The city of Tark had
fallen to the Empire after only five days of bombardment.
The Wasps then took
control with a firm hand born of long experience. They appointed their deputies
amongst the conquered people, giving their orders and leaving the delegation of
them to the Ant-kinden mindlink, so that by speaking to a single Ant they could
effectively command the whole city. Drephos and General Alder were able to walk
through the streets of the conquered city, watching the disarmed inhabitants set
to clearing the ruins of their own homes. They worked in silence, and both men
felt the shocked quiet that filled the space between their minds:
How could it have come to this?
‘I must confess, I do
not trust this silence,’ Alder remarked. He had an honour guard of a dozen
sentinels, implacable in their heavy plate armour.
‘That is because you do
not understand Ant-kinden, General,’ Drephos told him.
‘And
you
do?’
‘I make an effort to
know who my machines are to be used against, so that I can better direct that
use. They have come to the conclusion for now that to resist the Empire is only
to invite greater wrack, so they surrender.’
‘They’ll rebel in time,
then.’
‘Every subordinate
always does, when given the opportunity,’ Drephos said airily, and then
qualified it. ‘Except for the Bee-kinden. They don’t seem to have the knack.’
‘And that squad that got
away.’ Alder shook his head, his plan having not provided for that. Eight
hundred men suddenly breaking from the west gate and running his blockade – which,
needless to say, had not been expecting any assault and broke almost instantly.
He had himself been there to witness the tail end of the fighting and the Ant
soldiers making their orderly retreat from their own city, flanked by
nailbowmen and heavy crossbows. The pursuing airborne had been cut to pieces,
and he had realized that he could not spare more men to go after them just as
the Royal Court was being cracked open. So he had reinforced the western
perimeter and waited for them to make their vengeful return to attempt to break
the siege, but they had not come back. They had simply gone. ‘Did they run?’ he
wondered aloud. ‘Did their nerve break, at the end?’
‘It was done by design,
General. I am sure of that,’ Drephos said. ‘You’ve not seen the last of them.’
Alder nodded gloomily.
‘Do you believe it about their ruler?’ he asked. ‘Again, I don’t trust it. All
these Ants look the same to me.’
‘I believe it
implicitly, because it is the only way the matter could reasonably be
accomplished,’ Drephos said. ‘While he was King, no matter what order he had
just given, his people would still be waiting for his word. They would never
lay down their arms. They would always think that some further move could be
made in the game.’
‘Game?’ Alder surveyed
the dead Wasp soldiers that were, one by one, being hauled from before the
palace gates. ‘This is a game for you, is it?’
‘For all of us, General,
and you can’t say you didn’t know the stakes. No, the King had to go, and he
knew it.’
‘So he killed himself,
or had his generals kill him,’ Alder said tiredly. He had read the report. The
first Wasp soldiers had burst into the tunnels beneath the Tarkesh throne room
to find their King slain. The tacticians of Tark had been waiting there
peaceably, accepting their fate. They had been put to death, of course. There
was no sense inviting further trouble by letting them live.
‘I’ve sent a messenger
for the Supply corps,’ Alder added. ‘The administrators, the Auxillian militia,
the garrison and the slavers – they’ll all be here in a day, perhaps two.’
‘And for you the
conquest goes on?’ Drephos asked him.
‘I have orders to move
west,’ Alder confirmed. ‘There are two Fly-kinden communities to take into the
Empire but I’m not anticipating a fight there. Then my information is that
there is another Ant city-state offshore, and some Mantis savages in the woods
that we can root out.’
‘I wish you luck with
it, General.’
Alder frowned at the
halfbreed. ‘And where will you be, Colonel-Auxillian, that you’re wishing me
luck?’
‘I have arranged a
transfer to the Seventh for myself and my people, General. I have given you the
tools to unpick an Ant city, but the Seventh is yet to be thus supplied. They
are listed to march on Sarn eventually and, besides, their more immediate
destination is of interest to me.’
Alder shrugged,
one-shouldered. ‘If you have wheedled such orders, then so be it.’ He glowered
at the artificer briefly. ‘I don’t like you, Drephos. You’re a worm, and don’t
think I don’t know how much you hate us.’
