‘But?’ Tynan pressed.
She exchanged a glance with Major Oski: this was something they had obviously discussed previously. ‘Rumour, sir.’
Tynan’s heavy gaze swung from face to face: the Bee, the woman, the little man who probably held the highest rank a Fly had ever attained in the Imperial army – assembled here as though someone had wanted to rub his nose in the changing times. ‘Someone say something,’ he growled.
‘Rumour, sir,’ Oski echoed, ‘but there’s something that’s been brewed up at home to solve the air war problem. Search me for what, but the engineers are keeping some strange company these days. There’s something planned, General, but it sounds as though you’ll have to take it on faith, if they want you to march.’
Tynan was silent as the seconds ticked by, feeling his thoughts inexorably swing towards: What option do I have?
Four
‘Your uncle’s been going spare,’ Balkus revealed to Che. ‘About both of you,’ he added, his nod picking out Tynisa as well. ‘He thought you’d gone off the edge of the map.’
‘Commonweal,’ Che told him, ‘so almost right.’ She and her fellows had retreated to the Princep camp after the duel between the Mantids, because nobody seemed to know what was going on and the Ants were in a state of high tension that Balkus wanted to get well clear of. The Etheryen Mantis-kinden had done their best to deconstruct the duel for outsiders. The Nethyen woman, the visitor, had made some statement that had resulted in her counterpart challenging her – apparently a spontaneous matter of honour so critical that nothing short of instant bloodletting would do. As the challenger was dead and her opponent gone, nobody was supposedly any the wiser, but the Mantids had retreated into the trees shortly afterwards, leaving everyone with the feeling that they knew considerably more than they were saying.
The Collegiate ambassador was still trying to ask questions, of Ants and Mantids alike, which nobody was giving answers to. Helma Bartrer could be seen shuttling about the camp, increasingly frustrated with her own ignorance despite the fact that it was the common property of everyone there. Amnon was constantly looming behind her, and Che reflected that this was just as well, because the woman was plainly starting to get on people’s nerves.
‘And him,’ Balkus was eyeing Thalric, who stared coldly back. ‘Old Sten Maker heard how you were carrying on with him. He sent me a letter asking me to keep a watch out. He wasn’t exactly keen.’
‘Thalric is a reformed character,’ Che replied. Her words should have sounded foolish, naive even, but she invested them with a certainty that warned Balkus off.
‘All right. Good luck selling that to your uncle, though.’ His gaze flicked to Tynisa, tracing the line of her scar. ‘I can see you’ve been busy.’
She did not even look at him, her own attention focused entirely on the forest, as it had been since the duel took place.
In light of that silence, Balkus turned to the fourth member of their merry band. ‘And where do you fit in?’
The halfbreed, Maure, blinked at him. Che knew the girl must make a strange figure and opened her mouth to excuse her, but Maure was already dissembling.
‘A traveller from the Commonweal,’ she said. ‘I thought, “Why not see the Lowlands?” and with Che on her way home, when would I get a better chance?’ She offered a bright smile to go with the words, quite out of character. Nothing was said about being a necromancer, making a living from dredging up ghosts and pieces of ghosts, counselling mourners and laying guilts to rest. Maure was a practical woman, for a magician, and Che guessed that she did not intend to practise her trade much, here in the Lowlands. Most likely, she was looking forward to spending time in some Apt city where nobody even believed in such skills.
‘Che,’ Tynisa murmured from the corner of her mouth. ‘Trouble.’
A figure was storming towards them from the Ant camp, slender and almost rigid with suppressed emotion: the same Moth they had encountered earlier.
‘You!’ he called out, and there was no doubt who he meant. Che stood up, feeling surprisingly calm, because ever since Tynisa had been well enough to travel and they had made their plans to leave the Commonweal, she had anticipated this. The old Inapt powers of the Lowlands were jealous of their lore, and they had no love of Che’s kinden at all. Of course the Moths would be shocked, when faced with what Che had become.
Whatever it is that I have become.
