And then, just today, she had come trotting back into his life, as bold as the sun, at the heels of Tactician Milus as though she had every reason to be attached to the Sarnesh command staff.
And something within him, some dam, had cracked and now he was here and staring at her.
She stood carefully, and he saw in that movement the last traces of the wound she had taken in Solarno, the one that had severed her from Wasp service. ‘Oh, Laszlo, don’t be such a
fool. The world turns, surely you know that?’
‘Some of us are quick enough to keep up with it. And here you are.’ Unable to read her expression, he pressed on. ‘I killed the Wasp that was hunting you – their spy
woman. And I looked for you, I did. Don’t think you could just slip out of my mind. You’re not as sneaky as all that. And here you are. And . . . with
Sarn
?
Seriously?’
‘Why not Sarn, when they pay their spies as well as anyone else?’
He thought there was a minute hesitation in there somewhere, and his stomach sank because abruptly he was convinced that simply being on the Ants’ payroll was far too simple a web for
her.
‘And you’re off back to Sarn with their tactician,’ he prompted, feeling like a real spy for once, as he probed the edges of her infidelity.
‘Or wherever Milus chooses. Or wherever I do, if I tire of him.’
Laszlo had seen Milus perform for the Collegiates, as smooth and dangerous as any Spider noble. ‘He’s a good man to tie your fortunes to, is he?’
‘I’m not one to be tied, Laszlo . . .’ Some mockery died on her lips. ‘You’ve been thinking of me, truly?’
‘Oh, well, sometimes. Once or twice when I wasn’t busy.’
He thought she would come to him then – but a moment later he thought she would back away and be gone, feeling a cage closing about her. Then she found her equilibrium, and he had a
glimpse of some inner layer of her – perhaps still not the true woman beneath, but something more closely overlying it than the face she showed the world most of the time. ‘It
won’t work, Laszlo.’
‘Try me.’
‘I’m leaving with the Sarnesh.’
‘You’re off for some top-secret conference with the Mantis-kinden, which I’ve just so happened to get myself invited to as part of the Collegiate delegation.’
‘Oh, really?’ She folded her arms, but that unguarded look remained, of a woman caught between fight and flight, and not sure what to do about him. ‘And, once again,
you’ve no idea what you’re getting into – the man who went to play spy in Solarno and used his real name, for the world’s sake!’
‘And got out of there with you after everything went wrong!’ he reminded her.
‘I recall getting out of there quite well enough, and being fool enough to drag you with me,’ she scoffed. Her words wanted conviction, for she had been badly injured at the time.
The plan had been hers, but he had carried it out. ‘Go away, Laszlo.’ The words were spoken fondly, but they still stung. ‘I’ve made a living from moving on. The
past’s a thing to put behind you.’
And he was still perched at her window, despite that. ‘Give me something, Liss,’ he asked.
She waved a dismissive hand, and he saw her start to turn away, and yet not quite finish the movement, pulled back to face him as though drawn by a hook.
‘You are a fine fool,’ she told him. ‘You scare me.’ But at last she approached the window, until she stood within arm’s reach of him. ‘I don’t worry
about people. I don’t care about people. That’s not what I do. Don’t try to change me. I’ve killed men for less.’ But there was no sense of threat about her, and that
look was still on her face, the masks held at bay for this one extended moment.
‘I’ll see you in Mantis-land,’ he told her.
‘You . . .’ she began, putting her hands on his shoulders. Then there was a rattling at the door and she gave him a sudden shove, pitching him backwards and away, his wings catching
him a storey further down.
He was grinning, though, as he flew off. Now he really would have to talk his way onto the Collegiate delegation, and all the while without anyone guessing that he had his own motives. Time to
call on his old friend Stenwold Maker.
Laszlo skimmed off across the face of the College, wondering where Stenwold might have got to.
The mid-morning calm was interrupted by the hammering of engines from nearby, while the ragged tree cover shook under the beating of wings as a dozen Spearflight orthopters
scrambled into the air, clawing for height. The curved-bodied machines roared overhead, their wings a blur, rotary piercers already spinning up. A handful of the Light Airborne took wing after
them, but only as observers, not as fighters. No general nor artificer had yet found any field of combat in which flying man and flying machine could realistically oppose one another.
