Salute the Dark

Twenty-Two

There was a certain status to being brought in alone. Prisoners who came to Capitas in droves, such as escaped slaves, prisoners of war or manpower tithes levied on the subject races, were processed as a commodity, consigned to a group fate, enslaved, executed or sent to the fighting pits, recorded in quantities rather than names. How many thousand lives and dreams had been buried in such a manner, Thalric could not even begin to guess. That fate was not to be his, though. He had come in as a celebrity, a single prisoner with a heavy escort, flown in for the last tens of miles at great expense and with indecent speed. He was being accorded the treatment he had earnt.

Those prisoners whose circumstances merited something more than a humble clerk signifying their doom with a woodcut stamp were brought to the Armour Square, far enough into Capitas to be within easy sight of the top tier of the imperial palace. The square itself, which would have made a very serviceable marketplace, was instead lined with buildings commandeered by the imperial government. There were factor houses for the merchants of the Consortium, offices of military administration and requisition, the chief stockade of the Slave Corps, and this place: the Justiciary. It was a low, uninspiring edifice, staffed by slave clerks overseen by Wasps whose careers were dire enough to see them end up there. It dealt with the disposal of prisoners.

The building itself was not the point, though. The Justiciary was the basis for a fond tradition of the Empire, and thus the reason that Armour Square was a stopping point for anyone touring the city. Well-to-do Wasps brought their families there for entertainment, or their slaves as a warning.

The free-standing posts that lined each side of Armour Square, making a smaller square within the large, had been used once for displaying suits of mail, a relic of the Wasp-kinden’s tribal past when warriors had shown their readiness for battle by exhibiting their war-gear. More enlightened generations had found a better use for them. At noon, most days, almost every post had a prisoner hanging from it, hauled up high enough to make them balance on their toes, stripped naked for lashing if need be but, most of all, exposed for public ridicule.

There were guards, of course, for prisoners were a resource of the Empire and therefore not to be wasted needlessly. The citizens took the importance of tradition seriously. The Grasshopper-kinden three posts down from Thalric had just had three Wasp youths beat him bloody with staves, as the guards had watched with indulgent pride in such pranks and games.

Thalric shifted his weight again, despite his discovery that there was no easier position to find. Whoever had strung him up had known what they were doing. He tried to relax into it, but his body, which had put up with a great deal recently, was starting to fray. He knew from experience that he could be here for over a day before anyone decided what to do with him next.

Well, think of it as training for the artificer’s table. They would want to put him to the question, sooner or later, to find out why he had killed General Reiner and who had put him up to it. His own experience of operating on the other side of the table was not helping, either, and the mental pictures he recalled were too exacting and accurate for comfort. He had no illusions about being able to withstand such questioning. Nobody ever did. It was not some kind of competitive sport between the practitioner and the recipient. You could not win it.

Myna should be in arms by now. The thought sent an odd shiver through him, for he had taken a hammer to the Empire and cracked it. Myna would already be in arms, and then there was Szar… if Szar was still fighting, and Myna rose up, then where would the Empire choose to deploy its soldiers? And then it was not so far to the occupied Ant-kinden city of Maynes… Who could have thought that an Empire could be such a fragile thing?

‘Well, look at you,’ said someone next to him, and his first thought was, Time for a beating. When he identified the voice, his expectations did not alter. Painfully he shifted round to see her properly.

‘It is you, isn’t it,’ she said. She was standing beside him, quite free and unfettered, as though this was her city and not his own.

‘Tynisa,’ he got out.

The Spider girl examined him, seeing no doubt the latticework of scars across his naked torso, some of which were older than she was, and all set within the colourful backdrop of the recent bruises that had yet to fade. In turn, he saw that she was wearing the clothing of a well-off Capitas woman, with the cut modified by just inches to turn demure into sensual. If he had encountered her as a stranger, on any Capitas street, he would have taken her for an adventuress or even a prostitute, and probably taken her home with him for that matter.

‘I see,’ he said, ‘that you’re making yourself at home here. Thrown in the fight, have you? Or has Stenwold become a little optimistic about where he can plant his agents?’

‘On my father’s business.’

Tisamon? Thalric could not imagine the Mantis stalking about the city dressed in Wasp clothing and pretending… No, of course, he had run away. ‘Tisamon’s here?’ He craned about, looking at all the other posts. There were plenty of fellow sufferers but no Mantids among them.

She stared levelly at him. ‘That looks painful, Major Thalric.’

‘Well spotted.’

‘I’m allowed to strike you, I believe?’

