She had her line, and her piercers raked across the airship’s hull, and a handful of the host just exploded into wet shards of chitin and wing fragments at the touch of her bolts. But then
they were airborne. They were coming for her.
Nistic’s body jerked with exaltation as his soldiers took wing and filled the air, mad with rage, desperate to drive their stings into the enemy that was all around them.
The scent that the Imperial vessels had been daubed with reeked with sheer incitement, the concentrated musk of alarm and retribution that the hornets themselves would respond to in the wild.
Perhaps it would keep the Empire’s orthopters safe, perhaps not. It only helped lash the swarm into a berserk frenzy.
Killkillkillkillkillkillkill . . .
‘Kill!’ Nistic screamed, and all of his fellows screamed in unison: no mindlink here, but their Art made them part of the swarm and that was as good – indeed was better.
He took a hand from the rail – the other was white-knuckled in its efforts to keep him still on deck – and drew his blade. The old ways knew: a price must be paid to buy the service
of the swarm, a price and a reward. In Nistic’s mind the host’s hundreds raged, waiting only for him to become a true part of them.
At last he let go of the rail, hanging suspended between the deck beneath his feet and the murder-storm of the swarm’s collective mind. One hand found where his corselet of chitin scales
left off, and he wrenched it up to expose the hollow beneath his ribs.
The swarm was strong and mad, but he would give it direction. For as long as it raged, it would share some fragment of his human mind, and fall upon the enemies of the Empire in blood and
fury.
He poised his knife, letting its point hover over his flesh like a stinger.
With a great shout he drove it home, and let his mind fly free.
Taki spun frantically out of the way, but the sky was already full of them – everywhere she turned there were frantic, insanely angry insects battering and stooping and
attacking everything in sight, and her mind was running over and over with the mantra:
You can’t do this. Everyone knows this isn’t how it’s done.
Insect against
orthopter never worked – the insects were too nimble to be shot, the orthopters proof against the arrows and spears of their riders. But that was wisdom from flying against the dragonfly
cavalry of Princep Exilla, over the Exalsee, and these hornets didn’t even
have
riders to control them.
In these moments – in these last moments, she reckoned – the Empire had taught her something new about fighting in the air.
A Stormreader wheeled past, spinning out of control with its wings still powering, a hornet clinging to its underside, mindlessly jamming its sting into the machine’s guts. A second
Collegiate machine, cutting ahead of her, simply crashed into another insect, the orthopter’s blurred wings cutting the creature in two but faltering a moment later, one vane half smashed by
the collision.
Taki tried for height, catching a brief glimpse of an Imperial Spearflight weaving desperately through the host – not being attacked but still barely able to navigate the thronging
sky.
Got to get clear
. She knew she could outrun these creatures with ease, but she was boxed in, insects diving on her from every side, almost brushing wingtips with her as the
Esca
slipped by them. She had given up trying for targets. Her world had condensed into trying to survive the next half-minute intact.
Bergild kept trying to get above, into clear air, but there were just too many insects clogging the heavens, more appearing everywhere she tried to fly. The sky about her
became a chaos of horrific sights: everywhere she tried to fly she saw Collegiate machines locked in combat with the hornets – sometimes two or three of the creatures clinging to a single
flier, chewing, grappling, stabbing, heedless that their simple weight was dragging the machines out of the sky.
We can’t fight in this – get on the ground
. But her crystal-clear link with the other pilots was cluttered by that surrounding buzz, the deep fear it provoked coming back to
her from every one of her pilots. They were losing their coordinated picture of the battle, and losing control.
Then one of her own pilots was screaming, because a hornet had slammed into his Farsphex and had thrust its jagged mandibles through the glass of the cockpit, and perhaps the engineers had
stinted on the foul-smelling paint or perhaps the hornets were just mad now, and jealous of anything else in the sky.
Down!
she cried out mind to mind, and just hoped the Spearflight pilots and the others would register her intentions.
Down, all!
Then she followed her own advice, dropping as
fast as she could and hoping nothing would get in her way.
