Salute the Dark sota-4

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Totho went for him, fumbling for a knife at his belt. Drephos’ artificial arm, the bolt still jutting from its shoulder, was quicker. It took his wrist in a vice-grip that shot pain through Totho, forcing him back against the rail.

  ‘Why?’ Drephos asked him, but Totho had no answers for him. From the moment of Kaszaat’s arrival here tonight he had felt that his choices had been stripped from him, and the path he might otherwise have taken was closed.

  His left hand found the hammer in his tool belt and, despite the grinding pain in his other wrist, he pulled it out and struck. It was a small hammer, but he knew what he was doing now: striking not as a warrior but as an artificer. He hammered Drephos’ arm three times, three precise strokes, denting in the elbow and the shoulder and locking them in place. Drephos’ mottled face went pale at the last blow, and Totho knew that he had impacted something, some pin or plate, deep enough to reach the real man.

  He deliberately struck again at the same place, and Drephos hissed through bared teeth, sweat suddenly standing out on his forehead as the metal of his surrogate body cut deep into the flesh he had been born with. He fell to his knees, dragging Totho down by his rigid arm, and Totho saw the tears of pain in his eyes. His living hand clawed weakly at the ruined shoulder. He did not cry out. Either his pride or the pain was too great for that.

  Working carefully, left-handed, Totho removed the man’s thumb. Once he had prised the covering plate off, it was surprisingly easy, but of course Drephos would have had to maintain it single-handed and so it had been designed for that facility. That done, Totho could remove his bruised wrist from the other’s locked grasp.

  Looking down at the carnage he had wrought, his first thought was to go below to join Kaszaat, but there would be no last-second reconciliation there, no last fond words or exchange of vows. Big Greyv’s single blow had killed her as thoroughly as a catapult stone.

  Drephos let out a long, ragged breath, and Totho turned back to him. The master artificer gripped a pair of pliers awkwardly in one hand, with which he was trying to release something in his trapped shoulder. His fingers shook and his face was clenched into agonized concentration. When he saw Totho watching him, he stopped, the pliers scraping on metal. His eyes were bright through his agonized mask.

  ‘So what now?’ he asked. ‘Do I scream for the guards? And what do you do now, Totho?’ His voice was so quiet and clipped with pain that Totho had to hunch forwards to hear him.

  Totho looked beyond him past the gleaming metal of the engine towards the rebels’ lines. The city was waiting in the still air, waiting for what morning would bring. He knelt by Drephos, wondering how easy it would be to free the damaged arm, or whether Drephos could even survive the loss of this mechanical part of himself.

  ‘You’ve not so long left,’ Drephos said, his voice trembling despite all his self-possession. ‘Better make your decision soon.’

  ‘I have decided,’ Totho announced, standing up again. ‘And in a way, I think you would approve.’

  Towards morning, the Bee-kinden soldiers that had apprehended him brought him before their leader.

  ‘What’s this?’ Maczech demanded, sparing him only a brief glance. If she was now queen of the people of Szar, very little of her status showed. She wore a studded leather cuirass over worn, dusty garments, and she stood hunched over a table, poring over a map of the city with three of her officers. Totho could see the positions of the Wasps and the locals marked across it as solid or dotted lines.

  Time to redraw the map, he reflected.

  ‘He was approaching the barricades,’ Totho’s captor reported. ‘He stopped immediately when ordered. He also came unarmed.’

  She glanced at him again. She was young and, of course, reminded him of Kaszaat, just by her very race, the shape of her face and nut-brown skin. He had expected another Kymene, all fire and fierce leadership, but Maczech lacked that woman’s unbreachable resolve, and he could read in her face an agony of fear that she would lead her people astray. She had come to her throne suddenly, and been made her people’s war leader in the same moment, and she was afraid.

  She looked as though she had not slept in some time, and for a moment they just stared at one another dully.

  ‘A halfbreed,’ she noted. ‘What else are you?’ Before he could reply, she had looked him up and down. ‘Auxillian artificer,’ she identified. ‘But I don’t believe in defectors – not this close to a battle.’

  The slip was evident there, of course, although nobody else seemed to have noticed. Plenty of defectors before a battle, Totho thought, but not from the side that’s most likely to win.

