Salute the Dark (11 page)

‘Good,’ Uctebri said. ‘Then, in answer to your question, the Shadow Box does not merely
bear
on our plans; it
is
the plan. Life and death, my princess, both
reside within this box, and are there for me to draw upon. Life, for you, and death . . .’

She raised a hand before he could say it, even though she knew they could not be overheard.
I cannot trust you, can I?
She knew he must be planning to control her as a puppet ruler of his
Empire.
Still, he gives me more chance than my brother.
‘It seems very small,’ she said, archly disdainful. ‘I do wonder whether you do not throw this object in my way
simply to amaze and mystify me.’

His grin broke out again now, within the confines of his hood. ‘My dear doubting princess, do you believe in ghosts?’

She made to say that of course she did not, but he was so plainly waiting for this response that she just gave him an uninterested shrug.

‘I cannot hope to make you understand how the world is truly made,’ he told her. ‘Metaphor, then: the world is a weave, like threads woven into cloth.’ His hand came out
of his sleeve with a strip of his red ribbon.

‘If you say so.’

‘Everything, stone, trees, beasts, the sky, the waters, all are a weave of fabric,’ he said patiently. ‘But when you
think
, it is different. Your thinking snarls the
fabric, knots it. If you were a magician, you could use the knot of your mind to pull on other threads. That is magic, and now you see how very simple it is. I wonder everyone does not become an
enchanter.’ With a swift intertangling of his fingers, there was now a lumpy knot in the centre of the ribbon.

She managed to shrug again. ‘I cannot deny that you have a power, Mosquito. I cannot think to ever understand it – and I think it is better I do not.’

‘Perhaps.’ He grinned at her. ‘What happens, though, after you die? What happens to the knot?’ He pulled at the tape’s ends sharply, and the knot had vanished, as
though it had never been. ‘Alas, unravelled in an instant, my princess.’ His grin was conspiratorial. ‘But what if it were not?’

‘I . . . do not understand.’

‘The body gone – dead, rotten, decay and then dust – but the
knot
of mind still there, trapped within the weave, impossible to undo.’ Now he was moving about the
room, pinching out candle-flames between his fingertips, bringing on a gloom that she felt must match the evening outside.

‘I do not see how that can be.’

‘But then you do not understand any of what I say, for you merely see the convenient images I speak of,’ he said. ‘Laetrimae, would you come forth? Drama now requires
it.’

Seda frowned at him. ‘What are you talking about.’

‘Drama indeed,’ said Uctebri. ‘Perhaps more than is required, but the Mantis-kinden were always a race prone to the grand gesture.’

It was chilly in the room, and the dark seemed to have grown more swiftly than the dying candles could account for but, most disturbing of all, Uctebri was looking behind her, past her shoulder
at something
else
.

She turned, and screamed at what she saw there, falling backwards on to the floor of the mirror room and scrabbling to put more distance between herself and the apparition that had manifested
between herself and the door.

It was a woman, tall and lean and pale, and clad in piecemeal plates that might have been armour or chitin, and her body pierced through and through with briars that twisted and arched and grew
and impaled her over and over, and yet, despite it all, her face was calm and beatific and quite, quite insane.

‘Behold the greatest mistake of the Moth-kinden,’ hissed Uctebri, ‘the greatest knot in the weave of history, and a knot that will continue on and on and never be undone. She,
however, is only their spokeswoman, my princess. There are a thousand others of them, snarled together like the vines that pierce her, and they are Mantis and Moth both, tangled and matted and
interwoven. The creation of the single greatest act of magic ever known, and here I hold it in my hands.’

The tortured woman’s face had adopted a new expression, and Seda saw that it was loathing, and that it was directed entirely at Uctebri. She found that she sympathized with that emotion
wholeheartedly.

* * *

Tisamon returned to his rented rooms feeling shaken and sick at heart.

It was not from the fighting, which had been the only part of it to make sense. After all, the complicity that existed between people trying to kill one another bred a brotherhood he had long
been a part of.

