Salute the Dark sota-4

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Tisamon’s eyes were better than most in such gloom. When he came out of his killing trance, in the long hours when he could not avoid thinking about what he was reduced to, he wished they were not. These chambers beneath the arena were a reeking, smoky hell. Some of the cells contained other successful gladiators, who sat and waited there to be taken for exercise or training, or simply to be fed. They were not Wasps, however. Unlike the deserters or those of lesser race, the true Wasp gladiators were heroes and lived as free men. They were adored by the people of Capitas, but Tisamon had killed several of them, so now they did not pit him against them. The bulk of Tisamon’s fighting companions belonged to a dozen other subject races: Ants, halfbreeds, a Mole Cricket, a Thorn Bug. They were the outstandingly skilled ones who had lived through enough fights to become a commodity – as he was.

  Other cells held another kind of commodity: a disposable, consumable one. The arena was like a meat-grinder, and the Capitas crowds loved to see their share of blood. If it was not quality, with men like Tisamon or the Wasp professionals meting out skilled slaughter, then it was quantity they craved. The arena had an inexhaustible hunger for slaves, foreigners and prisoners of war. These were forced to hack clumsily at each other as an amusing warm-up, or else they were roped to each other and made to fight against giant beasts. Some were pitched against terrible automotives and machines. There were forty or fifty of them within Tisamon’s view at all times, but the individual prisoners varied from day to day, sometimes hour to hour. There were men and women of all kinden included amongst them, and children also.

  There were beasts, too, but they were further back. Tisamon saw little of them, heard only the occasional scuttle and hiss. They were cared for better than the men, with expert handlers and trainers. In this society of the violently doomed they were a kind of aristocracy. Compound eyes glittering in the smoky light, they watched their keepers constantly, looking for a chance to escape. It seemed to Tisamon that captivity had brought them closer towards the human condition, even as it had degraded the morose and silent gladiators towards the level of the beast.

  After a while, a handful of slaves passed between the cells, mostly Fly-kinden whose eyes could cut through the gloom as keenly as Tisamon’s own. Behind them came an old Wasp man, almost bald with a sour and leathery face. He limped, though he disdained a stick, and at his belt were hung a studded club and a whip. His name was Ult, he had informed Tisamon. He had been Slave Corps once, before becoming a trainer of gladiators. Now he was their keeper.

  He had stopped by Tisamon’s cell two days before, and sat there regarding the Mantis doubtfully for a long while, neither of them saying anything. The next day he had stopped again, and again the Fly-kinden boy he kept as a slave had put down the little three-legged stool, and Ult had sat there thoughtfully. Eventually he had spoken: ‘You know why I’m interested in you?’

  Tisamon had merely stared at him, feeling like one of the animals caged beyond, just waiting for its moment.

  ‘I get men like you all the time: the older ones, who’ve had their share of fights and gotten used to it,’ Ult had said. ‘They sit and they brood. Look, you can see a dozen of them from here, men whose card’s marked for death. They just don’t know when and don’t much care. But still they fight. At least they’re not prisoners when they fight, eh? This down here, it’s not real to them. Only the fighting is. You’re like that, too.’

  No, I’m a beast, caged, Tisamon had thought, on hearing that, but failed to convince himself. Ult had smiled, which caused a scar to stand out white across his left cheekbone.

  ‘You want out?’ He had given Tisamon enough time to respond. ‘You don’t want out,’ he had concluded. ‘But you caught my eye, you did. Not ’cos you’re a Mantis. I’ve had your kind down here before. No, it’s ’cos you’re already dead inside, even before you got here. It usually takes them a few tendays at least, to get to where you are.’

  ‘I know,’ Tisamon had replied. It was all he had said, but they both knew it was a concession.

  Now Ult came along yet again, after the slaves had doled out the evening slops. The boy put the stool down, and the old gladiator-trainer perched on it, close enough to the bars for Tisamon to grab at him. In just two days he had taken the Mantis’ measure, and the Mantis had taken his.

