Adrian Tchaikovsky - Salute the Dark

‘What are you writing so late?’ she asked him.

‘Reports on Jerez,’ he said, and on seeing her look he added, ‘Who for, you ask? I don’t know, but old habits die hard. I fear nobody will believe them anyway.’ He put the pen down. Che saw that it was a good-quality Collegium-made reservoir pen. He had obviously not been slow in taking advantage of his hosts.

‘So,’ he said, ‘are you here to warn me that the Dragonfly woman wants to kill me again, or is it simply that I’m to be arrested and tried at last?’

‘Would I come here alone for that?’

‘Perhaps you’d enjoy delivering such a message in person.’

She stared at him, loathing him, yet knowing that she now needed him. ‘Don’t think that we’re like the people of your Empire here. We don’t all take joy in other people’s suffering.’

‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘Yet your Mantis would kill me without a thought.’

‘But he wouldn’t torture you. He’d make it quick.’

‘What a consolation,’ he observed. ‘If a quick death was attractive to me, I’d have let my own people do it. This situation is ironic, is it not?’

‘What?’

‘You now have the say of life or death over me. It’s not so long since our places were reversed.’

‘I remember you were intending to torture me.’

‘I remember that I never did.’

She felt her anger flare up. ‘Because I was rescued! Not through any grace of yours!’

For a second it seemed he would argue the point, to her astonishment, but then he just shrugged and turned back to his papers. From nowhere she could identify, she felt a sudden stab of utterly unwelcome sympathy, at seeing the failed spy still clinging to his ritual, for want of anything else.

‘Thalric…’

‘Mistress Maker.’ He did not look up at her.

‘I need your help.’

He snorted with laughter, pen abruptly scratching on the parchment: not laughing at her so much as the sheer absurdity of that statement, after her words to him before. ‘What could I be qualified to do for you, Mistress Maker? Does the Assembly want some prisoners racking, whilst keeping their own hands clean?’

She approached quietly, was at his desk even before he had finished speaking, her hands gripping the edge. He looked up at her at last, his gaze measuring, considering.

‘What, then?’ he asked, realizing that she was serious, and desperate. ‘What is it?’

‘I need your help,’ she said again, slowly. ‘I need to get into a city that your people have occupied, and I don’t know how to do it.’

She waited for some reaction, but there was none. He was an intelligencer by trade, and whatever he thought of her request was played out inside, and hidden from her.

‘Tharn,’ she said. ‘I have to go to Tharn.’

The rap on his door was insistent, though if Stenwold had already got as far as his bed he would have ignored it. He heard Arianna stir at the sound. She had fallen asleep waiting for him, expecting him to join her hours earlier. But he could not sleep; he was too caught up with his worries: the defence of Sarn, and Balkus’ relief force; Salma’s mad Landsarmy; Tynisa’s guilt and Che’s grief; the litany of the wounded; the gallery of those faces who he would never see again, yet wished so dearly to take counsel with.

Stenwold went to answer the door, if only because it gave him at least a brief respite. He discovered Destrachis standing there, the lean Spider with his long, greying hair. Stenwold blinked at him.

‘Are we under attack?’

‘We are not, Master Maker. Not yet.’ Destrachis made no sign that he wanted to come in, just hovered beyond the doorway, clearly ill at ease.

‘What time is it?’

‘Four bells beyond midnight. Still one or two before dawn.’

Stenwold goggled at him. ‘So late?’ I must go to bed. I will even drug myself to sleep if I have to. ‘What… why are you here?’

‘It would have been earlier, Master Maker… but I have not known how to say this to you. I have no claim on you, and yet I need your help. I have spent hours hunting for answers in my mind. I need you to do something.’

‘At this hour?’

‘I need you merely to commit now. Act on it in the morning, but I need your word now, Master Maker.’

‘You’re mad,’ Stenwold told him, ‘and so am I for not being already in bed. How can it be almost dawn, for the world’s sake?’

‘Master Maker, please ,’ Destrachis implored, his composure slipping for a moment. Stenwold heard soft footsteps from behind him. Arianna, wrapped in a bedsheet, was coming to investigate.

‘Back to bed, please,’ he told her. ‘I don’t know what this is about but-’

‘Stenwold, why are you still dressed? Why are you even answering the door?’ she asked.

‘I…’ He decided to avoid the first half of that inquisition. ‘I’m answering the door because this man has decided it is a civilized time to call. Destrachis, what do you want? What is it, this thing you want from me?’

‘Find a suitable use for Felise,’ the Spider replied flatly. ‘If you do not, then I do not know what she might do come the morning. Surely your great plans can take account of her?’

‘I…’ Stenwold shook his head. ‘I’d supposed she would fight if ever the Wasps get this far, but…’

‘Master Maker, there is no time,’ Destrachis said urgently, and Stenwold was surprised by the glint of tears in his eyes, whether of frustration or emotion, he could not tell. ‘Master Maker, I have a plan for you.’

‘More plans. My head is already full of them. No more plans, please, at this hour.’

‘In the morning, then. Promise me, Master Maker, that you will hear me as soon as first light dawns.’

An hour till then, two at the most. ‘All right,’ Stenwold said, ‘I promise. Now just… go, please.’ He cast a look at Arianna. She was eyeing Destrachis distrustfully.

‘I’ll go,’ Destrachis said, ‘but you must believe that I am right in this. It means life or death, Master Maker.’

‘Life or death in the morning ,’ Stenwold said firmly, but before he could even close the door on Destrachis there was someone else running up, shouldering the Spider aside.

‘Sten!’

It was Tynisa this time. Stenwold stared at her helplessly, feeling his grasp of the situation slip further from him. He was wrong-footed by the impression that, whatever Tynisa was here about, Destrachis must already know of it.

‘What now?’ he asked, more harshly than he meant. He saw then that her face was blotched, her eyes red. Has the matter over Achaeos finally become too much for her? A sudden horror caught him. Is Achaeos dead? His voice now unsteady, he asked, ‘What is it?’

‘It’s Tisamon,’ she told him simply. ‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’ He held on to the doorframe, unable to keep up with events.

‘I don’t know but…’ She held her hand out to him, something glinting in her palm. ‘He’s really gone. Something’s happened to him. He’s left us. This was pinned to my door.’

In her hand was the sword and circle broach of a Weaponsmaster, which Stenwold had never seen Tisamon without.

They searched, of course, he and Tynisa together. First the Amphiophos, then Tisamon’s other haunts in the city, from the Prowess Forum outwards. In the last hour before dawn they ransacked the city for him, sensing they were already too late. He had pointedly left behind the symbol of his office. It was no mere errand he had departed on.

Then they came back, and found the long-faced Spider- kinden doctor again waiting for them, looking old and ill-used. In the sallow, early light they allowed him to finally explain to them what had happened between Tisamon and Felise Mienn, and the thing that Tisamon had done that had driven him away. Destrachis’ sad, tired voice related the story in measured tones, as though it was some medical curiosity, and yet it barely scratched the surface of the Mantis-kinden nightmare that Tisamon had become lost in.