‘Cherten.’ He shoved the paper towards his colonel, heard the choked exclamation as the man read it. ‘This calls. .’ Tynan’s voice shook, and he took a deep breath and started again. ‘This calls for a redeployment. We will need all able-bodied men mobilized immediately, and we will have very little time before they realize what we’re about. Have the Sentinels move against the Collegiate-held streets as planned, backed by your current forces there and by a further five hundred Light Airborne. Use the Air Corps as well. If we can’t bomb the library we can still bomb the rest. Everyone else. .’
‘I understand, General.’ There was relief in Cherten’s voice, and it told Tynan two things: firstly that, having seen the orders, he had obviously considered Tynan’s response to them in doubt, and secondly, that his own loyalty to Tynan was plainly not strong enough to survive such a shift. ‘Shall I take command of. .?’ he held up the scroll with its broken seal.
Tynan took it back from him. ‘No, it’s my responsibility. You’re in command of putting down the insurgents — or at least containing them until this other business is done. Vrakir, with me.’
And Tynan stormed out, and the orders clutched in his hand seemed to burn his skin: Destroy the Spider-kinden forces of the Aldanrael, their mercenaries, their Auxillians and allies, to the very last. Eliminate all Spider-kinden from Collegium. Do not spare a single one.
At the College, matters were now moving sufficiently fast that Stenwold felt his ailing body could not keep up with them. Up on the wall overlooking the street, he just sat and let the tide of news wash over him.
‘They’ve got Shod Street and Marley Row,’ Serena was reporting, breathless but still forcing the words out. Sartaea te Mosca was bandaging a gash across the woman’s arm even as she spoke, a close encounter with a snapbow bolt.
‘What about beyond?’ Eujen demanded. Stenwold let him take the lead — partly because these were his people, partly because Stenwold himself was still suffering moments when his strength would just evaporate — and other moments when he would be suddenly filled with an angry, burning energy that he could not dissipate.
‘Some sign of something off towards the manufactories, or maybe those fancy townhouses on the other side.’
Eujen looked out from the courtyard wall, as if he could somehow comprehend all of Collegium at once. The sound of fighting was not close, but it was there — most of the Student Company was out on the streets, adding their discipline and armament to the local resistance, but there were houses within a hundred yards that had changed hands two or three times already, and the Wasps would bring in more men, hour by hour. The rest of the city was key, and he had hoped that revolt would spread like a flame across the city once the streets beside the College went up in arms, but so far a lot of people were keeping their heads down.
‘Eujen, hoi!’
Leadswell’s head snapped down, and Stenwold craned over to see the ragged band of re-armed Coldstone Company soldiers that Serena had nominally been spotting for. The Antspider was waving up at him, looking exasperated at having to shout her report. She had her one-handed Woodlouse and that Dragonfly woman and a couple of others with her, none of them particularly recovered from losing the gate, and yet all of them running to Eujen’s orders.
‘Come on up,’ Leadswell called down, then glanced at Stenwold.
‘You’re doing well,’ the War Master wheezed.
‘I’m doing all I can,’ Eujen said shortly. ‘I don’t need you-’
‘Then why look at me as if you expect me to grade you?’ Stenwold snarled back.
For a moment Eujen’s expression was caught between a number of conflicting emotions, and Stenwold was reminded just how young he was — and how young were most of the Collegiate soldiers who had been left under arms. Then the Antspider woman came pounding up the steps.
‘Good news and bad!’ she announced. ‘Don’t know what the Jaspers are doing, but they’re not reinforcing properly. We’ve won back Marley Row already, and we’re still pushing. Gereth wants to get hold of something heavier to have a go at them. Gorenn needs more arrows.’
‘Arrows? Do we even have arrows?’
