‘So, they’re back in business,’ she finished, setting it out in terms a landsman could understand. ‘We think there are around a dozen Farsphex with the Second now, which isn’t enough to cause us problems, however good they are, but there’ll be more.’
‘Any chance of catching them on the ground?’ Reader asked her.
‘They’ve kept a solid air watch since we knocked them back,’ Taki informed him. ‘My guess is that they won’t restart the advance until they’ve got more air cover, but I could be wrong. They’ve got enough now to at least slow us down, make each raid more costly and, whilst I could harry them all day and night in my Esca Magni, many of the other Stormreaders don’t have the same staying power. Any kind of serious resistance will cut down on our efficiency.’
‘What about the new pilots?’ the Beetle woman asked.
‘Fit for defence, if we need them, but I wouldn’t want to chance them against Farsphex unless I had to.’ Taki and the best of her pilots had been training up newcomers as fast as they could, but there was a limit to the number of prospective pilots Collegium could produce.
‘The Vekken have pilots they could lend us,’ Willem Reader mused. All eyes turned to him and he shrugged. ‘Desperate times?’
‘Not that desperate,’ Stenwold decided. ‘I’ve worked harder than any to bring the Vekken into our alliance and, believe me, there are still a great many people who don’t trust them even sitting outside our walls. Give them our best machines and there will be riots. And the first suggestion the Vekken get that we might turn on them. . well, it’ll confirm all their usual fears. So, no, not yet. We’ll make do with what we have. Taki, anything more?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice.’
Stenwold nodded and, seeing that nobody else had any more questions for her, she ducked out of the room.
Stenwold himself spent an hour in debate with that husk of a council, concerning the best steps they could take next, before he tasked everyone there with some aspect of the resulting plan and sent them off. After that he settled down to read through the petitions — not the usual civilian business, but proposals from anyone in the city who thought they could help the war. There were hundreds of amateur inventors in Collegium, and most of them had nothing useful to offer and were offering it with great force. Yet there might be hidden gold amongst the dross, and they could not pass up on anything that would give them an advantage. Their last clash with the Wasps had made it plain that the Imperial artificers had not been idle.
Those proposals sorted through, he looked at his share of the endless supply of progress reports. All over the city there were men and women who had tasks allotted to them according to their talents. Builders carved trenches and earthworks; merchants stockpiled food and munitions; Company officers trained their recruits; smiths turned over their workshops to make snapbow bolts and clerks tallied how much of everyone else’s industry the city might need. A legion of planners and doers greased the wheels of Collegium’s amateur war machine, and when they had done their part, or when they encountered difficulties that blocked their way, they wrote it all down and it came to Stenwold or Jodry or a few others.
Stenwold sat patiently, leafing through them, eyes skipping over the words from long practice, pausing only where some problem had clearly identified itself, annotating and making recommendations, or passing the issue on to someone better suited. He seldom had to think much about each issue, but there was plenty to get through and, if he did not finish, there would be even more on the morrow.
He had lost track entirely of how much time had gone by, when there was a respectful cough from the doorway.
‘It’ll have to wait,’ he said, without looking up. Another half hour and I’ll have this done, and then I can sleep. And then. .
‘Master Maker, look at you,’ came a familiar, gruff voice. ‘Who’d have thought it: You, lord of all you survey, up to your nose in papers like some book-keeper’s clerk.’
‘Tomasso.’ Stenwold looked up to see the black-bearded Fly-kinden grinning at him. At least the man’s lightness of tone was guarantee that some other unlooked-for disaster was not about to come thundering down on him. ‘What do you want?’
‘Wys has been in with another shipment,’ the Fly ex-pirate explained. Wys was his opposite number beneath the waves, an enterprising Sea-kinden who was nominally Tomasso’s wife, by some bizarre pirate custom.
‘Have you. .?’
‘I’ve sent it on to the workshops, never you mind,’ Tomasso assured him. The shipment would consist of machine parts and the superior almost-steel that the Sea-kinden produced.
