Salute the Dark
Page 5
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.’
Four
The rap on his door was insistent, though if Stenwold had already got as far as his bed he would have ignored it. He heard Arianna stir at the sound. She had fallen asleep waiting for him, expecting him to join her hours earlier. But he could not sleep; he was too caught up with his worries: the defence of Sarn, and Balkus’ relief force; Salma’s mad Landsarmy; Tynisa’s guilt and Che’s grief; the litany of the wounded; the gallery of those faces who he would never see again, yet wished so dearly to take counsel with.
Stenwold went to answer the door, if only because it gave him at least a brief respite. He discovered Destrachis standing there, the lean Spider with his long, greying hair. Stenwold blinked at him.
‘Are we under attack?’
‘We are not, Master Maker. Not yet.’ Destrachis made no sign that he wanted to come in, just hovered beyond the doorway, clearly ill at ease.
‘What time is it?’
‘Four bells beyond midnight. Still one or two before dawn.’
Stenwold goggled at him. ‘So late?’ I must go to bed. I will even drug myself to sleep if I have to. ‘What . . . why are you here?’
‘It would have been earlier, Master Maker . . . but I have not known how to say this to you. I have no claim on you, and yet I need your help. I have spent hours hunting for answers in my mind. I need you to do something.’
‘At this hour?’
‘I need you merely to commit now. Act on it in the morning, but I need your word now, Master Maker.’
‘You’re mad,’ Stenwold told him, ‘and so am I for not being already in bed. How can it be almost dawn, for the world’s sake?’
‘Master Maker, please,’ Destrachis implored, his composure slipping for a moment. Stenwold heard soft footsteps from behind him. Arianna, wrapped in a bedsheet, was coming to investigate.
‘Back to bed, please,’ he told her. ‘I don’t know what this is about but—’
‘Stenwold, why are you still dressed? Why are you even answering the door?’ she asked.
‘I . . .’ He decided to avoid the first half of that inquisition. ‘I’m answering the door because this man has decided it is a civilized time to call. Destrachis, what do you want? What is it, this thing you want from me?’
‘Find a suitable use for Felise,’ the Spider replied flatly. ‘If you do not, then I do not know what she might do come the morning. Surely your great plans can take account of her?’
‘I . . .’ Stenwold shook his head. ‘I’d supposed she would fight if ever the Wasps get this far, but . . .’
‘Master Maker, there is no time,’ Destrachis said urgently, and Stenwold was surprised by the glint of tears in his eyes, whether of frustration or emotion, he could not tell. ‘Master Maker, I have a plan for you.’
‘More plans. My head is already full of them. No more plans, please, at this hour.’
‘In the morning, then. Promise me, Master Maker, that you will hear me as soon as first light dawns.’
An hour till then, two at the most. ‘All right,’ Stenwold said, ‘I promise. Now just . . . go, please.’ He cast a look at Arianna. She was eyeing Destrachis distrustfully.
‘I’ll go,’ Destrachis said, ‘but you must believe that I am right in this. It means life or death, Master Maker.’
‘Life or death in the morning,’ Stenwold said firmly, but before he could even close the door on Destrachis there was someone else running up, shouldering the Spider aside.
‘Sten!’
It was Tynisa this time. Stenwold stared at her helple
ssly, feeling his grasp of the situation slip further from him. He was wrong-footed by the impression that, whatever Tynisa was here about, Destrachis must already know of it.
‘What now?’ he asked, more harshly than he meant. He saw then that her face was blotched, her eyes red. Has the matter over Achaeos finally become too much for her? A sudden horror caught him. Is Achaeos dead? His voice now unsteady, he asked, ‘What is it?’
‘It’s Tisamon,’ she told him simply. ‘He’s gone.’
‘Gone? Gone where?’ He held on to the doorframe, unable to keep up with events.
‘I don’t know but . . .’ She held her hand out to him, something glinting in her palm. ‘He’s really gone. Something’s happened to him. He’s left us. This was pinned to my door.’
In her hand was the sword and circle broach of a Weaponsmaster, which Stenwold had never seen Tisamon without.