Within the shadow of his
cowl, Drephos smiled thinly. ‘But . . . ?’
‘But you have
accomplished a great deal here,’ Alder admitted reluctantly. ‘I shall note it
in my report.’
‘You’re too kind,’
Drephos said. ‘If you do not mind, General, I will return to the camp. I have
business to take care of before I bid you a final farewell.’
A few fires were lit,
well hidden in hollows to escape unfriendly eyes. They had marched a long way,
far enough that they were long out of the reach of the Ant minds left in Tark.
Parops and his men had thus no clue as to the fate of their city, but it seemed
clear that it would be one of two results: either Tark would bow the knee or it
would be overwritten on future maps by some Wasp name, a new town dug out of
Tark’s ashes.
His men were as
dispirited as he had ever seen soldiers be, and he shared their despondency.
They were creatures of routine and loyalty, creatures of the city they were
born in, conditioned to obedience there, knowing nothing but the will of Tark
and its monarch. Now they were alone. Six hundred and seventy-one Tarkesh men
and women out in the wilderness, on the road to Merro, with no idea of where
they could go or what could be done next.
Between them, they had
food for less than a tenday, even if carefully rationed. There were few of them
with the ability to live off the land, since it had never been needed, and all
of them had left family behind. Parops himself had abandoned his unfaithful
mate whom he now missed beyond reason.
There seemed barely any
point in continuing, and Par-ops found the burden of responsibility
intolerable. Though ground down with misery, at least his soldiers could look
to him for orders. He had never wanted this role. They had made him tower
commander simply because he had a good head for logistics and it was considered
a position where he could make the least trouble with his unconventional
thinking. Now unconventional thoughts were all that could save them, and he
could not seem to muster any.
‘How are you feeling?’
Nero came fluttering down beside him.
Parops gave him a look
that was all the answer he needed.
‘No sign of any pursuit,
anyway,’ the Fly said. ‘Got other things on their minds, I’ll bet. Any thought
to what you’re going to do next?’
‘If I had a free hand,’
Parops said flatly, ‘I would lead my men back to Tark and attack the Wasp
camp.’
‘Because that would be
suicide,’ Nero said.
‘Exactly. But my last
orders don’t allow that, so I have to think of something else.’
‘Well I’ve had a couple
of thoughts if you’d like to borrow them,’ Nero offered.
‘Anything.’
‘Get your men to
Collegium,’ Nero said. ‘I’ve got an influential friend there who’s dead set
against the Empire. He’s on the – what do they call it? The Assembly.’
‘Collegium’s too far,’
Parops countered. ‘We cannot travel through most of the Lowlands in the hope
that some friend of yours will take in six and a half hundred homeless Ant
soldiers. Not to mention that if the Kessen see us tramping down the coast,
they’ll wipe us out.’
Nero nodded. ‘I can see
your point there. All right, Parops. I’ve been a good friend to you – or as
good as I could be, yes?’
‘For a Fly-kinden, I
suppose.’
‘High praise there.
Right then, I’m going to suggest two courses of action, and you’ll not like
either of them. All right? One of them is what I’m about to do, and the other
one’s what you could do. You don’t have to, but I’m out of ideas if you don’t.
First off, I’m going back.’
Parops stared at him.
‘You’re mad.’
‘It’s a loyalty thing,
Parops.
You
should understand. Not to Tark, I admit:
loyalty to my friends. I have always tried to be loyal to my friends. Because I
travel a lot and have no certainties, and I never know when I’m going to need a
friend, for a bed, for a meal, or to get me out of prison. And Stenwold and me,
we go back twenty years.’
‘His two agents, or
apprentices – the halfbreed and the other one?’
‘The Commonwealer, yes.
I have to find out what happened to them. Probably they’re dead, but I have to
know. Because Stenwold would want to know.’
‘They’ll catch you,’
Parops said. ‘You’ll end up a slave, or dead.’
‘They won’t catch me,’
Nero said, ‘because I’m not going skulking in like a thief. I’m just going to
walk straight up to them: Nero the famous artist, perhaps you’ve heard of me?
