‘Can they be turned?’ Totho asked immediately. ‘They’re slaves, after all. If they turn on their masters, with our help, they could escape into the Lowlands—’
Salma was shaking his head and Nero chuckled. ‘You’d assume, with all their experience as slave-owners, that the Wasps would have spotted that one, boy. Which is exactly why they have. Any funny business from those poor bastards down there, and their families will get to know about it in the worst way. And, besides, if some platoon of Bee-kinden, hundreds of miles from home, does decide to go it alone, you think they’ll be welcomed any, in Tark? Or anywhere else? And home for them is now within the Empire’s borders, so any man jumping ship will never get to see it again.’
Salma nodded. ‘I should tell you something, I think, at this point.’
Nero and Parops exchanged glances. ‘Go on, boy, don’t hold it in,’ the Fly-kinden prompted.
Salma’s smile turned wry. ‘I didn’t come here just for Stenwold’s war, or even my own people’s war. Not just to fight the Wasps, anyway.’
Totho nodded, remembering. Salma had barely mentioned the lure that had drawn him on this errand, which had originally been Skrill’s errand alone. Totho had almost forgotten that himself, amidst the catalogue of his own woes.
‘Don’t keep us in suspense,’ Nero said.
‘A woman, I’m afraid.’ Salma smiled brightly. ‘I came here after a woman.’
‘A Wasp woman?’ Parops asked.
‘No, but I’m told she’s with the camp. With some order of theirs, the . . . Grace’s Daughters, is it? No, Mercy’s Daughters.’
‘Never heard of them.’ Nero said. ‘So what about it?’
‘I will be leaving Tark at some point,’ Salma said, ‘whether your monarch approves or not. Because she’s out there somewhere and I have to find her.’
Nero’s glance met that of Parops. ‘Must be wonderful, to be young,’ the Fly grumbled. ‘I almost remember it, a decade of making a fool of myself and getting slapped by women. Marvellous, it was. Your mind seems set, boy.’
‘I mean what I say.’
‘Then at least choose your moment,’ Parops said. ‘Work with the city and let us get to trust you. Because there will be a sortie sooner or later. We’re not just going to sit here and watch them ruin our walls, you realize.’
‘Forgive me, but so far your city doesn’t seem interested in working with any of us,’ Totho pointed out.
‘That was then,’ Parops told him, taking the jug from Skrill and taking a swig from it. ‘Now you are, nominally, on our side, and people want you to talk to them.’
Salma’s grin broadened. ‘Now that’s unfair. There was a delightful Ant-kinden lady earlier who wanted nothing more than for me to talk to her.’
And at that there was a rap on the door and, when Nero opened it, she was standing right there, the Ant interrogator, staring straight at Salma.
Alder made a point of not wearing armour. Not only should there be some privileges for a general, but he hated being fussed over by slaves and servants, for with one arm he was unable to secure the buckles.
The largest tent in the Wasp encampment was not his living quarters but his map room. If assassins chose to head for it at night in search of generals to kill then that was entirely agreeable with him. He had sent a call out to his officers to join him, and if he had known that an Ant tower commander had dubbed them ‘tacticians’ he would have found it highly amusing. The term might just fit himself but, as far as planning this siege went, his was a perilously lonely position.
He was a man made for and unmade by war: lean and grey, though athletic still. He remembered a time when the title ‘General’ was reserved for men commanding armies. Now back at the imperial court there were generals of this and that who had never even taken the field. In his mind he preserved the purity of the position.
He was of good family, in fact. That had taken him to a captaincy. After that each rung of the ladder had been hard-won, climbed under enemy shot, and slick with blood. His face had a rosette of shiny burn-scar across nose and right cheek. His right arm had been amputated by a field surgeon who had not expected him to live.
That surgeon still received, at each year’s end, twenty-five gold Imperials from the amputee’s personal coffers. General Alder remembered the competent and the skilled.
