I.

Since she embarked on this mission, Marka had been ready for violence and danger. The longer it goes on — wearing away at her with its endless walking and hard choices — the more she accepts she’ll come out the end of it exhausted to the point of dreamless sleep. And when Wik proposed to sneak through the sewers, she did expect it to be gross. But in all of her anticipation, it’s none of these that really tempt her to call it all off.

The sewers beneath Wentalel are dark, muggy and tight. Predictable, unsurprising facts? Sure. But inescapable ones, that seep into the very atmosphere of being in the sewers. They had a lantern, but Wik still has it covered. And while it had assured her the Wentalel sewers were more spacious than usual, when an hour passes surrounded on all sides by old stone, not being outright constricted is a small solace. The big, open room where they met and fought Angwi did reprieve, but now she follows Wik away into another sewer main.

Now far from the gangsters’ hearshot, Wik speaks. “I worry we’re losing track of what we’re here for.” A wide sweep of its foreleg encompasses the distant platform, still dimly visible. “Angwi, Essi, the boss – take a step back from circumstance, and realize this is not our fight. We came here to acquire the gang’s assets and avoid undue violence. Not more than that is necessary, and no less is desirable.”

Marka lifts her palps. “But the circumstance is pretty important. Angwi just tried to kill us –”

“Tried may be putting it a bit strongly.”

“She played with us, yeah. Still, her ultimate goal was clearly to eat us. Or me. That’s what she said. So, the circumstance means we’ll have to go down there and deal with the threat she poses.”

And they should see what’s down there, full stop. Why does the arch​-​fiend want no one in these sewers? Could he be here himself? And what is the gang seeking down below? A termite arcology? They’re excavating something, and no matter what, it’s something of interest.

“To put it simply, if we fight Angwi again, especially if it’s on her own terms, I fear we lose.” Its cotton antennae curl up. “Us exploiting surprise and lack of knowledge, and her not acting to her full ability were undeniably factors in us surviving that fight. We can expect neither in a rematch. And she isn’t the only one down there.”

Marka clenches her raptorials, pausing a moment before she moves her palps. “What do you want to do about her, then?”

“That’s a long conversation, one we need not have while the gangsters are back there chewing palps in impatience.” Wik reaches out and taps Marka on the head. “Stay focused on the goal. You’re a warden, Marka. Have you heard the phrase mission creep?”

Wik had changed the topic. Marka wants to change it back, nail the tallowbane to its positions and win. She bites back the impulse. Is Wik even wrong? Their best effort weakened Angwi by a margin. And her being a bloodbane — how soon will that injury be healed entirely?

“Fine. Let’s say I swallowed all my objections and followed your lead. What do you propose we do?”

Wik pauses at that, lifting a pale tarsus to tap slowly, thoughtfully on their labrum. The waxen digit fused to their face when it rested there, and when it lifted, strings of wet wax stretch between it and the mouthpart.

“Being seen entering the sewer,” Wik pauses there deliberately — it seemed above explicitly casting blame, but the emphasis fell there for a reason: it was Marka’s idea — “has damaged our chances of slipping through their base with stealth, but we can’t know by how much.” Wik drops their foreleg, and the tarsus with it. “Put simply, we don’t know what the situation at the base looks like, and whether they’re on guard or unawares.”

“But we know who would,” Marka says. “Whatever’s going on at the base, it’s going to be easier to get in with one of their own vouching for us.”

Wik peers at Marka, but it knows she’s right. It says, “Just remember what we are here for.”

Little more to discuss, they start back toward the gangsters. With the conversation gone, this new quiet underscores the high​-​pitched drips and dull, obscure reverberations which the sewers have for ambience.

After a short walk, Marka is looking over the gangsters who’d attack them long moments ago. There are six. The one who’d thrown rocks kneels by a prone, stinking mantis — the one Angwi had ran through with her wretched raptorials.

“Is she–” Marka starts, quietly.

Wik interrupts, “Yes. Dead. There wasn’t much I could do by the time I’d gotten to them.”

“There’s still something,” the rock​-​thrower says. She rises and big green eyes stare at the tallowbane. “You can get her back for this.” Her antennae are curled tight.

Wik only nods and says nothing.

Marka looks over the six — five — gangsters on the platform, all but one restrained by Wik’s wax. She can see where she’d earlier drawn blood, the injuries are now bandaged up, or covered in red wax – ichortallow. Was that safe for civilians?

“Names?” Marka asks, as was polite.

“Silenal,” the rock​-​thrower says. She had tried to convince the vesperbanes to back off, and then, failing that, to work together with the gang.

“Tlik,” says the mantis who had earlier argued with Silenal. On closer look — she wore the same warriorly rope garb — Marka recognizes this as the first gangster she fought. Tlik looks at the warden with a deferential bow of the antennae.

“Nal,” says a mantis wriggling against bonds to sit up.

“Memata,” grinds out a mantis not looking at anyone. Ruddy cloak — the mantis Wik had impersonated when it first joined the fight?

The last three had been spoken bymantids bound by Wik’s wax, some still struggling to be free. There was a fifth and final mantis, who seemed too out of it to respond — succumbed to injuries? Or had Wik sedated them?

“Alright. And which one of those need we actually remember?” Wik asks.

“Mine,” the rock​-​thrower, Silenal, says. “Everyone around here knows my face. If I’m the one speaking for you, they’ll listen. Just stick with me.”

Seeming the most important among them, Marka gives this Silenal another look. The darkgreen mantis stands shorter than the blackbane, with large, light eyes and thick palps. Clearly she’s female, so one concludes she’s an instar or two away from teneral.

Unlike the others, Silenal wears no cloak, only three shirts — one for each thoractic segment. All are the dull colors of cheap, low​-​class dye. And had no sleeves: instead, the legholes yield ropes or ribbons that run the length of the leg, attaching to what are leg warmers or guards.

It takes a moment of careful peering in the torchlight to notice each one has a concealed blade.

Silenal turns, taking a step forward. The vesperbanes don’t move until the gangster says, “C’mon,” with a wave of a foreleg. Marka starts after her, while Wik attends to the other gangsters, freeing them.

“Catacombs are down there, ain’t they?” It’s one of the gangsters.

Silenal holds up two digits. “We’re heading back for two reasons. One, the more bodies we got the better our chances are, so we’ll talk a few of the others to our side. Two, we’ll need a crank to force open one of the old doors down there.”

The walkway Silenal leads them down is not narrow; three mantids can walk side by side, and comfortably. Planks extend the walkways, looking similar to those shoddy bridges in the previous room.

At intervals come torches the gang had placed, creating in a rhythm of meager light followed by long stretches of darkness. (Sometimes very long; torches only last while they have fuel, and whoever kept this passage lit didn’t try very hard.)

Maybe if Marka wasn’t wearied after a long fight, she would have seen it coming.

A figure crouches low behind her. Marka dimly wonders, at first, if the they have dropped something.

There’s only a few heartbeats of time when she could’ve reacted differently. A gangster flies at her with all the speed of a mantid’s lunge.

On her back now. A triumphant snarl. A raptorial closing round her thorax, restraining her foreleg — but finding no purchase on armor.

But a real threat is in the other leg. A knife, swinging inward, at neck level.

The best that can be said for what Marka does next is that it was self​-​defense.

The modifications to her dorsal thorax and armor’s backplate are for propulsion. But what they do is eject high velocity, high energy enervate.

Pain jerks the foreleg upward, midswing. This lacerates the periphery of Marka’s eye instead of her neck. She sees pain. But the attacker falls back off her with an agonized cry. As per the third law of motion, Marka is pushed forward.

(There were strictures against envespered assault with endowed ability: a crime in all nine provinces. Marka hadn’t heard of anyone convicted of it — but the punishment was a strenuous dock in pay.)

In the dark between torches, Marka cannot see the damage done. She has no sense of just how much enervate was fired in that panicked discharge. Umbral damage is ranked in degrees, and some of them are merely crippling.

“Are you alright?” she asks.

By now, the other mantids on the walkway are reacting. Except for Wik, these were vesperless mantids, civilians, and the release of enervate will have set them on a primal edge.

Marka’s spoken question further confused things — it seemed an appropriate reaction to them tumbling into one other by accident, rather than the assault or counterattack the other mantis’s cries suggest.

Before any response manifested, the attacker’s on their feet. They’re striking forward with a raptorial. Marka can only shift to catch it – wherever it’s aimed — and hope it lands on her armor. Another strike comes, and then another. The darkness gives every attack stealth.

“Fuck’s going on?”

Marka gets a few blows of her own in — cracking them on the head with the weight of her foreleg guard, grabbing a raptorial limb, swinging out her midlegs to knock out their standing.

Then all are cast into blue light.

Wik’s lantern of Ngini’s light is still going — chemical reactions can’t easily be paused — and now illuminates Marka restraining a gangster — Memata, was it?

She had grabbed the wrong forelimb. Their other now stabs at her grip, forcing the warden to release. Her attacker falls back to all fours. Now the umbral dissolution becomes unbearable. They’re frantically trying to tearing off their nerve​-​blackened cloak.

Silenal, whom Marka had followed, had — initially — kept walking, putting her a fair distance ahead of anyone else. But she started running over when the cry went out.

The attacker is moving their palps. “Hey Sil–”

But the other gangster kicks her in the head with a midleg and with one foreleg and then another grabs at her limb, holding it in a raptorial vicegrip. Now Silenal is pinning them to the ground and in the new light Marka can see her reaching to apply pressure to a certain soft point under the neck that constricts a hemolymph vessel and cuts off flow to the brain and after several struggling seconds, the attacker is rendered unconscious.

“You might want to hop off her,” Marka says.

The warden approaches now, examining the once​-​ruddy cloak the attacker had tried to rip off — it was ruined by black nerve. The damage means it easily tears away, revealing a ventral thorax almost bubbling with the umbral pseudosubstance.

There are four degrees of black nerve dissolution. First is superficial contact, treatable with sunlight or heat or washing with mineral​-​enriched water. The second degree is moderate to severe cuticle damage, black nerve soaking into chitin. It can’t heal without being denervated — most easily done with amalgam salves Marka doesn’t have. Amputation is sometimes preferable, to avoid carcinogenesis, necrosis, or umbraphagia. If it’s the third degree, it’s probably fatal — the enervate will have penetrated deep enough that dangerous amounts slip into the circulatory system, and from there, it’s a whole​-​body disorder, and awful amounts persist in the system for weeks even with the best treatments.

The blue light grows brighter and it is Wik approaching.

Marka murmurs to the tallowbane. “Looks like it’s first, maybe second degree?”

It makes a sound of agreement. “Could be worse, but the thorax is a terrible place to be exposed.” You couldn’t exactly amputate a thorax.

“Will she live?” Silenal’s the one asking.

“Probably.”

“Should she?” asks another gangster.

“I will clean up the wound before it deliquesces,” Wik says, crouching, and only Marka is familiar enough hear something… displeased, in the tallowbane’s tone. “I hope no one will begrudge me returning them to restraints.” Nods all around. “And I hope none of you are nursing plans to attempt anything similar? Perhaps it’d be safer to restrain you all, and forget this illusion of alliance.”

“No,” starts the gangster in war​-​ropes, “because we aren’t damn fools.”

“We’ll see.” Wik stands up after a beat, and gestures at the body and a big gangster, expecting them to pick it up. It takes a nod from Silenal for them to actually do so.

All the while, Marka regards Silenal with a reevaluating glance. The small gangster wasn’t useless in a melee, and, maybe this was a small thing, but she had come to Marka’s defense, against one of her own. Her promise of helping them was now backed by action.

When the group starts walking again, Marka wonders if she’s imagining the extra hesitance and furtive glances all around.

“So what uh,” Marka starts, thinking back to her discussion with Wik, “will we see when we get back to this base of yours?”

“Hm,” Silenal says, looking between Wik and Marka for a moment, as if deciding what they would care about, “mainly, you’ll find it’s pretty sparse. After we got the tip, Ress took down a bunch of mants with her to the ’combs — her most trusted, I presume. This is good for us,” and she gives a grin. “If those she left are those she trusts less, means we can trust them more to turn on her.”

“Need we tell them it’s a mutiny?” Wik waggles antennae. “The most important thing is we’re on their side, and Angwi isn’t. Why not tell them Angwi broke trust — they’ll surely believe it — and instead say, hm, that she’s going down to kill her right now?”

Silenal pauses walking then. “Canny. But lying’s a shitty long term strategy — how do you think they’ll feel at the bottom of this, when the truth gets out?”

“Who’ll be revealing it? Angwi, the inveterate truth​-​teller?” Wik let that hang, then, “At the bottom of this, we’ll have what we want and you’ll see no more of us. If you need a story, tell them we pulled it over on you too.”

Marka frowns. “Do we really need the deception?”

“I believe punishing against a perceived betrayer will turn more gangsters to our side than asking them to do the betraying.”

“The good it does seems small. And if we expect them to trust us, the least we can do is tell them what they’re really siding with.”

“’ppreciate the concern, warden. But I’ll talk to our girls, and I’ll decide how to spin it. Worry about smashing heads and stealing our loot.”

Marka assumed it a good​-​natured jab, but she felt condescended to.

The conversation reached its it end, there, and Marka fell back away from Silenal. She went back far enough none of the gangsters were behind her now.

II.

Wik falls back to walk beside Marka. The warden finds herself matching pace with the tallowbane, and it finds itself matching pace with her. Like this, they both lag behind the contingent of gangsters, which was alright with how empty the sewers are.

That last fact is underscored by an improvement in lighting. Wik’s lantern, luminescing with vesper​-​made Ngini’s Light, shines like a bonfire where the flickering and dying torches are candles. Chemical reactions couldn’t be paused, but they sped or slowed with temperature, and Marka knew Wik’s wax could get hot.

Marka grows weary of what passes for silence in the sewers. “How sure are we that Angwi was lying about the six somatic arts thing?” There’s no serious concern behind the question, but it starts a conversation.

“Quite sure. The somatic arts are by their nature impossible to bring together.”

“Well, what is their nature? I… you’ll probably call this more of my, err, deficient education, but I’ve never heard of them, except in passing.”

“I would call it the opposite, honestly. It sounds like tutors cutting out nonsense myths and discredited theories.” Wik brings a digit up to rub or scratch at the waxy chitin behind its eye. “What passes for a somatic art is any of several unrelated hemotechnic endowments focused on a particular body part. But ‘somatic art’ is a made up category, pure pattern matching.”

Marka is nodding along, and when Wik lulls there, she shakes her antennae for it to continue.

“Alright, fine. The story — emphasis on story — that some tell about them goes like this: the beginning of the era of hope, the winged liberator Aromethia, the first vesperbane, revelator of pharmakon, and exalted ancestor, stole magic from the bats and used it to cut a swath across the myriad kingdoms, freeing the wingless mantids from their chiropteran overlords and spearheading the disenthralled rebellion.”

There was something mocking in its tone, enough that Marka interrupted to ask.

Wik explains, “This is already fantastical. The first vesperbanes were probably wingless. At this point, the ancestors of the children of welkin were cloistered in the eastern mountains, excommunicating and crucifying each other for the slightest breaches of purity — which is not even to speak of the grand heresy that union with the vespers constitutes. You understand?”

Marka nods.

“As the scope of the war mounted, Aromethia realized there would need to be more than one vesperbane. So she laid an ootheca, and, when her children reached teneral, allowed each of her daughters to consume of a portion her flesh. Which part they ate granted each of them a portion of her magic ​-​ supposedly the first endowments. Her eyes were the Prismatic Eyes — this is how the Brismati talk about their origins — and those eyes were passed down to each descendent thereafter. Her antennae became the Black Whiskers, a peerless enervate​-​sensing organ — now protected jealously by the Nibrissa clan, and only inherited along the mother’s line in the main branch.”

“I’m surprised Brismati and Nibrissa would claim common origin like that.”

“They don’t. The Nibrissa elders reject the story for exactly that reason.” Wik tosses an antennae, and resumes listing: “Her chitin became the Red Bones, which is now interdicted, after a practitioner discovered a way to grow endless fresh bat​-​blood with its marrow — now the art is unknowable outside the Ilhon Exclusion Zone. Meanwhile, records suggest every heir to the Shining Wings was killed, the art itself probably reclaimed by the last titans before they were vanquished.” Wik pauses then, and gets back on track. “They say her raptorials were unique, though. The daughter who inherited the Red Claws freely taught the art to anyone, until the practice was ubiquitous among vesperbanes that its inscription was common knowledge to every vesper, and the gene tendency encoded in our hemolymph. Instead of jealous secrecy and exclusion, it was shared and all benefited. You may know this by its colloquial name: the wretched raptorials.” Though the tallowbane was normally stiff and still, Marka had noticed it now made small, gentle gestures of its forelegs when it speaks. Getting to this part of its recounting, it’s almost animated. “I admit, this is one part of the story I don’t hate, and it might even be half true.”

“But you don’t think any of the rest is?”

“As far as the claims of origins go? Of course not. The vesperbane arts are a science, not some mystic tradition passed down. The first vesperbane would have been clueless, not some singular genius who could from nothing produce the six most advanced hemotechnic traditions even today.” Wik flicks an antenna. “But with all that said, you can see why I expect her to have none of these except the Red Claws.”

Marka noticed only five arts had been described. “But the Red Tongue?”

“Also special. It’s not a blood secret of any clan, and not the forbidden art of any crepuscule. But there’s a resemblance to both. An aspirant Heir of the Devourer must consume the flesh of one who is already heir. The expression can be learned without doing this, but you will be unable to mold the endowments nor wield the techniques.”

“And what do the endowments and techniques actually do?”

“At the most basic level? Enhanced digestion, and the ability to grow those bat​-​like tongues and teeth anywhere — but inside your mouth is often the most useful place.”

“Does it… make you hunger for mantid flesh?”

“That’s the rumor, but there are accords against vespers meddling with minds. I don’t think it’s fruitful to think of Angwi as some victim of her power, rather than one who chose this of her own will.” An errant gesture of Wik’s foreleg draws attention back to the lantern it holds. The enzyme that reacted to produce light also created this dull sludge that gathered at the bottom. There is more sludge now, and less light.

Marka folds her antennae back, and considers what she’d heard. Is this it? It’s… “Kinda underwhelming? Faster digestion and growing organs you could easily replicate otherwise?”

