‘Master Maker,’ the messenger reported, ‘a foreigner, a halfbreed, has come to the city looking for you. She said she has news of Tark.’
‘Of Tark?’ The wheels were already moving in his mind. ‘Her name?’
‘Is Skrill, she says, War Master,’ the messenger told him, and he felt a shock go through him. The blade that had been held over him, for so long he had almost forgotten it, was suddenly dropping.
‘Take me to her,’ he ordered. ‘Now!’
‘And so you left,’ Stenwold said heavily, after Skrill had told him her story, with all its wearisome digressions and diversions.
‘Weren’t my idea. Your man Totho did the plan,’ protested the gangly halfbreed sitting across the table from him. She scowled defensively. ‘What you think I was gonna do?’
‘No, you’re right,’ Stenwold said. ‘It wasn’t your fight. You were hired as a scout, not to fight for Tark.’
‘Straight up,’ Skrill agreed.
‘And so . . . ?’
‘Once I got far out enough, I stuck around. I thought I’d see the big balloons go on fire like the plan was. Only they never did. Next night I weren’t so far off that I couldn’t see the city burning.’
‘And so they failed,’ said Stenwold. He felt physically ill with the strain of it all.
‘Looks that way,’ Skrill agreed, and then added, ‘Sorry,’ a little later.
‘Hammer and tongs, what have I done?’ Stenwold whispered. He heard a sound at the door, the clink of metal, and then Balkus opened it, peering in respectfully.
‘Master Maker?’ he began.
‘A moment,’ Stenwold told him, and the big Ant hovered in the doorway as he turned to Skrill again. ‘Where are you for now?’
‘Well, excuse me, Master Maker, but I hear you got all kind of trouble coming down on you here. I’m for home, which is a wasting long ways from here. This ain’t my fight. I’m sorry.’
‘I can ask no more of you. I’ll see you’re paid, and supplied as well.’
She nodded, her narrow face unhappy. ‘I liked your boys, Master Maker. Salma especially. He was quite something. I’m sorry it looks like they’re gone.’
Stenwold said nothing, and she stood up and slipped out past Balkus.
‘Are you . . . all right?’ the Ant asked cautiously.
Stenwold shook his head slowly. ‘Another two of my own sent to their deaths. Attacking the Wasp camp! What were they thinking?’
‘They knew the risks,’ Balkus said philosophically. ‘I’m sure they knew what they were getting into.’
‘But they weren’t sent there as soldiers. They were just . . .’
‘Spies,’ Balkus filled in. ‘Better they went as soldiers. That’s why I’d never do spy work for Scuto, only strong-arming and the like. Soldiers live rough and die clean, and if they’re captured, there’s a respect between us men who live with the sword. If they went like soldiers, on the attack, then that’s for the best, because spies who get captured don’t get any mercy. Everyone hates spies.’
Stenwold shook his head. He wished, fervently wished, that he had a friend left, that he could talk to. Balkus was a loyal man, but blunt and simple of outlook, and Stenwold needed to sit with an old friend, and drink and vent his woes. He had nobody though. Che and Scuto were still north in Sarn. Tisamon, who he could have leant on, was heading east and taking Tynisa with him. He was being left alone here, and the weight of Collegium’s woes lay on his shoulders.
‘What did you want to tell me?’ he asked finally. ‘You had a message.’
Balkus nodded. ‘Just a little one,’ he said with a dour smile. ‘They’ve sighted the Vekken army. Some of your village folk have come in telling of it. Everything’s about to spark off around here.’
Greenwise Artector shuffled nervously, finding his lips dry, and aware of a knotting in his stomach. He had come out here in his very finest, his robes embroidered with Spider silk and gold thread, with a jewelled gorget tucked up against his lowest chin. Around him were a dozen others who had done their best to make a good first impression. Some had armour on, either ornately ceremonial or gleamingly functional steel. Many also wore ornamented swords at their belts. They were no soldiers and nobody could mistake them for it. These were the thirteen great Magnates of Helleron who made up its ruling council.
