Argastos has his legions of slaves, Seda said contemptuously. But he was a fool, and he has taken on more than he knew or understood. Seek them out: there will be those you can suborn to your purpose.
Che blinked, trying to discover what the woman meant. The exasperation of the Empress at such slow uptake came through to her clearly.
Just look! And for a few seconds she had the Empress’s eyes, and she was watching a vicious melee where the grey-faced, dead-eyed Mantis-kinden that Argastos had sent were kept away from Seda’s person by a handful of Imperial soldiers. Che recognized some of them as those who had come with Seda herself to this place, and died at the hands of Che’s own people. But there were others, too, in a motley selection of black and gold uniforms, Wasp soldiers who must have marched with General Malkan and the Seventh in the last war, and gone too far into the wood.
They are mine, Seda declared proudly. In life, in death, they are mine. You must find your own protectors from amongst Argastos’s collection.
But why?
I will need you to destroy Argastos, Beetle girl. Our truce holds until then. Quickly!
Che felt an innate revulsion at the idea: disturbing the dead who were already held in unnatural imprisonment here. And who amongst them could she move? She was no magician-empress to command loyalty beyond the grave.
And yet the sound of feet was coming nearer, and the darkness admitted movement closing in on her cell. The long march of Argastos’s servants was nearing its end.
Do they still feel lust? she wondered emptily. Or is it just cold loyalty to him that drives them?
A tremor within her, and for a moment she was almost crying out for someone to help her. . anyone. And perhaps that was just what Argastos had hoped for. Then she gathered her resolve and plunged her mind into the charnel house that was Argastos’s realm, like thrusting a hand into a rotting carcass. With a convulsive effort that seemed to turn her entire mind on its side, she drew forth a protector.
Seeing him, all she could say was, ‘I’m sorry. This is my fault. I’m sorry I brought you to this.’
The expression on his charcoal-grey face was one of mild reproach, but only because of the apology, not for her part in dooming him to this. He squared his shoulders, and she saw him not in his Company uniform, but in the armour he had worn in Khanaphes, that impenetrable suit of fluted plates that Totho had made for him. In one hand was his shield, in the other his leaf-bladed Khanaphir sword. This was Amnon prepared to do battle.
But he was not alone. To her surprise she saw that she had hauled up others, too — those whose faces she did not even know. There were a couple of aviators, and a woman in a College robe, and there were a dozen at least sporting the same sort of garb Helma Bartrer had worn when serving at dinner: clothes fit for a slave before the Revolution. Many were Beetle-kinden, but some were Ants from various cities, and they had knives and clubs and staves, all the makeshift weapons of the downtrodden.
None of them looked at her, but when the Mantids, the oppressors, emerged amongst them, Che’s guardians fell on them with a determination and a fury that startled her. Amnon was at their centre, immovable and unyielding, and the ghosts of the Apt — and what an irony! — flowed about him but held their line, and kept her safe.
And the voice of the Empress spoke to her once again. Good, but we won’t have much time now before Argastos realizes something’s gone wrong with his tawdry little plan. We need a weapon to use against him. All this around us is born of his own mind. We need something outside of him to distract him. Just a moment should be sufficient for us to break away from here, and then we will see if the two of us together can crack him.
He has had centuries to perfect his skills, Che cautioned.
What do you suggest we do, then? Seda demanded. Give in to him and become his creatures, even as these slaves are? No, we fight. Even if we must lose, we fight.
I haven’t been able to find anything solid here to break out from, Che admitted. When I try to focus my strength, it’s just like fog.
He is like a swordsman fighting stronger opponents. He cannot afford to pitch his might directly against ours, but he is fast and skilled. He can deflect where he cannot block. There was a particularly expressive pause, and Che received the impression that Seda’s defenders were hard-pressed.
She delicately stepped back from her link with the Empress, seeking out Esmail instead. We need to distract Argastos, she told him. Can you reach him from where you are?