“Those are the basics. You’d be underwhelmed too, if the answer to what could blackbanes do was siphon and eject enervate. The problem with understanding the capabilities of the Red Tongue is that it’s all either secret or specialized knowledge I wouldn’t be familiar with. That is, if you want something more sober than intriguing rumors. The Devourer’s Heirs lack the cohesion of a clan, the mechanism of inheritance meaning there can be so many divergent, unrelated strains. Some have astoundingly aggressive saliva enzymes that turn bites into devouring wounds, some have a sense of olfactory taste that puts hound​-​snakes to shame, and in one case it was fused with the plaguespitters’ art to become a curse, where any and everything you eat gets vomited back up. This isn’t even to speak of the truly exceptional evolutions — like the mother of monsters, a mad crepuscule who swallowed vesperbanes whole, birthing warped clones of them, all their abilities still present, if altered.”

“…Could Angwi do anything like that?”

“Probably not, or she wouldn’t be hired by some no name gang. If we stick with just what we can be sure of — the enhanced digestion alone shouldn’t be underestimated. There’s a reason Angwi had tried to eat gang members in the middle of the fight. She would be able to access the calories all but immediately.”

There wasn’t a more fitting reaction than Marka’s sigh and drooping antennae. “So what, that means we’re in for another slog of a fight?” she asks, then adds: “If it comes to that?”

“If it comes to that.”

By now, Marka couldn’t furnish hope for this to be a distraction, a meaningless chat. It’d devolved to what she wanted distraction from – in hindsight, predictably. But she wouldn’t cow, and could contemplate the trials ahead with knightly resolve. Nevertheless, it daunted.

(Marka looks to Wik’s lantern. The sludge builds up more — quickly now, as the brightness means more reactions means more sludge. It’s at the point where despite what all Wik’d done to make it brighter, it flagged. Soon it would be no better than the torches, or gone entirely.)

The path they follow takes more turns now, and Marka hopes it’s a sign of them circling in on their destination. It’s only been a few blocks of walking, but the sewers were monotonous. Beside them, there are a few dark openings — other mains connecting to this one, or some passage for maintenance purposes.

“So.” She starts speaking, and then stops. She decides to begin: “I think we should continue sparing the gangsters, even the ones the boss brought down as loyalists — give them a chance to switch to our side, right?” After a moment, Wik nods. “But… Angwi. With that digestion ability, if it’s going to let her keep a fight going to exhaustion… Maybe we need to be more decisive. Should we…”

“Kill her?”

“Yeah.” Marka had seen Wik what would have done in the fight, if Angwi’s slick tongue hadn’t saved her.

“Keep your eyes on the goal, Marka,” Wik is so quiet saying it that she almost doesn’t hear. They pass into another dark section, and eerie are murmurs in tunnels lit by wan alien light. “Remember, all we want is to get what’s in the safe, and we’ll run down for the key if we have to. If we can avoid Angwi — this is nothing personal. We will. We don’t need the fight nor uncertainty a fight entails, let alone a fight to the death. But if needs must… by all indications, killing Angwi is preferable to sparing her. You saw how she lied in that fight. You saw how quickly she ate her allies.”

“I guess it’s like the folly of the scorpion tamer.” Wik gives her a look, its waxen features almost inscrutable in the finally dimming light. “What? Didn’t you read about that in the academy?”

“You mean that bit of imperial propaganda pushing the idea that some sentient species are simply incapable of being civilized?”

“Huh? No! The parable is about individuals! The idea was just that some people will betray you, and there’s a point where trust becomes folly.”

“There were actual scorpions, Marka. It’s not called what it is for no reason. Honestly, I don’t think the scorpions were the ones that shouldn’t have been trusted.” Wik watches, and decides Marka looks appropriately chagrined. “Regardless, if I ignore the subtext, I suppose the metaphor lands. But to twist it some: if there is an animal which cannot be tamed — a mantis that would surely betray you — it may be just better to leave it be.”

“That ain’t the deal, you know it.”

Behind them! Again! Marka’s on guard, this time, and she’s spinning around in an instant — as soon as she hears the voice, before she processes the words.

Her raptorials aim for the head, and spines rake down.

Silenal lets the hit land.

And she doesn’t return it. Marka makes a sound of confusion. And Wik’s lifting its nearly​-​dead blue lantern to get a clearer look.

“This was an idiotic stunt to pull after what just happened.” The darkgreen gangster makes no counter.

They are in another dark gap between the torches, and Marka puts together the pieces: Silenal had ducked into one of the side passages in the dark, and between that and Wik’s failing light, they’d missed her.

“I thought it was suspicious of you two to hang back and whisper, and I was right to be suspect. The agreement is that you take out Angwi, get her back for the shit she’s done. None of this cheap pacified shit.”

“I think you understand our reluctance. Angwi is a mercenary. She’ll leave as soon as the money is gone.”

“And you think it’s good for her to walk away, what, only worse for not having a few more bones?”

“She is missing a limb,” Marka adds, but Wik is speaking almost simultaneously.

“Marka’s a warden. She’ll be reported. I think what we’ve seen is enough to get the vesperbane hunters’ attention on her.”

“And us? Will we be reported?”

“I doubt the wardens would have time for such matters. Unless there’s a vesperbane among you besides those you hired?” “None.” “Then you only have to worry about the guard, which we have nothing to do with.”

It was right, technically, but Marka wouldn’t have put it that way. Just because the wardens are not the city guard doesn’t mean there was no communication between them. But worse than Wik’s deception is that Marka doesn’t feel like clarifying things. She stews in this impure feeling.

“So what do we get for helping you?”

“A cut of whatever we retrieve?”

Marka expected an objection to them offering their own goods back them, but it doesn’t come — does the boss keep everything to herself?

“I don’t get it,” Silenal says. “I saw you fight Angwi. You had her. And this time, you’ll have our help.” Silenal looks to Wik, and then looks to Marka. “Are you just cowards, or what?”

III.

They emerged from the sewers into a room missing a wall — Marka recognized the signs of enervation demolition. Trash, bagged or dumped, piled up in the room in a slovenly mess that would shame a roach. The smell was different, owing to rotting food. There being a difference made it worse; they’d grown inured to the sewer’s stink.

As soon as they climbed up, Wik demanded they go to the treasury first of all.

Silenal has hesitance on her face. She presses them with other suggestions, other options: “Our armory?” “We don’t need weapons.” “Are you hungry? We could hit the mess hall fir–” “We ate before coming here.” “At least let’s talk to some of the big sisters and explain what’s –”

Wik shuts all this down. “We aren’t asking, we’re telling you. We’re going to where you store your bones. That’s what we’re here for. You can come along if you like. If you’re not deceiving us about wanting to help, then there should be no hesitance.”

It was that implication which ended the argument. Even if it hadn’t – Wik had already started walking, the cloaked tallowbane setting off alone. Silenal gives a terse command to two of the gangsters to tell everyone they had brought back some new vesperbanes and that “they’re cool, don’t fuck with them.”

That instructed, Silenal and another gangster (Tlik?) now follows after Wik, beside Marka.

Wik hadn’t lied when it said it could navigate the gang’s base without a guide. Marka almost asked — but with two gang member striding beside them, she decided to wait till there was more privacy.

Even without Wik or the gangsters, Marka may have guessed which room was most important.

Where most doors in the base are the sort to have been here when the building was constructed, this door was newly installed: unpainted, and thick enough to jut from the wall slightly. Marka knocks on it when she approaches, the sound speaking to metal reinforcement.

“Now, look at what your impatience got you,” Silenal says, “you get to wait longer.”

“Why is that?” Marka asks.

She points at the two metal cylinders jutting out of the door on one side. “Door’s got two special locks, as you can see,” she pauses in the middle of the sentence to slide a key into one lock, “and you can’t pull out the key without locking it back. Both locks are like that. The big sisters each got one key, so none of us can go in on our owns.”

“Boss got two keys,” Tlik says.

“Boss is the boss.”

“Didn’t used to have two. Only had one, then she kilt Lev and took hers.”

“Shit changes, and you gotta adapt,” was all the other gangster responds with. She steps away from the lock — taking her key with her — and says, “Gonna bring back Obe with another key.”

When the darkgreen mantis is out of sight, Wik steps toward the lock and crouches before it.

“Are you going to…” Marka trails off.

“It’ll be faster than waiting.” From its bag, it retrieves two tools – one a rod that tapered to a thin, precise length, and another, flatter one with a bend after the handle.

Marka turns away at first, but her curiosity compels her to turn back and watch. Wik had inserted both — the precise one moving in small, fiddling motions as if adjusting internal parts, while the bent tool was occasionally twisted — simulating turning a key, Marka realizes.

She asks, “How does one actually end up… knowing how to do such a thing?”

Wik doesn’t respond, and Marka resigns to being ignored. But then there’s a sad clack, and Wik makes an anonymous sound of frustration, untwisting the bent tool entirely. Before it gets back to work, it answers:

“In the stewartry, you study deep the workings of nerve, blood and vespers. All of the theorems and principles attract a certain type of mind, and it’s the sort that, when there’s no work left to be done, occupies itself with puzzles. And without a key, a lock is essentially a mechanical puzzle.”

Marka gives a verbal shrug, and Wik continues to work.

“Interesting. I’ve never seen a lock quite like this. It’s not just set up so that turning the key engages the actuator. You see, it also causes this hook right here to attach to the key — forcing it to stay in if it’s not inhibited by a mechanism in the wall there.” A few more workings of the tools. “Hm, I suppose this is going to be a bit more involved.”

Marka watches the tallowbane work, but uncomprehending, the finer details of what it’s doing are lost on her. There’s another mechanical click, this one sounding like what Silenal’s key had produced — but it’s followed by a sigh when the door doesn’t open. Ultimately, the solution Wik seems to hit on involves using bits of its wax to spoof a key, and with this attempt, the lock clicks, actuating the bolt, and stays in place.

Wik tentatively pushes the door. They’re in. The tallowbane makes no sound of triumph, but Marka notes its internal flames surging extra bright, and its cotton antennae stretching upward.

“Now,” Wik says, rounding on Tlik, the other gangster who’d watched this all with ever​-​rising antennae — it says: “Go find your friend and tell them they don’t need to bother.”

“’e’ll come back on ’er own.”

“When I ask,” Wik doesn’t grind, but there’s a distinct flatness of tone, “it will be in the interrogative mood. That was an imperative. Go. I’d rather not wait.”

It didn’t have to wait; the other mantis left, mandibles grinding.

Marka watched the exchange, comparing it to the tallowbane’s previous behavior. She says, “I kind of doubt you’re so eager for Silenal to come back.” She leaves the question implicit.

“Quite. But with that pair of eyes off us, we’ve a touch more freedom. There’s something I wish to show you, and I’m sure it’s in here.”

Wik opens the door.

First thing to note about this room that had motivated this entire adventure? It feels empty. It isn’t; there is a desk and a perch and a metal chest that yawned vacantly open, revealing its lack of contents.

With a moment to stare, Marka decides it’s not just the disappointing sparseness that gives it the feeling: on the floor and walls dust and dirt collected, but in places it had built up less — like there were other things here once, and are gone now.

“Mind your step inward,” the tallowbane calls. “Tripwire.” Wik was already in while the warden gawked.

When Marka decides to follow after, she does not move. A deep breath and flex of will overcomes this, but treading into the room furnished her with uncomfort and black dread.

Giving attention to the sensation sparked recognition: all animals had a sense for enervation, a disquieting one that deterred approach.

The source? Marka’s eyes flushed. She’d missed it — she’d dismissed it as some shadow.

The material was a nerve​-​amalgam that didn’t quite achieve the formless vantablack of pure enervate. But in design, it was alien enough to compensate.

Marka’s first attempt at description is that it’s a floating egg.

From a the floor beneath it, a pyramidal base stabs upward. And just beyond its spike, the oviform drifts unmoored to anything. Marka almost says it rotates as a planet might. But no, it undulates? Marka’s reminded of a hollow toy floating in a pond — but this is in open air.

An ephemeral draft flows out from it, as if it is exuding.

“I think this is what we’re looking for,” Marka absently says.

She dares to near it.

All of the vindicator tech Marka had seen has a sense of reductionism about it. They aren’t just geometrical forms defiantly whole in and of themselves. Vindicator constructs have screws, gears, pistons and springs. But this…

“Yes, the safe. Assuredly termite work.”

“Is–is this what you wanted to show me?”

“No.Come over here — oh, and do mind the pressure plate there.”

“Do you know what these traps do?”

“No, I just notice them. I wonder if it’s explosives — the gangsters did mention a bomb​-​maker.” “They did?” “Recall when we asked about Essi?”

“Essi is a blackbane. Those orbs Silenal mentioned don’t sound like conventional explosives — rather, I think it’s umbraconjuration. Enervate constructs created quickly, and degrading quickly.”

“You’re the enervate specialist, I shall take your word for it. Now, what I wished to show you is over on the desk. Right… here.”

A ledger, quite unlike Felme’s. (His had been artisanal paper, the work of euvespid wasps, which could last in archives for decades.) This paper here was thin and inconsistently colored, and you can see how the humidity so near the sewers has not been kind to it.

“Uh, I don’t see the significance?”

“This is a list of names and addresses. Recall what I said about this gang’s main activities: usury and racketeering. The gang offers loans – but these are uniformly poor mantids, who either can’t be served by a bank or were refused for good reason. And they offer protection. But in so many cases, I think the only thing one needs protection from is them.”

Marka curls up her antennae, raptorials clenched, and wonders about her earlier evaluation of Silenal as someone to almost trust, one who has her back.

Wik says, “I show you this because I don’t want you to leave with the impression that the world is better off for us sparing these mantids. I intended a nonviolent means of dismantling this operation only because it is too easy to mistake retribution for justice, and vesperbanes are stewarts, not judges. But I think if I killed them down to the last, it would hurt my principles far more than my conscience.”

With exactly the ease it had demonstrated at the casino, Wik sets the ledger aflame, the pages burning with satisfying cracks.

IV.

“Was working with the gang a mistake?”

Wik says, “We’ll find out.”

At almost the same time, Silenal says, “Oh, I hope not.” She was back, and Tlik was with her — but not whoever the big sister she mentioned looking for.

Wik turns to approach the new arrival with all the relaxed ease of one who had not moments before torched their new allies’ primary source of income.

“Didn’t expect you all to get fast with the lock. Thought you were wardens?”

“I’m not.” Wik says it with the danger of a threat.

“Right, right. Long as you ain’t a defect, we good.”

Wik points at that altar of lost gods that it insisted is a safe. “Explain to us how this is supposed to work.”

“You need a key.”

Wik looks at Silenal.

“Don’t give me that look. I know you must be real fast with mantis locks, but this ain’t no pin​-​tumbler. You’re not gonna pick this one, ’less you pale, blind and kinder than a roach.”

“The key don’t even look like a key,” Tlik adds helpfully.

Marka saw the chance. “What does it look like, then?”

“You seen a welkin​-​style clock?” Nod. “Twelve symbols, right? So imagine it’s got three legs –” (“Some do.”) “–yeah, ok. So say it’s got three legs. One’s on, uh whatsit, the glyph up top.” “Alpha.” “Yeah, and one’s on whatever the fourth one’s called, and the last’s on the eighth. It’s like that, but long.”

Wik sighs, tossing antennae, but Marka thinks.

“I think I get what she’s saying.” Turning to Wik: “Think three keys glued together by their spines, with an angle of two thirds pi radian between each of them.” Marka demonstrates with one digit from three of her legs. “That what you meant?” Tlik nods.

Wik arches an antennae, and after a moment begins sculpting a wax key matching the description, using the ichortallow from its own flesh. Some of it moves on its own.

The gangsters take a step back, their antennae extending straight back behind them like they were magnetically repelled. “Freak shit.”

Wik, unreacting, asks, “How long was it? And the radius?”

“You ain’t gonna be able to replicate it. There weren’t any teeth or nothing.”

“Then what could the mechanism be,” Wik says, but, not expecting an answer, it doesn’t come out like a question.

But Marka realizes. The construction of the safe? The theories of termite tech in general? “It’s black nerve.” She looks to the darkgreen mantis for confirmation. “Were there bits of the key that were of the umbral shade? Blacker than night?”

It continues like that. Teasing all of the specifics out of the undereducated gangsters was a frustrating tedium.

The fruits of their labor was a key they weren’t even sure could work. About as long as a tarsus, and each wing of the key not a quartet of that. (It took so much back and fourth before it ‘looked right’.) Along each wing, there was a row of identical circular enervate wafers – eight in each.

Then came the matter of finally inserting it. It puzzled both Marka and Wik — the faces of the pyramidal base, where they said the key was to be inserted, appears entirely undifferentiated. Sil’s only suggestion is is to ‘feel for it.’

This revealed an unseen dimension of the construct: the light​-​hungry surface made it impossible to see, but the pyramid was rich in tactile information. Bumps, grooves, channels, ridges, rough spots, impossibly smooth spots, soft and deformable spots, hard clicky spots.

“Ugh. This design is usage​-​hostile,” Marka says. “Why, with all the wisdom it takes to build a thing like this, would you make it impossible to see what you’re even doing!”

“The termites were blind, Marka. They wouldn’t have noticed.”

“They were smart, wouldn’t they have noticed how useful light is? You could sense things without having to be close enough to touch it. Surely they were advanced enough to build light​-​based technology.”

“Tenebra cycles are useful — you can predict the tides and incoming nerves storms, and track the passage of time. Some species of fish sense this innately. It’s quite useful, isn’t it? But how inclined are you to augment yourself just to have an internal umbragyroscope? To base every mundane object around reference to cosmic nerve forces?”

“I guess.” Marka flicks the pyramidal base. “I still think I have grounds to be annoyed at the termites for this.”

“Enjoy yourself. When you’re done, I’ve found the keyway.”

There is a bit that could be depressed to make a different bit in the upper center slide away, which reveals a circular plate divided by slots their faux​-​key could fit into, only the slots split it into ninths, not thirds, and give no indication of what orientation the key should have.

“It couldn’t be simple, could it?”

A tap from behind. One of the gangsters had walked over quietly, their sudden presence making Marka jump. Silenal indicates the key. “See that side with the two notches? Try putting it in the slot left from the top.” That delivered, she steps back, keeping distance from Wik.

“Am I being paranoid” — Wik crooks a maxillae, like the answer had to be yes — “or is it odd that they know so much about the safe?”

“We can just ask. They are at our mercy.” Then, rising out of the murmur, “So, does the boss have you operate this safe much?”

