‘You’ll fight, then? The Spider-kinden will fight?’
‘Impossible to say.’ Teornis smiled. ‘However, retinues and mercenaries are mustering at Seldis and Everis, and once they’re gathered there I can make use of them. What’s the use of my being a Lord-Martial if I can’t lord it? Meanwhile, there’s more business afoot at Mavralis on the Exalsee, which is why I’m taking Taki here with me. I fancy the Wasps could do with being jabbed in the rear.’
Stenwold nodded. ‘My reports seem to suggest that, with their occupation of Solarno, the Empire is becoming over-extended.’
Behind Teornis’ smile, something slipped aside to reveal for a moment the genuine tension within him. ‘My friend, we had better hope so, because if they aren’t, then there’ll soon be a great deal of black and yellow all the way down the southern coast. It may all come down to the abilities of some Wasp clerk filing supply requisitions in Asta, Master Maker. As you know, wars are fought by soldiers but won by logistics.’
‘And you’re happy to go with Teornis?’ Stenwold asked Taki.
‘Sieur Maker, remember I’ve served Spider-kinden all my life. I want to free my city, and the Spiders want my city free.’
‘There is another travelling companion that I shall be taking from your side, Master Maker. I trust you will have no objections,’ Teornis said.
Stenwold looked at him blankly. For some reason he thought, Tynisa? – perhaps because the girl so clearly wanted to go somewhere and find some purpose to take her away from her guilt.
Teornis’ smile twitched. ‘I believe Master Nero wishes a return to Solarno. I had not realized that the city had so exercised its . . . charms on him.’
With that, Stenwold could not help glancing down at Taki and thinking, at first, The old lecher, and then, I am in no position to judge!
‘What use he’ll be, I don’t know,’ Taki remarked. ‘I just hope he can keep up with me, is all. But, anyway, we’ve got him, so we’ll just have to make some use of him.’
The other members of the war council now were filing in and taking their places, so Stenwold clasped hands with Teornis and then with the Fly girl.
‘Good fortune to you,’ he said.
‘Good fortune to all of us,’ Taki corrected him.
* * *
His stance was perfect for his blade: crouched a little, knees bent and balanced to move him forwards or back at the speed of his reflexes, not of his thoughts. His arm was not straight like the arrow of a rapier duellist’s stance, but crooked in so that the claw blade ran almost down the line of his forearm, looking deceptively passive but ready to lash out and draw back just like the killing arms of his people’s insect namesake. His offhand was held out, pointing forwards, spines flexing all down his arm to the elbow, ready to beat aside an attack and thus create a gap into which his claw would strike.
He looked down the crooked line of his arm and claw. He looked at her.
Her stance was different in almost every particular, yet identical in its perfect poise, in its patience. She stood with one leg forwards and almost fully extended, the other bent beneath her; her back straight. The sword, with its long hilt gripped in both hands, she held low and almost vertical: her entire being and energy focused on its leading edge, its diamond point.
They had not moved, either of them, for what must have been ten minutes, barely even a blink.
He wore his arming jacket of course, dark green padded cloth with his gold brooch, the Weaponsmaster pin, on the left breast. She had eschewed her armour, instead wearing the closest she could find to Dragonfly garb: loose clothes of Spider silk pulled in tight at the waist, the forearms, the calves. She wore shimmering turquoise and gold, with a black sash for a belt.
Tisamon and Felise Mienn watched each other narrowly and waited for the other’s move.
His soul was focused on the razor edge of her sword. They could only spar with real blades. To propose otherwise would be an insult to their skill.
Somewhere in the back of his mind was a memory of when they had fought each other on the streets of Collegium. She had thought him a Wasp agent, and for the first time in many years Tisamon had been truly fighting for his life in single combat. For ten years previously he had made a name for himself in Helleron, hiring his blade to whoever could meet his fees. The money was nothing; the fights were all. He had thought that he was taking pride in his skills, displayed in all those brawls and formal duels, but now he discovered that he had been waiting to meet the one who could properly challenge him. In Collegium she had found him.
