is time for you to meet them.”

Marka looks the brown mantis up and down. “Why do you serve the Lord? I don’t think the Dream is big on hierarchy.”

“I call them my master, for it pleases them to think I serve them. I seek the wisdom of the shamans of eld, and for now, so do they.” A significant pause comes, where the brown mantis peers at Marka, and decides to continue. “And the Lord… is powerful. Their vespers are powerful. The host and hosted alike are bound in conditions I do not fully know. I would like to free them.”

When Alunyene moves, it is with unhurried grace. Marka, by contrast jittery with lingering stimulants, overtakes her, intuiting the Lord would meet them at the very top of the welkintower. She climbs (jumps, really) the last few tarsholds.

Marka lingers just before the ceiling hatch. Turning to the figure in her periphery, she finds Alunyene lingering too, waiting on the last mini​-​platform before the hatch.

She waves for the warden to go on. “It is best you arrive alone.”

Marka frowns. If this isn’t a trap, there had better be a reason for this.

She breathes in deep, and takes one more step.

The lantern room is lit by a circle of small fires at its fringes, and rather than lighting, they emphasize the dark. The central pit, where the welkinflame would have burned, is of course, emptied of heavenstone, unused.

A device sits there. Complex, but not the harsh cubes and exposed mechanisms of the vindicator tech reveling in complexity which Marka was familiar with. This would be what, stewartry design? She may have seen this exact device at an academy.

It has spoked wheels and a cylinder pointing out. Following the cylinder, it points at an installed curtain, eye​-​catching white. Curtains circle the room, but they are dark to this one’s light.

Marka continues looking around, for the Lord she expects.

A regal perch rests by the white curtain. A dark form is above it. The Lord? Of course, the conclusion is natural. And the perch beside it (lower, less important) has another form, a suggestion of gold. The Golden Lady, her mind jumps to — but how? She’d just been behind her. The thought goes nowhere, so Marka discards it. She’d seen the gold beside the Lord, and who else would sit beside him? Marka leans to look closer and her antennae tighten up in confusion, and she looks away and they relax.

The Lord and Lady are here — waiting, clearly. Why aren’t they saying anything?

Marka fidgets. Do they expect her to say something? Yes, of course. But what?

“I uh, came here like you asked. What… what’s next?”

No response comes. Are they judging her? Yes. Is she doing something wrong? Yes, that would explain it. But what?

With a title like Lord, with how Alunyene talked about him, perhaps he’s arrogating more respect in this guise. Should she kneel? Yes. That is appropriate.

Marka’s legs bend, and her forelegs go to the ground, her head bowing. She still feels like something’s wrong.

Is she in danger? Yes. Was this some kind of trap? Yes.

She needs to get out of here, go back to where things made sense. She should run.

No.

That doesn’t make sense. Marka doesn’t run. She’s not one to run.

No, that’s wrong. It feels wrong. It confuses her.

But it’s true. No.

Marka’s thinking now, introspecting. Remembering.

She knows what this feels like. She knows what this is.

No, that’s wrong.

The brains of heartlands mantids are unique among arthropods. All developed brains incorporate minutely enervated amalgams as trasmitter chemicals. But mantids had far more of them than any other. It means enervate can have pronounced effects. Vesperbanes can weaponize this as killing intent (natural aversion meaning concentrated amounts of enervate feels evil, painful) or — in controlled, chaotic bursts – it can disrupt firing patterns, cause confusion. Just like what she is feeling. (But more control than than this, paradoxically, is less precise: brains are too unique for specific, low entropy effects, let alone anything with semantic content.)

This line of thought becomes more boring, confusing as she runs down it. Why was she thinking it? She is in danger. Yes. If she’s in danger –

But she fights the confusion, refuses the other tracks her mind is trying to run down.

No, wrong.

The more she fights it, the more the artificial effects feel differentiated from her feelings. Why should they feel differentiated –

No, and it’s Marka thinking this. Thinking, reflecting, is a trap. She is being affected by a mental technique. Her mind is unreliable.

So she unsheathes her sword, and settles into a stance.

Marka would trust her body.

She looks around, unflinching, searching for the enemy bane behind this.

“Well done, warden.”

The confusion, the fog, begins to lift. Marka’s mind sparks freely across paths, and she looks around.

(The perches? More like fancy coat racks. What she’d taken for the Lord and Lady watching her is in fact just limp bundles of cloth. You could only mistake them in the edge of your vision.)