They had converted a marketplace into an arena, the Wasps ordering the locals to tear down their stalls and put up ranks of tiered seating instead. It looked not so different from the Prowess
Forum, of fond and distant memory. That was what he had expected, too: duels of skill, followed by polite applause. To a Mantis-kinden there was nothing inherently wrong in a duel of expertise that
ended in death. It was the logical final expression of the art form, that was all.

What he had just been through was different, and soiled him in a way he could not have guessed at.

He had entered into the arena with a dozen other fighters. Each had been introduced, lifting a weapon high for the crowd’s approval. They had been a motley band: Beetles, rogue Ants,
halfbreeds, even a Scorpion-kinden with a sword standing as tall as he was. There had been no alliances between them, no rules. When the official Wasp overseer had cast down his gilded wooden
baton, the fighters had simply gone at each other. At that moment Tisamon had felt the calm trance of his profession come upon him, and he had cocked his claw back and met the nearest opponent
joyfully: a Beetle-kinden armoured with overlapping plates as far as his knees and elbows, who had swung at him with a double-headed spear.

Tisamon had caught the spear in the crook of his claw, slammed the spines of his other arm down into the gap between the man’s neck and shoulder, and then slashed him across the throat as
he staggered backwards.

Next had been an Ant-kinden with a tall shield and a shortsword, and no armour save for a metal helm. Tisamon had killed him, too, and then two more, and by that time the remaining fighters had
taken notice and turned on him. There had been six of them, determined to take him down all together before resuming their separate quarrels.

It had been a demanding contest, for they had none of them been poor fighters, but they were not Weaponsmasters, either, nor trained to fight alongside each other. He eventually finished them
all, killing four outright and cutting two so badly that they could not fight on.

Only then did he hear the uproar of the crowd. Whilst fighting, he had been oblivious to it. He had not been fighting for
them
, but for himself.

They had gone mad: cheering and shouting and shrieking. He had stood in the arena’s heart with the blood of eight men on his blade, and the sheer force and power of their acclaim almost
drove him to his knees.

They were not done with him, though. They had then wanted him to kill the two opponents he had let live.

It was
unclean
.

He realized then, looking up at the faces of Wasp soldiers and administrators, at the faces of the Beetle-kinden wealthy and their servants and guests, that they did not actually
care
about the skill. It did not matter to them that he was a Weaponsmaster, that he had perfected a style of fighting that was a thousand years old and that he was
good
. They were there only for
the blood, and if he had come in and butchered two dozen pitifully-armed slaves they would have called out just the same.

But now they loved him. He was their champion of the moment, because he had shed more blood for them than his defeated opponents had.

The next match was indeed two dozen slaves: convicts from the cells, men and women from the Spider-kinden markets, or simply those who had somehow displeased Helleron’s new masters. He had
not wanted to fight them, but they had been promised their freedom if they killed him, and so they desperately tried. He waited for them, gave them every chance. As they neared him, he had
discovered that his hatred for slave-owners was very readily turning into contempt for those who had let themselves become enslaved.

And the crowd had applauded him, as though it was all some kind of
show.
Looking about him, he saw how the Beetle-kinden of Helleron were learning very swiftly from their new masters.
Their shouting was the loudest and longest.

When it was over he had told them to send his fee to Rowen Palasso, and then he was gone.

Never again.
There were other ways, honest ways, for a man to make a living by the blade. He now sat on his bed in the dingy little top-storey room he had rented, and thought hard. He
found that his hands were shaking: it was not the blood of others that could do this to him, but their approbation.

Differing kinden had differing traditions, in the duel. The Ants loved their sword-games, but they loved the skill and precision most, and seldom took matters beyond drawing the first blood. In
Collegium it remained a polite sport of wooden swords suitable for College masters and youngsters to watch. The Mantis-kinden killed one another sometimes, but only by mutual agreement, and never
for the amusement of an audience.