  ‘Mantis-man,’ Ult began. ‘I saw your fight again today. Very good. Very entertaining. I even had two colonels and a general tell me how much they enjoyed the show.’

  Tisamon grunted, a shrug showing how little he cared about that.

  ‘Too good, almost. They’d rather the last man had got you instead.’

  ‘The last man?’

  ‘Oh, yes, they want their blood, after all,’ Ult said. ‘They want the last blood to be a foreigner’s, though. You cut them boys down too easily. Deserters, sure, but Wasps still.’

  Tisamon shrugged again.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Ult observed.

  ‘So they’d rather I was dead,’ Tisamon said. ‘What else is there to understand?’

  ‘It’s about race,’ Ult said. ‘I never been to your lands, but I been to the Commonweal, and I seen a few other places before the Emperor rounded them up. It’s different here. You know any Ants, Mantis-man?’

  ‘I’ve known a few.’

  ‘We’re like them, really. You know how Ants reckon everyone else is off the mark, not as good as they are? We’re like that, too. Me, I seen all sorts – not greatly in love with any of ’em, me. Don’t care for my kin nor yours, nor anyone’s. I understand the punters, though. What they want to see is foreign blood shed. You take me for a philosopher, Mantis?’

  ‘No.’

  Ult chuckled, then coughed. ‘Oh, I know my trade. It makes a philosopher out of you. This isn’t just a whole round of fun, see? There’s a point here, when you get to it. There’s meaning, Mantis.’

  Tisamon shuffled closer, despite himself. ‘Meaning? To all the slaughter?’

  ‘Right.’ Ult closed his eyes, as though the whole circus of all the fights he had seen could thus be summoned up to parade about his mind. ‘This is all about us and you, us Wasps and everyone else. We go out to your lands, see? We catch you, we drag you back in chains. You fight for our pleasure. We bring in your beasts and make you fight them. We chain up the whole world and bring it here. That makes it ours, see? There are people out there who only see a slice of the Empire, a smaller slice still of what lies beyond, but here they see it all, and the end has to be the same. A dead foreigner – dead by our hands, or by beasts, or by each other, but dead foreigners all the way.’

  ‘What an art form you have here,’ Tisamon commented dryly.

  ‘You’ll understand soon enough. It’s why you’ve become a problem, old Mantis.’

  ‘Because I don’t die?’

  ‘Right,’ Ult said. ‘I’ve got the big games coming up, and you deserve your spot in them, but what am I supposed to do with you to keep them happy? You’ll kill beasts and you’ll kill men, and about the only way I could bring you down would be to stick so many people against you that nobody’d see what was going on. And don’t forget, it’s all for show. If there’s no show there’s nothing.’

  ‘You want me to throw a fight, then?’ Tisamon asked him. ‘Fatally?’

  Ult grinned at that, revealing teeth stained yellow. ‘I don’t reckon that’s going to happen, though. I’ll just have to keep you for some other day. But it’s a shame, you’re just too good.’

  ‘So what’s happening, that’s so important?’

  ‘Coronation Day.’ Ult stood. ‘Nine years since Himself took the throne. And I mean took.’ Ult glanced about him, taking a wary step back after he saw that Tisamon was on his feet.

  ‘In that case I want to fight there,’ the Mantis announced.

  ‘I want you to, as well,’ said Ult. ‘But I just can’t see how.’

  ‘I’ll go in barehanded. I’ll go against men, beasts, machines, whatever you-’

  ‘Mantis, ol
d Mantis,’ Ult interrupted him, ‘if I got nothing else from all my years, it’s an eye for the fighting man. What have I got available here, now, that would give you a run? I’m sorry, really. I want to see you killed as much as you want to die.’ His smile was genuinely friendly. The camaraderie might have seemed absurd, but was just as real. ‘Let me think about it. You deserve your audience, I’ll grant you that.’

