Salute the Dark

Twenty-Three

Colonel Gan was still governor of Szar, but merely by a knife-edge. More than half of the city was denied to his troops, for over thirty of the city’s orderly little streets had been barricaded, and these barricades were made of metal riveted to metal, dug firmly into the earth. They would not stop the Wasp airborne, of course, but they had already made wrecks out of several of Gan’s automotives. The Bee-kinden had always been notable craftsmen.

In this way a line had been drawn across the city. There had already been several hundred dead Wasps, and three times as many locals, in skirmishes along the barricades. The Bees had meanwhile captured two of the arms factories that for the last decade had happily been providing the Empire with its weaponry. They wore Wasp armour painted over in russet, bore pikes, swords, crossbows and a scattering of more sophisticated weapons, while some of the barricades had ballistae to back them up. The Bees fought without flair but with a solid determination that made it almost impossible to wear them down. Yesterday thirty of Gan’s men had pinned three of the locals within a makeshift shelter and called for their surrender. It had not been forthcoming, for the same blind devotion that had kept the people of Szar docile under imperial rule while their old queen still lived now gripped them with a spirit of rebellion under Queen Maczech.

I could break them, Gan liked to think, with enough men. The Bee-kinden fought with a cold fury, though. They were not the natural soldiers that the Imperial Army were but they would simply not give ground without blood spilt for every inch. When cornered, they fought with a savage, fearless fury, and they made every action, even those guaranteed to succeed, absurdly costly in lives and in time.

And then there was the problem of the Colonel-Auxillian. In the last tenday, Gan’s life had become a twisted nightmare: his command usurped, his men intimidated, his very grasp of warfare ridiculed, and all at the hands of an arrogant halfbreed. I should have him seized and whipped. I should have him made to disappear. But the Emperor himself had signed the orders that brought Drephos to Szar. He made no secret of how much he loathed being here, and Gan made no secret of returning that loathing in full force. But the man was here now, and Gan could only step back and watch as the newcomer’s men stole away the existing garrison, put them to work, berated them and monopolized Gan’s engineers. Gan himself was becoming a recluse in his own city. Every time he gave an order he discovered that Drephos had already been there. And what was the man doing, anyway? Being no artificer, Gan had no idea. At those points where Gan would have been mustering men for an assault on the barricades, Drephos was instead setting up great machines.

To Totho’s eye, they were something like leadshotters, but more delicate and longer in the barrel, cluttered with mechanisms to give their artillerists as much control over force and aim as artifice could provide. Instead of volatile firepowder, they housed steam engines for a less violent discharge of their ammunition. There were high watch platforms built beside them, from which engineers could see the lie of the city and thus make precise calculations of their exacting trajectories. When these engines loosed their loads, the shot would sail serenely overhead to land far inside the rebel-held districts of the city. Beside them sat canisters of the same stuff that had killed the soldiers, an invention of the Beetle twins, the dreadful potency of which had driven them to suicide. In assisting with the construction, Totho had seen enough to understand the plan. True to his stated aims, Drephos had taken war to a new level.

They had not been meant for this eventuality, however. Drephos had intended to deploy them against the defenders of Sarn, or the Sarnesh field army if it was foolish enough to venture forth. However, little adaptation had been needed to comply with the Emperor’s present wishes. Drephos had done most of the work himself with almost indecent speed, eager to return to what he saw as his true place on the front line itself.

The Szaren resistance assumed that there was a stalemate, and meanwhile the Bee-kinden were gathering their forces, making themselves strong. Scouts’ reports came back now with news that, as well as the stolen arms and armour of the Empire, more and more of the Szaren were wearing their own traditional styles: breastplates and helms freshly painted in russet bands, or great, intricately articulated suits of sentinel plate. Some of these had lain in storage these past fifteen years, waiting as patiently as their owners for the call to arms, others were newly smithed. The Bee-kinden were rediscovering their heritage.

But there was no stalemate, of course, as Totho knew well. There was just a peculiarity of the weather, for the wind was currently adverse. The breeze was gusting against the imperial forces, enough for them to hear the clatter and scrape of armed locals from ten streets away. The engines only sat idle while Drephos waited for a favouring wind, and he would not have to wait long.

The thought of what would then happen made Totho tremble. Even stretching his mind, he could not quite fit the concept in. There were hundreds of thousands of Bee-kinden here in Szar. It was formerly one of the industrial workhorses of the Empire. The Emperor had taken its rebellion personally, and he wanted an example made.

