Salute the Dark (5 page)

Stenwold reflected that all the renegade Ants he had ever known who had turned their backs on their home and people, they were each of them still chained to their heritage. Growing up with a
mind full of the thoughts of others left a big, empty gap when they set out on their own. How many of them were drawn back, eventually, for all that it would usually mean their deaths?

Balkus was obviously thinking on similar lines. ‘And they’re fine about it, are they? My . . . the Sarnesh?’

‘They know all about you. I’ve sent word to them, saying who I’ve put in charge.’

‘That isn’t the same!’ Balkus objected. ‘Look, I don’t want to go up that rail-line only to find they’ve just been sharpening the knives.’

‘We’re at war now, and the Sarnesh understand that they have to put aside their preferences,’ Stenwold replied. ‘And you have more experience than anyone else in the army
here.’

‘Well, you’ve got that right,’ Balkus grunted.

‘Shall we inspect the troops, now?’ Stenwold asked. The Ant nodded gloomily and led the way out of the hall of the Amphiophos, Collegium’s seat of government. While Stenwold
had been in Sarn, arguing diplomacy, Balkus had been training troops here at home. Collegium had never possessed a standing army and, although the recent siege by the Ants of Vek had created
hundreds of veterans, it was short of full-time soldiers. Balkus would not normally have been considered officer material in anyone’s book, but he had a loud voice, and he was an Ant, meaning
warfare in his very veins. What he had so far made out of the recruits they had given him was nothing to compare to a properly regimented Ant-kinden force, but it was something entirely new to
Collegium.

There were already a dozen other officers waiting on the steps of the Amphiophos, leaders of the merchant companies watching as their troops assembled in the square below. They were
Beetle-kinden men and women for the most part, broad and solid of build, wearing breastplates over quilted hauberks padded out with twists of rag and fibre that, in theory, would slow or even stop
a crossbow or snapbow bolt. They also wore caps armoured with curved metal plates designed to deflect shot. As armour went, it was very new and mostly untested. The breastplates had all been
stencilled with the arms of the Prowess Forum, namely a sword over an open book sketched in silver lines across the dark metal, but many of the officers and their gathering charges had overlaid
these with sashes and surcoats carrying the various company badges they had chosen to display.

There had been no time for complex planning, or for establishing elaborate networks of supply or support. On the other hand, since Collegium had begun building its army from scratch, it had
created something uniquely Beetle and previously unseen. The term the war council had coined was ‘bow and pike’. A third of the soldiers were equipped with glaive-headed polearms, the
stock-in-trade of watchmen everywhere, to hold off an enemy either on the ground or in the air. The rest were armed to fight at a greater distance. The Wasps were not an enemy to stand solidly
together like Ant-kinden and hack at close quarters. Instead they moved swiftly, struck from range or attacked from above. The square before the Amphiophos was currently filled with repeating
crossbows, nailbows and the new snapbows, the Beetle-kinden having taken to the weapon so readily that its designer might have specially intended it for them.

Could it be that the Wasps themselves have given us the tool we needed to defeat them?

There were some from other kinden too, for Collegium was not too proud to turn away any who wished to help. The army would include Fly-kinden spotters and archers, and some of the pikemen were
Mantis-kinden or Spiders. There were Ants of four or five different cities amongst the ranks, all former renegades like Balkus who had given their tireless loyalty to Collegium.

The city was now sending just under a thousand soldiers to reinforce Sarn – because if Sarn fell, then Collegium might as well surrender. It was the one point that the war council had not
bickered about. Several times that number of battle-ready troops would remain to guard the walls of the city against a surprise attack by the Wasps, or even by the Vekken. Meanwhile volunteers kept
arriving in droves for the new regiments.

My city will be changed irrevocably by this
, Stenwold reflected.
Not for the better, either
–
we could have lived happily without this war.

