Dragonfly Falling

Nine

General Alder woke as soon as the tent-flap was pushed aside. By long practice his one hand found the hilt of his sword.

‘General,’ came the hushed voice of one of his junior officers. ‘General?’

It was ridiculous. ‘Either you want me awake, soldier, in which case speak louder, or you don’t, in which case what in the Emperor’s name are you doing here?’

‘I’m sorry, General, it’s the Colonel-Auxillian.’

Drephos. There was only one Colonel-Auxillian in the army. ‘What does that motherless bastard want?’ Alder growled. It was pitch-dark within the tent, too dark for him to even see the man a few paces away. ‘What’s the hour?’

‘Two hours before midnight, General.’

‘And he wants to speak to me now? Can’t he sleep?’

‘I don’t know, General-’

‘Get out!’ Alder told the man. He sat up on his bed, a folding, metal-sprung thing they had made especially for him in the foundries of Corta. Drephos was a menace, he decided. The twisted little monster was taking his privileges too far.

Still, the man had a reputation, and it was a reputation for being right. Alder spat, and then dragged a tunic one-handed over his head and slung a cloak over his shoulders. Barefoot, he stepped out of his tent.

The camp had enough lights for him to see the cowled and robed form of Drephos standing some yards away. The agonized junior officer was hesitating nearby and, when Alder raised a hand to dismiss the man, Drephos’s voice floated towards him.

‘Don’t send him away just yet, General. I think you will have orders to issue before long.’

Alder stalked over to him. ‘What is it now?’ he demanded. ‘Your precious plan failed a day and a night ago.’

‘Did I admit its failure?’ Drephos enquired.

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘I did not, General, nor do I. Have your men gather for an attack. The moment is at hand.’

Alder stared at him, at the featureless shadow within the cowl. ‘Then-’

‘Tark’s walls are thicker to be sure, and of a stronger construction than I had thought, but the reagent has permeated the stone.’

‘And you know this?’

‘By the simplest expedient, General. I went and looked.’

Alder shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Darkness is a cloak to me, General, but a blindfold to my enemies. I simply walked up to the enemy’s walls and knew what I was looking for. In three hours, perhaps less, you will have your breach. I would therefore have your response standing by.’

‘A night assault?’ Which would be messy, Alder thought.

‘They’re bound to notice their walls coming down, General. Wait till morning and they’ll have barricades up. We must force the issue now. And while they’re busy fighting it out over the breach, in the darkness which will whittle away at their crossbows’ effectiveness, we can try to put a few more holes in them. I’ve not been idle these last few days, and one of the leadshotters is now converted into a ram.’

‘Major Grigan mentioned as much. He was not pleased.’

A derisive noise emerged from within the cowl. ‘Major Grigan, of your precious engineers, is a dull-minded fool.’

‘Major Grigan is an imperial officer-’ Alder felt his temper rise.

‘He is a fool,’ Drephos repeated. ‘He should be over on their side of the walls, hampering them. I am ten times the artificer he would ever be even if he opened his eyes to the world mechanical. A fool, General, and you would best give me what I ask for if you wish this war won.’

At this late hour it was too much. Alder’s one hand clutched Drephos by the collar again, drawing the man up onto his toes. ‘You forget your place, Auxillian.’

The general felt Drephos’s left hand, gauntleted in steel, take his wrist and, with an appalling strength, remove it from its owner’s person. Still maintaining that grip, which was gentleness backed with the threat of crushing force, Drephos’s unseen face looked straight into his.

‘Judge me on this, General,’ he said. ‘Prepare for your assault. If the walls still stand, then do what you wish.’

Not half an hour had passed before Alder had his command staff woken and rushed to his tent: Colonel Carvoc for the camp; Colonel Edric for the assault; the majors, including the sullen Grigan; the Auxillian chiefs and other unit leaders.

‘We are going to attack,’ he informed them, seeing blank incomprehension on all sides. ‘Drephos assures me that the wall will be down shortly and I want to be ready for it.’

He saw Grigan’s lip curl at the name, but when he fixed the man with his gaze, the major dropped his eyes.

‘Colonel Edric.’

‘Yes, General.’

