Salute the Dark (40 page)

Ult nodded slowly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I reckon I was just quick enough to keep you alive until next time, Mantis. I just hope the Emperor will appreciate the pair of you as much
as I do.’

* * *

It was the middle of the night, so far as he could judge, when they came for Thalric. Four guards opened up his cell, chained him up and hauled him off. He was conscious of
Tisamon’s wry gaze on him as he left.

They took him to a windowless room, lit by a dim gas-lantern fixed on the wall. For all he could see of the sun it could just as easily be noon outside as night.

It was an interrogation room. Not a room with that trade’s machines and artificers but a little booth of an office that, in the great scheme of questioning through excruciation, preceded
the main event. A big man was standing there behind a desk, an officer from his bearing, but Thalric noticed no badge of rank. Sitting at the desk itself was a woman.

He was surprised at that because, in Capitas, even the Rekef – which elsewhere used whatever tool best fit the hand – was intrinsically a conservative force. Women were considered
servants or perhaps clerks at best, but not put in charge, as this one clearly was. Even the officer, who had authority enough to be at least a colonel, was deferring to her.

She was young, fifteen or twenty years Thalric’s junior at least, and the dim light showed that she was attractive. Her hair was long and golden, tied back neatly. She wore clothes that
suggested wealth – some rich officer’s wife? Her gaze was very steady.

‘Major Thalric of the Rekef,’ she began, but not as a question. The guards were still watching him narrowly despite having bound his arms painfully tight behind his back. He waited,
understanding that this was not an opportunity to better his lot. He would just have to weather whatever came.

‘So you killed General Reiner,’ she noted.

Is she his wife?
That would make sense. He had no other theory as to who she might be. She would make a very young wife for Reiner, though, surely? He had never thought of Rekef generals
as being the marrying type, but then he himself was still married to a woman he had not seen in years. The Empire needed sons, but it was a duty only, and sentiment did not come into it.

‘Major Thalric . . . or perhaps just Thalric.’ Her smile remained bright and unreadable. In fact her eyes glittered with a hard-edged mirth, and if she was a widow there was little
enough grieving in her. ‘General Brugan, here, has shown me your records.’

Thalric blinked, glancing up at the big officer.
General Brugan?
So the Rekef really was ready to take him apart, was it? But if that was the case, who was this wretched woman? Where was
General Maxin?

‘A remarkable piece of patchwork, your career,’ the woman noted. ‘Remind me of it, General.’

Brugan stared bleakly at Thalric, like an artificer studying a broken machine. ‘Anti-insurgent work, after the conquest of Myna. Referred to the Rekef by Major Ulther, as he then was.
Behind the lines during the Twelve-Year War with assassination squads. Then the Lowlands business, Helleron. The strike against Collegium by rail.’

The woman’s smile was cutting. ‘That didn’t go very well, did it?’

I was outmanoeuvred. The army gave insufficient support. My chief spy betrayed me.
‘No,’ Thalric said simply.
If I am to be racked, let it be for my own failures. I will
not die blaming others for my misdeeds.

‘Neither did the Vekken campaign,’ General Brugan added darkly.

Major Daklan was in charge of that, you bastard.
A brief memory, of Daklan’s blade driving into him, made him twitch.

‘And then you went rogue, I’m told,’ the woman noted. Her face told him that she knew to the last detail all the circumstances, and that he would be able to use none of them in
his defence. He did not feel up to singing the old tune:
you sold me out before I sold you.
It was not as though it would make any difference.

‘Collegium, Jerez, and then you turn up in Myna and kill General Reiner. And then you surrender to the army, who bring you here. Why, Thalric? Tell me why.’

‘Why to which question?’ he asked. ‘There is no one reason for all of it.’

‘What a complex man you are.’ All the humour was gone from her face. ‘So tell me why you killed the general, Thalric.’