He closed his eyes. ‘That depends on who you’re supposed to be, Tynisa. Go on, try it. We’ve been at daggers drawn long enough and you’ve not laid a straight blow on me yet.’ That was not, of course, true. She had nearly killed him outside Helleron. Furthermore, it was a foolish thing to say because she took his provocation in the spirit it was meant and punched a fist into his abused ribs hard enough that he felt them creak. He made a short, choked sound of pain, hearing some of the spectators murmur appreciatively. Needless to say, the guards just watched.

She leant close to him. ‘You’ve earned that, and more,’ she murmured, ‘but right now we’re in a position to help each other.’

‘Your negotiating techniques leave something to be desired,’ he grated.

‘Do they?’ Before he could say anything to stop her, she had stepped back, and then the back of her hand cracked against his cheekbone and whipped his head round. My mouth is going to get me killed. This time when she leant close, he said nothing.

‘That was for the crowd, Thalric. And for me, a little – but mostly for them. Now, listen. I’ve made some friends here in Capitas. Well, maybe friends isn’t the word, but a chain of people who’ll do things for me if I ask them nicely. What they won’t do, though, is let me down to the cells beneath the palace.’

‘The pit cells,’ Thalric recalled. ‘And that’s where they’ve got Tisamon, is it? Right place for him.’

He felt her tense, but she did not strike him again. ‘I can get you down from your post here this afternoon, instead of tomorrow, seeing that my friend of the moment is an overseer of your Justice place here. If I ask him very nicely indeed, maybe he’ll have you sent to the pit cells, just like Tisamon.’

‘If you lead him on, you mean.’

‘Jealous?’ There was a edge to her voice. ‘I can’t fight an entire Empire with my sword, Thalric. There are just too many of your wretched people. I could stab at your kin all day and still not get anywhere. So I use other weapons. I got here, didn’t I? I’m not proud of my methods, but they work.’

‘And if I’m really good, your methods will now see me condemned to the pit cells. Thank you very much.’

‘Just to hold you there, until they decide what to do with you. You’d rather be sitting in a cell than hanging from a post, I assume.’

‘And in return…?’

‘Take a message to Tisamon.’ Her hand was in his hair, abruptly, dragging his head back, to the further appreciation of the spectators. ‘Tell him I’m here for him, that I will find some way to get him out.’

He thought about that slowly, long enough for her to yank at his hair again. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘if he doesn’t want to get out?’

She went very still. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Yes, you do. How do you capture Tisamon, the Mantis-kinden Weaponsmaster? Either dead or not at all, surely, and yet you say he’s malingering in the cells beneath the palace-’

‘Shut up,’ she hissed at him. ‘Shut up or this crowd will see me put your eyes out, Thalric. That’s not your problem. That’s my problem and I… I’ll deal with it.’ She stepped back, and he braced himself for further injury.

‘Nod or shake, Major,’ she told him. ‘Do what I want now, or I’ll make sure you hang here for another three days before they work out where to send you.’

He let his head sag. It could be taken for a nod. Then she punched him in the kidneys, and this time he could not stop himself crying out.

‘You move too fast,’ cautioned one of the cowled shapes around him. Uctebri saw all his reflections in the polished walls nod and nod, out of time but in agreement. He bared his needle teeth at the speaker, stalking across the room and making the candles gutter, so that all that assembled host within the mirror-shiny walls momentarily bobbed and flickered.

‘It must be now,’ he said. ‘I have wrestled with fate too hard just to get my players to the wings. I cannot stand back and let it all go to ruin.’

‘The risks are too great,’ said another, a whispering woman’s voice. ‘The Empire…’

‘Is the prize, in case you had forgotten,’ Uctebri supplied. ‘Temporal power, at last, and after so long,’ Uctebri said.

‘If they uncover you… If you fail… We have not the strength or the numbers to resist them or to survive another purge.’

‘They are savages,’ Uctebri snarled. He could feel his blood, that borrowed and mingled commodity, rising inside him: only his own people could ever provoke him so. ‘How would they find us? These are not the Moth-kinden, to understand our hearts, or the Spiders, to ensnare us. They have no understanding of the old days. If they recoil against us I shall pay the price, I alone.’

‘You cannot be so sure of that,’ another said. ‘The girl, she may know more than you realize.’

‘You have taught her too much,’ said yet another. Uctebri glared at them all. For a moment he saw them as they would seem to an outsider: a conclave of thin and twisted creatures, sickly and cowardly after so many centuries of hiding.

‘I have come too far now to cry “Hold”,’ he hissed at them. ‘So what would you have me do? Wait another year, perhaps? Burrow into the Empire like a maggot into rotten flesh, never to find the heart? You have been too long in the dark. The girl is mine, and all that she possesses is my promise. She has lived under the shadow of her brother’s knife all her life, so she will take what I give her, and do what I say, just for a chance to be rid of that doom. What is she, but a woman in a race where the men lead? She will not be able to rule without our aid. We will make her our puppet, and the Empire, all its youth and strength and blood, will be ours to tug at.’ Greed was the key here, he knew. His was a greedy race, and it had always been so. ‘What might we do, with such a beast under our spur? Do we not have scores to settle with the world? Are we not owed? What vengeance might we exact on our old foes, with all the armies of the Empire at our disposal?’

