Salute the Dark (9 page)

Salma looked every part the brigand chief. The armour had changed since Stenwold last saw him, presumably the pick of whatever equipment they had liberated from the Wasps. Now it was a cuirass
of layered leather with bronze studs over a suit of silk, all of it meticulous Spider work. The sword at his belt was slender and long-hilted, not true Commonweal but of no manufacture Stenwold
could identify. About his forehead he wore a gold-inlaid leather band, complete with cheek-guards.

‘You have arrived at a difficult time, Sten,’ Salma said at last, ‘and apparently travelling to see my people, no less.’

‘You think they won’t help?’

‘I cannot say, save that they will do whatever they do for their own reasons only.’ Salma tacked another blank sheet to his writing board and began to scribe on it.
‘Don’t assume they’ll sit like Beetles and listen to hours of argument. Just ask and then accept whatever answer they give.’

‘I’ll remember that.’ Stenwold flinched as something dragged at the side of the tent. A moment later daylight cut in, as the heavy fabric was rolled up around them, a gang of
huge men taking the tent apart with care, without effort, even as he and Salma were still inside. He started back from them, for they towered over him, pitch-skinned giants, either with shaved
heads or else mops of white hair.

‘Mole Crickets,’ he identified them.

‘Two score of them,’ Salma agreed. ‘Together with half a hundred Grasshopper-kinden from Sho El, which I understand is somewhere as far east as you can go without leaving the
Empire. They are Auxillian deserters.’

‘I didn’t think the Imperial Army was that easy to desert from.’

‘Normally there are reprisals against their families, back home. Here, though, we make a practice of not leaving any enemy bodies if we can help it. Whole scouting parties have vanished
completely, and the Auxillians along with them. The Wasps cannot then know who has died and who has deserted. And of course some Auxillians themselves realize the potential of this practice –
and that here, of all places, there is someone who will take them in. Morleyr and his people came to me of their own will.’

One of the great Mole Cricket-kinden turned and nodded at that, regarding Stenwold suspiciously.

‘Go to Suon Ren,’ Salma said, as he unpinned the paper and passed it to Stenwold. ‘Prince Felipe Shah may yet be holding his winter court there. He will remember me still, I
hope, so this shall serve as your introduction.’

‘Suon Ren,’ Stenwold repeated. In his head he conjured up what he had gleaned of the Commonweal, pinpointing the name as belonging somewhere north of the Moth hold of Dorax, towards
the Commonweal’s southern border.

‘You should go right now, though,’ Salma informed him. The Mynan warrior had just run up to him, handing over what looked like a scribbled land-plan, with arrows and blocks sketched
in. ‘The Wasp Sixth is advancing on our position,’ Salma explained. ‘We’re already blinding their approach, vanishing their scouts, but they’ve put a couple of flying
machines in the air just now, and that could cause some problems with your departure.’

‘I’ll go now,’ Stenwold confirmed.

Salma held one hand up. ‘There is one name from the old times that we haven’t yet mentioned, Sten.’

‘I know.’

‘He is . . . ?’

‘Totho is with the Wasps still, insofar as I know. He will most likely be with the army now marching on you.’

‘Ah.’ Salma looked down for a moment, then reached forward to clasp Stenwold’s arm, wrist to wrist. ‘Good luck, Sten – and fair winds.’

‘Good luck to you too,’ Stenwold said, already beginning to back towards the
Buoyant Maiden
, straining where the wind tugged at it. His last sight of Salma was as the single
still point in a camp that was disintegrating into nothing all around him.

‘It can’t really be just because of the girl, can it?’ Teornis asked. The Spider Aristos did not look at Nero as he asked the question, but purely because the
artist was intent on a profile sketch of him just then. ‘After all, you didn’t exactly spend much time with her, before she set off on her own.’

‘She didn’t exactly spend much time on board ship,’ Nero pointed out.

Teornis spent a further moment in composition, the chitin-shard pen poised deftly between his fingers, then he scratched a few additional notes to a report he was sending on. He had already
played host to two Fly-kinden couriers bringing document packets, and a third was anticipated soon. Their airship was passing over the isle of Kes even now, with the Ants’ metal-gleaming
navies mustering below in preparation for war.

‘I had thought Fly courtship to be a fairly straightforward affair,’ the Spider said idly.

