Empire in Black and Gold

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

‘Go,’ said the injured woman, no pain or reproach in her voice. She and the man with her locked shields, waiting. Stenwold stumbled away from them, then turned and fled after Marius and the others.

  Tisamon was beside him in an instant. He had a look on his face that Stenwold had never seen before, but he could read it as though the Mantis’s thoughts were carved there. Tisamon wanted a fight. He had been betrayed. He had been broken. Now he wanted a fight that he could not win.

  ‘Get a move on, fat-Beetle,’ he hissed, grabbing one strap of Stenwold’s apron and hauling him forward. ‘You’re getting out of here.’

  ‘We are,’ corrected Stenwold, too out of breath by now to say any more. He watched Tisamon snatch a Wasp spear from the air in his offhand and then the Mantis spun on his heel, launched it away into the sky behind them, and was immediately in step once again. Stenwold did not pause to look, but he had no doubt that behind them some Wasp soldier would now be dropping from the sky, pierced through by his own missile.

  Myna was a tiered city and they hit a set of steps then, a steep, narrow twenty-foot ascent. Stenwold tried to slow down for it but Tisamon would not let him, grabbing his arm again and pulling him upwards, exerting every muscle in his lean frame.

  ‘Keep moving,’ the Mantis snapped at him through gritted teeth. ‘Move your great big fat feet, you Beetle bastard!’

  The sting of that insult got Stenwold to the top of the steps before he realized. There were more citizens up there, all trying to head in the wrong direction, directly towards the gates. Something in Tisamon’s face or body language pushed them easily aside. Ahead, Stenwold could see Marius’s squad taking the next set of steps at a run.

  And Stenwold ran, too, as he had never run before. His toolstrip, and his sword and crossbow, all clattered and conspired to trip him up. His breath rasped as he dragged ever more of it into his lungs, yet he ran, because up beyond those steps lay the airfield. Then he would know if he could stop running or if it was already too late.

  There were Wasp soldiers scattered across the airfield. At the far end, the great bloated bulk of an airship balloon was slowly settling into itself, gashed in a dozen places and deflating. Some half a dozen dead men and women were strewn like old toys between the flying machines, but a dozen more were putting up a final desperate defence, letting off their crossbow bolts at the circling Wasp soldiers from whatever shelter they could find. If the Wasps had been arrayed in military order they could have swept the place clean in a minute, but they were mad for blood, each one on his own.

  Stenwold noticed one old man frantically stoking the boiler of a sleek orthopter that stood there like a tall ship, its slender wings folded together and pointing up towards the sky. A Wasp soldier passed close and caught him by the collar, hauling him ten feet away from the machine before touching down again and putting his sword through the old man once, twice, three times. A moment later a bolt caught the same soldier between the shoulder blades. He pitched forward, trying even as he fell to reach behind him and pull it out.

  ‘That one!’ wheezed Stenwold, stumbling towards the now deserted orthopter. It was stoked. It was ready to go. ‘Come on!’ he gasped.

  In a moment Marius’s men were around him, and then they were past him, deliberately moving away from the machine and making a brief wall of their shields with crossbows poised behind it, guarding the retreat as effectively as they could.

  ‘Can you fly this?’ Marius demanded. Stenwold merely nodded, because he had no more breath to speak, and no room left for doubt. The officer clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Get it moving. We’ll join you.’ And then, as Stenwold hurried past him, ‘Watch out for Tisamon. He does not want to leave this place.’

  I know why. But Stenwold did not have the breath for it.

  Tisamon was already at the orthopter, hand reaching for the hatch, then stopping. He looked back at Stenwold with an agonized expression. ‘I— how . . .’

  ‘The handle. Turn the handle.’

  Hand on the lever, the Mantis shook his head, baring his teeth. One of Marius’s men arrived just then, ducked neatly under his arm and hauled the hatch open, hurling Stenwold’s toolbag inside. Stenwold reached the orthopter so fast that he bounced back off the scuffed wood of its hull. The soldier had already unslung his crossbow and was running to join his colleagues. Tisamon turned and went with him.

