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.
There was a concentration forming in the centre of the Sarnesh lines, but his scouts suggested these were Auxillian troops, not the Ants themselves. A distraction for the greatshotters, then. But each death would still be one less enemy on the field, and so there was no reason not to oblige the Ants rather than attack their wide-spaced forces and squander the potency of the engines. It was as if he and the Sarnesh commander were following the same textbook, both seeing a different advantage in the same tactic, so that there were really no losers. Or nobody important, anyway.
A messenger landed nearby and ran up to him. ‘General, word from the forest!’
For a moment he could not imagine what the man meant, but then it fell into place. ‘The Mantids?’
‘One of their women is here to speak with you, General.’
He peered through the unrelieved grey, trying to pinpoint her, but spotted her only when she was almost within a spear’s reach: a lean, weathered, hard-faced woman, dressed in a chitin cuirass.
‘You’re of the Nethyen? How do things stand in the forest?’
‘I am of the Nethyen,’ she confirmed. ‘The fighting is over.’
His heart leapt. ‘Can you bring your forces to bear on the battle?’
‘We can.’ A small smile that made him uneasy. ‘We have put aside our differences, the Ethe
ryen and ourselves. From now on there is but one hold in the wood. Netheryon, it shall be called.’
Roder shrugged off the nuances of Mantis nomenclature. ‘When can you strike?’ he asked, acutely aware that the Ants would be closing the distance to his lines already.
‘Now,’ she explained, and went for him.
She nearly had him, too. Her blade rammed into his armour, biting into the metal but not penetrating, yet still knocking him from his feet. She wore one of those claw gauntlets, and he had not even noticed.
He thrust a hand out, but the soldiers around him were creditably alert and, even as she drew back her arm to finish him off, three or four snapbow bolts and a sting had found her, battering her from both sides so that she twisted and fell in a spray of blood.
‘Pits-cursed Inapt!’ Roder swore furiously, as one of his men helped him up. ‘What was that . . .?’ There was shouting, he realized. Within the camp there was shouting. In the pre-dawn he could make out nothing of it. ‘Someone find out what that is!’ he ordered.
But even as he said the words, he understood what it must be. He saw that the Mantis woman had not come alone; that her people, the Netheryen, were indeed ready to strike.
They had reached almost to the edge of the camp itself, and not one sentry or scout had spied them. All eyes had been focused on the Ants.
They had come, all of them, in their steel-edged hundreds.
Roder opened his mouth to cry out some command – any command – that might save the situation, and the might of the forest surged into the heart of his army, like a tide.
In that fractured second, Milus weighed many commodities within his soul, not least his surprisingly strong attachment to the original plan, however inappropriate. The Mantids had finally made their move; they were attacking the Wasps even now. They were hopelessly outnumbered, and yet when had that ever bothered them? He could now let them spend themselves against the black and gold, then strike at his own convenience. Or he could take full advantage of this unlooked-for intervention and hurry his men over to the Wasp lines as fast as they could be shifted, and construct a new battle plan while the fighting continued. It was another advantage of being an Ant, of course: he could change his orders at any time and the whole army would know and understand.
He made his decision in that same fraught second. Forwards, all speed. Close with the Wasps as swiftly as possible.
And Seda took one step forwards and threw out a stingshot at the seated figure of Argastos.
It was supposed to be that simple. However he chose to appear, the gnarled-stump body of the Moth War Master was there and had always been there, at the root-hung, earth-ceilinged centre of the barrow. This was the chamber they had dined in. This was where they had been imprisoned and threatened. This was the entirety of Argastos’s world.
But he was quicker to react than that, and more clever. For all that he had atrophied into, he had been one of the great magicians of his people, with a millennium of scheming even after that. The space around them became instantly folded and convoluted so that, although he was physically almost close enough to touch, he had contrived a mile of tangled forest between them, and dropped Seda and Che inside it. And it was not empty.
‘His ghost-soldiers are here with us, all around,’ Che recognized.
‘Keep them back. Misdirect them. Lose them within the landscape,’ Seda directed, taking command because . . . who else was there? Gratifyingly, she felt the Beetle girl’s immediate acquiescence. Perhaps there is some potential in her that I missed. If I can make a servant of my enemy, what could we not do together? And then she was pursuing Argastos, even as he tried to widen the apparent space between them, hauling swathes and handfuls of mismatched, misremembered land from his mind to cram into place.
But Seda had assessed his limits: his imagination was as dried-up as his body. Everything he raised up was brooding forest, fragments of ruined castle, clods of the deep underground. She had seen it all before and she flew through it like an avenging ghost, fire trailing from her hands.
Yet his memories, however limited, encompassed his days as War Master, his military campaigns, the great battles of the Inapt, and suddenly she was veering away, falling back, because she had met Argastos’s armies.
