Salute the Dark sota-4

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Salute the Dark sota-4 Page 36

by Adrian Tchaikovsky


  * * *

  ‘Achaeos.’

  He snapped awake, his wound pulling at him painfully. He felt as though he had been running for hours, rather than just lying here in a fevered sleep. He peered upwards, seeing the Arcanum agent, Xaraea. There was a finality to her expression that chilled him.

  ‘I am not strong enough for this-’ he started.

  ‘We have no more time,’ Xaraea interrupted. ‘The Skryres have observed all the omens and cast the lots of the future. We must act now, either with or without you.’

  Achaeos stared at her. She was not fond of him, but neither was anyone else here in what had once been his home. He was learning to live with it. Still, for that self-same reason, he possessed something they did not: a connection to the outside world.

  The wound that Tynisa had given him was healing, but slowly, very slowly. It had been too close, in the end, and the conflict of treatments between the stitching and patching carried out in Collegium and the work the doctors were doing here had not helped. He could just about walk now, for short distances, and only with a stick. He could not fly at all, and most of the time, as now, he spent resting.

  I think I should accept now that I am no warrior. He did seem to get his hide cut open with distressing frequency.

  ‘Nobody has even told me what they are intending to do,’ he pointed out.

  ‘It is not your place to question,’ she said, but he had unexpectedly touched a nerve. She knows, and it has shaken her. He remained staring at her, outwardly impassive, inwardly wondering how far he could force his minuscule authority and how much they really needed his help.

  The pause between them dragged on past mere awkwardness but, despite the background pain that never quite left him, he did not give way. After an excruciating time, it was Xaraea who spoke.

  ‘I…’ she began, and that single word told him that he had broken through to something, ‘I have spent years working on this. You can have no idea the battles I have fought. Yes, we could see the Empire on the horizon, and see all the cursed machines that the Helleren so obligingly built for them. I knew it would come to this, so I worked hard to have the right man in the right place: the one Wasp-kinden who would be one of us and not of them. Tegrec had already made himself a seer and an officer, but it was I who made him a governor. Why did I do all this? Because the Skryres realized that it would be necessary if we were to drive the enemy out of our halls. The Empire is your enemy just as much as it is ours. We have our differences, Achaeos, but we can agree on that. They are as much our enemy as are the cursed Beetle-kinden.’

  He did not flinch at that barb, even smiled a little to show his contempt for it.

  ‘So where has all this work led?’ he asked her. I should have been a Skryre, he reflected, for he knew he was now running Xaraea just as the Skryres had always run him: employing pointed questions, evasive answers, making her do the work.

  ‘A ritual.’ Her voice shook marginally, and he saw her fists clench. ‘I am not privy-’

  ‘But you have heard,’ he observed. She was hating him with a passion now, but he found he did not care so long as he could continue to pull her around like a marionette and get her to tell him what she knew.

  ‘They say…’ Her pause, then, was not reluctance to speak so much as reluctance to even think about it. ‘They say that it will be the greatest ritual since the Darakyon. They need… they command you there. They demand it.’

  ‘Do they?’ Achaeos had gone cold all over, and he knew that must show in his face. There was no gloating, though. Xaraea was frightened of what the Skryres were about, and he found that he was too. Slowly he swung his legs over the side of the bed. ‘I will come,’ he told her, ‘but it may take a while.’

  She nodded briefly and was gone in an instant. No doubt she had a great deal else to do. The Skryres seemed to have made her their personal agent in this business, and he had no idea whether that was intended as a reward or not.

  As great as the Darakyon, is it? he thought sourly, hearing in his mind the tortured, whispering voice of that haunted place. We all know how well that went. The great renegade ritual, five centuries before, intended to drag down the newly arisen Apt-kinden, to consign them to fear and barbarism and slavery once again, and it had failed. The great magicians who had shaped it had yet reached too far, and they, and the Mantis-kinden whose home had been their ritual ground, had been damned to a fate infinitely worse than death, eternal torture on the rack of thorns that was the blighted forest Darakyon, imprisonment in the Shadow Box, the twisted knot of spite that was all their ritual had achieved.

