‘He’s taken a beating,’
he explained. ‘You shouldn’t mind him.’
‘They won’t come in by
this door. They wanted to draw you out. I’ve understood it,’ Totho explained.
‘Since when were you a
tactician, lad?’ Nero asked him.
‘I don’t have to be.
There was a man . . . a slave of the Wasps. He told me. He warned me, I think.
“Airships,” he said. I would use airships, if I could.’
Staring at Totho, Parops
had gone very still. ‘Airships,’ he echoed.
Totho shrugged, still
finding it difficult to concentrate. None of it seemed that important. ‘That
was what he said. I think it was what he said.’
‘Totho!’ Salma took him
by the shoulders and pulled at him. ‘Come back to us,’ he said. ‘I don’t
understand what you’re saying, but if it’s important . . .’
The world shifted and
slid sideways in Totho’s head, and he blinked. ‘He said airships,’ he told
Salma softly. ‘I pulled him out from under the engine. He was an artificer,
Salma, like me.’
‘You’d better come with
me,’ said Parops, and set off for his guard tower at a jog.
He took them up to his
arrowslit, noticeably slanted now. Parops’s entire tower seemed to be at a slight
tilt. His commandership there might be living on borrowed time, Salma reckoned.
Out beyond the wall they
could see the broad swathe of the imperial camp, and there was little new
there, save that their numbers seemed barely touched by the atrocities of the
previous night.
At the camp’s far end,
though, lay the enemy’s makeshift airfield, where a few of the heliopters could
be made out. There, beyond those blocky, graceless things, something was now
rising up.
Several things, in fact.
Half a dozen bloated shapes were slowly, imperceptibly swelling. Already they
were bigger than the heliopters ranged before them, and Salma had the
impression they still had a way to expand yet.
Parops had passed round
his telescope, which Salma had no idea what to do with. It showed him nothing
but blurs but Totho took it and peered into it keenly, seeming more focused
than he had been since Skrill had first found him.
‘They would do the job,’
the artificer observed. ‘I can see that. Now there are no air defences left.’
‘Little enough,’ Parops
agreed. ‘Most of the nest crop is gone, and we only have a couple of orthopters
that could even be repaired on time. They threw a lot at us last night.’
‘Of course, and for that
very reason,’ Totho murmured, still scrutinizing the distant gasbags. ‘An
artificer’s war.’ He looked back at the others, seeming more himself, more the
avid student Salma had known. The animation with which he spoke of his trade
was macabre. ‘Airships are very vulnerable to any flying attack. That’s why they’ve
not been used much in warfare.’ Right now he might have been a College master
delivering his lecture.
‘So what
are
those things out there?’ Skrill demanded. Totho gave
her a frustrated look.
‘They’re
airships
, of course, because there will be no airborne
opposition to them now. They just have to float them over the city. It makes
perfect sense. It’s just that the Tarkesh don’t think like Wasps. Parops, your
people fight ground wars, and so your air power is secondary, kept just for
spotting and the occasional surprise attack, but the Wasps think like you
should think, Salma. They think in the air and now they’ve opened the city on
the ground, and stripped its wings away, they’ll proceed to attack it from
above. Those heliopters are too heavy, and they fly too low. You could shoot
them down with your wall artillery, maybe even with sufficient crossbows. The
airships, though . . . they can go so high, only the best fliers could reach
them. So what will you do?’
‘But what can
they
do?’ Nero asked. ‘They can spy us out, but we can
shoot their troops if they drop down—’
‘They can do whatever
they want,’ Totho said, leaning back against the wall, his mind still full of
airships. ‘The whole of Tark will be spread below them. Explosives,
incendiaries – it would be like dropping boiling oil onto a map, you see. Drop
– drop – drop, and three buildings gone. And all we will be able to do is shake
our fists at them.’
Che had never before
seen an Ant-kinden who was actually fat. If it were not for Plius’s distinctive
Ant features she would have thought him some kind of halfbreed. That was not
the only surprise about him. He was not a Sarnesh Ant, which was even more
remarkable given the Ants’ propensity to make war on others of their own kind.
His skin was icy blue-white while the irises of his eyes were dead black, which
had the effect of making them seem huge. She had seldom seen such colouring
before, and had no idea what city-state he might have come from.
