Salute the Dark

Twenty-One

The cards were slapped down on the wooden board, and Balkus cursed, not for the first time. Plius chuckled and scooped them up, adding them to his already considerable hoard.

‘Must have taken years of practice for you to get that bad, Sarnesh.’

Balkus glowered at him. He had been losing steadily throughout the evening, and mostly to this fat Ant with the bluish skin. ‘Just deal again,’ he grunted.

Plius laid out the next three centre-cards, and the players retreated to study their hands and decide what to play. The problem with the game of Lords was that the winner tended to keep on winning. It was a Fly-kinden import to Sarn, and Balkus didn’t think much of it. Being a poor player, he preferred games with a greater element of luck.

The third player, Parops, had already placed his cards down, not to be drawn further into the bickering of the two men. He had not come across card games before, for, alone of the three, he had lived close to a normal Ant-kinden life, before the Wasps had come to his city. Ants did not play card games with each other, for when they were amongst their own kind it was against their very nature to bluff. Amongst those from other Ant cities, they fought.

Except not here, not now, and it was one of those little pieces of history so easily trampled over and lost after the fact. The great bulk of the army camped about them was Sarnesh, of course, but here on this flank were the exceptions. Here, Balkus had his mob of Collegium volunteers, who were were audible across the entire camp with their drinking and singing and talking out loud – unthinkable! Parops had with him his pale Tarkesh, the exiles who had been left with nothing to do but spill imperial blood. Their chances of ever seeing home again were brittle and slim: they were renegades now in all but name, forced out of a conquered home and into mercenary life. Some Ants chose that willingly, even whole detachments of them, but Parops and his men would have preferred a settled existence back home had they been allowed.

Then there were the Tseni that had come, at Plius’ call, from their faraway city. They kept their distance from the others here in a land normally identified as hostile on all their maps. They were Ant-kinden, too, but foreign, wearing scale armour rather than chainmail, carrying oval shields and swords with a back-hook jutting from the blade. They might have seemed primitive, except that they came with superior crossbows: heavy pieces equipped with a long-handled winch to recock them at a single turn. They’re just different, Balkus had decided and, anyway, Tsen was far enough away from the other Ant cities not to have to fight them regularly. They had not followed the Lowlands’ curve of history but kept themselves well apart out on the Atoll Coast.

Those three Ant-kinden officers had become, not friends exactly, but enforced allies against the great sameness of the Sarnesh: two outsiders and one insider trying to remain outside. They kept to each other’s company and played the games that Plius had learnt from his days spent in the Sarnesh Foreigners’ Quarter. Ant-kinden needed peers and, from their positions of unwilling command, they had only each other as equals.

It had been hard enough, going on the journey east. They had not known if they would run into the Wasps before schedule, with nothing more than some panting Fly-kinden to warn them of it. Instead they had covered more distance than anticipated, the Wasp advance running well behind time. This suited the Sarnesh, who were thinking about what would happen if the coming clash became another Battle of the Rails. They wanted proper time to prepare their city’s defences.

The artillery, Balkus thought glumly. That was Stenwold’s boy’s job, of course, and he had done his best not to think of the young Dragonfly and his impossibly suicidal task, but right now it shouldered its way to the forefront of his mind.

The Wasp army was now encamped within sight. The talking and shouting amongst the Collegiate soldiers had become strained and over-loud due to the proximity of the enemy. General Malkan’s Sixth and Seventh Armies, the Hive and the Winged Furies in all their mortal strength, were scarcely three miles away. Before evening had darkened the sky, they had been in plain view, and Flies could spy on them with telescopes. Malkan was making no attempt at hiding his numbers, but instead displaying to the utmost his military strength, which exceeded everything the Sarnesh had gathered against him by two or three to one. The morning would see some bloody work.

Balkus stood up. ‘No more for me,’ he informed the other two. ‘Going out to walk amongst the soldiers.’