She thought she had lost him, but after a moment his voice came to her distantly. No. I am inside, as you are. I am just in. . a suite of abandoned rooms, not set for visitors. Or maybe the servants’ quarters that run all the way through an Arista’s house. But, no, I cannot find him.
Che took a step back, because Amnon was being forced to give ground, no matter how determinedly he tried to hold it.
Seda. . she relayed carefully, because it seemed fully possible that Argastos might seize on any incriminating thought the moment it had left her head.
Speak, the Empress snapped back, tensely.
I have it, Che revealed. I know how it can be done.
Thirty-Seven
The good merchants and artisans of Stockwell Street had been talking longer than Serena was happy with, at least twenty of their finest crammed into the backroom of the Helleren Patch taverna. The Fly-kinden had assumed they were moved by the leaflets she had handed them, and by now everyone seemed to know that the Empire was fighting a war on two fronts within the city. So rise up, she had said to them. Cast off your chains while you can! Drive the Empire out of Collegium.
And they had seemed to go for it, right then. There had been plenty of people around — workers, apprentices, refugees from more embattled districts of the city — and some of them had been armed, and she had thought, This is an army in the making. And then the local magnates, the men and women whom everyone would follow, had closeted themselves in the Helleren and. . and just talked. And were still talking, whilst Serena herself shuffled her feet, and Averic kept watch at the window. They were an odd pair to be out soliciting resistance to the Empire, she had to admit. She had assumed he would be doing the talking, denouncing his own people, telling of their atrocities in words that much more convincing coming from one of their own. Instead he just hung back, sullen and silent, and let poor Serena do all the talking.
And he haunted the window like last month’s cut flowers, staring out towards the conflict, towards the College library and his friends, and Serena was beginning to wish that they had sent her out with Gorenn the Dragonfly, because at least that long streak of exoticism had something appropriately harsh to say about the Empire.
What’s the matter, Averic? Wondering if you picked the right side? Which was a mean thing to think, but he was a Wasp, and it had been hard to accept him at the start.
Then she heard the door of the backroom open, and one of the local big men — maybe it was Vollery the plumber — was shouldering his way out, a slice of argument from within still to be heard as he shut the door.
‘You’re all set, then?’ Serena asked him brightly, in absolute defiance of his expression.
Vollery glanced about. ‘You’d better get going,’ he told her.
‘That’s fine. When can we expect you?’ She could read it all on his face — having been put there specifically for her to read — but yet she was cursed if she would accept it just like that.
‘We. . Just go now. It’s not going to happen,’ Vollery replied heavily.
‘You must be mistaken. It is happening.’ Our people are out there, fighting and dying right now, while you’ve made me wait for this?
‘No, it’s not.’ Vollery sighed, a tradesman confronted with something he couldn’t fix. ‘Some students have got some stupid idea that it’s not too late. It was too late as soon as the gate fell.’
‘It’s not just some students, it’s the Company,’ Serena insisted. ‘Averic, come over here. Tell him.’
; But Averic barely glanced at her, and she ground her teeth in frustration.
‘Students,’ Vollery repeated, and she read so much into that one word: how it was not just the Wasps who had overlooked the existence of the Student Company, or at least failed to take it seriously. ‘Students, what do they know? They really think calculus and philosophy are going to get anyone out of this?’
‘They’re your own people, your sons and daughters, and they’re fighting for your freedom right now!’ Serena hissed.
Vollery’s expression turned hard. ‘My son died defending the gate,’ he said. ‘My daughter was raped by the Wasps on that first night.’
She stared at him, flinching in the face of his lack of expression. ‘Then surely you. .?’
‘What do you know?’ he asked her. ‘You understand nothing. Fly-kinden? You lot can always just leave, can’t you. And him? I’m sure there’s a place waiting for him back home, when he stops playing.’ And even that barb failed to hook Averic’s attention. ‘But me? I have a home here, and a trade. I have a wife and a daughter who need me. And I should take up a crossbow and fight the Empire’s armies on the say-so of some fool students who think they know anything?’
