Salute the Dark (41 page)

To Totho’s eye, they were something like leadshotters, but more delicate and longer in the barrel, cluttered with mechanisms to give their artillerists as much control
over force and aim as artifice could provide. Instead of volatile firepowder, they housed steam engines for a less violent discharge of their ammunition. There were high watch platforms built
beside them, from which engineers could see the lie of the city and thus make precise calculations of their exacting trajectories. When these engines loosed their loads, the shot would sail
serenely overhead to land far inside the rebel-held districts of the city. Beside them sat canisters of the same stuff that had killed the soldiers, an invention of the Beetle twins, the dreadful
potency of which had driven them to suicide. In assisting with the construction, Totho had seen enough to understand the plan. True to his stated aims, Drephos had taken war to a new level.

They had not been meant for this eventuality, however. Drephos had intended to deploy them against the defenders of Sarn, or the Sarnesh field army if it was foolish enough to venture forth.
However, little adaptation had been needed to comply with the Emperor’s present wishes. Drephos had done most of the work himself with almost indecent speed, eager to return to what he saw as
his true place on the front line itself.

The Szaren resistance assumed that there was a stalemate, and meanwhile the Bee-kinden were gathering their forces, making themselves strong. Scouts’ reports came back now with news that,
as well as the stolen arms and armour of the Empire, more and more of the Szaren were wearing their own traditional styles: breastplates and helms freshly painted in russet bands, or great,
intricately articulated suits of sentinel plate. Some of these had lain in storage these past fifteen years, waiting as patiently as their owners for the call to arms, others were newly smithed.
The Bee-kinden were rediscovering their heritage.

But there was no stalemate, of course, as Totho knew well. There was just a peculiarity of the weather, for the wind was currently adverse. The breeze was gusting against the imperial forces,
enough for them to hear the clatter and scrape of armed locals from ten streets away. The engines only sat idle while Drephos waited for a favouring wind, and he would not have to wait long.

The thought of what would then happen made Totho tremble. Even stretching his mind, he could not quite fit the concept in. There were hundreds of thousands of Bee-kinden here in Szar. It was
formerly one of the industrial workhorses of the Empire. The Emperor had taken its rebellion personally, and he wanted an example made.

There would indeed be an example made, and it would be Drephos’ example of how war would be fought from now on. For Drephos had invented a war that needed no soldiers, only artificers, and
his machines would soon make full-scale armies obsolete. The very concepts of war would change. Conquest would become devastation, attack would become annihilation: cities turned to cemeteries,
farmland to wasteland. What would be seen here in Szar would stop the world in its tracks. In the wake of it, every artificer, every military power, every Ant city-state would be striving to copy
what Drephos had done, and without possession of such weapons there would be no chance of continued liberty, or even survival. It was not simply a case of an improvement on an old idea, as the
snapbow was to a crossbow, the crossbow to a thrown spear, the spear to a rock. It was a whole new method of warfare.

Totho sat in a corner of a workshop that he had marked out for himself, and tinkered with his new snapbow design, feeling obsolescence creeping over him already. This was not a war that he
understood any more.

Kaszaat was kept under watch most of the time. This was not by Drephos’ orders but those of Colonel Gan, who could not accept that she was Drephos’ creature and not a spy of the
rebellious locals. Totho knew that Gan was right to doubt her, and he was only thankful that he himself remained trusted enough that the spies would keep their distance when Kaszaat sought him
out.

He had expected her to try to recruit him in her own tiny rebellion but, when she was with him, she made no mention of the great engines, of the poison or of Drephos. He did not know whether it
was because she was uncertain of what move to make next, or whether she simply did not trust him.

I do not care what the history books will say.

But that was not entirely true, because Drephos had not managed to cut himself off from ordinary human feelings quite as thoroughly as he might have wished.

Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos now stood atop one of his observation platforms and looked out over the city of Szar, all those little low buildings, those innumerable factories and workhouses.
It was evening now, late and getting later, but a strong breeze was predicted to begin before dawn, blowing in from behind him. Daylight would then see the engines begin their work.