They had chosen for their podium a raised dais in one of the better market places beyond the city proper. It had seen its share of meat, whether the ham of poor actors or the subdued tread of slaves. Now it bore a nobler burden. Twelve men and one woman, none of them young and none of them slender. The wood had never groaned as much when the slaves were herded across it.
Behind the dais stood their retinues: a segregated rabble of guards and servants. Greenwise glanced back at his own followers, noting in the front rank one in particular.
And they were coming now. A change in the way his fellow magnates stood drew his attention to the front again. Three men approached, a spokesman and two of those common soldiers in their black-and-gold banded armour.
Behind them, off beyond the final tents of the extended city and onto the farmland eastwards, there were rather more than three, of course.
The man flanked by the soldiers was surprisingly young, surely only in his late twenties. Greenwise guessed at first he must be no more than a junior officer or a herald or some such, but there was something in his bearing that gave the lie to that. He had golden-red hair and a bright, open face full of edged smiles. No doubt he was the very darling of the Wasp-kinden womenfolk.
‘Are we all assembled?’ he enquired, clapping his hands together. Although the city’s councillors were raised above him he showed no sign of discomfort. By that demeanour he made it seem that, rather than seeking an audience, he had driven them up there as a wild beast might drive a man up a tree.
Greenwise glanced about him, because there was no spokesman in Helleron’s council. All were equal and as such none would trust the role to anyone else. One of his fellows was already stepping forward, though, a corpulent and balding man called Scordrey.
‘Young man,’ Scordrey said ponderously, ‘we are the Magnate Council of the great city of Helleron. Kindly give us the honour of your name and explain the purpose of . . . that presence.’ He waved a thick hand in the direction of the army to the east, as though it could all be dismissed so easily.
‘My apologies,’ said the young man, smiling up at them. ‘By the grace of His Imperial Majesty, I am General Malkan of the Imperial Seventh Army, also known as the Winged Furies.’ He had an odd way of speaking, self-aware and grinningly apologetic, that Greenwise saw instantly for a device. ‘I have come to you with a message and a proposal from my master. A choice, if you will.’
‘Now, look here . . . General, is it?’ Scordrey started, with the obvious intention of working towards delivering an insult. Greenwise stepped in quickly. ‘We are disturbed, General, that you appear to have brought a sizeable force to our gates,’ he said. ‘You must know that we of Helleron are not drawn into the wars of others.’
General Malkan’s smile did not diminish. ‘Forgive me, Masters Magnate, but I am unfamiliar with your local customs in that regard. You’ll find that we of the Empire tend to carry our own customs with us wherever we go. And, to correct you on one small point, we are not at your gates. You have no gates.’
‘Just what do you mean?’ Scordrey rumbled.
‘Shall I be plain, gentlemen? I am a man of honour and fairness. I pride myself on it. I would not dream of taking advantage of your good natures, just because I have been able to bring twenty-five thousand armed men to within striking distance of your homes without your taking up arms. I will, in the interests of equity, withdraw my men eastwards just as far as they can march before nightfall. Tomorrow, of course, we will return. I trust that will give you sufficient time to prepare yourself for any unpleasantness that might then occur.’
‘This is unspeakable!’ Scordrey bellowed.
‘And y
et I have spoken it.’ Malkan’s smile was now painful to behold.
‘Unthinkable!’ echoed another of the magnates. ‘We have no interest in your wars.’
‘We have always traded with your Empire,’ added the only female member of the council. She was named Halewright and she had made her fortune in the silk trade. The Spider-kinden always paid better prices to women.
‘General!’ said Greenwise, loud enough to quiet the rest momentarily. ‘You mentioned a choice?’
Malkan gave him a little bow. He was practically dancing with his own cleverness, Greenwise saw sourly. He was a general, he had said. Greenwise did not know whether, in the Empire, that station could be attained by good family alone, or whether Malkan would have genuinely earned that rank in his few years of service. He suspected the latter, unfortunately.
