Salute the Dark

Fifteen

Hokiak had kept her in a cellar for what had felt like an age, but was probably only a couple of hours. Che had thought, Again! Again in someone’s cell. At the time she had not believed his claims. She had assumed that he would hand her over to the Empire, or perhaps simply to the highest bidder.

She hoped Thalric had got away, at least. It was a strange thing to wish for, considering her own extremity. She had no illusions that he might come back for her.

Then she was dragged up into the old Scorpion’s back room again, hauled into the lamplight and cuffed sharply when she stumbled. Hokiak was waiting there for her, leaning on his stick.

‘As promised,’ he said. His clients were all cloaked but, on peering up at them, she found herself looking into blue-grey Mynan faces.

‘Please…’ she said. ‘Help me-’

Without otherwise showing any particular acrimony, one of them kicked her in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her. As she choked and gasped around the pain, the other handed a pouch to Hokiak.

‘Compliments of the Red Flag,’ she heard.

The Scorpion nodded. ‘And be sure you give your chief my regards. Anything she wants, she knows where to find me.’

Without another word, the two Mynans hauled Che effortlessly upright. She felt something cold pressed against her side and knew it was a dagger blade.

‘Any struggle, one word from you,’ the man said, ‘and your masters’ll still be picking up the pieces in a tenday’s time. Understand?’

‘Please,’ she got out, ‘just take me to Kymene.’

The dagger pricked her and she stopped.

‘One more word,’ said the Mynan flatly. ‘Any word you please, and I’ll gut you right here and now.’

They hurried her through the city by the backstreets. It was night and she got little sense of the place, but there was a tension in the air. A lot of the locals were out under the dark sky, standing aimlessly as though waiting to be told what to do.

Thalric was right about this place, she thought. Shame everything else has gone so wrong.

They reached an anonymous-looking house in one of the many districts the Wasps had left to decay, and bundled her swiftly into it: from Hokiak’s cellar to the cellar of this place with the minimum of fuss. They locked her in, and left her there with her hands tied.

It will all be all right, she tried to tell herself. Kymene will come, and she’ll believe me. It will all be all right. It served as a hollow little mantra to recite to herself.

She guessed that most of an hour had gone past before the door opened again, and a Mynan man stalked down the stone steps towards her. A second man stayed aloft with a lantern, but Che did not need its light to recognize her visitor. For a moment his name escaped her, then it was blessedly in the front of her mind.

‘Chyses!’

He stared at her, motioned for the lantern to come closer. The man had changed little, save that his expression of bitter dissatisfaction had deepened. He had a knife in his hand, and she realized it was not to frighten her so much as to whet his own anticipation. Tynisa always said she didn’t like him…

‘Chyses, it’s me,’ Che said. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’

‘Of course I recognize you,’ the Mynan said coldly. ‘That’s usually the case with traitors.’

‘I’m no traitor,’ she protested.

‘Hokiak thinks you are.’

‘Hokiak is wrong! Hokiak only thinks so because I came in with a Wasp. If I was really trying to infiltrate your people, would I do that?’

Chyses regarded her without love. ‘I can’t think of anyone who would do something that stupid, so why not a traitor? It makes sense to me. Besides, I hear the Wasp ran after killing some of Hokiak’s men.’

‘He’s a renegade and the Empire wants him dead. He must have thought Hokiak was going to sell him out.’

‘You tell whatever story you want, right now,’ Chyses said. ‘Give me time and I’ll pare the truth from you, so you just go ahead and babble.’

‘Will you at least let me speak to Kymene?’ she asked.

Chyses gave a smile that was brief and unpleasant. ‘Be careful what you ask for. She’s coming to see you, girl. For old times’ sake, maybe.’

Maybe she thinks she owes me that much, Che thought. Or maybe she just wants to see me cut up with her own eyes.

‘I can help you, help the whole resistance,’ she insisted. ‘I came here to help.’

‘Of course you did, only not to help us.’ He crouched by her, the knife prominent. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll have a talk, you and I. We’ll bare everything, every truth. Have no worries about that.’