  ‘What do you want?’ she continued. ‘You’ve a message? We will not accept terms that leave our city in chains.’ Her voice trembled slightly, but none of the surrounding Bee-kinden seemed to notice. She had their absolute faith, and it was torturing her.

  Totho felt a lump in his throat at that. She knows very well that they cannot hold against the Wasps, not forever. The time would come, in the normal course of this fight, when they would accept whatever terms were offered them. Totho guessed that Maczech herself would be dead by that point.

  ‘Your city is free,’ he said quietly.

  ‘And will remain so as long as we draw breath,’ she declared, turning away.

  ‘Your city is free,’ he repeated.

  Man by man, a silence fell on the Szaren’s little command-room. Maczech and her officers turned their heads, one by one, until they were all staring at him.

  ‘Explain yourself, halfbreed,’ she said.

  He felt himself start to shake, ever so slightly, at the thought of having to put it into words. ‘The Wasps are defeated. The Szaren garrison, I mean. Not the Empire, just those here.’

  Someone snorted in amusement, but Maczech’s face remained stern. ‘Some Rekef trick,’ she said slowly, ‘though I cannot see what it is supposed to achieve. Just waste our precious time, perhaps.’

  ‘Send a flier,’ Totho said. ‘Send a flier over the governor’s palace. High over, and he must not land.’

  ‘A trap,’ one of the officers decided.

  ‘For one scout?’ Maczech narrowed her eyes, trying to see past Totho’s face to the thoughts contained behind it. ‘Send one of the Fly-kinden. They see best in the dark.’

  ‘But-’

  ‘Please,’ she said, a calm word, without force, that silenced the man and sent him running to fetch a messenger.

  ‘I think you are mad,’ she told Totho. ‘Either a deceiver, or mad.’

  He nodded tiredly. ‘You may be right.’ Abruptly his legs buckled and he fell to his knees. Something inside him was building, a pressure that he could not release. He shuddered, feeling the bile rise within him.

  ‘Is he ill?’ someone asked, and someone else called out for a doctor.

  ‘There was a woman with us named Kaszaat,’ Totho said. ‘She was of your people. But she died.’ His words were almost too quiet for them to hear. ‘That is why I have done what I did.’ It was not true, of course, or not wholly true. Some of the reason that he had done it would make sense only to Drephos.

  ‘Get him some water, at least,’ Maczech ordered, and a moment later Totho found himself holding a clay cup. He sipped and it tasted stale, chemical. He shuddered again. Meanwhile, around him, aside from the two Bee-kinden guards watching him with axes in their hands, the war council proceeded. He put his face in his hands, waiting.

  Eventually the scout came back. Totho’s only fear had been that curiosity would tempt the Fly in to land, but she had kept to her orders, a middle-aged woman who barely reached past Maczech’s waist. On her return she looked unsteady, unsure of herself.

  ‘Report,’ Maczech instructed her, but the Fly had to swallow twice before she could say anything.

  ‘I saw… there are some Wasp soldiers leaving the city. I counted perhaps a few hundred, mostly in small groups.’ She glanced at Totho, and her eyes looked haunted.

  Maczech was frowning. ‘Wha
t is this?’ she asked.

  The Fly held up a hand. ‘Nothing else,’ she said, and then forced the words out of herself. ‘There was nothing else moving behind the Wasp lines.’

  ‘Well, they are asleep?’ started one of the officers, but the Fly broke in immediately.

  ‘I saw bodies. Bodies of sentries, of men stationed beside the artillery. Nothing else. There was a kind of… haze over the palace… a yellow haze.’

  ‘What is this?’ Maczech demanded again, but this time addressing Totho. The guards hauled him to his feet, and she saw something in his face that took her a step back. ‘What have you done?’ she whispered.

  ‘All gone,’ Totho replied. He thought of the effort, to haul those heavy kegs into the governor’s palace, until he had three of them stacked in an upper storeroom, six in another on the ground floor, four in the barracks itself. One of the guards had even offered to help him, but he had refused. It was trained artificer work, he had explained.

  I had to do it with my own hands. That way I can blame nobody else, not Kaszaat and certainly not Drephos.