After they had fought, after she had stepped out of the fight so abruptly, she had left him so inflamed, so fiercely alive, that he had even spared Stenwold’s Spider traitress. In that moment it had not mattered, because only she signified – only this woman who had walked in and out of his world in those brief minutes, to scar it forever.
Somewhere deep inside, he was now out of balance, as though he had been struck, back then, and was still reeling. Seventeen years of penance he had endured, in Helleron and other places: penance for betraying his race by consorting with the Spider Atryssa; penance for trusting in her false heart; and, at the last, penance for mistrusting her, who had died while being true to him. And I loved her, and she did not betray me after all. It was the most jagged wound of them all that it had been he who abandoned her, in the end. How she would have hated me, had she lived.
His eyes were now fixed on Felise’s – her eyes that were almond-shaped, and shifted from blue to green even as he watched and waited for her to move.
It has been so long. His kind bore some of their scars forever, but it had been so long. And I have broken the rules before. Felise’s face remained impassive. He could read nothing in it. He sensed no tension there, could foretell no gathering strike.
He had been dead, he realized, those seventeen years. Only Stenwold’s return and the discovery of Tynisa had awoken him to some kind of half-life, but beneath it all some part of him had slumbered on. Until Felise. He had not known who she was, what her purpose, or her allegiance. He had not needed to, and would not have cared if she had served a Spider lady or been a slave of the Arcanum, or even worn the black and gold. Skill spoke a language all its own and, when he had fought her, even as her blade drove for his heart, he had thrilled to it. If she had killed him, as well she might, then he would have cried out in joy as her sword ran him through.
And he knew she understood that. She was no Mantis, but her kind understood such perfection, such dedication.
She moved, stepping in suddenly with a thrust. He caught it with his claw, parrying it aside, his offhand lashing in to beat her blade aside.
They stopped, that single move and counter-move frozen in time, standing now within each other’s reach, face to face. She would seem beautiful to others, if made up as the Spider-kinden painted their faces, yet to him she was beautiful in every line of her body. Something within him was screaming, as he moved his hand to within an inch of her face, the spines flexing on his forearm.
There was a heavy tread, heralding a Beetle-kinden approaching the silence of the Prowess Forum. It was dark outside, and had been before they began this poised vigil. Tisamon broke away first, still gazing into her face.
It was Stenwold who entered, looking more haggard than ever. He nodded at the two of them but saw nothing of what had existed between them.
‘You weren’t at the war meeting,’ he said.
‘I’m a soldier, not a tactician,’ Tisamon reminded him.
Stenwold considered that. ‘True, I suppose. I missed you, though. I like to be able to look over at you and remind myself of the reality of warfare. How so many people became experts on fighting wars without ever picking up a sword I’ll never know.’
He frowned suddenly, becoming aware in some small way of the tension here. ‘Is . . . everything all right?’
‘Just sparring,’ Tisamon replied briefly. Then: ‘Tell me, you and your . . . Spider girl, you are happy together, ye
s?’
Stenwold grinned a little sheepishly. ‘More than I deserve, with Arianna, yes. But you were right in what you said. After all, the war’s on us now, and who knows where I’ll be when it’s done – or where she’ll be . . .’ He pressed his lips together then, no doubt imagining some harm coming to her, or to himself. ‘Anyway, I’ll leave you now to your practice. Four hours of talk is enough for any man.’
Tisamon barely noticed as the Beetle shuffled off. He himself had said that, had he not? He had said that Stenwold should take happiness where he could, and when he could. The future was looking uncertain – less certain by the day. A hundred thousand Wasps and more were on the march beneath their black and gold banner. There was a score of battlefields ahead waiting to be filled with the fallen.
Tisamon settled into a new stance, holding his claw high and back now, his pose more aggressive, more reckless. Felise countered with a low stance, one leg straight to one side, the other bent beneath her, sword held at waist-level and pointing directly at his heart.
There was something in her eyes that pierced him. He dared not name it, but he saw it. He felt the wound.
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 t
he 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.
Salute the Dark Page 2