Anyone within our cordon at dawn will be treated as an enemy of the Empire and no mercy will be shown, came the warning. Since the call had gone out, a steady trickle of locals unfortunate enough to live too close to the College had been emerging: men, women and children shuffling hesitantly towards the Wasp lines with their heads bowed, not looking back at the College.
In the corridor outside the infirmary, Stenwold was laboriously pacing, despite the objections of the medical staff, working strength into his ragged muscles, his stick clacking and clicking on the floor.
‘Any ideas from the War Master would be much appreciated,’ Eujen observed.
The sound of the stick stopped. ‘I have none,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘We could try to break out, but the cost would be terrible — their barricades will slow us far more effectively than ours ever slowed the Wasps. We could hold out here until they bring some artillery to bear. Or until they decide the lives of their soldiers are cheap enough for them to force entry. Or we could surrender.’
‘On what terms?’ Eujen asked bitterly.
‘Whatever they offer, which aren’t likely to be attractive,’ Stenwold admitted. He looked the student leader in the eye. ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this, Eujen. You deserved better.’
‘And you?’
Stenwold was silent for a long while. ‘Perhaps this is what my life has been leading to. If I was a Wasp commenting on the life of Sten Maker, I’d say it was a fitting end.’
‘This isn’t just about you,’ Eujen pointed out, clearly nettled.
Stenwold leant heavily on his stick, hearing it creak. ‘I’m glad I can walk with some confidence now,’ he remarked.
‘Well, I’m happy for you, Master Maker,’ Eujen replied acidly.
‘It means I could walk out of the College doors and hand myself over to the Wasps.’
The silence between the two men dropped like a curtain, and held for some time,
‘I’m right there at the top of their list,’ Stenwold observed. ‘I’ve earned that, frankly. I know there are others within these walls they want — probably everyone by now — but I’m the man whose name has been on the lips of the Rekef for ten years. I’m the notorious War Master. And our one bargaining counter is that, if they want to come and get me, they know full well my loyal followers will make them pay in bodies. And the Wasps are not quite so heedless of their lives that they would welcome the chance to cover every inch of this building in blood when there is another way.’
Eujen’s expression was almost frightened, as he looked on Stenwold. ‘And when the Rekef get you?’
‘Then I’ll regret we ever had this conversation. If I don’t get the chance to do myself in first, of course. I’ve not had the chance to find out how quickly I can open my own veins, but there’s always a first time. But if taking me alive will buy anything for everyone here, then I will go, Eujen. Because I am responsible.’
‘Again, it’s not just about you-’
‘Eujen.’ A reprimand within the utterance of the name, not War Master to soldier but College Master to student. ‘I have been fighting the Wasps for more than a decade, and I have been inciting my city to fight them, also. I believed that it was the right thing to do. I am the man who built the Lowlands’ resistance to the Empire. And, you know, it seemed to work. It seemed. .’ His arm was shaking, with the effort of just standing there, but he took a deep breath and calmed it. ‘But they came back, despite everything. They kept coming, swarm after swarm. And I can’t imagine how it must be to be General Tynan, just throwing an army at a problem over and over, machines and men and all the bloody waste of it, until you win. And if I’d known that before, known what an Imperial general — an Imperial army — was really like, then what would I have done?’
He looked at the silent Eujen and managed an ashen smile.
‘And some idiot student was saying only recently, should we not have been treating with the Wasps, working on them, trying to work with them, to change them from within rather than resisting them from without. Maybe someone should have listened, eh?’
‘Master Maker,’ Eujen said, almost a whisper. ‘I don’t know. I no longer know what’s right.’
‘I think we can both drink to that.’ Stenwold took a shuddering breath. ‘You yourself have to bargain with them, Eujen. Tell them they can have me. If they. . any concession is better than none. Tell them I’ll come out alive, if they let everyone else just go home. I don’t know. . Tell them something.’
Eujen stared at him for a long time, and then looked away. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said. ‘You need to go sit down now, War Master.’
