‘You should be dead,’ the soldier continued, his whispering voice obviously the best he could manage. ‘I saw you drop. You were fighting like a maniac but someone got you, and you fell, and that should have been the end of you. I was behind. I saw the point come clean through you, you bastard. She came for you, though, and you were dead, even then, but she came for you as though she knew what had been going on. She ran out and lit the place up and put her hands on you. And you stopped bleeding, right there and then.’ He coughed, a wretched, scratchy sound. ‘And she’s been with you every day, using her Art to keep you alive. I don’t know what you mean to her but you’re a lucky bastard, so you are.’
Salma tried to speak again, and this time a distant croak emerged, quieter even than the wounded soldier’s. ‘I came here for her.’
The man’s one eye studied him for a minute, before he said, ‘Well she’s certainly worth that.’
‘Salma?’
He had been asleep, or at least drifting somewhere else, but there was a new voice now, and it carried his name to him.
‘Salma, you have to wake up now.’
It was not her voice and he did not want to wake up. When he had opened his eyes last, she had been standing there, staring at him. Expression was hard to fathom from those dancing colours, from those eyes, but his heart had leapt painfully just to see her.
He had found her. She had found him. In this mad, war-struck world, they had found each other.
She had sat down at the edge of his bed and, although it was a flimsy folding piece that should have tipped immediately, she barely moved it, making him doubt his senses. He had reached out, though, and she had taken his cold hand in both her warm ones, warm like the sun on a summer’s day.
‘Why are you here?’ she had asked him. ‘Why did you come?’
‘I couldn’t stay away, knowing that you were here,’ was his whisper. ‘Aagen… I spoke to Aagen.’
‘Did you-?’
‘No. We parted on good terms.’ His voice was strengthening, as though healing energies were passing through her hands and into him. Perhaps they were, either by Ancestor Art or by plain magic.
‘You should not have come.’
The ghost of his old smile appeared briefly. ‘Why?’
‘You are hurt. You were already in the hands of death when I found you. All I have done since barely kept you with me.’
‘But I am with you.’ He was staring at her face. She was beautiful and it was not merely the ordinary human beauty of Tynisa. She was Butterfly-kinden and they were beautiful with the timeless perfection of a sunset or a spring day. He yearned for her even though she was already there right beside him.
She had shaken her head. ‘Then I myself have done this to you. I never intended this.’
‘No-’ But something had come to mind, something the Moth-kinden man had said, or that Che had claimed on his behalf. ‘They said… did you enchant me? Is this… what I feel now, just glamour?’
Her hand had touched his face and he felt a warmth flooding there, and also peace and safety. ‘I put a spell on you,’ she had confirmed. ‘We were penned there as slaves, before the great machines of the Wasps, and I saw your face and knew you were a good man. I needed the help of a good man so I put a spell on you, that still held strong when we were taken by their devices to the city of the slaves. But then you needed help yourself, and I took my spell away. I have no spell on you now.’
Staring at her, he had not known what to think, because his heart still reached for her and he wanted to touch her, to stroke that rainbow skin.
‘Then I must love you,’ he had said in wonderment, and realized that all this while some part of him had believed Che’s claim that it was no more than a spell that made him act this way. Now he discovered it was him, nothing but his own heart.
‘Salma! Please wake up!’
He snapped from the reverie – and saw she was not here. Instead there was a man standing by his bed, and it took Salma rather too long to recognize his face.
‘Totho…?’
‘Yes, Salma, it’s me.’
‘What… what in the world are you wearing?’
Salma registered the tunic Totho now wore, black, and edged with strips of black and gold. It was crossed with two leather belts, one for his tools and the other serving as a baldric for his sword.
‘Listen to me, Salma, because we don’t have much time,’ said Totho. ‘You have to listen and understand what I’m saying. I’m getting you out.’
‘Out?’
‘Out of here. Because the girl might have saved your life, but you’re still not safe. In fact if you stay here you’ll certainly die. The Wasps are just waiting until you’re well enough to interrogate.’ Totho gave a brief bark of laughter in which the strain he was under emerged clear enough. ‘What a world! They’re waiting for your wound to heal so they can tear you apart. You know how much they hate your kinden. Half of their men here fought in your Twelve-Year War.’
‘So be it,’ said Salma tiredly.
‘No! Not so be it! Aren’t you listening, Salma? I’ve bought you out. There’s a man, an artificer here, and he wants my service, and he says he can get you out of here.’
‘You trust him?’
‘Enough for this, at least. You remember Nero? Nero’s going with you. He’ll look after you until you’re strong again.’
‘I can’t leave, Totho.’
Totho glowered at him. ‘It’s the girl? That dancing girl? Listen, Salma, they are going to kill you, as slowly as they can. Would she want that? Because she won’t be able to stop them. This nursing order of hers might get to choose whose wounds it heals, but it’s got no such say over the fit and well. I’ve paid the asking price, Salma. I’ve sold myself just to buy you life.’
‘No!’ The effort racked Salma with pain, and he knew that everyone down the length of the hospital tent would be staring. ‘Totho, no-’
‘This way you survive, and live free, and I… live too. It’s not so bad. I won’t be a slave, quite. And who knows what could happen?’ And it’s not as if I had much to go back to, Totho added to himself. And this way, Che won’t detest me any more than she already does, because at least I won’t have left you to die, Salma.
‘Totho, you can’t do this,’ Salma said urgently, feeling himself worn out just by the effort of this conversation. ‘I’m not worth your doing this-’
‘Shut up!’ Totho snapped, shocking him into silence. ‘Shut up, Salma, because I have already done this. I have put on their colours and apprenticed myself to these monsters, and I have done it for you, and if you tell me now that you’re not worth it, just what have I done all that for?’ His fists were tightly clenched and Salma saw him anew then: not the shy, awkward youth always tagging along behind Che, but the man that same youth had forged into.
It came for all of us, Salma thought. We are all grown now. Che, when the Wasps enslaved her and put her before their torture machines. Tynisa when she discovered her birthright. To me on the point of a sword… and to Totho here and now. We have put childish things behind us, and look at the world we have grown into.
There were streaks of moisture on Totho’s face but he was putting on an angry mask to hide the despair.
I have no right to play the martyr here, nor have I the strength.
‘I’m sorry, Totho,’ he said softly. ‘I hope you find that you have done the right thing.’
Totho had assumed that the Imperial Fourth Army would be splitting, some to be led west by General Alder and others staying to secure the half-ruined city of Tark. Garrison duty was beneath the Barbs, though, and a new force had come tramping out of the desert following its Scorpion guides. A garrison force, Totho understood, was different to a field army. It contained more auxillians, for one, usually around one man in two, and many of the Wasp-kinden included were veterans who had now earned an easier assignment than open battle. All this he learned from Kaszaat. The garrison was commanded by a governor who was usually also a colonel in the imperial army. Running a garrison was less prestigious than commanding a field army, but having a whole city at one’s disposal, she explained, was an unparalleled opportunity for acquiring both power and wealth. More than one general had willingly taken the demotion.