"Refugees," Salma whispered, and he remembered how it had been during the Twelve-Year War. As the Wasps advanced they had displaced hundreds, even thousands, onto the roads of the Commonweal, to be preyed on by bandits or descend to thievery to feed themselves. The Commonweal"s rulers had done their best but there had been the war to fight as well, and the scale of the exodus had been unthinkable.
And now it seemed certain that it would happen here as well.
"What can we do for them?" he asked, and Nero laughed harshly.
"Do? You can"t even stand, boy. What do you expect to do?"
Salma stared at him, and then slowly forced himself up to his knees. His head swam briefly, but he pressed his hands flat on the earth for balance. Whilst Nero looked on uncertainly, he rose slowly, first one foot beneath him, then the next, and then, forcing his legs to obey him, he raised himself upright. Pain shot through him from his wound, but he clenched his teeth and ignored it.
Now he was standing. Nero had stood up, too, hands ludicrously spread to catch a man twice his size.
"I . . . can . . . stand," Salma got out, though he had to fight to keep his vision in focus. He knew that he might topple any minute, and placed a hand on Nero"s shoulder to steady himself. "Tomorrow, or the next day, I will walk," he said. "And then I shall be ready to act."
A man called Cosgren joined the refugees a day or so later. He was a Beetle-kinden, but huge the largest Salma had ever seen, and monstrously broad across the chest and shoulders. For the first day he was with them he was quiet enough, watching his travelling companions carefully and even fetching wood for a fire. The next day he waited until they were all awake and then addressed them: "Right, look at you. You don"t know the first thing about where you"re going, do you? So it"s going to be like this. I"m in charge. And because I"m in charge, I"ll get us to somewhere, but you all better do what I say, and that means I get what I want."
The Fly-kinden youths huddled closer and looked at him rebelliously. They all had their hair cropped short to their skulls in androgynous fashion, and they carried weapons of a sort, if only sticks and stones. Cosgren must have weighed more than all of them put together, though, and eventually they let their gazes drop sullenly.
Cosgren"s rule lasted almost peaceably for that same day. He took what food they had, with the pretence that he would distribute it, but everyone knew, and n.o.body said, that his own capacious belly would be filled first.
And then, at dusk, he wandered over to the wagon and the three Roach-kinden.
"Old man," he began. The father of the two girls eyed him cautiously. He was not so very old, not really, but his white hair and beard made him look it.
"You hear me?" Cosgren demanded. "Then say so."
"I hear you," said the Roach. His voice was surprisingly soft.
"I"m going to make your life easier, old man. I"m going to take your daughter off your hands."
"My life"s easy enough, and I thank you for your kind offer," the Roach said.
Cosgren smiled, and a moment later he had knocked the man down with a simple motion, almost thoughtless.
"I"ll give her more than you can," Cosgren said, grinning down at him. "You, girl, come here unless you want your old dad to get hurt some more."
He was, Salma realized, speaking to the younger of the two girls, not that it would have mattered either way.
Salma was on his feet, without quite realizing how he had got there, and Nero hurried over to him, telling him to be careful.
"You"re in no state," the Fly said. "Just wait a moment . . . there are ways . . ."
"I know." Salma approached Cosgren"s lumped back with dragging steps. "You there!" he called, and the big man swung on him.
"You get back in line, boy. Don"t want those wounds opened up again, do you?"
"No," Salma said. He felt the line of his life stretched taut here, a moment of dread and then peace. In this wasteland between wars, in this meaningless brawl, and why not? Why not indeed? He had been given his moment, reunited with Grief in Chains, and then it had pa.s.sed him by, and here he was. "I"m going to stop you," he told Cosgren, conversationally.
For a second the big Beetle did not quite know what to make of it, this drawn-looking invalid threatening him with . . . what? With nothing. Then he grinned.
"A lesson for boys that won"t do what they"re told," he said, and he picked Salma up effortlessly, huge hands agony about his ribs, and Salma poked him in the face.
The world was briefly a very painful and noisy place, and then dark, blessedly dark and quiet.
He came to with the sense that little time had pa.s.sed. There was an awful lot of noise nearby, but the pain in his chest and abdomen was too much for him to focus on it. Nero was kneeling beside him, asking over and over if he was all right.
There should have been another blow coming from Cosgren, but there was nothing. Perhaps the beating had finished, in which case he had got away lightly, but Cosgren would still be free to pursue his tyranny unchecked.
The sounds were screaming, he realized, and a man"s, not the child"s.