  ‘Wait—’ Stenwold got out, but the Mantis was already sprinting across the airfield with his blade drawn back ready for action. Even as Stenwold hauled himself up into the machine, the Mantis leapt and caught a passing Wasp by his black-and-gold boot, dragging the flailing man out of the sky and lashing the two-foot edge of his metal claw across the invader’s throat. It would be a poor day for any Wasp who met with the Mantis just then.

  Stenwold shouldered his way through the cramped interior of the flier towards the cockpit, there finding a single seat too small for him and unfamiliar controls. He was an artificer, though, and had lived with machines all his life. A moment’s observation told him which glass bar indicated the boiler pressure, which lever unleashed the wings. A Wasp soldier darted across the large and wide-open ports that were mainly what Stenwold had between him and the fighting outside. Then the wings clapped down and outwards with a roar of wood and canvas and the soldier was sent spinning by the concussion of air. Stenwold’s feet found pedals in the narrow confines of the footwell. The boiler pressure was now closing on the optimal. He put his head back, peering through the open hatch for any sign of his comrades.

  Half of Marius’s men were already dead, he saw, and this jolted his heart. They fought beautifully: even he, though no warrior, could see that. Each man knew by heart the thoughts of his fellows, so they moved as one. They were so few, though, and the Wasps swarmed all over the field. Shield and crossbow were no defence against their numbers.

  ‘Come on!’ Stenwold bellowed. ‘Let’s go now!’ He could not believe that they would hear him over the din of combat but one of them must have, and so they all did. They began to fall back, shields held high. Even as he watched, another was lanced in the side by a crossbow bolt, falling awkwardly before rising to one knee. The others continued to retreat, and Stenwold might have thought it heartless of them had he not been so sure that the fallen man would be exhorting them to go, to leave him there. Stenwold realized that he knew none of their names, had not even heard many of them speak.

  Ant-kinden, he would never understand them or their communal world. Or how Marius had managed to leave that world and not look back.

  The hatch went suddenly dark. A Wasp soldier forced his way in, the dance of his wings dying behind him. One open hand still crackled with the fire of his sting but he was now leading with his sword. Stenwold was lurching backwards even as the man’s shoulders cleared the entrance, hurling the first thing that came to hand, which happened to be a mechanic’s hammer. It thumped into the Wasp soldier’s shoulder and knocked him half out of the hatch. Then Stenwold was upon him, grabbing for his sword arm with one hand, lunging with the other. He never got hold of the man’s sword, but his right hand somehow managed to draw his own, and he rammed it up to its narrow guard in his adversary’s armpit.

  The Wasp spat at him and he recoiled in shock, then recoiled again as he saw the blood stringing across the man’s lips. Then the dying soldier was falling out of the flier, the weight of him taking Stenwold’s sword from his suddenly nerveless fingers.

  He had just killed another human being. There’s a first time for everything.

  One of Marius’s soldiers now reached the hatch and cast the wooden case inside. Marius himself and three of his men were still inching their way back, painfully slow.

  ‘Tisamon!’ Stenwold called out. ‘Tisamon!’

  He saw him then, the Weaponsmaster, moving in and out of the Wasps as they tried to corner him. But he stepped through the golden energy of their stings, their crossbow bolts that fractured on the hard earth of the airfield. He caught their spears easily and hurled them ba
ck. His blade, twisting and darting too swift to see, was never still for a second. It moved as naturally as his wrist and hand and arm could, and there were always the spines of his arms to cut and tear at anything the metal missed. Tisamon was going to die, but he would have more company on his journey than he knew what to do with.

  ‘Tisamon!’ Stenwold shouted and the Mantis-kinden broke off from the fight, danced across to him, casually cutting down a Wasp that tried to put a spear in him.

  ‘Get Marius inside and go!’ Tisamon commanded. ‘Go! Just go!’

  Stenwold’s face twisted up in anger and fear. ‘You bloody-handed bastard! If you stay here then you’re taking me with you! I’m not going without you!’

  Even as he moved to meet the next attacker Tisamon’s face showed how utterly unfair he felt that threat was. Even so, he was returning to the orthopter in the very next instant.