  * * *

  When the Wasp Second Army arrived within striking range of the Felyal, it began building its fortifications without delay. The engineers of the Empire lifted their pre-measured wooden wall sections from their hauling auto-motives, and constructed themselves a camp great enough to encompass the whole army. They had a workforce of thousands, and General Tynan, who commanded the Second, had made them all practise this decidedly non-standard procedure. He was an intelligent man, Tynan, and he had nothing but respect for the late General Alder, who had made this part of the Lowlands a graveyard for 20,000 imperial soldiers and Auxillians. Oh, there had been mitigating circumstances, of course. Alder had been played for a fool by the Spiderlands, crippled by a lack of firm instruction from Capitas, so his men had been kept in a state of uncertainty, forever hovering in their temporary camp, forever made ready for marching orders that never came. Then they had most of them died, and the remnants had been so little fit for purpose as an army that they had been broken up, dispersed across the whole Empire. The Barbs had ceased to exist.

  It was a mistake that General Tynan did not intend to repeat. By nightfall his men were already settled behind their makeshift walls, and he kept half of them awake all night, with sting and crossbow and snapbow ready for the assault. Under his eight-year command, the Second Army had gained the nickname of the Gears, because whatever they got their teeth into, they milled and crushed until it was nothing but dust. And because they stopped for nothing.

  That first-night assault did not happen, the Mantis-kinden being slow to venture forth from their forest haunts. The next day Tynan had his men continue their preparations, creating a great camp of angled walls and machines, with a ring of spindly towers inside it. He knew that inevitably the hammer would fall and sooner rather than later. And sooner was better, for the Empire had a timetable for him to keep to.

  From the second day onwards he sent out men to the treeline with firethrower automotives, clearing the trees as they came to them. As an exercise, he thought of it as a duellist calling out his enemy. He would not have long to wait.

  If he could have got a scout into the trees at twilight and out again alive, he would not have been disappointed by the news. The war host of the Felyal was indeed mustering, for the elders of the Mantids had already sent out the call to gather their people. Women and men, lean and fair, in green cloth or black-scaled armour, they came in their hundreds to the holds of their leaders. They brought their bows and spears, their rapiers and claws, and the deadly spines on their forearms. They came with their insect allies, from beasts that flew from the wrist to great armoured killers larger than a horse. The Mantids of Felyal fought constantly. They sparred amongst themselves and ambushed the unwary in their forest, and they savaged Spider-kinden shipping off the coast. Now they were going to war, and the mechanical sounds of the enemy would be drowned in their war-hymns, their oaths and battle-cries.

  They were silent for now, though, merely waiting in the trees. There were so many of them, too, more even than had marched against Alder’s Fourth, more than had ever stood together in living memory – and they were a long-lived breed: male and female, from callow youths to grey elders, and each one a killer of excellence. They had buckled on armour that had been made before any hill chieftain had arisen to start building an Empire: cuirasses of dark scales, suits of elegant plate and delicate mail links, spine-crested helms. They had put aside their feuds and enmities, blood-hatreds generations old, to stand together now as siblings.

  The elders – the Loquae of the hold of Felyal – met together, but there was little to plan. The Mantis-kinden had no use for formations, vanguards, rearguards or shield-walls. That was their strength: individually there was not a warrior to match them in all of the Lowlands, in all the world. The Wasps and their slaves could not stand against them, with blade or bow. This was their heritage, and they believed in it with an iron-shod faith.

  Parents bid their children be strong in their absence, brother and sister parted company: the older and more skilled on their way, the younger staying at home. The very oldest watched their entire families step out into the dark and head off to war.

  The armed might of the Felyal arose along with the dusk, and then hurled itself against an enemy twenty times its size. They came out of the trees in a sudden rush at twilight, unnumbered and unheralded. They were savage and brave, swift and skilled: the warriors of the Felyal, Mantis-kinden fierce and free.

  The first line of warriors swept on in silence, wings hurling high them into the air as they neared the makeshift walls. Their arrows took their marks, sentries falling from the ramparts or dropping where they stood. The Wasps had precious little warning before the Mantids were upon their ramparts, shooting down at the men below.

