Salute the Dark (47 page)

Her men had put up barricades of furniture, overturned carts and torn down buildings across two of the three routes leading towards her problem, and she stood at one such barricade now,
considering the building that had loomed so large in her own life.

The palace was the late Colonel Ulther’s miniature replica of the Emperor’s own in Capitas, a stepped ziggurat with, as she knew, just as much space below ground as above. The
majority of the surviving Myna garrison was dug in within the edifice: doorways, balconies and windows bristled with soldiers ready to shoot or sting anything that came within their range. There
was also a small catapult that the Wasp artificers had assembled, but Kymene had the luxury of assaulting the grand building from any side she pleased, whenever she chose, and to move the
cumbersome weapon around the engineers would be forced to dismantle it each time.

For now there was an uneasy stalemate. Until an hour earlier the Empire had held the neighbouring barracks building as well, but she had since heard from Chyses that his own personal guard had
fired the roof and that the soldiers had evacuated into the palace itself, while taking casualties from the Mynan crossbows. It still left her with a solid building that would be a bloodbath to
take.

But take it she must. As long as the Wasps were there, her soldiers were here, watching them, instead of consolidating her hold on the city. If she had time, she could starve them out perhaps,
but she had an uneasy feeling that time was one of the things not allowed to her.

She heard a step behind her and, turning, she saw the Beetle girl, Cheerwell, looking sombre. She had a sword at her waist and a crossbow in her hands, and the minders Kymene had set to protect
her had confirmed at least one enemy soldier dead at her hands.

‘Still thinking about your Wasp friend?’ Kymene enquired.

‘My friends, yes. Not just him.’ Che looked up at the palace. ‘This place brings back memories,’ she said weakly.

‘Were you tortured here?’ Kymene said.

‘Never,’ Che assured her, clambering up a little on the barricade. ‘So many times it seemed he was going to, but in the end it was just a cover, so that he could talk to his
man regarding some plot against the governor.’ She paused a moment, then added, ‘But he could have done it so easily, if he had wanted – Thalric, that is.’ She was aware of
Kymene’s sharp eyes on her, and she shrugged. ‘I don’t like him much, but . . . I think the Empire made him what he is. The raw material was worth something more than
that.’

‘And what about your other friends? The ones who came to rescue you from Thalric?’

Che bowed her head, letting her forehead touch the cold iron rim of a cartwheel in the barrier. ‘Scattered, gone . . .’ Stenwold gone to the Commonweal, Salma rushing his army about
Sarn, Tynisa in pursuit of her father, Totho . . . lost. And Achaeos sick, and hated by his own people because of her. ‘And here am I, back in Myna.’

They heard a disturbance amongst the soldiers behind them, a shouted word and counter-word. Both women turned to watch a Fly-kinden woman wing raggedly over the waiting fighters to virtually
throw herself at Kymene’s feet, one hand thrust towards her, offering a crumpled scroll. Messengers like this had been coming at two or three each hour all day, but this one seemed
particularly desperate. Kymene took the message and read it. There was a slight narrowing of her eyes, but nothing more.

‘Get me Chyses,’ she snapped. ‘Get all my officers here
now
, my artificers as well.’

Men and women rushed off to do her bidding. For a moment Kymene’s eyes were focused on nothing, seeing the future, weighing her next action.

‘What is it?’ Che asked her.

‘Szar must have fallen,’ Kymene replied. ‘There are two thousand Wasp soldiers marching here from there. They’ll be here in a day’s time to reinforce the
garrison.’

* * *

‘Achaeos.’

He snapped awake, his wound pulling at him painfully. He felt as though he had been running for hours, rather than just lying here in a fevered sleep. He peered upwards, seeing the Arcanum
agent, Xaraea. There was a finality to her expression that chilled him.

‘I am not strong enough for this—’ he started.

‘We have no more time,’ Xaraea interrupted. ‘The Skryres have observed all the omens and cast the lots of the future. We must act now, either with or without you.’

Achaeos stared at her. She was not fond of him, but neither was anyone else here in what had once been his home. He was learning to live with it. Still, for that self-same reason, he possessed
something they did not: a connection to the outside world.