For of course an Ant commander would not need to do that. Parops and Plius did not have to do that. They were always amongst their soldiers, mind touching mind in a net that supported each Ant and bound the whole together. Not Balkus. Balkus had his detachment of deaf-mutes, their minds single and separate, and in his brain instead there was always the murmur of the Sarnesh camp around him, no matter how hard he tried to blot it out.

The march here had allowed him his one moment of amusement when, in the midst of all the great voiceless march of Ant-kinden, a Collegiate woman had struck up a song in a single quavering and slightly off-key warble from the midst of the out-of-step merchant companies. A few others voices had risen to join her, and then half of the rest of them were chorusing the words, or loose approximations, using this simple rhythm to keep their steps sufficiently coordinated to catch up a little with the stoically silent Ants.

Balkus had enjoyed that. He had particularly enjoyed it because of the utter sense of horror that had arisen in his mind, transmitted there from each and all of the Sarnesh, that these shopkeeper soldiers should be going to war making noise, flapping their lips in some pointless and mostly tuneless song. Balkus had felt the minds of his kin, and known them to be scandalized and disgusted, and he had enjoyed that a great deal.

Then his soldiers had begun on a new song, the words of which he managed to catch:

Well, my old farm was a good old farm, the neatest you did see-o

With aphids, sheep and fields of wheat, that all were dear to me-o

But came a man in College white, the smartest e’er I saw-o

Who looked me o’er and ordered me to fight in Maker’s war-o

And Balkus had considered just exactly what Stenwold Maker himself would think of that, and had chuckled to himself over it for a good hour.

Now he passed amidst the campfires of his men, pausing occasionally to look out at that distant constellation of fires that indicated the enemy. At least there was no fear of a night attack, for the Wasps were not night-fighters – but the Mantids and Moths the Ancient League had brought were. Any force of Wasps that tried to use the cover of darkness would find that cloak soon stripped from them. Indeed it would be hard enough to stop the Mantis warriors going out tonight to kill as many Wasps as they could catch unawares, but that was emphatically not the plan.

The plan, the wonderful bloody plan! It was all the King of Sarn’s work, he and his cursed tacticians. The Ancillaries, as the Sarnesh had taken to calling their foreign hangers-on, had not even been consulted, merely instructed.

At least they’re not sticking us in front. That had always been the fear: that the Sarnesh would see their unreliable foreign friends simply as fodder for Wasp bolt and sting to cover their main advance. At least we’re only being given a fair share of the load. But Balkus knew who the load was really resting on. Stenwold’s boy.

Somewhere out there was rabble of bandits and refugees who would be readying themselves, even now, for what must look like certain death. At least it looked like certain death to Balkus, and he wasn’t even going.

‘We’re sure this is going to be a surprise?’ Phalmes asked. ‘If this isn’t a surprise, then it’s not going to go well for us.’

I’m not convinced it’s going to go well for us in any event, Salma thought, but Phalmes would know that already. After all, the Mynan was an old campaigner. He knew the odds.

‘Every scout that comes this way gets disappeared,’ said Chefre. The Fly-kinden woman sounded dispassionate and businesslike about it. She and her gang had been criminals in the Spiderlands before this and, as far as she was concerned, it was just the same war with bigger gangs. ‘Also, we’re disappearing scouts all over. I’ve got everyone who’ll be no good for this game out hunting Wasps in the dark.’ Her smile was neat, surgical. ‘Of course, most of our lot can see in the dark. Or more than they can anyway.’

Salma nodded. It was a weakness of the Wasps that the Empire could do little about. There was scarce moonlight tonight, the clouds hanging heavy about the sky. It was dark even for him and his people, so for the Wasps, the only light would be what they could make themselves.

Phalmes, who could not see in the dark either, grunted unhappily. ‘I don’t think we’ve got men enough.’ It was not the first time he had said this.

‘Probably not,’ Salma agreed, ‘but what are you going to do about it?’ He saw Phalmes’ shoulders rise and fall. ‘Your fliers are ready?’ he then asked Chefre.

