They were gathering only what was valuable. Not the mere flesh that was spent, not even the purses or effects of the dead. Only the harder metals, that could be used again or smelted and reforged. It seemed to him so fitting, what they did, for they were cogs, and war was the machine. Here on the battlefield was where the machine’s wheels ground hardest, where the metal met and the end process was written in bodies and blood. Had he not seen, in Helleron, where the raw materials of war were cast, all the swords and bolts and engines? Here was where the process came full circle, where the discarded pieces of a war were made as new, ready to go back into the mix. Only the meat, transient and replaceable, would not be saved. There was always more of that. Meanwhile, here came Ant-kinden soldiers to carry the stripped corpses to the pyres, and who knew whether the next ones to fall in this very place would be the same men who now hauled the bodies away? Interchangeable, the living and the dead. All meat.
He had not intended, when he left the others, to see this. His world had been complete without this. He had been happy in his ignorance, for ignorant Totho had been. But he was an artificer and this war was an artificer’s thing, a mechanical process cranked over and over by the constant refinement of the weaponsmith and the armourer, the automotive engineer and the volatiles chemist. Seen in that light, in that harsh but clear light, the whole business became somehow admirable. If he looked past the meat, contrived not to see it, then it was just another process that sharpened and honed itself each time it was set in motion.
‘Hey, Beetle-boy!’
He looked up without curiosity to see Skrill picking her way over to him, with Salma following a little way behind. Her arm was bandaged tightly, bound up in a sling. ‘I ain’t pulling any bow no time soon,’ she informed him. ‘Got me good, they did. Thought they’d got you too, when you took off.’
Totho merely shook his head. It seemed so long since he had spoken that the words had dried up inside him, making him envy the Ant-kinden and their voices of the mind.
‘Well, if this ain’t a right mess,’ Skrill decided, dismissing the butchery with that. The air was thickening with flies, an intrusion Totho had not noticed before, from the littlest ones to fist-sized blood-drinkers. Where do they come from? Was there some machine churning them out? Surely all these insects had not been just waiting around in Tark for a massacre.
‘The Ants think they won, last night,’ Salma said, ‘though I’m not so sure. The Wasps eventually pulled back, but to their own tune, not ours.’ He used to smile a lot, Totho remembered, but his face was tired now, without even the ghost of that grin left.
‘They’re all over the gaps in the wall, our lot, putting up stuff to fill ’em,’ Skrill added. ‘Ain’t going to make much difference is my thinking.’
‘Parops reckons they can hold against one more attack before the Wasps take the wall, anyway,’ Salma continued. ‘Their soldiers got the measure of the Wasp infantry last night, and the Tarkesh think they’re superior. If the Wasps want the wall they’ll have to pay for it, or that’s what they’re saying.’
Totho surprised himself by laughing. Salma stared at him.
‘What? Is something funny?’
‘You,’ said Totho, feeling his voice rasp in his throat. ‘You, fighting an Ant war. Where’s Parops?’
Wordlessly, Salma pointed to where a squad of Ants was labouring at one edge of the breach, fixing stone and wood into place to make some kind of a barricade.
‘Let’s talk to Parops,’ said Totho, but Salma gripped him by the shoulder.
‘Are you hurt, Toth?’
The halfbreed artificer looked him right in the eye, but without quite focusing. ‘I’ve just. seen. Salma, I made a mistake. You know why I came?’
‘I think I do.’
‘How could.? Surely this isn’t what I meant, by coming here.’
Salma let out a long breath. ‘I don’t think anybody meant this. I never saw it, but I heard reports during the Twelve-Year War. There were single days of fighting that you could have fitted these corpses into five times. And if Tark falls, then where next? Helleron? Collegium? This is why we have to fight them.’
Totho shook his head, feeling it throb in response. ‘If we wanted to stop this, then we should just not fight them at all. We should just give in. But we don’t, and so we don’t want to stop it. We fight them to create war, and this’ — a vague gesture across the strewn ground — ‘is just a byproduct. War is what it’s about, and we all work hard at it.’
‘Listen to you, Beetle-boy,’ Skrill said nervously. ‘You got knocked on the head or something?’