The sky was already heavy with evening when Serena dropped back into the College courtyard. She had been gone the best part of an hour and Eujen had been as taut as a wire every minute of it, wondering if he had sent her to her death.
‘Right, Chief,’ she said to him, sounding shaky. ‘Well, that went about as well as it was ever going to.’
She had not been the first to volunteer as messenger to the Empire. Castre Gorenn had put herself forward, but Eujen reckoned the Wasps would shoot a Dragonfly far quicker than they would a Fly-kinden and, besides, the Commonweal Retaliatory Army was nobody’s idea of diplomatic.
‘Report,’ he told her, fully aware that these might be some of the last words he ever spoke as chief officer of the Student Company.
‘Their officer in charge will meet with one of our leaders, Chief. To talk terms.’
It would not be fair to say that a great weight fell from Eujen’s shoulders, but at least it shifted position. ‘Now?’
‘Well, I don’t think they’re going anywhere until dawn, you know, but I reckon they’re expecting you sooner than that,’ Serena observed.
Eujen nodded. He wished now that he presented a better image: a breastplate that was clean and undented, a buff coat that wasn’t holed and stitched. Perhaps a more heroic physique. Perhaps a better man entirely, to handle this more adeptly.
But there was only him.
‘Then I think it’s time I went. Get ready to open the gates. Close them the moment I’m through.’
‘Eujen!’
He closed his eyes. He had hoped to avoid this moment.
The Antspider stormed across the courtyard towards him. ‘Have you been avoiding me, you child? What are you doing out here?’
He just looked at her. In fact he drank her in, those halfbreed features that were beautiful, to him, even flushed with annoyance, and the way she carried herself, the long-limbed grace of her.
‘I’m going to talk to the Wasps. I won’t be long.’
She made a strange noise that had probably started off as a word.
‘I’m going to see what can be salvaged. I’ve got a few things to bargain with. Otherwise nobody’s going to do well out of tomorrow, but least of all us here.’
He saw the sea-change pass across her face, Straessa automatically reaching for antagonism, because that was how she dealt with the world when she caught it cheating. ‘You’re doing what, now? Tell me I misheard you, Eujen, because that sounds about the most stupid thing I ever heard said on College grounds — and, believe me, that’s including the entire philosophy department.’
He did not smile. He denied her that. ‘The city hasn’t risen, Straessa. The Wasps are mopping up the Spiders right now and, even without that, they’ve got the men and the machines to beat us. It hasn’t worked.’ He said it softly, reasonably. He knew it would provoke her but he could not help that.
‘And you putting yourself in the hands of the Wasps will make everything all right, will it?’
‘Of course not, but it might help. There are lives at stake. If I can do anything. . They made me chief officer, Straessa. You remember, you brought me the note yourself. I’m responsible.’
She bit at her lip, and he thought she would break, but then she spat out, ‘You intellectual cripple, Leadswell. You self-righteous turd. And it’s all about you, is it? You nobly sacrifice yourself, and
that somehow helps, does it?’
‘I’m not sacrificing-’
‘Bollocks, you aren’t.’ Her fists were clenched, perhaps to keep her hands from straying to her sword. ‘Anyway, I’m coming-’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s an order, Officer Antspider. From your Chief.’
She looked at him as though he had stabbed her. ‘You think I’m soldier enough for that to work?’
‘Straessa, don’t take this the wrong way, but what would I do with you there? You’d stab the first Wasp you saw of major or above, and piss on the whole thing. Look at you. I can’t rely on you. You stay here.’ Sorry, I’m so sorry, but you’re not coming with me, not this time. Forgive me later, but believe me now.
She was trying to speak, and failing, the intended words just coming apart in her mouth, and he saw her shaking, shoulders, hands, all of her. In the lamplight her eyes were bright and shining.
‘Open the gates,’ Eujen ordered, and he heard the bars lifted off, the creak of reinforced wood. Stepping through them was a hard thing, perhaps the hardest thing he had ever done.