That voice had come from behind her. She turns, finding the mantis forming a tarsign. They release, and the confusing touch completely leaves her mind. She thinks they wanted her to see that.

The mantis stands in thick, all​-​concealing robes of deep red. Symbolic eyes pattern along its surface, and within each resides a deep umbral black spot. Each eye seemed a portal to an abyss. When they move, their steps sound out, the clank of weighty shoes.

The Waching Lord? Dlenam?

(He’s taller now, Marka notes. She might not have seen anything of Nammy in him, if she’d not known. He was using some technique that altered his pars stridens, his voice sounding deep and slightly alien.)

“What — why? I — that.” Marka stops, composing her thoughts. Lingering confusion? Or did she not know what to feel, what to say? “I came here expecting — alliance. If not that, then neutrality. That – that was enemy action.”

“I’m of the opinion intuition cannot be taught. This day — all of it, until this very moment — has been a test. How you respond to uncertain situations is something I evaluate, like a sculptor deciding if an unchiseled stone is adequate. I find you… adequate.”

“You tested me by — by…”

“It’s called neuroprojection. You are a blackbane — though you wield a sword. You may be ignorant of it.”

“I was trained to resist it.”

“I expect no less from a warden.” Was that tone pride, or is she reading that in? “But, just so that there’s no lingering paranoia: your experiences were all genuine, and your thoughts your own. Neuroprojection is not illusion, or mind control. The deception — a deception you, in truth, live every moment of every day — lay in the interprations and assumptions you invested in those experiences. You saw an organic form and hint of green​-​yellow — is that the gold​-​adorned mantis featuring so prominently in your thoughts, or just a pile of cloth? Your mind makes a guess. Very normal. And normally, it seeks evidence to confirm — but should the conclusion feel right, and the critical thoughts distressing, confusing, boring? You and — that is you; not I, the neuroprojector — may decide to take the path least resisting.”

“H​-​how is it not at least mind reading? You clearly knew which thoughts to make confusing, which thoughts to guide along.”

“I did not, though I’m flattered,” he says. “If you look at an object, are you not thinking of it? If you contract muscles in your legs, are you not thinking of moving? Easy guesses. But they are guesses. Anyone who claims to know your thoughts from merely looking at your brain either wants your money, or your faith. Seek divination by fire instead; at least then you get a pretty show alongside the nonsense.”

“So you just… what, nudged me?”

“Essentially? Yes, many nudges. You saw nothing that wasn’t there, thought no notions unnatural to you. At best, you were unusually hasty and arbitrary. Unusually thoughtless.”

“I feel… controlled, not hasty. Manipulated.”

“Attempted to be controlled. You fought it well. Else you would have run off, and I would not have sent after you.”

The Watching Lord has walked to the device at the center. “If it assuages you any, I consider myself a mere dabbler in neuroprojection. Perhaps this scene would have played out differently if I had the skill in it that I hold in my true talents.”

“How can I trust you after that?”

“An untrustworthy mantis would not have disclosed their ability, and instead used it to convince you to his side, unbeknownst.” He looks away. “You came here already having reason to trust me.”

Marka follows his gaze and sees why. Alunyene — the real Alunyene (she glances at the Lord’s tarsi to check) — has arrived at last.

“Is that everyone? I was told another vesperbane was with you.”

“It’s coming. If you were to attack or capture me, staggering our arrivals is some insurance. I’m starting to appreciate that.”

“Very well.” The Lord begins fiddling with the device. Simultaneously, he speaks. “The servant you disposed of before coming here claimed to have found something down there. Do you have it?”

The heart fragment. “No.Again, this meeting is to feel things out, see if you mean well.” Marka recalls the Lords — Nammy’s — palps touching hers, and wonders how that could not mean well. She continues the planned approach, though. Wik had good plans. “We won’t risk our bargaining chip. What’s the artifact for?”

“An element of my plan. You need not know, so long as you’re still ‘feeling things out.’ ”

“Okay. But will you answer any questions? You mentioned a servant. The gangster Ress? Are you responsible for what happened to her?”

“She was suffering from the affliction of old Wentalel, as others in her gang had. Alunyene told me you’ve forced the door open. Very… unfortunate, in that regard.”

“What is the affliction? Why is it still around, after being sealed for centuries?”