There would indeed be an example made, and it would be Drephos’ example of how war would be fought from now on. For Drephos had invented a war that needed no soldiers, only artificers, and his machines would soon make full-scale armies obsolete. The very concepts of war would change. Conquest would become devastation, attack would become annihilation: cities turned to cemeteries, farmland to wasteland. What would be seen here in Szar would stop the world in its tracks. In the wake of it, every artificer, every military power, every Ant city-state would be striving to copy what Drephos had done, and without possession of such weapons there would be no chance of continued liberty, or even survival. It was not simply a case of an improvement on an old idea, as the snapbow was to a crossbow, the crossbow to a thrown spear, the spear to a rock. It was a whole new method of warfare.

Totho sat in a corner of a workshop that he had marked out for himself, and tinkered with his new snapbow design, feeling obsolescence creeping over him already. This was not a war that he understood any more.

Kaszaat was kept under watch most of the time. This was not by Drephos’ orders but those of Colonel Gan, who could not accept that she was Drephos’ creature and not a spy of the rebellious locals. Totho knew that Gan was right to doubt her, and he was only thankful that he himself remained trusted enough that the spies would keep their distance when Kaszaat sought him out.

He had expected her to try to recruit him in her own tiny rebellion but, when she was with him, she made no mention of the great engines, of the poison or of Drephos. He did not know whether it was because she was uncertain of what move to make next, or whether she simply did not trust him.

I do not care what the history books will say.

But that was not entirely true, because Drephos had not managed to cut himself off from ordinary human feelings quite as thoroughly as he might have wished.

Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos now stood atop one of his observation platforms and looked out over the city of Szar, all those little low buildings, those innumerable factories and workhouses. It was evening now, late and getting later, but a strong breeze was predicted to begin before dawn, blowing in from behind him. Daylight would then see the engines begin their work.

In his mind’s eye, which was always sharper and more vivid than his actual sight, he could see it all: the canisters, full of poison held under immense pressure, would be hurled almost gently, tipping end over end into the sky. The locals would look up and wonder, at first. Only on impact would their casings crack open, their tight-pressed contents escape.

With Drephos’ arrival, Colonel Gan and his soldiers had ceased trying to break the rebel lines. With typical Bee-kinden thinking the locals had simply hunkered down and refortified, defensive to the last. They were a simple, industrious and inoffensive people, strong in their unity but in little enough else. That was the reason the world was not overrun with them. They were now waiting for the anticipated Wasp reinforcements to come, having heard there were 10,000 soldiers marching from the Capitas garrison. Drephos knew those men had now been diverted, however, redeployed to keep the lid on the situation at Myna, which he heard was deteriorating.

Let them first hear the news from Szar, and then let them think about their revolution, he reflected, but he felt oddly uncomfortable with the concept. This is war simply for politics’ sake. I prefer the reverse.

The canisters would burst asunder, and the gas would be let loose in the city. The natural breeze would keep the heavy gas from spreading back towards the Wasps, and the chemicals would pass through every window, into every cellar. Death would be relatively swift, but agonizing. The gas, once taken into the lungs, began to dissolve the very tissues, so that the victims died while trying to inhale the fluid of their own bodies. The Beetle twins had been great innovators in the field of alchemy, and Drephos had been lucky to have grabbed them for his own service.

Dead now, of course. He was disappointed in them for that, but he always failed to allow for basic human sentiment. It was such a weakening force. Besides, when it came to culpability, it would not be their names written in the history books.

Perhaps the Bee-kinden would seek shelter underground, considering so much of their city was dug into the earth. It would avail them naught since the gas, to be effective at all, needed to be heavier than air. It would sink inevitably into every cellar and tunnel and crevice, and if the Bees managed to board themselves up so tightly that the poison could not get in, well, neither could the air. Colonel Gan had already planned to send men in straight after the gas, to ‘clear up any remaining resistance’. His comprehension of what was about to happen was so blatantly limited that Drephos had not even begun to explain. He had simply warned that, wherever the gas lay, in any depression or hole or bunker, it would remain potent for many tendays.

‘But I will have a city to run,’ Colonel Gan had protested. Drephos had merely turned away from him. Gan would have no city, would no longer be a governor, after this. Drephos had an uncomfortable feeling that a great many careers would die here along with Szar. Even the Emperor himself, who had given the order for Drephos to come here, had not known what kind of war he was unleashing.

Drephos had designed protective masks, to filter the worst of the poison from the gas. There were enough of these for his people only, and he suspected that inhaling even the air thus filtered would make them all ill. If the gas was blown back by errant winds, at least his artificers had a chance at survival. Gan and his garrison would not be so lucky. After tomorrow, the whole Empire would come to know the name of Dariandrephos. Within a month his fame, or his infamy, would spread to the Commonweal and the Lowlands, and beyond. He had never objected to either fame or notoriety so long as either was justified.

