The Dragonfly looked round as though noticing Straessa for the first time. ‘Of course. Why not?’
Straessa saw them unsocket the spears again, in preparation for their bloody work. Setting the weapons up in advance like that was part of the ritual: to make the victims — and the onlookers — understand and know fear.
‘Founder’s Mark, do it,’ she spat. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Eujen. I wish you a clean death. That’s all I can do now.
Atop the roof overlooking the barricade, Cherten peered into the night, over at the College, seeing movement without detail along the wall.
‘Well, why not?’ he addressed his prisoners. ‘After all, you came to negotiate a surrender. I will now show your fellows what terms they can expect if they continue to resist the Empire.’
Eujen did not look at him, staring at his own feet, but Averic glowered, twisting in the grip of the soldiers who held him.
Cherten favoured him with a cold smile. ‘Yes, the greater of the two traitors first. Put the pikes in him now.’
He turned back to regard the dark bulk of the College and opened his mouth to shout something at his audience there, and an arrow pierced his throat, through to the fletching.
And on the College wall, Straessa cursed and demanded, ‘What did you do?’
Castre Gorenn stared at her. ‘Wasn’t that. . Wait, what did you mean for me to do?’
There was a moment when that single arrow became a full-scale attack in the minds of most of the Wasps there, and Averic seized on it.
He tried to put an elbow in the throat of the man holding him, but slammed it painfully into the soldier’s chest instead. It was enough, sending his captor reeling away from him, and then Averic’s hands flashed, knocking down the man with the pike who stood right next to him, still staring dumbly at Cherten’s body. The barbed spear ended up in Averic’s hands, and he lashed it across the face of the man holding Eujen.
‘Go!’ he shouted, and because Eujen plainly had no idea how or where to go, he grabbed the Beetle student tight and threw them both off the roof towards the splintered architecture of the barricade.
His wings flashed, but Eujen was heavy, and the two of them barely cleared the barricade at all, before tumbling to the ground. There were shouts from behind and above — at least some of them directed at the escaping prisoners and-
Averic’s heart soared. Eujen was on his feet and already beginning to lumber towards the College, stumbling at first, but gaining momentum as he went. And Averic flew after him, turning in the air to spit a scatter of stingshot at those he knew must be following.
‘Get the doors open!’ Straessa yelled. ‘Get. .’ and then she had simply vaulted the edge of the wall, hanging by her hands for a moment and then dropping. Gorenn was with her, and a couple of Fly-kinden, and she heard the rattle and groan as the doors were unbarred and opening behind her.
Her feet pounded the flagstones, and she was already trying to level her snapbow, but it was a futile effort. Ahead she saw bright flashes that must be Averic’s sting — and they were answered in kind, for the Wasps were in the air and descending fast on the fugitives. The distance between them — from Straessa to the escapees — seemed immense and ever-growing however fast she ran, like in some terrible dream.
Beside her, Gorenn was loosing another arrow, yet barely slowing.
She saw Averic turn again, kicking into the air, hands on fire with golden light. Then he had lurched sideways, and she realized he had been struck. There were snapbowmen still on the roof, and they had a clear shot. Averic was down on one knee, and she saw Eujen falter, slowing as if to turn — slowing to be caught.
‘Run!’ came Averic’s high, clear voice. He had not even looked back, but his hands flashed and flamed, burning up his life in crackling Art.
He was down. It was so sudden Straessa did not even see the transition, but her Wasp friend was a motionless heap on the ground when her eyes found him again. . and Eujen was still labouring towards her. He had spotted her now, and his expression was like a drowning man’s.
There were Wasps behind him, practically hovering over his shoulders. One spun away with an arrow punched through his mail. The other dropped down to the ground, snapbow levelled.
‘Eujen!’ Straessa shouted. ‘Go left!’
He lurched — it was nothing more than that — but she was already bringing her own weapon up, pulling the trigger, her hands so steady they should have belonged to someone else. The Wasp soldier stood up suddenly, then fell back down, and Eujen. .
