Salute the Dark

Latvoc’s stare was all ice, but Thalric had not expected anything else. In a clipped gesture, the colonel ordered the two guards out of the room. ‘You didn’t have to kill five of my soldiers,’ he said.

Thalric raised an eyebrow cynically. ‘The last time the Empire showed an interest in me, Colonel, I barely lived to learn a lesson from it.’

‘Even so,’ Latvoc said, ‘you’ve made things… very difficult.’

And why should you care? But Thalric could see it already. A Rekef colonel put in charge of the garrison, leaving the soldiers unhappy and mistrustful – and why not? What was there to trust?

‘Sit down,’ Latvoc ordered him flatly. When Thalric did not move he narrowed his eyes. ‘I am still your superior officer.’

‘Am I still in the army?’

Latvoc stared at him. Looking back into his sallow face, Thalric saw a man who had slept little recently. Local or imperial worries, I wonder? Or both at once? Abruptly, as though he was seeing a shape suddenly appear in the outlines of a cloud, Thalric saw the sheer, naked desperation within Latvoc. The man was on a knife edge, and barely balancing even on that.

‘I’m not exactly in love with the Empire, after recent treatment,’ Thalric said. That part of him that had been loyal was horrified at his own daring.

‘In love?’ Latvoc spat, each word he uttered becoming a separate fight to control his temper. ‘You are – were – an imperial major. You were a Rekef officer. It is not for you to criticize the Empire. It is not for you to put your petty personal concerns before the demands of your masters. If the Empire wanted you dead, you by rights should have died. If it wishes now to recall you from the grave, then you shall return.’

And I myself have used such logic once: after Daklan stabbed me, and I would rather not have lived. But recent association with Stenwold’s pack of misfits seemed to have rubbed the gloss off those arguments.

‘What do you want now?’ Thalric asked. ‘You want me dead? Well, you had your chance. So what do you want?’

‘I? I want nothing,’ Latvoc said coldly. ‘There is another, however, who is generous enough in spirit to give a broken vessel a second chance to be of service.’

Thalric studied him: the Rekef colonel who, at their first meeting, had shot him through with fear for his own future, a man on whose word so many hundreds of other lives had turned. He found himself unmoved.

‘Bring on your man,’ he said.

‘He is already here,’ Latvoc informed him, and the colonel’s eyes strayed past Thalric towards the balcony. A man was standing there. Standing outside, or has he just flown down? It was a child’s trick, despite the silent skill with which it had been accomplished.

The man was merely a knifelike silhouette for a moment, then he stepped forwards and stared into Thalric’s face, and Thalric recognized him. Despite himself, his heart lurched.

It was General Reiner, one of the three men who ruled the Rekef.

Reiner glanced at Latvoc and made a small signal, and the colonel backed out of the room with an angry glare. For a long while, Reiner and the renegade measured one another in silence. Then the general gestured to the table, and Thalric cautiously took a seat across from him.

‘So, General,’ he said, ‘if this is to be an execution it’s a needlessly grand one. These days a knife in a back alley would be more my level.’

Reiner opened his mouth to speak, but the words were a long time coming. Thalric realized that he had never heard this man speak before, and the first sound that Reiner uttered was so low and croaking that Thalric could not make it out.

Reiner tried again. ‘That will be enough, Major Thalric.’ Coming from a man of such power, the voice itself seemed weak and thin, but the words were another matter. Thalric felt the mention of that rank strike him like a blow so heavy that he actually rocked back in his chair.

And is it so? And is a year of my life thus erased, the disgrace forgotten, the sins undone? Is that certainty, that righteousness that they stripped from my every action, now dropped back on me like a blanket, and just as comforting?

‘Since when was that Major still the case?’ he got out. More angrily he added, ‘They tried to kill me.’

In the silence after that he heard a slight shifting, not coming from Reiner but from beyond the room. He filed it neatly in his mind: men concealed, false walls. Not so very trusting after all.

Reiner took a deep breath. ‘We are at war, Major.’

‘I had noticed, General.’