Salute the Dark (25 page)

He could not help smiling at that. ‘But that is different. That is using knowledge already gained about the world to guess at the most likely outcome.’

‘And that is also predicting the future, Stenwold Maker,’ she said. ‘The only difference is your source of knowledge. Everything that happens has a cause, which same cause has
itself a cause. It is a chain stretching into the most distant past, and forged of necessity, inclination, bitter memories, the urge of duty. Nothing happens without a reason. Predicting the future
does not require predestination, Stenwold Maker. It only requires a world where one thing will most likely lead to another. So it was that I could not tell Felipe Shah precisely that Stenwold Maker
of Collegium would come to him and seek audience, but I could say: there will be emissaries from the south, and they shall come to speak of war, they shall come by air and – because they do
not understand the air – they shall be caught in a storm.’

‘Guesswork after the fact,’ Stenwold protested.

‘Guesswork
before
the fact,’ Inaspe replied. ‘Once one has learnt how to converse with more abstract sources of information, one’s guesswork can become remarkably
accurate.’

Stenwold felt a little shiver go through him. ‘I have known other people who believed in this. I too have seen things I cannot explain. But still, I cannot accept it.’

‘I have heard of those such as yourself in whose world the future is but darkness, while to us it is second nature to trust in prediction. To us you appear blind – and yet you are
able to make such things, such metal creatures, and we are just as blind to
your
craft as you are to ours. How ingenious you are.’ The bleakness in her tone Stenwold ascribed to
memories of the Twelve-Year War.

She had scooped something into her hand from a bag, and now she cast the whole handful on to the pattern of light before her. Straws, he saw, and most of them instantly blew away in the breeze.
Only a few now remained: a random scatter of pale stalks dyed in all colours by the glass. He himself could see nothing there, no patterns, no significance. When he looked from this display to
Inaspe’s face, though, something sank inside him. He saw there such a certainty of woe, as though a Fly-kinden messenger had rushed up to present her with it in writing. She met his eyes, and
he saw how she would take it all back, her talk of prophecy, if she could.

‘Speak,’ he said. ‘For what it’s worth, speak.’

‘Perhaps you are wise not to credit prophecy,’ she said carefully, ‘for all your future is the shadow of the world’s own.’

Caught between doubt and dread, he forced himself on. ‘What have you seen?’

‘Do not ask me.’

His instincts were telling him that he should obey her in that, and leave his curiosity unsatisfied but, in the end, his heritage rose up within him, the practical Beetle impatient with such
mummery, and he insisted, ‘Speak.’

She sighed. ‘Stenwold Maker, you are destined for great loss, to both yourself and those close to you. You are caught in the jaws of history, and its mandibles tear pieces from
you.’

He shrugged. ‘It takes no prophet to foretell that.’

She looked up from the pattern to assess his reaction, as though the idle fall of sticks had produced such a clear picture that he should recognize it immediately. ‘Autumn leaves, Stenwold
Maker, that is the future shown to me. It is not too late, not quite, for you to escape the vice of winter, but the leaves are already falling.’

Her hands passed over the sticks, and a slight cold breeze suddenly passed over Stenwold, and made him shiver. He heard the woman murmur. ‘A city by the lake sits beneath a rain of burning
machines. Red hands, long dyed up to the elbows in the blood of others, plunge in one last time. The sky is on fire with the deaths of the brave. The slaves are being beaten. The hand that holds
the whip is raised. I see a whole kinden on the brink of oblivion. A man with an iron fist reaches to snuff them out like pinching a candle flame. The proud one is in chains, and though he turns on
his great master, he shall shed not one drop of his blood. The spinners’ webs are burning. The great plotter has out-thought himself.’

Her eyes were wide now, blazing with conviction. ‘They are fighting now, the warrior-breed, but there are flames around them. They are falling like moths in torchlight. So many, there are
now so many rushing to their deaths.’

‘Enough—’ Stenwold started, but the rush of words did not heed him.

