‘Neither did the Vekken campaign,’ General Brugan added darkly.
Major Daklan was in charge of that, you bastard. A brief memory, of Daklan’s blade driving into him, made him twitch.
‘And then you went rogue, I’m told,’ the woman noted. Her face told him that she knew to the last detail all the circumstances, and that he would be able to use none of them in his defence. He did not feel up to singing the old tune: you sold me out before I sold you. It was not as though it would make any difference.
‘Collegium, Jerez, and then you turn up in Myna and kill General Reiner. And then you surrender to the army, who bring you here. Why, Thalric? Tell me why.’
‘Why to which question?’ he asked. ‘There is no one reason for all of it.’
‘What a complex man you are.’ All the humour was gone from her face. ‘So tell me why you killed the general, Thalric.’
A hundred flippant answers came to him and he brushed them all away. Let them kill me for the truth, why not? Let them rack me and crush me, and find in the end only what they had at the start. ‘He cast me off. He let them send men to kill me, simply because of politics,’ he told her. ‘I had always served the Empire faithfully, and yes, I have not always triumphed, but the Empire was all I ever cared about. He cast me off. He let them take me. Then, when I was caught in Myna, he took it all back. He gave me back my rank and my place, and said he needed me again, but not to serve the Empire, just for his own private schemes.’ The rush of emotion he felt now putting it all into words thoroughly shocked him. ‘And do you know what? He got on my nerves. All the things I had done for him, that at the time I thought I had been doing for the Empire. All those muddied waters, the children I killed and the friends I betrayed, and was it for Empire, or just for Reiner? I’d never know. I’d only know that Empire’s good and general’s ambition were not the same thing any more. And he sat there, taking it all back and about to give me orders, and I just couldn’t take any more of him. And so I did it, and I defy anyone to honestly claim they wouldn’t have done the same. He was an irritating man.’
General Brugan’s mouth twitched just the once.
‘I killed Colonel Latvoc as well,’ Thalric added, as though this was some obscure mitigation.
The woman’s hand waved, consigning Latvoc to the oubliette of history. ‘And you really expect us to believe you did it all for the Empire?’
‘Not for a moment,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t make it any less true.’
‘You’re a presumptuous man. For the Empire? Most would be glad enough to do it for a superior officer, for their general, for their own self-interest, for the Emperor even. The Empire is a large master to claim.’
‘That is why it is fit to be served,’ replied Thalric. The evident sincerity in his own tone surprised him.
The woman stood up, still looking at him.
He shrugged again. ‘What do you want from me? You may as well just take it. I’m in no position to stop you, whoever you are.’
‘I will have to think about what I want from you,’ she said, and stepped neatly from the room, leaving him for the guards to manhandle away. Only later, after he had been cast back into his cell, did some thought of who she might be occur to him.
* * *
It had been a long night, and sleep was slow in coming. Tisamon suspected that he was staving it off because of the unsettling dreams. In his dreams he saw Laetrimae in all her riddled detail. That was all the dream consisted of. He was made to stare and stare at her despoiled flesh, her hybrid carapace and the constant piercings of the vines. He was a prisoner even in sleep now, and the blood he shed in the fighting pits was more wholesome than the sight of that mangled but undying cadaver.
The failure of all our kinden. Laetrimae and he, they were well matched in that. They had both led ruined lives, bitter ones, twisting inwards and inwards until they stood face to face in this sunless cell. The only thing that stood between them was five hundred years of torment, but he felt as though he was rapidly catching her up.
They brought Thalric back to the cells eventually. The Wasp had no words for him, although his skin looked as intact as it had done when he was dragged away. Thalric could make out the long scar that Tynisa had given him in Helleron, but it was only one amongst so many. The world had done its best to kill Thalric. And he has survived, for this?
Ah, Tynisa. And was she captured yet? Dead yet? And, if not, then surely the sands were running out on her. She would come stalking into the palace to find her father, but she was not skilled enough, as Tisamon well knew, to survive it. He had taught her all he could, but it was an errand he himself would have died in attempting.
