Where is this place? The gloom of the tent of the Mercy’s Daughters had become the dark of night, the stars visible above him. He lay on sandy ground with only a thin blanket.
Where is she? Grief in Chains, or Aagen’s Joy, or. no, it was coming to him.
They had been moving him. Night, again, and it must have been earlier this same night — or last night, was it? But he had been taken from the Daughters’ huge tent.
She had been there. He recalled her face, her eyes, radiant. Moth eyes knew no darkness, but hers could stare straight into the sun. She had touched his hand as they took him out. She had said. what had she said?
He could not recall it. It was stripped from him along with his health and his strength. The bandages were still tight about his chest, the line of the wound, that she had sealed with her fingers, pulled tautly as he moved, now secured with compresses and surgical silk.
He looked around. There was a scrap of waxing moon up there, enough for his eyes, and there was a fire nearby. They were in a hollow but the warmth was fast leaching out from it, so the cold had sunk into his bones. He made an attempt to crawl closer to the fire, and found he could do that, just. He was capable of it.
He saw Nero, curled up like a child, and indeed looking very like a child bundled in his cloak. A bald child, yes, and to be frank an ugly one, but even his belligerent features attained a kind of innocence in sleep.
Beyond Nero’s sleeping form there were two Wasp soldiers in armour. Salma felt his world drop away from him, and he was instinctively groping for a sword that was not there. He sat up, too fast, and hissed in pain, and they looked over at him. One was young, perhaps even younger than he was. The other was greying, forty at least in age, a peer for Stenwold.
‘Easy there,’ the younger one said. ‘How much do you remember?’
‘Who are you?’ Salma demanded, although he knew he could make no demands that he could enforce.
‘My name is Adran,’ said the younger of the soldiers. ‘This is Kalder.’
‘Lieutenant Kalder,’ the older man rumbled in a particularly deep voice. ‘We’re still in the army, boy.’
‘You’re Salma, right?’ Adran nodded absently. ‘So what do you remember?’
Salma acknowledged the point. ‘Assume I remember nothing.’
‘Then you’re out,’ Adran told him. ‘They got you out.’
‘They?’
‘The halfbreed artificer did it,’ said Lieutenant Kalder. ‘Arranged for it, anyway. He’s got some pull, that one, for all that he’s just a piebald bastard.’
‘Halfbreed?’ Totho? And it came back to him then, what Totho had done for him, the price that had been paid for Salma’s life and liberty. So the artificer Kalder meant was the other one, the man who had wanted to keep Totho as his slave.
‘So why are you.? What are you going to do with us?’
‘You don’t need to worry,’ Adran said, but Salma shook his head.
‘What is going on? I see Wasp soldiers before me. Look at me, I’m in no position to cause you any trouble, so at least tell me the truth.’
Adran and Kalder exchanged looks.
‘You probably think we’re all monsters in the Empire,’ said the younger man.
Thinking of Aagen, Salma said, ‘Not necessarily, but until proved otherwise.’
‘Right.’ Adran poked at the fire. ‘Have you heard of the Broken Sword?’ Kalder started to speak, but Adran continued, ‘He might have done, if he was in the Twelve-Year War.’
‘He’s too young for that,’ Kalder objected.
‘I’ve never heard of any Broken Sword,’ Salma told them.
‘It’s. We’re a group within the Empire, who don’t altogether agree with what it’s doing. Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud to be Wasp-kinden. But things are changing, and never for the better. We’ve always fought. We’re a martial people, just like the Ant-kinden or the Soldier Beetles of Myna. Back before the unification and the Empire, though. we might have lived in hill-forts and stolen each other’s daughters and cattle, but it was different then. It was. natural, almost.’ His halting way of exploring what he was trying to say reminded Salma unbearably of Totho.
‘The Empire, though, it’s wrong. The way it works now, the way it has to keep expanding, further and further, just to stop everything collapsing. You might not realize it, but every Wasp-kinden freeman past thirteen is in the army, and has a rank, and can be sent hundreds of miles away from home because the Emperor wants to bring some foreign city under his control. Nobody gets to choose otherwise. And then there are all the Auxillians, who have it even worse.’
‘The people you go and fight don’t exactly have a good time of it either,’ Salma said weakly.
‘No, they don’t,’ agreed Adran. He had a tremendous sincerity about him, and that in turn reminded Salma of Che, when she was on some moral mission or other. What Adran was saying really mattered to him.
‘The Empire imposes its will on dozens of other kinden, and it destroys them by making them behave like us. And that’s wrong. It’s evil, in fact, and by making us do its work, it makes all of us evil.’ He glanced at Kalder. ‘Or that’s what I think, anyway.’
The expression on the older man’s face said so clearly, These young soldiers today that Salma had to smile. ‘As for me,’ Kalder took over, ‘I just got sick of it. I fought your lot, right? And before that it was putting down insurrections amongst the Hornet tribes. And before that I was a sergeant fighting the Bees at Szar. And I did garrison duty at Jerez even before that. I had a family, once, but I haven’t seen them more than six months in twenty years. And now we’ve just taken Tark, and no sooner have the fires burned out than they’re marching us out again, the bastards, for some other forsaken place. It never ends. They just grind you down and abandon you when you drop. So what the Broken Sword is really about — rather than what it means to idealists like young Adran here — is men like me, soldiers who just want the fighting to stop. We want to go home to our wives, our farms. But even if we could, some of us, we wouldn’t, now, because by staying put we get to help others who think the same way, help them to get out and away. And it’s not just Wasp-kinden. Soldiers are soldiers, whether they’re imperial, Auxillian, or whichever poor bastards we might be fighting.’
‘But what if they find out?’
‘Then they take us apart an inch of skin at a time,’ Kalder said. ‘Because the Empire, the Rekef especially, hates none more than quitters like us.’
‘But we’re safe,’ Adran broke in. ‘We’re scouting, you see. Or that’s what they think. Drephos the artificer, he arranged for people to be looking the other way, but it was the Daughters’ Eldest, Norsa, who knew who we were and called us. The Daughters and the Broken Sword see eye to eye, and Norsa’s a favourite of the general.’
‘We can take you another day out from here,’ Kalder added. ‘After that you and your Fly friend are on your own. You’ll be far enough from the army to be as safe as anyone can be, but I don’t know where you can go next.’
‘If we were closer to home then we’d have safe-houses, Wayhouses and the like,’ Adran said. ‘We’re at the edge of the Empire, though. Just don’t head south and don’t head east.’
‘Or north,’ Kalder said slowly, ‘from what I hear. So I suppose you don’t have many options.’
The scout touched down virtually on the bonnet of the transport automotive, startling the driver, who cursed him. The scout made no reply but caught his balance quickly and saluted General Alder.
‘Report on the soldiers ahead, sir.’
Alder rose from a cramped conference he had been having with Major Grigan of the engineers and Colonel Carvoc, in the narrow space right behind the driver and ahead of the freight.
‘Tell me,’ he demanded. He had been informed earlier that an advance scout had spotted a force about two hundred strong encamped right in the path of the Fourth Army, and maybe it was about time someone told him what they intended. ‘It’s the Tarkesh fugitives, yes?’