Salute the Dark

Three

Balkus shuffled, shrugging his shoulders about and looking uncomfortable. ‘Remind me again why I’m doing this?’

Stenwold looked the big Ant-kinden soldier up and down. ‘Because you’re desperate for a reconciliation with your own people.’

Balkus spat. ‘Not likely. They’d lynch me.’ He shifted his broad shoulders, trying to settle the new armour more comfortably.

‘They won’t. You’re not turning up at their gates as some kind of renegade,’ Stenwold pointed out. ‘You’re arriving there as the field officer of a Collegiate relief force, Commander Balkus.’

‘Commander Balkus,’ the Ant mused. ‘Hate to say it, but a man could get to like the sound of that.’

Stenwold shrugged. ‘You wanted it, I recall.’

Balkus scowled. ‘You get tired of being on your own. It’s in the blood,’ he muttered. ‘Never thought I’d end up going home, though.’ He bit his lip.

Stenwold reflected that all the renegade Ants he had ever known who had turned their backs on their home and people, they were each of them still chained to their heritage. Growing up with a mind full of the thoughts of others left a big, empty gap when they set out on their own. How many of them were drawn back, eventually, for all that it would usually mean their deaths?

Balkus was obviously thinking on similar lines. ‘And they’re fine about it, are they? My… the Sarnesh?’

‘They know all about you. I’ve sent word to them, saying who I’ve put in charge.’

‘That isn’t the same!’ Balkus objected. ‘Look, I don’t want to go up that rail-line only to find they’ve just been sharpening the knives.’

‘We’re at war now, and the Sarnesh understand that they have to put aside their preferences,’ Stenwold replied. ‘And you have more experience than anyone else in the army here.’

‘Well, you’ve got that right,’ Balkus grunted.

‘Shall we inspect the troops, now?’ Stenwold asked. The Ant nodded gloomily and led the way out of the hall of the Amphiophos, Collegium’s seat of government. While Stenwold had been in Sarn, arguing diplomacy, Balkus had been training troops here at home. Collegium had never possessed a standing army and, although the recent siege by the Ants of Vek had created hundreds of veterans, it was short of full-time soldiers. Balkus would not normally have been considered officer material in anyone’s book, but he had a loud voice, and he was an Ant, meaning warfare in his very veins. What he had so far made out of the recruits they had given him was nothing to compare to a properly regimented Ant-kinden force, but it was something entirely new to Collegium.

There were already a dozen other officers waiting on the steps of the Amphiophos, leaders of the merchant companies watching as their troops assembled in the square below. They were Beetle-kinden men and women for the most part, broad and solid of build, wearing breastplates over quilted hauberks padded out with twists of rag and fibre that, in theory, would slow or even stop a crossbow or snapbow bolt. They also wore caps armoured with curved metal plates designed to deflect shot. As armour went, it was very new and mostly untested. The breastplates had all been stencilled with the arms of the Prowess Forum, namely a sword over an open book sketched in silver lines across the dark metal, but many of the officers and their gathering charges had overlaid these with sashes and surcoats carrying the various company badges they had chosen to display.

There had been no time for complex planning, or for establishing elaborate networks of supply or support. On the other hand, since Collegium had begun building its army from scratch, it had created something uniquely Beetle and previously unseen. The term the war council had coined was ‘bow and pike’. A third of the soldiers were equipped with glaive-headed polearms, the stock-in-trade of watchmen everywhere, to hold off an enemy either on the ground or in the air. The rest were armed to fight at a greater distance. The Wasps were not an enemy to stand solidly together like Ant-kinden and hack at close quarters. Instead they moved swiftly, struck from range or attacked from above. The square before the Amphiophos was currently filled with repeating crossbows, nailbows and the new snapbows, the Beetle-kinden having taken to the weapon so readily that its designer might have specially intended it for them.

Could it be that the Wasps themselves have given us the tool we needed to defeat them?

