Salute the Dark sota-4

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘No!’ he exclaimed, suddenly rebellious, startling Ult, who put his hand to the cell’s door. Is this it? The final turn of the knife?

  ‘You came here to fight me?’ he insisted.

  Felise was still gazing at him with an expression that spoke in equal parts of love and hate. ‘I did not come here for you. You know what I came here seeking. However, since you are here, perhaps you can help me find it.’ Her smile was pitiless. ‘Perhaps we can find it together.’

  We are being used like pieces of a machine. He felt her hand touch his as he clung to the bars. He half-expected her claw to lash out and to sever a finger or strike at his face, but her hand was warm, and when she covered his own it was a lover’s gesture.

  If we are pieces of a machine, we are broken pieces. He knew how she must feel. He had come here without hope, and then Ult had given him a purpose by mentioning the Emperor.

  Kill the Emperor. Would that make sense of it all?

  ‘Enough,’ grunted Ult, behind him. ‘Enough time.’ A glance at the Wasp showed the old man was not devoid of sympathy, shuffling a little in embarrassment. ‘You need to go back now, old Mantis. Your time’s up.’

  He felt her sudden presence in his dreams, Tisamon thrashing in brief nightmare before he leapt, kicking and fighting, into wakefulness.

  ‘Felise?’ he got out, but he knew, even before he opened his eyes, that it was not Felise Mienn who had come to visit.

  She coalesced out of the darkness, there beneath the arena, where a few smoky torches were shared across the whole labyrinth of bars and cages. She was strangely lit by light from elsewhere, so that he could see her more clearly than he wanted to.

  ‘Are you happy now?’ he asked softly, wishing he could strike at her, but there was nothing to strike at and, besides, it would be blasphemy.

  She stared down on him, nothing but that taut knot of pain and hurt that was left when the mortal woman Laetrimae had been ripped from the world of the living. Happy, Tisamon? The words came to him unspoken. Have I cause to rejoice?

  ‘Your plan has its hooks in me,’ he accused. ‘I had thought these bars would be the worst of it, but there is always something worse – and you have found it.’

  She shimmered and blurred for a moment, as the thorny vines continued to crawl their bloody tracks across her skin. It is not my plan, nor your place to complain.

  ‘You brought me here,’ he argued weakly.

  I was brought here against my will. You guided yourself here.

  He became aware that some of the neighbouring prisoners were now listening, and wondered what they could make of this one-sided conversation. Perhaps such muttered ravings were not uncommon down here.

  ‘So you are just a piece, then? Just another broken piece?’ he suggested.

  Just another broken piece. There is always something worse, as you say, and I have found it.

  For a moment the voice in his mind had sounded like that of a real woman, one alone and in great pain, and he glanced up at her.

  ‘So I must fight poor Felise Mienn, spill her blood to open the way to the Emperor, if I can manage it.’

  There came a noise that chilled him all the way through and made his skin crawl. It was, he realized then, Laetrimae laughing.

  Is that what you think your purpose is? Your pride is not yet sated then?

  Tisamon stared at her blankly.

  You cannot kill the Emperor, Tisamon. You are not as invincible as you believe. Try it, and you shall fail – as you have always failed in those things most important to you. You must set your sights at more realistic targets.

  He was on his feet abruptly, his clawed gauntlet already covering his hand. She shimmered and glowed in the darkness and he wanted to drive his blade into her heart. Except that he knew she was not truly there and had no heart left to her.

  The look she gave him, before she vanished away, was sheer contempt.

  Twenty-One

  The cards were slapped down on the wooden board, and Balkus cursed, not for the first time. Plius chuckled and scooped them up, adding them to his already considerable hoard.

  ‘Must have taken years of practice for you to get that bad, Sarnesh.’

  Balkus glowered at him. He had been losing steadily throughout the evening, and mostly to this fat Ant with the bluish skin. ‘Just deal again,’ he grunted.

