‘It pains me to make this decision,’ the Queen interrupted, in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘Collegium has been our ally, and it is an alliance we have profited by. If I could be sure that I could hold the Wasps with half my soldiers, I would send the other half to your city without delay. I would maintain that my forces are the best equipped and best trained in all the Lowlands, but now the Lowlands have changed. It is not just that Vek is at the gates of Collegium, or that Helleron is in the hands of the Empire. News comes from Tark, at last, and all word states that the city has fallen. An Ant-kinden city. A city-state like mine. I cannot afford to wait for the Empire to come right up to my walls, lest my city suffer the same fate as Tark. My soldiers are trained for open battle, battle on the field. We shall meet them in the open, and then see if we are still the soldiers to put the world in awe.’
‘But what about Collegium?’ Che cried. ‘What about Stenwold?’
‘Do you know what a Lorn detachment is?’ the Queen asked them. Surprisingly, it was Sperra who had the answer.
‘It’s a suicide detail, Your Majesty.’
The Queen’s lips twitched. ‘That is not exactly how my people would describe it — but a desperate assignment, certainly. I will send a Lorn detachment to Collegium. Solidarity should demand more, but no more can I afford to give. Three battle automotives with crew, though I can ill spare them.’ She turned to the Fly messenger. ‘Master Frezzo?’
He stood forward. ‘Your Majesty?’ He looked pale, and when he risked a glance at Che she saw her own distress mirrored in his face.
‘It was you brought me the news of the Vekken army from Collegium,’ the Queen told him. ‘Now you must take this reply back, though one that I am loath to make. The Vekken will almost certainly be at the walls by the time you arrive.’
‘It will present no difficulty, Your Majesty,’ Frezzo said firmly. Che knew that he had the honour of his guild to uphold.
‘Then go,’ the Queen ordered him, and he saluted her and ran from the room. The ruler of Sarn turned back to Che and her companions. ‘You may stay here or you may leave,’ she told them. ‘Save that there is no safe passage guaranteed to Collegium any more.’
‘Someone should go with the Lorn automotives,’ Scuto said.
‘It is your choice.’
‘Then it should be me,’ Che decided. ‘Stenwold is my uncle.’
‘You and Achaeos need to continue your work here,’ Scuto advised her. ‘It’s looking more important all the time. Stenwold’s going to need me, though. A War Master indeed? You know how he is, always forgetting himself and playing soldier.’
‘Scuto, no-’ started Sperra.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your Majesty, I’ll go. I’m an artificer and I never knew an automotive that couldn’t use another decent pair of hands.’
‘Scuto!’ Che reached for his arm but stopped just short of the spines.
‘Che, listen to me,’ Scuto insisted. ‘Stenwold is going to need to know what’s going on here, and I don’t just mean what that messenger can tell him. What’s going on with your work — stuff I wouldn’t trust to paper. I’m our best bet. I’ll be a good hand on the automotives, and I’m tough as a bastard. Remember the Pride, when it went up? Think you’d be standing here if my hide weren’t between you and that mess? And yet here I am, healthy as anything.’
‘You had better bloody be right about that,’ Sperra hissed. ‘Nobody as ugly as you was meant to be a hero.’
Salma opened his eyes to sunlight, and for a brief moment he thought it was her.
Then he recalled. The Broken Sword. Himself being smuggled out of the Wasp camp. He was about to sit up hurriedly, but remembered his wounds and eased himself up with care. The injuries tugged less than before, and he felt stronger. Looking around he saw Nero sitting close.
The Fly nodded to him. ‘You’re looking better than you have for a while.’
‘Where are we now?’ Propping himself up with one arm was about all he could manage, however improved he might look. Salma looked around, seeing a scrubby hollow and a dozen or so other people. There were a few feeble fires going, and an earth mound that smelled like bread, and that he realized must therefore be a scratch-built oven. ‘What’s going on, Nero? Who are these people?’
‘They’re on the run, like us,’ Nero said. He pointed out a mismatched trio in Ant-style tunics: a Spider, a Fly and a Kessen Ant. ‘They’re slaves who got out from the city before it surrendered-’
‘Tark surrendered?’
