Empire in Black and Gold sota-1

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Eventually he could take no more. He found a Consortium counting house and took refuge in it, buying his tenure with wine. He was shaking, he found. His family had been right. He was losing all hope of seeing his errant daughter again, or whatever the war had left of her.

  The clerk left minding the coffers, whilst his master revelled, was a young Beetle-kinden man named Noles Mender, obviously not long away from home, and not at ease with the Wasps. He and Sfayot diced for pittance coins, which game Sfayot let him win, and by then Noles was 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 the slavers’ profit. The army loathed the slavers, and would rough them up and throw 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, quite against his will, as a confidential messenger to more enterprising Consortium factors. He would have an escort of soldiers, but he would be more than happy to have any company that was able to maintain an educated conversation. He was a stout, dark, bookish youth, and it was plain that military life did not suit him. Like a lot of Beetles he couldn’t care less about Sfayot’s kinden, for Beetles in the Empire tended to judge a man on his moment-to-moment usefulness, not merely on his race.

  Noles travelled by mule, with Sfayot and the half-dozen soldiers on foot. The front was not far, he said, and he’d heard that there was some central depot that slaves, and slavers, were being sent to, but he wasn’t sure where it was. When they reached his destination he would surely be able to find out. The escort obviously disliked Noles almost as much as they disliked Sfayot, but the bonds of rank still 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 anything of value.

  Noles was explaining how the fighting had been close to here for some while, as some Dragonfly prince or other had amassed a big army, and there had been several inconclusive engagements, all quite bloody. Probably they were fighting even now, Noles opined, in the airy tones of one who considered himself a military expert.

  He might well have been exactly right. Certainly the battlefield they found two days later looked to be only about two days old.

  The smell got to them before they saw it, and then they started being approached by scouts, Fly- and Wasp-kinden both, all of whom pored carefully over Noles’s papers, and Sfayot’s. Then they emerged from a stand of trees and saw where the Dragonfly general had made his stand.

  The battle had been partly within a wood, and that part was mercifully hidden, but it had spilled out across several acres of low, rolling fields, although there was little enough uncovered ground to be seen now. Sfayot was no military man but he suspected that, if he had been, he would have been able to read the history of that battle simply in the dispositions of the dead. True, most of the Imperial dead had been claimed by now, taken off for identification, recording and cremation. The Commonweal dead had been left behind, probably because there were neither hands nor will enough in the victorious army to do otherwise. Drifts of peasant levy lay like snow, like earthworks, in a welter of broken spears and staves. Mounds of Grass-hopper-kinden, of Dragonfly-kinden, who had been sent off to war with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a knife tied to a broom shaft, lay five or ten deep, lay in their scores where the Wasps had halted them. They were sting-burned, stuck with crossbow bolts, impaled on spears, hacked by swords, broken by artillery, crushed beneath the tracks of armoured war-automotives, in their hundreds, in their many hundreds. Here and there the dead wore glittering armour, the pearlescent sheen of Dragonfly-crafted mail, hard chitin and harder steel layered together into a surface that would turn a blade or a sting-bolt with equal fortitude. Here they all lay, each little knot of dead a noble’s retinue, their mail broken, their long-hafted swords and bows and spears all awash with blood, where they had been plucked from the sky or made their last stand over the body of their fallen lord. Scavengers, the lowest camp-slaves and the Auxillians, picked over them for anything of value, and their expressions were of such hardened sobriety that it seemed they were performing some funereal duty rather than seeking their own profit.

  Noles Mender had gone quiet, was staring straight ahead with his lips pressed tightly together, but Sfayot could not drag his ravaged gaze away. He saw face after face, the men and women of the Commonweal, each locked in a final expression of fear, shock, pain or grief. He saw Mantis-kinden and Dragonfly swordsmen lying dead, the stained earth about them speaking all that needed to be said about their last moments. He saw 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, their killing claws broken. In the field’s centre a burnt-out automotive smouldered still. A small team of engineers, faces swathed with scarves against the reek, laboured over it, trying to salvage anything of value. And everywhere there were the flies: finger-long, torpid black flies, that coated the dead like tar and arose, as Noles’s party passed, in glutted, blood-addled clouds.

  Once they had passed through the battlefield, they found the army camp, where Noles’s contact was. The Beetle was obviously anxious to deliver his message and be gone, and the soldiers were 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, and too many men were in no fit state to cheer. He guessed that much of the army must be off routing the remaining Commonweal forces, for fully half the tents in that camp were crammed with the Imperial wounded. Battlefield surgeons, Wasp men with lined faces and steady hands, were working their way through them 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. The Daughters were not part of the army, were not officially even tolerated by the Empire, but any general that turned them away would lose the love of his men. These women, Wasp women and women of a dozen other kinden, were often the last sight and comfort that a wounded soldier could hope for. 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 a lot of 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 one of the Daughters’ tents. They were engineers, he understood, and from the look of their 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. For them it was a taste of distant, distant home, that briar-riddled place that the Empire ruled only loosely, but tightly enough to conscript luckless men such as them. Judging from their wounds, at least half would likely never return there.

