‘I apologize, sir. It was difficult to make out what happened, and those of my men I’ve questioned tell contradictory stories. The Scorpions scattered amongst the buildings, losing all cohesion, as if each was looking for a different place to hide. Then we heard them start screaming, just some of them, then others. None of them for very long. I did my best to keep some in sight, but amongst the ruins it was difficult. Many of the structures there seem relatively intact, some almost completely so, and I thought I saw…’ There was a pause, signifying a soldier trying to couch his experience in permitted language. ‘Movement, sir. Terribly swift movement between buildings. Something large and fast. Others have reported the same.. .’ His tone indicated that there was more, but that it would require prompting.
‘Speak, Captain,’ Angved duly ordered.
‘One squad hasn’t returned, sir. Sergeant Stasric and his people didn’t come back with us.’
‘You passed on my orders for nobody to enter the ruins?’ Angved asked sternly.
‘I did, sir, word for word.’
‘What’s this Stasric like, would you say?’
A diplomatic pause. ‘He is a man who seizes opportunities as they come, sir. He has been reprimanded in the past.’
Angved and Varsec exchanged glances. ‘Any other casualties, Captain?’ the aviator asked.
‘Eleven men lost, sir, all to enemy crossbows,’ the captain confirmed. ‘Twenty-one in total, including Stasric’s men.’
Twenty-one dead to six hundred of theirs, Angved considered. A mere skirmish, but the numbers would look good when sent home. ‘Have your men stay ready, since we can expect further attacks by the Many. They’re a stupid, brutal people.’
Midnight was approaching when the watch lieutenant awoke Angved, sounding panicked. ‘Something’s outside the wall, sir.’
It took a blinking and blurred moment of recollection before the Engineer remembered where he was and what he was doing there. For a moment he had thought he was back accompanying the first Khanaphir expedition, making war on the city on behalf of the Many of Nem, rather than the other way around.
‘The Scorpions are back?’ he demanded, shrugging his way into a leather cuirass and locating his sword.
‘Sir, we’re… we’re not sure what it is. The sentries don’t think so, sir.’
‘We’re under attack?’
‘Not yet, sir.’
Angved sighed, putting him down as the sort of overexcitable type who should never be left in charge of a night watch, for the good of everyone else’s sleep. Still, now that he was awake, it seemed prudent to go and investigate what had spooked the watchmen. He dragged a woollen cloak over his shoulders to keep out the night chill, and shouldered his way out of his tent.
There was barely any moon, and only the torches and lanterns of the camp repelled the night. Angved tugged his cloak closer about him and let the lieutenant lead him to the walls, where a flick of his wings got him up on to the parapet.
‘I don’t see anything,’ he grumbled, scowling into the darkness.
‘Report, soldier,’ the lieutenant instructed, stepping back and patently hoping thus to disappear from the angry major’s notice.
‘There’s something big out there, sir,’ one of the sentries said promptly. ‘It’s been back and forth three times now.’
‘An animal,’ suggested Angved dismissively.
‘The only glimpse I had of it, it seemed like a man, sir. Or at least a little like a man. Most of the other sentries have seen it, too.’ Even as he spoke, there came a shout from further along the wall, and Angved bustled over there to peer out beyond the range of the camp lights.
He saw it then, not very clearly but enough to confirm all that the sentry had said. The movement, as it slunk back into the night, was unpleasant – human but not quite, its limbs out of proportion, not quite on two legs, but not quite on all fours.
The Imperials exchanged unhappy glances.
‘What was it up to, that time?’ the watch lieutenant asked. ‘It was… digging, was it?’
‘Can you see something still out there?’ one of the other sentries wondered, squinting. ‘Looks like it left something behind.’
‘Get me a strong flier with a lantern!’ Angved snapped. Once this order was obeyed, he continued, ‘You, fly out there and drop the lantern down where we saw it.’
