He hurried downstairs in
time to intercept Balkus, recognizing the thin, bent figure that had come to
see him this morning.
‘Doctor Nicrephos?’
Stenwold asked blankly. Could matters be so desperate that they were drafting
such an ancient Moth as this to be a messenger? ‘Is it the wall? What news?’
‘Master Maker . . .
Stenwold,’ Doctor Nicrephos hovered awkwardly on the threshold. ‘We have known
each other for . . .’
‘We’ve done business for
years,’ Stenwold agreed. ‘But why . . . ?’
‘I need your help,’ the
old Moth said, ‘and I know no one else who might even listen. Tell me, what do
you know of the Darakyon?’
The Vekken woke like
clockwork. Thalric had witnessed it each morning of the siege. Each morning, at
precisely an hour before dawn, every single soldier in their army arose and
drew on his armour, buckled on his sword. No words, no sound but the clink of
mail. Walking down their lines of tents, Thalric felt a shiver at the sheer
brutality of their discipline, that strode roughshod over everything in its
path.
Except perhaps this
siege was starting to tell on them, he reflected. This morning they seemed a
touch off-kilter, their timing fouled by something. A few of them were even
running late, hurrying with their buckles, no doubt under the withering scorn
of their peers.
For some reason the
Ant-kinden had passed a troubled night, he decided, and that was curious. Still,
the siege had been now many days in the making. The casualties amongst the
Vekken had been, in Akalia’s words, ‘acceptable’, though, to Thalric’s eyes,
seeming far too high if these Ants were as good as they were supposed to be.
Even Ant-kinden would get their edges blunted eventually, under such punishing
treatment. Still, it seemed strange that, on this morning, a malaise should be
so marked amongst them.
Ant-kinden
,
he thought, mockingly.
They even go off the rails in
unison.
He saw Lorica threading
her way through the Vekken towards him, unconsciously falling in with their
mechanical rhythm, getting in no one’s way and finding her path without having
to seek it. She too looked out of sorts, though, and was frowning.
‘Something wrong?’ he
asked her.
‘Possibly.’ She rubbed
the back of her neck, her eyes still heavy with lost sleep. ‘You should know,
Major. There’s been a visitor to the camp.’
‘Speak.’
‘A Fly-kinden messenger
came in, for Major Daklan’s ears only.’
Thalric let his breath
out in a long sigh. ‘That could mean many things.’
‘He was from the Empire,
I’m sure of it,’ Lorica told him. ‘Imperial Fly-kinden have a kind of a look,
and they hold themselves a different way. They know they’re onto a good thing.’
Thalric nodded. Outside
his tent he could now hear the louder pieces of Vekken artillery launching at
the walls of Collegium. The actual fighting was just a distant murmur beyond.
‘You’ve cast your lot,’
he told the halfbreed. ‘I don’t know if you’ll regret it, but I hope not.’
‘I respect you, Major
Thalric,’ she said candidly. ‘And I hope you value me, since Major Daklan
certainly doesn’t. Do you know what’s going on, sir?’
‘For certain? No.’
‘But you suspect.’
‘I have seen this
before, and too many times,’ said Thalric, wearily thinking,
And most of the time I have been on the other side of it.
Secret messages from the Empire, and for Daklan’s ears only. ‘Perhaps it’s
nothing significant.’
‘You don’t believe that,
sir.’
‘No, I don’t, but that
doesn’t mean it isn’t true.’ He stood, shaking his head. ‘How do you think the
siege is going, Lorica?’
She had stood watching
with him, now she frowned. ‘I’m no strategist.’
‘If you’d asked me
yesterday I would have said well. Now something’s changed, and this message
doesn’t make me any happier. I’m going to talk to Daklan.’
‘Is that wise, Major?’
He managed a smile.
‘Lorica, I am a simple man. Nobody ever believes me when I say that, but it’s
true. I like my life simple. I am for the Empire, and I should therefore stand
shoulder to shoulder with everyone else who is, and face with a drawn sword all
those who are not. That is simple. you see, but someone is trying to complicate
my life. I’m going to talk to Daklan, to discover precisely what he’s not
telling me.’
He found Major Daklan
out by the artillery positions, with Lieutenant Haroc nearby as his constant
shadow.
