Salute the Dark

Two

The squad of Wasp scouts touched down around the farmhouse, half a dozen descending at the front of it whilst two came down behind and one perched on the roof.

Their leader looked about the farmyard. It had clearly been abandoned for some while, the occupants having fled before the Wasp advance. Most likely it had already been picked clean, but there was still the possibility that something of value had been left inside. He nodded to one of his men, and the soldier kicked in the door, its dry wood splintering on the second impact.

They paused, listening carefully. There was no sound from inside. There was always the chance that this place had been chosen by the brigands to hide out in. ‘Brigands’ was what the officers were calling them, but the sergeant had never known such country for bandits. The Lowlands was said to be a violent and divided place, but there seemed to be hundreds of armed men just waiting for imperial scouts to come their way. In the sergeant’s view that was the organized behaviour of an army, not a rabble of bandits, but he would not dream of stating such an opinion before his superiors.

However obvious it seemed.

Yet, if it was an army, it was an army that would not fight – that would not even be found. Scouts went out regularly and found dead trails, cold ash where fires had been. Or sometimes they went out and did not come back. This loss of scouting squads had become so draining that at first the officers had started sending their scouts out in larger and larger forces, but even squads of fifty or seventy men had seemed able to disappear without trace in the barren, rocky land between the Seventh Army’s camp and the Ant city of Sarn, vanishing amongst the stands of forest and the creek-cut gullies.

Later, they had tried sending no scouts at all beyond clear view of the main army, and thus the force had crawled on and found bridges smashed, terrain spiked with caltrops, wells poisoned. The army’s progress, mere days from the camp, had slowed to a crawl. So they had started sending out scouts again.

This did not inspire confidence, and everyone knew General Malkan was spitting fire about it. Two days before they had captured a couple of men believed to be part of the bandit army, whereupon Malkan had personally overseen their questioning, racking them pitilessly until they divulged the location of a camp.

They found nothing there, of course. There was nothing that even suggested there had ever been a camp there.

The prisoners, before they died, had also said that there was a bandit king. He was a great magician, one of them had claimed. He knew everything, and could not be beaten in a fight. He could walk through walls and read minds.

Malkan had let it be known that there would be a reward of 400 gold Imperials for the man’s capture, or half that sum for his death. Nobody had been over-keen to claim it, though, save that perhaps the scouts who disappeared had let the bounty tempt them a step too far.

Whenever the bandits were seen, by men who survived to report back, they often wore repainted imperial armour, carrying Wasp swords and spears. Each squad that vanished was making the enemy a little stronger. Malkan had tried using Auxillians as scouts, reasoning that the Seventh could stand to lose some of its conscripted slave-soldiers more than its regular Wasp-kinden. When the Auxillians disappeared, it was rumoured that they were seen alive later amongst the bandits’ ranks. So that put a stop to that.

The sergeant pushed his way into the farmhouse, not wanting to be the first inside but not wanting to be far behind in case anything valuable had been left there. It was an unspoken rule that sergeants got the best of the loot. The officers were too proud to look and the common soldiers had to wait their turn for plunder.

‘You round the back!’ he called out. ‘I hope you’re keeping your eyes open.’

He used his dagger to lever open the drawers of a table, finding a few loose coins there. He took them without hesitation, pride being no issue in this job. One of his men was meanwhile clumping up the stairs.

As the army advanced on Sarn there would, of course, be richer pickings, places not already abandoned, extra prizes for the diligent sergeant. Women perhaps? The Sixth Army was bringing in a detachment of the Slaver Corps, and they would pay a finder’s fee, and not enquire too hard as to the captives’ condition.

In the next room there was a chest tucked in under the bed. The sergeant went over to it and found it locked. He knelt down beside it, something nagging at him. There was just room between case and lid to get the thick blade of his dagger in, and he began levering, trying to either snap the bar of the lock or pry the lock from the wood.