And yet I might have tried it, even so. She is my daughter, yet.
It was a curse he would not wish on anyone, to possess his tainted blood in her veins. Instead I would tell her, look to Stenwold. There is your model for a proper life, a life of meaning.
He wondered if, somehow, it would have been possible to sever that twisted, self-hating part of himself, cut it away, cast it off. What manner of father would he have been to the girl then? A better one, surely.
When yet another stranger came to stare at Tisamon, the Mantis did not even look at him, at least not at first. He did not mark Thalric’s abrupt flinching away, nor did he care much about the two armoured sentinels that stood behind the visitor with spears at the ready. It was Ult that Tisamon finally noticed: Ult’s peculiar response to the newcomer. The visitor himself never glanced at the old man but Tisamon read it all in his reaction: here was a man that Ult feared, and revered, and hated so fiercely and intensely, all emotions melted together in the same pot. It told Tisamon who the newcomer was more eloquently than words.
He was young, this man, or at least younger than Tisamon: young and clean-featured and handsome in the Wasp way, fair-haired and well-dressed. His style was that of rich Wasp men, favouring garments that were loose-cut and intricately embroidered, yet with a military stamp still very much in evidence – and the fashion was so because this man dressed in such garb.
Tisamon finally turned to look with curiosity upon his Imperial Majesty Alvdan the Second.
‘This is him, is it?’ Alvdan asked, eyeing Tisamon without much interest. ‘This is your killer Mantis.’
Ult murmured something that might be, ‘Yes, your Imperial Majesty.’
‘We have heard that he fights well, and we hope we have been correctly advised.’
Again Ult murmured some confirmation.
Alvdan met Tisamon’s gaze and the Mantis saw that here was a man to be reckoned with: not vain or foppish but insecure and intelligent, the two qualities that ever honed the tyrant.
‘What will he fight?’
‘I’ve not made my final choice for the warm-ups yet, your Imperial Majesty,’ Ult mumbled. ‘A beast first, probably. Then I was thinking a bare-hand match, since he does that well.’
As Alvdan made a slight, dismissive sound, Ult hurried on.
‘Then for last we’ve got a Commonwealer.’
Alvdan smiled at that. ‘The best of the Lowlands against the best of the Commonweal. That may indeed entertain us. This Commonwealer is skilled?’
‘She’s something very special as well,’ Ult confirmed.
‘She? One of their fighting women? Yes, that will be appreciated,’ Alvdan remarked, with a dry smirk. Looking straight into Tisamon’s face, his eyes suddenly narrowed.
‘We do not like this Mantis,’ he decided. ‘His people have been a considerable obstacle to our armies, we understand.’
Ult said nothing, just waiting.
‘When the fight is done, between this one and the Commonwealer, the winner shall be executed on crossed pikes, in the arena.’
Ult pursed his lips but said nothing.
‘Our people shall see that our enemies do not prosper, even though they entertain us. Arrange it.’
The Emperor strode off, his guards in tow, and Tisamon watched Ult staring after them, the hat
red naked on his face. He saw that a man who lived as Ult lived, with the lives of all around him passing like water through his hands, must come to grief eventually. When he did he would have two choices: he must despise the wretches that he sent to their deaths, day in, day out, or he must despise those who command it.
Twenty-Three
Colonel Gan was still governor of Szar, but merely by a knife-edge. More than half of the city was denied to his troops, for over thirty of the city’s orderly little streets had been barricaded, and these barricades were made of metal riveted to metal, dug firmly into the earth. They would not stop the Wasp airborne, of course, but they had already made wrecks out of several of Gan’s automotives. The Bee-kinden had always been notable craftsmen.
