There was the dead Moth woman to consider, as well. This mixed bag of raiders had all the hallmarks of a mercenary team. The presence of a Wasp did not guarantee they were imperial, nor did it seem likely they were Vekken.
It was all rather more than he could disentangle.
He heard Balkus"s clumping tread, and then the big Ant was back with yet another body slung over his shoulder. As he lowered it to the floor Stenwold saw an elderly Beetle-kinden who had been killed by a single knife-blow to the back of the neck.
"Master Briskall was was at home then," Stenwold said weakly. "What else did you see through there?" at home then," Stenwold said weakly. "What else did you see through there?"
Balkus shrugged. "Bit of a mystery, Master Maker. There"s a nice big lock on this door, and all manner of stuff behind it that any thief would go out of his mind to steal. Some of it"s in locked cages or behind gla.s.s, but there"s plenty there just for the grabbing, only they didn"t."
"We interrupted them?" Stenwold suggested.
"That Spider had something with her when she ran off," Balkus pointed out, and he had obviously made his mind up about the s.e.x of the escapee. "There"s one thing gone, something square and about so big." His hands made a shape no more than six inches to each side. "It was just out on a stand, though nothing this old boy wanted locked away."
"Just an opportunistic grab, maybe," Stenwold suggested, but an odd thought came to him: Or something Master Briskall did not know the value of. Or something Master Briskall did not know the value of.
The three of them then carried the bodies of Briskall and Doctor Nicrephos to the nearest infirmary, although they were both beyond all healing. Stenwold told a reliable-looking soldier about the other bodies, and advised that Briskall"s house should be secured against thieves. Then the three of them returned to Stenwold"s home, to find a messenger waiting on his doorstep with even worse news.
Scyla realized, as she left, that her only regret was that Gaved had escaped. She worked alone for preference, so she had taken no joy in the company the Empire had forced on her.
And she had no intention of sharing a reward with anyone. If this box was so important, then the Wasps would just have to pay the full amount to her alone.
Within a street she had taken on the guise of a portly Beetle woman, easy enough to do under cover of darkness, and was heading towards the nearest city wall. Getting through the Vekken lines would be harder, but she was adept at her craft.
Though heavily carved, the box was otherwise as una.s.suming as she had been told, but she had been given no time yet to make a detailed examination. If she could find out what was so special about it, then maybe she could raise the asking price. The Empire had a lot of money to throw around, and with a thousand faces at her disposal she had no worries about making enemies. Perhaps she should even impersonate Gaved? Now that would be amusing.
She guessed that Gaved would now be circling the streets looking for her, but between her disguise and his pitiful Wasp eyes, he had no chance at all. He would give up in the end and get himself out of the city before dawn, heading back to the imperial masters he constantly disavowed but would never quite escape.
Some part of the back of her mind was aware that those who had originally taught her would despair at her behaviour. Theirs was a n.o.ble and ancient calling of spies, and now she was a mere profiteer prost.i.tuting the gifts they had awakened in her just for spite and for gold. She had long ago lost sight of any higher goals she might have had, any lasting achievement she could make. Now it was just the getting and the gaining and, most especially, the joy of outwitting making bigger fools of all the fools out there, who looked no further than another"s face.
She reached the city wall and stood close to it, seeing no one around, no airborne shape hovering above. Calling on her Art she swiftly scaled the stonework, hands and booted feet clinging easily to its smooth stone. Flat against it, near the top, she waited as a sentry pa.s.sed by, with eyes only for the Vekken camp beyond. She crawled onto the walkway and the battlements and, like a shadow, face downwards, to the earth below.
Now came the real challenge. She could have crept from darkness to darkness, and thus avoided the Vekken lanterns, but she wanted to complete her victory. She wanted to fool a whole army.
She focused her concentration and changed her face and form, taking on the obsidian hue of a Vekken Ant, even down to the dark chainmail and helm. Ants could not be fooled by mere appearances amongst their own kind, though, and she stretched her powers and gifts, feeling tensions and strains within her mind as she worked with it, reaching out towards something that was a distant and foreign concept, an ideal, a mere idea, but something that was the fount of Ant-kinden Art.
And the night was full of voices. She heard the rapidly pa.s.sed reports of sentries, the chatter of artificers working on the artillery, questions from officers, and the complaints of a few who simply could not get to sleep, and she walked into it and, when she was seen, she simply greeted them, mind to mind, as any Ant would. If they had asked her questions it might have been difficult, in an army where any stranger could be identified so quickly, but it never even occurred to them to be suspicious, for she was doing the impossible, counterfeiting them so well that they could not conceive that she was not one of them.
