Salute the Dark (52 page)

The crowd had gone silent as Tisamon stood beside his victim, hearing the man’s breath hissing, raw, amid his pain. He knew the custom now, as Ult had explained it to him. It would be for
the Emperor alone to decide.

Tisamon looked up at the Emperor for the first time since the man’s hurried visit to the cells, and his eyes began seeking for a way in.

Below the first row of the crowd there was a ring of soldiers atop the high wall of the pit, men in full armour with spears. They would be the first barrier to overcome. The Emperor, of course,
had his own private room facing the arena, a long enclosure constructed out of fabric that hid him from the crowd on both sides, so that only those sitting across from him could see him clearly,
and then only from well outside of sting range. More soldiers were standing on guard directly before the Emperor and on either side of his box.

Alvdan the Second sat staring down at the victor and, when their eyes met, Tisamon thought he saw the man flinch. He noticed an older man, balding and thickset, seated almost beside the Emperor,
and behind him . . .

For a moment Tisamon just stared, feeling something kick inside him. There was a darkness behind the Emperor that might be a robed man, a pale smear that must be a face half-hidden beneath a
cowl, and to one side a younger Wasp woman whose face resembled the Emperor’s own, but on the other side of the cowled figure was . . .

Atryssa
.

Atryssa, his long-dead lover, looked down on him, and she nodded. He saw it distinctly. She nodded her approval, her permission.

The Emperor drew a dagger and held it high, and Tisamon, obedient to the signal, drove his spines down into the Scorpion-kinden’s throat, finishing him. The Mantis barely realized what he
had done, though. He felt as though a monstrous weight had been suddenly lifted from him.

She approves. She forgives.
He almost stumbled as he left the arena.

He never considered that she might be his daughter, not his lover. He was too far lost in the maze of his own honour for that thought. Instead he took her silent camaraderie for absolution, and
he used it to cut free twenty years of guilt.

I am ready now
, he decided.

There were four guards leading Kaszaat, clustered to either side and behind her as though uncertain what to do with her. She was not quite a prisoner, therefore, but far less
than free. It was the Auxillian rank, of course, Totho realized. Kaszaat was a sergeant, after all, and it threw them a little to have been obliged to arrest her.

Totho saw Big Greyv shift, leaning on the haft of his axe, though still lurking in the shadow of the engine. It was astonishing, he considered remotely, how very quiet the Mole Cricket could be,
how easily overlooked.

‘Speak,’ Drephos commanded. Totho saw his superior purse his lips, but there was no surprise on his face, only a faint disappointment.

‘We caught her at one of the machines,’ called up a soldier.

‘She is an artificer, so how unexpected was that?’ Drephos asked. He did not raise his voice, but his tone was sharp enough to carry. The wind promised for the morning had yet to
rise, and the air was very still.

‘One of
our
artificers reckoned she was breaking it,’ the soldier explained. The slight hint of stress showed what he thought of Drephos’ ragged crew. ‘Sabotage,
he said. Said we should bring her to you or, if you wouldn’t deal with it, he’d take it up with the governor. After all, she’s one of them.’

‘I had always thought,’ Drephos said, probably too softly now for the soldiers to hear, ‘that she was one of mine.’ For a moment he paused, staring down, disparate hands
resting on the railing. Kaszaat glared up at him defiantly, looking so much slighter than the guards behind her. Totho felt something twist inside him.

‘Sergeant-Auxillian Kaszaat, step forwards,’ Drephos ordered. She did so instinctively.

‘I placed faith in you,’ Drephos told her. ‘I had not thought I had done so badly by you as to merit this.’ His voice was carrying clearly again, finding her ears without
effort. ‘I gave you station and position, drew you from the ranks of the slaves to be one of my chosen. How, therefore, has it come to this?’ Hearing him and his genuinely aggrieved
tone, Totho believed that the man truly did not understand – the master of machines was stuck with a problem that his own invincible logic could not solve.

Kaszaat was shaking her head slowly, and reflected in her eyes was the unnatural monster she was looking at, who could not himself see what was so plain to everyone else there.