He grunted with the effort, and the thought came to him that the men out back had not acknowledged his earlier order. Bad discipline, that was. ‘Hey, out back!’ he called again.

Still silence.

He kept up the pressure on the chest, but something was beginning to worm its way into him.

‘On the roof!’ he called out, at the top of his voice. ‘Anything there?’

Silence.

He stared at the wall, continuing to lever, feeling something finally give within the chest. His heart was quickening, still hearing nothing from the floor above.

‘Soldier, report!’ he shouted out, not caring which of them should answer him.

None of them answered him.

The lid of the chest came free suddenly, and he lurched forward. He saw at once that he had, at last, struck lucky. The chest was full of plate, both gilded and silver, obviously too heavy for the hoarding farmer to take with him.

He saw himself reflected in the top plate, a hunched figure against its tarnished silver. There was a man behind him.

He reached down for his sword-hilt, moving his hand very slowly. His other hand opened, ready to sting. Without making any sudden move, or anything else to trigger an attack, he very carefully stood up and turned around.

The man before him was not much beyond a boy: a gold-skinned Dragonfly-kinden from the northern Commonweal, wearing a banded leather cuirass, bracers and greaves, and Spider silks beneath them. He had a simple Beetle-kinden helm, open-faced but for a three-bar visor, and he held a sword of Ant-manufacture loosely in one hand.

Beyond him, the sergeant saw the bodies of three of his own men. He had heard nothing of it. How could they…?

It did not matter, he realized. Kill this boy, dash outside and take to the sky. Back to the army, and bring a hundred of the light airborne back here as quick as you can.

‘Looks like it’s you and me then, son,’ he said, making a show of readying his sword whilst bringing his offhand up to loose a sting-shot.

‘No,’ said the Dragonfly simply, and just then the sergeant felt something slam into his back, punching him forwards so that the boy had to step back quickly to avoid his pitching body.

Salma looked down at the dead soldier, seeing the tiny nub of steel where the bolt had gone into his back. Outside the window, a Fly-kinden woman raised an open palm for him, the Wasp sign of defiance that had since become their adopted salute. There was a snapbow in her hand: such a useful weapon, for all that he did not understand it, especially since the more inventive of his people had found that, if they ‘undercranked’ it, whatever that was, it was as quiet as a crossbow. Still, most of their work was still down to knives and wires and shortswords.

I have gone from bandit to assassin, he reflected, but he could not afford moral scruples now. Too many people were depending on him.

Outside, he gathered his people, a mere dozen of them but most of them skilled stalkers and wilderness-runners. The one exception, and their one non-combatant, came up to him now and embraced him, as she did after every mission like this. She was Prized of Dragons, his love, his soul, the Butterfly-kinden with lambent, glowing skin who had brought him back from the gates of death. He knew that she hated bloodshed but she knew that he only did what he had to. They had established an equilibrium, and she would not let herself be left behind. They had been apart too long.

‘We should go and see how far the army’s got,’ he said. The Wasp advance would be moving into more broken territory, a land riddled with gullies and canyons that were thick with undergrowth and forest. He could no longer afford to just hit isolated bands of scouts, and must soon commence attacks against the leading edge of the army itself. After all, he had made a bargain with the Sarnesh, and he only hoped that they were keeping their part of it.

It was a long haul back to his own camp, but they were used to that, running and flying over terrain that was becoming as familiar as home to most of them. When they were close enough, Fly-kinden messengers began dropping down towards them, keeping pace with Salma and rattling off reports.

‘Have the Wasps found us here?’ he cut through them.

‘We’ve killed a patrol. Fifteen men,’ one of the Flies replied. ‘We’re packing up. We’ll be gone before they even miss them.’

Always the same, always on the move, dodging the blade of the enemy, and impossible to predict. His people were split up, linked only by the diligence of the Fly-kinden who ran the gauntlet in all weathers to keep each leader informed of the others. They left almost no trace: when they had broken their camp, their own woodsmen muddled and obliterated their tracks. The Wasps’ advance was blind. And now time to take advantage of that.