Behind him, he heard Straessa hurl a scream at him — wordless, frustrated, agonized, loud enough that the Wasps must be wondering what horrors were going on inside the Collegiate camp. Just the usual, the way we always go about things. It was a single, short, ugly sound, but it stayed with him.
There was a whisper of wings before he was twenty feet from the gates, and he thought for a moment it would be some overbold Light Airborne come to escort him in, and about to get shot for his pains. Serena dropped down beside him, though, matching his pace.
‘Chief,’ she acknowledged.
‘Get back inside.’
‘What’re they going to think, if you just pitch up on your own, Chief?’ she asked. ‘Man needs staff, a retinue, or they won’t take you seriously. We thought at least we should show them you’re worth listening to.’
‘Are you serious? Wait — “we”?’
‘Eujen.’
The expected Wasp face, but set above a Collegiate uniform. Averic strode out of the shadows.
‘Not a chance. Back behind cover, the both of you.’
‘I’ll be able to help you. They’re my people.’
‘And you’re a traitor to them. That means. . what is it, crossed pikes?’
Averic sighed. ‘I’m not Straessa.’
Eujen frowned at him. ‘I didn’t think you were.’
‘So insult me, tell me I’ll spoil things, call me out for my kinden or my character. I’m still going with you.’
Eujen opened his mouth, but there was something in the man’s voice, his face, that rendered any response he could make seem trivial. And he had already parted from one of his friends on poor terms. And he had no way of making Averic go, even if he tried to insist on it.
And, anyway, we’re coming back. This is a diplomatic errand, like when Maker met with their general outside the walls.
He nodded, not trusting himself to find words, and continued on towards the Wasps with Serena to one side of him, and Averic to the other.
He had thought it hard to leave the gates. He had been wrong. Hard was approaching the Wasp-made barricades, seeing that long stretch of snapbowmen all giving him and his escort their undivided attention, seeing the great shell of a Sentinel reflecting the light of their sentry lamps, its scratched metal hide flaring silver. They all seemed unnaturally quiet and still, and he realized that it was because of him. He had their utter concentration. If he had been Stenwold Maker himself, in that moment, he could not have commanded the focus of the Wasps more completely.
As he neared them, two score soldiers dismantled a section of the barricade in front of him, with an efficiency that put his own troops to shame. He looked at their faces — Averic’s kin, pale, tough-faced men, soldiers and conquerors. They did not spit at him or call insults, but there were thirty stings and as many snapbows trained on him at all times, and the same on his companions. This was what professional soldiers looked like: men whose entire livelihood was the uniform and the Empire’s orders. How different from a Collegiate tradesman-turned-soldier, or even the Ant infantry who were citizens before they were warriors. War was what these men were made of.
He stepped on past them, Averic and Serena crowding closer without meaning to. There was a fire ahead, burning in the lee of a machinesmith’s shop front to retain the heat. The only clear path through the Wasp troops led to it.
For some reason he had expected General Tynan. That bald, stocky old man, seen only once, had become the face of the Wasp command for him. Instead the officer he found there was a little younger, taller, vaguely familiar from that meeting outside the walls.
‘You are not Stenwold Maker, I see,’ were the first words out of the man’s mouth. Apparently he had been labouring under a similar misapprehension.
‘My name is Eujen Leadswell, Chief Officer of the Student Company.’
‘I am Colonel Cherten of Imperial Intelligence,’ the Wasp told him. He glanced briefly at Eujen’s two followers, eyes lingering on Averic. ‘Tell me, before we start, do you have Stenwold Maker, back there?’
All Eujen could think at first was, Curse me, it really is all about him. But, of course, it was just as the man himself had said. There was a list, but his name topped it. And I have his permission to conjure with that name. Eujen had thought long and hard about that, before embarking on this foolishness.
‘We do not,’ he replied, with the utter candour of the student debater. ‘I thought he had escaped the city.’
If he was expecting Cherten to fly into a rage at being thus thwarted, he was disappointed. The man simply nodded curtly. ‘Very well.’ Barely a moment’s more consideration on the colonel’s part, then: ‘Take them.’
