Salute the Dark

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Right then.’ He put the wine bowl down, still untouched, flexing his hands in readiness. Out there his persecutors would be waiting. They had passed their message on to Flaneme, who, like any good taverna-keeper, would try to keep each side of the fight happy. She was telling him that he was no longer protected here, and she would call on her other patrons to throw him out or beat him unconscious if she had to.

  He stood up, throwing back his cloak to free his sword-hilt. The taverna door was already open, with a cold breeze ghosting in. With a slight smile he stepped out, seeing a full dozen cloaked men waiting for him, most standing on the ground, a few hovering on rooftops. It was the Rekef then.

  ‘I take the numbers as a compliment,’ he said, mostly to himself. The door slammed shut behind him, and he heard the bar go down into place.

  They moved in on him, rushing forwards directly or stooping from the roofs. He thrust his open palms towards them, summoning the Art of his people. The smile still had not left his face.

  In the end they had been hampered by their need to take him alive. Thalric had made no scruples of abusing that advantage. In the quick, vicious scuffle, as they descended on him from all sides, and then as they wrestled to subdue him, he had killed five of them with his sting. It was an Art he was strong in. Putting his hand to a man’s chest, he could punch a fist-sized hole right through his victim. In a brawl it was better than any hidden knife.

  He did not earn their love, for that. Their orders to keep him alive had not specified in what condition. By the time it was over he was bruised and bloody from the beating they inflicted.

  He had awoken, not in a cell but a small billet, the kind of room where a sergeant or junior officer might live out his life. There was a guard just within the door, and as Thalric stirred the man passed the word to others waiting outside.

  A prisoner now, and aching all over, Thalric found a strangely high mood on him. He realized that it was because, amidst all the pain and bruising, there was barely a stab from the deep wound that Daklan had inflicted on him outside Collegium, that had come so close to finishing him after his fall from Rekef favour. That wound, unlike the betrayal, was now consigned to the past.

  So where in the wastes am I? There was a quick enough answer to that one, since the men who had jumped him had been Wasp soldiers. This spartan little room he was in could be in the barracks, or perhaps in the governor’s palace. There was a high window, suggesting his cell was probably on the level just below ground. He considered flying up there to look out, but decided that it was better not letting his captors know whether he could fly or not.

  Of course, I can’t be sure myself. He seemed, nevertheless, to have come through the beating better than he might have done, but then he had always been a tough one to keep down. Captain Rauth, Ulther, Tisamon and Tynisa, Arianna, Daklan, Felise Mienn: they had all done their best, at one time or another, to put him out of this world. He wondered who would try next.

  Lying on the hard bunk, with the guard eyeing him cautiously, he had to concede that his life so far seemed to have been a whole lot of effort to achieve a great deal of nothing. I would have stayed with the Rekef if I could. I have made a lamentable revolutionary.

  But now what? He was not bound, so he could kill the guard now and make a run for it. He might get quite far, and he could certainly kill a considerable number of his captors before they were forced to re-evaluate just how alive they wanted him to be. Clearly he was being sent a message by someone confident he would be able to work it out: Wait. All is not lost.

  Had he been intercepted by rebel elements within the palace? If there were still Mynan staff and slaves here, then the resistance would have its own people nearby. Perhaps Kymene or Che had . . . but then he did not even know if Che was still alive. It seemed quite possible that, after his explosive exit, Hokiak’s people might have butchered her – or that Kymene might have had her killed as a Rekef agent. Such irony!

  And then, after a moment’s consideration, I am both betrayed and betrayer. The Empire’s rejection of him had turned a life of estimable service into one of perverse deceit, and when he had tried to go back over that path, to knit the wounds he had caused, he had only made everything worse.

  He was not made to be maudlin, though. I am alive, he reflected. It was the first and best building block that he could work with.

  Two soldiers entered the room without preamble. Their demeanour showed that they were fully aware of what their fellows – and their late fellows – had gone through to bring him here. They both loathed him and were frightened of him.

