Salute the Dark sota-4

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Salma, their army will have regrouped by now. We have no time.’

  I cannot let them live, Salma thought coldly. Not with a general. Ah, the things we must do in war.

  ‘Bring up the snapbowmen,’ he said quietly, and Phalmes galloped off without hesitation, crying out the order.

  ‘I am sorry, General,’ Salma said, stepping back. ‘For what it is worth, I salute you.’

  ‘Come away,’ Prized of Dragons advised him, one hand on his shoulder. ‘You do not wish to see this.’

  ‘No, I do not,’ Salma agreed. ‘That is why I must.’

  * * *

  The new king did not meet with him, which Salma took at first for a bad sign. He had come to Sarn as fast as he could, wearing a horse out to make the distance, and with two of Phalmes’ ex-bandits acting as escort. He had left Phalmes himself to hold the Landsarmy together until he came back.

  Out there, the Wasp army was stalking forwards, making good time despite the constant attacks of Salma’s people. The death of General Praeter had halted them for two days, while General Malkan made the necessary reorganization, but now they were ploughing forwards again.

  He had met with the Roach-kinden, Sfayot, after entering Sarn, hearing the old man’s account of how the refugees had been treated. Phalmes might order his army, but here was his nation: three times as many non-combatants led by an elderly Roach.

  The meeting in Sarn was barely a council of war, more of a military briefing. The time for idle talk, rather than orders, was almost done. The room was small, with a single table hosting a mere dozen of them. These were not the statesmen or the leaders on whose words war was unleashed or reined in, but rather the commanders who would enact the war itself. Here was Salma of the Landsarmy himself; Balkus, Parops and Plius the foreign Ant-kinden; Cydrae, a lean, hard-faced Mantis woman commanding the Ancient League warriors, along with a silent Moth-kinden in layered armour who did not give her name; a fat Beetle-kinden man representing something called the Sarnesh militia that was a force of irregulars put together of their own volition by the inhabitants of Sarn’s Foreigners’ Quarter. To these were added a single Sarnesh woman, a tactician from the Royal Court, with grey-speckled hair. Salma had been hoping for the King himself.

  But of course the King will be listening. That would have to be enough. Salma nodded a greeting to Parops, whom he had not seen since the ravaged streets of Tark.

  ‘Commanders,’ the Sarnesh said, addressing them all equally. ‘They are upon us. The fight is, by our estimates, a tenday away at most.’

  ‘Probably less,’ Salma interrupted. ‘By my reckoning.’

  The Sarnesh woman regarded him without expression. Am I expendable now? Have I outlived my usefulness? In the face of that blankness, concealing all the thoughts of the city of Sarn, he felt himself shrinking: from a prince and a military leader to a mere brigand and retainer of the greater Ant city-state.

  Then she said, ‘You are more soundly placed to know, tactician.’

  He almost missed it, although the other Ants at the table went quite still on hearing the word. What was in a word, though?

  ‘My people say that you have cared for them well,’ he said. ‘I was not sure, after the death of the Queen, how we might stand.’

  She was expressionless, still, but surely he was used to that from Ants: expressions or visible mannerisms did not come naturally to them. He had no other clues.

  ‘The movement of the crown is not succession, but continuity,’ the tactician said. ‘The King was party to the agreement made with you and your forces, and he considers himself bound by it. We understand that you have been doing good work in the east. You received our Lorn detachment, we believe?’

  A hundred Sarnesh soldiers, that was all that they could spare him. They had clearly expected him to meet the Wasps nose to nose, and for all to die in a glorious waste of time. He hoped he had not disappointed them by surviving and by not losing a man of their Sarnesh suicide force.

  ‘They were invaluable,’ he said.

  ‘But they did not fight,’ the tactician noted.

  ‘I had other uses for them,’ Salma replied. He had spread the Sarnesh throughout his troops, and used their ability to speak mind to mind, to coordinate the various wings of his disparate force. Without them it was certain that some part of his attack would have been too late, too early, caught out or over-extended. He had thus made the Lorn detachment his strategic eyes and ears, giving orders and receiving reports to dozens of scattered detachments.

