‘Nero!’ Totho exclaimed, noticing the Fly was not bound but neither was he free, for the soldiers were keeping a very close eye on him. He smiled grimly as he saw Totho, but there were mottled bruises across one side of his face and one eye was swollen almost shut.
‘Morning to you,’ he said. ‘And I’m glad to see you. Apparently you may be in a position to vouch for me.’
Drephos interrupted. ‘Who is this man, Totho?’
‘He’s a friend,’ Totho began, and then realized that this was imprecise. ‘He’s an old friend of . . . a College Master who was a good friend to me.’ Sudden inspiration struck. ‘He’s an artist, in fact, and I think he’s quite well known. We met in Tark,’ he added lamely.
‘You think he’s quite a well-known one?’ Drephos sounded amused. ‘How well known can he be, if you only think it?’
‘I don’t know about art,’ said Totho stubbornly. ‘And I don’t know why he’s here, either.’ He turned to the Fly-kinden. ‘Were you captured in the assault?’
‘Not exactly.’ Nero’s wan smile remained. ‘I came here to find out what had happened to you, as a matter of fact.’
‘Something which the soldiers who captured him did not quite understand,’ Drephos explained. ‘However, he kept repeating your name and eventually word came through to me.’
‘Since when the quality of hospitality around here has definitely improved,’ Nero put in, rubbing his wrists for emphasis. ‘Well, here’s a decent sight. You came through without a scratch, it seems.’
‘Without more than a lump,’ Totho confirmed. ‘But why did you come here? They could easily have killed you.’
Nero shrugged off the risks of it, but the gesture was unconvincing. He had not wanted to come, Totho could sense, yet he had been forced to, and by what other than his own conscience? ‘My old friend Sten, you see, we go way back,’ he said, sounding almost embarrassed about it. ‘We’ve been through a lot, him and me, what with the College and all.’ He glanced at Drephos. ‘Stop me if this is getting too sentimental or unmilitary for you.’
‘Say all you want, Master Nero. Knowledge is never wasted,’ said the Colonel-Auxillian.
‘Well then, there was a caper that Stenwold and the others went in for, a long time ago, pretty much the last – the second to last, really – that we did together back then. It’s history now, but it involved these fellows.’ He jerked a thumb back at the Wasp soldiers nearby. ‘And it was too hot for me. I bugged out of there quick enough, told him it wasn’t for me. I missed the fun, and then things went sour. Lost one good friend, and another died soon after. And I never forgot how I left them to it, because I didn’t like the odds. I know people think my kinden are a spineless bunch, and mostly they’re right, but it still didn’t sit well. Then, when you and the lad there turned up in Tark, I told myself I’d look after you, keep you on track. And a right job I made of that, too. So here I am still trying to put things right.’
‘You didn’t have to come,’ Totho reproved him. ‘I’m . . . holding out fine.’ He took a deep breath. ‘And Salma is . . . well, he didn’t make it.’
Nero looked up at Drephos. ‘Shall I say it, or is it going to get me shot?’
‘Say all you wish,’ Drephos told him. ‘I have only refrained from mentioning it because I assumed you would prefer to break the news yourself.’
Nero nodded, his mere expression making it plain he did not trust Drephos one inch.
‘The thing is, lad,’ he said, ‘Salma’s still here. He made it, all right – though only just. He’s alive and here in the camp.’
Salma was asleep when Totho came to see him. Nero and the others kept their distance, even Drephos, as he went to kneel at his friend’s bed.
Only a very slight rise and fall of Salma’s chest betrayed the life within him. His once-golden skin was now leaden pale, his cheeks sunken and his lips shrivelled like an old man’s. It was hard to see here the laughing, smiling fighter, the nobleman from a far foreign land, who had once brightened the austere halls of the Great College.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Totho murmured quietly, so as not to wake him. He was acutely aware of all the others nearby, two hundred laid out in this tent alone. All casualties of the war, in one way or another. Most were Wasps, but there were others too: Bee-kinden like Kaszaat, ruddy-skinned Ants, even a couple of Fly messengers who had not flown swiftly enough. Many there, he saw, carried terrible burns caused by the incendiaries, and the Wasp officers’ lack of concern for their own men.
