Salute the Dark (49 page)

Some fell on one another, hands crackling with the loosing of their stings, mouths foaming, tearing with nails and teeth. Some just died, seizing up and stopping like broken machines. Most fled,
crashing into walls and doorways, and into each other: fighting through the pitchy tunnels and hallways, trying to find the open sky. Those that found it cast themselves out, and some of them flew
and others fell . . .

And Achaeos, with the whole might of this horror pouring through him, now unstoppable, felt something catch inside him. Such a small thing, but his next breath seemed intolerably hard to draw,
and his wound was abruptly open again and bleeding, and something lanced through his mind, a pain so acute that it came almost as a relief, blotting everything else out.

And a falling away. And a darkness that even Moth eyes could not penetrate.

Che had been screaming for some time now, contracted into a ball, knees up to her chin. She could not hear Kymene or the Mynans demanding to know what was wrong with her,
talking about Wasp secret weapons. She could only hear the spiteful, hate-filled voices of the Darakyon as they exalted in their first act of revenge for 500 years.

She felt it through Achaeos. He was in her mind and so were they. She could not hear Kymene or the others. She would not unbend as their chirurgeons tried to wrestle her upright. She just
screamed and screamed.

And stopped.

They dropped her, then, but she was already stumbling to gain her feet. Without warning, her sword was in her hand.

Her mouth was open, but no words came, only a small, hurt noise as she felt Achaeos suddenly
not there
.

‘Che . . . what . . . ?’ Kymene had her blade drawn too, as all of the Mynans surrounding her did. The air around Che seemed to boil and shimmer with darkness.

‘Gone,’ Che finally got out. She was shaking uncontrollably. Where a moment before she had been so full, now there was a void inside her that had to be fed.

‘Che . . .’ Kymene started again, but a wail was building up inside the Beetle girl, a dreadful drawn-out keening sound of loss, loss and rage.

She was possessed. The fire of the Darakyon was still all about her. The world suddenly felt too small to her, too small to be penned in where she was. Achaeos was
gone
, taking some vital
part of herself with him. She had felt him fall away from her into the cold hands of the dead Mantis people, and she could not bear that. She could not live with it.

Her wail became a scream, and before they could stop her she was over the barricade, charging the Wasps at the palace gates with her sword held high.

History would not remember her for it. History would remember Kymene instead, for, as Che made her charge, the Mynan leader followed after her from pure instinct. She had only been aware of a
comrade in trouble, had been surely reaching for Che’s shoulder to drag her back, but the Beetle girl had a surprising turn of speed.

And after Kymene came the Mynans. Chyses barked out his orders, seeing the rallying point for their whole revolution about to throw herself on to the lances of the Wasps . . . and suddenly there
was a whole rush of Mynan warriors behind Kymene, and the Wasps braced their spears and thrust their hands forward to loose their stings. Few of them chose the Beetle girl in the fore as their
target, yet enough of them to kill Che five times over.

And then, before they could loose, the tide hit them. Not the tide of the enemy that was just rushing within their range, but the fear. All about the Beetle-kinden girl at the point of the Mynan
charge, the air was abruptly seething, writhing. She was surrounded by a host of half-seen figures: Mantis-kinden with claws and spears, fearful winged insects with killing arms, a leaning, arching
train of thorns that tore up the ground towards them. The echo of the Darakyon had come to Myna, but the echo was quite enough.

To the Mynans it seemed that the Wasps at the palace gate simply broke. Some fled inside, some hurled themselves into the air. None of them held long enough for Che and Kymene to reach them. A
moment later and the Mynans were into the palace, where the real fighting began.

The sky was streaked with the smoke from failing orthopters.

The Solarnese had no control over the fighting. The Wasps were using their greater mobility to split the locals up, dropping squads of the airborne down between them, holding strategic alleys
and avenues so as to divide the city into manageable sections. Jemeyn’s people, some 200 men and women of the Path of Jade, were now cut off from the rest of the fighting, and there were
seventy or eighty of the enemy blocking their way, holed up in a narrow street with a few ensconced in the buildings either side for flanking shots. Time was running short. If another forty
appeared behind them things would get particularly nasty.

