The other hunters were still outside the city, waiting for his return and report. He had decided that he was the most experienced man amongst them, and therefore that he should be their leader. So far, at least, they had followed his suggestions. He knew a few of them by reputation, had met with Gaved the Wasp once before in a bitter dispute over an escaped slave. There were no hard feelings, though. They were both professionals.
He holed up in a taverna until dusk, enjoying being the only unconcerned man in a panicking city. The prices were cheap but the service was poor, because the innkeeper’s son and daughter had both run off to join the army. That thought made Kori smile at the foolishness of the world. It was not that he feared risk, since risk was his business, but he always made sure that he was suitably reimbursed for any risks he took, and made sure he could always fly away if things got messy. In a world turned so badly on its head, there was no better life than that of a mercenary agent.
As dusk fell he made his silent exit, flying fast and high above the Vekken encampment, beyond any Ant-kinden’s view or crossbow’s reach, out into the hills beyond until he had tracked down his fellows’ camp.
‘You’re late,’ Scylis informed him, when he landed.
‘I set the clock, so I’m never late,’ Kori said. ‘I’ve been biding my time, is all.’
‘Well?’ asked Gaved.
‘Well I visited Collegium once before,’ Kori said, ‘but I don’t recall it as being quite so crawling with Ants.’
The four hunters looked over the camps of dark tents that had spread like a stain around the city. From their hilltop retreat they had heard the loudest sounds of conflict, the roars of the leadshotters and other firepowder weaponry.
Gaved had spent the day spying out the walls with his telescope. ‘Well, they warned us to expect trouble.’
‘This is more than just trouble,’ the Fly considered. ‘This complicates things. We should be asking for more money.’
‘That’s your answer to everything, isn’t it, Kori?’ observed Phin the Moth, looking amused.
‘Never found a problem it couldn’t solve yet,’ he agreed. ‘You reckon this is the Empire, then?’
‘Vekkens,’ Phin corrected him.
‘Yeah, but that maggot patron of ours in Helleron knew there’d be trouble. So I reckon the Empire’s been stirring, eh?’
‘Of course it’s the Empire,’ Scylis, Scyla, told them. Her companions talked too much, and she was fed up with all of them. She always worked best alone. Phin and Gaved had even slept with each other a couple of times, which she viewed as unprofessional. There was no real affection there, she knew, just physical need, but it still irked her. Perhaps it was the price of her wearing a man’s face most of the time.
‘I reckon the Empire wants all of this,’ Gaved said distantly. ‘They’re starting fires like this all over, so they can just come over and stamp them out. Going to be a bleak enough place when the black-and-gold gets here.’
‘You? What will you have to worry about?’ Scyla asked him. ‘They’re your cursed people.’
That made him frown at her, and sharply too. ‘If you had any idea how hard I’ve fought to be free of their bloody ranks and rules, you wouldn’t say that.’
‘Still living off their table scraps, though, just like the rest of us,’ she jibed.
‘Yes I am. So what’s the plan?’
‘Plan hasn’t changed,’ Kori explained. ‘Go in, get it, get out — just the usual. A little war won’t stop us.’
‘And if there’s anyone here who can’t get himself in past the Vekken then he shouldn’t be doing this job,’ Scyla added.
‘Well, Master Spider, and when did you grow your wings?’ Phin asked acidly.
‘Don’t you worry about me,’ Scyla told her. ‘I’ll be through the Ant camp and up the wall, and they’ll never even know it.’
‘Best if we all make our own way, then,’ Kori said. ‘You need to find the main marketplace of the middle city. That’s about three streets south of the white College walls,’ he added, because none of the others had been there before. ‘There’s a taverna called the Fortune and Sky, a merchant’s dive, so we’ll meet out back of that. For now, let’s all pick our points of departure, as close to the action as you like.’
Gaved looked at Phin and Scyla, seeing them nod in response. ‘Agreed then,’ he said. ‘Luck to all, and no stopping for stragglers.’
