Salute the Dark sota-4

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He shook his head, with no words to express what he felt. I love her so much, he thought. How can I do this to her?

  The Butterfly-kinden gazed along the line of nervous animals, the horses, the beetles, the crickets and spiders, the miscellaneous grab-bag of rideable monsters that they had drawn from everywhere. She looked at their riders, too: untested, awkward, half-skilled.

  ‘I feel your belief, my prince,’ she whispered. ‘It is the strongest thing here.’

  ‘Then it will have to suffice,’ he said, his cheer sounding slightly fragile, his face expression brave for those around him. She laid a hand on his, where it rested on his saddle pommel.

  ‘Share your belief with me,’ she told him. ‘Make me believe.’

  Salma sensed her presence as a halo that reached out from her, imbued with her gentle magics. She had enchanted him before, but she needed no such arts to secure his love now. Still, though, she touched his mind, the essence of him, and she brought her other hand up to the muzzle of his steed.

  ‘Be strong,’ she whispered. ‘Share the faith and be strong,’ and he knew that she was speaking not to him but to the horse.

  Speaking to all the horses, to every riding animal standing and stamping or chittering there in the dark, waiting for the signal. It was not like his people’s magic, but the Butterfly-kinden had their own arts, born of the sun, born of light and hope.

  ‘Be brave,’ she murmured. ‘Be true. You will not lose your way. You will not turn aside from danger.’ She was shining now, despite the cloak she wore, so that he was terrified that the Wasps might mark her, but still she spoke softly to his horse, and he felt the animal shift its stance beneath him, something strong and iron-like entering it. All down the line, to either side and also behind him, the nervous shuffle of animals quietened, replaced by a watchful patience, an anticipation.

  And at last she again looked up at him, with her face like a sunrise. ‘Come back to me,’ she whispered, and stepped aside from his mount.

  He heard the first bang even as she did, the first firepowder charge exploding. Chefre would be coming in from the side, her airborne rabble streaking over the Wasp camp, attacking indiscriminately, dropping ignited grenades, loosing arrows, crossbow bolts and fire-arrows, even slingshot. The Wasp soldiers on duty – he could almost see them in his mind’s eye – would streak into the air, their stings lighting up the night with a network of gold tracery. Some of Chefre’s people would die but the rest would keep moving: a great, chaotic cloud passing back and forth over the vast Wasp camp.

  There was no more time for thought, nothing to wait for now. He kicked his heels into his mount’s flanks and launched forward, the first man to the battle, forming the point of the wedge. False heroics, he knew, for in this fight it would be those at the rear who would be most at risk.

  But they had formed a decent wedge after all, which was something that had never quite come together as he drilled them. He saw the flames of the Wasp perimeter straight ahead of them. Somewhere behind him, there was the scream of a horse missing its step, going down. They were charging in the dark and some of the other riders could not see as well as he could. It was something he had anticipated and been unable to solve, and he knew that his plan could not survive too many unsolved problems.

  Behind the cavalry came the infantry, running as fast as they could: and hiding amongst their number were the Sarnesh engineers whose skilled job would be the point of all tonight’s festivities. It had been their arrival that had finally decided Salma. It meant that Sarn was not throwing his own people away needlessly as an expedient way of whittling down the enemy. Sarn had sent almost 100 highly trained artificers, who would almost certainly not survive the night. Sarn was allowing him the responsibility of a true tactician.