  And that I held, and opened, and look what happened to me…

  There were ritual chambers deep within the mountain but their walls, it seemed, were too confining for an enterprise on this scale. Instead Xaraea led the limping Achaeos upwards, first through slanted corridors and halls that he remembered from his youth, then by ascending long flights of steps that had always been forbidden to him before. From the murky, incense-fragrant halls they led to she took him step-by-step up steeply spiral paths cut into the rock, cramped and tortuous routes that he had never known existed. The chill told him where they were going. The very top of the mountain had signified a place of childhood terror. It was where the Skryres communed direct with the spirits and the elements, wholly open to the lashing responses of either. It was where they took you if you failed the Skryres.

  Well, they’re taking me there now, he thought drily. There was light ahead, but it was a muted red. At first he thought it was fire-glow but as he came out into the open air he saw that it was sunset. The entire Lowlands seemed to be in flames, as if the bloated crimson sun was searing the world to cinders.

  ‘An omen, do you think?’ There were only two figures waiting for them there. One was robed like a Skryre, but the voice told otherwise. The second was the Wasp girl, Raeka, which meant that the first must be her master.

  ‘Tegrec,’ Achaeos rasped hoarsely, using his stick to lower himself to the ground. He felt as though even getting to the place of ritual might have killed him.

  The Wasp magician cast his hood back. With it up, he had seemed forbidding and dangerous; now he looked only pale and worried. He cast a glance at Xaraea, but she was standing by the stair-mouth, locked up with her own demons. Haltingly, Tegrec knelt down beside Achaeos.

  ‘Second thoughts?’ the Moth asked him.

  ‘No,’ said Tegrec firmly. Raeka put a hand on his shoulder, and he reached back to grip it, a familiarity normally unforgivable under imperial law.

  ‘We will be striking your own people,’ Achaeos reminded him.

  ‘The technical term is “smite”,’ said Tegrec, mustering a smile from somewhere, ‘and I don’t know if they ever were my people.’ He glanced back at the girl, and Achaeos noticed his hand tighten on hers. ‘You can’t imagine… really, you can’t imagine how it is to grow up so different from the others, and to have to hide it. If I’d been poor, I’d undoubtedly have died… only having servants, slaves, being of good family, that’s all that saved me. Can you imagine living in a house where you sometimes can’t even open the doors: you just fumble at the catches and the handles, and curse and weep, and you just can’t see what it is that everyone else takes for granted. And it’s more than that – you can’t read their maps properly. You can’t understand their accounts. I’ve faked a life for thirty years, and all that time I’ve been living off mere scraps: rags of knowledge, learning stolen from old ruins, from the Commonweal, from the Grasshopper-kinden and other Inapt slaves, and all gathered in secrecy because, of course, I could never let anyone know’ – another backward glance – ‘except one. It started with the doors, you know. I bought her simply to have someone to open the doors for me. Everyone thought I was being very pretentious. I let them think that. A reputation for eccentricity was easier to live with.’

  Achaeos digested all of this, knowing that Tegrec was only divulging so much because he was nervous about what was yet to come. We
are both here solely because the Skryres wish to use us.

  The Wasp must have seen something in his expression because he nodded and continued, ‘We’re both outcasts, really. The mad thing is, when this is done, and assuming any of us survive it, I’ll stay here but they’ll make you leave, won’t they?’

  ‘I have no wish to stay,’ Achaeos replied flatly. ‘I came because I needed their medicine. I stayed because they are my people and, despite it all, I’ll fight for them. But when this is done, my home is elsewhere.’

