The next morning Achaeos
looked more pale and drawn than Che had ever seen him.
‘Still not sleeping?’
she asked.
He shook his head.
‘Sleeping, but dreaming.’ He sat down heavily beside her. ‘The Darakyon.
Something troubles it. It . . . wants something of me, but I cannot make it
out. The voices are confused.’
Che regarded him,
worried. ‘And if you could, would you do so?’
He stared dully about
the taverna’s common room, which was now mostly empty. ‘I must, for I owe a
debt – and the things of the Darakyon are creditors I cannot ignore. But I
cannot hear them clearly, and so I cannot act.’
Scuto and Sperra were
already breakfasting. Neither of them looked much better than Achaeos did.
I should feel as bad
, Che knew. It had not sunk in,
though, what might be happening to her own home. She wondered if the Vekken had
reached the walls. That seemed very likely.
Be
safe, Uncle Sten
, she willed silently, for he would always forget that
he was no soldier. She had visions of him striding along the walls of Collegium
and waving a defiant blade at the Ant horde.
There had been Sarnesh
soldiers assembling for two days now, forming up their expedition, their
automotives, their artillery and supply train. They would go by rail about half
of the way, but closer to the siege the Vekken were likely to have undermined
the tracks, and the army would proceed on foot. Nobody could march like the
Ant-kinden, though. They were tireless on campaign and they would send the
Vekken back home stinging.
An officer came into the
taverna that very moment and marched over to them, his chainmail clinking. He
looked about the table and said, ‘Which one of you is named Sperra?’ An
unnecessary question, because it was a Fly-kinden name, and she was the only
Fly there.
She raised her hand
timidly, and the Ant looked at the rest of them. ‘You must come with me. Your
associates also. If any of these here claim not to be your associates, then
they will be taken into custody pending investigation.’
‘Now wait a minute,’
Scuto started, rising.
‘We are all her
associates,’ Che said. ‘What is going on, officer?’
The Ant had been staring
at Scuto, more in horrified curiosity than anything else. ‘You are summoned to
the Royal Court immediately. You must come with me.’
‘Why?’ Scuto demanded.
‘You do not question the
commands of the Queen,’ the Ant snapped. ‘I don’t know what kinden you are,
creature, but I will have your spikes filed blunt if you speak out of turn
again.’
Scuto bared his snaggled
yellow teeth at him, but said nothing. The officer stepped back, and one by one
they filed past him. There was a squad of a dozen soldiers waiting just outside
to escort them.
‘What on earth is going
on?’ Che demanded in a hoarse whisper.
‘Nothing good,’ Achaeos
said, before the officer again shouted for silence.
The Queen herself met
them without any of her tacticians or staff. The belligerent officer had
virtually pushed Scuto and the rest into her presence: just a single Ant-kinden
woman standing at the end of a long table. Until Sperra whispered it, they took
her for just another Ant in armour.
There was only one other
there, a Fly-kinden man of middle years, wearing on his arm the badge of his
guild, a figure-of-eight endlessly looping within a circle, which signified:
Anywhere within the world.
The Queen of Sarn
regarded them coolly, her gaze dwelling long enough on Scuto that he began to
shuffle.
Eventually he spoke up:
‘Listen, Your Highness—’
‘Your Majesty,’ Sperra
hissed.
‘Your Majesty,’ he
corrected himself. ‘What it is, I’m a Thorn Bug. No, you don’t normally get my
kinden around these parts. Yes, there are others. No, it doesn’t hurt. Is that
about it, Your Majesty, with all respect?’
The others held their
breaths, but what would have seen Scuto dead by now if spoken to a Spider lady
or Wasp officer passed without reproach here, for the Ant-kinden knew little of
standing on ceremony.
‘Save the matter of how
you fell in with a Beetle named Stenwold Maker,’ she said.
Scuto shrugged. ‘He got
me set up in Helleron when there was no one else to turn to. He picked me out
as being good for something, Your Majesty, and since then we’ve done a lot for
each other. Is there news of him, if I might ask?’
‘Some of the last
reports to come in from Collegium give his name as one of their . . .’ there
followed a pause, in which some unseen aide was obviously briefing her, ‘. . .