  ‘Well?’ Thalric asked them. ‘What now?’

  ‘Come with us,’ said one. His lips twitched, as if at a foul taste, when he added, ‘sir.’ The word struck Thalric like a blow. He almost toppled back on the bed, his legs suddenly weak at the power of a mere three-letter word. He had endured a long, harsh winter since anyone had truly called him that. The word was a whole life away for him: a door onto better days.

  ‘Sir, is it?’ he managed to get out, hoping that his face showed none of his surprise.

  The man merely replied, ‘I have been ordered to request your presence, sir. You are sent for.’

  And you don’t like it, soldier, but you’ll obey your orders. That was the underlying principle of the entire Wasp nation, who were by nature so quarrelsome and undisciplined.

  ‘Lead on, soldier,’ Thalric said it as casually as he could manage.

  As soon as he got out into the corridor he knew that this must be the governor’s palace. He had no fond memories of it, for he had been through as much pain here as he had at any time before, and he had lost a good friend, too. The only luck thrown his way, aside from his continued survival, was that in the end it had not been his hand that had scorched out the life of Colonel Ulther, at the last. Mere chance, too, and he had no right to feel better over mere chance.

  They took him up three levels and he applied his mind to drawing himself a map of the place as he recalled it. These were the quarters of important guests and higher officers, up here. He had even stayed here himself. There were public staterooms too, though he was already above the grand hall that Ulther had held court in. Wherever he was being taken, it was to be behind closed doors.

  Do they imagine I know something, and wish to woo it out of me? Do I now turn informant against Stenwold and his people? And why not?

  If they had wanted information, they needed only put him under the machines, for surely the ways and means had not softened so very much. But if I myself were in charge, would I not ask nicely first? Sometimes it is more efficient. Of all the hypotheses milling in his brain this seemed the most likely. He should not therefore get used to his current liberty. Which means I should exploit it as soon as the chance arises. Just give me a room with a decent-sized window.

  And, obligingly, they did so. This palace, like most large Wasp-constructed buildings, was a ziggurat, and the room they brought him to even boasted a balcony, beyond which the blue sky stretched broad and inviting. He stayed put, though. He wanted to know where he stood, before he ran. There were two soldiers at the door, keenly watching over him, but they did not yet figure in his calculations. Five dead men could become seven soon enough. He had nothing to lose and it made him feel immortal.

  The room itself had little of the garish style that Ulther had loved: the gaudy and overdone, the displayed loot from a dozen conquered peoples. This was Capitas-style Wasp: the long table devoid of ornament and a single frieze on the wall, in the local style but depicting the battle for occupation of the city itself, eighteen years before. Thalric wondered idly if he could pinpoint one of those images of triumphant, larger-than-life Wasp soldiers as his younger self. Perhaps one of them was Ulther, commanding the attack. He glanced from the frieze to the soldiers, young men both. They were not there, of course. They had probably not even fought in the Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal. It made feel him oddly lonely. He had now more in common with Stenwold Maker th
an with these men. In the end the burden of cultural identity did not weigh as much as the years.

  They had come to attention swiftly, and he positioned himself across the table from the door, waiting. Some instinct told him that he recognized the tread, even before the man himself appeared: a grey-haired, severe-looking Wasp-kinden. A colonel and, as he saw now from the additional insignia, a governor.

  Of course. The new governor had not been referred to by name in any of the documents he had seen because there was no need, but if he had really, really tried, then he could have worked out who the man was. There was no reason for him to be surprised.

  ‘Colonel Latvoc,’ Thalric said. ‘Excuse me for the informality, but I don’t feel that I’m in a position to salute.’

  Latvoc’s stare was all ice, but Thalric had not expected anything else. In a clipped gesture, the colonel ordered the two guards out of the room. ‘You didn’t have to kill five of my soldiers,’ he said.

  Thalric raised an eyebrow cynically. ‘The last time the Empire showed an interest in me, Colonel, I barely lived to learn a lesson from it.’

  ‘Even so,’ Latvoc said, ‘you’ve made things . . . very difficult.’