“Much? Nah. And not at all anymore. But when she still tolerated anyone in the room while she counted and stored our shit, I’d watch her. Can’t say I’ve never thought about mutiny — though I knew better than to try. Till now.”

“Satisfied? Now, she said second from the top, didn’t she…”

It doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t.

The failure is accompanied by the safe emitting a harsh chord with all the dissonance of tones too close together.

“There are, I think, two possibilities.” Marka extends her antennae, and they idly feel the keys, avoiding the enervate. “These enervated spots must be the equivalent of a key’s teeth. And we aren’t so lucky that making every spot the same is the right pattern.” Wik nods for her to continue, though its eyes examined the keyway more closely. “So yeah, two possibilities for how the patterning works: either its based on the concentration of enervate, which is most convenient for us. Or its based on species of enervate, and it may be impossible for us to open this safe.”

The key — so far — only slid in to the first enervate wafer before meeting resistance. If Marka’s first theory is correct, to test it, they have to alter only the first three wafers. That meant the number of possibilities was only three times… oh. They had no idea what concentrations of enervate it was sensitive to, if that was even the mechanism.

“Marka, use your scanner.”

“Oh, I had assumed — if this was a safe, and if termites were smart and savvy with enervate, it’d be obscured from simple scrying.”

She was partly right. Pointing her scanner at the safe resulted in at best visual noise. But if she ‘turns’ the inner aperture to catch steeper anaward rays — the picture clears up. She’d compare it to gazing out of a foggy glass.

“Huh.” Was that the best the termites could do? Even vesperbanes could manage better stealth. Unless there was some non​-​obvious constraint…

“Is that a success?”

“Somewhat. We’ll see if it’s any help.”

Marka sweeps through some modulation bands, seeing if any perspective was clearer.

“Wait.” Marka fishes out the quick reference manual stored near the scanner in her bag — just to check. “It really is,” she murmurs to herself

The matter was somewhat speculative, because functioning termite tech wasn’t the easiest thing to find, let alone study. And all word of termites seems interminably diluted with unscientific nonsense. (Especially as of late, with the popularity of insane pseudohistory insinuating termites’ role in mantid origins.)

Merfal had named the enervate species lambda​-​nrv. Attributed to it is an astounding ability to bond with all kinds of matter and enervate. It’s supposed to be in all kind of termite creations, no matter their disparate properties.

Marka now had confirmation a stable species existed in that band, and that it had some connection to termites. This was more confidence than she could ever get out of Merfal’s unhinged writings or her attempted interpreters.

The harsh chord comes. “Did that make a difference?”

“I’m sorry, what? I was, uh, distracted.”

In one mesotarsus, Wik had the tool Marka had used for the wafers – there was a resemblance to a squeeze dropper. (It was more precise than her endowed nerve​-​manipuation organs.)

“I added 250 mg more beta​-​nrv to the wafer. Clearly it was not correct – but I was asking if it, the internals, looked any different, on the scanner. But you weren’t paying attention.”

“Sorry,” she says. “We could probably get a lot of renown for studying this. The theories about termites — are not the most grounded.”

“Keep your focus on the goal,” it says. “Adding 250 mg more to this one. See if there is any change.”

Marka would compare what she sees to an entire thermometer being reduced to one color, by some blurring or distorting photo manipulation, and then being asked to use that one color to tell the temperature.

It is an apt metaphor: most thermometers have a maximum temperature they ccan tell. Wik focused on adding nerve to one specific wafer to see what happened at extremes. The limit was 2 grams. 2, 2.1, 2.5, and 3g on the wafer all yielded the same internal state.

“You two sure are taking your time here,” Silenal says. “Our time.”

“It hasn’t yet been ten minutes. It would — will take us longer walking down to the catacombs.”

“Ten minutes for Angwi to go as far as she likes.”

“That’s for us to worry about. We can track Angwi no matter where she goes.” Wik flips an antennae. “Furthermore, we just fought her. Grant a moment of rest for those who didn’t hide away in the sewer fight.”

If they crack this safe, that would — in Wik’s eyes — obviate the need to descend the catacombs at all.

So if Marka wants to see what they were excavating, should she stop helping Wik?

Should she stop helping Wik pick a lock, because if anything was one more step down an impure road, it was that ignoble act.

“I think you might have done well in the Stewartry.” Wik is watching Marka, an antenna stretching out in her direction, yet keeping a polite distance. “You have a decent mind for problem solving and abstraction. It would have served you nicely.”

Marka shakes her head. “Maybe, but I think there’s a certain purity in action.”

“I think you might have done well in the Stewartry, and then you move your palps.” Wik retracts its antennae. “It makes sense, I suppose, from what you’ve said of how you were raised. But it remains… offputting.”

“How?”

“Come on. A certain purity in ‘action’? Does that not sound it could be a direct quote from some Oosifean welkinist? The third dominion loved action.” “That comparison–” “And in context, you’re contrasting this ‘action’ with what, intellectual attainment? Using vesper endowments for civic goods instead of continuing cycles of violence?” Wik waves a foreleg. Maybe it’s a gesture to swipe away this line of conversations, or maybe it’s a dismissal and silencing of what Marka was about to say. It was probably the former, she admits. “I should follow my own advice, and focus on the goal. Point being, it remains to be seen if we will succeed unravelling this puzzle — but you do have a certain aptitude.”

Marka does not want to be petty, and does not want to be argumentative. The way Wik responded — counterarguing, and then changing the subject – means any response to the unfairness of that would be petty and argumentative. And being petty and argumentative is unbecoming of Marka.

Looking critically at the form of what Wik said means she also notices the overall point of this digression. It is to reassure — and it is reassuring — to think of what they’re doing, what she’s doing, as solving a puzzle, and not the prelude to robbing mantids of their possessions. Ill​-​gotten though they may be. (Were they ill​-​gotten? A part of her that sounds like her father thinks one should always pay your debts.)

Meanwhile, Wik is placing two grams of beta​-​nrv on a different wafer and inserting the key again, expecting the dissonant chord once more.

But it doesn’t come. They got a result before trying every permutation of wafer concentrations.

The sound emitted is one of several octaves harmonizing.

“E’yama’s grace, I didn’t think you’d pull it off.”

“Now you’ll want to push it in further, and turn it by one slot.”

Wik can now push it in by one more wafer. The harsh chord returns, and so return they to trial and error.

Three more wafers to permute. First, they hopefully try the eight permutations where the wafers can have .5 or 2 grams of enervate. None work. Okay, what if they try it with .5, 1, 1.5, and 2 grams? Nothing. Even more options? It gets to the point where they need paper to track what they have and haven’t tried.

(They removed enervate with a device shaped just like the dropper. It had attractive theta​-​nrv core at the other end, and was lined with umbraconductive metal, so the black nerve was sucked up along the length. Wik had never used anything like it before, but all the iterations let it become adept with the operation.)

This was getting them nowhere fast, but with nothing else to try, they continued permuting.

Marka continues to think of the mechanism that reacted to the wafers as metaphorical thermometers, and thus, came to think of their states as ‘cold’ and ‘hot’. It was a continuous thing, technically, but there hadn’t actually been a configuration where the mechanisms benefitted from being put in any but the ‘coldest’ or ‘hottest’ state.

Marka talks about it like this, and can’t help but see the antennae flicks when she speaks the terminology. She asks.

“The imprecision annoys me. You know enervate doesn’t have a temperature, and neither do mechanical configurations. So the terms obviously tell us nothing about what’s actually going on.” It gestures at the safe. “Do you have any theories?”

What was going on inside the safe, actually? “If I was designing something like this…” she murmurs.

“What was that?”

“Nothing. I’m not a termite, I doubt I’d be able to understand what’s going on.”

Wik frowns on that, probably from the implication — it wasn’t a termite either. “A lock is a lock. If the termites could do it, we can do it.” It gives a shrug. “And right now, we’ve nothing. Even one of your ideas could give us a direction to go. How would you do it?”

“Well… if I was designing something to react to the concentration of enervate, the simplest way would be a moving component like a magnet, and differing amounts of enervate could then push it further along. At the far end I’d have it connect to… whatever kind of mechanism you need in a lock.”

“So like driver pins.” Wik regards the lock again.

The tallowbane’s antennae are moving with what Marka at first thinks is agitation. But that didn’t make sense, and as she watches she sees that isn’t quite it.

She hadn’t noticed before, but at the ends of Wik’s cotton antennae, little ties held them together, the sort you’d see on ropes. Wik is untying them now, and its antennae frays into dozens of strands.

Strands that start moving actively and independently.

(Behind them, a gangster makes a high pitched hiss of alarm, and both eventually step out of the room.)

Marka asks, “What are those?”

“I planned them to be the subject of my fiend thesis, when I still planned to be a fiend. These were… prototypes, proofs of concept.” Marka made an encouraging sound. “The idea was side​-​stepping some of the logistics of venation by giving muscular endowments a sort of bespoke respiratory system.” Wik lifts a digit, and several of its tendrils wrap around it. “In the case of these — they exchange gases directly with the environment. I assume you grasp biological law enough to know that can’t scale.” Nod. “But it was a modest and motivating success at the time. Perhaps too much. If I had had less confidence… When I attempted something similar to this with my body’s more derived muscle groups… Well, the results necessitated my first ichortallow grafts, which ultimately sent me down a different road.”

“Do you… wish it had gone differently?”

“At this remove, it’s the same as asking if I wish I’d never existed, and a different mantis were here in my place.”

“Well?”

“I’d rather not answer.”

Wik turns back to the safe.

Right, safecracking.

The tallowbane extends the tendrils into the keyway, and Marka can see them working for a moment. Then the tallowbane says, “Ah, you were right. I feel small, ocelli​-​sized pieces I can slide around — and they sting like enervate.”

It’s odd, to have predicted the termites again. Maybe Wik was right, and for a given problem, there’s a straightforward way to solve it whether you’re mantis or termite. Marka wonders if the featureless geometric aesthetic of the termite artifact was just that — an aesthetic, and inside it was the same simple, reductionist mechanisms you might find in a vindicator device.

Wik removes its antennae​-​tendrils and begins altering the enervate concentrations of the key.

“Wait,” Marka has a silly idea watching Wik directly mess with the internals, through the distorted view of the scanner. “What if we permute the previous wafers? You get stuck on puzzles when you make assumptions — and we’re assuming…”

Three iterations of this revised strategy are tried, Wik giving her ever tighter looks for each time​-​wasting failure where her new idea doesn’t pan out — and on the third try, Wik inserts the key… and the consonant chord is heard twice in succession.

“It was a bloody false shear line.”

“A what?”

“For pin​-​tumbler locks, you push pins up until they hit a shear line – when all the pins are such, the lock will be able to turn. But for some locks, there are modifications to the pins to make them catch on the wrong part, allowing the cyllinder to be turned prematurely and get stuck, fouling up the mechanism — not a problem when using a key, but it stops would​-​be lockpickers — unskilled pickers, at least.”

Marka catches on a specific part of that. “Wait,” she says, “does that mean we could set off some kind of similar trap, and break the whole safe?”

Wik is quiet for a moment, just staring at the safe. “I’ve never broken a lock beyond salvaging.”

“Have you ever picked a termite lock?”

A bit of Wik’s wax bubbles. “The termites didn’t traffic in magic. Nothing in the heartlands is magic. If their works were so beyond comprehension, how are we able to get this far? If you believe in the termites that populate myths, tell me how can this artifact blindly accept a wax key?” It looks at her and her antennae fold back. “It’s just a lock, Marka.”

“Still, going and getting the proper key is looking safer.”

“Facing a cannibalistic bloodbane and an explosive umbraconjurer in a catacomb hundreds of meters below the surface sounds safer to you?”

“In the sense that it won’t lock us out of the safe? Yeah.” Her antennae fold up. “No uh, no pun intended.”

Wik ignores it. “I think dying is worse for our ability to access the safe’s contents. I’m sorry Marka, but I think cracking the safe is the straightest path to achieving the only thing we’re here to achieve. Descend the catacombs if you’re so eager to end it all — but I will stay here until the safe is open.”

“Does my input matter to you?”

“I am listening to your concerns, but this was always an instrumental partnership. And this was always my plan. You are here in to the extent you help me.”

Marka looks away.

“Please don’t look so hurt. This was always a mercenary profession. You can’t have not noticed that.”

“Let’s just pick this stupid lock.”

V.

After their last success, the key slips in to four wafers deep. One, two four — Marka saw the pattern. They were in a sense halfway done.

The harsh buzz of failure comes, and now is time to permute more of the wafers. Marka reaches for the dropper​-​looking thing that applies enervate.

Wik drops the key though. Now it instead inserts its cotton​-​sheathed antennae​-​tendrils, and the tool she’d earlier seen turning in place of a key for this room’s lock. Was it trying to pick this like a normal lock?

The safe gives two pleasant hums as Wik’s tendrils simulate the forces enervate would apply on the mechanisms — Marka can watch with her scanner as certain specific bits go from ‘cold’ to ‘hot’.

And Marka watches the third set change and change and change. Wik is going through the permutations without the tedium of removing, altering, and reinserting the key.

Its method is quicker, but its search space…

“This isn’t working out,” she says. “This isn’t going to work out.”

Wik continues, wordless.

“You’re familiar with the principle of population explosion? Ten flies one generation, a hundred the next?”

“More than you are,” it speaks flatly. “I’m not stupid, Marka.”

“I’m just saying, each stage of this lock is taking us exponentially longer.”

“Populations don’t grow exponentially, and neither does this lock. There are constraints.”

“Still, do you think the best approach is just… trying everything, mindlessly?” And triggering every trap there could be?

“We are under no time limit.”

“We are? The boss and everyone aren’t going to stay down there. They know we’re up here.”

“And what they want is down there.”

“What they want?”

“Whatever they’re excavating. It’s clearly their only remaining priority.” Wik doesn’t look up. “I get it, why you’d prefer we march down there and resolve things. Your skill is violence. But my skill is with delicate matters, such as locks.”

Marka can’t help but hear an echo of one of the first things the tallowbane had said on that rooftop. “I wish I could say a plan like yours is a surprise coming from someone looking like you do, but I cannot.”

Wik had never stopped seeing her as some unsophisticated bit of wardens muscles, had it?

It’s still talking. “If you’re so ready to criticize my approach, why not look back at that vindicator scanner and tell me if you can see something useful.”

Wik returns to the lock. She can watch its palps enter a frustrated configuration as its exhaustive search tries permutations with more ‘hot’ states. Because it uses tendrils in place of enervate, the tendrils have to remain in place to keep it ‘hot’. It is becoming contorted, and seeing permutations take so many tries that hot wax begins sliding down antennae​-​tendrils, Marka does not smirk.

She turns her eyes to the scanner.

With more than a pair of inputs exposed, she sees there was more to the mechanism than just the ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ bits closest to the key.

It turns out those pieces Wik’s moving are the start of an extended mechanism Marka might liken to a river. Like a river, it met with others of its kind and merged. It seemed the correctness of an enervate pattern wasn’t determined immediately by those pieces it directly affected, but was relayed downstream, determined deeper in the mechanism.

Wik’s manipulations in effect become perfect tests to illustrate this behavior.

The points where the ‘rivers’ meet seem to be involved in the actual determination. The temperature analogy breaks down a bit here. A meetpoint affects other meetpoints like it itself is ‘hot’ or ‘cold’, but its actual state is more subtle, being determined by the two ‘rivers’ meeting here.

And the relation wasn’t always obvious! Sometimes only ‘hot’ and ‘hot’ together made the meetpoint act ‘hot’, but sometimes was only ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ (or ‘cold’ and ‘hot’).

She takes a bit of paper and maps it out, and it gives her perspective. For instance, her map of the flow from one wing of the key looks a little like:

o  o  o  o

\ ! \ / \ !

 +  &  & 

 \ / \ /

  &  -

  \ /

   &

She picks a different symbol for each type of meetpoint that behaves differently. Illustrating it like this gives her more perspective for solutions.

“Wik, I think I see something. Go back through the opening sequence?”

It bristles at the command, but only bristles.

She sees what she expects. The place where every river ends has to be ‘hot’ to trigger the next phase.

And with that assurance, she can run down through the branches of the diagram she drew, and figure out what will allow the final meetpoint to be ‘hot’.

“I think I’ve got it. See what happens if you activate these pins,” and she points to the corresponding wafers on the key.

Wik’s expression is a bit of surprise and perplexity. Its palps move to respond — but instead the sound is loud, hissing alarm through its abdominal spiracles.

“What?” she asks, then realizes what happened. It must have slacked just a bit with the tension tool. The lock reset. And its tendrils? Trapped in the closing compartments. Their cotton sheaths are dyed red and dripping.

“Maybe let’s return to using the key…”

She has to redo her work — the individual stages of the lock had different ‘rivers’ and meetpoints and each one with multiple solutions. Together, each was like a filter.

One hum. Two. Three.

It worked; one last stage to go.

“See? I’m not useless here just because I know how to fight. We couldn’t have done this if we didn’t work together.”

There’s no moment of apology or agreement, but Wik looks away, which feels like enough contrition. It understands.

They made it to the final stage, and their solution is one that won’t take an hour of iteration for the full twenty​-​four wafer stage.

Marka maps out the last ‘rivers’, her diagram of each twice as wide and as tall. When she does, something she’d noticed before becomes fully clear.

Her father would say that impurity by far outnumbered purity. Why? there are so many more ways for a thing to be unclean, broken, or suboptimal. A sorted shelf can be properly sorted in exactly one way.

This comes to mind because the mechanisms of the meetpoints are usually so similar — and the few different ones all unique — that she can’t help but think of them as damaged.

At the risk of mixing metaphors, some of these special meetpoints were like dams for the rivers, and never acted ‘hot’ no matter the input; others were… anti​-​dams. Always ‘hot’.

Marka sees entire parts of the lock’s internal mechanisms never light up despite being connected to the rivers. In some parts of the key, whatever you set the wafer too didn’t matter.

The safe makes one hum.

Then a second.

Then a third.

And then, finally, a triumphant series of beeps.

They did it. They’re in.

The floating egg, which had in their minds faded as a background fixture, now unravels.

Marka can only compare it to the intricate sliding motions of some snailflies when their shells become wings. The egg is now flat as a wide platform — wider than the circumference of the egg shape it had been.

Marka is grinning and Wik looks expectantly. What will the reward be? Bags of bone​-​pieces? Piles of jewelry?

When the egg is finished unraveling, the contents of the safe lay before them.

It’s a couple of pieces of paper.

