Salute the Dark

Phalmes greeted him as he rode into camp. The Mynan looked as though he had not slept much since Salma had seen him last, for the Wasp advance was forcing Salma’s irregulars to fall back before them, still harassing scouts, setting traps and deadfalls for their automotives, and never letting the Wasps forget about them or think themselves safe.

There must have been something in Salma’s face, because Phalmes bared his teeth unhappily as soon as he saw his leader.

‘That bad, is it?’ he asked. ‘They’ve cut us loose?’

‘Not quite,’ Salma said. ‘Sarn is on its way. They intend a field battle.’

‘Cursed Ants never learn,’ spat Phalmes. ‘Another field battle.’

Salma shrugged. ‘I’m not going to try to teach warfare to the Ant-kinden. They and we both need Sarn to remain safe, whilst the city’s army is abroad.’

‘I don’t like this.’

‘I don’t think anyone does,’ Salma told him. ‘I can see the logic, though.’

‘That means we’re where the metal meets, aren’t we?’

‘We have been that way for some time,’ Salma sighed. ‘You’ve scouted the army, yes? Its disposition, how it’s broken up?’

Phalmes nodded. ‘You want me to get the lads together for this?’

‘It might be best.’

‘The lads’ were Salma’s officers, such as they were: as ragged a band as his army itself was, without uniform or discipline, and yet they were devoted to him. More, they were devoted to what he was trying to achieve. Phalmes and the Fly-kinden woman Chefre had been with him from the start, as had a Maynesh Ant-kinden who had been one of Phalmes’ bandits. There was a laconic Mantis-kinden hunter, hooded always, who was incomparable with his bow, which was six and a half feet from point to point. Morleyr, the hulking Mole Cricket, was an Auxillian deserter, just as Phalmes himself was, and had been crucial to their land-engineering, his people carving out trenches and pits underground with their Art and their bare hands. There was an elderly Fly-kinden who was a skilled artificer, and a Beetle-Ant halfbreed from Helleron who was a solid infantry officer. To this jumbled rag-bag Salma had added the Sarnesh officer in charge of the Lorn detachment, and now the leader of the artificers that the King of Sarn had sent them.

He explained it all to them as concisely as possible. In fact there was not much to say. We must destroy their machines of war. He listened to them talk, one speaking over the other, ideas being hammered out, picked over, discarded. This was his governance: the melting pot of thought that he could skim from. He ladled out the best of it: the diversion, the reserve, the sudden strike, the aerial attack.

‘Their general will expect something like this,’ Chefre warned. ‘He’s no fool.’

‘That’s only because it is the strategy that we must accomplish,’ Salma told her. ‘And we shall.’

Eleven

I’m getting too old for this.

The old Scorpion-kinden known as Hokiak paused a moment, leaning on his stick, his other hand, with the thumb-claw broken off, resting on the handle of the door to his back room. He could just turn away, he knew. This was not a matter of profit. He had been in the game long enough to profit from anyone and everyone, and no man had ever accused him of being partisan.

Business had not been good recently. The Wasps knew that there was constant trouble on the streets, even if Kymene’s resistance groups kept eluding them. The response of the new governor was to employ an iron hand. Where old man Ulther would have set traps to lure them in, the new man’s response was almost panicky, and made more enemies than it intimidated.

The new man in question was Colonel Latvoc, who Hokiak knew for a fact was Rekef Inlander. Latvoc was not a man with any interest in Myna, and he made that clear in his every move. He did not hold audiences, he did not consult with Consortium merchants, but instead remained holed up in the palace like a man waiting for a siege. That was something that Hokiak expected Kymene’s people would eventually oblige him in.

For the last tenday it had been hard to do business in Myna, even for Hokiak. The garrison force had been out on the streets in force, meting out justice and injustice in equal measures, as Latvoc tried to scare the city into behaving itself. Hokiak knew of a dozen tavernas that had been officially closed down as meeting points for the resistance, and he also knew that some establishments had been just that, and others had been entirely innocent of it. People who had nothing whatsoever to do with the resistance had been dragged from their beds and thrown into the interrogation rooms, where, under threat of torture, a welter of unverifiable misinformation emerged to obscure whatever the genuine revolutionaries they captured might have revealed.