  And why should you care? But Thalric could see it already. A Rekef colonel put in charge of the garrison, leaving the soldiers unhappy and mistrustful – and why not? What was there to trust?

  ‘Sit down,’ Latvoc ordered him flatly. When Thalric did not move he narrowed his eyes. ‘I am still your superior officer.’

  ‘Am I still in the army?’

  Latvoc stared at him. Looking back into his sallow face, Thalric saw a man who had slept little recently. Local or imperial worries, I wonder? Or both at once? Abruptly, as though he was seeing a shape suddenly appear in the outlines of a cloud, Thalric saw the sheer, naked desperation within Latvoc. The man was on a knife edge, and barely balancing even on that.

  ‘I’m not exactly in love with the Empire, after recent treatment,’ Thalric said. That part of him that had been loyal was horrified at his own daring.

  ‘In love?’ Latvoc spat, each word he uttered becoming a separate fight to control his temper. ‘You are – were – an imperial major. You were a Rekef officer. It is not for you to criticize the Empire. It is not for you to put your petty personal concerns before the demands of your masters. If the Empire wanted you dead, you by rights should have died. If it wishes now to recall you from the grave, then you shall return.’

  And I myself have used such logic once: after Daklan stabbed me, and I would rather not have lived. But recent association with Stenwold’s pack of misfits seemed to have rubbed the gloss off those arguments.

  ‘What do you want now?’ Thalric asked. ‘You want me dead? Well, you had your chance. So what do you want?’

  ‘I? I want nothing,’ Latvoc said coldly. ‘There is another, however, who is generous enough in spirit to give a broken vessel a second chance to be of service.’

  Thalric studied him: the Rekef colonel who, at their first meeting, had shot him through with fear for his own future, a man on whose word so many hundreds of other lives had turned. He found himself unmoved.

  ‘Bring on your man,’ he said.

  ‘He is already here,’ Latvoc informed him, and the colonel’s eyes strayed past Thalric towards the balcony. A man was standing there. Standing outside, or has he just flown down? It was a child’s trick, despite the silent skill with which it had been accomplished.

  The man was merely a knifelike silhouette for a moment, then he stepped forwards and stared into Thalric’s face, and Thalric recognized him. Despite himself, his heart lurched.

  It was General Reiner, one of the three men who ruled the Rekef.

  Reiner glanced at Latvoc and made a small signal, and the colonel backed out of the room with an angry glare. For a long while, Reiner and the renegade measured one another in silence. Then the general gestured to the table, and Thalric cautiously took a seat across from him.

  ‘So, General,’ he said, ‘if this is to be an execution it’s a needlessly grand one. These days a knife in a back alley would be more my level.’

  Reiner opened his mouth to speak, but the words were a long time coming. Thalric realized that he had never heard this man speak before, and the first sound that Reiner uttered was so low and croaking that Thalric could not make it out.

  Reiner tried again. ‘That will be enough, Major Thalric.’ Coming from a man of such power, the voice itself seemed weak and thin, but the words were another matter. Thalric felt the mention of that rank strike him like a blow so heavy that he actually rocked back in his chair.

  And is it so? And is a year of my life thus erased, the disgrace forgotten, the sins undone? Is that certainty, that righteousness that they stripped from my every action, now dropped back on me like a blanket, and just as comforting?

  ‘Since when was that Major still the case?’ he got out. More angrily he added, ‘They tried to kill me.’

  In the silence after that he heard a slight shifting, not coming from Reiner but from beyond the room. He filed it neatly in his mind: men concealed, false walls. Not so very trusting after all.

  Reiner took a deep breath. ‘We are at war, Major.’

  ‘I had noticed, General.’

  ‘I do not mean the Lowlands,’ Reiner said dismissively. ‘Real war. Maxin is trying to take over the Rekef. Maxin is the true enemy.’ His eyes twitched about the room as though naming his fellow Rekef general might somehow conjure him up.

  ‘General Maxin,’ Thalric said slowly.