They searched, of course, he and Tynisa together. First the Amphiophos, then Tisamon’s other haunts in the city, from the Prowess Forum outwards. In the last hour before dawn they ransacked the city for him, sensing they were already too late. He had pointedly left behind the symbol of his office. It was no mere errand he had departed on.
Then they came back, and found the long-faced Spider- kinden doctor again waiting for them, looking old and ill-used. In the sallow, early light they allowed him to finally explain to them what had happened between Tisamon and Felise Mienn, and the thing that Tisamon had done that had driven him away. Destrachis’ sad, tired voice related the story in measured tones, as though it was some medical curiosity, and yet it barely scratched the surface of the Mantis-kinden nightmare that Tisamon had become lost in.
‘Poor Tisamon,’ was Stenwold’s comment at last. ‘Oh, poor Tisamon.’
‘Poor Tisamon?’ Destrachis exclaimed. ‘Perhaps I have not explained things clearly enough.’
‘No, no,’ Stenwold stopped him. ‘I understand. So he went to her at last.’ He looked at his own hands, broad and scarred, resting on the table. ‘I should have seen it in him, but I have been so taxed with other matters of late.’
‘There was no sign in Jerez,’ Tynisa said softly. ‘But then he kept himself occupied, always.’
The conference was just the three of them: the Beetle War Master, his adopted daughter and the Spider doctor who had never looked so old as now. In the harsh light of morning Stenwold saw now that his hair was not just greying but grey, almost white at the roots, in need of further dyeing. Spiders aged gracefully, and so Destrachis must be old – older than Stenwold by ten years and more.
‘He went to her, then. He slept with her.’ Stenwold’s hands clenched into fists, almost of their own accord. ‘And, in the aftermath, he thought of . . . of her.’
‘Atryssa,’ Tynisa agreed, although her thoughts surely ran, my mother. Stenwold wondered if Tisamon had thought of his daughter as well, seen a second betrayal there, where Tynisa would surely have been happy for him. After all, she’s not one to be easily shocked. But of course Tisamon would not have seen it like that.
‘Mantis pride,’ said Stenwold. ‘Anyone else . . . anyone else, given that chance, would have held on to their luck and not asked any questions. Anyone else would have been happy. Anyone but a Mantis, of course. So he’s been putting himself on the rack about what he’ll see as a betrayal. A final betrayal. He betrayed his own kind, and then he betrayed her, after Myna, and now . . . Mantids pair for life, I know. They never do what he has done – or so they tell each other. And Tisamon believed it, too. Poor Tisamon.’
‘And Felise is abandoned by him now,’ Destrachis said. ‘And who wouldn’t, in her place, take the blame on themselves, or at least part of it? I know she has.’
‘How is she?’ Stenwold asked him.
‘After I left you, I went and sat with her until dawn.’ From the Spider’s haggard looks Stenwold could well believe it. ‘She will kill herself.’
Stenwold and Tynisa stared at him, while his face took on an expression of excruciating patience.
‘She lost all her family, you’ll recall. She lost everything to the Wasps. To survive that loss she tracked the man, Thalric, across the whole of the Lowlands. That kept her going. Then she met Tisamon, who gave her another purpose, gave her – curse the man! – even a normal chance at life. And now he has gone, and she has nothing.’
‘And so you want her put into my plans, somehow. You think I can find her a purpose. You have a scheme?’ Stenwold said. ‘Destrachis, I do not mean to insult you . . .’
The doctor watched him with a faint smile, waiting.
Stenwold sighed, and continued. ‘My people say that Spiders always look in at least two directions at once. I confess I have been an intelligencer for twenty years, but I cannot read you. We Beetles are infants at these games compared to you. So what precisely do you want?’
Destrachis waited a long time before answering, still with that slight smile. ‘Ah Master Maker,’ he said at last. ‘I would tell you that I am a man of medicine and have a duty to my patient. Or insist that even Spiders know some little of honour and duty. I would tell you that I genuinely care that Felise Mienn, having suffered so much, should be happy, and does not destroy herself. I would tell you all of this, and you’d not believe a word of it, so therefore what can I tell you?’
