Salute the Dark

Thirty-One

She had seen the Bleakness go down.

Even as the corpse of the Starnest was settling on Solarno, the Wasp fliers had been attacking. They had been mad, then, almost jostling each other out of the air for a piece of him. Hawkmoth’s ugly, armoured vessel had turned back over the city but they had been putting bolts into him already, and Taki could do nothing. She had hung in the air, naked, unshelled, a poor Fly-kinden girl with nothing but a knife, watching the end of the most notorious pirate of the age.

In a flurry of yellow and black orthopters he had gone, the Bleakness thundering out over the Exalsee as if Hawkmoth was seeking to return to one of his island hideouts. The shrapnel throwers had shredded the air to either side of him, and at least two of the Wasp machines had been knocked out of the sky, spinning over and over on suddenly ragged wings before tumbling away. But there were a half-dozen others still strafing him, passing back and forth and pounding the Bleakness with everything they had.

She had watched the Bleakness begin its long dive towards the cold waters of the Exalsee, with the Wasps chasing it still.

And now she sat on the ground in the silence that followed, and wept.

It was not truly silence, since so much of the city had burnt, and some was burning still. There were a few knots of Wasps still holding out, in this quarter or that. To her it seemed a silence though, being without the sound of engines and the rush of the wind.

They had won, apparently.

Scobraan was dead, she knew. She had felt it in the way the handling of the Mayfly Prolonged had suddenly changed, known that within that metal and wood casing he was dead, his hands slack on the controls. The Creev was dead, and Hawkmoth too, he who had borne the Solarnese no love but had come to help them fight the greater enemy. Te Frenna, who had been more of a dandy than a duellist, was dead. With them had fallen dozens of others: Solarnese pilots, pirates of Chasme and the Exalsee, dragonfly-knights from Princep Exilla, and hundreds of citizens of Solarno who had turned out on to the streets to fight the Wasps.

Nero was dead, too. He would paint no more. Cesta, bloody-handed, a name feared and hated and courted, Cesta also was dead. She could not imagine a world without his loathsome shadow.

She did not weep for them, though she had cause. Her loss cut keener than even her own brother’s death had cut. Her Esca Volenti was gone, smashed on the streets of Solarno along with Axrad’s flier, and probably Axrad himself. There would be other orthopters, she knew, but never one like that, so perfect, so loyal. In the midst of so much death she wept, like a child for a lost mother, over a machine.

A footstep nearby made her look up, red-eyed. Niamedh crouched beside her, put a hand on her shoulder. Her Executrix had come unscathed through the fire, one of very few. Niamedh understood, though. Behind her stood the Dragonfly lord, Drevane Sae, leaning heavily on a staff with his leg splinted. His painted face was drawn and his expression grim. His mount, carefully nurtured from the egg as they all were, had been shot from beneath him. He also understood her grief.

There would be work to be done, and soon. Those citizens who were not mourning, or rescuing their possessions, or putting out fires, were already looking northwards. There was an Empire out there that they had barely guessed at, and the same thought occurred to all of them: What if it comes back?

It would definitely come back if it could. Unless Che and her friends could strike enough of a blow, then this triumph would be nothing. The victory that had cast the invader out of Solarno was just a stone bouncing off armour-plate to the Empire. It would not leave any dent in history, unless so many stones were thrown at once that even the Empire would have to pause, step back, raise a shield.

Taki found that she did not even care. The way she felt at the moment, Solarno was hardly her home. So much that she genuinely cared for here had been cut from it.

‘They’ve cleared out the last of the Wasps,’ Niamedh informed her. ‘They surrendered, I think. They’re going to be sent north with some suitably defiant message.’

‘Suitable?’ How about ‘Please don’t kill us?’ But Taki did not voice it. ‘So what now?’

‘Ceremonies,’ the other pilot said drily. ‘You know how we Solarnese are about such things. They’ll want to give you something in reward, probably. I thought I’d let you know in case you wanted to dodge it.’

‘Let them give me a new machine,’ said Taki hollowly. ‘Then let them let me go.’ Right now she wanted none of it. She was sick of it all.

The princess stood up. The crowd seated about the arena was in seven stages of panic and confusion. They did not know what was going on. Perhaps she was the only one who did.

Seda looked upon the body of her brother and, for the first time in her life, she felt sorry for him. He sat rigid in his chair, but twisted sideways, his skin bleached and on his face an expression of the most abysmal horror.

She turned to one side, and her eyes met those of General Maxin. The chief of the Rekef was shaking. As he tore his gaze from the drained features of his Emperor, he looked back at her.