  Tegrec stood up again, and Achaeos heard the shuffle of sandals on stone as other robed figures came up into the red-tinged air. He numbered a score of them at least, before he stopped counting. They have called everyone they can, he realized. All the most skilled ritualists of Tharn had been dragged up that same winding stair. There were at least a dozen Skryres, and there were other Moth-kinden who had never sought that position of power and responsibility: they were scholars, philosophers, skilled and private magicians. Here they all were, now, men and women all two decades older than Achaeos at least, and none looking confident or comfortable. In between them were others who had, like Tegrec, found a place here by virtue of their magic: there were Mantis-kinden and Spider-kinden side by side, a Grasshopper, two Commonweal Dragonflies, even a tiny, silver-haired old Fly-kinden woman who leant on a stick and looked as drained by the climb as Achaeos himself felt. Slowly, and without being directed, they formed themselves into two encircling rings, the Skryres inward, the rest standing behind them, closer to the edge of this little artificial plateau.

  Xaraea then came and helped Achaeos to his feet, not out of compassion but from necessity. Hobbling, he took his place in the inner circle standing opposite from Tegrec. Meanwhile Xaraea and the Wasp girl Raeka retreated to the stairwell.

  We are the eyes through which this ritual will perceive its prey, Achaeos knew. The work would be done, the power provided, by the others; he and Tegrec would merely focus it. Such rituals had often been done in the Days of Lore so many centuries before. But in living memory? No, and the power of the very last one performed within record had gone so disastrously wrong that, since then, nobody had even attempted what they were now about to do on the same scale. Of the meagre attempts that had been made, most had failed, some without issue and some with dire consequences. With magic so thin and so wan in the light of this new Apt world, nobody knew if what they were undertaking was even possible any more.

  Che… He wished now that he had said more before she had gone off to Myna with the wretched traitor Thalric. Standing here on the mountain-top, with the sky on fire behind him, he felt so many regrets.

  There was no preliminary signal. The ritual simply bloomed around them, burgeoning from the Skryres as they turned the force of their minds on the weave of the world and tried to scar their desires out upon it. Achaeos felt a ripple of shock run through the outer circle, the lesser magicians yoking themselves into that same great effort, so that the air around them grew hazy and shook with the power that they called up. He felt himself like a bow, taken up, strung and stretched, so that the arrow that they were jointly forming might be loosed. The strain, even right at the start, made him gasp. He became instantly, infinitely aware of the city of Tharn beneath him: of the Wasp-kinden intruders who did not belong, their soldiers and officers, the machines, their alien thoughts and minds.

  The Skryres stretched his mind further, until he choked on the pain, and still they tensioned him further. He hoped Tegrec was lasting better than he did, for it seemed that any moment he might snap and fly to pieces. Loose! His mind cried. For the sake of all, loose the shaft! But they did not, only pulled and pulled, the arrow yet unformed. The Skryres and their followers were pouring everything they had – all their living craft and strength – into this one single shot.

  And it was not enough.

  The greatest magicians in the world, and it was not enough. The circle of Skryres and their acolytes swayed and chanted and concentrated, forcing their will upon the very weave of existence, and it was still not enough. The age of great magics was long past and they did not have the strength. The world was no longer so malleable to their minds.

  Achaeos felt the air around him swim in and out of focus. His heart was like a hot stake being driven into his chest, flaring with pain at every beat, and the beats had become irregular, stuttering. He was held on his feet only by the collective will of those around him. Others had already fallen: the oldest of the Skryres was a crumpled heap across the circle; one of the Mantis-kinden had dropped to her knees.

  It is not working. That much was obvious. Less obvious was whether Achaeos would survive this failure, let alone a success. Opposite him, across the circle, Tegrec’s face glimmered under a sheen of sweat.

  I can’t… Achaeos could feel a tight coldness in his chest now, an unforgiving clenching that intensified with every breath.

  Che, he thought.

  There seemed to be a darkness blotting out the stars, but he knew this was in his vision only. The voice of one of the Skryres came to him, as if from far away.

  ‘We do not have the power for this! We must stop before we lose what we have!’

  Another voice cried, ‘Remember the Darakyon!’

  ‘No!’ It was the lead Skryre, the great force of whose mind was felt all about the circle. ‘We cannot give up now. We have this one chance only to drive the invader from our halls. Find more! Draw on every reserve you have! There can be no holding back. Drain your wells and give me all!’

