Maybe, after all this is over and Jodry has me indicted, going back to the sea will be the best option for me. The old fear rose in him of the dark and hungry water, but it seemed less immediate, now, more amenable to negotiation.
For a long time Stenwold stared at the letter, and then he began to work on a reply, less concerned with content than clarity of expression, submerging himself in the scholarly. When the Great Ear sounded, even when the bombs began to fall, he hunkered down and concentrated, as though he was truly an academic again and the sounds outside only the noisy distractions of students. Time and again, he chased away the thoughts, What if I die tonight; what if Banjacs does? Can this be salvaged, or will the sacrifice of so many come to nothing? But the queasy feeling grew within him, the uncertainty of the gamble he and Jodry had taken, until he could no longer palm off his mind with Sea-kinden calligraphy, but only stare out of the window and realize that the war hung on tonight and tomorrow, and any misjudgement could lose everything for his people.
There was a knock at the door. He finally put the letter down.
He was not sure who he expected, but Janos Outwright was not the man. The portly little moustachioed Beetle, in pristine uniform with his own wheel of pikes and snapbows proudly displayed, beamed at Stenwold with his usual self-importance. There were two more of Outwright’s Pike and Shot standing behind him.
‘What’s happened?’ Stenwold demanded.
‘Nothing yet, apparently,’ Janos said pleasantly, although the crash and crump of the bombs nearly swallowed up his words. ‘Can we come in?’
When he had got under cover, with his men, and when Stenwold grudgingly found some mediocre wine for them, Janos deigned to explain further. ‘All very baffling, but there was rumour that the Empire was going to take a poke at some of the great and good, with you as top of the list. Soon as word came, I decided that you merited the finest in guardianship, so here I am.’
‘Word from where?’
‘Some student,’ Janos said airily and then, just as Stenwold was preparing a brusque reply, ‘that Wasp one, apparently, though I didn’t hear it direct from him.’
‘The…?’ Stenwold tried to summon the Wasp youth’s name to mind, but couldn’t. ‘Where is he?’
‘Running around warning people, like I said.’ Janos sipped his wine and made a great show of appreciation. ‘You can arrest him tomorrow for it, if you want. Everything seems a bit busy tonight for that sort of thing.’ He waggled his eyebrows, as though the detonations so close by outside were just high spirits.
Stenwold did not even hear the next knock, but Janos plainly did. He went strolling over to the door as though he owned the place.
They shot him dead right on Stenwold’s doorstep, a snapbow bolt making a ruin of his throat above his gleaming breastplate and scarring the wall beyond, barely slowed. Then they were shouldering in: a half-dozen burly Beetle men, armoured piece-meal with leather and canvas and chitin plate, with knives and swords and two snapbows leading the charge.
Janos saved Stenwold’s life even so — both by being the man to answer the door and by bringing two Merchant Company regulars along with him. They were caught off guard, by surprise, and yet both managed to get a shot off, killing a snapbowman and a swordsman, and wounding one of the men behind as the bolt passed right through his comrade.
Then it was blade work. One of the soldiers got his sword clear, receiving a couple of strikes that his mail fended off. The second Merchant Company man had barely dropped his discharged snapbow when a dagger was rammed into his groin and he collapsed.
Stenwold had no weapons on him. Shouting for the sole remaining defender to hold, somehow, he rushed for the stairs. A snapbow bolt ploughed past his head into the wall, an opportunistic shot spoiled by the jostle of the melee inside the doorway.
Stenwold usually wore his sword, but not in his own house, and he had left it by the door — as unattainable now as if he had dropped it in the street. Upstairs, though, he had the collected works of a life lived at war with the Empire, if he only had time to deploy them.
There was a choking cry from below, and he guessed that the sole remaining soldier had fallen to superior numbers. Stenwold threw himself into his bedroom, flipping open a drawer of his bedside cabinet, and then hurled himself over the bed, clutching for what was mounted on the wall there. He heard feet thundering up the stairs.
