‘Excuse me,’ one of the students piped up eventually, a broad Beetle girl in chemical-stained overalls. ‘We can get out another way, I think.’
Everyone stared at her and she shuffled back a little, obviously not happy with being the centre of attention.
‘Cornella Fassen, isn’t it?’ Berjek Gripshod said kindly. ‘Tell us what you mean, please.’
‘Well, Master Gripshod, do you know the Cold Cellars?’
There was a murmur of bafflement and even laughter at that, as though she had told a joke just to defuse the tension. Those cold, slick, allegedly haunted chambers had been a part of student folklore for many years.
Even Berjek raised half a smile. ‘What of them?’ He remained painfully polite and correct, for all that there was an army gearing up outside even as he spoke.
‘Last year, some friends of mine worked out that it’s just. . they’re adjacent to the Natural History vaults underneath the Living Sciences faculty. That’s where they keep the samples, and where all the preservatives tanks. . and the cooling machinery.’
Stenwold and Berjek exchanged glances.
‘What are you saying?’ the War Master asked.
‘For the last day we’ve been working on the wall there. We reckon there can’t be that much that separates the two cellars. We had acids on it, and we were chipping away. If we could just get into Living Sciences, we could come out through the Old Workshops, and that means outside the Wasp cordon. We thought it would be useful, but we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. But this morning there’s a crack. . In the wall, Masters. I think we must be almost through.’
A shudder went through them on hearing that. It meant the insertion of hope, like a needle. A way out?
Almost immediately there was shouting upstairs, and moments later a Fly skidded down, calling out to them, ‘They’ve started! They’re moving for the wall!’
‘Get through to Living Sciences any way you can!’ Stenwold almost shouted at Fassen, who was out of the door the next instant. ‘Everyone else. .’ Wheels spun in his mind. ‘I need a detail to man the windows — cover for the wall guards. And then. . and then. .’ And then hold your ground until they kill you, he thought, as he realized what he was asking.
‘I’ll take volunteers for that,’ Berjek said calmly.
‘No-’
‘Oh, shut up, Maker. Give someone else a chance.’ The old man smiled wanly. ‘Less to lose here, and less of a loss. Who needs one more historian, eh?’
Stenwold took a deep breath. ‘I need a detachment ready to go through the breach in the wall as soon as it’s made. We don’t know who might be on the far side — the place could already be packed with Wasps.’
‘I’ll sort that,’ someone volunteered, and Stenwold nodded in gratitude. ‘Te Mosca, ready the wounded for movement. Yes, I know you don’t want to move them, but you must. Tomasso’s right. And, as for your distraction. .’
‘You make the call,’ Tomasso told him, ‘and I can signal them, no problems.’
‘What are we talking about?’
‘Suicidal counter-attack on the Wasps. Spider-kinden lorn detachment.’
Stenwold shook his head, impressed despite himself. ‘We will have to talk about how you managed that.’
‘Well, on the same subject, I have a whole bunch of former Spiderlands mercenaries hiding out with some trading friends of mine, at great expense, who will be getting themselves out of the city as soon as the Wasps open the gates to trade. I recommend you get your wounded, and anyone on the Empire’s lists, to hook up with them. Best chance they’ll get, believe me.’
‘And me?’
‘Master Maker, you’re with me and Laszlo. We’ve got a boat to catch.’
‘General!’
Tynan found that he had been expecting it, even as he sat taking reports and checking over the seemingly endless details of the Second’s assimilation of Collegium. He looked at the sergeant who had burst in on him, here on the second floor of some ousted magnate’s townhouse.
‘An attack?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The sergeant took a deep breath. ‘Best guess, about four hundred, sir. They must have been sneaking as close as they could, but as soon as we spotted them, they formed up. Sir. . my lieutenant said you’d want to see.’
Did he, now? But Tynan put down his pen and shoved his chair back. Four hundred, formed up, and I have a thousand snap-bowmen right here, right now, and so many more ranged across the city. Is this all you could manage?