They shuffled and turned to one another, and he felt his fingers crooking into claws with frustration.

‘If we had known-’

‘You knew,’ he addressed them all. ‘My plan has been years in the making. You all knew what I intended, and for the good of us all! Only now, when I am on the cusp, do you cringe away from grasping it.’ He drew himself up straight. ‘It matters not,’ he decided. ‘I do not need to care what you all think. I am in too far, now, to draw myself from the wound. I needs must suck it dry. If you will not share the feast, so be it. But I have no doubt that when I have the Empire in my hand, you shall come begging on your knees for a share.’

They fell very silent then. The Mosquito-kinden were close-knit out of necessity, surviving by mutual conspiracy. The censure of the many was always enough to govern the few, or so it had been for longer than any of them had been alive.

‘You will bring ruin on us,’ one of them said slowly. ‘You are become too proud.’

‘And you are not proud enough,’ Uctebri retorted. ‘Where is the race that once battled with magi and great scholars to be the masters of the world? Is there nothing left of that ambition? Has our defeat so long ago crippled us, even until today? Well, not I. I shall grasp the Empire with both hands and make it do my will. I shall be shadow-Emperor behind the girl’s throne, and in a hundred years from now – three generations of theirs but within a single lifetime for us – we shall walk openly in their streets, and speak counsel to their leaders, and perhaps we will no longer remember what craven things we had once become.’

With an impatient thought, he severed his link to them. Worms, all of them, pallid, soft things hiding away from an enemy that had suffered its own catastrophic reversals some five centuries before. The world needed a stronger hand to master it, and that hand was his. He considered his prote?ge?e, the Wasp princess. At this moment he felt she showed more promise than all the rest of his kinden put together. And you will be mine, heart and soul. You will sell your people’s future, your own will, in exchange for the empty reward of a throne. The thought cheered him, the nearness of all he had worked towards. His puppets were now all in place and ready to dance for him.

That she was so reliant on others was frustrating to her, but then it had always been so. To compensate, Seda had developed the ability to persuade others to do those things for her that almost any other member of her race could simply have reached out and accomplished in person.

This room, however, she had found for herself: an armoury on the third floor of the palace, stripped of its contents when the new garrison quarters had been built elsewhere in Capitas. No alternative use for it had yet been found. It had one main door and one hidden door, as was the case with most of the military rooms in the palace, for Seda’s father, the late Emperor, had been a man given to surprises and ambushes – and so had his chief advisor, the infamous Rekef, whose name lived on in the force of spies and agents that he had fashioned.

The secret entrance was crucial. It was of the utmost importance that nobody realized just how many people she was meeting here. Otherwise it would be so easy for word to get to her brother Alvdan, and then everything would be thrown into disarray.

Already, General Brugan had his men posted nearby, watching all approaches, turning passing servants away. Alvdan and his lackey Maxin need never know what had transpired here.

She wondered if Uctebri would, however. The Mosquito had ways of spying on her that she could not control, just as she could not control him. His invisible eyes could be present here, in this very room, as she received her fellow conspirators and told them what they must do for her. Like all the others, Uctebri had missed discovering the real Seda. She had grown up in continual fear of her life, and her one defence was to seem vulnerable and helpless. She had lived with Maxin’s knife poised over her, and Alvdan’s temper always ready to give him the word. She had made her way through the world with meekness as her only shield. She had cultivated it assiduously, seeming a willing tool to every purpose. When she was young, she had feared that General Maxin could read minds, that he would register even the slightest flicker of rebellion or resentment.

But now she had as her doubtful ally a man who really could read minds, and she was practised enough to place there in front of him just what he wished to see. Even the master-sorcerer himself would have to dig very deep to find the real Seda beneath her camouflage.

He was clever, was Uctebri the Sarcad, clever enough to plot the downfall of an Emperor, but she hoped that, like so many clever men, he underestimated the intelligence of others. She now gazed about the room at her assembled allies. They included General Brugan, of course, solid and dependable and very much hers since her brother had made Maxin the lord of the Rekef. The suspicious death of General Reiner looked enough like a precursor to his own that he was now entirely Seda’s to play with. She liked him, too: in face and body, here was a man to be admired, and with an uncommon streak of integrity that she found intriguing. She knew what he hoped from her, and she had given him nothing to dispel those expectations. They would prove useful to her.