  ‘His orders, to kill you,’ said Reiner. ‘Not mine.’

  Thalric remembered his last conversation with Daklan before the man had done his level best to kill him. Yes, Daklan had named Maxin as the source of the death warrant, but he had spoken of Thalric’s supposed patron as well. You could have protected me, General Reiner, he thought. His imperial conditioning was meanwhile subtly falling back on his shoulders, conjured up by the mere mention of his vanished rank and privilege.

  ‘So where does that leave me now?’ he said, and then added unwillingly but inexorably, ‘Sir?’

  Reiner’s eyes alone acknowledged the concession. ‘We need capable agents,’ he rasped. ‘You are capable. Maxin had no right. You are mine. You are my major until I say otherwise.’ The speech seemed to exhaust him and he sank a little into his chair.

  ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’ Thalric asked him.

  What could I give to you now? The secrets of the Lowlands . . . Stenwold’s plans . . . Che’s plans? I could take Che back from the resistance and make her in fact what they took her for in error: an agent of the Rekef. I could single-handedly secure the future of the Lowlands campaign.

  He looked into General Reiner’s dry, barren face, and thought, But you don’t care.

  ‘Capitas,’ Reiner said. ‘I will send you to Capitas with false papers. The usual. I have work there for a capable man.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ said Thalric. I’m back in. It was like a triumphant shout within his mind, the last months unwritten, wiped clean. He had never been cut loose from the army, from the Empire. He had remained loyal Major Thalric all this time, and the great cloak of imperial necessity had shrouded all his deeds in impenetrable rightness. But the rush of relief, of release, did not come. He waited for it eagerly but he was still wound up as tense as a bowstring inside. He felt sudden frustration with himself rise up inside. Can I not take this gift, now? Is this not what I wanted?

  ‘Sir, may I ask a question?’

  Reiner nodded.

  ‘My work here at Myna, before – the removal of the old governor – I assume that you were preparing the ground. He was Maxin’s man?’

  Reiner nodded again.

  ‘Good,’ Thalric said, and the slightest smile moved across Reiner’s face.

  I’m back in, Thalric told himself. I’m back in. No more associating with lesser races, or running their errands. I’ve got power again. I can have my revenge on that Beetle
whore-master and his Mantis executioner, and the whole bloody lot of them.

  Another voice, so recently heard, said in his mind’s ear: It is not for you to criticize the Empire. It is not for you to put your petty personal concerns before the demands of your masters.

  The thought was gall in his mouth. It cuts both ways, that does. It cut down to the lowest slave and servant, and it cut up all the way to the top. Empire over all. For the Empire, not for himself, not for a general, not for the Emperor, and not for the Rekef. And not for some grasping general’s bastard faction games!

  Something inside him wailed in despair at his conclusions, losing a second time what he could hardly bear to lose on the first occasion.

  ‘General,’ he said, ‘when you sent me to kill my former friend Colonel Ulther I did not want to do it, but when I did so, at least it was because he was guilty of an actual crime.’

  Reiner’s eyes widened and his mouth opened, but Thalric did not have time to wait for that hoarse voice to emerge. The flash of his sting-shot was concealed beneath the table, but the blast of it smashed the Rekef general’s chair into pieces even after it had passed through the occupant’s body.

  Sixteen

  He stepped out on to the sand, the sun suddenly bright in his eyes. He put a hand up to blot it out, and could then see the walls of the place curving away from him, scarred and blackened by years of abuse.

  His life had become a kind of waking dream. They took him from place to place, caged like an animal, and whenever they halted, he fought and killed. He had ceased to care what they put before him, save that, whatever it was, they had not found the thing to beat Tisamon yet.

  Beyond the walls’ ten-foot barrier, ranks of seats rose steeply on all sides. Mostly there were simple benches, but at one end there was something grander, a cloth-roofed pavilion furnished with wooden chairs for honoured guests. He wondered how many were watching today, the Wasp-kinden and their favoured servants and slaves. More than last time, certainly, and last time there had been hundreds.