He knew that the Spider-kinden had their slaves fight one another, sometimes, simply for the sport. He had not thought to find the same decadent tastes magnified in the Wasps.

Tisamon rose and went to the door. He would find some other way of surviving, or some other city. This life was not for him.

He was not alone in the room.

He turned instantly, the claw appearing over his hand, its gauntlet about his arm, slashing out at where he
knew
someone stood.

His shock, when it clanged off the swift parry of an identical blade, held him motionless, easy victim to a riposte. He could feel the steel there, but saw nothing.

She formed out of the air as a faint shadow, writhing and twisting with vines and thorns.

Tisamon
, she named him.
Weaponsmaster
.

He stared, feeling fear creep over him. Magic was something he had no defence against.

Tisamon
, she said again. He could just make out Mantis features there, amidst the blur of leaves and the glitter of compound eyes.

‘What do you want with me?’ he asked.

I am here to judge you
, she said.
Are you not seeking judgment?

He realized that he had already fallen to his knees. ‘Judgment . . . for what?’

Her eyes, insubstantial as they were, held him tight.
You know your own crimes. Are you not seeking atonement even now, in this spiritless city?

‘There can be no atonement,’ he choked out.

And so you must atone forever? That is a familiar concept of our kinden. We have so many laws and rules, and therefore we cannot avoid breaking them. We are always imperfect by the impossible
standards that we set ourselves. Do we not therefore live our lives in an agony of thwarted desires, our laws pressing against our skin like sharp thorns?

‘Who are you?’ He stared at her. ‘
What
are you?’

I am a monument to Mantis pride and failure, Tisamon. They called me Laetrimae, before my fall. Five hundred years I have wept and atoned, and yet I still have not escaped the consequences of
my actions. Nor shall you.

He had no words, no thoughts save that surely this must be the thing he had gone looking for when he fled Collegium. Surely this was the judgment he deserved.

What shall I judge you for, Tisamon?
she asked him.
You were false to your people in the lover you took. You were false to yourself, in the guilt you felt for it. You were false to
your lover in your abandonment of her, and of your daughter as well. You have been false to your past lover in your new love, and now false to your new love in your turning away from her. Is there
anything of worth you have not cast aside, Tisamon?

‘No.’

But there is. You may have thrown aside the badge, but you are a Weaponsmaster still. Are you not aware of the duties that role carries? You are yet the defender of your people, all your
people
–
even those such as I who have fallen so far that your own disgrace now seems but a stumble.

‘What could you need defending from?’

Evil and rapacious men who would steal that which belongs to our kind
–
our legacy, our history.

‘I am unworthy—’

It is because you are unworthy that I reach out to you
, she continued urgently.
You have suffered, but there is a suffering and disgrace that no one of our kind should bear. Who else
but a vessel already broken can be asked to withstand the strain?

‘What do you want of me?’ he demanded.

There are, even now, men coming to take you prisoner, Tisamon. You have attracted their notice. They wish to take you and enslave you. You have been sold by your own factor. She leads them to
you even now.

He was on his feet on the instant, the blade of his claw opening. ‘Rowen has betrayed me?’

The betrayer betrayed.
Her words silenced him.
If you would truly seek atonement for your pride, Tisamon, you must let them take you. You must submit to the worst before you might hope
for any redemption.

‘Take me? You mean . . . ?’

Or have you pride, yet, that fears to be broken?

He was at the door now, pointing his blade at her. ‘You cannot ask me to become a slave. No Mantis has ever fallen so far.’

The shadow that was Laetrimae drifted closer, passing right through the cramped bed.
I am a slave, Tisamon. I am a slave to the Shadow Box that you let slip. Now, as a result, I am a slave of
our enemies. Believe me, I am all that is Mantis: all fragile pride and fear of failure. I do not ask this of you lightly.
She was standing before him, still transparent, a mere smudge on the
air.
In this way you may erase the stain that you see on your soul.