Salute the Dark

He had entered into the arena with a dozen other fighters. Each had been introduced, lifting a weapon high for the crowd’s approval. They had been a motley band: Beetles, rogue Ants, halfbreeds, even a Scorpion-kinden with a sword standing as tall as he was. There had been no alliances between them, no rules. When the official Wasp overseer had cast down his gilded wooden baton, the fighters had simply gone at each other. At that moment Tisamon had felt the calm trance of his profession come upon him, and he had cocked his claw back and met the nearest opponent joyfully: a Beetle-kinden armoured with overlapping plates as far as his knees and elbows, who had swung at him with a double-headed spear.

Tisamon had caught the spear in the crook of his claw, slammed the spines of his other arm down into the gap between the man’s neck and shoulder, and then slashed him across the throat as he staggered backwards.

Next had been an Ant-kinden with a tall shield and a shortsword, and no armour save for a metal helm. Tisamon had killed him, too, and then two more, and by that time the remaining fighters had taken notice and turned on him. There had been six of them, determined to take him down all together before resuming their separate quarrels.

It had been a demanding contest, for they had none of them been poor fighters, but they were not Weaponsmasters, either, nor trained to fight alongside each other. He eventually finished them all, killing four outright and cutting two so badly that they could not fight on.

Only then did he hear the uproar of the crowd. Whilst fighting, he had been oblivious to it. He had not been fighting for them, but for himself.

They had gone mad: cheering and shouting and shrieking. He had stood in the arena’s heart with the blood of eight men on his blade, and the sheer force and power of their acclaim almost drove him to his knees.

They were not done with him, though. They had then wanted him to kill the two opponents he had let live.

It was unclean.

He realized then, looking up at the faces of Wasp soldiers and administrators, at the faces of the Beetle-kinden wealthy and their servants and guests, that they did not actually care about the skill. It did not matter to them that he was a Weaponsmaster, that he had perfected a style of fighting that was a thousand years old and that he was good. They were there only for the blood, and if he had come in and butchered two dozen pitifully-armed slaves they would have called out just the same.

But now they loved him. He was their champion of the moment, because he had shed more blood for them than his defeated opponents had.

The next match was indeed two dozen slaves: convicts from the cells, men and women from the Spider-kinden markets, or simply those who had somehow displeased Helleron’s new masters. He had not wanted to fight them, but they had been promised their freedom if they killed him, and so they desperately tried. He waited for them, gave them every chance. As they neared him, he had discovered that his hatred for slave-owners was very readily turning into contempt for those who had let themselves become enslaved.

And the crowd had applauded him, as though it was all some kind of show. Looking about him, he saw how the Beetle-kinden of Helleron were learning very swiftly from their new masters. Their shouting was the loudest and longest.

When it was over he had told them to send his fee to Rowen Palasso, and then he was gone.

Never again. There were other ways, honest ways, for a man to make a living by the blade. He now sat on his bed in the dingy little top-storey room he had rented, and thought hard. He found that his hands were shaking: it was not the blood of others that could do this to him, but their approbation.

Differing kinden had differing traditions, in the duel. The Ants loved their sword-games, but they loved the skill and precision most, and seldom took matters beyond drawing the first blood. In Collegium it remained a polite sport of wooden swords suitable for College masters and youngsters to watch. The Mantis-kinden killed one another sometimes, but only by mutual agreement, and never for the amusement of an audience.

He knew that the Spider-kinden had their slaves fight one another, sometimes, simply for the sport. He had not thought to find the same decadent tastes magnified in the Wasps.

Tisamon rose and went to the door. He would find some other way of surviving, or some other city. This life was not for him.

He was not alone in the room.

He turned instantly, the claw appearing over his hand, its gauntlet about his arm, slashing out at where he knew someone stood.

His shock, when it clanged off the swift parry of an identical blade, held him motionless, easy victim to a riposte. He could feel the steel there, but saw nothing.

She formed out of the air as a faint shadow, writhing and twisting with vines and thorns.

Tisamon, she named him. Weaponsmaster.