He had stitched together a little of his reserve, but the inscrutable Moth facade was still far from repaired. His hands clenched and unclenched as he stalked closer, and Che faced him squarely, hiding any uncertainties, because to a man of his kinden any weakness was exploitable.
And I may not be able to hide that well enough. In the Commonweal everyone believed in magic, and many practised it in a small and personal way, but they seemed to have no great magicians amongst them any more. Whether the Moths still did, she could not say, but they had whatever was left of magic in the Lowlands securely in their hands. Her odd and unasked-for status within the magical world might carry no weight with them. Or it might make them jealous to the point of telling their Mantis lackeys to cut Che’s throat.
She was expecting a personal challenge, even an assault, but when the Moth spoke it was to jab a finger back towards the forest and demand, ‘Is this your doing?’
She held his blank gaze, replying, ‘The Mantis-kinden killing each other? No.’ And then she continued to face him down, feeling his magic scrabble at her, feeling his Art trying to dominate her. He was no Skryre, though, no grand master of sorcery. She shrugged him off when he came with strength, and matched him move for move when he tried to creep past her guard. At last he took a step back, baffled and looking almost vulnerable.
‘I am not your enemy,’ Che assured him. ‘I am a daughter of Collegium who has been given an unexpected gift, that is all.’
‘That is not all,’ he hissed, but more to himself than to her. ‘You arrive here from – from where? – just in time for all my work to go suddenly awry.’
‘I have been in the Commonweal, and if my time there taught me anything it is that, amongst the Inapt, matters such as chance and coincidence are seldom entirely trustworthy,’ Che declared. She was aware of the subtext within her words: this was not how the Apt spoke, certainly not how any Beetle-kinden he had met would speak. She was presenting her credentials and showing him she was part of his world.
His feet did not move, but she sensed a second mental step backwards, another concession granted her. She was sizing him up now, trying to place him and then – almost vertiginously – she thought she might even have met him before. She had once been in Sarn on her uncle’s orders, contacting the Moth-kinden secret service known as the Arcanum, and there had been one brief meeting . . . She could not say, so long after, whether this man had been present, but she thought he might have been – and not as their leader. A magician, perhaps, but an intelligencer first, and from his presence at this meeting of powers it took no great leap of the imagination to see what his work here had been. He had been supporting the alliance of the Treaty of Gold, and now something had gone wrong amongst the Mantis-kinden.
‘You are Cheerwell Maker, so they say,’ he observed, and even this was him trying for power over her, the power of names that his people put such stock in.
‘And you?’ The unthinkable question, to a Moth, but she sensed that she had the authority to ask and she was damned if she would give him any more of her time if he would not expose himself to that small extent.
She saw his throat working, as though he were choking on something, and then he spat out, ‘Terastos.’
It was a useful weather-gauge both of his low station and her apparent standing in the eyes of the Inapt. He did not like her but he could not deny her.
‘So tell us what’s going on,’ she invited, sitting back down, cutting the tension from the moment by sidestepping it. ‘We’re none of us friends of the Empire here – no, not even Thalric. We know the W
asps are on the move again, and they must have taken control of the Alliance cities and Helleron fast, to get here so quickly. Perhaps we can even be of some help. So tell us.’ Following her lead, her companions had also sat back down at the tent’s mouth, and Terastos shifted from foot to foot, uncertain and ignorant, the worst thing for a Moth. At last the spy’s practicality overcame the magician’s pride, and he sat down.
‘It is no secret that the Wasps are very near, their Eighth Army with all its machines. They have destroyed the Ant fortress that lay east of here, and beaten a field army too. The Sarnesh had hoped that speed would be their ally. Now they admit that they need real allies to carry the day. They have called on the Ancient League.’
‘I remember when the Ancient League was formed. I spoke to your people in Sarn itself before the last war,’ Che recalled.
Terastos blinked. ‘That was not you.’
She gave him a small smile. ‘Oh, it was. I was different then. I had not . . . lost touch. But it was me.’
‘And here you are now.’ He was shaken more than suspicious. She guessed that a very emphatic coded missive would soon be winging its way to the Skryres of Dorax, or perhaps he would send the news using his magic, if he was capable. No doubt the next Moth who came to confront her would be made of sterner stuff.