  ‘Marius, now!’ Stenwold shrieked, and at last Marius and his two survivors broke into a run, shields temporarily slung on their backs. Stenwold ducked away from the hatch and even as he did so a lance of energy blasted a smoking hole in the rim. Hands shaking, he squeezed himself back into the pilot’s seat, and began to pedal fast. He felt the entire frame of the flier creak as the wings moved, first up and then down, powered by the steam-boiler but guided by his feet.

  Someone vaulted into the flier, and Stenwold flinched in fear, but it was only Tisamon, face grim. He set on the wooden case immediately and tugged at the buckles, his bladed glove now removed. A moment later a woman belonging to Marius’s squad climbed in too and turned to help her commander aboard. By now Stenwold had the wings working smoothly and felt the orthopter lurch as though eager to be gone from here.

  Marius was halfway in when he arched backwards without warning and began to fall away. The female soldier caught his belt and dragged him to safety, but Stenwold caught a glimpse of the leather vanes of the crossbow bolt buried deep in the commander’s lower back beside the rim of his shield.

  ‘Any more?’ He could barely keep the machine on the ground.

  ‘No!’ the woman yelled to him, and he doubled his pace and the orthopter sprang into the sky, spinning a couple of Wasps out of their way with the displaced air.

  Stenwold risked a single glance behind him to see what was happening. Marius was lying on his side, his skin turned from tan to ashen-grey, his sole remaining soldier investigating the wound. Tisamon had opened his case and was stringing his greatbow. Another relic of the Bad Old Days, Stenwold knew, but he would not have swapped such a bow in Tisamon’s hands for the latest repeating crossbow. The Mantis crouched at the still-open hatch and nocked an arrow. A moment later he loosed it and Stenwold saw, as he circled the airfield, another Wasp go whirling downwards, sword spinning off separately, out-reaching him as he fell.

  ‘Away would be good!’ Tisamon snapped, reaching into the case for another arrow.

  ‘I have to gain height first,’ Stenwold told him, knowing that the Mantis would not understand. He was pulling the orthopter into a ponderously slow upwards circle of the airfield as the steam-driven wings worked up and down. None of the other Mynan flying machines had got off the ground. He did not want to think about what might be happening in the city below them. He just pedalled and steered, watching a rising circle of Wasps below them, flying men with swords and spears milling in a furious swarm. Tisamon leant far out, securing his position with one knee and one elbow, and drew back the string.

  High enough. Stenwold decided, and wrestled the orthopter out of its curve. But he had misjudged the angle and ended up sending it straight out over the teeming city. Below him a dozen Wasp soldiers passed by, oblivious, but Stenwold’s attention was by now somewhere else.

  ‘Hammer and tongs!’ he swore. ‘Will you look at that!’

  It was ugly as sin and it hung in the air as elegantly as a hanged man, but nevertheless it stayed up and there had to be some craft in that feat. A heliopter in Wasp colours, a monstrous, uneven metal box with three spinning blades straining to keep it from crashing to the ground. There must have been hatches in its underbelly, he realized, because there was a stream of missiles falling constantly from it onto Myna. He thought they were rocks at first but, on seeing the explosions, decided they must be fire-pots or firepowder grenades.

  Why am I still flying at it? He wrenched quickly at the simple wooden stick and the orthopter veered away, the Wasp heliopter sliding out of his frame of vision as he cast his newly acquired vehicle across the city and out over the walls. The orthopter was a simple piece of machinery, and the artificers back at his native city of Collegium, hundreds of miles away, would have called it ‘prentice stuff’. It was all Stenwold needed, though, for it could outpace the Wasp light airborne, and in only minutes their pursuers were dropping back, turning for the city again, and Tisamon could lower his bow.

  The Wasp heliopter, however – that was a crude and primitive piece. Any self-respecting artificer would have been rightly ashamed of it. And yet it flew, and only five years ago the Wasps had possessed nothing like it.

  ‘Marius . . .’ he began. He could crane over his shoulder, but even while letting the machine glide on its canvas wings he dared not take his attention from the controls. ‘Marius, talk to me.’

  ‘He is sorry,’ said the woman, and after a moment’s blank surprise Stenwold realized that Marius must now be too weak to speak, but strong enough to send his thoughts into her mind.