‘Get me all of your Hornets that are still able to fly. Back them with two wings of the light airborne and a wing of the Medium Elites. Go and organize them now.’

Edric saluted and ran from the tent.

‘Carvoc.’

‘Yes, General?’

‘I want three wings each of Lancers and Heavy Shield-men, and our Sentinels. Go now.’

When Carvoc had gone, a worried frown already appearing on his face, Alder turned to the Auxillian officers. Discounting the maverick Drephos there were two of any worthwhile rank. Anadus of Maynes was a ruddy-skinned Ant who was either the army’s swiftest dresser or slept in most of his armour: a solid, bitter man who detested the Empire and all it stood for. Alder knew all that, just as he knew that so long as the man’s city-state of Maynes, his family, his people, were all held hostage to his behaviour, that hatred would be turned on the Ants of Tark. Besides, Ants fought Ants. All the subject races had flaws, and that feuding was theirs.

Beside him was Czerig, a grey-haired Bee-kinden artificer from Szar. There was never any trouble from that direction, fortunately. The Bee-kinden were loyal to their own royal house and, since the Emperor had taken their queen from them and made her his concubine, they had served the Empire as patiently as if they were its born slaves.

‘Captain-Auxillian Anadus,’ Alder said, enjoying the dislike evident in the man’s eyes, ‘assuming Drephos is correct, your brigade gets to take the breach.’

Anadus’s eyes remained bleak. The worst danger, the greatest glory, a chance to kill Ants of a city not his own? Alder could only guess at the thoughts going on behind them. ‘Go and prepare your men, Captain. If there’s a breach I want it packed end to end with your Maynesh shields before the Tarkesh can fill it.’

‘It shall be so, General,’ said Anadus, his tone suggesting that he considered death in this other man’s war the only way out with honour for him and his men.

Which concept I have no concern with.

‘Captain-Auxillian Czerig.’

The old man looked up tiredly. Like all his kinden he was short, strong-shouldered, dark of skin.

‘Get the new ram Drephos has tinkered with ready for the gates. You know the one?’

Czerig nodded. He said nothing that was unnecessary, and when he spoke it was mostly about his trade.

‘Good. And I also want the Moles.’

Czerig pursed his lips.

‘What is it, Captain?’

‘They. are not happy.’ Czerig twisted, clearly less than delighted himself. ‘They say. they are not warriors, General.’

‘So what makes a warrior?’ Alder enquired. ‘If they have the ill luck not to be born Wasp-kinden, then they have this: they have armour, they have weapons and they are going to war. Tell them they’re all the warrior they need to be. I want them against some patch of the walls within a hundred yards of the breach — if it ever happens. So I can support the main assault. Is that clear?’

Czerig nodded glumly and saluted.

Awake. Totho’s eyes were abruptly wide in the darkness. It was not the sound, although there were sounds, but a shudder that had awakened him. He clung to his pallet because the floor was shaking.

People were running about in the hall outside. He was in Tark — that was it. Not in Collegium. Not Myna, which for some reason had come to him as a second guess. The Ants of Tark. The siege.

He stumbled up from the floor, feeling it twang again like a rope pulled taut. Part of him was desperate to believe he was still dreaming. He tripped over his discarded clothes on his way to the door and pulled it open. There were lamps outside, and he stared at them blearily: simple globes over gaslight, but one of the covers had fallen and smashed, leaving the naked flame guttering.

A squad of soldiers charged past him, heading for the outside. They were armed and armoured, but there was an uncharacteristically slipshod look to them: warriors who had harnessed in haste. He called after them, but not one of them looked back.

‘Totho, lad.’ The small figure of Nero almost tripped down the stairs, his wings flaring as he caught himself. He was wearing only a nightshirt. ‘What’s happening?’

Totho could only shake his head, and a moment later Nero was displaced by Parops, his chainmail hauberk hanging open at the back. Totho expected him to say this was no place for civilians, that they should go back to bed and let the army deal with it. Instead Parops hissed, ‘You’ve arms and armour? Put them on!’

‘Parops, what in blazes is going on?’ Nero demanded.

The Ant commander’s face was haunted. ‘The wall’s down.’

‘The what?’