Nero grimaced. ‘I suppose you never heard. You never saw, either. The Wasps. they just took the city apart from the air, like your friend said they would do, until the Ants knew there was nothing for it but to give up, or to see Tark rubbed from the map. That’s how they deal with Ant-kinden, apparently. Anyway, those three were lucky enough to make a run for it, and now they’ve got nothing — just like the rest of us. As for them-’ He indicated the woman tending the oven, who had three small children holding close to her skirt. ‘They used to farm at a waterhole on the Dryclaw edge. Now Tark’s gone, though, the Scorpions are raiding unchecked, and there are dozens of little farmsteads, and whole villages, that are getting attacked and left burnt out. She thinks her husband might be alive, but he’s a slave of the Scorpions if he is, and being dead might be better.’
There were half a dozen young Fly-kinden sitting close together at the lip of the hollow, staring suspiciously at all the others. ‘They were slaves of the Wasps,’ Scuto identified them. ‘I get the impression they were a gang of some kind, probably from Seldis. They sell off their criminals down Seldis way. Anyway, they’re completely lost. They know the Wasps are going to take Merro and Egel, and they don’t want to go back to the Spiderlands in a hurry, and so they’re pretending they’re not part of our troupe here, but they’re sticking around all the same. And the gentleman and ladies behind you. ’
Salma made the laborious effort of turning himself over to look. There was a covered cart there, he now saw, and a bearded man seated on the footboard was carving something in wood. A girl of around twelve was stretched out across the back of their draft-animal, which was a big, low-bodied beetle with fierce-looking jaws. Another girl of nearly Salma’s age was nearby, picking over the halfhearted bushes for berries. They were all white-haired and tan-skinned, and they wore loose clothes of earth-tones and greens. The older girl sensed Salma’s attention and glanced his way. She had a heart-shaped face and bright eyes, and she smiled timidly at him.
‘Roach-kinden,’ Salma identified them. ‘I didn’t think you had them in the Lowlands, but they roam all over the Commonweal.’
‘And the Empire too, although the Wasps really hate them,’ Nero agreed. ‘Oh they’re not seen much, but I hear they come south past Dorax from the Commonweal into Etheryon, and even down the Helleron-Tark road and west towards Felyal. The Mantis-kinden seem to tolerate them, or so I understand. These poor fools were found by the Wasp army as they were travelling, and a pack of scouts decided to do a little free-range looting. They don’t know what happened to the rest of their family.’
‘Refugees,’ Salma whispered, and he remembered how it had been during the Twelve-Year War. As the Wasps advanced they had displaced hundreds, even thousands, onto the roads of the Commonweal, to be preyed on by bandits or descend to thievery to feed themselves. The Commonweal’s rulers had done their best but there had been the war to fight as well, and the scale of the exodus had been unthinkable.
And now it seemed certain that it would happen here as well.
‘What can we do for them?’ he asked, and Nero laughed harshly.
‘Do? You can’t even stand, boy. What do you expect to do?’
Salma stared at him, and then slowly forced himself up to his knees. His head swam briefly, but he pressed his hands flat on the earth for balance. Whilst Nero looked on uncertainly, he rose slowly, first one foot beneath him, then the next, and then, forcing his legs to obey him, he raised himself upright. Pain shot throug
h him from his wound, but he clenched his teeth and ignored it.
Now he was standing. Nero had stood up, too, hands ludicrously spread to catch a man twice his size.
‘I. can. stand,’ Salma got out, though he had to fight to keep his vision in focus. He knew that he might topple any minute, and placed a hand on Nero’s shoulder to steady himself. ‘Tomorrow, or the next day, I will walk,’ he said. ‘And then I shall be ready to act.’
A man called Cosgren joined the refugees a day or so later. He was a Beetle-kinden, but huge — the largest Salma had ever seen, and monstrously broad across the chest and shoulders. For the first day he was with them he was quiet enough, watching his travelling companions carefully and even fetching wood for a fire. The next day he waited until they were all awake and then addressed them: ‘Right, look at you. You don’t know the first thing about where you’re going, do you? So it’s going to be like this. I’m in charge. And because I’m in charge, I’ll get us to somewhere, but you all better do what I say, and that means I get what I want.’
