Salute the Dark (21 page)

The sergeant turned to her. ‘You stay here while I report. I’ll come out soon enough, or someone else will.’ The look he gave her was calculating, narrow-eyed, still weighing
up her usefulness.

He left her then, pushing his way through the throng, and his men quickly dispersed, seeking food, drink, dice games and whores. With no option left to her, she waited. After a while of being
jostled, she found a nearby automotive wagon and climbed up the side of it, gaining purchase on the smooth wood and metal by her Art, until she could sit aloft, gaining some illusion of being apart
from it all. Even then, soldiers were constantly buzzing overhead, close enough for her to reach out and grab. The air was full of Wasps and Flies, and other kinden in the Empire’s
colours.

It was more than an hour before someone came for her, and then it was not the same sergeant but a narrow-faced Wasp, middle-aged and with rank bars that she identified as a major’s,
alighting atop the wagon and looking down on her. He put her in mind of the first Wasp she had spoken to, and deceived: Captain Halrad aboard the
Sky Without
, whom Totho had killed for
her.

‘You want to make yourself useful, do you?’ he asked flatly. ‘What are you? Spiderlands spy, perhaps?’

She made herself smile at him easily. ‘Would I tell you if I was? Besides, since when was the Empire at war with the Spiderlands?’

‘I expect news of that hourly,’ he said, regarding her doubtfully. ‘So, what are you, precisely?’

‘A mercenary,’ she replied.

‘An honest one, then?’

‘Just so.’ She leant back. ‘So, Major, can you think of any use for me?’

‘Don’t play games,’ he told her, but she could see a glint there, which showed she had reached some vanity within him. ‘I could have you arrested.’

‘Yes, but what would you gain?’

‘You tell me. What’s your name, first off?’

‘Atryssa.’ She had not meant it, but the name came out without a thought: her mother’s name. Surely it would not have been begrudged, if permission could have been asked for.
‘Your sergeant told me you have a Mantis here.’

‘And he told me you’re looking for one. Some kind of vengeance, is it?’

She read his tone carefully. ‘Not that can’t be put off. Just a dangerous man I’d rather keep track of.’

‘Or he was hunting you, was he?’ he smiled then. ‘You don’t think much of us Wasp-kinden, I’ll wager. You Spiders, you look down on all sorts. When did you last
catch a Mantis alive, though, in your webs?’

‘You have him prisoner?’ Her own anxiety bled through, even though she reminded herself,
It need not be Tisamon
, once again. He read her question as simple surprise,
though.

‘More than that. Nicely broken in, and playing for the crowd.’

Despite herself, she made herself sound impressed. ‘I should like to see that.’
Can it be this easy?
she thought, and then,
It cannot be him, not the man this Wasp
describes.

She was all wide-eyed for him, and she was young, and he was a man who liked to impress. He hopped down from the wagon in a brief flurry of wings, holding his hand out. ‘Come and see what
the Empire can accomplish,’ he told her, and she jumped down after him, knowing in her heart that it could not be
him
, just some other Mantis pressed into servitude here.

He led her across Asta, shouting at any soldiers that got in his way, and that told her a lot about him, more than did their conversation. They wove their path through the tents and the press of
bodies and the machines, around the buildings that were already showing the wear and tear of their impromptu nature, until she came to an arena.

It was as temporary as the rest of the place, crates and boards nailed together, thrown up to enclose a circle no more than thirty feet across. Wasps stood at the railing or hovered above.
Officers got to sit on stacked boxes and crates that formed the crudest kind of raked seating overlooking the fighting pit. She noticed a lot of soldiers in the enclosed helms of the Slave
Corps.

The major was leading her straight to the stacked-up seating, saying, ‘I don’t suppose they even have this pastime where you come from.’

In Collegium? No.
But she said, ‘Do you think we don’t know good sport in the Spiderlands, Major? I happen to have a fondness for it. Fancy a wager?’

That made him grin properly, as she had hoped. ‘A patron of the games, are you? Good. I don’t know what use you might be to the Empire, but it was the sergeant mentioning our Mantis
that caught my attention. I don’t want anyone tampering with my prize.’

