Salute the Dark

‘Whatever pays the most,’ Thalric agreed. ‘When we start looking west again, none of that will make any difference.’

‘You think it will come to that?’ Stenwold asked unhappily.

Thalric stopped abruptly. ‘I will have to become the diplomat in just a moment, and tell pleasant lies to people. Stenwold, you know there will be war again, between the Empire and the Lowlands. We will all put our names to the truce today, the Treaty of Gold, and everyone will rejoice, but every man who signs it will know that they are writing in water, and that the ripples will be gone soon enough. The truce is convenience, until one of us is ready for war again, and we both know it. I’d like to hope that it doesn’t come in either of our lifetimes.’

Stenwold looked at him and nodded briefly. ‘I believe you in that. Have I misjudged you?’

Thalric shook his head. ‘Not that I noticed.’

Stenwold moved on, then, to join with the other great men of his people, leaving Thalric and his retinue waiting for their formal introduction. Whoever had decreed that the peace should be signed outside the walls of Collegium had not reckoned for the wind today, and vitally important documents were being hurriedly weighted down with stones.

‘Thalric?’ Che approached him almost tentatively. He had been many things to her, after all, comrade and captor and fellow prisoner, undoubted enemy, even doubtful friend.

‘Cheerwell Maker.’ He gave an odd smile, as he looked on her, and she suddenly wondered if he were thinking What if… while contemplating a world without the Wasp Empress or the war.

‘I owe you a great deal,’ she said. ‘But that’s all right, because you owe me as well, from before. I’ve done the tallying, and I think I’m in debt to you still, overall. At the end, you did a lot. For Myna.’

She saw him go to make a flippant comment, to shrug it all off, but something dried up the words in his mouth, and instead he just gazed at her sadly. He had told her once how he had a wife back in the Empire, and now imperial writ had decreed a new one for him, and anyway she had felt throughout that the pairings of the Wasp-kinden were merely intended for progeny and convenience. Yet there was regret in that glance of his, a fond regret from a man too pragmatic to act on it.

She hugged him briefly, feeling his armour cold against her, and then let go. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and then they were walking onwards – with treaties waiting to be signed, history to be made.

* * *

The workshop’s owner ducked back into the room, under the sloping ceiling. A garret room and, after the machines had been moved in, precious little space to move about.

‘This is all I can spare you,’ he explained to the solemn young man who followed him. ‘You make good, then maybe you’ll get something better. You waste my time, you’ll regret it, understand?’ His expression was all suspicion and dislike, but it was free of prejudice – because he was a halfbreed, just like Totho was.

Chasme was a city of halfbreeds. Since arriving the day before, Totho had never seen so many. One out of any two of this ramshackle place’s occupants was of mixed blood: Ant and Bee, Spider and Dragonfly, Solarnese Soldier Beetle and Fly-kinden, or a bastard mingling of any combination. A man like Totho attracted no stares.

Oh, he had noticed that many of them were slaves, and many others menials or factory workers. It was not a universal rule, though. Chasme was fluid, not fixed like in the Empire or the Lowlands.

The garret workshop was better than he had hoped. Chasme was a little jewel of civilization on a barbarous shore, powered by the need of Princep Exilla to match the aerial and naval might of Solarno. It was therefore a fortuitous, sheltered little backwater for an artificer to work in.

‘I’d better see something from you before the end of the month,’ the owner warned him. ‘Or you’re on the street.’

‘I’ll show you now,’ Totho said. ‘As a down payment. Just bring me a target mannequin or whatever else you use here.’

The man studied him, narrow-eyed. He himself was of such a mixed ancestry that there was no deciphering it. A flick of his wrist sent one of his slaves off, to return an awkward minute later with a stuffed leather torso on a stand, a mess of patches and rips.

Totho gave a nod for the slave to position it, and he unslung his latest prototype, pumping up the pressure as he did so with ratcheting winches of the handle. It was his showpiece: too delicate for war-work but it made a pretty display.

‘I give you the future,’ he announced, and emptied the snapbow at the dummy, shearing off everything above the navel, even the post that supported it.

The workshop owner said nothing for a long time, to his credit. Totho could almost see money being counted in the man’s eyes. Small concerns, petty profits, but they would outgrow this place soon enough. There would shortly be a revolution here in Chasme. Progress, which had stumbled at the end of the Wasps’ war, would begin its march once more.