  ‘Sarn requires your services once again,’ the tactician informed him. The other commanders were watching closely. This was not a council of war, but the officers of the Sarnesh main army gathered to meet with him.

  ‘We have our agreement,’ he replied, with an easiness he did not feel.

  ‘We wish to meet them on the field,’ she then told him. ‘The Royal Court has determined that a field battle represents our best chance of victory.’

  ‘Despite the Battle of the Rails?’ Salma asked, seeing the same question in other faces around the table.

  ‘We are better prepared now that we have snapbows of our own,’ the tactician said. ‘Even so, we recognize the risk. A field battle will at least allow us to retreat to the city walls if all goes badly. However…’

  Salma waited for her words, already putting together in his mind what would come next.

  ‘However,’ the Sarnesh woman continued, ‘we will be leaving our city poorly defended, if we commit the full force that this venture requires. If matters do not fall out according to plan,’ she explained, and perhaps there was the tiniest tremor in her voice that translated, if we all die on the field, ‘our people – and yours – will have no protection save the walls and defences of Sarn itself. We have heard from our ally of Tark,’ she picked out Parops. ‘Wasp-kinden are no strangers to breaking sieges. In order to risk a proper confrontation with the Empire, we require an assurance that our walls can stand, at least until a relieving force can be brought home.’

  Salma nodded slowly. He might not understand the mechanics of the machines involved, but he knew what a siege entailed. He had seen that already at Tark. ‘And so, before you meet them, you want their… what, their…?’

  ‘Artillery,’ Parops intervened in a clipped tone. ‘A strike against their siege engines.’

  ‘Indeed,’ the tactician confirmed. ‘We can provide material and artificers to assist, but your own force has the greatest chance of achieving this end.’

  Salma looked around the table, from face to face: Parops was grimacing, not liking the odds; the two Ants beside him exchanged uneasy glances; Cydrae the Mantis gave him a single, respectful nod.

  Oh, Stenwold, if you could see me now.

  ‘I must trust that your artificers will know what to destroy and how to do it,’ Salma replied finally. ‘I confess that I know nothing of that skill. I can get them in, though, with a swift, sudden strike. That I can do.’

  ‘We understand what it is we are asking of you.’

  ‘So long as you understand what I have asked of you.’

  The tactician, and by extension the city-state of Sarn, nodded. ‘What you ask shall be accomplished in every particular, so long as Sarn survives to undertake it.’

  He began calculating, on the hard ride back, his mind working through days and numbers. Are we ready for this? If we are not ready for this, what then? His special project, this meant, which had drained Sarn and its surrounding countryside of riding beasts. His people had been training since the spring, or at least every one of them with any aptitude for the saddle.

  I am trying to fight a Commonweal war with Lowlands soldiers. That was not quite true, for the war he was fighting had never been fought before in anyone’s histories.

  Phalmes greeted him as he rode into camp. The Mynan looked as though he had not slept much since Salma had seen him last, for the Wasp advance was forcing Salma’s irregulars to fall back before them, still harassing scouts, setting
traps and deadfalls for their automotives, and never letting the Wasps forget about them or think themselves safe.

  There must have been something in Salma’s face, because Phalmes bared his teeth unhappily as soon as he saw his leader.

  ‘That bad, is it?’ he asked. ‘They’ve cut us loose?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Salma said. ‘Sarn is on its way. They intend a field battle.’

  ‘Cursed Ants never learn,’ spat Phalmes. ‘Another field battle.’

  Salma shrugged. ‘I’m not going to try to teach warfare to the Ant-kinden. They and we both need Sarn to remain safe, whilst the city’s army is abroad.’

  ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone does,’ Salma told him. ‘I can see the logic, though.’

  ‘That means we’re where the metal meets, aren’t we?’

  ‘We have been that way for some time,’ Salma sighed. ‘You’ve scouted the army, yes? Its disposition, how it’s broken up?’

  Phalmes nodded. ‘You want me to get the lads together for this?’

  ‘It might be best.’