As he arrived, they were still training. He stopped to watch the prodigy of it, though feeling his heart sink. Neither men nor beasts were much taking to the idea of discipline.

He had sent to Sarn, to his man Sfayot there: Give me all the horses they can spare, all the riding beetles, every beast broken for riding and not too weary to gallop. He had been obliged to send twice, because the Sarnesh had not taken him seriously the first time. Then the animals had started to arrive, trains of five, ten – twenty even. Two-thirds were horses, which he preferred for riding, being better for stamina and speed than most insects. Beyond that, they had been gifted as motley a nest of creatures as he had ever seen: a racing beetle long past its prime; a dozen plodding draught animals with high, rounded shells; a brace of nimble coach-horse beetles, fiery of temperament, their tails arching like scorpion stings. There were even a couple of exotic creatures that might have come from a menagerie: a black-and-white-striped riding spider that had the alarming tendency to jump ten feet when it became unsettled, and a low-slung, scuttling cricket that could give a horse a decent race over any short distance.The animals’ overall quality was variable, their temperament uncertain, since cavalry had little place in the Lowlander or imperial view of war. A combination of airborne troops, accurate crossbows and the Ant-kinden’s reluctance to rely on any minds not linked to their own had seen no development here of the noble art of horsemanship. Riding, after all, was for scouts and messengers, not real soldiers, so when Salma had told them what he planned, they had looked at him as though he were mad.

Except, that is, for men like Phalmes, who had served in the Twelve-Year War against Salma’s own people. They had seen how the Commonwealers fought.

Of course, the Commonwealers had better mounts, and longer to train. Still, the circling mounted rabble that Salma was now watching was at least managing to remain in the saddle. Phalmes, in the lead, kicked his mount on to a gallop, and most of the rest followed, the horses changing pace from a canter with rather more will than he had witnessed before, the insects scuttling after them, their legs speeding into a frantic blur.

Phalmes spotted him and slowed his mount, letting the column of riders behind disintegrate into a rabble. The Mynan rode over, looking as though he had been playing teacher to them far longer than he was happy with.

‘How goes your cavalry?’ Salma asked him.

Phalmes spat. ‘Three more broken legs since you went off,’ he said. ‘Still, the Sarnesh finally made good on those new saddles you designed for them, and riders are staying on more often than not, now we’ve got them. I haven’t yet explained why we need them, because I didn’t think they’d like it.’

Of course the Commonwealers had better saddles, too, and Salma had sketched his recollection of them, and sent the resulting drawing to Sarn for their leatherworkers to puzzle over. It seemed that something had actually come of that, although he had not been hopeful. The high front and rear were not to keep the rider seated so much as to prevent a charging lancer from being flung from the saddle on impact.

But Phalmes was right: it was not the time to explain about that.

‘Are they ready, then?’ he asked.

‘Not by a long ways,’ Phalmes told him. ‘Keep training them, they’ll get there eventually, but if you’ve got something happening soon, we can’t rely on them.’

Salma bared his teeth, but nodded. ‘I trust your judgment,’ he said, ‘but we need to make a stand sooner rather than later. Malkan’s reinforcements are with him already: the Sixth is joining the Seventh, and that means they’ll stop dragging their feet and start marching properly at last. If we’re to make good our promises to Sarn, then the time is upon us.’

General Malkan had ordered an automotive driven out to oversee the arrival himself, standing on its roof with some guards and his intelligence officer, eyes narrowed as he watched 15,000 soldiers marching towards his temporary camp.

‘Tell me about the Sixth, then,’ he directed, having observed they were in good order. Despite the long march, the troops on the ground were keeping ranks, forming columns between the snub-nosed wood and metal of the war automotives embellished with their turret-mounted artillery, and amid the huge plated transporters that plodded along patiently like enormous beetles. The scouts that had flown ahead and those on the flanks of the army were pulling in now as they neared the Seventh’s fortifications, filtering down to land ahead of the column in order to make their reports.