Marka doesn’t move. There’s no moves to make. Wik, though, has it in itself to reach out for the topmost piece of paper.

It glances at it for a moment.

“It… it’s for you.”

What?

“Ress, I guess, is the boss we’ve heard so much about?”

“Without a doubt.” Wik stands with a sigh.

“This means we’ll have to go down there, doesn’t it?”

VI.

Marka’s metal boots clank against the catacombs’ stone. Hers are the loudest, though not the only steps heard. Behind her come treads of all kinds, from pedechit shoes, sandals with rubber soles, to just bare tarsus.

Nine gangsters had come along. They trudge alongside Marka, an assymmetric rabble that gestures toward the tight formation the warden had asked of them. Not for a lack of subordination, however: she can say a word, and one will pass her a blue​-​glowing torch or push some debris out of her way. It leaves her feeling like a proper troop​-​leader. A battle​-​queen, even.

Marka does not walk up front, on the off chance traps lie in wait. She doesn’t walk behind either, even as this means letting gangsters behind her again. But it’s caution, too: just in case there’s stragglers coming up behind them. This concern had been brought up more than once, and not for no reason.

Every dozen meters, or after a line of sight break (whichever comes last), Wik leaves a ball of wax glowing with secreted Ngini’s Light. This makes their party easier to track, if any enemy gangsters skulk in the shadows. But it gives them breadcrumbs to follow back, no matter what happens.

And it has another, puzzling impetus. They come now upon a still​-​burning torch and a gangster runs over to take it down and pass it to the tallowbane who’ll put it out and drain any oil it might have left.

They carry jugs of the stuff with them, most of it raided from the base. None of the gangsters had questioned it, because they lug it anonymously alongside jugs of water. (When asked about the procedure with the torches, Wik said it might use it to light torches as back up, if it runs out of Ngini’s light.)

They’d brought quite a few things down they couldn’t have carried if they hadn’t accepted the gang’s help — and things they probably couldn’t have accessed at all if they’d been sneaking in a hostile base.

Of course, some of what they carry is a consequence of bringing this many mantids, like all the food and water. Civilians couldn’t move as fast nor for as long as the banes.

They definitely feel the slow down, as this journey crawls on. The catacombs beneath Wentalel are cramped, contorted mazes in stone, and they may never get out without the signposts left by the excavation teams.

Their light is never bright, which means the forms that decorate the walls are never fully limned, only hinted at in briefly illumed planes and angles. An eyeless head. A leg with no soft joints, only hard chitin. The black orbs called souls.

“Spooky,” Marka says. “Why is there even a catacomb down here?”

“The way you tell it,” — it’s Silenal responding — “is before the Stewartry, we had plagues every day. Had to put the bodies somewhere, you know? It makes sense to dig a hole and drop ’em down.”

When Marka’s party comes to a room that opens up even a little, it’s enough of a relief that the mantis in front is walking forward without watching their step.

They stop suddenly, forelegs flailing in the air like they almost fell, and the warden bumps into them.

“Watch it!” they’re saying, but it’s not directed at her, “Huge drop right ’ere.”

Wik comes forth, and brightens its Ngini’s Light, and they look.

(If you had a bane who could make it — and plenty from the Stewartry could — Ngini’s Light had a few advantages over lamp oil, the easily manipulated brightness most salient. Accessibility was another big one: the metabolic pathways are mapped out well enough that it doesn’t take Wik much more than calories and some focus to produce more, and they’d an excess of both. The one odd ingredient it needs is phosphorus, which they got from some celebratory fireworks the gang had in a closet.)

“Well damn,” a gangster says, and then asks one in particular: “What now? We walkin around or what?”

The enhanced light reveals the chasm was once bridged by the gang’s now​-​iconic makeshift constructions. But that bridge exists now as banestone planks smashed and scattered around.

A gangster is dropping a rock down the chasm — about two seconds later, an impact.

“Two seconds,” Wik says. “It’s about fifteen meters deep, then.”

Leg​-​breaking heights to fall from, and climbing all the way back up afterward wasn’t happening.

“By E’yama am I not gonna be blind poking around all these dead fuckers down here. No thank you.”

Marka looks to Wik, thinking. “Could you toss some blue wax over to the other side?” (‘Blue wax’ was what the gang had taken to calling Wik’s Ngini’s Light​-​filled creations.)

The other bane’s aim is about as bad as you can expect from an untrained mantis. But the toss lands — about six meters distant. (The wax construct splits open on impact, spilling Ngini’s Light over the ground, its light now seriously diminished.)

Marka studies the distance.

“Wik, still have those nerve crystals?”

Murt had not been among the gangsters left above ground. But they raided her slice of the communal sleeping room, and found black rocks heavy like lead. Filled with gamma​-​nrv, they must have been involved in operating the termite ‘gun’.

“Of course,” it responds.

Marka crouches and leaps across the gap, enervate emissions lingering as a cloud in the dark room.

She makes it.

“Okay, I have an idea, but this may be a bit fraught,” she calls across, palps struggling for volume.

Marka could easily blast enerverate to fly across a room. And she’d trained enough in the wardens to carry another mantis. But both at once?

“I have rope,” Wik is saying after Marka leaps back over and proposes her plan. “We can tie those you carry to something fixed on this side, and they can climb back up if you fail.”

The warden nods. Then, regarding the gangsters scattered and milling about the room. “Well, who’ll be first?” She can’t make herself sound confident.

Size varied among the gangsters. A few were male, and some (most familiarly Silenal) weren’t quite imagos. Not a trivial thing to tell – the gang had many wingless and halfwinged among them.

One is an extreme outlier, though. About half the age of the rest, there was nymph here because her brother (the only one who knows their way with a ranged weapon) refused to leave her alone at the base.

Now, she’d be easier to carry, but the prospect of dropping a nymph was almost enough to dissuade them entirely.

“What do you think, little one? Want to fly?”

The nymph had hard, intelligent eyes, for a sixth instar. She looks at Marka, and then at the rope Wik is tying. “You best not drop me.” Its stridulation has the jerky, start​-​stop rhythm to sound like a tough bark, but her palps are so small it’s still a high pitched sound.

Marka does not drop the nymph. She drops the next mantis she tries. But after that, she’s figured out a way to securely hold mantids in her midlegs, and a way to direct nerve flow on her armor to increase throughput. Each pass is punctuated by Marka gathering the enervate from the cloud left behind her; it’s a bad call to let it build up when civvies will be passing through.

(Marka can form a sizable glob of enervate on her tarsus with endowed outlets common to all vesperbanes. And the second rule of enervate holds that cohesion — the name for the attractive force between enervate – is inversely proportional to saturation. When Marka keeps this enervate glob get especially unsaturated, this attracts the diffuse enervate cloud. Imagine if hot things were positively charged, and cold things negative — then this would be like refrigerating something to maintain its charge, and that is about as energetically demanding. Admittedly, the analogy is a bit circular, since refrigeration is done with enervate, but still.)

Six mantids are ferried across, and three remain. Two seem skittish. To be fair, Marka had dropped two so far, but she was getting the hang of it!

“Do not forget,” Wik tells them, “this is entirely voluntary. We won’t force you to come with us without your consent.” It gestures to behind them. “The way back is lit.”

Unspoken, of course, was that they wouldn’t get a cut of the profits if they ran off. It will be split among everyone who remains at the end.

“We don’t need cowards,” comes the distorted voice of another gangster. “If you’re going to hesitate for something this riskless, I don’t want you beside me in a fight. Scamper off now.”

This was Obe. She was a big sister, one Silenal had talked up. Taller than Marka, with chitin the color of bruised mammalian flesh, and a face decorated with scars. Scars on the eye, scars over her welkinmark, and one scar that ran across her pars stridens, which gave her words a harsh distortion.

Marka could hardly lift Obe, so of course she drops her. Twice.

The purple mantis spits as it climbs back up. “Look, if you can’t pick me up, why don’t you tie a rope to the other side, and I’ll just climb over myself.”

And like that, all the gangsters got over, except one, who took Wik’s suggestion and picks their way back up how they’d come.

Ropes collected, they continue the expedition. One benefit of crossing the chasm: less whining about the chance of someone following behind them. Good luck crossing over without Marka.

It’s boring traversing the dark. As she marches, Marka hears clicking and breaks formation (no one cares), falling back to see Wik is manipulating with three legs a lock attached to nothing. Marka could barely see it in the gloom, and she didn’t think Wik’s eyes were any better.

“It’s a practice lock. Not much else to do, and the amount of light and focus I’d need for reading would be wasteful.”

“Aren’t you already good enough at… that?”

“It’s sport. You duel, don’t you? Aren’t you good enough at killing things?”

“You don’t kill in duels. At least, not under most rulesets?”

“And you don’t steal in locksport.”

“The point of the skill is still stealing. It’s distasteful.”

“And is violence any less distasteful? Picking locks doesn’t involve hurting mantids.”

“No… okay, maybe you’ll find this also ‘off​-​putting’, but… don’t you see there’s a certain honor in strength and competition? Mantids are meant to hunt and fight.”

“I think it’s savagery that should be beneath us, but isn’t yet, not for the worst of us,” it responds. Then, a thoughtful look takes over its face, and it puts away the lock. “Hmm. Tell me about your duels. How would you conduct one?”

Marka’s taken aback by the switch. After a moment, she slowly muses, “Well, after the terms are agreed on, the most important element is the circle. Usually it’s physical, but sometimes a crowd that surrounds and bars exist is enough. The classic style I’m familiar with has a system of points for like, landing decisive blows or take downs. So there has to be a way to score that — my favorite is with ritual fire, lit or stoked for each point awarded.”

Wik was listening, humming understanding, and seeming to take note of everything said. But offered no further comment or insight into its curiosity.

VII.

“– tired of sittin’ around waiting for nothing to happen. Even digging was better, and digging was shit.”

“This is the third time you’ve gone on this rant.”

“Rantin’s better than waiting. And this is what, the fourth hour we’ve been here? I’ve been positively restrained, considerin.”

“Oh, she bustin out the big words.”

“Whatever. I’m just sayin, I think the boss is losin it. Want another big word? Paranoia. This is mad mantis shit.”

“We have orders,” comes a stridulation of utterly flat rhythm, “We have to stay loyal to the boss.”

Marka’s party is descending long, wide steps — a wildly inefficient design, whose sole virtue was perhaps the drama, the grandness of it.

It also means Marka’s party sees — shadows of — the gang before the gang had any idea they were here. There was the flickering of flames like they gather around some massive campfire. There was a deathly chill in the catacombs.

“Enemies coming up, I’d wager.” After a moment, Marka places their name: Tlik.

“Everyone remember our tactics?” Marka asked her troop.

They had equipped every gangster with a spear. (The sling​-​wielding brother of the nymph probably wouldn’t use theirs, of course.) The “armory” the gang had was mostly clubs, knives, and whips — so several of their spears were actually knives on sticks, securely attached with Wik’s strongest adhesive.

This operation had no time to impart any serious military doctrine, but some basics — advancing as an organized front, the idea of kiting – might carry them.

Marka walks at the front — nerve bursts would give her mobility, and nothing should stand in the way of that. Wik stands at the very back, and Marka suspects it might not contribute to combat.

At a gesture, the gangsters arrange into two ranks, and advance.

There’s another reason Marka walks in front.

“Stand down. This doesn’t need to be a fight,” she’s calling out in a bark she’d picked up from the wardens.

It costs them stealth to gamble for peace, but Marka insisted.

“Finally, some action!”

Marka can’t place the voice, any more than noting it’s one of those overheard arguing.

Gangsters had perched on fallen stone pillars that dot this vast chamber. The big, circular things could be rolled after they fell, and many are arranged around the blazing fire, some crumbling as mantids leap from them.

“Silenal? Obe? That really y’all?”

That mantis with the flat, unarticulated stridulation spoke. “We cannot succumb to mutiny.”

The doorway is just narrow enough a rank of four mantids can’t actually squeeze in. They switch to three ranks, then. Beside the doorway sits a shallow pool of water, and it’s not the only one. The battlefield ahead of them isn’t just scattered with pillars and debris rising up, but wet depressions and puddles.

Marka lunges in with a nerve burst, covering several body lengths. Landing with a tarsus in a puddle, her thin, shadowsteel sword lifts up higher as her steps cover the remaining distance.

The show of speed should daunt them, right? Her nerve​-​blackened armor? Her professional sword?

Marka watches the flat​-​toned speaker. From behind her armored thorax, that mantis unties and hefts a hammer, two raptorials vise​-​gripping the grille. The metal gleams in firelight, and the thick mass of the business end gives way to a proportionally small face — it would concentrate force in a devastatingly small area.

Marka saw enough vindicators use this style of weapon. Slow, clumsy, but one swing was enough to crush most bugs.

Caught sizing up this honestly quite menacing weapon, Marka doesn’t track the other gangsters. A gangster slips through the shadow of a half​-​upright pillar. He’s jumping out at her now.

A midleg holds a bit of debris intent on smashing her head. Raptorials fly at her chaotically to snare her limbs.

He has the skill to block her sword with the rock, but really, he would have fared better standing away and throwing the thing. Lugging it into melee was a fool move.

But maybe he’s buying time. A mantis with a stick is coming at her from the opposite side, and the hammer​-​wielder ever approaches, slow strides for the weight of the hammer.

What’s easy is falling into the defense pattern that defined her first fight with Tlik.

“Are you tired of digging and waiting? Join us,” Marka says. Marka kicks out decisively — the unprecedented action surprising her foe. Knocked onto the ground, Marka has a moment to hold the sword to their throat and not put weight behind it. The other attackers approach, and Marka breathes in deep.

The moments lasts long enough to show she could, and does not, kill him.

“Are you tired of Angwi terrorizing you?” Marka’s still at almost the highest volume she can manage. “Do you trust siding with that monster? Join us, and we can get back at her.”

“If we can’t trust Angwi,” the male mantis at her mercy says, “then we doubly can’t trust you.”

“Would Angwi have spared you?”

“If I’m fighting Angwi, maybe I shouldn’t be spared.”

The hammer​-​wielder nods. “We cannot succumb to mutiny.”

Her enemies have help coming, but so does she. Two spear wielding gangsters lunge in from her rear.

(The main light in this big chamber is the big blaze in the center, defining every thing in the room, projecting silhouettes on the wall. The mass of bodies overlapping in shadow underscores the chaos of the multiple engagements happening simultaneously.)

Marka knows the new arrivals are on her side because every gangster in her troop has blue wax glued to a raggy makeshift vest. Easy to see in the dark, which helped them, and helped their enemies.

One spear​-​mantis goes for the stick​-​wielder, and her spear gives a range advantage.

Marka gives the mantis below her another look. She grabs a wax container, one of a few strapped to her.

Two motions come as quick as one: Marka removes the sword at her downed foe’s neck, and before he can take advantage, grabs two opposite limbs and slaps the wax at them, covering the joined limbs with adhesive.

They didn’t have an abundance of the stuff, so a midleg glued to a hindleg would have to do for restraint.

One down. Marka rises to meet the hammer​-​wielder.

“Still want to fight me?”

“We have orders.”

“So be it. Let’s begin.”

Marka begins circling, to hit from the side or bait an opening — the hammer’s weight means every swing would be a commitment.

From what she sees, the rest of the battle goes well for them. The ranks had broken to engage enemies scattered around the big room. The spears and the coordination together forged an insurmountable advantage for their side.

Hammer​-​mantis charges at Marka. No, not a charge — they don’t even raise their weapon — but a weighty step forward to make Marka dodge back.

That second of dodging is when they pull back their hammer.

Marka tries stepping further back, avoid the swing. But she can’t, that was the gambit! Hammer​-​mantis had waited until her motion had put a bit of fallen debris behind her.

The hammer is coming down.

So, with a nerve burst behind her, Marka flies toward the mantis swinging a massive, deadly hammer at her.

And her thinking is sound.

The length of the hammer — not the head — pounds against the pauldrons of her armor. She feels (but does not hear) the impact, and it staggers her.

That was close. Keeping up with the rest of the fight was too much of a distraction. Her last glimpse is of a blue​-​wax’d mantis cracking a mantis’s head with a mace nearby before she’s turning all her focus to the fight.

Hammer​-​mantis shoves her back.

But she’s recovered enough to stab her sword, and scared enough to put deadly, impaling force behind it.

Her efforts dig it just enough to scrape chitin. Is that baneleather? Where did they get baneleather?

The hammer comes down again.

This time Marka expects it, and has turned enough a burst sends her to the side of and past her foe.

She hears the weapon smash the remnants of the pillar she’d backed her up to, and wonders if that’s not some kind of sledgehammer. One closer look, the similarities with vindicator’s smithing implements were her imagination.

“You sure you want this? If you keep swinging that thing, I might not be able to keep holding back…”

“We have to stay loyal to the boss.”

Another swing. From the side, this time, and high. Marka ducks under it.

But it’s a setup for them to sweep with their legs and knock her down. Marka resists.

But that was another setup for them to snap out with a raptorial (holding onto the heavy hammer with just one foreleg now), and grab Marka’s sword leg.

She’s saved from the impending grappling match by a certain violet mantis sauntering up behind the hammer​-​wielder.

“Always wanted to knock the guts out of this thoughtless” — a swing of her mace — “fucking” — another — “thrall.”

All hits of the spiked mace pulp the tergites of their abdomen. Hemolymph is flowing, and the wheezing sounds like collapsed tracheas, breathing difficulties.

The raptorial holding Marka’s leg tighten, and then slacks.

Her foe’s legs tightens, and then slacks. They fall to the ground.

Obe lifts up a leg, and despite Marka reaching out, she isn’t fast enough to stop the gangster from stomping her foe’s heart.

“She was down. Why?”

“You were never going to bring her over. She wasn’t even all the way there in the head. Don’t lose sleep over it.”

Marka regards the corpse with another glance, to give it some kind of respect. And she sees black nerve. Melting its abdomen, and oozing from where it’s fallen head cracked against the stone floor. Its eyes are black, and lines of black nerve crawl cross its face even now.

“Obe,” she says, dangerously, “can I see your mace?”

She lifts the gnarled, spiked thing. It’s made of blackbronze, cheaper than shadowsteel. But the metal reflects nothing, like a hole cut in the world — covered in black nerve.

“Why are you using enervate? That’s cruel. That’s lethal. We’re hoping to turn some of these mantids to our side.”

While she says this, Marka lifts one of her tarsi endowed with enervate conducting outlets, and uses her earlier technique to form an unsaturated glob of enervate.