‘Send out orders — to keep all eyes out for lone archers and assassins,’ he instructed, though if none was found it would not surprise him. An attack of any kind was madness. Surely she could have escaped over the walls? We can’t watch everything all of the time. Did I not leave even that much of a gap for you? In his heart he felt he knew. What would she be returning home for, if she escaped? Already in disgrace in the Spiderlands, her family humiliated and brought low, this campaign had been her last chance to redeem herself in the eyes of her peers. Tynan had crushed that hope — Tynan and his orders.
‘Let me see her,’ he said.
The Spider-kinden had not attacked, and the Wasps of the Second had held their positions, waiting for their general’s command, and so it was a motionless tableau that awaited him, as perfect as if they were holding still for some artist of epic talent, come to capture this moment in history.
They had their banners up, too. That was something the Spiderlands troops had eschewed while fighting alongside the Wasps, for perhaps Mycella had believed it would appear old-fashioned. Now, with nothing left to lose, flags billowed over the Spiderlands ranks, the bright silks of a dozen houses, with the Aldanrael at their heart.
She has come to say goodbye, Tynan thought. He could not see her, and it would have been perfect Spider planning for the woman herself to be elsewhere, perhaps sneaking over the walls even now, but he believed fiercely that she was somewhere in front of him, that she had chosen this way to finish their relationship with true Arista style.
‘I want her alive,’ he said, at first too quietly for anyone to notice, and then louder so his officers could hear.
‘Sir. . with a snapbow volley. .’ one of them ventured.
‘Do what you can,’ Tynan instructed. ‘Two volleys, and then send the Airborne in and, if she lives, bring her before me.’
‘Think your skipper can pull this off?’ Stenwold asked, just because he needed to say something.
‘Tomasso? There’s nothing he sets his mind to that he can’t do,’ Laszlo declared loyally.
The stench of chemicals was overpowering as Fassen and her friends worked on the wall. Even far down the corridor, Stenwold kept a rag to his mouth and nose to block it out. He had stopped asking how much longer. Nothing he could do would achieve anything but to distract the artificers. Around him, the vanguard force shuffled and rechecked their snapbows or fingered swords ready in scabbards. Laszlo shuffled from foot to foot.
Word had come, soon after the start of the attack, that the courtyard wall had fallen, Gorenn pulling back as instructed, for once. The main gates had been punched in by a Sentinel’s lead-shot, and the machine had muscled up to the wall and sent a shot through the gateway to stave in the College building’s inner doors as well. Since then, Berjek Gripshod’s lorn detachment had been keeping the Wasps off, making the final approach a nettle that the Empire was still steeling itself to grasp.
Beyond the wall, Tomasso’s distraction had now arrived, a ragged band of Spider-kinden hurling themselves at the rear of the Wasp position, massively outnumbered but pushing as far as they could with the benefit of surprise, so that Laszlo had reported fighting deep within the Wasp camp. The Empire had drawn its forces back to eliminate these new challengers, whereupon the students had dragged out all manner of broken furniture to block up the doorway and the courtyard gate.
Then the Wasps had come back, the Spiders clearly dealt with. The sands were running fierce and fast in the glass now.
‘Maker!’ It
was Sperra barrelling down into the cellars, her eyes wide. ‘They’re in! They’re through the doors, Maker!’
A cold weight settled itself in Stenwold’s gut.
‘How are the wounded?’
‘We’re still getting them ready to move,’ Sperra reported. ‘Tell me we have somewhere to move to.’
He opened his mouth to confess that he stood between her and nothing but a dead end, that the end had found them.
There was a whoop, a veritable howl of triumph, from Fassen back in the Cold Cellars. ‘Through! We’re through!’ followed by ‘Hammer and tongs, what’s that?’
‘Vanguard forward!’ Stenwold snapped. ‘Sperra, get the infirmary cleared. Get everyone down here as quick as you can. Get. .’ but she was already gone.
And whatever Fassen’s found, don’t let it be another wall, he begged, as he pushed forwards with Laszlo at his heels.
He skidded down into the gripping chill of the cellar, and saw the wall ahead of him almost completely fallen, enough space for two people to squeeze through side by side. The work of the acids was plain, but there was a great deal of physical cracking that made him wonder if there had somehow been some movement of the earth that had touched only here. Or had Fassen other methods at her disposal than the chemical?
