Salute the Dark (10 page)

Taki made the flight from Seldis to Porta Mavralis by coasting on the updraughts above the Silk Road that skirted the edge of the Dryclaw. From there her last chute wound the
engine enough to bring her into the Mavralis airfield.

Nero would be following by whatever means he could. He had even exacted from her two-thirds of a promise to stay there until he joined her.

‘Just wait for me,’ he had requested her. ‘I won’t be long. You don’t want to go off half-ready, so why not taste the air, scout about, but wait for me.’

She had folded her arms. ‘If I learn that someone needs me back home, then I’m going. If Solarno needs me, or my friends need me.’ Seeing his pained expression, she had then
relented a little. ‘But other than that, I’ll wait – so long as you don’t take too long catching me up.’ She regarded him dubiously. ‘I’m going to have to
ask, though, why do you even care? It isn’t your fight, so why are you even here?’

And his smile had gone from brash to self-mocking to brash again. ‘Because I like you, girl, why else?’ A bald, knuckle-faced man twice her age, and not even of her profession.

She was still trying to work out what she thought of that. Still, he might be useful back in Solarno, if she could judge from how swiftly he had won over Domina Genissa, her previous
employer.

The shock of the imperial invasion was still resounding through Porta Mavralis. Trade all about the Exalsee had been thrown into chaos, with the Wasps still trying to clench their fist on the
city. They were turning most ships away from Solarno docks, impounding some, allowing a few others to trade freely, all decided apparently at random. Listening to this news, Taki formed the opinion
that the Wasps themselves were divided, different officers ordering different strategies, and she further understood that the Crystal Standard party was still trying to assert itself as the new
master of Solarno against the resistance of all the rival factions. There would be a reckoning for that pack of traitors, she knew, when they found out what kind of venomous creatures they had
given their city over to.

Teornis had not sent her off with no help at all. He had given her a sealed introduction to his chief agent in Mavralis, and Taki met with her on the second day after her arrival: a lean,
sly-looking Spider woman named Odyssa.

‘Refugees are still fleeing Solarno,’ the spy explained. ‘There’s almost a quarter of the Path of Jade’s members of the Corta Lucidi set up here in Mavralis,
claiming to be a government in exile. Others have dispersed further around the Exalsee, to Princep Exilla, Ostrander, Diroveshni and Chasme. The Wasps are still fighting to lock down the streets
and gain total control of the city. Their colonel has not even been able to proclaim himself governor and four or five of the top Crystal Standard collaborators are dead.’

‘By whose hand?’

‘Nobody knows,’ the Spider replied. Odyssa’s smile said that she had her own thoughts. ‘There’s enough general mistrust, though, that Wasp assassins are not so far
from people’s thoughts.’

‘Good.’
Let them continue to fight amongst themselves, especially before their prize is secure.
‘I need to find out where certain individuals have gone, if you can help
me.’

‘My Lord-Martial does not prohibit it, so give me a list of them and I will see what I can uncover.’ Odyssa slid a blank scroll over to her, with an inkpot and chitin quill balanced
on it.

They may be all dead
, Taki thought.
Some of them will surely be dead.
She was thinking of her fellows, her peers, the fighting pilots of Solarno and the Exalsee.
My brothers and
sisters of the air, my glorious enemies and closest friends.
‘What else are you allowed to give me,’ she asked, ‘or is it just information?’

‘By no means, for my Lord-Martial is not so parsimonious,’ Odyssa replied. ‘I myself am staying at the Cartel-House of the Craesandral family. Do you want to know who my fellow
guests are there?’

Taki ground her teeth. ‘Forgive me, Bella Odyssa, but I am a pilot, not a game-player. My city is under the yoke, so please just say what you mean.’

Odyssa’s responding glance was pitying but Taki could live with that. ‘I have twenty Craesandral house-guards as company, and two hundred mercenaries from Iak.’

Taki blinked. ‘You will . . . ?’

‘Make your plans, little one, and I shall help you as I may. When the time comes for blood-letting on the streets of Solarno, we shall be with you.’

Two hundred and twenty.
Odyssa looked very pleased with herself but Taki was already seeing in her mind the mighty imperial airship
Starnest
and the hundreds of Wasp soldiers
descending from it.
And how many friends are left in Solarno that will fight?
She needed her friends, her fellow pilots, and she needed a plan.