Eujen was picking himself up unsteadily, weaving oddly. His lurch had not been in response to her call. He had been shot.
She tried to run faster to reach him, to compensate for the fact that he was no longer running at all. The next two bolts that struck him, she saw only in the shuddering of his body before he collapsed.
She was screaming, and there were other Wasps ahead, but she had brought a boiling mass of students in her wake, and now the snapbow bolts were flying in both directions and the Wasps had not been ready for a Collegiate sally.
She reached Eujen’s body, saw him still moving, still clawing to stand up, and she took his hand, took his arm, but the sound he made when she tried to get him to his feet curdled her insides, and she let go.
‘Gereth!’ she called out, and of course the Woodlouse was there, without even a snapbow in hand. But he had come after her, and now he was gathering up Eujen, lifting the Beetle’s bulk as though it was nothing, while soldiers of the Student Company flanked him and loosed their bolts at the Wasps to keep them back.
Straessa spared one look for Averic, but he was too far away, and lying too still. . and she knew that to go after his corpse would be to run into a killing ground.
‘Fall back,’ she spat. ‘Back for the College.’
The surgeons had been and gone before she was allowed to see him, coming and going behind closed doors as if they were merely ghosts or rumours. When Straessa finally forced her way in, after she had exhausted the protests of the staff, she found the same two Fly-kinden tending him as had watched over Stenwold Maker earlier. Sperra, the woman from Princep, and of course Sartaea te Mosca, her friend. Eujen’s friend.
There was such grief on the little woman’s face that Straessa thought he must have died.
When she crouched beside him, though, kneeling on the floor by his mattress, she could just hear his breathing, picking it out from the laboured breath of the other casualties there because she recognized it, even diminished as it was.
‘Tell me,’ she whispered.
Te Mosca shook her head slightly. ‘We can’t know, dear one, I’m sorry. There’s hope. .’ Her tone belied her words.
‘They said if he hadn’t been a Beetle, he’d not have made it as far as the walls,’ Sperra explained, briskly businesslike because Eujen was just one more injured Collegiate to her. ‘They’ve dosed him up with Instar but sometimes it doesn’t take, and sometimes it makes things worse.’
‘It seems that medical science has come full circle, until it’s as vague as my magic,’ te Mosca murmured.
Sperra bent over Eujen’s chest and listened carefully, before noting something down on a scroll. ‘Don’t do anything stupid. Just let him lie there. . and let whatever happens happen. Make a nuisance of yourself, and it’ll make him worse.’ She stood up for a moment, swaying slightly, and Straessa wondered when this woman had last slept.
Te Mosca squeezed the other Fly’s arm — small support but all she could wring from the situation — and Sperra nodded and moved on to the next bed, where her big Ant friend was sitting halfway up and sipping gingerly at a jug of water.
Eujen’s dead weight lay beside Straessa, and she would have needed the instruments of the Apt to register his chest rising and falling. His colour was a ghastly greyish hue, as though the blood had congealed inside him. His exposed skin bore at least a score of lacerations, many still weeping.
She took his good hand, finding it clammy and too
cold, and she sat there beside his bed for as long as she could stand it, listening to the weakening falter of his breath. Nobody was counting, but she reckoned that she lasted less than twenty minutes before she wanted to scream out her anger and frustration at the vaulted ceiling.
She stood up without warning, and te Mosca looked up at her, concerned.
‘Straessa?’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t just. . I can’t just sit here and wait.’
The Fly took in her expression. ‘Please, he needs you.’
‘I can’t. Not for him, not for you.’ She was shaking a little, with a chill that had come from his cool hand.
‘Straessa, please, don’t go and do anything-’
‘I can’t just wait for him to die!’ she burst out — heedless of the other patients, or of Eujen himself. But it was a true confession, and every moment she spent there, wondering if there would even be a next breath, was winding her up like a clockwork, tighter and tighter, until she could not remain still any longer. Until she had to act.