‘I’ve got no idea how they do things in Solarno – probably slap each other with fish or something. All mad in that city. Sure, in the hollows it’s simple enough,’
Nero remarked, meaning Egel and Merro. ‘That’s because it’s mostly arranged. Everything’s run by family there. That’s why I got out, and that’s why you find so
many of my people away from home. Easier for us to live anywhere but directly under the noses of our own kind. Why, how’s it work with your people?’

‘I’ve no idea how they do things down in the gutter,’ Teornis said, with a dry imitation of the artist’s tone in his voice. ‘Amongst the Aristoi, however, it is a
very delicate and intricate business. If a woman wishes a man’s companionship, he is allowed to discover it from some third party, but most often the woman merely waits for suitors, no mere
man being considered important enough to attract her attention. Once his affections are engaged, the man is expected to approach the woman carefully, respectfully. There is a chain of social
observances that he must perform: questions to be asked of her servants and friends, discreet giving of gifts through intermediaries, the scribing of poetry or the commissioning – as you must
know – of artistic works for her.’

Nero nodded, making connections. ‘I didn’t realize I’d become part of some Spider fellow’s love games.’

‘A minor and preliminary part,’ Teornis said. ‘Then there comes the meeting with her closer court, perhaps a duel, a challenge made by some unimportant member of her cadre
– the skill of that challenger varying, of course, in inverse proportion to her favour of the admirer’s suit. Then they will meet by her arrangement, on an occasion unknown in advance
to him. She will evaluate him. If he has displayed sufficient wit, beauty, charm, whatever virtues she seeks in him, then he may gain further access to her household, to her chambers, finally to
her body. If not, well, if he is lucky he will escape with his life and reputation, but that is not always the case. Wooing a Spider-kinden Arista is a perilous business for the
unprepared.’

‘And if she’s made it known to him that she wants him, but he doesn’t want her?’ Nero asked, fascinated.

Teornis chuckled quietly. ‘Little man,
his
interests are of no importance in this ritual, save to explain why so many of the men of
my
people are also to be found living in
the cities of others.’ In that revealing moment of frank humour, Nero almost liked him.

There was a respectful knock at the cabin door and, on Teornis’ invitation, one of the crew let a Fly-kinden messenger in. The woman was obviously used to serving Spiders, finding nothing
unusual in seeing her target sitting for a portrait, and simply presented him with another wallet of documents. If she had flown herself ragged in meeting up with the airship her manner certainly
did not show it.

‘Find her some victuals,’ Teornis ordered the crewman who had escorted her in. ‘I shall have returns for her to take away shortly.’

He unsealed the wallet carefully and stripped out the topmost scroll, reading down what Nero guessed was a summary of the most important points of the enclosed documents. Nothing in his face
betrayed any reaction but, when he finally spoke, he announced, ‘It would seem that the diplomatic channels are closing.’

Nero said nothing, waiting for further exposition.

‘We sent ambassadors to the Wasp forces massing at Tark, and to Solarno as well. Now we have the response.’

Again, Nero waited. Teornis’ smile had become a hard line.

‘We have been told that all land north of Seldis is officially the Empire,’ Teornis said, ‘and that, if we interfere, then Seldis itself shall be invested in siege. My own
efforts, it seems, have stalled them as far as they are willing to be stalled, and now they set about the business as Wasp-kinden are wont to do: with simple force. The Wasp Second Army has marched
from Tark against Merro and Egel, and the Eighth sits in the Ant city still, waiting to strike if we venture outside our walls. Well, we are at war now, so we must expect such treatment.’ He
paused a moment, perhaps evaluating how much Nero actually needed to know. ‘Our ambassadors to Solarno were killed, I see. They were seized as spies and executed. I am afraid that you are
flying into a tempest, Master Nero. Therefore I hope you and your friend are strong enough to battle your way through.’

After Nero had gone, Teornis returned to the reports his agents had brought him. They were penned in elegant hands, a collection of polite nothings, niceties, social calendars and fashions. It
took a true Spider-kinden Manipulus to pierce through the nothings and decode to the steel core of information within.
It is all coming together
, which meant that it was all falling apart.
Teornis read and read.

I have to assume
, he thought,
that there will come a time when the coming-together and the falling-apart converge.

