Triumph Over Tragedy: an anthology for the victims of Hurricane Sandy

by R. T. Kaelin

  * *** *

  On the road to Shona, Sfayot keenly examined every slaver that passed back towards the Empire, seeking a head of white hair. Slaves aplenty there were, and a few dozen of his kinden, but none was his daughter.

  Shona had been torn up by the roots. War and marching feet had churned up the fields, the Dragonfly buildings gone and replaced by a veritable city of tents, shacks, and lean-to’s. A large portion of the Imperial Third was currently billeted there, either waiting to march ahead to the current fighting or taking a rest from the front.

  It was growing dark by the time that Sfayot arrived at the tent-town’s edge, but he had been able to hear Shona for miles: the sound of an army off duty and riotous with it. This was no simple soldiers’ camp, but a Consortium town where the Empire’s merchants set about the business of fleecing its soldiers of pay and booty. The guards who stopped him wore surly, miserable expressions of men on punishment detail and a gratis wine jug bought Sfayot more ready admittance than all the papers in the world.

  He saw three fights before he had gone thirty yards, all of them between Wasps. Taverns, gaming houses and brothels lined the makeshift, mud-rutted street he walked. Soldiers were everywhere, most having shed their armor, but still dangerous as Wasps were never unarmed. Their expressions were those of men determined to lose themselves in any vice rather than think about what tomorrow might bring.

  Sfayot saw that further progress with the cart was going to be impossible. He sold it and most of his remaining stock to a taverner for a price that told him just how much the soldiers were being overcharged. He retained as many jugs as he could safely string from his belt or hide in his pack for future bribes. He made for Shona’s center, adopting a careful, skulking walk that put him beyond the notice of the rowdy Wasps. Sfayot’s Roach-kinden people had developed a knack for hiding born of long years of spite from other races.

  He could see (for Roach eyes were good in the dark) that the tent-town’s center, was an open square, and that there was some manner of entertainment there. Vague, wild strains of music drifted to him, and he followed them around the edge of a crowd until he saw a set of Grasshopper-kinden minstrels plucking and piping as best they could, enduring the occasional kick and missile from the jostling crowd.

  The square boasted a series of raised wooden platforms, upon which women danced. They wore rags only, and he soon saw why. When any of them got too close to the crowd, hands reached for them to tear off whatever remained. They were Dragonfly-kinden, all, possessing all their people’s slender grace and elegance as they danced, weeping and shaking as they did. With the wide sky waiting above them, Sfayot could not understand why they did not simply manifest the wings their Art gave them: fly free and risk the Wasp stings.

  Then he spotted an unexpected rank of the audience: a dozen children sitting cross-legged, some crying, some stony-faced and blank eyed, watching their mothers or sisters humiliated for the pleasure of their captors. Too young to have learned the airborne Art, their presence held their relatives in captivity more surely than locks and chains. Sfayot felt ill and shouldered on past the spectacle.

  Other platforms boasted fighters, men and women hobbled and bound together, forced to fight each other or beasts. He watched a nine-foot dragonfly, its wings mere broken stubs, savagely slice into a pair of unarmed Grasshopper women with its razor mandibles. A tethered, raging Mantis-kinden, one eye out and the rest of her face a mask of blood, slaughtered slave after slave in a heedless, mindless frenzy, carving each up with the spines of her arms until an officer flew from the crowd and seared her with the bright fire of his sting. The expression on the officer’s face as he killed her was the only compassion Sfayot was to see that night.

  Eventually he could take no more. He found a Consortium counting house and took refuge in it, buying his tenure with wine. He sat there, shaking. His family had been right. This was no place for his kind. His hope of seeing his errant daughter again, or whatever the war had left of her, was slowly slipping away.

  Sfayot diced for pittance coins with a young Beetle-kinden clerk left minding the counting house coffers whilst his master revelled. The clerk’s name was Noles Mender, a stout, dark-skinned, bookish youth, obviously not long from home nor at ease with the Wasps. Sfayot let Noles win, making the clerk happy enough to answer a few questions.

  Did he know Sergeant Ban?

