Salute the Dark sota-4

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

She stared levelly at him. ‘That looks painful, Major Thalric.’

  ‘Well spotted.’

  ‘I’m allowed to strike you, I believe?’

  He closed his eyes. ‘That depends on who you’re supposed to be, Tynisa. Go on, try it. We’ve been at daggers drawn long enough and you’ve not laid a straight blow on me yet.’ That was not, of course, true. She had nearly killed him outside Helleron. Furthermore, it was a foolish thing to say because she took his provocation in the spirit it was meant and punched a fist into his abused ribs hard enough that he felt them creak. He made a short, choked sound of pain, hearing some of the spectators murmur appreciatively. Needless to say, the guards just watched.

  She leant close to him. ‘You’ve earned that, and more,’ she murmured, ‘but right now we’re in a position to help each other.’

  ‘Your negotiating techniques leave something to be desired,’ he grated.

  ‘Do they?’ Before he could say anything to stop her, she had stepped back, and then the back of her hand cracked against his cheekbone and whipped his head round. My mouth is going to get me killed. This time when she leant close, he said nothing.

  ‘That was for the crowd, Thalric. And for me, a little – but mostly for them. Now, listen. I’ve made some friends here in Capitas. Well, maybe friends isn’t the word, but a chain of people who’ll do things for me if I ask them nicely. What they won’t do, though, is let me down to the cells beneath the palace.’

  ‘The pit cells,’ Thalric recalled. ‘And that’s where they’ve got Tisamon, is it? Right place for him.’

  He felt her tense, but she did not strike him again. ‘I can get you down from your post here this afternoon, instead of tomorrow, seeing that my friend of the moment is an overseer of your Justice place here. If I ask him very nicely indeed, maybe he’ll have you sent to the pit cells, just like Tisamon.’

  ‘If you lead him on, you mean.’

  ‘Jealous?’ There was a edge to her voice. ‘I can’t fight an entire Empire with my sword, Thalric. There are just too many of your wretched people. I could stab at your kin all day and still not get anywhere. So I use other weapons. I got here, didn’t I? I’m not proud of my methods, but they work.’

  ‘And if I’m really good, your methods will now see me condemned to the pit cells. Thank you very much.’

  ‘Just to hold you there, until they decide what to do with you. You’d rather be sitting in a cell than hanging from a post, I assume.’

  ‘And in return…?’

  ‘Take a message to Tisamon.’ Her hand was in his hair, abruptly, dragging his head back, to the further appreciation of the spectators. ‘Tell him I’m here for him, that I will find some way to get him out.’

  He thought about that slowly, long enough for her to yank at his hair again. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘if he doesn’t want to get out?’

  She went very still. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Yes, you do. How do you capture Tisamon, the Mantis-kinden Weaponsmaster? Either dead or not at all, surely, and yet you say he’s malingering in the cells beneath the palace-’

  ‘Shut up,’ she hissed at him. ‘Shut up or this crowd will see me put your eyes out, Thalric. That’s not your problem. That’s my problem and I… I’ll deal with it.’ She stepped back, and he braced himself for further injury.

  ‘Nod or shake, Major,’ she told him. ‘Do what I want now, or I’ll make sure you hang here for another three days before they work out where to send you.’

  He let his head sag. It could be taken for a nod. Then she punched him in the kidneys, and this time he could not stop himself crying out.

  * * *

  ‘You move too fast,’ cautioned one of the cowled shapes around him. Uctebri saw all his reflections in the polished walls nod and nod, out of time but in agreement. He bared his needle teeth at the speaker, stalking across the room and making the candles gutter, so that all that assembled host within the mirror-shiny walls momentarily bobbed and flickered.

  ‘It must be now,’ he said. ‘I have wrestled with fate too hard just to get my players to the wings. I cannot stand back and let it all go to ruin.’

  ‘The risks are too great,’ said another, a whispering woman’s voice. ‘The Empire…’

  ‘Is the prize, in case you had forgotten,’ Uctebri supplied. ‘Temporal power, at last, and after so long,’ Uctebri said.