She reaches the bead out, bringing it closer to the mace. Obe thinks she’s gonna take the mace away, and starts to pull back.

But force is force. The umbracohesive force exerted by Marka’s glob is attracting the enervate coating Obe’s mace. It’s like she already has her tarsi on it, already is pulling it toward her.

Eventually umbracohesion overcomes umbrainduction, and the enervate is stripped from the mace.

“What the fuck?” Obe’s able to pull the mace away now. Pull it away, then pull back, and swing it at Marka.

She catches the limb in the air, but Obe has strength enough it’s an effort to fully stop it.

“Letting you have that instead of a spear was already an allowance,” Marka says. “Don’t trample on my good will.”

It wasn’t imbued when they’d argued over it. How did Obe even manage that? Marka supposes you could use a larger version of the squeeze droppers, though she’d never seen anyone do it. In the wardens, if you used imbued weapons, you were a blackbane who could do it yourself.

“Look, vesperbane. I know you want to do your hero thing, but there’s no need to keep asking. Your mercy is pointless. Just take em out.”

“We aren’t here as judges or executioners.”

“I don’t give a fuck. I’m just telling you, trying to save every sad sack we come across won’t just waste our time, it’d hold us back.”

VIII.

Alone, either door of the massive gate would have towered over them. Together, it was a humbling monument, and seemed all the more vast for the fact that their lanterns could not illuminate even half before fading.

There are images in relief upon the stone of the gate​-​doors. On either one was rendered a vesperbane — you can tell, because each has wretched raptorials rising from their metathorax, and webbing and a posture that suggested the unfurled wings of a bat.

Each had promenient welkinmarks, and horns rising from their heads – archaic antennae guards.

“What is this?” Marka asks Wik. They hadn’t yet left the room of the big battle — behind them the fire still blazed — they’d just stepped further into the room.

“Bodies aren’t the only thing buried in these catacombs,” the tallowbane says. It points. “There’s some paper over there — perhaps it’ll save me the trouble of explaining.”

It might’ve been a dais or a podium, but this isn’t a place for holding speeches. No, it is more of a placard before a museum exhibition. It isn’t in the best shape, cracked with pieces fallen in front of it.

The paper Wik mentioned is held in place with a stone. It’s new paper, the ink hardly even faded.

“How amateurish. I imagine there might be more gravity to this inscription if it wasn’t so poorly translated.” Wik plucks the paper and lets it fall to the ground, revealing the plaque underneath, written in an alphabet influenced by the pure script.

“So what, Wentalel was destroyed and then rebuilt? And the ruins are down here?”

“Something like that.” Wik turned around, regarding the gangsters who’d ambled behind them.

Some sustained injuries in the fight. Wik had made a new rule before they all left: each of the gangsters got one ichortallow​-​coated bandage they could use, and that’s it. Essentially, they could recover from one grievous injury.

Of the eight mantids with them, three had gotten injured enough to use the bandages (Tlik among them), and one whose crushed midleg was so bad even the bandage wouldn’t leave them in fighting shape.

Three gangsters had agreed to switch sides in wake of the battle. Silenal vouched for one, and the other two escorted back two of the injured — he with the crushed leg, and one (not Tlik) who didn’t like their chances now that they’d used up their bandage.

Wik is scanning the crowd, and finds Silenal making their way to front.

“A while ago, you said something about needing a crank for the door? Is this the one you meant?”

Silenal has a told​-​you​-​so crook to her palps. “Yep. Only way to open the door is with a detachable crank. The Dominion really didn’t want people crawling around in these ruins.”

“Well, where do we put it?”

“The cover on the centerpiece there comes off. Right underneath Essi’s note here.” The stone plate pops off, and then Silenal’s smirk disappears.

“What the hell…”

If you put all the pieces together, Marka believed you might be able to insert a crank. Now though… it looked like someone had taken a hammer and smashed the top, and it revealed the warped rods and gears of the mechanism.

“So, we came all this way to find that we’d already been outplayed? They blocked the one way in?”

“No, no, there’s a chance we can still make it.” Silenal turns around and looked among the gangsters, only some of whom were still paying attention. She points to one. “Yefen, you were there the first time the boss came down here, weren’t you? C’mup here.”

A yellow — deeper, redder than Angwi — mantis walked up. Their cloak trailed behind them like a cape.

Silenal’s saying, “So, to hear some tell it, this door was shut when we found it, and we didn’t have a crank to begin with. How’d we get around that?”

“Angwi.”

“Want to give us a few more words?”

“Had some red, bloody sludge it chugged like beer. Left veins bulging on it afterwards, like pulsating worms. Heart must have been beating like a war​-​pede’s tread. Anyway,” they said, and pointed off the side of the wall. It had looked naturally collapsed at first, but now that they pay attention, what natural process knocked holes through a wall? “Dug there, found a big weight for one of the doors. Was easier than digging through the door, don’t know why. When the bloodbane was roided up like it was, could lift the whole damn thing on its own. Some of those worm​-​looking veins popped while it was doing it. Freak was plain out of it afterwards, didn’t do shit for days but made the boss pay her like she did.”

“The weights, they’re what keep the doors shut?”

Wik looks up at the massive, decorated things. “You’d think their weight alone would take care of that, without a need for any kind of pulley.”

“I mean,” Silenal says, “door’s controlled by a little crank. Heavy as they are, there must be some tricky working inside to let them slide simply.”

“Maybe Angwi needed drugs, but could we lift if we worked together?”

Marka starts walking towards the broken bit of wall Yefen had indicated. Wik comes, and Silenal does, but not the yellow mantis.

Cracks had traveled up the wall of the room above the hole in the wall, like branches of a tree. And as a consequence of the cracks, rubble and chunks of stone have fallen down.

The end result is the hole was smaller, much smaller than it probably originally was. Once, a mantis might have been able to crawl inside, but now? The hole would need to be twice as big as it currently is.

Wik shines light inward. Crowding around the hole, peering in, the three of them see a rusty chain catching the light, connected to a solid block of stone — the weight.

“Chain’s probably rusty enough we could break it, if we could get in there with some kind of tool.”

Marka looks at the size of the opening. If only it was twice as big as it was. Or… if they were half the size they were. And there was one who was half their size. “The nymph. The nymph could probably fit in there and break the chain.”

When they bring the nymph over to look at the hole and ask her, she says, “No.”

“No?”

“Queens no. Look at those cracks. You want me to crawl inside where the rocks might fall and crush me? Trap me? No!”

“They stood this long without falling,” Wik points out. They had no idea how long ‘this long’ was. “This’ll take a couple minutes at most.”

“How am I even gonna break the chain? Swing some kind of hammer at it? Won’t that just bring down the rocks faster? No.You can’t — I’m not doing it.”

Marka stares at the little nymph. Meeting its big eyes, willing it to change its mind. But she remains resolute.

The verbal slip up was telling. They could make her do it. They could threaten the child to risk her life for their convenience.

Marka entertains this possibility, because when she exercises the will to refuse, it reassures her there’s still a core of decency in her.

“Alright,” she says. “We can’t make you do it. Let us know if you change your mind. It’s — important that we do what we came here to do.”

Not just to dispense justice for that Snurratre male Marka’d almost forgotten about. Not just for the fortune they’d find. A percipient implored them to fix something that had gone wrong down here. Percipients don’t reach out for light matters.

“So what now? It’d be real nice if we could just reach in there and lift up the thing. Or have some kind of rod that we could stick in there and lift up it up that way.”

Marka’s listening the gangster’s ideas. And something about the image speaks to her. Cranks, pulleys — it all puts her in mind of things she’d learned of physics. And sticking a rod was almost there, just one piece missing.

“We could make a lever?”

They took bits of the hard wood branches their fallen enemies had left as a piles of firewood, and held them together with Wik’s adhesive, and at the very end, a shiv they’d repurposed for the spears, now repurposed as a thin bit that could slip under the solid block of rock.

They positioned a bit of debris in the mouth of the hole to act as fulcrum, and then fed the lever in, the shiv scraping along the ground.

It meets the rock. They push, the blade slips under. More. The wood is compressed under the weight of the rock, but there’s enough of it to hold. More.

They call over more gangsters, including Obe (who still glares at Marka), to put enough force down on their side of the lever.

“Everyone ready?”

Five mantids collectively push as hard as they can on the lever.

And they lift the solid stone block.

Nothing happens.

The yellow mantis — Yefen — moves. She wasn’t one helping with the lever, and she goes over to one of the doors, and begin to push. A couple other gangsters see this, then run over to help.

The massive stone door begins to glide. Not actually — it’s still a gigantic mass, and it still scrapes. But it moves with ease unbecoming of a massive stone door.

As a rift forms between the pushed door and the other, and as it grows, they hear something.

Water.

It’s rushing in from behind the door, and coming it faster the wider they open it. The weight of the water is pushing the door itself open wider.

The fire in the center of the room goes out, immersing them in darkness but for the blue wax. They’re like many tiny stars in the subterranean gloom.

The torrent of water reaches them, and it pushes against their fulcrum. The mass of water must have knocked the feet out from under some mantids, because bodies are falling onto Marka and pushing her underneath the water. Some of it slips into her spiracles before they close, and she’s coughing.

“What in the dream?”

Do these catacomb hate them? All the false starts, and they find a solution that works — only to be washed away.

Clearing all the water from her throats, Marka pieces together. This didn’t come from nowhere — the puddles? The rust?

Wentalel was founded around the Wenta river. If there were massive caverns and catacombs beneath it, of course there would be some leakage.

“I guess this is what they meant about their city drowning in itself,” Marka says.

Wik is the most unbothered by the sudden influx of water. It’s brightening the lantern once more.

With the fulcrum knocked away, the great door slowly slams shut.

“So, we gonna try this again? Can’t be too much more water, not unless Essi brought down the whole Wenta river, and the room beyond didn’t look filt up, least from the glimpse we got.”

Silenal isn’t looking at her. Marka watches the green gangster look this way and that before Marka realizes her armor’s still shrouded in enervate. She siphons the nerve back into her soul.

And then she realizes.

“You know,” she starts, looking at Wik, since it’s probably the one who’d understand, “it’s funny how framing a problem a certain way can make you blind to other solutions.”

Marka walks over to the hole, and forms a bead of unsaturated enervate on a tarsus. And then with another tarsus, instead of keeping it unsaturated, does a trick similar to her nerve​-​burst: saturated it so much it repels the other bead, flying out of her tarsus and into the hole.

(Maybe she misses, but if she does, mass preference would save her: iron’s atomic number was higher than the silicon of rock.)

“Hand me a spear.”

She pokes into the hole, and feels the chain silently disintegrate.

IX.

For all that this is a catacomb, there isn’t much of the reality of death to confront them. Yes, they’d glimpsed eyeless heads adorning the walls above in morbid decoration, but when it comes to bodies, they are spared the sight. All seem interred in crevices their lanterns need not illume. And the excavation teams that came before had the respect not to disturb the long dead.

With the vast door to the old city open, they advance to find waterlogged husks on the opposite side of the door. The flow of water had disturbed them, making their original posture a mystery, but there’s something about the piles of bodies behind the door, all facing it. Not just mantids, but roaches too.

“Did… did they seal this door with mantids still inside? Were they trapped here?”

“Focus, Marka. We’re not here to gasp at the horrors of history. I think we’re deep enough the other vesperbanes should show up on your scanner. Try it now.”

Marka sighs, and tries to stop thinking about the bodies.

Wik brightens the light for her sake, and the new light just makes the water​-​rotten corpses and their abortive decomposition more distracting. Sealed this deep underground, their bodies must have taken longer to rot.

But Marka takes out her scanner, and checks for any indication of Angwi and the other vesperbane, Essi.

There were a few metaphors for the modulation bands her scanner could single out. Marka had once seen a kind of stained glass that rendered the world in dark monochrome of whatever color the glass was. Through a green lens, a leaf would look brighter than a lilac — not because it was brighter, but because it reflected light of the right kind where the flower absorbed it.

Another metaphor was a tuning fork, which would resonate sympathetically only if the right frequency, or multiple of said frequency, was played.

In scanning, Marka mainly cared about two species (not quite analogous frequencies or colors) of enervate: Beta​-​nrv and gamma​-​nrv. Beta​-​nrv (and its degenerative form: alpha​-​nrv) was something you could be expect to find in any mantis, as wherever enervate naturally occurs, so will they. Gamma​-​nrv, though, spoke to the presence of a vesperbane, the way steel spoke to the presence of a rich mantis. It occurred either in nerve​-​crystals from rare mines, or produced by vindicators’ special nerve​-​pumps.

When viewed through the scanner, the differences between a civilian and a vesperbane is the difference between a candle and a star. It isn’t just that a vesperbane could bear ten thousand times the amount of enervate without issue — it’s like how a paragon diamond looks shinier than a muddy rock, because of its polish and intrinsic properties. In a vesperbane, enervate flows and reacts in exponentially faster and more complex ways than in a common mantis. The vespers have a mastery of enervate through myriad metabolic pathways, to a degree unknown in the primitive phenotypes of kingdom animalia — a mastery rivaled only within kingdom fungi, among species who so regularly feast among the decaying things where enervate may collect like water in a downstream lake.

Marka, after a bit of panning, easily finds the two stars she was looking for, one so much brighter than the other. Definitely a blackbane, then. The dim one, Angwi, is moving, approaching the brighter one. Both are far away.

When Marka shifts bands to check the more common beta​-​nrv, she registers several dim, distant amorphous blobs of the stuff. She does this because Wik requests it, but she knows it would be next to useless — enervate emissions fall off quickly with distance, and beta​-​nrv is much less “bright” than gamma​-​nrv in terms of what the scanner could pick up, and civilians have so little of the stuff that the fact she could discerning anything testified to the sensitivity of the device.

The best she can make out is several distinct clusters of civilian​-​like signatures, some of them shifting around. Some clusters are unusually bright, including one far away, near the radiance of the vesperbanes.

Lastly, Marka shifts into the more rarefied, exotic bands looking for indications of the lambda​-​nrv that would characterize a termite safe key. But she’s blindsided by something unexpected.

The band — one so rare it takes a while to look up the name: psi​-​nrv – is populated, its sources corresponding to all of the unusually bright clusters she identified. The one nearest the vesperbanes looks particularly developed, in the way you’d say a terminal stage cancer is developed.

If vesperbanes were metaphorical stars, and civilians candles, this was a volcano. Not just being intermediate in brightness, it was hot and disorganized in its activities, tendrils spilling out in erosive lines.

“Angwi and Essi are both still here, but there’s something else.” Marka looks to Silenal. “Are you sure there’s no vesperbanes among your gang? No vindicators? No percipients?” She’s reaching for anything that could explain the mantis stuffed with exotic enervate.

“We ain’t nothing special, no.”

“Well, expect something unexpected when we get there. There’s enervate signatures I can’t account for. All over the place, really, but we can avoid those? Maybe? But one is near Essi.”

“Speaking of,” Wik starts, and turns to regard Silenal. “Essi. What do you know about her? We’ve heard reports of a blackbane that raided a Stewartry archive. What do you know about that?”

“We’ve nothing to do with it. Essi said she ain’t with the Stewartry anymore, and needed work, and that was good enough for the boss – needed some help with the digging after we got this door open. If you ask me, there’s a reason the clutz ain’t with the stewartry anymore. But as long as her magic’s helping the dig, boss treats her like she’s golden and us like trash.”

Wik turns away without a response. They’re all left with nothing else to do but trek further into the ruins of old Wentalel.

There’s something unplaceably wrong about walking down the cracked cobble of an unremarkable street, yet in a vast, starless darkness and with knowledge that you’re deep underground. There are ruins on either side of them, once buildings, and some of collapsed under erosion or decay, and some have been crushed by bits of falling cave ceiling.

A gangster Marka can’t name speaks. “There’s a spot we used to rest at back when I was on the teams making trips down here. C’mon, it’s this way.”

It was a watchtower. Fortified walls and their watchtowers were a thing any civilized mantis could recognize, being a necessary ingredient of every settlement.

This one crumbled, its surrounding wall melted into bits barely larger than gravel, and the tower itself now level with the homes around it. A pool of water lay in front, and the embers of long unattended torches reflected dimly in the water.

When Marka pushes on the door, it creeks and then falls off its hinges. Marka waves antennae in surprise and confusion.

Doing so, she catches a scent.

“Something smells like rancid pus,” a gangster comments.

“Don’t like that smell. We should get out of here.”

“Wait outside then?” Marka asks. She goes in alone. Wik and Silenal venture in after a moment.

By the stairwalls, the upper floor has collapsed over the wall leading downward, blocking its shaft — but the climbing wall beside it, going up, is accessible.

They make their way towards it, paying only brief mind to what’s on this floor — bags, digging gear, bottles labeled like it came from a Stewartry pharmacy. That gives a pause.

“Wik, do you recognize it?”

Stepping over to look, it responds, “Purging solution, to rid the body of bat blood.”

When they climb up, they find three sleeping mantids… no, three corpses.

Three… hopefully corpses? Swelling bits of fluid rise from soft parts of their cuticle, skin taut with the fluid inside. Fluid that’s red, and hemolymph isn’t red. As they watch, the growths pulse, as if under the ministrations of a slowly beating heart.

But most strikingly, the eyes are black, of the umbral shade, and lines of the stuff crawl outward from the eyes. A familiar look.

On a suspicion, Marka takes out the scanner.

The corpses are bright in the psi​-​nrv band.

Exiting the watchtower, Marka looks over her troop. “Was there an excavation team that went missing? Were mantids coming back sick with something from down here?”

Yes to both.

“Stay away from any fresh bodies, alright?”

When Silenal relayed what they’d found inside, there was no objection to pushing on now, abdanoning this rest spot.

“The infection can’t be prevalent, if most gangsters aren’t catching it, if they hadn’t even realized.”

Marka can only nod at Wik’s assessment. In darkened silence, they continue on. Marka’s coping with the dissonance of walking an normal street deep underground by imagining it is simply a tunnel they walk through. As her mind wanders, she thinks of the her theory of a termite arcology lying beneath Wentalel. An ancient, alien city beneath a ancient city beneath a catacomb beneath a sewer would be a bit much, wouldn’t it?

There’s something else out there. They probably only hear the sound because no one’s speaking. Scurrying, chittering, and rubble being shifted by movement. Whatever’s out there doesn’t carry any light with it.

