She had been ready to shout at him for failing her, but she saw from his face that he had already spent nights and days trying to overcome mountains, and that nobody was more aware of the stakes than he was.
‘I’m sorry, Willem,’ she said. ‘What can you give me?’
‘There’s a big consignment of the new steel just shipped in, and I can get another dozen or so Stormreaders fitted with replacement springs. About half your strike force, by then.’
She was shaking her head. ‘No point having half our machines that can stay over the enemy for a day at a time, if we’re still out of bombs in three passes.’
‘I know, I know, but it’s better than nothing. It’s something.’ Neither of them bothered to raise the obvious fact that, the closer the enemy came, the less important the simple staying power of the Stormreaders would prove. ‘A lot of the city’s resources are going elsewhere. They’ve new artillery on the walls, for example. . and if it does come down to a siege, it shouldn’t just be you standing between victory and defeat.’
‘Let them keep telling themselves that,’ Taki grumbled. ‘I don’t trust fancy new untested artillery, and those Wasp big leadshotters already have two cities to their tally is what I hear.’ She waved over at one of the ground crew. ‘Get them all re-tensioned, right away. Training flights in two hours!’
‘You push yourself too hard,’ Reader said softly.
‘Me? I’m a Fly, Willem. We just keep buzzing.’ She was aware that her grin was too bright and cheerful, to the point of cracking about the edges. ‘Maker’s Draft has given me three score Collegiates who think they can fly an orthopter. By the end of today I reckon at least a score of them will be wearing the sashes of the Merchant Companies and praying never to leave the ground again. The rest perhaps I can use.’ But they’ll never have a chance to get good at it, was another unspoken but shared thought. ‘How’s the family?’ An awkward digression. Taki had lived in a world of feuding pilots most of her life and the small talk of other people baffled her. Only after coming to Collegium had she started to care about the earth-bound masses: men such as Willem Reader or Stenwold Maker. Only after running foul of the Empire had she started to appreciate the bigger issues and what they meant to the individuals around her.
‘Jen’s grumbling that they want to use her library as a hospital, if the worst comes to the worst. I swear she’d let the Empire in through the gates if they showed a thorough knowledge of indexing. Little Jen has been learning emergency drill at school, She always used to draw me pictures of orthopters, but now, when she does, they’re fighting. Everything’s gone mad.’ He said it matter-of-factly, but there was a world of weariness there.
I’m not the only one pushing myself too hard, Taki decided. ‘Come on, Willem, you don’t need to oversee all this personally.’
‘Better than the committees.’ He shrugged. ‘Which reminds me, the War Master wants a report from both of us. Now there’s a man, I swear, who never sleeps.’
Outside Collegium’s walls, another grand project was under way. The approach to the city was a broad and shallow slope of land that the river had ground out with its meanderings over thousands of years, the cliffs on either side dipping down gently towards the sea. This was the bowl that held Collegium, and it had been a coastal resort for the Moth-kinden once, but was now a seat of trade, rich farming and comfort for the Beetles. Defence had never been something the city had been sited for, and recent years had seen too many enemies simply come walking up to the city’s gates. Now a great force of men and machines and animals was working on both sides of the river, and the rail line, to complicate the Second Army’s last few hundred yards of advance.
Straessa was well aware that a battery of cartographers, architects, engineers and mathematicians had been up for nights working out the perfectly calibrated defence against the marching feet of the Wasps. Taking into account the arcs of the city’s artillery, the strengths of the wall and the natural lie of the land, they had set out a complex maze of artificial topography to trip and slow, funnel and compress; to force the hand of the Imperial general and make his soldiers victims of Collegium’s wall engines. The theory was all there and, as a student of the College, she could probably have done some of those calculations herself.
Standing with a spade in her hand, overlooking the toiling soldiers of the Coldstone Company working alongside the machines of a dozen professionals who had made moving earth their business, it all looked like a colossal mess to her. She could not shake off the feeling that this entire grandiose venture was simply to give the city’s massed soldiery something to do.
‘Water!’ came a shout, and she turned gratefully. A draught beetle was dragging out what had been a fire engine until recently, but had now been pressed into service to quench the thirst of Collegium’s defenders.
‘Gorenn, get cups and buckets down the line,’ she called, and a Dragonfly woman took off from a nearby mound of earth, glad to be out of it, and started to organize a bucket chain.
I should probably tell everyone how well they’re doing, but for all I know we’re going to have to shift everything ten feet to the left or something. Plans on paper were all very well, but putting them into action on the ground was another matter.
‘Officer Antspider!’ Another demand for her attention, but at least it gave her an excuse not to start shovelling again. All the privilege of rank had not stopped her underlings shaming her into doing her bit.
She had not recognized the voice but, turning, she knew the man. ‘Gerethwy!’ she cried, delighted. If her voice wavered very slightly over the last syllable of his name, well, he had changed somewhat since losing half a hand to an exploding snapbow. He had always been freakishly tall — long-limbed, long-faced, with that stooped hunch that all Woodlouse-kinden apparently had. Now his cheeks were hollow, and his grey skin seemed to show something beyond just his kinden’s natural hue.