‘There may have been a grenade,’ Totho said vaguely. ‘Close, perhaps. We should speak to Parops.’ Without a further look at them he wandered away.
Parops glanced up as they came over. Helping build barricades, he still had his armour on and it was still unfastened at the back. In all the night’s chaos there had been nobody yet to secure it for him. Nero was sitting nearby, watching the busy activity but pointedly taking no part in it.
‘You’re wasting your time, Commander,’ Totho announced for all to hear. Parops raised an eyebrow.
‘And why’s that?’ he asked. Salma came up quickly and took Totho’s arm.
‘He’s taken a beating,’ he explained. ‘You shouldn’t mind him.’
‘They won’t come in by this door. They wanted to draw you out. I’ve understood it,’ Totho explained.
‘Since when were you a tactician, lad?’ Nero asked him.
‘I don’t have to be. There was a man. a slave of the Wasps. He told me. He warned me, I think. “Airships,” he said. I would use airships, if I could.’
Staring at Totho, Parops had gone very still. ‘Airships,’ he echoed.
Totho shrugged, still finding it difficult to concentrate. None of it seemed that important. ‘That was what he said. I think it was what he said.’
‘Totho!’ Salma took him by the shoulders and pulled at him. ‘Come back to us,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying, but if it’s important. ’
The world shifted and slid sideways in Totho’s head, and he blinked. ‘He said airships,’ he told Salma softly. ‘I pulled him out from under the engine. He was an artificer, Salma, like me.’
‘You’d better come with me,’ said Parops, and set off for his guard tower at a jog.
He took them up to his arrowslit, noticeably slanted now. Parops’s entire tower seemed to be at a slight tilt. His commandership there might be living on borrowed time, Salma reckoned.
Out beyond the wall they could see the broad swathe of the imperial camp, and there was little new there, save that their numbers seemed barely touched by the atrocities of the previous night.
At the camp’s far end, though, lay the enemy’s makeshift airfield, where a few of the heliopters could be made out. There, beyond those blocky, graceless things, something was now rising up.
Several things, in fact. Half a dozen bloated shapes were slowly, imperceptibly swelling. Already they were bigger than the heliopters ranged before them, and Salma had the impression they still had a way to expand yet.
Parops had passed round his telescope, which Salma had no idea what to do with. It showed him nothing but blurs but Totho took it and peered into it keenly, seeming more focused than he had been since Skrill had first found him.
‘They would do the job,’ the artificer observed. ‘I can see that. Now there are no air defences left.’
‘Little enough,’ Parops agreed. ‘Most of the nest crop is gone, and we only have a couple of orthopters that could even be repaired on time. They threw a lot at us last night.’
‘Of course, and for that very reason,’ Totho murmured, still scrutinizing the distant gasbags. ‘An artificer’s war.’ He looked back at the others, seeming more himself, more the avid student Salma had known. The animation with which he spoke of his trade was macabre. ‘Airships are very vulnerable to any flying attack. That’s why they’ve not been used much in warf
are.’ Right now he might have been a College master delivering his lecture.
‘So what are those things out there?’ Skrill demanded. Totho gave her a frustrated look.
‘They’re airships, of course, because there will be no airborne opposition to them now. They just have to float them over the city. It makes perfect sense. It’s just that the Tarkesh don’t think like Wasps. Parops, your people fight ground wars, and so your air power is secondary, kept just for spotting and the occasional surprise attack, but the Wasps think like you should think, Salma. They think in the air and now they’ve opened the city on the ground, and stripped its wings away, they’ll proceed to attack it from above. Those heliopters are too heavy, and they fly too low. You could shoot them down with your wall artillery, maybe even with sufficient crossbows. The airships, though. they can go so high, only the best fliers could reach them. So what will you do?’
‘But what can they do?’ Nero asked. ‘They can spy us out, but we can shoot their troops if they drop down-’
‘They can do whatever they want,’ Totho said, leaning back against the wall, his mind still full of airships. ‘The whole of Tark will be spread below them. Explosives, incendiaries — it would be like dropping boiling oil onto a map, you see. Drop — drop — drop, and three buildings gone. And all we will be able to do is shake our fists at them.’