‘Chief, if we don’t give ’em the word soon, they’re just going to go off and do it on their own,’ she told him cheerfully. She had at least 400 under her command, mostly Fly-kinden but with Moths and others amongst them. They had bows and, where the Aptitude ran, they also had crossbows, snapbows and grenades. Salma would have been happier fighting along with them but he was needed here, at the point of the lance, where his army met the enemy head on.

Every horse, every riding insect that his people had been able to steal, capture, beg, buy or inherit was here, till he had a cavalry force that was nearly half again the number of Chefre’s rag-tag airborne. They had trained and trained again, a rabble that the Commonweal would cringe from. They had got on their horses and fallen off and broken legs or ridden the wrong way. The mounts had been just as bad. It was, he knew full well, a stupid idea, and nobody in their right mind would have thought of it.

The Wasps would not have thought of it. In fact it would be something most Wasps would never have seen, or at least not since the Twelve-Year War. It would come as a surprise, and in war surprise could be fatal. He was attacking a full imperial army, tens of thousands of men. His people would be outnumbered fifty to one, but…

They would anticipate an attack, but he hoped it was just skirmishers, infiltrators, saboteurs, that the Empire was expecting. He would not be sending such, however. He had decided already that General Malkan’s camp could not be opened up by a stealthy few. The scalpel must give way to the hammer.

When Malkan had overwintered his forces after the Battle of the Rails, he had built a palisaded, fortified camp protected against land and air attack, reinforced with artillery. Now his army was on the march, he was forced to rely on a torchlit perimeter and sentries. Where an Ant-kinden army would have dug in every night, if they knew that someone like Salma was out there, the Wasps were not quite so organized. It was the same mistake that General Alder and the Fourth Army had made, when the Felyal Mantids caught them unawares. Salma realized that Malkan would have learnt from that, and would surely have a force on standby, ready to spring to the camp’s defence and give the main army time to organize. Cavalry, though…

We must punch through whatever they throw at us. We will give the Sarnesh artificers time to finish their work.

Or we will die.

It was at least a plan. He did not feel particularly proud of it, but at this late stage it was the only one he had.

‘Morleyr’s people must be in place by now,’ Phalmes decided. His horse shifted, picking up his unease.

‘You’re right,’ said Salma. The Mole Cricket, Morleyr, would be leading a feint attack on the camp’s far side, but Salma had not been able to spare the giant much in the way of manpower, and it was unlikely to deceive the enemy for long. He looked down at the Sarnesh standing beside him. ‘It feels like time,’ he agreed.

The man held a little device in his hand, and Salma knew that there was another such device with the Sarnesh army. In some arcane way wholly lost on him, these instruments told the Sarnesh how much of the night had already passed. They were waiting for the Ant’s mark, and he had been watching the little dials and wheels of his device closely, with a tiny lamp cupped in his other hand.

‘You have a good sense for these things,’ the Sarnesh observed, ‘and it… is time, indeed.’ Salma knew that the man would be simultaneously speaking with his mind to others of his kin accompanying Morleyr, or to the Ant-kinden soldiers and artificers ranked up behind Salma’s makeshift cavalry.

‘Chefre, over to you,’ he said. With no access to the Sarnesh and their mindlink, once Chefre’s airborne took off they would be cutting themselves loose from Salma’s command, operating on their own initiative. ‘Go,’ Salma told her, and she went.

The wait was something he had not thought of, before. There was an appalling, stretched-out moment, between Chefre’s people taking wing and his hearing their signal, in which he sat in his saddle with nothing to do. Prince Salme Dien, the commander of armies, had finished his shift, and Salma the warrior, the battle-leader, had yet to go on duty… and he now waited while the horses stamped nervously, feeling his men around him shift and try to even out their breathing.

‘Salma.’ The faintest touch at his shoulder, and he turned in the saddle.

