Salute the Dark sota-4

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘I don’t have much, but I can pay-’

  Again he stopped her, his clawed hand raised. ‘I do remember you, girl.’

  ‘Good, then-’

  ‘You was the one the Wasps got – the one that Stenwold’s lot came over here to spring.’

  ‘Me and Salma, yes.’

  ‘I heard they put you to the question.’

  She could not avoid glancing at Thalric, who, after all, had been the man who put her on the rack, for all he had not, in the end, actually tortured her. ‘I… in a way.’

  Hokiak sighed heavily. ‘And now you want in to the resistance.’

  Che heard Thalric shift in his chair, tense all of a sudden. A moment later she, too, was aware that the sound of the room had changed. The boisterous pack of gamblers had fallen quiet. She heard chairs scraping back, and glanced at Thalric again.

  ‘Someone must have cheated at cards,’ she said weakly, trying to work out what was wrong.

  The gamblers were heading over. Che stood up hurriedly as she saw knives drawn. Only when they surrounded the table did she realize, so very late, that they were Hokiak’s men. She found herself with her hand only halfway to her sword-hilt, feeling foolish and off-balance, and completely blind to what was going on. Thalric was still seated, leaning back in his chair, but she knew him enough to see that he was coiled ready to move, whether to kick the table back in Hokiak’s face or to blast the nearest man with his Art.

  ‘What’s going on, Hokiak?’ she asked. ‘You…’ She felt her world shift beneath her. ‘You’ve gone over to the Wasps?’

  Hokiak laughed out loud at that, genuinely if not pleasantly. ‘I have, have I? You sit down again, girl. You listen to old Hokiak for a moment.’

  ‘Sit,’ hissed Thalric, and she did so without quite deciding to.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Hokiak wearily, ‘Sten’s little niece is all growed up, is she? She’s in town again and wants to keep up with her old friends in the resistance. She don’t even care that the Wasps are here, ready to slam her back in the machine room? No, she don’t.’ He chewed on his pipe-stem for a moment. ‘So what a feller gets to wonderin’ is just what the girl is doin’ here with a Wasp-kinden handler. Bit obvious, maybe? Not very subtle, but these ain’t subtle times. You I remember, him I don’t. More, you won’t be the first to come out of the machine room with a change of heart. I hear they can be right persuasive in there.’

  Che stared at him. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘He’s saying he thinks you’ve been turned,’ said Thalric, with a certain satisfaction. ‘He’s saying he doesn’t trust you.’

  ‘What? But I’m Stenwold’s niece-’

  ‘And old Sten himself would know that doesn’t carry much weight with me… Oh, I forgot, he don’t know you’re here.’

  Che looked from the Scorpion to his men. ‘But… what can I do to make you believe me?’

  Hokiak shrugged. ‘Don’t have to make me believe you. I ain’t no more than a simple pedlar. All that happens now is who you get peddled to.’

  ‘So we’re your stock-in-trade now, are we?’ Thalric asked him.

  Hokiak leered at him. ‘Man’s got to make a livin’.’

  Che sensed the Wasp about to move, and she said hurriedly, ‘So sell us to the resistance. That’s fine. Kymene will know me. Just let me speak to her.’

  ‘Che-’ Thalric started, but she shook her head and went on.

  ‘I’ll go unarmed. I don’t care. Look, I’m not working for the Wasps, and Thalric here isn’t either. He’s gone renegade.’

  Hokiak’s eyes narrowed. ‘Thalric? Ain’t the first time I heard that name.’

  Thalric cursed and kicked over the table.

  It was so without warning that he caught them, and Che, by surprise. The round surface of the table sprang up, toppling Hokiak backwards, still on his chair, slamming into two of the bravos and sending them stumbling. Thalric’s hand flared and the man closest to him was punched from his feet, to land heavily, his chest now a smoking ruin. The Wasp vaulted the tipped-over table with his wings coursing from his shoulders. Hokiak’s Fly-kinden flung a blade at him, but Thalric loosed his sting at the same time. The Fly ducked back, his aim going awry so that the hiltless blade skimmed Thalric’s scalp rather than taking him through the eye. Another man tried to get in the Wasp’s way and caught Thalric’s elbow in his face. The single leap had taken the Wasp halfway across the room.

