‘I saw as much as I
needed. What will they be flying, when tomorrow comes? You have destroyed most
of the artillery on their eastern walls, and the walls themselves have seen
better days. Endgame, General. Their air cavalry, their flying machines – what
remains of them?’
Alder nodded soberly. It
had indeed been a bloody night. The Mercy’s Daughters were filling every bed,
giving help to the less wounded and last comfort to the dying, but Drephos was
right: the endgame was at hand. He was glad of it. He had seen the Maynesh
rebellion a few years back and he hated fighting Ant-kinden. Still, he felt a
glowing coal of pride that it was him they had chosen to crush this first
Lowlander city.
Even if I have had to rely on this wretched
monster to do it.
‘What do you want from
me, Drephos?’ he growled. ‘You’ll get yourself a fair report, don’t worry.
They’ll know what you’ve accomplished.’
A little cackle of a
laugh came from within the cowl. ‘Oh, General, not so soon. Write nothing yet,
I implore you. I’ve only started. Write your eulogies when the city has
surrendered.’
For
he has his scheme
, Alder knew.
I’d ask if it will
work, but when has he been wrong yet? The entire military establishment
despises this man, and yet it seems we cannot do without him.
‘I was at Maynes,’ Alder
said. ‘I remember Ant-kinden.’
‘Maynes was a lesson to
be learned, General,’ Drephos told him. ‘A lesson I have learned from. Tark
shall be yours in a fraction of the time.’
‘For a fraction of the loss?’
Drephos paused as though
considering. ‘Imperial losses? Almost certainly. Tarkesh losses? Alas no, but
in war one must always anticipate a little destruction, mustn’t one?’
He then went on his
limping way, and Alder knew the man was fully aware of the stares of hatred he
attracted, the narrowed eyes and curses from the other men. Aware, and enjoying
it.
Later, Alder permitted
himself a visit to the Daughters. They had lashed three long tents together end
to end and the wounded were crammed into them shoulder to shoulder. There were
Wasps here, and Ants from Anadus’s contingent, a few of the Bee-kinden
engineers and a couple of Fly messengers who had been just plain unlucky. He
caught the eye of Norsa, the most senior Daughter here, looking tired and drawn.
She and her coven had been labouring all night, bandaging the lucky and holding
the hands of the rest. It would do no good, he knew, to insist she took the
Wasp wounded in first. The Daughters made no distinction between kinden, just
as they accepted into their ranks any penitent who showed herself willing to
serve. Norsa had all kinds here to help her, from across the Empire and beyond.
They exchanged a look,
he and Norsa, that was familiar to both of them, and then he turned to that
part of his duty that he felt signified a true officer: to walk amongst the
wounded, to acknowledge their whimpers and cries and not to shy away from them.
To take ultimate responsibility for the inevitabilities of war.
In dawn’s unforgiving
light, Totho found himself wandering along the line of the ruined wall, trying
to find some way in which to account for what he was seeing. The smoke gusting
past him was a fickle mercy: for every scene it concealed there were a dozen
more clearly visible wherever the eyes turned – the tangible testament to the
events of the night.
The sheer numbers of the
dead! The dead were everywhere, all across the city, but mostly here by this
stretch of wall and non-wall. To his right were three houses staved in like
eggshells by the twisted hulk of a crashed heliopter. The metal of the machine
and the stone of the buildings was smoothed off into one tangled whole by the
soot, with a single rotor blade jutting proud like a standard above the jagged
roof-edges. The ground that he picked his way across was a litter of windfall
dead, some savage encounter between the light airborne of the enemy and the
defenders’ crossbows. Fallen to the earth like so much rotten fruit, Wasp
soldiers and the savage Hornet bolt-fodder lay twisted all over the place, so that
he had no clear footing, but stumbled on over broken limbs and the spines of
quarrels, spears snapped like matchwood, swordblades sheared from their hilts,
and everywhere the vacant, empty faces of once-angry men. Wasp-kinden,
certainly, but here in death that stigma was gone from them. They were brothers
now with the fallen of the city: all members of that great and inclusive
society of the dead.
