Salute the Dark

Twenty-Four

They had chosen the island of Findlaine as their staging point. The Wasps, still focused on holding on to a turbulent Solarno, had not further expanded their influence out over the waters of the Exalsee. But Findlaine was close enough to undertake the flight and still have fuel and fire to do battle over the city itself; far enough that the flying machines and beasts could muster there without sharp eyes from Solarno’s garrison spotting them.

There was an old tower on Findlaine, its provenance lost after successive changes of ownership. The style was Spider-kinden of centuries before, a delicate once-white spire that the years had brought down so that only a stump still remained, rising mutely out of the screen of surrounding trees. Taki had taken it as her vantage point. Looking north, she could see the pale blur on the shoreline that was Solarno, while looking south, down into Findlaine’s broad and shallow bay, she…

They were now gathered there, every flying machine that the free pilots of Solarno could muster, as well as a contingent of pirates and freebooters from Chasme, with some concerned mercenaries and a flight of dragonfly-riders from Princep Exilla. She had never seen so many pilots in one place, and it was all she could do to hold them together. They were at each others’ throats all the time: no natural allies but bitter enemies and rivals reluctantly pressed into service side by side. When the time came, they would fight as they always had, as individuals. She only hoped that they would concentrate on fighting the Wasps.

In her hand was a crumpled note recently brought to her by a messenger who was even now skimming back in his little sail-boat towards the city. It reported that Nero had organized what resistance he could. The Wasp governor’s ceremonial confirmation was nigh. The entire Wasp garrison would be out on the streets, waiting for trouble. They would certainly not be disappointed.

One single strike, to shatter their power. Very little word had come from the west, but Taki knew that the Spider-kinden were engaged in fighting up on the Silk Road, at places she had barely heard of, seen only briefly in passing.

She spared a thought for Che: I hope your plight is not as bad as ours. She also hoped that, in making this push against the Empire, she would be aiding the Beetle girl, just as she hoped that whatever trouble Che was in would take some of the pressure away from Solarno. Even the Empire only has so many soldiers, so many armies.

That was the theory, at least.

She consulted the little pocket clock that had been a gift from her brother, years before. She angled it at the sun until the little shadow told its tale. It was telling her that she would have to get started.

Without giving herself time to think, Taki sped down the slope towards the bay. Nero had better have his end of this action in hand. Even the thought of the man made her uncomfortable, because she knew he was not really here for any love of Solarno or hate of the Empire. A man ten years older than she was, and bald and not well favoured and, most of all, not a pilot. She could have overlooked the rest but she had never glanced twice at a man who wasn’t a flier. It was something in her heart and blood, needing a man who would share in the places that she really belonged.

Old fool that he is. She still hoped he would be all right. She wanted no more guilt on her shoulders than was there already. There will be a great many people by sunset who will not be ‘all right’.

Freedom, though – freedom for Solarno and the Exalsee and perhaps, just perhaps, for the world. We cast our little stone now in the hope of a landslide.

‘To your vessels!’ she shouted as she descended the slope. She saw men and women starting up from their card games and campfires, and mechanics make a final twist or turn, then scrambling out from beneath or within a machine. Niamedh flipped her a salute before vaulting up to the cockpit of her sleek Executrix. On the water, the bulky Mayfly Prolonged already had its propellers moving sluggishly as Scobraan started up the engines.

A big female dragonfly some thirty feet long lifted out of the woods with an armoured rider perched on its back. She marvelled at the sight, viewing it from the ground like this, and for this fragile moment as an ally not an enemy. They were fleet, jewelled anachronisms, those beasts – far nimbler than a flying machine, but what could the rider’s lance or bow do against Taki’s vessel’s metal hide?

There were more insects in the air by now, all circling and hovering. She saw Drevane Sae’s own mount take flight, identifiable by the emerald banner streaming behind his saddle. From the water the ugly, blackened hulk that was Hawkmoth’s Bleakness, most infamous pirate vessel of a piratical age, was planing over the wave-tips, fighting for height.

‘Luck.’ The word was spoken briefly by its owner passing her by. It was the Creev, the slave-mercenary of Chasme. She watched him climb up the spiny hull of his vicious-looking new fixed-wing Nameless Warrior, his previous Mordant Fire having been lost in a duel with the Wasps. Beyond him she saw the flash of the Fly-kinden te Frenna’s red scarf as she dropped into the seat of her slender heliopter, the Gadaway. It came to Taki that this might be the last time she saw many of these people, whether friends, foes or strangers. She had brought them together and now she was sending them into war.

