Then the Moth woman was stepping aside – almost shouldered aside – and the Mantids were storming forwards. Roder tensed, and was not remotely reassured to find that the rest were bracing too – the Empress’s women bodyguards and Tegrec, even Gjegevey. Only the mailed form remained still, and Roder felt that it harboured a constant tension anyway, always just on the verge of violence.
From Seda’s manner, by contrast, she might be receiving a Beetle trade delegation in her throne room back at Capitas.
She opened her arms to the Mantids, displaying herself to them – and if her hands were spread to sting, well, amongst other kinden that was a gesture of friendship, was it not? If one of them jumped forwards with spear or rapier, then the Empire would be headless once again, and who knew what might follow?
Roder was almost physically holding himself back, ready at the first wrong move to leap forwards and fight for her, and well aware that he would be too slow, even so.
And they knelt. All six of them went down on one knee, heads bowed, weapons on the ground, the killing tension vanishing without any explanation. The Mantids abased themselves before the Empress of the Wasps, when they had barely spared a kind look for the Moth Yraea.
Roder stole a glance at the other faces gathered there. Surely they had all been expecting this? But he saw writ plain on that rabble of mystics’ faces that they had not. They had expected terms, treaties, negotiations that they themselves could have meddled with – not this abject surrender.
‘Rise,’ the Empress said to them, just as she had to Roder earlier. ‘Rise and speak.’
The foremost of the Mantids, a cord-lean woman, ageless and scarred, tried twice before she could utter a word. Her eyes were young, struck with a sort of adulation that Roder had never seen before, ‘You will bring it back,’ she whispered hoarsely.
‘I will bring it all back, all that you once had,’ Seda told her gently. ‘Go and tell your people that their time is coming again. That I will do this thing, and none other, if they bind themselves to me.’
‘We shall,’ the Mantis woman whispered. ‘Empress, we shall.’
And they were padding off, the six of them stepping swiftly into the darkness, eager to spread the word, and Seda turned her smiling face on Roder and trapped him in the radiance of her regard.
‘You see, General? Even so simply does the Empire conquer. You understand all, now.’
‘I understand nothing,’ Roder frankly admitted, before he could stop himself. ‘I understand enough,’ he corrected himself.
‘The Nethyen are with us, as is Tharn. The Inapt that formerly declared for Sarn and Collegium are divided. Now your work begins. The hold of Etheryon has always been close to Sarn, and likely they will hold to the Ants, as will the Moth-kinden at Dorax. There will be fighting amidst the trees even tonight. You must arrange for your very best, your scouts and Pioneers and wildsmen, to enter the forest and fight alongside our new allies. You can be sure the Sarnesh will be doing the same. Whoever controls this forest controls our road to Sarn.’
Roder considered the list that he had drawn up, at Gjegevey’s urging. ‘It shall be accomplished, Empress.’
‘Of course it shall.’ She was turning back to head for the camp, but more words forced themselves from Roder’s lips.
‘Empress . . . what you promised them . . .?’
Her smile was still as sweet. ‘They feel betrayed, General. The Apt city-states of the Lowlands and their modern ways have made such inroads into the Mantis way of life, as the corruption of the Etheryen hold shows. Now the Nethyen will fight just for the right to be left to their own devices. Just as we do in the Empire, they value their traditions.’
Roder glanced at Seda’s armoured shadow, to find that faceless helm looking right back at him. He had an unhappy feeling that he was somehow looking right into the heart of those old Mantis traditions, but he would never be able to put it into words.
He was about to hurry back to camp and surround himself with men whose company he understood, but Seda herself had paused, and for the first time that night Roder sensed that she was in less than complete control of the world.
The Empress was looking towards the hostile west, where the skies were still faintly grey with sunset. ‘Gjegevey,’ she murmured.
‘Here, your, hm, Majesty.’ The old slave was at her elbow immediately.
‘Is it . . . ?’ A terrible, hard cast fell over the Empress’s face. ‘It’s her.’
