Salute the Dark

‘Chief, if we don’t give ’em the word soon, they’re just going to go off and do it on their own,’ she told him cheerfully. She had at least 400 under her command, mostly Fly-kinden but with Moths and others amongst them. They had bows and, where the Aptitude ran, they also had crossbows, snapbows and grenades. Salma would have been happier fighting along with them but he was needed here, at the point of the lance, where his army met the enemy head on.

Every horse, every riding insect that his people had been able to steal, capture, beg, buy or inherit was here, till he had a cavalry force that was nearly half again the number of Chefre’s rag-tag airborne. They had trained and trained again, a rabble that the Commonweal would cringe from. They had got on their horses and fallen off and broken legs or ridden the wrong way. The mounts had been just as bad. It was, he knew full well, a stupid idea, and nobody in their right mind would have thought of it.

The Wasps would not have thought of it. In fact it would be something most Wasps would never have seen, or at least not since the Twelve-Year War. It would come as a surprise, and in war surprise could be fatal. He was attacking a full imperial army, tens of thousands of men. His people would be outnumbered fifty to one, but…

They would anticipate an attack, but he hoped it was just skirmishers, infiltrators, saboteurs, that the Empire was expecting. He would not be sending such, however. He had decided already that General Malkan’s camp could not be opened up by a stealthy few. The scalpel must give way to the hammer.

When Malkan had overwintered his forces after the Battle of the Rails, he had built a palisaded, fortified camp protected against land and air attack, reinforced with artillery. Now his army was on the march, he was forced to rely on a torchlit perimeter and sentries. Where an Ant-kinden army would have dug in every night, if they knew that someone like Salma was out there, the Wasps were not quite so organized. It was the same mistake that General Alder and the Fourth Army had made, when the Felyal Mantids caught them unawares. Salma realized that Malkan would have learnt from that, and would surely have a force on standby, ready to spring to the camp’s defence and give the main army time to organize. Cavalry, though…

We must punch through whatever they throw at us. We will give the Sarnesh artificers time to finish their work.

Or we will die.

It was at least a plan. He did not feel particularly proud of it, but at this late stage it was the only one he had.

‘Morleyr’s people must be in place by now,’ Phalmes decided. His horse shifted, picking up his unease.

‘You’re right,’ said Salma. The Mole Cricket, Morleyr, would be leading a feint attack on the camp’s far side, but Salma had not been able to spare the giant much in the way of manpower, and it was unlikely to deceive the enemy for long. He looked down at the Sarnesh standing beside him. ‘It feels like time,’ he agreed.

The man held a little device in his hand, and Salma knew that there was another such device with the Sarnesh army. In some arcane way wholly lost on him, these instruments told the Sarnesh how much of the night had already passed. They were waiting for the Ant’s mark, and he had been watching the little dials and wheels of his device closely, with a tiny lamp cupped in his other hand.

‘You have a good sense for these things,’ the Sarnesh observed, ‘and it… is time, indeed.’ Salma knew that the man would be simultaneously speaking with his mind to others of his kin accompanying Morleyr, or to the Ant-kinden soldiers and artificers ranked up behind Salma’s makeshift cavalry.

‘Chefre, over to you,’ he said. With no access to the Sarnesh and their mindlink, once Chefre’s airborne took off they would be cutting themselves loose from Salma’s command, operating on their own initiative. ‘Go,’ Salma told her, and she went.

The wait was something he had not thought of, before. There was an appalling, stretched-out moment, between Chefre’s people taking wing and his hearing their signal, in which he sat in his saddle with nothing to do. Prince Salme Dien, the commander of armies, had finished his shift, and Salma the warrior, the battle-leader, had yet to go on duty… and he now waited while the horses stamped nervously, feeling his men around him shift and try to even out their breathing.

‘Salma.’ The faintest touch at his shoulder, and he turned in the saddle.

She was there, his luminous lover. He had told her not to come, but she, of all his army, took no orders from him. She hung in the air, her skin streaked with colours, radiant wings beating.

‘You should not…’ he started.

‘How could I not?’ she responded. ‘I know what you go now to do.’

‘Please, this is hard enough…’