She was about to appeal to him again, but she could not. This was a man short on trust. He had lived his life in an occupied city, fighting his own private war, and to him she was just another excuse to sharpen his hatred. She guessed that he even preferred killing traitors to killing the enemy. Probably he liked to take longer over it, too.

Then Kymene herself was stepping down into the cellar. The sight of her showed just how far the revolution in Myna had progressed. She wore a robe, but it was open down the front, exposing her black breastplate adorned with the two red arrows of the resistance: We have fallen, we shall rise again. She was armed, and she must have walked openly through the streets like that, along with her guards and unchallenged by the Wasps. Che guessed that areas of Myna like this must be virtually off-limits to the invaders now.

But Kymene herself, beyond the clothes, was the same woman Che recalled: young and fierce and proud, her hair cropped short, truly a warrior queen of Myna. In her expression there was no acknowledgement of the night that both women had been freed from the Empire’s cells, no common cause.

‘It is her, isn’t it,’ she declared.

Chyses nodded, stepping back. Che tried to speak but, in the face of Kymene’s piercing gaze, the words dried up.

‘Cheerwell Maker,’ she said, ‘they tell me you’re a Wasp agent these days.’

‘No,’ Che whispered. Kymene knelt beside her, scabbard-tip grating on the stone of the cellar floor.

‘I liked your uncle,’ the woman said. ‘As far as I’d trust an outsider, I’d trust him. You’re not him, though, for if he was here, like this, I’d take his word.’

‘Please,’ Che said, looking into her eyes. ‘I’m no traitor. I came with news, to help you. The Wasps never tortured me to make me their agent! They’re fighting my people even now.’

‘We have people in the palace – we had them there even then – and they know you were taken off to be interrogated. They heard the machines working, though sometimes all it takes is just the sight of them to break someone’s spirit.’ Kymene said it in a tone of dreadful reasonableness.

‘It… they didn’t really do it,’ Che insisted, aware of how wretched that must sound. ‘It was just a ploy… the man in charge was doing something complicated, political. He, please, he needed the noise as a cover to talk to one of his own agents…’

‘Did he. And who was this man?’

‘He was…’ The same man who fled from me at Hokiak’s. Kymene was eyeing her expectantly, though, so silence was not an option.

‘His name,’ Che said finally, ‘is Thalric. He went renegade later, for another reason. It’s complicated but, please, you have to…’

Kymene cut her off with just a gesture. A thoughtful expression came over her face. Chyses shuffled, sensing a new turn in the conversation which he was not happy about.

‘Thalric,’ the Mynan leader repeated.

‘Yes…’ It was obvious that Kymene knew that name, but for the life of her Che could not work out how.

‘Kymene, this is nonsense,’ Chyses grated. ‘Let me work on her now. I’ll have the true story in two minutes.’

‘Thalric,’ Kymene repeated. ‘Yes, that was his name.’

‘What?’ Chyses demanded.

Kymene stood up abruptly, and Che wondered if it was because she did not entirely trust Chyses behind her with a knife.

‘Thalric was indeed doing something political right then. I have cause to know it. So that much, at least, is true.’

‘Political? What’s that supposed to mean?’ Chyses snarled.

Kymene’s smile was brilliant and hard. ‘He was killing the Bloat, Chyses. He’s the one who killed our last governor for us, rid us of good old Ulther.’

To his credit, Chyses made no protest, merely stared.

‘Keep hold of her,’ Kymene ordered. ‘Untie her but keep her guarded. Find me this Thalric. Find me also people from Hokiak’s who’ll recognize him. I want to talk to him.’

Thalric had found himself a low taverna by the river by the name of Flaneme’s. Under the stern gaze of a woman of the same name, who was a broad-shouldered, massive-armed matron, he took a cup of wine and considered his options.

How madly optimistic he had been to think that his name would not have become common parlance in Myna! Seeing the facts inscribed on paper, uncovered during his idle investigations at Tharn, the idea had seemed clear to him. He had put himself seamlessly back into the spy game without recalling the pain that had sent him away from it.