‘The machines of war are turned on your own people. Your friends are loyal to you, and they shall die for it, or be scarred through, and never to recover what they once were. Blood is born
of blood, welling up between the trees, beneath the gold lightning. Ancient evils brought to light, the dead tradition of the life-drinkers remade, and armies marching under a standard of black and
gold and running red. A pillaging of the past for power, so that even the worst excesses of the old times are dug up.
The worms of the earth!
I see the worms of the earth feasting on all our
corpses. Autumn leaves, Stenwold Maker. So many that you shall not see again. They fall and fall, the leaves of autumn, red and green and black and gold.’

‘But can we win?’ he demanded, forgetting that he did not believe.

‘What is it to win? How much will you sacrifice for it, when victory is more costly than defeat?’

She took a deep breath. ‘Your future. All our futures. I am sorry.’

Felipe Shah was a man of indeterminate age. His face was that of a young man, but his hair grey above the ears. His princely court was open to the sky, a courtyard within the
palace-castle that overlooked Suon Ren. He was like the rest of his kind to Stenwold’s eyes: slim and golden-skinned, dark-haired. He sat in the courtyard’s centre, on a blanket spread
on the ground. The four figures standing round him, whom Stenwold had initially taken for soldiers, became statues of burnished wood when he looked closer. Felipe wore a robe of shimmering red and
blue, with an edging of gold discs, very much like the robe in which Salma had first arrived in Collegium, wondering why everyone found him such a spectacle.

The rest of his court, about thirty other Dragonfly-kinden, sat about him in what Stenwold assumed was a precise pattern, not just before him but on all sides. Some sat in nooks up on the walls.
Some held scroll and stylus, poised to write. Others were simply sitting there, not even paying any particular attention to Felipe Shah. They wore the usual loose, flowing Dragonfly garments, and
Felipe Shah himself was by no means the most ostentatious. Like Spiders they managed to carry it off without seeming overdressed.
If I had myself got up like that, I’d be vulgar
,
Stenwold conceded.

Stenwold himself now sat to Felipe’s left, and he had no idea whether this was a position of honour, of security, or what any of it meant. The precise patterns on which the Commonwealers
so obviously organized their court were opaque to him. He wished Destrachis was still here to advise him.

Looking around, Stenwold spotted the fortune-teller, Inaspe Raimm, with three other Dragonflies seated in a shallow curve behind her. She did not glance at him, however, looking straight ahead
only. There was something strange about the way she sat there, something in her positioning, that suggested things were not as he had understood them – but more than that he could not
discern.

A whole life spent in the intelligence business and I’m now completely out of my depth.

There was a handful of Mercers present in their full armour, and now one stepped forwards to hand something to the prince. It was Salma’s letter, Stenwold saw: Prince Salme Dien’s
message to Prince Felipe Shah.

The prince read it in silence and the court waited. Nobody had mentioned what this document was and yet everyone seemed to already know, as though they were Ant-kinden linked by a common mind.
Stenwold increasingly felt that he was skimming the surface of a vastly complicated world.
Of course the Commonweal is both vast and complicated, so I should expect this bafflement. Yet it is
still hard to deal with, when matters are so pressing back home.

There had been no news, of course. For all he knew, Sarn could have fallen by now.

Prince Felipe Shah began to weep, and Stenwold started in surprise. He had not set eyes on Salma’s message, but he could not think of anything his former student might have written that
would have sparked this reaction. Still the Prince wept silently, tears trickling down his face, unwiped, and falling to spot his robe. It was impossible, Stenwold realized, to tell what emotion
was being displayed here, only the intensity of it. All around, the other Dragonflies were nodding silently, clearly approving whatever was going on. Stenwold ground his teeth in frustration at his
inability to grasp it.

A servant stepped forwards with a white cloth. Felipe Shah quickly wiped his eyes and then sat with the letter in one hand, the cloth clutched so tight in the other that his fist shook. The rest
of him, in poise, manner and expression, remained utterly calm, as though he had transferred his inner feelings over to the cloth as naturally as doffing a hat.

‘Master Stenwold Maker,’ Prince Felipe began, ‘your ambassador has stated that you wish an audience.’

Stenwold was aware of how Gramo, sitting nearby, straightened up proudly.

‘I would owe you the hospitality that I owe to all who visit my court in peace,’ Felipe continued slowly. ‘I owe you more than this, though, for you have brought me the
farewell of my kin-obligate, who I shall not see again.’