  He had a brief view of a Wasp sentry standing almost exactly in his path, turning from the confusion within the camp behind him – several tents already ablaze, swift work on Chefre’s account – to see 500 of horse and other beasts thundering down on him. The man’s wings flared instantly but he was only at head height when Salma’s first lance drove into him, the weight of his dying body ripping the shaft from the Dragonfly’s hand. Salma and his men were fortunately armed to the teeth, much of it through the unintentional benevolence of all the Wasps they had caught and killed. Most wore repainted Wasp armour, and they carried two or three lances each besides crossbows and swords. Salma himself had a holstered shortbow, ready strung, that he now hooked out into his hand. To either side of him the lance-wedge was driving itself through the scattered Wasp watchmen, but ahead of them the main force was mustering, men rushing into place both on the ground and into the air. The Wasp airborne were meanwhile being harried by Chefre’s utter shambles of a squadron, their formation constantly being broken and re-forming. Chefre’s Flies and Moths were not real warriors, their attacks causing more nuisance than real threat, but they were too insistent to be ignored. The Wasps already in the air kept trying to pin them down, but they were not a force of soldiers to stand together. They were individuals, and had to be chased and caught one by one. It looked as if that would take all night.

  Spears were now levelled amongst the Wasp lines, firmly grounded against the charge. Salma sent off his first arrow but, even as he did so, was beaten to it by at least a score of his men, shooting crossbows and snapbows into the massing enemy. Sting-fire came right back at them. Salma knew that many of his soldiers were falling but, so long as they were not stopped, so long as they kept moving, then they were not beaten.

  The archery from his riders had been concentrated towards the point of the wedge, and Salma saw a good number of Wasps go down before it. Was it enough? Only one way to find out. He took up another lance, bow clutched for a moment in his reins-hand, and let his mount dictate the timing of its leap, plunging down on to the Wasp lines with thundering hooves and lance and a great shout. An enemy spearhead streaked past his face, his second lance was torn from his hand on the impact, and then he had smashed past the front rank, broken the Wasp order, and there were 400 and more riders following right behind him.

  He pulled his sword out, a heavy Hornet-kinden blade with the weight loaded towards the tip, and simply laid about him as his horse charged on, feeling the jarring shocks as men fell beneath its hooves. Others tried to fly at the last moment, nerve failing them. At every split second he was fighting a different man, just time for a single strike, whether hit or miss, and then was carried past them, galloping deeper into the camp. The enemy spears tilted and skewed, the sheer weight of thundering cavalry breaking the Wasps’ will to stand. Hooves trampled them remorselessly, while the mandibles of insects sheared and cut. They were scattering even as the cavalry struck them, and those who could not take to the air in time were simply ridden down.

  Salma was clear of the Wasp lines without warning, charging down a thoroughfare between tents, and the soldiers he saw were half-dressed or unarmed, coming out to see what was going on, and then throwing themselves up into the air or just to one side in utter panic. All the while Chefre’s scattered airborne were taking every opportunity to evade their pursuers and bombard the ground again.

  From across the camp a thunder roared, and for just a second the entire place was like day, lit up bright white and then red. Salma closed his eyes against it, trusting his horse would manage. He himself had no idea what had happened.

  Time to turn, though. He wheeled his mount along another avenue of tents, safe in the knowledge that every Wasp possible would be watching him, believing that he, Salme Dien and his cavalcade, formed the attack. Beside him, Phalmes was grinning fiercely.

  ‘Firepowder store!’ he screamed over all the noise, though Salma could still barely hear him. ‘Chefre must have hit it!’

  Behind the cavalry, his infantry must have already fallen on the broken Wasp defenders, taking them apart in savage desperation. Time was everything, now. Salma and Chefre and Morleyr’s little force had been all simply to catch the eye, like a flashy bro
och, whilst the infantry got the engineers to the engines and then let nature take its course.

  He did not even turn to look back at his riders, as he twisted in the saddle to loose another arrow. He knew that they would be falling, shot from both sides, from behind and above, by Wasps who probably did not realize quite what was happening but knew an enemy when they saw one. His people were busy dying, and his only hope was that they had all known, as he had, what they were getting themselves into.

  Many had families and friends who were under the care of Sarn now. Their safety was what this was about, and surely it was a nobler aim than personal survival.

  They were running out of room, though. Enough of the Wasp camp was now aware of them and was trying to box them in. Salma turned this way and that, knowing that with each turn he had fewer riders behind him.