‘Well,’ the intelligence officer said, ‘you must have heard that the Sixth took the brunt of several engagements against the Commonwealers in the Twelve-Year War.’

‘Battle of Masaki, wasn’t it?’ Malkan asked.

‘Well… “battle” is probably overstating the case, General,’ the intelligence officer confessed. ‘Their then commander made the mistake of pushing too far into Dragonfly lands, ahead of the rest of the advance. My guess is that he mistook a lack of technical sophistication for mere weakness. In any event, the bulk of the Sixth was ambushed near Masaki by a Dragonfly army that outnumbered them at least ten to one. It was perhaps the largest single force the Commonweal ever put together.’

‘You sound impressed, Captain,’ Malkan noted.

‘Organization on that scale for an Inapt kinden is indeed impressive, General,’ the man said blandly. ‘Certainly it must have represented the high point of Commonweal strength, because the balance of the war was just a staggered holding action.’

‘So what about the Sixth? I thought it was a great triumph.’

‘Oh, well,’ the officer said, ‘a small detachment of Auxillian engineers had been split off to fortify a nearby camp, and thus escaped the massacre. Then they came under attack themselves from what should have been an overwhelming Commonwealer force. However they managed to hold out for seven days from behind their fortifications, and killed so many of the enemy that the relieving force was able to put the Dragonflies to flight and save the honour of the Empire.’

‘And those Auxillians were Bee-kinden?’

‘Yes, sir. And so the new Sixth, when it re-formed, became known as the Hive.’

Malkan watched as the gates to his camp opened, and the newcomers began to file in. At the very head of the army, the vanguard itself was composed of a rigid block of heavily armoured soldiers, too short and stocky to be Wasp-kinden, and dressed in black and gold uniforms halved down the front, rather than sporting the usual horizontal stripes. It seemed the Bee-kinden at Masaki had won themselves some privileges in their mindless defence of another race’s Empire.

‘So tell me about General Praeter,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t the original general, of course.’

‘No, sir. General Haken died at Masaki, which most think was the best thing that could have happened to him. Praeter was merely a lieutenant at the time, but he had already been given command of the engineers. Rumour suggests that he was not popular with his superiors, and it was a punishment duty.’

‘Engineers and glory seldom go hand in hand,’ Malkan admitted. Praeter had been the man the Empire chose to make a hero, though. He had been the only Wasp-kinden officer available for the post, hence the man’s sudden rise through the ranks.

‘They say he is a little… too comfortable with the Auxillians,’ the intelligence officer said carefully, ‘and he likes things done his way. Traditional ways.’

‘We shall have to see about that,’ Malkan decided. ‘Send a message to him. Give him two hours to settle his men, and then I request his presence.’

Praeter was older than Malkan had expected, and his short-cut hair was liberally dusted with grey. He must have been quite an old lieutenant, at Masaki. He was relatively slight of build, neither tall nor broad of shoulder. The two Bee-kinden soldiers who clanked in alongside him were barely shorter, and much more heavily set. He wore a simple black cowled cloak over his armour.

‘General Praeter,’ Malkan acknowledged.

‘General Malkan.’

Malkan had expected resentment from the older man forced to serve under the younger’s guidance, yet Praeter’s manner was anything but, which triggered a current of unease.

‘Alone, General,’ he suggested. ‘I think we should speak alone.’ His pointed glance took in the two Bees, without deigning to acknowledge his own intelligence officer.

Praeter frowned, glancing back at his men.

‘I did not ask you here to have you murdered, General,’ declared Malkan, with hollow good humour.

The older man nodded to the two Bees, who ducked back out of the square-framed tent that Malkan commanded from. Nevertheless the sound of the two of them taking up stations outside the door was pointedly clear.