“I have sent samples off to be analyzed. Beyond that? You have seen more of it than I have. Field work is beneath me, and I merely read my servants’ reports. Judging from that… old Wentalel was controlled by the Second Dominion in the end, I believe? Every Dominion loved the sanguine arts, and plaguecraft is the oldest. The pieces are there,” he concludes it all with a dismissive waved raptorial.

Now, with all the mixed feelings of the neuroprojection test behind her, and she can appreciate what Nammy’s doing here. The talk of servants and what’s beneath him? That accent? This is a perfomance, he’s playing a character. Well enough Marka had been taken in.

She doesn’t try to poke it. Seriously, she asks, “Wentalel will be safe?”

“I promise it. No Lord wishes to rule a plague​-​stricken waste.”

“Are you a mantis of promises, then?”

He lifts a raptorial toward Alunyene. “I promised her amnesty from the hunters. I promised her I’d secure her the wisdom of her elders.” He leans toward Marka. “But I believe you will be more interested in what I could promise you, no?

“For you, Marka, I could secure you a promotion, even sponsor you embarking on the first of the fiend trials.” The Lord’s — Dlenam’s – face is behind a mask, expression invisible. “And for the tallowbane, I could pull the strings to secure its return to the stewartry, or grant it a clean break.”

His antennae are still visible though, expressing his consideration. “But I can tell you two aren’t mantises driven by base money or power, are you? Not wholly. You think of yourself a little knight errant.” (Marka heard Nammy behind those words.) “So perhaps spoiling a few details of what I’m doing shall encourage your cooperation. Let me tell you how this story goes.”

The Watching Lord finally finishes his ministrations with the device. It comes to life with the hum of gears and flowing enervate Marka could feel. It comes to light too, illumination spilling from the cylinder when he removes the cap. It flies out to strike the light curtain, and an image is visible

A map of the Plains southern, bisected by the Wenta river. Wental is visible near the southernmost curves of the waterway. It’s highlighted, and another highlight is a town so close to the Ambrosia Woods Marka wonders if it’s still Panthecan.

“Less than a quarter moon ago, there was a termite mound emergence. It would have been a routine investigation, classification and exclusion – except this mound emerged within the Ambrosia Woods. Naturally, this has agitated the weevils, and, with this being so far north in the woods, there is a village built idiotically close. The Syndics, you may guess, are loath to lose another settlement. You might think this all unremarkable and irrelevant to us, so let me tell you where things become interesting. I shall introduce the real players on the board.”

With the press of a button, the map disappears, and a new image is projected by the light. It’s a mantis now, an artist’s impression, wearing the black robes characteristic of hemotechnics. Wingless, but with bluish chitin.

“A genius hemotechnic, corrupted by the weevils and her own ambitions – defected and gone renegade.”

A mantis with a midleg gone below the coxa, and deep yellow chitin. She’s dressed like a commoner.

“A wayward student, grown to teneral yet twisted in her loyalties.”

A reddish​-​yellow nymph, with big eyes and thin legs, a book in their legs.

“That student’s daughter, who even now is being drawn into the machinations of this renegade. Imagos on my path may live or die, but I have some code of honor. I’ve never condoned the Stewartry’s habit of binding nymphs into its mess, and in this regard our renegade is no better.”

Another button pressed, and there is no image.

“Now, on the other side?” he starts, and then an image appears: Nammy – Dlenam, but dressed in tough baneleather garb, with wardens iconography. It’s still cut teasingly high, but it’s not revealing. “We have the cooperation of arch​-​fiend Dlenam, briefly absconding his administrative role to handle this matter.”

Three nymphs appear on screen, one of green chitin, another of red, and the last with Brismati eyes.

“The young and stupid students of Dlenam, who are already making a mess of things. A mess Dlenam has reached out to us to rectify, act as a professional influence. He believes we are his winning pieces, and that is what I shall send you into this town to be.”

(A petty part of her sighs at the possibility. A tiny village at the edge of the Pantheca? It sounded like exactly the backwards sort of town Marka hated to visit. But they are mantids all the same — and they are endangered by the termite remnants.)

The click of the button. The last image is the Watching Lord positioned near the center, rendered as a menacing, indistinct form. To one side, the Golden Lady. Farther off to the other — Marka in her armor, and Wik in its douter of a shawl.

“We would have the arch​-​fiend’s full cooperation, and this would even have the appearance of being a wardens’ mission — it can go on your record as such. But make no mistake: we do not intend to advance the Stewartry’s ends, except insofar as they advance ours. It’s no coincidence the termite mound emerged where it did. We know what the Wardens do not. We can save this town caught too close, and we can revive Wentalel.” A button is pressed, and the light dies. “But I shall speak no more about that, at least until I hear a yes from you.”

