Empire in Black and Gold

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  A sting blast scorched across Rakka’s bare back, and the Scorpion howled in pain. Balkus returned the shot, the chamber of his nailbow flashing again and again. Rakka now had the axe up once more, every ounce of his strength focused on that single point of the machine. With a wordless battle cry he brought it down once, and then twice, even as a second bolt of energy impacted between his shoulder blades. The leg had canted to one side with the first stroke, its joints abruptly frozen. The second blow must have cut almost through it because, when the automotive took its next step, the damaged leg snapped off entirely and the machine tipped forwards, back leg waving in the air, its nose grinding into the dirt.

  ‘Clear it!’ Stenwold shouted, rushing ahead. Balkus was meanwhile helping Rakka away, whereupon Stenwold lit his last grenade and hurled it at the ballista’s cupola.

  It bounced, but he had overshot, and so it struck the sloping hull beyond the weapon and rolled back. Then it thundered to pieces and in its wake the ballista became a shredded splay of metal around an open hatch.

  Stenwold looked for Balkus and saw the Ant lowering Rakka’s body to the ground before snatching his nailbow up again. Even before Stenwold could call it, he was rushing forward, stepping up onto the tilted hull. He levelled his nailbow down the hatch and emptied it at the crew as they tried to climb out.

  There were more Wasps out there, at least another two squads that had been following up behind the automotive. Stenwold felt old, weary to his bones, his heart like a hammer pounding in his chest and his lungs raw. He was past all this. He should be safe in some distant study with his papers, like all good spymasters. He squared himself up, advanced to the cover of the wrecked automotive, waiting for them.

  But they were not coming closer: instead they were fighting. He could not tell who they were fighting save that it was armoured men, not Achaeos’s raiders. Then he could tell, and could not quite believe. They were Helleren militia, men with pikes and crossbows and chain mail. They were not as mobile or as savage as the Wasps, but there were more of them, and they were giving a good account of themselves.

  His first thought was that it was Greenwise who had sent them, but how would he have known? The obvious answer then came, that there had been enough commotion in this place to attract someone’s attention, and when the guardsmen had arrived they had taken the closest combatants rushing towards the embattled engine as their enemies.

  Thalric came in high, fast. He saw the Mantis-kinden duellist spin, dance, another two men falling back, and dying as they did so. There was a chill in the Wasp’s heart. He was better travelled than most of his race, so he had heard tell of Mantis Weaponsmasters, the last scions of a truly ancient cult. He could not really believe it but here was the very thing.

  He would have no second chance now. He watched the swift passes of the Mantis’s claw, the step of his feet, the rhythm of his fight. Thalric was no novice himself: his Art-sting was second nature to him, stronger than it was in his fellows, and he himself more practised with it.

  As Tisamon lashed out at another of his soldiers, Thalric chose his moment and loosed, the golden energy of his bolt streaking ahead of him like a falling star.

  Impossibly, the Mantis was already turning away from the bolt, twisting away from it even as he fought. Thalric saw it strike, though, lashing down the Mantis’s side as the man finished off the last of his opponents, throwing him against the Pride’s hull and bouncing him backwards to where he collapsed.

  Victory soared in Thalric’s heart and he stooped on the Pride, determined to finish this. He heard a voice, and it surely must have been Cheerwell Maker’s voice, cry out, ‘Tisamon!’

  Thalric landed ahead of his men, sword in his right hand and his left spread open to unleash his Art-fire. The Mantis was hunched about the wound, struggling to rise. One blow and it would be a simple matter to break into the engine room and dispatch whoever was inside, dispatch Cheerwell, if it was her.

  The idea hurt him, but it was for the Empire. It was war.

  He looked up, and Tynisa descended on him from atop the engine. She led with her sword, and she shrieked something as mad as the rage-racked look on her face.

  His blade was coming up, and he was falling back, but too late, too late.

  The point of the rapier lanced for his chest. It struck the banded imperial armour and pierced it with the slightest bending of the blade, but the plates slowed it enough that when it met the copperweave beneath it merely scraped down the links, severing them one after another, drawing a line of agony down his chest that was nevertheless only skin deep, until it ripped free of his ruined armour and stabbed him through his thigh.

