1: The Three Mantes Rule
If you need to make a team of mantes, the magic number was three.
More was better, but being a mantis meant itching to compete :– to win. More teammates meant more bugs to fight with. Moreover, with four mantes brought you to the perfect number to fracture. First one made enemies with another, then after that there would be one they disliked second most of all, which finally left their partner in strategy. (Some say a mantis kept two lists: their enemies and their not-yet-enemies — more interesting that way.)
Larger groups could be stable, still — I think you could go up to seven before you would wind up with rules and some hierarchy, whether you mean to or not. But even a group of seven split right down the middle left two factions dancing at that threshold between three’s magic and four’s fractiousness. Wheels within third wheels.
Why was three so special? Put two mantes together on a single task and you’d get a rivalry. Add another, and she would find herself competing as well. But measure her up, and she must always either be contending for the best or be dead last. Point was, only the strongest rivalry could remain hot and contested. And yet, being the best alone meant losing to the second best with allies — which, in turn, lost to being the best with allies.
So thus, when there was just one other bug for either side to win over? You get stability from that unending tug of war for the tiebreaking third.
On Anno’s team, I was that tiebreaker.
Did this grant me decisive power and influence? No, I was the bridge member because I didn’t have much of either. The team needed me, and I knew how to keep my head down (really, why bother fighting so hard?) — but mostly? It just meant the both of them could boss me around.
Hm. Anno’s team? Best not to put it that way out loud. In principle, it was our team, or really the team of both of them. But on paper, and at a glance? Well…
Right now, Epifani was rousing me for the (hopefully!) last day of the mission. Morning flames were crackling down in the firepit, and I smelled blood and breakfast. Still sprawled in my hammock, I was the last up.
I knew it could only be Epifani waking me up :– there was no sound, no touch. Just cold alien force twisting my neck. Already, black nerve was rushing out of my coils, automatic, my own cold surging to fight the intruding cold, its adumbrations coating me in an aura to catch and repel that force. A proxy field.
Useless instinct, as proven a moment later. Another, sharper twist leeched right through the resistance, and pinched me inside my flesh. If proxy fields were armor, then Epifani was a knife, a needle, a poison dripping. Any crack meant no protection of it — and there was no instinct without cracks.
My dewfocals took shape while a flush of light-sensitive pigment brought color to my compound eyes. I cast a gaze over the camp below me, across the forest floor — but of course the first place to look was the wrong one. Forces must follow lines, arcs. And I have black nerve within me, so I listened for it. Feel for the tug, Kharla, I thought. Where is it coming from?
«Query?»
«Appraisal: adumbration descending.»
Above me, always above me: Epifani looked even smaller from this far away. Atop a thin shelf jutting from a fungal column, billowing robes draped this pale scowl of a nymph, black silk garments too large for her, six sleeves cuffed to reveal the pale blue chitin of her legs.
In her splayed foretarsus, a nerve-cross scintillated. Four orbs stuck to the pulvillus-tip of each finger, held as if magnetized. Filaments of black enervate stretched between them, curling and arcing under its hyperdimensional convulusions.
If you gave me reams of paper, I couldn’t explain to you how enervate applies force at a distance sideways — my dewfocals turned to tears when I had to do math with negative roots. Epifani, though? She could do the math in her head. She could crack a proxy field by feel.
“Bleh.” It was as much groaned with my abdomen’s spiracles as my chirring palps. “I’m up.”
Twist. The nerve-cross spun and the force redoubled, my head sharply wrenched, face forcibly pulled toward Epifani.
“Knock it out,” I scratched. The sound was quiet, reedy, unable to resonate in my gullet with the airway choked off. “I’m awake!”
“Shiftless lout!” she squeaked. “You awake to an unknown nervecaster penetrating your proxy field, and you do nothing! You just wriggle! Like a worm stranded on the banestone under the sun… you’ll die!” The little antennae poking out of her robe-hood swung forward like whips. She had her forelegs up and open now, dark purple eyespots flaring.
See, the thing was, if she was an enemy nervecaster, I would simply be dead. The force it took to turn my head and squeeze my gullet close from inside? No, It’d be easier to nick my heart open. Or, if not easier — the proxy field was thicker around the vitals — it wouldn’t be hard for her.