Blithely and openly, she walked straight through the Vekken camp and out into the night.
By dawn she was far from the Vekken camp, back to the easy guise of a Spider-kinden man of younger years. When she had first called up this face he could have been her twin. Now he was a decade younger than she was.
The local people around here, solid farmers all, had heard about the siege of Collegium but had no idea what to do about it. They were simply awaiting the outcome, and if that meant Vekken soldiers coming down the road then they would take it as it came. Even the Vekken needed farmers to till the land, and Scyla suspected life as Vekken slaves would not change their rural ways so very much.
She found a barn where two placid draft-beetles were stabled, and climbed up to the hayloft. It was time to examine her prize.
Nothing but a box carved in wood that was her first impression. The carvings were strange, though. They drew the eye in a way that seemed to ignore the angles and corners of the thing, as though whatever they truly encompa.s.sed had no real edges at all, and they led on and led on, and as she turned the thing over in her hands she could see no end or beginning to them, coiling and twining traceries of th.o.r.n.y vines and ragged-edged leaves that overlapped and overlapped and only emphasized the depths of the s.p.a.ces in between them, depths that seemed, by some trick of light and shadow, to fall into recesses far further than the small box itself could readily accommodate.
In her intense concentration she did not notice the light wane within the stable, or hear the increasingly uncomfortable shuffling of the big insects below.
But how remarkable, she thought, that those lines split apart again and again, and yet whatever path she followed only turned and twisted, while all the others flourished with leaves, and carved insects, beetles and grubs and woodlice and other things that dwelled within rotten wood. Over and over she turned it, trying to unravel the essential mystery. A box it was, and light enough that it must be hollow, and yet there was no lid, no catch, no way of working her way into it, save to follow, follow, follow the carved patterns laid over and under one another, round and round the seemingly endless sides of the box.
There was a flickering within her mind, like shadows when the candle flame is blown, a flickering and a dancing, and at last she looked up, and saw shadows moving of their own accord across the walls of the barn, shadows that her eyes picked out of the darkness. Warrior shadows, with spined arms and stalking gait, the shadows of great clawed insects, forelimbs clasped in solemn prayer, robed men raising daggers to a shadow moon, and ever the interlacing, clutching branches of the encroaching trees. Shadows overlapping with yet more shadows, so that whatever was being enacted around her and within her mind was lost, save for the emotions that flooded and coursed through her, beyond her beck and call, as wild and furious as a storm tide: rage, betrayal, loss, a seething sense of bottomless hatred.
She was aware that she was holding her breath, and that seemed only wise because these shadows or some at least were Mantis-kinden who had no love for her kind, and she felt that she had no disguise sufficient to cloud their eyes to what she really was.
But too little, too late, for one such shadow had turned to her, if shadows could turn. There were no eyes, but as it gazed on her she was aware of a shadow thing part woman, part insect, part twining plant, but also the very shape that hate might take if some alchemist could distil it and then make it flesh.
She had a sense that this unfolding of power this long-denied awakening that she had provoked was not going unheard, and just as the things from the box stretched their serrated limbs, so distant minds that had been searching for this moment were sparked into wakefulness. The imperial contract The imperial contract, she thought, and in her mind was the instant image of a pale, emaciated man with bulbous red eyes, the skin above his forehead shifting with blood. One long-nailed hand was reaching for her, his face cast into a covetous scowl . . .
And she gasped in shock, and it was gone, they were all gone, and the sun was shining back through the hayloft hatch, and the beetles below were straining at their tethers, clawing at the walls, with oily foam welling between their mandibles, causing enough ruckus to bring the farmer. She ducked out of the hatch and climbed down the outside wall.
She was no true magician, no seer, but her people had their women and men of magic, just as the Moths did, and she had learnt a lot from them back when she was young and willing enough to subjugate herself to others. She had no idea what this box truly was, but she realized that it was powerful powerful. The magic trapped within it, from the Days of Lore for sure, was of an order she had never encountered before. She had no idea what the pragmatic Wasp Empire could want with it, but one thing was clear: she was being offered only a pitiful fraction of the true value of the thing. More, the Empire, ignorant as it was, would never come forward with a fitting price.
She knew places she could take it where a proper buyer might be found. Once word was out, then there was still gold enough within Moth haunts, still collectors of the arcane, rogue Skryres, Spider manipuli, all willing to bid for what she possessed. To the wastes with the Wasps. She would go find her own buyers and name her own price.
