Salute the Dark

‘What’s this?’ Maczech demanded, sparing him only a brief glance. If she was now queen of the people of Szar, very little of her status showed. She wore a studded leather cuirass over worn, dusty garments, and she stood hunched over a table, poring over a map of the city with three of her officers. Totho could see the positions of the Wasps and the locals marked across it as solid or dotted lines.

Time to redraw the map, he reflected.

‘He was approaching the barricades,’ Totho’s captor reported. ‘He stopped immediately when ordered. He also came unarmed.’

She glanced at him again. She was young and, of course, reminded him of Kaszaat, just by her very race, the shape of her face and nut-brown skin. He had expected another Kymene, all fire and fierce leadership, but Maczech lacked that woman’s unbreachable resolve, and he could read in her face an agony of fear that she would lead her people astray. She had come to her throne suddenly, and been made her people’s war leader in the same moment, and she was afraid.

She looked as though she had not slept in some time, and for a moment they just stared at one another dully.

‘A halfbreed,’ she noted. ‘What else are you?’ Before he could reply, she had looked him up and down. ‘Auxillian artificer,’ she identified. ‘But I don’t believe in defectors – not this close to a battle.’

The slip was evident there, of course, although nobody else seemed to have noticed. Plenty of defectors before a battle, Totho thought, but not from the side that’s most likely to win.

‘What do you want?’ she continued. ‘You’ve a message? We will not accept terms that leave our city in chains.’ Her voice trembled slightly, but none of the surrounding Bee-kinden seemed to notice. She had their absolute faith, and it was torturing her.

Totho felt a lump in his throat at that. She knows very well that they cannot hold against the Wasps, not forever. The time would come, in the normal course of this fight, when they would accept whatever terms were offered them. Totho guessed that Maczech herself would be dead by that point.

‘Your city is free,’ he said quietly.

‘And will remain so as long as we draw breath,’ she declared, turning away.

‘Your city is free,’ he repeated.

Man by man, a silence fell on the Szaren’s little command-room. Maczech and her officers turned their heads, one by one, until they were all staring at him.

‘Explain yourself, halfbreed,’ she said.

He felt himself start to shake, ever so slightly, at the thought of having to put it into words. ‘The Wasps are defeated. The Szaren garrison, I mean. Not the Empire, just those here.’

Someone snorted in amusement, but Maczech’s face remained stern. ‘Some Rekef trick,’ she said slowly, ‘though I cannot see what it is supposed to achieve. Just waste our precious time, perhaps.’

‘Send a flier,’ Totho said. ‘Send a flier over the governor’s palace. High over, and he must not land.’

‘A trap,’ one of the officers decided.

‘For one scout?’ Maczech narrowed her eyes, trying to see past Totho’s face to the thoughts contained behind it. ‘Send one of the Fly-kinden. They see best in the dark.’

‘But-’

‘Please,’ she said, a calm word, without force, that silenced the man and sent him running to fetch a messenger.

‘I think you are mad,’ she told Totho. ‘Either a deceiver, or mad.’

He nodded tiredly. ‘You may be right.’ Abruptly his legs buckled and he fell to his knees. Something inside him was building, a pressure that he could not release. He shuddered, feeling the bile rise within him.

‘Is he ill?’ someone asked, and someone else called out for a doctor.

‘There was a woman with us named Kaszaat,’ Totho said. ‘She was of your people. But she died.’ His words were almost too quiet for them to hear. ‘That is why I have done what I did.’ It was not true, of course, or not wholly true. Some of the reason that he had done it would make sense only to Drephos.

‘Get him some water, at least,’ Maczech ordered, and a moment later Totho found himself holding a clay cup. He sipped and it tasted stale, chemical. He shuddered again. Meanwhile, around him, aside from the two Bee-kinden guards watching him with axes in their hands, the war council proceeded. He put his face in his hands, waiting.

Eventually the scout came back. Totho’s only fear had been that curiosity would tempt the Fly in to land, but she had kept to her orders, a middle-aged woman who barely reached past Maczech’s waist. On her return she looked unsteady, unsure of herself.

‘Report,’ Maczech instructed her, but the Fly had to swallow twice before she could say anything.

‘I saw… there are some Wasp soldiers leaving the city. I counted perhaps a few hundred, mostly in small groups.’ She glanced at Totho, and her eyes looked haunted.

Maczech was frowning. ‘What is this?’ she asked.