Whatever the reason, there was certainly a gap there, and it led somewhere.
The vanguard had waited for him, and he unslung his snapbow as he glanced around at them, at Fassen and her artificers, at Laszlo.
‘Master Maker,’ Fassen started.
‘Let me see.’ And he pushed his way to the edge of the hole.
He could see the cellars of Living Science, pungent with the reek of preservative because a lot of the jars and canisters there were broken open. That explained the chill and the smell that had tainted the Cold Cellars, and, for it to have done so, those cellars must have abutted here precisely, only this single thickness of wall separating two distinct College buildings.
He stepped across, and it took a long stride, because there was a gap below him, an impossible gap, and that was what Fassen had exclaimed about.
It was not large, just six inches in width, but for a long moment Stenwold stared down into it, and tried to understand what he was seeing. Darkness, yes, and the barrel of a snapbow poked into it encountered no resistance. Just a flaw in the earth, then? And yet. . if he strained his eyes were there lights, at some unfathomable distance down below? As though this little crack gave onto a vast, echoing cavern extending impossibly beneath Collegium itself.
He drew back, feeling sudden vertigo. He had no idea what this was, whether it had always been there or had only manifested during this last night, in time to help Fassen in her work. He had more prosaic matters to hand.
‘Living Science cellars look clear,’ he announced, trying for his old booming Assembly voice, but low enough in the end for his words to have to be relayed back. ‘Come on, we need to secure the floors above.’
Behind him, as they crossed, there wasn’t a member of the vanguard who didn’t pause and shiver a little, while crossing that inexplicable gap.
The narrow corridors leading down to the lower levels had never been intended for stretcher-bearers. Te Mosca and Sperra had got the wounded out of the infirmary easily enough, but navigating them to the Cold Cellars was an agonizingly slow business of knocks and bottlenecks, whilst everyone else in the building was desperately trying to hurry to the same place.
The sounds of fighting — and dying — were closing in on them. The Wasps were inside the building, and Berjek’s gallant few were fighting them from room to room, spending blood and buying time at whatever rate of exchange they could get.
Another flight of stairs, but the stolid stretcher-bearers knew their business now — mostly Beetles, and many of them former wounded now strong enough to help their comrades. One stretcher at a time they descended as swiftly as was safe, their faces tight with concentration, blotting out the shouting and the fighting from just a few rooms away.
Sperra had gone on ahead, a faithful escort to Balkus’s stretcher, but at the rear was Sartaea te Mosca, who perhaps had planned to provide an infinitesimal barrier between her charges and the Empire.
She brimmed over with exhortations to hurry that were utterly pointless. Nobody knew better than the men and women with the stretchers just how little time they had, and it was to their lasting credit that none of them cast aside their burdens to safeguard their own lives.
Most of the wounded were now on the level below, the last stretcher just about to begin its descent. Its rear bearer was Raullo Mummers, bag-eyed and hungover, but he had volunteered quickly enough.
‘Please go,’ he asked her, setting his foot on the top step. There was room for her to slip through above him, if she flew nimbly enough, but she shook her head.
‘I shall see you to the foot of the stairs, Master Mummers, and then I shall be right behind you.’ She risked a glance at Raullo’s burden: he had insisted on carrying Eujen, and she hadn’t had the heart to deny him the task. The chief officer of the Student Company looked. .
Dead, he looked dead, and in Mummers’s shaking grip there was no chance of detecting that infinitesimal rise and fall that earlier had betrayed some spark of life yet clinging to him. Simply shifting him might already have finished him off.
Running feet, and te Mosca wondered if there was any wretched magic that this heart of the Apt world would permit her, or if she had ever known any trick that could salvage a situation such as this.
‘Knife. . I’ve got a knife,’ Mummers gulped out, stumbling on the stairs but keeping his balance. She just shook her head. One knife against the Empire was not going to tip any scales.
Rounding the corner came a couple of soldiers in Collegiate colours, but neither of them locals: Gerethwy and Castre Gorenn.
‘You need to make better time!’ the Dragonfly shouted at her.