The soldier looked none too happy at this, but the Imperial Light Airborne did not admit to being scared of the dark, so he kicked off from the wall and swooped in, making the pass as swiftly as he could and letting the lantern drop from ten feet up, ending tipped on its side on the sand, still burning.
At the sight revealed, one of the sentries swore. The rest were silent.
They could see a neat pyramid of human heads out there: Wasp-kinden heads, without a doubt. Angved felt quite equally sure that, asking around, he would find someone able to recognize the twisted features of Sergeant Stasric. Each of the expressions that the lantern picked out suggested that their deaths had not come quickly or easily.
At the far edge of the lantern’s reach, something shifted, a hulking, long-armed thing with its knuckles resting on the ground, its massive fists clublike and thorned. It seemed as big as a Mole Cricket-kinden, but thinner and longer of limb. The head jutted from between broad shoulders heavily knotted with muscle, and although the eyes glinted, even the lantern light seemed reluctant to illuminate its face.
Angved felt its attention focus on him, as though it had somehow managed to identify him as the man in charge. His soldiers were thoroughly spooked, he knew, but they would still launch an attack on his word. And besides, this thing must surely be mortal, susceptible to sword and sting and snapbow bolt.
But still… ‘Message understood!’ he called out. ‘You’ll see no more of us in your city. That’s not what we’re here for. And we’ll see no more of you, either. Agreed?’
His voice seemed to roll out for ever across the desert, as if the only sound in the world. He was aware that most of the camp was awake by now, with eyes on him alone.
The thing crouched even lower, leaning forward a little, and Angved caught a brief, stomach-twisting glimpse that made him wish its face had stayed hidden. The skull-like contours, that brutal tusked jaw… and yet those eyes were so human that they seemed to be agonized and appalled by the monstrosity that they were set in. Then it was gone, and it was Angved who cursed, this time, as it moved off, vanishing like wind and shadow in an instant.
‘I dearly hope it understood you, sir,’ said the lieutenant, standing at his elbow. Angved had feared that his actions might have made him seem weak before his men, but he realized then that he had gained their unexpected approval. Not one of them had wanted to go out and fight that thing, whatever it was, and no amount of tactical or technological superiority would change that.
There was nobody else at the camp either disobedient enough or venturesome enough to go treasure hunting, and their nocturnal visitor remained conspicuous by its absence, although Angved himself set up a searchlight for the night watch, just in case.
Subsequently it took them a single day to get the drill working, and a day after that to start the pumps. The machinery was designed to work in primitive conditions, sandstorms included, it being solid Beetle-kinden workmanship from Sonn that could survive being dragged all over the world by rough and ready Imperial soldiers. They were soon packing barrels with the mineral oil that generations of Scorpions had used for lighting lamps. Angved remembered them explaining its properties to him: wood was hard to come by, but the oil welled up in numerous places around the desert. If ignited, it would burn for days.
He had never come across mineral oil that would burn so steadily, in the quantities the Scorpions decanted into the bowls of their lamps. He had performed his tests and that simple artificer’s inquisitiveness had led inexorably to this current pumping operation – and the similar stations that would soon be set up across the Nem.
He sent a messenger back t
o Khanaphes, and a few days later the first airship appeared, sailing serenely across the disc of the glaring sun, then scudding sideways in the crosswind as it tacked lower. Angved had the filled barrels ready for collection, and the airship crew and his own off-duty soldiers made quick work of hoisting them on board the vessel, which sagged a fraction lower in the sky with each additional load. The pilot brought news, too, together with supplies for the men and even three Dragonfly-kinden slave girls. The visit made a pleasant change from the brisk orders and hard looks that Angved had grown used to.
With evening coming on, he and Varsec stood outside his tent and watched the airship leave with its first consignment. The pumps were still going and everyone would have to learn to live with their noise, but the two engineers themselves were used to that sort of privation.
‘There goes the future,’ Angved observed, holding up a bottle to the fading light. It was good Imperial brandy, and the label denoted a vintage that he had only heard of, never been able to afford. ‘If I were a more suspicious man, I’d think Colonel Lien was trying to poison us both with this.’ The bottle had been marked for the two majors’ personal attention.