He could never know the sheer depth of the plot, but he understood. He saw it was her doing, somehow.

‘Take her!’ he bellowed, above the shouts and wails and fighting of the crowd. It was the voice of a man whose agents are never far away. ‘Kill the little bitch! Now!’ His own sword was in his hand but he did not dare approach her.

The Rekef agents came instantly from the crowd, though she could not have spotted them before they made their presence clear.

‘She’s murdered the Emperor!’ Maxin yelled. ‘Put her to the sword!’

One of them said something to him, which she was sure was, ‘We’re sorry, General.’ They took his sword and held his arms, wrestling him to his knees. Maxin’s face was instantly all incandescent incomprehension, and he began bawling and yelling at them as though they had simply made some ridiculous mistake.

There was then a figure coming up beside Seda, and she recognized General Brugan. He looked shaken by what he had witnessed but he had done his work well these last tendays, by replacing or subverting the men that Maxin had put in position. Maxin had been so fixed on his more outspoken adversary, Reiner, that he had never perceived the threat.

She nodded briefly, having no sense of drama when it came to these things.

Brugan drew his dagger and stomped over towards Maxin in a businesslike way.

Maxin was the lord of the Rekef, of course. He had ten times as many agents as Brugan, all across the Empire. He had the power, and had possessed the Emperor’s favour. Right here, though, in this limited slice of that vast Empire, the men were Brugan’s and Brugan held the knife.

Have I now avenged my siblings? Seda decided that she was too honest with herself to believe that.

‘People of the Empire!’ Brugan was shouting. ‘People of the Empire!’ but the crowd was still too wild to hear him. He made a curt, angry signal, and there was a sudden explosion. One of his people, standing by one of the entrances, had shot off a nailbow or a piercer, or something with a firepowder charge. The ripples spread through the crowd, until they were quiet enough to hear the general shout.

‘Your Emperor is dead!’ Brugan bellowed at the top of his lungs. ‘He was slain by his outlander slave, and through the treachery of his closest advisor! I am General Brugan of the Rekef, and I have now slain the traitor.’

There was no applause for him. The murmuring of the crowd was frightened, at the brink of violence. They wanted to see what would happen next.

‘I therefore declare the Princess Seda, last of great Alvdan’s bloodline, to be the new Empress!’ Brugan boomed.

‘No!’ someone shouted, and then others were calling out, ‘A woman?’ in sheer outrage. Seda stood before them, knowing that if the scales tipped against her they would tear her apart. Within the chorus of defiance she heard other voices, though, shouting her name – insisting that she was the only choice. Gjegevey and her other ministers had done their work well, spreading the poison of her popularity. These here, attending the Emperor’s private games, these were the great and the good of the Empire, the rich, the powerful, senior officers and scions of good families. These were the ones who must be won over to her side.

‘Listen to me!’ Brugan was demanding. ‘Who else is there? The imperial line must be kept pure!’

They were wavering, however, and she knew that there were many who would not willingly accept her as she was. She had plans for that, if only she could survive these next few minutes. She would take a partner into her bed. She would give them a figurehead of a man to respect, while she consolidated her grip on her brother’s empire.

She listened to the riotous arguing of the crowd, while she waited for the balance to tip.

The next morning, before the walls of Collegium a Wasp messenger arrived, with Stenwold’s name on his lips. He was escorted to the War Master’s door, and there he and his Collegiate guards were made to wait some time before Stenwold presented himself. When he did so, the Beetle looked half dead: hollow-eyed and grey-faced, dishevelled and shaken.

‘What has happened?’ he demanded, emerging out on the street.

‘I bear a message from General Tynan,’ the Wasp announced, staring at Stenwold with utter disdain. ‘He suggests that you, and you especially, General Maker, come to the east wall to observe something this morning. He will even delay his assault for that purpose.’

Stenwold knew, at that moment. For the last hour he had been sending messengers out across all Collegium in the hope that they would find Arianna, so abruptly vanished. The Wasp emissary did not need to explain any further. Stenwold pushed past him and hurried to the walls.

He ignored the greetings of his officers and charged the steps like a siege engine, knocking down anyone who got in his way. He did not stop until he stood atop the battlements, looking down on the Imperial Second Army.

And seeing what he did, he uttered a hoarse cry of grief and horror.

‘War Master, what is it?’ asked one of the defenders nearby, a man less familiar with Wasp-kinden customs. ‘It’s just two crossed spears they’ve put up. What does it mean?’