‘The wall’s down,’ and the floor shook as he repeated himself. ‘It’s coming down right now, and the Wasps aren’t far behind.’

And then Parops was charging back upstairs, his loose armour flapping. Even as Totho watched, Salma bolted from his room, heading for the outside, his sword in his hand.

Nero shook his head. ‘I have a bow upstairs in my room,’ he remarked philosophically. ‘I think I shall go and string it.’ He left Totho gaping.

But gaping would solve nothing. Totho stumbled back into his room and wrestled on his leather work-coat: that would serve as armour better than his bare skin would. He had the repeating crossbow that Scuto had given him and he slung on his sword-baldric that had a bag of quarrel magazines hanging from it.

I am no soldier, he inwardly protested. But the Wasps would not care.

Totho blundered out into the hall again.

‘Hey, Beetle-boy? You fighting now?’

It was Skrill. She wore her metal scale vest and her bow and, to his surprise, she looked more frightened than he felt.

‘I suppose,’ he said uncertainly.

She clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll stick right with you then, Beetle-Boy. Whole world’s coming apart at the seams.’

And it was. Another shudder racked Parops’s tower, and Totho pushed his way to the door and flung it open.

Behind him, Skrill uttered something, some awed exclamation, but his ears were so crammed with the sound from outside that he heard not one word.

The wall was down. The wall beside the tower had fallen and was still falling. Totho saw the stones of the lower reaches bulge and stretch like soft cheese, shrugging off the colossal weight of their higher-up brethren, so that to the left and right of the breach whole stretches of wall were bulging inwards or outwards as though pressed either way by a giant’s hand.

There were Ant soldiers running for the gaping breach, each man and woman falling into formation even as they ran, shields before them, locked rim over rim. The stones fell on them as they massed forwards.

There were other soldiers charging the breach from the outside. For a moment Totho could not work it out at all. The shields of the defenders were meeting the same locked rectangles of the attackers, and in the poor light of the moon he could see no difference between them. Ant against Ant, shortswords stabbing over shield-tops, second-rank crossbows shooting, almost close enough to touch, into the faces of the enemy, and all happening in silence: metal noises aplenty but not a cry, not an order yelled on either side. The battle line twisted and swayed over the breach, which widened and widened, dropping further stones that slammed gaps into the ranks of both sides.

The skies were full. He found himself dropping to one knee, a hand up to shield him. The skies were crowded tonight with a host of madmen out for blood. There were Wasp soldiers darting and passing there above, and the spear-wielding savages in their howling hosts. From the rooftops of nearby houses, from the ground and the still-standing wall, Ant crossbows were constantly spitting. As Totho’s wild gaze took in the archers, he saw that most were merely in tunics, others were near naked. They were citizens, off-duty soldiers, the elderly or children no more than thirteen straining to recock their bows by using both hands.

The skies were busy with more than just flying men. Even as Totho watched, a great dark shape cut through a formation of the Wasp light airborne, its powering wings sounding a metal clatter over all the rest. Totho saw the flash of nailbows from within and knew it must be a Tarkesh orthopter. More of the machines flapped, some loosing their weapons against the airborne while others were dropping explosives on attackers beyond the wall.

Beyond the wall: there were more, then. Totho craned up and saw the trebuchet on Parops’s tower pivoting, leaning at an angle, launching a missile past the section of wall that still held the gate. Then something thundered over it, and there was the flash of incendiaries that briefly silhouetted the siege weapon in sharp detail. Moments later it was on fire, and Totho saw one of its crew drop blazing down onto the soldiers fighting below. He hoped Parops was well clear.

The juddering machine flew on, a great ugly heliopter clinging to the air with its three labouring rotors. It would have been a simple matter to dispatch it with artillery or with the orthopters but the Wasps had given Tark all manner of distractions tonight.

Totho raised his crossbow, but the sky was such a jumble that he could find no sense in it. He fell back against the tower wall, feeling the stones shift against one another. He had never been intended to see this: it was a world the sedate College had no words for.

Cheerwell, he cried in his mind, but no doubt she had already forgotten him in his self-imposed exile.

Skrill crouched beside him, tracking a passing Wasp with her bow and sending the arrow off, a hiss of annoyance already on her lips as she saw her shot fall short. Totho himself could not even manage to shoot, though. The assault on his senses was overwhelming.