Varsec smiled and shook his head. ‘ General Lien hates the pair of us, as upstarts and troublemakers,’ he mused, ‘but he also knows full well that he needs us. Besides, the Empress knows our names, Angved. We can’t just be made to vanish so someone else takes credit for our work. And Lien knows that I could have written how the Aviation Corps shouldn’t be subject to the Engineers, but I was loyal enough not to. This is him saying that so long as we keep to our side of the deal, he’ll keep his, Major Angved.’
‘Why, thank you, Major Varsec.’ Angved plucked from his toolstrip something that had not been particularly intended for extracting corks from bottles, but which artificers had been using for that purpose for two generations. The brandy was darker than blood, rich and smoky on the tongue, burning at the back of the throat.
‘They’re training the new pilots,’ Varsec observed softly, once he had taken a first sip.
Angved remembered that other proposition to be found in Varsec’s little book, regarding the sort of man they would need at the controls of one of his revolutionary new fliers. ‘I didn’t think they’d go for it,’ he said, his tone hushed. ‘You’ve put yourself out of a job, you know. Didn’t you use to be an aviator yourself?’
‘For me, it was never the flying, just the fact of us having the machines. I’ll not miss it,’ Varsec replied, although there was a touch of regret in his voice. ‘Still, there will be plenty of jobs for the old batch of pilots – civilian roles, support roles. It’s just that for our new type of air combat, we need the new type of men.’
His proposals had shocked Angved, visionary to the point of lunacy. ‘It’s going to be a very different place by the time we get home.’
‘It was always going to be,’ Varsec said philosophically. ‘The only difference is that we will have made it so. The future, Angved – we’re making the future right here, you and I. Even if nobody remembers our names, and the historians jabber on about how General Lien and Empress Seda revolutionized the world, it will be us, only us, behind it all.’ He raised his bowl, and clinked it against Angved’s own. ‘The future,’ he repeated.
‘Our future,’ Angved agreed.
He sipped his brandy. Life was good.
Nineteen
She heard the footsteps. She was still awake past midnight, on this night of all nights. How had she known? There was no explaining it, but a premonition had needled her and jabbed her, and filled her stomach with sinking dread – a premonition that the end of her little world was coming.
She was Seda, youngest daughter of the Wasp Emperor, a child of eight years old.
The footsteps were in no hurry. There was shouting elsewhere in the palace, but the man, that death-handed man, idled down the corridor towards their door. She sat up in her bed. Distantly, someone was cursing. Distantly, there was weeping, fighting. Slave sounds usually, but somehow she knew that it was free men and women who now wept and fought, on this particular night.
She slipped out of her bed, shivering, her bare feet cold on the stone. It was always cold here, the sun’s fleeting warmth stolen away as quickly as it came, but there was a deeper cold now, and it came with those footsteps.
She knew who was approaching and what he intended. She knew what had happened: the terrible event that had hung in the balance for three days, and now was done.
Father? But he was dead, of course. His death had brought the footsteps.
Eight years old and intelligent enough to know what had occurred, and what must follow. For a moment she considered the window, but she had no Art to climb or fly with.
Stripped of any options, she hunched down at her own bedside, hearing the footsteps stop at the door of her room.
In the bed across from hers, her brother Tarvec stirred, but slept on.
She retreated and retreated, but the only place to go was beneath the bed. When she had been very young, she had believed, after a vivid nightmare, that a creature dwelt there – red-eyed and its mouthparts honed into a long, hollow stiletto – waiting for her to sleep so that it could drink her blood. Now the space beneath the bed became her refuge, for the monsters were already abroad.
The door opened. There had been guards posted outside. Perhaps they still stood there, but they made no attempt to hinder the footsteps coming into the room.