No doubt that old rogue Hokiak had since heard all the Rekef news: who was in and who was out. He bared his teeth in frustration and glowered into the wine, seeing there a darkened glimpse of his own reflection. Hokiak had obviously pegged Che as a Rekef turncoat, this new allegiance twisted into her painfully in the torture rooms of the governor’s palace. The irony of that notion was not lost on Thalric, who had in the end never quite found the proper moment to put Che to the question. Now he could spare a thought to wonder whether the Scorpion would sell her either to the resistance or the Empire – and which of them, at this stage, would be kinder. Beyond that single speculation his own fate consumed his thoughts entirely.

He was being shadowed, he knew. Whoever it was, acting for whatever side in the little brawl that was brewing in Myna, they did not yet want to broach him openly. They were waiting for him to put himself neatly where they could descend on him with the minimum of public fuss. That might mean that it was Kymene’s people come to finish him off. Or it might mean that it was the Rekef, who preferred to have people disappear without even a ripple. He was definitely being watched, however. He had come into Flaneme’s place because it was near-full with rivermen and labourers, men and women whose politics were probably not hot enough to set them against him. Still, he had gathered some filthy looks on entering, so the intelligence he had perused in Tharn had been right. Uprising was hanging on the air like smoke.

Why in blazes did I come back to this wretched town? His past had crossed with Myna’s too many times: in the initial imperial conquest, when he had been a raw young officer under Ulther’s patronage; his betrayal of that same patron all those years later, on the orders of his Rekef masters; and now a third time with this debacle. He should have left it at just twice.

He had to leave Myna immediately. He caught himself wondering how he would break this news to Stenwold. Fool! But it was true that abandoning Che had left a foul taste in the mouth. In a life composed of so many dark deeds this one, he realized, would stay with him.

Just one more amongst the host, though, so he would live with it.

A shadow crossing him made him look up. Flaneme stood there, burly arms folded. ‘Time for you to leave, Master Wasp.’

He stared up at her, biting down his instinctive response. He knew this game well, for he had played it from across the table often enough.

‘Right then.’ He put the wine bowl down, still untouched, flexing his hands in readiness. Out there his persecutors would be waiting. They had passed their message on to Flaneme, who, like any good taverna-keeper, would try to keep each side of the fight happy. She was telling him that he was no longer protected here, and she would call on her other patrons to throw him out or beat him unconscious if she had to.

He stood up, throwing back his cloak to free his sword-hilt. The taverna door was already open, with a cold breeze ghosting in. With a slight smile he stepped out, seeing a full dozen cloaked men waiting for him, most standing on the ground, a few hovering on rooftops. It was the Rekef then.

‘I take the numbers as a compliment,’ he said, mostly to himself. The door slammed shut behind him, and he heard the bar go down into place.

They moved in on him, rushing forwards directly or stooping from the roofs. He thrust his open palms towards them, summoning the Art of his people. The smile still had not left his face.

In the end they had been hampered by their need to take him alive. Thalric had made no scruples of abusing that advantage. In the quick, vicious scuffle, as they descended on him from all sides, and then as they wrestled to subdue him, he had killed five of them with his sting. It was an Art he was strong in. Putting his hand to a man’s chest, he could punch a fist-sized hole right through his victim. In a brawl it was better than any hidden knife.

He did not earn their love, for that. Their orders to keep him alive had not specified in what condition. By the time it was over he was bruised and bloody from the beating they inflicted.

He had awoken, not in a cell but a small billet, the kind of room where a sergeant or junior officer might live out his life. There was a guard just within the door, and as Thalric stirred the man passed the word to others waiting outside.

A prisoner now, and aching all over, Thalric found a strangely high mood on him. He realized that it was because, amidst all the pain and bruising, there was barely a stab from the deep wound that Daklan had inflicted on him outside Collegium, that had come so close to finishing him after his fall from Rekef favour. That wound, unlike the betrayal, was now consigned to the past.

So where in the wastes am I? There was a quick enough answer to that one, since the men who had jumped him had been Wasp soldiers. This spartan little room he was in could be in the barracks, or perhaps in the governor’s palace. There was a high window, suggesting his cell was probably on the level just below ground. He considered flying up there to look out, but decided that it was better not letting his captors know whether he could fly or not.

Of course, I can’t be sure myself. He seemed, nevertheless, to have come through the beating better than he might have done, but then he had always been a tough one to keep down. Captain Rauth, Ulther, Tisamon and Tynisa, Arianna, Daklan, Felise Mienn: they had all done their best, at one time or another, to put him out of this world. He wondered who would try next.

