Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

‘I’m no warrior, me,’ she agreed. ‘I’d tell you all the ways in which I’ll be helping you, but you wouldn’t believe me in that, either.’

‘Probably not.’ He tried a smile, but it was a bleak and stillborn thing. ‘Back in the bloody Commonweal. I feel like this place has been waiting for me ever since the war ended. He took a deep breath that set the plates of his armour rising and grating against one another. ‘I should have died on the field with the Seventh, when their snapbows cut us down like wheat.’ Balancing the helm in one hand he touched the entry hole with an armoured finger. ‘But I’d rather have died fighting that girl here in the Commonweal. Then I’d not have had to see the end of us, the end of all of our ways.’ He glanced off into the darkness. ‘Just like all the old Commonweal magic, eh? They used to put such faith in us, and then one day… nobody believed in us any more.’

He reached up and placed the helm on his head, his world reducing to a slit, and yet he felt that he somehow saw more, sensed more, now that his armour was complete. He had regained a connection to the world, feeling all of its tricks and changes. He was something elemental.

‘Pride of the Sixth,’ he murmured, tugging the chinstrap tight. He swung the helm to find Maure, saw her expression. ‘Such a long road just to come back here,’ he said, his voice loud in his own ears.

Thalric stood waiting for him a short distance off. Varmen had dug out an old tunic for him, creased and stained but recognizable still in its colours. Varmen’s mail had once been immaculately painted in black and gold and, although it was chipped and scarred, the hues were still plain to see. It would take more battering than that to rub away the hand of the Empire.

Maure watched them go, and then set about her own work. It was nothing she had discussed with the two Wasps, for she thought they would not understand or appreciate it, and their scepticism would merely damage her efforts. Having exchanged those few words to Varmen, though, she wondered whether she had done the right thing in staying silent.

Their plan to rescue Che had been both simple and desperate. Just the two of them against a camp filled with Dragonfly warriors. They had almost ended up making their assault in broad daylight, for Thalric reasoned that the Dragonflies saw better at night, and so why bother relying on the stealth of it? In the end, neither of the Wasps quite had the nerve for that, but even at night their business seemed just a shaving away from suicide. They had only one advantage over the Commonwealers: they were Wasp-kinden, they were the Empire – they were the fear at the heart of a conquered people. That was little enough to even the terrible odds, but Thalric claimed that it would buy them enough time for a sudden strike: just grab Che and go.

Maure had heard him discuss it, and knew that he did not believe his own words, but he was now in a corner with nowhere else to go. She had not realized – perhaps he himself had not realized – his depth of feeling for Che, until she was taken from him this last time. He had reached the end of his wire, now, and action was his only release. Win or lose, the outcome was going to be bloody. Since Che had been lost to them, something else had surfaced in Thalric – or perhaps resurfaced. Maure sensed a kind of murderous capability in him, a man who would do anything to achieve his goals.

She took a deep breath. All her life she had used her skills sparingly, as she had been taught. A Moth Skryre or some such grand magician would think of the practice as accumulating power, but she had been taught that she was accruing credit with the world, especially with the world of the dead. Every spirit she helped to its destination, every ancestor who could share a few posthumous words with a descendant, every legacy passed on, it all added up; and though the coins were small, yet she had a lot of them by now. She was not powerful, as magicians measured themselves, but she had a deep well to draw on, now that she needed it.

Setting a ghost to haunt someone was an old necromancer’s trick, both risky and difficult and seldom worth the effort. Each person had their own weaknesses, each vengeful spirit its own small remit. Such skills would be little use in confronting the numbers that Thalric and Varmen now went to confront.

But they had provided her with the answer, of course. Thalric’s plan was better than he knew.

She took a deep breath. None of the mummery of before, involving candles and circles. She did not want to pacify these ghosts, and indeed she was not sure that calm was even in their nature. She wanted them fighting mad.

They would be drawn from the minds of the Salmae’s followers, from each and every one, either from personal experience or from second-hand fear brought on by the stories they would have heard.

She closed her eyes and concentrated upon the black and gold.

Thalric and Varmen: representatives of the Rekef and the invincible Imperial army, those spectres that had poisoned the Commonweal over twelve years of bloody warfare, that had left fearful ghosts in every mind: that had even replaced blood-drinking Mosquitos as the terrors invoked to caution children with. Terrors that any moment could march back across the border to continue their slaughter. Terrors of the machine-handed, the disciplined, the cruel, slavers and butchers, rapists and child-killers.

The ghost she raised and sent to follow Thalric and Varmen was the nightmare that troubled the sleep of the entire Commonweal. The two Wasps themselves would never know, never see, but they were trailed by a wake of black and gold shades with flaming hands and red swords.

The Salmae’s warband had entered dense forest now, following the recaptured trail of the fugitives. Under such cover, Thalric’s party had been able to move far closer than they could while pursuing the Salmae through hilly open countryside. Now he hoped to use the same cover to get within sting range before he was spotted. There must be sentries, he knew, for nobody was fool enough to hunt brigands through woodland without setting plenty of watchmen. Still, he was already within sight of the camp’s edge, a chaotic gathering of tents spread out in a maze of canvas between the trees, and he was just beginning to think that he should have left Varmen behind. It seemed entirely possible he could sneak into this place, find Che, and get her out again, all on his own.

Then a scout dropped from the branches above, her bow already bent back. Thalric could not see the woman’s expression, but he was sure she was next to laughing at him: just one man come to storm half a hundred of the Commonweal’s finest. He tensed himself to dive aside behind a tree, his hands warming to sting. Then Varmen caught up with him.

The archer swung the arrow towards the newcomer and then recoiled away, her back rebounding from a tree trunk and her arrow skipping off one of Varmen’s pauldrons. She tried to shout something, but for a moment nothing emerged but jabber, the terrified stutter of a warning as she fumbled frantically for another arrow. The flash from Thalric’s outstretched palm struck her down, and then the two were moving again.

Just the two of them, because Thalric knew that there was only himself and Varmen in this raiding party. But as he rushed past the first tent, it seemed that the forest all around was alive with running feet, the rattle of armour, even the distant sounds of heliopter engines. For a moment, this chill Commonweal night intermeshed with one from his memories, and this was no longer a doomed rescue but the inexorable weight of the Empire’s military might descending to crush yet another disorganized Commonweal force.

He saw armoured men and women ahead, spears and swords glittering in the firelight. An arrow lashed past, far to his left. He let his hands speak for him, taking any target that presented itself. He knew that the scintillating Commonweal mail could scatter stingshot from itself at the right angle, but it did not seem to matter. He and Varmen had become an unstoppable force, and the Dragonflies did not even try to resist. They scattered right and left or straight up, a few falling to Thalric’s sting, but none staying to chance Varmen’s sword. Then the two Wasps were charging through the heart of the camp, trees looming on all sides, Dragonfly-kinden came rushing half-dressed from their tents, to stare or flee at the sight of Varmen’s armoured form,