She also had three of the Imperial advisors on her side now: there was old Gjegevey, who saw her as a victim who needed nurturing, and two of the older Wasp councillors who could feel their seats beside the throne being prepared for younger men now dearer to the Emperor. Two years ago such treason would not have been thinkable, but the war within the Rekef had made men fearful for more than just their station or reputation. General Reiner’s death had scared a great many powerful people.

She had both of the palace stewards in her party: considered lowly menials who ordered the servants and slaves about, nobody cared much about them; one was a Wasp woman, the other a Grasshopper slave. Being strictly civilian, they were firmly under the heel of the Empire, and nobody save Seda had realized quite how much power they wielded and what they could accomplish. Beyond that, she had several military officers: a colonel and two majors from within the Capitas garrison, and a scattering of others from outside it. They were disaffected men that Brugan had been watching, and normally he would have caused them to disappear, thus increasing that fear of the Rekef that kept ambitious officers throughout the army in line. But now he had made them her offer.

From face to face she looked in turn, seeing there her own fragile empire ready to set against her all-powerful brother – and against the unthinkable Uctebri.

She smiled at them warmly, and set about explaining precisely what they must do for her.

‘You’ve got another visitor,’ came Ult’s voice. Tisamon opened his eyes, his mind falling back from dream-tormented sleep to the gloomy confines of his cell.

‘Keep your visitors.’

‘What can I say? You’re a popular man.’ Ult grinned mirthlessly. ‘Never had a prisoner get so many visitors wanting to see him.’

Tisamon shrugged. ‘To the pits with them.’

‘Don’t be like that. You’re denying me a chance to make a fortune.’

Two nights ago, the Mantis had fought in one of the smaller private arenas, after which word had spread. This last day alone there had been over a dozen people escorted down into the gloom to see him, almost all of them women of good family. It was a tradition, Ult explained. So many menfolk were away with the army, it was only natural that their wives became bored. A little excitement, a little titillation, and of course most of the fighters were glad of the attention.

‘But not you,’ Ult noted. ‘We’d do well out of them, if you’d let them touch you.’

‘What if I killed them instead?’ Tisamon asked bitterly.

‘Then you’d be stung to death in your cell,’ Ult said with equanimity. ‘Don’t think that hasn’t happened. It’s all part of the thrill.’

Tisamon sat down with his back to the bars, his arms wrapped about his knees. ‘What is it they really seek, Ult?’

‘Death, Mantis. Surely you know that rich people love death.’

‘In Capitas perhaps.’

‘It’s because they live safe lives, the rich and powerful. Oh, some of them go off to the army, and that ain’t exactly safe for anyone, but there’s a load of people with rank and medals who just sit behind their desk and do their marching on paper. And there are the officers’ wives, of course, with all the time and money they could want, and nothing to do with it… And here you are, a bit exotic, a bit rough and dangerous, and not bad-looking for all that, and you move like you do – bound to catch their eye, yes?’

‘It’s disgusting.’

Ult laughed at him. ‘You got cursed high standards for a pit-fighter, Old Mantis. Look at your fellows here – they’d give a lot to be where you are. Think of it as a recognition of your skills, if you want, and the more people want to see you…’

The Wasp left the words hanging, but Tisamon heard the rest in his head: the more chance you’ll get what you want.

‘So who’s asking for me now? The queen herself?’

‘Something a little different. Something you can say “no” to without me thinking you’re a fool for refusing. Got a fellow wanting the cell next to yours, just for a bit. He says he can point me in the way of some money in the city, if I do it. But it’s your call in the end.’

‘Another prisoner?’

‘He’d like me to think so,’ Ult sneered. ‘They reckon you got to be stupid, to work down here, but I seen most types. This fellow, he’s a spy. He’s got that look to him. He’s Rekef, more than likely. He’s here to take a look at you. Maybe the Emperor’s heard of you, and wants you checked out.’

‘Then bring him in. I’ll play the abject slave, shall I?’

‘You ain’t got it in you,’ Ult told him. ‘You carry yourself prouder than a battlefield colonel, you do. I’ll bring him over, though. If you end up gutting him through the bars that’s your business.’

Tisamon waited in the dark, listening to the other prisoners all around him. Am I so proud, still? Perhaps he should have given those Wasp women what they wanted: one more debasement, the last step in his descent. But she is out there, somewhere: Felise Mienn whom he would have to kill – or else she would kill him.

He did not even look up as Ult and a pair of guards returned, and his latest visitor was slung into the cell next to him, which had been empty since the previous evening.

‘What do you want?’ he growled.

‘Is that any way to greet an old friend?’ There was more weariness than humour in the voice, and it took a moment for Tisamon to place it.

‘Thalric?’