‘Scuto,’ he called out
from the table he had to himself in the taverna, leaning back in a capacious
chair. He wore an open robe over an expensive-looking tunic that strained over
his belly, but there was a shortsword slung over the chair-back, to show he had
not entirely left his belligerent roots behind.
Scuto glanced about, but
none of the other patrons, few enough of them, seemed interested. It was still
before midday and most of the inhabitants of Sarn’s foreign quarter were out
taking care of business.
‘It’s been a while,’
Plius remarked, as the Thorn Bug approached. He kicked another chair out for
him, and then glanced quickly from Che’s face to Sperra’s. ‘Pimping now, are
you?’ he asked. Despite his louche appearance, he spoke in an Ant’s voice, with
its characteristic clipped precision.
‘This lady here is
Cheerwell Maker. You remember Sten Maker? Well this is his niece. The other’s
called Sperra.’
Plius waved the
introductions away. ‘So I heard you were looking for me, Scuto. It’s been a
while,’ he repeated.
‘It has that,’ Scuto
admitted. ‘Didn’t know how much of the old cadre would still be here for me.’
Plius shrugged. ‘There’s
Dola over at the Chop Ketcher Importing place but, if you’ve not heard from
her, she’s probably keeping her head down. As I said, Scuto, it’s been a while
since then, and we’ve all had the chance to make some money here in Sarn.’
Scuto’s pause for
breath, his moment of hesitation, opened a book for Che on his relations with
Plius: revealing that they had never really trusted one another, and that Scuto
had no guarantee that the other man would be of any use to them.
‘So where are we now?’
Scuto asked.
Plius shrugged. ‘We’re
in a city where I have a good business going, Scuto, but if you want something,
then ask and, if it’s not too much out of my way, maybe it will happen.’
‘What
is
your business, if I can ask?’ Che put in. This man
seemed so corrupt, but she knew the Ants were ruthless with crime, even here in
Sarn.
‘Ah, well.’ Plius
coughed and grinned. ‘It happens I’m the most successful milliner in Sarn.’
‘The most successful
what?
’ Che asked.
‘I used to be the only
one, but now there are two more, which shows you how profitable the trade’s
become.’
‘A milliner? You mean
hats?’
Plius’s grin widened.
‘The way it was, you see, there weren’t any here, because Ants would wear helms
or go bare-headed, but of course Sarn has a foreign quarter that covers almost
a third of the city these days, and Sarn is half again as big as most Ant
states. So there was a call for them, and business was good. And you know what?
Now the Ants have started buying as well. Now they can see the foreigners
having a good time, they themselves start to change how they dress and the
like. They still all look like they’re ready for a funeral, but at least
they’re not all dressed exactly the same.’ He turned his attention back to
Scuto. ‘So what is it, then? What brings you back here for me?’
‘You know what,’ Scuto
told him. ‘It’s happening, Plius. It’s time.’
‘Yes, well, I’ve heard
the news.’ Plius spread his hands. ‘The Empire, which was your man Sten’s
bedbug back in the old days, is away battering Tark even as we speak. Things
may have changed in this city, but not that much. Nobody in Sarn’s going to
lose sleep about the Tarkesh taking a few punches.’
‘We ain’t here to ask
for Tark’s sake,’ Scuto said flatly. ‘It’s too late, anyway, by my reckoning.
This lot’d never get there in time. Now I ain’t a diplomat or a pretty speaker,
so I’ll put it plain as I can. Sure, you’ve heard about Tark. Well, soon enough
you’ll hear about Helleron, too.’
‘What about Helleron?’
‘Soon enough,’ Scuto
said again. ‘And probably Egel and Merro, once they’re done with Tark. Who
knows where next? They’ll be marching up the coast towards Collegium, and from
Helleron it’s not such a jump to take Etheryon. Or even Sarn.’
Che expected Plius to
laugh this off, but something in Scuto’s tone, maybe his very lack of emphasis,
had drawn the Ant’s face longer and longer. ‘You mean it, don’t you?’ Plius
said. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Ain’t never been more,’
Scuto confirmed, sounding tired. ‘Look, Plius, I saw the start of it at
Helleron, when they tried to get a thousand men by rail into Collegium to shake
the place up. They’re not really after Tark. It’s the Lowlands they want. The
whole of it, from Helleron all the way to Vek and the west coast. They’ve got
more fighting men than five Ant cities put together, and a dozen slave-towns to
pull more soldiers from. You know the Commonweal?’
