Empire in Black and Gold sota-1

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She had stopped speaking, and he realized he had been nodding along without actually absorbing any of the words. ‘I suppose you think that scares me,’ he hazarded.

  ‘You have your once-only chance to cast your weapons down,’ the Dragonfly man snapped, icy voiced. ‘I suggest you take it.’

  Yeah, I thought it was something like that. ‘Nothing doing,’ Varmen said, talking to her and not to him. ‘Sorry, girl, but the first thing they teach you when you put on this armour is not to go knock-kneed with fear, ’cos of how everyone can hear you.’ Was that a bit of a smile? I think it was. Shame we all have to kill each other now, really. We were getting along famously.

  ‘Bring your worst,’ he finished.

  ‘Oh, we shall,’ the Dragonfly man promised. Varmen could see him raging inside, desperate to bring the fight to the Wasps. And you with a bow on your shoulder. Angry men make rotten archers, I know that much.

  ‘Bring your worst!’ Varmen repeated, ‘’Cos we’re the best — Pride of the Sixth!’

  The words rose up from behind him in a chorus of imperial solidarity.

  The man stalked away, and Varmen was mildly surprised that one of the Fly-kinden didn’t put an arrow in his oh-so-inviting back. The woman regarded him for a moment more, that very-nearly-almost-amused look still on her face, and then followed after. Varmen carefully stepped backwards until he could see Pellrec from the very corner of his visor.

  ‘How’d I do?’ he muttered.

  ‘Oh, I’m amazed the Emperor didn’t come round and hand out medals,’ the other sentinel told him. ‘What now?’

  ‘We fight.’

  ‘And when the Sixth doesn’t come, like she said?’

  ‘Feh.’ Varmen shrugged. ‘And why won’t they come?’

  ‘Well. .’ There was a pained pause, but Varmen wouldn’t look at him, so Pellrec went on, ‘There was the little thing about the whole Grand Army of three principalities currently beating on the Sixth like a man with a sick slave.’

  There was, was there? ‘And you believed it?’ Varmen raised his voice to carry to the men around them. ‘Of course they’re going to tell us that. Why would they even come here to ask for surrender, unless they were scared of us, eh?’

  He heard a subdued rustle of laughter as his tone rescued a little morale. Pellrec wasn’t fooled. Pellrec never was. Still, Pellrec would stand and fight alongside him whether he believed it or not. Sentinels didn’t break. ‘Pride of the Sixth,’ Varmen murmured to himself.

  ‘And here they come,’ Tserro said, and to his credit his voice was steady. Varmen dropped into his fighting stance, keeping his shield up, and the arrows began to arc into the firelight. He felt an impact on his shoulder, two or three on his shield. A sharp rap knocked his head to one side but he brought it back, waiting. The gash in the crashed heliopter was mostly filled with Varmen and his sentinels, and it would be a fine archer who could spin an arrow into a narrow eyeslit or up under an armpit at the range they were shooting at. Varmen heard a shout of pain from behind him, an errant missile catching one of the Fly-kinden in the leg after clipping Pellrec’s pauldron. Another splintered on a sentinel’s halberd blade.

  ‘Spears now,’ Tserro said. He must have been crouching high aloft, just behind and beside Varmen’s head.

  ‘Brace!’ Varmen shouted. Arrows began to dance the other way, the short shafts that the scouts used. Fly-kinden weren’t good for much, in Varmen’s estimation, but they were decent shots when their nerve held.

  The firelight caught movement, and then the Commonwealer soldiers were on them. They came running: lithe spearmen with thin leather cuirasses, archers in amongst them with arrows to the string, a rushing rabble of golden-skinned faces. Even as they hit the firelight, half of them were airborne, the wings of their Art flaring from their backs and shoulders, launching them up and forward. Their arrows kept coming, loosed on the run or on the wing. One struck Pellrec’s breastplate and bounded up into the mail under his chin, sticking and hanging there like a beard. Varmen heard several cries behind him as the missiles punched through the banded armour of Arken’s medium infantry. The Wasps were returning shot for shot. The light arrows of the scouts were cut through with crackling bolts of gold fire. Varmen saw a half-dozen of the Commonwealers go straight down. No decent armour and not a shield amongst them, he thought. The Dragonflies did have a few good military traditions, but most of their army was merely levy like this.