‘The same.’ The Wasp looked haggard and bruised. If he was a Rekef spy once more, he was certainly well disguised as a man to whom life had not been kind for some time.

‘You’ve come home, then,’ Tisamon observed, finding that the sight of the man raised no particular emotion in him.

‘The Emperor called for his errant son,’ replied Thalric, and leant carefully back, wincing in pain. ‘I’ve not been this comfortable for a while, believe it or not.’

‘Why are you here, Thalric?’

‘The consequences of a piece of fairly severe insubordination.’

‘I thought you’d left the army.’

‘Ironic,’ Thalric laughed. ‘They let me back in just beforehand. You’ve never trusted me, have you?’

‘Any reason that I should have?’

‘No.’ Thalric’s smile was small and bleak. ‘So in that case you can decide whether I’m faithfully passing on a message or merely taking pleasure in putting the knife in.’

Tisamon regarded him. ‘I don’t cut easily.’

‘Excellent. Well, your daughter is in the city and she wants to rescue you.’ Thalric closed his eyes. ‘For some reason she wanted me to tell you and, although I can hardly say that I’m ever as good as my word, here I am, and the words are said.’

There was a long silence, which gave Tisamon every chance to consider Tynisa’s likely fate if she attempted to free him, until eventually, eyes still closed, Thalric said, ‘Tisamon? You haven’t died, have you?’

‘Felise Mienn is here,’ Tisamon said, out of some obscure desire to strike back. ‘She will probably kill you, if she gets the chance.’

Thalric’s smile actually broadened. ‘Then tell her to stand in line.’ He gave a sigh, which ended up as a wheezing kind of laugh. ‘Don’t you love it when old friends get together?’

Thalric was asleep the next morning, when Ult came to fetch Tisamon. If the former Rekef man was playing a role now, he was playing it to the hilt. Even at rest his face looked haunted by past decisions.

‘Whose blood am I shedding?’ Tisamon asked.

Ult shook his head. ‘Not this time, old Mantis. This time you’re indulging me.’

‘Is that so?’

‘I want to see you fight her.’

Tisamon was on his feet instantly, and something caught inside him, like a hook. ‘Felise?’

‘The Dragonfly woman, right.’ Ult unlocked the cell and Tisamon stepped out. He felt unsteady, unsettled within himself. It was anticipation, he realized. The moment’s thought came to him, not of their sparring bouts in the Prowess Forum, but of their very first meeting when she had been trying to kill him for real, both of them tested to the very edge of their skill. He felt his heartbeat speed up just at the memory.

Ult led him to the practice ring beneath the palace, where a dozen Slave Corps guards were sitting around the periphery of the room. In the centre stood Felise Mienn. Ult nodded to her, warrior to warrior, as he came in, before heading for the weapon racks.

‘We generally use these for the comedy matches,’ he explained, weighing a short stave in his hand. ‘Good enough for practice, though. I want to see the pair of you go at each other.’

Tisamon did not even look at him. His eyes were fixed on Felise. They had not given her back her armour but, standing there with the three-foot length of wood in her hands, she had regained every semblance of the warrior.

‘Comedy matches?’ she repeated emptily, but her eyes were just as much for Tisamon. She spared no glance for their jailer, or for the Wasp soldiers that ringed this little private arena.

‘Oh, you know, half a dozen Fly-kinden up against a big scorpion, civilians against the reaping machine, that kind of thing.’ Ult shrugged, looking between them. ‘I keep telling them that if I was allowed to properly train the prisoners I get down here, get them practising, the shows would become that much the better, but they don’t like the idea.’ It was clear that his mouth was simply making the words while his mind considered the problem these two represented. ‘Right then,’ he said at last, handing a stave to Tisamon. ‘Remember, this is just a friendly.’

Felise’s eyes narrowed and she dropped back into a defensive stance, weight on her back foot, weapon held low and forward. Tisamon found that his own stance came on him without thinking, the stick cocked back behind, one hand ready to beat aside her weapon, a stance that invited attack, yet not at all the best for dealing with her own pose.

Their eyes met almost with a shock. She wanted to kill him, and she would do so unless someone stopped her, wooden stick or no. Dirt-smeared and haggard as she was, in that moment she was as beautiful as he had ever seen her.

She went for him, the defensive stance becoming something else without warning, a sudden darting lunge. They had bound leather across her back to stop her calling up her wings, but she seemed to fly at him anyway. A swift downward strike, which he avoided, was cover for a lunge at his midriff that clipped him, the slightest contact, perhaps the pinprick of a splinter from the stave. With a quick turn of her wrists, she spun the wooden blade in a circle to catch his inevitable counterattack, but it did not come; instead he moved back and back, weapon still poised to strike.