The guards understand more than he does
, Totho thought, as Kaszaat cried out, ‘Drephos, they’re my
kin
!’ Her admission changed the attitude of the guards, and
Totho saw their hands flex, and one man shift his grip on the snapbow he was carrying. He met Kaszaat’s eyes just briefly, and the loathing in them made him flinch. She had found him here
with the enemy, and she could not know that he had come simply for the same purpose.
The same purpose
–
but I have failed. Even before she came Drephos had talked me out of
it.

‘But, Kaszaat,’ Drephos continued, and he was still so dreadfully hurt, so absurdly hurt by her turning from him, ‘how can you choose an accident of birth over our
work
?’ So spoke Drephos the halfbreed, even as Totho was a halfbreed: both men without kin and without homes.

And Kaszaat let out a shriek of pure anger, bursting forwards suddenly, flinging her hand up towards Drephos as though in salute. Totho was shouting her name even as she did so, seeing the
darkness shift as Big Greyv abruptly stirred into motion. She had caught them all by surprise, standing there guarded and unarmed but, like a good magician, there had been something up her
sleeve.

It was a slender silver rod and less than a foot long, the simplest iteration of the snapbow she could construct. It was in her hand instantly, and the trigger pressed, and Totho saw something
flash past his face – no precise shape, just the impression of movement. Drephos rocked back, and Totho saw the quilled end of the dart buried at the point where his shoulder met his
chest.

Kaszaat was still moving forwards, though he would never discover what she intended next. The first sting-blast struck her a glancing blow to her side, though the snapbow bolt passed by her, the
guards caught unprepared by her sudden move. It was Big Greyv’s great axe, cleaving out of the darkness in a colossal double-handed swing, that buried itself in her chest, crushed her body
entirely with the force of it, flinging her back into the guards and scattering them.

Totho felt the impact like a physical shock to his own body and his own snapbow, his glorious repeating snap-bow, was now levelled in his hands and, without a moment’s hesitation, he
pulled on the trigger, feeling the weapon rattle, its mechanism still slightly rough and needing adjustment.

Three shots tore through Big Greyv, ripping into the massive Mole Cricket’s frame and driving the huge man to his knees. The rest sprayed the guards even as they were gaping at
Kaszaat’s body, the weapon leaping wildly in his hands, but the bolts punching straight through armour and flesh without distinction. Only the last man to fall had some idea of what was
happening, and he was able to look up and see his killer before the bolt found him.

And there will be more guards
, Totho thought desperately, automatically fitting a new magazine just as he had when he tested the weapon. Even as he thought it, he heard running footsteps
from the tower’s other side. Two sentries who had heard the shouting were coming up, not seeing any bodies yet, hearing no massed attack and so suspecting little. They did not even hear the
snapbow crack before Totho had shot both of them dead.

More, surely?
But no more came. The sentries from the other side of the line must have been the same men who came with Kaszaat. The Bee-kinden rebels of Szar were well dug in, and nobody
was expecting an attack.

A hand closed on the barrel of his snapbow and crushed the metal like foil, twisting it closed and useless. Totho jerked back and found himself at the rail with Drephos standing before him, the
ruined weapon dangling from his metal hand. The master artificer looked at it sadly, recognizing the waste. He turned the same expression on Totho.

Totho went for him, fumbling for a knife at his belt. Drephos’ artificial arm, the bolt still jutting from its shoulder, was quicker. It took his wrist in a vice-grip that shot pain
through Totho, forcing him back against the rail.

‘Why?’ Drephos asked him, but Totho had no answers for him. From the moment of Kaszaat’s arrival here tonight he had felt that his choices had been stripped from him, and the
path he might otherwise have taken was closed.

His left hand found the hammer in his tool belt and, despite the grinding pain in his other wrist, he pulled it out and struck. It was a small hammer, but he knew what he was doing now: striking
not as a warrior but as an artificer. He hammered Drephos’ arm three times, three precise strokes, denting in the elbow and the shoulder and locking them in place. Drephos’ mottled face
went pale at the last blow, and Totho knew that he had impacted something, some pin or plate, deep enough to reach the real man.

