But even Spiders, it was said, got caught in their own traps, every so often.
Lineo Thadspar led them out onto the steps, and the roar of approval seemed to shake the very marble beneath them, making Stenwold stagger a little until Balkus caught his good arm to steady him. There were no words in that roar, but the unadulterated joy of a people freed from terror. Ever since the previous Vekken attack had retreated from the city before the arrival of a Sarnesh relief force, in the days when these grown men of Collegium were but boys, there had been the knowledge that the Vekken would try again. Now the Vekken army had been smashed so decisively it would take that city a decade to regain its strength.
Thadspar had been intending to speak but the crowd just would not be silent, continuing to thunder its approval for the saviours of the city. A junior artificer had hurried forward and passed Thadspar a speaking horn, but there was not a device invented that would have made his voice clear over that joyous throng, and so he waited. Stenwold, who had always taken the old man for a shrewd politician, saw tears in his eyes.
Back in a guest suite, and under heavy guard, was Thalric – Major Thalric of the Rekef – who had limped into the city with Stenwold’s name on his lips. Major Thalric, who had nowhere else to go, by his own story, and so had finally come here.
‘What would I do with you?’ Stenwold had asked him sharply. ‘We are enemies, you and I.’ He could not rid himself of what this man had been ready to do to his niece Che, when she had been in his clutches.
‘I have only enemies left in the world,’ Thalric had admitted. He was a man fighting to control his circumstances, not drowning but not swimming either. The next adverse wave could swallow him. ‘The fact that I am sitting here talking to you shows that you are less my enemy than those I once called friends. As for what I can do for you, I know something about what the Empire may do next. I know a great deal more than you about how the Empire does things.’
‘And how can I trust you?’
‘You’ll never know if you can,’ the Wasp had said, ‘and I’m sure that little traitress on your arm will urge you to put me to death but, really, will you ever have a better chance?’
Stenwold frowned, now, in retrospect. He did not want this, to be here at the focus of all this cheer and attention. Instead he needed to deal with Thalric and make his decision. He hated unfinished business.
Still, if he put those nagging thoughts aside, just for a moment, there was some strange satisfaction in finding himself here in a jubilant scene that would surely be recorded in history books to come. The saviours of Collegium, the defiers of Vek. Thadspar stood with the other surviving members of the War Council, fewer than might have been expected, and a handful of other citizens who had led the defence: militia officers, stalwart merchants and artisans, and College artificers, even Master Hornwhill, who had been so very reluctant for his inventions to be used at all. Balkus stood shoulder to shoulder with the Tarkesh commander, Parops, and beside them was the slighter, rangier form of Dariaxes, with his constant copper smile. Then there was Teornis of the Aldanrael, dressed as soldier-gone-fop in a gold breastplate, jewelled gorget and a helmet adorned with glittering wings. His expression was one of modest contentment, which drew attention to him far more than waving and grinning ever could. There were others, too, of his own company: Scorpion, Fly, Dragonfly, Spider. The steps before the Amphiophos were crowded today.
At last the crowd had quieted enough for Thadspar to be heard, and he left it another beat before he spoke.
‘Citizens of Collegium, this day shall be recounted to our children so that it never be forgotten,’ he said, his voice booming metallically from the horn. ‘To teach them, we must learn many lessons ourselves. We might learn from this that we are strong in ourselves, for it is true. Most important, we may learn that we are strong in our friends – you see those around me, do you not? There is not one man or woman standing before you who has not earned their place on these steps but, in truth, if all who had earned such a place were given it, then we would need steps that spanned our whole city! I see those before me who have shed blood for their city. I see the peaceable citizens who took up the sword and the crossbow without fear or complaint. This victory belongs to every one of us.
‘But look again at these who stand beside me, familiar faces and strangers both. Our true celebration must not be for the destruction of the Vekken who, but for their misguided envy, should not even have been our enemies. Instead, it should be for this alliance, this company you see before you. When else, in all the years this city has stood, known as Collegium of the Beetles or even as Pathis of the Moths so long before, has such a band of allies been ranged together? You see here Ants from the city-states of Sarn and Tark who have fought side by side for Collegium. You see lords of the Spiderlands, and the allies they have brought with them whose faces have never been seen in our community before.
