Salute the Dark (27 page)

To his credit, Chyses made no protest, merely stared.

‘Keep hold of her,’ Kymene ordered. ‘Untie her but keep her guarded. Find me this Thalric. Find me also people from Hokiak’s who’ll recognize him. I want to talk to
him.’

Thalric had found himself a low taverna by the river by the name of Flaneme’s. Under the stern gaze of a woman of the same name, who was a broad-shouldered, massive-armed
matron, he took a cup of wine and considered his options.

How madly optimistic he had been to think that his name would not have become common parlance in Myna! Seeing the facts inscribed on paper, uncovered during his idle investigations at Tharn, the
idea had seemed clear to him. He had put himself seamlessly back into the spy game without recalling the pain that had sent him away from it.

No doubt that old rogue Hokiak had since heard all the Rekef news: who was in and who was out. He bared his teeth in frustration and glowered into the wine, seeing there a darkened glimpse of
his own reflection. Hokiak had obviously pegged Che as a Rekef turncoat, this new allegiance twisted into her painfully in the torture rooms of the governor’s palace. The irony of that notion
was not lost on Thalric, who had in the end never quite found the proper moment to put Che to the question. Now he could spare a thought to wonder whether the Scorpion would sell her either to the
resistance or the Empire – and which of them, at this stage, would be kinder. Beyond that single speculation his own fate consumed his thoughts entirely.

He was being shadowed, he knew. Whoever it was, acting for whatever side in the little brawl that was brewing in Myna, they did not yet want to broach him openly. They were waiting for him to
put himself neatly where they could descend on him with the minimum of public fuss. That might mean that it was Kymene’s people come to finish him off. Or it might mean that it was the Rekef,
who preferred to have people disappear without even a ripple. He was definitely being watched, however. He had come into Flaneme’s place because it was near-full with rivermen and labourers,
men and women whose politics were probably not hot enough to set them against him. Still, he had gathered some filthy looks on entering, so the intelligence he had perused in Tharn had been right.
Uprising was hanging on the air like smoke.

Why in blazes did I come back to this wretched town?
His past had crossed with Myna’s too many times: in the initial imperial conquest, when he had been a raw young officer under
Ulther’s patronage; his betrayal of that same patron all those years later, on the orders of his Rekef masters; and now a third time with this debacle. He should have left it at just
twice.

He had to leave Myna immediately. He caught himself wondering how he would break this news to Stenwold.
Fool!
But it was true that abandoning Che had left a foul taste in the mouth. In a
life composed of so many dark deeds this one, he realized, would stay with him.

Just one more amongst the host, though, so he would live with it.

A shadow crossing him made him look up. Flaneme stood there, burly arms folded. ‘Time for you to leave, Master Wasp.’

He stared up at her, biting down his instinctive response. He knew this game well, for he had played it from across the table often enough.

‘Right then.’ He put the wine bowl down, still untouched, flexing his hands in readiness. Out there his persecutors would be waiting. They had passed their message on to Flaneme,
who, like any good taverna-keeper, would try to keep each side of the fight happy. She was telling him that he was no longer protected here, and she would call on her other patrons to throw him out
or beat him unconscious if she had to.

He stood up, throwing back his cloak to free his sword-hilt. The taverna door was already open, with a cold breeze ghosting in. With a slight smile he stepped out, seeing a full dozen cloaked
men waiting for him, most standing on the ground, a few hovering on rooftops.
It was the Rekef then.

‘I take the numbers as a compliment,’ he said, mostly to himself. The door slammed shut behind him, and he heard the bar go down into place.

They moved in on him, rushing forwards directly or stooping from the roofs. He thrust his open palms towards them, summoning the Art of his people. The smile still had not left his face.

In the end they had been hampered by their need to take him alive. Thalric had made no scruples of abusing that advantage. In the quick, vicious scuffle, as they descended on
him from all sides, and then as they wrestled to subdue him, he had killed five of them with his sting. It was an Art he was strong in. Putting his hand to a man’s chest, he could punch a
fist-sized hole right through his victim. In a brawl it was better than any hidden knife.