  ‘We have to tell them what has happened here,’ Stenwold continued. ‘Marius, we have to tell Sarn. We must warn your city.’

  ‘He says we are considered renegades there,’ the woman replied impassively. ‘He says we can never go back.’

  Beneath them the fields and small villages that were Myna’s tributary settlements swept past. ‘But Marius only left because he thought this was for your people’s good,’ Stenwold said stubbornly. ‘He saw the threat even when they did not. You know this, and you have to tell them.’

  ‘We can never go back there,’ the woman said, and he realized she was speaking for herself this time. ‘Once the bonds of loyalty are broken, we can never go back.’

  ‘But Marius – Sarn isn’t like the other Ant cities any more. There have been changes. There are even some of my own kin on the council there,’ Stenwold insisted.

  There was a lengthy silence from behind him, and he assumed that Marius must have died. He choked on a sob, but then the woman put a hand on his shoulder in a strong soldier’s grip.

  ‘He says you must do what you can,’ she told him softly, and even her intonation resembled Marius’s own. ‘He says he regrets that things have ended this way, and he also regrets that the others, Atryssa and Nero, were not with us, but he does not regret following you from his city, and he does not regret dying in this company.’

  Stenwold wiped a hand across his eyes and felt the first shaking of his shoulders. ‘Tell him . . .’ he managed, but then the woman’s hand twitched on his shoulder, just once, just for a moment, and he knew that Marius was dead.

  He let out a long, racked breath.

  ‘We can tell nobody about this, because nobody will listen,’ Tisamon said. ‘We tried to warn your people at Helleron that the Wasps were coming, and what did they say? That nobody would invade Helleron. They claimed that the city was too useful. That Wasps needed to trade and deal in arms like everyone else. They look upon the Empire as just another Ant city-state.’

  ‘And if we told your people?’ asked Stenwold bitterly.

  ‘Then they would simply not care. They have quarrels a thousand years old that they have yet to settle. They have no time for new ones.’ And Stenwold heard, to his surprise, an equal bitterness in Tisamon’s voice. The Mantis was hinging his metal claw forward and back, rolling his fingers about the crosspiece to lay the blade flat against his arm, then bringing it out to jut forward from his knuckles. It was not a threat, but just the man seeking reassurance in his old rituals.

  ‘We saw their map,’ Stenwo
ld whispered. That one glimpse he had caught, of the Wasps’ great map, had been a harsh education. A map of lands he had never seen, extending down to lands he knew all too well, the Lowlands of his home, and all sketched out with lines of advance and supply. A map of a projected conquest that stopped only with the Wasps’ knowledge of their world.

  ‘Nobody will care,’ Tisamon repeated, and there was a rare wisdom in his voice. ‘What is the Lowlands, anyway? A half-dozen feuding city-states, some hold-overs from the Days of Lore, when things were different, and perhaps a few men like yourself, trying to make sense of it all. The Wasps are a unity, we are a motley.’ The gloom about him deepened, and Stenwold knew that his thoughts were turning inexorably towards Atryssa, towards the betrayal. Stenwold wished he could find some other way to explain her absence and their failure at the gates.

  ‘What will you do,’ he asked the Ant-kinden woman, ‘if you cannot go home?’

  ‘I will not be the first Ant renegade to go mercenary. If you now take us to Helleron I will sell my sword there,’ she said. ‘The market for us is good, and like to get better.’

  ‘The same for me,’ Tisamon confirmed.

  ‘Tisamon—’

  ‘No.’ There was more finality in the Mantis’s voice than Stenwold had ever heard from him. ‘No return to Collegium for me, Stenwold. No debate and diplomacy. No society. No kind words, ever again. I followed you down that path once, and see where I am now.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I will stay at Helleron and I will oppose the Wasps the only way I can.’ With careful movements Tisamon replaced his greatbow in its case. ‘You yourself have other means, Sten. You must go back to your college and your clever, machine-fingered people, and have them make ready. Of all of us, you were always the real hope of the future.’

  Stenwold said nothing as, below them, the last of the straggling fields gave out, and a scrubby, dry landscape passed beneath them without so much as a whisper.

  I cannot even claim that I did not have time to prepare.