Totho returned to Drephos and the others. There was a woman now standing there with them, a severe-looking Wasp-kinden who was scowling at the master artificer.
‘Totho,’ Drephos said, ‘this gentle lady is Norsa, the Eldest of Mercy’s Daughters in this camp. Norsa, this young man was a companion of the Commonwealer lying over there.’
Norsa turned a stern eye on Totho, who tried to face up to it. ‘He will live,’ she said flatly. ‘He will recover, now, although at first only she kept him with us at all.’ She pointed and Totho followed her extended finger to see a robed woman passing along the line of beds, bearing a basin of water. Her eyes were white, and her skin glowed through a rainbow of colours. Totho had never seen her before but, from Salma’s words, he knew who this must be.
‘So he found her, at last,’ he murmured. ‘Thank you for aiding him, lady. I realize he is your enemy.’
‘I have no enemies,’ Norsa replied sharply. ‘Mercy’s Daughters give aid to whoever they will, however the Empire may take issue with us. Suffice to say that the imperial army knows your friend is here.’
Totho’s stomach lurched with the thought and he turned to Drephos. ‘Then you must have known!’
Totho caught a sardonic smile from under the hood. ‘Norsa here holds me to blame for the injuries done to many of these men. I hear no news from her Daughters, and I heard none from any other quarter. Just be grateful that Master Nero himself thought to look here.’
‘But when he recovers,’ Totho said, ‘they’ll . . .’
Drephos finished for him grimly. ‘Take him? Question him? Torture him and then enslave or kill him? Yes, they will, for that is their way. A waste of healing, in my opinion.’
‘I do not even recognize that sentiment,’ Norsa snapped at him, ‘although if you were the patient I might make an exception, Colonel-Auxillian.’
Totho glanced from Drephos to Nero, and then back across the room to the unconscious Salma, and realized that some part of his mind had a plan and a decision already prepared for him.
‘Colonel Drephos,’ he said, although he had found his thought already. ‘I need to speak with you. I think you know what about.’
*
Salma drifted in and out of wakefulness. Sometimes he recalled who he was, where he was, and sometimes he did not, perhaps blessedly. He existed in a blurred greyness that was pulled taut between the light of Grief in Chains and the darkness of the void that was still hungry for him.
On one occasion he opened his eyes and found himself looking straight into the face of the man on the next bed. He was a Wasp-kinden with his head bandaged low so as to cover one eye, the wrappings crisp and clean, having just been changed. When he saw Salma looking at him, the other man grinned weakly.
‘You,’ he said, in a voice just loud enough for Salma to hear, ‘are so cursed lucky.’
Salma tried to make a sound, but nothing audible came out. In truth he did not feel so very lucky.
‘You should be dead,’ the soldier continued, his whispering voice obviously the best he could manage. ‘I saw you drop. You were fighting like a maniac but someone got you, and you fell, and that should have been the end of you. I was behind. I saw the point come clean through you, you bastard. She came for you, though, and you were dead, even then, but she came for you as though she knew what had been going on. She ran out and lit the place up and put her hands on you. And you stopped bleeding, right there and then.’ He coughed, a wretched, scratchy sound. ‘And she’s
been with you every day, using her Art to keep you alive. I don’t know what you mean to her but you’re a lucky bastard, so you are.’
Salma tried to speak again, and this time a distant croak emerged, quieter even than the wounded soldier’s. ‘I came here for her.’
The man’s one eye studied him for a minute, before he said, ‘Well she’s certainly worth that.’
‘Salma?’
He had been asleep, or at least drifting somewhere else, but there was a new voice now, and it carried his name to him.
‘Salma, you have to wake up now.’
It was not her voice and he did not want to wake up. When he had opened his eyes last, she had been standing there, staring at him. Expression was hard to fathom from those dancing colours, from those eyes, but his heart had leapt painfully just to see her.
He had found her. She had found him. In this mad, war-struck world, they had found each other.
