Salute the Dark

‘Small package work,’ the Fly-kinden smuggler had explained to Tisamon. ‘Messages in. Messages out. Weapons. People sometimes. Can fit a couple back there, at a pinch.’

The smuggling was accomplished via a single stripped-down automotive, with six high, narrow-rimmed wheels powered by an over-wound clockwork engine that ran almost silently, so that the vessel seemed to skate over the ground, and to fly when it vaulted a rise. The Fly-kinden drove it, and fixed it, and did his best to outrun any trouble, but now he kept a couple of guards on the payroll at all times, because he earned his high profit margins through danger and secrecy. The danger was attested by the vacancy that Tisamon had now filled.

It was as easy as that to get to occupied Helleron. Just short of two tendays, hanging from the scaffolding that was all the Fly had left of the automotive’s original shell, and they were then able to merge with the stream of travellers coming into Helleron from Tark and Asta, heading up the Silk Road from the south.

‘And from here on, we’re legal,’ the Fly-kinden had explained. ‘The Wasps might think they run the city, but it’s still a market and not a military camp. The Beetles know better than to turn people away, and there isn’t a magnate in the city who doesn’t make some coin for himself through the Black Guild. From what I hear, most of Wasp customs are on the take now, too. They learn fast, that lot.’

Helleron, a city devoted to the eternal cycle of building and decay, where today’s grinding wheel erased the tracks of yesterday: a city of machines that took in and spat out a hundred men and women a day who had come there to make their fortunes, feeding them to its furnaces. This was where he had come before, after Atryssa’s betrayal of him, after his own betrayal of her. This was Helleron, where he had been able to forget, in the unqualified shedding of blood, what had first driven him there. In a twisted, bitter sense he had fond memories of Helleron.

It had been only a short space of absolution, between his leaving this place and his return to it. Stenwold’s call had summoned him out of his exile, away from his meaningless round of street-fighting and the settling of quarrels. It was Stenwold who had given him the chance to redeem himself, to make himself the man he should be. For a brief span – fighting the Wasps here and in Myna, training his daughter, questing in Jerez – it had seemed that he would succeed in rediscovering himself.

Weak at heart. He should have stayed in the Felyal, remained true to his kinden, but he had betrayed them for a Spider woman, and thus had begun the road of failures which had led him here. Looking about him at the grimy bustle of Helleron, he smiled thinly. What better tomb for one such as he than this filthy warren of blackened metal.

The building he sought had not changed, the door’s plaque almost unreadable beneath the dirt of a year: ‘Rowen Palasso: Factor’. Once inside Tisamon gave his name and had no more than a minute’s wait before being shown to the third-storey office of the proprietor herself.

Rowen Palasso was a Beetle-kinden woman of middle years, probably not far from Tisamon’s own age. Her hair had been dyed red not too recently, and her face was baggy and lined. She was one of the middle-merchants of Helleron, who had worked at her trade all her life and never quite made the fortune and the success of it that she had planned, a type the city was full of. Her trade was a liaison for men and women of undoubted but clandestine skills: housebreakers and thieves, thugs and strong-armers, duellists and killers. In defiance of the darkened-corner conventions of her associates, her office was as domestic a place as Tisamon had ever seen, with cushions on the chairs and little embroidered pictures on the walls with homely mottos. In fact, it was calculated to put her patrons and her clients off their stride with its cosy banality.

‘Tisamon of Felyal, as I live and breathe,’ Rowen exclaimed. ‘And here was I thinking you’d given us the slip. They always come back to Helleron, though.’

‘It seems that way,’ he said quietly.

‘And here you are, looking for a little work to tide you over?’

‘I want to fight,’ he told her.

‘Of course you do. It’s what you’re good at. Carpenters want to make things out of wood, and artificers want to tinker with machines, and you want to kill people. Why not? Go with your talents, that’s what I say.’

It was indeed what she said. He had heard it a dozen times before, at least. ‘What do you have for me?’ he asked.

‘It isn’t as easy as that, dear blade, not at all,’ she told him. ‘City’s under new management now.’

‘I refuse to believe the Wasps have put your trade out of business.’