Happened to have a lot of black and yellow paint spare. Maybe you want a
portrait. You know the stuff.’
‘They will kill you or
enslave you,’ Parops said firmly.
‘You were going to kill
me too, at one stage. I’m good at not being killed. I’ve done it all my life,’
Nero said. ‘I owe Stenwold, and he would want to know.’
Parops shook his head
but found he did not have the strength to argue. ‘So what is your suggestion
for us? Is it as mad as that one?’
‘Madder,’ Nero said,
giving the first smile anyone there had seen for a long time. In a low voice he
explained his plan, and men around them began raising their heads as Parops’s
mind put out the information.
‘We cannot do that. It
would be—’
‘Suicide?’
‘Worse. We’d be slaves.
My people would never agree to it,’ Parops stated.
‘Wouldn’t they? There’s
an Empire coming this way, with armies to spare, and you’ve got
seven-hundred-odd highly trained Ant warriors. So who would turn you away?’
Parops just stared at
him.
‘Will you at least think
about it?’ Nero pressed.
There was a moment when
Parops did not even see him, when he was concentrating simply on the
interchange of ideas flashing between his men, their rapid, silent debate of
the concept, of Nero’s plan.
‘We will attempt it,’
said Parops finally. ‘What do we have to lose?’
He swam in those dark
reaches, those vast abyssal reaches that no light had ever touched. No stars
there were, and no lamps. There was only the void and the rushing of the wind,
or the sucking of the current that sought to draw him downwards.
He had fought free of
those depths once already, and now he had no strength for any second struggle.
There were monsters in those depths, trawling for ever through the vacant dark
with their jaws agape. To fall between the needles of their teeth meant
oblivion and surrender.
Not death, because all
was death here.
In Collegium it had been
the fashion, while he had been resident there, to paint death as a
grey-skinned, balding Beetle man in plain robes, perhaps with a doctor’s bag
but more often an artificer’s toolstrip and apron, like the man who came in, at
the close of the day, to put out the lamps and still the workings of the
machines.
Amongst his own people,
death was a swift insect, gleaming black, its wings a blur – too fast to be
outrun and too agile to be avoided, the unplumbed void in which he swam was but
the depth of a single facet of its darkly jewelled eyes.
Amongst his own people
they drew up short poems for a death, and carved its wings into the sides of
tombs and cenotaphs, with head down and abdomen tapering towards the sky as it
stooped towards its prey. They would paint death’s likeness as a shadow in the
background, always in the upper right quarter of the scroll, when depicting
some hero’s or great man’s last hours. In plays an actor, clad all in grey,
would take the stage bearing a black-lacquered likeness of the insect, which he
would make swoop or hover until the time came for it to alight.
He himself could not
fly, for his wings would not spark to life. The void hung heavy on him and it
clawed at him, howling for him. He swam and struggled and fought, because a
second’s stillness would see him whisked back to the monsters and the pit. He
fought, but knew not why he fought. He had no memories, no thoughts, nothing
but this haggard, desperate fight.
And there seemed, for
the faintest moment, something hard and distant there in the void, some great
presence diminished almost to a star-speck by its separation from him: an
insect, but not the death insect. Four glittering wings and eyes that saw
everything, all at once: the source of his Art and his tribe; the archetype of
his people. He was a spirit lost and that creature was his destination – where
he would rejoin the past and be with his ancestors.
And he struck out for
it, knowing only that it was right to do so. But it was so far and the void
still dragged at him, and that tiny gnat-speck of light was receding and
receding.
And then gone.
And with that spark
dead, he finally gave up. The fight left him and he swam no more but let the
wind catch him and draw him down into darkness.
But there was a light
again. Above him there was a light, and it was swelling and growing. A soft
light, that was at once pure white and many colours. A light like bright
sunlight reflected on a pale wall, and for that reason as he saw it he recalled
the sun. He had forgotten that such a thing existed, but now the thought of
that once familiar sun surrounded and filled him, and he swam again. He caught
the cruel current off-guard and slipped from its grasp. He swam and swam, up
towards that lambent ceiling, towards that great spread of light that held back
the void.