Blood of the Mantis

Eight

Balkus leant back along the raked seats of the Prowess Forum, watching as the Dragonfly-woman danced through the air. The sunlight that broke from the chamber’s four doorways glittered on her armour so that she seemed to be clad in rainbows. The long-handled, short-bladed sword was a blur, passed from hand to hand, or sometimes held in both, but never still.

Felise Mienn was at her daily practice.

‘He set you on her, did he not?’

Balkus looked over at the Spider-kinden, Destrachis, seated a few rows further up. He was a mystery, and that was something Balkus had no time for.

‘He being who?’ the Ant asked.

‘He being Master Maker,’ Destrachis said. He was old, or at least looked it, for his long hair was greying. Instead of the easy grace his kinden usually moved with, he had retreated to a delicate, measured patience. Of course, as he was a Spider, it could all be an act, to put those around him off their guard.

When Balkus made no reply, the Spider-kinden continued, ‘Because he’s going away.’

‘It’s no secret Maker’s going north,’ Balkus said. ‘And someone’s got to watch over your woman there.’

‘I watch her,’ Destrachis said reasonably. ‘But perhaps you mean someone you can trust.’

‘We don’t know you,’ Balkus agreed readily. ‘Furthermore, Maker’s Mantis friend has taken a shine to her, but I really don’t think he’s taken one to you.’

Destrachis’s long face grimaced at that. ‘In Seldis and Siennis they tend to laugh at the Mantis-kinden and their grudges,’ he said. ‘Of course, the Mantids don’t come there much. And, as for the rest, I’m perhaps the only Spider-kinden who’ll ever admit to you that I cannot be wholly relied on. I’ve failed before.’

‘Haven’t we all.’ Balkus turned back to Felise Mienn, still engaged in her exercise, watching in silence for a moment as she spun and glittered. She was beautiful, there was no doubt, but it was a beauty that would be dangerous to approach. Her very presence set him reaching instinctively for his sword-hilt, and he fought off this impulse because it could be so easily misconstrued by a madwoman like her.

‘It’s something of a mystery, really,’ continued the careful voice of Destrachis. ‘Before it happened, she was never reckoned so good. She was trained, of course. She was a Mercer, and they’re not exactly slack with sword or bow, but this… this mastery just seems to have fallen on her like a mantle, after her family was lost to her.’

Balkus nodded, still trying to follow the shimmering movements of the Dragonfly-kinden, and finding that his speed of eye was not quite up to the task.

‘Well it’s all very pretty,’ he said, as dismissively as he could muster, ‘but I prefer my own manner of fighting.’ He patted the heavy bulk of the nailbow resting on the stonework beside him.

‘Nobody’s keeping you here,’ Destrachis pointed out.

‘Like you said,’ said Balkus. ‘Sten Maker left me here with an armful of jobs, and keeping an eye on that one there was one of them – in case she goes mad.’

‘A waste of your time,’ the Spider observed.

‘Says you. I’ve seen her and I’ve seen mad, and she’s it.’

Destrachis smiled, but it was a tired smile. Felise had been in Collegium for more than a month now without any sudden explosion of her madness. She had not even shown any inclination to charge off after Thalric. Yes, she was making every show of being sane now, and yet he knew it was not so. He felt like a man living in a tottering house that one night will collapse and crush him. ‘Oh, I’ll not argue with that, friend,’ he said. ‘Only that, when it happens, you’ll not be able to stop it.’

‘My girl here can stop near enough anything,’ Balkus said proudly.

Destrachis sniggered. ‘You might get the chance to shoot at her, but you would never hit her. Then her sword would cut that piece of artifice of yours in half.’

He expected a quick rejoinder, but instead Balkus craned back at him, frowning. ‘It’s Sarnesh steel, this. She could cut my nailbow in half?’

‘That weapon of hers is one of the Good Old Swords, as we say, made in the old fashion that almost nobody remembers now, save amongst the Dragonflies, and perhaps the Mantis-kinden. A proper Commonweal noble’s duelling blade, no less. They don’t make them like that any more, but they don’t have to, because they last for ever.’

Balkus gave a rude snort. ‘If they’re so wonderful, everyone would be making swords like that still.’