‘Then. .?’ Stenwold gestured at the paperwork. ‘It’s just, I have a lot to get through.’
For a painful moment he saw himself through Tomasso’s eyes, the ex-pirate looking at him and seeing a man of action and adventure crippled and pared down to this thing of paper and sums. Tomasso’s smile changed, less flippant, more calculating. ‘Put it down, Master Maker, just for one evening.’
‘It’s not as easy as that-’ Stenwold stopped talking immediately, because a woman was peering shyly around the doorframe, her expression equal parts trepidation and concern.
He almost kicked over his chair in getting to his feet, then stood there, feeling embarrassed by the vigour of his reaction, watching her even as she was watching him.
Her name was Paladrya, and she was Sea-kinden — although to the uninitiated she could pass as a Spider woman. When he had first met her they had both been prisoners, and torture and deprivation had left her bruised and gaunt. The marks of that ill-treatment were still there in the lines on her face, but she was now adviser to the new Sea-kinden ruler, and those days of incarceration and false accusations were behind her.
Tomasso slipped away while they were still gazing at each other, leaving Paladrya to walk carefully into the room, as though feeling out the borders of Stenwold’s domain. He remembered their last parting, the mutual realization that they were creatures of different worlds. The crushing, lightless depths of the sea filled him with horror and despair, whilst the parched and barren land was utterly inhospitable to one of her people. And here she was.
‘Wys said you were fighting,’ she said, stopping out of arm’s reach.
And in the end, being people of responsibilities and both well past the impetuous foolishness of youth, they had parted. She had sent letters, and so had he, but neither of them had made much headway with the alphabet of the other. What words they had exchanged that way had remained simplistic and unsatisfying. With a Beetle’s Apt pragmatism, Stenwold had resigned himself to the task in hand — knowing that he would live with a little piece of himself forever out of balance, because of her, but aware that he could live that way for as long as was needed. He had assumed that she would have said the same.
‘Not me personally. They wouldn’t let me go. But fighting, yes.’ The paperwork lurked at his elbow, waiting to drag him down once again. ‘And soon to resume, I believe.’
‘I just. .’ A pause. ‘I forced Wys to bring me. She didn’t want to — and Aradocles almost forbade me. But I had to come. Stenwold.’
‘It’s good to see you.’ Weak words, he realized, but he did not know what to do with her, or where he was with her, and it was plain that she was caught in the same no-man’s land. His mind sprang formal options at him: show her the College, the preparations, the soldiers drilling. Talk to her in bluff, unconcerned tones of the war to come, to lay her mind at rest. Draw her into discussions of politics, land and sea.
Instead, he found himself standing very close to her, his hand just brushing her pale cheek. Her expression held a great deal of fear but, in amongst her fear of the land and its dangers, there was fear for him.
‘We will hold, don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘I could show you a hundred things — inventions, fortifications, engines — that would convince you how we will hold. We have thrown them back twice before. We shall do so again.’
She was Inapt, of course,
so all his inventions and engines would mean nothing to her, but perhaps she had some touch of prophecy about her, because his words failed to reassure.
‘I think of you a great deal in Hermatyre,’ she whispered. ‘Aradocles could use your counsel and your artifice, and I. . Do you dream of the sea, Stenwold?’ She must have seen it in his eyes: the nightmares he had still of chasmic depths, the churning tentacles of sea-monsters, drowning in the dark.
He saw, in her face, that she had faced just such fears in coming here, and only out of concern for him; a kind of selfish madness gripped him, and he said, ‘When this is done, I will come to you.’
The words hung there between them, and he was shaken by his pledge, despite the vast weight of war that now stood between him and any chance of fulfilling the promise. He was shocked by the words, but he could not disown them. To his great surprise, they were sincere. To the pits with the city and its government and Jodry Drillen. When the Wasps were beaten back, he had earned himself a retirement. Thinking of those midnight waters was less terrible now, with Paladrya there beside him. He would adapt. Beetle-kinden always did.