Serena opened her mouth and closed it, her words had unaccountably dried up.
‘Go,’ Vollery told her. ‘Go, and be thankful I care enough to come out and get rid of you before they finish debating whether to hand you over to the Wasps.’
‘We have to go,’ Averic declared. Serena looked between the two men for a moment, realizing that Averic had not been paying attention to a word Vollery had said, that his focus had been elsewhere entirely.
‘We’re going,’ she confirmed, already backing towards the taproom door, and a moment later she and Averic were out on the street.
‘It’s changed,’ he told her hollowly.
‘What has?’
‘The sound of the fighting. Come on.’ His wings flashed from his shoulders and he was in the air in an instant, leaving her to catch him up.
They had held the Light Airborne off with some success for most of the morning. The students had thrown a barricade across Albamarl Street and put snapbowmen at every window, and on the roofs, with more snipers dotted in buildings halfway to the College. When the Empire had dropped soldiers behind them, the Wasps had found themselves being shot at from every direction, and for hours now they had been driven off, over and over.
Word from the neighbouring streets had been encouraging. Everyone was holding their ground, and the Wasps did not seem to have the sheer manpower to force the issue. A bloody stalemate had gripped the streets around the College library.
Straessa was commanding the Albamarl barricade, for want of anyone better. Gerethwy, standing beside her, had a repeating snapbow leaning on the barricade as he fiddled awkwardly to fit a new tape of ammunition into its feeder. Since the last such device had blown his fingers off, she’d have thought he wouldn’t want to touch the thing, but apparently he had new plans. A bulky pack of machinery rested beside him, and he was murmuring an explanation of what it was that he intended doing with it.
‘There’s no reason for any of this barbaric spectacle,’ she caught him saying. ‘This is just sheer atavism. We’ve scarcely moved on from the Days of Lore. But devices like ratiocinators have shown us that there’s no limit to the tasks a machine can be set, which might have required a man to handle just a few years ago. Even fighting wars can be left to them, so long as we can work out sufficiently complex calculations fitting the task. .’
‘Shut up now, Gereth. They’re coming.’
His head snapped up. ‘But I’m not ready.’
‘So sorry, I’ll tell them to come back in an hour, shall I?’ She looked at the heap of loose pieces inside his pack or scattered about him. ‘Or would tomorrow suit you better? Inbound, everyone! Looks like grenadiers are back, too!’
All around her, the soldiers of the Student Company, plus a few veterans of her own Coldstone troops, levelled their snap-bows or their pikes, whilst a few checked the always delicate mechanisms of their nailbows in preparation for close-in work. The Wasps were massing three blocks away from the barricades, and snapbow shot was already being exchanged, inaccurate on both sides. Straessa saw Castre Gorenn draw back her bowstring, kneeling under cover of the barricade, and then launch an arrow up at a ridiculous angle. The Antspider was quick enough to see it descend, striking a Wasp who looked as if he had been giving orders just a moment before from the shelter of a doorway.
Gorenn selected another arrow, her expression all business, devoid of pride. The fact that, at full draw, she could outrange a rifled snapbow with an accuracy that Straessa could not have matched at ten feet, had become a tenet of faith amongst the Collegiate insurgents.
‘They’re coming!’ someone shouted, helpfully announcing what was evident to absolutely everyone.
The Antspider levelled her snapbow, butt to the shoulder to steady it, sighting down the barrel and then up a little to adjust for the range, leading the Airborne as they took wing. Her own shot was lost in the general explosive release all around her, like a round of spontaneous applause for the Wasps’ grim perseverance. And that was the thing, because they were not going away, not even slightly. The Empire had been prodding at them all morning, taking light casualties, dealing considerably lighter ones, and all that while the bulk of their forces were not even fighting the Collegiates at all, but brawling with their erstwhile allies four districts away.