  Plius laid out the next three centre-cards, and the players retreated to study their hands and decide what to play. The problem with the game of Lords was that the winner tended to keep on winning. It was a Fly-kinden import to Sarn, and Balkus didn’t think much of it. Being a poor player, he preferred games with a greater element of luck.

  The third player, Parops, had already placed his cards down, not to be drawn further into the bickering of the two men. He had not come across card games before, for, alone of the three, he had lived close to a normal Ant-kinden life, before the Wasps had come to his city. Ants did not play card games with each other, for when they were amongst their own kind it was against their very nature to bluff. Amongst those from other Ant cities, they fought.

  Except not here, not now, and it was one of those little pieces of history so easily trampled over and lost after the fact. The great bulk of the army camped about them was Sarnesh, of course, but here on this flank were the exceptions. Here, Balkus had his mob of Collegium volunteers, who were were audible across the entire camp with their drinking and singing and talking out loud – unthinkable! Parops had with him his pale Tarkesh, the exiles who had been left with nothing to do but spill imperial blood. Their chances of ever seeing home again were brittle and slim: they were renegades now in all but name, forced out of a conquered home and into mercenary life. Some Ants chose that willingly, even whole detachments of them, but Parops and his men would have preferred a settled existence back home had they been allowed.

  Then there were the Tseni that had come, at Plius’ call, from their faraway city. They kept their distance from the others here in a land normally identified as hostile on all their maps. They were Ant-kinden, too, but foreign, wearing scale armour rather than chainmail, carrying oval shields and swords with a back-hook jutting from the blade. They might have seemed primitive, except that they came with superior crossbows: heavy pieces equipped with a long-handled winch to recock them at a single turn. They’re just different, Balkus had decided and, anyway, Tsen was far enough away from the other Ant cities not to have to fight them regularly. They had not followed the Lowlands’ curve of history but kept themselves well apart out on the Atoll Coast.

  Those three Ant-kinden officers had become, not friends exactly, but enforced allies against the great sameness of the Sarnesh: two outsiders and one insider trying to remain outside. They kept to each other’s company and played the games that Plius had learnt from his days spent in the Sarnesh Foreigners’ Quarter. Ant-kinden needed peers and, from their positions of unwilling command, they had only each other as equals.

  It had been hard enough, going on the journey east. They had not known if they would run into the Wasps before schedule, with nothing more than some panting Fly-kinden to warn them of it. Instead they had covered more distance than anticipated, the Wasp advance running well behind time. This suited the Sarnesh, who were thinking about what would happen if the coming clash became another Battle of the Rails. They wanted proper time to prepare their city’s defences.

  The artillery, Balkus thought glumly. That was Stenwold’s boy’s job, of course, and he had done his best not to think of the young Dragonfly and his impossibly suicidal task, but right now it shouldered its way to the forefront of his mind.

  The Wasp army was now encamped within sight. The talking and shouting amongst the Collegiate soldiers had become strained and over-loud due to the proximity of the enemy. General Malkan’s Sixth and Seventh Armies, the Hive and the Winged Furies in all their mortal strength, were scarcely three miles away. Before evening had darkened the sky, they had been in plain view, and Flies could spy on them w
ith telescopes. Malkan was making no attempt at hiding his numbers, but instead displaying to the utmost his military strength, which exceeded everything the Sarnesh had gathered against him by two or three to one. The morning would see some bloody work.

  Balkus stood up. ‘No more for me,’ he informed the other two. ‘Going out to walk amongst the soldiers.’

  For of course an Ant commander would not need to do that. Parops and Plius did not have to do that. They were always amongst their soldiers, mind touching mind in a net that supported each Ant and bound the whole together. Not Balkus. Balkus had his detachment of deaf-mutes, their minds single and separate, and in his brain instead there was always the murmur of the Sarnesh camp around him, no matter how hard he tried to blot it out.

  The march here had allowed him his one moment of amusement when, in the midst of all the great voiceless march of Ant-kinden, a Collegiate woman had struck up a song in a single quavering and slightly off-key warble from the midst of the out-of-step merchant companies. A few others voices had risen to join her, and then half of the rest of them were chorusing the words, or loose approximations, using this simple rhythm to keep their steps sufficiently coordinated to catch up a little with the stoically silent Ants.