She had sat down at the edge of his bed and, although it was a flimsy folding piece that should have tipped immediately, she barely moved it, making him doubt his senses. He had reached out, though, and she had taken his cold hand in both her warm ones, warm like the sun on a summer’s day.
‘Why are you here?’ she had asked him. ‘Why did you come?’
‘I couldn’t stay away, knowing that you were here,’ was his whisper. ‘Aagen . . . I spoke to Aagen.’
‘Did you—?’
‘No. We parted on good terms.’ His voice was strengthening, as though healing energies were passing through her hands and into him. Perhaps they were, either by Ancestor Art or by plain magic.
‘You should not have come.’
The ghost of his old smile appeared briefly. ‘Why?’
‘You are hurt. You were already in the hands of death when I found you. All I have done since barely kept you with me.’
‘But I am with you.’ He was staring at her face. She was beautiful and it was not merely the ordinary human beauty of Tynisa. She was Butterfly-kinden and they were beautiful with the timeless perfection of a sunset or a spring day. He yearned for her even though she was already there right beside him.
She had shaken her head. ‘Then I myself have done this to you. I never intended this.’
‘No—’ But something had come to mind, something the Moth-kinden man had said, or that Che had claimed on his behalf. ‘They said . . . did you enchant me? Is this . . . what I feel now, just glamour?’
Her hand had touched his face and he felt a warmth flooding there, and also peace and safety. ‘I put a spell on you,’ she had confirmed. ‘We were penned there as slaves, before the great machines of the Wasps, and I saw your face and knew you were a good man. I needed the help of a good man so I put a spell on you, that still held strong when we were taken by their devices to the city of the slaves. But then you needed help yourself, and I took my spell away. I have no spell on you now.’
Staring at her, he had not known what to think, because his heart still reached for her and he wanted to touch her, to stroke that rainbow skin.
‘Then I must love you,’ he had said in wonderment, and realized that all this while some part of him had believed Che’s claim that it was no more than a spell that made him act this way. Now he discovered it was him, nothing but his own heart.
‘Salma! Please wake up!’
He snapped from the reverie – and saw she was not here. Instead there was a man standing by his bed, and it took Salma rather too long to recognize his face.
‘Totho . . . ?’
‘Yes, Salma, it’s me.’
‘What . . . what in the world are you wearing?’
Salma registered the tunic Totho now wore, black, and edged with strips of black and gold. It was crossed with two leather belts, one for his tools and the other serving as a baldric for his sword.
‘Listen to me, Salma, because we don’t have much time,’ said Totho. ‘You have to listen and understand what I’m saying. I’m getting you out.’
‘Out?’
‘Out of here. Because the girl might have saved your life, but you’re still not safe. In fact if you stay here you’ll certainly die. The Wasps are just waiting until you’re well enough to interrogate.’ Totho gave a brief bark of laughter in which the strain he was under emerged clear enough. ‘What a world! They’re waiting for your wound to heal so they can tear you apart. You know how much they hate your kinden. Half of their men here fought in your Twelve-Year War.’
‘So be it,’ said Salma tiredly.
‘No! Not so be it! Aren’t you listening, Salma? I’ve bought you out. There’s a man, an artificer here, and he wants my service, and he says he can get you out of here.’
‘You trust him?’
‘Enough for this, at least. You remember Nero? Nero’s going with you. He’ll look after you until you’re strong again.’
‘I can’t leave, Totho.’
Totho glowered at him. ‘It’s the girl? That dancing girl? Listen, Salma, they are going to kill you, as slowly as they can. Would she want that? Because she won’t be able to stop them. This nursing order of hers might get to choose whose wounds it heals, but it’s got no such say over the fit and well. I’ve paid the asking price, Salma. I’ve sold myself just to buy you life.’
‘No!’ The effort racked Salma with pain, and he knew that everyone down the length of the hospital tent would be staring. ‘Totho, no—’
‘This way you survive, and live free, and I . . . live too. It’s not so bad. I won’t be a slave, quite. And who knows what could happen?’ And it’s not as if I had much to go back to, Totho added to himself. And this way, Che won’t detest me any more than she already does, because at least I won’t have left you to die, Salma.
