Salute the Dark

Tegrec smirked. That was the only word for the expression that crossed his face. He cast a look back in the direction of his retreating soldiers and smirked. A tension, perhaps an entirely manufactured tension, then left the room. His Mantis carer lowered Achaeos back to the floor, where he sat cross-legged and watched the Wasp governor of Tharn don a black robe and go native. Tegrec held onto the last rags of his sombre mood until his girl had finished tugging the garment into shape, and then smiled at them, and perhaps at himself.

‘My Lord Governor,’ the Skryre said, standing almost hidden in the folds of her robe, a coiled staff in one hand. Like all Skryres, and like most Moth-kinden of station, she had not revealed her name.

Tegrec looked from her to Achaeos, and then himself sat down. In the robe, he could have been a somewhat bulky Moth student ready to learn from his teachers. That is what he is – Achaeos had not quite believed it, when they had told him – a Wasp seer, and mostly self-taught, but here he is learning from the masters.

Xaraea seated herself as well, as did the slave-girl. The aged Skryre took a few halting steps.

‘This is Achaeos,’ she declared. ‘He comes to us from the Lowlands, where your people make war.’

Tegrec nodded.

‘We are approaching a time of crisis, Tegrec,’ said the Skryre. By naming him, while herself remaining nameless, she shaped her authority over him. ‘You, especially, face such a time too. Do you understand me?’

‘I believe I do.’ The Wasp still smiled.

‘Our bargain holds, does it not?’

‘I have no complaints.’ He glanced at the girl beside him, and Achaeos saw that, with the guards now gone, the distance between master and slave had relaxed as well.

‘You have been an able student,’ the Skryre admitted. ‘You have achieved more than we might have expected, from your kind.’

Tegrec looked directly at Achaeos, as though trying to read him. In returning the favour Achaeos discerned a man out of his depth, and yet who was still swimming further away from shore.

What must it have been like, to grow up in a different world to all those around you? The division between the Apt and the Inapt was the defining line between the burning new and the fading old. There were so few that could even get close enough to see into the other side. He thought of Che, then, who had been willing to join him on that border, close enough for them to touch hands. He found himself respecting this Tegrec for what he must have achieved. Taking on the Empire with a handful of magical tricks, and then carving out his own place in it, must have been difficult for him. It probably still was.

‘You are asking me to make an exchange,’ Tegrec said at last. He glanced at his girl once again. ‘You want to change our arrangement?’

‘We have tried to hold back change for many centuries,’ the Skryre remarked drily. ‘We discover that it cannot be done, so, yes, there will be change.’

‘I understand what you are asking of me,’ Tegrec said, ‘but perhaps you do not understand what you are asking me to give up.’

The Skryre’s lips twitched. ‘This Achaeos you see here, he knows, for he is here only as a brief gap in his exile. He has chosen life with our enemies, rather than with his own. Still, he is here, which shows that loyalty to the great mysteries overcomes all else. Can you yourself look upon your Empire, your rank, your years of time-serving, and say, “This is a thing I cannot let go of”?’

‘I must think on this,’ Tegrec insisted.

‘Do not think overlong,’ the Skryre warned him.

After doffing the robe, Tegrec stepped from the room and rejoined his Wasp escort, but he said nothing to them. He was still deep in thought.

I have always walked a line.

He was Major Tegrec, governor of the little-regarded city of Tharn, a chill and mountainous backwater taken by the Empire only because it was there, on the edge of their expanding frontier. The Moth-kinden, isolated and backward, had nothing to offer the Empire: poor warriors, poor labourers, a nation of recluses and hermits. Tegrec himself had already confirmed this to his superiors, reporting in just the right tones of resentful suffering.

Walking the line indeed, but he was a fiercely ambitious man, always pushing, always manipulating. He could not name any other major who was a governor, even of such an insignificant place as this. At the same time he was a cripple – enduring a carefully hidden mental deformity, an inability to conceive of what others found so natural. It leaked out, it showed, and he was not liked even by those who made use of him. They knew there was something unsound in him, and they had failed to root it out only because the barrier to understanding worked both ways. They could not imagine the world he lived in.