She was there, his luminous lover. He had told her not to come, but she, of all his army, took no orders from him. She hung in the air, her skin streaked with colours, radiant wings beating.

‘You should not…’ he started.

‘How could I not?’ she responded. ‘I know what you go now to do.’

‘Please, this is hard enough…’

She reached out, took his head in her hands and darted in to kiss him as he leant down in the saddle, her lips soft against his. He felt her tears on his cheek. They ran down her face and glinted and sparkled over her faintly radiant skin.

‘I will never abandon you,’ she assured him. ‘Never. As you were there for me, I shall always come for you.’

He shook his head, with no words to express what he felt. I love her so much, he thought. How can I do this to her?

The Butterfly-kinden gazed along the line of nervous animals, the horses, the beetles, the crickets and spiders, the miscellaneous grab-bag of rideable monsters that they had drawn from everywhere. She looked at their riders, too: untested, awkward, half-skilled.

‘I feel your belief, my prince,’ she whispered. ‘It is the strongest thing here.’

‘Then it will have to suffice,’ he said, his cheer sounding slightly fragile, his face expression brave for those around him. She laid a hand on his, where it rested on his saddle pommel.

‘Share your belief with me,’ she told him. ‘Make me believe.’

Salma sensed her presence as a halo that reached out from her, imbued with her gentle magics. She had enchanted him before, but she needed no such arts to secure his love now. Still, though, she touched his mind, the essence of him, and she brought her other hand up to the muzzle of his steed.

‘Be strong,’ she whispered. ‘Share the faith and be strong,’ and he knew that she was speaking not to him but to the horse.

Speaking to all the horses, to every riding animal standing and stamping or chittering there in the dark, waiting for the signal. It was not like his people’s magic, but the Butterfly-kinden had their own arts, born of the sun, born of light and hope.

‘Be brave,’ she murmured. ‘Be true. You will not lose your way. You will not turn aside from danger.’ She was shining now, despite the cloak she wore, so that he was terrified that the Wasps might mark her, but still she spoke softly to his horse, and he felt the animal shift its stance beneath him, something strong and iron-like entering it. All down the line, to either side and also behind him, the nervous shuffle of animals quietened, replaced by a watchful patience, an anticipation.

And at last she again looked up at him, with her face like a sunrise. ‘Come back to me,’ she whispered, and stepped aside from his mount.

He heard the first bang even as she did, the first firepowder charge exploding. Chefre would be coming in from the side, her airborne rabble streaking over the Wasp camp, attacking indiscriminately, dropping ignited grenades, loosing arrows, crossbow bolts and fire-arrows, even slingshot. The Wasp soldiers on duty – he could almost see them in his mind’s eye – would streak into the air, their stings lighting up the night with a network of gold tracery. Some of Chefre’s people would die but the rest would keep moving: a great, chaotic cloud passing back and forth over the vast Wasp camp.

There was no more time for thought, nothing to wait for now. He kicked his heels into his mount’s flanks and launched forward, the first man to the battle, forming the point of the wedge. False heroics, he knew, for in this fight it would be those at the rear who would be most at risk.

But they had formed a decent wedge after all, which was something that had never quite come together as he drilled them. He saw the flames of the Wasp perimeter straight ahead of them. Somewhere behind him, there was the scream of a horse missing its step, going down. They were charging in the dark and some of the other riders could not see as well as he could. It was something he had anticipated and been unable to solve, and he knew that his plan could not survive too many unsolved problems.

Behind the cavalry came the infantry, running as fast as they could: and hiding amongst their number were the Sarnesh engineers whose skilled job would be the point of all tonight’s festivities. It had been their arrival that had finally decided Salma. It meant that Sarn was not throwing his own people away needlessly as an expedient way of whittling down the enemy. Sarn had sent almost 100 highly trained artificers, who would almost certainly not survive the night. Sarn was allowing him the responsibility of a true tactician.