‘Apparently we do,’ Straessa confirmed. ‘But, look, they’ve one of those big bastard machines coming in there as well — and that’s going to be as good as a whole load of actual soldiers, unless we can stop it. We need some grenades, little ones preferably.’ She was talking very fast, obviously fighting to seem offhand about the whole business, but there was an unhealthy tremble about her eyes, like a woman holding her composure together with both hands. ‘Eujen, I don’t know what they’re doing. Makes no sense to me. You need to look out for-’
‘In case they come from elsewhere, yes,’ Eujen finished up, plainly trying to sound businesslike.
Stenwold shied away from the weight of unsaid words between the two of them. I should have some counsel to offer. I should tell them to speak to each other now, because later may be too late. But that’s hardly advice I ever heeded myself.
‘Chief!’ A student came bursting out of the building behind them with a box under her arm. Wearing an ink-smudged smock, she virtually vaulted the stairs up towards them, slamming her burden down on the wall’s edge with pride. It contained a stack of papers, the sort of polemic familiar to Collegiate citizens from a score of Assembly elections. The text was bold, simple: RISE UP, CHILDREN OF COLLEGIUM! NOW IS YOUR CHANCE! LIBERTY TODAY, OR SLAVERY FOREVER! Then there was an image, simply delineated, yet with a kind of dynamic power to it: a Beetle man brandishing a hammer out towards the reader, his face a picture of grim determination — and not entirely dissimilar to Stenwold’s own.
‘Raullo did this?’ Eujen asked, and Stenwold recalled the artist who had surely been too inebriated to achieve any such thing. The printer was nodding enthusiastically, though, and Eujen locked eyes with Stenwold, who had the grace to shrug.
‘It will serve. He’s done us proud.’ Eujen thrust the box at Serena. ‘Can you fly with this?’
She weighed it up, winced at her newly bandaged arm, then nodded.
‘Good. Get out past their blockade. Drop these on the far side, those districts that haven’t risen yet.’
‘I went to the same classes as you, Chief. I know what we’re about,’ she confirmed.
Then Laszlo dropped down on the very brink of the wall, feet skidding for a moment before he righted himself.
‘They’re fighting!’ he announced.
‘That’s hardly news,’ Eujen objected, but Laszlo gave him the cold shoulder and addressed Stenwold directly.
‘Mar’Maker, they’re fighting each other!’
There was a heartbeat of stunned silence, and then Stenwold nodded stiffly to Eujen. ‘Report to the chief officer.’
The Fly looked put out, but complied. ‘Over that way, you’ve got a row of big warehouses or factories or something, where we thought they were mustering. . well they’re not. They’re in and out of every building there, and they’re killing each other.’
‘The Wasps?’ Eujen demanded.
‘The Wasps are fighting their Spiders,’ Laszlo explained, as though it was obvious. ‘They’ve actually done it: they’ve gone after each other. There’s hundreds and hundreds scrapping all over — and you know the Spiders aren’t just sitting still and taking it. They’ve got archers at every window, and the Wasps are bringing their engines in, and. . it’s a mess, a real mess.’
Eujen and Stenwold’s glances met sharply.
‘Stab me, that changes everything,’ the Antspider murmured.
‘Push them,’ Eujen decided. ‘All along their line. They have no reinforcements now. Keep their machines busy and push them back, and. . the city must learn of it. Print me more leaflets, and call up every Fly-kinden who can get out there — just to spread the word. This is our chance. This is our chance!’
Thirty-Six
‘So, what now?’ Che demanded. ‘Come on, Argastos. What’s your next sally?’
Another dar
k place, and she received a sudden insight that there might be nothing else left in the man’s withered mind. He had lain bound in the earth for so long that he could not remember the sun. Here was some gloomy cavern, with her placed on a ledge beside a drop that fell in folds of rock for three hundred feet. Down there, she could see faint signs of fire, in pinpoints like stars.
‘This is the place of my enemy,’ came his voice, and he faded into existence almost within arm’s reach, and with none of the excessive drama he had used at the table. What illuminated him, she could not say, but he cut a stark figure of grey and black and white, the scales of his mail glinting like moonlight, his skin like stone, his cloak merging seamlessly into the darkness.