She had already lost perhaps one in three of her pilots to the superior numbers of the Stormreaders, and who knew how many she would now lose to the Empire’s own secret weapon.
Was
this the plan? Whose stupid plan was this?
Then she had broken through into a clear sky, and was dropping, for once in her aviator’s career wanting nothing more than the safety of the ground.
In the moment before impact, Taki had simply lost track of everything, her concentration funnelling down to encompass only the sky directly ahead, trying to turn back for
Collegium and hoping that her comrades would reach the same conclusion.
This is not a fight we can win. This is barely even a fight.
Then something slammed into her, skewing the
Esca
sideways in the air, its weight suddenly monstrously loaded to the right, and she realized that one of them had her.
Two hooked claws scratched across the cockpit, and she was limping sideways across the sky, still somehow keeping height and her aircraft’s wings working freely. But then the hornet must
have rammed its sting home, because something slapped the
Esca
hard enough to make Taki’s teeth rattle, and in the wake of that she had no steering at all and the
Esca
was
making a grand slow circle that was going to bring it round into . . .
Into the side of the airship. She had come all the way back.
She wrestled with the stick, but it was loose, all control severed. Then there was a splintering, grinding sound from behind her, and she knew that the beast had started chewing away with its
jaws, blindly tearing through wood and metal to get at whatever was inside.
She
was inside.
Despite all of this, and her very rational realization that she was dead in any number of ways if she stayed put, it still took supreme willpower to reach for the cockpit release. Even then she
had to fight: the single barbed foot the insect had grappled to it was keeping it closed, and she had to put both hands up and push with all her strength to prise it open far enough to let her
out.
Out into that busy, hungry sky, and whilst the swarm should not have been able to take on orthopters the way it was doing, it was most certainly well suited for taking living things on the
wing.
The side of the airship’s gondola was coming up fast.
With a cry of despair over the loss of her flier, the loss of the battle and her fellows, but most of all out of sheer terror, she squeezed out of the cockpit and abandoned her machine, tumbling
over and over into that terrible sky.
Esmail had already worked out that they would have been having a very different time of it here without
her.
These grey woods, the inner forest, this was not abandoned
empty ground. Things dwelt here. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that things were
remembered
here. The landscape was composed of knots and snarls of memory – particularly the
memory of Argastos that slowly decayed year to year, like one of the Mantids’ idols, and yet never went away.
The three Pioneers, who should have been breaking new ground ahead of the rest, had seen it too. They clung close to the Empress, divining correctly that if they strayed from her notice, they
might never get the chance to stray back.
Esmail had seen a great mantis stalking between the trees, its carapace scarred and battered, its eyes like intricate stained glass. He had seen the rushing shadows of Mantis-kinden all clad in
ancient armour – war bands of centuries past, perhaps Argastos’s own followers from when he drew breath and knew the sun. There were others, too, barely glimpsed, and Esmail knew that
they must be those unfortunates who had found their way here in more recent times – who had slipped in so easily, without needing even a blood sacrifice to open the way, back before the
Mantis-kinden were riled up and the forest suddenly bristled with hostility. He had seen Moths and Ants, Collegiate Beetles, Imperial soldiers: the forest’s many victims, still caught in
image, here in the web of Argastos’s thoughts. Perhaps being killed by the Nethyen without would have been a mercy.
And will they see us here, too, those who come after us? If the Empress fails, I am afraid they will.
And that was another reason to stay his hand, should he ever find that combination of courage and motivation to carry out his Tharen orders. For, if he killed her here, there was no guarantee
that he was magician enough to find his own way out.
Gjegevey had been leading the way. Seda had more raw power in one fingertip than the old slave had in his whole weary body, but he was wise. He had a skill and application that only years of
experience could bring, and he had been guiding them through this tormented forest with patience and care, step by step. Now he leant on his staff, looking well past his time to die, plainly
exhausted beyond all measure. Seda’s hands twitched angrily, and Esmail thought she would berate the haggard old man, but she visibly restrained herself, and something unfamiliar and awkward
touched her expression. Seen on the face of the Empress of the Wasps, it was hard to recognize anything approaching compassion.