  Time for a last-ditch attempt to escape, he decided. He would just have to hope that by now the Sarnesh engineers had got their work done.

  The next clot of soldiers that barred his way he did not turn aside from. With his last lance couched in his arm he simply rode straight into them. They scattered at the last moment, many of them too late. One man, in his hurried flight, slammed a knee into Salma’s shoulder, rocking him back in the saddle. The lance, unbloodied, flew from his hand, but he managed to stay on horseback, charging in what he hoped, after all the twists and turns, was the direction of the camp’s closest perimeter.

  At least they all know this part. From this point on, their work was done and it would be everyone for himself. Wasp sting-bolts crackled and danced past him, each one lighting up a single strand of the night.

  One struck his horse.

  He felt a lurching shock run through the animal’s very frame, not the shock of impact but the animal’s own pain and fear. It reared up, and he had a brief sense of other riders flashing helplessly past him, and then another shot struck the wretched beast, whether sting or bolt he never knew, and it pitched sideways. He knew enough to get himself out of the saddle and into the air as the animal crashed to the ground.

  The air was full of fire and light, but a calm voice in his head reminded him We have been here before. That had been the camp outside Tark, but the principles were the same. In the air he became a target for every man within thirty yards. He nevertheless tried to ascend, but then found that there were Wasps all about him and no sign of Chefre’s people. Fled. I hope they fled. He had his sword out, wounding the three closest to him, and then a blade coming from behind and below opened a shallow cut on his leg and, with the sense that he was totally surrounded and about to be cut apart, he dropped from the air.

  He landed running, forcing away the pain, knowing that he was too far now from the camp’s edge to escape. There were Wasps all about him, but most were too surprised at the sight of this single running enemy in their midst to react. The rest formed a growing tail of pursuit, hounding him through their camp. Despite the pain, the deaths, the certainty of his end, he was grinning because the situation was so utterly ridiculous.

  Amid all the noise, he missed the voice shouting his name. It was only when Phalmes’ horse flashed in front of him that he realized that someone was trying to rescue him.

  ‘Away!’ he shouted. ‘Just go!’ but Phalmes was returning for him, riding back towards the pursuing Wasps with his sword raised, a mere black silhouette now against a backdrop of leaping light.

  And Salma skidded about the corner of a tent and saw the flames. The sight stopped him: a field of fire, a whole quarter of this tent city roaring in conflagration.

  ‘Salma!’ shouted Phalmes again, as he must have been doing for some time, and he was reaching down from his mount when a sting caught him in the chest. Salma saw his face contort, the force of the blow punching him out of the high-ended saddle. The horse slewed about, dragged by the reins, and then Phalmes released it, and it fled.

  As the Wasps arrived, Salma knelt beside him, the thunderous flames fierce against his face. He would have liked a last word, for the Mynan bandit had been a good friend to him. Phalmes’ words were done, though. He was gone.

  He was in good company, at least, for the ground was covered with bodies. Salma saw dead Wasps, in and out of armour, occasionally the bodies of his own motley following, and the scattered forms of the Sarnesh engineers. The fires ahead leapt and roared about complex skeletons of wood and metal, about the wagons of parts and ammunition, all the paraphernalia for bringing a city’s walls down. It was like a forest on fire, but it was a forest of engines, burning their wood, their fuel, their firepowder. The Sarnesh had done their work, and only the morrow would tell whether they had done it well enough to justify all this waste of life.

  The Wasps approached him carefully, but he put down his sword, laying one hand on Phalmes’ chest. He suddenly felt very tired.

  Twenty-Two

  There was a certain status to being brought in alone. Prisoners who came to Capitas in droves, such as escaped slaves, prisoners of war or manpower tithes levied on the subject races, were processed as a commodity, consigned to a group fate, enslaved, executed or sent to the fighting pits, recorded in quantities rather than names. How many thousand lives and dreams had been buried in such a manner, Thalric could not even begin to guess. That fate was not to be his, though. He had come in as a celebrity, a single prisoner with a heavy escort, flown in for the last tens of miles at great expense and with indecent speed. He was being accorded the treatment he had earnt.