‘Not everyone can devote so many years to crafting a single blade,’ Destrachis explained, silencing the Ant once more. When it seemed that he had given Balkus enough to think about, he added, ‘She’s changed, though. I travelled with her from Helleron to Vek, and I can’t remember her ever practising like this when she was hunting down Thalric. It’s as though it’s some new challenge she’s preparing for…’ His professional instincts were worried – that much he knew. Perhaps it was just the idea that Felise might become even better at killing people. In the Commonweal they believe that madness can gift someone with a skill and vision that sanity cannot touch, and here in her I see the proof of that, but now she is taking that madness and reforging it, and why?

‘And you’re meant to be a doctor,’ Balkus scoffed. ‘You want to know what this is about? I’ll tell you right off.’

‘And?’

‘She wants to impress someone. You know who I mean.’

Destrachis looked at Felise dancing, the utter precision of it, and at the same time the passion that drove it. Such a thing to overlook. ‘I cannot think so. She has been driven many miles by the death of her family. Surely…’ Or has this lump of an Ant-kinden struck the truth, after all?

‘She’ll be disappointed,’ Balkus added, ‘and I wouldn’t want to be around when that happens, either. I like my nailbow in one piece.’

‘Disappointed? In what way?’

‘You get to know a bit about the Mantids, growing up in Sarn, and besides, that one’s madder than most. Tisamon, he’s got a history. I picked it up in pieces, but that Tynisa’s his own daughter, which meant there was a mother. I never heard of a Mantis-kinden who paired off twice.’

‘I’ll freely confess that I don’t know too much about them,’ Destrachis said. There had been enough of them about in the Commonweal, but their Lowlander cousins’ hostile reputation against his kind had led him to keep his distance.

‘Shame, when you think about it. Both as mad as each other, both widowed,’ Balkus mused. ‘Do well together that pair.’

Destrachis sent him a stern frown, to make known his disapproval of such thoughts directed at his patient. Inwardly, his mind was spinning. Of course, Felise could easily know far more than he about the Mantids: as a Dragonfly, as a Mercer especially. The Spider-kinden doctor’s former uneasiness now had a focus at last. He remembered when Tisamon and Felise had fought, how perfectly matched they had been. How there had been a connection, in the dance of blades, that neither of them could ever have managed by speech or expression or anything civilized.

So, in her mind, they would fight again – and she would win him, or else she would kill him, or he would kill her.

Perhaps, he thought wryly, she was approaching it right. Perhaps that was what Mantis-kinden meant by ‘love’.

College engineers had restored the rail line between Sarn and Collegium within a tenday of the Vekken defeat, and the floods of returning refugees, mostly frightened-looking children, served to remind the people of Collegium that, although their Sarnesh allies had been able to send precious little armed support, they had yet played their part.

It was to be a time of confirming old alliances and, as Stenwold hoped, making new ones. The crisis point was reached, for the Lowlands must stand united now, or within the year to come the Wasps would roll over them, city by city.

It had been some time since he had visited Sarn, several years even. He suspected that the changes he now saw in the city were only months in the making, because Ant-kinden changed nothing that did not need it. They were a people of traditions, of set ways of doing things. Now someone had kicked over their nest.

It was easy to see how the Wasps had upset that familiar way of life. It almost seemed that a third of the walls of the city was spun in scaffolding, as though some great metal spider was saving the city for a later meal. The buildings along the road running beside the rails had all gone, demolished and then levelled to strip any enemy of cover, despite the fact that the main assault would most likely come from the air. The walls themselves were changing shape, from the original smooth curve that encircled the city to something spiky, with sloping, pointed buttresses jutting out to give defending archers more inroads into any besieging force, also battlements that curved up and out and then in again, so that sheltered crossbows could fire through slots above them at any airborne enemy. The summit of the wall was studded with siege engines and, as the rail-automotive drew closer, Stenwold watched an impossibly spindly crane winching one of these into position. Some were heavy-barrelled leadshotters, some repeating ballistae plated in steel. There were others still that were new to him – racks of tubes that must be the new serial scrap-shotters he had heard about, which would fill a space of air with enough loose metal to bring down anything flying through it. He saw the machines tilt and turn experimentally with hisses of steam leaking from their joints. All the wall emplacements were armoured with shields before and above to protect the engineers. Too heavy to be winched by hand, the engines were kept grinding back and forth by steam or clockwork.