  Balkus had enjoyed that. He had particularly enjoyed it because of the utter sense of horror that had arisen in his mind, transmitted there from each and all of the Sarnesh, that these shopkeeper soldiers should be going to war making noise, flapping their lips in some pointless and mostly tuneless song. Balkus had felt the minds of his kin, and known them to be scandalized and disgusted, and he had enjoyed that a great deal.

  Then his soldiers had begun on a new song, the words of which he managed to catch:

  Well, my old farm was a good old farm, the neatest you did see-o

  With aphids, sheep and fields of wheat, that all were dear to me-o

  But came a man in College white, the smartest e’er I saw-o

  Who looked me o’er and ordered me to fight in Maker’s war-o

  And Balkus had considered just exactly what Stenwold Maker himself would think of that, and had chuckled to himself over it for a good hour.

  Now he passed amidst the campfires of his men, pausing occasionally to look out at that distant constellation of fires that indicated the enemy. At least there was no fear of a night attack, for the Wasps were not night-fighters – but the Mantids and Moths the Ancient League had brought were. Any force of Wasps that tried to use the cover of darkness would find that cloak soon stripped from them. Indeed it would be hard enough to stop the Mantis warriors going out tonight to kill as many Wasps as they could catch unawares, but that was emphatically not the plan.

  The plan, the wonderful bloody plan! It was all the King of Sarn’s work, he and his cursed tacticians. The Ancillaries, as the Sarnesh had taken to calling their foreign hangers-on, had not even been consulted, merely instructed.

  At least they’re not sticking us in front. That had always been the fear: that the Sarnesh would see their unreliable foreign friends simply as fodder for Wasp bolt and sting to cover their main advance. At least we’re only being given a fair share of the load. But Balkus knew who the load was really resting on. Stenwold’s boy.

  Somewhere out there was rabble of bandits and refugees who would be readying themselves, even now, for what must look like certain death. At least it looked like certain death to Balkus, and he wasn’t even going.

  ‘We’re sure this is going to be a surprise?’ Phalmes asked. ‘If this isn’t a surprise, then it’s not going to go well for us.’

  I’m not convinced it’s going to go well for us in any event, Salma thought, but Phalmes would know that already. After all, the Mynan was an old campaigner. He knew the odds.

  ‘Every scout that comes this way gets disappeared,’ said Chefre. The Fly-kinden woman sounded dispassionate and businesslike about it. She and her gang had been criminals in the Spiderlands before this and, as far as she was concerned, it was just the same war with bigger gangs. ‘Also, we’re disappearing scouts all over. I’ve got everyone who’ll be no good for this game out hunting Wasps in the dark.’ Her smile was neat, surgical. ‘Of course, most of our lot can see in the dark. Or more than they can anyway.’

  Salma nodded. It was a weakness of the Wasps that the Empire could do little about. There was scarce moonlight tonight, the clouds hanging heavy about the sky. It was dark even for him and his people, so for the Wasps, the only light would be what they could make themselves.

  Phalmes, who could not see in the dark either, grunted unhappily. ‘I don’t think we’ve got men enough.’ It was not the first time he had said this.

  ‘Probably not,’ Salma agreed, ‘but what are you going to do about it?’ He saw Phalmes’ shoulders rise and fall. ‘Your fliers are ready?’ he then asked Chefre.

  ‘Chief, if we don’t give ’em the word soon, they’re just going to go off and do it on their own,’ she told him cheerfully. She had at least 400 under her command, mostly Fly-kinden but with Moths and others amongst them. They had bows and, where the Aptitude ran, they also had crossbows, snapbows and grenades. Salma would have been happier fighting along with them but he was needed here, at the point of the lance, where his army met the enemy head on.