  No.

  Did he know about slavers?

  Yes. Shona was not fair game for slavers, he explained. Everyone here was for the army’s pleasure, not slavers’ profit. The army loathed the slavers, roughing them up and throwing them out if they tried anything. Slavers were being sent hotfoot to the front, where there was enough spare flesh to fill all the quotas of the Empire.

  Noles was heading there too, against his will, as a confidential messenger to more enterprising Consortium factors. He invited Sfayot to travel with him. He had an escort of soldiers, but was more than happy to have company able to maintain a civil conversation. Like most Beetles, he had no difficulty with Sfayot’s kinden. Beetles in the Empire tended to judge a man on his moment-to-moment usefulness, not his race.

  * *** *

  Noles travelled by mule while Sfayot and the half-dozen soldiers walked on foot. The escort obviously disliked Noles almost as much as they disliked Sfayot, but the bonds of rank held them: Noles was, youth notwithstanding, a sergeant, and despite provocation, they took no action against him. Sfayot was willing to bet that matters would have been different if Noles had been carrying much of value.

  Noles was explaining how the fighting had been close to here for some while now. A Dragonfly prince had amassed a large army and several inconclusive engagements, all quite bloody, had followed. They were probably fighting even now, Noles opined, in the airy tones of one who considers himself a military expert. The battlefield they found two days later seemed to prove him right. The smell got to them before they saw it. Scouts—Fly- and Wasp-kinden both—started approaching them, carefully pouring over Noles and Sfayot’s papers. After being waved on, Sfayot’s group came out of a stand of trees and saw where the Dragonfly general had made his stand.

  It seemed most of the battle had been within a wood, but the fighting had spilled out across several acres of low, rolling fields. Sfayot was no military man, but he suspected that such a man would have been able to read the battle’s history in the dispositions of the dead. Most of the Imperial corpses had been claimed by now, taken off for identification, recording, and cremation.

  The Commonweal dead had been left, however, to rot in the sun. Drifts of peasant levy lay like snow, like earthworks, in a welter of broken spears and staves. Mounds of Grasshopper- and Dragonfly-kinden, sent off to war with nothing but the clothes on their back and a knife tied to a broom-shaft, lay five or ten deep. They were sting-burned, stuck with crossbow bolts, impaled on spears, hacked by swords, broken by artillery, crushed beneath the tracks of war-automotives, in their hundreds, in their many hundreds. Here and there, the dead wore the pearlescent sheen of Dragonfly-crafted armor: hard chitin and harder steel layered together into a surface that would turn a blade or a sting-bolt with equal fortitude. Here they lay, each little knot of dead a noble’s retinue, their mail broken, their long-hafted swords, bows, and spears awash with blood. Noles Mender had gone quiet and stared straight ahead with his lips pressed together, but Sfayot could not drag his ravaged gaze away.

  The broken, husk-like bodies of insects—saddled dragonflies with shattered wings, the curled bodies of wasps riddled with arrow-shafts, fighting mantids with spread limbs, their gorgeous, glittering eyes caved in—littered the field. In the meadow’s center, a burnt-out automotive smoldered. A small team of engineers, faces swathed with scarves against the reek, labored over it, trying to salvage anything of value. And everywhere there were the flies: the finger-long, torpid black flies that coated the dead like tar and arose as Noles’ party passed, in glutted, blood-addled clouds.

  Once they passed the battle
field, they found the army camp where Noles’ contact was. The Beetle appeared anxious to deliver his message and be gone, and the soldiers seemed likewise keen to return to the delights of Shona. Sfayot bid them farewell and took his last few jugs of wine to see what they might buy.

  He had expected fierce celebration, Shona in miniature, but there was none. The battle was too recent; too many were in no fit state to cheer. He guessed that much of the army must be off routing the remaining Commonweal forces, for on half the tents in the camp were occupied, crammed with the Imperial wounded. Battlefield surgeons, Wasp men with lined faces and steady hands, worked their way through the injured with fatalistic patience. Elsewhere were tents of the Mercy’s Daughters, caring for those that the surgeons had not reached yet, or had given up on. Their faces, as they went from pallet to pallet, were calm and fixed, their voices low. Around them, the wounded cried out, or begged, wept, slept or died.