Twelve
Che had never before seen an Ant-kinden who was actually fat. If it were not for Plius’s distinctive Ant features she would have thought him some kind of halfbreed. That was not the only surprise about him. He was not a Sarnesh Ant, which was even more remarkable given the Ants’ propensity to make war on others of their own kind. His skin was icy blue-white while the irises of his eyes were dead black, which had the effect of making them seem huge. She had seldom seen such colouring before, and had no idea what city-state he might have come from.
‘Scuto,’ he called out from the table he had to himself in the taverna, leaning back in a capacious chair. He wore an open robe over an expensive-looking tunic that strained over his belly, but there was a shortsword slung over the chair-back, to show he had not entirely left his belligerent roots behind.
Scuto glanced about, but none of the other patrons, few enough of them, seemed interested. It was still before midday and most of the inhabitants of Sarn’s foreign quarter were out taking care of business.
‘It’s been a while,’ Plius remarked, as the Thorn Bug approached. He kicked another chair out for him, and then glanced quickly from Che’s face to Sperra’s. ‘Pimping now, are you?’ he asked. Despite his louche appearance, he spoke in an Ant’s voice, with its characteristic clipped precision.
‘This lady here is Cheerwell Maker. You remember Sten Maker? Well this is his niece. The other’s called Sperra.’
Plius waved the introductions away. ‘So I heard you were looking for me, Scuto. It’s been a while,’ he repeated.
‘It has that,’ Scuto admitted. ‘Didn’t know how much of the old cadre would still be here for me.’
Plius shrugged. ‘There’s Dola over at the Chop Ketcher Importing place but, if you’ve not heard from her, she’s probably keeping her head down. As I said, Scuto, it’s been a while since then, and we’ve all had the chance to make some money here in Sarn.’
Scuto’s pause for breath, his moment of hesitation, opened a book for Che on his relations with Plius: revealing that they had never really trusted one another, and that Scuto had no guarantee that the other man would be of any use to them.
‘So where are we now?’ Scuto asked.
Plius shrugged. ‘We’re in a city where I have a good business going, Scuto, but if you want something, then ask and, if it’s not too much out of my way, maybe it will happen.’
‘What is your business, if I can ask?’ Che put in. This man seemed so corrupt, but she knew the Ants were ruthless with crime, even here in Sarn.
‘Ah, well.’ Plius coughed and grinned. ‘It happens I’m the most successful milliner in Sarn.’
‘The most successful what?’ Che asked.
‘I used to be the only one, but now there are two more, which shows you how profitable the trade’s become.’
‘A milliner? You mean hats?’
Plius’s grin widened. ‘The way it was, you see, there weren’t any here, because Ants would wear helms or go bare-headed, but of course Sarn has a foreign quarter that covers almost a third of the city these days, and Sarn is half again as big as most Ant states. So there was a call for them, and business was good. And you know what? Now the Ants have started buying as well. Now they can see the foreigners having a good time, they themselves start to change how they dress and the like. They still all look like they’re ready for a funeral, but at least they’re not all dressed exactly the same.’ He turned his attention back to Scuto. ‘So what is it, then? What brings you back here for me?’
‘You know what,’ Scuto told him. ‘It’s happening, Plius. It’s time.’
‘Yes, well, I’ve heard the news.’ Plius spread his hands. ‘The Empire, which was your man Sten’s bedbug back in the old days, is away battering Tark even as we speak. Things may have changed in this city, but not that much. Nobody in Sarn’s going to lose sleep about the Tarkesh taking a few punches.’
‘We ain’t here to ask for Tark’s sake,’ Scuto said flatly. ‘It’s too late, anyway, by my reckoning. This lot’d never get there in time. Now I ain’t a diplomat or a pretty speaker, so I’ll put it plain as I can. Sure, you’ve heard about Tark. Well, soon enough you’ll hear about Helleron, too.’
‘What about Helleron?’