Lying on the hard bunk, with the guard eyeing him cautiously, he had to concede that his life so far seemed to have been a whole lot of effort to achieve a great deal of nothing. I would have stayed with the Rekef if I could. I have made a lamentable revolutionary.

But now what? He was not bound, so he could kill the guard now and make a run for it. He might get quite far, and he could certainly kill a considerable number of his captors before they were forced to re-evaluate just how alive they wanted him to be. Clearly he was being sent a message by someone confident he would be able to work it out: Wait. All is not lost.

Had he been intercepted by rebel elements within the palace? If there were still Mynan staff and slaves here, then the resistance would have its own people nearby. Perhaps Kymene or Che had… but then he did not even know if Che was still alive. It seemed quite possible that, after his explosive exit, Hokiak’s people might have butchered her – or that Kymene might have had her killed as a Rekef agent. Such irony!

And then, after a moment’s consideration, I am both betrayed and betrayer. The Empire’s rejection of him had turned a life of estimable service into one of perverse deceit, and when he had tried to go back over that path, to knit the wounds he had caused, he had only made everything worse.

He was not made to be maudlin, though. I am alive, he reflected. It was the first and best building block that he could work with.

Two soldiers entered the room without preamble. Their demeanour showed that they were fully aware of what their fellows – and their late fellows – had gone through to bring him here. They both loathed him and were frightened of him.

‘Well?’ Thalric asked them. ‘What now?’

‘Come with us,’ said one. His lips twitched, as if at a foul taste, when he added, ‘sir.’ The word struck Thalric like a blow. He almost toppled back on the bed, his legs suddenly weak at the power of a mere three-letter word. He had endured a long, harsh winter since anyone had truly called him that. The word was a whole life away for him: a door onto better days.

‘Sir, is it?’ he managed to get out, hoping that his face showed none of his surprise.

The man merely replied, ‘I have been ordered to request your presence, sir. You are sent for.’

And you don’t like it, soldier, but you’ll obey your orders. That was the underlying principle of the entire Wasp nation, who were by nature so quarrelsome and undisciplined.

‘Lead on, soldier,’ Thalric said it as casually as he could manage.

As soon as he got out into the corridor he knew that this must be the governor’s palace. He had no fond memories of it, for he had been through as much pain here as he had at any time before, and he had lost a good friend, too. The only luck thrown his way, aside from his continued survival, was that in the end it had not been his hand that had scorched out the life of Colonel Ulther, at the last. Mere chance, too, and he had no right to feel better over mere chance.

They took him up three levels and he applied his mind to drawing himself a map of the place as he recalled it. These were the quarters of important guests and higher officers, up here. He had even stayed here himself. There were public staterooms too, though he was already above the grand hall that Ulther had held court in. Wherever he was being taken, it was to be behind closed doors.

Do they imagine I know something, and wish to woo it out of me? Do I now turn informant against Stenwold and his people? And why not?

If they had wanted information, they needed only put him under the machines, for surely the ways and means had not softened so very much. But if I myself were in charge, would I not ask nicely first? Sometimes it is more efficient. Of all the hypotheses milling in his brain this seemed the most likely. He should not therefore get used to his current liberty. Which means I should exploit it as soon as the chance arises. Just give me a room with a decent-sized window.

And, obligingly, they did so. This palace, like most large Wasp-constructed buildings, was a ziggurat, and the room they brought him to even boasted a balcony, beyond which the blue sky stretched broad and inviting. He stayed put, though. He wanted to know where he stood, before he ran. There were two soldiers at the door, keenly watching over him, but they did not yet figure in his calculations. Five dead men could become seven soon enough. He had nothing to lose and it made him feel immortal.

The room itself had little of the garish style that Ulther had loved: the gaudy and overdone, the displayed loot from a dozen conquered peoples. This was Capitas-style Wasp: the long table devoid of ornament and a single frieze on the wall, in the local style but depicting the battle for occupation of the city itself, eighteen years before. Thalric wondered idly if he could pinpoint one of those images of triumphant, larger-than-life Wasp soldiers as his younger self. Perhaps one of them was Ulther, commanding the attack. He glanced from the frieze to the soldiers, young men both. They were not there, of course. They had probably not even fought in the Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal. It made feel him oddly lonely. He had now more in common with Stenwold Maker than with these men. In the end the burden of cultural identity did not weigh as much as the years.