Stenwold took a deep breath, clenching his hands tight on the stone. This was how the Wasps disposed of their most despised prisoners: the slow death they gave to their traitors, their failed officers, their recaptured slaves. He went to his elbows on the crenulations, clasping his face in his hands.

When he looked up, the Wasp messenger was waiting, with a thin smile on his lips. ‘Shall I tell General Tynan you shall speak with him?’ the man asked.

Stenwold only nodded.

But even winged messengers took time to do their work, and he had a quarter of an hour in which to consider precisely what he should say.

I have only the one thing to offer.

Then the messenger returned, saying that General Tynan would be only too happy to talk.

The walk from the gates of Collegium seemed the longest of Stenwold’s life. He had done his absolute best to turn back his escort, but three dozen Beetle-kinden insisted on accompanying him and ignored every plea that they return behind the safety of the walls. The Wasps awaited their approach perfectly peaceably, ready for the morning’s assault but holding their hand. General Tynan was clearly anticipating his surrender and was prepared to sacrifice half a day’s bloodletting to obtain it.

Stenwold stopped at the crossed pikes. When they eventually brought her out, the spears would be thrust through Arianna’s body and she would be left to hang there, dying slowly and in agony. He understood that this Wasp custom went back to days when they were still uneducated tribesmen. The passage of time had made them more sophisticated, but no less cruel.

‘Wait here for me,’ he instructed his escort. It was not the first such order but, so close to the might of the Imperial Army, they finally took him at his word and stayed behind. It would still not save them if the Wasps decided that they should be cut down. Feeling ill and frightened, Stenwold passed the crossed pikes, passed the front ranks of the waiting Wasp army. Drawn up like this, their ranks seemed to go on forever. He saw the heavy infantry, the massed light airborne, the sentinels and artificers. He saw the Auxillians: Mole Crickets, Skaters, Ants, Grasshoppers. He saw the war engines primed to launch shot at his city, or grind forwards towards its walls. It seemed that there was not enough expanse of world to contain all the might of the Second Army, and he walked and walked further until one of the general’s aides collected him and brought him to Tynan’s tent.

There were a dozen soldiers within, or perhaps they were officers, for Stenwold just saw armoured Wasps. General Tynan himself was seated behind a folding table, with a swathe of bandages about his neck and jaw. He looked pale and stern and unsympathetic. Shackled at his side by chains drawing her to her knees was Arianna.

Stenwold could not help himself. He ran for her. He heard the clatter of drawn swords, and a single sting-shot crackled over his shoulder as he crouched down beside her. He heard Tynan ordering them all to hold, banging on the table to emphasize his point. He heard all this and did not care, enfolding the trembling prisoner in his arms.

Oh my poor dear Arianna. He thought suddenly of Sperra, tortured by the Sarnesh. The Wasps had spared his Spider-kinden the questioning at least, and perhaps he could spare her the pikes. She was weeping uncontrollably, and he knew she must be cursing him for having put himself into the enemy’s hands, but he did not care.

‘General Maker,’ Tynan began in a wounded, raw voice, ‘your assassin was not successful.’

Stenwold glared up at him. ‘She is not my assassin. She is mine, though.’

‘So I understand.’ The general’s face creased with pain, and he bared his teeth in annoyance. ‘She has spoken of you, and of your wretched city there, while my surgeons were bandaging the wound she dealt me. She has even tried to poison me with your doctrine.’

Stenwold looked from him to Arianna. A child of Collegium after all. ‘What do you want, General?’

‘You know what I want.’

‘I cannot give you the city. I have no authority to do so, nor will I betray Collegium.’ Seeing Tynan nod resignedly he hurried on, ‘But I will take her place on the pikes, where all the city can see. Surely that will mean more to you?’

Arianna cried out, tried to push him away from her, fighting desperately against the chains. He held her in, begging her to be quiet. Through it all, General Tynan stared stonily at him, saving his breath. When at last there was quiet, he merely said, ‘What’s to stop me putting up another pair of pikes?’

Stenwold stared him in the eye. ‘Nothing, General. Nothing whatsoever. What else do I have that I can give you, though? Not my city. Only me.’

Tynan stood up, wincing from his injuries. A Fly messenger had come to the tent’s flap, aviator’s goggles pushed up his forehead, and was signalling to the general urgently. ‘If this is your city sallying out, you shall both regret it,’ the general croaked, and pushed himself over to hear the message.

‘Oh, Sten, why did you come?’ Arianna demanded quietly.

‘And why did you go?’ he countered, raising the ghost of a smile.

‘I had to do something.’

‘And I see just how close you got.’

‘He’s going to kill us both.’