  He dropped to one knee with a cry of pain and lunged forward with his own blade. It caught her in the belly but it was a weak blow, dulled by shock and hurt, and it skidded across her arming jacket before it drew blood, slicing along her waist and then bloodying her arm on the backstroke. She reeled backwards and he saw her fingers open, and yet the rapier hung in her hand still, refusing to be dropped.

  He stood, fell to his knee almost immediately, but already loosing his sting at her. It melted a fist-sized dent in the metal of the Pride as she lurched out of the way.

  ‘You killed him!’ she screamed at Thalric, and he fell back and rolled as she lunged at him, the rapier’s tip drawing a line of blood across his scalp. He came up swinging, forcing her back, left hand pulled back for another shot.

  Tisamon lurched to his feet. They were both deadly still in that moment as he levered himself halfway up, and then forced himself to rise the rest of the way. One arm was wrapped about his burned side, but his claw hung ready for battle, steeped in the blood of two dozen Wasps and not slaked yet.

  His bared teeth might have been a grimace of pain or a smile of anticipation.

  Faced with that sight, wounded and battered and with this monster on its feet again and standing like an executioner, Thalric felt his nerve falter. He had feared before, but it had been a rational fear. Now he kicked backwards, wings flickering in and out of his back, putting a distance between himself and this mad killer and his even worse daughter. Then his men were there, rushing into the fray, and he watched Tisamon and Tynisa take them on. Both injured, both more ragged in movement than before, and yet they held their ground. Thalric gathered himself, looking round for the automotive which surely must be there by now.

  It was burning, he now saw. Three legs were rigid and one gone entirely, flames licked from within its cabin, gusted from its eyeslit. Beyond it he could see a slow trail of fire in the sky where the spotter blimp was drifting downwards in ruin.

  Che pulled another two levers and turned one of the crank wheels, feeling the power within the engine start to vibrate the footplates beneath her. She was almost there, she knew. The glass-fronted chamber was almost incandescent, with Scuto peering into it through two layers of cloth. She could feel the whole of the Pride shaking, and she knew its inventors had never intended such intense stresses on it.

  ‘Almost,’ she said, and gave the wheel another three turns, bringing the supercharged elements within the engine’s long body closer and closer. She could only imagine the lightning crackling one to another, faster and faster until it was lightning no longer, but pure motive power.

  ‘Che—’ Scuto began nervously.

  ‘Just a little more,’ she told him.

  ‘Che!’ he said. ‘No more! We have to go!’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, and looked up from the controls.

  He was only half there, or so her eyes told her. The half of him furthest from that window was dark shadow, the rest was invisible in a sea of light. Not heat, she realized, pure light, and yet the thick glass was running like ice on a warm morning, limned with a molten glow, streaking the metal beneath it to puddle like wax on the floor.

  ‘We have to go!’ he said again desperately, and then with all his might, for those close to the Pride, he yelled, ‘Everybody clear of the train!’

  Tynisa heard the Thorn
Bug’s wild cry. She saw the surviving Wasps were already being routed, those few that could. She looked at Tisamon and saw him ashen even in the moonlight, swaying.

  She caught him, got his arm over her shoulder and her arm about his waist. He barked with the pain, but there was no time, no time. Behind them white light was streaming from the Pride’s cab, and from the very seams of its engine housing.

  There was a Wasp ahead of them on one knee, the very man who had shot Tisamon. She readied her rapier, hoping to cut him down before he could loose his sting or cut at them. For a moment she met his eyes, seeing pain and bitterness and a certain resignation. Then he was gone, his wings casting him high into the sky.

  And she ran, and Tisamon ran when he could and she dragged him when he couldn’t.

  And they fell. She looked back then, at the Pride, which was leaking fire at every rivet hole.

  She saw it explode.

  Except it was not that, not quite. The roof of the engine chamber burst open with a thunderous peal and a bolt of lightning shot straight upwards at clouds that were forming even then, spewing out of a vortex above the stricken Pride, enough to blot out the moon.

