Salute the Dark

Nine

‘So, we trust Thalric now, do we?’ Achaeos asked. He was looking better, genuinely better, since his own people’s doctors had started tending him. The long haul to Tharn had been worth the trouble, though now it had seemingly brought more trouble in its wake.

‘I… I think I do,’ Che said.

‘You think you do?’ He grimaced. ‘That doesn’t show much faith, Che.’

He reached his hand out and she took it, marvelling as always at how delicate his fingers were.

‘You remember Myna, Achaeos,’ she said. ‘You remember Kymene and the occupation.’

‘I do, yes.’

‘They need what I can bring them,’ she said simply. ‘Trust him or not, Thalric’s logic is sound.’

‘Only if his information is. Assuming he isn’t simply leading you into a trap.’

‘How can I know.’ She shrugged. ‘But if Thalric wanted to capture us, he’s already had his chance. He could easily hand us over to the Wasps here. He could have forced me to fly off into the Empire – Helleron’s imperial now, and only a step away. Or there’s the camp at Asta, that must be seething with them. I think he’s… lost. He’s used to having a whole Empire driving him on, and now he’s on his own, and he’s not used to that.’

‘Poor little Thalric,’ commented the Moth acidly.

‘But you see what I mean? If Myna rebels, then there will be fewer Wasp soldiers to throw at the Lowlands. If Myna and this other place rebel – and with Sten in the Commonweal trying to roust them up – we could see the whole western Empire reeling. And there must be other places who will try to throw off the yoke if they know the Empire simply doesn’t have the soldiers to spare for them.’

Achaeos closed his eyes, thinking. ‘The Ants of Maynes,’ he murmured, ‘and Sa. Great Delve. Yes, there are others.’ He opened those curious eyes again, without iris or pupil so that she could not tell whether he was looking at her or not. ‘I understand, Che, I really do. I remember Myna. Perhaps we owe them something, after all. I’m just… I don’t trust Thalric and I doubt I ever will. And I worry about you.’

‘And I worry about you too,’ she told him. ‘I’m leaving you here in their hands, after all. And, last I heard, your own people weren’t likely to step in and help you if the Wasps decided that you were a prisoner and not a guest.’

He smiled slightly. ‘It might be that things are changing a little there. It might be that the Tharen are realizing that they’re part of a greater world after all, and that someone who has at least put his nose outside once in a while is, if not much trusted, still useful.’

‘Really?’ Her eyes widened.

‘I’ve been meeting people,’ he explained. ‘They do not like me, Che. I have broken too many unwritten laws for them to like me. They need me, however. And things here are not quite what they seem, regarding the occupation. You forget that we are a cunning people, in our way.’

She pressed her lips together. ‘Well, if you trust them, then maybe I can trust Thalric.’

‘Che, that isn’t the same thing at all.’

‘I know, but…’

His smile became sharp-edged. ‘I know. It’s what Stenwold would do, in your place. And I know what Myna means to Stenwold. For him, it was the door that opened onto the Empire. I know.’ His grip on her hand increased. ‘And you want to be able to tell him how you liberated Myna. You want him to be proud of you.’

He had cut too deep with that. ‘I want to be proud of myself,’ she protested. ‘I seem to spend my whole time walking from one person’s cell to another. I haven’t done anything yet. Now I want to do my bit.’

She had brought the peoples of the Ancient League to stand alongisde Sarn, Achaeos reflected. She had retrieved the plans for the snapbow. She had found allies in Solarno and Tharn for her people. He knew that she would not be satisfied with that, though, for she was still in the shadow of her uncle and her foster-sister, Tynisa.

The thought of Tynisa sent a twinge running through him, even though he never saw her wield the sword against him. That led him on to thoughts of the other player in this drama: the Mosquito-kinden whose servant had, through Tynisa’s stolen arm, vicariously inflicted this wound he suffered. It was a matter he would have to discuss with the Skryres. Even if he could have travelled, he needed most of all to be here.

‘Go, then,’ he told her. ‘You’re right, you must go. Please, though, do not let Thalric guide your hand too much. Do not give him a chance to betray you. When you are in Myna, trust only Kymene and her people, even trust that old Scorpion more than you would trust Thalric. If the Empire should ever hold its hand out to him again, he is theirs.’

‘I know,’ she said.

He hunched forwards, and she hugged him gently but still felt him twitch in pain.

