Prologue

Rem never liked being out and about in places with lots of humans. They were always so very noisy, and they didn’t move right.

Humans were always in motion, twitching and walking and running and moving their arms around to do stuff. There was none of that silent contemplation, the slow calculated positioning that came before a strike.

She didn’t like that. It made them so very annoying to deal with. Worse, when the humans saw her face, with her many-faceted eyes and finger-sized mandibles, they always had such loud reactions. They’d scream, and if she pinned them down to demand things they would tremble and kick.

Her mother had said that humans were not for eating, and the word of the God Mother was absolute, the humans had nothing to worry about.

Rem reached up and adjusted her hood. It hid her face, reducing the amount of screaming and running that would happen. It also made her peripheral vision terrible.

She hated cities.

Not only were they filled with humans, but they stank, and it was hard to hunt. You ate one noble’s favourite dog and all of a sudden life got really complicated for a while.

Rem twitched her scythes, the many powerful muscles that held her arms back from snapping out tensing up.

She didn’t have a choice in the matter though. Her Divine Mother had demanded that they find that Herald of...

Rem brought her arm up and rubbed her elbow over an eye. She couldn’t remember. Something about science?

He was a skeleton guy, and her mom wanted her and her sisters to find and kill him. Easy.

So, she was in this stinking city because that’s where people went. And she’d find that skeleton guy before her sisters, and then she’d get to eat her sisters because they were so much slower than her.

Her mandibles worked, keeping her acidic spit in check before it spilled down the front of her robes.

Robes!

That was another thing that was stupid about humans. They had to wear all these clothes things, and they imposed them on perfectly normal mantis girls like her. She didn’t want to wear any coverings. It wasn’t natural.

Had she the right kind of face bits, Rem would have pouted.

She came to a stop in the middle of the city square. It was a big place. Very square. With square buildings all around. A very functional name for a place. She liked that.

What she didn’t like were all the hawkers screaming from behind kiosks and the carriages moving by, pulled by hardy horses that she wasn’t allowed to eat where people could see her.

The air stank of manure and human sweat and... she opened her mandibles a bit wider and turned to the side. Something smelled different. It didn’t take much for her five eyes to settle on a cart set off to one side, right by the corner leading off to some road with a collection of shops selling human things.

The cart had a fire on it, in a sort of stone device, and a young man was turning a spit on which a small, skinless bit of meat was skewered. The fat from the meat landed in the fire with a sizzle-hiss that sounded as good as it smelled. She noticed a bag next to him, filled with more meat.

Rem skittered over to the man and the cart and the meat. The problem with cities--one of them--was that the hunting was awful. But they sometimes had food just set out like this.

She stopped before the stall and paused.

Humans had this thing where they traded small pieces of metal for food. She wasn’t stupid, she understood currency and all of that. She even took the little pouch of coins that her mother’s servants had offered her to help on her mission.

The problem was that scythes were really not suited to fiddling inside of a pouch to pull out a single coin.

No matter. If the meat selling person wanted his coins, he’d have to figure it out.

She leaned forwards before the cart until the man turning the spit paused and looked at her. “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked. “We have some excellent beef here today. Fresh from the field.”

Rem hissed and screeched at him that she was, in fact, very interested in his stock of meat. She even slid her hood back to better communicate.

Of course, the stupid human didn’t speak the language of insects, and he fell back, gibbering stuff about how his emperor would save him. The stupid human.

Rem shifted her mandibles in frustration and focused as hard as she could. She, of course, knew how to speak human. Not all the human tongues, because humans being humans they had to make things complicated and have more than one language, but she could manage with the local dialect at least.

“Stupid,” she said, addressing the man. “I’m hungry. I want this meat.”

The man picked himself off the ground and swallowed hard as she eyed him. “You’re one of those... ah, I mean... of course?”

“Good. Good stupid,” she praised the human. She carefully slid one of her scythe-tipped arms out from under her robed and tapped the cart before her. “Now.”

The man nodded quickly, pulled the meat off the spit, and stuck the whole thing onto a long piece of wood.

Rem eyed the skewer, then her scythes.

Scythes were great for many things. Cutting, stabbing, pinching things against the spines jutting out of her arm.

They were not great at grabbing things. That was one area where humans had it better than her.

Carefully, she aimed at the piece of meat in the man’s hand, then her arm shot out and stabbed through it, one of the little spines on the back of her arm holding it fast so that she could pull it to her widened mandibles.