She let her own Art wings bring her out to the Esca Volenti as it bobbed just off the shoreline, and then started the clockwork of its engine determinedly, trying to lose such mournful thoughts in the comfort of her old routines. Her elegant orthopter leapt from the waters in a spray of silver, passing up and up through the strata of carefully circling machines and beasts, and flung itself like an arrow across the waters towards Solarno, with a train of others following immediately in her wake.

The Empire had found a scapegoat in the local branch of the Demarial family, former supporters of the Path of Jade. With most of that family’s Aristoi having fled to Porta Mavralis, the Wasps had simply seized their expansive townhouse with its prime view over the Galand Square and the bay. The new imperial governor himself intended to live there in style, it was clear, and the gesture had even brought a measure of approval from the Solarnese.

Galand Square was full today, the people of Solarno jostling shoulder to shoulder and Fly-kinden roosting on the three outsized martial statues that the square was famous for. One of those trespassing Flies, a bald, lump-faced creature, was doing his best not to keep glancing behind him at the glittering waters of the Exalsee.

Nero felt as tense as he had ever been. The hammer was about to fall – or at least that was the plan. He had to take it on faith that the hammer was poised at all. There were so many pieces to come together and, although he was high up here, sitting like a privileged child on the shoulders of the great stone soldier, he could see none of them. Even the Wasp governor had yet to show himself. The balcony – and perhaps the confiscation of this house had been solely to acquire that great balcony, so suited to public declamation – currently hosted a half-dozen soldiers in heavy sentinel armour and two Fly-kinden slave-scribes, but nothing that resembled an officer, let alone whichever imperial colonel would be governing here.

Finally the game was about to begin. Nero had spent the last two days urging people into position by sheer force of will. Jemeyn and Wen, and the other Solarnese who were willing to take up arms, were split into bands of ten and twenty now within a quick dash of the square. Odyssa and her Scorpion mercenaries were on ships out in the bay, equipped with a telescope and a Solarnese artificer to use it, closely watching Galand Square for the signal. Somewhere out across the waters, Taki and the other free pilots were waiting. The frustration in seeing none of it was maddening.

Nero, old boy, you’re only an artist. What are you doing starting revolutions?

Then there was Cesta, of course, who must already be lurking somewhere close, ready for whatever he intended to do to light the fuse here. A blade thrown from a good distance was Nero’s guess, but first there would have to be the right target.

By now there were soldiers lining the square, marching forth with black and yellow pennants on their lances. Nero shifted his balance on the statue, resisting the urge to glance back towards the sea (were there black dots he could see, in the distance over it?) or to check that his dagger could be easily drawn through the buttons of his breeches. The incoming crowd, hustled together by roving Wasp soldiers to witness the new governor’s inauguration, had already been searched for blades, but few Wasps were diligent enough to feel up the inside of a Fly-kinden man’s thighs, especially one as grim-looking as Nero.

The mood in the square was very quiet. Some spoke together in low voices, but many simply stared up at the imposing balcony or at the encircling soldiers. They were not taking their subjugation well, and today would be either kill or cure. Nero was willing to bet that there were more than a few hidden weapons among the crowd. The Wasps had not won any great love amongst the people here, nor was Nero the only player whose pieces were out of sight. Only the day before, a third of the Solarno garrison had simply packed up and marched north again. Rumour said that the siege of the Spider-kinden city of Seldis was dragging, despite the Empire’s mechanical might. Nero himself knew how the Spider-kinden dealt with sieges: assassination, mass poisonings, sabotage, infiltration and incitement, and all the time there would be mercenaries and Spider levies gathering to the south, along the Silk Road. The news had helped stoke the smoulder that was Solarno and he reckoned it was all about to catch ablaze.

Myna all over again. But of course he had not been there at Myna when the gates came down. He had carefully weighed up the odds, and then told them – Stenwold and Tisamon and Marius – that he wasn’t game for it. After all, Fly-kinden were not noted for their warlike tendencies. It was the nature of his small kinden to bend before the storm. That was why they fitted in so well, why they had settled everywhere from Collegium to the Ant city-states and the heart of the Empire. But here in Solarno he had met a different breed of them: fighting Fly-kinden amongst the free pilots. One in particular, actually.