So why, he asked himself, am I left with these misfits as my command staff? He lowered himself into one of the four folding chairs, watching his staff file in. The Officer of the Camp was Colonel Carvoc, an excellent administrator though an almost untried soldier, now seating himself to the general’s left. His armour was polished and unblemished. To Alder’s right came the Officer of the Field, Colonel Edric. Edric was a man of strange appetites and humours. An officer of matchless family, he spent his time amongst the hill-tribe savages that passed for shock troops in this army. He always went into battle, by his own tradition, in their third wave. He even wore their armour, and a chieftain’s helm with a four-inch wasp sting as a crest. With coarse gold armbands and a mantle of ragged hide, he looked every inch a tribal headman and not at all an imperial colonel.
The fourth chair remained empty, but Alder’s third and most problematical colonel was usually late and kept his own timetable. The general’s hand itched to strike the man every time he saw him, but some talents were precious enough for him to suffer a little insolence. For now at least.
The others were assembling in a semicircle before those seats: field brigade majors, the head of the Engineering Corps, the local Rekef observer posing as military intelligence. Behind them were the Auxillian captains from Maynes and Szar, their heads bowed, hoping not to be singled out.
Still Alder waited, whilst Colonel Edric fidgeted and played with the chinstrap of his helm.
His missing colonel remained absent, but she came at last. He had not ordered her to attend. Supposedly he could not, although he could have had her marched into his tent or out of the camp any time he wished. Instead, he kept a civil accord with her because an officer who was seen to drive away any of the Mercy’s Daughters was an officer soon disliked by the men.
‘Norsa,’ he said, although he had greeted none of the others.
‘General.’ Norsa was an elderly Wasp-kinden woman in pale lemon robes, walking with the aid of a plain staff. Alder’s respect for her was based in part on that staff and the limp it aided, which had been gained in battle, retrieving the wounded.
‘Colonel Edric. The morale amongst your . . . adherents?’ Alder asked.
‘Ready to make a second pass on your word, General,’ Edric confirmed.
‘I suppose we should be grateful that they’re all so stupid,’ Alder said, noticing the sudden crease in Edric’s forehead. The fool believes it. He’s gone native. In that case it was an illness that time would soon cure.
‘Major Grigan. We lost three engines, I counted.’
The Engineering Corps major nodded, not meeting Alder’s eyes. ‘We can retrieve parts, and we have enough spares in the train to construct six new from the pieces.’
‘Your estimation of their defences?’
Grigan looked unhappy. ‘Maybe we could go against them again tomorrow. Don’t think we made too much impression. Can’t be sure, sir.’
‘I want your opinion, Major,’ Alder said sternly.
‘But he doesn’t have one, General,’ snipped out a new voice, sharp and sardonic. Here was the errant colonel at last and, despite the man’s usefulness, Alder always preferred a meeting where he did not appear.
‘Drephos,’ Alder acknowledged him.
‘He prefers to defer to my opinions, since my judgment is sounder.’ The newcomer swept past Grigan with a staggering disrespect for a man of his heritage. He wore an officer’s breastplate over dark and decidedly non-uniform robes. A cowl hid his face. ‘General, the normal engines just won’t dent those walls.’
‘Well, Colonel-Auxillian Drephos, just what do you suggest?’
‘I have some
toys I’m longing to set on the place,’ Drephos’s voice rose from within the cowl, rippling with amusement, ‘but I’ll need the cover of a full assault to do so. Specifically, throw enough men at those emplacements atop the towers, as their crews are too skilled for my liking.’
‘Well we wouldn’t want to see any of your toys broken,’ Alder said.
‘Not when they’re going to win your war for you.’ With his halting tread Drephos took up the final seat, on the other side of Colonel Carvoc. ‘We all know the plan, General,’ he continued. ‘And the first part of the plan is to knock a few holes in those walls of theirs. Give me the cover of a full assault and I’ll work my masterpiece. Stand back and watch me.’
