Salute the Dark sota-4

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  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 than 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. Yo
u 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.

  The arena was bigger than last time, too, and stonewalled rather than roughly-hewn wood. He decided he had not been here before.

  There was a constant murmur of anticipation around him, as if they had never seen a Mantis-kinden fight before. He stood halfway towards the centre, the sand around him already crusted and stained with the memory of some previous fight, and waited there for his opponent. His metal claw flexed slightly, as though of its own accord.

  The gate opposite him, built of wood studded and reinforced with iron, ground upwards, and he caught sight of a flicker of movement in the gap below. He instantly dropped into his fighting stance, claw drawn back across his body and folded ready along his forearm.

  Out of the gate came a beetle, but of no kind he knew. It was a long, lean creature, twelve feet from head to tail and supported high off the ground on its slender legs. It moved fast, rushing out from the darkness and halting immediately across from him, the same distance from the centre as he was. Its green carapace was dappled with white and gold, and it had huge eyes and mandibles like scythe-blades. The crowd picked up. They knew this beast or its type, and were in favour of it.

  If only Stenwold’s kind had taken their Art from this thing, rather than the plodding soil-rollers, Tisamon thought wryly. The beetle was regarding him with a keen awareness that most mere animals had no right to. He was not surprised, though, for the mantids of his own homeland could think and reason, and outwit the men that came to hunt them. So why not this splendid, predatory specimen?

  Abruptly it rushed him, from motionless to full charge without a break, and the crowd roared it on hugely. Tisamon leapt high, seeing the scimitar mandibles clash together beneath him, got one foot on the insect’s thorax and kicked off, skidding a little on the sand behind it but knowing it would have already turned to follow him. Even before looking round he had lashed back at it, but there was no contact. The beetle had reared back onto four legs, threatening him now with its hooked foreclaws. Tisamon backed up, a slight smile appearing on his face, while the huge, glittering eyes regarded him intently as it sank back down. For a moment they paced each other, Tisamon circling, and the beetle retreating or advancing, but always facing each other head on.

  It made a second charge, as swift as the first, and again he hurled himself out of the way. His blade swung back to bite into the armour of its carapace, leaving a shallow cut along its wing case. The crowd howled, so he knew that the beetle was right behind him, turning itself faster than he had thought. He could not hope to outrun it, so he threw himself up and back. The point of one mandible snagged his shirt briefly, and he drove his claw down into its thorax.

  The tip of it dug in, then skittered out again across its armour, and he fell onto the creature’s back and rolled off instantly, a second hasty swing cutting across one of its mid-legs. It rounded on him yet again.

  They understood one another. He had fought so many other men and women on his way to this place. There had never been this same connection. The mottlings of its carapace were the scars of old battles, he knew. They understood one another.

  As it rushed him with jaws gaping, he let his feet skid out from under him, saw the shadow of that lethal head pass over him, claws on all sides of him scrabbling to stop its charge. Without hesitation he drove his blade up into its thorax, between the roots of its legs, drove it in right up to the wrist.

  When the beast was finally dead, Tisamon knelt beside it for a moment, laid a hand on its stilled head, within the arc of those great jaws. Then he stood up again and let them take him away. The crowd were now shouting deliriously for him, just as they had been shouting for the creature he had slain.

  Capitas. He came out of his waking dream just enough to recollect the destination he had reached. I am in Capitas, the heart of the Empire – and with a drawn blade.

  They next set him against deserters, as a special treat for the crowd. Before releasing him into the the arena they had brought in eight men, and manacled them by the leg to a ring at the centre of the sand, giving them a generous length of chain to let them move. The master of the games had put up wooden barricades and walls to make a fake ruin that was low enough for the raised audience to see over, but high enough so that the deserte
rs, or their opponent, could hide behind it. The condemned men had no idea what was coming against them. They had no armour and carried knives rather than swords, but they still had their stings. They had been promised their freedom if they survived the contest.

  Tisamon came into the arena so subtly that most of the watchers did not see him. Slowly he stalked the chained men, letting only the spectators notice him, moving from cover to cover. The deserters looked about for him, aware from the reaction of the crowd that something was now loose in there along with them, but something they could not see.

  Tisamon showed the onlookers something new: how the Mantis-kinden hunt. His first rush was without warning, accelerating from stealthy pace to a full-scale charge within an instant. He was through the centre of the arena and away again in three steps and a leap, blade dancing on all sides. Four men died. The others loosed their stings but he was gone. They scorched only the wooden stage-scenery, and came close to burning each other.

  Then they began to argue. They shouted at each other. They had completely forgotten the crowd. They only knew that they were alone in a hostile place, and hunted.

  One of them started trying to smash at his chain with a stone. The others kept their hands outspread, searching for their enemy. The crowd was completely rapt. They could see that Tisamon was right there with the surviving men, almost amongst them. He slowly picked up a knife in his left hand, a blade dropped by one of his victims. With a flick of the wrist he sent it flying into the throat of the one furthest from him. The others, slaves to instinct, turned to look.

  And it was done.

  He let himself be taken back to his cell, in the holding pens beneath the arena. A strange and nightmarish place, it was a maze of iron bars with no walls and no privacy. Its designer had made it infinitely movable, so that a small cell for a man could be opened into a larger cell for a beast, or for a group of wretches destined to spend their last hours together, and then die in one another’s company. A low light was provided by bowls of burning oil hung from the ceiling. This warren of cells predated much of the Empire’s technological development, and was almost the oldest section of Capitas still standing. The Wasps had maintained certain priorities.