  And a clear second later, the lightning lashed down, a stabbing spear of blinding white that struck the Pride square on and blasted it to pieces. She was blinded by it, seeing white only, and deafened because of the thunder that rumbled on and on in the sky.

  She realized then that she had not seen Che get clear of the doomed engine before the bolt struck.

  Tynisa awoke slowly, knowing pain. She had shifted position, and sleep had cast her out of its welcome embrace at once. The world was now contracted to a dull throb in her side, a slightly sharper one in her arm. But of course, though the latter cut was shallower, she had worked with that arm, fighting that last squad of soldiers beside her father, and then she had been running, his weight bearing down on her, and there had been that cataclysmic explosion of light and metal . . .

  And she remembered precious little more. Her strength had not lasted much past that moment.

  She had no idea where she was. Perhaps the Wasps caught me!

  That forced her to open her eyes. The room was dim, lit only by windows high in the walls. For a moment she thought she was back in the resistance shelter in Myna, but the architecture here was different, only the mood was the same.

  She propped herself up on one elbow, discovering that someone had cleaned and dressed her wounds. To one side there was a woman she recognized vaguely as one of Scuto’s crew who had fought alongside her. She was still asleep, or unconscious, and there were blotched bandages neatly wrapped about her head and chest. To Tynisa’s unprofessional eye the woman looked in a bad way.

  Beyond her was Tisamon. He slept, too. Tynisa sat up, feeing her side twinge, the stitches pull, but hold. He lived, then. His bare chest rose and fell, and she saw the extent of the burn that he had taken, a shiny blemish across his skin from waist almost to collarbone, all up one side. But he lived: she had not known, in those confused last moments, if any of them would.

  She looked to the other side, and saw a Moth’s back as he knelt beside another pallet. Somehow she knew it was Achaeos, and realized this because he no longer held himself quite like others of his race. Something had opened up in him.

  She shifted round, and as he turned at the sound she saw that he was tending to Che.

  The girl was awake, but she had dozens of tiny wounds, small patches of bandage across her face and shoulders and body. Tynisa gaped at the extent of it.

  ‘Is that what the . . . the explosion . . . ?’

  There was a chuckling cough from near the foot of Che’s bed, and Tynisa saw that a second row of pallets had been laid toe to toe with her own row, and that Scuto was there. He lay, improbably, on his front, and she saw his back was a war of blisters across the blasted landscape of his spines.

  ‘I’m afraid that scattershot was me,’ the Thorn Bug said. ‘We’d only got a second, and I just grabbed ’er up and jumped. Sometimes I forget my own shape, you know. All shallow, though, and they’ll heal good as new, mind, ’cos Beetles is tough buggers, but they had to cut her armour off ’er before they could prise it off me.’

  ‘And . . . ? How did we do? Who did we lose?’

  ‘Enough,’ said Scuto soberly. ‘Rakka’s gone. Pedro and Halyard Brighter. Archedamae, who took a hit when we got out of the workshop, she died while we were fighting at the Pride. More, more and more. Easier to name the survivors. Balkus didn’t get scratched, the bastard, but Sperra’s all cut up. You’ve seen Hadraxa to your right, and she’s not so good. All in all I’ve got five left, including me. That’s the Helleron operation. I mean, we did our bit, in the end, made it worth the chief putting us here, but we paid for it. The lad’s lot there, they took their cuts as well.’ Achaeos just nodded. Tynisa saw that he held one of Che’s hands anxiously in both of his.

  Thalric gritted his teeth as the field surgeon dealt with his leg, the heated needle passing deftly back and forth as Thalric bit down on the softwood bar and winced.

  ‘You were lucky with this one, sir,’ the surgeon announced, and Thalric knew that he had dealt with many less lucky men before this particular job. ‘A little off and the big blood vessel would have been cut. Dead in minutes then, sir.’

  And there were two suits of armour riven before that blade even bloodied me. Not quite true, of course. In the way of ripping both his prized copperweave and the regulation imperial light cuirass, it had drawn a pretty scar from his nipple to his navel, but he had taken worse than that and still fought on.