  Che went for her sword, feeling horribly slow and clumsy. The Mynan closest to her got his blade out of the scabbard first and tried making a stab at her, but too close to make a good job of it. The tip scored into her leather artificer’s coat and she fell back, reaching and grabbing his baldric as she did so, pulling the man on top of her. His sword thudded into the floorboards instead and the blade snapped.

  Thalric did not wait for her, powering his way towards the door that would take him into the cluttered trading front of Hokiak’s Exchange. It opened before he reached it and he saw an old Spider there with a knife just clearing his belt. Thalric, with no time to scorch him, simply collided with him shoulder first, bowling him backwards with all the momentum his wings could give him. A moment later he was in the Exchange, and a moment after that he had vanished into the street.

  ‘Alive!’ Hokiak was shouting. ‘Take her alive, curse it!’

  Che threw off the half-stunned man atop her, but before she could try to escape he had grabbed her ankle, bringing her down again. She scrambled to her hands and knees, and at that moment Hokiak’s cane gave her a ringing smack across the side of the head. She cried out, falling sideways, and then Hokiak’s man was forcing her face into the floorboards, dragging her sword from its sheath and casting it away.

  ‘You traitor!’ she yelled, fighting furiously, but utterly ineffectually, to get free. The point of Hokiak’s cane came back down into her range of vision.

  ‘One of my men’s dead,’ she heard the Scorpion say. ‘A moment ago I had me a choice to make, whether to do what you wanted, or to sell you. Now I ain’t choosing. Your friend there’s just gone and forced my hand.’

  ‘He’s a renegade!’ Che shouted helplessly at his feet and the ferrule of his cane. ‘He thought you were going to turn him in.’

  ‘Sure, I bet,’ sneered Hokiak. ‘I know, girl, I know that Thalric is Rekef. I know that name well enough. More fool you for spillin’ it, but then I reckon you ain’t been in the trade long enough to get things right.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I only wanted to see Kymene.’

  ‘And you’re goin’ to,’ he assured her. ‘Gryllis, how are you feeling?’

  ‘I’ve seen better nights.’ The Spider clawed at the door-frame to pick himself up, one hand pressed to the back of his head.

  ‘Send a message to the Flag,’ Hokiak said. ‘Tell ’em we got a Wasp turncoat all packaged for them. Girl, you’re now goin’ to find there are worse things than an Empire machine room, believe you me.’

  * * *

  There had been the one event that Tynisa could not explain, and which had brought her to this point.

  At first news of her father Tisamon had remained scarce. He had not been hiding his trail so much as travelling so swiftly and surely as to leave none. At last, and after twice drawing blood in order to preserve herself, she had fallen in with some black marketeers. In a taverna on the Collegium riverside she had encounted an old halfbreed, Beetle and Ant-kinden mixed. Had he seen a Mantis-kinden man of just this description? As it happened he had, and in that very taproom, agreeing to take service with a package-shipper bound for Helleron.

  Helleron? It had made perfect sense, of course. Where had Tisamon gone previously, to forget his past? Nowhere but Helleron, where people seldom asked about such trivial comings and goings. She should have thought of that sooner.

  It just remained to get herself there and she decided to follow Tisamon’s own strategy. Despite the war, or because of it, there was a regular and shady trade between the occupied Be
etle city and its free sibling. Tynisa then remembered the city of Myna, and Hokiak, and how the old Scorpion had claimed that the Wasps themselves liked to keep a little of the black market going.

  She had therefore taken up with a Beetle-kinden smuggler by the name of Artelly Broadways, who ran a little airship catering for small and easily portable goods. He had himself and a Fly crewman on board, but he needed a couple of guards too, and Tynisa fought off two other hopefuls for the job without much effort.

  The problem came when they were still two days from Helleron, blown east by inclement weather and with the balloon and gondola seeming equally rickety. Tynisa had realized by then that Broadways was a man whose confidence and optimism outstripped his ability, and that he was not nearly as experienced in the trade as he constantly assured her he was.