The wound that Tynisa had given him was healing, but slowly, very slowly. It had been too close, in the end, and the conflict of treatments between the stitching and patching carried out in
Collegium and the work the doctors were doing here had not helped. He could just about walk now, for short distances, and only with a stick. He could not fly at all, and most of the time, as now,
he spent resting.

I think I should accept now that I am no warrior.
He did seem to get his hide cut open with distressing frequency.

‘Nobody has even told me what they are intending to do,’ he pointed out.

‘It is not your place to question,’ she said, but he had unexpectedly touched a nerve.
She knows, and it has shaken her.
He remained staring at her, outwardly impassive,
inwardly wondering how far he could force his minuscule authority and how much they really needed his help.

The pause between them dragged on past mere awkwardness but, despite the background pain that never quite left him, he did not give way. After an excruciating time, it was Xaraea who spoke.

‘I . . .’ she began, and that single word told him that he had broken through to something, ‘I have spent
years
working on this. You can have no idea the battles I have
fought. Yes, we could see the Empire on the horizon, and see all the cursed machines that the Helleren so obligingly built for them. I knew it would come to this, so I worked hard to have the right
man in the right place: the one Wasp-kinden who would be one of
us
and not of them. Tegrec had already made himself a seer and an officer, but it was I who made him a governor. Why did I do
all this? Because the Skryres realized that it would be necessary if we were to drive the enemy out of our halls. The Empire is
your
enemy just as much as it is ours. We have our
differences, Achaeos, but we can agree on that. They are as much our enemy as are the cursed Beetle-kinden.’

He did not flinch at that barb, even smiled a little to show his contempt for it.

‘So where has all this work led?’ he asked her.
I should have been a Skryre
, he reflected, for he knew he was now running Xaraea just as the Skryres had always run him:
employing pointed questions, evasive answers, making her do the work.

‘A ritual.’ Her voice shook marginally, and he saw her fists clench. ‘I am not privy—’

‘But you have heard,’ he observed. She was hating him with a passion now, but he found he did not care so long as he could continue to pull her around like a marionette and get her
to tell him what she knew.

‘They say . . .’ Her pause, then, was not reluctance to speak so much as reluctance to even think about it. ‘They say that it will be the greatest ritual since the Darakyon.
They need . . . they command you there. They
demand
it.’

‘Do they?’ Achaeos had gone cold all over, and he knew that must show in his face. There was no gloating, though. Xaraea was frightened of what the Skryres were about, and he found
that he was too. Slowly he swung his legs over the side of the bed. ‘I will come,’ he told her, ‘but it may take a while.’

She nodded briefly and was gone in an instant. No doubt she had a great deal else to do. The Skryres seemed to have made her their personal agent in this business, and he had no idea whether
that was intended as a reward or not.

As great as the Darakyon, is it?
he thought sourly, hearing in his mind the tortured, whispering voice of that haunted place.
We all know how well that went.
The great renegade
ritual, five centuries before, intended to drag down the newly arisen Apt-kinden, to consign them to fear and barbarism and slavery once again, and it had failed. The great magicians who had shaped
it had yet reached too far, and they, and the Mantis-kinden whose home had been their ritual ground, had been damned to a fate infinitely worse than death, eternal torture on the rack of thorns
that was the blighted forest Darakyon, imprisonment in the Shadow Box, the twisted knot of spite that was all their ritual had achieved.

And that I held, and opened, and look what happened to me . . .

There were ritual chambers deep within the mountain but their walls, it seemed, were too confining for an enterprise on this scale. Instead Xaraea led the limping Achaeos upwards, first through
slanted corridors and halls that he remembered from his youth, then by ascending long flights of steps that had always been forbidden to him before. From the murky, incense-fragrant halls they led
to she took him step-by-step up steeply spiral paths cut into the rock, cramped and tortuous routes that he had never known existed. The chill told him where they were going. The very top of the
mountain had signified a place of childhood terror. It was where the Skryres communed direct with the spirits and the elements, wholly open to the lashing responses of either. It was
where they
took you
if you failed the Skryres.