‘I am well aware of the situation, thank you,’ te Mosca said tightly. ‘We are evacuating as quickly as possible.’
‘I’ll hold here for them,’ Gerethwy announced. ‘This is a perfect position for my surprise.’
Gorenn gave him a nod. ‘There will be no more of us coming this way. Those that remain are drawing the Wasps away, for as long as they can.’
‘Perfect.’ Gerethwy had dropped to one knee and unslung his kitbag, dragging out his repeating snapbow and a tangle of mechanism.
‘Gorenn, what about you?’ te Mosca asked. Behind her, Mummers had wrestled Eujen’s stretcher down to the foot of the stairs, sparing her one last look back before he went lurching off with it.
‘I shall fight the Wasps,’ the Dragonfly said, and all the fires of the Twelve-year War leapt in her eyes. ‘And then, when that bores me, I shall leave, for there is no son of the Empire alive who can pursue me in the air. And I shall go to Sarn, and from there I shall fight them again.’
‘May the sun be in the eyes of your enemies,’ Gerethwy told her, his hands fitting components together deftly now, practice compensating for his lost fingers. Already the repeating snapbow was mounted on a low, bulky tripod, with some viciously toothed mechanism set in place to feed in its bolts.
Then the Dragonfly was gone, and Sartaea te Mosca was left staring only at the hunched back of her friend. ‘Gereth, come with me now, please.’
‘Not just yet,’ he told her. ‘But I will, believe me. Because I’ve solved the war problem.’ A momentary grin appeared over his shoulder. ‘Believe me, you won’t catch me sticking around for the Wasps, but I won’t need to once this is ready. My weapon will fight here without me.’ Abruptly a dozen slender wires lashed out, unspooling themselves down the corridor. ‘Ratiocinators, Sartaea, the future of artifice. Machines that can do things by themselves, react, calculate, even fight. And so simple — we could have done it ten years ago, if only anyone had thought!’ His hands flickered over the mechanisms, making minute, final adjustments. ‘Wars without soldiers, how about that? And we’re done!
’
Then a Wasp appeared at the far end of the corridor, with snapbow levelled. There was a frozen moment of shock on both sides and then the Wasp, seeing an enemy with a weapon directed at him, shot Gerethwy through the chest.
He rocked as the bolt tore through him, eyes wide, a single audible breath escaping from him. Then the Woodlouse fell back with a perplexed expression. Sartaea dropped beside him, keening with loss because he was dead. She could see instantly that he was dead.
‘You, away from the weapon, halt there!’ the Wasp shouted at her. And then she was up, wings flashing about her shoulders, screaming at him for giving the warning one death too late.
Face fixed, he sighted on her and took one step forwards, and Gerethwy’s snapbow twitched on its mount and shot the man two or three times, spilling him back against the wall.
She stared at it, then at Gerethwy. It was as if his ghost was animating the weapon, in some impossible bridging of the Apt and Inapt.
Then another half-dozen Wasps were there, also shouting at her, and she flew back from the weapon and watched as it attacked them, barrel jerking precisely left and right, spitting out handfuls of bolts at a time, the chattering gears feeding through the tape of ammunition with meticulous economy.
She left Gerethwy there and set off after the stretchers, knowing that her friend, even dead, was guarding their retreat.
Her bodyguard had been the last man standing.
With all the rest dead around him, Jadis of the Melisandyr had stood over his wounded mistress’s body in his gleaming mail, shield up and sword ready to defy the entire Second Army. A Spider Sentinel, something out of another time, he had shown no fear nor even acknowledged the possibility of defeat. The sheer temerity of his defiance, backed by all the Spider Art he could muster, had held back the snapbow shot for a long count of ten.
And then they had gone amongst the bodies, giving the Spider wounded a swift, merciful death rather than have them fall into the hands of Vrakir or the interrogators. Save for Mycella — she, they had left for Tynan.
She had taken a snapbow bolt through the leg, he understood, but even then her sheer force of personality — the Art of her kinden — had held them back beyond the reach of her rapier. She had made laying hands on her person unthinkable, a sacrilege.
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