Salute the Dark (36 page)

The artillery
, Balkus thought glumly. That was Stenwold’s boy’s job, of course, and he had done his best not to think of the young Dragonfly and his impossibly suicidal task,
but right now it shouldered its way to the forefront of his mind.

The Wasp army was now encamped within sight. The talking and shouting amongst the Collegiate soldiers had become strained and over-loud due to the proximity of the enemy. General Malkan’s
Sixth and Seventh Armies, the Hive and the Winged Furies in all their mortal strength, were scarcely three miles away. Before evening had darkened the sky, they had been in plain view, and Flies
could spy on them with telescopes. Malkan was making no attempt at hiding his numbers, but instead displaying to the utmost his military strength, which exceeded everything the Sarnesh had gathered
against him by two or three to one. The morning would see some bloody work.

Balkus stood up. ‘No more for me,’ he informed the other two. ‘Going out to walk amongst the soldiers.’

For of course an Ant commander would not need to do that. Parops and Plius did not have to do that. They were always amongst their soldiers, mind touching mind in a net that supported each Ant
and bound the whole together. Not Balkus. Balkus had his detachment of deaf-mutes, their minds single and separate, and in his brain instead there was always the murmur of the Sarnesh camp around
him, no matter how hard he tried to blot it out.

The march here had allowed him his one moment of amusement when, in the midst of all the great voiceless march of Ant-kinden, a Collegiate woman had struck up a song in a single quavering and
slightly off-key warble from the midst of the out-of-step merchant companies. A few others voices had risen to join her, and then half of the rest of them were chorusing the words, or loose
approximations, using this simple rhythm to keep their steps sufficiently coordinated to catch up a little with the stoically silent Ants.

Balkus had enjoyed that. He had particularly enjoyed it because of the utter sense of horror that had arisen in his mind, transmitted there from each and all of the Sarnesh, that these
shopkeeper soldiers should be going to war making noise, flapping their lips in some pointless and mostly tuneless song. Balkus had
felt
the minds of his kin, and known them to be
scandalized and disgusted, and he had enjoyed that a great deal.

Then his soldiers had begun on a new song, the words of which he managed to catch:

And Balkus had considered just exactly what Stenwold Maker himself would think of that, and had chuckled to himself over it for a good hour.

Now he passed amidst the campfires of his men, pausing occasionally to look out at that distant constellation of fires that indicated the enemy. At least there was no fear of a night attack, for
the Wasps were not night-fighters – but the Mantids and Moths the Ancient League had brought were. Any force of Wasps that tried to use the cover of darkness would find that cloak soon
stripped from them. Indeed it would be hard enough to stop the Mantis warriors going out tonight to kill as many Wasps as they could catch unawares, but that was emphatically not the plan.

The plan, the wonderful bloody plan!
It was all the King of Sarn’s work, he and his cursed tacticians. The Ancillaries, as the Sarnesh had taken to calling their foreign hangers-on,
had not even been consulted, merely instructed.

At least they’re not sticking us in front.
That had always been the fear: that the Sarnesh would see their unreliable foreign friends simply as fodder for Wasp bolt and sting to
cover their main advance.
At least we’re only being given a fair share of the load.
But Balkus knew who the load was really resting on.
Stenwold’s boy.

Somewhere out there was rabble of bandits and refugees who would be readying themselves, even now, for what must look like certain death. At least it looked like certain death to Balkus, and he
wasn’t even going.

‘We’re sure this is going to be a surprise?’ Phalmes asked. ‘If this isn’t a surprise, then it’s not going to go well for us.’

I’m not convinced it’s going to go well for us in any event
, Salma thought, but Phalmes would know that already. After all, the Mynan was an old campaigner. He knew the
odds.

‘Every scout that comes this way gets disappeared,’ said Chefre. The Fly-kinden woman sounded dispassionate and businesslike about it. She and her gang had been criminals in the
Spiderlands before this and, as far as she was concerned, it was just the same war with bigger gangs. ‘Also, we’re disappearing scouts all over. I’ve got everyone who’ll be
no good for this game out hunting Wasps in the dark.’ Her smile was neat, surgical. ‘Of course, most of our lot
can
see in the dark. Or more than they can anyway.’