All this for a pretty face. But it was a very pretty face, and a lively manner, and though she was young enough to be his daughter, still he had been drawn to her like a moth to a flame. I am, let’s be honest here, too old for all of this, so if I’m going to start playing the young man in going to war, why not play him elsewhere too?

The thought put a smile on his face, but it vanished as the governor appeared.

There were abruptly a dozen Wasp officers up there on the balcony, looking interchangeable in their armour and peering down at the resentful mass of their new subjects with disdain. Amongst them, only the governor had dressed for the occasion. Over his banded hauberk he wore open-fronted robes of black with gold trim, and from somewhere, doubtless some pillaged loot of a Solarnese Aristos, he had found himself a golden circlet.

Drama, Nero thought. I can’t deny that the man has drama. He then realized that he did not even know the governor-to-be’s name. But you shouldn’t be wearing that crown just yet…

The governor was a broad-shouldered man, with greying hair, an imperial colonel whose loyal service had earned him this prestigious post. He went over to grip the balustrade, visibly scowling down at the brooding Solarnese below. His officers stood back, giving him the moment. Was this because they respected him as a commander, or because they did not want to draw the ire of the natives onto themselves? Nero shifted his balance again, aware of the dagger strapped to his thigh as though it were scorching him. The crowd had gone quite quiet, even the murmur of private thoughts expressed to a neighbour had ceased. Only the pounding surf of the Exalsee and the occasional clink of a soldier’s armour broke the silence.

As the governor opened his mouth to speak, Cesta was magically there.

Nero never noticed whether he had leapt from a neighbouring building, or flew there, or even pushed his way through from the interior of the Demarial house, but he was suddenly there, dressed in the loose white garments of a Solarnese citizen and cutting the governor’s throat in public. Perhaps it was the world’s most witnessed assassination. Nero felt his jaw drop, and a shock eddied through the crowd as if recoiling away from the spray of blood that spattered the front rows of those watching like a benediction.

In his artist’s heart, Nero yearned to capture that tableau: the colonel – never now to truly be the governor – arched back, the glitter of red hanging in the air, the lean man of uncertain race poised beside him on the balcony rail, the utter blank shock of the officers behind. Even as he appreciated it, the moment was gone, to be succeeded by the next.

With the governor’s blood spotted across his pale clothing Cesta cried out ‘Solarno!’ and his hands sprang alive with metal, hurling his blades even as the shocked sentinels lumbered torwards him. Nero saw two men fall back, all their weight of armour no protection against a narrow dart through the eyeslit. A lance drove for the assassin, but he used it as a step to cast himself upwards and forwards, towards the retreating officers. Nero saw a scatter of sting-blasts explode around Cesta, at least one of which struck down a Wasp major by mistake, and then the assassin was amongst them. His blades sprang from his hands like steel rain, but it was the hands themselves that dealt death. Open, empty hands, yet some Art of Cesta’s lost kinden made them killing things, passing through armour without a mark, slicing flesh like razors.

The crowd took over at that point. No swords but a sea of daggers, walking sticks or Art-bladed fists, and abruptly they were rushing the cordon of soldiers around them. The Wasp-kinden still possessed lances and stings, and the mob in Galand Square fell back from them and their wall of steel points, but a moment later Jemeyn and Wen, and all the others, had appeared at all the exits to the Square and immediately the Wasps were a thin line of men fighting on two fronts.

And word has gone to the garrison already, Nero knew. More soldiers are coming, but let’s hope they aren’t the only ones.

The fighting was all around him now and, though he had dragged his dagger out of concealment, he stayed clinging to the statue’s stone head. The front doors of the Demarial house burst open and a wedge of imperial heavy infantry tore out into the crowd; just as the Wasp cordon on the east side of the square disintegrated entirely, and whole bundles of Solarnese curved swords were passed over into waiting hands – and still Nero had eyes only for Cesta.

Over half the Wasp officers were dead now, and most of the rest retreating into the house, frantic to get away from this madman and his bloody hands, but Nero was there to see the sentinel’s lance drive into the assassin’s back, finding a gap that no amount of luck or skill could quite cover. Cesta was slammed into the doorway and, even as he convulsed on the pike’s end, his hand flicked out a knife that snapped the sentinel’s head back, collapsing him to his knees.

