Salute the Dark sota-4

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

‘I see why you need my differing viewpoint,’ he told her. ‘You have an imperial garrison. You have an imperial governor. What part of the Empire are we not inside?’

  She scowled at him but had no answer to that, just saying, ‘Speaking of the governor, it is time for you to meet him. As it is not fit for him to come to your bedside, that means you will have to walk.’

  In the end they had to help him along. He was not even capable of the length of journey that a few turned corners and passages would have made. He was healing fast, but the wound had been an inch off mortal. The chamber they took him to was one designed for meditation. Perhaps they hope to make the Empire think like them?

  There was a Skryre, an old woman, seated there. Her glance towards Achaeos was bleak but not hostile. Achaeos thought he saw a touch of fear there, too, in the very depths of her white eyes. She nodded to his escorts and they took him over and lowered him until he sat beside her. A Mantis-kinden in robes knelt down beside and slightly behind him, ready to assist him if he needed it.

  ‘Say nothing,’ the Skryre instructed him. ‘Watch only.’

  Xaraea had now taken up station beside the door, beyond which Achaeos could already hear the marching feet: the military approach of destiny.

  Their visitor wore the uniform of a Wasp officer off duty: not armour but tunic and cloak in black and gold, fastened richly with jewelled pins. He entered with a female Wasp slave-girl and with half a dozen guards as his escort, as haughty and arrogant as any Wasp governor might wish to appear.

  The old woman stood up as he entered, and even Achaeos was helped to his feet

  ‘My Lord Governor Tegrec,’ greeted Xaraea, who had been waiting at the door with every appearance of calm. Achaeos knew his own people, though: she was the centre point, the knot that was holding this fragile arrangement together, and she knew it. The weight of all her people was on her, and he could detect the minute signs of strain. Achaeos had found in himself a growing coldness for his people, for their isolationism, their hostility to the world and particularly to Che’s kin. In contrast he admired Xaraea. She had delivered herself into the very hands of the Empire in order to save the Moths.

  Tegrec, this new governor, was not impressive for a Wasp: short and stout and garishly dressed, Still he put on a show, looking over the conquered people with the proper disdain before waving to his escort. ‘You may leave us.’ It was not recklessness in the face of danger that he displayed, but the confidence of a man who knows in his heart that the enemy is beaten.

  The soldiers retreated, and Tegrec waited, as if listening while their footsteps receded, the light of their lanterns dimming and dying away. That left only the two torches the Mantis servant had lit to flare and gutter and cast shadows about the little room.

  Tegrec smirked. That was the only word for the expression that crossed his face. He cast a look back in the direction of his retreating soldiers and smirked. A tension, perhaps an entirely manufactured tension, then left the room. His Mantis carer lowered Achaeos back to the floor, where he sat cross-legged and watched the Wasp governor of Tharn don a black robe and go native. Tegrec held onto the last rags of his sombre mood until his girl had finished tugging the garment into shape, and then smiled at them, and perhaps at himself.

  ‘My Lord Governor,’ the Skryre said, standing almost hidden in the folds of her robe, a coiled staff in one hand. Like all Skryres, and like most Moth-kinden of station, she had not revealed her name.

  Tegrec looked from her to Achaeos, and then himself sat down. In the robe, he could have been a somewhat bulky Moth student ready to learn from his teachers. That is what he is – Achaeos had not quite believed it, when they had told him – a Wasp seer, and mostly self-taught, but here he is learning from the masters.

  Xaraea seated herself as well, as did the slave-girl. The aged Skryre took a few halting steps.

  ‘This is Achaeos,’ she declared. ‘He comes to us from the Lowlands, where your people make war.’

  Tegrec nodded.

  ‘We are approaching a time of crisis, Tegrec,’ said the Skryre. By naming him, while herself remaining nameless, she shaped her authority over him. ‘You, especially, face such a time too. Do you understand me?’

  ‘I believe I do.’ The Wasp still smiled.

  ‘Our bargain holds, does it not?’

  ‘I have no complaints.’ He glanced at the girl beside him, and Achaeos saw that, with the guards now gone, the distance between master and slave had relaxed as well.