  Sfayot spilled time and wine finding someone who might know what he wanted. In the end, he found a half-dozen Thorn Bug-kinden Auxillians at the back of a Daughters’ tent. They were engineers, he understood, and from the shiny burns and scars, they had caught the rough end of their trade. He had the impression that the greater part of their company was dead. They were hateful, hideous, spiky creatures, crook-backed and hook-nosed, and the Empire regarded them with as little love as it did Sfayot’s own people. He produced for them his last jug of wine, though, and they passed it around in solemn silence, quietly enjoying the taste of a distant, distant home, that briar-riddled place that the Empire ruled only loosely, but tightly enough to conscript luckless men such as them.

  Two of them knew Sergeant Ban. The sergeant had a reputation as a gambling man, but not insofar as it extended to paying debts owed to lesser kinden.

  Had he been through here?

  Yes, twice.

  “Twice?” Sfayot frowned.

  “Once out, once back, with a full string of Dragonfly-kinden slaves. Good ones too, all decent looking women.” A Thorn Bug leer has no equal.

  “All Dragonfly-kinden?” Sfayot pressed, dismayed that he had managed to miss Ban entirely. “There was one, perhaps, a woman of my kinden? White hair.”

  They shook their malformed heads. They had a good look at those women, yes they had. They would remember if one of them had been something as lowly as a Roach. Dragonfly princesses, the lot of them, all fit to fetch a good price back in the Empire.

  “More than any Roach-kinden, of course,” Sfayot said softly.

  Of course, they agreed, almost laughing at the thought, the last dregs of the jug making their rounds. Who would buy Roach-flesh when that beautiful golden Dragonfly skin was so cheap these days?

  And where was this place that all the slaves were going?

  They weren’t sure, but they knew which road the slavers always took.

  Sfayot spent much of the night in thought, and by dawn, he thought he understood, for all the bitter taste it left in his mouth. Ban had a quota, and no doubt the Slave Corps set limits on how many charges any given slaver could mind. Sfayot’s daughter, stolen from him on a brutal whim in Nalfers, had been held up to the light and judged unworthy. Ban had cast her off in favor of the extra coin a Dragonfly woman might earn.

  She might be dead, therefore. She might have been used and cast off, throat slit, into a trench. Or she might be alive, having fallen into that great melting pot of unclaimed slaves of which he was hearing. He could only hope it was the latter. He set off that morning with little coin in his pocket after giving away most of his stock. He sensed Malic’s papers would not hold much weight this far out. A lone Roach-kinden had no legitimate business in these places. If caught, he would most likely be executed as a spy.

  He saw more signs of war, on the road, but he felt as though his sensibilities had begun to erode under the relentless storm of trauma. Dead men and women, dead children, dead animals, his eyes slid off them. He had no more room for horror. Or so he thought. Then found where the slaves, the myriad captives of war, were going, and discovered that he did indeed have a little room left.

  The Wasps had built a vast honeycomb cage, eight-score cells at least, all wooden-slatted walls with a hatch at the top. There had been a forest here, before, but it had been hacked back for half a mile in all directions, the felled wood going towards to this abomination.

  There were plenty of Wasps here, some arriving and departing with strings of slaves, while others were plainly the custodians of the place. All wore the tunics and full helms of the Slave Corps and were either stalking about the perimeter of the thing they had built or walking atop it, looking down on their massed charges. There was not a regular soldier, Consortium factor, clerk, or artificer to be seen. Sfayot waited until twilight and crept closer, trying to find a vantage to see into the wooden cells.

  The sheer size of the construction awed him. They had built cell upon cell, each one borrowing a wall from the last as more slaves had come, their labor as mindless and instinctive as that of their insect namesakes. Each cell appeared only large enough to hold four prisoners yet Sfayot guessed that none had fewer than eight and many had more. The stench put the battlefield to shame, a sour, stomach-clutching stink of sweat and excrement, fear and despair. They were thin, starved from lack of food or fever. Many were dead and still their remains endured because the slavers were too busy bringing more people in to be bothered with removing the corpses.