  Beside the failure of the previous night, any injury short of death was light work. There was a blank scroll waiting for him, and what he wrote there would go to Colonel Latvoc or General Reiner or some other Rekef official, who would decide just how much he had lost the Empire by his failure.

  The Wasps were already packing up their camp beside Helleron. There were impatient delegations from the Council of Magnates, who were becoming more difficult to fob off with misdirection. They wanted to know whether it was the Empire that had destroyed Helleron’s Pride. Telling them that they, the Wasps, had been trying to save it only posed further awkward questions. This setback might claim Thalric’s career. It might even claim his life, politics being what they were, but it would barely dent the Empire’s ambition.

  He had often wondered how he would take an occasion like this, when his star had fallen but the Empire still peopled the night sky with its lights, and he was both surprised and relieved to find he took comfort in that. He could be lost, but he was only one small piece of the machine, and the machine itself would go on forever. To the south the assault on Tark would be starting any day, if it had not begun already. Tark would fall as Ant cities always fell to the Empire, with a bloody, brutal, no-quarter fight, but overwhelmed by an enemy more numerous, more mobile, broader of thought, and ruthless of purpose.

  And Helleron? Thalric would return home with the balance of his two thousand soldiers, but either he, or his successor, would be back with five thousand, or perhaps he would counsel fifty thousand. The Helleron Beetles were already telling themselves that the entire Imperial Army was at Tark – for the news was finally breaking here – but the men who were in sight of Tark’s walls were only the Fourth Army, supported by a few Auxillian battalions and some detachments of the Engineering Corps. The Empire had plenty of armies to spare, as Helleron would discover.

  As the surgeon swabbed off the stitched wound and closed his toolbag, Thalric began to compose his report, without emotion or fear.

  Stenwold gathered up those who could travel. After the two days that had passed, that included Che, Tynisa and even Tisamon, although the Mantis was still pained by his wound and kept his chest bare, his arming jacket slung open over his shoulders.

  ‘Now comes the time,’ Stenwold told them simply. ‘We have struck a small victory against a great enemy, not for Helleron, or Collegium, or revenge, or justice, or anything so small.
We have done it for all the Lowlands, so the Lowlands retains a chance to lock shields against the foe.

  ‘But of course it is only one blow struck. There is now war in Tark as you know, and the Empire is sending more troops westwards, I guarantee it. We must carry the word ahead of them. Unity or slavery, these must be our watchwords, for they are no more than the flat truth. The future of the Lowlands: unity or slavery. The unity, if we achieve it, will never last. The slavery, however, might lie on our shoulders forever.

  ‘So I myself am bound for Collegium, which is the best soil we have for unity to grow in. Collegium is already allied with the Ants of Sarn, and that net can spread. If Tark does fall, as I fear it will, it will serve as an example, burning letters ten feet high that state: The Empire Must Be Stopped.

  ‘And there will be danger aplenty, for the Wasps will have their agents in Collegium and Sarn and Merro, and all the other places, and they will be preaching to the great and the good of all those places that the Empire comes only to attack their enemies, not them. They will tell each city to rub its hands as its ancient rivals fall, and in this way they will seek to eat the Lowlands bit by bit, and they may even succeed.

  ‘Ours will not be a war of swords, but of words. The swords are there, but we must convince the hands that hold them to draw them from the scabbard, to let them flash defiance in the sun.

  ‘I have sent messengers already, to Collegium, to Sarn, even to the Spiderlands, whose denizens have always worked against Lowlander unity in the past. There is no hand from which I would not take help at this point. I would write to the underground halls of the Centipede kingdom or the Mosquito Lords if they were anything more than a myth. Perhaps, if matters grow much worse, I will do so anyway.’

  He looked over his audience, battered and bruised as they were. His niece and his adopted daughter, and her true father; the ever-faithful, durable Scuto, and Balkus the mercenary Ant-kinden, who had not been paid and yet was here; Achaeos, forever inscrutable, here amidst his traditional enemies; Sperra the Fly-kinden, who had insisted on being carried from her convalescence to hear his words.