‘The Ancient League . . .’ he went on, glancing from her to her comrades and Balkus.
‘Is not ancient,’ Che finished for him. ‘The Moths of Dorax and the Mantis-holds of this forest here might be united in their traditions, but there was never a league until the Wasps came last time. I can guess that, once the Wasps had gone, the League ceased to be, each of you back to your solitary pursuits?’
‘And now the Sarnesh have called on us, whereupon we, being the masters of the League, have called upon our servants. And something has miscarried, yes. And you know nothing of this?’
‘Not yet,’ Che admitted. ‘But we’ve only just arrived. What are the Wasps doing?’
‘Waiting, no man knows for what.’
‘What do you mean, waiting?’ Thalric demanded, leaning into the conversation.
The Moth glowered at him. ‘They were advancing, sweeping all before them. Then they stopped. They have been still some tendays now. They keep their scouts ready, and prevent any others coming close, but they just wait.’
‘The cost of keeping an army in the field, at this distance from the nearest city, is enormous,’ Thalric pointed out. ‘Only orders from Capitas could allow it, unless someone’s playing some very complex game with them.’ His eyes slid aside from the Moth until they met Che’s.
‘Capitas,’ she echoed: heart of Empire and domain of the Empress Seda. Seda, who had been touched by the same ritual that had stripped Che of her Aptitude, who shared that intangible mark that Terastos and the Mantis-kinden perceived on Che. Seda, who had added a swiftly burgeoning magical skill to the vast breadth of her temporal might.
Che stood up abruptly, tentatively reaching out. Seda scared her, and all Che’s newfound power and knowledge did not help – it simply meant that she knew precisely why the woman was to be feared. Last time they clashed, only Maure’s intervention had saved Che from being imprisoned forever within her own mind.
Another newcomer was approaching: a young Roach-kinden girl, slender and white-haired. She came hurrying up, stopping for a moment when she saw how many guests Balkus had.
‘Syale, where have you been?’ the Ant demanded, his companions forgotten. ‘You’re the ambassador, life’s sake. You can’t just up and vanish. I thought something had happened to you. What would I have told old Sfayot?’
The girl stood with arms folded, as if on the point of sulking. ‘Firstly, don’t you dare twit me with my father’s name. If he had faith enough to send me, then that’s all you need to know. Secondly, something very nearly did happen to me. I’ve news: the Mantis-kinden have gone mad.’
‘Madder,’ Balkus responded sourly. ‘Their Nethyen woman came out here and stabbed someone, in your absence, and now nobody knows what’s going on.’
‘I know,’ Syale told him simply. ‘Balkus, I was there in the forest when it happened. They’re fighting.’
He opened his mouth, closed it, then said, ‘You don’t mean fighting the Wasps, do you?’
The girl shook her head and, in that wordless moment, Che saw just how shaken she was.
‘The Mantis-kinden are fighting each other. Their two holds are at war.’
And Che, whose magical sense had been stretching itself towards distant Capitas, snapped back into herself with a hiss, flinching as though she had burned herself.
‘What is it?’ Thalric was at her shoulder.
‘She’s here.’
She heard questions, then: from the Moth, from Balkus, from Tynisa. Thalric had gone very still, though, because he understood all too well.
‘The Empress, she’s here now. She’s with their army. She has done this.’
Five
‘General, she’s on her way in.’
General Roder glanced up, seeing one of the watch captains hovering at the door of his tent.
‘Report,’ he grunted.
‘Airship and escort spotted by our scouts, General,’ the officer informed him. ‘Signals say it’s her.’
Roder’s expression still pinned him. He was famous for his hard stares, which owed a great deal to the paralysis that had locked half his face following a Spider assassin’s poisoned strike. ‘By airship? She must be mad,’ the general muttered, half to himself. One adventurous sortie by Sarnesh orthopters and the Empire’s looking for a new ruler . . .