They don’t really know what they’re doing, Stenwold decided, but it was still a hopeful sight. At least they were doing something. The Sarnesh, backed by the ingenuity of the Collegiate artificers, were preparing for a conflict with the Wasps that would come all the way to the walls of their city.

And he saw further emplacements beyond the walls, too: bunkers and entrenched weapons, that might or might not be connected underground to the city’s subterranean levels where the ant hive housed the working insects that the city used as beasts of burden. He hoped this activity would impress the others as much as it impressed him.

Across from him dozed a pale-skinned Ant. His name was Parops and he was from Tark, and normally a Tarkesh would be risking death merely by coming to Sarn. Tark was in the hands of the Wasps, however, and Parops had been almost eager to come along with Stenwold. The last chance for Tark would be the utter defeat of the Wasps, and he was willing to break centuries of xenophobia to achieve that. It was enough to give a man hope.

If we beat the Wasps, Stenwold reminded himself. ‘If’ was a poisonous word. Let’s beat the Wasps first. For, in fact, even welding together a unified front against the Wasps seemed to be almost impossible, for everyone was pulling in different directions. It was like trying to shoo flies out of a window: no sooner had you swept them into the open air than they were back again.

Aside from Parops, he had come with only two of his staff: Sperra, who was now sleeping curled along the length of one seat and quite oblivious to the roar of the engine and the rattle of the wheels, and Arianna. Looking a little queasy, she sat pressed up against him with her head resting on his rounded shoulder. Travel by rail was the fastest and most efficient way to get anywhere these days, but it was a rough experience for the Inapt.

He reached for her hand and squeezed it, and she managed a wan smile. Before them, just then, the walls of Sarn opened up to swallow the train of open-roofed carriages in which they travelled.

When the automotive pulled in, they were ready waiting for him: it was hard to fault the Ant-kinden for organization. A small delegation had obviously been passed his mental image by some Ant that had once met him, and so they singled him out easily even as his little company disembarked.

‘War Master Stenwold Maker.’ He found himself addressed by a Sarnesh woman robed in the Collegium style, which counted as a token of high respect.

‘I suppose I must be.’

‘You have requested an audience with our Queen,’ he was further informed. ‘It is granted. Even now rooms are being prepared at the Royal Court for you and your fellows. Kindly follow me.’

Nothing would have singled the Queen out from her fellows, save for the ornament that she adopted out of pity for the foreigners’ confusion. She had not been born royal. Unlike Spider Aristoi the Ant-kinden put no stock in hereditary dynasties. The Queen’s childhood had displayed in her an aptitude for command, decision-making, leadership. Such traits were watched out for, among the Ant-kinden. They were discouraged, in most cases, but sometimes these gifts shone in exactly the right way, and in such children they were cultivated.

She had been young for the post when made an officer, and very young when given her commander’s rank, stepping easily up through the simple hierarchy that was all the Ants needed. Her ability, and the soundness of her judgment, marked her as exceptional in a race where conformity was the rule, but it was that rare breed of ‘exceptional’ that managed to complement the whole rather than challenge it.

At thirty they had made her a tactician. She had been chosen from a hundred candidates, her every thought and action having been carefully scrutinized without her ever knowing that the Court was watching her. Never let it be said that the Ants could not keep any secrets from their own.

When she was thirty-eight the old King had died, and she had joined his other tacticians as they put their minds together even as his body cooled. The decision had been unanimous. In putting herself forward she had showed no personal ambition. They had simply measured one another by the standards of each other, and she had stood taller than the rest.

The absolute trust of an Ant city-state was a burden she was proud to bear, for all it weighed on her heavily. For eleven years she had lived with such iron responsibility, but never to this degree. It was the time of crisis that any Ant regent dreaded.

The Queen of Sarn now sat at her war table, on which maps and charts were pinned in immaculate order, updated daily by the clerks of her army. Eleven years ago she had been chosen as the supreme voice of Sarn, the fount of all authority, the ultimate origin of all orders. She knew that outsiders considered the Ant city-states to be merely autocracies but the truth was richer than that, infinitely more complex. The mindlink that laced them all together did not exclude her, nor did it make them her unthinking slaves. She was constantly present in the minds of her subjects as they were also an influence in hers. The Beetles of Collegium thought they had achieved government by the people in choosing their quarrelsome leaders by the casting of lots, but in reality they had no idea, no idea at all.