After tomorrow the world would know Drephos for one thing. It would not be as a genius artificer, inventor of machines, paragon of progress, the man who drove the mills of war. They would know him as the man who killed Szar. They would overlook the technical achievements he had made in bringing it about, citing him only as a butcher, the pedlar of atrocity. The Empire, that had given him such opportunity, would have made him its scapegoat, the focus for the world’s scorn and hatred. The Wasps would keep him around, keep him working, but the world would never know the truth for which he had worked all his life, his ideology and his ethos. Anything he put forward henceforth, be it philosophy or technology, would be tainted with that reputation.

He heard movement below him, where nobody should be trespassing, then a sudden shout of alarm as Big Greyv, the silent Mole Cricket, loomed massively from the shadows to accost the newcomer.

‘It’s all right, let him come up,’ Drephos called down. ‘Come on, Totho. I’ve been expecting you.’

It was the sudden unfolding of Big Greyv from the shadows that had given Totho such a turn. Of course he knew that the Mole Cricket could see perfectly in the dark, just as Drephos could, but that someone so huge could lurk totally unseen shook him badly. Greyv held an axe casually in one hand, the weapon dwarfed by its wielder. Totho himself would barely have been able to lift it.

He weighed his own burden in both hands while looking up at the watchtower beside the new engines. The lights of the engineering works behind showed him the robed figure standing atop it.

‘You are here to talk to me, are you not?’ the voice of Drephos drifted down to him. ‘Then climb up here. I dislike shouting.’

Totho cast a look at Greyv. The Mole Cricket’s dark face was unreadable but the set of his body said that he was unhappy, and that he did not trust Totho alone with their master. It was, Totho reckoned, a fair enough assessment.

He slung his burden over one shoulder and walked over to the metal rungs. One was missing and some were loose, and he therefore divined that this must be a tower constructed by the garrison engineers and not Drephos’ own people. He paused for a moment beside the deceptively small cask that was crammed full of the poison. It looked manageable enough to be carried easily by one man but the material within was so compressed and concentrated that it would have taken all Totho’s strength to shift it. He glanced up to see Drephos peering down at him, his halfbreed, iris-less eyes calmly curious as to what Totho might do.

What he did was climb on up to join his master. He wanted to talk.

‘I anticipated I would be seeing you at some point tonight,’ Drephos said. ‘You have brought another sample of your work, I notice.’ He held a hand out and automatically Totho unslung his piece and held it out to show him.

‘You have perfected the loading mechanism, I see,’ Drephos remarked.

The repeating snapbow lay slender and silver in Totho’s hands. ‘I adapted one from a nailbow,’ he explained. ‘It’s too complex for mass-production, though, and it jams too easily. It needs more modification.’

‘Even so, I am impressed. Good work.’ Drephos’ hand touched the weapon briefly, but he made no protest as Totho reslung it, continuing, ‘I know why you’re really here.’

‘And why is that?’ It had been an unexpectedly hard climb, or perhaps Totho’s own nerves were running him fierce and ragged.

‘You are not yet one of my cadre, not fully. That is only to be expected. Everyone needs time to settle in and learn the routines.’

‘Routines?’

‘Both physical and ideological.’

Totho grasped the rail, looking out towards the Szaren barricades. How many thousands of people…? ‘And the Twins?’

Drephos shrugged unevenly, joining him at the rail. ‘I was surprised by that,’ he admitted. ‘I had not judged the limits of their stresses and their tolerances as well as I might.’

That brought a bitter smile to Totho’s lips. ‘So they were just a piece of your machine that failed.’

‘After their task was done, thankfully.’ If Drephos had heard any accusation in his underling’s words there was no sign of it.

‘They killed themselves rather than see you do this.’ Totho knew that he had to force a confrontation now, before his own nerve failed altogether.

Drephos’ hands found the rail, one of them with a subtle scrape of metal. It looked for all the world as though he and Totho were simply sharing the view. ‘If that was the choice that they set themselves,’ the Colonel-Auxillian replied, ‘then I am disappointed, but it was their own choice to make.’ His voice hardened slightly. ‘You will note that they did not attempt to interfere with my work. Is that the choice that you have set yourself, Totho?’

Totho took a long breath. ‘I have merely come to ask you to reconsider.’ It sounded absurd to him, a pathetic anticlimax, but Drephos was nodding.

‘Good. Rational debate, I never tire of it. I always knew that you were trying to install yourself as my conscience. I am glad that you felt you could bring your problem to me rather than dwelling on it in silence, as the Twins did. You have already learnt your lesson, after the issue with the girl.’

The girl: Che. The mention of her jarred in Totho, wrong-footing him. ‘I cannot believe that you would willingly do what you are about to do, if you had… if you had properly considered the consequences,’ he got out.

‘Consequences,’ echoed Drephos. ‘Do you mean political? Technical?’

‘Moral,’ Totho blurted out. ‘What you’re about to do is immoral. It’s wrong.’