She did not stop to ask herself where this thought of betrayal, so natural to her, had first sparked, and whether the idea was really hers at all.
Thirty-Six.
They were three days out of Sarn, moving at the speed of the slowest automotive. The Queen was unwilling to let the Wasps bring the place of battle any closer than their current camp, and Che read from this that the Queen wanted the battlefield to stay as far away from her city as she could get it. She supposed that this was to protect the farmland and villages on which Sarn relied, but another thought suggested that Sarn"s ruler was already planning where to make her next stand, if her army lost the contest here.
Che and Sperra had been packed in with the rest of the non-combatants. This was Sarn"s trade-off for doing things Collegium"s way. In exchange for the mechanization and the superior weaponry, they had inherited a baggage train of foreign artificers and support staff doing jobs that would normally have been done by Ant-kinden soldiers.
She had seen little of Achaeos since the journey began. He was liaising between the various Mantis and Moth leaders of the newly formed and fragile Ancient League. Che understood that the League itself was still settling, and that neither of the kinden concerned came easily to placing their sovereignty under the leadership of others, even others of their own kind. Achaeos was worried about the battle, she knew, and whether things might go badly wrong even without the Wasps" intervention.
And then the train itself was abruptly slowing, with an unmistakable forward-lurching as the brakes were applied.
"Perhaps it"s a broken line," Sperra suggested, but there were Ants in the carriage with them that had stood up instantly and, as soon as the train was at rest, were flinging the doors open and ordering everyone to get out as quickly as possible. That was when Che realized that they had sighted the enemy.
It was really tremendously civilized, she supposed. The Wasps had arrived by train too, as though this were merely some polite meeting of diplomats. The Queen of Sarn had sent a big block of crossbowmen and nailbowmen out to screen the army from airborne attack, but the rest of her men were pitching tents methodically, checking the engines of the automotives or fitting the wings on the fliers.
"What about the Wasps?" Che wondered.
"Too late in the day for a battle," an Ant told her. "If they come for us, we"ll be able to form up in time, but there"s no sense in just waiting."
Of course they would be able to simply stop what they were doing, all at once, and begin to fight, for a single order could mobilize the entire Ant army. Che realized this was a luxury the Wasps did not have, so their soldiers must be currently preparing for a possible attack, and would have to stand ready at least until nightfall. Their tents were already pitched, though. Moth scouts reported that they had arrived at this point where the rails gave out some days ago, and had been steadily reinforcing their numbers ever since. She tried to get a better view of them, but they remained just a black stain on the horizon, further down the gleaming and interrupted metal line.
Achaeos suddenly dropped out of the sky beside her, making Che jump.
"You should witness this," he told her. "The Queen and Scelae are having their first command conference. I think we should be there, too, in case they have a falling out."
The three of them rushed through the Ant camp towards the Queen"s tent. The guards barred them momentarily, but then the word obviously came to let them pa.s.s. They did not even need to demand admittance before they were being ushered inside.
Within the barely furnished tent was a single table, with one map pinned upon it. Behind stood a handful of tacticians gathered up about their Queen, a clutch of sibling-similar Ant-kinden wearing partial plate-mail but with no other sign of rank or precedence. On the near side of the table were Scelae in her scaled armour, and a single grey-robed Moth-kinden. The way they looked at the Sarnesh was more adversarial than allied.
The Queen acknowledged their arrival with a brief nod. "It is as though you are truly part of my army," she said drily. "I only have to think of sending for you, and at once you are summoned."
"We have a certain responsibility for this meeting," Che said boldly. It was what Stenwold would have said, were he himself here.
The Queen nodded. "Cheerwell Maker," she said. "Sperra the Fly-kinden. You shall be our translators, should we need them. I do not know, as yet, whether this Ancient League shall speak a language Sarn understands."
She looked to Scelae, who shifted stance slightly, ready for a confrontation.
"Speak, O Queen," the Moth said, quietly, "now that you have called us to you."
Che sensed hostility radiating from the tacticians, at a possible lack of respect, and only the Queen herself seemed wholly calm. This alliance is so brittle, still, and they have marched side by side for only days. This alliance is so brittle, still, and they have marched side by side for only days. She could sense relations between their different cultures straining and stretching. She could sense relations between their different cultures straining and stretching.
"So tell me," the Queen of Sarn invited. "What will our battle order be on the morrow?" She met Scelae"s sharp Mantis glance without hesitation.
The other woman shrugged. "We will fight the Wasps alongside you. We know how to fight."
