Salute the Dark Read Online Free

snapbow in her hand: such a useful weapon, for all that he did not understand it, especially since the more
inventive of his people had found that, if they ‘undercranked’ it, whatever that was, it was as quiet as a crossbow. Still, most of their work was still down to knives and wires and
shortswords.
    I have gone from bandit to assassin , he reflected, but he could not afford moral scruples now. Too many people were depending on him.
    Outside, he gathered his people, a mere dozen of them but most of them skilled stalkers and wilderness-runners. The one exception, and their one non-combatant, came up to him now and embraced
him, as she did after every mission like this. She was Prized of Dragons, his love, his soul, the Butterfly-kinden with lambent, glowing skin who had brought him back from the gates of death. He
knew that she hated bloodshed but she knew that he only did what he had to. They had established an equilibrium, and she would not let herself be left behind. They had been apart too long.
    ‘We should go and see how far the army’s got,’ he said. The Wasp advance would be moving into more broken territory, a land riddled with gullies and canyons that were thick
with undergrowth and forest. He could no longer afford to just hit isolated bands of scouts, and must soon commence attacks against the leading edge of the army itself. After all, he had made a
bargain with the Sarnesh, and he only hoped that they were keeping their part of it.
    It was a long haul back to his own camp, but they were used to that, running and flying over terrain that was becoming as familiar as home to most of them. When they were close enough,
Fly-kinden messengers began dropping down towards them, keeping pace with Salma and rattling off reports.
    ‘Have the Wasps found us here?’ he cut through them.
    ‘We’ve killed a patrol. Fifteen men,’ one of the Flies replied. ‘We’re packing up. We’ll be gone before they even miss them.’
    Always the same, always on the move, dodging the blade of the enemy, and impossible to predict. His people were split up, linked only by the diligence of the Fly-kinden who ran the gauntlet in
all weathers to keep each leader informed of the others. They left almost no trace: when they had broken their camp, their own woodsmen muddled and obliterated their tracks. The Wasps’
advance was blind. And now time to take advantage of that.
    As he arrived, they were still training. He stopped to watch the prodigy of it, though feeling his heart sink. Neither men nor beasts were much taking to the idea of discipline.
    He had sent to Sarn, to his man Sfayot there: Give me all the horses they can spare, all the riding beetles, every beast broken for riding and not too weary to gallop. He had been obliged
to send twice, because the Sarnesh had not taken him seriously the first time. Then the animals had started to arrive, trains of five, ten – twenty even. Two-thirds were horses, which he
preferred for riding, being better for stamina and speed than most insects. Beyond that, they had been gifted as motley a nest of creatures as he had ever seen: a racing beetle long past its prime;
a dozen plodding draught animals with high, rounded shells; a brace of nimble coach-horse beetles, fiery of temperament, their tails arching like scorpion stings. There were even a couple of exotic
creatures that might have come from a menagerie: a black-and-white-striped riding spider that had the alarming tendency to jump ten feet when it became unsettled, and a low-slung, scuttling cricket
that could give a horse a decent race over any short distance.The animals’ overall quality was variable, their temperament uncertain, since cavalry had little place in the Lowlander or
imperial view of war. A combination of airborne troops, accurate crossbows and the Ant-kinden’s reluctance to rely on any minds not linked to their own had seen no development here of the
noble art of horsemanship. Riding, after all,