Salute the Dark

Kymene knew that she was running out of chances now. Fly-kinden scouts were reporting hourly on the relief force on its way from Szar. If she had possession of the palace, then they might be able to hold off the reinforcements. Otherwise, as soon as they engaged the new force, the Wasps barricaded in the palace would sally out and take them from the rear.

‘We just have to keep hammering at them all night,’ Chyses advised her. She knew that already, though it did not seem acceptable, in this day and age, to have no options but sheer bloody-mindedness.

‘What about the new explosives?’ she asked.

‘Still being brewed,’ Chyses replied, and his tone made it clear that he knew they would be ready too late. ‘We’ve got another batch of the firebombs, though.’

Kymene scowled. Those were unreliable weapons, just bottles of anything flammable with rags as their fuses. They had caused carnage amongst the Wasps, but had taken their share of the Mynan attackers too. If the flames really caught in the palace doorway, they could lose hours of progress in which all the Wasps needed to do was retreat up to the balconies above and watch an impassable blaze raging away below.

If we had our own flying troops… but all she had were a motley rabble of Fly-kinden who would scout for her, but not fight.

‘We’re losing too many fighters,’ she observed. Chyses merely nodded. He was someone who believed in the inevitability of casualties, an ingredient that made eventual victory all the sweeter. Kymene, however, could only think of her people and the price she was setting on their promised freedom.

‘Issue the firebombs,’ she instructed him. ‘Pass the word along. Twenty minutes and we’re going in again.’

Che watched and said nothing. She was now wearing a chainmail hauberk of Mynan make, and so far she had stood anxiously at the edge of groups, even on the barricades that the Mynans had erected facing the palace, but had seldom been called upon to fight. She had simply watched the ghastly business unfold: the Mynans’ repeated, bloody charges at the palace; the Wasps’ equally costly defence. She had seen Kymene try everything, had even made her own suggestions. At her behest, they had made up a small catapult to pelt the palace door with grenades, but then they had run out of grenades and explosives, and the home-made firebombs were sufficiently volatile that not even Chyses would suggest delivering them by engine.

This is where it ends, is it? But that seemed ridiculous. After all, Thalric had been right about the Mynan situation, so everything should be working as planned. Instead the Wasps stayed stubbornly in place despite the losses that the resistance had inflicted on them. They knew that all they had to do was sit tight and wait.

Che.

She flinched. The sound of his voice was as though his mouth was at her ear, yet at the same time it was faint, far away.

‘Achaeos?’

Help me, Che.

She looked over at Kymene, saw that nobody was paying her any heed. A shiver went through her. ‘Achaeos?’ She could not simply form the name in her mind. She had to say it aloud. ‘Tell me you’re all right.’

I need you, Che. There was a terrible wrongness to his voice, and she thought instantly of his wounds and how frail he had looked when she left him.

Che, I need your strength. I’m sorry… please…

She did not even ask what for. She did not need to know. Her reaction was as unquestioning as a child’s.

Take it, she said, and this time there was no need to voice the words aloud.

Beetle-kinden were not a magical people, nor were they great warriors, neither fleet nor graceful. Beetles, however, were enduring: their dogged pragmatism had made them a power in this world because they worked and worked tirelessly. They owned reserves of strength that other kinden could never guess at.

Achaeos suddenly felt the tenuous connection he had built towards Che start to wax and surge – and he touched her spirit, the core of her. It shook him to discover that within the one short and amiable Beetle girl there was such a wealth of power. Without hesitation it was offered to him, began flowing into him, and thus passing through his conduit into the ritual. Along with it he felt, like an aftertaste, her feelings and the love she held for him.