‘A full assault will cost thousands of lives,’ Carvoc noted, ‘and it will be difficult to sustain it for long.’
‘Don’t think I’ll need all that long. Mine are exquisitely clever toys,’ Drephos said, delighted with his own genius as usual. ‘I’d suggest that you start by putting your usual tedious engines up front, give them something to aim at. While you’re at it, give the archers on the inside something to think about. We all know Ant-kinden: if it works, they won’t change it. Which always means they only try to mend something after it breaks. And if something breaks messily and finally enough, well, we artificers know that sometimes things just can’t be fixed.’
Salma awoke as she slipped from his bed. There was wan light spilling sullenly from the two slit windows up near the ceiling, and it caught the paleness of her skin. He had never known skin so pale, like alabaster with ashen shadows. In that grim, colourless light she seemed to glow, picked out from all the surrounding room.
Her name, he recalled, was Basila. Her second interrogation had been gentler than the first, and the third, after the hours of night, gentler still. He had not believed, quite, that these Ant-kinden even possessed a concept for the soft arts, as his people called the intimate act. They seemed all edges and planes and cold practicality. There had been heat aplenty, though, until he wondered just how many women across the city he was making love to simultaneously. She was stronger than he was, and fierce, constantly wresting control from him, an officer commandeering a civilian. For a man used to casually seducing women, it had been quite an experience.
He watched, eyes half open, as she pulled on her tunic and breeches. She was lacing her sandals before she noticed his watching attention.
‘You might as well sleep,’ she said.
‘I’m awake now. It’s dawn already?’
‘It is. I have duties.’
He watched as she shrugged on her chainmail, twisting for the side-buckles from long practice. He knew, or at least suspected, that they would not lie together again, that it had been merely curiosity that had drawn her to him. For his part it had been, at least, a way of showing the world and this city that his destiny had not escaped entirely from his own grasp.
Back in Collegium his liaisons had been the titillation and scandal of the Great College, scandal most particularly among those he had passed over or those who would have indulged in the same liaisons if they had dared. The strait-laced of Collegium would not have believed it, but Salma’s own kinden had a strict morality of coupling. It divided the world of the preferred gender into two parts, not based on race or social standing or anything other than the subjective feelings of the individual concerned: sleep where you wish, amongst those who mean little to you, and amongst those to whom you mean little. Amuse yourself as you will, but with those close to you, those who love you or those you love, bestow your affections only where they are sincerely meant.
He had never elaborated on this creed for Collegium, for there it would not have been understood. He had never lain with Tynisa who had, he knew, wanted it. Particularly he had never lain with Cheerwell, who would have agreed, for all the wrong reasons, if he had asked.
Basila buckled on her sword and, seeing Salma smiling at her, ventured a small one of her own.
‘Off to a hard day’s beating people?’ he asked, and her smile slipped. He assumed it was annoyance at him, but then she said, ‘It is dawn. The enemy is advancing on the walls.’
He dressed as fast as he could, his belongings having been returned to him. He took up the stolen Wasp sword without even buckling on a scabbard. Basila was now gone to join her unit or await prisoners or whatever she had to do. She had left him to cower here behind doors like the slaves of Tark and await his fate, and that cut deep.
He found Totho emerging from the next-door room just as he left. For a second he had time to wonder whether the halfbreed artificer had heard anything of the previous night’s activities, before recalling that Basila, of course, had been silent throughout.
So Totho heard nothing but the whole city knows we did it. He had to grin privately at that.
‘What’s going on?’ Totho asked sleepily.
‘The Wasps are attacking. Get your sword and bow.’
‘But the Ants won’t let us fight—’
‘Totho, if enough of the Wasps get over the wall, then our hosts’ preferences won’t come into it.’
Salma bolted up the stairs as Totho turned back for his gear.
They had been billeted in the rooms beneath Parops’s tower. Salma chose the first outside door, the ground-level door, and stopped with it half open, frozen.