  The slavers had gone beyond all military practice and business sense. In their haste to acquire and own they had built something too large to manage, even with so many of them. They had lost control, not to their prisoners, but to entropy.

  Sfayot was sure that he could not simply walk up and offer the slavers money for a Roach girl. They would likely throw him in one of those cells as well. No papers, promises, or appeals would move them. He would have to go about this a more direct way.

  Sfayot waited until it grew properly dark, and then crept forward. The slavers had set a watch, but it was a desultory one. They were expecting no retribution. The war-front had moved on.

  He reached the outside edge of the pens, peering in and seeing Dragonfly-kinden bundled together, leaning on one another, without enough room to lie or even sit properly. Some slept, some just stared. None saw him. With creeping care, Sfayot ascended, using his Art to scale the wooden wall until he was atop the pens. The stench assailed him anew here, rising up from below almost as a solid thing. Methodically, he began to search.

  Sometimes there were slavers up there with him, landing in a shimmer of wings to give the prisoners a look over. At these times, he crouched low and called on his Art to hide him from their view. In truth, they were so careless in their examinations that he barely needed it.

  He searched and searched, as the hours of the night dragged away. Even with his good eyes it was hard, peering between the slats and trying to see how many were in there, who lay atop who, what kinden they were. Toward the center was a knot of a dozen cells whose occupants were all dead. Sfayot grew desperate. He began to move faster, glancing in at each hatch for a glimpse of white hair.

  A voice hailed him softly and he froze, unsure from where it had come. When it spoke again, he realized it came from below. A Dragonfly man was looking up at him from out of a tangle of his fellows.

  “They tell me that Roach-kinden get everywhere,” said the man, sounding quietly amused despite everything. “Now I see it’s true.”

  “Please be quiet,” murmured Sfayot, horribly aware of all the Wasp slavers, of how close they all were.

  “What are you scavenging after?” the Dragonfly asked. His voice was cultured, elegant, suited for polite conversation over music. He was around Sfayot’s own age, the Roach saw. The others in his cell were awake now, eyes glinting in the dark.

  “My daughter,” Sfayot said hoarsely. “They took my daughter.” He realized how pathetic his plea must sound, to those locked away in cells.

  “Mine too,” the Dragonfly told him. “
Although she is out of this place at least. It seems strange to say that the life of a slave in the Empire may be the best she could have hoped from, having come here.”

  He sounded infinitely calm. Sfayot wondered if he was mad.

  Then the Dragonfly said, “I know you, I think.”

  In the dark, Sfayot could not have placed the man for any money, but Dragonfly eyes were always keen. He just crouched there above while the prisoner studied him, and at last decided, “Yes. I remember, you were a thief, I think. A vagrant and a thief. Like all your kind. You were brought before me. I sentenced you to work in the fields, but your family rescued you. It was a long time ago now, but I remember.”

  Sfayot felt like weeping, clutching at the slats with crooked fingers. Now? he asked the heedless world. This man, now? In truth, he had no idea whether it was true. It could have been some other Roach. It was a common sequence of events.

  “I had thought we were all from the battle, or from the villages hereabouts,” the Dragonfly said abstractly. “Do we have a Roach-kinden girl among us?” He did not raise his voice, but Sfayot numbly heard the word being passed back and forth between those who were still awake until at last, some reply was passed back for the Dragonfly informed Sfayot, “five cells away, in the direction I am pointing, is a Roach-kinden girl. May I take it that you intend to remove her from here?”

  For a mad moment Sfayot thought the man, in this reeking, hideous place, was objecting to sharing captivity with a Roach. The Dragonfly’s face was sublimely serious, though.

  “I shall try.”

  “You have the means to get her out?”

  Padlocks secured the hatches, but the fittings themselves were wood. “I do,” Sfayot said. “But it will take time.” He was frowning. “What do you intend?”

  “Tell me,” said the Dragonfly nobleman. “Were you really a thief, when I tried you?”