The sound of precisely marching feet came to his ears and the final part of the relief force came into view with a discipline that shamed the locals. Commander Parops had arrived, with 700
pale-skinned Tarkesh Ants to his name. This was the bulk of the Free Army of Tark, as Parops himself had named it, comprising the military strength of his currently occupied city. They were the
best-armed Ant-kinden in the world, just now: every second man of them carried a snapbow as well as a sword and shield, and many sported nailbows and crossbows as well. Their linked minds meant
that this entire force could go from weapon to weapon, in whole or in part, as the battle demanded. They would form the core of the Collegiate force, from whom the locals would take their strength
and their example.

Parops halted his men and strode up the steps towards Stenwold.

‘All ready to go, War Master,’ he said, and smiled because he knew Stenwold could not abide that title.

‘The troop trains are waiting at the station,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘Already loaded with supplies, canvas, even some light artillery, I’m told.’ He clapped the
Tarkesh on the shoulder. ‘I know what’s at stake for you, Commander.’

Parops nodded soberly. ‘The Sarnesh are bound to be cursed ungrateful hosts as well, but we’re short of choices right now and my soldiers want to fight. With your permission,
I’ll begin getting them stowed on board.’

Stenwold nodded silently and the Ant marched back to his men and began to move them out. Stenwold turned to Balkus to find him now a little distance away, kneeling down by a small figure that
was hugging him tightly. Sperra, Stenwold saw, was looking better in health than she had been before, though clearly upset that the Ant was leaving. She and Balkus had been close since their time
as agents working for Stenwold’s cause in Helleron.

‘You look after yourself, you oaf,’ Sperra was ordering him. ‘Don’t you dare let anything happen to you.’

‘What could happen to me?’ Balkus replied, trying hard to smile. ‘And if those Sarnesh give me any grief, I’ll give them double in return.’

‘You do that,’ she hissed fiercely, and clung to him one last time, before letting go and giving place to Stenwold.

‘Suppose this is it.’ Balkus grimaced.

‘You’ve said your other goodbyes?’ Stenwold asked.

Balkus grinned. ‘To those that have time for it. Everyone seems to have something urgent on their minds right now.’

‘That’s true enough.’ Between Achaeos’ injuries and whatever emotional gauntlet Tisamon seemed to be putting himself through, it had been a lonely time for Sten-wold
recently. ‘Good luck, Commander. I hope you won’t need it, but good luck all the same.’

‘A man always needs luck,’ Balkus murmured, and went down into the square to order his troops. All around the Amphiophos square men and women were bidding goodbye to their loved
ones: wives, husbands, parents, children. Beetles in unfamiliar armour bent for a last embrace from a lover, friends clasped hands, business partners thrust forward knapsacks of choice tidbits from
the stock to lighten the journey. Eyes took one last look over the roofs of Collegium, the Amphiophos and the College, and there cannot have been many who did not wonder whether they would see any
of it again – or what flag would be flying over it if they did.

Tisamon had spent the day deliberately seeing no one. He had found a high tower of the College, the stairs leading to it thick with dust, and some abandoned study given over by
its occupant in exchange for somewhere less exerting. It gave him a fine view of the city, if he had wanted it, but instead he looked up at the sky. Even the clouds that scudded there, ragged
nomads in that vast blue, weighed upon him. He felt as though he was dying.

He should be with Tynisa now, he knew. She was suffering, and he should go to her. It was good Mantis suffering, though, and that was what she did not understand yet. They had brought her up
amongst soft Beetle-kinden, who did everything in their power to stave off pain, and so she had never learned the catharsis of hurt.

It was a Mantis thing: to have slain or injured a fellow by tragic mistake, in the madness of battle – the songs were legion that told this same story. She should bear up to the deed, take
it inside herself rather than hiding from it. He himself should be teaching her all this.

Except that he was no role model – at least not now.

The storm had come, at last. He had felt the winds rising before he had left for Jerez. He had given Felise into Stenwold’s care, but not for her sake, never for her sake. He had felt the
storm-winds in his soul, and he had gone off with Achaeos to shelter from their blast.

The storm had inevitably come.