‘We have to take them!’ Nero declared. Jemeyn shook his head, with teeth bared. He had a curving Solarnese sword clutched defiantly in one hand but his nerve was going. Nero could
see it visibly fraying.

‘We have to go!’ Nero insisted. Jemeyn licked his lips. His fighters kept shouting insults and challenges at the Wasps, but they were keeping well out of sting range. Some of them
had crossbows, but the Solarnese fashion was for little pocket-sized things that had no reach to speak of.

The Solarnese fight for style
, Nero reflected,
while the Wasps fight for substance. This isn’t going to go well.

‘Listen to me,’ he began, but he already had gone through all the reason and logic of it. The fact of it was simply that Jemeyn could not bring himself to grasp the nettle, and that
was that.

‘Behind us!’ someone cried, and Nero swore, kicking up into the air to see better. Instead of another detachment of the black and yellow, what he saw gladdened his heart.

It was Odyssa the Spider-kinden, and not alone. Lumbering behind her were at least three score of her mercenaries: huge, broad-shouldered men with massive claws and jutting jaws, all
Scorpion-kinden warriors from the Dryclaw desert, those inveterate slavers, raiders and sell-swords. Nero was gladder than he could believe possible, just to see them.

He saw the same uplift of spirits surge through the Solarnese, too. These Scorpions, however dubious their reputation, looked the business.

‘We need to punch our way through!’ Nero proclaimed. ‘To get to where the real fighting’s at.’ Odyssa merely nodded and he saw, all Spider masks and airs aside,
that she looked pale and frightened. He guessed that she had never been in a real battle before.

The Wasps had closed ranks on seeing the mercenaries appear. They had raised a fence of spears, and they had their stings and their blades ready behind them. The Scorpions, however, had massive
cleaving swords, five or six feet long, just made for the job of hacking a hole through a line of men who carried no shields. Others had heavy crossbows or throwing axes, most had at least a
leather cuirass and kilt, but some were bare-chested and their leader wore a breastplate over a long chain hauberk.

‘Gonna hurt, this,’ the chief Scorpion remarked.

‘And?’ Nero demanded, as a flying machine hit the ground a street away. Whether it was Solarnese or imperial he never knew, but he did not flinch.

‘So let’s get to it,’ said the Scorpion, and he raised his great sword over his head one-handed and bellowed a roar that could have been heard out across the Exalsee, and which
shook the Wasps as they consolidated their stand. Then the Scorpions were charging, and taking the Solarnese with them, in a sudden, rushing mob descending on the soldiers. Nero took up his sword,
a short blade stolen from the enemy that was like a broadsword to him, and he lifted it high and joined the charge, his wings a blur, scooting over the ground in the very front rank.

He witnessed the sting-blast that felled Jemeyn, the man pitching back to trip the two following behind him, but of the shot that then struck Nero himself he saw nothing at all.

Axrad was very nearly too quick for her, his striped orthopter darting out from beneath the barrels of her rotaries and dancing along the length of the
Starnest
.
Taki’s heart was heavy as stone. She had known Scobraan a long time and, although they had not always had kind words for each other, they had never been enemies. The
Esca Volenti
dived
after Axrad, jinking with him, her aim creeping inexorably on to him.

Elsewhere, across the sky over Solarno, there were tens of private duels. Niamedh’s beautiful, sleek
Executrix
drove into a Wasp fixed-wing and forced it down into one of the
carrier blimps, propellers shredding the cumbersome dirigible’s airbag. Drevane Sae’s jewelled dragonfly stooped on the streets of Solarno, the city of his lifelong enemies, his arrows
picking off Wasp officers who were trying to organize the defence on the ground. The ugly, blunt-nosed
Bleakness
, constant scourge of the Exalsee, fired its broadside banks of
shrapnel-casters at anything that came close, even as the
Bleakness
itself closed towards the great overhanging canopy of the
Starnest
.

