The moment’s pause told Salma that the lie, the outright abject lie, had registered. Malkan obviously knew of the Mercers, and imagined them, no doubt, as some kind of Dragonfly Rekef.
‘Well, perhaps I should send your head back to your Monarch, to show him how he has failed,’ Malkan declared and, without that pause before, he would have sounded entirely confident.
‘What failure would that be?’ Salma asked him.
‘Your “Landsarmy” is scattered and mostly slain,’ Malkan replied. Salma knew that he must have flinched at that news, for he saw his reaction mirrored in the other man’s eyes. ‘I have you, to do with as I wish, to enslave or kill or send to the Emperor himself as a trophy. You have failed.’
‘But you were speaking of the Monarch, not of myself.’ Salma kept his voice steady, hoping that Malkan was painting the situation darker than it really was. ‘The protection of the Lowlands from imperial aggression is not a task to be entrusted to only one man.’
Malkan stopped, again just for a moment, but Salma noticed it. The thought of a dozen, a score, a hundred Mercers, infiltrating the Lowlands, raising scrap-armies as Salma had done – the tactical implications unfolded in Malkan’s mind.
If I can achieve nothing else now, let me crack his confidence. Words were all Salma had left in the way of weapons. He would not spare them.
‘Well, we shall question you at leisure about whatever comrades you have,’ Malkan decided. ‘Being a Commonwealer, you will be unfamiliar with our methods of questioning, so I shall have my artificers introduce you.’
Beneath Salma’s feet, the earth shifted slightly, very slightly. He had only soft shoes on, and most likely Malkan would have felt nothing through the soles of his armoured boots. Behind his back, Salma flexed his fingers. ‘General?’
‘You have some other vague threat for me?’ Malkan asked him.
Salma’s thumb-claws flicked out, digging into the ropes about his wrists. The angle was awkward, but he drove them in as hard as he could. ‘You forget two things.’
‘Do I, now?’ Malkan asked, irritated, but paused for just a moment more. ‘And what would they be?’
‘You will have to discover that for yourself,’ Salma said, every bit the picture of the mysterious Commonwealer, and when Malkan signalled for the two guards to take him, he concentrated all his strength into his arms, his hands and his thumbs, and flexed them.
The rope sheared and his hands sprang free, just as the whole of the earth floor within the tent bucked once and then burst open.
General Malkan was thrown off-balance, but already grabbing for his sword’s hilt as the ground split. A monstrous form hauled its broad-shouldered bulk out of the ground, and for a moment, in the explosion of dust, it was impossible to see just what it was. The two guards that Malkan had kept to hand did not need to know precisely what was attacking their general, though. One was already raising a hand towards Salma even as the ropes gave way. The other drew his sword and threw himself forwards with a kind of blind courage, not risking a sting-shot with Malkan so close.
It was Morleyr, of course. Morleyr the Auxillian deserter whose squad Salma had talked into defecting. Morleyr the Mole Cricket-kinden giant who could dig through the earth with his bare hands.
His hands were not bare now, though. The soldier that rushed at him, into the cloud of dust, met the upswing of a mace-blow intended for Malkan. Salma heard bones snap as its heavy iron head struck the man through the ribs. Salma was already moving, casting himself to the left as the crackling bolt of energy seared past, and then jabbing with his thumbs, going for the throat but tearing a bloody line across the soldier’s face instead as he reeled back.
Malkan’s sword was now clear but there were others emerging after Morleyr, coughing and choking but armed with shortswords and daggers. They were a handful of Salma’s people dragging themselves out of the darkness…
No, not dark, for there was light down there. Salma’s chest contracted at even the brief glimpse he had of it.
No! Not here! He lunged forwards, got a hand about the soldier’s sword-wrist, trying to prise the weapon free. The man backed out of the tent into the night, stumbling through the flap, colliding with another man who rushed in and just managed to say, ‘General Malkan-’ before he was bowled over. The soldier Salma was grappling with tripped, and the contested sword was driven deep into his chest as Salma fell on top of him.
There was no time to waste. Salma got his hands around the hilt of the stunned new arrival’s blade and drew it clear; easier to pluck a sword from a scabbard than from a man’s ribs. The messenger goggled at him and Salma gritted his teeth and drove the sword into the man’s throat. Honour was like a coat: sometimes one did not have time to put it on.
He spun back towards the tent, seeing Morleyr aim another great sweep of the mace at General Malkan. Mole Crickets were monstrously strong, but also ponderously slow, and Malkan drove his sword forwards once, twice, in the time it took Morleyr to strike. The first lunge carved into the great man’s side and his blade came out spilling red, but the second went up to the hilt in Morleyr’s armpit, making the Mole Cricket cry out in shock. Then the huge body was collapsing, sword still deeply embedded, and by then Malkan had a knife in his other hand and had slit the tent behind him. Another man, Salma could not see which of his followers it was, lunged at the general with a dagger, but Malkan grabbed his wrist almost contemptuously and then stabbed him in the eye before backing out of the command tent altogether.
Salma darted out of the tent and pursued him with sword in hand. Within the tent, the light was growing ever brighter and he did not want to see her here in this place where death was moments away in any direction. But of course, how else could Morleyr have found me, save by her?
This was not the plan. A mad rescue was not the plan. We’re right in the middle of their army! But the army currently seemed to have other things on its mind. Soldiers were everywhere, but they were all heading somewhere else, and most of them were running towards the western edge of the camp. It occurred to Salma suddenly that, of course, this was the plan after all.
The Sarnesh possessed their own time-keeping machine to count the moments for them. They would have sprung up, every one of them, at a single thought, and begun their approach. Dawn had not begun to lighten the eastern sky, and already the Sarnesh assault had reached the Wasp camp.
The dust-coated fighters Morleyr had brought with him were now spilling out from the tent, twenty of them at least, a chaotic rabble raggedly engaging any black and gold that they could find. General Malkan grabbed a passing sergeant, shouting orders at him, dragging the man’s sword from his hand. Before the sergeant could pass on the word Salma was on them both. Distantly he heard the roar of field artillery, a leadshotter loosing its shot, the tremble of the ground as a catapult missile landed. Salma jammed his sword in under the sergeant’s arm, swiftly and cleanly, dragged it clear and turned towards Malkan.
That he was amazed meant only that Balkus had been away from his own kind too long.
When the moment came, every Sarnesh in the camp had woken simultaneously by virtue of the tactician’s call to arms. Balkus himself had leapt up, snapped instantly from his sleep, hauling on his chainmail by old instinct, in exact step with thousands of Sarnesh soldiers.
By the time he had the hauberk on, he had come fully to his senses. He had first kicked awake Parops and Plius, thus wrenching their entire detachments from sleep into instant wakefulness. Then he had run about amongst his own men, shouting and striking them, telling them to go and wake others. They would be the anchor dragging at the attack, he realized. The last to be ready, the last to get in line. Still, his urgency got through to them, and they strapped on their armour as swiftly as they could, readied their snapbows and crossbows and pikes. Beyond them, Balkus saw the Moth and Mantis-kinden warriors spreading out to take up their staggered skirmish line ahead of the army. By day there had been Wasp scouts lurking nearby, keeping an eye on the Sarnesh force. By the time Balkus’ men had assembled they would all be dead.