Kori’s Art-conjured wings flared from his shoulders even as he spoke, lifting the stocky Fly-kinden into the air. Phin’s wings, when they followed suit, were darkly gleaming, almost invisible.
The warden obviously recognized him, a balding, portly man doing his best to stand to attention, as another balding, portly man came to call. Stenwold waved him down.
‘No formality, please. I have just escaped from a meeting.’
Memory of that meeting would stay with him for a long time, because the War Council had degenerated into a room full of people who had lost their grip on how the world worked. There was no continuity between them. Stenwold had seen the dull, aghast faces of men and women present who had fought on the wall when the Ants made their first sortie. There had been artificers manning the artillery, who had first experienced war when dozens of Ant-kinden died beneath the scatter-shot of their weapons. Then there had been those, in these sharp-edged times, who had found a new purpose: men whose inventions were finally being put to work, men who had always dreamed of taking up a sword, and now found that the reality was better. Stenwold would always remember Joyless Greatly, even when every other memory had gone. The Beetle aviator’s dark skin had been soot-blackened, and his calf was bandaged where a crossbow bolt had punched through it, but his eyes shone wildly, and he grinned and laughed too easily. He was living, Stenwold realized. He was consuming every moment. Flames that burned so brightly never burned for long, but Joyless Greatly, artificer and aviator, was burning so fiercely that it seemed he would not outlast even a tenday.
Kymon had been there, the lean old Ant-kinden become a soldier again after years in an academic’s robe, and Stenwold even found Cabre in the crowd, bandaged and burned but alive. When her tower had fallen she had escaped through a window so small that only a Fly-kinden could have managed it. Others had not been so lucky.
And Stenwold had made his excuses as soon as he could but found he had nowhere to go. Not his own house, certainly. They would find him there, and bother him with papers and charts when he really had nothing further to contribute. He needed a break. Most of all, he needed someone to talk to.
‘Has anyone been to see her?’ he asked the warden.
‘No one except the staff,’ the man said. ‘I go in and talk to her a little, sometimes.’
‘Good,’ said Stenwold. ‘What about charges?’
‘None,’ the warden said. ‘She’s your collar, War Master. They’re leaving her to you.’
‘Don’t call me that, please.’
The warden looked surprised, himself obviously a man who would love such a grand title. He shrugged and unlocked the door of the cell.
She was being well enough looked after, he saw. Save for the bolted shutters on the window the room beyond the locked door hardly seemed a prison at all. There was a rug on the floor, a proper bed, even a desk provided with paper and ink. For confessions, perhaps? Last testimonies and defiant speeches? This was certainly not the room of a common felon. Stenwold had made no particular arrangements, but he wondered whether his recent rise through the city’s hierarchy had effected this good treatment.
‘Hello Stenwold,’ said Arianna. She was sitting on the bed, dressed in her old student’s robes, her arms wrapped about herself. ‘I wondered when you would. ’ She stopped herself. ‘I suppose I wondered if, really.’
Stenwold crossed slowly and turned the desk chair to face her, lowering himself wearily into it. ‘Things have been difficult,’ he said.
‘I’ve heard.’
‘But you can’t imagine,’ he said. ‘Just tw
o days now and — the College halls have become infirmaries, and every student who ever studied medicine is there, doing what little can be done. And there are artificers that have fought all day who will now be working all night, on the artillery, on the walls. There were girls of fifteen and men of fifty who were out on the walls today and many, enough, who never came back to their mothers or their husbands or wives. And the Ants keep coming, over and over, as if they don’t care how many of them it takes. And they’ll get over our walls if they have to make a mound of their own dead to do it. Have you heard that?’
Numbly she shook her head.
‘And I. I’m here because — who else can I tell? I’ve sent them all away, my friends, and I keep asking myself whether it was to help, or just because I wanted to try and keep them safe. Because I have a record, there. I have a real history of sending people off to keep them safe. I even seem to have thought that two of them might be safe at Tark.’