  Those prisoners whose circumstances merited something more than a humble clerk signifying their doom with a woodcut stamp were brought to the Armour Square, far enough into Capitas to be within easy sight of the top tier of the imperial palace. The square itself, which would have made a very serviceable marketplace, was instead lined with buildings commandeered by the imperial government. There were factor houses for the merchants of the Consortium, offices of military administration and requisition, the chief stockade of the Slave Corps, and this place: the Justiciary. It was a low, uninspiring edifice, staffed by slave clerks overseen by Wasps whose careers were dire enough to see them end up there. It dealt with the disposal of prisoners.

  The building itself was not the point, though. The Justiciary was the basis for a fond tradition of the Empire, and thus the reason that Armour Square was a stopping point for anyone touring the city. Well-to-do Wasps brought their families there for entertainment, or their slaves as a warning.

  The free-standing posts that lined each side of Armour Square, making a smaller square within the large, had been used once for displaying suits of mail, a relic of the Wasp-kinden’s tribal past when warriors had shown their readiness for battle by exhibiting their war-gear. More enlightened generations had found a better use for them. At noon, most days, almost every post had a prisoner hanging from it, hauled up high enough to make them balance on their toes, stripped naked for lashing if need be but, most of all, exposed for public ridicule.

  There were guards, of course, for prisoners were a resource of the Empire and therefore not to be wasted needlessly. The citizens took the importance of tradition seriously. The Grasshopper-kinden three posts down from Thalric had just had three Wasp youths beat him bloody with staves, as the guards had watched with indulgent pride in such pranks and games.

  Thalric shifted his weight again, despite his discovery that there was no easier position to find. Whoever had strung him up had known what they were doing. He tried to relax into it, but his body, which had put up with a great deal recently, was starting to fray. He knew from experience that he could be here for over a day before anyone decided what to do with him next.

  Well, think of it as training for the artificer’s table. They would want to put him to the question, sooner or later, to find out why he had killed General Reiner and who had put him up to it. His own experience of operating on the other side of the table was not helping, either, and the mental pictures he recalled were too exacting and accurate for comfort. He had no illusions about being able to wi
thstand such questioning. Nobody ever did. It was not some kind of competitive sport between the practitioner and the recipient. You could not win it.

  Myna should be in arms by now. The thought sent an odd shiver through him, for he had taken a hammer to the Empire and cracked it. Myna would already be in arms, and then there was Szar… if Szar was still fighting, and Myna rose up, then where would the Empire choose to deploy its soldiers? And then it was not so far to the occupied Ant-kinden city of Maynes… Who could have thought that an Empire could be such a fragile thing?

  ‘Well, look at you,’ said someone next to him, and his first thought was, Time for a beating. When he identified the voice, his expectations did not alter. Painfully he shifted round to see her properly.

  ‘It is you, isn’t it,’ she said. She was standing beside him, quite free and unfettered, as though this was her city and not his own.

  ‘Tynisa,’ he got out.

  The Spider girl examined him, seeing no doubt the latticework of scars across his naked torso, some of which were older than she was, and all set within the colourful backdrop of the recent bruises that had yet to fade. In turn, he saw that she was wearing the clothing of a well-off Capitas woman, with the cut modified by just inches to turn demure into sensual. If he had encountered her as a stranger, on any Capitas street, he would have taken her for an adventuress or even a prostitute, and probably taken her home with him for that matter.

  ‘I see,’ he said, ‘that you’re making yourself at home here. Thrown in the fight, have you? Or has Stenwold become a little optimistic about where he can plant his agents?’

  ‘On my father’s business.’

  Tisamon? Thalric could not imagine the Mantis stalking about the city dressed in Wasp clothing and pretending… No, of course, he had run away. ‘Tisamon’s here?’ He craned about, looking at all the other posts. There were plenty of fellow sufferers but no Mantids among them.