He had put his sword into Captain Halrad, all those tendays before, put it right into his back as they had escaped the Sky Without. The first blood he had ever shed and it had been spilled for Che Maker. He had been there, as one of Stenwold’s men, but only for Che.

He had fought in Helleron and then tracked her into the very Empire, stealing into the Governor’s Palace in Myna. He had used this same crossbow to kill Wasps there, and it had been to rescue Che, to bring her safely home.

But in gaining her he found he had lost her. Her heart had been stolen from him. Stolen, because she had barely met the other man, Achaeos, the Moth-kinden deceiver. And in the end, for her sake, he had left to go along with Salma, to go to war.

He knew a great tide of despair that almost eclipsed him, and when it receded he found himself standing, shooting into the soldiers passing overhead, dragging the lever back over and over until the wooden magazine was empty, and then reaching for another from his bag.

Outside the city wall the advancing infantry of the Empire was almost untroubled, as the defenders sent their missiles at the flying corps or at Anadus’s Ant-kinden. Captain Anadus’s men had not been able to press into the breach, for the Tarkesh were holding them at bay, although the carnage on both sides was unspeakable. The very bodies of the dead were now starting to clog the gap. This was the ancient war that the Ant-kinden had always waged upon themselves. Shield rammed against shield, neither side would give an inch.

Drephos’s new engine was almost at the gates, shielded from above by a great curved iron coping. It was a lead-shotter in essence, a siege engine that should launch great powder-charged balls of stone or metal. Drephos, however, had given it a new purpose.

Captain Czerig himself had taken on this duty, along with two of his artificers. The three of them now sheltered under the eaves of the machine’s metal roof, and guided it forwards until it was mere feet away from the gate. Behind them came a mass of Wasp armoured infantry, bristling with spears and desperate to join the fight.

The sound of missiles above them was more persistent now. If the Tarkesh got a siege engine to bear on them it would be over. The Tarkesh had other things to think about, he knew.

The Wasp army had ramming engines, of course, but they traditionally relied on their engines’ power to push through the barriers. Drephos had a better plan, though. Czerig gave the signal and his artificer had the great machine ratchet back, cogs and gears moving the foot-thick arm into place. There was a firepowder charge in the chamber that could have hurled a stone from the Wasp camp all the way over Tark’s walls, but its force would now be concentrated into the three-knuckled metal fist. Czerig did not like Drephos: the man made him shiver to his very core. Nevertheless, there was no denying his skill as an artificer.

‘Stand clear,’ he said, and his men scurried back, raising round shields against the engine itself in case it failed.

He took a deep breath and released the catch. The powder exploded, swathing them instantly in thick, foul smoke, and the trapped power of the charge went into the ram that punched against the gates of Tark. Czerig heard them bend inwards, heard the crunch of ruined wood, the snap of metal fixings.

His artificers were already moving to draw the ram back and put a second charge in place. Something heavy struck the coping above and bounded off, either engine-shot or a stone hurled from the walls. Czerig remained phlegmatic: the ram would succeed or fail, he himself would live or die. He was a slave of the Wasps without hope of freedom and he found he cared little enough.

Across the field his fellow slaves of war were marching into battle, dwarfing the Wasp soldiers all around them. The giants were striding forth and Captain Czerig felt a stab of sorrow. They were so wretched, he knew: they hated the fighting even more than he did, had less hope even than he.

In his heart he wished them luck — or a swift death.

There were a dozen of them only, half of their kinden’s unwilling contingent currently serving with the Wasp Fourth Army. As tall as two men, as broad as three, sporting massive slabs of metal armour and thick sheets of studded leather that would crush a normal warrior, they bore great spade-headed spears and seven-foot shields of metal and wood. They now moved with five-foot strides towards the walls of Tark. Mole Cricket-kinden they were and, like the other Auxillians, they were slaves whose families were held hostage to their loyal service. Few and reclusive, to them it seemed that they had always been slaves to someone or other. They had laboured and built for the Moth-kinden and Spiders when the world was younger and the revolution still a dream, but at least their masters had known where their true skills lay. Now the Wasp-kinden had garrisoned their towns and their mines, and turned them into warriors.