The human’s face went pale as he watched her other arm come up to hold the meat in place as she chewed it apart, her mandibles tearing pieces out and tossing them to her acid-covered palps. “Oh, Emperor,” the man whispered.

When she was left with nothing but a piece of wood sizzling with her saliva, she tossed it down, then leaned over the cart. “How much?”

“P-pardon?”

“How much money was that?” she asked.

“I...” he swallowed, then pointed to a sign.

She looked at the scribbles on it, then back to the man. Did he expect her to know what any of that meant? “Tell me, stupid.”

“It’s two copper pieces?” he tried.

She had silver pieces in her pouch. Opening her robes a little more, she exposed her belt, which was a piece of leather strapped around her waist, then pointed to her money pouch with a sythe. “The money is here.”

“It’s okay, totally okay,” the man said.

“Take the money!” she hissed.

She didn’t need anyone accusing her of being a thief. Again. It was too much trouble dealing with all those stupid cultivators. Sure, they tasted better, but they also put up more of a fight.

“It’s fine?” he tried.

She tilted her head down so that she was meeting each of his eyes with at least two of her own. “Take the money.”

The map’s tongue darted out and licked his lips. Carefully, he reached out and brought his trembling hand over to her money pouch. He fumbled with the drawstring for a moment, then pulled out a silver coin.

“I want change.”

The man jumped a foot into the air, almost fumbled the coin, then clutched it close. “Of course!” he said.

“And another meat.”

“They’re not ready yet,” he said. He sounded like he was about to cry.

She didn’t like it when humans cried. Especially the young ones. They always threw tantrums when they found her eating their dogs.

If humans didn’t want her eating their dogs, they just had to find less delicious pets.

“I don’t care,” Rem said. “Give me another meat. And no wood.”

The man fumbled with his own change pouch, then placed some coins on the top of the cart next to a piece of fresh meat from his meat bag. “Th-there you go!”

“Put it in the pouch, stupid,” she said as she grabbed the meat and started chewing through it. It was much better uncooked, but she did miss the warmth a little. Of course, actual fresh meat wouldn’t have that kind of problem.

Once the shopkeeper... the cartkeeper, had put her change away, she thanked him by not eating him, then stalked off while picking at her mandibles with one of the spikes on her arm joint. She’d have to try eating at other stalls, to try our different sorts of meat. It wouldn’t beat hunting, but it would at least entertain her for a little while.

She didn’t know how long she’d be in the city. Seven Hills, which was a stupid name for a city, was right on the border of the Flamming Steppes and the rest of the Empire. She wasn’t allowed in the rest of the Empire of course.

People like her were always accused of being beasts and hunted by cultivators if they moved too far from the Steppes and the influence of her divine mother.

This was the city nearest the border, so if that bony guy came here, he’d have to pass by this city.

Most humans moved from city to city, and used roads to move around when they could. It was because they didn’t like hunting, which was always best far from the roads.

Like a good ambush predator, she just had to find a place to stalk the bony man from, then she could chop his head off, and be rewarded for all of her efforts.

Not that Rem particularly cared much for rewards and such. She was a simple kind of mantis.

She was halfway to the edge of the city square when she noticed something that caught her eye. A splash of white in the sea of blandly dressed humans. Her eye twitched to the side to follow the motion.

It was a person, a human, moving through the crowds with an elegant, almost dance-like gait. They wore a black dress, with white lacy and a head-dress atop their head.

They movements weren’t the motions of a normal human though. They were too precise, to perfect. Even with the wide skirt they avoided so much as brushing anyone, all without slowing down their step.

She thought she recognized them. Then it clicked. The person that was travelling with the bony person she had to kill.

Her mandibles clicked together in joy and she lowered herself down before darting ahead.

So lucky! Her prey came to her.

Now all she had to do was find a place from which to catch this person in an ambush and she’d not only have another meal, she’d get a lead to the bony man.

Being the patient hunter that she was, Rem didn’t merely rush towards the woman in the black dress. She instead moved to the edges of the square and climbed up the walls of a building until she lay herself flat atop the roof.

From there, she could wait, saliva drooling out of her mouth as she watched the black-clad woman going from cart to cart and from shop to shop. She had a basket which she filled with all sorts of foods and cloth and other such things.

Once, Rem thought she was seen, but that was unlikely, she was in the shade cast by a taller roof, and her robes were of a similar colour as the tiles on which she rested.

She lay there, completely unmoving for some time.

And then the woman slipped into an alley nearby.

Rem’s mandibles twisted into a content grin.

It was time to strike!

***