In his mind’s eye, which was always sharper and more vivid than his actual sight, he could see it all: the canisters, full of poison held under immense pressure, would be hurled almost
gently, tipping end over end into the sky. The locals would look up and wonder, at first. Only on impact would their casings crack open, their tight-pressed contents escape.

With Drephos’ arrival, Colonel Gan and his soldiers had ceased trying to break the rebel lines. With typical Bee-kinden thinking the locals had simply hunkered down and refortified,
defensive to the last. They were a simple, industrious and inoffensive people, strong in their unity but in little enough else. That was the reason the world was not overrun with them. They were
now waiting for the anticipated Wasp reinforcements to come, having heard there were 10,000 soldiers marching from the Capitas garrison. Drephos knew those men had now been diverted, however,
redeployed to keep the lid on the situation at Myna, which he heard was deteriorating.

Let them first hear the news from Szar, and then let them think about their revolution
, he reflected, but he felt oddly uncomfortable with the concept.
This is war simply for
politics’ sake. I prefer the reverse.

The canisters would burst asunder, and the gas would be let loose in the city. The natural breeze would keep the heavy gas from spreading back towards the Wasps, and the chemicals would pass
through every window, into every cellar. Death would be relatively swift, but agonizing. The gas, once taken into the lungs, began to dissolve the very tissues, so that the victims died while
trying to inhale the fluid of their own bodies. The Beetle twins had been great innovators in the field of alchemy, and Drephos had been lucky to have grabbed them for his own service.

Dead now, of course. He was disappointed in them for that, but he always failed to allow for basic human sentiment. It was such a weakening force. Besides, when it came to culpability, it would
not be their names written in the history books.

Perhaps the Bee-kinden would seek shelter underground, considering so much of their city was dug into the earth. It would avail them naught since the gas, to be effective at all, needed to be
heavier than air. It would sink inevitably into every cellar and tunnel and crevice, and if the Bees managed to board themselves up so tightly that the poison could not get in, well, neither could
the air. Colonel Gan had already planned to send men in straight after the gas, to ‘clear up any remaining resistance’. His comprehension of what was about to happen was so blatantly
limited that Drephos had not even begun to explain. He had simply warned that, wherever the gas lay, in any depression or hole or bunker, it would remain potent for many tendays.

‘But I will have a city to run,’ Colonel Gan had protested. Drephos had merely turned away from him. Gan would have no city, would no longer be a governor, after this. Drephos had an
uncomfortable feeling that a great many careers would die here along with Szar. Even the Emperor himself, who had given the order for Drephos to come here, had not known what kind of war he was
unleashing.

Drephos had designed protective masks, to filter the worst of the poison from the gas. There were enough of these for his people only, and he suspected that inhaling even the air thus filtered
would make them all ill. If the gas was blown back by errant winds, at least his artificers had a chance at survival. Gan and his garrison would not be so lucky. After tomorrow, the whole Empire
would come to know the name of Dariandrephos. Within a month his fame, or his infamy, would spread to the Commonweal and the Lowlands, and beyond. He had never objected to either fame or notoriety
so long as either was justified.

After tomorrow the world would know Drephos for one thing. It would not be as a genius artificer, inventor of machines, paragon of progress, the man who drove the mills of war. They would know
him as
the man who killed Szar
. They would overlook the technical achievements he had made in bringing it about, citing him only as a butcher, the pedlar of atrocity. The Empire, that had
given him such opportunity, would have made him its scapegoat, the focus for the world’s scorn and hatred. The Wasps would keep him around, keep him working, but the world would never know
the truth for which he had worked all his life, his ideology and his ethos. Anything he put forward henceforth, be it philosophy or technology, would be tainted with that reputation.

He heard movement below him, where nobody should be trespassing, then a sudden shout of alarm as Big Greyv, the silent Mole Cricket, loomed massively from the shadows to accost the newcomer.

‘It’s all right, let him come up,’ Drephos called down. ‘Come on, Totho. I’ve been expecting you.’

