‘What can we do for
them?’ he asked, and Nero laughed harshly.
‘Do? You can’t even stand,
boy. What do you expect to do?’
Salma stared at him, and
then slowly forced himself up to his knees. His head swam briefly, but he
pressed his hands flat on the earth for balance. Whilst Nero looked on
uncertainly, he rose slowly, first one foot beneath him, then the next, and
then, forcing his legs to obey him, he raised himself upright. Pain shot
through him from his wound, but he clenched his teeth and ignored it.
Now he was standing.
Nero had stood up, too, hands ludicrously spread to catch a man twice his size.
‘I . . . can . . .
stand,’ Salma got out, though he had to fight to keep his vision in focus. He
knew that he might topple any minute, and placed a hand on Nero’s shoulder to
steady himself. ‘Tomorrow, or the next day, I will walk,’ he said. ‘And then I
shall be ready to act.’
A man called Cosgren
joined the refugees a day or so later. He was a Beetle-kinden, but huge – the
largest Salma had ever seen, and monstrously broad across the chest and
shoulders. For the first day he was with them he was quiet enough, watching his
travelling companions carefully and even fetching wood for a fire. The next day
he waited until they were all awake and then addressed them: ‘Right, look at
you. You don’t know the first thing about where you’re going, do you? So it’s
going to be like this. I’m in charge. And because I’m in charge, I’ll get us to
somewhere, but you all better do what I say, and that means I get what I want.’
The Fly-kinden youths
huddled closer and looked at him rebelliously. They all had their hair cropped
short to their skulls in androgynous fashion, and they carried weapons of a
sort, if only sticks and stones. Cosgren must have weighed more than all of
them put together, though, and eventually they let their gazes drop sullenly.
Cosgren’s rule lasted
almost peaceably for that same day. He took what food they had, with the
pretence that he would distribute it, but everyone knew, and nobody said, that
his own capacious belly would be filled first.
And then, at dusk, he
wandered over to the wagon and the three Roach-kinden.
‘Old man,’ he began. The
father of the two girls eyed him cautiously. He was not so very old, not
really, but his white hair and beard made him look it.
‘You hear me?’ Cosgren
demanded. ‘Then say so.’
‘I hear you,’ said the
Roach. His voice was surprisingly soft.
‘I’m going to make your
life easier, old man. I’m going to take your daughter off your hands.’
‘My life’s easy enough,
and I thank you for your kind offer,’ the Roach said.
Cosgren smiled, and a
moment later he had knocked the man down with a simple motion, almost
thoughtless.
‘I’ll give her more than
you can,’ Cosgren said, grinning down at him. ‘You, girl, come here – unless
you want your old dad to get hurt some more.’
He was, Salma realized,
speaking to the younger of the two girls, not that it would have mattered
either way.
Salma was on his feet,
without quite realizing how he had got there, and Nero hurried over to him,
telling him to be careful.
‘You’re in no state,’
the Fly said. ‘Just wait a moment . . . there are ways . . .’
‘I know.’ Salma
approached Cosgren’s lumped back with dragging steps. ‘You there!’ he called,
and the big man swung on him.
‘You get back in line,
boy. Don’t want those wounds opened up again, do you?’
‘No,’ Salma said. He
felt the line of his life stretched taut here, a moment of dread and then
peace. In this wasteland between wars, in this meaningless brawl, and why not?
Why not indeed? He had been given his moment, reunited with Grief in Chains,
and then it had passed him by, and here he was. ‘I’m going to stop you,’ he
told Cosgren, conversationally.
For a second the big
Beetle did not quite know what to make of it, this drawn-looking invalid
threatening him with . . . what? With nothing. Then he grinned.
‘A lesson for boys that
won’t do what they’re told,’ he said, and he picked Salma up effortlessly, huge
hands agony about his ribs, and Salma poked him in the face.
The world was briefly a
very painful and noisy place, and then dark, blessedly dark and quiet.
He came to with the
sense that little time had passed. There was an awful lot of noise nearby, but
the pain in his chest and abdomen was too much for him to focus on it. Nero was
kneeling beside him, asking over and over if he was all right.