  ‘The lads’ were Salma’s officers, such as they were: as ragged a band as his army itself was, without uniform or discipline, and yet they were devoted to him. More, they were devoted to what he was trying to achieve. Phalmes and the Fly-kinden woman Chefre had been with him from the start, as had a Maynesh Ant-kinden who had been one of Phalmes’ bandits. There was a laconic Mantis-kinden hunter, hooded always, who was incomparable with his bow, which was six and a half feet from point to point. Morleyr, the hulking Mole Cricket, was an Auxillian deserter, just as Phalmes himself was, and had been crucial to their land-engineering, his people carving out trenches and pits underground with their Art and their bare hands. There was an elderly Fly-kinden who was a skilled artificer, and a Beetle-Ant halfbreed from Helleron who was a solid infantry officer. To this jumbled rag-bag Salma had added the Sarnesh officer in charge of the Lorn detachment, and now the leader of the artificers that the King of Sarn had sent them.

  He explained it all to them as concisely as possible. In fact there was not much to say. We must destroy their machines of war. He listened to them talk, one speaking over the other, ideas being hammered out, picked over, discarded. This was his governance: the melting pot of thought that he could skim from. He ladled out the best of it: the diversion, the reserve, the sudden strike, the aerial attack.

  ‘Their general will expect something like this,’ Chefre warned. ‘He’s no fool.’

  ‘That’s only because it is the strategy that we must accomplish,’ Salma told her. ‘And we shall.’

  Eleven

  I’m getting too old for this.

  The old Scorpion-kinden known as Hokiak paused a moment, leaning on his stick, his other hand, with the thumb-claw broken off, resting on the handle of the door to his back room. He could just turn away, he knew. This was not a matter of profit. He had been in the game long enough to profit from anyone and everyone, and no man had ever accused him of being partisan.

  Business had not been good recently. The Wasps knew that there was constant trouble on the streets, even if Kymene’s resistance groups kept eluding them. The response of the new governor was to employ an iron hand. Where old man Ulther would have set traps to lure them in, the new man’s response was almost panicky, and made more enemies than it intimidated.

  The new man in question was Colonel Latvoc, who Hokiak knew for a fact was Rekef Inlander. Latvoc was not a man with any interest in Myna, and he made that clear in his every move. He did not hold audiences, he did not consult with Consortium merchants, but instead remained holed up in the palace like a man waiting for a siege. That was something that Hokiak expected Kymene’s people would eventually oblige him in.

  For the last tenday it had been hard to do business in Myna, even for Hokiak. The garrison force had been out on the streets in force, meting out justice and injustice in equal measures, as Latvoc tried to scare the city into behaving itself. Hokiak knew of a dozen tavernas that had been officially closed down as meeting points for the resistance, and he also knew that some establishments had been just that, and others had been entirely innocent of it. People who had nothing whatsoever to do with the resistance had been dragged from their beds and thrown into the interrogation rooms, where, under threat of torture, a welter of unverifiable misinformation emerged to obscure whatever the genuine revolutionaries they captured might have revealed.

  Then there were the internal purges. At the same time as all of that public activity, Latvoc was going through his own officers. Several men had already been made to disappear, and it all seemed the actions of a man who was either blindly committed to some ideal or else absolutely terrified.

  Yes, business was difficult and yet business was booming. The resistance had never been stronger and Hokiak was happy to sell them whatever they wanted, so long as they met the high prices he charged. At the same time he had smuggled Wasp officers out of the city, or falsified papers to help others escape the continuing cull. The one thing he always made sure of was that his clients did not get to meet each other. He was not inclined to sell information these days, for each side was too prone to exact singular vengeance if betrayed.

  Which brought his thoughts round neatly to the new arrivals waiting in his back room, the people who had been asking to speak with him.

  A man tries to keep his books straight. He had known, surely, that the day would come when someone would ask him to take sides: Kymene herself had already thrown enough hints his way by declaring that she considered him a true citizen of Myna. The Wasps, too, would surely realize soon enough that a man of his activities must know more than he ever revealed. The day would surely come.