It was the sudden unfolding of Big Greyv from the shadows that had given Totho such a turn. Of course he knew that the Mole Cricket could see perfectly in the dark, just as
Drephos could, but that someone so huge could lurk totally unseen shook him badly. Greyv held an axe casually in one hand, the weapon dwarfed by its wielder. Totho himself would barely have been
able to lift it.

He weighed his own burden in both hands while looking up at the watchtower beside the new engines. The lights of the engineering works behind showed him the robed figure standing atop it.

‘You are here to talk to me, are you not?’ the voice of Drephos drifted down to him. ‘Then climb up here. I dislike shouting.’

Totho cast a look at Greyv. The Mole Cricket’s dark face was unreadable but the set of his body said that he was unhappy, and that he did not trust Totho alone with their master. It was,
Totho reckoned, a fair enough assessment.

He slung his burden over one shoulder and walked over to the metal rungs. One was missing and some were loose, and he therefore divined that this must be a tower constructed by the garrison
engineers and not Drephos’ own people. He paused for a moment beside the deceptively small cask that was crammed full of the poison. It looked manageable enough to be carried easily by one
man but the material within was so compressed and concentrated that it would have taken all Totho’s strength to shift it. He glanced up to see Drephos peering down at him, his halfbreed,
iris-less eyes calmly curious as to what Totho might do.

What he did was climb on up to join his master. He wanted to talk.

‘I anticipated I would be seeing you at some point tonight,’ Drephos said. ‘You have brought another sample of your work, I notice.’ He held a hand out and automatically
Totho unslung his piece and held it out to show him.

‘You have perfected the loading mechanism, I see,’ Drephos remarked.

The repeating snapbow lay slender and silver in Totho’s hands. ‘I adapted one from a nailbow,’ he explained. ‘It’s too complex for mass-production, though, and it
jams too easily. It needs more modification.’

‘Even so, I am impressed. Good work.’ Drephos’ hand touched the weapon briefly, but he made no protest as Totho reslung it, continuing, ‘I know why you’re really
here.’

‘And why is that?’ It had been an unexpectedly hard climb, or perhaps Totho’s own nerves were running him fierce and ragged.

‘You are not yet one of my cadre, not fully. That is only to be expected. Everyone needs time to settle in and learn the routines.’

‘Routines?’

‘Both physical and ideological.’

Totho grasped the rail, looking out towards the Szaren barricades.
How many thousands of people . . . ?
‘And the Twins?’

Drephos shrugged unevenly, joining him at the rail. ‘I was surprised by that,’ he admitted. ‘I had not judged the limits of their stresses and their tolerances as well as I
might.’

That brought a bitter smile to Totho’s lips. ‘So they were just a piece of your machine that failed.’

‘After their task was done, thankfully.’ If Drephos had heard any accusation in his underling’s words there was no sign of it.

‘They killed themselves rather than see you do this.’ Totho knew that he had to force a confrontation now, before his own nerve failed altogether.

Drephos’ hands found the rail, one of them with a subtle scrape of metal. It looked for all the world as though he and Totho were simply sharing the view. ‘If that was the choice
that they set themselves,’ the Colonel-Auxillian replied, ‘then I am disappointed, but it was their own choice to make.’ His voice hardened slightly. ‘You will note that
they did not attempt to interfere with my work. Is that the choice that you have set yourself, Totho?’

Totho took a long breath. ‘I have merely come to ask you to reconsider.’ It sounded absurd to him, a pathetic anticlimax, but Drephos was nodding.

‘Good. Rational debate, I never tire of it. I always knew that you were trying to install yourself as my conscience. I am glad that you felt you could bring your problem to me rather than
dwelling on it in silence, as the Twins did. You have already learnt your lesson, after the issue with the girl.’

The girl: Che.
The mention of her jarred in Totho, wrong-footing him. ‘I cannot believe that you would willingly do what you are about to do, if you had . . . if you had properly
considered the consequences,’ he got out.