Anno was faster, stronger — but if Epifani had the drop, I don’t think even our leader would survive her.
Maybe it was the yawn, or my antennae stretching lazily back with languid dismissal rolling along their length, but the pale mantis only scowled deeper. Sandals scraped against the metataxite’s shelf.
Then Epifani leaped. Hindlegs rocketed off her perch, but the scintillating cloud left in her wake spoke to where the force really came from. As the caster sailed through the sky, the nerve-cross blackened the air once again.
Cold alien force yanked me upward now, from where I had lain sprawled in my hammock. In turn she lurched toward me; now in the air, she didn’t need to worry about an equal and opposite reaction force stressing the metataxite’s shelf.
I rose now as if grabbed by the scruff of my neck, unable to lay or sit. Under her spell, only standing remained comfortable. Standing to the side in my own hammock. This cleared space for Epifani to land, and the suspended platform swung from her impact. But not by much.
Because the thing about Epifani — the first thing you notice, the glaring detail that makes salted wounds of all her commands, all these I-could-kill-you-where-you-stand demonstrations of how much better she was?
Her voice was a high-pitched squeak, because her gullet wasn’t large enough to go deeper; her robes billowed too large to fit her, because they didn’t make licensed nervecaster robes her size; she lifted and threw everything around with black nerve telekinesis, because she just didn’t have the strength in her frame to do it any other way.
Epifani stood beside me, and she was half my size :– she was a nymph.
I had my pharmakon metamorphosis in 1713; four years ago, I’d become a vesperbane. Epifani was on her 9th instar, old now as I’d been when I started. And she’d been in this game — training, fighting, killing — almost as long as I had.
My foreleg reached out to pat her between the eyes, palm brushing the heartseal by the base of either antennae.
And Epifani hissed. Her fingers splayed again, black orbs already at her pulvillus-tips. But this close? I could easily check her.
A flick of my wrist, and a rope of fungal-fibers unlooped from my arm. With all the mischievous, inexplicable tangling of threads left in a pocket, the legersnare caught her fingers. A second, and I was yanking my hand back, tightening the knot.
Bound and squeezed tight, Epifani couldn’t move her fingers. Even the orbs that would soon spawn a cross between them could do nothing now; my enervate-aborbent fibers wicked away the black nerve.
The caster clicked her mandibles together. It wasn’t a sound of respect — though if I needed the encouragement, I could interpret some acknowledgement in there. Still, I had her, for now.
“Too late to defend yourself at this point,” she started, sounding (despite herself) like a girl pouting, “you’d already be dead!”
“Not too late, just in time,” I said. “All I need to defend from is annoyance ~ it’s only now that I’ve run out of patience.”
“You think I’m some mere annoyance!?” Another hiss from abdominal throats.
Epifani snapped her offhand — obscured by billowing robes until now — where her caster’s cross was already half-formed.
Fast enough I’d have no time to react.
…If reaction time was based on when you saw it coming, not when you knew it was coming. Her indignation was predicable. I already had my other wrist ready with a legersnare, and now both her casting hands were bound.
“I know how it goes, darling.” (She hated being called that.) “I bolster my proxy field to resist ~ you get more pointed with your offense to compensate. I won’t win that tug of war with you. So why bother?”
Epifani crossed one foreleg over the other. “Shame! You’ll never get better with that attitude!” But crossing her legs like that overlayed the two ropes still tethered to me, tangling them further.
“Right now, I’m still trying to wake up,” I said. “I haven’t even had my coffee yet.”
That was all the warning the nymph recieved before a violet-striped midleg rose and kicked her out of the hammock. A flex of my coils severed the legersnare — severing them near my wrists, so she fell with hands still bound.
She squeak-shouted as she fell.
I sighed, and glanced down at my morning mess. Needed to fold up my blanket and put on something more than a cerci-cloth. This would only take a few seconds — I had stitched the blanket and my shirts with legersnares, rendering them eager to fold or unfold at my willing.
The legersnare technique didn’t make rope prehensible nor turn it into anything like some innumerably jointed finger. Really, calling it control gave me too much credit; legersnare users don’t control their ropes. Seminerve fibers run along the length, and when polarized with enervate, the fibers self-attracted or self-repelled.