There was no sound or expression from the tacticians, but Che felt their disapproval deepen until the tent almost reeked of it. The Queen shook her head. "We are grateful for your a.s.sistance and your support, but we cannot dispose of this matter so casually. Tomorrow shall stand or fall on precise details such as this. The strength of Sarn is in its order, its discipline, each man and woman knowing exactly where they are supposed to be, what they are doing, and what the rest of the army is doing all around them. Your people are known as great duellists, archers, killers. I do not dispute it. They are indeed warriors, but they are not soldiers. In that field, my own kinden have no rivals. Not the Wasps, not the Mantis. Do you deny it?"
Scelae"s expression, her brief glance towards the open flap of the tent, indicated the great numbers of the Ants all around, and the few followers she herself had brought. That was the only superiority she would recognize, but she said nothing. The Queen smiled thinly.
"Your people will fight their own battle tomorrow, each one of them alone," she said, softly but firmly. "My people will fight my my battle all together, united, for that is our strength. So, tell me, how shall we use you?" As the Moth opened his mouth to speak she raised her hand in a gesture of such simple authority that she silenced him. "I do not cast your alliance back in your faces. I value, more than I have words to say, that your people have come to honour us in this way. I ask the question for no other reason than that I need to know the answer. You cannot move with us. You cannot hear my orders in your minds, even if you were disposed to follow them. Tell me how I may make use of you. Show me, that I can make my people understand." battle all together, united, for that is our strength. So, tell me, how shall we use you?" As the Moth opened his mouth to speak she raised her hand in a gesture of such simple authority that she silenced him. "I do not cast your alliance back in your faces. I value, more than I have words to say, that your people have come to honour us in this way. I ask the question for no other reason than that I need to know the answer. You cannot move with us. You cannot hear my orders in your minds, even if you were disposed to follow them. Tell me how I may make use of you. Show me, that I can make my people understand."
After that speech there was a s.p.a.ce of silence. Scelae and the moth exchanged glances, and Che found herself thinking, So it is not just the old races that can practise subtlety. So it is not just the old races that can practise subtlety.
The Mantis woman cleared her throat. "I have lived in Sarn for many years," Scelae began, "and I have some idea of how your kinden think. You are right, of course. In the heat of battle, your orders may not seem right to us, so I cannot guarantee that my people will follow them, even if we could hear them. Tell us then how are you intending to progress the battle tomorrow?"
"Aggressively, we have decided," the Queen said, after a brief silent word amongst her surrounding advisers.
Scelae nodded. "Then let"s be plain with it. Any fancy planning and contingencies we come up with now won"t survive a meeting with the Wasp battle line. We cannot hope to react to your sleights and changes and tactics. You, however, can react to ours."
"Explain," said the Queen.
Scelae leant over the map, but it was obvious that she could make little sense of it. "I will split my force and place one half on each of your flanks. We will screen your advance with our bows, and our wings. We will prevent their flying soldiers from wrapping your lines. I have many skilled archers amongst my people. Then, when we"re close to the enemy, we will attack, draw them out, break their lines. Wasp discipline does not match your own. They can be provoked, dispersed. With your mind-speech, you will be able to take advantage of what we can give you. Let us be the spearhead, then. Give your orders based on how we strike. That way you can make best use of us."
The Queen considered this, still surrounded by the silent counsel of her tacticians. She nodded slowly, a deliberate affectation simply for the benefit of the other kinden there. "The idea has merit, although you take a great deal of risk on your people. If you yourselves break rank, to charge or pursue, we may not be able to save you."
Scelae tilted her head on one side. "We are warriors. We fight. We understand all that means."
The Queen looked down at the map-tables, then up at Cheerwell, the shock of eye contact startling in its intensity. And how many others now look at me out of her eyes. And how many others now look at me out of her eyes. "Your comments?" "Your comments?"
Che opened her mouth, trying to think, but Sperra said, "Messengers, surely."
"Little one?"
"Messengers. If it goes wrong you can send someone out to the League soldiers," the Fly-kinden said. "You can call them back, put them elsewhere." She spread her small hands. "Not that I know the first thing about war, anyway, but that"s what I"d do."
"You wouldn"t need actual messengers-" Che broke in suddenly.
The Queen found a smile for her. "Yes, we have the same thought. I shall place a few of my fleetest soldiers with each half of your warriors," she told Scelae. "They at least will be able to hear me, and they can tell you what I . . . suggest that your forces do. Many things can happen in a battle, and we can never predict them all. I may have need of your warriors in ways we cannot yet consider."
Scelae glanced at the Moth-kinden, who nodded.