He did not earn their love, for that. Their orders to keep him alive had not specified in what condition. By the time it was over he was bruised and bloody from the beating they inflicted.

He had awoken, not in a cell but a small billet, the kind of room where a sergeant or junior officer might live out his life. There was a guard just within the door, and as Thalric stirred the
man passed the word to others waiting outside.

A prisoner now, and aching all over, Thalric found a strangely high mood on him. He realized that it was because, amidst all the pain and bruising, there was barely a stab from the deep wound
that Daklan had inflicted on him outside Collegium, that had come so close to finishing him after his fall from Rekef favour. That wound, unlike the betrayal, was now consigned to the past.

So where in the wastes am I?
There was a quick enough answer to that one, since the men who had jumped him had been Wasp soldiers. This spartan little room he was in could be in the
barracks, or perhaps in the governor’s palace. There was a high window, suggesting his cell was probably on the level just below ground. He considered flying up there to look out, but decided
that it was better not letting his captors know whether he could fly or not.

Of course, I can’t be sure myself.
He seemed, nevertheless, to have come through the beating better than he might have done, but then he had always been a tough one to keep down.
Captain Rauth, Ulther, Tisamon and Tynisa, Arianna, Daklan, Felise Mienn
: they had all done their best, at one time or another, to put him out of this world. He wondered who would try
next.

Lying on the hard bunk, with the guard eyeing him cautiously, he had to concede that his life so far seemed to have been a whole lot of effort to achieve a great deal of nothing.
I would have
stayed with the Rekef if I could. I have made a lamentable revolutionary.

But now what? He was not bound, so he could kill the guard now and make a run for it. He might get quite far, and he could certainly kill a considerable number of his captors before they were
forced to re-evaluate just how alive they wanted him to be. Clearly he was being sent a message by someone confident he would be able to work it out:
Wait. All is not lost.

Had he been intercepted by rebel elements within the palace? If there were still Mynan staff and slaves here, then the resistance would have its own people nearby. Perhaps Kymene or Che had . .
. but then he did not even know if Che was still alive. It seemed quite possible that, after his explosive exit, Hokiak’s people might have butchered her – or that Kymene might have had
her killed as a Rekef agent.
Such irony!

And then, after a moment’s consideration,
I am both betrayed and betrayer.
The Empire’s rejection of him had turned a life of estimable service into one of perverse deceit,
and when he had tried to go back over that path, to knit the wounds he had caused, he had only made everything worse.

He was not made to be maudlin, though.
I am alive
, he reflected. It was the first and best building block that he could work with.

Two soldiers entered the room without preamble. Their demeanour showed that they were fully aware of what their fellows – and their late fellows – had gone through to bring him here.
They both loathed him and were frightened of him.

‘Well?’ Thalric asked them. ‘What now?’

‘Come with us,’ said one. His lips twitched, as if at a foul taste, when he added, ‘sir.’ The word struck Thalric like a blow. He almost toppled back on the bed, his legs
suddenly weak at the power of a mere three-letter word. He had endured a long, harsh winter since anyone had truly called him that. The word was a whole life away for him: a door onto better
days.

‘Sir, is it?’ he managed to get out, hoping that his face showed none of his surprise.

The man merely replied, ‘I have been ordered to request your presence, sir. You are sent for.’

And you don’t like it, soldier, but you’ll obey your orders
. That was the underlying principle of the entire Wasp nation, who were by nature so quarrelsome and
undisciplined.

‘Lead on, soldier,’ Thalric said it as casually as he could manage.

As soon as he got out into the corridor he knew that this must be the governor’s palace. He had no fond memories of it, for he had been through as much pain here as he had at any time
before, and he had lost a good friend, too. The only luck thrown his way, aside from his continued survival, was that in the end it had not been his hand that had scorched out the life of Colonel
Ulther, at the last. Mere chance, too, and he had no right to feel better over mere chance.