Easy to make it straighten out or curl up. If you pulsed enervate at the right rhythm, timing which parts want to be straight or curled, a whole lot more became possible. If you were a master, it’d looked a whole lot like you controlled it. But that took math almost as complicated as what Epifani did. I wasn’t a master, so I stuck to copying patterns.
I did rope tricks, nothing fancy.
A minute later, I lighted on the ground, my shirts handlessly tightening their straps around thoracic segments while my hammock folded itself into a tote with its own suspension cords.
Four feet slid into leather sandals, tarsus-toes curling around perch-soles, like walking on branches. Hard teeth dug into moss wet with morning dew, and I walked toward the ground made dry by footsteps and fire.
I’d woken up last. Didn’t like that — feeling like I held things up — but every evening Anno went out like a light, sworn to take the last watch, and Epifani chose to wake before the sun to practice her techniques. She declared dawn the best time to condense atmospheric enervate; I didn’t ask why.
Eyes toward the sky :– it was a cloudy morning, autumn-chill in hillside forests of north Windhold. Chilly was best for enervate users, too, but it just made me want to curl up tighter. Like every fungus in me just itched to seal itself in dormancy.
Air warmed, step by step. So I was smiling as I walked toward the firepit, and only smiled wider to see Epifani perched in front of it, using the light to try to undo the knots binding her hands, face set to hide her annoyed desperation.
Anno wasn’t smiling, though. A dead bug lay gutted in front of her.
If standing beside me, Epifani merely looked small. Anno, though, was all and only looming bulk, muscle and shell thick in a way that gave and took force without flinching. Green-grey flesh lay between chitinous plates like bricks in a wall. She wore sparse padding atop it — gambeson-cloth to protect her thoracic spine, plus pauldrons and gloves — but between that armor, rope criss-crossed her chitin. She had let me tie the patterns.
Anno inclined her head at my arrival. She had chains around her neck, though they didn’t shift when she moved. I followed her eyes. The insect corpse in front of her was mangled indiscernible, distended lymph and viscera. Was it our breakfast? But I looked to the fire and saw there a pot of water already steaming — she’d prepared it for me.
“Thanks,” I said.
Anno hummed. “Slept in?” she asked, voice a harsh warble. She saw me cringe, which was answer enough, and continued, “Good. Gonna need you alert today.”
Epifani jerked her head up at that, mandibles working. A frown, but she said nothing.
It didn’t stop Anno from checking that look with her own frown. A moment of staring between them, and Epifani was the one who looked away.
“You’re tense,” I said, eyeing a foreleg that had been gripping the handle of her weapon — a heavy, heavy hammer — since before I arrived. “What happened?”
“They’ll be expecting us, now,” Anno said. “Not just bandits. Got banes calling the shots. Saw some fucker last night trying to steal or kill our tiger-beetles. Got yours before I spooked ’em off, Khar. Sorry.”
I looked around. We’d ridden out here on cicindela-back, the bugs rented from the clan that bred them. Wide-eyed tiger beetles with tall legs and bright elytra. The two that remained looked around with antennae awhirl. Their reigns were tied to a metataxite. A third leash lay limp on the ground.
That was where the maybe-breakfast bug came from. I was a bit less hungry, now.
“A dead purebred cicindela.” I sighed. Or grumbled, one of the two. “They’re expecting it back. Can we afford the penalty fee?”
Anno had a smile baring mandible-teeth. “If we finish this mission? Yeah.”
“All in, then.” I grabbed the pot with a spiked foreleg vise-tight, spines slotting into its wire-grille; my other foreleg dug in my bag for a jar of grounds.
“Don’t look so glum, ’s not bad news. Look at this way :– they fucked up.” Anno’s dewfocals shifted, teardrops gliding across her compounds, crossing over a scar, a black crack through white facets. The oldest mantis was looking at the youngest still trying to free her hands. “Ep, they fled away blastrunning. Think you can track ’em by the traces?”
A mandible-click. “How long ago was it? That beast already smells like plague! Has it been hours?” Epifani’s voice turned shrill. “I’d be able to track it better if you’d woken me up! What’s the point of a watch if you don’t even sound the alarm?”
