Salute the Dark

She was expressionless, still, but surely he was used to that from Ants: expressions or visible mannerisms did not come naturally to them. He had no other clues.

‘The movement of the crown is not succession, but continuity,’ the tactician said. ‘The King was party to the agreement made with you and your forces, and he considers himself bound by it. We understand that you have been doing good work in the east. You received our Lorn detachment, we believe?’

A hundred Sarnesh soldiers, that was all that they could spare him. They had clearly expected him to meet the Wasps nose to nose, and for all to die in a glorious waste of time. He hoped he had not disappointed them by surviving and by not losing a man of their Sarnesh suicide force.

‘They were invaluable,’ he said.

‘But they did not fight,’ the tactician noted.

‘I had other uses for them,’ Salma replied. He had spread the Sarnesh throughout his troops, and used their ability to speak mind to mind, to coordinate the various wings of his disparate force. Without them it was certain that some part of his attack would have been too late, too early, caught out or over-extended. He had thus made the Lorn detachment his strategic eyes and ears, giving orders and receiving reports to dozens of scattered detachments.

‘Sarn requires your services once again,’ the tactician informed him. The other commanders were watching closely. This was not a council of war, but the officers of the Sarnesh main army gathered to meet with him.

‘We have our agreement,’ he replied, with an easiness he did not feel.

‘We wish to meet them on the field,’ she then told him. ‘The Royal Court has determined that a field battle represents our best chance of victory.’

‘Despite the Battle of the Rails?’ Salma asked, seeing the same question in other faces around the table.

‘We are better prepared now that we have snapbows of our own,’ the tactician said. ‘Even so, we recognize the risk. A field battle will at least allow us to retreat to the city walls if all goes badly. However…’

Salma waited for her words, already putting together in his mind what would come next.

‘However,’ the Sarnesh woman continued, ‘we will be leaving our city poorly defended, if we commit the full force that this venture requires. If matters do not fall out according to plan,’ she explained, and perhaps there was the tiniest tremor in her voice that translated, if we all die on the field, ‘our people – and yours – will have no protection save the walls and defences of Sarn itself. We have heard from our ally of Tark,’ she picked out Parops. ‘Wasp-kinden are no strangers to breaking sieges. In order to risk a proper confrontation with the Empire, we require an assurance that our walls can stand, at least until a relieving force can be brought home.’

Salma nodded slowly. He might not understand the mechanics of the machines involved, but he knew what a siege entailed. He had seen that already at Tark. ‘And so, before you meet them, you want their… what, their…?’

‘Artillery,’ Parops intervened in a clipped tone. ‘A strike against their siege engines.’

‘Indeed,’ the tactician confirmed. ‘We can provide material and artificers to assist, but your own force has the greatest chance of achieving this end.’

Salma looked around the table, from face to face: Parops was grimacing, not liking the odds; the two Ants beside him exchanged uneasy glances; Cydrae the Mantis gave him a single, respectful nod.

Oh, Stenwold, if you could see me now.

‘I must trust that your artificers will know what to destroy and how to do it,’ Salma replied finally. ‘I confess that I know nothing of that skill. I can get them in, though, with a swift, sudden strike. That I can do.’

‘We understand what it is we are asking of you.’

‘So long as you understand what I have asked of you.’

The tactician, and by extension the city-state of Sarn, nodded. ‘What you ask shall be accomplished in every particular, so long as Sarn survives to undertake it.’

He began calculating, on the hard ride back, his mind working through days and numbers. Are we ready for this? If we are not ready for this, what then? His special project, this meant, which had drained Sarn and its surrounding countryside of riding beasts. His people had been training since the spring, or at least every one of them with any aptitude for the saddle.

I am trying to fight a Commonweal war with Lowlands soldiers. That was not quite true, for the war he was fighting had never been fought before in anyone’s histories.