  He felt a hand grip his chin, drag his face around until he was looking into Maczech’s eyes.

  ‘What has happened?’ she asked him. ‘Tell me clearly. Please.’

  ‘All the Wasps are gone,’ he said simply. ‘The whole garrison is dead. Except a few who must have been too far away from it.’ Her eyes still held him and he continued. ‘It was their own weapon, that they were going to use against you.’ So simple it had been, with those kegs, to rig explosive charges with a clockwork timer, and then creep out of the garrison again. Only small charges, ones you’d barely hear.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ one of the Bees said. ‘That means thousands of soldiers.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Totho, feeling the shakes return. ‘And auxillians, and servants and slaves, and beasts. But they’re all dead now. The city’s yours.’ He choked on the next thought before he could add, ‘Except for the palace and garrison quarters. I wouldn’t go there for at least a month. Maybe two months, just to be sure. And maybe you should draw your people away from your barricades, just in case. Put a few streets’ clear space between you and… it. It’s too heavy to drift far in the wind, but even so…’

  They were all staring at him now and he saw that they were beginning to believe him. With believing came not triumph but a kind of stunned horror.

  ‘We never wanted this,’ Maczech said hollowly, shaking her head. ‘We wanted our freedom back. Was that so wrong? We wanted to drive them away, so that we could live in our city in peace. How has this happened? What have you done?’

  The Bee-kinden were shuffling away from him, as though what he had become might be contagious somehow. They looked on him and saw an atrocity, a destroyer beyond their capacity to comprehend. An entire army dead in one night, with not a blow struck, not a battle-cry – just a small detonation and a slight yellowing of the air. Their expressions suggested that he, Totho of Collegium, had become an abomination.

  He could not help but agree with them.

  * * *

  Major Krellac considered his options, none of which appealed to him.

  He was a dutiful officer, who had never been considered anything other than dependable by his superiors. That was why they had given him the Myna relief force, where his orders would be straightforward, the tactical position simple. Colonel Gan had despatched him from Szar with strict instructions.

  The situation had changed, however. He was conscious now of being a man confronted with history, a man whose name, for better or worse, would be remembered.

  For worse seemed undeniably more likely, whatever course he chose.

  On the one hand he had his orders: they were to enter the city of Myna, relieve the besieged garrison and put down the rebellion. Implied in that was his triumphant return to Szar, where Colonel Gan and the rest of the higher command would be celebrating their own swiftly anticipated victory over the local insurgents. There was no ambiguity in Krellac’s situation insofar as his orders went.

  His scouts had just come back from Myna reporting that there was no garrison left to relieve. Krellac’s forces had been joined by almost half a thousand Wasp soldiers lucky enough to escape the city, and many of them were too badly shaken to even make proper report on the disposition of the enemy. Instead of catching the resistance in a pincer, he was presented with a battered but unified city. Colonel Gan had given him a siege train so, if necessary, he could pound down the city gates and fight the Mynans street to street, but that was not what his orders had detailed and he was unhappy about it.

  It was while he was digesting this unwelcome development that the messengers from Szar reached him. ‘Messengers’ was actually too grand a term for what they were, but he refused to think of them as refugees.

  The Szaren garrison was gone.

  ‘Gone?’ he had asked, and the survivors had said, ‘Yes, gone.’ And the more they divulged, the more Major Krellak had felt a creeping chill rise within him, because the Szaren garrison had not been defeated in battle, had not fallen to some sudden surprise attack of the Bee-kinden: it had just… died. There had been a kind of fog, and men had dropped dead even as they began to notice it. The men who had found their way to Krellac had been those on sentry duty or patrol, minding the new artillery or keeping watch on the rebels: the men furthest from the governor’s palace and the garrison. Nobody else had escaped. Nobody.

  Compared to that, the other news seemed nothing. Fly-kinden messengers had arrived at Myna, some mistakenly dropping into the city, but others realizing their mistake and diverting to find the nearest Wasp camp, which meant Krellac. They came from the provinces north-west of Myna: provinces that had become part of the Empire only after the Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal. They were sent to warn all standing forces that there was some manner of Dragonfly-kinden force massing beyond the borders, therefore after all this time it seemed that the Commonwealers were going to reopen the old wounds. Of course the Empire had a strong force stationed there, if for no other reason than because taking over further principalities of the Commonweal was constantly in the minds of some generals. But how would they fare now, with Myna and Szar in the hands of enemies, and their lines of supply severed?