They had come to attention swiftly, and he positioned himself across the table from the door, waiting. Some instinct told him that he recognized the tread, even before the man himself appeared: a grey-haired, severe-looking Wasp-kinden. A colonel and, as he saw now from the additional insignia, a governor.

Of course. The new governor had not been referred to by name in any of the documents he had seen because there was no need, but if he had really, really tried, then he could have worked out who the man was. There was no reason for him to be surprised.

‘Colonel Latvoc,’ Thalric said. ‘Excuse me for the informality, but I don’t feel that I’m in a position to salute.’

Latvoc’s stare was all ice, but Thalric had not expected anything else. In a clipped gesture, the colonel ordered the two guards out of the room. ‘You didn’t have to kill five of my soldiers,’ he said.

Thalric raised an eyebrow cynically. ‘The last time the Empire showed an interest in me, Colonel, I barely lived to learn a lesson from it.’

‘Even so,’ Latvoc said, ‘you’ve made things… very difficult.’

And why should you care? But Thalric could see it already. A Rekef colonel put in charge of the garrison, leaving the soldiers unhappy and mistrustful – and why not? What was there to trust?

‘Sit down,’ Latvoc ordered him flatly. When Thalric did not move he narrowed his eyes. ‘I am still your superior officer.’

‘Am I still in the army?’

Latvoc stared at him. Looking back into his sallow face, Thalric saw a man who had slept little recently. Local or imperial worries, I wonder? Or both at once? Abruptly, as though he was seeing a shape suddenly appear in the outlines of a cloud, Thalric saw the sheer, naked desperation within Latvoc. The man was on a knife edge, and barely balancing even on that.

‘I’m not exactly in love with the Empire, after recent treatment,’ Thalric said. That part of him that had been loyal was horrified at his own daring.

‘In love?’ Latvoc spat, each word he uttered becoming a separate fight to control his temper. ‘You are – were – an imperial major. You were a Rekef officer. It is not for you to criticize the Empire. It is not for you to put your petty personal concerns before the demands of your masters. If the Empire wanted you dead, you by rights should have died. If it wishes now to recall you from the grave, then you shall return.’

And I myself have used such logic once: after Daklan stabbed me, and I would rather not have lived. But recent association with Stenwold’s pack of misfits seemed to have rubbed the gloss off those arguments.

‘What do you want now?’ Thalric asked. ‘You want me dead? Well, you had your chance. So what do you want?’

‘I? I want nothing,’ Latvoc said coldly. ‘There is another, however, who is generous enough in spirit to give a broken vessel a second chance to be of service.’

Thalric studied him: the Rekef colonel who, at their first meeting, had shot him through with fear for his own future, a man on whose word so many hundreds of other lives had turned. He found himself unmoved.

‘Bring on your man,’ he said.

‘He is already here,’ Latvoc informed him, and the colonel’s eyes strayed past Thalric towards the balcony. A man was standing there. Standing outside, or has he just flown down? It was a child’s trick, despite the silent skill with which it had been accomplished.

The man was merely a knifelike silhouette for a moment, then he stepped forwards and stared into Thalric’s face, and Thalric recognized him. Despite himself, his heart lurched.

It was General Reiner, one of the three men who ruled the Rekef.

Reiner glanced at Latvoc and made a small signal, and the colonel backed out of the room with an angry glare. For a long while, Reiner and the renegade measured one another in silence. Then the general gestured to the table, and Thalric cautiously took a seat across from him.

‘So, General,’ he said, ‘if this is to be an execution it’s a needlessly grand one. These days a knife in a back alley would be more my level.’

Reiner opened his mouth to speak, but the words were a long time coming. Thalric realized that he had never heard this man speak before, and the first sound that Reiner uttered was so low and croaking that Thalric could not make it out.