The weight of the piercer fell into his hands, and he checked the weapon every tenday, keeping the monstrous instrument charged and loaded. It had saved his life more than once, a firepowder-charged bolt-thrower with four arm’s-length spears in its barrels.
Then the attackers were spilling in, or that was how he read the situation as he pulled the trigger. The first man had time to skid off his feet, falling flat on his back, and the third was still partway up the stairs, recharging his snapbow, so the luckless second man took three of the four bolts dead on, enough to render the bulk of him unrecognizable as human.
The piercer was useless now, and Stenwold leapt for the drawer even as the first man was lunging for him. A shortsword gashed his arm and then he had the little two-barrel snapbow out and tried to bring it to bear. For a moment he and the killer wrestled, each trying to wrench the weapon out of the other’s hand, Then there was a shout, and Stenwold’s opponent flung himself backwards. The snapbowman in the doorway had his weapon loaded and was frantically charging it.
Stenwold loosed, taking the swordsman in the chest with one barrel, not a tactical decision so much as sheer reflex. He had no time to take the other man, for there was a sizzling flash — a sound and sight odious and familiar to Stenwold from twenty years of personal war.
The third man’s snapbow discharged, the snap sounding a moment after the flare, but the wielder was already falling forwards, punched from behind, his weapon’s mouth jerking up. Stenwold felt a searing claw rake the side of his face, shooting pain through his head, but he was still standing afterwards, his right ear torn so that he could not tell what of the thunder came from outside, and what from within his head.
A Wasp appeared at the door and Stenwold made a strangled sound and jabbed the little snapbow forwards, There was a flicker of wings as the new arrival fell back, dragging the door closed after him, the bolt holing the wood effortlessly.
Trying to work out what was real, Stenwold stood in his own bedroom, three men in various extremities of death decorating his floor, his own blood flowing freely down the side of his neck and pooling at his collar. His hands, those past masters of necessity, found fresh bolts in the drawer, reloading and recharging the snapbow even as his mind reeled.
From downstairs, an uncertain voice called up, ‘Master Maker?’ He felt he should recognize it, but no name sprang to mind.
Stenwold took the bedside cabinet and moved it over to the door, kicking the dead snapbowman clear of its opening arc. His head was still ringing, and the house itself rang, too, the bombardment continuous and close. For a moment Stenwold balanced himself, one foot on the cabinet, a hand on the door, before flinging the door wide and kicking the cabinet out as hard as he could. He heard it reach the stairs, with surprised oaths from below.
Then he went after it, standing at the balcony rail with his snapbow levelled. ‘Weapons down!’ he yelled, murder in his voice,
There was a Beetle youth below him, also the Wasp, both with their hands held in sight, the Wasps’ clenched into fists. They wore some sort of Company sash, and the Beetle looked like a student. They both looked like students.
Eujen Leadswell and Averic, his errant memory recalled, and further reminded him that the snapbowman dead behind him had the charring of a Wasp sting in his back. There was a short-sword at Eujen’s feet that had blood on it, too, and that other body at the foot of the stairs had presumably supplied the blood.
For a moment Stenwold simply stood there, trapped in the moment, weapon levelled and listening to the sound of his city being destroyed, until chains of logic fell into place, and he ja
mmed the snapbow in his belt.
Nine dead men downstairs, and Stenwold was shaken now to think how he might have been one more. Step by step, he stomped his way down the stairs. ‘What’s going on? Why are you here?’ he demanded. He could not find it within himself to thank them — not these two.
They exchanged nervous glances, guilty almost. He felt the screw turn within him at the unfairness, given what they had done, but he could not stoop. He found his pride would not let him.
Some consensus was reached, and Eujen spoke first. ‘Master Maker, Averic was approached by Imperial agents who tried to recruit him. They had a list of victims to kill tonight. We have passed on details, best guesses as to targets. But you were surely top of the list. We tried to get here sooner. The streets…’ By the end of his speech he had recognized the corpse of Janos Outwright and was staring at it in horrified fascination.