  ‘Pride of the Sixth!’ he called out and stepped forward just as the first spearman got to him. The Commonwealer’s wings flashed as he charged and the spear slammed into Varmen’s shield hard enough to stop both of them in their tracks. Varmen’s sword flashed down, knowing where the spear-shaft would be through the surface of the shield, hacking the head clean off it. The Dragonfly reached for a dagger but one of the Fly-kinden arrows lanced him through the throat and he dropped. Another two spears were coming in but Varmen’s shield was dancing on its own, his reflexes keeping it moving, covering throat and groin. An arrow clipped his helm and a spearhead was briefly lodged between the plates of his tassets. He swung his sword, tireless as an automaton, breaking spears and keeping them back while their friends tried to push forwards, and the Wasps behind him launched their sting-shot over his shoulders. It was an archer’s war. The sentinels stood as firm as a wall, and everyone else died at range, not even seeing the face of their killers. If Varmen and his fellows had fallen back, it would all have been over, the mob of Dragonfly levy swirling forward to run each Wasp and Fly onto a pike. They held against the ground troops, though, and those who tried to force through between the sentinels’ flashing weapons and the jagged edge of the heliopter’s top wall were picked off by the men behind.

  Abruptly as they had come, the Dragonflies broke off the attack, disappearing into the darkness, chased by a few hopeful arrows. Varmen made a quick count and saw a score of bodies. No counting how many dead and wounded they took away with them.

  ‘What’s our losses?’ he called back.

  ‘Two scouts, one infantry,’ came Arken’s dutiful voice. ‘Two others wounded.’

  ‘They’ll be back,’ Pellrec said.

  ‘Oh, surely.’ Varmen shrugged his shoulders, settling the plates back into place. Pellrec murmured to him and he added, ‘They’ll take a few shots at us now. . hope we’ve forgotten about them. Stay sharp.’

  ‘Sergeant. .’ Something in Arken’s tone promised complications.

  Varmen sighed. ‘Watch the front,’ he told Pellrec and ducked into the wrecked heliopter. ‘What? What now?’

  Arken said nothing, but he was stepping back from the prone form of Lieutenant Landren.

  ‘Don’t suppose we’re lucky enough that he died in his sleep?’ Varmen said. There was an awkward pause, several seconds’ worth, before he noticed the arrow.

  ‘Ah, right.’ He knelt by the body: dead, all right, no mistaking that. It was dim back there, too dim to get a look at the wound, not that it would have told him much. But he could feel a tension behind him. Sounds like he was alive and well when Arken did his count the first time round. ‘You must have missed him in the dark,’ Varmen said absently.

  There was a distinct pause before the ‘Yes, Sergeant.’

  ‘Go get some of your men to back up my sentinels,’ Varmen told him. ‘Sergeant Tserro, a word.’

  The Fly approached, doing a fine impression of nothing-wrong-here. Varmen nodded amiably and then lunged for him. He had been going for the throat, but the fly’s reflexes were good enough to foul his aim. The heliopter was a cramped cage, though, and Varmen got a fistful of tunic and hauled the man in. He was aware that several of the other Fly scouts had arrows abruptly nocked to the bow. ‘Go on,’ he growled softly, ‘see if your little sticks’re any better than the Commonwealers’.’

  Tserro waved a hand frantically at them, still trying for a calm face. ‘Something. . something wrong, Sergeant?’

  ‘You stabbed him,’ Varmen said quietly. He was aware th
at all this was taking people’s attention off the real fight, but then a scatter of arrows came in to rattle from the sentinels’ plate, and that took up most people’s minds. ‘And then you stuck an arrow in,’ he added. ‘Or maybe you stuck him with an arrow first. What’s going on?’

  Tserro’s face twisted, and for a moment he was going to keep up the act, but Varmen shook him hard enough to loosen his teeth, and finally the truth broke loose.

  ‘Who d’you think was going to get the blame for this?’ the Fly hissed.

  ‘Him,’ Varmen pointed out. ‘Or were you saving him the long walk to the captain’s tent to explain himself?’