She halted, evaluating, watching, turning as he circled her. Something inside him had told him at the start that he could not strike at her. After all, he was the betrayer, so he had no right to fight to win. But as soon as the fight had begun, he had shaken that off. The old fierce fire came back to him, as though the whole of his recent past had never occurred. It was as though he had now stepped sideways into a different word: a pure, plain world of light and air and the uncorrupted elegance of combat.

He struck, a sudden whirling of the blade towards her to draw her out, but she just swayed back. Her own stave drove at his face, and he put it aside with his free hand, bringing his mock-weapon down on her shoulder. She caught it with her offhand, bending at the knees to absorb the force, and cast him off, and he spun away, dancing across the arena floor, every line become a circle within that closed space, so as to lead him back to her.

He took no pause, lashing down at her, and their sticks met a dozen times in a rapid patter, instinct taking over where the eyes were too slow. Then they were past each other, without a strike scored. He slung the stave back, arcing it at the back of her head, but she dropped to one knee and her own weapon skimmed his side and caught the cloth of his slave’s shirt.

They parted again, circling. Ult and his men might not even have been there. They now had their small and hermetic world entirely to themselves.

She was smiling – as he realized that he was, too. Their expressions must have seemed a perfect match.

She was at him then, striking down at his head, sideways at his neck, blows swift and hard enough to break bone if they landed. He skipped back, swayed aside, dragged the stave across the front of her body to slash her open as though it was a blade indeed, missing only by moments. Her own stick blurred overhead as he dropped down. She had struck one-handed, and her left hand came in, ripping a bloody line across his shoulder with her thumb-claw. He felt the pain only as a distant voice urging him on. His own arm-spines grazed her hip, and then cut at her stomach as she gave ground, and all the time his stave was moving, meeting hers again and again, as though they had practised the fight for months or even years. They were closer and closer together, well inside each other’s reach, the deadly work being done with the offhands, the useless staves only a distraction. She gouged his cheek, aiming for his eye. He raked three lines of red below her collar-bone, looking for her throat.

They broke apart, six feet of clear ground between them in an instant, poised in their perfect stances, waiting. Although she still gripped it like a sword, Felise’s stick had been sheared in half.

Ult made a small sound into the silence. The soldiers were on their feet in shocked silence, hands out and open ready to sting.

Tisamon looked at Felise, seeing the few lines he had managed to score on her, and feeling his own blood where she had drawn it. He met her eyes, took a step towards her. She cast the halved stick away, her thumb-claws flexing and out, while moving in towards him. Ult was saying his name, but he did not care.

Another step, and almost within reach of her hands. He knew now that, where his stick had been, his clawed glove was now buckled about his hand and forearm as though it had always been there, the short, deadly blade drawn back to strike. He had not even realized that he had called to it.

He looked into her face, golden and savage and beautiful, and, even as Ult called his name again, he said, ‘Forgive me.’

Even as she tensed to spring, her lips moved, and what she said was, ‘Of course.’

He let his arms fall to his sides, but she did not kill him. Instead, the soldiers had grabbed her, hauled her back, even as others were reaching for him, reaching to take away the weapon they had seen, but that was no longer there. He held her eyes, and felt at the same time a crippling joy and a wrenching bitterness that he should realize only now, at this waning end of their time together, that he loved her. It was only when they fought that he could see it clearly.

Ult was staring at him – indeed all the Wasps were staring at him, but Ult’s expression was different. He was the only one there not busy convincing himself that he had been mistaken. He signalled for some of his men to lead Felise away, and Tisamon watched her until she was gone. Only then did he turn to his keeper, expressionless.

‘If your badge got taken from you, I can get it back,’ Ult said, studying him. Tisamon raised his eyebrows, and the Wasp continued, ‘Oh, they had me in the Twelve-Year War, early on, so don’t think I don’t know your kind. We were fighting plenty of Mantis as well as Dragonfly back then, and I saw some pull tricks like you just pulled. Don’t assume I don’t know anything.’

‘I abandoned the symbol of my order by choice,’ Tisamon said. Because of her, and my own pride.

Ult nodded slowly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I reckon I was just quick enough to keep you alive until next time, Mantis. I just hope the Emperor will appreciate the pair of you as much as I do.’

It was the middle of the night, so far as he could judge, when they came for Thalric. Four guards opened up his cell, chained him up and hauled him off. He was conscious of Tisamon’s wry gaze on him as he left.

They took him to a windowless room, lit by a dim gas-lantern fixed on the wall. For all he could see of the sun it could just as easily be noon outside as night.

It was an interrogation room. Not a room with that trade’s machines and artificers but a little booth of an office that, in the great scheme of questioning through excruciation, preceded the main event. A big man was standing there behind a desk, an officer from his bearing, but Thalric noticed no badge of rank. Sitting at the desk itself was a woman.