  Two of them said they knew Sergeant Ban, in no uncertain terms. The sergeant was a gambling man, but not insofar as it extended to paying debts owed to lesser kinden. Sfayot guessed that the man had been gaming with the Thorn Bugs because nobody else would take his marker. They knew him, yes. 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 girl of my ki
nden. White hair.’

  They shook their malformed heads. They had got 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.

  ‘A higher price 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, to where all the slaves were going? They weren’t sure, but they knew which road the slavers took, and it could only lead to their destination.

  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. She had been cast off in favour of the extra coin that a Dragonfly woman might buy.

  She might be dead, therefore. She might have been used and cast off, throat slit, into a trench, and not another thought on the part of whatever Wasp slaver or soldier had done it. Or she might have fallen into that great melting pot of unclaimed slaves he was hearing of, and might still be there. Having come this far, what choice did he have?

  He set off that morning. He had some coin in his pocket, little enough after giving away most of his stock. His wine was all gone, and he sensed that Malic’s papers would not carry much weight this far out. A lone Roach-kinden had no legitimate business in these places, so he would most likely be executed as a spy if they caught him.

  He saw more signs of war on the road, but he felt as though his sensibilities had begun to erode under the relentless visions of trauma. Dead men and women, dead children, dead animals, his eyes slid off them quickly now. He had no more room for horror. Or so he thought.

  For he found it. He found where the slaves, these myriad captives of war, were going, and he discovered that there was a little room left, after all, for a kind of horror that a connoisseur might savour as Ferro had savoured his wine.

  The Wasps had built a cage, and the cage was like a honeycomb, and the honeycomb was vast, eight-score cells at least, all wooden-slatted walls and a hatch at the top of each. There had been woodland here before, but it had been hacked back for half a mile in all directions, the felled wood contributing to this abomination.

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

  The sheer size of the construction awed him. They had built cells, and then built more and more, each one borrowing a wall from the last and, as more slaves had come, they had built and built, their labour becoming as mindless and instinctive as that of their insect namesakes. The cells looked to be designed each for perhaps four prisoners, but Sfayot guessed that none held fewer than eight, and many had more. The stench put the battlefield to shame. For that was a smell of death, while this was life, the most wasted, pitiful dregs of life: a sour, stomach-clutching stink of sweat and excrement, fear and despair. The slaves went in, he saw, and if they were lucky some slaver came and took them out. Otherwise, they stayed and some were fed and others starved or grew fevered from wounds, and eventually, he saw, some of them had died, and still their remains remained, because the slavers were working all the time bringing more people in. Every cell he could peer into had at least one collapsed form that did not move.

  He saw one slaver take his helm off, just the once. The man’s face was hollow-cheeked, haunted. He looked away from the slave pens as though he would rather be a slave himself elsewhere than a master here. They had built something too large to manage, even with the force of slavers that was here. They had lost control, not to their prisoners but to entropy.

  He knew, was absolutely sure, that he could not simply walk up and offer them money for a Roach girl. They would take his money and throw him in one of those cells, because men who could do this would have no possible shred of civilization left in them. No papers or promises or appeals would move them. He would have to go about this in a more direct way.

  Sfayot waited until it grew properly dark, and then he crept forward. The slavers had set a watch, but it was a desultory one. They were expecting no Dragonfly retribution, and the warfront 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. He was Roach-kinden, though. His was a hardy people who could survive a great deal. 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, and looking for what, Sfayot wondered, because it surely could not have been to check on their well-being. 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 probably would not have needed it.

  He searched and searched, as the hours of the night dragged away. Even with his keen eyes it was hard, peering between the slats and trying to see how many were in there, who lay atop whom, what kinden they were. Towards the centre was a knot of around a dozen cells whose occupants were all dead, every one. Sfayot was growing 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 where it had come from. When it spoke again he realized that 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, despite everything, quietly amused. ‘Now I see it’s true.’

  ‘Please. .’ murmured Sfayot, horribly aware of all the Wasp slavers, of how close they all were.

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

  ‘Please, sir,’ Sfayot said hoarsely. ‘My daughter. They took my daughter.’ He realized how pathetic the plea would sound to people already 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 for after having come here.’ He sounded infinitely calm and Sfayot wondered if he was mad.

  ‘Please,’ he said again, but 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 good. 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 he spoke of. It was not so uncommon a sequence of events.

  ‘I had thought we were all taken from the battle, or else from the village
s hereabouts,’ the Dragonfly said abstractedly. ‘Do we have a Roach-kinden girl amongst 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 must have been passed back, for the Dragonfly informed Sfayot, ‘Five cells away, in the direction that 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?’

  The hatches were all secured with padlocks, something the slavers had apparently possessed in abundance, but the fittings themselves were wood. ‘I do,’ Sfayot said. ‘But it will take time.’ He was frowning. ‘What do you intend?’

  ‘Tell me,’ the Dragonfly — the Dragonfly nobleman, Sfayot assumed — enquired. ‘Were you really a thief, when I tried you?’