This latest attack turned out to be more tentative than most, and the score of grenadiers, whose approach the Airborne had presumably been intended to cover, lost four of their number almost immediately and broke off. Not a single flying assailant’s shadow crossed the line of the barricade, and one Beetle student of agricultural economics took a bolt through the arm and was ordered to get herself off to the infirmary. The massing Wasps down the street had not gone, though, although Gorenn was still making their lives unpredictable and interesting.
Then someone was shouting her name, and she turned to see that Fly friend of Stenwold Maker’s — Laszlo? — spiralling down towards the barricade amidst Wasp snapbow shot zipping past him.
‘Get down!’ she ordered him, ‘What’s. .?’ But the look on his face shook her, transformed from the usual easy-going man she remembered.
‘You’ve got to get out!’ he told her. ‘Pull back for the College right now!’
‘What? No, we’ve-’
‘Shaw Street’s gone. Half of them are dead and the rest are running.’
‘That’s-’ That’s right next to us. Shaw Street ran parallel to Albamarl. ‘Gone how?’
‘Just pissing move, will you?’ the little man yelled at her. ‘How much time do you think you have?’
And if they flank us, they can just come over the roofs anywhere they want. ‘Everyone pull back! Get out of the buildings and head back for the College!’ She saw Gerethwy frantically packing up his kit, gathering all those delicate gears and pieces. ‘Gereth, there’s no time!’ But he would not be dissuaded, his hand and a half moving as deftly as he could to get everything back into his pack.
The thoroughfare behind her was emptying swiftly, her soldiers retreating further down the street, whilst keeping their eyes fixed on the sky. Those at the barricade, however, were ignoring her orders, and she belatedly realized this was because she herself had showed no signs of going.
Hold for another minute. Give the rest a chance to make some distance. ‘What in the pits happened in Shaw Street?’ she demanded.
‘It’s not just Shaw Street. .’ he started, and then pointed: ‘That.’
A familiar metal bulk was moving smoothly onto the far end of Albamarl Street. The sun reflected off its articulated carapace, that one blind eye.
‘Gorenn, got grenades?’ Straessa called.
‘Only works if I can get it in the eye,’ the Dragonfly replied tersely.
‘They’re wise to that, believe me,’ Laszlo told her. ‘It can sh
ove this whole barricade aside and mow the lot of you down with its piercers. It doesn’t need its leadshotter at all. Now are you bloody leaving or what?’
The Antspider stared at the gleaming flanks of the Sentinel as it settled itself to face the barricade. The soldiers around it were obviously preparing to advance, but the way they were massing showed that the war machine would provide their vanguard.
She had seen how fast those things could move.
‘Back,’ she ordered, just the one word. She had a hand on Gerethwy’s shoulder, but the Woodlouse was already straightening up, his toys all cleared up.
The Sentinel shook itself with a clatter of metal and she heard its engine roar even at that distance.
‘Run!’ she decided, and followed her own advice.
By the first sight of evening, the insurgents held the single College building from where their revolt had started, and no more.
They were the students, in the main. The neighbouring townsfolk who had risen alongside them had fled for their homes and workshops, those of them still alive to do so. The Wasp response had been brutal. Any Collegiate had been fair game for the snap-bows, armed or not. Street by street, with their Sentinels at the fore, they had crushed any resistance until only the College itself was left.
The students still held the courtyard wall, their line of snap-bows defended by more archers at every little window, and the Wasps seemed to think they had achieved enough for the day. They had built some barricades of their own, gutting a score of nearby buildings for material, and cordoned off every street surrounding the gate, out of easy snapbow range of the students but well within sight.
They were still fighting the Spiders, by most recent accounts. The soldiers of the Second had not even broken stride, it seemed.
The early evening quiet was broken now only by sporadic demands from the Wasp barricades that the Collegiates surrender, and that any non-combatants trapped on the wrong side of the barricades give themselves up now.
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