  Everyone was now waiting for him to come to a decision. Some of his officers had advocated pressing on to Myna; others said that he should return to Szar as quickly as possible. Some even said he should press onwards to Maynes, closer to the Commonweal, to combine forces with the garrison there. The decision was Krellac’s alone.

  But he found he could not make it. He was a man who obeyed orders, and orders had suddenly abandoned him. He sent messengers to Capitas imploring instructions, and had his men set up camp, and then did nothing.

  Thirty

  Uctebri shifted in his seat, momentarily discomforted.

  Tisamon would do. He had proved to himself long before that Tisamon would be the perfect tool. Now he wondered whether the man might be too good, too fit for the purpose. That had not occurred to him before. He had seen the way that Tisamon had looked at Alvdan, and he was not surprised. What had shaken him was the way that Alvdan had stared back.

  He knows, Uctebri thought, followed by, He can’t know and then again, despite all logic, He knows. Not about the plot, of course. Not about Seda or Uctebri’s own perfidy, but about Tisamon. Alvdan knew that Tisamon intended to kill him.

  It was impossible, of course. The best of duellists, the most determined of killers, could not achieve it. Yet Uctebri had seen Alvdan flinch when the Mantis’ gaze was turned upon him.

  ‘Your Imperial Majesty,’ he murmured, leaning forwards.

  Alvdan did not return his gaze, but said, ‘That man, we do not like him.’

  General Maxin gave a short laugh from the other side of him. ‘Then you are in an ideal position, Majesty, since you can watch him die.’

  ‘We have ordered it,’ Alvdan agreed. ‘If he does not die fighting, we shall have him execut
ed.’

  Uctebri saw Maxin’s brow wrinkle at the bad form of that, but he shrugged and nodded.

  ‘As your Majesty decrees.’

  Alvdan’s mouth twitched. ‘Uctebri,’ he snapped, ‘slave.’

  ‘I am here, Majesty.’

  ‘It will be tonight as you have promised. I will accept no more delays.’

  So that is it, Uctebri realized, and berated himself for not understanding sooner. The promise of death in Tisamon’s eyes was a final reminder of mortality. Alvdan had given himself over now to the dream of sorcerous eternal life that Uctebri had held out before him. The ritual that Uctebri had promised him was the removal of all worries about an heir and the succession. Uctebri had indeed assured the Emperor that it would be realized tonight, on the anniversary of his ascension to the throne. He had even prepared a room for the promised moment, with eldritch markings on the floor, with candles and bells and crystals, and an altar, of course, for the sacrifice. All of it dressing, all invention, for the ritual would take place sooner than Alvdan had guessed, and to a very different end.

  Both Ucterbi’s pale hands were clutched about the Shadow Box, resting in his lap.

  The Mosquito-kinden glanced to his right. Chained to the floor and crouching like a pet was the Mantis’ halfbreed daughter, just in case Tisamon should, at the last moment, need some additional persuasion.

  He looked towards Seda, seated between himself and the Emperor, seeing her fidget distractedly. Her time, which would be his own time, had almost come. It now needed only the blood of an Emperor, and Uctebri knew exactly where to acquire that. With such blood on his hands, and therefore on hers, she would be his to control, and the great might of the Wasp Empire would be at his fingertips.

  He was still undecided as to which way to turn it. The Moth-kinden were due an extinction, since they had done their best to extinguish Uctebri’s people so long ago, but Uctebri rather thought that his first act as the power behind the throne would be to teach the naysayers of his own breed a lesson. He would root them out of their holes, drag them into the light and before the throne. He would then show them his creation, his puppet, the witch-queen Seda, and perhaps he would have some of them exsanguinated as in the old days. Yes, the Empire was ripe for the reintroduction of a few customs from the Days of Lore, and all the easier since these Wasps were such a guilelessly cruel and energetic breed.