And she needed someone she could trust to go into Solarno on her behalf, and that someone was not Odyssa.

It would have to be Nero.

There were certain businesses that did not stop even for the war. In fact there were some businesses that took on extra staff.

‘Small package work,’ the Fly-kinden smuggler had explained to Tisamon. ‘Messages in. Messages out. Weapons. People sometimes. Can fit a couple back there, at a
pinch.’

The smuggling was accomplished via a single stripped-down automotive, with six high, narrow-rimmed wheels powered by an over-wound clockwork engine that ran almost silently, so that the vessel
seemed to skate over the ground, and to fly when it vaulted a rise. The Fly-kinden drove it, and fixed it, and did his best to outrun any trouble, but now he kept a couple of guards on the payroll
at all times, because he earned his high profit margins through danger and secrecy. The danger was attested by the vacancy that Tisamon had now filled.

It was as easy as that to get to occupied Helleron. Just short of two tendays, hanging from the scaffolding that was all the Fly had left of the automotive’s original shell, and they were
then able to merge with the stream of travellers coming into Helleron from Tark and Asta, heading up the Silk Road from the south.

‘And from here on, we’re legal,’ the Fly-kinden had explained. ‘The Wasps might think they run the city, but it’s still a market and not a military camp. The
Beetles know better than to turn people away, and there isn’t a magnate in the city who doesn’t make some coin for himself through the Black Guild. From what I hear, most of Wasp
customs are on the take now, too. They learn fast, that lot.’

Helleron, a city devoted to the eternal cycle of building and decay, where today’s grinding wheel erased the tracks of yesterday: a city of machines that took in and spat out a hundred men
and women a day who had come there to make their fortunes, feeding them to its furnaces. This was where he had come before, after Atryssa’s betrayal of him, after his own betrayal of her.
This was Helleron, where he had been able to forget, in the unqualified shedding of blood, what had first driven him there. In a twisted, bitter sense he had fond memories of Helleron.

It had been only a short space of absolution, between his leaving this place and his return to it. Stenwold’s call had summoned him out of his exile, away from his meaningless round of
street-fighting and the settling of quarrels. It was Stenwold who had given him the chance to redeem himself, to make himself the man he should be. For a brief span – fighting the Wasps here
and in Myna, training his daughter, questing in Jerez – it had seemed that he would succeed in rediscovering himself.

Weak at heart.
He should have stayed in the Felyal, remained true to his kinden, but he had betrayed them for a Spider woman, and thus had begun the road of failures which had led him
here. Looking about him at the grimy bustle of Helleron, he smiled thinly. What better tomb for one such as he than this filthy warren of blackened metal.

The building he sought had not changed, the door’s plaque almost unreadable beneath the dirt of a year: ‘Rowen Palasso: Factor’. Once inside Tisamon gave his name and had no
more than a minute’s wait before being shown to the third-storey office of the proprietor herself.

Rowen Palasso was a Beetle-kinden woman of middle years, probably not far from Tisamon’s own age. Her hair had been dyed red not too recently, and her face was baggy and lined. She was one
of the middle-merchants of Helleron, who had worked at her trade all her life and never quite made the fortune and the success of it that she had planned, a type the city was full of. Her trade was
a liaison for men and women of undoubted but clandestine skills: housebreakers and thieves, thugs and strong-armers, duellists and killers. In defiance of the darkened-corner conventions of her
associates, her office was as domestic a place as Tisamon had ever seen, with cushions on the chairs and little embroidered pictures on the walls with homely mottos. In fact, it was calculated to
put her patrons and her clients off their stride with its cosy banality.

‘Tisamon of Felyal, as I live and breathe,’ Rowen exclaimed. ‘And here was I thinking you’d given us the slip. They always come back to Helleron, though.’

‘It seems that way,’ he said quietly.

‘And here you are, looking for a little work to tide you over?’

‘I want to fight,’ he told her.

‘Of course you do. It’s what you’re good at. Carpenters want to make things out of wood, and artificers want to tinker with machines, and you want to kill people. Why not? Go
with your talents, that’s what I say.’