The actual ghost soldiers, the remains of Argastos’s real victims that could take on enough form to injure or kill her and the Maker girl – just as she herself had given Tisamon’s ghost such form – were still being kept away, led into the dense, gnarled thickets of Argastos’s own mind, constantly turned away by the Beetle’s will. But that could not last forever. Seda had to tear her way past all the mummery that Argastos had thrown up, before those dead killers fought through Che’s diversions enough to cross the few feet of actual real space that separated them from their intended victims. The two women became hunter and hunted all at the same time.
And here now was what kept her from her quarry: Argastos had ransacked his mind and cast up this recollection of the war-host of the Inapt. She had seem some fraction of it in the visions he had shown her, while wooing her, but this was it entire or as close as his memory could call forth. The forest was filled with moving soldiers: Moth, Mantis, Spider, Dragonfly, Woodlouse and others, great loose formations of them, armoured and armed, a dark glass being held up to the glory of another age.
Hurry! came Che’s voice, in her mind. The Beetle was losing ground.
Useless creature. And Seda stood before Argastos’s recreated host and called out, ‘I am Seda, Empress of the Wasp-kinden. Do you presume to teach me about armies?’
She took a deep breath and clawed power out of the very tapestry that Argastos had raised to stop her, and she gifted him with her own thoughts on the subject.
She gave him the Barbs, General Alder’s Fourth Army; she gave him Malkan’s Winged Furies and Tynan’s Gears. She gave him the Eighth, which General Roder was even now leading against Sarn. She gave him the artillery of the Engineers and the flying machines of the Aviation Corps. She gave him the Rekef assassins she had once lived in fear of. She gave him snap-bows and the bright dawn of the new Apt age.
His remembered soldiers, a thousand years dead and obsolete, began their work, butchering her followers by the thousand, slaughtering the Wasps wholesale as she watched, and not all her powers or inspiration could inspire into that ersatz Black and Gold any semblance of the discipline and indomitable might of the Imperial armies that she recalled.
She had miscalculated. There was a hollow, clutching feeling inside her, and at last she was forced to recognize it as fear.
Hurry! Che Maker again, not realizing how Seda’s plans had just collapsed in upon themselves. And then Seda was forced to confront two equally unpalatable options: lose to Argastos; confess to Maker that she was failing.
But she was not like her brother. She was not so insecure.
I need your help. A bitter confession, yet she shoved the situation facing her into Che’s mind, and the girl understood immediately. What can you give me?
In the real world, the Wasp armies would have destroyed Argastos’s barbaric rabble without slowing. Their orthopters and automotives, greatshotters and snapbows would have reaped that enemy like wheat and turned an army into an abattoir within two hours. But Seda had no understanding of such devices. She knew that they existed, but she left the details to her generals and her engineers. Here, with only her own mind to draw on, all the great machinery of the Wasps, their tactics and their innovations, might as well just be theatrical props. Argastos had led armies: he knew full well the strengths and weaknesses of his troops.
Change places with me, Che told her instantly, and Seda swallowed her pride and fell back, taking on the task of throwing Argastos’s real soldiers into confusion, whilst Che hunted the man himself. It was the only chance they seemed to have.
In the midst of this twisted landscape that Argastos had summoned into being, Che could not see her own physical body, but she had the uncomfortable feeling that some of th
e Moth’s dead slaves were practically standing over her with blades raised. She had tried all she had – misdirection, flight, lengthening the imagined terrain that they must cross, even calling on Amnon once again, and having him throw himself against their blades – and it was foul work, to do so, but she was dead if she did not.
In passing that task to Seda, she could only hope that the Empress would put her ruthlessness and her Wasp minions to good use, because Che herself had played that game as far as she could.
Here was a different battle, though, and one she had a new perspective on. She saw exactly what Argastos had thrown between them to protect himself – his great remembered army – and she understood why Seda had failed.
And what do I have?
She reached into her mind and peopled Argastos’s battlefield with her own forces, marvelling at the irony that she should be more suited to such an attack than Seda herself. Here were the Dragonflies that she had seen in the Commonweal; here were the Moth-kinden of Tharn; here were the Mantids of the Nethyon and Etheryon – Argastos’s own people turned against him by her will. And here . . . here was the Grand Army of Khanaphes, the great host of her own kinden, with chariots and cavalry and Amnon’s heroic guard at its centre. And if they were Apt, it mattered little, because they were still waging war in a way that had barely changed since the Bad Old Days.
These were her troops, and she sent them off to war.
Argastos’s own forces outnumbered hers to the extent that she reckoned his memories had multiplied the actual numbers who had ever fought under his command. Still, this was his battle, and played by his rules. Even if his mind was a liar, he would still manage to destroy her soldiers in time.
But that was not what she was trying to accomplish. She had another reason to take the initiative from Seda: a secret weapon.
The tide of battle swayed, and washed back and forth, her Khanaphir legion driving forward into the heart of the enemy, a bold thrust to get even a single arrow as far as Argastos himself. He countered perfectly, of course, concentrating his forces to block her at every point, but at the same time she was leading him on, stripping him of his reserves and his bodyguards, until he had committed everything he had in order to meet her threat.
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