A hundred flippant answers came to him and he brushed them all away.
Let them kill me for the truth, why not? Let them rack me and crush me, and find in the end only what they had at the
start.
‘He cast me off. He let them send men to kill me, simply because of politics,’ he told her. ‘I had always served the Empire faithfully, and yes, I have not always
triumphed, but the Empire was all I ever cared about. He cast me off. He let them take me. Then, when I was caught in Myna, he took it all back. He gave me back my rank and my place, and said he
needed me again, but not to serve the Empire, just for his own private schemes.’ The rush of emotion he felt now putting it all into words thoroughly shocked him. ‘And do you know what?
He got on my nerves. All the things I had done for him, that at the time I thought I had been doing for the Empire. All those muddied waters, the children I killed and the friends I betrayed, and
was it for Empire, or just for Reiner? I’d never know. I’d only know that Empire’s good and general’s ambition were not the same thing any more. And he sat there, taking it
all back and about to give me orders, and I just couldn’t take any more of him. And so I did it, and I defy anyone to honestly claim they wouldn’t have done the same. He was an
irritating
man.’

General Brugan’s mouth twitched just the once.

‘I killed Colonel Latvoc as well,’ Thalric added, as though this was some obscure mitigation.

The woman’s hand waved, consigning Latvoc to the oubliette of history. ‘And you really expect us to believe you did it all for the Empire?’

‘Not for a moment,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t make it any less true.’

‘You’re a presumptuous man. For the Empire? Most would be glad enough to do it for a superior officer, for their general, for their own self-interest, for the Emperor even. The
Empire is a large master to claim.’

‘That is why it is fit to be served,’ replied Thalric. The evident sincerity in his own tone surprised him.

The woman stood up, still looking at him.

He shrugged again. ‘What do you want from me? You may as well just take it. I’m in no position to stop you, whoever you are.’

‘I will have to think about what I want from you,’ she said, and stepped neatly from the room, leaving him for the guards to manhandle away. Only later, after he had been cast back
into his cell, did some thought of who she might be occur to him.

* * *

It had been a long night, and sleep was slow in coming. Tisamon suspected that he was staving it off because of the unsettling dreams. In his dreams he saw Laetrimae in all her
riddled detail. That was all the dream consisted of. He was made to stare and stare at her despoiled flesh, her hybrid carapace and the constant piercings of the vines. He was a prisoner even in
sleep now, and the blood he shed in the fighting pits was more wholesome than the sight of that mangled but undying cadaver.

The failure of all our kinden.
Laetrimae and he, they were well matched in that. They had both led ruined lives, bitter ones, twisting inwards and inwards until they stood face to face in
this sunless cell. The only thing that stood between them was five hundred years of torment, but he felt as though he was rapidly catching her up.

They brought Thalric back to the cells eventually. The Wasp had no words for him, although his skin looked as intact as it had done when he was dragged away. Thalric could make out the long scar
that Tynisa had given him in Helleron, but it was only one amongst so many. The world had done its best to kill Thalric.
And he has survived, for this?

Ah, Tynisa
. And was she captured yet? Dead yet? And, if not, then surely the sands were running out on her. She would come stalking into the palace to find her father, but she was not
skilled enough, as Tisamon well knew, to survive it. He had taught her all he could, but it was an errand he himself would have died in attempting.

And yet I might have tried it, even so. She is my daughter, yet.

It was a curse he would not wish on anyone, to possess his tainted blood in her veins.
Instead I would tell her, look to Stenwold. There is your model for a proper life, a life of
meaning.

He wondered if, somehow, it would have been possible to sever that twisted, self-hating part of himself, cut it away, cast it off. What manner of father would he have been to the girl then? A
better one, surely.

When yet another stranger came to stare at Tisamon, the Mantis did not even look at him, at least not at first. He did not mark Thalric’s abrupt flinching away, nor did he care much about
the two armoured sentinels that stood behind the visitor with spears at the ready. It was Ult that Tisamon finally noticed: Ult’s peculiar response to the newcomer. The visitor himself never
glanced at the old man but Tisamon read it all in his reaction: here was a man that Ult feared, and revered, and hated so fiercely and intensely, all emotions melted together in the same pot. It
told Tisamon who the newcomer was more eloquently than words.

He was young, this man, or at least younger than Tisamon: young and clean-featured and handsome in the Wasp way, fair-haired and well-dressed. His style was that of rich Wasp men, favouring
garments that were loose-cut and intricately embroidered, yet with a military stamp still very much in evidence – and the fashion was so
because
this man dressed in such garb.

Tisamon finally turned to look with curiosity upon his Imperial Majesty Alvdan the Second.