‘That seems likely.’ He held her tighter as General Tynan re-entered the tent. His expression was strange, twisted by more than the pain of his wound. Without even looking at Stenwold he beckoned the other Wasps towards him, giving them hurried orders and watching most of them depart. Only then did he glance back at his prisoners.

Stenwold met his scrutiny, seeing a world of thought move behind it: this was the man who had crushed the Felyal and was well on his way to bringing Collegium to its knees. He was no fool.

‘The pikes, sir. It has to be now,’ urged one of the other Wasps. ‘We still have the time.’

Tynan just stared at Stenwold and Arianna, on and on, while his officers grew impatient.

‘Unchain her,’ he rasped at last, and one of them pushed Stenwold roughly away and released Arianna’s bonds. Standing, shaking still, she clung to the Beetle.

‘You will return to your city,’ Tynan said, ‘and you will instruct your army to stay within its walls. If the least Fly-kinden emerges from Collegium in our sight, we will destroy it.’

Stenwold frowned. ‘I don’t…’ he started but he was drowned out by the protests of Tynan’s own officers, demanding immediate death for both the prisoners. Tynan simply glared them into silence, and even struck one across the face when he would not be quiet.

‘Outside,’ he ordered, and led the way into the morning light. Stenwold emerged after him to see the Imperial Second Army stood down and already about the business of striking their tents with hurried efficiency.

‘What in the wastes is going on?’ Stenwold demanded.

‘If I did the decent thing and had you and your Spider whore properly excruciated, what would it profit me, save to make me worse enemies that I have not the time to crush?’ Tynan rasped. ‘Perhaps I could even take the city this day, but I can no longer spare the men to hold it. When we meet again, General Maker, you remember what I could have done.’ He blinked, staring at the white walls of Collegium, seeing where his army had blackened and scarred them. ‘Now get your men behind your city gates and take your woman with you.’

Looking out from the wall now, it seemed impossible to believe that there had been a Wasp army camped here such a short time ago. Stenwold had to admit that the enemy were neat in their leaving.

It was only days later that they had heard the news from the Empire: the bloody event that had savaged the imperial capital a tenday before Tynan arrived at the gates. The news which had summoned General Tynan, and every other senior Wasp officer, back home.

He leant his elbows on the wall. ‘I have seen so many sieges and battles,’ he said, ‘and I’m not sorry to have this one cut short.’

‘Nor I,’ said the Spider-kinden man beside him.

‘But you’re Lord-Martial,’ Stenwold pointed out. ‘Surely war is what you do?’

Teornis chuckled. ‘Purely a ceremonial title, War Master. One I’m happy to be stripped of. I’m merely a man. They’ll put me back in my place when I go home.’

‘No hero’s welcome?’

‘You don’t know my people very well,’ the Spider pointed out. ‘I have defeated an army and won a war, and brought my people new allies, and if I’m very, very lucky they’ll post me somewhere so far away that nobody can even remember what that place is called. I took risks with my family’s wealth and station, Stenwold, and with the very sovereignty of the Spiderlands. Even though the Wasps have withdrawn from Seldis, my family won’t easily forget. No, I’ll be taking my time in going home to face the music.’

The Collegium airfield was still quite bare. Between the Vekken siege and the war with the Empire, the air trade had yet to regain its hold on the city. There was a chill wind gusting off the sea, and Stenwold wished that he had thought to bring a cloak. Getting old, he thought. Arianna would claim differently, and he would know she was lying and love her for it. She, at least, was one of the people determined to profit from the end of the war. It was a Spider-kinden’s natural instinct he supposed. She was somewhere in the city even now, probably trying to talk people into appointing her a member of the Assembly.

The broad-shouldered Sarnesh man was waiting for his response. ‘Come on, Master Maker, what do you think?’ At least he was not still saying War Master. The title otherwise showed alarming longevity.

‘I don’t know if I can imagine it,’ Stenwold said. ‘A new city in the Lowlands.’

‘I don’t need to imagine it,’ said the big Ant. ‘I’ve seen it already being laid out. All of Salma’s people that survived, and a whole load more from the Foreigners’ Quarter in Sarn. They’re all out digging the foundations right now. They want a free city. A city without a kinden.’ Balkus shook his head in wonder. ‘I’ve never heard of anything like it, but it’s happening. He made the Sarnesh promise, you see, and he made sure everyone else knew it.’ His hands squeezed the shoulders of the frail little Fly-kinden woman with her head nestling against his stomach.

‘Who’s running it?’ Stenwold asked.

‘Oh, you’d certainly approve. They got a kind of a council of people chosen by all the other people, like you got here. Some old boy, Sfayot, he’s Speaker there – or at least, they call him the steward or some such. Her steward. You know, that colourful girl.’