Out on the courtyard wall again, with the night sky above her — was it only a couple of hours past midnight? — she stared out towards the Wasp lines. She had escaped Eujen’s deathbed, but the scratchy, failing whisper of his breathing had come outside with her, as though his comatose body was hung just behind her, whichever way she turned.
And she knew only this one thing: I have to act.
Castre Gorenn, who seemed to need no sleep at all, was eyeing her doubtfully, but then she used that same expression for so much she encountered in Collegium. She had left her home and come to an alien world of Beetle-kinden politics and artifice, and for her the Wasps were probably the only familiar faces in the whole city.
‘I’m going over the wall,’ Straessa told her, and the look that appeared on the Dragonfly’s face was one of pure understanding. ‘I’m going to fight the war.’
No objections, no raising of the alarm. Gorenn just nodded because it made sense to her.
‘I’ve fought as an Ant for long enough,’ the Antspider stated, unbuckling her breastplate. ‘Now I’m going to fight as a Spider.’ She set the metal down carefully and stripped away her buff coat as well, leaving only her dark tunic beneath. ‘Besides, I’m far better with a sword than I ever was with a snapbow.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m going to kill General Tynan.’ There, the words were said.
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
Straessa stared at the Dragonfly. She had already considered the likely outcome of her mission, and it was plain that Gorenn concurred, but that offer had still been made.
And it seemed so tempting, but Straessa wanted no more weighing on her conscience, not just then. ‘You hold your post, soldier. I’ll be back before morning.’
And then she was over the wall and away, with assassination on her mind.
In the extensive cellars of the College library building there was one spur of rooms never used to store books. The chill was insidious there, far more so than any obvious factor could account for, and the walls ran perpetually with an acrid condensation. The College had tried to use the little chambers there as an ice room, but the resulting ice always smelled odd. People reported hearing strange scratchings sometimes. It had become a standard student dare to spend the night there: the Inapt claimed it was haunted, and the laughing Apt found it a safe place to titillate themselves with daring thoughts of the old days once the lanterns were put out.
But, being a place of education, among each generation of students there had always been a few inquiring minds who had been curious and analytical enough to work out precisely what was going on, to solve the mystery and declare it anything but supernatural, although they were largely ignored.
As luck would have it, a couple of such inquiring minds were in the Student Company garrison trapped inside the College, even then.
Forty
Milus had barely slept, or perhaps not at all. That was another thing that marked him out amongst his people — placed him on that razor-edged line between prized thinker and freak. His troops slept soundly, and would wake in an instant. Only he felt compelled to run his plans over and over, to build increasingly redundant fallback scenarios for remote possibilities. What if they. .?
He went to speak with Lissart, because he could kick her awake at any hour, but she stared at him sombrely as though death had entered the tent alongside him.
‘Come morning, is it?’ she asked.
He nodded, his eyes on her but his mind working elsewhere.
‘Good luck, then. I’m sure you Ants don’t put faith in mere luck, but my people live by it.’
‘I would have thought your wishes would be with the other side,’ he said drily.
‘That, Tactician, is because you’re a humourless bastard and you don’t understand me. You won’t, either, however much you twist and pry.’ She was in one of her brave moods, and that lifted his spirits. When she was too miserable with her lot, there was no talking to her. Her emotions seemed to swing wildly, and at their nadir they were more of a torment to her than anything he had inflicted.
‘Your people out there,’ he pointed out.
‘Not my people now. The people I used to work for, yes. Several minutes of inquiry teased that one out of me. I’m no Imperial. I was born in the Spiderlands.’ She grimaced.
‘Also the enemy,’ he observed.
‘Well, Tactician, let me put it this way, shall I? If the Eighth beats your army and sacks your camp and gets their hands on me, and if I can’t persuade them otherwise — if they recognize who I am — then what the Rekef have at their disposal will make all your instruments and freezings and beatings look like the work of amateurs, believe me.’
