Adrian Tchaikovsky - Salute the Dark

Tisamon’s opponent was already waiting: Scorpion-kinden instead of scorpion animal. He was built on a massive scale, twice as broad across the shoulder as Tisamon himself, barrel-chested and with arms almost contorted with muscle. His hands formed claws, thumb and forefinger grown into long blades of bone. He was stripped to the waist and the physiology thus revealed looked something beyond human.

Tisamon shrugged off his slave’s tunic, looking like a child or a toy before the Scorpion, but his own blades flexed in readiness from his forearms. He dropped into his fighting stance, perfectly balanced and waiting.

The Scorpion moved faster than someone of his bulk had any right to, a sudden scuttle across the sand, claws driving for Tisamon’s face, trying to run him back against the wall. Tisamon swayed to one side, feeling the man’s finger-blade cut the air just an inch from his eye, while thrusting a leg out to trip the man in his charge. The Scorpion stumbled, but held his feet, delivering a murderously swift backhand blow as he passed. Tisamon disengaged, stepping out of range and back into his stance, watching to see how the other man had taken it.

There was no anger in the Scorpion’s eyes: his savagery was entirely divorced from his emotions. Tisamon noted this, and reassessed his opponent.

He spotted the slight flexing of muscles before the Scorpion’s next charge, and so was better ready for it. He moved in to meet the man, and hammer-blows from the Scorpion, which would have broken his arm if he blocked them, were turned away by precise circular gestures of Tisamon’s hands, until he stood calmly in the eye of the storm. The Scorpion had reach, though, and he kept Tisamon at the end of it, slightly too far to strike back. He kept methodically assaulting the Mantis’ defences, looking for any weakness, seeking a way in.

Tisamon stepped out of reach three times without having struck a blow in return, and there was still no sign of fatigue or frustration at all in his opponent, just a dreadful patience. Tisamon watched carefully and waited.

The crowd was getting restless, shouting for this fight to be finished one way or another. Tisamon did not care: they could go hang themselves for all it meant to him. The Scorpion was a professional, though. The crowd’s approval was his reward. It eventually made him take a chance.

Tisamon saw the feint coming, at the last moment realized it was the offhand that would be the danger. The claws of the Scorpion’s right clipped his shoulder in a little dart of pain, but then Tisamon was inside the man’s reach, past the upward-driving left, and he brought his own spines down sharply on either side of the man’s neck. He drew blood, but not enough, for the man’s hide was Art-strong, durable as leather. Tisamon kicked upwards, getting a foot on the man’s thigh, then another on his shoulder, vaulting over him and turning to face him. The Scorpion backed off three steps, blood trickling its way down his chest.

There was a tremble in his eyes that had not been there before. He had scars, but they were old scars, or small scars, evidence that nobody had recently come so close. The crowd held its breath.

Tisamon attacked, moving from still to swift without a warning, but the Scorpion was still almost ready for him, blocking three blows before the fourth speared past his guard to cut a gash across his chest – not his throat as Tisamon had intended. The big man tried to carry the fight back at him, stabbing at Tisamon’s stomach, but the Mantis twisted sideways about the strike, lashed his spines across the other man’s face in passing and then dropped to one knee behind him. With clinical precision he sliced across the back of the man’s legs, stepping out of the way as his opponent fell.

The crowd had gone silent as Tisamon stood beside his victim, hearing the man’s breath hissing, raw, amid his pain. He knew the custom now, as Ult had explained it to him. It would be for the Emperor alone to decide.

Tisamon looked up at the Emperor for the first time since the man’s hurried visit to the cells, and his eyes began seeking for a way in.

Below the first row of the crowd there was a ring of soldiers atop the high wall of the pit, men in full armour with spears. They would be the first barrier to overcome. The Emperor, of course, had his own private room facing the arena, a long enclosure constructed out of fabric that hid him from the crowd on both sides, so that only those sitting across from him could see him clearly, and then only from well outside of sting range. More soldiers were standing on guard directly before the Emperor and on either side of his box.

Alvdan the Second sat staring down at the victor and, when their eyes met, Tisamon thought he saw the man flinch. He noticed an older man, balding and thickset, seated almost beside the Emperor, and behind him…

For a moment Tisamon just stared, feeling something kick inside him. There was a darkness behind the Emperor that might be a robed man, a pale smear that must be a face half-hidden beneath a cowl, and to one side a younger Wasp woman whose face resembled the Emperor’s own, but on the other side of the cowled figure was…

Atryssa .

Atryssa, his long-dead lover, looked down on him, and she nodded. He saw it distinctly. She nodded her approval, her permission.

The Emperor drew a dagger and held it high, and Tisamon, obedient to the signal, drove his spines down into the Scorpion-kinden’s throat, finishing him. The Mantis barely realized what he had done, though. He felt as though a monstrous weight had been suddenly lifted from him.

She approves. She forgives. He almost stumbled as he left the arena.

He never considered that she might be his daughter, not his lover. He was too far lost in the maze of his own honour for that thought. Instead he took her silent camaraderie for absolution, and he used it to cut free twenty years of guilt.

I am ready now , he decided.

There were four guards leading Kaszaat, clustered to either side and behind her as though uncertain what to do with her. She was not quite a prisoner, therefore, but far less than free. It was the Auxillian rank, of course, Totho realized. Kaszaat was a sergeant, after all, and it threw them a little to have been obliged to arrest her.

Totho saw Big Greyv shift, leaning on the haft of his axe, though still lurking in the shadow of the engine. It was astonishing, he considered remotely, how very quiet the Mole Cricket could be, how easily overlooked.

‘Speak,’ Drephos commanded. Totho saw his superior purse his lips, but there was no surprise on his face, only a faint disappointment.

‘We caught her at one of the machines,’ called up a soldier.

‘She is an artificer, so how unexpected was that?’ Drephos asked. He did not raise his voice, but his tone was sharp enough to carry. The wind promised for the morning had yet to rise, and the air was very still.

‘One of our artificers reckoned she was breaking it,’ the soldier explained. The slight hint of stress showed what he thought of Drephos’ ragged crew. ‘Sabotage, he said. Said we should bring her to you or, if you wouldn’t deal with it, he’d take it up with the governor. After all, she’s one of them.’

‘I had always thought,’ Drephos said, probably too softly now for the soldiers to hear, ‘that she was one of mine.’ For a moment he paused, staring down, disparate hands resting on the railing. Kaszaat glared up at him defiantly, looking so much slighter than the guards behind her. Totho felt something twist inside him.

‘Sergeant-Auxillian Kaszaat, step forwards,’ Drephos ordered. She did so instinctively.

‘I placed faith in you,’ Drephos told her. ‘I had not thought I had done so badly by you as to merit this.’ His voice was carrying clearly again, finding her ears without effort. ‘I gave you station and position, drew you from the ranks of the slaves to be one of my chosen. How, therefore, has it come to this?’ Hearing him and his genuinely aggrieved tone, Totho believed that the man truly did not understand – the master of machines was stuck with a problem that his own invincible logic could not solve.