General Tynan was not going to be that man, he knew. That aspect of warcraft had already moved beyond his experience. He did not have enough knowledge of the science or specifications of those
machines to plan an air war.
Even he, though, knew that the Spearflights hurriedly flown to him from back home were yesterday’s models, and no match for the Collegiate Stormreaders that would even now be speeding
through the skies towards his forces. His Second Army had endured daily raids for a month now, and his Spearflights had done little but slow the enemy down. What sent the Beetle pilots home was not
the terrible force of the Imperial Air Corps, but the simple fact that the Stormreaders had not been designed with ground attacks in mind, and they soon ran out of munitions.
The irony was that the last time he had been out this way, Tynan had done his best to strip the place of any real cover. Only the coveted jewel that was Collegium had hauled him away before he
had finished the job. He had not realized that he himself would need to hide here before the war was done. This was the Felyal, a former Mantis hold and thorn in the side of every Imperial advance
up this coast. Tynan had beaten them twice, and had finally ousted them entirely from their forest haunts. Now a quarter of his Second Army was holed up in what dubious cover the forest could
provide, with the remainder spread out in camps over several square miles, to deny the Stormreaders a satisfactory target. The forest itself hid the precise location of Tynan’s surviving
artillery, his paltry air defences, his supplies and the Sentinel automotives, although those last were probably sufficiently armoured to survive a direct bombing.
He had watchers out between here and Collegium, and if a large ground force marched out to attack, he was betting his life that he could regroup before they reached him. Thus far the Beetles had
not tried it. Even though they had retained command of the skies, he had given their forces a bloody enough nose in the accompanying land battle that they were wary of another clash. Instead, their
orthopters, smug and inviolate, coursed over his scattered army at any time of the day or night, trailing bombs and making his soldiers endure lives of constant uncertainty and fear.
Such fear was a weapon of war, he knew. He himself had deployed it against the people of Collegium, and there was a certain philosophical interest in being the recipient, now.
Go away
,
the Collegiates were shouting at him, by means of their constant buzzing attacks.
Leave our lands. Go away.
His orders were to await resupply and then press on; despite the harrowing
bombardment, the Second had no intention of retreating. They were the renowned Gears, and it was galling enough that they had been stopped in their tracks.
He heard the solid crump of the first bomb striking, not too far away. The Stormreaders were poor bombers, without the dedicated design needed to be accurate against ground targets, but they got
lucky, and he had hundreds of dead to prove it. A moment later, one of the Collegiate machines passed swiftly overhead, and Tynan held himself still, waiting to see if this would be the day his own
luck ran out. A second later, it was veering off after one of the Spearflights, which would do its best to lead the enemy on a dance all around the sky until it was shot down, or until the
Collegiate broke off to go home or find another target.
Another flying machine passed overhead, this one even slower than the Spearflights: an antiquated four-winged orthopter with a broad, flat hull. It thundered low over the trees, spewing so much
smoke that Tynan wondered if it had already been hit. This would be one of the machines found by his Spider-kinden allies, who had no air force of their own save for mercenary aviators. Like the
Spearflights, the ragbag of machines the Spiders had come up with were doing nothing but delaying the inevitable.
An army under attack which cannot fight back is a miserable thing, and being on the sharp end of a technology gap for once was a bitter reversal. The soldiers of the Second were finding their
morale eroded day by day. So far there had been no desertions, unless those had been covered up as deaths, but Tynan was expecting them. Even as this attack started he had been going through his
sergeants’ assessments of their subordinates’ will to endure. There was plenty of angry talk amongst the rank and file, and Tynan could not blame them. They had done their duty, and
this was none of their fault.
A bomb landed close to the glade in which he had been working, and he edged further under the cover of the trees – as though that would help should the Collegiates strike lucky. Across
their widely separated camps, all his soldiers would be crouching under whatever defences they could find or dig out, and hoping that today was not their final day.