The paperwork was abruptly an unbearable burden, and he found that he was no longer shackled to it. ‘Let’s leave here,’ he decided. ‘This is no place to be.’ Collegium, even under threat of war, offered a hundred diversions and yet, just then, the only place he wanted to take her was home.
Seven
‘Who’s this headed over?’
Tynisa had been staring at the trees, trying to feel some sense of connection, to open up to her own Mantis-kinden blood, and now the unwelcome voice of Thalric pulled her from her reverie. She was supposed to be keeping watch, just as he was, but the great brooding expanse of the Etheryon-Nethyon forest had drawn her attention away. In there are my people, she had tried to tell herself, but she did not quite believe it. Her father, Tisamon, had been a poor adherent of the Mantis-kinden way — and the fact that her mother had been Spider-kinden, the Mantids’ traditional enemies, was evidence of that. Tynisa herself could pass easily for one of her mother’s kin, but the bloody-handed Mantis way of doing things had lived close to the surface in her for a long time. She had only recently reined it in and brought under control.
That combination within her — the Spider heritage, the Mantis miscegenation, the Weaponsmaster’s badge that the Mantids put such store in — had surely earned her any number of challengers here, and she knew that Che could not hold them off forever. With her sister occupied, she had been expecting to be called out, but when Thalric dragged her back to the present moment, she recognized the approaching tread as being heavier than any Mantis: a man in armour, and in company.
It was the Ant tactician, the one who seemed to be in charge around here. Since the Mantis duel, the Ant camp had been in silent uproar as they tried to understand what was going on. Scouts and emissaries sent into the wood had been rebuffed: the Etheryen were not talking. Orthopters and Fly-kinden were already winging their way towards where the Imperial Eighth was camped to see what they were doing, and the usual Ant paranoia about outsiders was abruptly to the fore. The camp was a prickly place to be, all of a sudden; the delegations from Princep and Collegium were being carefully watched, and Che’s party was practically under full-scale surveillance.
‘He’s come to see Che,’ Thalric guessed.
Tynisa nodded without looking at him. The two of them made an uneasy pair of sentries. They had known each other for some years now, and had shared a variety of escapades, but they were not friends. Only their mutual care for Che kept them civil to each other.
Che herself was sitting closer to the trees than either of them would have liked, along with the halfbreed woman, Maure. The two of them had done precisely nothing for the past half hour, after Maure had scratched out some manner of circle in the ground and lit some candles to go around it, most of which had since blown out.
Magic — they’re doing magic. Tynisa tested the words carefully. She had grown up in Collegium, where magic was a joke they made about the stupid things the Inapt believed and which, though Inapt herself, she had not credited. There was no magic, she had once been sure.
Now she was returned from the Commonweal, where everyone believed in it implicitly, and Tynisa herself had witnessed such things. .
After that, Tynisa found that she could face the word magic and feel almost none of the old embarrassment. Instead, some deep-buried part of her, born of both her parents’ kinden, rose eagerly for it, too long denied its proper place in her thoughts.
The real surprise had been Thalric, for he was as Apt as any Wasp. But when Che had declared that she and Maure would be undertaking a ritual to investigate just what was going on in the forest, he had merely nodded, jaw clenched a little, and said nothing.
Milus the tactician, however, was surely not going to be quite so accepting.
As he approached, Tynisa and Thalric drew closer together without intending to, making the space between them a barrier for the Ant. The threat was a weak one: the Tactician had a dozen men at his back, and there were hundreds of Ant-kinden just a thought away.
Still, as the Ants closed, Tynisa took another step forward, right into his path. The movement was awkward and stiff, thanks to the wound that had come close to finishing her, in that same fight which had mauled her face. In truth, Apt surgeons would probably have given up on her, or at the least confined her to a bed for months to come, but the Commonweal held other ideas about medicine, and those who wore the Weaponsmasters’ badge could draw on unusual sources of strength. Tynisa’s hand was closed about her rapier hilt, and she could feel the steel all the way down her spine, supporting her.