There were some from other kinden too, for Collegium was not too proud to turn away any who wished to help. The army would include Fly-kinden spotters and archers, and some of the pikemen were Mantis-kinden or Spiders. There were Ants of four or five different cities amongst the ranks, all former renegades like Balkus who had given their tireless loyalty to Collegium.

The city was now sending just under a thousand soldiers to reinforce Sarn – because if Sarn fell, then Collegium might as well surrender. It was the one point that the war council had not bickered about. Several times that number of battle-ready troops would remain to guard the walls of the city against a surprise attack by the Wasps, or even by the Vekken. Meanwhile volunteers kept arriving in droves for the new regiments.

My city will be changed irrevocably by this, Stenwold reflected. Not for the better, either – we could have lived happily without this war.

The sound of precisely marching feet came to his ears and the final part of the relief force came into view with a discipline that shamed the locals. Commander Parops had arrived, with 700 pale-skinned Tarkesh Ants to his name. This was the bulk of the Free Army of Tark, as Parops himself had named it, comprising the military strength of his currently occupied city. They were the best-armed Ant-kinden in the world, just now: every second man of them carried a snapbow as well as a sword and shield, and many sported nailbows and crossbows as well. Their linked minds meant that this entire force could go from weapon to weapon, in whole or in part, as the battle demanded. They would form the core of the Collegiate force, from whom the locals would take their strength and their example.

Parops halted his men and strode up the steps towards Stenwold.

‘All ready to go, War Master,’ he said, and smiled because he knew Stenwold could not abide that title.

‘The troop trains are waiting at the station,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘Already loaded with supplies, canvas, even some light artillery, I’m told.’ He clapped the Tarkesh on the shoulder. ‘I know what’s at stake for you, Commander.’

Parops nodded soberly. ‘The Sarnesh are bound to be cursed ungrateful hosts as well, but we’re short of choices right now and my soldiers want to fight. With your permission, I’ll begin getting them stowed on board.’

Stenwold nodded silently and the Ant marched back to his men and began to move them out. Stenwold turned to Balkus to find him now a little distance away, kneeling down by a small figure that was hugging him tightly. Sperra, Stenwold saw, was looking better in health than she had been before, though clearly upset that the Ant was leaving. She and Balkus had been close since their time as agents working for Stenwold’s cause in Helleron.

‘You look after yourself, you oaf,’ Sperra was ordering him. ‘Don’t you dare let anything happen to you.’

‘What could happen to me?’ Balkus replied, trying hard to smile. ‘And if those Sarnesh give me any grief, I’ll give them double in return.’

‘You do that,’ she hissed fiercely, and clung to him one last time, before letting go and giving place to Stenwold.

‘Suppose this is it.’ Balkus grimaced.

‘You’ve said your other goodbyes?’ Stenwold asked.

Balkus grinned. ‘To those that have time for it. Everyone seems to have something urgent on their minds right now.’

‘That’s true enough.’ Between Achaeos’ injuries and whatever emotional gauntlet Tisamon seemed to be putting himself through, it had been a lonely time for Sten-wold recently. ‘Good luck, Commander. I hope you won’t need it, but good luck all the same.’

‘A man always needs luck,’ Balkus murmured, and went down into the square to order his troops. All around the Amphiophos square men and women were bidding goodbye to their loved ones: wives, husbands, parents, children. Beetles in unfamiliar armour bent for a last embrace from a lover, friends clasped hands, business partners thrust forward knapsacks of choice tidbits from the stock to lighten the journey. Eyes took one last look over the roofs of Collegium, the Amphiophos and the College, and there cannot have been many who did not wonder whether they would see any of it again – or what flag would be flying over it if they did.

Tisamon had spent the day deliberately seeing no one. He had found a high tower of the College, the stairs leading to it thick with dust, and some abandoned study given over by its occupant in exchange for somewhere less exerting. It gave him a fine view of the city, if he had wanted it, but instead he looked up at the sky. Even the clouds that scudded there, ragged nomads in that vast blue, weighed upon him. He felt as though he was dying.