‘Yes, I know the
Commonweal,’ Plius said testily.
‘Well then you know
they’ve spent the last dozen years carving out a great lump of that, and now
they’re ready for us,’ said Scuto. Plius’s easygoing manner had evaporated
entirely now, and he was looking a little stunned.
‘So what do you want?’
he asked, and Scuto replied, ‘We need to speak to the top, Plius. To the Royal
Court.’
Plius let out a long
breath. ‘If you’d asked that straight off I would have said you were mad. Now,
though . . . I have some contacts. Not high-up contacts, but they’re there. I
can try for an audience, but it’ll use up just about all my credit with them.’
‘What,’ Scuto said
pointedly, ‘were you saving it for?’
On their arrival, Che’s
first view of Sarn had been of a city split by the line of the rail track. As
the automotive pulled in to the depot it had seemed to her that somehow – by Achaeos’s
magic perhaps – there were two cities, as close as a shadow to each other, but
each blind to its neighbour.
To the right was Sarn,
the Ant city-state comprised of low, spartan buildings, pale stone and flat
roofs without decoration. The people there moved briskly but without haste, and
they did not stop to speak to one another or gather to converse. Everyone knew
precisely where they were going. Soldiers were on hand to watch the automotive
and make sure, she suspected, that only native Sarnesh alighted through the
right-hand doors. Everything looked clean and orderly and the streets of the
city ran at precise angles to one another, all in the shadow of the city wall.
To the left lay the
foreigners’ quarter, which presented a totally different world. To start with,
its limits had begun outside the walls, with stalls, wagons and tents extending
a hundred yards down the road that ran alongside the rail track. Inside the
walls, it fairly bustled. Even the depot’s goods yard had suffered a hundred
encroachments, with market stalls pitched ready to ambush the unwary visitor,
peddlers and hawkers and dozens of kinds of traders converging or waiting or
looking out for each other. There were a lot of Beetle-kinden amongst them,
mostly Collegium-grown and many even College-educated: merchants and artificers
and scholars all mingling, clasping hands, making animated conversation with
frequent gestures, as though to compensate for the quiet world just across the
track. There were others, too, especially Fly-kinden – dozens of them, from
ostentatiously well-dressed merchants to grubby peddlers of trinkets, their
eyes keen for a loose purse or dropped coin. There were also some from breeds
not commonly found within the Lowlands: a Commonweal Dragonfly mercenary in piecemeal
armour of glittering hues and a long-faced Grasshopper in College-styled robes
discoursing with two Beetle scholars. Spiders, she saw, though not so many as
Collegium regularly knew, and small wonder, for she had never seen so many
Mantis-kinden in one place in her life. Some were in bands, lounging about and
watched carefully by the guard. Many went singly, at the shoulder of some
wealthy foreigner or other as a tactful and tacit warning to thieves and
rivals. With their strongholds of Nethyon and Etheryon just north of Sarn, a
lot of Mantis-kinden young bloods came down here looking for excitement, hiring
themselves out as mercenaries or bodyguards.
The Sarnesh were to be
found in the foreigners’ quarter as well, of course. She had expected their armoured
men and women patrolling through the throng and keeping a careful eye on
exposed weapons and their owners. She was struck, though, by the many
brown-skinned Ant-kinden, robed or dressed in simple tunics, doing patient
business with their visitors, or simply walking through the crowd, taking a
vicarious interest in all the bustle that was going on within their walls.
Scuto had found them a
taverna going under the sign of the Sworded Book, which suggested that its
owner, past or present, had been a duellist at the Prowess Forum. Certainly it
was decked out in Collegium style, with a great clock perched over the bar in
imitation of the Forum itself. Now Che sat at a window and watched the
foreign-quarter marketplace, a bizarre halfbreed venue that seemed wrenchingly
close to home and yet completely distant. Meanwhile, only three streets away,
the Sarnesh proper continued to hold their normal silent communion with one
another.