Salute the Dark

‘Behind us!’ someone cried, and Nero swore, kicking up into the air to see better. Instead of another detachment of the black and yellow, what he saw gladdened his heart.

It was Odyssa the Spider-kinden, and not alone. Lumbering behind her were at least three score of her mercenaries: huge, broad-shouldered men with massive claws and jutting jaws, all Scorpion-kinden warriors from the Dryclaw desert, those inveterate slavers, raiders and sell-swords. Nero was gladder than he could believe possible, just to see them.

He saw the same uplift of spirits surge through the Solarnese, too. These Scorpions, however dubious their reputation, looked the business.

‘We need to punch our way through!’ Nero proclaimed. ‘To get to where the real fighting’s at.’ Odyssa merely nodded and he saw, all Spider masks and airs aside, that she looked pale and frightened. He guessed that she had never been in a real battle before.

The Wasps had closed ranks on seeing the mercenaries appear. They had raised a fence of spears, and they had their stings and their blades ready behind them. The Scorpions, however, had massive cleaving swords, five or six feet long, just made for the job of hacking a hole through a line of men who carried no shields. Others had heavy crossbows or throwing axes, most had at least a leather cuirass and kilt, but some were bare-chested and their leader wore a breastplate over a long chain hauberk.

‘Gonna hurt, this,’ the chief Scorpion remarked.

‘And?’ Nero demanded, as a flying machine hit the ground a street away. Whether it was Solarnese or imperial he never knew, but he did not flinch.

‘So let’s get to it,’ said the Scorpion, and he raised his great sword over his head one-handed and bellowed a roar that could have been heard out across the Exalsee, and which shook the Wasps as they consolidated their stand. Then the Scorpions were charging, and taking the Solarnese with them, in a sudden, rushing mob descending on the soldiers. Nero took up his sword, a short blade stolen from the enemy that was like a broadsword to him, and he lifted it high and joined the charge, his wings a blur, scooting over the ground in the very front rank.

He witnessed the sting-blast that felled Jemeyn, the man pitching back to trip the two following behind him, but of the shot that then struck Nero himself he saw nothing at all.

Axrad was very nearly too quick for her, his striped orthopter darting out from beneath the barrels of her rotaries and dancing along the length of the Starnest. Taki’s heart was heavy as stone. She had known Scobraan a long time and, although they had not always had kind words for each other, they had never been enemies. The Esca Volenti dived after Axrad, jinking with him, her aim creeping inexorably on to him.

Elsewhere, across the sky over Solarno, there were tens of private duels. Niamedh’s beautiful, sleek Executrix drove into a Wasp fixed-wing and forced it down into one of the carrier blimps, propellers shredding the cumbersome dirigible’s airbag. Drevane Sae’s jewelled dragonfly stooped on the streets of Solarno, the city of his lifelong enemies, his arrows picking off Wasp officers who were trying to organize the defence on the ground. The ugly, blunt-nosed Bleakness, constant scourge of the Exalsee, fired its broadside banks of shrapnel-casters at anything that came close, even as the Bleakness itself closed towards the great overhanging canopy of the Starnest.

Axrad’s flier was abruptly beyond the great dirigible’s frame, and it dropped out of sight instantly. Taki cursed, pulled up and high, knowing that, in his position, she would have then looped round the airship’s hull in order to meet her enemy. She was right, and he came back into view even as she was poised at the point of her dive, his fleet, agile ship leaping into sight for an ambush that she had not been fool enough to fall for. Instead he rose now to meet her, and she fell upon him, and their weapons began to blaze at the same time.

Two bolts clipped her hull, then a third smashed the window of her cockpit and clipped her shoulder, enough to make her tug on the stick without intention. She dragged her goggles down over her face against the blasting air, while Axrad’s undamaged vessel passed over her so close that their beating wingtips touched.

In the instant she was spiralling away, fighting to get back on the level, and she knew that he must be wrestling for just the same goal, and then the Esca was hers again and she swung back towards Axrad, towards the Starnest, seeing him find his place and commence a mirror-image move.

He had killed Scobraan, and who knew how many others, but he was a pilot to reckon with and she could not take that from him.