He was surprised at that because, in Capitas, even the Rekef – which elsewhere used whatever tool best fit the hand – was intrinsically a conservative force. Women were considered servants or perhaps clerks at best, but not put in charge, as this one clearly was. Even the officer, who had authority enough to be at least a colonel, was deferring to her.

She was young, fifteen or twenty years Thalric’s junior at least, and the dim light showed that she was attractive. Her hair was long and golden, tied back neatly. She wore clothes that suggested wealth – some rich officer’s wife? Her gaze was very steady.

‘Major Thalric of the Rekef,’ she began, but not as a question. The guards were still watching him narrowly despite having bound his arms painfully tight behind his back. He waited, understanding that this was not an opportunity to better his lot. He would just have to weather whatever came.

‘So you killed General Reiner,’ she noted.

Is she his wife? That would make sense. He had no other theory as to who she might be. She would make a very young wife for Reiner, though, surely? He had never thought of Rekef generals as being the marrying type, but then he himself was still married to a woman he had not seen in years. The Empire needed sons, but it was a duty only, and sentiment did not come into it.

‘Major Thalric… or perhaps just Thalric.’ Her smile remained bright and unreadable. In fact her eyes glittered with a hard-edged mirth, and if she was a widow there was little enough grieving in her. ‘General Brugan, here, has shown me your records.’

Thalric blinked, glancing up at the big officer. General Brugan? So the Rekef really was ready to take him apart, was it? But if that was the case, who was this wretched woman? Where was General Maxin?

‘A remarkable piece of patchwork, your career,’ the woman noted. ‘Remind me of it, General.’

Brugan stared bleakly at Thalric, like an artificer studying a broken machine. ‘Anti-insurgent work, after the conquest of Myna. Referred to the Rekef by Major Ulther, as he then was. Behind the lines during the Twelve-Year War with assassination squads. Then the Lowlands business, Helleron. The strike against Collegium by rail.’

The woman’s smile was cutting. ‘That didn’t go very well, did it?’

I was outmanoeuvred. The army gave insufficient support. My chief spy betrayed me. ‘No,’ Thalric said simply. If I am to be racked, let it be for my own failures. I will not die blaming others for my misdeeds.

‘Neither did the Vekken campaign,’ General Brugan added darkly.

Major Daklan was in charge of that, you bastard. A brief memory, of Daklan’s blade driving into him, made him twitch.

‘And then you went rogue, I’m told,’ the woman noted. Her face told him that she knew to the last detail all the circumstances, and that he would be able to use none of them in his defence. He did not feel up to singing the old tune: you sold me out before I sold you. It was not as though it would make any difference.

‘Collegium, Jerez, and then you turn up in Myna and kill General Reiner. And then you surrender to the army, who bring you here. Why, Thalric? Tell me why.’

‘Why to which question?’ he asked. ‘There is no one reason for all of it.’

‘What a complex man you are.’ All the humour was gone from her face. ‘So tell me why you killed the general, Thalric.’

A hundred flippant answers came to him and he brushed them all away. Let them kill me for the truth, why not? Let them rack me and crush me, and find in the end only what they had at the start. ‘He cast me off. He let them send men to kill me, simply because of politics,’ he told her. ‘I had always served the Empire faithfully, and yes, I have not always triumphed, but the Empire was all I ever cared about. He cast me off. He let them take me. Then, when I was caught in Myna, he took it all back. He gave me back my rank and my place, and said he needed me again, but not to serve the Empire, just for his own private schemes.’ The rush of emotion he felt now putting it all into words thoroughly shocked him. ‘And do you know what? He got on my nerves. All the things I had done for him, that at the time I thought I had been doing for the Empire. All those muddied waters, the children I killed and the friends I betrayed, and was it for Empire, or just for Reiner? I’d never know. I’d only know that Empire’s good and general’s ambition were not the same thing any more. And he sat there, taking it all back and about to give me orders, and I just couldn’t take any more of him. And so I did it, and I defy anyone to honestly claim they wouldn’t have done the same. He was an irritating man.’

General Brugan’s mouth twitched just the once.

‘I killed Colonel Latvoc as well,’ Thalric added, as though this was some obscure mitigation.

The woman’s hand waved, consigning Latvoc to the oubliette of history. ‘And you really expect us to believe you did it all for the Empire?’

‘Not for a moment,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t make it any less true.’

‘You’re a presumptuous man. For the Empire? Most would be glad enough to do it for a superior officer, for their general, for their own self-interest, for the Emperor even. The Empire is a large master to claim.’

‘That is why it is fit to be served,’ replied Thalric. The evident sincerity in his own tone surprised him.

The woman stood up, still looking at him.