For a long time he sat in silence, grasping for more words and finding none, until she said, ‘Stenwold — what’s going to happen to me? You can tell me that, can’t you?’ She bit at her lip. ‘I keep expecting your Mantis friend to turn up as my executioner.’
‘Or your Wasp friends to pull you out,’ he said bitterly. ‘No, that’s right, you told Tisamon you were fighting amongst yourselves, you. imperial agents.’
‘Rekef,’ she said. ‘Say it. I was a Rekef agent, Stenwold. Not a proper one. Not with a rank, or anything. But I was working for them. And, yes, we fought. We tried to kill a man called Major Thalric.’ She watched his reaction carefully. ‘You remember him?’
‘We’ve met,’ Stenwold allowed. ‘I wish. I wish it was so simple that I could just. ’
‘Believe me? But of course, I’m a Spider and I’m a traitor. Twice a traitor therefore. I’m sorry, Stenwold, really I am. I. seem to have done a very good job of cutting myself off, here.’
He looked at her, at the misery in her eyes, the hunched shoulders, and knew that he would never be able to discern what was truth and what was feigning. By race and profession she was doubly his better at that game.
‘There were three of us in the plot,’ she said slowly. ‘If it helps explain. It happened when Thalric told us the Vekkens were getting involved.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand. You were working against us. You sold us out to the Empire. I don’t understand why the change of heart.’
‘Because the Empire is different,’ she told him flatly. ‘We were expecting an imperial army to take Collegium. Not this year, probably not even next, but eventually. And the Empire conquers, and if you conquer, then you make sure that you leave the place standing so you have people left to push around. They would probably even have let the College go on, so long as they got to control what was being taught. And Collegium would still be Collegium, only with a Wasp governor and Wasp taxes, and Wasp soldiers in the streets. That’s what we thought. But the Vekken hate this place. It’s a reminder of a defeat, so they’ll not leave a stone standing given the chance. And that made us think and realize just what the stakes were. And we broke away, Hofi, Scadran and I. We tried to kill Thalric when he came to brief us. We killed his second, but the man himself was too good for us. He got the other two, and I’d have been next if your Mantis hadn’t found me. Lucky for me, wasn’t it? A quick and private death swapped for a public execution. Or perhaps just death at the hands of the Vekken when they burn this place around me.’ She stood up suddenly, and he knew she was going to ask for his help, to demand it, to impose on him in the name of the lies she had once shared with him. But the words dried in her throat and she just made a single sound, a wretched sound.
‘I cannot vouch for the Vekken, or the Empire,’ he said. ‘There will be no execution here. Even in these exceptional times, the Assembly won’t break a habit of ten years just for you. The irony is that you’d probably be exiled, eventually, but that currently presents us with technical difficulties.’
Her fists were clenched, and he saw the small claws there slide in and out of her knuckles. There was more in her eyes than mere pleading, and he felt her Art stir there, the force of it touch his mind, trying to turn him, to make him like her and pity her. That Art was weak, though, sapped by her own despair, and he shrugged it off almost effortlessly.
‘You know. I could have easily killed you,’ she got out.
‘I’d guessed it. You cannot spin that into an obligation.’
‘No.’
‘Do you regret not doing it?’
She stared at him. She was obviously at the very end of her leash, stripped of her strategies and schemes, more and more transparent in her desperation. ‘No,’ she said, and he wished that he could believe her.
He felt a sickening lurch inside him at the thought of what he was going to do, all the perils and unspeakable foolishness of it. Tisamon, for one, would never speak to him again.
‘You’re being held here to my order, and therefore I’m going to set you free,’ he said, speaking fast so that he could get the words out before he changed his mind.
She was silence itself, awaiting his next words.
‘What more do you want me to say?’ he asked her. ‘You’re going free. No conditions. You’ve already been questioned, and I have no more questions for you. I’m not even going to ask you to go back to the Rekef and work against them on my behalf, even if you could. I cannot know the truth of it now; I would not know the truth of it then. I. just. You can walk out of here as soon as I tell the warden, and I’ll tell him as soon as I leave.’ He got to his feet, feeling ill and sad. ‘Which is now.’