‘
Your
prize?’ she asked him, as he evicted a lower-ranking officer to make a space for her. She sat down uncomfortably close to him, and in the pit below she saw two
Beetle-kinden, bare-chested and armed with swords, face a Wasp contestant with a spear. She could tell that neither of the Beetles was a warrior, as they stumbled about and waved their blades
frantically. Only after a moment did she notice that they were bound together, wrist to wrist.

The Wasp constantly played with them, vaulting backwards and forth, wings a blur, until he put his spear through the chest of one, leaving it there and taking up the victim’s dropped
sword. The surviving Beetle tried to back away, dragging at his companion’s fallen body as the Wasp stalked him, every slow move for the entertainment of the crowd. Tynisa made herself seem
to enjoy it, cheering and shouting whenever the major did. Inside, as she watched the second Beetle eventually dispatched, she thought,
Is this really how they like their victories? As simple
and predetermined as this? How pathetic of them.

The major called down some question that she missed amidst the noise of the crowd, and one of the slavers called back to him.

‘You’re in luck,’ the major informed her. ‘He’s next.’

Tynisa steeled herself, but she did not feel she had it in her not to react, if it was
him
.

The audience of soldiers had now fallen silent, almost respectfully. She caught sight of fair hair as the new fighter was led in, and then
he
stepped into the rough ring. He was not
wearing his arming jacket but was bare to the waist, like the Beetles had been, all his fighting history traced on his hide in burns and scratches. His claw gauntlet was on his arm – Tisamon
the warrior, the Weaponsmaster.

‘It’s him, isn’t it,’ the major enquired. She could hardly deny it.

‘I’m amazed you caught him,’ she heard herself say. ‘He’s been a great deal of trouble for everyone.’

‘There’s little the Empire can’t do, when it sets its mind to it,’ he bragged.

From the far side of the ring to where Tisamon had taken his stand there came a sudden rattling and a scraping. They had a corral built there, and now they hauled up a slatted gate, and out came
one of the desert scorpions, its tail and claws raised in mindless threat. A creature longer than he was tall, Tisamon watched it without moving as it explored its environment, first trying to
climb up the wall and being prodded back by the spears of the slavers, all the while becoming more and more enraged.

At last it either saw or scented him. The creature’s pincers gaped wider, and she heard a shrill hiss emerge from it. Tisamon slowly, very slowly, fell back into a defensive stance. The
soldiers grew murmurous with speculation, and by that she gathered quickly that he had fought for them many times before.

‘You’re lucky to have arrived when you did,’ the major said, his eyes fixed on the beast. ‘A couple of days and he’s leaving us, if he lives that long.’

‘For where?’ she asked.

‘Oh, he’s a commodity now,’ he said. ‘He’s too good for the provinces. If he’s going to get cut apart, let it happen before a more discerning
audience.’

Lunging forwards, the scorpion struck, but Tisamon was already gone, and when it turned on him again it was missing a claw. It backed off a little until its tail touched the wall of the arena,
and then rattled forwards again, and he lopped the stinger from its tail, but still did not kill it.

It is almost as bad as the last fight
, Tynisa thought.
How can he allow himself to become a part of this?

But now he drove in to finish the beast off, cutting half the remaining claw away, stepping within its impotent reach and then driving the claw-blade straight down into its eyes, not once but
three times, until the wretched creature twitched its last and finally lay still.

And how they cheered him! He did not acknowledge it, merely stared down at the dead beast, and it seemed to Tynisa that he were wishing their positions were reversed.

‘He’s a valuable commodity,’ the major repeated to her, ‘so if you try to harm him, we’ll make a slave of you, too, no matter how useful you might otherwise be.
He’ll cause you no more trouble, though. You can see that. He’s ours now.’

She forced herself to smile at him, though it proved her hardest deception. ‘I see that he has been punished more than I could ever hope for,’ she said, feeling her heart break at
her own words.

She had assumed that the major would deal further with her, take her along with him. Instead the man was gone the next night, and his prized fighter too, and without a word to her.
He feared
I wanted to kill Tisamon.
The man must have read something in her, the ferocity of her emotion. He had not wanted to risk her harming his prize.