Well, they’re taking me there now
, he thought drily. There was light ahead, but it was a muted red. At first he thought it was fire-glow but as he came out into the open air he saw
that it was sunset. The entire Lowlands seemed to be in flames, as if the bloated crimson sun was searing the world to cinders.

‘An omen, do you think?’ There were only two figures waiting for them there. One was robed like a Skryre, but the voice told otherwise. The second was the Wasp girl, Raeka, which
meant that the first must be her master.

‘Tegrec,’ Achaeos rasped hoarsely, using his stick to lower himself to the ground. He felt as though even getting to the place of ritual might have killed him.

The Wasp magician cast his hood back. With it up, he had seemed forbidding and dangerous; now he looked only pale and worried. He cast a glance at Xaraea, but she was standing by the
stair-mouth, locked up with her own demons. Haltingly, Tegrec knelt down beside Achaeos.

‘Second thoughts?’ the Moth asked him.

‘No,’ said Tegrec firmly. Raeka put a hand on his shoulder, and he reached back to grip it, a familiarity normally unforgivable under imperial law.

‘We will be striking your own people,’ Achaeos reminded him.

‘The technical term is “smite”,’ said Tegrec, mustering a smile from somewhere, ‘and I don’t know if they ever
were
my people.’ He glanced back
at the girl, and Achaeos noticed his hand tighten on hers. ‘You can’t imagine . . . really, you
can’t
imagine how it is to grow up so different from the others, and to have
to hide it. If I’d been poor, I’d undoubtedly have died . . . only having servants, slaves, being of good family, that’s all that saved me. Can you imagine living in a house where
you sometimes can’t even open the doors: you just fumble at the catches and the handles, and curse and weep, and you
just can’t see
what it is that everyone else takes for
granted. And it’s more than that – you can’t read their maps properly. You can’t understand their accounts. I’ve faked a life for thirty years, and all that time
I’ve been living off mere scraps: rags of knowledge, learning stolen from old ruins, from the Commonweal, from the Grasshopper-kinden and other Inapt slaves, and all gathered in secrecy
because, of course, I could never let anyone know’ – another backward glance – ‘except one. It started with the doors, you know. I bought her simply to have someone to open
the doors for me. Everyone thought I was being very pretentious. I let them think that. A reputation for eccentricity was easier to live with.’

Achaeos digested all of this, knowing that Tegrec was only divulging so much because he was nervous about what was yet to come.
We are both here solely because the Skryres wish to use
us
.

The Wasp must have seen something in his expression because he nodded and continued, ‘We’re both outcasts, really. The mad thing is, when this is done, and assuming any of us survive
it, I’ll stay here but they’ll make you leave, won’t they?’

‘I have no wish to stay,’ Achaeos replied flatly. ‘I came because I needed their medicine. I stayed because they are my people and, despite it all, I’ll fight for them.
But when this is done, my home is elsewhere.’

Tegrec stood up again, and Achaeos heard the shuffle of sandals on stone as other robed figures came up into the red-tinged air. He numbered a score of them at least, before he stopped counting.
They have called everyone they can
, he realized. All the most skilled ritualists of Tharn had been dragged up that same winding stair. There were at least a dozen Skryres, and there were
other Moth-kinden who had never sought that position of power and responsibility: they were scholars, philosophers, skilled and private magicians. Here they all were, now, men and women all two
decades older than Achaeos at least, and none looking confident or comfortable. In between them were others who had, like Tegrec, found a place here by virtue of their magic: there were
Mantis-kinden and Spider-kinden side by side, a Grasshopper, two Commonweal Dragonflies, even a tiny, silver-haired old Fly-kinden woman who leant on a stick and looked as drained by the climb as
Achaeos himself felt. Slowly, and without being directed, they formed themselves into two encircling rings, the Skryres inward, the rest standing behind them, closer to the edge of this little
artificial plateau.

Xaraea then came and helped Achaeos to his feet, not out of compassion but from necessity. Hobbling, he took his place in the inner circle standing opposite from Tegrec. Meanwhile Xaraea and the
Wasp girl Raeka retreated to the stairwell.