He shrugged again. ‘What do you want from me? You may as well just take it. I’m in no position to stop you, whoever you are.’

‘I will have to think about what I want from you,’ she said, and stepped neatly from the room, leaving him for the guards to manhandle away. Only later, after he had been cast back into his cell, did some thought of who she might be occur to him.

It had been a long night, and sleep was slow in coming. Tisamon suspected that he was staving it off because of the unsettling dreams. In his dreams he saw Laetrimae in all her riddled detail. That was all the dream consisted of. He was made to stare and stare at her despoiled flesh, her hybrid carapace and the constant piercings of the vines. He was a prisoner even in sleep now, and the blood he shed in the fighting pits was more wholesome than the sight of that mangled but undying cadaver.

The failure of all our kinden. Laetrimae and he, they were well matched in that. They had both led ruined lives, bitter ones, twisting inwards and inwards until they stood face to face in this sunless cell. The only thing that stood between them was five hundred years of torment, but he felt as though he was rapidly catching her up.

They brought Thalric back to the cells eventually. The Wasp had no words for him, although his skin looked as intact as it had done when he was dragged away. Thalric could make out the long scar that Tynisa had given him in Helleron, but it was only one amongst so many. The world had done its best to kill Thalric. And he has survived, for this?

Ah, Tynisa. And was she captured yet? Dead yet? And, if not, then surely the sands were running out on her. She would come stalking into the palace to find her father, but she was not skilled enough, as Tisamon well knew, to survive it. He had taught her all he could, but it was an errand he himself would have died in attempting.

And yet I might have tried it, even so. She is my daughter, yet.

It was a curse he would not wish on anyone, to possess his tainted blood in her veins. Instead I would tell her, look to Stenwold. There is your model for a proper life, a life of meaning.

He wondered if, somehow, it would have been possible to sever that twisted, self-hating part of himself, cut it away, cast it off. What manner of father would he have been to the girl then? A better one, surely.

When yet another stranger came to stare at Tisamon, the Mantis did not even look at him, at least not at first. He did not mark Thalric’s abrupt flinching away, nor did he care much about the two armoured sentinels that stood behind the visitor with spears at the ready. It was Ult that Tisamon finally noticed: Ult’s peculiar response to the newcomer. The visitor himself never glanced at the old man but Tisamon read it all in his reaction: here was a man that Ult feared, and revered, and hated so fiercely and intensely, all emotions melted together in the same pot. It told Tisamon who the newcomer was more eloquently than words.

He was young, this man, or at least younger than Tisamon: young and clean-featured and handsome in the Wasp way, fair-haired and well-dressed. His style was that of rich Wasp men, favouring garments that were loose-cut and intricately embroidered, yet with a military stamp still very much in evidence – and the fashion was so because this man dressed in such garb.

Tisamon finally turned to look with curiosity upon his Imperial Majesty Alvdan the Second.

‘This is him, is it?’ Alvdan asked, eyeing Tisamon without much interest. ‘This is your killer Mantis.’

Ult murmured something that might be, ‘Yes, your Imperial Majesty.’

‘We have heard that he fights well, and we hope we have been correctly advised.’

Again Ult murmured some confirmation.

Alvdan met Tisamon’s gaze and the Mantis saw that here was a man to be reckoned with: not vain or foppish but insecure and intelligent, the two qualities that ever honed the tyrant.

‘What will he fight?’

‘I’ve not made my final choice for the warm-ups yet, your Imperial Majesty,’ Ult mumbled. ‘A beast first, probably. Then I was thinking a bare-hand match, since he does that well.’

As Alvdan made a slight, dismissive sound, Ult hurried on.

‘Then for last we’ve got a Commonwealer.’

Alvdan smiled at that. ‘The best of the Lowlands against the best of the Commonweal. That may indeed entertain us. This Commonwealer is skilled?’

‘She’s something very special as well,’ Ult confirmed.

‘She? One of their fighting women? Yes, that will be appreciated,’ Alvdan remarked, with a dry smirk. Looking straight into Tisamon’s face, his eyes suddenly narrowed.

‘We do not like this Mantis,’ he decided. ‘His people have been a considerable obstacle to our armies, we understand.’

Ult said nothing, just waiting.

‘When the fight is done, between this one and the Commonwealer, the winner shall be executed on crossed pikes, in the arena.’

Ult pursed his lips but said nothing.

‘Our people shall see that our enemies do not prosper, even though they entertain us. Arrange it.’

The Emperor strode off, his guards in tow, and Tisamon watched Ult staring after them, the hatred naked on his face. He saw that a man who lived as Ult lived, with the lives of all around him passing like water through his hands, must come to grief eventually. When he did he would have two choices: he must despise the wretches that he sent to their deaths, day in, day out, or he must despise those who command it.