If you asked, I didn’t tune out the argument. But my main focus right now was eyeballing half a cup of ground coffee. (Why bother arguing?) I packed the grounds down into the seive till it looked about right, little particulates floating through, and then I dripped some steaming water to let it bloom.
“Ain’t chasing them in the dark, not when there could’ve been an ambush. I need you two sharp as knives for the job, so I let you sleep. I didn’t.” Anno looked over at me as I worked. (There was a rhythm to ledgersnares, and there was a rhythm to pouring coffee.) To me, she said, “Think I can get a drink of that, Khar? Been on edge since the jump — already tired.”
I nod. “Salt? Honey?”
“Why would you add honey? Oh no,” Epifani made a voice, “the bitter bean juice is too bitter for me!”
“Tradition? It’s how the bees prep it,” I said. Shrug. “I think they’d know their own drink.”
The nymph looked like she had a retort ready, but Anno interrupted:
“Can you track it?” she repeated.
Epifani’s mouth parted, a serious look. She clapped her hands together, then her fingers twisted and intertwined into a series of four tarsigns, a technique given a somatic name. When the nerve-cross darkened to life, a blue-white antenna drooped down, and Epifani ran enerve-tipped fingers across the sensitive fluff, imbuing her antenna.
It rose, waving through the air before settling on a direction, now aligned to a gradient.
“It’s still there! Yeah, I can do it!”
“Good.” With that declaration, Anno fixed her dewfocals on me. Liquid lens were focusing light on facets of her compound eyes — I saw myself reflected in those dewdrops. Somehow, I had garnered our leader’s total focus.
Oh! Right, the coffee. “Give me something to pour it in,” I said.
“Drinks can wait,” she said. “Listen, Kharla.”
As a rule, Anno didn’t go for two syllables if one was enough. She could have spoken it surname and all, but coming from her, she might as well have.
“What is it?”
“Ever heard a vesper whisper to you?” In her eyes, my reflection froze, save for antennae curling subtly in thought. “That appraisal, it’s like a new instinct. And last night? Instinct told me the bane they sent didn’t know their ass from their antenna. So, here—”
On the ground beside her, metal glittered with firelight. It’d lain down there long enough to gather morning dew with the moss. A scuffed metal in the shape of three spiked rings welded together.
Anno’d picked them up, and now threw them at me. I could only catch them. Like this, I looked closer. Knuckledusters. Metal the color of rust, but it was solid :– bloodiron. The rings were large enough to slide three pulvilli in while the opposable digit folded beneath. Leather jutted out on one end of the things. Sheaths. Sliding them away revealed the sharp edge of a dagger.
“—my old pair, ’fore I found the hammer,” Anno finished. “I think you’ll need them.”
“Huh?” I started. “I’m just a rootnurse, I don’t—”
“The game’s changed. Fuckers tipped their hand :– if they had one fresh-fevered wretch, bet on them having others. Mission brief said we might catch banes working with these highway robbers. Was a chance from the start. Now, the dice fell. And I think we just rolled two ones.”
At that, my eyes fell and landed on the body of the purebred cicindela, ichorous effluvia already rotting to plague. From this angle, it appeared half-consumed in flames already.
“Yeah,” I said. “Rotten, rotten luck.” I looked at the bloodiron in my hands. It felt heavy. I tried to explain, “I just do rope tricks. Grow evening cap, sprinkle shatter dust. Rootnursing. My specialty is… tactics.” I was explaining this like I hadn’t spent six months working with her. “I’m trained for—”
A long night watch had put an edge in Anno’s tone. She said, “Training ain’t all there is. When blood hits the ground, the thing you need most? Simple. Promise me, Kharla. Don’t need to swear it. Just… when it’s time to fight, fight. Fight like you want to live.” She stared at me with tired, tired eyes. “Believe me. It’s worth the bother.”
Like I want to live? I don’t… but my palps only pressed together, and didn’t start rubbing. I didn’t stridulate. I didn’t feel like arguing the point.
My gaze fell, again, slower this time, and stopped at her neck. Anno had chains looped and locked, tight and heavy enough to dig into the chitin atop her prothorax.
Five chains. She’d never explained them, nor the colorful, painted locks that hung like cryptic pendants at her neck.
But I had joined this squad before Epifani — before there was room for Epifani without breaking past magic number three.
And when I joined, there were four chains.