He should be with Tynisa now, he knew. She was suffering, and he should go to her. It was good Mantis suffering, though, and that was what she did not understand yet. They had brought her up amongst soft Beetle-kinden, who did everything in their power to stave off pain, and so she had never learned the catharsis of hurt.

It was a Mantis thing: to have slain or injured a fellow by tragic mistake, in the madness of battle – the songs were legion that told this same story. She should bear up to the deed, take it inside herself rather than hiding from it. He himself should be teaching her all this.

Except that he was no role model – at least not now.

The storm had come, at last. He had felt the winds rising before he had left for Jerez. He had given Felise into Stenwold’s care, but not for her sake, never for her sake. He had felt the storm-winds in his soul, and he had gone off with Achaeos to shelter from their blast.

The storm had inevitably come.

She had been practising, he heard, while he had been away. She had been dancing through all the infinite moves of her skill in readiness for his return. They had sparred; they had matched their skills. It had been his doorway back into a world that he had long been barred from. It had been the world of his people, and hers, the perfect expression of the duel, but all the histories of his race were cursing him for how he felt now.

The air was chill up here, but he hauled off his arming jacket, tore apart his shirt, bared his chest, tried to freeze the malady from himself. Yet the cold could not touch sufficiently deep in him: there was not mortification enough in all the world of men to do that.

He hurt with a pain he had not felt in a long time. Even when the Wasp intelligencer Thalric had seared him with his sting in Helleron it had not hurt like this. When Stenwold had suddenly thrust an unknown halfbreed daughter on him, it had not hurt like this. He was impaled: writhe as he might, he could not escape. He could now not even seek sanctuary in his skill, because of the gaping absence he felt when he trained and danced alone.

This is wrong. Betrayal on betrayal, he who had already sold so much of his heritage to indulge his personal lusts. All the ancient traditions of his people were in pieces at his feet, and now he would trample them one more time. And he would grind a heel into her memory as well, for good measure: the Spider-kinden woman he had made his sacrifice for so long ago, who had been everything to him – and was she just one more thing to cast off, when he felt the urge to? And if so, if that was all she had been, why had he cast aside so very much, just to be with her?

So turn away! Run away! He should leave Collegium. He should seek the Empire out, and then kill Wasps until they brought him down. He should flee so far that none who saw him would know him. He should open his own throat here and now rather than contemplate this sin.

Mantis-kinden pair once, and are faithful beyond death. Everyone knows this.

But his mind came back and back to her perfect grace, her eyes, the line of her blade and the flash of her wings, and he hurt with the sheer bitter longing of seventeen bleak years.

Ancestors, save me.

The sky grew dark as he sat up in his tower, and when the night came he had made his choice. He padded down the dusty stairs that were marked only by the tread of his own ascent, and he felt like a man falling. Something had infected him, had gnawed him to the heart. He let it take him away from the College, padding past over-late students and home-bound Masters, unseen by any of them.

It was a short enough step from the gates of the College to those of the Amphiophos. Here there were guards, but he passed them unseen for all their vigilance. His disease had made him skilled.

He could not stop himself now. He had fought that battle up in the tower, and he had lost. It was the hurt, that razoring hurt, that drove him on: a burning he could not quench save in this one way. He crept, quiet and half-clad, through the corridors of the hostels behind the Amphiophos, through the diplomats’ chambers and the rooms for the foreign guests of the Assembly. He knew he was ill.

Ill and incurable, Tisamon thought. I should not be here.

There were more guards here, of course, in case of Wasp assassins. Some were Beetles in their clanking mail; others were Fly-kinden, more subtle and able to see better in the dark. Tisamon evaded them easily, for he had spent a portion of his earlier career in the factory-city of Helleron, moving unseen through buildings like this. Everyone knew that his race were full of pride and honour, and so few realized how neither of those qualities was in any way compromised in being a skilled assassin. What was their Mantis totem, after all, but a stealthy killer of insects and men.