Eujen’s mouth was still open to speak when three soldiers grabbed him and slammed him to the ground hard enough to rattle his teeth. He heard Averic snarling, had brief glimpses of scuffling feet. A sting went off — he heard the crackle but saw barely a flash of it — but then the Wasp beside him was down, his hands pinned behind his back.
Eujen gave a great wrench and half threw off the men leaning on him. It was then he saw Serena drive a knife into the leg of the man who had laid hands on her, and a moment later she was in the air, wings driving her as hard as they could back towards the barricade and the College beyond.
He heard a sharp retort, without seeing the shooter, but Serena’s scream was unmistakable. And then Eujen was shouting, fighting, throwing awkward punches at everyone within reach, clutching for a sword already taken from his scabbard. A Wasp punched him in the face, the Art-grown bone spike jutting from the edge of the man’s hand laying open Eujen’s cheek, and then he was being forced to his knees, arms twisted back as far as they would go, looking up at Colonel Cherten.
‘We came to talk!’ he spat, aware of how weak the words sounded. ‘We came to make a deal.’
Cherten’s face succumbed to contempt. ‘The Empire may negotiate honourably with enemy combatants, boy, but your city has surrendered. That makes this a rebellion. That makes you all traitors to the Empress’s rule. No negotiation, no mercy. Now get them back to the gatehouse. I have questions to ask.’
Thirty-Eight
Helma Bartrer came from an old, old family.
Of course, everyone came from an old family: nobody’s family was older than anyone else’s, but hers was superior to the rest, she knew. Her family had remembered the traditions and remained true. Generation to generation they had told the stories of their own heritage, all through the time of forgetting that followed the revolution in Pathis and the breaking of the Days of Lore.
Collegium, Pathis-that-was, had forgotten, but she remembered, as did some very few families else. Down through the harsh, bright centuries they had not abandoned their purpose or their faith.
And all it said in the Collegiate history books was that the Beetles had been slaves once, and the Moths had be
en their masters. They made that sound like such a bad thing. They compared it with being a slave for the Ants, for the Wasps, just hard drudgery in service of the uncaring, of the banal. They had forgotten how it was.
But Helma knew better, for the secret annals of her family made it plain. Perhaps even the Moth-kinden these days did not know the truth, mired as they were in their inward-looking squabbles. But there really had been a golden age: a golden age of night.
True, the Moths of Dorax did send word now and then, praising Helma’s kin for their ongoing service, offering some scrap of lore in return for intelligence on the internal workings of Collegium. She was cynical enough to recognize that for what it was: mere espionage, the regular business of modern nations. In itself that was an admission of failure: confession that their ancient skills had withered to the extent that they had to ask, and could not simply know. Helma’s kin remembered what they had once been, better than the Moths did themselves.
And true also that Helma was Apt, and her family had been Apt for many generations, though the secret histories suggested that their Inaptitude had survived at least a century beyond the Revolution. There were wonders written there that Helma could not truly understand, just as she could not quite grasp the meaning of the old Moth scrolls in the College library, but that had not stopped her trying. She had steeped herself in Inapt lore from an early age, thus becoming, almost incidentally, one of the College’s great scholars of history. She had even sought to take the chair for Inapt studies, but her Aptitude had shackled her, and even the halfwit Fly they had brought in for the post had that crucial advantage over her.
But she had learned, even if only by rote and in ignorance, and thus been vindicated spectacularly. She had come here to the forest with only the dusty old tatters of understanding and the name of Argastos, a great name from the Days of Lore.
And she had shed Moth blood, and so she had got in. It was her crowning achievement, to mimic Inaptitude with such sincerity that she had crossed the line, that once. She had become a fit servant for her masters.
Rather, for her master. Because whatever the Moths of today had devolved into, Argastos represented that kinden at its height, a man — and such a man! — who had strode a world that knew nothing of Aptitude, a world in which great things were still being done.
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