Parops was of unusual character for an Ant, especially an officer. His friendship with Nero had begun on rocky ground when the universal grapevine had informed him that the woman picked out as his mate was sitting nude before the Fly’s easel, and he was a joke across the city before he had stormed across to remonstrate. Ant pairings were a strange business, though, made for the convenience of the city and the furtherance of children, and they lacked the personal investment, the jealousies and passions, of other kinden. In truth, after their coupling was achieved, the two of them had grown bored of one another. Nero had been one of a line of diversions she had taken up.
And of course Parops had been expected to kill the Fly on the spot, both by his mate and the city at large. Not from rage, for Ants were rarely given to it, but for the affront to his racial, civic and personal dignity. Instead, he had passed most of the night up on the roof by Nero’s side, looking out over the city and talking about other places.
Parops was a wild eccentric by Ant standards, which meant that he entertained unusual thoughts occasionally. His natural intelligence had brought him just so far up the ladder of rank and he knew that he would never receive further promotion. In the opinion of his superiors he was not wholly sound. So here he was, a tower commander on the walls of Tark, a position considered more bureaucratic than military until now. Now he stood at the arrowslit window of his study and looked down over the chequer-board of the Wasp army. The late sunlight played on his bleached skin.
‘How are the negotiations going?’ Nero enquired, for a Wasp embassy had been admitted to the city earlier that day. While Parops was not privy to their debate, news of its progress loomed large in the collective mind of the city, silently passed from neighbour to neighbour in rippling waves of information.
‘Still keeping them waiting,’ the Ant explained.
‘It’s their prerogative,’ Nero allowed. ‘So what are they doing meanwhile?’
‘There are some Spider-kinden slavers left in the city,’ Parops said, ‘and some of them have Scorpion-kinden on their staff. It seems that the Scorpions and the Wasps go way back, mostly in the same trade, so we have people paying the Scorpions for their recollections. The Royal Court is busy putting the picture together.’
‘How seriously are they taking it?’
‘There are thirty thousand soldiers at our gates,’ Parops pointed out.
‘Yes, but you know how politics goes. Everyone’s city is the greatest, and everyone’s soldiers are invincible, at least until they get vinced.’
Parops nodded. ‘They’re taking it seriously, plentifully seriously. They’ve gone to the tunnels and spoken to the nest-queen herself, woken up the flying brood. They’re putting in readiness every machine that can take to the air. Everyone who can pilot a flier or handle artillery is getting marching orders, and it’s crossbows for everyone else. It’s a flying enemy we face, and that much we understand. It’s something new.’
And Ants did not like new things, Nero reflected, but at least the complacency had gone. The ant nest beneath the city, which produced domesticated insects that laboured for their human namesakes, was a valuable resource. To utilize the winged males and females as mounts of war would kill off an entire generation of them, a tragedy of economics which meant they were only brought out in the worst of emergencies. The Royal Court of Tark had finally conceded that this was nothing less.
‘You’ve had some dealings with these Wasps,’ Parops noted.
‘As few as I could but, yes, a long time ago.’
‘Tell me about the other kinden they have in their army. Have they formed an alliance against us?’
‘The Wasp Empire doesn’t do alliances,’ Nero said with a harsh laugh. ‘Those are slaves.’
‘They arm their slaves?’ The Ants of Tark, as with Ant-kinden almost everywhere, kept slaves for the menial work and would not dream of putting so much as a large knife in their hands. It was not so much for fear of rebellion as pride in their own martial skills.
‘It’s more complicated than that. They deal in very large armies, and they swell their ranks with the conquered – Auxillians, they call them. They enslave whole cities, you see. Then they ship out fighters to some part of their Empire remote from their homes, and set them to it. It’s as though here you got sent out to . . . Collegium or Vek, or somewhere. I imagine sometimes it doesn’t work, but mostly the men sent out there will have family back home and they’ll know that if they run, or turn on their masters, then their kin will suffer. And so they fight. They’ll either be skilled help, artificers and the like, or just bow-fodder, first into the breach. It can’t be much of a prospect.’
Parops nodded again, and Nero felt a shiver as he realized that his words would be at large in the city now, darting from mind to mind, perhaps even reaching the Royal Court itself.