He died in the doorway, did Cesta, his back turned to the great fighting scrum of people that he had set alight: impaled and scorched with Wasp fire, but still casting one last blade before he fell. In his mind was the sad knowledge that his kinden, his whole race and heritage, might wink out the moment he did.

Nero shuddered at the sight, and only then looked back out over the Exalsee, hearing in the very back of his mind the drone of engines. There he spotted the dark dots that were the flying machines of the free pilots casting themselves across the waters towards the beleaguered city of Solarno.

When the first message had reached the imperial garrison it was so garbled that they had not known what to make of it. Men were sent out on to the streets, others towards the governor’s coronation. Then more word came in, and units of the Wasp army began to form, a coordinated march to clear Galand Square.

Lieutenant Axrad cared nothing for that activity. The moment word came, he had rallied his pilots and rushed for their commandeered airfield. He had sent word to the captain of the Starnest, still up above the city, to expect attack, and then he and his people had leapt to their machines. Some of them were being lifted aloft by the airships, able to drop gracefully into the air. Others, the better fliers, were making their awkward take-off from the ground. Axrad flew to his own cockpit, there starting the engine and feeling the wings thrum so that the machine lurched and lifted as though hastily woken from sleep.

The ground fell away from him and he was free.

Axrad was not a model officer, but things were different in the flying corps. Five years earlier there had not even been such a division, but the Imperial Army was evolving rapidly. Three generations before they had been nothing but barbarians with spears and war-cries. How they had evolved since then to produce Lieutenant Axrad, pilot, aerial duellist and sophisticate. Some foreigners thought that the Wasp’s assurance of their own superiority would prevent them ever learning from the conquered, but that was not so. They saw the achievements of their subject peoples, and they thought: We are superior to them, so we can do better.

The rebels’ attack had been sudden, but the assault force on Solarno was not composed as a normal imperial army. The need for a sudden strike to secure the city, once the Rekef operation had foundered, had required a conquest far swifter and more mobile than all that grinding artillery and slogging infantry. Launching an aerial attack had been a glorious and successful experiment.

Now let us see if we can hold on to what we have gained. The lifting blimps were now in the air – they had been held ready since the invasion, although it was originally anticipated that they would be carrying the airforce west towards Seldis and the Spiderlands to support the army there. Much of the infantry, which had come stomping into Solarno already too late for the conquest, had already stomped right out again, heading to reinforce the besieging of the Spider cities.

There were wings everywhere over the city. Axrad tried a quick count. More than forty flying machines he saw. The numbers would be tight. Under normal circumstances, the air-fight would be over by now, the imperial machines destroyed in their hangars by the sudden strike but, as the airforce had been kept ready to leave the city, every machine had already been in a position to launch.

Behind and above him the sleek and massive bulk of the great dirigible Starnest blotted out the sky. She had nowhere near her complement of soldiers, for they were on the ground already or had marched out days ago, but there were enough engineers to man her weapon emplacements: leadshotters and bombards to thunder into the city, and nimble repeating ballistas to take on the Solarnese aircraft.

Axrad himself had been busy these last few days, not through conquering zeal but from professional curiosity. Flanking the nose of his craft were two rotary piercers, the firepowder weapons that the Solarnese pilots preferred, which were more powerful than the mechanically assisted ballistae the Wasp vessels normally sported.

The Fly-kinden Taki would be amongst that crescent of fliers that was even now sweeping over the Exalsee. He hoped he would spot her Esca Volenti. He owed her a final duel.

If she falls, it should be by my hand, and with respect, he thought. If I fall, I would rather it be due to one of her skill. Axrad had no room in his own head for the mantra of racial superiority that drove the Empire to conquest. He was one of that strange new breed combining soldier and artificer and aviator, a fighting pilot. Skill in the air was the sole qualification for respect in his world, and he did not care what colour of skin or physical frame came with it.

They were all in the air now, clawing for height or already dropping from the lifting blimps. The Imperial Airforce, the daring innovation that had taken Solarno, was about to defend it against all comers.

The free pilots came barrelling in from over the Exalsee with engines ablaze. The battle for the skies of Solarno had begun.

