Salute the Dark

‘My friends, yes. Not just him.’ Che looked up at the palace. ‘This place brings back memories,’ she said weakly.

‘Were you tortured here?’ Kymene said.

‘Never,’ Che assured her, clambering up a little on the barricade. ‘So many times it seemed he was going to, but in the end it was just a cover, so that he could talk to his man regarding some plot against the governor.’ She paused a moment, then added, ‘But he could have done it so easily, if he had wanted – Thalric, that is.’ She was aware of Kymene’s sharp eyes on her, and she shrugged. ‘I don’t like him much, but… I think the Empire made him what he is. The raw material was worth something more than that.’

‘And what about your other friends? The ones who came to rescue you from Thalric?’

Che bowed her head, letting her forehead touch the cold iron rim of a cartwheel in the barrier. ‘Scattered, gone…’ Stenwold gone to the Commonweal, Salma rushing his army about Sarn, Tynisa in pursuit of her father, Totho… lost. And Achaeos sick, and hated by his own people because of her. ‘And here am I, back in Myna.’

They heard a disturbance amongst the soldiers behind them, a shouted word and counter-word. Both women turned to watch a Fly-kinden woman wing raggedly over the waiting fighters to virtually throw herself at Kymene’s feet, one hand thrust towards her, offering a crumpled scroll. Messengers like this had been coming at two or three each hour all day, but this one seemed particularly desperate. Kymene took the message and read it. There was a slight narrowing of her eyes, but nothing more.

‘Get me Chyses,’ she snapped. ‘Get all my officers here now, my artificers as well.’

Men and women rushed off to do her bidding. For a moment Kymene’s eyes were focused on nothing, seeing the future, weighing her next action.

‘What is it?’ Che asked her.

‘Szar must have fallen,’ Kymene replied. ‘There are two thousand Wasp soldiers marching here from there. They’ll be here in a day’s time to reinforce the garrison.’

* * *

‘Achaeos.’

He snapped awake, his wound pulling at him painfully. He felt as though he had been running for hours, rather than just lying here in a fevered sleep. He peered upwards, seeing the Arcanum agent, Xaraea. There was a finality to her expression that chilled him.

‘I am not strong enough for this-’ he started.

‘We have no more time,’ Xaraea interrupted. ‘The Skryres have observed all the omens and cast the lots of the future. We must act now, either with or without you.’

Achaeos stared at her. She was not fond of him, but neither was anyone else here in what had once been his home. He was learning to live with it. Still, for that self-same reason, he possessed something they did not: a connection to the outside world.

The wound that Tynisa had given him was healing, but slowly, very slowly. It had been too close, in the end, and the conflict of treatments between the stitching and patching carried out in Collegium and the work the doctors were doing here had not helped. He could just about walk now, for short distances, and only with a stick. He could not fly at all, and most of the time, as now, he spent resting.

I think I should accept now that I am no warrior. He did seem to get his hide cut open with distressing frequency.

‘Nobody has even told me what they are intending to do,’ he pointed out.

‘It is not your place to question,’ she said, but he had unexpectedly touched a nerve. She knows, and it has shaken her. He remained staring at her, outwardly impassive, inwardly wondering how far he could force his minuscule authority and how much they really needed his help.

The pause between them dragged on past mere awkwardness but, despite the background pain that never quite left him, he did not give way. After an excruciating time, it was Xaraea who spoke.

‘I…’ she began, and that single word told him that he had broken through to something, ‘I have spent years working on this. You can have no idea the battles I have fought. Yes, we could see the Empire on the horizon, and see all the cursed machines that the Helleren so obligingly built for them. I knew it would come to this, so I worked hard to have the right man in the right place: the one Wasp-kinden who would be one of us and not of them. Tegrec had already made himself a seer and an officer, but it was I who made him a governor. Why did I do all this? Because the Skryres realized that it would be necessary if we were to drive the enemy out of our halls. The Empire is your enemy just as much as it is ours. We have our differences, Achaeos, but we can agree on that. They are as much our enemy as are the cursed Beetle-kinden.’

He did not flinch at that barb, even smiled a little to show his contempt for it.