They took him up three levels and he applied his mind to drawing himself a map of the place as he recalled it. These were the quarters of important guests and higher officers, up here. He had
even stayed here himself. There were public staterooms too, though he was already above the grand hall that Ulther had held court in. Wherever he was being taken, it was to be behind closed
doors.

Do they imagine I know something, and wish to woo it out of me? Do I now turn informant against Stenwold and his people? And why not?

If they had wanted information, they needed only put him under the machines, for surely the ways and means had not softened so very much.
But if I myself were in charge, would I not ask
nicely first? Sometimes it is more efficient.
Of all the hypotheses milling in his brain this seemed the most likely. He should not therefore get used to his current liberty.
Which means I
should exploit it as soon as the chance arises. Just give me a room with a decent-sized window.

And, obligingly, they did so. This palace, like most large Wasp-constructed buildings, was a ziggurat, and the room they brought him to even boasted a balcony, beyond which the blue sky
stretched broad and inviting. He stayed put, though. He wanted to know where he stood, before he ran. There were two soldiers at the door, keenly watching over him, but they did not yet figure in
his calculations. Five dead men could become seven soon enough. He had nothing to lose and it made him feel immortal.

The room itself had little of the garish style that Ulther had loved: the gaudy and overdone, the displayed loot from a dozen conquered peoples. This was Capitas-style Wasp: the long table
devoid of ornament and a single frieze on the wall, in the local style but depicting the battle for occupation of the city itself, eighteen years before. Thalric wondered idly if he could pinpoint
one of those images of triumphant, larger-than-life Wasp soldiers as his younger self. Perhaps one of them was Ulther, commanding the attack. He glanced from the frieze to the soldiers, young men
both.
They were not there, of course.
They had probably not even fought in the Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal. It made feel him oddly lonely. He had now more in common with Stenwold
Maker than with these men. In the end the burden of cultural identity did not weigh as much as the years.

They had come to attention swiftly, and he positioned himself across the table from the door, waiting. Some instinct told him that he recognized the tread, even before the man himself appeared:
a grey-haired, severe-looking Wasp-kinden. A colonel and, as he saw now from the additional insignia, a governor.

Of course.
The new governor had not been referred to by name in any of the documents he had seen because there was no need, but if he had really, really tried, then he could have worked
out who the man was. There was no reason for him to be surprised.

‘Colonel Latvoc,’ Thalric said. ‘Excuse me for the informality, but I don’t feel that I’m in a position to salute.’

Latvoc’s stare was all ice, but Thalric had not expected anything else. In a clipped gesture, the colonel ordered the two guards out of the room. ‘You didn’t have to kill five
of my soldiers,’ he said.

Thalric raised an eyebrow cynically. ‘The last time the Empire showed an interest in me, Colonel, I barely lived to learn a lesson from it.’

‘Even so,’ Latvoc said, ‘you’ve made things . . . very difficult.’

And why should you care?
But Thalric could see it already. A Rekef colonel put in charge of the garrison, leaving the soldiers unhappy and mistrustful – and why not? What was there
to trust?

‘Sit down,’ Latvoc ordered him flatly. When Thalric did not move he narrowed his eyes. ‘I am still your superior officer.’

‘Am I still in the army?’

Latvoc stared at him. Looking back into his sallow face, Thalric saw a man who had slept little recently.
Local or imperial worries, I wonder? Or both at once?
Abruptly, as though he was
seeing a shape suddenly appear in the outlines of a cloud, Thalric saw the sheer, naked desperation within Latvoc. The man was on a knife edge, and barely balancing even on that.

‘I’m not exactly in love with the Empire, after recent treatment,’ Thalric said. That part of him that had been loyal was horrified at his own daring.

‘In love?’ Latvoc spat, each word he uttered becoming a separate fight to control his temper. ‘You are – were – an imperial major. You were a Rekef officer. It is
not for you to criticize the Empire. It is not for you to put your
petty
personal concerns before the demands of your masters. If the Empire wanted you dead, you by rights should have
died
. If it wishes now to recall you from the grave, then you shall
return
.’