‘Wait,’ she said. There were tears in her eyes and he wondered dully if they were genuine.
‘I’m waiting.’
He could feel her Art touching him again, feeling at the edges of his mind and trying to find a way in. It must have been just instinct for her, her last defence, still trying to sway him because she did not really believe what he said. She thought this was a trap. Her lips moved but she said nothing.
‘No words,’ he said tiredly. ‘No thanks, even. I’m sorry but I don’t even know if I could believe that.’
He turned and walked out, and then told the warden that she could go. As he reached the door he looked back and saw her emerging cautiously from the cell, testing the first steps of her freedom.
He left then, set off for his house at last. He had probably made a mistake, and he hoped he would be the only one to suffer for it. It had been lies and pretence, and he had been a fool, as he still was, but for the few days that she had been with him she had made him feel young, and made him happy.
Nothing he had done in the defence of his city had sat well with him, the horrors of the naval assault recurring over and over, but he found that, when he remembered that he had freed her, the pawn of his enemies, he slept easily.
The next day the Vekken came against the wall in force. During the night they had brought up their remaining artillery, and the dawn saw great blocks of their infantry assembled behind their siege engines. There were massive armoured ramming engines aimed, three each, at the north and west gates, and both those walls already had a full dozen automotive towers ready to bring the Ant soldiers to the very brink of the walls.
The harbour mouth was still blocked by the pair of ruined armourclads, and the buildings nearest the wharves had been abandoned after the incendiary shelling from the Vekken flagship. Stenwold had Fly messengers on the lookout who would fetch him if the ships started moving again, but he could not meanwhile just sit idle. Against Balkus’s protests he made his way over to Kymon on the west wall.
There had been some fighting here the previous day. The Ants had made assaults at the gate, and one of the siege towers stood at half-extension, a burned-out shell only ten yards from the wall itself. The wall artillery had obviously been busy, and would be still busier today.
Stenwold made his hurried way along the line of the defenders. Most of them now had shields, he saw,
which he knew was a reaction to the crossbow casualties of the previous day. The Ants had advanced far enough on one earlier assault that some of those shields were the rectangular Vekken type the attackers used.
‘War Master,’ some of them acknowledged him, to his discomfort. Others saluted, the fist-to-chest greeting of the city militia. They all seemed to know him.
Out beyond the wall, without any signal that could be perceived, every Ant-kinden soldier suddenly started to march. The engines of the rams and towers growled across towards the defenders through the still air.
‘They’re coming in faster this time,’ Kymon said, striding up to him, and it did seem to Stenwold that the engines were making an almost risky pace of it, bouncing over the uneven ground. Close behind them the Ant soldiers were jogging solidly in their blocks.
‘Ready artillery!’ Kymon called, and the same call was taken up along the wall. ‘They’re going to rush us!’
‘Master Maker!’ someone was calling in a thin voice, and Stenwold turned to see a man he vaguely recognized from the College mechanics department.
‘Master Graden,’ he now recalled.
‘Master Maker, I must be allowed to mount my invention on the walls!’
‘This isn’t my area, Master Graden.’ But curiosity pressed him to add, ‘What invention?’
‘I call it my sand-bow,’ said Graden proudly. ‘It was made to clear debris from excavations, but I have redesigned it as a siege weapon.’
‘I’m not an artificer. Do you know what he’s talking about?’ Kymon growled.
‘Not so much,’ Stenwold admitted.
Then the Ant artillery started shooting, and abruptly there were rocks and lead shot and ballista bolts falling towards the wall, and especially towards Collegium’s own emplacements. Stenwold, Kymon and Graden crouched under the battlements, feeling more than hearing as their wall engines returned the favour. Stenwold risked a look at the advancing forces and saw, almost in awe, that Kymon had been right. Behind the speeding engines, the Ant soldiers were no longer in solid blocks that would make such tempting targets for the artillery. Instead they were a vast mob, a loose-knit mob thousands strong, surging forwards behind their great machines.
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