  ‘If they uncover you… If you fail… We have not the strength or the numbers to resist them or to survive another purge.’

  ‘They are savages,’ Uctebri snarled. He could feel his blood, that borrowed and mingled commodity, rising inside him: only his own people could ever provoke him so. ‘How would they find us? These are not the Moth-kinden, to understand our hearts, or the Spiders, to ensnare us. They have no understanding of the old days. If they recoil against us I shall pay the price, I alone.’

  ‘You cannot be so sure of that,’ another said. ‘The girl, she may know more than you realize.’

  ‘You have taught her too much,’ said yet another. Uctebri glared at them all. For a moment he saw them as they would seem to an outsider: a conclave of thin and twisted creatures, sickly and cowardly after so many centuries of hiding.

  ‘I have come too far now to cry “Hold”,’ he hissed at them. ‘So what would you have me do? Wait another year, perhaps? Burrow into the Empire like a maggot into rotten flesh, never to find the heart? You have been too long in the dark. The girl is mine, and all that she possesses is my promise. She has lived under the shadow of her brother’s knife all her life, so she will take what I give her, and do what I say, just for a chance to be rid of that doom. What is she, but a woman in a race where the men lead? She will not be able to rule without our aid. We will make her our puppet, and the Empire, all its youth and strength and blood, will be ours to tug at.’ Greed was the key here, he knew. His was a greedy race, and it had always been so. ‘What might we do, with such a beast under our spur? Do we not have scores to settle with the world? Are we not owed? What vengeance might we exact on our old foes, with all the armies of the Empire at our disposal?’

  They shuffled and turned to one another, and he felt his fingers crooking into claws with frustration.

  ‘If we had known-’

  ‘You knew,’ he addressed them all. ‘My plan has been years in the making. You all knew what I intended, and for the good of us all! Only now, when I am on the cusp, do you cringe away from grasping it.’ He drew himself up straight. ‘It matters not,’ he decided. ‘I do not need to care what you all think. I am in too far, now, to draw myself from the wound. I needs must suck it dry. If you will not share the feast, so be it. But I have no doubt that when I have the Empire in my hand, you shall come begging on your knees for a share.’

  They fell very silent then. The Mosquito-kinden were close-knit out of necessity, surviving by mutual conspiracy. The censure of the many was always enough to govern the few, or so it had been for longer than any of them had been alive.

  ‘You will bring ruin on us,’ one of them said slowly. ‘You are become too proud.’

  ‘And you are not proud enough,’ Uctebri retorted. ‘Where is the race that once battled with magi and great scholars to be the masters of the world? Is there nothing left of that ambition? Has our defeat so long ago crippled us, even until today? Well, not I. I shall grasp the Empire with both hands and make it do my will. I shall be shadow-Emperor behind the girl’s throne, and in a hundred years from now – three generations of theirs but within a single lifetime for us – we shall walk openly in their streets, and speak counsel to their leaders, and perhaps we will no longer remember what craven things we had once become.’

  With an impatient thought, he severed his link to them. Worms, all of them, pallid, soft things hiding away from an enemy that had suffered its own catastrophic reversals some five centuries before. The world needed a stronger hand to master it, and that hand was his. He considered his prote?ge?e, the Wasp princess. At this moment he felt she
showed more promise than all the rest of his kinden put together. And you will be mine, heart and soul. You will sell your people’s future, your own will, in exchange for the empty reward of a throne. The thought cheered him, the nearness of all he had worked towards. His puppets were now all in place and ready to dance for him.

  * * *

  That she was so reliant on others was frustrating to her, but then it had always been so. To compensate, Seda had developed the ability to persuade others to do those things for her that almost any other member of her race could simply have reached out and accomplished in person.

  This room, however, she had found for herself: an armoury on the third floor of the palace, stripped of its contents when the new garrison quarters had been built elsewhere in Capitas. No alternative use for it had yet been found. It had one main door and one hidden door, as was the case with most of the military rooms in the palace, for Seda’s father, the late Emperor, had been a man given to surprises and ambushes – and so had his chief advisor, the infamous Rekef, whose name lived on in the force of spies and agents that he had fashioned.