He had a brief view of a Wasp sentry standing almost exactly in his path, turning from the confusion within the camp behind him – several tents already ablaze, swift work on Chefre’s account – to see 500 of horse and other beasts thundering down on him. The man’s wings flared instantly but he was only at head height when Salma’s first lance drove into him, the weight of his dying body ripping the shaft from the Dragonfly’s hand. Salma and his men were fortunately armed to the teeth, much of it through the unintentional benevolence of all the Wasps they had caught and killed. Most wore repainted Wasp armour, and they carried two or three lances each besides crossbows and swords. Salma himself had a holstered shortbow, ready strung, that he now hooked out into his hand. To either side of him the lance-wedge was driving itself through the scattered Wasp watchmen, but ahead of them the main force was mustering, men rushing into place both on the ground and into the air. The Wasp airborne were meanwhile being harried by Chefre’s utter shambles of a squadron, their formation constantly being broken and re-forming. Chefre’s Flies and Moths were not real warriors, their attacks causing more nuisance than real threat, but they were too insistent to be ignored. The Wasps already in the air kept trying to pin them down, but they were not a force of soldiers to stand together. They were individuals, and had to be chased and caught one by one. It looked as if that would take all night.

Spears were now levelled amongst the Wasp lines, firmly grounded against the charge. Salma sent off his first arrow but, even as he did so, was beaten to it by at least a score of his men, shooting crossbows and snapbows into the massing enemy. Sting-fire came right back at them. Salma knew that many of his soldiers were falling but, so long as they were not stopped, so long as they kept moving, then they were not beaten.

The archery from his riders had been concentrated towards the point of the wedge, and Salma saw a good number of Wasps go down before it. Was it enough? Only one way to find out. He took up another lance, bow clutched for a moment in his reins-hand, and let his mount dictate the timing of its leap, plunging down on to the Wasp lines with thundering hooves and lance and a great shout. An enemy spearhead streaked past his face, his second lance was torn from his hand on the impact, and then he had smashed past the front rank, broken the Wasp order, and there were 400 and more riders following right behind him.

He pulled his sword out, a heavy Hornet-kinden blade with the weight loaded towards the tip, and simply laid about him as his horse charged on, feeling the jarring shocks as men fell beneath its hooves. Others tried to fly at the last moment, nerve failing them. At every split second he was fighting a different man, just time for a single strike, whether hit or miss, and then was carried past them, galloping deeper into the camp. The enemy spears tilted and skewed, the sheer weight of thundering cavalry breaking the Wasps’ will to stand. Hooves trampled them remorselessly, while the mandibles of insects sheared and cut. They were scattering even as the cavalry struck them, and those who could not take to the air in time were simply ridden down.

Salma was clear of the Wasp lines without warning, charging down a thoroughfare between tents, and the soldiers he saw were half-dressed or unarmed, coming out to see what was going on, and then throwing themselves up into the air or just to one side in utter panic. All the while Chefre’s scattered airborne were taking every opportunity to evade their pursuers and bombard the ground again.

From across the camp a thunder roared, and for just a second the entire place was like day, lit up bright white and then red. Salma closed his eyes against it, trusting his horse would manage. He himself had no idea what had happened.

Time to turn, though. He wheeled his mount along another avenue of tents, safe in the knowledge that every Wasp possible would be watching him, believing that he, Salme Dien and his cavalcade, formed the attack. Beside him, Phalmes was grinning fiercely.

‘Firepowder store!’ he screamed over all the noise, though Salma could still barely hear him. ‘Chefre must have hit it!’

Behind the cavalry, his infantry must have already fallen on the broken Wasp defenders, taking them apart in savage desperation. Time was everything, now. Salma and Chefre and Morleyr’s little force had been all simply to catch the eye, like a flashy brooch, whilst the infantry got the engineers to the engines and then let nature take its course.

He did not even turn to look back at his riders, as he twisted in the saddle to loose another arrow. He knew that they would be falling, shot from both sides, from behind and above, by Wasps who probably did not realize quite what was happening but knew an enemy when they saw one. His people were busy dying, and his only hope was that they had all known, as he had, what they were getting themselves into.