‘The Emperor, His Imperial Majesty Alvdan, second of that name, has no wish to force or coerce the great and the good of Helleron,’ the general confirmed. ‘So he offers you this ultimatum – my error, sirs, this choice. When we return tomorrow you shall agree to make Helleron a city of the Empire; you shall make its manufacturing facilities available for the demands of the imperial war effort; you shall place its commercial affairs into the hands of the Consortium of the Honest; you shall submit to imperial governance and an imperial garrison. If all these things are agreed to, without conditions, without the lawyerly quibbles that I am sure you are so fond of, then His Imperial Majesty shall see no reason to disrupt further the everyday business of this admirable city of yours. You magnates yourselves shall form the advisory council to the imperial governor, and you shall be permitted entry into the Consortium of the Honest along with such of your factors as you should wish to so honour. You shall, in short, continue to hold the reins of this city’s trade so long as you conform to the requests of the governor and the Emperor.’
The magnates of Helleron stared at him, quite aghast. Greenwise looked from face to face and saw that no other one of them was going to say it.
‘We have heard no choice as yet, General Malkan,’ he pointed out.
‘Did I forget the other option? What a fool I am,’ Malkan said merrily. ‘If you wish, of course, you are perfectly entitled to reject these demands and meet us with armed force. I am sure this city can dredge up a fair number of mercenaries and malcontents at short notice. If, however, I am met with a less than friendly reception tomorrow then I have orders to take this city by force. It would make me unhappy if that should come to pass. To assuage my unhappiness I should be forced to ensure that every one of you that I see before me now would be taken and executed in some suitably complex manner. Your families, your business associates, your servants and employees would all then be seized by our slave corps and sent to the most distant corners of the Empire to die in misery and degradation. Before that I would have to see to it that your wives and daughters, even your mothers if still alive, would suffer beneath the bodies of my men, and that your sons were mutilated in the machines of my artificers. I would destroy you so utterly that none would ever dare speak your names. I would remove you from the face of the world, and reshape your city entirely to my wish. Have I made myself clear concerning the precise options you must choose between?’
Greenwise silently watched the three Wasps leave. Just three, he thought. There were a dozen men with crossbows in the retinues assembled behind him. They could have stretched General Malkan headlong on the ground and his bodyguards too, but nobody had any illusions about the consequences of that.
He looked around at his own men, who were uncertain and unhappy, and beckoned to a Fly-kinden lad in the fore. Around him the conversation, the inevitable murmur of conversation, had started. He heard one man say, almost apologetically, how he had been trading with the Empire, and they had always settled their accounts admirably.
‘A military presence would mean that we would not need to worry about . . .’ started Scordrey, and tailed off because they had never had to worry about anything, until General Malkan and his twenty-five thousand.
‘The Consortium of the Honest have always seemed sound merchantmen,’ said Halewright slowly.
‘We would be able to expand our business into eastern markets much more easily,’ another added.
Greenwise turned to the Fly-kinden, stooping to speak quietly to him. ‘Are you in any doubt,’ he said, ‘about the response of the Council of Helleron to that general tomorrow?’
The diminutive Fly-kinden always seemed younger than they were, and this one looked barely fourteen, but the world of cynicism in his voice surprised even Greenwise. ‘Master Artector, no, sir.’
Greenwise nodded. ‘Then you must fly to Collegium, by whatever means you can, and tell the Assembler Stenwold Maker that Helleron has fallen to the Empire, and without a single blow being struck.’
‘I am gone, sir.’ The Fly-kinden took wing instantly, hovered for a second, and then darted off across the city. Nobody paid him any notice, and there were similar messengers lifting from the ground all around to their masters’ orders.
And Greenwise Artector turned his attention back to his peers, and to their slow and patient rationalization of the decision they had already made. The decision he, too, had made, for he was no hero, and he had his own lucrative business to safeguard.
