Salute the Dark sota-4

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He lifted his hands towards her, and within them was clasped a gnarled wooden box, its surface carved and carved over again.

  ‘Through hardship and travail…’ he hissed. ‘Through blood and fire, treachery and theft, it is here. The Rekef have prevailed at last. And the box is mine.’

  She made herself regard him coldly. ‘And was it worth it?’

  ‘A thousandfold,’ he said. He rose smoothly, all pretence of age and infirmity now gone, and she wondered whose blood he was replete with, to have given him his youth back. ‘I have just been performing certain introductions. This garb of mine, these ribbons, there is nothing magical in them. They are, however, symbols that have significance to certain things from a certain time. I have thus identified myself to them, so they will not turn their influence onto me.’

  ‘Where will this influence fall, then?’ she asked him.

  ‘Where I will it, or where it will, so long as it does not meddle with my plans,’ Uctebri replied. His robe had been discarded by one wall, and he retrieved it with one spindly arm and shrugged it on, still holding tightly to the box with the other hand. She had the odd idea that he had seen himself through her eyes for a moment, and found himself feeling self-conscious.

  ‘This box,’ she said. ‘Is it something for your amusement, or does it bear on what we must do?’

  ‘How goes your work?’ he asked, drawing his cowl up. She thought that he sounded disappointed, almost. Had he wished her to seem more impressed?

  ‘I have some colonels on my side, Brugan among them. I flatter old Governor Thanred, for what little influence he has left. A major of engineers, a major of the Slave Corps, two factors of the Consortium, all with me now. Disappointed and passed-over men, the ambitious and the vengeful. I am spinning my webs as if I was born a Spider.’

  ‘Good,’ Uctebri said. ‘Then, in answer to your question, the Shadow Box does not merely bear on our plans; it is the plan. Life and death, my princess, both reside within this box, and are there for me to draw upon. Life, for you, and death…’

  She raised a hand before he could say it, even though she knew they could not be overheard. I cannot trust you, can I? She knew he must be planning to control her as a puppet ruler of his Empire. Still, he gives me more chance than my brother. ‘It seems very small,’ she said, archly disdainful. ‘I do wonder whether you do not throw this object in my way simply to amaze and mystify me.’

  His grin broke out again now, within the confines of his hood. ‘My dear doubting princess, do you believe in ghosts?’

  She made to say that of course she did not, but he was so plainly waiting for this response that she just gave him an uninterested shrug.

  ‘I cannot hope to make you understand how the world is truly made,’ he told her. ‘Metaphor, then: the world is a weave, like threads woven into cloth.’ His hand came out of his sleeve with a strip of his red ribbon.

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Everything, stone, trees, beasts, the sky, the waters, all are a weave of fabric,’ he said patiently. ‘But when you think, it is different. Your thinking snarls the fabric, knots it. If you were a magician, you could use the knot of your mind to pull on other threads. That is magic, and now you see how very simple it is. I wonder everyone does not become an enchanter.’ With a swift intertangling of his fingers, there was now a lumpy knot in the centre of the ribbon.

  She managed to shrug again. ‘I cannot deny that you have a power, Mosquito. I cannot think to ever understand it – and I think it is better I do not.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ He grinned at her. ‘What happens, though, after you die? What happens to the knot?’ He pulled at the tape’s ends sharply, and the knot had vanished, as though it had never been. ‘Alas, unravelled in an instant, my princess.’ His grin was conspiratorial. ‘But what if it were not?’

  ‘I… do not understand.’

  ‘The body gone – dead, rotten, decay and then dust – but the knot of mind still there, trapped within the weave, impossible to undo.’ Now he was moving about the room, pinching out candle-flames between his fingertips, bringing on a gloom that she felt must match the evening outside.

  ‘I do not see how that can be.’

  ‘But then you do not understand any of what I say, for you merely see the convenient images I speak of,’ he said. ‘Laetrimae, would you come forth? Drama now requires it.’

  Seda frowned at him. ‘What are you talking about.’