‘Soon enough,’ Scuto said again. ‘And probably Egel and Merro, once they’re done with Tark. Who knows where next? They’ll be marching up the coast towards Collegium, and from Helleron it’s not such a jump to take Etheryon. Or even Sarn.’
Che expected Plius to laugh this off, but something in Scuto’s tone, maybe his very lack of emphasis, had drawn the Ant’s face longer and longer. ‘You mean it, don’t you?’ Plius said. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Ain’t never been more,’ Scuto confirmed, sounding tired. ‘Look, Plius, I saw the start of it at Helleron, when they tried to get a thousand men by rail into Collegium to shake the place up. They’re not really after Tark. It’s the Lowlands they want. The whole of it, from Helleron all the way to Vek and the west coast. They’ve got more fighting men than five Ant cities put together, and a dozen slave-towns to pull more soldiers from. You know the Commonweal?’
‘Yes, I know the Commonweal,’ Plius said testily.
‘Well then you know they’ve spent the last dozen years carving out a great lump of that, and now they’re ready for us,’ said Scuto. Plius’s easygoing manner had evaporated entirely now, and he was looking a little stunned.
‘So what do you want?’ he asked, and Scuto replied, ‘We need to speak to the top, Plius. To the Royal Court.’
Plius let out a long breath. ‘If you’d asked that straight off I would have said you were mad. Now, though. I have some contacts. Not high-up contacts, but they’re there. I can try for an audience, but it’ll use up just about all my credit with them.’
‘What,’ Scuto said pointedly, ‘were you saving it for?’
On their arrival, Che’s first view of Sarn had been of a city split by the line of the rail track. As the automotive pulled in to the depot it had seemed to her that somehow — by Achaeos’s magic perhaps — there were two cities, as close as a shadow to each other, but each blind to its neighbour.
To the right was Sarn, the Ant city-state comprised of low, spartan buildings, pale stone and flat roofs without decoration. The people there moved briskly but without haste, and they did not stop to speak to one another or gather to converse. Everyone knew precisely where they were going. Soldiers were on hand to watch the automotive and make sure, she suspected, that only native Sarnesh alighted through the right-hand doors. Everything looked clean and orderly and the streets of the city ran at precise angles
to one another, all in the shadow of the city wall.
To the left lay the foreigners’ quarter, which presented a totally different world. To start with, its limits had begun outside the walls, with stalls, wagons and tents extending a hundred yards down the road that ran alongside the rail track. Inside the walls, it fairly bustled. Even the depot’s goods yard had suffered a hundred encroachments, with market stalls pitched ready to ambush the unwary visitor, peddlers and hawkers and dozens of kinds of traders converging or waiting or looking out for each other. There were a lot of Beetle-kinden amongst them, mostly Collegium-grown and many even College-educated: merchants and artificers and scholars all mingling, clasping hands, making animated conversation with frequent gestures, as though to compensate for the quiet world just across the track. There were others, too, especially Fly-kinden — dozens of them, from ostentatiously well-dressed merchants to grubby peddlers of trinkets, their eyes keen for a loose purse or dropped coin. There were also some from breeds not commonly found within the Lowlands: a Commonweal Dragonfly mercenary in piecemeal armour of glittering hues and a long-faced Grasshopper in College-styled robes discoursing with two Beetle scholars. Spiders, she saw, though not so many as Collegium regularly knew, and small wonder, for she had never seen so many Mantis-kinden in one place in her life. Some were in bands, lounging about and watched carefully by the guard. Many went singly, at the shoulder of some wealthy foreigner or other as a tactful and tacit warning to thieves and rivals. With their strongholds of Nethyon and Etheryon just north of Sarn, a lot of Mantis-kinden young bloods came down here looking for excitement, hiring themselves out as mercenaries or bodyguards.
The Sarnesh were to be found in the foreigners’ quarter as well, of course. She had expected their armoured men and women patrolling through the throng and keeping a careful eye on exposed weapons and their owners. She was struck, though, by the many brown-skinned Ant-kinden, robed or dressed in simple tunics, doing patient business with their visitors, or simply walking through the crowd, taking a vicarious interest in all the bustle that was going on within their walls.
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