‘There are still some foreigners leaving by the west gate,’ the Ant said carefully. ‘In fact there are still foreigners coming in by the west gate – mostly slavers hunting a late sale. It’s probably time you made your move.’
‘I’ll stay a little while,’ Nero said casually.
‘I get the impression that when these fellows draw sword they’re not going to care what kinden you are, if you’re found inside the walls.’
‘More than likely true,’ Nero admitted.
Parops at last turned from the window and his obsessive scrutiny of the near future.
‘Why are you here, Nero?’ he asked. ‘Your race is hardly renowned for its staying power in the fray. You run further to live longer, isn’t that it? So why haven’t you done what any sensible human being would do, and run while you can?’
Nero shrugged. Partly it was due to his friendship with Parops, of course, but there was another reason, and it was such a personal, trivial thing that he was ashamed to admit it. ‘I’ve never witnessed a war,’ he said. ‘I’ve put a few skirmishes under my belt, over the years, but never a war. Not really. I did a study once, the Battle of the Gears at the Collegium gates, you know, and shall we say critical reception was lukewarm. That’s because it was beyond my experience, and I couldn’t capture it. And so that’s my reason, as good as any other – and it’s a poor one, I know.’
‘You are quite mad,’ Parops told him.
‘Probably. However, my own kinden are very good at squeaking out at the last minute, and there are still a few grains of sands in the glass. You never know, perhaps I’ll reclaim my heritage after all.’
‘Don’t leave it too long,’ Parops warned, and then some fresh word came to him, invisible through the crowded air of the city. ‘They have taken the ambassadors in, at last,’ he announced.
When Skrill came running back she was ducking low amidst the sprays of man-high sword-grass. Her progress involved a series of sudden dashes across less covered ground, moving with her long legs at a speed Salma knew he himself could not have matched. Then she would freeze into immobility, hunched under cover, an arrow already fitted to her bowstring. He and Totho were dug in together beneath one of the great knots of grass that arched over them with its narrow, sharp-edged fronds. They watched Skrill’s punctuated progress impatiently.
Then she had flung herself to a halt beside them, bowling into them in a flurry of loose earth. She was a strange creature, halfbreed of Mynan Soldier Beetle and something else, and with no manners or education to recommend her, but she had led them flawlessly to within sight of the Wasp army as if she knew every inch of the terrain.
‘What did you see?’ Totho asked her.
‘Did you see her – or the Daughters?’ Salma interrupted.
She gave him a wide-eyed, mocking look. ‘Did you perchance not notice those many thousand soldiers out there, Your Lordship? Wherever your glittery lady is, she ain’t paradin’ herself about their camp, now, is she? So no, I din’t happen to meet her and invite her over here for a pint and a chat.’ She shook her head, one hand coming up to tug at her pointed ears as though trying to make them longer. ‘I didn’t eve
n get close to the camp because they got a thousand men on sentry duty, or that’s like it looked to me. A whole ring of them, and earthworks, palisade, even little lookie-outie towers. And the sky! Don’t even get me started. If you was thinkin’ about just swanning in with those wings of yours you best put that candle right out. They got men circlin’ and circlin’ like flies on a tenday-dead corpse. They plainly reckon the Ants’ll give ’em grief – and why not? I would, if I was runnin’ things at Tark Hall.’
‘Ants are too straight for that, aren’t they?’ Totho asked. ‘I thought they’d just line up and fight.’
‘Don’t believe it, Beetle-boy,’ she told him. ‘Ants’ll play the dirty tricks same as anyone. They do war, Beetlie, and war means day and night work. Nobody ever won a war just by fighting fair.’
‘Don’t call me that,’ Totho said, for the nicknames she used were starting to gall him. ‘I’m no more a Beetle than you are a . . . a whatever it is you are, or aren’t.’
‘Am I a Beetle? No. Is His Lordship a Beetle? No. Then you get to be Beetle-boy unless we can get a better Beetle than you,’ she told him without sympathy.
‘Will the pair of you be—’ Salma had started to hiss, and then the Wasps were in sight, skimming at just a man’s height and touching the tops of the sword-grass as they came. In that same moment they had clearly spotted the three spies.