Stenwold nodded. He had never really met Grief in Chains, the woman who had become Salma’s lover. ‘How is she taking it?’

‘She doesn’t see anyone,’ Balkus replied sombrely. ‘Anyone except her advisors, I mean. They love her even more than the Sarnesh loved their queen. They say they’re doing it all for her – and for him. He was a good man.’

‘Yes, yes he was.’

‘They’re calling the new place Princep Salmae.’

Stenwold had to take a moment to fight down the lump in his throat. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t stay there. It sounds quite remarkable.’

‘Oh, I’m going back,’ Balkus said, with absolute conviction. ‘I just came to pick up Sperra, then we’re both heading back. After the fight with the Wasps, I reckon I can live that close to Sarn again without them wanting my head, or me wanting to go back, but I’ll never be properly Sarnesh, and…’ And Sperra would never go to Sarn again. He did not need to say it. ‘Only I thought, before I went there, I might go with Parops to see them retake Tark from the Wasps. They reckon now, with things being like they are in the Empire, that as soon as the Tarkesh get word that an army’s on the way to relieve them, they’ll rise up and throw the Wasps out. They know nobody’ll be coming to set fire to their city again any time soon.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Some of them are saying Parops’ll be king, but that’s rubbish. The man’s a commander, no more, no less.’

The airship that Stenwold had been watching for some time was now slowly descending onto the airfield. It could have been one of two, and he saw that it was the Buoyant Maiden, property of the ever-reliable Jons Allanbridge. The man was here on his last errand for Stenwold before he went off, he claimed, to seek his fortune in the Commonweal. Stenwold started forwards, even as the airfield crew caught the ship’s lines to secure her down.

Jons himself was shinning down from the deck, but the one person Stenwold really wanted to see just stepped straight from the rails, her wings catching her awkwardly and carrying her down to the ground.

He wanted to speak, but he had no words.

Her face said it all in that moment, as he ran towards her. Cheerwell Maker, in the uniform of a Mynan fighter, her sword slung at her side so naturally that he hardly noticed it. Her face was not that of a triumphant warrior but the face of a widow.

She had known, in that instant at Myna, what had happened. Stenwold would later hear how she had forced Allanbridge to take the Maiden to Tharn, how a Moth woman had flown out to them and curtly told her no more than she had already known: Achaeos the seer, pawn of the Darakyon, was dead. She had begged, she had pleaded with them until they had drawn back their bowstrings and threatened to shoot her, and Allanbridge had been forced to manhandle her back aboard the Maiden. They had not even let her see his body.

For a moment Che seemed so changed, so stern, that Stenwold ground to a halt, just staring at her. And then she saw him, and she was suddenly his niece again, throwing herself into his arms.

‘Uncle Sten!’

You’re safe. Hammer and Tongs, but you’re safe. He just held her close for as long as she would let him.

Taki arrived the next day, coasting in over the sea on a fixed-wing that she had flown on a single-legged journey from Porta Mavralis. At the airfield, nobody knew who she was, and they assumed she had come from Egel or Merro, until they had the chance to examine her flier. After that, the mechanics and artificers had a great many questions to ask her. Eventually, by repeating the name enough, she got them to go find Cheerwell Maker.

‘They made me an ambassador,’ she explained, as Che studied her, shocked by the changes she found in the woman. The lively spark had gone, replaced by a listlessness. ‘It was the price of the machine. I’m now ambassador to all the Lowlands, because I was the one person that cared a curse about the place.’

‘What will you do?’ Che asked her. She had done her best to make herself Stenwold’s right hand, since her return. Her mind was thus kept busy, because it was the only way through the pain.

Taki shrugged. ‘All I want to do is fly my Esca…’

She had told Che all about the retaking of Solarno, and Che had felt a hollow pang when she heard that she would never see Nero again. Another name to add to the list of the fallen and the missing. It was clear where Taki’s heart had gone, though.

Che had already spoken at length with one of the airfield artificers and with one of Stenwold’s colleagues at the College. She pursed her lips. ‘I have an idea, while you’re here.’

Taki cocked an eyebrow at her.

‘After the war with the Wasps, everyone is thinking about the future, and it’s clear to everyone that flying machines are part of that. A big part, too. The Wasps took Tark by air. We defended ourselves by air. There are artificers all over the Lowlands just waking up to the fact.’

Taki nodded, showing finally at least a mote of interest.