‘She’s got some of the new fliers with her,’ the captain added, as if reading his thoughts. ‘Enough to throw back anything the Sarnesh could put in the air, sir. Maybe she’ll hand them over to us.’
‘Get the men turned out,’ Roder snapped at a nearby lieutenant. ‘If it is her, she’ll see us at our best. And double our scouts, ground and air; this would be a very bad time for the enemy to find some gap in our perimeter. Oh, and get hold of that long streak of jerky she calls an adviser. She’ll want him, I’d guess.’
‘He’s already out there,’ the captain informed him. ‘Even before our pilots reported back.’
Roder gave him a sour face. ‘No mystery there: he knew when she’d be arriving all along, just decided that an Imperial general wasn’t trustworthy enough to be told. Just goes to show, Captain, there are too many hands pulling in too many directions, back home, and precious few of them Wasp.’ He stepped out of his tent and scowled at the daylight. ‘Sends us headlong for Sarn, lets us smash them in the field, keep them off balance . . . and then what? Some ancient, dried-up freak turns up waving her writ and has us kicking our heels for tendays while the Sarnesh get their nerve back and build their strength. If you’ve some way to make sense of that, I’d welcome it. It makes none to me.’
The object of his ire was standing out in the centre of the camp, gazing up at the sky as though the sparse clouds held an inordinate fascination. The old creature was hunchbacked, though still absurdly tall, gaunt and withered and bald like an unearthed corpse. His grey skin was banded with white and he wore a shabby robe of halved black and gold. He was the Empress’s slave, they said, and her adviser on unusual matters. He had been flown here by a Wasp belonging to something called the Red Watch – some new crowd of the Empress’s favourites – and with enough seals and recommendations to set his word as law over even an Imperial general. That he had failed to make a friend of Roder was understandable.
His name was Gjegevey, which Roder seldom bothered to even attempt. Now the general stomped over to the man with a simple, ‘Hey, you!’
The long face turned towards him, eyes glinting within their wrinkled sockets. ‘General?’
‘Your mistress is coming,’ Roder told him. ‘Now maybe we’ll get to the bottom of this nonsense.’ The placid gaze of the old slave made him angrier, and he had to bite off the other words that rose into his mouth. Ev
en so – as always – Gjegevey seemed to hear them.
‘Yes, General, if I have, hm, somehow misunderstood my orders, and held your Eighth here unnecessarily, I am sure that you’ll have the pleasure of, ahm, stringing this old frame up on the crossed pikes. I would assure you that you were right in following my, mmn, advice, but you will have your confirmation soon enough.’
Even the slave’s meandering speech was like nails on a chalkboard to Roder, but he gritted his teeth and bore it.
Another wing of Spearflights powered into the air, more security in case the Sarnesh got lucky, or in case Imperial intelligence had been compromised. The old Emperor – Seda’s brother – had never left the capital and, for all that everyone admired this new girl’s courage and enterprise, no general wanted the ruler of all the Empire actually looking over his shoulder, especially when faced with such nonsensical orders as had left the Eighth sitting idle for so long.
He spent some minutes inspecting his troops, stalking along the ranks and making his displeasure known if any officer’s charges were found wanting. Save for those already out on patrol, here was the glorious Eighth, the Empress’s Hammer: its legion of Light Airborne, the infantry, the Engineers, as well as a neat block of Auxillian Ants from Maille. They were a skilled and proven fighting force, and they were being wasted.
The Empress’s airship was lowering itself, holding steady in the light breeze whilst its Farsphex escort flew in wide circles. The treasonous thought crossed Roder’s mind that, were he an ambitious man, a little artillery accident might go a long way here. His current circumstances had bred a fair amount of resentment in him, but he had not been pushed anywhere near so far as treason, nor was he sure that his men would follow him. She put on a good show, did the Empress.
He waited impassively for her, standing at the head of his army. This would be his chance, he knew. Once away from the men he would be able to impress upon the girl just what the Eighth should have been doing these last tendays, and how it should be best used from now on. His experience and rank carried a great deal of weight in the Empire. She needed him. She would have to listen.
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