There were half a dozen of them, light airborne out merely on a scouting mission, but Wasps were a pugnacious lot and never ones to shirk a fight. Their leader shouted an order and two of them broke off, arrowing back towards their camp. The others sped towards Salma with swords drawn and palms outstretched to unleash their energy stings.
Skrill shot one straight off, leaping up with her sudden speed and loosing an arrow that split the second oncomer’s eye. The Wasp flier recoiled in the air and then dropped from sight amidst the tall grass.
Salma had no time to string his own bow. As the three remaining soldiers launched the golden lightning of their stings he let his wings take him straight upwards, his shortsword – stolen Wasp-make itself – clearing its scabbard.
Skrill had already dashed to one side but Totho had no option but to cast himself to the ground and hope. He felt one sting lash across his pack as though he had been punched there by a strong man. Then he was up with a magazine slotted into his crossbow.
One of the men had skimmed upwards in pursuit of Salma and it struck Totho how they seemed nimbler in the air than most Wasps, obviously hand-picked as scouts. He raised his bow and loosed.
The man coming for him jinked aside and the bolt sped past him. Totho saw the man’s face split into a grin in the knowledge that there would be no reloading of such a cumbersome weapon as a crossbow in time. By then Totho was racking back the lever and shooting again and again, seeing surprise and dismay splash across those same features. The man dodged the second shot but not the third, nor the fourth or fifth, and he ploughed dead into the earth six feet away. They were a race of builders and artificers, the Wasps, but for all their numbers and ingenuity they were behind the Lowlands yet in craft.
He heard a shout nearby and saw Skrill fighting furiously with another enemy, sword to sword. She was swift, her blade lunging and darting like a living thing, but her opponent was a professional, and the metal plates of his armour kept turning aside her blows. Totho knew he couldn’t risk a shot in their direction and drew his own blade, breaking cover to run to her aid.
Above them Salma dived and spun in a deadly aerial ballet with his opponent. For them, distance was all: too close and they would foul each other, too far and the Wasp would have more chance to use his sting. Amidst their aerobatics their swords flashed rarely, each seeking a second’s opening to strike against side or back.
Salma was Dragonfly-kinden, born to the air, and his race prided themselves on their grace and control while on the wing. The Wasp, for his part, was as fleet and nimble as his kind ever were, but there was a distance even so. Salma had abruptly cut away, seeming to falter in the air, allowing the Wasp to draw up to shoot at him. In that same moment Salma reversed his motion, wings powering him forwards. The man tried to angle down to face him head-on, sword sweeping in a broad parry, but Salma was through his guard on the instant, driving the blade between the Wasp’s ribs where his armour left off, and then using the pull of the man’s heavy descent to drag the steel from his corpse.
He touched down, looking around for more enemies just in time to see Totho and Skrill finish off the last Wasp scout together.
‘Get your kit together!’ Skrill urged him. ‘There’ll be more!’
Salma scooped up his satchel, seeing Totho shoulder the big canvas bag that held his tools and belongings. I travel very light these days, the Dragonfly thought wryly, but of course, being captured and stripped of your possessions would do that to a man. He had only what the Mynan resistance had been able to find for him.
Skrill’s kitbag was already strapped on her back, a position it never left save when she was using it as a lumpy pillow. She pelted past him even as he and Totho were collecting their gear, and they ran after her, knowing it was vain to try to catch up.
The Wasp armies had yet to invest the city of Tark in siege. But for us the war has already started.
He remembered his talk with Aagen, the Wasp artificer whose information had originally sent him south to Tark – the same who had been given the Butterfly dancer named Grief in Chains and then released her with the name Aagen’s Joy. Salma had now killed another Wasp, his first since then. There had been no hesitation at the time. After all, the man had been trying to kill him.
And yes, the Wasp had been another human being with all a man’s hopes and aspirations, and now snuffed out by eighteen inches of steel. But also, there had been enough Dragonfly dead during the Twelve-Year War to make the numbers now massed outside Tark pale into insignificance. Amongst them, his own father and three cousins, including his favourite, Felipe Daless. Not just kinden but kin: blood that called out for a levelling of the scales; three principalities of the Dragonfly Commonweal that groaned under the boot of the Empire.