‘Well then, you Solarnese have been fighting in the air in a way we never did. Maybe it’s because of your Dragonfly neighbours. Here in the Lowlands we’ve been dragging our feet, because fighting on the ground was always enough for the Ant-kinden. So you’re ahead of us, with your designs. Even that fixed-wing you brought here has people excited, and I know that it isn’t…’

Taki nodded. ‘What are you trying to say, Che?’

‘What we’ve got here is a city full of very clever artificers,’ Che continued. ‘Any one of them would be more than happy to work with you – to design a new flier for you. That way you’d save them ten years of trial and error. We’re not a naturally airborne race, we Beetles. We badly need what you can teach us.’ An idea struck Che suddenly. ‘And you know what else we need? Pilots. There are people all over the Lowlands who’d come here just to learn.’

The Fly-kinden was looking slightly alarmed by now. ‘Teaching? I don’t think I…’

‘Who better?’ Che insisted. ‘At least consider it. Uncle Sten could get you a place at the College. They’d create a whole new post for you, I’d bet on it. So at least think about it.’

The other woman’s look was still cautious, but at least something had surfaced that hinted at the same Taki she had known in Solarno.

‘One other thing,’ Che said slowly. ‘If you’re now ambassador to the Lowlands, I think I already have an official appointment for you.’

‘Oh?’

‘We’re expecting a… special guest shortly. His airship’s on its way, due to be here any day now. If you’re here on behalf of Solarno, you should definitely be there to meet him.’

The airship manoeuvred ponderously above the Collegium airfield. Looking up at it, Taki had to fight the urge to run for her flier, to take to the air and fight. Some quirk of supply had produced the exact same blimp carrier that she remembered so vividly, even down to the four stripe-painted orthopters that roosted beneath its pontoons. She supposed that an important Wasp envoy would inevitably travel well protected, but still…

There were only a few of them waiting there on the field itself, comprising Stenwold’s personal retinue. The great and the good of Collegium, and of Sarn and Seldis and the Ancient League, had taken their stand closer to the walls of the city, with guards of honour and flags and musicians. For now it was just Stenwold and those few who had walked his road with him, or done his work: namely Arianna, Che, Balkus and Sperra, Parops of Tark, Taki.

Veterans, Che thought. Survivors. There were too many faces that should have still been there. She knew the same thought must be in everyone’s mind.

The Wasp airship finally lowered itself to where the ground crew could secure it. The hatch above was already opening as they rushed to wheel the steps over. From this distance, the man who appeared could be any other Wasp-kinden, with his gold-edged black robes left open over his banded armour.

About half a dozen of them came out, trying to maintain proper military order whilst coming down the steep steps. In the end their leader lost patience and just opened his wings to touch down the faster, so the descent of the others, too heavily armoured to follow suit, became an undignified scramble to catch up with him.

Stenwold stepped forwards, aware he had wanted it this way, this moment at least, before the ponderous bulk of the Collegium bureaucracy could heave itself into motion.

‘Welcome to Collegium,’ he said. ‘Is it… Regent, I should call you, or General?’

‘Formally it’s Regent-General,’ the Wasp replied, ‘but you can call me Thalric, since I know that titles coming from your mouth wouldn’t mean much anyway.’ He turned to one of his followers. ‘Major Aagen, have the men stand down and our passenger sent for.’ Thalric looked older, Stenwold observed, and he wondered whether it was his visitor’s incarceration by his own people or his being the consort of an Empress that did it.

‘Aagen will be our imperial ambassador to Collegium, at least as long as we need one,’ Thalric explained. ‘I named him so for two reasons. He understands machines, so maybe he’ll understand you Beetle-kinden as well, and also he’s an honest man. I’m experimenting with good faith. I don’t know whether I’ll take to it, but we’ll see.’

‘So you think there’s room for good faith?’

Thalric shrugged. ‘Probably not.’ He looked back up at his airship as Aagen returned with…

Stenwold felt his heart skip, just as he heard Che exclaim in surprise and delight. He glanced at Thalric, seeing the same hard-to-read expression the man had worn whilst a prisoner at Collegium.

Stenwold rushed forwards just as the woman reached the ground, throwing his arms around her. ‘We thought you were dead,’ he said hoarsely. ‘We’d heard nothing. We thought you were dead, Tynisa! Where have you been?’

She was now shaking in his arms, her face buried in his shoulder, and he realized she was weeping, desperately trying to speak. He held her at arm’s length but she would still not meet his eyes, and eventually he made out her words.

‘I’m so sorry, Stenwold. I couldn’t save him.’