And speaking of Beetles, here was one arrived to see her, she was informed, and it was a name she had heard before.

She did not even need to glance at them for their reactions. She felt the presence of her tacticians supporting her. They were eight Ant-kinden men and women, the keenest military minds in the city, with a pair of Beetle women, an artificer and a merchant, to advise on matters less warlike. There would, she guessed, be little need of those last two in the next months.

Stenwold Maker, she reflected, seeing the doors open to reveal a stocky, bald man dressed in the folded white robes of a College master but looking as though he missed a sword at his side, approaching with a walk that still compensated for the blade he had not been allowed to bring in.

Tell me about him, she directed.

– He has been quite a maverick, causing trouble for the Assembly, came the first voice from among her tacticians.

– Reports confirm that he has been spreading warnings of the Empire for at least fifteen years.

– He was in Sarn six years ago, starting an agent network. We have the details of some of his contacts here, but not all.

– Reports suggest that he was in the thick of the fighting during the Vekken siege.

– His position at the College was in the department of history, but prolonged absences have punctuated his teaching. Known associates…

The Queen waved that information away in her mind, and all this time Stenwold had been approaching the war table, hearing none of it, not guessing how he was being weighed up. His character, then? she said.

– Resourceful. Charismatic. He has been able to control the Assembly.

– He inspires loyalty in others. A good officer – for a foreigner.

– Do not forget that Beetles endure. He has endured a great deal.

‘War Master Stenwold Maker,’ she began, and he gave her a stiff, somewhat paunchy bow. ‘Your Majesty,’ he acknowledged, and then gave a brief nod left and right to her council.

‘We are pleased to find our allies in Collegium still in possession of their freedom,’ she said to him.

‘We are pleased to still be in possession of it. I see you anticipate a siege here, your Majesty.’

‘We do, but no siege such as these walls have ever known. We have sent Fly-kinden scouts to investigate the Wasp army. It seems they have made fortifications for the winter, and their defences are intended against both an air and ground assault. We have therefore borrowed from their designs.’

Stenwold nodded. ‘Clever,’ he admitted.

‘And it may be that we can borrow from them even further,’ the Queen remarked, almost casually, and then fixed him with a steel gaze. ‘We understand an agent of yours who fought beside us may have escaped the Wasp forces with something of immense value.’

‘The reports of agents…’ began Stenwold, holding up a hand, but she forestalled him.

‘We mean the new weapon, that the Wasps turned on us at the Battle of the Rails.’ Even as she spoke her advisors were in her mind.

– Reports suggest that Collegium has been constructing their own version. It was unclear whether this was purely from first principles or…

– There is a Spider-kinden now waiting in the antechamber with a wrapped bundle of the correct size and shape, according to battlefield recollection.

She saw the Beetle glance sideways at her expressionless Tacticians, obviously guessing at their constant exchange and yet deaf to it. ‘War Master Maker?’ she prompted.

‘They call it a snapbow,’ he told her at last, bowing to necessity and the accuracy of her own intelligence. ‘Your own soldiers have seen its efficiency. My agent was able to bring me the original plans.’

– There is more to this, though. He is holding back information.

He is entitled to, the Queen responded. He is an ally, not a citizen.

– We cannot risk the future of Sarn on the squeamishness of our allies.

– If we merely requisition the sample weapon he has brought, it could be reverse-engineered by our artificers.

In offending Collegium we would lose more than we gained, the Queen decided. ‘You can recreate this marvel?’ she asked.

‘And we have done so,’ Stenwold said. He still felt a stab of pain when he recalled those plans, the so-familiar handwriting of his student, Totho, who was working with the Empire now somehow, driven there by the curse of his blood and the fall of Tark.

On the crest of a wave of mental voices, the Queen announced, ‘We will set our artificers to the task, Master Maker. We will require the plans, therefore, in order to work efficiently at rearming our soldiers.’

This was the moment he had been waiting for, but she had dropped it on him sooner than he had wanted, though perhaps not sooner than he had expected.

‘I… The Assembly, that is, is unsure… the weapon is of a remarkable design. We fear to see it in general usage, you understand. We are therefore training elite groups of-’

‘The weapon is already in general usage, Master Maker,’ she reminded him. ‘The Empire, we understand, is very large and has many, many soldiers. If it is to be defeated we cannot now stint on any advantage your agents have procured for us.’