War Masters, we believe the term is.’
‘Do you know if the
fighting has started yet, Your Majesty?’ Che burst out.
‘It seems certain. You
four are his agents, then, in my city. You are the delegation sent to win us
over to join your fight against the Wasps?’
‘We are, Your Majesty,’
Che confirmed.
‘Then consider us won,
but in no way that you will appreciate,’ the Queen declared with heavy irony.
‘You have heard that the Empire is already in possession of Helleron. We
believe they are coming here next.’
‘Here, Your Majesty?’
Scuto goggled. ‘To Sarn?’
‘At the moment,’ she
said, ‘there is a running conflict between my artificers and those of the
Empire. Mine are destroying the tracks of the Iron Road while theirs are
replacing them. There will inevitably be a battle. Our agents inform us the
Empire’s armies are mustering for a march on my city even now.’
They stared at her. The
whole room seemed unutterably still.
‘You must understand
what this means,’ she continued.
But they did not. They
could not understand. Too much was happening too fast.
‘I cannot therefore send
my soldiers to Collegium,’ she said, almost gently. ‘I must defend my own city,
my own people.’
Che gasped. ‘But –
Collegium cannot stand against the Vekken. Our citizens aren’t proper warriors.
Your Majesty, please—’
‘It pains me to make
this decision,’ the Queen interrupted, in a voice that brooked no argument.
‘Collegium has been our ally, and it is an alliance we have profited by. If I
could be sure that I could hold the Wasps with half my soldiers, I would send
the other half to your city without delay. I would maintain that my forces are
the best equipped and best trained in all the Lowlands, but now the Lowlands
have changed. It is not just that Vek is at the gates of Collegium, or that
Helleron is in the hands of the Empire. News comes from Tark, at last, and all
word states that the city has fallen. An Ant-kinden city. A city-state like
mine. I cannot afford to wait for the Empire to come right up to my walls, lest
my city suffer the same fate as Tark. My soldiers are trained for open battle,
battle on the field. We shall meet them in the open, and then see if we are
still the soldiers to put the world in awe.’
‘But what about
Collegium?’ Che cried. ‘What about Stenwold?’
‘Do you know what a Lorn
detachment is?’ the Queen asked them. Surprisingly, it was Sperra who had the
answer.
‘It’s a suicide detail,
Your Majesty.’
The Queen’s lips
twitched. ‘That is not exactly how my people would describe it – but a
desperate assignment, certainly. I will send a Lorn detachment to Collegium.
Solidarity should demand more, but no more can I afford to give. Three battle
automotives with crew, though I can ill spare them.’ She turned to the Fly
messenger. ‘Master Frezzo?’
He stood forward. ‘Your
Majesty?’ He looked pale, and when he risked a glance at Che she saw her own
distress mirrored in his face.
‘It was you brought me
the news of the Vekken army from Collegium,’ the Queen told him. ‘Now you must
take this reply back, though one that I am loath to make. The Vekken will
almost certainly be at the walls by the time you arrive.’
‘It will present no
difficulty, Your Majesty,’ Frezzo said firmly. Che knew that he had the honour
of his guild to uphold.
‘Then go,’ the Queen
ordered him, and he saluted her and ran from the room. The ruler of Sarn turned
back to Che and her companions. ‘You may stay here or you may leave,’ she told
them. ‘Save that there is no safe passage guaranteed to Collegium any more.’
‘Someone should go with
the Lorn automotives,’ Scuto said.
‘It is your choice.’
‘Then it should be me,’
Che decided. ‘Stenwold is my uncle.’
‘You and Achaeos need to
continue your work here,’ Scuto advised her. ‘It’s looking more important all
the time. Stenwold’s going to need
me
, though. A War
Master indeed? You know how he is, always forgetting himself and playing
soldier.’
‘Scuto, no—’ started
Sperra.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your
Majesty, I’ll go. I’m an artificer and I never knew an automotive that couldn’t
use another decent pair of hands.’
‘Scuto!’ Che reached for
his arm but stopped just short of the spines.
