Salute the Dark

She was a Moth of middle-young years with a severe face, and two others came in behind her. One of them was a young scribe with a scroll, and the other a woman bearing a staff, which identified her to Achaeos as a guard, although the Wasps present would not have guessed it. He supposed that the Wasps must have banned the carrying of weapons inside Tharn, but a staff was beneath their notice.

‘I understand you to be a Rekef agent,’ began their leader, with enough questioning in her tone for him to know that he had not been condemned out of hand. The presence of the doctors should already have told him that, but he was taking nothing for granted. Even now he did not know whether it was simply his imagined link to the conquering Empire that protected him from his own people’s wrath.

‘Is that all you understand?’ he asked her. His voice was weak, and he kept it soft, making her strain to hear his words. At this point, words were all he had to fight with.

‘You are Achaeos,’ she noted, ‘you didn’t leave here in glory. In fact you nearly did not leave here at all. During this last year you have progressed from uninspired student to positive maverick – and now here you are.’

He kept his feelings from his face. ‘Is a man not allowed to come home? I may have dallied with exile, but I do not believe a sentence of exile was ever passed.’

She glanced backwards, but not at her companions, so he knew that they were being overheard by another – one of the Skryres he guessed – who might be anywhere in Tharn.

‘There are no Wasps guarding the door,’ she said, ‘so we speak only before our own people. Or at least my own people. Do you really still claim the Moths of Tharn as yours?’

‘I do.’

‘Then you are no Rekef, or Wasp agent.’

‘Well deduced.’

If she felt he was baiting her, she gave no sign of it. They faced each other without expression. ‘Our situation here is currently delicate. We do not wish some agitator appearing in the halls of Tharn, spreading confusion.’

‘You would rather remain slaves?’

‘It takes more than a single glance to truly tell the master from the slave.’

That made him pause. Again she was unreadable but there had been something in her tone, in that simple platitude, to suggest that there was more going on here than he had thought.

He narrowed his eyes as she glanced over her shoulder again. It was a bad habit of hers and there was no need for it. It suggested someone who had spent a long time away from her own people. But where? And the answer was quick to suggest itself. She has been in the Empire, surely. What is going on here?

It was not that she was simply being observed, either. She must be receiving instructions from a Skryre and they did not sit well with her. Her expression was beginning to tell him things.

‘I am Xaraea,’ she announced suddenly.

He held on to that for a moment, feeling his heart leap, for his people did not give up their names easily. It was a sign of status: to know a name gave you power. To be given a name made you at least an equal. That could only mean he had been let into something.

‘What is happening here?’ he asked her.

‘You know much of what passes in the Lowlands?’

‘I know some of it.’

She considered him. ‘You are not strong enough yet to leave your bed.’

‘I am stronger than I was, but no.’

‘But later you will be, and there is someone you must meet.’

He stared at her suspiciously. ‘And who would that be?’

At last her mouth twisted into a slight smile. ‘Who else but our new master, the governor of Tharn?’

Che paused at the doorway of Thalric’s room, suddenly doubting herself. Surely there must be some other option, but they had shooed her out of Achaeos’ sick-room with venomous looks and mutterings about their Hated Enemy.

The corridors of Tharn had never been friendly, save when Achaeos had been beside her. Even with her Art-given sight, which could pierce the darkness the Moths habitually lived in, it was a world of hostile gazes, pointedly turned backs, and lantern-bearing Wasp soldiers who stared suspiciously at her. It was enough to make her wish she could not see it all.

She had spent some time at an exterior window, watching the rain lash down over the landing strip where the Cleaver was almost lost amongst a dozen imperial flying machines. The rain had made her unhappy. She had found herself yearning to fly, as she had done for the first time, when last she was here.