  ‘You have been an able student,’ the Skryre admitted. ‘You have achieved more than we might have expected, from your kind.’

  Tegrec looked directly at Achaeos, as though trying to read him. In returning the favour Achaeos discerned a man out of his depth, and yet who was still swimming further away from shore.

  What must it have been like, to grow up in a different world to all those around you? The division between the Apt and the Inapt was the defining line between the burning new and the fading old. There were so few that could even get close enough to see into the other side. He thought of Che, then, who had been willing to join him on that border, close enough for them to touch hands. He found himself respecting this Tegrec for what he must have achieved. Taking on the Empire with a handful of magical tricks, and then carving out his own place in it, must have been difficult for him. It probably still was.

  ‘You are asking me to make an exchange,’ Tegrec said at last. He glanced at his girl once again. ‘You want to change our arrangement?’

  ‘We have tried to hold back change for many centuries,’ the Skryre remarked drily. ‘We discover that it cannot be done, so, yes, there will be change.’

  ‘I understand what you are asking of me,’ Tegrec said, ‘but perhaps you do not understand what you are asking me to give up.’

  The Skryre’s lips twitched. ‘This Achaeos you see here, he knows, for he is here only as a brief gap in his exile. He has chosen life with our enemies, rather than with his own. Still, he is here, which shows that loyalty to the great mysteries overcomes all else. Can you yourself look upon your Empire, your rank, your years of time-serving, and say, “This is a thing I cannot let go of”?’

  ‘I must think on this,’ Tegrec insisted.

  ‘Do not think overlong,’ the Skryre warned him.

  After doffing the robe, Tegrec stepped from the room and rejoined his Wasp escort, but he said nothing to them. He was still deep in thought.

  I have always walked a line.

  He was Major Tegrec, governor of the little-regarded city of Tharn, a chill and mountainous backwater taken by the Empire only because it was there, on the edge of their expanding frontier. The Moth-kinden, isolated and backward, had nothing to offer the Empire: poor warriors, poor labourers, a nation of recluses and hermits. Tegrec himself had already confirmed this to his superiors, reporting in just the right tones of resentful suffering.

  Walking the line indeed, but he was a fiercely ambitious man, always pushing, always manipulating. He could not name any other major who was a governor, even of such an insignificant place as this. At the same time he was a cripple – enduring a carefully hidden mental deformity, an inability to conceive of what others found so natural. It leaked out, it showed, and he was not liked even by those who made use of him. They knew there was something unsound in him, and they had failed to root it out only because the barrier to understanding worked both ways. They could not imagine the world he lived in.

  Since coming to Tharn, he had found another line to walk. He spit-shone his public face daily: the grim imperial governor of Tharn administrating this lonely, ancient eyesore, dealing with the complaints of his staff and soldiers, who were treating their assignment here as a punishment detail. Behind that face, however, he was a changed man. Before arriving here he had learnt his magic hand to mouth, from old books, or through ailing slaves from distant lands. He had come to Tharn with a piecemeal, patchwork knowledge that had eased his way within the Empire only because he used it like
a conman would: they heard his words, saw his hands move the cups, and none of them could see why the ball was not where they had guessed. He had lived his whole life in fear that he would be uncovered, not as a fake but as the real thing. He had never named himself as a Seer.

  The Moths, however, had named him as just that. The Moths were arrogant, exclusive, elitist, but what they looked for was not race or birth but talent. His scraps of understanding had been patched and stitched into whole cloth during his time here. His talent was unquestioned: they had never known a Wasp magician before. Perhaps there had never been one since the Days of Lore.

  I do not belong here. But nor did he belong anywhere. He had burrowed his way through the Empire like a parasite, but here in Tharn he did not have to hide what he was. He would not be the first traitor the Empire had known, nor even the first traitor governor. He consoled himself with the thought that they would never understand, back in Capitas, why he had acted as he had.

  He had made his choice.