‘This is him, is it?’ Alvdan asked, eyeing Tisamon without much interest. ‘This is your killer Mantis.’

Ult murmured something that might be, ‘Yes, your Imperial Majesty.’

‘We have heard that he fights well, and we hope we have been correctly advised.’

Again Ult murmured some confirmation.

Alvdan met Tisamon’s gaze and the Mantis saw that here was a man to be reckoned with: not vain or foppish but insecure and intelligent, the two qualities that ever honed the tyrant.

‘What will he fight?’

‘I’ve not made my final choice for the warm-ups yet, your Imperial Majesty,’ Ult mumbled. ‘A beast first, probably. Then I was thinking a bare-hand match, since he does
that well.’

As Alvdan made a slight, dismissive sound, Ult hurried on.

‘Then for last we’ve got a Commonwealer.’

Alvdan smiled at that. ‘The best of the Lowlands against the best of the Commonweal. That may indeed entertain us. This Commonwealer is skilled?’

‘She’s something very special as well,’ Ult confirmed.

‘She? One of their fighting women? Yes, that will be appreciated,’ Alvdan remarked, with a dry smirk. Looking straight into Tisamon’s face, his eyes suddenly narrowed.

‘We do not like this Mantis,’ he decided. ‘His people have been a considerable obstacle to our armies, we understand.’

Ult said nothing, just waiting.

‘When the fight is done, between this one and the Commonwealer, the winner shall be executed on crossed pikes, in the arena.’

Ult pursed his lips but said nothing.

‘Our people shall see that our enemies do not prosper, even though they entertain us. Arrange it.’

The Emperor strode off, his guards in tow, and Tisamon watched Ult staring after them, the hatred naked on his face. He saw that a man who lived as Ult lived, with the lives of all around him
passing like water through his hands, must come to grief eventually. When he did he would have two choices: he must despise the wretches that he sent to their deaths, day in, day out, or he must
despise those who command it.

Colonel Gan was still governor of Szar, but merely by a knife-edge. More than half of the city was denied to his troops, for over thirty of the city’s orderly little
streets had been barricaded, and these barricades were made of metal riveted to metal, dug firmly into the earth. They would not stop the Wasp airborne, of course, but they had already made wrecks
out of several of Gan’s automotives. The Bee-kinden had always been notable craftsmen.

In this way a line had been drawn across the city. There had already been several hundred dead Wasps, and three times as many locals, in skirmishes along the barricades. The Bees had meanwhile
captured two of the arms factories that for the last decade had happily been providing the Empire with its weaponry. They wore Wasp armour painted over in russet, bore pikes, swords, crossbows and
a scattering of more sophisticated weapons, while some of the barricades had ballistae to back them up. The Bees fought without flair but with a solid determination that made it almost impossible
to wear them down. Yesterday thirty of Gan’s men had pinned three of the locals within a makeshift shelter and called for their surrender. It had not been forthcoming, for the same blind
devotion that had kept the people of Szar docile under imperial rule while their old queen still lived now gripped them with a spirit of rebellion under Queen Maczech.

I could break them
, Gan liked to think,
with enough men.
The Bee-kinden fought with a cold fury, though. They were not the natural soldiers that the Imperial Army were but they
would simply not give ground without blood spilt for every inch. When cornered, they fought with a savage, fearless fury, and they made every action, even those guaranteed to succeed, absurdly
costly in lives and in time.

And then there was the problem of the Colonel-Auxillian.
In the last tenday, Gan’s life had become a twisted nightmare: his command usurped, his men intimidated, his very grasp of
warfare ridiculed, and all at the hands of an arrogant halfbreed.
I should have him seized and whipped. I should have him made to disappear
. But the Emperor himself had signed the orders
that brought Drephos to Szar. He made no secret of how much he loathed being here, and Gan made no secret of returning that loathing in full force. But the man was here now, and Gan could only step
back and watch as the newcomer’s men stole away the existing garrison, put them to work, berated them and monopolized Gan’s engineers. Gan himself was becoming a recluse in his own
city. Every time he gave an order he discovered that Drephos had already been there. And what was the man doing, anyway? Being no artificer, Gan had no idea. At those points where Gan would have
been mustering men for an assault on the barricades, Drephos was instead setting up great machines.