She had something in her hands, two metal tokens, and it was a moment before he recognized the sword-and-circle badges. One was her own, the other… The other was the badge that Tisamon had not felt himself fit to wear when he left Collegium. The message was clear.

Stenwold felt as though he had been holding his breath for tendays, in anticipation of this moment. Things left unknown but long suspected had fallen into place, ends tied up. So, he is dead, and it occurred to Stenwold that, of the little band of fools who had set out to fight the Empire all those years ago, he himself was the only survivor. Marius and Atryssa were long gone, Nero and Tisamon so recently, and only he had lived to see their work even half done.

‘Thank you,’ he said to Thalric. Behind him, Che and Tynisa were embracing, not-quite-sisters reunited.

Thalric shrugged. ‘It will never be believed of me, but, left to my own devices I’m an honourable man.’

‘How are things in the Empire – what’s left of it at least?’ Stenwold turned to guide Thalric towards all the waiting delegates and Assemblers.

‘We progress,’ Thalric told him. ‘Seda and her advisors have already managed to convince almost half the Empire that an empress can rule just as well as an emperor. The central cities remain loyal. The South-Empire has disintegrated entirely, a mass of generals and governors and colonels who each of them want to rule the world. We’re taking it back piece by piece. I don’t know what you’ve heard about the West-Empire…’

‘I’ve heard enough to know it’s not the West-Empire.’

Thalric smiled at that. ‘We have given a lot of employment to the map-makers recently, haven’t we? No, Myna and Szar and Maynes have made this Three-City Alliance nonsense.’

‘And Helleron has redeclared its independence, I hear – whilst retaining close ties to the Empire, of course,’ Stenwold recalled cynically.

‘Whatever pays the most,’ Thalric agreed. ‘When we start looking west again, none of that will make any difference.’

‘You think it will come to that?’ Stenwold asked unhappily.

Thalric stopped abruptly. ‘I will have to become the diplomat in just a moment, and tell pleasant lies to people. Stenwold, you know there will be war again, between the Empire and the Lowlands. We will all put our names to the truce today, the Treaty of Gold, and everyone will rejoice, but every man who signs it will know that they are writing in water, and that the ripples will be gone soon enough. The truce is convenience, until one of us is ready for war again, and we both know it. I’d like to hope that it doesn’t come in either of our lifetimes.’

Stenwold looked at him and nodded briefly. ‘I believe you in that. Have I misjudged you?’

Thalric shook his head. ‘Not that I noticed.’

Stenwold moved on, then, to join with the other great men of his people, leaving Thalric and his retinue waiting for their formal introduction. Whoever had decreed that the peace should be signed outside the walls of Collegium had not reckoned for the wind today, and vitally important documents were being hurriedly weighted down with stones.

‘Thalric?’ Che approached him almost tentatively. He had been many things to her, after all, comrade and captor and fellow prisoner, undoubted enemy, even doubtful friend.

‘Cheerwell Maker.’ He gave an odd smile, as he looked on her, and she suddenly wondered if he were thinking What if… while contemplating a world without the Wasp Empress or the war.

‘I owe you a great deal,’ she said. ‘But that’s all right, because you owe me as well, from before. I’ve done the tallying, and I think I’m in debt to you still, overall. At the end, you did a lot. For Myna.’

She saw him go to make a flippant comment, to shrug it all off, but something dried up the words in his mouth, and instead he just gazed at her sadly. He had told her once how he had a wife back in the Empire, and now imperial writ had decreed a new one for him, and anyway she had felt throughout that the pairings of the Wasp-kinden were merely intended for progeny and convenience. Yet there was regret in that glance of his, a fond regret from a man too pragmatic to act on it.

She hugged him briefly, feeling his armour cold against her, and then let go. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and then they were walking onwards – with treaties waiting to be signed, history to be made.

The workshop’s owner ducked back into the room, under the sloping ceiling. A garret room and, after the machines had been moved in, precious little space to move about.

‘This is all I can spare you,’ he explained to the solemn young man who followed him. ‘You make good, then maybe you’ll get something better. You waste my time, you’ll regret it, understand?’ His expression was all suspicion and dislike, but it was free of prejudice – because he was a halfbreed, just like Totho was.

Chasme was a city of halfbreeds. Since arriving the day before, Totho had never seen so many. One out of any two of this ramshackle place’s occupants was of mixed blood: Ant and Bee, Spider and Dragonfly, Solarnese Soldier Beetle and Fly-kinden, or a bastard mingling of any combination. A man like Totho attracted no stares.

Oh, he had noticed that many of them were slaves, and many others menials or factory workers. It was not a universal rule, though. Chasme was fluid, not fixed like in the Empire or the Lowlands.