  Ten

  Maintaining a force of cavalry was not part of the Wasp army’s mandate but General Praeter had seen enough of it during the Twelve-Year War to learn its uses. Regular horses were too fragile for a Wasp-kinden war, and so he now observed his men from the high-fronted saddle of an armoured beetle, extending ten feet from its mandibles to its tail. Around him the heavy war machines of the Sixth Army were grinding forwards with a mechanical determination that he knew was illusory. Machines regularly stopped working in the middle of battles, and he had never known a combat without some automotive simply falling silent at the worst possible time. He had therefore learnt not to rely on them.

  The automotives nevertheless formed the central push of his advance, screened from attack by a curtain of the light airborne winging ahead. His infantry – and the Sixth was more infantry-reliant than most – was contained in great curved wings to either flank. Praeter himself kept pace with the slowest of the machines in the centre, a score of his personal bodyguard mounted alongside him and the rest keeping good time behind despite their heavy armour.

  His thought, on sending his soldiers forward, was that this was all a lot of fuss over nothing, for General Malkan’s scouts had indicated a force of no more than 2,000 men, possibly fewer, and not even Sarnesh soldiers, either, but mere vagrants and brigands. Even so, Praeter had taken upon himself the task of disposing of them. It would not do to let Malkan win too much honour in this campaign, and the young general must be constantly reminded who was in charge.

  This would not be like Masaki, though. He remembered the glitter of the Dragonfly soldiers as they had swarmed forth, clouding the air, till the ground below seethed with their shadows. He often thought of those colours, the reds and golds, iridescent greens and blues. He remembered them in their glorious, furious charges, and also when they lay dead, like blossom and leaves after a storm, carpeting the battlefield before the withering volleys of his ballistae and his crossbows.

  The land here was not good for an open conflict: hilly and broken, undercut by streams and rivers that his automotives would make heavy work of. The hillsides themselves were scrubby and piebald with patches of woodland, and dotted with the huts of goat-farmers or aphid-herders. The lay of the land had put Praeter’s left wing up on a hillside and hilltop, slowed down and pushing its way through spiny bushes, whilst his right wing was almost in a valley, just creeping up the hill on the far side, with a screen of scouts to their own right, looking out for enemy skirmishers. The automotives themselves were pressing down the centre of the valley itself, progressing either side of the stream that over the ages had somehow worn this crease in the map. Somewhere else, General Malkan would be taking the Seventh in a long, curving path north of him, intending to encircle what enemy survived, to make sure not a man of them escaped. Mopping up is all that man is fit for…

  The enemy were not in his sight yet, but he saw a signal from the advance airborne and, from that, knew that the foe must have been spotted. The enemy had strung wooden fences and barricades across the valley, which would be of no protection against the airborne and merely be ground beneath the wheels and tracks of the automotives. Praeter wondered why they were even bothering to make a stand.

  He frowned, holding tighter to the boss of his saddle as his beetle negotiated a rocky patch. There was the matter of the scouts, though. Whoever these enemy were, they had been remarkably good at killing General Malkan’s scouts, and yet this time the scouts had seen this little holdout. They had been allowed to see it.

  He had worried away at that thought for a long time, but come up with no solution save to spread out his forces to enclose as wide an area as possible while keeping aerial screens to either side in case of ambush. But who could aim to ambush an entire army?

  One of the automotives lurched awkwardly and he assumed it had gone into the streambed, but it was well clear of that: struggling for no reason at all in the dusty ground with its wheels spinning, and then sinking to its axles, throwing up a vast curtain of dust so that Praeter was blinded, covering his eyes against the grit. His ears told him that the stricken automotive was not alone. Another to his left was abruptly in difficulty, too. He brought his crop down on the beetle, driving it towards the labouring machine, and the insect stumbled, the ground giving way beneath it, its claws scrabbling for purchase before it dragged itself out. Pits, everywhere: the valley floor had been undercut. There had been no sign of it until now, and the men on foot had been too light, but all around him now he could hear the wheeled and tracked automotives grinding helplessly, choking on the earth, whilst those that walked on metal legs must be striding too far ahead.

  ‘Send to the lead automotives, tell them to reduce to half speed!’ he ordered, and immediately one of his men spurred his animal into motion, guiding it between the beached metal hulks. ‘Call some engineers here to free the automotives,’ Praeter added, and another man rode off.