  The secret entrance was crucial. It was of the utmost importance that nobody realized just how many people she was meeting here. Otherwise it would be so easy for word to get to her brother Alvdan, and then everything would be thrown into disarray.

  Already, General Brugan had his men posted nearby, watching all approaches, turning passing servants away. Alvdan and his lackey Maxin need never know what had transpired here.

  She wondered if Uctebri would, however. The Mosquito had ways of spying on her that she could not control, just as she could not control him. His invisible eyes could be present here, in this very room, as she received her fellow conspirators and told them what they must do for her. Like all the others, Uctebri had missed discovering the real Seda. She had grown up in continual fear of her life, and her one defence was to seem vulnerable and helpless. She had lived with Maxin’s knife poised over her, and Alvdan’s temper always ready to give him the word. She had made her way through the world with meekness as her only shield. She had cultivated it assiduously, seeming a willing tool to every purpose. When she was young, she had feared that General Maxin could read minds, that he would register even the slightest flicker of rebellion or resentment.

  But now she had as her doubtful ally a man who really could read minds, and she was practised enough to place there in front of him just what he wished to see. Even the master-sorcerer himself would have to dig very deep to find the real Seda beneath her camouflage.

  He was clever, was Uctebri the Sarcad, clever enough to plot the downfall of an Emperor, but she hoped that, like so many clever men, he underestimated the intelligence of others. She now gazed about the room at her assembled allies. They included General Brugan, of course, solid and dependable and very much hers since her brother had made Maxin the lord of the Rekef. The suspicious death of General Reiner looked enough like a precursor to his own that he was now entirely Seda’s to play with. She liked him, too: in face and body, here was a man to be admired, and with an uncommon streak of integrity that she found intriguing. She knew what he hoped from her, and she had given him nothing to dispel those expectations. They would prove useful to her.

  She also had three of the Imperial advisors on her side now: there was old Gjegevey, who saw her as a victim who needed nurturing, and two of the older Wasp councillors who could feel their seats beside the throne being prepared for younger men now dearer to the Emperor. Two years ago such treason would not have been thinkable, but the war within the Rekef had made men fearful for more than just their station or reputation. General Reiner’s death had scared a great many powerful people.

  She had both of the palace stewards in her party: considered lowly menials who ordered the servants and slaves about, nobody cared much about them; one was a Wasp woman, the other a Grasshopper slave. Being strictly civilian, they were firmly under the heel of the Empire, and nobody save Seda had realized quite how much power they wielded and what they could accomplish. Beyond that, she had several military officers: a colonel and two majors from within the Capitas garrison, and a scattering of others from outside it. They were disaffected men that Brugan had been watching, and normally he would have caused them to disappear, thus increasing that fear of the Rekef that kept ambitious officers throughout the army in line. But now he had made them her offer.

  From face to face she looked in turn, seeing there her own fragile empire ready to set against her all-powerful brother – and against the unthinkable Uctebri.

  She smiled at them warmly, and set about explaining precisely what they must do for her.

  * * *

  ‘You’ve got another visitor,’ came Ult’s voice. Tisamon opened his eyes, his mind falling back from dream-tormented sleep to the gloomy confines of his cell.

  ‘Keep your visitors.’

  ‘What can I say? You’re a popular man.’ Ult grinned mirthlessly. ‘Never had a prisoner get so many visitors wanting to see him.’

  Tisamon shrugged. ‘To the pits with them.’

  ‘Don’t be like that. You’re denying me a chance to make a fortune.’

  Two nights ago, the Mantis had fought in one of the smaller private arenas, after which word had spread. This last day alone there had been over a dozen people escorted down into the gloom to see him, almost all of them women of good family. It was a tradition, Ult explained. So many menfolk were away with the army, it was only natural that their wives became bored. A little excitement, a little titillation, and of course most of the fighters were glad of the attention.

