Salute the Dark

Thirteen

It was a long road to Szar, travelling only at the dragging pace of the machine wagons. Drephos’ mobile workshops, his mechanisms and tools, pieces and parts, furnaces and refineries, had all been carefully packed into a convoy of a dozen great hauling automotives. The master artificer himself spent the time cursing the lack of rails, and fitfully designing a rail-laying automotive that would allow him to go anywhere, with his entire surroundings, as fast as he pleased.

His staff received less preferential treatment than his working materials. A single automotive was assigned to carry them, and the huge Mole Cricket, Big Greyv, took up most of that. The others perched on top, or moved between the wagons, or dropped back and conversed with the soldiers who were escorting them.

Kaszaat had no talk, however. If not for Totho’s presence she would have passed the entire journey without one single word. For Kaszaat was going home.

At nights, Totho led her away from the others, to the camp’s fringes sometimes or into one of the wagons. She could not bear to be near Drephos, even to be anywhere he might turn his head and see her.

‘He thinks I will betray him,’ she said.

‘No,’ Totho assured her, and it was no more than the truth. Drephos did not think of her at all.

‘But the others do. They know where we’re going, and why. We’re going now to kill my people. My own people.’

Totho regarded her carefully. Tonight they were in one of the machine wagons, nestled amongst the canvas-wrapped crates and boxes.

‘How did you come to leave your home?’ he asked, hoping that there was some bad blood to uncover, some injustice she could cling to.

‘I was conscripted, sold into the army, what did you think?’ she snapped at him. ‘I had training, so they put me with engineers. I was passed hand to hand. Then Drephos saw me, took me. Now they will kill me.’

Though curled up in his arms, she was tense as a drawn bow. By ‘they’ he did not know whether she meant the Empire or her own people. Neither did he have any simple answers. What will she do, when we face her family? He did not want to find out, but each morning, as the lumbering caravan set off again, it took them closer to that inexorable confrontation.

It was Totho’s first experience of travelling officially through the Empire, rather than as on that hurried and furtive expedition to Myna to rescue Che and Salma. He was not sure that he preferred the change. The Empire was not so dissimilar to the Lowlands. Once they were past the Darakyon and the northern fringe of the Dryclaw, they passed into hilly farming country, with fields being ploughed by hand or with the help of draught-beetles, and with little goat- or sheep-herding villages huddled between the rises. The difference was in their reaction to the convoy. As soon as it was sighted, the locals, be they Soldier Beetles or Bee-kinden or Wasps, turned themselves more diligently to their work. They would not even look on the convoy or its escort, but Totho could read the sense of fear in them. The Empire was a harsh master.

And I am now a part of the Empire. Not a new thought either. If he let himself recall the despite he had suffered for his heritage, he could wash his guilt away easily. It was a constant effort to stave the idea off.

For the first tenday of the journey, Drephos had kept to himself in icy anger, not speaking to anyone, glowering at the crew of the automotives or at the soldiers of the escort if they dared approach him. He hunched over his drawings, scoring them through and making better copies, still smarting from being wrenched from the mechanical wealth of Helleron. After that, he recovered something of his usual character, and then it became a daily business of conference with the Beetle twins and Big Greyv, whilst the other artificers were let loose to do whatever they wished. Aside from sitting silently beside Kaszaat atop one or other of the automotives, watching the sparse countryside pass them by, Totho worked on his elaboration of the snapbow. He thought he had a design now for a repeating model, although he doubted it would ever prove economic enough to furnish an army with it. Still, he had no other project to hand.

When they were only a tenday or so from Szar, by their best calculations, the twins disappeared. The vehicles had set off that morning, no different from the last, but then one of the other artificers had remarked on their absence. Drephos had the convoy halted at once, sending the soldiers out in all directions to search for them. He was not overly concerned, and Totho could detect no thought in him that the two Beetles might have come to harm. Instead, Drephos was inconvenienced. He merely wanted the two of them returned so that he could continue his work. All the while, Big Greyv dogged his steps solemnly, carrying cases of scrolls and books without complaint.

It took the soldiers almost half a day to find the missing artificers, and they brought them back nervously for Drephos’ inspection. Both were dead, though unmarked. All thoughts instantly turned to possible enemies in the villages around them. Perhaps the Bee-kinden had sent assassins out. Kaszaat found that idea ridiculous. Drephos himself conducted the examination of the bodies, hunched over them as though they were malfunctioning machines that he could bring back to life with the right repairs.

He did not speak to Totho about his findings, but he must have told someone other than the habitually silent Big Greyv, because rumour leaked out. The twins had been poisoned. They had, by all appearances, poisoned themselves.

From there it was a matter of remaining quiet and listening. Totho was good at that. The convoy meanwhile was rife with speculation. Drephos and Big Greyv seemed the only two not talking about it. Totho had not known the two Beetle-kinden, but posthumously he discovered a great deal.

After that, one night on which the convoy had stopped close enough to Szar for Kaszaat to be staring off towards the north-easterly horizon anxiously, Totho crept about the haulage automotives and inspected the contents, looking closely at form and function and drawing his conclusions.

It was something he should have been able to work out before, had he only thought of it. It was something, he suspected, that all of the other artificers had realized but were pretending otherwise. It was Drephos’ new weapon.

That night, after these conclusions, he sought out Kaszaat and guided her away from the convoy, passing between lax sentries until they were on a hilltop overlooking the circle of machines, and well out of earshot.

