Salute the Dark

Tynisa cried out again, feeling the physical shock as one desperate Wasp rammed a spear home into Felise’s back. The Dragonfly woman arched backwards, but without the reach to find her tormentor. A sting-shot seared past her, to punch a soldier on the far side of the fight off the wall and hurl him into the pit. Felise drove her thumbs into a soldier’s eyes.

Tynisa kept straining forwards, reaching with manacled hands as though she could somehow stop what was happening and wrench it all to a halt. She watched Felise double over a sword suddenly forced under her ribs. The faces of the Wasps were terrible to behold: exhibiting not hate or rage but sheer heroic courage in giving their lives to keep these monsters away from their Emperor.

Felise was by now on her knees and Tisamon fell alongside her, another sweep of his claw killing the closest assailant cleanly and driving the others back momentarily. He had his other arm about the Dragonfly, though his offhand was a ruin. She was leaning into him limply, and Tynisa knew that she was dead.

A Wasp lunged forward with a spear and Tisamon rose up to meet it, taking the point past his left shoulder and snapping out his claw to pierce the wielder’s neck. He was laughing, she saw. He was weeping.

Alvdan contorted in his seat as Laetrimae drove her claw right through the wooden back of it and continued on, until the smudge of its grey tip had torn out of his chest. Uctebri saw the Emperor’s mouth gape in silent horror, so wide that it seemed his jaw would snap. Then he was lost amid a tide of writhing thorns and insect limbs. Uctebri saw the Mantis woman’s face dip down to feast, beautiful even when disfigured by scalpel-sharp mandibles.

He took out his knife and held it poised above the box. It was not a special knife, possessing no golden hilt, unadorned by jewels or silver inscriptions on the blade, but he had no need of a magical knife, he knew, for the holder of the Shadow Box was magic in his very being.

Give him to me, he commanded, and the blood began to well – not across the unmarked yet spasming body of Alvdan, but along the length of Uctebri’s dagger. At first a drip, then a running red trickle, and then it had become a stream coursing down the blade and spattering the box, saturating Uctebri’s robes beneath. For his kinden, the blood was all things.

He brought the impossibly flowing blade up to his mouth, let his tongue taste an Emperor’s blood. Then he held it out to Seda. His red eyes transfixed her.

‘Taste it,’ he said.

She stared at him, almost grinning, but shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Immortality,’ he hissed. ‘You cannot tell me you don’t believe in magic.’

‘Oh, I believe,’ she told him. ‘I believe in what you could do to me.’

‘Taste it, you little fool!’ he spat at her, the blood from the knife flowing down his arm, pattering on to the floor. Seda’s face twisted with an emotion even all her years of dissembling could not conceal and with a scream she struck the weapon from his hand.

‘You fool, you are bound to this! You have nothing but this!’ hissed Uctebri, but Seda was no longer even looking at him. She was abruptly retreating, staring past him.

He looked around instinctively. He could not, in that moment, help himself.

Out of the tangle of fighting Wasp soldiers a single figure had fought clear. It was drenched head to foot in blood, with one hand gone, a spear’s broken shaft jutting from its leg. Even as it burst forth, a soldier drove a sword into the apparition’s back and lost his grip on the slick hilt. The bloody, mangled thing was then free to hurl itself up the tiered seats, keening a battle-cry.

Your prey is already dead, Uctebri thought, seeing the drained corpse that had been Alvdan the Second, Emperor of all the Wasps. It was still his thought as Tisamon reached him with that fearsome claw drawn back.

For a split second Uctebri fought to assemble his magic to overwhelm the susceptible mind of the Mantis who had been his tool for so long. Tisamon’s mind was all pain and fury and ravaged love, so slippery with blood that the Mosquito struggled for purchase on it. For a second he had the man again in his power, but then something lanced through Uctebri’s leg, tearing his robe, laying his flesh open with dreadful pain from the calf downwards to pin his foot to the ground. He experienced a second’s horrified realization that the blade that now shed his precious blood was the dagger that Seda had knocked from his grasp – and that its new wielder was Tynisa.

Her hands gripping about the dagger hilt, Tynisa watched a Wasp soldier, his own face slashed open by Tisamon’s claw, slam his blade up to the hilt in Tisamon’s back, alongside the sword already lodged there, and Tisamon shuddered, crying out something, a word or a name. It could have been Felise.

The claw descended and Uctebri screamed, holding out the only thing he had left to defend himself.