Salute the Dark

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Laetrimae, thought Tisamon. Since sending him here, that shadowy and tortured woman had not reappeared to him. Could she have abandoned him? It seemed entirely possible, for perhaps she had simply sought to punish him for his pride. Laetrimae, you brought me here, and it must have been for this purpose or none at all. If you wish me to accomplish anything, you must give me the means.

  The thought echoed in silence.

  I care not how. He felt, abruptly, the oppressive weight of stone above, the walls around them, the fact that he was a prisoner, of his own making. He had put himself in the hands of fate, and it had let him fall.

  ‘Take me back to my cell,’ he said quietly. Ult nodded, saying nothing. His old face was all understanding.

  It was on the way back to his cell that Tisamon saw the key that fate had provided, but instead of triumph it plunged him into the depths of black despair. He was still reeling from the sight as Ult got him to the door of his cell, but there he stopped, unwilling to step inside.

  ‘Ult …’

  ‘What is it?’ The Wasp trainer’s eyes narrowed, aware that something was wrong.

  ‘Your new prisoner …’

  ‘Which one? We’ve all kinds of new faces here.’

  ‘The Dragonfly woman,’ said Tisamon, feeling something hollow in his chest.

  ‘Oh, the mad one,’ Ult replied dismissively. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Let me see her,’ Tisamon requested, and his voice shook.

  Ult stared at him suspiciously. ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘I … know her. Let me see her,’ Tisamon insisted.

  ‘You know her? I don’t like this,’ the Wasp said. ‘How can you know her? Unless this is some kind of trick?’

  ‘No trick,’ Tisamon said. ‘It may not even be coincidence. She may have tracked me here, followed me. She’s good at that. I must speak with her.’ Suddenly he felt himself genuinely a prisoner, being denied this one request. Up until then the bars, the guards, the tasks, none of it had really confined him, because he had no wish to be elsewhere or do otherwise. Now he had a desire that only Ult could grant, and he was a prisoner.

  Ult let his breath out. ‘Not in the same cell, and not alone. I’ll be there too. You want to speak with her? You do it so I can hear. I’ll put you in the cell next to hers.’

  ‘That will suffice,’ stated Tisamon, as calmly as he could. Something was turning over in his stomach, though. I am being brought to trial, at last. It was his own doing, of course. He was the master of his fate, and his hand alone had piloted his life on to these rocks. Even now he could have ignored this grotesque turn of events, but he had already put his hand into the jaws of the machine, waiting for it to bite. Why spare himself now?

  She did not look up as they reached the cell beside hers and Ult unlatched the door. The current occupant, a scarred Ant-kinden man, was taken out. He stood tensely, looking down, like a mount being readied for riding. Tisamon stepped into his place, holding to the bars that separated this small piece of captivity from hers.

  They had taken her armour from her, and her blade, and instead they had dressed her in slave’s clothes just as they had with him. He wondered if she had submitted to it so readily. Why was she here?

  ‘Mienn,’ he began, and then again, ‘Felise Mienn.’

  From beyond the bars, in that part of this underground realm that was nominally free, Ult watched them both. It was a long time before the seated figure looked round but, even when she glanced back over her shoulder, she said nothing. She did not need to. Her expression was wounding enough.

  ‘How did they catch you?’ Tisamon asked her softly. He forced himself to meet her gaze, and knew that her imprisonment had been by her choice just as it had with him. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked her. ‘Why did you let them take you?’

  The slightest, bitterest smile touched her lips, and she said, ‘You think I came here after you?’

  He had been so ready to now take responsibility for her that it was as though he had suddenly stepped into thin air. He held on to the bars to keep on his feet. ‘But … why? If not that, why?’

  The smile was widening, like something tearing. ‘Why, Tisamon, because I had nowhere else to go. I cannot be with my own people. I have been told as much from the highest authority. I would have gone to the Lowlands, but … what have I left to me there?’ Her voice shook while uttering the last few words. Abruptly, she was on her feet and facing him. Her beauty, her grace of movement, stunned him as on the first time he saw her.

  ‘I know what I am,’ he said. ‘You cannot understand … I have betrayed so many …’

  She cut him off silently with just the slightest movement that, for a moment, he could not identify. Then he realized that her thumb-claws had flicked out, ready to fight.

  ‘Do you think I care about your history of self-indulgence?’ she asked him quietly. ‘Do you think anybody cares, apart from you? Do you expect me to understand? Yes, I know – you lay with some Spider-kinden, and then she died. How is that my burden to bear? How am I now the victim of your desires?’

  ‘I know what I am,’ he heard himself say, again.

  ‘You do not know what you are,’ she spat at him, approaching the bars that separated them. ‘You are beautiful, Tisamon, you are beautiful and deadly and bright, but you are cold and barbed like an arrow, that hurts most when it’s drawn out.’ She was so close that he could have touched her, had the bars suddenly lifted away.

  Oh I have done this badly, he reflected, and for just one moment the mists of his own pride lifted and he saw how he could have been quite happy, just in staying by her side. Atryssa would not have understood, but of course Atryssa, being dead, would have made no comment.

  ‘You wish to fight with me again,’ he said, and it fitted so neatly into the plan that he looked around for that other woman who had entangled herself inextricably with his life.

  She was there, like a writhing dark shadow in the corner of his cell. Laetrimae shuddered and hung there as though suspended on hooks: woman and mantis and savage thorns all intertwined. He glanced quickly at Felise, then at Ult, realizing that neither of them could see her. Laetrimae was present for his nightmares only and, when he looked back at her, she nodded once.

  ‘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 he
r, 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 with 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 wa
s 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.