Stenwold pursed his lips, thinking of the golden future he had envisaged, and how the Sarnesh having the snap-bow would change it. Oh, they were the best of Ant-kinden, without doubt, and had come so far in just a few decades. They were Ant-kinden all the same, though, so how long before their armies were at the gates of Vek or of Tark?

‘I have not brought the plans with me to Sarn,’ he said.

– He is lying.

– He should be persuaded to send back to Collegium to collect them.

– I concur that he is lying. The Beetles clearly do not trust us.

– We cannot therefore trust them.

– We need allies now if we are to stave off the Wasp-kinden when they come.

‘Master Maker,’ the Queen said softly. ‘We understand that you have been the man to cut through philosophical procrastination at Collegium, and to impart a keener view of reality than your people might otherwise have achieved. Allow me to do the same for you. We must defeat the Wasps at all costs. If Sarn falls, the Lowlands has lost its heart. We cannot stand on niceties or other such considerations. I wish you to think very carefully about how much our need for victory outweighs any other needs of your own just now.’

‘I understand, your Majesty. I have another proposal, though. I would like to use Sarn as a rallying point for those cities willing to send troops and aid in order to resist the Wasps. You are correct that Sarn is the keystone of the Lowlands, as matters now stand, and I am also aware that there is an alliance of Moth and Mantis-kinden north of here. So, as well as Collegium, we can hopefully bring several others to the table. We can then plan a unified strategy regarding how best to fight and how best to hamper the imperial advance. Would you be willing to consider this?’

‘You do not deflect us so easily, Master Maker,’ the Queen remarked acidly. ‘You must come to accept that this weapon you have discovered is wasted in the hands of Collegium. You are builders and inventors but not warriors. That is our profession here in Sarn. To pass weapons into our hands is simply an efficient division of labour. However, I am confident that you will, after due thought, come to make the correct decision on this point. As to your own request, we are agreed. Let those who are prepared to stand against the Wasps send their Tacticians and embassies here in safety. We shall receive them all.’

Stenwold backed out of the war room, feeling off-balance and ill at ease. He had expected that Sarnesh agents would have sniffed out Collegium’s new acquisition, and he had come armed with the authority of the Collegium Assembly to deny the Queen’s logical request, but she had ambushed him with it before he was ready, launching him into the pitched diplomatic battle he had been hoping to defer. Nor was that battle won yet.

He wondered uneasily how far news of the snapbow had spread.

Back in the antechamber he rejoined Arianna, hugged her briefly, and then turned to look at the next petitioner ready to enter the war room.

It was Salma.

Stenwold blinked at him, seeing the same lean, hard-edged man he had encountered when recovering his niece. Salma all grown up, calloused and lean, standing here still in his brigand’s armour as though he were not about to speak to a queen.

‘Hammer and tongs,’ Stenwold said softly. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Merely a prince calling on fellow royalty, what else?’ Salma said. His smile was the same old smile gleaming through a filter of time and pain. ‘It’s good to see you, Sten.’

‘It’s good… very good to see you,’ Stenwold told him. ‘I wish I’d been able to bring along Che or Tynisa.’

The smile lingered, now sadder. ‘Those were the days, weren’t they?’ said the Dragonfly. ‘How little we knew. Except you, of course. I listened to everything you said, and I still wish I’d listened harder.’

‘At least you listened. It took my own people a lot longer.’ Stenwold looked him up and down, this most unlikely of royal petitioners. ‘You’re here on the business of your… surrogate people?’

Salma nodded. ‘My followers, yes. I come to barter like any tradesman. To horse-trade, in fact.’ Seeing Stenwold’s expression he waved a hand dismissively. ‘It’s a Commonweal expression, although more fitting than you’d think. Your own business here is your grand alliance, of course.’

‘Let us hope it’s more than just my business,’ Stenwold said, and at that moment an Ant functionary was at Salma’s elbow. The two old friends clasped hands, and Stenwold said, ‘Good luck,’ before returning to Arianna.

She raised the wrapped bundle questioningly, but he shook his head at her, relieved to be out of here without having to unsheathe it. She kept her questions to herself until they were well clear of the royal palace and pacing back through the well-ordered streets of Sarn proper towards the Foreigners’ Quarter.