Thereby saving my life twice over. But still the gracious words would not come. ‘I need to know everything they told you,’ he snapped at Averic, making the Wasp twitch. ‘Come with me, both of you.’ He stomped past them, heedless of the blood underfoot, collecting his sword. He was in command, he assured himself. The roar and crash from without gave the lie to that thought, but he clung to it, building a self-righteous anger to defend himself, which led on to the words: ‘And Master Leadswell, I trust you have reconsidered your stance on the Empire.’
He was so much the mighty engine of state, right then, that he had stepped onto the street outside before realizing that the two students were not simply pattering in his shadow. He looked back, and the flash and gout of the next bomb showed Eujen Leadswell’s face all too clearly, standing motionless beside that small fragment of the Empire that had cast its lot in with Collegium this night.
‘Master Maker,’ Leadswell stated, ‘when this is done, I will put myself forward at the Lots and get myself made Assembler, however long it takes. And when I do, I shall fight you at every bloody turn.’
‘Let us hope you that have the opportunity. If the Wasps win I don’t imagine anyone will be casting Lots any time soon,’ Stenwold retorted instantly, even though part of him was listening to his own words and shouting, Give it a rest! Just unbend and put a hand out to them. Except that putting a hand out meant friendship only in Collegium. To a Wasp it was a prequel to killing.
Averic’s hand was out already, and Stenwold flinched, reaching for his snapbow. The Wasp was pointing, though, his face bloodless and horrified in the ruddy glare of flames.
Stenwold turned, without expectations, and the sight struck him like a blow. There was a colossal conflagration at the centre of the city. The Amphiophos was burning.
Thirty-Four
Reaching the Amphiophos was a nightmare journey through disintegrating streets, encountering the dispossessed, the grieving, the blank-faced Merchant Company soldiers who could not help. The city’s familiar landmarks had been picked up and strewn like a child’s toys. Collegium was large and the enemy orthopters had been few, relatively speaking. The Beetle-kinden would survive, but still the scale of the damage was daunting. An unopposed incursion finally served to show what the hard work of the Collegiate airmen and women had been achieving as the nightly fruits of their failing defence.
The bombing was tailing off by the time Stenwold reached the first rubble foothills of the Amphiophos, and it was a bitter thought that only a shortage of bombs could be behind their retreat.
They will come in greater numbers tomorrow. That is what this has all been about. If I am wrong about Banjacs’s machine, though… then I will have invited the end. The thought of that same end being inevitable sooner or later, if Banjacs failed, was not one to comfort him.
Like little ants whose nest has been kicked over. That was the image that came to Stenwold as he set eyes on Collegium’s fallen heart of governance. Visible in the light of those fires still blazing, the shell and rubble of the place was crawling with the living, and he knew they were searching for the dead. He saw clerks and Company soldiers, servants, cleaners, concerned citizens, some still in nightshirts, all of them picking over the collapsed grandeur of the sprawling building. The Amphiophos’s heart was of ancient Moth construction, and succeeding generations had re-edified it, adding wings and rooms, domes, gardens, spires and suites, but all with surprising taste, preserving the pre-revolution elegance of the original white stone, so that the whole formed a bridge to a distant past that the Beetles had otherwise turned their backs on. From these halls the Moth-kinden had ruled their coastal city of Pathis, and the subject people who would, in the end, overthrow them. From these same white halls the founding parents of Collegium had set their course: embracing not arms and grudges and feuding like their Ant neighbours, but learning and tolerance and thought. The College and the Amphiophos, and the whole of Collegium sprang from that source, mind and heart.
One of the new wings was still standing, its windows just jagged empty sockets, but the interior merely singed rather than gutted. The rest had been laid waste. Domes had cracked like eggshells, often one wall and a section of curved roof still tottering, the rest fallen amidst a devastation of tapestries and murals and mosaics and art, and of lives too. The western end was still on fire, the water crews fighting to beat down the flames. The rest… Stenwold had never seen such a wasteland, not even in Myna. The attack on that city had been brutal but swift, but Collegium had been pounded and pounded, night after night, and now…
The expressions on the faces of those around him were haggard and gaunt with grief and incredulity, thoughts retreating deep inwards as the hands worked, shifting stones, searching for survivors or for simple confirmation of mortality. There were sobs from a few, but most simply forced themselves to it like automatons, building up a head of grief that would strike them the moment they rested.