‘Tell me your plan.’
‘I am no tactician,’ the Spider said, ‘however I understand this: the Wasps have more soldiers than you have – than you and the Sarnesh and all the little cities put together. The Empire is very large, the Wasps and their warriors are very many.’
‘We have the Spiderlands,’ Stenwold pointed out.
‘You do not trust me, and yet you suggest relying on the Spiderlands,’ Destrachis said disdainfully.
Stenwold nodded, conceding the point. ‘Then you are essentially correct, yes.’
‘So you make enemies for the Wasps – as with Solarno, for I have heard about this from your niece. Now the Wasps have another city to keep under control, another battle to fight.’
‘The Wasps took Solarno of their own will,’ Stenwold argued.
Destrachis shrugged. ‘Still, there are a few thousand Wasps there now who won’t be at the gates of Sarn. Well, then, the Wasps have other enemies.’
Stenwold opened his mouth, then shut it again. Des-trachis waited for the moment of comprehension, for the moment when Stenwold said, ‘You mean Felise’s own people? You’re talking about the Commonweal.’
Destrachis nodded evenly.
‘But there’s been no contact, no diplomatic relations at all – and besides, they must know—’
‘What do they know?’ Destrachis interrupted him. ‘What do most of your people know about the Twelve-Year War? The Commonweal is very old, and it has been collapsing in stages since long before the Empire ever arose from the dust. To the Dragonfly-kinden, everyone living outside their borders is a barbarian. There are only a few who have any interest in the Lowlands – such as your man who now fights with Sarn.’
Destrachis has been busy listening, I see. In fact Stenwold could hardly blame him.
‘If the Empire is attacking the Lowlands,’ the Spider continued, ‘then the land lost by the Dragonflies in the Twelve-Year War is open to being reclaimed, but the Commonweal must be made to understand that. They must be invited to join us, for they are a formal people. Felise can be your safe passage. Whatever she has done, she is still one of them.’
‘And you would come along as well?’ Stenwold asked him.
‘I would, but if this plan is to be of any assistance we must leave now, and by air. Otherwise your cities will have fallen by the time we even make our request.’
‘And if the Dragonflies should attack the Empire . . . well, the Wasps have a lot of soldiers but they cannot be everywhere at once. Especially if Teornis can persuade the Spiderlands to rise up also . . .’
‘For you and for Felise, Master Maker,’ Destrachis said. ‘I do not ask this for any profit to myself.’
But Tynisa replied, ‘No.’
‘Tynisa, surely . . . ?’
‘Because there is something else I must do.’
‘Ah, no.’ Stenwold held up a hand, as though he could forbid her.
‘Yes, I must follow Tisamon and bring him back.’
‘He will not thank you for it.’
‘I do not want his thanks. I want merely to tell him that I do not care what he has done – and that he should not either. I want to speak to him for myself, and my mother. I want to pull his guilt out of him, before the wound festers.’
* * *
The train rattled and jolted its way along the rails, each carriage packed with soldiers sleeping fitfully, or awake and sharing quiet words, games of chance, perhaps a communal bottle. The Collegium relief force was on its way to Sarn.
Balkus passed down the train from carriage to carriage, stepping over carelessly stowed kitbags and the outstretched legs of sleepers, checking on the welfare of his men. Enough of the waking had a nod or a smile for him that he felt this inspection was doing some good. They belonged to all walks of life, he knew, and many were men for whom Collegium had never found much use before. Those were strong-armers, dock-brawlers, bruisers and wastrels, but the Vekken siege had overwritten their many years of bad living with the lesson that even they could be heroes, even they could become the admired talk of their city. Others had signed up simply for the money, to escape creditors or enemies. More were simply those who wanted to do their bit as good citizens: he had here his share of shopkeepers, tradesmen, runaway apprentices and College graduates. There had probably never been an army in history with so many men and women who could strip down an engine or discourse on grammar. He even had a couple of College Masters, whom he had promoted to officers.