‘And more than this, I look into your faces, and I see Fly-kinden, Mantis, even Moth. And more, I see in my mind all the faces of those who cannot be with us, who have been cut down in this war, and they were many, and of all kinden, and this day is also theirs. We must never forget all those who gave everything for us. Where you stand now there shall be a memorial carved, and I wish every one of you to bring us the names of those you knew who fell, and each one shall have its place. The gate of the west wall, whose shutters, I am informed, can never rise again, shall never be reopened, and a new gate will be built where the Vekken made their breach. In this way, by including it into the very structure of our city, we shall never forget our friends, or our victory.’
Thadspar accepted a bowl of wine from a servant, drained it, and handed it back, pausing a moment before continuing.
‘Many of you will have heard that in the east a new power is brewing,’ he told the crowd. ‘They are Wasp-kinden, and they call themselves an Empire. You may even have heard that they have taken the city of Tark for their personal possession, and we know this is true. Their forces even now threaten Sarn.
‘We have never seen their like before. Some of you may know that War Master Stenwold Maker has been warning of their power for many years, and I say now, as Speaker for the Assembly, that it is to our shame that we did not heed him sooner. The Wasps wish to see us destroyed, and why? Why us? Look upon these men and women ranged beside me, and that is your answer. All of us, standing here, we are the Lowlands entire, and to conquer the Lowlands, their Empire must first conquer us!
‘We have won a battle,’ Thadspar told them finally. ‘We still must fight a war.’
Stenwold thought that he should feel triumphant, that his warnings had finally been heeded, that Collegium was at last committed openly to opposing the Empire. Instead he just felt tired, heading back with Balkus and Arianna to speak once again to Thalric – to interpret the foreign script of his prisoner’s face and try to master its grammar.
‘Good speech,’ Balkus rumbled beside him. ‘Of course, I’m not really Sarnesh any more. I did wonder why they wanted me up there.’
Stenwold was about to reply when he saw a young Beetle waiting to see him as he approached Thalric’s suite.
‘Master Maker!’ he got out. ‘There’s someone to see you. Says it’s urgent!’
Then a Fly-kinden had bolted past him, virtually bouncing off from Stenwold before she had come to a halt.
‘What’s—’ Stenwold started, but Balkus got out, ‘Sperra!’
Stenwold stared at her, seeing a thin and grubby Fly woman who looked as though she had neither eaten nor slept for days.
‘But you were in Sarn . . .’ he said stupidly.
Balkus knelt quickly towards her, and Sperra leant against him gratefully. She looked half-dead with exhaustion.
‘The Sarnesh have fought the Wasps . . . field battle,’ she got out. ‘They lost, pulled out . . . when the train got us back to Sarn we had news from here that the Vekken had been turned. I got on a train to get here right away – didn’t stop for anything. I broug
ht the Moth-boy. He got himself hurt. They put him in a Wayhouse hospice nearby.’
Something in her manner, in the words left unsaid, had crept up on Stenwold, and now he said softly, ‘Slow down now. What about Cheerwell?’
‘Master Maker, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Che was supposed to be in the last automotive off the field, only . . . it never made it back to the city. I’m so sorry.’
Forty
It was the greatest magic, from the very ebbing shores of the Days of Lore.
Here, within these close-knit tree trunks, treading ancient paths through the forest, they came on a moonless night. Tramping lines of grey-robed figures made their unfaltering way through the pitch-dark with their heads bowed. There was a sense of desperation about them, of tattered pride held up like a standard. How much had already been lost, to have brought them to this state?
Watch closely, little acolyte.