She had made an attempt to follow them, a pack on her back, a lone Spider-kinden heading off into the depths of the Empire. Something of her foster-father Stenwold had rubbed off, though, to
make her reconsider the idea.
Alone in the Empire, they will make a slave of me, or I will shed enough blood resisting it that they will have to kill me.

Tisamon was being hauled off in chains, further and further away each moment, and yet she must now play a delicate game. She was in the Empire, where every pair of eyes belonged to a spy that
could denounce her. She did not have the craft for this, nor was her kinden such that she could walk through them unnoticed. She had a bitter moment of longing for the skills of the face-changing
Scyla, who could have gone anywhere and done anything, but who had squandered her gifts so meanly.

Tynisa had to wait two days before the right man came along. Until that time she slipped through the ordered commotion of Asta like a slim-bladed knife. She gave herself airs, behaving as though
she was the agent of someone of status. She remembered the little she had gleaned from Thalric about the shadowy Rekef, so she let people believe by looks and omissions that she might be Outlander.
To the officers she was a worrying enigma, because they did not really know if they wanted her. Nor did they know if they were allowed to be rid of her. She walked a tenuous line, staying out of
the way of the highest ranks and bewildering the sergeants and lieutenants.

To the common soldiers serving below them she made herself something different. She could never be one of them, being the wrong kinden and the wrong gender, but still, she made herself their
companion. She sat at their games of chance, joined their conversations, though it was hard for her: far harder than simply cloaking mystery about herself for the benefit of their superiors. She
learnt a lot about the people she had been fighting and killing for the last year. She learnt about the intense rivalries between armies, between companies and squads within those armies. She
learnt that they envied the engineers their pay and privilege, yet looked down on them for never getting their hands dirty. She learnt that they loathed the Slave Corps but joked about the Rekef in
a way that their officers would never have dared. She learnt that many of them were here in the army just as much against their wishes as were the Auxillians they fought alongside. The sense she
got of the Empire was frightening: that it fought because it could not do anything else. If the Empire ran out of enemies, it would tear itself apart.

Thus, between the officers and their men, she held an uneasy place: an intruder, a parasite, in their hive of dedicated activity. There was only one strange encounter, when a junior lieutenant
caught up with her and talked in circles around her for the best part of an hour, strangely hesitant, oddly delicate, as though he was reaching his hand into a trap in order to draw some valuable
thing out. Only later did she wonder if he had been a Rekef agent, and been trying to determine whether she was genuinely Rekef also. The encounter had left her with no answers, but something to
ponder.
So, the Rekef is not as unified as all that. Well, didn’t Thalric say that it was his own sneaks that tried to kill him?

After those two days, she at last found her mark. His name was Otran and he was almost universally loathed by officers and men alike. He was a major in the Consortium but, more than that, he was
a tax-gatherer, a bureaucrat. He arrived in Asta, a small, angry Wasp-kinden man with an automotive and a squad of armoured sentinels as his guards, and then he took the Emperor’s cut of
everything that had been gathered in from the Lowlands campaign so far. He was, she could see, keenly aware of the hatred with which he was regarded. After a little observation she could tell that
he was highly upset by it too. He considered himself a serious military officer, given an unpleasant task, rather than the belligerent little moneyman that everyone saw him to be. In short, he was
perfect for her.

She courted him. It was not difficult, either. Major Otran was a man who craved recognition, and he was snubbed at every turn by his own people. The presence of an attractive Spider-kinden was
nectar to him. She even suspected that her swift association with the man only confirmed, in the eyes of others, that she was indeed Rekef.

Otran was going on to Capitas, that was the important thing. Capitas was where they had taken Tisamon, apparently, for there was an ever-hungry market there for fighting slaves. It was an
important form of Wasp entertainment and that explained Tisamon’s value to them. The Mantis seemed to be willingly cooperating with their estimation of him, and she could not understand that.
She could only hope that he had some plan, but that man she had seen bloody-bladed in the makeshift Asta arena had given no sign of it. He had been more a dead-eyed machine ready to cut apart
whatever was set against him. Seeing him like that, she had no doubt that, if she had stepped into that ring, he would have killed her, too.