Stenwold, though bursting with questions, forced himself to remain silent, but something must have shown on his face.

‘You do not have this custom, in your own land, I am sure,’ the Prince said. ‘Here we do not keep our children close to us, Master Stenwold Maker. We ensure, instead, that they
reside in the houses of others, to thus learn their ways, their world. So they learn to judge, or to labour, or to peer into the waters. Prince Minor Salme Dien came to me, when he was young, to
learn governance. He was not my son, and yet he was a son to me, while my own children were far away.’

‘Did . . .’ Stenwold waited to see if he would be silenced, but Felipe Shah nodded for him to continue, ‘did you send him to the Lowlands, master – your
Highness?’

Felipe inclined his head then. ‘It was my choice that he went.’

‘We have been very blessed in his addition to our people,’ Stenwold proclaimed, aware that he was becoming rather over-florid in attempting simply to be polite. ‘Could I ask
why you did so? Otherwise there has been very little contact between our peoples, the ambassador excepted.’

There was a pause then, and it was to Inaspe Raimm that the Prince’s eyes flicked. ‘Two reasons suggest themselves,’ Felipe said at last. ‘But who can say which is the
truth? After the war with the Empire, I thought we needed to know more about our neighbours. Also divination suggested that the Commonweal would benefit.’

‘I cannot comment on the second reason,’ said Stenwold awkwardly. ‘As for the first, we are fighting the Empire even now.’

‘We know this,’ Felipe Shah confirmed.

‘And if the Empire defeats the Lowlands, then they will come north.’ Realizing what he had just said, Stenwold smiled weakly. ‘I’m no fortune-teller, but I can predict
that, I think.’

Felipe put the tear-stained cloth down and placed his hands on his knees, and from the reaction of the entire court Stenwold saw that this was a significant gesture, as though, back in
Collegium, one man around a table had just stood up to speak.

‘Before you came, we had long discussed this,’ the Prince declared. ‘The Commonweal has suffered greatly under the Empire’s advance. Our people have died and been
enslaved, in numbers so great they make us weak to consider it. Now you, the new kin-obligate of Salme Dien, have come asking us to join in a common cause.’

Stenwold blinked at the new designation he had been given, but nodded anyway. ‘That is so,’ he allowed.

‘We fought the Empire,’ the Prince said, his voice falling so low that Stenwold could barely hear it. ‘We resisted them with our blood and our bodies. The road their war
machines travelled on was made up of the bones of our people. There are those among us who wonder what it was for, all that valour and passion. What did we accomplish, that our sons and daughters
bled for?’

Stenwold opened his mouth to retort, as though this was the Collegium Assembly, but the character of the silence told him that his words were not wanted. For a long while the Dragonfly lord
stared at the ground, and not a single one of his followers moved.
Autumn leaves
, came a voice in his memory.
Green and red and black and gold.

‘The place is not mine,’ Felipe Shah said at last. ‘I am but a prince amongst princes. The Monarch alone must give you our answer.’

‘It is then possible to secure an audience with . . . with the Monarch?’ Stenwold felt as though he was walking a fragile tightrope of etiquette. The Commonweal was vast, the Monarch
doubtless distant and mighty. How many such baffling audiences would he have to sit through, how much
time
before he could put his case? Could the Lowlands last that long?

Felipe Shah’s melancholy did not break, precisely, but there was a curious spark in his eye, a slight creasing about his face, as though he nonetheless saw that something in his view was
amusing. Looking around, Stenwold saw an identical expression on all the courtiers’ faces, a polite and pointed fixedness of feature.

At last he saw that one Dragonfly face remained composed and still, and then he understood.

With the greatest possible care, Stenwold stood up and made a low bow before Inaspe Raimm – teller of the future and Monarch of the Commonweal.

‘I . . . am a fool,’ he confessed.

‘That understanding is the first step to wisdom,’ the Monarch replied softly. ‘Perhaps Prince Salme Dien has not spoken to you of the proper role of a prince of our Commonweal.
It is not to be heaped with honours and raised high, but to stoop low, to bear burdens for the people that the prince must serve. So it should be for a prince, and so much more for a
monarch.’