Salute the Dark

They arrived in Szar itself soon afterwards. Smoke hung over its far side, smogging the city’s low, domed buildings. The only people abroad in the streets were Wasp-kinden soldiers and a few Scorpion Auxillians with mottled, yellowish skin and long-hafted axes cocked back over their shoulders. The artificers’ convoy made a snaking circle around a resting marketplace, where the rags and splinters of ruined stalls still crunched underfoot. Totho glanced at the nearby houses, expecting to see the faces of locals peering out suspiciously, but they seemed empty. The doors were mostly broken in, and some had been burnt out.

Drephos half-climbed and half-flew down from the lead automotive, pausing halfway to look critically about him at the city. Totho could see what must be the governor’s palace, a heavy ziggurat of Wasp architecture louring over the smaller native buildings. As the convoy approached it, a delegation of Wasp soldiers issued forth in a large enough number to make Totho suspect some plot against Drephos. Their attention seemed locked towards the north, though, and the bulk of the city in that direction. There was a large Wasp of middle years nested within these soldiers, who only stepped forth when his escort had merged with that of the convoy. His face was marked with a livid, painful weal that seemed almost in the shape of a small hand.

‘Colonel Drephos?’ he asked uncertainly, and the hooded halfbreed raised his one metal hand.

‘You’re Colonel Gan, I take it. The governor here?’

‘I am, yes. I think-’

‘Have your men unload my wagons. I want as much space as possible within your palace cleared for a workshop.’

Colonel Gan bristled. ‘Colonel-Auxillian Drephos…’

‘Listen to me, Governor,’ Drephos said sharply. ‘I did not ask to come to this wretched place. I did not ask to be the agent to relieve you from your own failures. I have work to do and a war to fight, and I want none of this provincial brawling. I will do here what I am commanded, and then I will leave.’

‘Now listen here-’ Gan puffed himself up, acutely aware of his soldiers listening.

‘Are you aware of my orders?’ Drephos demanded.

‘Of course-’

‘Repeat them to me, if you will.’

‘Repeat them?’

‘I wish to ensure,’ the master artificer said, ‘that you are fully aware of my brief, Governor. If you please.’

‘I am told, halfbreed,’ Gan said pointedly, obviously wishing he could have Drephos struck dead on the spot, ‘that you are here to put down the rebellion in my city.’

‘At whatever cost,’ Drephos prompted.

‘At whatever cost,’ Gan agreed. ‘And believe me, if you fail, they shall hear of it in Capitas.’

‘No doubt. Now kindly have my machinery unloaded so that I may get to work.’ Drephos turned his back on the purple-faced governor, and limped back over to his team. Behind him, soldiers had already begun to unbuckle the automotives’ loads.

‘Any comments?’ he asked his cadre.

‘You… are clearly not interested in making friends here, master,’ Totho said slowly. Some of the other artificers laughed a little at that.

‘The Empire has dozens of heavy-minded buffoons like Colonel Gan, all men of good family and narrow views. There is only one of me, however. Do not fear his retribution, for we will not feel it.’

At that moment there was a loud clang as one of the unloaders dropped some piece of equipment, and Drephos rounded on them furiously.

‘Be careful, you fools!’ he shouted across at them. ‘There is not a piece there that is not delicate.’

The Szaren garrison men stared back at him sullenly. Totho guessed that, while they might not be overfond of their own commander, they resented this halfbreed artificer striding into their city as though he owned it.

One of them, quite deliberately, took the keg he was holding and dropped it ten feet off the back of an automotive, staring at Drephos expressionlessly. That was when it happened: Drephos twitched as if stabbed, and then shouted a warning at them all to move back and clear the entire area. The artificers were sufficiently used to his commands to scurry away as quickly as possible. Totho could even hear the faint hiss from the keg and, looking back from a distance that Drephos seemed to think was safe, he thought he detected a faint yellow mist in the air.

By that time the garrison men nearest to the keg were either dead or dying, convulsing and arching their backs, clawing bloody lines in their own throats and faces. The rest were already running or airborne, but the slowest of them collapsed before they were clear of the circle of automotives, until there was a sprawl of dead soldiers radiating outwards from the dropped keg and a dreadful silence throughout the ruined market, the survivors staring not at the corpses but at Drephos.

‘Once again,’ the master artificer reminded them, ‘be careful. Am I understood?’

Fourteen