‘General!’ he heard, and he called out his location – a necessary risk, since the army still needed to communicate with itself. He, above all, must be findable, despite the
threat of assassination that the Beetles had not quite got round to resorting to yet. The messenger, half-running and half-flying, skidded to a halt before him. ‘General, the supply
flight’s incoming.’
Tynan went cold, because his run of bad days had just got much worse. The Second Army was being supplied via the new Spider-kinden holdings in Tark and Kes, but the Spiders refused to use
sea-power since their fleet had somehow been turned back from Collegium before. With that approach barred, and short of building a rail line from scratch, the only way to get sufficient food and
materials to the beleaguered Second was by airship.
They had staggered the deliveries and mostly made them at night, playing a lethal guessing game with the Collegiates. The enemy knew full well that their orthopters would easily destroy the
slow-moving airships, because neither Tynan’s own fliers nor any escort the Spiders could put together had any chance of stopping them.
He stood there helplessly, a general without a plan, without any means of communicating with his army. ‘Our machines—?’
‘They’re all moving to screen the airships, sir,’ the messenger confirmed.
But that won’t be enough. Now the Collegiates have smelt blood, they won’t rest until they bring the ships down.
‘Tell them . . .’ His mind worked wildly. ‘Get the fastest Fly-kinden we have – ours or the Spiders’ – get them up to those airships. They need to put down
now, I don’t care how far off. We need those supplies safely on the ground. That way we can salvage something.’ It was a wretched sort of a plan, but he had been forced to spin it from
nothing,.
The messenger was off without even offering a salute, well aware of the urgency of his job.
‘I want a detachment ready to get to the landing site!’ Tynan snapped at the officers around him, very nearly saying
crash site
. ‘Automotives, haulers, plenty of men
ready to carry loads. Start moving now.’ And all the while, in the back of his mind,
Too late, too late.
‘Get me . . .’ But what he really wanted to say was,
Get me somewhere I can see what’s going on
. He might exercise only a pitiful influence on the conflict, but it was
his responsibility to watch it happening.
Quickly he made his way through the forest to the nearest tower: one of the makeshift wooden constructions engineered from sections of the travelling fort his men had brought with them, rising
barely above tree level and dressed with deadwood to make it less of a visible target. He let his wings drag him up there despite the weight of his armour, though he felt every one of his nigh-on
fifty years as he reached the top. The Fly-kinden lookout saluted briskly, making room as half of Tynan’s bodyguards made their laborious way up as well.
‘Send word to the – the Spider colonel,’ he ordered the Fly. He had almost referred to the woman by name, which always disconcerted his soldiers. ‘Have her get ready any
automotives she can. Tell her we’re going to retrieve what we can from the airships.’
The Fly was off instantly, wings ablur.
Tynan looked out: the airships were plainly visible as little round shapes in the sky, approaching fast with a following wind and growing larger even as he watched. How much more obvious must
they be to the Collegiate pilots whose eyes were trained to scan the sky, and everything in it?
Overhead, the aerial battle was moving away, heading east now towards the approaching supply ships.
At least we get spared a pummelling
, Tynan considered grimly. Suddenly the enemy had
better things to do than scatter bombs randomly in the hope of killing Wasp soldiers.
Perhaps, after this, I can talk Mycella into sending our supplies by sea, although I suppose sea-ships would be just as vulnerable as airships.
Mycella of the Aldanrael was rightly the
joint commander of the Collegium campaign. Labelling her as a colonel had been the best way to keep Tynan’s own people in line, though, for they had been trained rigorously to observe a rigid
command structure: general to colonel to major in command, captains and lieutenants in the middle, sergeants and regular solders to fight and work and complain. An army had only one general. Two
heads could not govern the same body, every Wasp knew.
Tynan knew better now, He had been initially surprised at how easy the Spider Arista was to work with. Then he had got to know her better, and to understand that she had been stripped of a great
deal of her pomp and pride as a result of the failed armada attack on Collegium. After that, he had come to know her altogether too well by most standards. No doubt his intelligence officer,
Colonel Cherten, had sent a few interesting reports back home, but no reprimand had come back to Tynan yet.