It was a mark of his illness that, even as he crept past the guards, he did not think I must tell Stenwold to bolster the security here, but was simply grateful that the gaps in their watchfulness were sufficient for a Mantis to slip through. If they had seen him, well, they would recognize him, greet him, think no more of it, but he did not want to be seen. He wanted no other eyes to witness this failure of his. He was ashamed.

He was nearing his destination now, and his heart, which would keep a steady pace through duel or skirmish, was beginning to speed. He was sweating: he felt physically ill now, feverish, but he suppressed it. No magician had ever inspired this dread in him, nor had any threat of death or pain.

The doorway was straight ahead, down this little hall, and in his absorption he almost missed the figure lounging in the alcove next to it, very nearly passed the man by without seeing him, but then his instincts struck home. A moment later he was in his killing stance, with his claw-blade at the throat of… it took him a moment to see that the man’s face was familiar. It was the Spider physician, Destrachis, her constant shadow.

He saw how his metal claw was shaking, a slight but noticeable tremor.

‘Interesting,’ Destrachis whispered, holding himself very still. ‘And here was I thinking you unarmed.’

‘People see what they wish,’ Tisamon said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Waiting for you.’

Tisamon’s eyes narrowed. ‘Do you think it would pain me to kill you, Spider?’ He would do it, too, not from will but because of the fever that clenched him in its jaws. He could not control himself. He had let slip the reins and perhaps he would never hold them again.

‘I think you would rather enjoy it,’ replied Destrachis carefully. ‘However, here I am.’

‘Speak your piece.’

‘Turn back.’

Tisamon stared at him, hearing his own ragged breathing in his ears, almost like sobbing.

‘I know what you are about,’ Destrachis said. ‘I know also that she is waiting for you.’ His lips pressed together for a moment in thought. ‘I know of you, Mantis. There are people in this city who remember you from years back. Both of you are bringing chains to this meeting. That is unwise.’

‘I know,’ Tisamon said flatly.

‘Then turn back.’

‘Not at your word – not the word of a Spider-kinden. No games from you, no twists. If I think that you meddle in my life, Spider, I will kill you.’ I will kill you. I will kill you anyway. I cannot stop myself. And yet the Spider remained breathing, with that blade wavering at his throat.

‘Your life can end up on a stake or deep in the sea for all I care,’ Destrachis said. ‘I care about her.’

‘Do you?’

‘She is my patient, and I have sheltered her from the worst of the world as best I could.’ He sighed. ‘But I cannot shelter her from this. I can only ask-’

‘You have feelings, Spider? Your have feelings for her?’

‘I… am her doctor,’ Destrachis said. It was not clear whether the catch in his voice came from the sudden twitch in Tisamon’s blade or had some other cause.

‘If I came to believe you coveted her…’ Tisamon murmured. The threat went unsaid, nor did it need to be spoken.

Destrachis made to speak, and then again, but no words came.

Tisamon removed the blade from the Spider’s throat. ‘Go now. Do not presume to tell me this is wrong.’ A spasm of pain crossed his face, making Destrachis flinch back. ‘I know it is wrong. I am not master of myself. I am not… well. So go. This is no place for you any longer. I will kill you, if you do not go. I will kill you.’

Destrachis nodded tiredly, seeming for a moment so haggard that he must have looked close to his natural age. His eyes flicked once towards her door, but then he shook his head and walked away, padding off as quietly as Tisamon had arrived.

He is right. Tisamon clenched his fists. Perhaps he could yet salvage himself. He could step away now, force himself to go.

That perfect poise, the delicate balance of her blade. Not since her… Seventeen years was a long time to go without something that had once been his life and very breath. I hurt! He still had his clawed gauntlet buckled on, and the urge came upon him to drive it into his own flesh, to excise the hurt from himself like a surgeon.

And then her door opened, with Felise Mienn standing in shadow beyond, clad in her shift, staring out at him.