Totho paused beside the
corpse of a great ant, its wings shattered to shards, its legs curled in on
themselves. The crossbow had been shorn from the saddle-mountings, the rider
also. Not so far from it lay most of the wing of a Tarkesh orthopter, and for a
moment Totho stopped, unable to conceive of any string of events that could
leave just the wing, with the bulk of the craft falling elsewhere. He crouched
by the great twisted vane, examining where its cables and struts had sheared.
Just one more casualty, but it came to him that this wing could serve again,
could even be reunited with its original body to fly again, unlike the broken
wings of the insect. Thus the artificer became a magician beyond the dreams of
the Moth-kinden.
But in the end it had
been those Moth dreams she had preferred.
And here was where the
giants had broken through the wall, the gap they had excavated with their Art
and their hands. Their bodies lay, overlapping, where the quick swords of the
Ants had found the gaps in their armour. In death, sadness still ruled their
faces, not the anger or hatred of the other combatants. The breach they had
carved still supported itself, a rough but perfect arch within the wall. Around
them the bodies of the defenders and of the Wasp soldiers who had followed
after them seemed paltry, like children.
Now the footing became
trickier because here was where the gate had been and gone. The charred corpse
of the great ramming engine was still here and Totho looked for, but did not
find, the body of the man he had dragged clear – the artificer. It had seemed
strange to him, then, that artificers should go to war. Now it was all
beginning to make sense.
Despite their engine,
the Wasps had not made it through the gate, though the gap between the strained
hinges was choked with their corpses and their enemies’. Besieger and besieged
lay over and beside one another in a frozen jumble of black and silver, black
and gold, pale skin and the dark stains of dried blood.
And beyond there, the
wall gave out entirely of course. Here was where it had started, and at the
broken edge of stone closest to him he could see some of the lower stones
squeezed out of shape where the reagent of the Wasps had softened and distorted
them. Here was where the defenders’ main force had met the Ants of Maynes, and
the slain were piled so high that Totho could not see past them to the field beyond.
There was no sense to be made of it, this tangle of arms and legs, shields and
swords. It was like one of those clever pictures where a series of shapes
interlocks so perfectly that there is no gap between them that does not form
another shape, another Ant body. He found himself backing away from the sight
but, even as he did, he was thinking,
Meat, just meat.
The Ant-kinden had been killing each other like this since history cared to
record. If the Wasps wanted to join in that pointless bloody round, why should
they be dissuaded? The Tarkesh were fighting for their homes now, but how many
years would he have to track back before he found them assaulting another
city’s gates? Certainly, had Totho been caught outside their walls at any other
time, halfbreed and foreigner that he was, he would have been chained as a
slave here without hesitation. There could be no special plea for Tark’s
virtue.
Something was moving
amongst the dead: he saw children, searching over the bodies of both their own
kin and the enemy. He watched them, saw them gathering crossbow quarrels that
had not been broken, saw them pulling swords from cold hands, meticulously
undoing the buckles of armour. They called out to each other to announce their
finds. It shocked him at first, to hear those thin, high voices in this silent
place. They were too young, he realized, to have learned the Ancestor Art of
the Ants, so they must have been taught these words by their parents, mouth to
ear, before they would be able to speak them back mind to mind.
They were gathering only
what was valuable. Not the mere flesh that was spent, not even the purses or
effects of the dead. Only the harder metals, that could be used again or
smelted and reforged. It seemed to him so fitting, what they did, for they were
cogs, and war was the machine. Here on the battlefield was where the machine’s
wheels ground hardest, where the metal met and the end process was written in
bodies and blood. Had he not seen, in Helleron, where the raw materials of war
were cast, all the swords and bolts and engines? Here was where the process
came full circle, where the discarded pieces of a war were made as new, ready
to go back into the mix. Only the meat, transient and replaceable, would not be
saved. There was always more of that. Meanwhile, here came Ant-kinden soldiers
to carry the stripped corpses to the pyres, and who knew whether the next ones
to fall in this very place would be the same men who now hauled the bodies
away? Interchangeable, the living and the dead. All meat.