"Agreed," she said, and moved to go, preparing to explain to her people a plan that all the Ants already understood.
Che coughed pointedly. "I have . . . something to say, I think. Something that my uncle himself would say, if he were here."
The Mantis stopped, looking back at her.
"Speak," the Queen directed.
"This is something that stretches beyond the battlefield of tomorrow," Che said, sounding to her own ears unbearably awkward and pompous. "We"re writing history, right now, here in this tent. The three cities of the Ancient League, and Sarn, and Collegium, are all standing together and of one mind. We must remember our common cause. We must. If we turn the Wasps back, then it would be all too easy just to go back to trying to ignore each other, to forget how we have stood here, all together, for one purpose. We should remember that, for as long as we can."
Scelae, who had so long been a spy in the Queen"s city, smiled bleakly. "I am not sure even the threat of the Wasps can bring us to that degree of unity. Let us defeat them first, and see what remains."
Che slept that night in Achaeos"s arms, clutching at him for security, while Sperra lay as a curled and lonely shape at the other end of the tent. The morning woke Che not with dawn light but with his absence.
"Achaeos?" she called softly. There was a noise from outside, not loud, but a constant and steady sound of the Ants getting ready to fight: preparing armour and weapons, the engines of the automotives, the propellers of the fixed-wing fliers, and not a single human voice to be heard.
"Out here," he said finally. Sperra was slowly uncurling as Che put her boots on. Stepping outside made her head swim because of the sheer quant.i.ty of movement all around. The entire Ant force was afoot, forming into its traditional tight units of shield and crossbow. There were several thousand infantry in her view alone, and every single one of them knew where he or she should be.
Sperra ducked out after her just as the engines of the flying machines began to settle into a low grumble beyond the tents and the machines themselves to slowly crawl across the ground.
"Apparently the Wasps tried to attack at dawn," Achaeos explained, his voice sounding oddly empty. "A strike force of fifty or so intended to destroy the fliers. The Queen had put the Mantis-kinden on guard, though. They can see well in the dark, and their bows can shoot further than any Wasp sting."
"Are you all right?" Che asked him. He sounded shaken and numb.
"Our scouts came back," he said. "The Empire outnumbers us by about three to two, but the Ants don"t seem to think it makes much difference. It"s tactics and discipline, not numbers, apparently." There was a ragged edge to his words, emerging as though he had not the least interest in the conflict that was about to unfold.
"Achaeos, what"s wrong? Tell me!"
"I have dreams, Che," he told her. "Terrible dreams. The Darakyon is hounding me but I cannot understand it. It is going mad, it seems, over something new that it cannot get through to me. Something terrible is going to happen, Che."
"Here? In the battle?"
"Something dire enough to make this battle look like children brawling," he said.
The engines of the automotives roared suddenly, and the entire Ant army set forth together, every single man and woman of the infantry marching precisely in step. Sperra poked her head further out of the tent and swore in a small, lost voice, as thousands of men and women all around them were suddenly on the move and falling into place. It felt as though the whole world was leaving them behind.
Technically, all three of them had been seconded to join the field surgeons, as they each had some experience of medicine in various forms. There would be a blessed pause before any casualties came back, though, and Che wanted to see for herself exactly what was going on. She looked around for a vantage point and picked one of the transport automotives, empty of everything except rations now. With a clumsy flick of her wings she cast herself up at the overreaching cage of struts that defined its cargo area, clung tight and hauled herself up until she could stand on them, looking out over the battlefield. She was just in time for the first of the orthopters to drone overhead, just taking off but still going fast enough for the downbeat of their wings to buffet her. She sat down hurriedly just as Achaeos and Sperra joined her on her perch.
Plated with shields, the units of Ants were themselves like great crawling insects. The centre of the Sarnesh battle array was made up of them, square after square plodding forward with a single will. Interrupting these black metal lines, armoured automotives drove forward at walking pace, their brand-new nailbows glinting proudly in the sun.
On either side, the soldiers of the Ancient League were a diffuse cloud, now getting a little ahead of the line, now being reined in again. Che pictured all those Mantis-kinden, all running as individuals, some with arrows to bowstrings, others brandishing swords, claws or lances. She saw in her mind"s eye the tight cl.u.s.ters of Moth-kinden with short-bows and knives and blank white eyes.
Ahead of the Sarnesh advance, the Wasp army moved like a living thing. Behind their soldiers, blocky flying machines began to lurch into the air.
"The scouts said they had "armoured heloropters" or some such," Achaeos reported.