  ‘Fool, nothing would have landed on his shoulders,’ Tserro snapped. ‘Landren was Rekef. We all knew it.’

  The mere mention of the name made Varmen feel uncomfortable, feel watched. The imperial secret police, the Rekef, the thing that men of the Empire feared more than any external enemy. ‘And killing him helps, does it?’

  ‘A dead man’s got no reputation to maintain,’ Tserro stated. ‘You’re Wasp-kinden, what could you know? It’s easy to blame us, and nobody cares if we end up hanging on crossed pikes to protect some Rekef man’s career.’

  Varmen threw him down, seeing the flash of wings as Tserro caught himself. ‘This isn’t over,’ he promised. ‘But, in case you hadn’t noticed, they’re trying to kill us. If we get out of this, we’re going to have words.’

  ‘Oh, for sure,’ said Tserro, half-mocking, but with fear still in his voice.

  ‘And, in case you get any daft ideas, you just remember who’s standing between you and the Commonweal.’

  The rest of the night passed under light showers of arrows: long, elegant shafts that broke off the sentinels’ armour or rattled against the ruined coping of the heliop-ter. One of Varmen’s men took a hit to the elbow, the arrowhead lodging through the delicate articulation of his mail and digging three inches into the joint. He let Tserro’s field surgeon remove the missile, the Fly doctor’s hands tiny as they investigated the wound, and got his arm strapped up. In just over an hour he was back in place, wielding a single mace in his left hand. Another arrow, arcing overhead, resulted in one of Arken’s men officially dying of bad luck, as it came from nowhere to spit him through the eye. There were no other casualties. By mid-afternoon the next day it had become plain to all sides that this occasional sniping was getting nowhere. The Dragonfly-kinden mounted another sally.

  That they had been reinforced since was unwelcome and immediately obvious news. After a fierce volley of more arrows, one of which came in hard enough to put its point through the inside of Varmen’s shield, the first wave out of the trees were not Dragonflies but a rabble of Grasshopper-kinden. They were lean, sallow men and women without armour, wielding spears and long knives, clearly a levy sent to the front from some wretched peasant farmland somewhere. They were very quick, rushing and bounding towards the heliopter in no kind of order, but nimble on their feet. Several had slings that they were able to loose whilst running. A stone dented Pellrec’s helm over his forehead, staggering him, and for a moment Varmen was bracing himself for a real fight to hold them, but then Arken’s voice was shouting to aim and loose, and a concentrated lash of short arrows and the golden fire of sting-shot ripped through them. Varmen reckoned that almost a score of them went over in that first moment, and the others scattered instinctively: no trained soldiers they. Arken called to shoot at will and another score of the Grasshoppers were picked off as they tried to get away. There was precious little left of them but a crowd of frightened farmhands by the time they lost themselves in the trees.

  ‘Good work,’ Varmen called back. ‘Now let’s have some proper fighting.’

  The Dragonflies themselves had massed. Varmen guessed they had expected to ride the wave of their Grasshopper levy and break up an imperial line already engaged. There was a pause now while they re-evaluated their tactics. Varmen tried to see if he could make out either of the envoys, the woman especially, but when they stood shoulder to shoulder they were all too alike.

  ‘Here they come,’ muttered Pellrec, and they came. Again there was a mass of spearmen in the vanguard, and the individual archers, the Dragonfly nobles and their retainers, vaulted up into the air, Art-spawned wings glittering, to slice down shafts at the Wasps. The sentinel line braced, arrows and sting-fire lancing past and between them from behind. Although they were no more professional soldiers than the Grasshopper-kinden had been, the Dragonflies weathered the volley without breaking and smashed against the thin line of black-and-gold armour that held the entryway to the crashed heliopter.

  The fighting was more fierce this time. Varmen took a dozen strikes to his mail in the first few moments, each one sliding off to the armourer’s design. There were a lot of them, jabbing and stabbing furiously at him and his men. He had the uncomfortable realization that if they had been Ant-kinden or even Bees, used to fighting in solid shoulder-to-shoulder blocks, then the fight would be halfway over by then. The Dragonflies were accustomed to mobile, skirmishing wars and, although the Wasps could match them in that, the locals had nothing suitable to meet the hard core of an imperial battle formation, the core that Varmen had drawn up in miniature here. The Commonweal spearheads were long and narrow, but narrowing only very close to the tip, not the needle-point lances that Varmen would use against heavy armour. These Dragonflies were summer soldiers, their first love and training in some peaceful trade, mostly farming. They had neither the mindset, training nor gear for this war. Every Wasp-kinden man of the Empire was foremost a soldier. It was the slaves and the subject races that did the tedious business of actually making the Empire run.