‘Reporting for duty,’ he told her, striding over the uneven ground. ‘If you’ll have me.’
‘Te Mosca let you go, did she?’
‘I need to do something.’ And he was saying more than he used to, as well. Single words, nods and wry expressions had always seemed enough before. Now all those unspoken words were leaking out. ‘What in the pits is this?’ His eyes raked over all that grand effort of earth-moving.
‘Second-to-last line of defence against the Wasps,’ she told him. ‘Get the ground all rucked up so that they can’t just march over it without getting in the way of our artillery, and pack a load of the soil up against our walls to shield us from theirs.’
She thought he would go along with it, for a moment. She dearly wanted him to just nod along, as he always had done. That long face was swinging back and forth, though, the banded brow furrowing.
‘All of this just for that?’ he pressed her.
‘It’ll help: every little thing. .’ She should just be giving him orders, but he had been her friend longer than she had been his officer.
‘Straessa,’ he challenged her, still speaking in his quiet and gentle way, but now as if explaining something to a child, ‘two-thirds of the Wasp army can fly. And their artillery can hit us from well beyond any of this stuff. And their orthopters. .’ He looked like a man trying to work out whether he was caught in a nightmare or not. ‘We’re fighting yesterday’s war. What will all of this achieve?’
‘I said that, too,’ the Dragonfly woman, Gorenn, said, dropping down for more water. ‘Would they listen? They would not.’
She wasn’t the only one. Straessa had heard that Kymene, the leader of the Mynans in exile in Collegium, had got into a blazing row over that very same issue, having witnessed her own city fall to the Wasps, and of course half of Gorenn’s homeland had been Wasp-occupied for years. It seemed their voices counted for little.
‘They have ground troops,’ she insisted, listening to herself defend a decision of her superiors that she had not really agreed with in the first place. ‘You remember their infantry
as well as I do.’ Better, probably, under the circumstances. ‘Their Spiderlands mob won’t be in the air, either. So it’ll help, and it’s better than not having it.’ There were a lot of soldiers listening in now, who had been slaving away in the sweat-harvesting sun for hours, and she was abruptly aware how tenuous the whole structure of Collegiate authority was, how much it relied on the consent of all concerned. ‘Look, you said you were reporting for duty,’ she pointed out, more harshly than she had intended.
He just looked at her, and she guessed he might walk away, but then he had grabbed a spade, fumbling with it a little, and set to work, driving at the earth as though it was a surrogate for all the things he could not just bludgeon into place. He was half a hand short, but he was stronger than he looked, and soon everyone was back to following orders. Thanks to me. Hooray for me.
‘Bookworm,’ said Gorenn, drawing the final bucket of water, and Straessa looked up to see a wobbling figure weave unsteadily through the air until it had dropped down on the ground in front of her. This was Jodry Drillen’s Fly-kinden secretary, who had taken to going about with a breastplate on, so heavy he made hard weather of even the short hop from the city walls. Does he just want to look like a soldier, or does he know something about the range of the Wasp engines?
‘Where’s your chief officer?’ he demanded, not so much of the Antspider as of everyone.
‘On the walls with the artillerists,’ Straessa told him. ‘You probably just passed him.’
The little man choked down his annoyance, smoothing his face over with his usual slightly superior expression. ‘Well, kindly go and get him and send him on to the War Council. They need everyone.’
We’re not even trying for a field battle, are we? Straessa wondered, but she remembered the last one quite well enough, most especially the way that all the courage, imagination, armament and righteousness of the Collegiate forces had been ground down and broken against the numbers and discipline of the Wasps. And that discipline is something they learn from the womb, most likely. It’s not something we can just work out from first principles. And then there had been the Sentinels, the great armoured wood-louse-shaped machines armed with leadshotters and rotary piercers, proof against just about anything that the Collegiates had been able to throw at them, including aerial bombardment. And has anyone got a clever plan for those, I wonder? Because, if so, nobody’s said what it is.
‘I’ll get him, don’t worry,’ she promised.
‘To the Prowess Forum, that’s where they’re meeting. And now’s not too soon,’ the Fly snapped at her, and then he was clawing for the air again, touching down a couple of times as he built up speed, before lurching away back towards the city. Easier for you to find him yourself, you overdressed little prig, Straessa reflected, but no doubt the Speaker’s vaunted secretary had better things to do. She glanced at Gerethwy, contemplating taking him along with her, but, looking at the fragile set of his face, she decided wretchedly that she couldn’t cope with him just then, so she left him digging.
The new chief officer of the Coldstone Company was indeed up on the walls. Straessa uncharitably decided that he was playing with artillery rather than doing the job he had been elected to but, truth be told, Madagnus had come to Collegium ten years ago as a very skilled artillerist, and had only been honing his skills since. Now the College was installing its new toys on the walls, and wrestling him away was likely to be a full-time job.
Like his assassinated predecessor, Madagnus was an Ant, although from some Spiderlands city nobody had ever heard of. He was a gaunt man on the wrong side of middle years, his skin the colour of rusting iron, and he disdained armour save for the Company-issue buff coat, which he left open down the front. In a crowd of Beetle-kinden artillerists he was easy to spot.