Many had families and friends who were under the care of Sarn now. Their safety was what this was about, and surely it was a nobler aim than personal survival.

They were running out of room, though. Enough of the Wasp camp was now aware of them and was trying to box them in. Salma turned this way and that, knowing that with each turn he had fewer riders behind him.

Time for a last-ditch attempt to escape, he decided. He would just have to hope that by now the Sarnesh engineers had got their work done.

The next clot of soldiers that barred his way he did not turn aside from. With his last lance couched in his arm he simply rode straight into them. They scattered at the last moment, many of them too late. One man, in his hurried flight, slammed a knee into Salma’s shoulder, rocking him back in the saddle. The lance, unbloodied, flew from his hand, but he managed to stay on horseback, charging in what he hoped, after all the twists and turns, was the direction of the camp’s closest perimeter.

At least they all know this part. From this point on, their work was done and it would be everyone for himself. Wasp sting-bolts crackled and danced past him, each one lighting up a single strand of the night.

One struck his horse.

He felt a lurching shock run through the animal’s very frame, not the shock of impact but the animal’s own pain and fear. It reared up, and he had a brief sense of other riders flashing helplessly past him, and then another shot struck the wretched beast, whether sting or bolt he never knew, and it pitched sideways. He knew enough to get himself out of the saddle and into the air as the animal crashed to the ground.

The air was full of fire and light, but a calm voice in his head reminded him We have been here before. That had been the camp outside Tark, but the principles were the same. In the air he became a target for every man within thirty yards. He nevertheless tried to ascend, but then found that there were Wasps all about him and no sign of Chefre’s people. Fled. I hope they fled. He had his sword out, wounding the three closest to him, and then a blade coming from behind and below opened a shallow cut on his leg and, with the sense that he was totally surrounded and about to be cut apart, he dropped from the air.

He landed running, forcing away the pain, knowing that he was too far now from the camp’s edge to escape. There were Wasps all about him, but most were too surprised at the sight of this single running enemy in their midst to react. The rest formed a growing tail of pursuit, hounding him through their camp. Despite the pain, the deaths, the certainty of his end, he was grinning because the situation was so utterly ridiculous.

Amid all the noise, he missed the voice shouting his name. It was only when Phalmes’ horse flashed in front of him that he realized that someone was trying to rescue him.

‘Away!’ he shouted. ‘Just go!’ but Phalmes was returning for him, riding back towards the pursuing Wasps with his sword raised, a mere black silhouette now against a backdrop of leaping light.

And Salma skidded about the corner of a tent and saw the flames. The sight stopped him: a field of fire, a whole quarter of this tent city roaring in conflagration.

‘Salma!’ shouted Phalmes again, as he must have been doing for some time, and he was reaching down from his mount when a sting caught him in the chest. Salma saw his face contort, the force of the blow punching him out of the high-ended saddle. The horse slewed about, dragged by the reins, and then Phalmes released it, and it fled.

As the Wasps arrived, Salma knelt beside him, the thunderous flames fierce against his face. He would have liked a last word, for the Mynan bandit had been a good friend to him. Phalmes’ words were done, though. He was gone.

He was in good company, at least, for the ground was covered with bodies. Salma saw dead Wasps, in and out of armour, occasionally the bodies of his own motley following, and the scattered forms of the Sarnesh engineers. The fires ahead leapt and roared about complex skeletons of wood and metal, about the wagons of parts and ammunition, all the paraphernalia for bringing a city’s walls down. It was like a forest on fire, but it was a forest of engines, burning their wood, their fuel, their firepowder. The Sarnesh had done their work, and only the morrow would tell whether they had done it well enough to justify all this waste of life.

The Wasps approached him carefully, but he put down his sword, laying one hand on Phalmes’ chest. He suddenly felt very tired.