  The angles of the walls were planned against just such an assault, though. They bellied to halfway up, then drew in, and slots in the upper half allowed the men below to loose their stings and weapons upwards into the attackers. It took only the first sentry’s death-cry to set the camp in motion.

  The Wasps had learnt bitter lessons from the demise of the Fourth. Their progress from Merro had been slowed by assembling their travelling fort each evening, and General Tynan himself had been surprised to reach so near to the forest before this assault came.

  A full third of the Imperial Army was on night-shift. As soon as the call came they were scrambling from their tents, already fully armoured and armed. All the while, the Mantids were vaulting to the wall, driving their arrows into every target in the half-light that the Wasps’ eyes could not pierce. For a moment the Wasps could not form a line. Men were dropping even as they took up position, and there were Mantis warriors everywhere within the camp, their blades bloody. The balance teetered in the favour of the ancient ways of war.

  All through this, engineers were at work. They did not rush forth as soldiers would, and the Mantids did not mark them, perceiving no threat in them. Even when the great engine within the ring of towers grumbled to life they were not hindered. They threw their levers and the generators whirred into motion, and abruptly there was light. The apex of each tower had burst into a blinding white flame that left the inside of the camp – and a hundred yards beyond – as bright as day. The shock of it brought the Mantis influx to a halt, the attackers reeling back, launching into the air, covering their eyes.

  Wasp stings and Wasp crossbowmen now loosed at will. The new snapbows, hundreds of them shipped from Helleron and Sonn, cracked and spat their bolts, too swift and small to be cut aside or dodged. The Mantids were too widely spread for volley fire and so each of the Wasp soldiers picked a target and loosed on his own volition, and the real slaughter started.

  The Mantids did not understand, and with speed and fury they kept mounting the wall and launching themselves into that steel rain of shot, and dying. They died and died. It should have been the end of them, but such was their swiftness that twice more they swept over the inside of the camp once again, lashing and stabbing indiscriminately, reaping whole blocks of Wasp soldiers with their blades. Their steel claws rent flesh and dug around armour, a spinning, lashing dance of blood that carried death to all within their reach. Their archers loosed arrows at the snapbowmen, each shot deadly, but it was like spitting into the storm. Their beasts, the terrible forest mantids, lashed out their killing arms, crushing and severing limbs or taking up whole screaming soldiers and snapping them, their knife-blade mandibles rending steel effortlessly. The Mantis war host fell on the Wasp lines with their spears, their swords and their antique armour that could not protect them.

  There were too
few, in the end. Against that scythe of shot, too few ever came together within the walls to break the Wasps, but they tried over and over, until the bodies of their warriors were scattered like wheat after a storm. Their armoured beasts lay still with the fletching of snap-bow bolts riddling their carapaces, eyes dull and barbed limbs stilled. The Mantids shouted their defiance of the invader, each one of them honed to a degree of skill that no Wasp soldier could ever know, masters of a fighting art a thousand years old and more. The snapbows and the crossbows did not care: they found their mark, automatic as machines. And the Mantids charged and died, and charged and died, until even their spirits failed, their proud hearts broke, and they could come no more.

  The flower of the Felyal had fallen that night, and in the morning there were over 1,700 Mantis dead. Despite their technical advantages and their weapons, the imperial slain numbered 173 men more.

  The next day the Felyal was burning. Mantis holds that had stood for a thousand years were going up in flames. Tens of thousands of soldiers and machines, artillery and firethrowers were working their way through the Felyal, torching everyone and everything they came across. The Mantis-kinden still fought back, and every Mantis that died within those trees had already shed the blood of many Wasps, but there were always more Wasps. The burning only stopped when the survivors at last turned and fled, leaving their homes, their lives and their history beneath the Wasp boots. They fled west – where else? They fled towards Collegium, or maybe to Sarn. They had no other choice available.

  In his study in Seldis, Teornis of the Aldanrael perused the news almost dispassionately. The Mantids had served their purpose, and now they were gone. It was a small loss, at least one that no Spider would be sad about. If the war was won, then perhaps they would re-establish themselves, or perhaps not.