In the midst of all this, he found Jodry.
The Speaker for the Assembly came shambling out from between roofless walls, his formal robes torn and soot stained, skin disfigured with bruises. There was a gash on his scalp that had been clumsily, hastily dressed. He stumbled and tripped over the fallen stones, hugging to him a burden that Stenwold could not identify for a moment, and then realized was a mass of papers bundled together awkwardly, charred and ripped and sodden in turn.
Jodry dumped them to the ground, and Stenwold saw that there was already a couple of other similar mounds, a meagre harvest of scrolls and books that were now in too poor a state to be sold in a Helleron street market.
‘Jodry,’ he called, and the man looked up, eyes bloodshot with the smoke, haunted by knowledge.
‘Sten.’ The fat man’s voice was the ghost of its former self.
‘What are you…?’ For a moment Stenwold wondered if the Speaker had gone mad.
‘The records, Sten. The minutes, laws, Assembly debates… our government, Sten.’ Jodry gestured helplessly at the ruined papers, even as his secretary, Arvi, staggered out with another pile, looking as battered and begrimed as his master.
‘But these…’ Stenwold crouched to begin leafing through the nearest pile. Loose pages from manifests, transcripts, judgements, accounts, but nothing connecting to its neighbours, nothing complete or whole, each pile almost whimsical in its juxtaposition, books compiled by idiots for illiterates.
‘It’s all we have. It’s Collegium,’ Jodry whispered. ‘It just needs… sorting out and filing, Sten…’
‘Jodry, for the world’s sake, sit down. Get something to drink. Arvi, surely you can…?’
Wearily, the Fly reached into his tunic and produced a flask. Stenwold had the impression that it was not from Jodry’s stock, rather for the little man’s private consumption, but he passed it to his master without comment. Jodry tipped it back, gagged at whatever was inside, and then choked over it for long enough that, on looking Stenwold in the face again, there was a measure of composure once more in his eyes.
Neither of them said it. Neither of them uttered the words, We did this. The thought travelled be
tween them as though they had rented a mindlink from the Ants for the occasion.
Stenwold shook his head. ‘It could have been any night, Jodry. It would have come, sometime. The very inevitability of this, and all the other variants of this, was why we… why we made our decision.’
Jodry nodded wearily. ‘Banjacs’s house still stands,’ he said. ‘The College lost the Awlbright workshops and machine rooms, and they put a hole through the Prowess Forum roof, though that one didn’t go off. And the rest, Sten… the list of homes and shops and lives.’ He looked up, frowning. ‘What happened to your ear?’
In truth, Stenwold had almost forgotten, having just slapped some ointment on the wound — a pain worse than the original — to kill off the animicules before he left the house. ‘Assassin,’ he explained curtly. His own difficulties seemed trivial by comparison.
‘Someone assassinated your ear.’ Jodry managed a half-inch worth of weak smile. ‘Well that sounds as though the general warning we got was a good one.’ The smile was gone. ‘More paperwork, then. Who was attacked? Who did they get? I know poor Bola Stormall was shot dead outside her house. We sent soldiers off to guard everyone who seemed likely, but we couldn’t protect everyone.’
‘And they couldn’t attack everyone, either. And the men who came for me won’t be moving on down the list, for certain,’ Stenwold put in fiercely.
Jodry nodded wearily, unwilling to accept even that meagre victory, and then his eyes lit on something beyond Stenwold. Eujen Leadswell and the Wasp Averic had trailed after him to the devastation of the Amphiophos, and were now standing, humbled and aghast at the sight of the ruin.
‘They came to warn you, then,’ Jodry noted. ‘The Wasp boy guessed you’d be top of their list.’ For a moment it seemed that he might gloat, perhaps suggest that Stenwold take Averic off for an interrogation by the soldiers of the Maker’s Own. Seeing this diminished man before him, Stenwold would almost have preferred that.
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