They stop in their tracks. Wik, unprompted, thinks to cast some blue wax into the darkness in front of them. It cracks against cobblestone, but it illuminated bodies crossing the street.

Rats. A mass of them, scrambling from one building to another cross the street, but now reacting with distraction and fear at the sudden light.

If they weren’t moving, you would believe they were dead. Hair had fallen out in clumps, and the rats had the same swelling boils the lost gangsters did.

The hair having fallen out means you can see lines of black nerve on their flesh.

Wik darkens their lantern, and Silenal’s saying, “Get back. Let’s get out of here.”

There’s confusion in the darkness, the gangsters milling like an indecisive crowd.

When compound eyes adjust to the dim, their lights are enough to see a few rats have broken off to chase them. Marka falls to the rear — and Obe too? — to beat back the rodents with stabbing and crushing force.

Regrouping at an intersection, Tlik’s asking “Why did we run? We can handle some rats.”

“We couldn’t see how many there were,” Wik replies.

Marka says, “Those rats are infected. We saw mantids with that same infection, at the watchtower. We can’t lose any of you.”

“How’s a rat gonna infect a mantis? We’re whole different kinds of creatures.”

“Not a risk worth taking, when we can just back off and go another way. Right?” Marka looks around the gangsters, not able to pick out which ones had exhibited the most knowledge of the deep catacombs. “The whole rest of the city can’t all be collapsed, can it?”

“There’s a place nearby, all walled up and full of dead bodies. We checked it out pretty early on after finding the city, and used to went through there before we found a faster route. Might still be able to get to the dock from there.”

There, they found another bit of paper, this time Essi translating a sign attached to a spiked metal fence. It reads:

They enter the ancient Snurratre ghetto. It’s haphazard even by the standards of unplanned cities (which old Wentalel surely was). It looks like a bunch of ramshackle huts thrown up in a few days, and all these centuries removed, what was left was undignified rubble, and dusty husks of dead mantids.

There was a stream running throughout the district, which they followed. More streams merge into it as they explore.

It takes them this long, this far off the right track for them to encounter any more living mantids. Three of them, tired and shaking, who said they’d hid here to escape the rats. They’d approached weapons drawn, but didn’t really want to fight, and Marka’s troop by far outmatched them in numbers and equipment. They’d secured a surrender from them.

And then Obe swings a mace and brains one of them.

“What the fuck?”

“I know ’em. That snur​-​fucker owes me money, and kept tellin me she’d pay it back tomorrow for the last three weeks. I saw the look in her eyes. Think I’m going to trust her not to stick a knife in my abdomen now that she’s got every reason to?”

“We had them dead to rights.”

Meanwhile, that outburst of violence gets a scream​-​hiss out of the other two. Panicked glancing between their captors. One of them jumps to their tarsi and starts to run. The other swings madly at Obe, who takes the excuse to catch the limb and jab with the mace’s spiked top right into their eye. Now blinded, Obe ends it with another blow.

The runner disappears into the darkness, slipping into the ruins of buildings. They hear the pings of the sling​-​mantis’s shots falling uselessly. (Had he been any use?) Marka starts after the runner, but there’s no catching them when she can’t see them, and she didn’t trust leaving Obe alone back there.

“This is the second time you’ve killed a mantis unnecessarily. This time, they weren’t even attacking –”

“Yet,” she says. “Do you really care so much about mantids — who you’ve never met, who can’t trust, who want to kill you — getting what’s coming to them?”

“We’re not killers. We’re the heroes, and heroes don’t kill surrendering mantids.”

“What if Angwi surrenders?”

“We can’t trust it. She deceived us before.”

Obe looked smug, like she’s made a point.

“If it happens again,” Wik says, “We’ll decide we can’t trust you, and leave you tied up down here.”

“We’re almost there, anyway.”

X.

Crawling out through the cracked wall of a fallen Snurratre temple, they emerge to a vast cavern vaulted high above. This is not a space whose size had been curtailed by collapsed ceilings or the decay of years. Before them was the complete view: The city of old Wentalel, buried and drowned and forgotten.

When Marka had asked, Wik said there are three stories as to how it happened. Two similar theories hold that during the fight — it had avoided the word ‘battle’ — that liberated Wentalel from its vesperbat tyrant, the land itself was reshaped by some grand technique, used in the heat of the conflict, which wielded the flows of enervate beneath the earth. The two theories differed as to whether the bat or the banes that opposed it had used the technique in that confrontation. The other theory is that Wentalel was actually intact after the altercation, and instead the city was deliberately buried many decades later, after becoming part of the Second Dominion. Like much of that empire’s history, the records were erased after Oosifea was destroyed.

This underground expanse seems like it would yield no answers — less a city than a mute imprint of one.

The score to this vista is the minute sound of water falling. The ghetto’s streams emptied off the cliff behind the temple, where whatever had been there fell away. Yet there is also the suggestion of what Marka wants to call rainfall, like precipitation over a giant lake.

The ruins of the city is wreathed in mist — but why can they see the mist? Marka peers, and sees the answer.

Every city, especially one lousy with vesperbanes (like old Wentalel), especially one that existed before Stewartry regulations (like old Wentalel), is going to wind up with enervate deposits. There is a chemical reaction that can extract energy from the species and amalgams vesperbanes use, and a fungus that relies on that reaction as its main source of energy. Oh, and that reaction produces dull visible light as a byproduct.

The result? These drowned ruins of old Wentalel are draped in softly glowing lichens and moss. It only serves to give the occasional buildings definition, yet leave everything deep in gloom.

With rope, they descend the cliff and continue following the stream. Soon they’re seeing more buildings — bigger ones, like they near the center of the city.

There’s a old style of construction — rooves tipped with big spires – that is common in very old cities. Marka’s father once told her it was to impale swooping vesperbats, and she still doesn’t know if that’s a myth. The spires do serve to hold up the ceiling, though.

“I never thought something like this could exist beneath my home city. It’s… it’s not beautiful, but there’s something about it…”

“It’s haunting.”

Marka frowns. “That feels like some kind of pun.”

“Isn’t it, though? Dim, pale silhouettes draped in mist? Constant soft rainfall? Abandoned, forgotten ruins?”

“And thousands of dead mantids whose spirits might linger here.”

Wik sighs. “I see your point.”

They are stepping into puddles as they speak, and had been for a while. They come more often now, and go deeper. When they lower their eyes from the sights on the horizon, they see a flat expanse of water, and the lights of the city mirrored in reflection.

Calling it a lake might overstate its size, but it was far, far larger than Marka had any interest in swimming, even if she hadn’t been wearing heavy metal armor.

“Hey, veebees? Dock’s over this way. Don’t hold us up.”

The two of them, Marka and Wik, had diverged from the main group of gangsters. The troop stood where a building rose from the shallow water, and poles rose, ropes tied to them but tethered to nothing. There’s a torch — better maintained than some higher in the catacombs — which illuminate banestone wrecks. “Banestone” they may be, but the construction was different, internal air pockets allowing parts to float in the water, not unlike pumice. Rafts?

The closest one has a curve which suggest it’s floating belly​-​up, and there’s a hole punched into its hull. A gangster experimentally reaches with a leg to apply weight, and water surges up through the hole, enough they almost fall into the water before pulling back their leg.

Marka and Wik walk over.

It says, “I’m not surprised to hear so many of you complain about excavation work if this the distance you have to cover just to get started.”

“Wasn’t always like this. Used to dig higher up, but it got deeper and deeper till this shit was normal.”

Silenal was the one investigating the banestone rafts, and she comes to a conclusion.

The runner had made it here before them, and used rocks or tools to bust up the rafts. Only some of them had outright holes punched in, though – like they had stopped partway through, out of impatience, tiredness, or realizing they would be followed. One raft had simply been dragged up onto the shore, and one sunk to the lake floor a ways out, weighed down with rocks. And one, presumably, was gone, having ferried them across.

Wik easily descended the lake to retrieve the sunken raft — when it emerges, droplets of water are sliding off its waxen chitin.

Marka, meanwhile, works with a less​-​glarey Obe to push the other into the water.

All this done, two of the banestone rafts now float, scuffed with scratches, but seeming lake​-​worthy. The crafts could comfortably seat one mantis or two if they didn’t mind being close to one another.

“So. I’m guessing we aren’t all making it across?”

“’less we wanna walk around and find some long way over? Or swim?”

“Terrible idea,” Wik says. “Consider that runner making it across means they know we’re close and will be anticipating our arrival. We need to get there fast.

Silenal looks over their rafts. “We can probably fit three in each if we all but sit on top of each other. So, six picks. Obviously the veebees are gonna be two of them of, so four picks really. I guess they’ll be deciding.”

Marka looks over the gangsters. “Silenal, I trust you most. Uh, Tlik, you feeling up for more action?”

“Maybe someone with a bandage left would be better.”

As Marka looked over the gangsters, she sees more and more backing off, or otherwise indicating distinterest. The sling​-​mantis and his little sister — understandable. Mantids who’d sustained injuries, okay. In the end, they hadn’t much choice.

“If we’re taking down Angwi, ’pose I should be there.” It’s she who’d explained the door — Yefen.

Obe simply smiled, as if it was foregone that she’d be there. And Tlik sighs, and accepts.

For their raft, Marka is the one at the back with the oars. It’s a few minutes of gripping them with her raptorials and churning with her forelegs before it occurs to her, a thought that curls her palps with excitement.

The blackbane looks to the other mantids on this raft, and says, “Hey, I wanna test something.”

So she paused the rhythm of the oars, and then she braces against the raft’s floor.

And she does a nerve burst.

The raft and its three occupants are heavy enough the craft does not fly forward. But it’s a definite burst of speed, enough the tallowbane and gangster are jerked back against her — and the acceleration sends a funny thrill through her body.

Marka laughs.

Wik regards her levelly. “Think you can keep that up till we get to the other shore?”

She could. They burn through a whole nerve crystal doing this, and doing all that siphoning is a stall — she can’t do it instantly, and she couldn’t intake enervate while blasting it, not without complications in her umbral system.

Wik tethered a rope between their two rafts, and like that, they reach the other shore in quick minutes.

“We’re almost there.”

“Where is ‘there’?” Wik asks.

“The old capitol building. The boss thinks she’s found whatever she’s looking for there. Just today, actually. Funny timing y’all had.”

“Yes, funny.” Wik murmurs.

In the distance, the capitol looms. Two styles negotiated for definition in its architecture — one the tendency of wingless mantids to build vast, monumental stepped pyramids, and the other the old dominion’s fondness for domes and pillars. There’s two dome on either side of the main pyramid, or was — the domes have cracked and collapsed. The doors are gone, seeming to have been blasted open with enervate.

All of it is well​-​lit by fires that speak of mantid presence.

Before they reach the building, they come upon a statue and around it perches for mantids to stop and appreciate it. The party rests here, so close to the end.

The statues depict several mantids — seven, all of them vesperbanes, as told by their wretched raptorials. They have frozen in contortions of battle, active poses — which mark a difficulty in the case of the wretched raptorials, for whom tiny pillars rise from the ground to support the twisting tentacles the stone alone cannot.

The statue​-​mantids wield what all the first vesperbanes tended to – farming tools turned to weapons. One holds a pitchfork, another a digging knife poised to be thrown. One has a scythe, its blade turned one half pi radian so it’s actually usable as a weapon.

But she at the rear is curiously exempt from the pattern, wearing robes instead of armor, and holding what might be a staff, adorned like a key.

In front of all of them, their foe: a vesperbat, an eyeless monstrosity, fur like many spikes. Above its face curls the antlers vesperbats grew, showing they are elders. (One half has fallen to the ground, probably not intended.)

If this was meant to be an elder, it couldn’t have possibly be that small. It is only as big as several mantids. One vesperbane is near it, a large scythe poised to behead the thing.

The statues have an inscription, though this one isn’t in common, and a paper translation isn’t there.

“I wonder what it says,” Marka murmurs.

“I can translate it myself,” Wik says. “It’s common enough to be iconic: the gift we give every tyrant. Or thereabouts — I imagine most wingless palps didn’t draw a distinction then between ‘tyrant’ and ‘bat’, back then. Or, if this postdates the end of interregnum, perhaps they had remembered there are other kinds of tyrants.”

Marka looks up at the ancient warriors limned in weathered stone. “I wonder what the story behind this statue is.”

“The liberation of Wentalel. It’s a common enough story in early era of hope — at least how it started. Some enthralled mantids underwent the pharmakon rites and became vesperbanes. Except uprisings were typically done by liberating the bat’s entire horde, marshalling a force with the advantage of numbers. But that bat of old Wentalel — his name was Ghean – had a unique hold over his subjects, unbreakable by conventional means. So who was there to stand against him? A handful of neophyte vesperbanes — some nerve queens, some blood fiends, and a shaman.”

“Shaman?”

“Today, we’d say ‘haruspex’. Anyway, it’s clear this wasn’t enough to stand before a bat elder for more than moments in a fair fight.”

“So how’d they do it?”

“Nobody knows, and all the historians — and some military strategists – would like to. It was probably a redemption. So many of the impossible things the disenthralled rebellion did were.” Then, its tone loses its rarefied edge. It looks at Marka, rather than the statues. “We’re closer now. Use your scanner again, and see what we’re dealing with.”

After a moment, Marka’s saying, “There’s… quite a few gangsters – signatures are still too weak to count. But more than us, for sure. Everyone seems holed up in the capitol building.”

“We’re safe to approach, then,” Wik says. “What about the gun? Can you pick it out?”

“Yes. It’s… below the capitol, near Essi and the anomaly.” “Hm, putting the pieces together… the anomaly’s probably an infected mantis?”

“If one of them is infected, does that mean more might be?”

“I don’t know enough to say no, but there’s no evidence of that,” she replies. “Like I said though, they’re at the bottom, so we might be able to get through everyone else and deal with them alone. Is that uh, is that what we’re doing?”

“Only if we have to.”

“It looks like they have the key.”

Wik nods once as acknowledgement. They both know what it meant.

The courtyard before the capitol was once a kept garden or meadow, expanding around the pyramid. You couldn’t tell from the plants, which were dust and crackling underfoot, but littered around them are husks which once were bees.

(After roaches, bees are the least surprising of all the sentients to find within a mantis settlement before the Third Dominion. They were the Disenthralled Rebellion’s first allies.)

The ceiling above them had sloped down as they approached the capitol. Where it vaulted high over the city, it fell to much less impressive height now. Marka could easily wall​-​walk up to the ceiling.

“Now that we’ve finally arrived, we should lay the preparation for my plan. Which, I suppose, starts with telling you what it is.”

Marka feels a lightness or shakiness throughout her body – nervousness. This is it, the last hurdle. It’d all resolve here — but in which direction?

“Do you trust me, Marka?”

XI.

Marka walks the steps up the capitol, sword in its sheath, and calls out Angwi’s name. She’s stepping past enevate​-​disintegrated doors, and into the ruined building.

A moment passes, and then another. Then she hears a deep growl.

The bloodbane’s scraping bones reach volumes Marka’s palps would struggle with.

“Come to face your death, little warden?”

“No,” Marka responds, affecting more confidence than she felt. “I don’t intend to die. Come here, Angwi. Alone, if you’re brave enough.” She was following Wik’s advice, baiting the bloodbane.

“Confidence alone won’t save you.”

Marka has her scanner out, and can see the brightness of Angwi jostling against dimmer signatures. She waits for the bloodbane to come closer before she responds — her palps can’t keep up that volume, she doesn’t want to get sore.

“Nor will it save you. Why don’t we both drop the bravado?” she says. About now was when the gambling began. “I’ve been thinking,” Marka is all but parrotting Wik’s words now, framing it just the way the tallowbane instructed, “you wouldn’t have run from our last fight if you really thought you could kill us, without risk. Else, why flee all the way down here, hide behind your minions?” ‘Minions’ — they weren’t hers, and they certainly didn’t see themselves that way. But it’s how Angwi would love to think of it.

“I wanted to give you time to rest up. Be at your strongest when I crush you.”

“I don’t believe that.” Marka pauses, to let a wave of nervousness fall off and not show in trembling palps. “Look, I don’t want to die. You don’t want to either. It’s not clear which one of us is going to walk away from a fight with no quarter.” This time, the pause is all drama. “So why don’t we both walk away alive?”

“You came all the way down here to tell me you’re going to flitter out of a fight?”

(Wik had told her, “My plan… is for you to rely on her mercy.” Marka had waited for punchline, and it never came.)

“No.We will fight, but not to the death. It will be a duel, as warriors would. It will show which of us is superior.”

(Wik had told her, “We have to hope that our first fight — your first fight — inspired some measure of respect in Angwi’s eyes. The only way I see us pulling this off is if you get her to agree to a formal duel.” It was back there right now, setting up the ceremonial flames.)

“So, you want a pretend fight? Are you that scared of dying to someone stronger than you?”

“Perhaps not,” Marka says, and doesn’t know if she’s lying. “But there’s more at play here than the purity of battle, and victory or defeat concerns more than honor or pride.” She would have left it at that, but a jab occurs to her. “Are you so ashamed of defeat that you’d rather die than live with it?”

If she hadn’t had her scanner, she’d have startled or outright fled the capitol. Angwi emerges from the dark of a doorway like a monster of horror. The same pale yellow chitin, crawling with veins. Her chitin has melanized in places where Marka had stabbed or cut her. Three wretched raptorials are curled up behind her, the fourth still a stub, now tied up with a piece of cloth.

For a moment, the bloodbane simply stares at Marka. There were other incentives Wik had proposed — tell her if she cooperated, they’d pay her; tell her they’d put it good words for her with the Wardens or with Felme; tell her some half​-​truth involving the infection.

But Angwi says, “Fine. Say I play this game. What are the rules?

“We can do it tournament style? One point for the first to draw blood. One point for the first to draw a scream or yelp. One point for the first to pin or restrain the other. Two points for the first to grievously injure.” There were other rules Marka had heard of ​-​ points for the first to land blows, points for the first to kill. But this was enough.

Marka continues, “If I win, you have to let us pass. If you win, we will give up this endeavor.”

“If I win,” Angwi growls, “I will devour you. But… I’ll allow your friend and your traitors to live.”

Marka’s antennae curl up. But she hides the displeasure from her tone. “I’ll… allow you to take a single limb, but not my life.” Would you sacrifice a limb to live?

Angwi grins. “How about all of them?”