‘They’re obviously fond of you,’ Malkan noted.

‘We’ve been through a lot,’ Praeter agreed, expressionless.

‘How many of them? Bee-kinden Auxillians, I mean?’

‘Two thousand, one hundred and eight.’

Malkan glanced at his intelligence officer, his smile brittle. ‘General, are you quite mad? Surely you’ve heard the news from Szar. What happens when your Bee-kinden troops hear it too?’

‘They have already.’

‘Have they?’

‘Unrest in Szar,’ Praeter said. ‘Their queen dead. They know it all.’

‘And you’re not worried?’

‘No.’ Without ceremony, Praeter drew off his cloak. The armour beneath was not the banded mail of the Empire but a simple breastplate, half black and half gold. ‘That’s why they’ve sent us out here, to keep us away from Szar, though there’s no need.’

‘Is there not?’ Malkan asked.

‘With respect, no. My men are loyal.’

‘They’re Auxillians nevertheless, General. You surely can’t say that they’re as loyal as the Imperial Army.’

‘They are more loyal,’ Praeter said simply. ‘Nobody understands the Bee-kinden – not even after we conquered their city. The inhabitants of Szar were loyal to their queen. It was a commitment that they never even thought to break. When we had the queen, we had them too. Now the queen is dead, they have no reason to obey us. That is the root of Szar.’

‘But your men are different?’ Something’s wrong here, Malkan was thinking. Praeter was like a man with a sheathed sword, just waiting for the moment to present it. All this talk of Auxillians was just a prologue.

‘They have sworn an oath to me,’ Praeter said, ‘and they will not break it. An oath from Masaki, which binds them and their families, their fighting sons, to me.’

‘And if you die, General?’

‘You had better keep me alive, General Malkan.’

Malkan nodded. Here we go. ‘I must admit, General, that I had expected a frostier man to stand before me. After all, it’s a rare senior officer content to serve beneath someone twenty years his junior.’ That ‘twenty years’ was a deliberate exaggeration, but not a flicker of annoyance crossed Praeter’s face.

‘Why, General Malkan, you mistake me,’ he said blandly. ‘I have no intention of doing so.’

Malkan carefully raised a single eyebrow.

Praeter smiled shallowly. ‘Perhaps this will explain.’ He reached for a belt-pouch and retrieved a folded and sealed document, which Malkan took cautiously.

Men have encountered their death warrants like this, he was aware, but he opened it without hesitation, seeing on the wax the sigil of the palace.

In a scribe’s neat hand, there were a few brief lines written there: This commission hereby grants to General Praeter of the Imperial Sixth, known as the Hive, on account of his seniority and notable war record, joint command over the Sixth and Seventh armies, for the duration of the campaign against the Sarnesh.

Malkan peered at the signature. ‘General Reiner,’ he said slowly.

‘Of the Rekef Inlander. He is most kind,’ Praeter said flatly. Malkan felt the situation now balanced on a fulcrum. The Sixth were settling themselves in, the Seventh were already established. A single word from him and things could get bloody. Bloody and potentially treasonous. The mention of the Rekef, the Empire’s secret service, had charged the air in the tent as though a storm was about to break.

‘You are aware that I was installed in this position by the grace of General Maxin,’ Malkan said. ‘Also of the Rekef Inlander.’

‘Do you have his sealed orders to confirm that?’ Praeter asked him expressionlessly.

Well, no, of course not, because since when did Rekef generals actually put their own cursed names on such things? Since when was that the drill? But the answer to that was since now, he supposed, because here was Reiner’s own name, clear as day. Malkan had been distantly aware of the Rekef’s internal squabbling, but he had never thought it would come to bludgeon him out here on the front. Don’t they know there’s a war on?

‘Well, General,’ he said, with brittle brightness. ‘Do you have any orders for me, or shall I have my intelligence staff brief you on our present situation?’