Salute the Dark

Alvdan smiled at that. ‘The best of the Lowlands against the best of the Commonweal. That may indeed entertain us. This Commonwealer is skilled?’

‘She’s something very special as well,’ Ult confirmed.

‘She? One of their fighting women? Yes, that will be appreciated,’ Alvdan remarked, with a dry smirk. Looking straight into Tisamon’s face, his eyes suddenly narrowed.

‘We do not like this Mantis,’ he decided. ‘His people have been a considerable obstacle to our armies, we understand.’

Ult said nothing, just waiting.

‘When the fight is done, between this one and the Commonwealer, the winner shall be executed on crossed pikes, in the arena.’

Ult pursed his lips but said nothing.

‘Our people shall see that our enemies do not prosper, even though they entertain us. Arrange it.’

The Emperor strode off, his guards in tow, and Tisamon watched Ult staring after them, the hatred naked on his face. He saw that a man who lived as Ult lived, with the lives of all around him passing like water through his hands, must come to grief eventually. When he did he would have two choices: he must despise the wretches that he sent to their deaths, day in, day out, or he must despise those who command it.

Twenty-Three

Colonel Gan was still governor of Szar, but merely by a knife-edge. More than half of the city was denied to his troops, for over thirty of the city’s orderly little streets had been barricaded, and these barricades were made of metal riveted to metal, dug firmly into the earth. They would not stop the Wasp airborne, of course, but they had already made wrecks out of several of Gan’s automotives. The Bee-kinden had always been notable craftsmen.

In this way a line had been drawn across the city. There had already been several hundred dead Wasps, and three times as many locals, in skirmishes along the barricades. The Bees had meanwhile captured two of the arms factories that for the last decade had happily been providing the Empire with its weaponry. They wore Wasp armour painted over in russet, bore pikes, swords, crossbows and a scattering of more sophisticated weapons, while some of the barricades had ballistae to back them up. The Bees fought without flair but with a solid determination that made it almost impossible to wear them down. Yesterday thirty of Gan’s men had pinned three of the locals within a makeshift shelter and called for their surrender. It had not been forthcoming, for the same blind devotion that had kept the people of Szar docile under imperial rule while their old queen still lived now gripped them with a spirit of rebellion under Queen Maczech.

I could break them, Gan liked to think, with enough men. The Bee-kinden fought with a cold fury, though. They were not the natural soldiers that the Imperial Army were but they would simply not give ground without blood spilt for every inch. When cornered, they fought with a savage, fearless fury, and they made every action, even those guaranteed to succeed, absurdly costly in lives and in time.

And then there was the problem of the Colonel-Auxillian. In the last tenday, Gan’s life had become a twisted nightmare: his command usurped, his men intimidated, his very grasp of warfare ridiculed, and all at the hands of an arrogant halfbreed. I should have him seized and whipped. I should have him made to disappear. But the Emperor himself had signed the orders that brought Drephos to Szar. He made no secret of how much he loathed being here, and Gan made no secret of returning that loathing in full force. But the man was here now, and Gan could only step back and watch as the newcomer’s men stole away the existing garrison, put them to work, berated them and monopolized Gan’s engineers. Gan himself was becoming a recluse in his own city. Every time he gave an order he discovered that Drephos had already been there. And what was the man doing, anyway? Being no artificer, Gan had no idea. At those points where Gan would have been mustering men for an assault on the barricades, Drephos was instead setting up great machines.