“How about this,” the warden starts. “For every point you get, you’ll be allowed one limb.” Beat. “Sound good?” At this point, she can’t hide the tremble from her palps. She tried not to think of it like she was just offering up her body — the alternative wasn’t nothing, it was death. The more she pushed back against Angwi’s suggestions, the more likely the bloodbane would stop entertaining this, and just try to kill her.

But would Angwi just do that anyway, no matter what she says?

“I can play that game,” the bloodbane says.

Marka nods. “Then I swear upon my ancestors most recent and remote that I shall uphold these strictures. May my words remain pure, or their stain mark me forever.”

Angwi arches an antennae, and languidly asks, “A welkinist, really? I always thought the vespers had a way of breaking faith.”

“The ritual of it soothes me. When I lie down at night and imagine my ancestors judging me, I want for them to find in me… something to approve of. Even if it’s only my imagination, I still have to live with the thought.” Marka looks up at the tall mantis. “Is there anyone whose judgment you fear?” Are you completely shameless?

“My vespers. If there’s any power worthy of my veneration, they have a better claim than most,” she replies. “But I like to think the vespers relish in indiscriminate, unrestrained slaughter far more than dull peace.”

Marka holds her palps still, but she has to ask. “Is there any way I can trust you to uphold your word?”

“How about we treat it like an exchange? I act a just a bit more like you, and mean what I say — and you act just a bit like me, and fight like you want to hurt me. We come just a bit closer together,” she says with beared maxillae.

Her words don’t erase the distrust sown by their last fight, and she’s not sure if there was a combination of words that would.

“Look. In a fight, talk is cheap, and I don’t see the difference between a feint and some syllables that accomplish the same thing. But I’m not some pathological liar. And right now?” Angwi gives her a look. “I want you to believe me — I’ve been with these bugs for weeks, and none of them put up any kind of fight. You’re different.” She pauses there, as if looking for the right words. “You know E’yama’s Axiom?”

Cooperate if and only if they cooperate if and only if you cooperate. (There are more poetic formulations, but Marka likes the mathematical language of this one.)

How was this relevant? Unless… Could it be that Angwi had only acted as she had earlier thinking Marka was only acting in her capacity as a Warden, thus assumed she would try to bring her in no matter what? If so, what changed her mind? Wik being there? Their gathering the gang? Seeing Marka fight?

“We’re gonna do it, then?” Angwi asks.

Marka breathes deep. “Yes. My friend has the fires set up in the courtyard. There’ll be more room to maneuver there.”

“Guess I’ll walk back and tell Essi and the boss how this is gonna go.”

“You should tell them to come watch.”

“Doubt the boss will bother, obsessed fucker she is.” Angwi turns and lifts a midleg to take a step away. Without facing the warden, she says, “I’ll see you on the battlefield.”

Marka exits the capitol.

They had begun before she left, but she’s still surprised to see the arena completely set up.

They chose to demarcate the Circle with rocks. A more dramatic — too dramatic — proposal had been to use all the oil they’d collected to fuel a big ring of fire. Wik emphatically shot it down, and a good thing – that proximity to the heat and light would have specifically disadvantaged Marka’s umbral techniques.

There are three small piles of firewood on either side of the Circle (symmetrical by the capitol’s axis). Sure, you could get five points total, but three means you won.

The Circle had been cleared of any debris, eliminating any opportunity for clever tricks — for either of them. At the center of the circle is an ‘x’ carved into the rock, probably with a knife. Around, Marka thinks she sees something catching the light — water droplets? The ruins of Wentalel certainly aren’t a dry place.

Marka stands on the edge of the Circle farthest from the capitol, and waits for Angwi.

A figure is emerging — with a small frame, dark gray chitin, and purple antennae. Metal glint near their palps and tympanum — piercings? They have a welkinmark, but no wings. Still, they’re big enough they must be near teneral.

The cobble is uneven where they walk, and they trip on a pit where a stone is missing. They fall and barely catch themself with forelegs.

They continue and stop about where the pyramid steps begin, and perch there.

“Would that be Essi?”

“Yep.”

More forms come, and for the first few, Marka still expects it to be Angwi. But it’s gangsters instead. She’d done as Marka suggested then – they were here to watch? There’s probably more than twice as many gangsters coming from the capitol than came with them across the lake. It makes Marka nervous.

A small crowd of gangsters diffuses through the courtyard, some of the new arrives daring to strike up conversation with Marka’s troop. Occasionally, she catches a few of her troop glancing upward, over the Circle. Marka looks up, but sees nothing. Just the darkness of the cave ceiling.

All of this waiting and false starts means when the bloodbane finally comes, Marka’s lulled, to the point of resting on the ground.

The emerging bloodbane is stopped almost right after stepping out, Essi leaning over to whisper in her tympanum. Marka notices the blackbane’s legs shaking a slight bit, but not out of any sort of nervousness otherwise apparent.

Angwi walks up and matches Marka in standing just outside the Circle.

“Essi pointed something out,” she says, antennae extending towards her. “These… duels, are they usually done with armor?”

Marka’s antennae straighten. After a moment, she says, “They can be,” and nearly cringes as she does. They, almost as a rule, are not. In fact, the most refined of the arts went to the opposite extreme. Warriors would wear nothing but a weave of ropes tied in patterns across their body. Points were awarded for severing the rope, but removed for damaging chitin.

“Look, I’ll put it a different way. How am I supposed to draw blood if you’re wearing armor? Take it off, ’sonly fair.”

“How am I supposed to injure you when you have a bloodbane’s regeneration? Can you agree to mend yourself? I think that would be fair.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

If you were bad at it, yeah. A skilled hemotechnic, Marka knew, could easily exercise that degree of control. This wasn’t so surprising — a skilled hemotechnic might have already healed the limb they’d torn off. A skilled hemotechnic might have had better clients to work for. There had been a chance Angwi was merely resource limited, though.

“Here,” Marka says, and she reaches for her own legs. “I’ll remove my limb and abdomen guards. My thoractic plates are necessary for my techniques, though.” Marka watches the bloodbane, considering her next words a moment more. “I’m sure this is necessary for you to be able to score any points.”

“I thought you’d appreciate it. Elsewise, I’d have to go for the one unarmored part you got,” the bloodbane says, staring at her — at her head. “That’s the last courtesy I’ll offer. I’m tired of waiting.”

Angwi lunges — into the Circle.

Was she ready? No.But if Angwi was already impatient… If Marka would wait until her nerves were perfectly accepting of going forward and – literally — risking life and limb… Strike while the iron is hot.

Marka takes one deep breath, and quickly steps in.

While the two fighters talked, Wik had walked around, and now stands at the base of the pyramid, opposite Essi.

The circle is close enough Marka hears it speak. “Don’t worry, Marka.”

With action looking imminent, the gangsters in the courtyard stop their conversation and draw in toward the Circle. Keeping at least some distance, it becomes a kind of second circle around the first.

The heartbeat Marka is inside the circle, before she can say anything to the effect of “Shall we duel?” or “Let’s begin,” Angwi has flung herself at Marka.

The bloodbane’s already at the edge of her guard. Raptorials fly at the warden. The rhythm of them — sometimes in rapid sequence, sometimes in pairs — is impossible to match with just her sword.

Marka is woefully off​-​balance here. Her armor is not imbued black with enervate, and her wretched raptorials aren’t even everted.

A tentacle flies at her. Lined with bone spurs like a comb, adequate to rasp away chitin.

Though the bloodbane’s ferocity leaves Marka backpedalling and dodging through crouches and leans, she doesn’t again fall into the trap of pure passivity.

Her sword snaps out at a limb that had gone still. The limb slips away just in time to avoid a cut. Marka bursts away from a slap planned by Angwi’s longest tentacle. She predicts it would have ensnared her — and that alone could have ended this fight.

Marka strikes again with her sword, to make Angwi hop back for once. The edge of her blade is like light to the bloodbane’s shadow — it flees all contact.

The only hit she lands resounds against bone. The way Angwi sucks in breath after says it can’t feel good. But it’s not blood nor injury.

Her sword was just batted away by an errant tentacle. Can’t parry. So she lifts the tibia of her foreleg by instinct, before realizing that’s terribly mistaken.

The boney limb crashes into hers, spurs cracking through chitin, hemolymph spilling out.

It’s all she can do not to cry out when it happens, and cede another point.

“Stop!” Wik’s voice calls out.

Angwi’s already raising other tentacles to continue the assault before she opts to comply, a self​-​assured, if bemused, grin on her palps.

“One point to Angwi for drawing blood.” A gangster — instructed by a gesture from Wik — lights a fire on one side of the arena beyond the circle.

This pause grants Marka space to evert her own wretched raptorials, and imbue her sword and armor with enervate. She curls up her abdomen up against her thorax, for protection.

She says, as if it would buy her more time, “I see you’ve learned to stop playing with your food.”

“I just know you can take it.” Angwi sounds less menacing, speaking with palps instead of bones.

“And if I couldn’t?”

“You wouldn’t be here right now.”

Angwi bares her palps wide, and Marka guesses the time for banter has passed.

The warden takes initiative this round. She bursts forward, nerve​-​imbued sword angled to impale. She’s quick, but Angwi has the reflexes to bat aside the sword so it only scrapes shallowly. Committed to this, Marka can’t avoid the swipe of Angwi’s forelegs scratching her eye and palps.

Marka jumps back to get room to stab again. Angwi isn’t avoiding hits like she used to, and will now take a slash if it doesn’t interrupt her cavalcade of blows. The wounds don’t last, the smallest turning to cicatrices, and the biggest at least closing.

Angwi’s secured the point for drawing blood, and doesn’t care about that any more.

The exchanges continue. Having her wretched raptorials out now, she can land more hits. One had been mended with some of Wik’s ichortallow, but is still tender. Still Marka waves it around as threat, a bluff. She attempts no decisive strikes with it.

Marka watches Angwi’s stance, waiting for moments when her center of balance goes this way or that, so she can exacerbate it with a well​-​placed strike, and perhaps secure a point.

(She notices something subtle after two misses aimed at her abdomen. Whenever Marka’s about to hit, Angwi breathes out. You can’t scream if you don’t have air in your throats. Clever.)

A sudden chop at her foreleg and then a yank at her weapon has Marka drop her nerve​-​imbued sword. Marka swears, and bursts away. Not just to dodge the followup, but to get space for a trick.

Marka backs away as Angwi recovers and approaches.

Enervate forces fall off quick, but she thinks this is close enough.

She’s forming a glob of enervate, tarsus obscured so the bloodbane can’t see it.

The bigger mantis slows, caution materializing. Who would approach a vesperbane seemingly performing an unknown technique?

But that’s to Marka’s advantage. She desaturates the glob.

Angwi sees nothing happening, and stokes herself into moving again. Marka steps forward. She desaturates further, and pours more enervate into the glob. Come on.

Slightly, the sword moves.

“Yes, got it,” Marka says, hoping to bluff out more advantageous caution.

More enervate. The glob is about as big as her tarsus now, and as desaturated as she can make it. Angwi definitely feels the tug. But the sword feels it more.

She thrusts her glob​-​bearing leg up into the air, high as she can, even as the sword slides along the ground. Silently, for enervate attenuates sound.

Maybe Angwi put the pieces together then. Maybe Marka’s gaze (or the gaze of onlooking gangsters) betrayed her. The bloodbane’s turning just in time.

The sword accelerating off the ground toward her drives into her metathorax, where tentacles emerge, instead of the vulnerable abdomen.

Angwi lunges at the warden, trying to break her focus. Marka hops back, and the motion means the sword wiggles sympathetically instead of driving deeper into her.

Marka starts forming another glob, and quickly, not caring if it’s a bit sloppy.

She’s thinking of how she broke the chain.

She’s thinking of the termite ‘gun’.

Could she replicate that effect?

She supersaturates the new glob, bringing it behind the big one.

The result? Propulsion.

The fat glob of enervate arcs through the air, the saturation launching it fast enough Angwi’s impressive reflexes just manage to let her pick where it lands. She picks a wretched raptorial.

(Marka had never trained with a ranged weapon, and her improvised approach, lacking the machine consistency or barreling of the termite gun, couldn’t be accurate. But Angwi still has the sword in her metathorax, with enough imbued enervate to correct the course.)

The glob gloms onto Angwi’s limb, and she screams.

Black nerve dissolution is the worst the nervous system can endure, far beyond burning. In that moment, Marka almost feels sorry for the bloodbane.

“Stop!” Wik calls out. “One point to Marka for making her opponent cry out.”

Marka waits for it to continue. It does not. “What? Shouldn’t that be grievous injury too?” Shouldn’t she have won?

“No.She’s recovering.”

Marka looks over. Angwi is scraping away the black nerve with bone spurs, but then notices the attraction of the sword, and uses that to wick away the black.

“And even if she weren’t, it’s only a limb. I say it’s only grievous if it’s the head or abdomen.”

“S​-​surprised,” Angwi starts, voice shaky from pain, “that her friend is ruling in my favor.”

Marka straightens up, and considers if she should take a swing while Angwi is still recovering. She says, “I don’t need biased rulings to beat you.”

“Sure. That was a funny trick. And I hope,” she grips Marka’s sword, “you don’t need this crutch either.” She flings the sword out of the circle. The wild throw smacks into a gangster, who falls down with a ‘oof’.

The warden grits her mandibles.

Marka was a strong mantis. She’s trained long enough to have thickly muscled joints. But Angwi was bigger, stronger, with a bloodbane’s augmentations.

The sword had helped. But without it? Her chitin and bones will fold long before shadowsteel would.

On top of that, Marka was tiring. She can’t be alone in that — if Angwi had faster digestion, would that also mean burning through energy faster?

Maybe she imagines the multilimb assaults come a touch less relentless. (But wouldn’t they? She’s lost another tentacle now.) Maybe she imagines the window of reaction to Marka’s faster attacks seems less reflexive, sloppier. (But wouldn’t they? The attacks themselves are sloppier).

This battle would be over soon.

It resumes with Marka encircling a Angwi haughty with the advantage she’d secured. It’s a lull, and space for Marka to think.

Marka likes swords because they are technical instruments. An axe or spear is simple, but swords are highly regarded because so much more skill goes into their use. Marka has studied pages of sequential art and imagined one day she’d be like those rendered heroes, spinning and rolling at the apex of skill. There were masters of the sword. But have you ever heard of masters of the hammer? The club?

There were masters of raptorial brawling, too, she admits. Marka always knew it was a bloodbane’s game, but she had never known it until now.

Angwi has more reach than Marka. Angwi has more flexibility than Marka. Angwi has more experience than Marka.

Marka’s ability with her wretched raptorials almost felt contained within Angwi’s abilities. But the warden has three advantages: her nerve​-​burst, her nerve​-​imbued raptorials, and her armor. Impacts against it shook and bruised her, but it beat the alternative.

Marka’s mind keeps falling back to the technical gap left by her lost sword. Not just because her clenched raptorials feel for an absent grille, but her style relied on the versatility of the sword.

Marka’s taking more and more hits trying to parry, trying to riposte, trying to predict and maneuver around Angwi.

With every thick, boney tentacle that slams into her, she’s realizing this is a flaw in her fighting that was there from the start, but without the sword to support it, the insufficiencies are manifest.

Marka and Angwi were playing two different games. Marka was in her head. But Angwi? Angwi just acted. She didn’t have a ‘style’ any more than a centipede did.

Absent the tools of civilization, perhaps she could fight like a beast.

It’s harder to overthink what she’s doing if she’s speaking. And if she’s taking cues from Angwi’s playbook anyway…

“Have you fought the arch​-​fiend yet, or did we get here before him?”

Angwi doesn’t falter in the hit she’d prepared. But instead of launching another one, she falls back. “I’d be stupid to get anywhere near the arch​-​fiend.”

“Oh, so you haven’t noticed he shut down access to the sewers? I assumed it was in preparation to come down himself.”

Angwi waves with a tentacle, and turns it into a low​-​commitment strike Marka easily dodges. “The arch​-​fiend doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Oh, he does. I was just talking to him earlier today.” Of all the things she’s said so far, this one comes the closest to being a lie. But she can make the case that she could believe it.

“Why would the arch​-​fiend be interested in this no name excavation?”

Angwi starts moving, and Marka starts moving. They circle each other.

“Oh, why would the arch​-​fiend be interested in the gang about to unleash a plague unseen since the Second Dominion?” Marka leaves it there for a moment, weighing notions in her head, then takes a shot in the dark. “Haven’t you wondered what’s up with the boss?”

“You haven’t even seen the boss.”

“I’ve seen the rats.” Marka pauses in her circling. “We aren’t just here to get rich, you know. We’re here to keep Wentalel safe. I’m down here on a percipient’s order. That’s what’s at stake.”

At this, Angwi stops too. And she laughs. “Ah, this is you trying to get me back? You almost had me.”

“No.Well, the difference between us,” Marka says, “is that even when I’m messing with you, I’m not going to lie to you.”

“The worst part is, I believe that.”

They hadn’t stopped fighting throughout that. Theirs was the game played between a jumping spider and a beetle. Pursuer and pursed. Though her supply of enervate isn’t infinite, Marka’s nerve bursts mean she can simply not be where Angwi aims. Her wretched raptorials are smaller, which means there is less weight to move when she stabs with them.

“A percipient, then? Is it true they walk around with their brains in jars?”

“I don’t know what is under their robes. But,” — Marka leans away from a raptorial flies straight at her, and leans toward Angwi to aim a hit at her head. Angwi jumps, and takes it on the thorax. — “you know they know your termite safe inside and out? Disabled the locking mechanisms, and put a letter inside. I wonder if they snuck in under your labrums, or this is some action at a distance. Which one is scarier?”

“As far as I’m concerned, the percipients can do whatever they want. What they get up to has nothing to do with me.”

Marka could point out how that was literally not true, probe how she feels about the percipients involving themselves here — but operating a conversation on that level would get to the level of actually distracting Marka. She dials it back.

“So, did you start eating mantids before you became Heir of the Devourer, or did it start there?”

“That’s a question for at least the third fight.” Angwi backs up. “Hm. I suppose now there’s a chance there’ll be a third, eh?”

“I don’t plan to stay in Wentalel.”

“A pity. If you’re done messing around, how about we end this?”

Angwi again bares her maxillary palps wide, making further talk impossible.

The fight is a tired continuation of what came before. Marka is evasive enough, and the Circle big enough, that they can repeat the cycle of Angwi attacking and Marka dodging again and again. The limit is attrition — how much energy lies in the vesperbanes (admittedly augmented) reserves, and how much enervate lies in Marka’s soul for nerve bursts — she is down to a quarter of the max the crystals allowed her.