  He saw it only in retrospect. One of the Commonweal archers had been scorched out of the sky even as he dived in for a shot. He came skidding into the mass of spears, bowling a couple of peasants over, still trying to regain his feet with feebly flickering wings even as he ended up at the very feet of the sentinel line. His chest and side was a crisped mass of failed leather and chitin armour, with boiled flesh beneath. His arrow was still to the string.

  Varmen raised his sword, point-downwards, to spit him, and the man’s fingers twitched, the arrow spearing upwards. From the limited window of his eyeslit Varmen did not actually see Pellrec struck, nor did he hear him cry out. Even as his broadsword chopped solidly into the archer’s chest, his honed senses were telling him of a gap to his right, the abrupt absence.

  The worst was that he could not turn, could not look to see what had happened to his friend, whether the man was even alive. He stood his ground. He kept his shield high, and redoubled his swordwork to make up for the gap, the man on his right doing the same. For Varmen the man it was loss and horror, but for Sergeant Varmen it meant a change to the tactical situation.

  The Commonwealers kept up the assault for another twenty savage minutes before the back of their offensive was broken and they made a messy retreat under the fire of Arken’s stings. Varmen forced himself to watch them go, to be sure that they would not suddenly rally and return. The very moment he was assured of that, he turned, barking the name, ‘Pellrec!’

  The man lay prostrate, but the field surgeon had taken his helm off. The sight made Varmen’s innards squirm. The arrow had pierced the mail under Pellrec’s chin, lancing up into his jaw. One corner of the arrowhead glinted out of his left cheek.

  ‘Report,’ Varmen got out.

  The surgeon looked up resentfully, and Varmen spared a brief moment, only a brief one, to acknowledge that a good eight more men were wounded or dead around them, victims to the Commonwealer arrows.

  ‘He lives,’ the surgeon said. ‘But whether he’ll live much longer-’

  ‘Make him live,’ Varmen snapped, further endearing himself by spitting out, ‘He’s worth ten of the others.’ And I need Pellrec around to stop me saying things like that.

  ‘No guarantees.’ The little Fly-kinden seemed to be watching the steam dial of Varmen’s temper, knowing how essential his skills
were. ‘I need to find how deep it’s gone. Then I need to take it out.’ Pellrec’s eyes were staring, unfocused. Varmen guessed the surgeon had already forced something on him to strip the pain away. The wounded man’s breathing was skipping, ragged. There was a scream there, waiting for its moment.

  ‘Do it.’

  ‘No guarantees.’

  ‘Do it! If he-’ dies I’ll kill every last one of you midget bastards. . But he managed to bite down on that comment. ‘What can be done to help?’

  The surgeon shook his head disgustedly, glanced sidelong at Tserro, beside him. The sergeant of scouts had a clumsily tied bandage about his forehead, a narrow line of blood seeping through it.

  Varmen stalked over to them. ‘If he lives, then nobody cares how Landren died,’ he promised.

  The surgeon’s eyes were haunted. ‘Listen, Sergeant, I will do all I can, but men die easy from wounds like this. Ain’t nothing you could do, unless you reckon you could talk the Commonwealers into pissing off just to give me some quiet.’

  ‘Right,’ Varmen said, and walked back to the other sentinels. They were awaiting him patiently, looking only outwards towards the hidden enemy.

  ‘What’s going on, Sergeant?’ The worried tones were Arken’s, the infantryman now stepping up behind him.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Varmen. He glanced out at the trees, at the waiting Commonwealers watching their every move. ‘Sometimes I do some pretty stupid things, soldier,’ he explained. ‘Only normally, see, there’s Pellrec telling me not to, to keep me in line. You’d think it’d be the other way, what with me a sergeant and him not, but that’s just the way it turned out.’