  Every horse, every riding insect that his people had been able to steal, capture, beg, buy or inherit was here, till he had a cavalry force that was nearly half again the number of Chefre’s rag-tag airborne. They had trained and trained again, a rabble that the Commonweal would cringe from. They had got on their horses and fallen off and broken legs or ridden the wrong way. The mounts had been just as bad. It was, he knew full well, a stupid idea, and nobody in their right mind would have thought of it.

  The Wasps would not have thought of it. In fact it would be something most Wasps would never have seen, or at least not since the Twelve-Year War. It would come as a surprise, and in war surprise could be fatal. He was attacking a full imperial army, tens of thousands of men. His people would be outnumbered fifty to one, but…

  They would anticipate an attack, but he hoped it was just skirmishers, infiltrators, saboteurs, that the Empire was expecting. He would not be sending such, however. He had decided already that General Malkan’s camp could not be opened up by a stealthy few. The scalpel must give way to the hammer.

  When Malkan had overwintered his forces after the Battle of the Rails, he had built a palisaded, fortified camp protected against land and air attack, reinforced with artillery. Now his army was on the march, he was forced to rely on a torchlit perimeter and sentries. Where an Ant-kinden army would have dug in every night, if they knew that someone like Salma was out there, the Wasps were not quite so organized. It was the same mistake that General Alder and the Fourth Army had made, when the Felyal Mantids caught them unawares. Salma realized that Malkan would have learnt from that, and would surely have a force on standby, ready to spring to the camp’s defence and give the main army time to organize. Cavalry, though…

  We must punch through whatever they throw at us. We will give the Sarnesh artificers time to finish their work.

  Or we will die.

  It was at least a plan. He did not feel particularly proud of it, but at this late stage it was the only one he had.

  ‘Morleyr’s people must be in place by now,’ Phalmes decided. His horse shifted, picking up his unease.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Salma. The Mole Cricket, Morleyr, would be leading a feint attack on the camp’s far side, but Salma had not been able to spare the giant much in the way of manpower, and it was unlikely to deceive the enemy for long. He looked down at the Sarnesh standing beside him. ‘It feels like time,’ he agreed.

  The man held a little device in his hand, and Salma knew that there was another such device with the Sarnesh army. In some arcane way wholly lost on him, these instruments told the Sarnesh how much of the night had already passed. They were waiting for the Ant’s mark, and he had been watching the little dials and wheels of his de
vice closely, with a tiny lamp cupped in his other hand.

  ‘You have a good sense for these things,’ the Sarnesh observed, ‘and it… is time, indeed.’ Salma knew that the man would be simultaneously speaking with his mind to others of his kin accompanying Morleyr, or to the Ant-kinden soldiers and artificers ranked up behind Salma’s makeshift cavalry.

  ‘Chefre, over to you,’ he said. With no access to the Sarnesh and their mindlink, once Chefre’s airborne took off they would be cutting themselves loose from Salma’s command, operating on their own initiative. ‘Go,’ Salma told her, and she went.

  The wait was something he had not thought of, before. There was an appalling, stretched-out moment, between Chefre’s people taking wing and his hearing their signal, in which he sat in his saddle with nothing to do. Prince Salme Dien, the commander of armies, had finished his shift, and Salma the warrior, the battle-leader, had yet to go on duty… and he now waited while the horses stamped nervously, feeling his men around him shift and try to even out their breathing.

  ‘Salma.’ The faintest touch at his shoulder, and he turned in the saddle.

  She was there, his luminous lover. He had told her not to come, but she, of all his army, took no orders from him. She hung in the air, her skin streaked with colours, radiant wings beating.

  ‘You should not…’ he started.

  ‘How could I not?’ she responded. ‘I know what you go now to do.’

  ‘Please, this is hard enough…’

  She reached out, took his head in her hands and darted in to kiss him as he leant down in the saddle, her lips soft against his. He felt her tears on his cheek. They ran down her face and glinted and sparkled over her faintly radiant skin.

  ‘I will never abandon you,’ she assured him. ‘Never. As you were there for me, I shall always come for you.’