Salute the Dark

The knife twitched again and cut another little mark beside the first, moved by nothing more than her nerves.

He hissed involuntarily. How fast can I grab for the blade? How good are her reflexes?

‘This seems an odd display of bravado,’ he got out. Should I hope that a servant or one of Savrat’s people may come in? But they would be too surprised to act straight off, and if she kept her head she could still kill me in an instant.

‘Stenwold wouldn’t want me to kill you,’ she remarked pensively.

‘The Beetle general.’

‘Stenwold Maker,’ she replied softly. ‘He is a fat, bald, clumsy old man. Also, he is mine.’

The third cut on his neck was due to his own surprised reaction. He was becoming impatient, his Wasp temper rising, in a situation where impatience could prove fatal. ‘So, what?’ he demanded.

She doesn’t know.

But she was already saying, ‘I had wanted… wanted to try to talk to you, to convince you…’

He opened his mouth to say something, and just then a lieutenant of the watch put his head into the tent, mouth open to speak.

Arianna stabbed, even as Tynan tried to hurl himself off the bed.

Twenty-Eight

I can wait no longer.

Tynisa had been in the imperial city now for days enough to know that no magical voice would solve this one for her. She had distributed her affections among the groping hands of a half-dozen well-placed Wasps, each believing her a slave, or a whore, or a Rekef agent, depending on what role would best unlock their confidences. She could easily have brought Stenwold back a hundred of the Empire’s most guarded secrets.

But it was not enough to get her what she wanted, because she had run into an unexpected barrier. The Empire survived off its slaves, the living produce of its foreign conquests. Everywhere throughout the Empire all the menial work was performed by them. There was only one place where that was not the case: the imperial palace in Capitas, where Tisamon was currently being held.

She could not get inside. None of her besotted Wasps could get her in, for those very few slaves of other kinden that lived within the palace were there for specific reasons. There was no room for random and unaccompanied foreigners in this very heart of the Empire. So, unless she put herself forward as a pit-fighter, and thus sold herself into real chains, she could not hope to enter the palace with the Empire’s consent.

She had considered the situation very thoroughly, and she had no option but to assume that Tisamon wanted to be freed. Therefore if Tisamon desired to be free, yet was not free, it could only be because the pit-fighters’ cells held him so tightly he could not escape. In those circumstances she would become as much of a prisoner as he was.

So she would therefore rely on old-fashioned methods: the resources of her mother’s and father’s kin.

Tonight she intended assaulting the Emperor’s residence to get her father back.

Reaching the palace through the dark streets was challenge enough, for Capitas was an ordered city and only Wasps were allowed about after nightfall. It was a well-lit city, too, with gas lamps flaring at each street corner, so that the Emperor could look down after sunset and see himself at the heart of an almost geometric constellation.

She stalked the palace from the shadows, a tiny hunter approaching her monumental prey unseen. The nightly patrols and watchmen, with their pikes and lanterns, did not see her. She drew upon the Art inherent in her blood until she was right beside the palace walls.

There was too much light here, but she had no time to catch breath. The main door was impossible, but the Wasps erected their public buildings so that they rose in tiers, each succeeding step of the ziggurat narrower than the last. Somewhere up there, there must be an unguarded way in. She had to believe that.

What would Tisamon do in the same circumstances? And the answer was simple. He would just go, without all this deliberation. He would act.

She went skimming up the wall and on to the next tier in moments, her Art keeping her hands and feet close to the immaculately dressed stone, up the wall and over it, and down half that distance to the ground on the other side. It was a garden enclosed in a walled courtyard, she found: a low assemblage of shrubs and ferns that must be monstrously difficult to keep properly watered. There were doors at the far end of it and she skulked towards them.