Salma nodded. It was a weakness of the Wasps that the Empire could do little about. There was scarce moonlight tonight, the clouds hanging heavy about the sky. It was dark even for him and his
people, so for the Wasps, the only light would be what they could make themselves.

Phalmes, who could not see in the dark either, grunted unhappily. ‘I don’t think we’ve got men enough.’ It was not the first time he had said this.

‘Probably not,’ Salma agreed, ‘but what are you going to do about it?’ He saw Phalmes’ shoulders rise and fall. ‘Your fliers are ready?’ he then asked
Chefre.

‘Chief, if we don’t give ’em the word soon, they’re just going to go off and do it on their own,’ she told him cheerfully. She had at least 400 under her command,
mostly Fly-kinden but with Moths and others amongst them. They had bows and, where the Aptitude ran, they also had crossbows, snapbows and grenades. Salma would have been happier fighting along
with them but he was needed here, at the point of the lance, where his army met the enemy head on.

Every horse, every riding insect that his people had been able to steal, capture, beg, buy or inherit was here, till he had a cavalry force that was nearly half again the number of
Chefre’s rag-tag airborne. They had trained and trained again, a rabble that the Commonweal would cringe from. They had got on their horses and fallen off and broken legs or ridden the wrong
way. The mounts had been just as bad. It was, he knew full well, a stupid idea, and nobody in their right mind would have thought of it.

The Wasps would not have thought of it. In fact it would be something most Wasps would never have seen, or at least not since the Twelve-Year War. It would come as a surprise, and in war
surprise could be fatal. He was attacking a full imperial army, tens of thousands of men. His people would be outnumbered fifty to one, but …

They would anticipate an attack, but he hoped it was just skirmishers, infiltrators, saboteurs, that the Empire was expecting. He would not be sending such, however. He had decided already that
General Malkan’s camp could not be opened up by a stealthy few. The scalpel must give way to the hammer.

When Malkan had overwintered his forces after the Battle of the Rails, he had built a palisaded, fortified camp protected against land and air attack, reinforced with artillery. Now his army was
on the march, he was forced to rely on a torchlit perimeter and sentries. Where an Ant-kinden army would have dug in every night, if they knew that someone like Salma was out there, the Wasps were
not quite so organized. It was the same mistake that General Alder and the Fourth Army had made, when the Felyal Mantids caught them unawares. Salma realized that Malkan would have learnt from
that, and would surely have a force on standby, ready to spring to the camp’s defence and give the main army time to organize. Cavalry, though …

We must punch through whatever they throw at us. We will give the Sarnesh artificers time to finish their work.

Or we will die.

It was at least a plan. He did not feel particularly proud of it, but at this late stage it was the only one he had.

‘Morleyr’s people must be in place by now,’ Phalmes decided. His horse shifted, picking up his unease.

‘You’re right,’ said Salma. The Mole Cricket, Morleyr, would be leading a feint attack on the camp’s far side, but Salma had not been able to spare the giant much in the
way of manpower, and it was unlikely to deceive the enemy for long. He looked down at the Sarnesh standing beside him. ‘It feels like time,’ he agreed.

The man held a little device in his hand, and Salma knew that there was another such device with the Sarnesh army. In some arcane way wholly lost on him, these instruments told the Sarnesh how
much of the night had already passed. They were waiting for the Ant’s mark, and he had been watching the little dials and wheels of his device closely, with a tiny lamp cupped in his other
hand.

‘You have a good sense for these things,’ the Sarnesh observed, ‘and it … is time, indeed.’ Salma knew that the man would be simultaneously speaking with his mind
to others of his kin accompanying Morleyr, or to the Ant-kinden soldiers and artificers ranked up behind Salma’s makeshift cavalry.

‘Chefre, over to you,’ he said. With no access to the Sarnesh and their mindlink, once Chefre’s airborne took off they would be cutting themselves loose from Salma’s
command, operating on their own initiative. ‘Go,’ Salma told her, and she went.