"What"s going on, Nero?"
Nero grimaced. "You . . . kind of cut him, Salma. Don"t look so confused. That"s what you meant, right?"
"Cut him? What . . . ?"
Nero took one of Salma"s hands and brought it before his face. The first thing he saw was that it was covered in blood. Then he saw the claw, a sickle-shaped thing that curved from his thumb. Even as he watched it retracted back until there was barely a sign of it. Curiously, he flexed it back and forth, and felt its companion on his other hand do the same.
"I never had these before. When . . . ?"
"I noticed them on you back in the tent of the Daughters," Nero told him. "I couldn"t remember then whether you"d had them before."
There was a sudden shifting around them, of people coming together. Salma turned over and forced himself to sit up. Cosgren was standing, one hand clapped to a face slick and red. His eye, his one remaining eye, was staring madly.
"You little b.a.s.t.a.r.d." The voice was choked with pain.
Salma saw a movement beside him, a glimmer of metal. The Roach man had drawn a thin-bladed knife, hiltless but sharp. They had all gathered around him, even the Fly gangsters. When Cosgren took a step forward, a flung stone bounced off his shoulder.
Half weeping with the pain he stared at them: the Fly gang, the Beetle mother, the ex-slaves and the Roach family. By that time, Nero had his own long knife out, and was holding it casually by the tip, ready to throw.
Cosgren snarled something something about their not wanting his leadership, then let them starve and he stumbled out away from them, off into the barren terrain.
Tension began to leach out of the refugees. The Roach man knelt by Salma, offering him some water that he took gratefully. Behind their father, his two daughters stood, staring curiously.
Salma glanced around at the others. The Flies had gone back into their exclusive huddle as though nothing had happened. The three slaves had drifted away as well, and he saw that they had found their own new hierarchy, with the Spider as their spokesman, as though they were still compelled to live within rules of obedience.
He should feel weak after his exertions, he knew, but he felt stronger than he had in days.
The next day there were bandits. A dozen rode in, half of them mounted two to a horse. Their leader, though it was little satisfaction to see, was wearing Cosgren"s leather coat.
He was a Beetle himself, or nearly. His skin was a blue-black that Salma recognized from his recent travels. The refugees had been travelling at the wagon"s steady pace, most walking but Salma lying in the bed of dry gra.s.s it carried, staring up at skies that promised unwelcome rain before nightfall. Then the thunder of hoofs had come to them, and they had stopped dead, and most of them had looked to Salma.
Am I riding here on the wagon because I am weak, or because I have become their leader now? They needed no leader except perhaps in moments such as this. Salma got down, pleased to find his legs holding him without a tremor, and watched as the intruders" eight horses made a very crude semicircle before the wagon. The draft-beetle hissed at them, swaying its jaws from side to side, but the bandit leader ignored it, looking over the ranks of the refugees. They needed no leader except perhaps in moments such as this. Salma got down, pleased to find his legs holding him without a tremor, and watched as the intruders" eight horses made a very crude semicircle before the wagon. The draft-beetle hissed at them, swaying its jaws from side to side, but the bandit leader ignored it, looking over the ranks of the refugees.
"Let"s keep it simple," he said. "These are troubled times, n.o.body"s where they wanted to be, everyone"s a victim, so on, so forth." He spoke with the accent Salma recalled, and refined enough that he seemed testament to his own words, a man not originally cut from this kind of crude cloth. "So let"s see what you"ve got. Let us just take our pick and then you can go on your way."
Salma looked over the bandit"s men. They were a motley band, but not as raggedly dressed as might be expected. These were not just desperate scavengers driven to robbery. Most had some kind of armour: leather jerkins and caps, padded arming jackets, even one hauberk of Ant-made chain. There were axes and swords amongst them, and a halfbreed at the back, who looked to have Mantis blood, had a bow ready-strung with an arrow nocked. Salma"s own army had some knives, some clubs, and the staff that Sfayot the Roach had cut for him.
He leant on it now, grateful that it would disguise how weak he really was. "So what do you imagine we have?" he asked. "Perhaps you think that we all had time to pack, before we were driven out, before we escaped." Salma planted his staff in the ground, firmly enough. "If you"re slavers then we will fight you, and you can sell our corpses for whatever they"ll bring you. But if it"s goods you want, we have none. Less than none. Come down here and see for yourself."