  What reserves? What wells? Achaeos thought numbly, but around the circle he sensed the grudging obedience of the others. Not all, maybe, but still there were many who reached and found in themselves some hoarded cache of strength to cast into the ritual. Some had artefacts from the Days of Lore to which a shred of glamour still clung. Others had places to which they had forged a link, receptacles in which they had stored their faith long years ago. Some had siblings they could draw upon, or else family, students and servants. Achaeos saw the Wasp Tegrec reach back, and the hand of his slave girl was in his own without hesitation. He saw Raeka pale as she gave of herself to him, the strength and will leaching out of her.

  I cannot, Achaeos thought, but on the heels of that came, I cannot stand, cannot last, unless I do.

  He had called to her once before, before ever she had given herself to him. How much stronger now was the bond between them.

  Che! he cried, simultaneously in his mind and across the miles that lay between them. Che! Hear me! Please help me, Che!

  The Wasps had now mounted two catapults on the palace roof, but the Mynan resistance had merely found mustering points that lay outside their angle of fire. It had been a costly lesson.

  They had no time: that was what everyone knew and nobody said. The Wasps still held the palace despite a day of savage fighting. They had barricaded the doors over and over, and the resistance had stormed them with firebombs and crossbows, swords and claw-hammers, and torn the barricades down or burnt them up. The prized furniture of the palace, which Ulther had spent years collecting, was mostly smashed and charred now, and yet the Wasps held out. They met the Mynans at every door, with sword and spear and sting, and they did not give an inch of ground.

  Kymene knew that she was running out of chances now. Fly-kinden scouts were reporting hourly on the relief force on its way from Szar. If she had possession of the palace, then they might be able to hold off the reinforcements. Otherwise, as soon as they engaged the new force, the Wasps barricaded in the palace would sally out and take them from the rear.

  ‘We just have to keep hammering at them all night,’ Chyses advised her. She knew that already, though it did not seem acceptable, in this day and age, to have no options but sheer bloody-mindedness.

  ‘What about the new explosives?’ she asked.

  ‘Still being brewed,’ Chyses replied, and his tone made it clear that he knew they would be ready too late. ‘We’ve got another batch of the firebombs, though.


  Kymene scowled. Those were unreliable weapons, just bottles of anything flammable with rags as their fuses. They had caused carnage amongst the Wasps, but had taken their share of the Mynan attackers too. If the flames really caught in the palace doorway, they could lose hours of progress in which all the Wasps needed to do was retreat up to the balconies above and watch an impassable blaze raging away below.

  If we had our own flying troops… but all she had were a motley rabble of Fly-kinden who would scout for her, but not fight.

  ‘We’re losing too many fighters,’ she observed. Chyses merely nodded. He was someone who believed in the inevitability of casualties, an ingredient that made eventual victory all the sweeter. Kymene, however, could only think of her people and the price she was setting on their promised freedom.

  ‘Issue the firebombs,’ she instructed him. ‘Pass the word along. Twenty minutes and we’re going in again.’

  Che watched and said nothing. She was now wearing a chainmail hauberk of Mynan make, and so far she had stood anxiously at the edge of groups, even on the barricades that the Mynans had erected facing the palace, but had seldom been called upon to fight. She had simply watched the ghastly business unfold: the Mynans’ repeated, bloody charges at the palace; the Wasps’ equally costly defence. She had seen Kymene try everything, had even made her own suggestions. At her behest, they had made up a small catapult to pelt the palace door with grenades, but then they had run out of grenades and explosives, and the home-made firebombs were sufficiently volatile that not even Chyses would suggest delivering them by engine.

  This is where it ends, is it? But that seemed ridiculous. After all, Thalric had been right about the Mynan situation, so everything should be working as planned. Instead the Wasps stayed stubbornly in place despite the losses that the resistance had inflicted on them. They knew that all they had to do was sit tight and wait.

  Che.

 

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