The wait was something he had not thought of, before. There was an appalling, stretched-out moment, between Chefre’s people taking wing and his hearing their signal, in which he sat in his
saddle with nothing to do. Prince Salme Dien, the commander of armies, had finished his shift, and Salma the warrior, the battle-leader, had yet to go on duty … and he now waited while the
horses stamped nervously, feeling his men around him shift and try to even out their breathing.

‘Salma.’ The faintest touch at his shoulder, and he turned in the saddle.

She was there, his luminous lover. He had told her not to come, but she, of all his army, took no orders from him. She hung in the air, her skin streaked with colours, radiant wings beating.

‘You should not …’ he started.

‘How could I not?’ she responded. ‘I know what you go now to do.’

‘Please, this is hard enough …’

She reached out, took his head in her hands and darted in to kiss him as he leant down in the saddle, her lips soft against his. He felt her tears on his cheek. They ran down her face and
glinted and sparkled over her faintly radiant skin.

‘I will never abandon you,’ she assured him. ‘
Never
. As you were there for me, I shall always come for you.’

He shook his head, with no words to express what he felt.
I love her so much
, he thought.
How can I do this to her?

The Butterfly-kinden gazed along the line of nervous animals, the horses, the beetles, the crickets and spiders, the miscellaneous grab-bag of rideable monsters that they had drawn from
everywhere. She looked at their riders, too: untested, awkward, half-skilled.

‘I feel your belief, my prince,’ she whispered. ‘It is the strongest thing here.’

‘Then it will have to suffice,’ he said, his cheer sounding slightly fragile, his face expression brave for those around him. She laid a hand on his, where it rested on his saddle
pommel.

‘Share your belief with me,’ she told him. ‘Make me believe.’

Salma sensed her presence as a halo that reached out from her, imbued with her gentle magics. She had enchanted him before, but she needed no such arts to secure his love now. Still, though, she
touched his mind, the essence of him, and she brought her other hand up to the muzzle of his steed.

‘Be strong,’ she whispered. ‘Share the faith and be strong,’ and he knew that she was speaking not to him but to the horse.

Speaking to all the horses, to every riding animal standing and stamping or chittering there in the dark, waiting for the signal. It was not like his people’s magic, but the
Butterfly-kinden had their own arts, born of the sun, born of light and hope.

‘Be brave,’ she murmured. ‘Be true. You will not lose your way. You will not turn aside from danger.’ She was shining now, despite the cloak she wore, so that he was
terrified that the Wasps might mark her, but still she spoke softly to his horse, and he felt the animal shift its stance beneath him, something strong and iron-like entering it. All down the line,
to either side and also behind him, the nervous shuffle of animals quietened, replaced by a watchful patience, an
anticipation
.

And at last she again looked up at him, with her face like a sunrise. ‘Come back to me,’ she whispered, and stepped aside from his mount.

He heard the first bang even as she did, the first firepowder charge exploding. Chefre would be coming in from the side, her airborne rabble streaking over the Wasp camp, attacking
indiscriminately, dropping ignited grenades, loosing arrows, crossbow bolts and fire-arrows, even slingshot. The Wasp soldiers on duty – he could almost see them in his mind’s eye
– would streak into the air, their stings lighting up the night with a network of gold tracery. Some of Chefre’s people would die but the rest would keep moving: a great, chaotic cloud
passing back and forth over the vast Wasp camp.

There was no more time for thought, nothing to wait for now. He kicked his heels into his mount’s flanks and launched forward, the first man to the battle, forming the point of the wedge.
False heroics, he knew, for in this fight it would be those at the rear who would be most at risk.

But they had formed a decent wedge after all, which was something that had never quite come together as he drilled them. He saw the flames of the Wasp perimeter straight ahead of them. Somewhere
behind him, there was the scream of a horse missing its step, going down. They were charging in the dark and some of the other riders could not see as well as he could. It was something he had
anticipated and been unable to solve, and he knew that his plan could not survive too many unsolved problems.