It changes when Angwi throws a tentacle forward at the Warden’s head.

And Marka does not burst in time.

She rolls with the strike, but it’s still a massive impact. Right in the mandible. It cracks and folds inward just how it shouldn’t.

But she planned for this.

At the same time, she reaches for that tentacle, wrapping around with a tarsus. A tarsus black with enervate.

Maybe it’s familiarity, but the sound Angwi makes is less of a scream, this time.

The gambit could be exactly what Marka needed to turn this fight. She’d be effectively down yet one more tentacle.

But Angwi realizes that too. Marka is still holding the limb. The bloodbane throws herself at the warden to turn this into a tackle.

If she hadn’t ferried gangsters across the chasm, or powered the raft, it might not have even occurred to her to try this.

She does a nerve burst and meets Angwi in the air.

They slam into each other, and Angwi is bigger than Marka, but Marka has more momentum and more functional limbs. The warden wraps forelegs, midlegs, and wretched raptorials around the bloodbane to restrain her.

She hears a familiar wet voice call out, but the words aren’t familiar.

“Marka! Push her to the center! Trust me!”

After a moment, Marka pushes, her technique blackening the air behind her.

The ‘x’ still marks the center.

Something white is thrown at it, but Marka’s going too fast to think about this.

She pins Angwi to the center of the ring, expecting it to call out another point. It doesn’t.

Instead, it says, “Get back!”

Marka pauses a moment in confusion.

(“Do you trust me, Marka?”

“No.But for this mission? I can.”)

Marka dodges back.

Angwi struggles to get up, and meets unexpected resistance — the white had been adhesive wax.

It couldn’t hold her, but she only struggles for a moment.

Bright liquid pours from above.

Marka’s antennae twitch perplexity, and then she smells it, and then she understands. Why the ‘x’. Why the furtive glances upward. Why collect all the oil. Why Wik suddenly changed its mind from ‘we have to kill Angwi’ to ‘rely on her mercy’ — it never did.

It used Marka. Misled her about the plan, made her betray the bloodbane.

Angwi screams as she burns.

When she speaks, it’s bones scraping — her palps are being destroyed.

“You — conniving — fucking — shitstain — coward!”

Angwi manages to stand. She manages a step toward Marka.

Wik is running over, black sword in grasp, carelessly violating the Circle. It extends the hilt toward Marka.

“Kill her. She might still have life left in her, but the blood is worst at dealing with fire.”

Marka is staring at the extended hilt. She’s all hesitation.

But she need not make the decision. Silenal runs up after it, and grabs Marka’s sword instead. She takes it, and charges at the burning bloodbane.

The bloodbane swings a wretched raptorial, but it has none of the speed it had before. Silenal dodges around it, and pulls back the sword.

“Her name was Wanlowa.”

Silenal strikes forward, running the sword through Angwi’s head.

Strings cut, she falls.

XII.

It’s not over yet. There’s a hiss of alarm — Essi has stood up, and her digits are going through a series of tarsigns. She makes one Marka doesn’t recognize, then stops and restarts the whole sequence.

(The gangsters, allied and not, start to react in sounds of confusion and outrage.)

Essi finishes, and brandishes her tarsi — strings of enervate flow out from them, and between them an orb forms.

“You feel up to taking out Essi? I think you’d know how to handle another blackbane. I can deal with the gang.”

Marka’s mind was still on the betrayal. Its betrayal.

Then the courtyard gets darker.

The weakest form of enervate is alpha​-​nrv. It doesn’t interact with matter at all, only with light and other enervate. It’s what saturated beta​-​nrv evaporates to, and between these two facts, it’s called waste enervate.

The release of this much alpha​-​nrv requires great amounts of enervate to evaporate. Marka looks and finds it — the orb Essi made was released and floated away and silently, violently expanded with all the chaos of supersaturated enervate — the chaos of all repelling all.

Some of it lands on the ground, and some on gangsters. The ones not of Marka’s troop are running for it already. They immediately tear off the clothes the black lands upon. The courtyard is filled with hissing from mantids on both sides.

Why was she using explosive techniques when mantids on her side might get hit?

The gangsters congregate around the fires — including Angwi’s still​-​burning body — because their heat and light repels enervate. It gets warmer in the chilly ruins — when alpha​-​nrv saturates, it produces light, and light without much energy is heat.

It’s the urgency of seeing all this, this explosive technique, that gets Marka moving. Essi’s running through the tarsigns, forming another.

Odd, that she has to do all of the signs each time.

While Marka acts, Wik has started speaking.

“Angwi is dead. Even then, you might think you still outnumber us. You do not! This change of leadership has been planned long before now. Look around you. We have allies among those your boss brought down, ready to switch sides. But we don’t need to fight. Anyone who stands down is welcome beside us.”

Was this a gambit, a bluff? Or had Marka been right at the start, suspecting Wik of working with the gang? She wondered if she knew the tallowbane at all.

Essi’s next orb is better aimed. It’s coming at Marka. She has perhaps a moment before it detonates.

She has, lightly, studied the theory of umbraconjuration. When you scaled in power beyond fiend, civilian weapons like swords are thought to be dead ends. If Marka ever walks down that road, umbraconjuration is an option.

The orb swells in size, and Marka picks up a pebble.

Conventional explosives work by packing lots of gunpowder in a tight space, and combustion causes expansion causes a big boom. Nerve​-​alchemy had iota​-​nrv, a highly reactive species, one of the six great enervates.

Umbraconjuration meant making constructs almost purely out of black nerve. A thing about black nerve? Unlike matter, it didn’t really have a normal force. (She’s heard it said that enervate attenuates the normal force, but she doesn’t understand.)

Marka imbues the pebble with enervate, and throws it, umbracohesion correcting her aim.

The pebble sails into the orb.

An orb has to be secured by a membrane. If the force of an explosion comes from its reactants being packed tightly, then sending an enervated pebble to pierce the membrane could cause the reactants to spill out, decreasing density, dampening the explosion.

The orb behaves like a water droplet does when you poke it. The next explosion does not darken the room with alpha​-​nrv. More of a dissolution than a combustion.

Still, all this enervate flying around has gangsters fleeing the courtyard. With Essi at the pyramid, the safest place is away, out the way Marka’s troop came.

Essi’s forming another orb.

“Can you make those things any bigger? They ain’t doing shit to that freak at this size,” says a gangster near Essi, who has not fled. “Might be able to hit something if it’s bigger.”

“You– you do realize that the amount of enervate required for an apparent sphere of a g​-​given radius is half pi squared times the fourth power of that radius, right? Do, do you realize how quickly that term grows?”

“Whatever.”

Marka’s getting closer, and the gangster decides now to flee. She throws another pebble, even as Essi’s forming the thing. It implodes all over her robes. Marka has seen stewartry blackbanes with them — it had silk resistant and conducive to enervate, woven by a certain moth tribe.

Essi begins the tarsigns again, frantic now, making more mistakes.

It takes Marka’s palps a few times to make sound; Angwi hit her mandibles hard, but the pain is distant right now. “Is that the only technique you know?” Surely something could be more effective at this range.

“Um,” the enemy blackbane says. Embarrassed, or not expecting conversation from an enemy?

“How? Combustion orbs are not low level tech. There are umbraconjuration fundamentals before it — don’t you know them?”

“I — only got this one.” Her voice is quiet.

Got? Then it clicks. “Is this what the stewartry raid was about? Stealing — techniques?”

“I thought it would make me — valuable, now that… I don’t have a future in the Stewartry.”

How could you just… steal a technique? Not even understanding the fundamentals? But Marka remembers what she saw earlier today. If sclerotia could convey oaths, what else could they convey? Endowments and techniques are communicable knowledge.

“One last thing I will ask, because I have to know,” Marka starts, crouching and looking for more pebbles, “if I had won that duel fairly… would you have honored it?”

“My orders are… we have to protect the heart fragment, until she gets here.”

With the warden this close, Essi gives up on tarsigns. She starts climbing up the pyramid. When Marka reaches the base of it, she uses the height to lunge, bounding over the warden, landing to start running away. Marka turns around. She follows

The running is cover for her to pull something from her robes.

The termite gun.

She points it at Marka.

Marka does the only two things she can do: dodge out of the way of course, but before that, she throws the pebble. Guided by umbracohesion, the pebble flies into the barrel of the gun.

She holds her breath, even as she dodges away.

Nothing happens.

Essi curls antennae, and turns to investigate the gun, looking down the barrel. She reaches a finger toward it –

The discharge comes very fast, firing directly at her face.

Marka sees a head deliquescing, and there’s nothing she can do.

It feels disrespectful, when she kneels to collect the gun, but it’s better to be rid of the chance of someone else — not on their side – getting it. She looks for the other vesperbane.

On its end, things seem to have gone more like a proper fight. As she watches, the tallowbane is in an exchange with a spear​-​wielding gangster. A real spear, not the makeshift one her troop had.

It runs the tallowbane through with the spear.

This must have pierced some kind of internal sac, because the spear comes away coated in oil. The tallowbane lifts a tarsus, and the oil is fire. They drop the burning spear, and now the matter of grabbing and binding the gangster is solved. It passes them off to a friendly gangster.

Now Wik approaches.

Marka tries not to growl. “You made me lie to her. Violate a promise I made.”

“We agreed it was safest to kill her.”

Marka looks away. “I believed her. I thought she was going along with the duel.”

“I had no way of knowing that. And Essi? The rest of the gangsters? Would they have gone along with it?”

“You could have at least told me.”

“You wouldn’t have done it, or you’d have ruined it.”

“You understand this is why I don’t trust you?”

“My plan worked.”

Marka turns around. “Let’s just go find the boss.”

A capitol was a place where legislation and bureaucracy dwelled. Consequently, much of what was interesting about the capitol could not survive centuries draped in mist. The Disenthralled Rebellion had had the backing of the biggest euvespid wasp confederacy, and thus, this capitol had long since switched from clay tablets to paper.

It was just Marka and Wik walking the halls of the pyramid, seeing empty rooms of perches arrayed around tables. Wik entrusted Silenal with sorting things out with the gang. They would finish their business alone.

According to Marka’s scanner, there was one other signature in here with them. Below them, the mantis with psi​-​nrv convulsions like the infected. The boss.

Wingless pyramids often had chambers below for the ashes of highly regarded vesperbanes. (Sometimes called their battle​-​queens, but that’s a slight projection of Snur​-​Welkin culture and values.)

So they once more descended, though this is far, far shorter a trek than the one above.

“Would this be… a catacomb within a catacomb?”

“Not really.”

There’s a door between them and their quarry. But how could this stop them? Marka dissolves the edges with black nerve, and starts pushing it away. There are things behind it, keeping it closed.

They hear a voice, barely a murmur.

“I have to protect it. Have to protect the heart.”

They enter.

“She is come?”

The room is dimly lit by candles, giving it an almost ritualistic air. They have to squeeze by the rests and tables pushed against the door. Wik has an easier time of it.

“No,” the voice says when they come visible. She comes visible, too.

Ress is a greenish​-​yellow mantis. Abdomen thin, as if from malnourishment. Wingless and plain​-​clothed, nothing remarkable.

When she lifts her gaze to meet Marka’s, the warden is startled by the black depths of the fovea. Whatever distinguishing features the boss may have are overshadowed by the black lines engulfing them. Unlike all others she’s seen, these curl and cross to create intricate patterns.

Marka looks her up and down, seeing no boils or reddened flesh. No signs of sickness.

“Have to protect the heart.” There was a knife on a table, and it’s in her tarsus now. “Leave me, strange mantids.”

“Any last tricks, Ress?” Marka asks. “This adventure feels like it has one more trap to spring on us.”

Wik says, “The percipient said end her. Is this what they meant by too far gone? Ress, what are you doing here?”

“Waiting. She is come. Leave me.”

“She seems somewhat lucid,” Wik says. “If you give us the safe key, we will leave.”

“No.” She waves the knife. “Leave me now.”

Marka lifts her sword, considers some things. Her head hurts – exhaustion and betrayal and uncertainty and guilt — and she decides to act instead of really thinking about what she’s doing.

“I’m sorry it had to come to this.”

She ends it quickly.

“That’s–that’s three mantids we’ve killed today.”

“Unfortunate, quite unfortunate. But I’m unsure it could have played out any other way.” Wik is regarding Marka as she wipes hemolymph from the blade. “Is that another puncture wound you have?”

“I didn’t expect that strength from her.”

“Under dire threat, or in the grip of certain kinds of mania, the body can exceed its normal limits.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, your scanner should allow us to find the key.”

And now they have it, the impetus for all this drama. It resembles the spoof Wik made, with a wave to the edges, and geometric patterns all over it. The material feels unlike any other. Marka runs a digit lightly covered in enervate over the bitting, feeling the differentials of enervate, comparing it to what they remembered of their fake key.

“What was the secret at the bottom of the catacombs? Was this it?” Marka asks. “Or would that be the infection?”

“Perhaps they expected us to find this heart fragment Essi and Ress spoke of.”

Beyond the body of Ress, on a clean table, surrounded by candles, lies it.

It looks like a sclerotium the way a foreleg looked like a mantis.

Marka’s the one to pick it up, since the letter was to her.

“I guess that’s it?”

They ascend out of the capitol’s depths, and hope no secret eluded them.

XIII.

When they emerge from the capitol, they see her.

Across the courtyard​-​turned​-​battlefield, a mantis stands adorned in regalia, her chitin brown like the finest woods. A golden crown with horns — a dress of silken ropes forming intricate patterns across the geometry of her body — a necklace prominent on the thorax, whose centerpiece is a gnarled and pulsating core.

The crown does not obscure their forehead, where the lack of a welkinmark is manifest.

She is leant against the wall. It wasn’t a natural posture for a mantis, standing on two legs, abdomen between them, vulnerable. It was a posture of confidence.

She meets their eyes briefly and looks away, seeming neither furtive nor staring. She falls to all fours and strides forward, gaze drifting to the charred remains of Angwi, the deliquescing corpse of Essi. She lifts her forelegs, and fluidly forms a few tarsisigns. Black nerve and red ichor flows from her necklace to form a unstable sphere in the air. The air grows misty with a cloud of — something, exuding from the sphere, and then clears, exudate cohering into a long flow that bifurcates and seeks the two vesperbanes’ corpses.

Marka has seen cadavers in all stages of decay. Marka has seen a flowers unfurling in the sunlight. Marka has seen glass shatter.

Angwi and Essi are — reduced. Their bodies are engulfed in a mossy fuzz, long black forms bursting from chitin, and ichor seeping from the cracks. Long tracks form all over their bodies, like from the passage of worms. Their entrails are everted.

(A scent falls on her antennae. One of enticing, morbid sweetness, how she imagined mammalian blood smelt to Oskeila flies.)

The process continues. Marka has seen grains ground to powder, and she’s seen surgical extraction of organs.

Redness, blackness, and forms of organic hue float through the air to the regal mantis’s waiting raptorials. That form which rests in the necklace is nourished by what is received from the vesperbanes.

(A sense of profundity has crept up on Marka, and Wik feels it too. It’s silenced the questions or exclamations that would otherwise come, even more than their exhaustion would have. The sensation feels almost foreign — a reaction from her vespers?)

“What,” Marka’s the first one to find her words, “are you doing?”

“I am passing judgment.”

When Marka looks again, the remains of the vesperbanes have been diminished.

“Are you…” The words are stilled on Marka’s palps.

“My name is Alunyene.” Her neutral expression folds to briefly bear a smile, which comes as a surprise on a face that seems as inviolable as a mountain’s.

Wik is more decisive. “You’re the Golden Lady.”

“I’m familiar with the title.” Marka realizes the mantis has been walking, approaching them still.

Wik raises its staff. “You’re a renegade with a kill order.”

“Was. I got better.” The smile comes again.

Now Marka rests a foreleg on her sword’s grip. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“The term I believe you’d be familiar with is special countenance,” says the Golden Lady. “My… unfortunately jaundiced sentencing has been waived temporarily while I render aid.”

“And what assurance have we that that isn’t an outright lie?”

Her tone is light. “I never found swaying nonbelievers rewarding. What does it matter? I don’t wish to fight you, nor you me. I’ve simply come to deliver a message. But first…”

She’s much closer now. Marka’s stepping back, but her strides are long. She’s taller than Marka. She has a pleasant, beatific expression. She can see why the gangsters would have called her hierophant — it’s the visage of the devout, with all of the welcoming, reassuring presence.

Her foretarsus reaches out, and gently touches Marka’s thorax.

Marka is coughing. There’s something in her throat. Pain, too.

A moment, and the object emerges with a bit of red blood. A sclerotium?

Alunyene points a digit at it, and a flow of black nerve flies into it, flooding it, disintegrating it.

“You and yours were bound to another host. You are not now. I have severed the connection, and you are free.”

“You​-​” Marka spoke before her mind had cough up, and she paused to put the pieces together. “Do you mean… the oath I swore to Felme? How? I​-​ shouldn’t oaths be inviolable?”

“By the will of the vespers, all things may unravel and realign. I give the Dream breath.”

Wik takes a step back. “You’re a night​-​prophet. That​-​ it explains everything. The haruspices and spellbrand killings, the lack of record, the clan…”

“It’s less a matter of being one, than becoming one. But yes, I aim to walk that path the nymphs did, that others have tried.”

“You said you were here to deliver a message. What is it?”

“My master is impressed with the work you’ve done here today, and would like to meet you. I know you’ll have your little worries, but my master plans no foulness. Atop one of the rooftops in the entertainment district tonight at midnight? We could be seen and not heard, if that would ease your concerns.” She looks levelly at Marka, peering into her. “My master will have answers, explain exactly what’s going on, and what is planned.” Then, turning to Wik. “And pay handsomely, to be sure.”

Alunyene lifts her head, and gestures broadly. “Answers, money, and if you have a sense of morality… we intend to save lives.”

The Golden Lady touches Marka’s prothorax again, but to no magical effect, only the dramatic. “Do bring the heart fragment, it’s important.”

There are questions on her palps — what about the people you’ve killed? What, exactly, are you? Who is your master?

But the Golden Lady has turned and is swiftly departing. And Marka can predict what it’ll come down to: we’ll tell you everything… if you come meet my master.

Marka once more retrieves her vindicator​-​engineered timepiece, and dimly makes out the loss of hours. Night is falling even now. This long, eventful day is finally coming to a close…

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.