  Shortly after that the Wasps caught them. It was sudden enough. A fixed-wing had come from out of the sun and danced contemptuously past their bows, throwing Broadways into utter confusion. A moment later there had been Wasp soldiers in the air all around them, darting past the stays to land, crouching with swords drawn, on the deck. Broadways’ one piece of wisdom had been to offer no resistance at all.

  They had forced him to bring the airship down, to find more Wasps waiting there. In total there were barely a dozen of them, patrolling the Silk Road from Tark to Helleron with their flying machine in the air and a big docile spider, laden with packs and water bottles, on the ground. Tynisa had instantly started considering her options. She could probably not manage to kill them all, but she could eliminate enough to get away, but then they could still fly after her and shoot at her, and there was also the fixed-wing somewhere nearby to take into her equations.

  Broadways had no convincing explanation for them, but the leader of the patrol looked sufficiently venal to Tynisa’s eyes. She virtually had to kick the Beetle-kinden before he took the hint and led the man aside, offering to make a contribution to the Emperor’s war chest. Thankfully, the goods he was carrying included machine-cut gems from Collegium’s workshops, which served to smooth the way well enough.

  It was then that the inexplicable happened, for, looking at the leader of the Wasp patrol, she heard words inside her head. The voice that spoke them was not a voice as she recognized it. It was composed of whispering and rustling and the darkness between trees, all forced through the gaps of human words, and it said to her, Go with him.

  She started so suddenly that the Wasp officer stared at her, perhaps thinking she was about to try something violent.

  ‘What?’ he asked of her. ‘She’s your crew is she, or a passenger?’

  ‘Crew. Guard,’ explained Broadways.

  ‘Excuse me, Sergeant,’ Tynisa said. ‘I was just wondering…’

  ‘Wondering what?’ He looked her up and down, but the expected smile did not come. He had a broad-jawed, solid face that did not show his feelings much.

  ‘What’s work like in the Empire?’

  The sergeant looked from her to Broadways. ‘Fed up with this fellow’s company are you? Can’t say I blame you.’

  ‘I’m sick of working for clowns,’ she said. ‘You people always seem to have it worked out.’ She ignored Broadways’ squawk of protest. ‘Is there anyone I could speak to, back where you’re based, or is it a closed shop?’

  At that he did smile, if only slightly. ‘You ever heard of the Auxillians? They come in all shapes and kinden.’ She could not tell his thoughts but guessed that he was considering the war with the Lowlands, the possibility of a useful spy or agent. So let him think that. ‘I can take you to the camp at Asta, if you want,’ he continued. ‘I’ll fit you up with someone, I’m sure, if they reckon you’re useful.’

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘would be very acceptable.’

  She did not bid farewell to the scandalized Broadways, only watched his patchwork airship sail on towards Helleron. Helleron, where she too was supposed to be going – so why was she not? Because of a voice, just a voice in her head, which had said, ‘Go with him.’

  She wondered if Felise Mienn heard voices in her head, or whether the Dragonfly woman’s madness was of a different sort.

  Still, Tynisa was committed now. The Wasp patrol trekked north and east with their patient spider pack-beast, with the fixed-wing circling sometimes overhead. She tried to recall her memories of Asta: a midnight reconnaissance with Tisamon while in search of Che. It was little enough. She was alone now, living on her wits and on three words spoken to her by a voice she did not know.

  She gave them two days before she broached the subject. In that time the Wasps had got used to her. They did not include her, their talk and occasional laughter being about people and rituals she did not recognize, but she proved that she could keep pace with them, and that went a little way towards being accepted.

  ‘Sergeant,’ she finally said, those two days in, ‘I don’t suppose you see much in the way of Mantis-kinden this far east.’

  The look he gave her sent a thrill through her because, however flat his features, something moved there. Voice or no voice, she was not just casting herself into the void.

  ‘Strange question, that,’ he said.

  ‘There’s a particular man,’ she explained. ‘I’ve been tracking him for a while. Just asking out of interest, you understand.’

  ‘I understand your kinden and theirs don’t get on,’ he remarked. ‘Odd thing is, yes, we’ve got one at Asta right now.’

  At Asta? What is he doing at Asta? But of course it need not be Tisamon. There was no reason at all for it to be Tisamon. No reason except the voice…

  ‘Maybe I’ll take a look at him when I’m there.’