  ‘Drama indeed,’ said Uctebri. ‘Perhaps more than is required, but the Mantis-kinden were always a race prone to the grand gesture.’

  It was chilly in the room, and the dark seemed to have grown more swiftly than the dying candles could account for but, most disturbing of all, Uctebri was looking behind her, past her shoulder at something else.

  She turned, and screamed at what she saw there, falling backwards on to the floor of the mirror room and scrabbling to put more distance between herself and the apparition that had manifested between herself and the door.

  It was a woman, tall and lean and pale, and clad in piecemeal plates that might have been armour or chitin, and her body pierced through and through with briars that twisted and arched and grew and impaled her over and over, and yet, despite it all, her face was calm and beatific and quite, quite insane.

  ‘Behold the greatest mistake of the Moth-kinden,’ hissed Uctebri, ‘the greatest knot in the weave of history, and a knot that will continue on and on and never be undone. She, however, is only their spokeswoman, my princess. There are a thousand others of them, snarled together like the vines that pierce her, and they are Mantis and Moth both, tangled and matted and interwoven. The creation of the single greatest act of magic ever known, and here I hold it in my hands.’

  The tortured woman’s face had adopted a new expression, and Seda saw that it was loathing, and that it was directed entirely at Uctebri. She found that she sympathized with that emotion wholeheartedly.

  * * *

  Tisamon returned to his rented rooms feeling shaken and sick at heart.

  It was not from the fighting, which had been the only part of it to make sense. After all, the complicity that existed between people trying to kill one another bred a brotherhood he had long been a part of.

  They had converted a marketplace into an arena, the Wasps ordering the locals to tear down their stalls and put up ranks of tiered seating instead. It looked not so different from the Prowess Forum, of fond and distant memory. That was what he had expected, too: duels of skill, followed by polite applause. To a Mantis-kinden there was nothing inherently wrong in a duel of expertise that ended in death. It was the logical final expression of the art form, that was all.

  What he had just been through was different, and soiled him in a way he could not have guessed at.

  He had entered into the arena with a dozen other fighters. Each had been introduced, lifting a weapon high for the crowd’s approval. They had been a motley band: Beetles, rogue Ants, halfbreeds, even a Scorpion-kinden with a sword standing as tall as he was. There had been no alliances between them, no rules. When the official Wasp overseer had cast down his gilded wooden baton, the fighters had simply gone at each other. At that moment Tisamon had felt the calm trance of his profession come upon him, and he had cocked his claw back and met the nearest opponent joyfully: a Beetle-kinden armoured with overlapping plates as far as his knees and elbows, who had swung at him with a double-headed spear.

  Tisamon had caught the spear in the crook of his claw, slammed the spines of his other arm down into the gap between the man’s neck and shoulder, and then slashed him across the throat as he staggered backwards.

  Next had been an Ant-kinden with a tall shield and a shortsword, and no armour save for a metal helm. Tisamon had killed him, too, and then two more, and by that time the remaining fighters had taken notice and turned on him. There had been six of them, determined to take him down all together before resuming their separate quarrels.

  It had been a demanding contest,
for they had none of them been poor fighters, but they were not Weaponsmasters, either, nor trained to fight alongside each other. He eventually finished them all, killing four outright and cutting two so badly that they could not fight on.

  Only then did he hear the uproar of the crowd. Whilst fighting, he had been oblivious to it. He had not been fighting for them, but for himself.

  They had gone mad: cheering and shouting and shrieking. He had stood in the arena’s heart with the blood of eight men on his blade, and the sheer force and power of their acclaim almost drove him to his knees.

  They were not done with him, though. They had then wanted him to kill the two opponents he had let live.

  It was unclean.

  He realized then, looking up at the faces of Wasp soldiers and administrators, at the faces of the Beetle-kinden wealthy and their servants and guests, that they did not actually care about the skill. It did not matter to them that he was a Weaponsmaster, that he had perfected a style of fighting that was a thousand years old and that he was good. They were there only for the blood, and if he had come in and butchered two dozen pitifully-armed slaves they would have called out just the same.

  But now they loved him. He was their champion of the moment, because he had shed more blood for them than his defeated opponents had.