  ‘General!’ A soldier dropped beside him, choking through the dust. ‘General, the left flank is under attack.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Enemy concealed in the woodlands ahead, sir.’

  ‘Then charge them and drive them out.’

  ‘We’re taking heavy losses, sir.’

  ‘How?’ Praeter leant down towards the man. ‘How many enemy?’

  ‘Unknown, sir. But they’re armed with snapbows, sir. We’re closing on them now, but they’re picking off our fliers.’

  Praeter opened his mouth to reply to that, but even as he did so something exploded ahead, both to the left and to the right, showering stones and dust down on them.

  I need to see what’s going on. ‘With me!’ he shouted, and turned his beast to grapple its way up the hillside, knowing that his bodyguard would follow close. The air was solid dust, and he guessed that the charges detonated ahead had not been intended to injure but to throw up as much cover as the enemy could manage, in order to conceal whatever it was they were actually doing.

  Something else then flashed within the dust cloud behind him, thundering dully. The sound was familiar enough to him: he had not worked with engineers all those years to fail to recognize a grenade now. He could even tell from the sound that it was one with a hatched casing, rather than a simple smooth one, so that the metal shards would fly outwards in an even rain of shrapnel.

  Before he was clear of the cloud, there were another five retorts behind him. He found it maddening, to be thus blinded to what was going on, not knowing if his entire force was being wiped out or whether this was just a gnat’s sting. There was now a chaos of men flying around him as Wasp soldiers took to the air to escape the dust. He could hear the crackle of sting-shot, and the solid thump of one of the motorized leadshotters that he had brought for artillery support. Then finally he was cresting the hill, the dust falling away behind him.

  * * *

  ‘They’ll be fighting now,’ Parops remarked.

  ‘Who? Oh, you mean Stenwold’s friend, whatever his name is.’ Bal
kus frowned. Up on the walls of Sarn, he had a good view of the great town of refugees that the Sarnesh were slowly letting into their city, in groups of ten or fifteen at a time. The Ants of Sarn were caught on a two-pronged fork of dilemma. On the one hand, the last thing they wanted in time of war was a vast crowd of clamouring, hungry and suspect foreigners within their walls. On the other hand, as Parops said, that Dragonfly boy would be fighting for them even now, trying to slow the Wasp advance so that the Sarnesh could perfect their defences. The Sarnesh were pragmatic, as Ant-kinden always were, but because of that they understood an obligation and, if they cast out Salma’s people now, the remembrance of that betrayal would taint all Sarnesh dealings with foreigners for decades to come.

  ‘They call him the Captain of the Landsarmy, Lord of the Wastes,’ Parops observed.

  ‘The Prince of the Wastes,’ agreed Balkus, savouring the foreign word. ‘Boy’s done good. Let’s hope he lives through it.’

  Parops turned to watch a new siege engine being slowly winched up to the wall-top. It was a giant repeating ballista with two sets of alternating arms and a shield before and above, slotted for vision. It was far more effective than the big catapult that had graced his own tower back in lost Tark.

  If we had been better artificers, then…? But the fall of Tark had been so decisive that he was not sure anything could have saved them. Then, of course, there was the history: centuries of isolation, and more dealings with the Spiderlands and the Scorpions of the Dryclaw than with the rest of the Lowlands. Sarn had the edge with weaponry because it was arm in arm with the Beetle-kinden, abandoning some of its Ant-kinden heritage to take up the Beetles on their strange ideas. More foreigners on the streets, more foreign ideas in the city-mind. No slaves, either. No slaves! Parops, though he had personally had little use for them, could still barely imagine that. How did things get done?

  As well as Salma’s refugees, there were the new arrivals from the north. Many of them had yet to even request entrance to the city, and if they decided they wanted in, the chances were they would just fly over the walls and put the new Sarnesh anti-airborne defences to the test. It had taken a long time for the so-called Ancient League to gather its forces, and even longer, so the story went, for them to decide how many to send. Balkus had joked that he half expected to see a single Mantis warrior turn up at the gates of Sarn one morning, claiming to be the army of Nethyon.