  ‘You’re likely to enjoy it,’ he said, although he did not clarify.

  Asta was larger than she remembered it, at least twice the size now. There were more and more of the same hastily constructed barracks and storehouses, and a field of tents bivouacked beyond. Tynisa’s party arrived around noon, and it seemed to her that not one of the Wasp-kinden she could see kept still. There were troops of soldiers marching or flying in, unpacking their kit, setting up tents or taking them down, packing up, moving out north or west or south. There were flying machines, automotives, pack animals. There were Auxillians of half a dozen kinden amidst the Wasps. Entire armies were on the move.

  The patrol she was with did not slow for any of it, and so she was plunged into the hurly-burly of the Imperial Army like a stone thrown into unruly waters. For a moment they were shoulder to shoulder with other Wasps and their slaves, thronging back and forth, and she felt that she was drowning in the sheer scale of the Empire, of which this was just an outlying camp, just a small drop in their ocean.

  The sergeant turned to her. ‘You stay here while I report. I’ll come out soon enough, or someone else will.’ The look he gave her was calculating, narrow-eyed, still weighing up her usefulness.

  He left her then, pushing his way through the throng, and his men quickly dispersed, seeking food, drink, dice games and whores. With no option left to her, she waited. After a while of being jostled, she found a nearby automotive wagon and climbed up the side of it, gaining purchase on the smooth wood and metal by her Art, until she could sit aloft, gaining some illusion of being apart from it all. Even then, soldiers were constantly buzzing overhead, close enough for her to reach out and grab. The air was full of Wasps and Flies, and other kinden in the Empire’s colours.

  It was more than an hour before someone came for her, and then it was not the same sergeant but a narrow-faced Wasp, middle-aged and with rank bars that she identified as a major’s, alighting atop the wagon and looking down on her. He put her in mind of the first Wasp she had spoken to, and deceived: Captain Halrad aboard the Sky Without, whom Totho had killed for her.

  ‘You want to make yourself useful, do you?’ he asked flatly. ‘What are you? Spiderlands spy, perhaps?’

  She made herself smile at him easily. ‘Would I tell you if I was? Besides, since when was the Empire at war with
the Spiderlands?’

  ‘I expect news of that hourly,’ he said, regarding her doubtfully. ‘So, what are you, precisely?’

  ‘A mercenary,’ she replied.

  ‘An honest one, then?’

  ‘Just so.’ She leant back. ‘So, Major, can you think of any use for me?’

  ‘Don’t play games,’ he told her, but she could see a glint there, which showed she had reached some vanity within him. ‘I could have you arrested.’

  ‘Yes, but what would you gain?’

  ‘You tell me. What’s your name, first off?’

  ‘Atryssa.’ She had not meant it, but the name came out without a thought: her mother’s name. Surely it would not have been begrudged, if permission could have been asked for. ‘Your sergeant told me you have a Mantis here.’

  ‘And he told me you’re looking for one. Some kind of vengeance, is it?’

  She read his tone carefully. ‘Not that can’t be put off. Just a dangerous man I’d rather keep track of.’

  ‘Or he was hunting you, was he?’ he smiled then. ‘You don’t think much of us Wasp-kinden, I’ll wager. You Spiders, you look down on all sorts. When did you last catch a Mantis alive, though, in your webs?’

  ‘You have him prisoner?’ Her own anxiety bled through, even though she reminded herself, It need not be Tisamon, once again. He read her question as simple surprise, though.

  ‘More than that. Nicely broken in, and playing for the crowd.’

  Despite herself, she made herself sound impressed. ‘I should like to see that.’ Can it be this easy? she thought, and then, It cannot be him, not the man this Wasp describes.

  She was all wide-eyed for him, and she was young, and he was a man who liked to impress. He hopped down from the wagon in a brief flurry of wings, holding his hand out. ‘Come and see what the Empire can accomplish,’ he told her, and she jumped down after him, knowing in her heart that it could not be him, just some other Mantis pressed into servitude here.

  He led her across Asta, shouting at any soldiers that got in his way, and that told her a lot about him, more than did their conversation. They wove their path through the tents and the press of bodies and the machines, around the buildings that were already showing the wear and tear of their impromptu nature, until she came to an arena.