He deliberately struck again at the same place, and Drephos hissed through bared teeth, sweat suddenly standing out on his forehead as the metal of his surrogate body cut deep into the flesh he
had been born with. He fell to his knees, dragging Totho down by his rigid arm, and Totho saw the tears of pain in his eyes. His living hand clawed weakly at the ruined shoulder. He did not cry
out. Either his pride or the pain was too great for that.

Working carefully, left-handed, Totho removed the man’s thumb. Once he had prised the covering plate off, it was surprisingly easy, but of course Drephos would have had to maintain it
single-handed and so it had been designed for that facility. That done, Totho could remove his bruised wrist from the other’s locked grasp.

Looking down at the carnage he had wrought, his first thought was to go below to join Kaszaat, but there would be no last-second reconciliation there, no last fond words or exchange of vows. Big
Greyv’s single blow had killed her as thoroughly as a catapult stone.

Drephos let out a long, ragged breath, and Totho turned back to him. The master artificer gripped a pair of pliers awkwardly in one hand, with which he was trying to release something in his
trapped shoulder. His fingers shook and his face was clenched into agonized concentration. When he saw Totho watching him, he stopped, the pliers scraping on metal. His eyes were bright through his
agonized mask.

‘So what now?’ he asked. ‘Do I scream for the guards? And what do
you
do now, Totho?’ His voice was so quiet and clipped with pain that Totho had to hunch forwards
to hear him.

Totho looked beyond him past the gleaming metal of the engine towards the rebels’ lines. The city was waiting in the still air, waiting for what morning would bring. He knelt by Drephos,
wondering how easy it would be to free the damaged arm, or whether Drephos could even survive the loss of this mechanical part of himself.

‘You’ve not so long left,’ Drephos said, his voice trembling despite all his self-possession. ‘Better make your decision soon.’

‘I have decided,’ Totho announced, standing up again. ‘And in a way, I think you would approve.’

Towards morning, the Bee-kinden soldiers that had apprehended him brought him before their leader.

‘What’s this?’ Maczech demanded, sparing him only a brief glance. If she was now queen of the people of Szar, very little of her status showed. She wore a studded leather
cuirass over worn, dusty garments, and she stood hunched over a table, poring over a map of the city with three of her officers. Totho could see the positions of the Wasps and the locals marked
across it as solid or dotted lines.

Time to redraw the map
, he reflected.

‘He was approaching the barricades,’ Totho’s captor reported. ‘He stopped immediately when ordered. He also came unarmed.’

She glanced at him again. She was young and, of course, reminded him of Kaszaat, just by her very race, the shape of her face and nut-brown skin. He had expected another Kymene, all fire and
fierce leadership, but Maczech lacked that woman’s unbreachable resolve, and he could read in her face an agony of fear that she would lead her people astray. She had come to her throne
suddenly, and been made her people’s war leader in the same moment, and she was afraid.

She looked as though she had not slept in some time, and for a moment they just stared at one another dully.

‘A halfbreed,’ she noted. ‘What else are you?’ Before he could reply, she had looked him up and down. ‘Auxillian artificer,’ she identified. ‘But I
don’t believe in defectors – not this close to a battle.’

The slip was evident there, of course, although nobody else seemed to have noticed.
Plenty of defectors before a battle
, Totho thought,
but not from the side that’s most likely
to win.

‘What do you want?’ she continued. ‘You’ve a message? We will not accept terms that leave our city in chains.’ Her voice trembled slightly, but none of the
surrounding Bee-kinden seemed to notice. She had their absolute faith, and it was torturing her.

Totho felt a lump in his throat at that.
She knows very well that they cannot hold against the Wasps, not forever.
The time would come, in the normal course of this fight, when they would
accept whatever terms were offered them. Totho guessed that Maczech herself would be dead by that point.

‘Your city is free,’ he said quietly.

‘And will remain so as long as we draw breath,’ she declared, turning away.

‘Your city is free,’ he repeated.

Man by man, a silence fell on the Szaren’s little command-room. Maczech and her officers turned their heads, one by one, until they were all staring at him.

‘Explain yourself, halfbreed,’ she said.