  It had come.

  ‘What if I ain’t playin’?’ he asked, scratching the creased and baggy skin under his jaw with one claw. ‘I don’t have to go in.’

  ‘Then don’t.’ His business partner shrugged. He was an old, dishevelled Spider-kinden, skeletally gaunt and with long grey hair, going by the name of Gryllis. ‘Let them just kick their heels.’

  It was an apposite image, signifying both waiting and being hanged, because Hokiak thought he had guessed the truth about his visitors’ real allegiances, but he didn’t know.

  ‘We ain’t goin’ to win out of this business either way,’ he complained.

  ‘We’ve always managed so far, old claw,’ Gryllis remarked, but there was a lack of certainty in his deep-set eyes. ‘Or do you think it’s time for us to move house?’

  ‘I been workin’ on this place a long time. Ain’t lookin’ to let it go to rack and rot just yet.’ Hokiak filled his pipe one-handed, by dint of long practice, and then lit it, taking comfort from the smoke. ‘You jus’ make sure you get the boys watchin’, in case things go wrong. I want the bodies out of there and into the river ’fore anyone can blink.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  Hokiak pushed open the door and surveyed the little back room where his select clients came. He knew most of them gathered there by sight. The two Maynesh Ants were mercenary bodyguards, closer than sisters and waiting for their next patron. The young Mynan woman in the corner was a pawnbroker of rare articles, who paid Hokiak a percentage to keep shop on part of his premises. The rowdy card game between the Fly-kinden knife-thrower and the three local bruisers was just a cover for Hokiak’s own men, who were waiting for his word. The halfbreed facing the main door, marked with Mynan and Wasp features, must be the new smuggler in town who was reputedly trawling for business. Hokiak would speak to him later. This current business came first.

  They were seated, the two of them, at a table near one of the corners. He recognized the girl instantly, because he might be old, but his memory for faces was still young. There she was, but what was she now, the one who had been Stenwold Maker’s niece?

  Che rose from the table as the old Scorpion hobbled over. Beside her Thalric sat merely as a cloaked, cowled and brooding presence.

  ‘Ho
kiak,’ she greeted him. ‘Thank you for seeing us.’

  He squinted at her through yellowed eyes. ‘Ain’t usually expecting to find any Lowlanders round here.’ His eyes flicked to Thalric briefly.

  ‘Do you remember me?’ Che asked him. ‘I’m Cheerwell Maker, Stenwold’s niece.’ She kept her voice deliberately lower than the murmur of the other patrons. A young Fly-kinden boy stopped at their table with three shallow bowls of beer. Hokiak nodded to him absently and then made a great show of lowering himself, creaking joints and all, into an empty chair.

  ‘You I do remember,’ he said. ‘So tell me, what’s his nibs’s kin now doing round old Hokiak’s place? Ain’t a good time, this, for social calls. You’re delivering messages? Perhaps a gift for the old man?’

  ‘I… I have some money,’ Che said, and immediately bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not really… Stenwold doesn’t know I’m here, Hokiak. He thinks I’m in Tharn, the Moth city. But I heard of how things were in Myna.’

  ‘And you jumped on a flier and decided to pay old Hokiak a visit.’ The Scorpion began relighting his pipe. ‘Good of you to think of me.’

  ‘Hokiak, you’re the only person I know in Myna that I could easily find,’ Che replied. ‘I need your help.’

  ‘Seems just about everyone does.’ He settled back in the chair. ‘But don’t get to reckoning that, just ’cos I know your uncle, you can get credit, girl.’

  ‘I know how you’ve helped the resistance-’ Che started.

  ‘I ain’t never helped no one. I just sold to ’em, because I ain’t choosy that way. The Red Flag pay like everyone else.’ He was obviously waiting for something that she had not given him yet.

  Is it the money? She persevered regardless. ‘Hokiak, you’ve got to… I need your help to get in touch with them.’

  He smiled, the pale skin creasing about the stumps of his tusks. ‘Now then,’ he said slowly, ‘how come I already knew that, eh?’