There were lamps ahead, though dim: wicker baskets crowded with fireflies lending an underwater radiance to the tree boles, and not even touching the shadows between them. Figures waited there, tall and stark. There was black metal there, scale armour, spearheads. This grove was sacred, and the idol to their Art that they kept here was a mere stump, the relic of a thousand years of rot and busy agents of decay. Around it the Mantis-kinden stood, like statues themselves, and with some were the great hunched forms of their insect siblings, their killing arms folded as if in silent contemplation.
Watch closely, little neophyte.
In solemn procession the robed men and women wound their way between the trunks to them. Night was all around them, yet a dawn had come to the world that no shadows could resist. This was the end of the Days of Lore, and across the Lowlands their dominion was shrinking by the day. Their ancient cities were overthrown: Pathis, Tir Amec, Shalarna and Amirra had fallen as the slaves rebelled, and not all their craft, not all the killing steel of their Mantis soldiers, could stem that tide. The slaves, the dull-witted and the ugly, the graceless and the leaden, had cast them off. They had made themselves armour and terrifying new weapons, and they had declared themselves free.
Pathis, Tir Amec, Shalarna, Amirra.
And Achaeos’s mind called up the counterparts: Collegium, Tark, Sarn and Myna. And how many more had been the haunts of his own Moth people, that none now even remembered?
And when unity was most needed there had been schism. Centuries of strife had held the Moth-kinden together. They had raised armies against the Centipede-kinden who had erupted from the earth. They had staved off or defeated the machinations of all the other sorcerous powers: Spiders and Mosquitoes, the sly Assassin Bugs and the ancient buried kingdoms of the Slugs. The revolt of the slaves had struck at their very being, and they had flown to pieces. Some counselled peace, some retreat and isolation. Factions and parties grew, and when blades were raised they fell brother on brother, and all the while the inexorable tide of history was sweeping them aside, leaving little sign that they had ever existed.
You have seen some of our stones in Collegium that still stand, and the sewers at Myna that the Mole Crickets built for us. What else remains?
And so this. At last, this. This last attempt to summon the guttering forces of the old magic that the Moths had once lived and breathed – this most ambitious of all rituals. They were renegades, of course. Even those in Tharn or Dorax who advocated war and bloody retribution would have nothing to do with this. These outcasts had vowed to risk anything, to use up all the credit their kinden had amassed. They had come to the Mantis-kinden with stories of revenge, and the warrior-race had listened to them. Thus they had come here.
To Darakyon.
To the Darakyon, Achaeos thought. The Darakyon is a forest. ‘Darakyon’ alone would be a Mantis hold, and there is no such hold there.
But there was.
Here was the hold of Darakyon, seen in brief glimpses in the darkness between the trees, and here was its heart, its idol, once as sacred as that of Parosyal, a place of pilgrimage, of reverence.
They were gathered about it now, those robed shadows, and the Mantis-kinden stood proud and strong, their beast-allies beside them, and waited for the might of the Days of Lore to smite the unbelievers, to fragment their minds and terrorize them.
It was the darkest and the greatest magic ever plotted, to put a shadow on the Lowlands that would last a hundred years, to shatter the spirits of the people of the daylight and drag them down into slavery. A spell to taint the whole world and wash away the revolution, even down to the ideas that had fermented it. A spell that would sicken the world to their children’s children’s children, or for ever.
It was the greatest magic, the darkest magic, and it went so terribly wrong.
I do not want to see this, Achaeos pressed, but the whispering chorus of voices was unmoved.
You could not understand, little seerling, so we must show you.
And he watched, without a head to turn aside, without eyes to close, as the ritual reached its bloody peak and the magic began to tear apart. He saw the deed that wiped the hold of Darakyon from all maps and made the forest of that name into the place of dread that even the lumberjacks of Helleron or the Empire would not approach, and he screamed, but chill hands held him and forced him to see it all, every moment of its demise.
And he saw what was done to the men and women of Darakyon, and how they were made to linger beyond time in that place, forever hating, forever vengeful and in pain.
But most of all he saw what they made of the rotten idol, and all the unfathomable power and evil that their ritual released. He saw it, small and deeply carved and potent beyond the dreams of Skryres, and knew that it was abroad in the world again, a tool for whatever evil hand should find it.