‘So I carried this along for nothing then?’ she said eventually.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘We knew they knew that we knew how to make it, so to speak, but the Queen is not going to be derailed from her intentions.’ He grimaced about him at the perfectly grid-patterned streets, at the silent Sarnesh going about their lives without fuss or haste, at soldiers trooping past them carrying material to the walls. ‘I suppose I can’t blame them, given that they were on the receiving end, but they really, fiercely want Totho’s invention. I’m starting to worry about precisely what they’ll do if I don’t willingly give them the plans.’

‘The Assembly opinion seemed to be fairly unified on that point,’ she noted.

‘The Assembly of Collegium, lucky fellows, aren’t here facing the Queen of Sarn.’ He sighed. ‘I know it’s an artificial situation. Old Thadspar wanted to keep it out of the wrong hands, and yet the Wasps already have it. And, anyway, the Sarnesh will capture one eventually, build their own copy, and then they’ll have it too, and they’ll only remember that we didn’t want them to get it. And they want it now. They want to be able to put it to use against the Wasps next spring, and for the short term, of course, that’s the best idea.’

‘And for the long term…’

‘They will turn it against the world, sooner or later. No doubt about that. The temptation to win a few battles over their old enemies will prove too much. This weapon is dangerous enough in Wasp hands, but in Ant hands the possibilities are even worse.’

Now they were securely inside the Foreigners’ Quarter, approaching the elegant Beetle-style two-storey that was the Collegiate embassy. Once inside, past the guards and the functionaries, Stenwold retired to the suite of rooms that had been made available to him.

And there’s the joke because, a month before, Collegium’s

own diplomatic staff wouldn’t have let me in the door. ‘You were right,’ he told Sperra. ‘She’s a tough one.’ The Fly nodded. ‘Rather you than me, chief.’

‘I take it not so good, Sten?’ This came from the last man there, a fleshy creature with pale, bluish skin – an Ant from some western city-state at the fringes of the Lowlands proper. His name was Plius and he was nominally Stenwold’s man here in Sarn. Stenwold had been in the game a long time, cutting his teeth on agent-running in a half-dozen cities, and way back when he had first recruited Plius, Stenwold had taken him for what the world usually saw: an outcast trying to make his difficult way in a hostile city. Now, his customary pipe in his hands, Plius managed a wan smile at Stenwold, who smiled back and nodded.

With his extra years of experience, Stenwold had known as soon as he reacquainted himself with the man. He knew the telltale signs now of a man with divided loyalties. Either he had been blind to it before, or Plius had been turned fairly recently. They were still both playing the game as though it was not so but, somewhere along the line, someone else had put their mark on Plius, and Stenwold knew he could not trust the man any more, only keep him close and wait.

Who is this man? the Queen asked, and this time the silent answers came more hesitantly.

– A nobleman from the northlands. He has been a student at the College.

– Reports suggest he was at Tark during the siege.

– He may be a spy.

– We have heard unconfirmed reports of irregular resistance to the imperial advance being linked to his name.

– Our knowledge of the Commonweal is almost nonexistent.

– Save that they, too, have fought the Wasps.

With no clear vision from her Tacticians, she used her own eyes, seeing a young man, too young to be standing before her in this weighty role. He wore a long leather hauberk reinforced with metal plates that would ill become the worst of her own soldiers, and yet he carried himself with a casual authority. Apart from that he was golden-skinned, handsome, clear-eyed, and he stood before her war council as though he was the lord of a realm and not just the chief of a ragged pack of bandits and refugees.

‘Prince Salme Dien,’ she said, pronouncing the foreign name carefully. She was aware that he was studying her in return, unsurprised at seeing nothing but a woman of Sarn of middling years, with the same close features, brown skin and short-cut dark hair as all her kin. No doubt the lords in his homeland wore gaudy flowers of gilt and gems, compared with the token regalia she bore to identify her. Her look told him flatly that in Sarn they valued other things.

‘Your Majesty.’ He sketched a bow that was obviously a shadow of something more formal.

‘Your name is known to us, to my council and myself,’ she told him. ‘It has therefore won you this time, when our time is precious to us. Who are you, Dragonfly, and why should we heed you?’