‘Major, how goes the
war?’
Daklan’s face was so
devoid of guile that it was evidence of guilt in itself. ‘Well enough, Major
Thalric.’
‘The Vekken seemed slow
off the mark this morning, I thought,’ Thalric said. Daklan gave a glance over
at Haroc and then nodded.
‘I cannot explain it. I
heard some talk of disturbed sleep, no more.’
‘You don’t think they’re
losing their stomach for the campaign?’
‘Not at all.’ Daklan
shook his head. ‘Tactician Akalia seems satisfied with their progress. Every
day they are closer to breaking the wall, or taking it by storm.’
‘She’s a cold woman,’
Thalric observed. ‘I’ve heard some of the casualty figures.’
‘That’s Ants for you,’
said Daklan dismissively. ‘The ships, the artillery, the men – she’s only
looking for the victory. Whatever has unsettled her men clearly hasn’t reached
her yet. Perhaps the Collegiates have developed some kind of mind-affecting gas
that has drifted over here. Ant-kinden are strong of body, but they lack our
strength of will. They would be more easily swayed than we.’
Thalric nodded
carefully, and then said, as offhandedly as he could make it, ‘I hear there was
a messenger from command.’
Perhaps there was a
moment’s flicker in Daklan’s eyes. ‘Nothing to worry youself with, Major.
Helleron has fallen to our troops, or rather, has capitulated. The Winged
Furies now threaten Sarn and so the siege here will not be relieved.’
‘Good,’ Thalric decided.
‘Then all we have to do is wait.’ He turned and walked back towards the camp,
knowing coldly that Daklan had been lying, and that his days of cherished
simplicity were gone.
They had been shadowing
the Vekken army since it first came in sight, and had been given an
unexpectedly good view of the first day’s festivities. All that time, he had
kept his head low, which was a skill he had acquired over many years of
doubtful company, while Felise Mienn had gone about her business as freely as
she pleased.
Living off the land,
Destrachis considered, was a game for fools and peasants. And, inexplicably,
for Dragonfly nobles.
He had watched her. With
the cloak blunting the sound and shine of her armour she could freeze to
near-invisibility while standing amongst trees or crouched against the scrub.
She moved as though she was part of the landscape, and she would always come
back with food. He himself was, he suspected, eating better than he had in the
fiefs of Helleron.
When she came back this
time he had to put the question to her. For all that questioning Felise was a
dangerous game, it was time to air some facts.
‘You were a Mercer, were
you not?’
She looked at him as
though she didn’t know who he was, which was always a possibility.
‘What do you know of the
Mercers, Spider?’
He smiled. She scared
him badly a lot of the time, but he knew he must never show it. ‘I have done my
stint in the Commonweal. That was what attracted me to your cause in the first
place. I therefore know the skills a Mercer needs in going about her business.
There’s a lot of open country in the Commonweal: woods and farmland and
marshland and hill country. Lots of villages but lots of space between them,
and the roads not so good, and half the Wayhouses lie empty and rotted. Keeping
the peace, tracking bandits, carrying the Monarch’s word: it means spending a
lot of time in the wild, doesn’t it?’
‘It does that,’ she
agreed, then she sat and dumped a bagful of roots beside the fire, together
with some grain biscuits she must have taken from a farmhouse. He took out his
smallest knife and began to peel, aware that she was looking at him with more
curiosity than usual.
‘Destrachis,’ she said
at last, and he allowed himself to relax, because when she could actually
remember his name she was least likely to threaten him. ‘What was a Spider-kinden
doing in the Commonweal?’
‘My question first,’ he
pressed, carefully not looking at her.
‘Yes, I was a Mercer,
when I was very young. I wanted to . . . but it changed when . . .’
He sensed a shift in her
and said hurriedly. ‘I drifted north of Helleron years ago. Ended up in Myal
Ren and then travelled a little, plying my trade, stitching and quack-salving.’
‘I saw him today again,’
she said, without warning.
His knife stopped for a
second and then went on. Looking down onto the Vekken encampment, he had caught
a glimpse of a couple of men in black and yellow armour, but her eyes were
better than his and she now swore she had seen Thalric.