‘Why?’ Drephos asked. Totho just stared at him. After a beat had passed without an answer, the master-artificer added, ‘There is a matter of scale, undoubtedly. I have found certain… obstacles within my own mind. Morality does not enter into it, but there are other matters that have given me pause.’ For the first and only time in Totho’s knowledge, he sounded uncertain.

‘You are a war-artificer,’ Totho said, ‘and you know it is not flattery if I say that you are the greatest I have known. This is not war, however. This is beneath you. You constructed these weapons for the battlefield.’

Drephos smiled with the pure, simple expression of a clever man who is understood. ‘I have considered this myself. War, though – war is not a static thing. A war is not just the sum of its battles and skirmishes, Totho. It is the same as the difference between strategy and tactics: the great war and the little one. This is the great war.’

‘But most of those people who will die tomorrow will not be warriors,’ Totho pointed out. ‘They will be… just citizens of Szar: the young, the old-’

‘And on the field against the Sarnesh, my opponents would be soldiers?’ Drephos finished for him. ‘Yes, I asked myself that. What is the great war, though, if it is not the Empire against the world? That world is not built on soldiers. The soldiers are merely the sword, not the hand that holds it, nor the body to which that hand belongs. Those people out there, you consider them as innocents in war? Mere bystanders, detached and uninvolved? Surely you were better schooled in logic than that.’

Drephos’ manner made Totho think of his studies at the College, the same dry approach to theory, and here it was trotted out with a whole city’s fate resting on it.

‘Have they fed a soldier? Then they are the war,’ Drephos elaborated. ‘Have they clothed one? Taught one? Given birth to one? Will they grow to be one? Have they lived their lives fed and aided by the achievements of the soldiers gone before? You cannot say that they are not the war, Totho. The soldiers themselves are merely the tip of it, but beneath the waters is a great mountain building towards them. You see, Totho, I have already considered all this. I am not some irrational tyrant.’

‘Yes, but-’

‘If they survive, they shall rise up again, the next generation, or the next. If they are whipped down by main force, they shall merely nurse their wounds and resharpen their blades. If a single Szaren still stands after tomorrow, then the Empire is doomed sooner or later, for inevitably the war will be lost, in ten years or a hundred or a thousand. If we wish to win the war, then we must make war on all our enemies – not only those that now present themselves with a blade in their hand. Can you honestly refute my logic?’

‘But there are other ways to solve a problem, surely?’

‘Now that is an old argument, and you are merely echoing it,’ Drephos replied, as mildly admonitory as a schoolteacher. ‘Yes, there are truces and treaties and accords and concords and all of that, but they are merely games, Totho. They are games to give both sides time to prepare for the real thing, and that is war. Treaties can be broken. In fact most are made with that in mind. There was a philosopher of Collegium a hundred years ago who thought that, instead of wars, your Ant cities could resolve their differences by playing games, thus saving the loss of countless lives. You must see the inevitable flaw in his idea, for what if the losing side refused to accept its defeat? In war there is no such uncertainty. The bodies left on the field give a finality to what happened, however each side dresses it up in its reports. And in this war, my new war, I will expunge even the most lingering doubt. The Empire will win and Szar will lose, and the proof of it will be that there will be no Szar left, no Szaren people, no trace of those who defy the Empire.’

‘So that the other cities, Myna and the others, they’ll never rebel again, is that it?’ Totho asked him. ‘Surely-?’

‘Surely I can see that it isn’t the case? Yes, the Maynesh and the Mynans and the rest, they will rise up again, and, when they do, do you know what they will have? They will have weapons of their own to counter this one, to bring a new war against the Empire, and we will have to find weapons more terrible still to defeat them. Don’t you see, Totho? That’s the point. This is war, and it is also progress, the living, breathing engine of war. Your snapbows, the incendiaries that took Tark, they’re just stopgaps. This is the next step, and that, beyond any other reason, is why I must take it. One cannot deny history its prize, Totho.’

Totho opened his mouth, once or twice, but no words came out. Drephos’ smile, kindly enough in its way, broadened.

‘If you will be my conscience, well and good,’ he allowed, ‘but from where do you derive yours?’

Totho stared down at his hands as they gripped the rail, realizing as he did so that he was now copying one of Stenwold’s mannerisms, when the old man felt harried on all sides and beset with unsolvable problems. ‘From her,’ he replied, and it was true. ‘From Cheerwell Maker. I always ask myself if she would approve, and if she would not, then it’s wrong. But then I’ve already done so many things that she would not approve of, so where am I now?’

‘Quite,’ said Drephos. ‘Be thankful that reason and calm thought can prevail over such vague notions.’ Abruptly his head turned, and he was looking past Totho at something below them. ‘And here,’ he said, ‘is my other expected guest.’

Totho turned to see Kaszaat herself being led towards the engine, firmly pinioned between two Wasp soldiers.