Below them the battle for the streets, the houses, the city proper, would have to be left to the amateur forces of the resistance, the Path of Jade, Odyssa and her Scorpion-kinden mercenaries. They and the Wasp heavy infantry would now grind through Solarno, skirmish after skirmish, until either the spirit went out of the locals or the Imperials cut their losses.

If the Empire gained control of the sky then the rebellion would be over before it began. Just as with the invasion, the Wasp airborne would then be able to descend anywhere across the city with sword and sting, picking the resistance off bit by bit, stopping the Solarnese from unifying. It was Taki’s job to contest the skies with them.

An airborne Empire. She saw now what she should have seen before: how it was that the Wasps had grown so powerful. They had all the fighting spirit of the Solarnese or the Ant-kinden, but they had the air as well, in which to give full rein to it. If only we Flies were fighters by nature, we’d be masters of the world.

Ahead she saw the long grey bulk of the Starnest’s airbag as the great vessel lifted higher. They had all agreed that it must be their target, beyond all else. They even had a plan, or at least some cobbled-together flimsy sort of thing that passed for one. What with the natural enemies that Taki had under her command, it was the best that they could manage.

She was approaching it fast, but it just kept growing. She had not appreciated the sheer scale of the vessel as it rose sluggishly into the air. The smaller carriers were already well above it, and she hauled back on the stick to take the Esca Volenti up towards them, meanwhile starting the motor of her rotary. In order to down the Starnest, they would have to cut through the enemy flying machines, and that was what she and the nimbler of the pilots would now be doing.

The air shuddered, a thunder felt in the sudden tremor of her controls before she actually heard it, and the weapons of the Starnest opened up on them. She saw gouts of powder-smoke from the leadshotters and, to her left, one of the Creev’s mercenary pilots was smashed to splinters, going without transition from a darting heliopter to a… a nothing, within a mere second. It was a lucky strike for the Wasps, since the leadshotters had never been meant as weapons against fliers. There were rapid-firing ballistas there, too, swivel-mounted to cover all angles, and, although they were still clumsy hammers to bring to bear on a swift flyer, Taki knew there would be losses to them also before this was out.

She was now coursing up across the grey vastness of the Starnest’s flank, while above her were Wasp flying machines dropping from their carriers and falling towards the Solarnese vessels.

Right.

Her first target had not even seen her, simply an unwary pilot who still thought he was the predator and not the prey. Just as the Wasp jockeyed his orthopter into position for a shot at one of her colleagues, Taki let her rotary spin and simply ripped the underside of his vessel out from under him. He lurched in the air, dropping sideways with engines still running, so that she realized that one of her shots must have reached the pilot himself. Beneath the whir of her own engines and the concussive bang of the rotating piercer his descent towards the city was silent.

All around, her attacking fleet of fliers had split off to tackle the Wasps in individual duel. In the moment’s grace before she found her next target, Taki saw the iron-clad bulk of the Creev’s Nameless Warrior clip one of the Wasp fliers in passing, suffering barely a shudder but sending the smaller enemy ship spinning. Meanwhile Niamedh’s Executrix lanced through a scatter of circling ships with rotaries blazing.

There were men in the air as well, for the Wasps had sent up some of the light airborne to support their airships. That was a tactical mistake, Taki knew. Men and machines did not go well against each other, pitching small and agile targets against swift hulls that were proof against their little weapons. She was glad of it: the more soldiers despatched impotently into the sky left fewer that could do real damage on the ground.

She flung the Esca straight through a crowd of them, scattering Wasp soldiers left and right, but then a shadow swept over her and, craning back she spotted a gap, a hole in their formation that the others were still reeling away from. Just then a second shape passed her, and she recognized the sleek lines of a hunting dragonfly, a creature that was born to take live prey in the air. A red and gold banner fluttered alongside the arrow-straight length of its tail, and she caught a glimpse of its rider, one of Drevane Sae’s people, turning back to loose an arrow even as the beast clutched a victim to itself.

Taki sent the Esca Volenti across the sky, leaving the plume of a failing Wasp flier to fall behind her. It was as if her mind was split in two. One part continued to grip the controls and sent her darting through the cluttered skies, hunting targets, striking at Wasp pilots and evading their reprisals, and all the time trying to find a clear path towards the Starnest in order to bring the giant dirigible down. But there was another part of her that had gone numb, for she had never seen aerial war conducted on this scale. It seemed unthinkable.