‘Some might say you’re too obsessed with them,’ Che pointed out, ‘given they’re a thousand years gone.’
‘But they’re not gone. They endure, on the far side of the Seal. And I was sacrificed to a living death to keep them there — not because it was needful, for in a thousand years the Worm have never tried to break through, nor could they ever. I was buried and forgotten because they thought they could bury their own guilt along with me.’ He eyed her bitterly. ‘Do you not agree, just for one moment, that I have been treated poorly? Am I not deserving of some sympathy, Beetle girl?’
Che folded her arms, trying to stretch out her power as subtly as she could in order to find the edges of this charade he had woven about her, and so tear it down, but he was always ahead of her, dancing where she must lumber, forever extending the world beyond her reach. ‘And for this I become your whore, do I? And relinquish all I have to you?’
‘You will be my concubine, valued and treasured,’ he told her. ‘And as for “all you have”, if you will only use your power as I direct, what might you then learn about how to control it? See: you are the stronger, I freely admit, and yet you are like your kinden’s namesake, a beetle blundering blindly about while I lead you one way and another. You have so much to learn, and do you think that there is anyone left in the world to teach you, save me? And you know I am no mean power myself, for why else did you and the Wasp girl come here, save to steal what is mine? With our strengths combined, what might we not accomplish?’
‘Nothing good,’ she decided, and, when he just stared at her, she went on, ‘Argastos, yes, you are hard done by. What a terrible thing they did to you, all those years ago. And had you not spent all the years in-between in dooming everyone who came here to that exact same fate, then you might be able to presume on my sympathies. But I have seen your collection of victims, and I am not at all sure that your solution for dealing with the Worm does not deserve some guilt and expiation. And I still do not believe that anything you intend is for the good. For anyone’s good — least of all mine.’
She felt strong, while saying that, and for a moment the shadowy world around her seemed to waver.
Then he was on his feet, glowering at her. ‘You self-righteous child! How can you know how it was? How can you know what I thought, or what might have been! I was there! Someone had to make the choice, and I was the only one strong enough to do it! And you stand here, with your unearned inheritance, your life of freedom that I bought for you with my everlasting torment, and you dare to judge? You should come to me on your knees in gratitude for what I have done for the world!’
Che sighed. ‘So, you have tried to draw on my better nature, and now you try to threaten me. What next, Argastos? For if you could simply take what you wanted from me, then you would have done so without hesitation. I am just a slave girl who has stolen something that’s of value, to you. If you must woo me, it is for that reason only.’
For a long moment their gazes locked, and she felt relieved at the honesty visible there, the open acknowledgement that everything she had said was true. And then he nodded, and the hard-edged expression that came across his face almost made her want to withdraw her words.
‘Perhaps you think I will beg?’ he suggested. ‘No, I will wait for you to beg me. You are right. I have not been content to suffer alone. I have always had followers, and all those who have come to this place are my rightful prey. I have gathered them all to me. Now I give you to them. They remember what it is like, to live. Their appetites have been starved these long years, but they will awake again if I give the order. You may possess your strength, Beetle girl, but I will wager that here I can hold you down while they slake their lusts on you. And I have many hungry servants these days — many! You are proud, Beetle girl, just like the little Wasp is proud, and I will break you both as proud slaves should be broken. I shall return in a day or so, as the time shall seem to you. For now, I go to rouse my servants to the heights of their vigour. Enjoy the wait, Beetle girl, for it shall be the last peace you will know for some time.’
He boiled away into nothing, leaving her staring at the dark that he had gone back to. She could feel fear hovering at the edge of her attention, in case she had need of it, but her mind was working as analytically as if she was faced with a logic problem back at College. That Argastos intended to carry out his threat, she had no doubt. She was no helpless girl, though, and his mastery of her was reliant on her being unable to use her strength properly.