Reiner tried again. ‘That will be enough, Major Thalric.’ Coming from a man of such power, the voice itself seemed weak and thin, but the words were another matter. Thalric felt the mention of that rank strike him like a blow so heavy that he actually rocked back in his chair.

And is it so? And is a year of my life thus erased, the disgrace forgotten, the sins undone? Is that certainty, that righteousness that they stripped from my every action, now dropped back on me like a blanket, and just as comforting?

‘Since when was that Major still the case?’ he got out. More angrily he added, ‘They tried to kill me.’

In the silence after that he heard a slight shifting, not coming from Reiner but from beyond the room. He filed it neatly in his mind: men concealed, false walls. Not so very trusting after all.

Reiner took a deep breath. ‘We are at war, Major.’

‘I had noticed, General.’

‘I do not mean the Lowlands,’ Reiner said dismissively. ‘Real war. Maxin is trying to take over the Rekef. Maxin is the true enemy.’ His eyes twitched about the room as though naming his fellow Rekef general might somehow conjure him up.

‘General Maxin,’ Thalric said slowly.

‘His orders, to kill you,’ said Reiner. ‘Not mine.’

Thalric remembered his last conversation with Daklan before the man had done his level best to kill him. Yes, Daklan had named Maxin as the source of the death warrant, but he had spoken of Thalric’s supposed patron as well. You could have protected me, General Reiner, he thought. His imperial conditioning was meanwhile subtly falling back on his shoulders, conjured up by the mere mention of his vanished rank and privilege.

‘So where does that leave me now?’ he said, and then added unwillingly but inexorably, ‘Sir?’

Reiner’s eyes alone acknowledged the concession. ‘We need capable agents,’ he rasped. ‘You are capable. Maxin had no right. You are mine. You are my major until I say otherwise.’ The speech seemed to exhaust him and he sank a little into his chair.

‘What do you want me to do, sir?’ Thalric asked him.

What could I give to you now? The secrets of the Lowlands… Stenwold’s plans… Che’s plans? I could take Che back from the resistance and make her in fact what they took her for in error: an agent of the Rekef. I could single-handedly secure the future of the Lowlands campaign.

He looked into General Reiner’s dry, barren face, and thought, But you don’t care.

‘Capitas,’ Reiner said. ‘I will send you to Capitas with false papers. The usual. I have work there for a capable man.’

‘Of course, sir,’ said Thalric. I’m back in. It was like a triumphant shout within his mind, the last months unwritten, wiped clean. He had never been cut loose from the army, from the Empire. He had remained loyal Major Thalric all this time, and the great cloak of imperial necessity had shrouded all his deeds in impenetrable rightness. But the rush of relief, of release, did not come. He waited for it eagerly but he was still wound up as tense as a bowstring inside. He felt sudden frustration with himself rise up inside. Can I not take this gift, now? Is this not what I wanted?

‘Sir, may I ask a question?’

Reiner nodded.

‘My work here at Myna, before – the removal of the old governor – I assume that you were preparing the ground. He was Maxin’s man?’

Reiner nodded again.

‘Good,’ Thalric said, and the slightest smile moved across Reiner’s face.

I’m back in, Thalric told himself. I’m back in. No more associating with lesser races, or running their errands. I’ve got power again. I can have my revenge on that Beetle whore-master and his Mantis executioner, and the whole bloody lot of them.

Another voice, so recently heard, said in his mind’s ear: It is not for you to criticize the Empire. It is not for you to put your petty personal concerns before the demands of your masters.

The thought was gall in his mouth. It cuts both ways, that does. It cut down to the lowest slave and servant, and it cut up all the way to the top. Empire over all. For the Empire, not for himself, not for a general, not for the Emperor, and not for the Rekef. And not for some grasping general’s bastard faction games!

Something inside him wailed in despair at his conclusions, losing a second time what he could hardly bear to lose on the first occasion.

‘General,’ he said, ‘when you sent me to kill my former friend Colonel Ulther I did not want to do it, but when I did so, at least it was because he was guilty of an actual crime.’

Reiner’s eyes widened and his mouth opened, but Thalric did not have time to wait for that hoarse voice to emerge. The flash of his sting-shot was concealed beneath the table, but the blast of it smashed the Rekef general’s chair into pieces even after it had passed through the occupant’s body.