‘They’ll think we’ve gone the same way as the twins,’ she murmured, looking down at the cooking fire, the pole-mounted lanterns of the sentries.

‘Kaszaat,’ Totho said, ‘the twins… they weren’t actually machinists, were they?’

‘Of course they were, we all are,’ she said, and then, ‘but not just that. Not only.’

‘I’ve heard people talk about those two,’ he said. ‘They were alchemists as well. That was why Drephos recruited them.’

‘They worked the reagent that brought down the walls of Tark,’ Kaszaat agreed. From a certain reticence evident in her tone, Totho knew that she had already guessed at the suggestion he was about to make. Out there was her home city, currently in arms against the Empire, while here came Drephos to reforge the chains and bonds of imperial servitude.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and she did not ask, For what? but just leant into him. She was trembling slightly.

Why doesn’t she flee? he wondered. Why doesn’t she go back to her own people? But he knew the answer to that. It was the same invisible leash that kept him here. They had all of them severed their ties to their former homes when they joined Drephos’ cadre.

He was not sure what impulse had made him spare her a further revelation that most likely would reveal nothing she had not already grasped, but instead he held close to her and said nothing more.

Certainty was closer than he thought.

They arrived in Szar itself soon afterwards. Smoke hung over its far side, smogging the city’s low, domed buildings. The only people abroad in the streets were Wasp-kinden soldiers and a few Scorpion Auxillians with mottled, yellowish skin and long-hafted axes cocked back over their shoulders. The artificers’ convoy made a snaking circle around a resting marketplace, where the rags and splinters of ruined stalls still crunched underfoot. Totho glanced at the nearby houses, expecting to see the faces of locals peering out suspiciously, but they seemed empty. The doors were mostly broken in, and some had been burnt out.

Drephos half-climbed and half-flew down from the lead automotive, pausing halfway to look critically about him at the city. Totho could see what must be the governor’s palace, a heavy ziggurat of Wasp architecture louring over the smaller native buildings. As the convoy approached it, a delegation of Wasp soldiers issued forth in a large enough number to make Totho suspect some plot against Drephos. Their attention seemed locked towards the north, though, and the bulk of the city in that direction. There was a large Wasp of middle years nested within these soldiers, who only stepped forth when his escort had merged with that of the convoy. His face was marked with a livid, painful weal that seemed almost in the shape of a small hand.

‘Colonel Drephos?’ he asked uncertainly, and the hooded halfbreed raised his one metal hand.

‘You’re Colonel Gan, I take it. The governor here?’

‘I am, yes. I think-’

‘Have your men unload my wagons. I want as much space as possible within your palace cleared for a workshop.’

Colonel Gan bristled. ‘Colonel-Auxillian Drephos…’

‘Listen to me, Governor,’ Drephos said sharply. ‘I did not ask to come to this wretched place. I did not ask to be the agent to relieve you from your own failures. I have work to do and a war to fight, and I want none of this provincial brawling. I will do here what I am commanded, and then I will leave.’

‘Now listen here-’ Gan puffed himself up, acutely aware of his soldiers listening.

‘Are you aware of my orders?’ Drephos demanded.

‘Of course-’

‘Repeat them to me, if you will.’

‘Repeat them?’

‘I wish to ensure,’ the master artificer said, ‘that you are fully aware of my brief, Governor. If you please.’

‘I am told, halfbreed,’ Gan said pointedly, obviously wishing he could have Drephos struck dead on the spot, ‘that you are here to put down the rebellion in my city.’

‘At whatever cost,’ Drephos prompted.

‘At whatever cost,’ Gan agreed. ‘And believe me, if you fail, they shall hear of it in Capitas.’

‘No doubt. Now kindly have my machinery unloaded so that I may get to work.’ Drephos turned his back on the purple-faced governor, and limped back over to his team. Behind him, soldiers had already begun to unbuckle the automotives’ loads.

‘Any comments?’ he asked his cadre.

‘You… are clearly not interested in making friends here, master,’ Totho said slowly. Some of the other artificers laughed a little at that.

‘The Empire has dozens of heavy-minded buffoons like Colonel Gan, all men of good family and narrow views. There is only one of me, however. Do not fear his retribution, for we will not feel it.’

At that moment there was a loud clang as one of the unloaders dropped some piece of equipment, and Drephos rounded on them furiously.

‘Be careful, you fools!’ he shouted across at them. ‘There is not a piece there that is not delicate.’

The Szaren garrison men stared back at him sullenly. Totho guessed that, while they might not be overfond of their own commander, they resented this halfbreed artificer striding into their city as though he owned it.

One of them, quite deliberately, took the keg he was holding and dropped it ten feet off the back of an automotive, staring at Drephos expressionlessly. That was when it happened: Drephos twitched as if stabbed, and then shouted a warning at them all to move back and clear the entire area. The artificers were sufficiently used to his commands to scurry away as quickly as possible. Totho could even hear the faint hiss from the keg and, looking back from a distance that Drephos seemed to think was safe, he thought he detected a faint yellow mist in the air.

By that time the garrison men nearest to the keg were either dead or dying, convulsing and arching their backs, clawing bloody lines in their own throats and faces. The rest were already running or airborne, but the slowest of them collapsed before they were clear of the circle of automotives, until there was a sprawl of dead soldiers radiating outwards from the dropped keg and a dreadful silence throughout the ruined market, the survivors staring not at the corpses but at Drephos.

‘Once again,’ the master artificer reminded them, ‘be careful. Am I understood?’