‘Tisamon.’ His name on her lips, in that softly accented voice. He lurched a step backwards, claw gone, staring. Unwillingly, as if tugged by wires, he approached her.

She reached out, but stopped just before her hand touched his chest. She, too, was shaking very slightly. ‘Tisamon,’ she said again, her voice unsteady.

She looked up into his face, and he wondered what she saw in his sharp features, his grey-flecked hair. He, who found his own face in the mirror both severe and haunted in turns, looked upon Felise and felt such fierce fire that he could barely keep his hands from her.

She is not so young, not so young as she looks. She was widow, after all, as he himself was widower. They neither of them had the fresh gloss of youth still on them. Yet the Dragonflies were a beautiful people, and none was more beautiful than Felise Mienn seen through the eyes of the Mantis Tisamon.

‘Please,’ he whispered, ‘send me away. One word from you and I will go. I cannot be here. I… betray…’

She was biting her lip, her hand still hovering an inch from his torn shirt.

‘I could not keep myself from this place, because I had not the will,’ he confessed. ‘But you can banish me. Send me away. Your word is strong, where I have failed. Please.’

‘For so many years I have woken up screaming.’ She spoke at last, so very quietly that he instinctively leant in to hear – and then closer still, to scent her dark hair. ‘Not out loud, but in my head,’ she continued. ‘What the Wasps did to me, I carried it like a picture to look at every day. Now the picture is gone and the scream is just an echo. But it was not having Thalric at my blade’s mercy that did this, for all I thought it might.’

‘I have no such powers,’ he said softly. ‘Do not make me into such a healer.’

‘What do you want here?’ she asked him. ‘Are you here to fight me? Then I shall take up my sword. Is that what you want?’

‘No. It is not.’ He swallowed. I want to feel your golden skin, to taste the sweat on it, to bury myself in your grace and poise. No matter how he tried, the thoughts would not stay away from him.

Abruptly his arms had swept her into his grasp and, with the same instinct that guided his blade faster than thought could take it, he had kissed her. For a moment she was stiff with shock, but then her arms gripped him, nails digging into his back, across pale skin sparsely signed with old scars and newer burns. Her thumb-claws inscribed fresh writing on him in shallow blood.

He pushed her into the room, the door swinging shut behind them. He lifted her shift over her head, and his breath ran ragged with the sight of the lithe economy of her body.

A hand abruptly closed on Che’s, startling her out of half-sleep. For a moment she could not work out what had happened, and then she looked at him – and Achaeos’ eyes were slightly open, a line of white showing beneath each lid. Her heart shook, for joy, for worry. Was he even conscious? Could he speak? ‘Achaeos?’ she whispered. Around her, the other casualties slept on, turned restlessly, some murmured to themselves.

She saw his lips move, moved her head closer to hear him, but there was no sound.

‘Achaeos, can you hear me?’

‘Che…’ Little more than a breath, but it was her name he spoke, her name on his breath. He still looked pale and hollow-cheeked, as though he should be dead. His featureless eyes might be focusing on her or staring into the abyss. He had said her name, though, and that was all that now mattered.

‘I’ll go and get a doctor…’ she started but his hand twitched on hers.

‘Che, wait,’ he breathed again. The interval before his next laboured words was agonizing. ‘I need… healers. No doctors. No physicians… I cannot stay here. I cannot heal here… This Apt city is killing me… This is not medicine.’ That much effort exhausted him and she clung to his hand as though he was drowning, being dragged into the dark water, and she was his only hope of rescue.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, and then, ‘This is… Your medicine is different. But that is because we are Apt here, and we do things differently. I remember…’ She recalled his own medicines of herbs and poultices at their first meeting, while she stitched his wound. How was it that he had such a habit of getting injured?

‘Che… the box… Is it…?’

She did not want to tell him. She did not know if he could stand the news. Still, if she lied now then she would always have lied to him, whatever her reasons for it. Besides, he would inevitably read it in her eyes. She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry.’

He shuddered. All that for nothing, he must surely be thinking. ‘Che,’ he said again, ‘help me.’