Her surroundings had now changed from the caverns of his memory to something better fitting the fate he intended for her: a small cell, but with its walls formed of knotted roots as if she was buried beneath some colossal tree. Perhaps this, too, was some place Argastos recalled from his long-ago life.
She tried to change the walls, but they would not bend for her. In her mind they were unaccountably slippery, impossible to bring her strength to bear on. Well, then, that was only her most obvious and crude application of power. He would have anticipated that. She must keep one step ahead of his imagination.
She heard movement from without, and for a moment her mind threw up an image: a column of dead Mantis men approaching, their hollow eyes hungry for even the cruellest memento of life. Fear clawed at her, but she stepped back from it, holding tenuously on to her calm. And she moved her cell.
This was no physical place, of course, even though it imprisoned her. It was set within a matrix of Argastos’s thoughts. There were no hard laws that determined the relationship of one mind-place to another. If she could not escape her cell, she could relocate it, sliding the idea of it through Argastos’s mouldering mind, and thus giving herself more time.
It was a temporary solution, but one that she could perhaps repeat a few times before he realized what she was doing. He had not prepared for it. She had the idea that, just as his backdrops were always gloomy and enclosed, so his ability to think like a human being had been decaying for a long time. He would find it hard to predict her.
With a little time in hand, she cast her mind out, reaching for anything she could use, and found a familiar mind reaching back to her.
She recoiled in shock, but a moment later she was groping forward again, worried that she might have lost him entirely. He was still there, though, and she envisioned him behind closed eyelids: a gaunt man with a high forehead, hair grey like iron, skin like bronze, a figure owning to no particular kinden the modern world would recognize. . save that she did.
You are Cheerwell Maker, the girl the Empress hates, he identified her.
Although the Empress and I appear to have made common cause, if you can believe that, she replied.
He digested that. I would ask you: do not tell her of me. I tried to kill her — tried and failed, but I tried. Because of you.
She did not need to question him. He had been in her mind, as one of her pieces. She understood. So, who are you? And how are you here, even?
There was a pause before he answered, and she guessed he was weighing up the merits of being honest. My name is Esmail. I was a spy placed near the Empress, but I lost my way. As for here, I was drawn here with the rest of you, when Argastos came. But I was already trying to hide from the Empress. I am good at hiding. It is in my blood and my training. Besides Argastos was not interes
ted in me. He wanted you.
You’re hurt, she understood.
By the Empress. I’ll live.
She had a sense of him moving with a freedom denied her. Where are you now, if the question means anything here?
I am. . behind the scenes, perhaps. A dark place, but untended, untenanted save for myself. I can feel. . my magical skill is just enough to know that there are other places just next to me, and yet unreachable. But I’m working on them. You must be imprisoned in one of them, the Empress in another.
There were others as well, she told him. My friends and the Empress’s bodyguard.
I found them. A pause. Or where Argastos put them, he added. I saw him take them. . They are like statues, now, where they are: statues of wood, grown into the floor. I think he is only keeping them at all because they may be useful to work on you. I had thought your halfbreed would resist him, in the end but, though she is clever, she is weak. He overpowered her.
She shifted her prison again, whilst maintaining her link to Esmail. The sound of approaching feet diminished, but did not fade away entirely. Can you help me?
I don’t know. I am trying to locate you but. . the internal architecture of where I am seems. . broken down, falling apart. There is no logic here.
The mind of Argastos, she considered, and then the tenuous connection with him was severed, gone in an instant, at his will, and a moment later a very different voice sounded loud in her head.
Beetle girl!
Seda? Che flinched, because if Argastos was carrying out his threat, this might be an agonized cry for help, a window onto the other woman’s pain.
Instead, the Empress’s tone sounded properly imperious. Listen to me, while you can. No doubt the creature has made the same threats against you as he has to me. Focus on me and I will tell you how to defend yourself. Che had the mental image of. . fighting, blade on blade.
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