Tap, tap, tap. Army-issue boots approached the side of her bed, and she pictured him staring at the thrown-back blanket. She tried not to breathe, tried to summon up some of the hiding Art that some of the lesser kinden practised. Go away. There is nothing for you here.
Then he was crouching, and she could not but open her eyes and look into his face. It was not a bad face, in itself: a Wasp-kinden man with receding, greying hair. A soldier, like so many others. An officer. Her father’s friend.
But not today. She pressed herself back against the wall, as far from him as she could get, and jabbed an empty palm out towards him, as though she possessed the stinging Art that had made her people the greatest kinden in the world. She was only eight, though, and not so very precocious as all that. The intruder’s face merely twisted in dry humour.
She heard Tarvec stirring, sitting up, her brother asking, ‘Maxin, what-?’
Maxin’s face vanished from her view as he stood up, and she heard the sharp crackle of his sting, a truncated exclamation as Tarvec died.
Then Maxin was kneeling to peer at her again. Was he making a decision on his own, or recalling instructions given to him by that other brother, her eldest brother – the one about to assume the throne.
The Rekef officer stood up again and she heard his footsteps cross the room. She breathed a little easier, because now she remembered how the rest of the dream went. He would go and murder her other siblings, a second brother and two other sisters, so that, out of the Emperor Alvdan the First’s progeny, only the eldest boy and youngest girl would survive the night. Over the next tenday, eleven other Wasp-kinden – children or young men and women – would also die for the crime of having a mother whom the Emperor had found beguiling. Twenty-nine halfbreeds of various part-Wasp ancestries would follow them. Maxin was as thorough as the late Emperor had been lustful.
Then the third Emperor of the Wasps would take the throne, ushering in a new era.
She was so lost in this recollection that she almost failed to notice how the footsteps had not left the room. Maxin was standing at the doorway, and she knew he was looking back towards her.
A few hammering heartbeats before he moved again. He was coming back. But it hadn’t been like this. He had gone off about his bloody-handed business, she recalled. But now he had changed his mind? Not for General Maxin the restricting bonds of history. This time he would guarantee his new Emperor’s eternal reign by killing the only remaining threat to his power.
She was already screaming when he reached the bed, screaming as
he dragged her out from under it, pushing her back towards the window with a hand about her throat. He was older now, with lines of cruelty and ambition written across his face which were the wages of eight years of service to the man he had made Emperor. He was just how she remembered him.
In the centre of the storm of terror wheeling about inside her head there remained one constant point, and she struggled for it like a swimmer in deep water. Just how I remember you? But if you will be that man, then let us renew our old acquaintance, Maxin.
With a great effort, she cast off her eight-year-old self enough to find the fabric of the dream around her and wrench at it, using strength without finesse. Give me visions, will you? Then I shall have some of my own.
The face of Maxin twisted and leered before her, and his grip was tight about her throat. With a fierce lunge of her will, she conjured hands on his shoulders, dragging him off her. In a moment she had squirmed from his grasp, watching the hated Rekef general hauled away by the two protectors that she had conjured from her own mind and pressed into service. Only one of them had been present for the real Maxin’s death, but it pleased her to have the two of them side by side: Thalric, her regent, and Brugan, her new Lord General of the Rekef.
For a moment she found herself fighting back and forth for control, sensing the dream world all around her try to suborn her new agents, to make the two newcomers a part of the same nightmare. But they were new, and reacting to the new was most definitely not the strong point of Khanaphes.
Thalric had arched General Maxin over with a knee in the small of the man’s back, thrusting his arms outwards so that Maxin could not sting. She saw Brugan’s knife glint just as it had when the real Maxin had met his end.
‘Hold,’ she commanded, because if this was to be her dream, she would rip all the joy she could from it. She approached the straining Maxin, with her palm held out, watching him physically diminish, from ogre to a wretched old man weeping for mercy.
She took a deep breath and summoned her Art, and then her hand was blazing, again and again, the bolts of golden fire striking Maxin over and over, searing and crisping the flesh of his face, smashing its way into his skull.
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