To his credit, Milus stopped deliberately before them, dispersing the threatened confrontation by pointed diplomacy. His eyes narrowed, fixing on Che and Maure inside their circle. ‘What’s she doing?’ he asked.
Tynisa allowed herself to exchange a glance with Thalric. She had a choice, to obfuscate, or to simply baffle the man. She chose the latter.
‘Magic.’
Tactician Milus nodded. ‘She is Inapt, I’d guess. She must believe so.’
Tynisa blinked, trying to reassess him, but unable to quite pin him down.
‘Do you think I’d come to treat with the Ancient League without some understanding of the Inapt?’ Milus declared. ‘I have a devious little adviser on such matters, who tells me all manner of lies about the business, but even so I cannot deny that many kinden believe in such things,’ Milus frowned further. ‘What’s she hoping to achieve?’
‘Divination,’ Tynisa explained. ‘Far-seeing.’
‘She wants to spy on the enemy? Good, I need to talk to her.’
‘She’s busy,’ Tynisa objected. Thalric was keeping his peace, she noted, and that was just as well. Even the most conciliatory words were unlikely to be received well from a Wasp.
Milus let two seconds’ silence pass. ‘I need to talk to her,’ he repeated, slightly more forcefully. ‘There is a Wasp army at hand. There is fighting in the Etheryon. I cannot afford to wait on her pleasure.’
There was iron in his glance, a seamless transition from friend to threat that nearly had Tynisa’s rapier in her hand.
She opened her mouth to defy him, feeling a fighting calmness settle on her shoulders, all her thoughts and worries falling into the moment.
‘Tynisa, it’s all right.’ Che’s voice.
Tynisa did not look away from Milus. ‘You’re happy to talk?’
‘I think I’d better,’ Che confirmed. She started to get up, but the tactician strode between Tynisa and Thalric, near enough to touch either, and crouched down at her level.
‘Tell me what’s going on,’ he said, back to being friendly and reassuring.
Tynisa saw Che take a deep breath. ‘The Empress is here, with the Eighth,’ she declared.
Milus gave a grunt of surprise. That was plainly not what he had expected to hear. Before he could question her, she added, ‘Don’t ask me
how I know. I couldn’t tell you in any way you’d understand. And I don’t really expect you to believe me — but you did ask.’
After a moment of introspection, perhaps summing up the reactions and opinions of his advisers, or his whole army, he nodded. ‘It seems unlikely,’ was all he said.
‘There is something in the forest she wants; that is all I am sure of. Maure and I have been trying to find out what it is, but. . the magical landscape is much as you see the physical — tangled and knotted and dark, layer on layer. That there is something there at the heart of the wood, between the two holds, is plain. What it is. . Tactician, permit me to suggest that you’re taking this very well.’
Milus nodded. ‘Some of what you say matches recent intelligence from my own sources, and from the Roach girl from Princep, who’s been in and out of the green a few times. There’s fighting going on in there, and the Etheryen think that there are Wasps under the trees already, helping out the Nethyen. The Empress? Who knows, but something has gone badly wrong. We’ve lost key allies, and if the forest is lost then we’ve lost our flank as well, and the next battlefield will probably be at the gates of Sarn. And still I don’t know what’s going on, which is the worst thing in the world for a tactician. The Mantis-kinden won’t talk to me, so that’s where you come in.’
Che’s gaze remained level. ‘What do you think I am, Tactician?’ There was a keen tension between them, and Tynisa felt her instincts twitch and tighten as they sized each other up.
‘I don’t care what you are,’ was Milus’s answer. ‘All I know is that I’ve never seen Mantids back down like they did when you confronted them. So: you’re important. They will listen to you. You can find out what in the pits is going on. Possibly you can even put it right.’
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