‘And don’t you trust your people more than you have to,’ she warned him. ‘If they genuinely liked you, that might last, but if they only need you then they’ll drop you as soon as that need is gone.’

‘Oh, I know it,’ he agreed. ‘Don’t think that I don’t.’

And yet, when she paused in the infirmary doorway before going, he was stabbed by the sudden thought, I will never see her again, and did not know if this was fear or prophecy.

After Che had gone, he sensed movement nearby, and it was not long before Xaraea stepped suspiciously into the room with narrowed eyes.

‘All overheard of course,’ said Achaeos tiredly. ‘I would have more privacy if I were an Ant.’

‘Aside from your perversions,’ she said, ‘you come close to betraying us.’

‘Only if you believe she would betray me.’

‘If she is to go now into the Empire, she is not safe bearing any knowledge that could harm us.’

Achaeos stared at her for a long time, until she broke and asked him, ‘What? What is it?’

‘I see why you need my differing viewpoint,’ he told her. ‘You have an imperial garrison. You have an imperial governor. What part of the Empire are we not inside?’

She scowled at him but had no answer to that, just saying, ‘Speaking of the governor, it is time for you to meet him. As it is not fit for him to come to your bedside, that means you will have to walk.’

In the end they had to help him along. He was not even capable of the length of journey that a few turned corners and passages would have made. He was healing fast, but the wound had been an inch off mortal. The chamber they took him to was one designed for meditation. Perhaps they hope to make the Empire think like them?

There was a Skryre, an old woman, seated there. Her glance towards Achaeos was bleak but not hostile. Achaeos thought he saw a touch of fear there, too, in the very depths of her white eyes. She nodded to his escorts and they took him over and lowered him until he sat beside her. A Mantis-kinden in robes knelt down beside and slightly behind him, ready to assist him if he needed it.

‘Say nothing,’ the Skryre instructed him. ‘Watch only.’

Xaraea had now taken up station beside the door, beyond which Achaeos could already hear the marching feet: the military approach of destiny.

Their visitor wore the uniform of a Wasp officer off duty: not armour but tunic and cloak in black and gold, fastened richly with jewelled pins. He entered with a female Wasp slave-girl and with half a dozen guards as his escort, as haughty and arrogant as any Wasp governor might wish to appear.

The old woman stood up as he entered, and even Achaeos was helped to his feet

‘My Lord Governor Tegrec,’ greeted Xaraea, who had been waiting at the door with every appearance of calm. Achaeos knew his own people, though: she was the centre point, the knot that was holding this fragile arrangement together, and she knew it. The weight of all her people was on her, and he could detect the minute signs of strain. Achaeos had found in himself a growing coldness for his people, for their isolationism, their hostility to the world and particularly to Che’s kin. In contrast he admired Xaraea. She had delivered herself into the very hands of the Empire in order to save the Moths.

Tegrec, this new governor, was not impressive for a Wasp: short and stout and garishly dressed, Still he put on a show, looking over the conquered people with the proper disdain before waving to his escort. ‘You may leave us.’ It was not recklessness in the face of danger that he displayed, but the confidence of a man who knows in his heart that the enemy is beaten.

The soldiers retreated, and Tegrec waited, as if listening while their footsteps receded, the light of their lanterns dimming and dying away. That left only the two torches the Mantis servant had lit to flare and gutter and cast shadows about the little room.

Tegrec smirked. That was the only word for the expression that crossed his face. He cast a look back in the direction of his retreating soldiers and smirked. A tension, perhaps an entirely manufactured tension, then left the room. His Mantis carer lowered Achaeos back to the floor, where he sat cross-legged and watched the Wasp governor of Tharn don a black robe and go native. Tegrec held onto the last rags of his sombre mood until his girl had finished tugging the garment into shape, and then smiled at them, and perhaps at himself.

‘My Lord Governor,’ the Skryre said, standing almost hidden in the folds of her robe, a coiled staff in one hand. Like all Skryres, and like most Moth-kinden of station, she had not revealed her name.

Tegrec looked from her to Achaeos, and then himself sat down. In the robe, he could have been a somewhat bulky Moth student ready to learn from his teachers. That is what he is – Achaeos had not quite believed it, when they had told him – a Wasp seer, and mostly self-taught, but here he is learning from the masters.

Xaraea seated herself as well, as did the slave-girl. The aged Skryre took a few halting steps.

