Salute the Dark полностью

‘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.

‘Consequences,’ echoed Drephos. ‘Do you mean political? Technical?’

‘Moral,’ Totho blurted out. ‘What you’re about to do is immoral. It’s wrong.’

‘Why?’ Drephos asked. Totho just stared at him. After a beat had passed without an answer, the master-artificer added, ‘There is a matter of scale, undoubtedly. I have found certain… obstacles within my own mind. Morality does not enter into it, but there are other matters that have given me pause.’ For the first and only time in Totho’s knowledge, he sounded uncertain.

‘You are a war-artificer,’ Totho said, ‘and you know it is not flattery if I say that you are the greatest I have known. This is not war, however. This is beneath you. You constructed these weapons for the battlefield.’

Drephos smiled with the pure, simple expression of a clever man who is understood. ‘I have considered this myself. War, though – war is not a static thing. A war is not just the sum of its battles and skirmishes, Totho. It is the same as the difference between strategy and tactics: the great war and the little one. This is the great war.’

‘But most of those people who will die tomorrow will not be warriors,’ Totho pointed out. ‘They will be… just citizens of Szar: the young, the old-’

‘And on the field against the Sarnesh, my opponents would be soldiers?’ Drephos finished for him. ‘Yes, I asked myself that. What is the great war, though, if it is not the Empire against the world? That world is not built on soldiers. The soldiers are merely the sword, not the hand that holds it, nor the body to which that hand belongs. Those people out there, you consider them as innocents in war? Mere bystanders, detached and uninvolved? Surely you were better schooled in logic than that.’

Drephos’ manner made Totho think of his studies at the College, the same dry approach to theory, and here it was trotted out with a whole city’s fate resting on it.

‘Have they fed a soldier? Then they are the war,’ Drephos elaborated. ‘Have they clothed one? Taught one? Given birth to one? Will they grow to be one? Have they lived their lives fed and aided by the achievements of the soldiers gone before? You cannot say that they are not the war, Totho. The soldiers themselves are merely the tip of it, but beneath the waters is a great mountain building towards them. You see, Totho, I have already considered all this. I am not some irrational tyrant.’

‘Yes, but-’

‘If they survive, they shall rise up again, the next generation, or the next. If they are whipped down by main force, they shall merely nurse their wounds and resharpen their blades. If a single Szaren still stands after tomorrow, then the Empire is doomed sooner or later, for inevitably the war will be lost, in ten years or a hundred or a thousand. If we wish to win the war, then we must make war on all our enemies – not only those that now present themselves with a blade in their hand. Can you honestly refute my logic?’

‘But there are other ways to solve a problem, surely?’

‘Now that is an old argument, and you are merely echoing it,’ Drephos replied, as mildly admonitory as a schoolteacher. ‘Yes, there are truces and treaties and accords and concords and all of that, but they are merely games, Totho. They are games to give both sides time to prepare for the real thing, and that is war. Treaties can be broken. In fact most are made with that in mind. There was a philosopher of Collegium a hundred years ago who thought that, instead of wars, your Ant cities could resolve their differences by playing games, thus saving the loss of countless lives. You must see the inevitable flaw in his idea, for what if the losing side refused to accept its defeat? In war there is no such uncertainty. The bodies left on the field give a finality to what happened, however each side dresses it up in its reports. And in this war, my new war, I will expunge even the most lingering doubt. The Empire will win and Szar will lose, and the proof of it will be that there will be no Szar left, no Szaren people, no trace of those who defy the Empire.’

‘So that the other cities, Myna and the others, they’ll never rebel again, is that it?’ Totho asked him. ‘Surely-?’