"We"re not slavers," the bandit leader replied. "Too many of us have been on the wrong end of that market to risk trying to sell there." He smiled, teeth flashing in his dark face. "Commonwealer, aren"t you? I"ve known enough of your kind in my time." He swung off his horse, and Salma heard the clatter of a scale-mail cuira.s.s beneath Cosgren"s coat. Without needing orders, two of his fellows got down off the horse they shared, and the three of them walked past Salma to peer into the wagon.
"You"re slaves yourselves?" Salma asked. As his fellows prodded through the gra.s.s in the bed of the wagon, the leader turned back to say, "Some of us."
Salma had spotted the colours of that scale-mail, then, and the design of the sword the man bore. "You"re an Auxillian," he said.
For a long moment the bandit leader regarded him fixedly, until at last he said, "So?"
"There are no friends to the Empire here," Salma explained. "I was a prisoner in Myna myself, once."
"There"s nothing but the wagon," one of the bandits said. "And even that"s nothing you could borrow money on."
"Excuse me, sir," said the Roach Sfayot. "But we have nothing, no goods. No food, even, until we stop for the evening and forage."
"You have women," the bandit leader noted. "Roach-kinden, isn"t it?"
Sfayot regarded him narrowly, waiting.
"You sing, dance? Anything? Only I remember your lot as being musical."
Sfayot nodded slowly.
"Well then we"ll deal," the bandit leader decided. "We have a commodity for trade: safe pa.s.sage on this road. In return, you"ll trade us some entertainment. And we"ll break our bread together, or whatever you can find. And then we"ll decide what we"re going to do with you."
Twenty-Eight.
The morning began bright and cloudless, and Stenwold had the dubious pleasure of being able to see it. Balkus had kicked at his door an hour before dawn, and then carried on kicking until Stenwold had arisen.
Now he was in his temporary base in the harbourmaster"s office, the harbourmaster himself having taken ship at the first word of the Vekken advance. Around him were his artificers, his messengers, and a fair quant.i.ty of others whose purpose and disposition he had no ideas about. Balkus stood at his shoulder like some personification of war, his nailbow in plain view, and Stenwold tried to imagine what would happen when the naval attack actually took place.
The harbour at Collegium had been designed to be defended. There was a stubby sea-wall sheltering it, and the two towers flanking the harbour entrance held some serviceable artillery, if not particularly up to date. There was a chain slung between these towers, currently hanging well below any ship"s draft, that would serve when raised to prevent a vessel crossing that gateway, or that was the theory. Defence had been a priority in the minds of the architects, certainly, but they had lived two centuries ago, and had never heard of armourclads, or even of ships that moved by the power of engines rather than under sail or with banks of oars. Since then, defence had been a long way from anyone"s mind right up until the Vekken had turned up with a fleet.
Out-thought by Ant-kinden, he cursed to himself, trying to find some gem of an idea that might save the day. If the Vekken could land their troops, those superbly efficient paragons of Ant-kinden training, then the docks would be lost in half an hour, and the city in just a day.
"They"re moving!"
The shout roused Stenwold from his ruminations. He rushed over to the expansive window of the harbourmaster"s office and saw that the funnels of the armourclads had now started to fume in earnest. Four smaller vessels were beginning to make headway towards the harbour, whilst the huge flagship had begun to come around with ponderous but irresistible motion. The small ships of the fleet began to tack around it, some by engine power and a few by sail.
"Is the artillery ready?" Stenwold demanded. "Where"s Cabre?"
"Gone to get the artillery ready," said one of the soldiers with him. "It"s in hand, Master Maker. All you need to do is sit here and watch."
"No," muttered Stenwold, because he had to do do something, and yet what was there to do? "Master Greatly, is he . . . ?" something, and yet what was there to do? "Master Greatly, is he . . . ?"
"He said that he was ready, although I don"t believe a word of it," said one of his artificers, the man with the underwater explosives. "He did say you could go and watch the launch if you wanted."
"Yes, I do want," Stenwold decided. He looked around for Balkus. "Where"s . . . ?"
There was a dull thump from quite close by, and he felt the floorboards shudder. For a mad second he was two decades younger and in the city of Myna, with the Wasps" ramming engine at the gates.
"What was that?" he demanded, but n.o.body knew, so he rushed to the window and saw three buildings away a warehouse burning merrily, its front staved in.
"Sabotage!" someone shouted and, even in the moment that Stenwold was wondering coolly who would sabotage a warehouse, a second missile was lobbed from the great Vekken flagship. It flew in a shallow, burning arc, and it seemed impossible that it would not just drop into the water, but their range was accurate, and in the next moment another of the dockside buildings had exploded.