‘Che, listen to me,’
Scuto insisted. ‘Stenwold is going to need to know what’s going on here, and I
don’t just mean what that messenger can tell him. What’s going on with your
work – stuff I wouldn’t trust to paper. I’m our best bet. I’ll be a good hand
on the automotives, and I’m tough as a bastard. Remember the
Pride
, when it went up? Think you’d be standing here if my
hide weren’t between you and that mess? And yet here I am, healthy as
anything.’
‘You had better bloody
be right about that,’ Sperra hissed. ‘Nobody as ugly as you was meant to be a
hero.’
Salma opened his eyes to
sunlight, and for a brief moment he thought it was
her
.
Then he recalled. The
Broken Sword. Himself being smuggled out of the Wasp camp. He was about to sit
up hurriedly, but remembered his wounds and eased himself up with care. The
injuries tugged less than before, and he felt stronger. Looking around he saw
Nero sitting close.
The Fly nodded to him.
‘You’re looking better than you have for a while.’
‘Where are we now?’
Propping himself up with one arm was about all he could manage, however
improved he might look. Salma looked around, seeing a scrubby hollow and a
dozen or so other people. There were a few feeble fires going, and an earth
mound that smelled like bread, and that he realized must therefore be a scratch-built
oven. ‘What’s going on, Nero? Who are these people?’
‘They’re on the run,
like us,’ Nero said. He pointed out a mismatched trio in Ant-style tunics: a
Spider, a Fly and a Kessen Ant. ‘They’re slaves who got out from the city
before it surrendered—’
‘Tark surrendered?’
Nero grimaced. ‘I
suppose you never heard. You never saw, either. The Wasps . . . they just took
the city apart from the air, like your friend said they would do, until the
Ants knew there was nothing for it but to give up, or to see Tark rubbed from
the map. That’s how they deal with Ant-kinden, apparently. Anyway, those three
were lucky enough to make a run for it, and now they’ve got nothing – just like
the rest of us. As for them—’ He indicated the woman tending the oven, who had
three small children holding close to her skirt. ‘They used to farm at a
waterhole on the Dryclaw edge. Now Tark’s gone, though, the Scorpions are
raiding unchecked, and there are dozens of little farmsteads, and whole
villages, that are getting attacked and left burnt out. She thinks her husband
might be alive, but he’s a slave of the Scorpions if he is, and being dead
might be better.’
There were half a dozen
young Fly-kinden sitting close together at the lip of the hollow, staring
suspiciously at all the others. ‘They were slaves of the Wasps,’ Scuto
identified them. ‘I get the impression they were a gang of some kind, probably
from Seldis. They sell off their criminals down Seldis way. Anyway, they’re
completely lost. They know the Wasps are going to take Merro and Egel, and they
don’t want to go back to the Spiderlands in a hurry, and so they’re pretending
they’re not part of our troupe here, but they’re sticking around all the same.
And the gentleman and ladies behind you . . .’
Salma made the laborious
effort of turning himself over to look. There was a covered cart there, he now
saw, and a bearded man seated on the footboard was carving something in wood. A
girl of around twelve was stretched out across the back of their draft-animal,
which was a big, low-bodied beetle with fierce-looking jaws. Another girl of
nearly Salma’s age was nearby, picking over the halfhearted bushes for berries.
They were all white-haired and tan-skinned, and they wore loose clothes of
earth-tones and greens. The older girl sensed Salma’s attention and glanced his
way. She had a heart-shaped face and bright eyes, and she smiled timidly at
him.
‘Roach-kinden,’ Salma
identified them. ‘I didn’t think you had them in the Lowlands, but they roam
all over the Commonweal.’
‘And the Empire too,
although the Wasps really hate them,’ Nero agreed. ‘Oh they’re not seen much,
but I hear they come south past Dorax from the Commonweal into Etheryon, and
even down the Helleron–Tark road and west towards Felyal. The Mantis-kinden
seem to tolerate them, or so I understand. These poor fools were found by the
Wasp army as they were travelling, and a pack of scouts decided to do a little
free-range looting. They don’t know what happened to the rest of their family.’
‘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.