Salute the Dark

‘Not for a moment,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t make it any less true.’

‘You’re a presumptuous man. For the Empire? Most would be glad enough to do it for a superior officer, for their general, for their own self-interest, for the Emperor even. The Empire is a large master to claim.’

‘That is why it is fit to be served,’ replied Thalric. The evident sincerity in his own tone surprised him.

The woman stood up, still looking at him.

He shrugged again. ‘What do you want from me? You may as well just take it. I’m in no position to stop you, whoever you are.’

‘I will have to think about what I want from you,’ she said, and stepped neatly from the room, leaving him for the guards to manhandle away. Only later, after he had been cast back into his cell, did some thought of who she might be occur to him.

* * *

It had been a long night, and sleep was slow in coming. Tisamon suspected that he was staving it off because of the unsettling dreams. In his dreams he saw Laetrimae in all her riddled detail. That was all the dream consisted of. He was made to stare and stare at her despoiled flesh, her hybrid carapace and the constant piercings of the vines. He was a prisoner even in sleep now, and the blood he shed in the fighting pits was more wholesome than the sight of that mangled but undying cadaver.

The failure of all our kinden. Laetrimae and he, they were well matched in that. They had both led ruined lives, bitter ones, twisting inwards and inwards until they stood face to face in this sunless cell. The only thing that stood between them was five hundred years of torment, but he felt as though he was rapidly catching her up.

They brought Thalric back to the cells eventually. The Wasp had no words for him, although his skin looked as intact as it had done when he was dragged away. Thalric could make out the long scar that Tynisa had given him in Helleron, but it was only one amongst so many. The world had done its best to kill Thalric. And he has survived, for this?

Ah, Tynisa. And was she captured yet? Dead yet? And, if not, then surely the sands were running out on her. She would come stalking into the palace to find her father, but she was not skilled enough, as Tisamon well knew, to survive it. He had taught her all he could, but it was an errand he himself would have died in attempting.

And yet I might have tried it, even so. She is my daughter, yet.

It was a curse he would not wish on anyone, to possess his tainted blood in her veins. Instead I would tell her, look to Stenwold. There is your model for a proper life, a life of meaning.

He wondered if, somehow, it would have been possible to sever that twisted, self-hating part of himself, cut it away, cast it off. What manner of father would he have been to the girl then? A better one, surely.

When yet another stranger came to stare at Tisamon, the Mantis did not even look at him, at least not at first. He did not mark Thalric’s abrupt flinching away, nor did he care much about the two armoured sentinels that stood behind the visitor with spears at the ready. It was Ult that Tisamon finally noticed: Ult’s peculiar response to the newcomer. The visitor himself never glanced at the old man but Tisamon read it all in his reaction: here was a man that Ult feared, and revered, and hated so fiercely and intensely, all emotions melted together in the same pot. It told Tisamon who the newcomer was more eloquently than words.

He was young, this man, or at least younger than Tisamon: young and clean-featured and handsome in the Wasp way, fair-haired and well-dressed. His style was that of rich Wasp men, favouring garments that were loose-cut and intricately embroidered, yet with a military stamp still very much in evidence – and the fashion was so because this man dressed in such garb.

Tisamon finally turned to look with curiosity upon his Imperial Majesty Alvdan the Second.

‘This is him, is it?’ Alvdan asked, eyeing Tisamon without much interest. ‘This is your killer Mantis.’

Ult murmured something that might be, ‘Yes, your Imperial Majesty.’

‘We have heard that he fights well, and we hope we have been correctly advised.’

Again Ult murmured some confirmation.

Alvdan met Tisamon’s gaze and the Mantis saw that here was a man to be reckoned with: not vain or foppish but insecure and intelligent, the two qualities that ever honed the tyrant.

‘What will he fight?’

‘I’ve not made my final choice for the warm-ups yet, your Imperial Majesty,’ Ult mumbled. ‘A beast first, probably. Then I was thinking a bare-hand match, since he does that well.’

As Alvdan made a slight, dismissive sound, Ult hurried on.

‘Then for last we’ve got a Commonwealer.’