  ‘But not you,’ Ult noted. ‘We’d do well out of them, if you’d let them touch you.’

  ‘What if I killed them instead?’ Tisamon asked bitterly.

  ‘Then you’d be stung to death in your cell,’ Ult said with equanimity. ‘Don’t think that hasn’t happened. It’s all part of the thrill.’

  Tisamon sat down with his back to the bars, his arms wrapped about his knees. ‘What is it they really seek, Ult?’

  ‘Death, Mantis. Surely you know that rich people love death.’

  ‘In Capitas perhaps.’

  ‘It’s because they live safe lives, the rich and powerful. Oh, some of them go off to the army, and that ain’t exactly safe for anyone, but there’s a load of people with rank and medals who just sit behind their desk and do their marching on paper. And there are the officers’ wives, of course, with all the time and money they could want, and nothing to do with it… And here you are, a bit exotic, a bit rough and dangerous, and not bad-looking for all that, and you move like you do – bound to catch their eye, yes?’

  ‘It’s disgusting.’

  Ult laughed at him. ‘You got cursed high standards for a pit-fighter, Old Mantis. Look at your fellows here – they’d give a lot to be where you are. Think of it as a recognition of your skills, if you want, and the more people want to see you…’

  The Wasp left the words hanging, but Tisamon heard the rest in his head: the more chance you’ll get what you want.

  ‘So who’s asking for me now? The queen herself?’

  ‘Something a little different. Something you can say “no” to without me thinking you’re a fool for refusing. Got a fellow wanting the cell next to yours, just for a bit. He says he can point me in the way of some money in the city, if I do it. But it’s your call in the end.’

  ‘Another prisoner?’

  ‘He’d like me to think so,’ Ult sneered. ‘They reckon you got to be stupid, to work down here, but I seen most types. This fellow, he’s a spy. He’s got that look to him. He’s Rekef, more than likely. He’s here to take a look at you. Maybe the Emperor’s heard of you, and wants you checked out.’

  ‘Then bring him in. I’ll play the abject slave, shall I?’

  ‘You ain’t got it in you,’ Ult told him. ‘You carry yourself prouder than a battlefield colonel, you do. I’ll bring him over, though. If you end up gutting him through the bars that’s your b
usiness.’

  Tisamon waited in the dark, listening to the other prisoners all around him. Am I so proud, still? Perhaps he should have given those Wasp women what they wanted: one more debasement, the last step in his descent. But she is out there, somewhere: Felise Mienn whom he would have to kill – or else she would kill him.

  He did not even look up as Ult and a pair of guards returned, and his latest visitor was slung into the cell next to him, which had been empty since the previous evening.

  ‘What do you want?’ he growled.

  ‘Is that any way to greet an old friend?’ There was more weariness than humour in the voice, and it took a moment for Tisamon to place it.

  ‘Thalric?’

  ‘The same.’ The Wasp looked haggard and bruised. If he was a Rekef spy once more, he was certainly well disguised as a man to whom life had not been kind for some time.

  ‘You’ve come home, then,’ Tisamon observed, finding that the sight of the man raised no particular emotion in him.

  ‘The Emperor called for his errant son,’ replied Thalric, and leant carefully back, wincing in pain. ‘I’ve not been this comfortable for a while, believe it or not.’

  ‘Why are you here, Thalric?’

  ‘The consequences of a piece of fairly severe insubordination.’

  ‘I thought you’d left the army.’

  ‘Ironic,’ Thalric laughed. ‘They let me back in just beforehand. You’ve never trusted me, have you?’

  ‘Any reason that I should have?’

  ‘No.’ Thalric’s smile was small and bleak. ‘So in that case you can decide whether I’m faithfully passing on a message or merely taking pleasure in putting the knife in.’

  Tisamon regarded him. ‘I don’t cut easily.’

  ‘Excellent. Well, your daughter is in the city and she wants to rescue you.’ Thalric closed his eyes. ‘For some reason she wanted me to tell you and, although I can hardly say that I’m ever as good as my word, here I am, and the words are said.’