‘Rest now,’ she ordered, and Gjegevey sank down gratefully. Esmail knew he would need help getting up, too. Since entering the forest they had been travelling for so long that it
seemed they should have passed every tree within it at least twice. Here, in this bleak place, where the sun never quite rose, the air was chill enough to leach away a body’s warmth and
Gjegevey had been funnelling all his fading strength into finding a path for his mistress. He was indeed old, but
old
was a feeble word compared to just how many years the man must have
resting on his shoulders. Esmail knew little of the Woodlouse-kinden save that they had been a Power once, and had declined irrevocably centuries before ever a Beetle thought of revolution. With a
jolt, some more of the old histories came to him: had it been the war with the Worm that had done for Gjegevey’s people, left them the hermits and recluses that they now were? And did that
mean the ancient magician had his own reasons for being here?
To a mind used to intrigue it was an attractive thought, yet Esmail found that he did not believe it. Perhaps the old man had once pursued double purposes, served more than one master, but, at
this faded, trailing end of his life, he was Seda’s creature, and perhaps he was the one man she would actually pause pursuit of her ambitions for. He had, after all, turned her away from the
Worm once, if only to seek that self-same Seal again here with Argastos.
Thunder rumbled from the sky above them. That sky was mostly hidden behind the vault of the forest roof and, when it could be seen, coursed with clouds that seemed ragged and decomposing even as
they seeped overhead.
Abruptly Gjegevey began scrabbling for his staff, and big Gorrec hauled him to his feet without being asked to. Everyone was now looking up at the sky, and the Wasp magician Tegrec cried out,
holding his hands up as though to fend something off.
Something’s coming. Argastos?
But Esmail could sense that whatever was on its way now was as alien to this place as they were.
‘We must move!’ the hunched Woodlouse cried. He was trembling all over, and Seda took his arm.
‘Eyes out, lads!’ Gorrec shouted. The Pioneers already had weapons to hand, as did Seda’s remaining bodyguard. Tisamon’s right hand was his clawed gauntlet, of course,
and he never took it off.
Or can’t
,
more like.
Gjegevey had doubled his speed, even though he stumbled and skidded over the uneven ground, and around them all the ghosts of the forest flickered and danced, appearing almost too briefly to be
registered, then gone in the next blink. A wind had struck up, fierce and unheralded, which clawed at the branches overhead, as if trying to find a way in.
Is this what it was like here when we forced our own way in?
There was something ahead . . . a mound, was it? And, on sight of it, Seda had cried out in triumph—
Then that thunder sounded again, so close, so apocalyptically loud, that Esmail found himself thrown to the ground, stunned by the sheer savagery of the air that shook and jumped with the impact
of it.
And, in its wake, everything had changed.
The thunder itself was a poor accompaniment for the soundless shudder of force that rushed through that other forest, and Seda understood that
she
was following at
last. Whilst Seda had been battling her way towards Argastos,
she
had somehow simply stepped here – had bided her time on the outside, had . . .
Seda tasted the sour triumph of the
other
’s arrival. Yes,
she
had won over the Nethyen; she had severed them from Seda’s own purpose.
But my purpose was only to get here – to get to Argastos – and I’m almost there. So close!
And she felt the mind of her enemy like a hot ball of iron, and knew that the Beetle had found her in turn.
‘They come!’ she called. Gjegevey was standing still, looking back. ‘Move, old man!’ she spat at him. He sensed only enough to know everything was now going wrong.
‘Soldiers, destroy them,’ she snapped at Gorrec and the pioneers, while she hauled on Gjegevey’s arm. ‘Come, slave.’ And she found the stab of fear she felt was not
for herself but for him.
She
could defend herself, and he . . . he was withered and frail and, despite her many threats, he was
hers
, and he had been her friend once.
‘Ostrec – see them destroyed, every one of them,’ for the Maker girl had her own soldiers, she could detect them. Each new set of feet set this unnatural terrain dancing like a
spider web, telling her – telling both of them – exactly where the fighters were, marking out the woodland between them like a chessboard. ‘Tegrec, help me with him.’