The Watching Lord gazes at Marka. “Would you stare into the void of my eyes and pledge to follow me, Knight Marka?”

Marka pauses there, and she could have thought for a long time. She could have reached for her timepiece in reflection, as was her habit, as was the way these things always ended — but it isn’t with her now.

This was one more choice after a long sequence of them, but it feels different now.

Wik had been right, hadn’t it? It always seemed to be right.

You still have the choice to not fight and die on a court too big for you.

But you’d never make that choice, would you?

It’s a coincidence of the city’s layout, that when she turns to follow the Watching Lord, it’s turning her back on the Church of Blue Welkin.

Marka takes one more step.

Coda.

The house lies along a road of trampled dirt, rocky and uneven enough carts avoid it. It was squat and white, with a low roof and small windows, and wood blackened where someone had tried to burn it down.

Stalked lichens grow tall in the dirt before it, parting to make a path toward the door. The lichens are crushed and irregularly chopped, scars from feeble attempts at yard​-​keeping.

The door is cheap wood, looking like a determined shove would see it off its hinges, the handle rusted and wiggling when grasped and pulled. The knocker is a pentagram of polished bronze, gleaming in the light of the night.

Inside the house, one might expect to find a hoarder; anyone who enters immediately faces stacks. Stacks of books and clothes and boxes; shelves burgeoning with trickets and idols and kitchenware not in use, never in use; drawers that cannot be pulled open for their fullness; pantries where the back row of foods have gone stale or bad, because more food is habitually bought than is eaten daily now. Paths through the house are very narrow for this abundance. But the rooms, none of the rooms, are in mess. Everything is arranged with symmetries; straighted, ordered, sorted, purely in its place.

Some kinds of snailbugs, whether by disease or outliving fertility, have shells that grow and grow, and it gets to the point where the creature cannot move for the size and rigidity of its shell. Internally this house has grown and grown with the detritus of years passing. It will grow no further.

Navigate this house deep enough, and you will find a closed door and this door too has a bronze adornment: an engraved plate. Two names are written upon it, in letters older than the Pure Script.

Open the door, and there is room for two mantids to sleep. Only one is here now.

When first seen, the motion of the abdomen is quivering done very slowly. At length of observation, it can finally be called a rise and fall.

Even now, all the joints of the legs and the antennae and the abdomen but for spiracle holes are covered. Underneath those coverings, there are swelling boils tinted vaguely red. Typically, this mantis would be observed with eyes cast down, and from that angle the dark of pseudopupils might be conflated with black nerve lining the top of its eyes.

The breathing is slow but the heartbeat is erratic. This mantis is not well.

Beside it, there are four items (five, counting the mantis). A compass. A stone disk which traditionally tracked lunar time. An idol of the exalted ancestor E’yama, resplendent. A dim candle burning down.

There is no dish below the candle. Soon, it will cause a fire.

It wasn’t a good way to go.

According to the matriarch’s daughters, there are five things which are one thing which is everything. The world, space. The flow, time. The exalted, spirit. The revelation, light. The mantis, alone.

These are five aspects of a pure whole, only seen distinct from blind eyes. Mantis is impure in being apart, severed from the whole.

And there is no greater severance than death.

But in this ritual, there is hope to find a connection to that unified, fivefold purity.

The Descendents of Snurratre do not have a Dream. They do not believe in any wrathful tyrant unchained by death who will return to save them. They are not granted a fiery life​-​after​-​life below the earth.

The Descendents of Snurratre do not think the All has a special regard, intent, or care for them. They couldn’t, really.

But they are a part of the All. They do believe in something greater than them. And that’s not nothing.

A mantis stands at the threshhold of the doorway, watching the male who is sickly and near death.

They lift a leg to step into the room.

He is dead now. Perhaps he has found some peace, some unity, some purity. Perhaps he will.

They return to the doorway, and watch a little longer. They nod once.

Eyes drift to the candle burning down. They could put it out, and stop the fire that’s coming. They do not.

They turn, and above their eyes, between their antennae, the light of the fire glints off the metal of an antennae​-​band.

The door closes behind them. They cannot read the letters of the door.

Into the night, they go. The mantis moves intently, and soon the squat white house in the outskirts of Wentalel is far behind them.

After this, no one remembers the Snurratre male.