‘This is Achaeos,’ she declared. ‘He comes to us from the Lowlands, where your people make war.’

Tegrec nodded.

‘We are approaching a time of crisis, Tegrec,’ said the Skryre. By naming him, while herself remaining nameless, she shaped her authority over him. ‘You, especially, face such a time too. Do you understand me?’

‘I believe I do.’ The Wasp still smiled.

‘Our bargain holds, does it not?’

‘I have no complaints.’ He glanced at the girl beside him, and Achaeos saw that, with the guards now gone, the distance between master and slave had relaxed as well.

‘You have been an able student,’ the Skryre admitted. ‘You have achieved more than we might have expected, from your kind.’

Tegrec looked directly at Achaeos, as though trying to read him. In returning the favour Achaeos discerned a man out of his depth, and yet who was still swimming further away from shore.

What must it have been like, to grow up in a different world to all those around you? The division between the Apt and the Inapt was the defining line between the burning new and the fading old. There were so few that could even get close enough to see into the other side. He thought of Che, then, who had been willing to join him on that border, close enough for them to touch hands. He found himself respecting this Tegrec for what he must have achieved. Taking on the Empire with a handful of magical tricks, and then carving out his own place in it, must have been difficult for him. It probably still was.

‘You are asking me to make an exchange,’ Tegrec said at last. He glanced at his girl once again. ‘You want to change our arrangement?’

‘We have tried to hold back change for many centuries,’ the Skryre remarked drily. ‘We discover that it cannot be done, so, yes, there will be change.’

‘I understand what you are asking of me,’ Tegrec said, ‘but perhaps you do not understand what you are asking me to give up.’

The Skryre’s lips twitched. ‘This Achaeos you see here, he knows, for he is here only as a brief gap in his exile. He has chosen life with our enemies, rather than with his own. Still, he is here, which shows that loyalty to the great mysteries overcomes all else. Can you yourself look upon your Empire, your rank, your years of time-serving, and say, “This is a thing I cannot let go of”?’

‘I must think on this,’ Tegrec insisted.

‘Do not think overlong,’ the Skryre warned him.

After doffing the robe, Tegrec stepped from the room and rejoined his Wasp escort, but he said nothing to them. He was still deep in thought.

I have always walked a line.

He was Major Tegrec, governor of the little-regarded city of Tharn, a chill and mountainous backwater taken by the Empire only because it was there, on the edge of their expanding frontier. The Moth-kinden, isolated and backward, had nothing to offer the Empire: poor warriors, poor labourers, a nation of recluses and hermits. Tegrec himself had already confirmed this to his superiors, reporting in just the right tones of resentful suffering.

Walking the line indeed, but he was a fiercely ambitious man, always pushing, always manipulating. He could not name any other major who was a governor, even of such an insignificant place as this. At the same time he was a cripple – enduring a carefully hidden mental deformity, an inability to conceive of what others found so natural. It leaked out, it showed, and he was not liked even by those who made use of him. They knew there was something unsound in him, and they had failed to root it out only because the barrier to understanding worked both ways. They could not imagine the world he lived in.

Since coming to Tharn, he had found another line to walk. He spit-shone his public face daily: the grim imperial governor of Tharn administrating this lonely, ancient eyesore, dealing with the complaints of his staff and soldiers, who were treating their assignment here as a punishment detail. Behind that face, however, he was a changed man. Before arriving here he had learnt his magic hand to mouth, from old books, or through ailing slaves from distant lands. He had come to Tharn with a piecemeal, patchwork knowledge that had eased his way within the Empire only because he used it like a conman would: they heard his words, saw his hands move the cups, and none of them could see why the ball was not where they had guessed. He had lived his whole life in fear that he would be uncovered, not as a fake but as the real thing. He had never named himself as a Seer.

The Moths, however, had named him as just that. The Moths were arrogant, exclusive, elitist, but what they looked for was not race or birth but talent. His scraps of understanding had been patched and stitched into whole cloth during his time here. His talent was unquestioned: they had never known a Wasp magician before. Perhaps there had never been one since the Days of Lore.

I do not belong here. But nor did he belong anywhere. He had burrowed his way through the Empire like a parasite, but here in Tharn he did not have to hide what he was. He would not be the first traitor the Empire had known, nor even the first traitor governor. He consoled himself with the thought that they would never understand, back in Capitas, why he had acted as he had.

He had made his choice.