Axrad’s flier was abruptly beyond the great dirigible’s frame, and it dropped out of sight instantly. Taki cursed, pulled up and high, knowing that, in his position, she would have
then looped round the airship’s hull in order to meet her enemy. She was right, and he came back into view even as she was poised at the point of her dive, his fleet, agile ship leaping into
sight for an ambush that she had not been fool enough to fall for. Instead he rose now to meet her, and she fell upon him, and their weapons began to blaze at the same time.

Two bolts clipped her hull, then a third smashed the window of her cockpit and clipped her shoulder, enough to make her tug on the stick without intention. She dragged her goggles down over her
face against the blasting air, while Axrad’s undamaged vessel passed over her so close that their beating wingtips touched.

In the instant she was spiralling away, fighting to get back on the level, and she knew that he must be wrestling for just the same goal, and then the
Esca
was hers again and she swung
back towards Axrad, towards the
Starnest
, seeing him find his place and commence a mirror-image move.

He had killed Scobraan, and who knew how many others, but he was a pilot to reckon with and she could not take that from him.

Elsewhere, the Creev’s
Nameless Warrior
danced with three Wasp orthopters. The halfbreed slave, the finest pilot of Chasme, had a ballista bolt jammed through his leg, pinning him
to his weakening hull, though he barely felt it. He had no Art-flight anyway, and if his ship died, so would he. His rotaries, four of them, spat out their bolts, and span together about one axis
to make a storm of shot, smashing one Wasp flier entirely, shredding its wings to ribbons, leaving a punctured carcase of its hull. He was faltering, though, his body and ship both wearing thin. He
would die above his enemies’ city unmourned and unseen by any save for the Wasp that would bring him down – but not yet. He had some killing left to do before the end.

Axrad was now flying straight, and Taki knew that he would soon end it one way or the other. The
Esca
was shaking in unfamiliar ways: the poor ship had taken her share of beatings in this
fight.

She pulled the trigger even as Axrad did, and she saw furrows raking into his hull before her rotary jammed altogether, and his shots slammed into the
Esca
’s undercarriage.

Oh.

She must dive aside now, but when she did he would find his place behind her, and then she would be lost. Another shot lanced past her, through the broken cockpit, heading for the engine
casing.

She counted. Three bolts passed her by and one tore straight through the flesh of her arm. She screamed.

Taki pulled the release, and the broken frame of the cockpit fell away, and she kicked up, despite the pain, letting her wings flower.

Axrad pulled up at the very last moment, pulled up late because he had been so determined to bring her down that he had not realized he had already succeeded.

She was nearly caught between the two craft. Only a Fly-kinden’s swift reflexes saved her as the empty, abused
Esca Volenti
drove straight into Axrad’s flier, their wings
snarling instantly, the
Esca
’s nose snapping on Axrad’s underside and then breaking through.

She did not notice if he was able to fly clear, as the two dying ships span madly down towards the earth.

She had a dagger, and the
Starnest
, which blotted out her sky, was very large, but even so it was all right because someone else had a larger blade than that.

She should have known that Hawkmoth, the old pirate, had preyed on airships before. Who knew how many he had assailed in the sky, and sent plummeting down to the Exalsee, where his shipbound
confederates would be waiting? Over the
Starnest
’s taut canvas the
Bleakness
dipped low, a black and evil-looking flying machine, armoured and squat, with all the natural grace
of a scarab in flight. From beneath it had unsheathed two curving blades, each the length of a man. There was no subtlety in it. The pirate simply threw his machine against the airbag and unseamed
it, from stern to fore, with twin gashes seventy feet from end to end.

At first it seemed that even this had not affected this pride of the Wasp airforce, but then the difference told, the lighter gas venting out from the violated compartments, until the colossal
bulk of the
Starnest
was dipping, sagging, and then falling down upon the city it had been sent to conquer.

* * *

He would not come to bed. Stenwold, instead, sat at his desk with reports and maps and tried to make sense of it.

‘You must sleep, surely,’ Arianna urged him. She was standing at the door to his study, wrapped in a robe of his that was vastly too large for her. ‘Stenwold, they will want
you on the walls again tomorrow.’