  The next match was indeed two dozen slaves: convicts from the cells, men and women from the Spider-kinden markets, or simply those who had somehow displeased Helleron’s new masters. He had not wanted to fight them, but they had been promised their freedom if they killed him, and so they desperately tried. He waited for them, gave them every chance. As they neared him, he had discovered that his hatred for slave-owners was very readily turning into contempt for those who had let themselves become enslaved.

  And the crowd had applauded him, as though it was all some kind of show. Looking about him, he saw how the Beetle-kinden of Helleron were learning very swiftly from their new masters. Their shouting was the loudest and longest.

  When it was over he had told them to send his fee to Rowen Palasso, and then he was gone.

  Never again. There were other ways, honest ways, for a man to make a living by the blade. He now sat on his bed in the dingy little top-storey room he had rented, and thought hard. He found that his hands were shaking: it was not the blood of others that could do this to him, but their approbation.

  Differing kinden had differing traditions, in the duel. The Ants loved their sword-games, but they loved the skill and precision most, and seldom took matters beyond drawing the first blood. In Collegium it remained a polite sport of wooden swords suitable for College masters and youngsters to watch. The Mantis-kinden killed one another sometimes, but only by mutual agreement, and never for the amusement of an audience.

  He knew that the Spider-kinden had their slaves fight one another, sometimes, simply for the sport. He had not thought to find the same decadent tastes magnified in the Wasps.

  Tisamon rose and went to the door. He would find some other way of surviving, or some other city. This life was not for him.

  He was not alone in the room.

  He turned instantly, the claw appearing over his hand, its gauntlet about his arm, slashing out at where he knew someone stood.

  His shock, when it clanged off the swift parry of an identical blade, held him motionless, easy victim to a riposte. He could feel the steel there, but saw nothing.

  She formed out of the air as a faint shadow, writhing and twisting with vines and thorns.

  Tisamon, she named him. Weaponsmaster.

  He stared, feeling fear creep over him. Magic was something he had no defence against.

  Tisamon, she said again. He could just make out Mantis features there, amidst the blur of leaves and the glitter of compound eyes.

  ‘What do you want with me?’ he asked.

  I am here to judge you, she said. Are you not seeking judgment?

  He realized that he had already fallen to his knees. ‘Judgment… for what?’

  Her eyes, insubstantial as they were, held him tight. You know your own crimes. Are you not seeking atonement even now, in this spiritless city?

  ‘There can be no atonement,’ he choked out.

  And so you must atone forever? That is a familiar concept of our kinden. We have so many laws and rules, and therefore we cannot avoid breaking them. We are always imperfect by the impossible standards that we set ourselves. Do we not therefore live our lives in an agony of thwarted desires, our laws pressing against our skin like sharp thorns?

  ‘Who are you?’ He stared at her. ‘What are you?’

  I am a monument to Mantis pride and failure, Tisamon. They called me Laetrimae, before my fall. Five hundred years I have wept and atoned, and yet I still have not escaped the consequences of my actions. Nor shall you.

  He had no words, no thoughts save that surely this must be the thing he had gone looking for when he fled Collegium. Surely this was the judgment he deserved.

  What shall I judge you for, Tisamon? she asked him. You were false to your people in the lover you took. You were false to yourself, in the guilt you felt for it. You were false to your lover in your abandonment of her, and of your daughter as well. You have been false to your past lover in your new love, and now false to your new love in your turning away from her. Is there anything of worth you have not cast aside, Tisamon?

  ‘No.’

  But there is. You may have thrown aside the badge, but you are a Weaponsmaster still. Are you not aware of the duties that role carries? You are yet the defender of your people, all your people – even those such as I who have fallen so far that your own disgrace now seems but a stumble.

  ‘What could you need defending from?’

  Evil and rapacious men who would steal that which belongs to our kind – our legacy, our history.

  ‘I am unworthy-’

  It is because you are unworthy that I reach out to you, she continued urgently. You have suffered, but there is a suffering and disgrace that no one of our kind should bear. Who else but a vessel already broken can be asked to withstand the strain?