The Fly-kinden youths huddled closer and looked at him rebelliously. They all had their hair cropped short to their skulls in androgynous fashion, and they carried weapons of a sort, if only sticks and stones. Cosgren must have weighed more than all of them put together, though, and eventually they let their gazes drop sullenly.
Cosgren’s rule lasted almost peaceably for that same day. He took what food they had, with the pretence that he would distribute it, but everyone knew, and nobody said, that his own capacious belly would be filled first.
And then, at dusk, he wandered over to the wagon and the three Roach-kinden.
‘Old man,’ he began. The father of the two girls eyed him cautiously. He was not so very old, not really, but his white hair and beard made him look it.
‘You hear me?’ Cosgren demanded. ‘Then say so.’
‘I hear you,’ said the Roach. His voice was surprisingly soft.
‘I’m going to make your life easier, old man. I’m going to take your daughter off your hands.’
‘My life’s easy enough, and I thank you for your kind offer,’ the Roach said.
Cosgren smiled, and a moment later he had knocked the man down with a simple motion, almost thoughtless.
‘I’ll give her more than you can,’ Cosgren said, grinning down at him. ‘You, girl, come here — unless you want your old dad to get hurt some more.’
He was, Salma realized, speaking to the younger of the two girls, not that it would have mattered either way.
Salma was on his feet, without quite realizing how he had got there, and Nero hurried over to him, telling him to be careful.
‘You’re in no state,’ the Fly said. ‘Just wait a moment. there are ways. ’
‘I know.’ Salma approached Cosgren’s lumped back with dragging steps. ‘You there!’ he called, and the big man swung on him.
‘You get back in line, boy. Don’t want those wounds opened up again, do you?’
‘No,’ Salma said. He felt the line of his life stretched taut here, a moment of dread and then peace. In this wasteland between wars, in this meaningless brawl, and why not? Why not indeed? He had been given his moment, reunited with Grief in Chains, and then it had passed him by, and here he was. ‘I’m going to stop you,’ he told Cosgren, conversationally.
For a second the big Beetle did not quite know what to make of it, this drawn-looking invalid threatening him with. what? With nothing. Then he grinned.
‘A lesson for boys that won’t do what they’re told,’ he said, and he picked Salma up effortlessly, huge hands agony about his ribs, and Salma poked him in the face.
The world was briefly a very painful and noisy place, and then dark, blessedly dark and quiet.
He came to with the sense that little time had passed. There was an awful lot of noise nearby, but the pain in his chest and abdomen was too much for him to focus on it. Nero was kneeling beside him, asking over and over if he was all right.
There should have been another blow coming from Cosgren, but there was nothing. Perhaps the beating had finished, in which case he had got away lightly, but Cosgren would still be free to pursue his tyranny unchecked.
The sounds were screaming, he realized, and a man’s, not the child’s.
‘What’s going on, Nero?’
Nero grimaced. ‘You. kind of cut him, Salma. Don’t look so confused. That’s what you meant, right?’
‘Cut him? What.?’
Nero took one of Salma’s hands and brought it before his face. The first thing he saw was that it was covered in blood. Then he saw the claw, a sickle-shaped thing that curved from his thumb. Even as he watched it retracted back until there was barely a sign of it. Curiously, he flexed it back and forth, and felt its companion on his other hand do the same.
‘I never had these before. When.?’
‘I noticed them on you back in the tent of the Daughters,’ Nero told him. ‘I couldn’t remember then whether you’d had them before.’
There was a sudden shifting around them, of people coming together. Salma turned over and forced himself to sit up. Cosgren was standing, one hand clapped to a face slick and red. His eye, his one remaining eye, was staring madly.
‘You little bastard.’ The voice was choked with pain.
Salma saw a movement beside him, a glimmer of metal. The Roach man had drawn a thin-bladed knife, hiltless but sharp. They had all gathered around him, even the Fly gangsters. When Cosgren took a step forward, a flung stone bounced off his shoulder.