It was indeed what she said. He had heard it a dozen times before, at least. ‘What do you have for me?’ he asked.

‘It isn’t as easy as that, dear blade, not at all,’ she told him. ‘City’s under new management now.’

‘I refuse to believe the Wasps have put your trade out of business.’

She gave him a bleak smile. ‘Not quite, Tisamon, not quite. Your old stamping grounds have mostly gone, though. It’s like the end of an era. All that gang-fighting, street-fighting,
where you made your name: gone now, the lot of it. The Empire has been rooting out any fiefs that won’t bow the knee. The only work I could get you in that direction would be signing up for
your own suicide with those few still holding out.’

Tisamon nodded, thinking.

‘On the other hand, if you were interested in something a little different . . .’ Her bright smiles were less convincing than her bleak ones.

‘Tell me.’

‘The Wasps have brought in a new kind of entertainment. They’re very keen on it, and so all the locals who want in with them are keen on it too, though it’s a little . . .
gauche.’

‘Prize fighting,’ Tisamon filled in.

‘It’s not like the skill-matches the Ants have,’ Rowen warned. ‘Bloodsports – men against animals, or a duellist against a pack of unarmed slaves or prisoners.
Nothing
honourable
, Tisamon. Not your line, I’d have thought.’ She watched him keenly. ‘But if you were interested, I could make the arrangements. It’s very new, and
anyone can put up a fighter. Slaves get entered, mostly, but there’s no law about it . . .’

And so you have found your new place in the order
, Tisamon considered, and did not know if he meant the woman or himself.

‘Arrange it,’ he told her.

* * *

Seda had never before seen the Mosquito in anything other than robes of black, or the imperial colours her brother sometimes dressed him in, but now she had discovered him,
sitting cross-legged on the floor of the mirror room, surrounded by a glitter of candles. He was swathed in pale clothing that was as tight on his limbs as bandages, secured by ribbons of red tied
at his elbows, wrists and knees. His otherwise uncovered head had a band of dark cloth circling his brow, making the white flesh of his skull look more corpse-like than ever.

‘What are you dressed as, sorcerer?’ Seda asked acidly, once the guard had left. That she was now allowed to be alone and unwatched with Uctebri was a recent occurrence, and she did
not know whether it was down to her brother the Emperor’s preoccupations elsewhere, or to Uctebri’s subtle influence.

When he lifted his head to look at her, she took an automatic step back, because there was something in that skull-face that she had never seen before.

Satisfaction
, she realized: naked, gloating satisfaction. His bloody eyes, that raw, shifting mark half-covered by his headband, pulsed scarlet and wild. His lips pulled back into a grin
that showed her every pointed, fish-like tooth in his head.

He lifted his hands towards her, and within them was clasped a gnarled wooden box, its surface carved and carved over again.

‘Through hardship and travail . . .’ he hissed. ‘Through blood and fire, treachery and theft, it is here. The Rekef have prevailed at last.
And the box is
mine.
’

She made herself regard him coldly. ‘And was it worth it?’

‘A thousandfold,’ he said. He rose smoothly, all pretence of age and infirmity now gone, and she wondered whose blood he was replete with, to have given him his youth back. ‘I
have just been performing certain introductions. This garb of mine, these ribbons, there is nothing magical in them. They are, however, symbols that have significance to certain things from a
certain time. I have thus identified myself to them, so they will not turn their influence onto me.’

‘Where will this influence fall, then?’ she asked him.

‘Where I will it, or where it will, so long as it does not meddle with my plans,’ Uctebri replied. His robe had been discarded by one wall, and he retrieved it with one spindly arm
and shrugged it on, still holding tightly to the box with the other hand. She had the odd idea that he had seen himself through her eyes for a moment, and found himself feeling self-conscious.

‘This box,’ she said. ‘Is it something for your amusement, or does it bear on what we must do?’

‘How goes your work?’ he asked, drawing his cowl up. She thought that he sounded disappointed, almost. Had he wished her to seem more impressed?

‘I have some colonels on my side, Brugan among them. I flatter old Governor Thanred, for what little influence he has left. A major of engineers, a major of the Slave Corps, two factors of
the Consortium, all with me now. Disappointed and passed-over men, the ambitious and the vengeful. I am spinning my webs as if I was born a Spider.’