The garret workshop was better than he had hoped. Chasme was a little jewel of civilization on a barbarous shore, powered by the need of Princep Exilla to match the aerial and naval might of Solarno. It was therefore a fortuitous, sheltered little backwater for an artificer to work in.

‘I’d better see something from you before the end of the month,’ the owner warned him. ‘Or you’re on the street.’

‘I’ll show you now,’ Totho said. ‘As a down payment. Just bring me a target mannequin or whatever else you use here.’

The man studied him, narrow-eyed. He himself was of such a mixed ancestry that there was no deciphering it. A flick of his wrist sent one of his slaves off, to return an awkward minute later with a stuffed leather torso on a stand, a mess of patches and rips.

Totho gave a nod for the slave to position it, and he unslung his latest prototype, pumping up the pressure as he did so with ratcheting winches of the handle. It was his showpiece: too delicate for war-work but it made a pretty display.

‘I give you the future,’ he announced, and emptied the snapbow at the dummy, shearing off everything above the navel, even the post that supported it.

The workshop owner said nothing for a long time, to his credit. Totho could almost see money being counted in the man’s eyes. Small concerns, petty profits, but they would outgrow this place soon enough. There would shortly be a revolution here in Chasme. Progress, which had stumbled at the end of the Wasps’ war, would begin its march once more.

‘I’ll leave you to your work,’ said the owner, almost reverently, before turning to go. He stepped aside quickly as Totho’s companion came in, hooded and robed.

‘This will do, for a start,’ Totho said. ‘And they’ve manpower and materials enough for us here in Chasme. I thought we’d complete the arm first, and then…’

Drephos tugged his hood down, one-handed. ‘And then the future,’ he suggested. ‘And then the world.’

It became aware of itself between the trees, awakening to agonized existence shot through with thorns and briars.

Where-?

Around it, the forest was twisted and dark, each tree knotted and diseased and forever dying, never quite dead. It knew this place, immediately, instinctively. There was no mistaking it.

The Darakyon.

Yet this was not the true Darakyon, that brooding forest east of Helleron that, for centuries, had turned back or consumed any travellers foolish enough to breach its borders. The true Darakyon lay untenanted now, its ghosts faded from between its tortured boles, the sun breaking in through its matted canopy. The 500-year-old work of the magicians who had blighted it with their hubris had been undone.

So there was only one place that this could be, it knew. It had been touching the Darakyon. It had been part of a great ritual. It was inside the Shadow Box.

Awareness was coming back, and bringing the echo of memories. It – no, he – looked about himself. There was a mist at the edge of the trees now, and it was growing closer. Where it touched, the briars shrank back, the trees themselves faded and were gone.

The Shadow Box had been destroyed. The snarl that it made in the fabric of the world was being unpicked. The world was being dismantled around him, and soon it, and he, would be gone.

For a long moment, watching the greyness creep closer, he could not think why this should be a bad thing. He had not gained such joy out of life, most especially out of the ending of it, that he should wish to protest his extinction. Tree by tree, the heart of the Darakyon was undone, and he, the last inheritor of its power, watched dispassionately.

He had lived a strange and violent life, at odds with his own people, with ambitions utterly alien to the rest of his kind. Would it be so wrong to simply let go now?

Then he remembered some more, shards of his life falling upon him like blades, and he knew he could not go.

No.

No, not like this. He would not give up the world for this grey death-in-death. I have work to do.

He stood, unfolding himself, drawing the stuff of his body from the thorns and the knotted wood and the evaporating darkness.

I have not finished.

It was clear in his mind now. He had something left undone, and there was nobody else who would do it. He bared his teeth at the encroaching nothingness.

There must be a way out. The disintegrating world around him told him that there was no such way, but in life he had never much listened to the rules of others. He dashed from tree to tree, faster and faster, a narrowing spiral as the end came for him. I will not give up. I will not surrender. I haven’t finished. It isn’t over.

And then, at the very last, with the world no more than an arm’s length on either side, he found it.

The ritual, the Darakyon, all those ancient magics torn open and unleashed upon the cold world of the Apt, they were not gone. They lived on in him, for all that he was dead, and…

There was another. He felt the distant call of kindred power to power. Out in the world of the living there was another, if he could only find the way.

He stretched out for that faintest of threads, the ebbing reverberation of the Darakyon’s power in the world.

After that was silence: the Shadow Box destroyed, the Darakyon empty, all its tormented prisoners released.

But he was gone before the mist came, pulling himself hand over hand into the world of the living.

I haven’t finished.

He had work to do.