Most of the Collegium dockside was wood, Stenwold realized dully, and then, They must be sighting for our artillery They must be sighting for our artillery. There was only a brief stretch of sea-wall at Collegium, but the two stubby towers that projected were already launching flaming ballista bolts and catapult stones towards the approaching armourclads, sizing up the distance. The siege engines on the Vekken flagship must be enormous, though, the entire vessel a floating siege platform. Collegium"s harbour defences could not hope to match the range.
Something flashed overhead, and Stenwold saw a heliopter cornering madly through the smoke. It was a civilian machine, some merchant"s prized cargo carrier, but its pilot was putting it through manoeuvres its designer had never antic.i.p.ated. Behind it barrelled a sleek fixed-wing flier, propellers buzzing, and then a heavy h.e.l.leron-made orthopter painted clumsily with a golden scarab device. The airfield had begun to launch its defences. He should go and see how Master Greatly was doing.
And someone called, "Look out!"
He turned, idiotically, towards the window, just in time to see the whole wall in front of him explode. The incendiary blast hurled him away in a raking of splinters, knocking everyone else off their feet. He hit his own map-table, smashed it with his weight, and a wall of heat pa.s.sed over him. He could hear himself shouting out some order, but he had no idea what.
Then he was being helped to his feet, and for a moment he could not see, and his face and shoulder were one ma.s.s of pain.
"What"s . . . ? Who"s . . . ?"
"Steady there." The voice was Balkus"s but there was a lot of other noise, too the crackling of flames, the cries of the wounded. He let Balkus guide him blindly away and prop him against a wall.
"Now hold still," the Ant said. People kept running past, jostling him, and he felt stabs of pain as Balkus plucked the worst of the splinters from him. He wiped his face, feeling blood slick on his hand. The injured were still being hauled from the harbourmaster"s office, even as the room burned.
"Is everyone . . . ?" he started, and then realized: "The fleet! Is the chain up?"
"No idea," Balkus said, and Stenwold staggered away, thumping down the stairs with blood seeping into his eyes again, and Balkus trying to keep up. From somewhere there was another explosion, another flaming missile from the Vekken flagship.
He staggered out into the clearer air, that was nevertheless blotched and stinking with smoke, onto the flat open quayside. Ahead of him was the calm stretch of the harbour, and the two stubby walls with their artillery towers, with the great open s.p.a.ce of water between them.
Only it was open no longer, for the first ships of the Vekken navy were fast crowding into it. Three of the armourclads were powering forwards, and he could hear above all of it the thump of their heavy engines. To either side of them, wooden craft knifed through the water, coursing ahead of the c.u.mbersome metal-hulled vessels, their catapults and ballistae launching up at the harbour towers.
The towers were loosing back, however and Stenwold saw one skiff swamped by a direct hit from a leadshotter, its wooden hull simply folding in the middle, the mast toppling sideways. The men that fell from its sides were armoured Vekken soldiers, as were most of the crews of the approaching navy, and Stenwold thought they must be mad to dare a sea a.s.sault.
And yet here they came, and the chain was still nowhere to be seen.
"Raise it!" he shouted, with no hope of being heard across that expanse of water, amongst such commotion. "The chain! Raise the chain!"
Beside him Balkus was slotting a magazine into his nailbow, which at this distance was as futile as Stenwold"s own shouting. By the time the weapon would mean anything, it would be too late.
And then Stenwold saw a gleam in the water as something was cranked up from the seabed: the great spiked chain that closed off the harbour mouth. There were engines three storeys high in the paired towers to drag the great weight of metal through the water, but they were engines fifty years old. Here it came, though, and Stenwold ground his teeth in agony as it seemed that the powering armourclads would be past it before it was up in place. They were bigger ships than he had thought, though, and further away, but the fleetest of the wooden vessels now surged forwards, trying to cross the barrier before it was finally raised.
The chain caught the ship before a quarter of its length had pa.s.sed, and it abruptly began rising with it in a splintering of wood. The spikes on the chain were busy rotating, each set in opposition to the next one, chewing and biting into the vessel"s hull even as its bows were lifted entirely out of the water. Then the craft began to tip, spilling men out, even as its engine mindlessly pushed it further over the chain. A moment later it slid back, entirely heeling onto its side, to lie awash in the water directly in the path of the armourclads.
"Nice work!" Balkus exclaimed. Stenwold shook his head.
"They didn"t even have armourclads when that chain was made. There"s no telling whether it will stop them."