In the form of the Shadow Box. The soul of the Darakyon.
‘So tell me,’ Stenwold said, ‘why I should take the appalling risk of keeping you close, or even keeping you alive.’
Thalric smiled, reclining easily behind the table as though he were back in his own study. ‘You should start thinking like a man of your profession, Master Maker, and not just a Lowlander. I was a spymaster once. We both know the value of an enemy agent turned.’
‘I couldn’t trust you.’
‘You have the craft to weigh what I tell you. I can be of more value to you than ever your Spider girl turncoat is.’
‘No, you cannot,’ Stenwold said flatly.
Thalric raised an eyebrow. ‘Is it like that, then? Well then, do you want me to tell you about her? The truth? You must be still wondering whether the subtle Spider has spun a straight line?’
‘Thalric,’ Stenwold said warningly, and found his hand at his sword-hilt, and the Wasp’s gaze followed it.
‘I did not take you for a killer of unarmed prisoners.’
‘You’re Wasp-kinden,’ Stenwold pointed out. ‘Therefore you’re never unarmed. What do you want, Thalric?’
Thalric stood up from the table, a little of his casual ease sloughing off him. ‘I have been alone before, and hunted, but never so much of both at once. There was always the Empire. Now I find that the Empire I knew is a hollow egg. The insides are rotting with factions and I, who have disdained them, have become a casualty of politics. You believe, Stenwold, in something beyond yourself?’
‘I believe that it is the duty of the strong to help the weak, and of men and women to live in peace and to build together,’ the Beetle said, without even thinking. That was the doctrine so much of Collegiate thought was based on.
‘I believe in the Empire, but it did not bear the weight of my belief,’ Thalric said.
‘So you’re more imperial than the Empire now, is that it?’ Stenwold shook his head. ‘I can’t see you as such a thorough turncoat.’
‘I had my chance to die for my beliefs, Master Maker,’ Thalric said with surprising emotion, ‘but when they came for me, at the last, I fought them. I made my decision then. I can no longer claim now to be a loyal son of the Empire, having failed to follow
its last command. I have to live, Maker, and you know as well as I the fate that awaits an agent cut loose by either side. He falls, Maker. He falls and is gone. So employ me, make use of me, while you still have me.’
‘Sit down again,’ Stenwold said, and then, ‘Let’s talk.’
Thalric returned to the table, glancing up at Arianna’s hostile gaze. ‘She would still see me dead, I observe.’
‘Perhaps she has more sense than I do,’ Stenwold said. ‘What do you know of the forces currently marching on Sarn?’
Thalric raised his eyebrows. ‘From what I recall, the Seventh had the honour set aside for it – General Malkan’s Winged Furies. Malkan is the Empire’s youngest general, and very ambitious.’
‘What is the Empire’s attitude to taking prisoners after a field battle, Thalric?’
The question was obviously not one the Wasp had expected. ‘It depends on the battle. A battle against Ants would see few prisoners taken. If the fighting was bitter then the soldiers may leave none alive to be taken, whether they have surrendered or not.’
Stenwold found himself gripping the table, imagining Che surrendering with hands out in supplication, yet the swords still coming down.
‘So the Sarnesh have lost a battle,’ Thalric mused. ‘Who did you have with them, Master Maker?’ When Stenwold did not reply, he said, ‘Not your niece?’
There was no mockery in his tone, so Stenwold nodded.
‘I am sorry,’ said Thalric, and when the Beetle glared at him he continued, ‘She impressed me as a woman of intelligence and resource.’ He seemed to brace himself before adding, ‘Do you want me to go and find her for you?’
‘You?’ Stenwold demanded, puzzled.
‘With appropriate help,’ Thalric said, and it was clear that he was wrestling the idea into shape even as he spoke. ‘I might be able to achieve it, for I am at least of the right kinden, and among the thousands in Malkan’s army, I could appear just one more foot soldier, one more of the light airborne.’
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