Te Frenna’s elegant Gadaway lay shredded across a forty-foot extent of the city, unrecognizable now, the fate of its pilot unknown. A downed Wasp craft had rammed the 500-year-old Celenza gallery, which was now in flames, only one of a dozen fires across the city. The fighters on the ground were in constant danger from a sporadic rain of broken machines, dead men and crippled insects. This was a horror surely never meant to be inflicted on her poor home.

The Esca turned on her wingtip, and she found another Wasp vessel cutting through the air before her. Its twinned repeating ballistas were already loosing, and she saw a Solarnese fixed-wing abruptly shudder in the air as the bolts struck. It was Scobraan’s heavy Mayfly Prolonged and Taki realized that her friend was making his own run at the Starnest now, either tired of waiting or spotting some chance she had overlooked. She unleashed the fury of her rotary on the Wasp, seeing her enemy falter, then dive and dart away to try and escape her, abandoning its prey. She swung into line behind it, matching swoop for swoop, unhurried and cool-headed, whilst her stomach sank in worry over the fate of Scobraan as he dived in towards the gigantic airship.

One of her bolts struck the enemy engine, and she saw the smoke start to billow. The Wasp began to lose height as quickly as he could, and then she saw the pilot kick the cockpit open and throw himself over one side, wings unfurling to catch him. She broke off immediately, and just then the Esca took three solid strikes from behind, two piercing the canvas of the craft’s wings, and a third slamming into the fuselage two feet behind her. Taki dived low, almost clipping the tumbling ship she had just dispatched, but a quick glance back showed that her pursuer was still with her, its ballistas ratcheting out bolts with mechanical precision. She hauled the Esca up into the sky, as steeply as she dared, knowing that she was thereby making a target of herself. Another bolt nipped past her, causing her to flinch.

Taki released her first chute, cutting it free entirely and sending the Esca wide. The Wasp was too close behind her, and the silk of the chute was in his wings before he could avoid it, snarling them, stopping them, and turning him from a flying machine into just another weight to plummet into Solarno.

She looked desperately around for Scobraan and spotted the Mayfly as just a small shape against the grey wall of the Starnest’s airbag. She sent the Esca scudding across to help him. Airships were notoriously difficult to bring down and, unless the Wasps were notably bad at their craft, it would take a thousand little bolts to pierce that bag enough to make the ship lose even a foot of height. The material would simply contract about each tiny puncture, every needle-wound nearly sealed almost in the moment of its making.

Scobraan’s Mayfly hurled itself straight at a Wasp orthopter, breaking the nerve of the pilot, who let his machine drop away rather than clash head-to-head with the big, armoured fixed-wing. Scobraan brought his craft as close as he dared to the Starnest’s fabric, until it seemed to Taki that he was skimming across it, that he should be leaving ripples in his wake.

Flame gouted from the Mayfly’s aft, indicating the firethrowers that Scobraan was so proud of, for what punctures could not do to damage an airbag fire would invariably accomplish, shrivelling the material to nothing. Taki felt her heart leap for joy at the sight.

But the Starnest remained untouched, no more than a long soot-mark to tell of Scobraan’s passage. Some new material, she reflected numbly, some stuff that would not burn. It seemed the Wasp artificers had outmanoeuvred them.

Then there was a Wasp pursuing Scobraan, darting around the Starnest’s bulk to fall in line behind him. Taki saw the Mayfly break off quickly, trusting to its armour to shrug off the shot of the nimbler craft, but then the Wasp opened up with its paired rotaries – pillaged Solarnese weaponry – and the Mayfly jerked in the air, losing height.

Taki was already diving to intervene, sending the Esca in as fast as her wings could beat, but the Wasp kept his line perfect, sending bolt after bolt punching into the Mayfly’s frame as Scobraan tried to throw him off. Then abruptly Scobraan was not trying any more, and the Mayfly Prolonged was simply dipping, nose-heavy, towards the ground.

Axrad, Taki realized. The Wasp fliers were all painted alike but she recognized the way he moved in the air, his unique style and skill.

She slung the Esca towards him. It was time to conclude their business.