‘I love you, Achaeos. I’ll do anything for you. Just say it.’

A fragile smile touched his lips, and she bent closer to hear him speak.

Ten minutes later Cheerwell Maker paused on the man’s threshold, seeing a strip of lamplight beneath the door. A late night for him, then, and what would Major Thalric be doing up past midnight?

She knew she should knock straight away, but, standing here, she ran her mind through the road the pair of them had travelled together. Herself as his prisoner, under threat of rape, under threat of torture; a pawn in his political games. She owed him no courtesy, she decided.

She was about to throw open the door but changed her mind. She was here to beg, for all that it sickened her. She could not see any other way this could be done.

Che raised her hand to knock, and his voice came from within: ‘Whoever is out there, what do you want?’

She stood, frozen, feeling guilty and already hating him.

‘Open the door, clumsy assassin,’ suggested Thalric’s voice, and helplessly she did, pushing the heavy wooden door open and letting the lamplight stream out to narrow her eyes. Some had wanted him locked up still, but Stenwold had ruled against it. Perhaps, Che thought, my uncle hopes that he will overplay his hand, somehow, and reveal himself as a traitor. As a traitor yet again, she supposed, since he had already betrayed his own people.

Thalric was sitting at a desk as if interrupted in the act of writing. He had an open palm raised towards the door. After a thoughtful pause, he lowered it and sat regarding her without expression.

‘Mistress Maker,’ he said. ‘Not a visitor I’d expected.’

In the absence of either dismissal or invitation, she stepped into the room, closing the door behind her.

‘What are you writing so late?’ she asked him.

‘Reports on Jerez,’ he said, and on seeing her look he added, ‘Who for, you ask? I don’t know, but old habits die hard. I fear nobody will believe them anyway.’ He put the pen down. Che saw that it was a good-quality Collegium-made reservoir pen. He had obviously not been slow in taking advantage of his hosts.

‘So,’ he said, ‘are you here to warn me that the Dragonfly woman wants to kill me again, or is it simply that I’m to be arrested and tried at last?’

‘Would I come here alone for that?’

‘Perhaps you’d enjoy delivering such a message in person.’

She stared at him, loathing him, yet knowing that she now needed him. ‘Don’t think that we’re like the people of your Empire here. We don’t all take joy in other people’s suffering.’

‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘Yet your Mantis would kill me without a thought.’

‘But he wouldn’t torture you. He’d make it quick.’

‘What a consolation,’ he observed. ‘If a quick death was attractive to me, I’d have let my own people do it. This situation is ironic, is it not?’

‘What?’

‘You now have the say of life or death over me. It’s not so long since our places were reversed.’

‘I remember you were intending to torture me.’

‘I remember that I never did.’

She felt her anger flare up. ‘Because I was rescued! Not through any grace of yours!’

For a second it seemed he would argue the point, to her astonishment, but then he just shrugged and turned back to his papers. From nowhere she could identify, she felt a sudden stab of utterly unwelcome sympathy, at seeing the failed spy still clinging to his ritual, for want of anything else.

‘Thalric…’

‘Mistress Maker.’ He did not look up at her.

‘I need your help.’

He snorted with laughter, pen abruptly scratching on the parchment: not laughing at her so much as the sheer absurdity of that statement, after her words to him before. ‘What could I be qualified to do for you, Mistress Maker? Does the Assembly want some prisoners racking, whilst keeping their own hands clean?’

She approached quietly, was at his desk even before he had finished speaking, her hands gripping the edge. He looked up at her at last, his gaze measuring, considering.

‘What, then?’ he asked, realizing that she was serious, and desperate. ‘What is it?’

‘I need your help,’ she said again, slowly. ‘I need to get into a city that your people have occupied, and I don’t know how to do it.’

She waited for some reaction, but there was none. He was an intelligencer by trade, and whatever he thought of her request was played out inside, and hidden from her.

‘Tharn,’ she said. ‘I have to go to Tharn.’