Half weeping with the pain he stared at them: the Fly gang, the Beetle mother, the ex-slaves and the Roach family. By that time, Nero had his own long knife out, and was holding it casually by the tip, ready to throw.
Cosgren snarled something — something about their not wanting his leadership, then let them starve — and he stumbled out away from them, off into the barren terrain.
Tension began to leach out of the refugees. The Roach man knelt by Salma, offering him some water that he took gratefully. Behind their father, his two daughters stood, staring curiously.
Salma glanced around at the others. The Flies had gone back into their exclusive huddle as though nothing had happened. The three slaves had drifted away as well, and he saw that they had found their own new hierarchy, with the Spider as their spokesman, as though they were still compelled to live within rules of obedience.
He should feel weak after his exertions, he knew, but he felt stronger than he had in days.
The next day there were bandits. A dozen rode in, half of them mounted two to a horse. Their leader, though it was little satisfaction to see, was wearing Cosgren’s leather coat.
He was a Beetle himself, or nearly. His skin was a blue-black that Salma recognized from his recent travels. The refugees had been travelling at the wagon’s steady pace, most walking but Salma lying in the bed of dry grass it carried, staring up at skies that promised unwelcome rain before nightfall. Then the thunder of hoofs had come to them, and they had stopped dead, and most of them had looked to Salma.
Am I riding here on the wagon because I am weak, or because I have become their leader now? They needed no leader — except perhaps in moments such as this. Salma got down, pleased to find his legs holding him without a tremor, and watched as the intruders’ eight horses made a very crude semicircle before the wagon. The draft-beetle hissed at them, swaying its jaws from side to side, but the bandit leader ignored it, looking over the ranks of the refugees.
‘Let’s keep it simple,’ he said. ‘These are troubled times, nobody’s where they wanted to be, everyone’s a victim, so on, so forth.’ He spoke with the accent Salma recalled, and refined enough that he seemed testament to his own words, a man not originally cut from this kind of crude cloth. ‘So let’s see what you’ve got. Let us just take our pick and then you can go on your way.’
Salma looked over the bandit’s men. They were a motley band, but not as raggedly dressed as might be expected. These were n
ot just desperate scavengers driven to robbery. Most had some kind of armour: leather jerkins and caps, padded arming jackets, even one hauberk of Ant-made chain. There were axes and swords amongst them, and a halfbreed at the back, who looked to have Mantis blood, had a bow ready-strung with an arrow nocked. Salma’s own army had some knives, some clubs, and the staff that Sfayot the Roach had cut for him.
He leant on it now, grateful that it would disguise how weak he really was. ‘So what do you imagine we have?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you think that we all had time to pack, before we were driven out, before we escaped.’ Salma planted his staff in the ground, firmly enough. ‘If you’re slavers then we will fight you, and you can sell our corpses for whatever they’ll bring you. But if it’s goods you want, we have none. Less than none. Come down here and see for yourself.’
‘We’re not slavers,’ the bandit leader replied. ‘Too many of us have been on the wrong end of that market to risk trying to sell there.’ He smiled, teeth flashing in his dark face. ‘Commonwealer, aren’t you? I’ve known enough of your kind in my time.’ He swung off his horse, and Salma heard the clatter of a scale-mail cuirass beneath Cosgren’s coat. Without needing orders, two of his fellows got down off the horse they shared, and the three of them walked past Salma to peer into the wagon.
‘You’re slaves yourselves?’ Salma asked. As his fellows prodded through the grass in the bed of the wagon, the leader turned back to say, ‘Some of us.’
Salma had spotted the colours of that scale-mail, then, and the design of the sword the man bore. ‘You’re an Auxillian,’ he said.
For a long moment the bandit leader regarded him fixedly, until at last he said, ‘So?’
‘There are no friends to the Empire here,’ Salma explained. ‘I was a prisoner in Myna myself, once.’
‘There’s nothing but the wagon,’ one of the bandits said. ‘And even that’s nothing you could borrow money on.’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the Roach Sfayot. ‘But we have nothing, no goods. No food, even, until we stop for the evening and forage.’
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