In this way a line had been drawn across the city. There had already been several hundred dead Wasps, and three times as many locals, in skirmishes along the barricades. The Bees had meanwhile captured two of the arms factories that for the last decade had happily been providing the Empire with its weaponry. They wore Wasp armour painted over in russet, bore pikes, swords, crossbows and a scattering of more sophisticated weapons, while some of the barricades had ballistae to back them up. The Bees fought without flair but with a solid determination that made it almost impossible to wear them down. Yesterday thirty of Gan’s men had pinned three of the locals within a makeshift shelter and called for their surrender. It had not been forthcoming, for the same blind devotion that had kept the people of Szar docile under imperial rule while their old queen still lived now gripped them with a spirit of rebellion under Queen Maczech.
I could break them, Gan liked to think, with enough men. The Bee-kinden fought with a cold fury, though. They were not the natural soldiers that the Imperial Army were but they would simply not give ground without blood spilt for every inch. When cornered, they fought with a savage, fearless fury, and they made every action, even those guaranteed to succeed, absurdly costly in lives and in time.
And then there was the problem of the Colonel-Auxillian. In the last tenday, Gan’s life had become a twisted nightmare: his command usurped, his men intimidated, his very grasp of warfare ridiculed, and all at the hands of an arrogant halfbreed. I should have him seized and whipped. I should have him made to disappear. But the Emperor himself had signed the orders that brought Drephos to Szar. He made no secret of how much he loathed being here, and Gan made no secret of returning that loathing in full force. But the man was here now, and Gan could only step back and watch as the newcomer’s men stole away the existing garrison, put them to work, berated them and monopolized Gan’s engineers. Gan himself was becoming a recluse in his own city. Every time he gave an order he discovered that Drephos had already been there. And what was the man doing, anyway? Being no artificer, Gan had no idea. At those points where Gan would have been mustering men for an assault on the barricades, Drephos was instead setting up great machines.
To Totho’s eye, they were something like leadshotters, but more delicate and longer in the barrel, cluttered with mechanisms to give their artillerists as much control over force and aim as artifice could provide. Instead of volatile firepowder, they housed steam engines for a less violent discharge of their ammunition. There were high watch platforms built beside them, from which engineers could see the lie of the city and thus make precise calculations of their exacting trajectories. When these engines loosed their loads, the shot would sail serenely overhead to land far inside the rebel-held districts of the city. Beside them sat canisters of the same stuff that had killed the soldiers, an invention of the Beetle twins, the dreadful potency of which had driven them to suicide. In assisting with the construction, Totho had seen enough to understand the plan. True to his stated aims, Drephos had taken war to a new level.
They had not been meant for this eventuality, however. Drephos had intended to deploy them against the defenders of Sarn, or the Sarnesh field army if it was foolish enough to venture forth. However, little adaptation had been needed to comply with the Emperor’s present wishes. Drephos had done most of the work himself with almost indecent speed, eager to return to what he saw as his true place on the front line itself.
The Szaren resistance assumed that there was a stalemate, and meanwhile the Bee-kinden were gathering their forces, making themselves strong. Scouts’ reports came back now with news that, as well as the stolen arms and armour of the Empire, more and more of the Szaren were wearing their own traditional styles: breastplates and helms freshly painted in russet bands, or great, intricately articulated suits of sentinel plate. Some of these had lain in storage these past fifteen years, waiting as patiently as their owners for the call to arms, others were newly smithed. The Bee-kinden were rediscovering their heritage.
But there was no stalemate, of course, as Totho knew well. There was just a peculiarity of the weather, for the wind was currently adverse. The breeze was gusting against the imperial forces, enough for them to hear the clatter and scrape of armed locals from ten streets away. The engines only sat idle while Drephos waited for a favouring wind, and he would not have to wait long.
The thought of what would then happen made Totho tremble. Even stretching his mind, he could not quite fit the concept in. There were hundreds of thousands of Bee-kinden here in Szar. It was formerly one of the industrial workhorses of the Empire. The Emperor had taken its rebellion personally, and he wanted an example made.