The space before the gate was filled with ranks of Ant-kinden soldiers with crossbows and plenty of quarrels. Above them the walls, their crenellations slightly scarred from the previous day, were lined with more of them, and some of those had greater weapons. There were nailbow-men there with their blocky, firepowder-charged devices, and two-man teams with great winch-operated repeating crossbows resting on the walls.
They were shooting. All the men on the walls were shooting, either straight ahead or slightly upwards. Salma heard the grinding thunder of mechanisms, and the arm of the trebuchet atop Parops’s tower flung itself forward, slinging its load of man-sized stones in a high arc. All along the slice of wall that Salma could see, other engines were busy doing the same.
Then the Wasps were at the wall itself, and what he had only been told about became real.
The first wave was a great ragged sweep of spear-wielding savages who hurtled into a field of crossbow bolts. There were already deep holes punched in their scattered mass. Salma watched almost three in four get ripped from the sky in that first instant, as soon as their silhouettes appeared in the sky above the walls. Some were killed outright. Others screamed and plummeted from the air to be finished on the ground with pragmatic brutality. The surviving attackers paid them no heed. Some alighted on the walls. Others ploughed into the waiting men below or scattered across the city. They were in a blood-rage, foaming at the mouth, hurling their spears and blasting with their stings, drawing great slashing swords from their belts to lay about them. One came down close to the tower’s entrance, flinging his lance with such force that it punched right through an Ant’s chainmail, knocking the man off his feet. Salma leapt out instantly, taking to the air and dropping on the attacker with sword extended. Another Ant was there already, and the Wasp savage took both sword-blows simultaneously. He howled in something that was more rage than pain, swinging his own blade at Salma and then at the Ant soldier, cutting a long dent in the latter’s shield before falling.
There was a second wave of them at the walls already, coming too swiftly for many of the soldiers to have reloaded, although the repeating bows had taken a savage toll of the incursors. There was now hand-to-hand fighting all along the wall, and attackers kept dropping, or sometimes falling, down into the courtyard before the gates.
Salma had never seen Ants in combat before. There was no confusion here, no hesitation. The invaders were set upon efficiently, without haste. All found that any Ant they attacked was ready for them as those they tried to surprise turned to see them. The Ants had a hundred pairs of eyes watching each one’s back. The Wasps took a toll with their stings and their frenzied hacking, but how small tha
t toll was! Most of their second wave had been turned into corpses, all for the loss of no more than two dozen defenders.
‘Get back inside, you!’ one of the Ants shouted over at him. ‘No place here for a civilian.’
‘I’m not a civilian!’ Salma called back. ‘Look, I have a sword!’
The man was about to answer him when something pulled his attention upwards. They were all looking up, and across all those raised faces one expression was asking: ‘What . . . ?’
And then they were moving. Without a word, without panic or cries of alarm, they scattered as best they could. Those at the edge of the square were backing quickly into the side streets, others were pushing up against the wall itself. Some found the shelter of doors or doorways. All this in the space of seconds. Salma would have remained standing still if an Ant had not cannoned into him, pushing him back into the tower door, where he collided with Totho so that all three of them fell in a heap.
The first explosion came across the other side, just left of the main gate. A crack of sound, a burst of fire and stone and dust, flinging half a dozen soldiers up and away, shearing through the next nearest squad with jagged metal and shards of stone. Up above, the trebuchet was winching itself ponderously round, while other enemy missiles were landing now, some right before the gates and others impacting on nearby buildings in a sporadic and random rain of fire. Wherever they struck, they split and burst, cracking stone and flinging pieces of their shells in scything arcs. Soldiers everywhere were holding their shields up, falling back to what cover they could find. Each second yet another fireball burst close about the gates, and there had been so many soldiers gathered there a moment ago that each missile claimed at least one victim. Salma, clinging to the doorframe, saw shields punched inwards by the invisible fists of these explosions, a nearby door smashed to kindling, men and women given a second’s notice before being blown apart.
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