  ‘What do you want of me?’ he demanded.

  There are, even now, men coming to take you prisoner, Tisamon. You have attracted their notice. They wish to take you and enslave you. You have been sold by your own factor. She leads them to you even now.

  He was on his feet on the instant, the blade of his claw opening. ‘Rowen has betrayed me?’

  The betrayer betrayed. Her words silenced him. If you would truly seek atonement for your pride, Tisamon, you must let them take you. You must submit to the worst before you might hope for any redemption.

  ‘Take me? You mean…?’

  Or have you pride, yet, that fears to be broken?

  He was at the door now, pointing his blade at her. ‘You cannot ask me to become a slave. No Mantis has ever fallen so far.’

  The shadow that was Laetrimae drifted closer, passing right through the cramped bed. I am a slave, Tisamon. I am a slave to the Shadow Box that you let slip. Now, as a result, I am a slave of our enemies. Believe me, I am all that is Mantis: all fragile pride and fear of failure. I do not ask this of you lightly. She was standing before him, still transparent, a mere smudge on the air. In this way you may erase the stain that you see on your soul.

  ‘Is it so bad?’ he said hoarsely.

  No, she said simply, save in your own mind. But that is one judge that you can never escape from, nor hope to deceive.

  A great weight settled on him, even as he heard the clump of feet at the foot of the stairs. That would be Rowen and whoever she had sold him to. Wasps, most likely.

  He let the claw slip away, banishing it, and went to sit on the bed to await their arrival

  Seven

  Thalric straightened his armour, which felt strange on him now after even so short a time without it. Perhaps it’s because I no longer have a right to wear it, he thought wryly.

  ‘Right,’ he said. The curving-sided hold
of the Cleaver was crowded with fuel barrels, save for a space near the pilot’s chair that had been fenced off for Achaeos’ sickbed. The Moth had propped himself up on his elbows, still ghastly pale, but watching Thalric with something that might, in a healthier man, be considered humour.

  ‘So, how is this going to work, Major?’ he asked, just loud enough to be heard over the engines.

  Is it Major, or is it Captain? Thalric asked himself. Do I now go in as army or Rekef? Rekef would make more sense, but a Rekef major of his description might strike an unwelcome chord in the wrong quarters. It would be his wretched luck to encounter another man who both recognized him and had heard of his disgrace.

  ‘I can see the city now,’ Che called out to them from her seat, peering through a viewing slit past which driving rain was lashing. Fortunately the Cleaver was a solid, workmanlike flier, and Thalric wondered if a flimsier vessel could even have made it here through the foul weather of the last day or so. It was the last gasp of winter, he guessed, stomping up and down the east of the Lowlands and making its presence known.

  He discovered himself as nervous as an actor about to go on stage. This is absurd. This is my profession. Or at least it had been, not so long ago.

  ‘Where do I bring us in?’ Che asked.

  ‘How am I supposed to know?’ Thalric snapped at her. ‘I don’t imagine the builders included an airfield, unless they were more prophetic even than legend gives them credit for.’

  ‘No, I see it now,’ Che said. ‘They’ve set aside some fields, I think, just some fields and some huts. There are some heliopters there, and a collapsed airship. I’ll bring us in beside it. Thalric, you’re ready with your speech, right?’

  Thalric nodded, then realized that she could not see it, and said, ‘Yes, right,’ in a voice that, to him, lacked all conviction. Now came the testing moment.

  The Cleaver jostled with the wind, was buffeted in return, and then the lurch in his stomach informed him that they were dropping in fast. He heard Achaeos groan at the change – for an airborne race such as the Moths it was remarkable how much mechanical flight distressed them. Then Che had touched the Cleaver down harder than was wise, and Thalric was bounced off his feet, sitting down hard up against the curving wall, hearing Achaeos’ pained gasp. They were instantly slewing sideways, and Thalric had a moment to think of their altitude, the narrow mountain platforms, a makeshift airstrip that was no more than a mud-slicked field. He clutched at the lashed-down barrels, wondering if he could get the hatch open before…