He hardened his heart. There would be more blood spilled before the end of this, and some of it could easily be his own.
Skrill had stopped ahead, waiting for them. Totho blundered up to her.
‘And how did they find us?’ he demanded.
‘Scouts, Beetle-boy. What do you think they were doing?’
‘They followed you.’
‘You take them words back, or we’re lookin’ to have a disagreement right here,’ she said hotly. ‘Nobody asked you to link with us.’
Totho swallowed whatever words he had been going to utter and, after a moment’s thought, said, ‘Well it’s just as well I did, or you’d have been spitted right back there. What do you think of that?’
‘Will the pair of you be quiet?’ Salma grumbled without much hope.
‘I was playing with him,’ Skrill said. ‘I was—’ Suddenly she fell silent, turning away from Totho with her hand plucking an arrow from her quiver.
‘Put the bow down! Put the swords down! Put the crossbow down!’ barked a voice from somewhere within the grass. There was an uncertain pause, and then a bolt spat out of a nearby thicket, ploughing the earth at Totho’s feet. Even as they watched men began emerging in a crescent formation in front of them, swathed in cloaks of woven grass and reeds, but all with crossbows levelled. For a moment Salma thought it was the Wasps that had them, but they were Ants – Tarkesh Ants – with their pale faces smeared with dirt and green dye. Beneath the cloaks they wore armour of boiled leather and darkened metal.
‘Weapons down!’ shouted their leader. ‘Or I shoot the lad with the crossbow. This is your last chance.’
Totho dropped the bow quickly enough, and his sword as well. Salma did the same, trying to gauge his chances of taking to the air. He counted ten Ants in all, and they would be in each other’s minds. The least wrong move and they all would see it. Salma
did not rate his chances of dodging so many bolts.
Skrill gave a hiss of annoyance and placed her bow on the ground, replacing the arrow in her quiver.
‘What in blazes have we here?’ the Ant officer asked, aloud for their benefit. ‘A bag of halfbreeds, it would seem.’
Salma could only guess at the silent thoughts going meanwhile between him and his men.
‘We’re not with that army out there,’ he said hastily. ‘In fact, we’re from Collegium.’
‘I can’t see a crew like yours fitting in anywhere outside a freakshow,’ the Ant officer replied levelly. ‘But what you are right now, lad, is prisoners. You come along with me, and anyone who does any tricks gets a bolt up the arse, and no mistake. There’re folk in the city just waiting to speak to folk like you.’
‘We’re not your enemies,’ Salma tried again. He tried a smile, but the officer was having none of it.
‘You might be all sorts, lad, but I think you’re spies looking to get inside the city. Looks like you got your wish too, doesn’t it, although not in the way you might prefer.’
Three
The Prowess Forum had never seen the like. This was no formal event, no meeting of teams from the duelling league, and yet the backsides of the onlookers were packed all the way up the stone steps that rose in tiers at every wall. The aficionados of the duel were crammed in shoulder to shoulder, from College masters through the ranks of students and professional bladesmen to the children who followed their favourites with the fanatical loyalty of Ants to their city.
The fighters stood ready in the circle, which had been scuffed by a hundred hundred feet in the past. Neither participant was new to it. They had faced each other before, and there was nothing the crowd liked better than a rematch of champions. The Master of Ceremonies, the old Ant-kinden Kymon of Kes, had tried to start the duel three times, but the crowd was refusing to quieten down for him.
To one side stood the acknowledged champion of the Prowess Forum. He was Mantis-kinden, as the very best of the best always were. They were born with blade-skill in their blood: it was the Ancestor Art of their nation. They came to the College sporadically, one or two in every year. When they fought they inevitably claimed the prize, and then mostly they left. Piraeus of Nethyon had stayed on, however, preferring the life of a champion of Collegium to anything his homeland might offer. He made his living in private duel and by hiring out his skills to any duelling house so desperate for victory as to show the bad form of buying in a champion. Nor had he been short of offers this last year, for winning had ousted taking part as the fashionable thing. Now many magnates of Collegium kept duelling teams to further their prestige.
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