Distant news informed him that two Wasp armies were marching on Sarn and its allies, but he was barely interested in that. The Ants now had their chance: they would grasp it or fail. If the
worst came, then the northern half of the Lowlands was expendable. That it would complicate the defence of Collegium was the only way in which it mattered to him. Collegium he wished to keep free.
Its value as a grateful tool of the Spiderlands was too high to neglect. He had not gone so far to lift the siege the previous year, just to have the Wasps taking the place now.

Even if it lost eventually, Sarn would occupy its Wasp tormentors for many tendays before
they
occupied
it
, and after Sarn the mopping-up of the so-called Ancient League would take
even longer. Teornis was meanwhile more concerned about local conditions.

The Wasp army that had left Tark so recently had set course directly for the Fly warrens of Merro and Egel. True to form the Fly-kinden had surrendered without even drawing a blade, swearing
fealty to the Empire from a distance of many miles, just as they would happily swear to the Spiderlands or the Tarkesh or whoever else came against them. Such fealty would, of course, last only as
long as there was sufficient strength to enforce it, but the Wasp possession of the two interconnected Fly warrens was a fact he had to live with.

From Egel and Merro the going got tougher for the Empire as their supply lines became increasingly stretched, by then conveniently close to the Spiderlands border and wanting but a knife to cut
them. Beyond the Fly-kinden territories was the island city-state of Kes, a formidable investment for any besieger, especially with the new weapons that the Kessen had taken away from Sarn. Down
the coast from Kes was the Felyal, whose Mantis-kinden were still bloody-handed from their destruction of the Imperial Fourth.

The imperial strategists must surely have a plan for Kes and for the Mantids, but as yet Teornis’ agents had not uncovered it. He suspected that the general of this latest army was keeping
it mostly within his head, where it could not be easily spied upon.

There was also the problem of the fortified garrison that the Wasps had left north of Seldis, and the Eighth Army waiting in nearby Tark. The Spiders still controlled the sea, as the landlocked
imperials did not seem to recognize how useful it might be as a means of attack down the coast, but if Teornis wanted to move soldiers north by land to support the Lowlands, then he would have to
fight them for every inch of ground.

Well, it may come to that
, he decided. His family, the Aldanrael, was already gathering its allies and forces in Seldis and Everis. House-guards from a dozen of the noble Aristoi families
were jostling shoulders in the streets and challenging each other to duels, whilst mercenary and Satrapy companies were either shipped in or marched up the Silk Road past Siennis. More than half of
the contributions had been made by Spider families that would have marked the Aldanrael down as their bitter foes not long ago. The imperial capture of Solarno had damaged Spider pride, and Teornis
was making good use of the backlash.

Solarno, of course: another angle to consider. Solarno, the renegade city that declined to be part of the Spiderlands, instead enmeshing itself into the provincial politics around the watery
expanse of the Exalsee. Easy to see why the Wasps had thought they could take it, although, as in so many things, they failed to understand. Solarno was a renegade, yes, but it was the
Spider-kindens’ own pet renegade. It was the little political backwater where a Spider Aristos could go and paddle about, and not worry too much about who they upset or fret over any
repercussions. It was the manipulus’ seaside resort. A great many influential families had a fondness for Solarno.

Not so the Aldanrael, but the family had seen just how useful a banner the invasion of Solarno would provide. Teornis thought about the Fly girl, Taki, how dreadfully serious and earnest she
was.
Well, good luck to her
. Whether she liberated the city or if not, either outcome would serve.

He turned to the next report, from an agent within Kes, and tried to measure how long it would be before the Wasps were, one way or another, at the gates of Collegium.

Subterfuge and distraction.
That was the Solarnese game, of course: the very board on which he had just placed his ignorant agents. Nero seemed a capable, if uninspired, choice and
Teornis always preferred Fly-kinden tools where Spiders could not be risked. The aviatrix, though, was an unknown quantity.
She could be dangerous. She could also be invaluable. I hope
she’s as good as she thinks she is.
His mind focused on Taki, already far ahead of his airship in her refurbished flier.
Save your city if you can, girl
, he thought,
but, above
all, give the Wasps something still more to think of. If you can manage that, then let Solarno burn to the ground for all I care.