She said it quite matter-of-factly, and he found her conviction genuine.
‘Believe me, Tactician,’ she went on, gathering speed a little, her heavy shackles clinking as she leant forward, ‘I will go and act against the Wasps, I will. Set me free and I’ll be yours. I’ll go into their camp, I’ll sabotage their machines and burn their supplies. You know how I can.’
He studied her for a long time, and into his mind crept a seditious thought, Is that it? Have I misused this piece all this while?
The barrier he would have to clear before trusting her to go about with her hands free was high, but had he been given enough time to think, then perhaps he could have surmounted it with sufficient safeguards. At that moment, though, he felt the ground shake and heard the distant thunder of the Wasp greatshotters.
Awake and to arms! Go rouse the cursed Mynans and that rabble from Princep! To battle, my siblings! And he was already striding out into the grey pre-dawn, with the leadshotters stalking their shells across the land, whilst his men were awake and in motion, thousands of them like gears in a perfect machine.
Behind him, Lissart’s cry of frustration went almost unnoticed.
His soldiers would remain dispersed, even widening their front, daring the Wasps to sweep them aside; whilst the others — the foreigners he could not rely on — would be forming into solid ranks because they lacked the Art and the discipline to do anything else. Let the Imperial engines track them down and reap them like wheat as the Sarnesh advanced.
He strode through the effortlessly mobilizing camp, drawing his cloak tighter about him against the chill.
The battle for the Lowlands was beginning.
Tactician, change in the situation, a hurried report from one of his sentries, and an image — the hours before dawn still grey enough that he could not discern what the man was looking at. There were the campfires of the Wasps, and that blackness was. .
Was something he had not foreseen.
He froze, letting the wheels of his mind spin, and trusting them to come up with the best solution in the seconds he had before he was required to give an order.
General Roder listened to the greatshotters as they found their rhythm, pounding out their percussion against the distant Ants. He knew what his opposite number was about,
of course. The Ants would stay spread out as long as they could, to deny him a good target. Those huge engines were not really made for field battles, but he was looking forward to giving them their head before the walls of Sarn. Afterwards, perhaps, he would write a brief report on the relative merits of Mynan and Sarnesh architecture.
But, for now, the Sarnesh had made the sound decision to test him on the field, and the Eighth Army had nowhere near the fortifications it had been able to rely on at Malkan’s Stand. He had set out his lines as best he could, nevertheless, with enough trenches and sharpened stakes to make any movement by the enemy a constant trial. He was also guessing that the Ants would have to mass up as they neared the Wasp lines, and that they would want to engage in close fighting, where they had an undeniable superiority. In that case the Wasps would trust to their own manoeuvrability, using the Light Airborne’s wings to simply relocate the battlefield again and again, refusing to lock swords.
His fliers were taking off: some veteran Spearflights and half a dozen of the new Farsphex loaded with bombs. The Ant orthopters would be able to keep an impressive discipline and coordination in the air, but their machines were a generation out of date, by Imperial standards, and Roder was looking to secure control of the air relatively swiftly.
If the Ants stayed back, then the fighting would get bogged down into a long-range pissing contest with snapbows, which Roder reckoned he would eventually win, given his superior numbers and what he predicted would be a Wasp advantage in speed and accuracy. That would be a costly way to bring the battle to a close, though, and one that would be likely to allow the Ants to disperse and meet him again before their walls — or even attack him from behind as he invested the city. The painstaking progress the Eighth had made towards Sarn, with the Ants using minimal forces to cause maximum delay, had given him a new respect for whoever was planning their war.
Still, the Sarnesh resistance was all for nothing, since a messenger had arrived from Tynan’s Second to confirm that Collegium had capitulated. The reinforcements that Sarn had presumably been hoping for were not coming. Sarn now stood alone.
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