There would indeed be an example made, and it would be Drephos’ example of how war would be fought from now on. For Drephos had invented a war that needed no soldiers, only artificers, and his machines would soon make full-scale armies obsolete. The very concepts of war would change. Conquest would become devastation, attack would become annihilation: cities turned to cemeteries, farmland to wasteland. What would be seen here in Szar would stop the world in its tracks. In the wake of it, every artificer, every military power, every Ant city-state would be striving to copy what Drephos had done, and without possession of such weapons there would be no chance of continued liberty, or even survival. It was not simply a case of an improvement on an old idea, as the snapbow was to a crossbow, the crossbow to a thrown spear, the spear to a rock. It was a whole new method of warfare.
Totho sat in a corner of a workshop that he had marked out for himself, and tinkered with his new snapbow design, feeling obsolescence creeping over him already. This was not a war that he understood any more.
Kaszaat was kept under watch most of the time. This was not by Drephos’ orders but those of Colonel Gan, who could not accept that she was Drephos’ creature and not a spy of the rebellious locals. Totho knew that Gan was right to doubt her, and he was only thankful that he himself remained trusted enough that the spies would keep their distance when Kaszaat sought him out.
He had expected her to try to recruit him in her own tiny rebellion but, when she was with him, she made no mention of the great engines, of the poison or of Drephos. He did not know whether it was because she was uncertain of what move to make next, or whether she simply did not trust him.
I do not care what the history books will say.
But that was not entirely true, because Drephos had not managed to cut himself off from ordinary human feelings quite as thoroughly as he might have wished.
Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos now stood atop one of his observation platforms and looked out over the city of Szar, all those little low buildings, those innumerable factories and workhouses. It was evening now, late and getting later, but a strong breeze was predicted to begin before dawn, blowing in from behind him. Daylight would then see the engines begin their work.
In his mind’s eye, which was always sharper and more vivid than his actual sight, he could see it all: the canisters, full of poison held under immense pressure, would be hurled almost gently, tipping end over end into the sky. The locals would look up and wonder, at first. Only on impact would their casings crack open, their tight-pressed contents escape.
With Drephos’ arrival, Colonel Gan and his s
oldiers had ceased trying to break the rebel lines. With typical Bee-kinden thinking the locals had simply hunkered down and refortified, defensive to the last. They were a simple, industrious and inoffensive people, strong in their unity but in little enough else. That was the reason the world was not overrun with them. They were now waiting for the anticipated Wasp reinforcements to come, having heard there were 10,000 soldiers marching from the Capitas garrison. Drephos knew those men had now been diverted, however, redeployed to keep the lid on the situation at Myna, which he heard was deteriorating.
Let them first hear the news from Szar, and then let them think about their revolution, he reflected, but he felt oddly uncomfortable with the concept. This is war simply for politics’ sake. I prefer the reverse.
The canisters would burst asunder, and the gas would be let loose in the city. The natural breeze would keep the heavy gas from spreading back towards the Wasps, and the chemicals would pass through every window, into every cellar. Death would be relatively swift, but agonizing. The gas, once taken into the lungs, began to dissolve the very tissues, so that the victims died while trying to inhale the fluid of their own bodies. The Beetle twins had been great innovators in the field of alchemy, and Drephos had been lucky to have grabbed them for his own service.
Dead now, of course. He was disappointed in them for that, but he always failed to allow for basic human sentiment. It was such a weakening force. Besides, when it came to culpability, it would not be their names written in the history books.
Perhaps the Bee-kinden would seek shelter underground, considering so much of their city was dug into the earth. It would avail them naught since the gas, to be effective at all, needed to be heavier than air. It would sink inevitably into every cellar and tunnel and crevice, and if the Bees managed to board themselves up so tightly that the poison could not get in, well, neither could the air. Colonel Gan had already planned to send men in straight after the gas, to ‘clear up any remaining resistance’. His comprehension of what was about to happen was so blatantly limited that Drephos had not even begun to explain. He had simply warned that, wherever the gas lay, in any depression or hole or bunker, it would remain potent for many tendays.
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