Roder had no idea who ‘her’ might be, but whoever it was had better prepare herself for the end, for utter hatred was writ large in the Empress’s expression.
‘She’s here, here!’ Seda turned wild eyes on Gjegevey. ‘She is here for your Argastos, just as I am. She seeks to keep it from me.’
The slave spread long-fingered hands in demurral, but Seda would not be forestalled. ‘Then I cannot wait, nor will I be denied. General, have your soldiers ready to enter the forest tomorrow morning, in force. And have ready your very best Pioneers, your most skilled trackers and hunters and woodsmen. I will have work for them all.’
‘My Empress, no!’ Gjegevey started, showing more courage in the face of her anger than Roder himself could have mustered.
‘And wait for the leaden clash of armies while she steals what is mine?’ Seda demanded. ‘Only one of us can live, Gjegevey, the stronger of us. If she takes what is here, then it will be her. Is that what you want?’
‘Empress, no, but—’
‘Then prepare yourself, old man, for you’re coming too.’
Six
‘Look at this, though.’
Sartaea te Mosca glanced politely at the scroll Gerethwy had unrolled for her. ‘Two matters, dear one,’ she replied. ‘Firstly, what in the world do you think that I would make of that, save for tinder? Secondly this would be considerably easier for me if you kept still. Consider that I am slightly smaller than your arm: every slightest twitch throws me about as though I’m in a hurricane.’
She exaggerated slightly, but he was an enormously tall, long-limbed man, a Woodlouse-kinden, perpetually hunched like an old man, but a young and sprightly student where the few others of his kinden that anyone had ever seen seemed to have been ancient forever, old as the stones of Collegium. He had come from the east with an esoteric but impressive understanding of machines that had won him a place at the Great College, and he had stayed on for the war.
Te Mosca herself was a Fly-kinden, and someone who had also turned up begging at the College gates, though in her case she had come from the Moth-kinden at Dorax, and had been looking for work. The old chair for Inapt studies – meaning those parts of the world that the Apt neither understood nor cared about – had been gathering dust, but even then they had not made her a full master, just had her marking out her time as though a replacement was expected at any moment. There had been votes in Assembly, she knew, to abolish the position entirely, but respect for tradition had thus far allowed her field of study to cling on by its fingernails.
She was small even for a Fly, delicate of frame and with a faint ashen tint to her skin, for her kinden often looked a little like those they grew up amongst. She taught the histories of the Inapt as they themselves would tell it, and she taught a little of the principles of magic, but her few students were mostly Apt and, however diligently they took notes, they could never grasp even the most basic tenets. It was a curiously futile existence, but she enlivened it by offering her skills as a doctor. Inapt kinden often fared far better under the care of an Inapt healer and, when it came to it, she could stitch a wound almost as well as any Collegiate surgeon.
She took Gerethwy’s long hand in both of hers and inspected the stumps where an exploding weapon had torn off two fingers. ‘Healing nicely,’ she said, ‘but it would heal far quicker if you’d not use the hand. It must hurt you, surely?’
He shrugged, something his bony hunchbacked frame was made for. ‘But there’s too much work. I’m due to drill with the Companies, and I need every
moment I can get at the workshops. Nobody else will.’ He thrust the paper at her again, then dragged it back, recognizing the pointlessness of it. Gerethwy himself was a man who seemed to understand everything. He sat through her lectures as attentively as any Inapt scholar, seeming to take it all in, but then went off to the workshops to work on his devices. Her own masters had always muttered that the Woodlouse-kinden were a law unto themselves.
‘Rational machinery,’ Gerethwy insisted, and she recognized that doomed passion to explain from her own classes, in trying to hammer home some patently obvious point into skulls simply not designed for it. Now she was on the receiving end, and could only blink politely as his words gushed out – for he who had been so quiet and self-contained now had something he needed to speak of.