She hung back to watch for a moment, seeing only a disappointingly small machine, something looking like a ballista with no arms mounted on a big wooden box. The elderly Beetle demonstrating it was saying something about building up a magnetic differential between the two ends of the device, therefore she gathered that the box contained something in the way of a dwarf lightning engine. Which means I’m standing about three streets too close to it for comfort. She was no artificer, though, and the details passed her by. By then the demonstrator had slipped an all-metal bolt into the thing, and declared it ready for a test.
The box beneath the machine began not making a noise. The Antspider could tell it was not making a noise because it was making the stones beneath her feet vibrate with all the silence it was putting out.
‘Excuse me,’ she put in, feeling a sudden stab of fear. ‘Those are my soldiers out there beyond the walls.’
They all looked at her as though she was simple-minded, and the old man aiming the machine chuckled indulgently.
‘This is intended to counter the Wasp artillery, girl. At this elevation nobody within a mile of the city’s going to be in any danger.’
Straessa blinked at him, and at last the contraption began making an audible sound, a high whining just at the edge of hearing, which the old man clearly took as a good sign.
‘And. . loose!’ He got it wrong, said it again, and then, a second later, the bolt was simply gone. Straessa had the faint sense of very swift motion, and no more. Of the missile’s eventual impact there was no sign.
‘Of course we’ll tip the bolts with explosives when Wasps arrive,’ the old artillerist said cheerily, ‘but it’s all about magnets and the new steel and good old College know-how.’ And then the others were crowding in to study the device.
Straessa plucked at the sleeve of her chief officer’s coat as he tried to elbow his way in. ‘You’re wanted, Chief.’
The Ant looked annoyed at that, but he glanced off over the walls — east, towards the Wasps, she thought — then nodded, and they descended together.
She accompanied him as far as the Prowess Forum, for fear that he would end up back on the walls again if she left his side. The College’s old sparring ground had been decked out with banners, she saw, which meant that this gathering was not just another in the interminable series of committees that seemed to be Collegium’s answer to everything. This was it. The great minds of the city had come together, and were about to impart their wisdom to their martial servants.
She saw Stenwold Maker within, sitting on the tiered seats as though waiting to watch a practice match. The sagging bulk of Jodry Drillen lurked in one doorway, speaking to another couple of Assemblers, and at least a score of others were already sitting in small cliques and factions, some there to speak and some to listen. She recognized the small form of Willem Reader, the aeronautics artificer, and a few others she could put a name to. One was Helmess Broiler, Collegium’s least favourite son in many quarters, and a man often claimed to be on the Imperial payroll. The Prowess Forum was public, though, and many people had come to see the leaders of their city’s armed might. A morale exercise, then, more than anything. No state secrets here.
She ticked off the banners, seeing the various chief officers and other military leaders arrive and assemble beneath them: five Companies and four others, nine men and women to direct the battle.
The Companies first. Red scarab was the badge of Maker’s Own, and their chief officer, Elder Padstock, was the senior military figure there. Through the Gate was their motto, and Padstock was known to be a fervent, even fanatical supporter of Stenwold Maker.
Madagnus himself was standing beneath the banner depicting a white helm in profile — not the original Vekken design but an Imperial infantry helmet now, for reasons of politics. Their motto, and Straessa’s own, was In Our Enemy’s Robes, after the original inhabitants of Coldstone Street had taken arms and armour from Vekken dead to throw back the invaders.
Outwright’s Pike and Shot had a wheel of pikes and snap-bows as its device, whose intricacy must have left the embroiderers cursing. Outright Victory or Death went their words, and the original Outwright had indeed died defending Stenwold Maker from Imperia
l assassins. His nephew, someone-or-other Outwright, looked far too young for the job, but his soldiers had elected him out of fondness for his martyred uncle. Beside him stood sweating Remas Boltwright of the new Fealty Street Company, his banner simple crossed crossbow bolts, his words To End the Quarrel. He was doing his best but, like Outwright Junior, he did not look the soldier.
Eujen Leadswell stood at his shoulder, beneath the purple banner displaying the open book. He and Averic had been devoting every waking moment to turning their rabble of malcontents into something approximating a fighting company, but some wit amongst the students had seen to it that the words Learn to Live had been added to their flag. In Straessa’s experience it was entirely possible that Eujen, beneath them, had not even noticed. So very focused, always.
And curse me, but he looks the part. Eujen Leadswell, student of social history and outspoken detractor of no less a man than Stenwold Maker, stood straight-backed and proud in his breastplate, and if any had been ready to mock the idea of the Student Company, or to slight him for his political beliefs, they held their tongues now.
I am not going to cry. But, looking at him, Straessa felt so very aware of how fragile he was, just as any man or woman was fragile. One bolt, one sword, and all that young promise would be gone.
The others came as no surprise, those defenders of the city who were not formally part of the Companies. She saw, standing beneath a sky-coloured banner without device or motto, the little Fly-kinden pilot who was everyone’s darling after the Wasp Air Corps had been brought down last time.
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