There should have been
another blow coming from Cosgren, but there was nothing. Perhaps the beating
had finished, in which case he had got away lightly, but Cosgren would still be
free to pursue his tyranny unchecked.
The sounds were
screaming, he realized, and a man’s, not the child’s.
‘What’s going on, Nero?’
Nero grimaced. ‘You . .
. kind of cut him, Salma. Don’t look so confused. That’s what you meant,
right?’
‘Cut him? What . . . ?’
Nero took one of Salma’s
hands and brought it before his face. The first thing he saw was that it was
covered in blood. Then he saw the claw, a sickle-shaped thing that curved from
his thumb. Even as he watched it retracted back until there was barely a sign
of it. Curiously, he flexed it back and forth, and felt its companion on his
other hand do the same.
‘I never had these
before. When . . . ?’
‘I noticed them on you
back in the tent of the Daughters,’ Nero told him. ‘I couldn’t remember then
whether you’d had them before.’
There was a sudden
shifting around them, of people coming together. Salma turned over and forced
himself to sit up. Cosgren was standing, one hand clapped to a face slick and
red. His eye, his one remaining eye, was staring madly.
‘You little bastard.’
The voice was choked with pain.
Salma saw a movement
beside him, a glimmer of metal. The Roach man had drawn a thin-bladed knife,
hiltless but sharp. They had all gathered around him, even the Fly gangsters.
When Cosgren took a step forward, a flung stone bounced off his shoulder.
Half weeping with the
pain he stared at them: the Fly gang, the Beetle mother, the ex-slaves and the
Roach family. By that time, Nero had his own long knife out, and was holding it
casually by the tip, ready to throw.
Cosgren snarled
something – something about their not wanting his leadership, then let them starve
– and he stumbled out away from them, off into the barren terrain.
Tension began to leach
out of the refugees. The Roach man knelt by Salma, offering him some water that
he took gratefully. Behind their father, his two daughters stood, staring
curiously.
Salma glanced around at
the others. The Flies had gone back into their exclusive huddle as though
nothing had happened. The three slaves had drifted away as well, and he saw
that they had found their own new hierarchy, with the Spider as their spokesman,
as though they were still compelled to live within rules of obedience.
He should feel weak
after his exertions, he knew, but he felt stronger than he had in days.
The next day there were
bandits. A dozen rode in, half of them mounted two to a horse. Their leader,
though it was little satisfaction to see, was wearing Cosgren’s leather coat.
He was a Beetle himself,
or nearly. His skin was a blue-black that Salma recognized from his recent
travels. The refugees had been travelling at the wagon’s steady pace, most
walking but Salma lying in the bed of dry grass it carried, staring up at skies
that promised unwelcome rain before nightfall. Then the thunder of hoofs had
come to them, and they had stopped dead, and most of them had looked to Salma.
Am I
riding here on the wagon because I am weak, or because I have become their
leader now?
They needed no leader – except perhaps in moments such as
this. Salma got down, pleased to find his legs holding him without a tremor,
and watched as the intruders’ eight horses made a very crude semicircle before
the wagon. The draft-beetle hissed at them, swaying its jaws from side to side,
but the bandit leader ignored it, looking over the ranks of the refugees.
‘Let’s keep it simple,’
he said. ‘These are troubled times, nobody’s where they wanted to be,
everyone’s a victim, so on, so forth.’ He spoke with the accent Salma recalled,
and refined enough that he seemed testament to his own words, a man not
originally cut from this kind of crude cloth. ‘So let’s see what you’ve got.
Let us just take our pick and then you can go on your way.’
Salma looked over the
bandit’s men. They were a motley band, but not as raggedly dressed as might be
expected. These were not just desperate scavengers driven to robbery. Most had
some kind of armour: leather jerkins and caps, padded arming jackets, even one
hauberk of Ant-made chain. There were axes and swords amongst them, and a
halfbreed at the back, who looked to have Mantis blood, had a bow ready-strung
with an arrow nocked. Salma’s own army had some knives, some clubs, and the
staff that Sfayot the Roach had cut for him.