‘It’s the future,’ he insisted. ‘It’s very simple.’ His eyes were begging her to agree with him. ‘It’s all down to putting information in, and getting information out. It’s all in the gear trains that convert one to the other. You can do anything with it, if you just work out the gearing. Machines that can do things for themselves in response to what you tell them.’
‘As far as I’m aware, that works only indifferently with human beings,’ she remarked, yanking on his arm to stop him gesturing with it, then immediately feeling guilty as he winced. She began to apply fresh bandages, not that the healing wound really needed them any longer, but more as a mnemonic so that Gerethwy would remember he was hurt, and therefore take more care.
‘But, look . . . as a doctor, surely you can . . . It must look familiar?’
At last she squinted at the plans, seeing something resembling an explosion, a thousand little pieces scattered in random profusion.
She did not have to say it: he nodded resignedly. ‘Ten years ago, before anyone in Collegium had even thought of the idea, someone in the Empire – some mad genius – was already building rational machines of a complexity that nobody has matched since. This work . . . it’s beautiful, perfect. And I can learn from it, duplicate it even . . .’
‘Well what is it, this glorious whatnot of yours?’ Te Mosca was ready for it to be a weapon. Every artificer in the city was talking weapons just now and, given that they had only just beaten the Imperial Second Army back, she supposed that was entirely reasonable.
‘It’s an arm,’ Gerethwy told her simply. ‘He constructed a rational arm: a mechanical arm that would translate the motions of his stump.’
She looked at him, from his mangled hand to the frank, innocent and slightly off-balance look in his face, and felt very sad because, despite the long and learned pedigree of his kinden and the mystery of his origins, he was still little more than a boy, and they had made him a soldier, and he still thought it could all be put right.
The tragedy was, she knew, that he was telling her precisely because she could not understand. Amongst his friends and his comrades, he would remain as taciturn as ever, unwilling to let them in on his secret projects for fear he would be told that none of them would work.
‘Officer Antspider, orders for you.’
The Fly-kinden pressed the scroll into her hand and was off into the skies of Collegium before Straessa could object. She was left standing in the street, just twenty feet from the bookbinder’s that Eujen lodged over. If she had been a little brisker on her way, then the missive might never have found her.
Straessa – called the Antspider because, whilst Collegiates might be fair to halfbreeds, they still tended to point at them in the street – had a strong urge to cast the scroll in a fire and deny it had ever found her, but she was not the feckless student she had once been. Putting on the uniform of the Merchant Companies had taken half her naivety from her, and going out to fight the Wasps had done the rest. Under the banner of the Coldstone Company she had shed blood for Collegium. Her commanding officer had been assassinated. Her maniple and its neighbours had been routed. Her friend Gerethwy had been maimed by his own weapon. She had rallied her troops and gone back, with the lunatics from Myna, to try and slow the Wasp advance, to attack their artillery, to do something other than simply wait for the end. Memories like that could be expected to leave their mark on a girl, she reckoned.
Since General Tynan’s Second had been forced to retreat by Collegiate air-power, the soldiers of the Merchant Companies had been training and recruiting, or at least trying to recruit. Numbers were still down – hardly surprising after the beating they had taken at the hands of the more disciplined Wasp soldiers. Everyone was pulling double shifts: Straessa had little enough time to herself, and this should have been one of those times. She had wanted to take off the breastplate and the buff coat, just for a little while; to make it up with Eujen and pretend she was just a student again, with no more to worry about than the end-of-year exams and making a little money on the side as a sword instructor.
Orders were never a good thing. Orders meant that something had changed.
The Second is on the move again. That was the most obvious conclusion. For a moment, her mind’s eye superimposed the battlefield over the tidy little Collegiate street, the shouting and the screams, the thunderous clatter of the monstrous Imperial automotives, the chaos of the retreat.
She steadied herself, by which time her hands had broken the seal. There was nothing for it now but to read.
That done, she read it all again, and even checked the signature for authenticity.