‘Totho, you can’t do this,’ Salma said urgently, feeling himself worn out just by the effort of this conversation. ‘I’m not worth your doing this—’
‘Shut up!’ Totho snapped, shocking him into silence. ‘Shut up, Salma, because I have already done this. I have put on their colours and apprenticed myself to these monsters, and I have done it for you, and if you tell me now that you’re not worth it, just what have I done all that for?’ His fists were tightly clenched and Salma saw him anew then: not the shy, awkward youth always tagging along behind Che, but the man that same youth had forged into.
It came for all of us, Salma thought. We are all grown now. Che, when the Wasps enslaved her and put her before their torture machines. Tynisa when she discovered her birthright. To me on the point of a sword . . . and to Totho here and now. We have put childish things behind us, and look at the world we have grown into.
There were streaks of moisture on Totho’s face but he was putting on an angry mask to hide the despair.
I have no right to play the martyr here, nor have I the strength.
‘I’m sorry, Totho,’ he said softly. ‘I hope you find that you have done the right thing.’
Totho had assumed that the Imperial Fourth Army would be splitting, some to be led west by General Alder and others staying to secure the half-ruined city of Tark. Garrison duty was beneath the Barbs, though, and a new force had come tramping out of the desert following its Scorpion guides. A garrison force, Totho understood, was different to a field army. It contained more auxillians, for one, usually around one man in two, and many of the Wasp-kinden included were veterans who had now earned an easier assignment than open battle. All this he learned from Kaszaat. The garrison was commanded by a governor who was usually also a colonel in the imperial army. Running a garrison was less prestigious than commanding a field army, but having a whole city at one’s disposal, she explained, was an unparalleled opportunity for acquiring both power and wealth. More than one general had willingly taken the demotion.
General Alder was not that kind of soldier, however. He was already busy organizing the Fourth to move westwards. Expecting no answer, Totho had enquired of Drephos, and was surprised when the artificer had told him that the plan was very simple.
&nb
sp; ‘The Fly-kinden settlements of Egel and Merro will be invited to avail themselves of imperial protection. There seems little doubt, given the timorous and pragmatic character of the race, that they will accept. Then the army will proceed on to the island city-state, Kes.’
Totho knew that the garrison force had resupplied the Fourth with more than just rations and ammunition. Two dozen battle heliopters had been assembled on the airfield by the camp, with four hulking carrier heliopters – monstrously clumsy machines that could each hold three hundred men in the open cage of its belly. ‘These are just to draw out Kes’s airpower,’ he guessed.
‘Quite,’ Drephos confirmed. ‘We have a few soldiers who could fly all the way from the mainland, but most of them would tire halfway and drop into the sea. So we will ship them over in droves, to die over Kes and to destroy its flying machines and its riding insects and whatever else shall come against them. Then the airships will drop incendiaries upon the Kessen navy, which I believe is formidable, and drop rockbreaker explosives on its sea-wall and its artillery. After that, the city itself will burn and we will begin landing our forces. I estimate that it will take General Alder three times as long to take Kes as it did to take Tark, partly because the city is naturally more defensible, and partly because I shall not be there with him.’
Totho nodded. That seemed only reasonable.
‘We shall shortly be embarking on our own journey, however,’ Drephos continued, ‘so we shall see none of it. I have faith that General Alder will prove his usual mixture of military efficiency and imaginative bankruptcy.’ He went striding with his uneven gait back towards his tent. ‘First, though, I have something I would like your opinion on, Totho.’
Totho hurried after him. He was forever surprised to find himself so free just to run around. It seemed the black and yellow that he wore was a shield against persecution, for all that he earned plenty of disparaging looks from the Wasps.
In his tent, Drephos had assembled a little workshop of the most delicate tools Totho had ever seen. There was a grinder for machining metal, a casting ladle and a set of wax moulds, and everything he needed to replace parts and help maintain his devices in the field. Turning, Drephos had something in his hands, long and wrapped in dark cloth, and for once he seemed almost hesitant.
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