He leant on it now,
grateful that it would disguise how weak he really was. ‘So what do you imagine
we have?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you think that we all had time to pack, before we
were driven out, before we escaped.’ Salma planted his staff in the ground,
firmly enough. ‘If you’re slavers then we will fight you, and you can sell our
corpses for whatever they’ll bring you. But if it’s goods you want, we have
none. Less than none. Come down here and see for yourself.’
‘We’re not slavers,’ the
bandit leader replied. ‘Too many of us have been on the wrong end of that
market to risk trying to sell there.’ He smiled, teeth flashing in his dark
face. ‘Commonwealer, aren’t you? I’ve known enough of your kind in my time.’ He
swung off his horse, and Salma heard the clatter of a scale-mail cuirass
beneath Cosgren’s coat. Without needing orders, two of his fellows got down off
the horse they shared, and the three of them walked past Salma to peer into the
wagon.
‘You’re slaves
yourselves?’ Salma asked. As his fellows prodded through the grass in the bed
of the wagon, the leader turned back to say, ‘Some of us.’
Salma had spotted the
colours of that scale-mail, then, and the design of the sword the man bore.
‘You’re an Auxillian,’ he said.
For a long moment the
bandit leader regarded him fixedly, until at last he said, ‘So?’
‘There are no friends to
the Empire here,’ Salma explained. ‘I was a prisoner in Myna myself, once.’
‘There’s nothing but the
wagon,’ one of the bandits said. ‘And even that’s nothing you could borrow
money on.’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said
the Roach Sfayot. ‘But we have nothing, no goods. No food, even, until we stop
for the evening and forage.’
‘You have women,’ the
bandit leader noted. ‘Roach-kinden, isn’t it?’
Sfayot regarded him
narrowly, waiting.
‘You sing, dance?
Anything? Only I remember your lot as being musical.’
Sfayot nodded slowly.
‘Well then we’ll deal,’
the bandit leader decided. ‘We have a commodity for trade: safe passage on this
road. In return, you’ll trade us some entertainment. And we’ll break our bread
together, or whatever you can find. And then we’ll decide what we’re going to
do with you.’
The morning began bright
and cloudless, and Stenwold had the dubious pleasure of being able to see it.
Balkus had kicked at his door an hour before dawn, and then carried on kicking
until Stenwold had arisen.
Now he was in his
temporary base in the harbourmaster’s office, the harbourmaster himself having
taken ship at the first word of the Vekken advance. Around him were his
artificers, his messengers, and a fair quantity of others whose purpose and
disposition he had no ideas about. Balkus stood at his shoulder like some
personification of war, his nailbow in plain view, and Stenwold tried to
imagine what would happen when the naval attack actually took place.
The harbour at Collegium
had been designed to be defended. There was a stubby sea-wall sheltering it,
and the two towers flanking the harbour entrance held some serviceable
artillery, if not particularly up to date. There was a chain slung between
these towers, currently hanging well below any ship’s draft, that would serve
when raised to prevent a vessel crossing that gateway, or that was the theory.
Defence had been a priority in the minds of the architects, certainly, but they
had lived two centuries ago, and had never heard of armourclads, or even of
ships that moved by the power of engines rather than under sail or with banks
of oars. Since then, defence had been a long way from anyone’s mind right up
until the Vekken had turned up with a fleet.
Out-thought
by Ant-kinden
, he cursed to himself, trying to find some gem of an idea
that might save the day. If the Vekken could land their troops, those superbly
efficient paragons of Ant-kinden training, then the docks would be lost in half
an hour, and the city in just a day.
‘They’re moving!’
The shout roused
Stenwold from his ruminations. He rushed over to the expansive window of the
harbourmaster’s office and saw that the funnels of the armourclads had now
started to fume in earnest. Four smaller vessels were beginning to make headway
towards the harbour, whilst the huge flagship had begun to come around with
ponderous but irresistible motion. The small ships of the fleet began to tack
around it, some by engine power and a few by sail.
‘Is the artillery
ready?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘Where’s Cabre?’
‘Gone to get the
artillery ready,’ said one of the soldiers with him. ‘It’s in hand, Master
Maker. All you need to do is sit here and watch.’
‘No,’ muttered Stenwold,
because he had to
do
something, and yet what was
there to do? ‘Master Greatly, is he . . . ?’