‘Madness,’ she murmured, and then hurried towards the bookbinder’s shop, opening the side-door and taking the stairs to Eujen’s lodgings three at a time.
Eujen already had company, but she expected that. It was Averic the Wasp scholar – the Wasp renegade, she supposed he was now, for he wouldn’t be going home any time soon – and the two of them were plainly midway through planning something, judging by the quantity of paper strewn about the small room.
‘What’s this? Plotting to overthrow the Assembly?’ she observed, rather too heartily.
Eujen regarded her warily. ‘Those plans were laid a long time ago,’ he said, trying to match her jovial tone. ‘Just training schedules for the Student Company.’ Meaning his own project: that odd little band of amateur soldiers he had raised after she had persuaded him not to follow her into the regular military. Eujen Leadswell was a conflicted man: he had spent his life protesting against war – war with the Empire especially. He had debated constantly on the subject, accusing those who vilified the Wasps of bringing closer the very conflict claimed to be guarding against. Now that war was upon them, Eujen did not know whether he had been a prophet or a fool.
‘That’s going well?’ She had always adopted an acerbic manner even amongst her friends, and normally it was accepted no more seriously than she meant it, but she and Eujen had not been seeing eye to eye recently.
‘We’re fine. We may not be your regulars, but we’re making real progress.’ His answer was too quick and too defensive. He was frightened for her, and resentful of the Companies that took her away from him, and so they argued, and were reconciled, and argued yet again. Averic was already looking ill at ease, and she guessed he might start making his excuses soon.
She wanted a fight with Eujen because at least she knew the rules to that game. She wanted to joke with him. The orders in her hand felt like they were burning her fingers.
‘They were saying that, now you’ve got your Student Company, you’ll be forming a Student Assembly next,’ she put in. Anything to lighten the mood.
Eujen fixed her with a solemn stare. ‘Were they?’
‘You’re not, are you?’ Because that would be ridiculous. Because it would also be just like Eujen.
‘Do you know it’s more than a month since the Assembly last met properly?’ Eujen asked her. ‘The elected government of Collegium?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Do you know who’s now running the city? Making all the important decisions?’ he pressed her. ‘Because I can give you a handful of names – Maker, Drillen, Padstock – but of the rest? Nobo
dy knows. It’s whoever they call on, their friends and allies, and whoever the new chief officers are. The whole basis of our city-state just gone.’
‘Since the Amphiophos was bombed—’
‘Let them meet at the College. Let them meet in a marketplace,’ Eujen contested hotly. ‘The place wasn’t important. The institution was. And now they’ve done away with it!’
‘Only until the Wasps—’ She was getting angry now at being talked over, but he had built his momentum and was running with it.
‘And if we beat the Empire back, what then?. Some other threat? Some other excuse?’
‘Eujen, we are at war! War needs swift decisions, firm leadership.’ Even as she shouted the words at him, she realized that she did not necessarily believe them, but he was casting her as the establishment by virtue of her rank within the Companies. She had become an apologist for Stenwold Maker without ever being asked – and that, of course, just made her angrier.
‘Right,’ Averic stood up, as she had known he would, ‘I’ll just—’
‘You stay right there.’ Her mere glower halted him. ‘I’ve got work to do.’
Eujen, who had a lot of argument in him yet and who had probably assumed that they would make peace later in the evening, went still. ‘No you don’t. You said that . . . wait, look . . .’
‘No, really.’ She attempted a smile, just about managed one. ‘You think I’d back out of a fight with you just because I’ve been shouldering a snapbow all day? But it’s orders, Eujen. New orders. They want me to go recruiting.’
‘I thought they’d already done that to death,’ Eujen replied, after a pause. ‘I thought they’d pretty much squeezed out every volunteer the city had to offer.’
‘Well, yes, and it looks like they – whoever, as you say, they are – have kind of come to the same conclusion.’ She pitched him the incriminating scroll, because this news would be all over the city soon anyway, and because he would hear of it soon enough.
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