Twenty-Two
Parops’s mind, like his city, was on fire. It was a clearing house for a thousand voices: his own calling to his men, keeping them in order; the soldiers with him, relaying their positions from every side; the watchers looking out for the next bomb to fall from the distantly circling airships; the civilians fleeing their homes; the civilians trapped in their homes and who could not escape. Tark was built of stone, but when the bombs exploded overhead they deluged streets in fiery rain that scorched in through shutters and doors, flooded the rooms beyond, and burned and burned. The substance being used was stickier than oil and it clung to walls, to armour and especially to flesh. It did not keep burning for long but even water would not kill it.
Through this constant cacophony the order came to him to fall back immediately. He knew that two score of his soldiers were busy trying to free trapped civilians but he passed the call on, leaden-hearted. Orders were reaching him directly from the Royal Court now, the King’s own voice issued them. Even Parops, who thought further and wider than most of his kin, would not dare ignore a royal command.
Fall back to Fourteenth-Twenty-ninth! he instructed his detachment, slinging his shield up on his back. Just then another incendiary charge struck, only two streets away, igniting at barely over roof level, and he felt its impact amongst the men of Officer Juvian, heard the exclamations of fear and horror as it consumed the officer himself and two dozen of his men, scorching the street clean of them. Tears shone bright on Parops’s face, but he had his duty. As an Ant-kinden of Tark, he would never shirk it.
His men began falling back in good order. About half of them were regular infantry, properly armed and armoured. The rest were drafted citizens, for every Ant was trained to use a sword from the youngest age. These militia had no shields, but they had no armour to slow them either, and armour proved no protection against this incendiary deluge.
He had lost his tower, almost the first structure to fall. During the evacuation, half of Parops’s staff had succumbed to shot or flame, not just soldiers but his messengers, his clerks, his quartermaster. As soon as Parops was clear he had new duties forced on him: to take command of a hastily formed body of men, to oppose the Wasp advance. Yet his progress had been retreat after retreat. He knew that several of the other detachments were advancing slowly and that there must be some grand plan that the Royal Court was working towards, but he himself was not privy to it. He must only hope that it was a good one, so that if he was called upon to give his life for his city, it would not be in vain.
He had always thought himself a bit of a philosopher amongst his people, a man who questioned where others never thought to. Now he discovered that he was, after all, just a
soldier. If the orders came to die for Tark, he would do it and gladly. He surprised himself with the thought.
‘I’ve been looking all over for you!’
A blur of motion above, and Parops only just gave the order in time for them to stay their hands before Nero would have been transfixed by a dozen crossbow bolts.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded of the Fly.
The bald man shrugged his shoulders, settling on a windowsill one floor up. ‘Looking for you, you fool! What the blazes are you up to?’
‘Obeying orders,’ Parops told him shortly. ‘You should move back – we’re the front line here.’
‘Oh, I know that.’ Nero wore a padded cuirass, that was an arming jacket meant for a child of twelve, and a short-bow was slung over his shoulder.
‘You’re no soldier!’ Parops insisted. ‘You’ll get killed if you stay here, probably by us. Go find yourself somewhere safe!’
‘You tell me where that might be, and I’ll go there,’ Nero said.
Parops wanted to argue, but orders came through again at that instant: Commander Parops. Advance.
He spared one more upward glance at Nero, then sent this command onwards, watching his men come out from their shelters, from side streets and within buildings. Those armed with shields formed up to the fore, and the rest quickly crowded in behind. Parops took his place, as naturally as any of them. It seemed he had always been trying to find his place in his own city, and it was terrible that only a disaster such as this could show it to him.
But they were now advancing, as ordered, and he knew that the detachments on either side, that were within the reach of his mind, were doing likewise. Ahead he could see a flitting of black and yellow as the Wasps spotted them and began to get into order. They were lightly armoured advance troops, and many were already taking to the air. The first bolts of energy spat towards the front rank of Parops’s men, most falling short and fading, and one crackling impotently against a shield.
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