‘In the Commonweal it is customary to bring gifts when currying the favour of great men and women,’ Salma declared. ‘I have something you should appreciate, and also may serve as your answer.’

She sent out a query, but discovered no aide awaiting him with bundles in the antechamber. ‘Speak clearly,’ she advised.

‘In the Foreigners’ Quarter I have, under lock and key, three Wasp scouts my men have caught. I have questioned them all I need to. They are now yours.’

There was a murmur in her head, a sound of cautious re-evaluation. ‘You are in the habit of catching Wasps without being stung?’ the Queen asked.

– This may yet be a trap. Misinformation is easy to plant. – Wasps are hard to take alive. They are more mobile than our own scouts.

‘There is,’ said Salma, ‘a knack to it.’

The Queen frowned at him. ‘And who are your men, exactly? Do you hold yourself a tactician now?’ She said it with a glance of mockery at his travel-stained dress, the stitched repairs to his armour.

‘Yes,’ Salma replied, quite seriously.

That stilled the voices in her head for a moment, and he let his voice step into the breach.

‘The Empire has wrought a great change east of here. They have displaced hundreds, thousands, from their homes: people from Tark, from Helleron, from all the little communities between there and here. The roads are full of refugees, escaped slaves, wilderness folk: a great tide of humanity that the Wasps have driven before them, to shiver and starve through the winter. Now the Wasps have halted their advance so that they can accumulate more reserves of men and weapons, and we have regrouped too. We are the dispossessed, your Majesty, and we fight.’

‘You fight the Empire.’

‘We turn upon our creator.’

– This is preposterous.

– There is no precedent for this.

– He is no more than a brigand with ideas above his station.

Because she was Queen of Sarn, one mental word silenced them. ‘And what are your plans, this winter, Prince Dien?’

He smiled at her. It was a smile baked hard and sharpened to an edge. ‘We are attacking the Wasps, your Majesty. We are attacking them, even as I speak, in all the little ways we can. My soldiers have disrupted their supply lines. My artificers have broken up the rails between their camp and Helleron. My Fly-kinden pass over their camp and lure out their soldiers into ambush or capture. My foragers take everything from the land before the Wasps can harvest it. My spies become their slaves in order to discover their plans. Can you say as much of your own people, your Majesty?’

The outrage about the table was almost tangible to him, loudly audible to her, but she felt as though, despite the others present, there were now only the two of them truly there in that room: the Queen of Sarn and this young man with his disturbing smile.

‘You are here with a proposal, young prince,’ she informed him.

‘Certainly,’ he agreed. ‘For the moment, the city of Sarn presents a line across which the Wasps dare not go, not until they are fully ready for their great battle. I have with me thousands who cannot fight: the young, the old and the wounded. I know Ant city-states well enough, and you will have hoarded enough within your walls to withstand a siege lasting years. You have therefore enough to provide for those of my people that I cannot.’

‘And in exchange you will make yourselves soldiers of Sarn?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Under no circumstances. We know what that would mean: to be the least valued, the first sent into the fire. We are free, your Majesty, no subjects of yours, nor of any ruler’s.’

‘So, in return, what?’ Her Tacticians were now hanging on her words, trying to keep up with the way the world around them had suddenly shifted.

‘In exchange we will do what you cannot. We will tell you all that we discover about the Wasps. When they advance, we will harry their vanguard and ambush their baggage train. We are woodsmen, trackers, thieves and brigands, your Majesty, and we will become the very land about them, which turns upon them. We are not many, but we are still an army. More, we are an army without shield-wall or formations, an army that moves swiftly, that has no home, that cannot be pinned or broken against a solid line. They do not know how to fight us. This is what you shall have, in return.’

‘And where will this proud independence of all rulers take you at the last, young prince?’ she asked him, and he knew from the question that he had won, that she would agree.

‘A city, your Majesty. A city west of here, where my people can stop running. We do not know where it is, yet, or what it shall be called, but when we see the land just so, we shall build there.’

The flurry of conflicting voices in her head rose high, some saying that he should be instantly destroyed, others that he should be used, but still more that he was an ally worth having, now and for the future.

For the future, she agreed, If there is to be one for any of us, a new community built by those who have cause to love us is no bad thing. And it would not be hard to commandeer, if that were to become necessary.