She had been practising, he heard, while he had been away. She had been dancing through all the infinite moves of her skill in readiness for his return. They had sparred; they had matched their
skills. It had been his doorway back into a world that he had long been barred from. It had been the world of his people, and hers, the perfect expression of the duel, but all the histories of his
race were cursing him for how he felt now.

The air was chill up here, but he hauled off his arming jacket, tore apart his shirt, bared his chest, tried to freeze the malady from himself. Yet the cold could not touch sufficiently deep in
him: there was not mortification enough in all the world of men to do that.

He hurt with a pain he had not felt in a long time. Even when the Wasp intelligencer Thalric had seared him with his sting in Helleron it had not hurt like this. When Stenwold had suddenly
thrust an unknown halfbreed daughter on him, it had not hurt like this. He was impaled: writhe as he might, he could not escape. He could now not even seek sanctuary in his skill, because of the
gaping absence he felt when he trained and danced alone.

This is wrong.
Betrayal on betrayal, he who had already sold so much of his heritage to indulge his personal lusts. All the ancient traditions of his people were in pieces at his feet,
and now he would trample them one more time. And he would grind a heel into
her
memory as well, for good measure: the Spider-kinden woman he had made his sacrifice for so long ago, who had
been everything to him – and was she just one more thing to cast off, when he felt the urge to? And if so, if that was all she had been, why had he cast aside so very much, just to be with
her?

So turn away! Run away!
He should leave Collegium. He should seek the Empire out, and then kill Wasps until they brought him down. He should flee so far that none who saw him would know
him. He should open his own throat here and now rather than contemplate this sin.

Mantis-kinden pair once, and are faithful beyond death. Everyone knows this.

But his mind came back and back to her perfect grace, her eyes, the line of her blade and the flash of her wings, and he
hurt
with the sheer bitter longing of seventeen bleak years.

Ancestors, save me.

The sky grew dark as he sat up in his tower, and when the night came he had made his choice. He padded down the dusty stairs that were marked only by the tread of his own ascent, and he felt
like a man falling. Something had infected him, had gnawed him to the heart. He let it take him away from the College, padding past over-late students and home-bound Masters, unseen by any of
them.

It was a short enough step from the gates of the College to those of the Amphiophos. Here there were guards, but he passed them unseen for all their vigilance. His disease had made him
skilled.

He could not stop himself now. He had fought that battle up in the tower, and he had lost. It was the hurt, that razoring hurt, that drove him on: a burning he could not quench save in this one
way. He crept, quiet and half-clad, through the corridors of the hostels behind the Amphiophos, through the diplomats’ chambers and the rooms for the foreign guests of the Assembly. He knew
he was ill.

Ill and incurable
, Tisamon thought.
I should not be here
.

There were more guards here, of course, in case of Wasp assassins. Some were Beetles in their clanking mail; others were Fly-kinden, more subtle and able to see better in the dark. Tisamon
evaded them easily, for he had spent a portion of his earlier career in the factory-city of Helleron, moving unseen through buildings like this. Everyone knew that his race were full of pride and
honour, and so few realized how neither of those qualities was in any way compromised in being a skilled assassin. What was their Mantis totem, after all, but a stealthy killer of insects and
men.

It was a mark of his illness that, even as he crept past the guards, he did not think
I must tell Stenwold to bolster the security here
, but was simply grateful that the gaps in their
watchfulness were sufficient for a Mantis to slip through. If they had seen him, well, they would recognize him, greet him, think no more of it, but he did not want to be seen. He wanted no other
eyes to witness this failure of his. He was ashamed.

He was nearing his destination now, and his heart, which would keep a steady pace through duel or skirmish, was beginning to speed. He was sweating: he felt physically ill now, feverish, but he
suppressed it. No magician had ever inspired this dread in him, nor had any threat of death or pain.

The doorway was straight ahead, down this little hall, and in his absorption he almost missed the figure lounging in the alcove next to it, very nearly passed the man by without seeing him, but
then his instincts struck home. A moment later he was in his killing stance, with his claw-blade at the throat of . . . it took him a moment to see that the man’s face was familiar. It was
the Spider physician, Destrachis,
her
constant shadow.