Her patience impressed
and appalled him. She had been stalking this entire army for almost a tenday
now.
‘So when are you going
to make your move? Are you going in there after him?’
He had missed the
change, but she had snatched her sword out. ‘So many questions,’ she said.
‘Why? What are you hiding, Spider? Who are you working for?’
‘You,’ he said, still
peeling although his hands shook slightly. ‘Or, if you won’t have me, for
myself. I’m not your enemy, Felise.’
‘No . . . you’re not.’
The sword was hovering just in the edge of his vision. ‘But I do not know what
you are . . .’
Why
did I ever agree to this?
But he was here now and there was no getting
away from it. He would rather cut his own thumbs off than risk becoming a
target for Felise Mienn.
‘I will have my moment
soon,’ she said. ‘Thalric cannot hide amongst the Ants for ever. Or perhaps
I
will go in and get him. We shall see.’
There was one matter
only before the imperial advisers today. The tangled news of the Spiderland
intervention in the progress of the Fourth Army had been flown to Capitas as
fast as a chain of messengers and fixed-wing flying machines could fetch it. It
had thrown them all but, while most were still reeling, General Maxin had been
able to find his moment. After all, there were few setbacks for the Empire that
he could not turn into his personal opportunities. Life was a ladder, and if he
clung on when everyone fell back a rung, then he was inevitably closer to the
top.
Of course, he must be
seen to be deeply concerned. He had even brought an expert to speak before the
council, which meant a double victory for him. Not only was he himself shown to
be so committed to the Empire’s progress, but his witness was formerly in
General Reiner’s camp, until she had seen the way the wind was blowing and come
over to Maxin’s side.
She was a Spider-kinden
named Odyssa, a Lieutenant-Auxillian in the Rekef, and she had been telling the
advisers and the Emperor what she knew about the Spider military potential. The
summary was that it varied.
‘The Spider ladies and
lords prefer to hire or levy their armed help when needed. There are personal retinues
but no real standing army,’ Odyssa explained. ‘The various cities of the
Spiderlands all have provincial forces that can be called on and, as there is
always plenty of work for mercenaries and fighting men in the Spiderlands,
there is always a sizeable pool to draw on.’
‘Perhaps we should
simply avoid these Fly-kinden places,’ one of the Wasp advisers said. ‘What
glory or profit can there be in vanquishing Fly-kinden?’
‘Merro is a keystone in
the Lowlands trade routes,’ one of the Consortium factors intoned drily. ‘Also
a large proportion of black-market and underworld trade passes through the
hands of the Fly-kinden. There is a great market at Merro in which, it is said,
anything can be purchased for a price.’
‘Moreover,’ put in old
Colonel Thanred, ‘we have no guarantee that the Spiders will not simply disrupt
our supply lines and attack our rear, with or without the cooperation of these
Ant islanders.’ Thanred was the nominal governor of Capitas, a ceremonial
position accorded to a war hero, and his sole advisory role seemed to be to
deride other people’s ideas.
‘Is that likely?’ an
adviser asked, and Odyssa then explained to them about Spider politics, or at
least so far as they could be made comprehensible to outsiders.
‘The Spiderlands,’ she
said, ‘are like the Empire in that they have a fair number of subject peoples
within them, although those territories, I would think, are more than twice the
size of the current imperial holdings. Unlike the Empire there is no central
rulership. Individual cities have families that vie for control, and so do
whole regions, and then groups of regions and so on. And all these families are
constantly working against each other, playing one another off, changing
alliances or enmities. Spider-kinden, when engaged in politics, cannot be
second-guessed. Therefore they may decide that General Alder’s army represents
a threat, and thus attack, or instead they may not. You can only be certain
that you will have no clue of what they will do before it happens.’
‘A load of good that
information is,’ the Consortium factor grumbled.
‘What about that city
beyond the Dryclaw, what is it called? Our recent find?’ someone asked.
‘Solarno,’ Maxin
completed for them: a city that Wasp exploratory expeditions had contacted only
months before, that seemed to represent the north-east corner of the
Spiderlands. ‘It may repay long-term investment,’ he suggested. ‘Unfortunately
it seems to have seceded unilaterally from the Spiderlands, with no attempt to
recapture it. More politics, I suppose.’