He had not intended,
when he left the others, to see this. His world had been complete without this.
He had been happy in his ignorance, for ignorant Totho had been. But he was an
artificer and this war was an artificer’s thing, a mechanical process cranked
over and over by the constant refinement of the weaponsmith and the armourer,
the automotive engineer and the volatiles chemist. Seen in that light, in that
harsh but clear light, the whole business became somehow admirable. If he
looked past the meat, contrived not to see it, then it was just another process
that sharpened and honed itself each time it was set in motion.
‘Hey, Beetle-boy!’
He looked up without
curiosity to see Skrill picking her way over to him, with Salma following a
little way behind. Her arm was bandaged tightly, bound up in a sling. ‘I ain’t
pulling any bow no time soon,’ she informed him. ‘Got me good, they did.
Thought they’d got you too, when you took off.’
Totho merely shook his
head. It seemed so long since he had spoken that the words had dried up inside
him, making him envy the Ant-kinden and their voices of the mind.
‘Well, if this ain’t a
right mess,’ Skrill decided, dismissing the butchery with that. The air was
thickening with flies, an intrusion Totho had not noticed before, from the
littlest ones to fist-sized blood-drinkers.
Where do they
come from?
Was there some machine churning them out? Surely all these
insects had not been just waiting around in Tark for a massacre.
‘The Ants think they
won, last night,’ Salma said, ‘though I’m not so sure. The Wasps eventually
pulled back, but to their own tune, not ours.’ He used to smile a lot, Totho
remembered, but his face was tired now, without even the ghost of that grin
left.
‘They’re all over the
gaps in the wall, our lot, putting up stuff to fill ’em,’ Skrill added. ‘Ain’t
going to make much difference is my thinking.’
‘Parops reckons they can
hold against one more attack before the Wasps take the wall, anyway,’ Salma
continued. ‘Their soldiers got the measure of the Wasp infantry last night, and
the Tarkesh think they’re superior. If the Wasps want the wall they’ll have to
pay for it, or that’s what they’re saying.’
Totho surprised himself
by laughing. Salma stared at him.
‘What? Is something
funny?’
‘You,’ said Totho,
feeling his voice rasp in his throat. ‘You, fighting an Ant war. Where’s
Parops?’
Wordlessly, Salma
pointed to where a squad of Ants was labouring at one edge of the breach,
fixing stone and wood into place to make some kind of a barricade.
‘Let’s talk to Parops,’
said Totho, but Salma gripped him by the shoulder.
‘Are you hurt, Toth?’
The halfbreed artificer
looked him right in the eye, but without quite focusing. ‘I’ve just . . . seen
. . . Salma, I made a mistake. You know why I came?’
‘I think I do.’
‘How could . . . ?
Surely this isn’t what I meant, by coming here.’
Salma let out a long
breath. ‘I don’t think anybody meant this. I never saw it, but I heard reports
during the Twelve-Year War. There were single days of fighting that you could
have fitted these corpses into five times. And if Tark falls, then where next?
Helleron? Collegium? This is why we have to fight them.’
Totho shook his head,
feeling it throb in response. ‘If we wanted to stop this, then we should just
not fight them at all. We should just give in. But we don’t, and so we don’t
want to stop it. We fight them to create war, and this’ – a vague gesture
across the strewn ground – ‘is just a byproduct. War is what it’s about, and we
all work hard at it.’
‘Listen to you,
Beetle-boy,’ Skrill said nervously. ‘You got knocked on the head or something?’
‘There may have been a
grenade,’ Totho said vaguely. ‘Close, perhaps. We should speak to Parops.’
Without a further look at them he wandered away.
Parops glanced up as
they came over. Helping build barricades, he still had his armour on and it was
still unfastened at the back. In all the night’s chaos there had been nobody
yet to secure it for him. Nero was sitting nearby, watching the busy activity
but pointedly taking no part in it.
‘You’re wasting your
time, Commander,’ Totho announced for all to hear. Parops raised an eyebrow.
‘And why’s that?’ he
asked. Salma came up quickly and took Totho’s arm.