There was some shot coming from the city walls now and they put their shields up, feeling the metal shudder as crossbow bolts bounced from them. Their kind were onyx-skinned and pale-haired, huge and strong, but, though they were armoured like automotives, a keen shot with a crossbow could finish them, just like any mortal man.

But their present enemies were creatures of the surface and the sun, while the Mole Crickets saw better at night than in daylight. They were closing on the walls.

Their leader glanced left, seeing old Czerig with the ram and that the gates were almost broken through. No doubt it was important to the Wasps that all these holes be made in one go. He had no wish to learn strategy himself.

A fistful of grenades suddenly landed all around them, dropped from an orthopter already burning, even as it passed overhead. An instant volley of explosions erupted about them, killing three and wounding another, denting and splitting shields. The remainder picked up their pace. Their orders were to go through the wall, they knew, and then through the men beyond.

None of them would survive. So much seemed certain. The Mole Cricket leader braced himself as the great stones loomed before him.

Pardon this violence, he said silently, dropping his spear and shield. His great chisel-nailed hands found the gaps between the stones, and he called upon his ancestors, called upon the Art they had given him. The stones within his grasp — and those his brothers grasped — began to soften and to shift.

Totho found himself crouching against some of the fallen wall, frantically slotting another magazine in place and knowing he was almost out of ammunition. Skrill was behind him, her back to his, sending sporadic arrows up at the enemy. More and more Ants were coming to help hold the breach, and even Totho could see how the attacking force was being made to give ground, every inch of it bought in blood. Above them the cavalry had arrived, Ant-kinden soldiers riding great winged insects, cumbersome in flight as they buzzed ponderously through the darting Wasp airborne. Each flying beast had a big repeating crossbow mounted above its thorax and soon the newcomers were taking a savage toll of the enemy.

Knowing that Salma was up there somewhere, Totho just hoped he would be safe, but he could spare him no further thought.

Yet more Ant-kinden were coming to join the defence. Some had brought packs of giant ants under leash, drawn from the nest of tunnels beneath the city. The creatures were the guards and soldiers of the nest below, and another resource the city could barely spare, but they had stings and jagged mandibles. As soon as they were within sight of the enemy their leashes were loosed, and they scuttled towards the foe with jaws gaping in idiot threat.

Totho tried to track another Wasp soldier while the man darted overhead, hands spitting golden fire. Then one of the Wasp heliopters rumbled past, and Totho noticed it was failing, one of its rotors torn and still. The ponderous, blocky machine limped through the air, tilting and tilting further. One of the great flying insects was clinging to its side, riderless, peeling at the metal casing with its jaws. Then it went out of sight over the rooftops, but Totho felt it come down, felt the ground shake and heard the sudden blast as its engine ruptured and its fuel exploded. Looking over the rooftops he saw the night was punctuated by a dozen red gleams where Tark was burning.

There was a sudden sense of movement around him, Ants pushing into him, wordless but eyes wide as some unheard alarm went through their heads.

A bright light, a sound — he was lifted up by a great hand. He heard Skrill scream and then. and then. Nothing.

*

Totho’s head was ringing, and he did not know why. He was aware of lying on some uneven surface and there seemed to be a great deal of noise and confusion going on. He sat up, clutching his head, and then saw what he was lying on.

Bodies.

He was lying on corpses, dead Ant-kinden from Tark, dead Wasp-kinden from the Empire. He stumbled to his feet, fell over almost immediately. His artificer’s coat was bloody and ragged, and he picked a metal shard from it curiously. All around him a lot of people were rushing back and forth, but he felt it was his duty as an artificer to identify the piece of metal he had found.

It looked like the sort of fragment that would be left behind by an exploding grenade, he thought. A crude ball-type grenade, not one of the hatched-metal ones the Beetles made in Helleron.

Awareness ran through him like a swordblade: Tark; the siege; the night attack. It was still going on. He must have been knocked flat by an explosion.

‘Skrill?’ he shouted, remembering how she had been there with him. ‘Skrill?’ but there was absolutely no chance of being heard. Even his own voice sounded muted and far away. Another thirty or forty Ant soldiers went charging past, trampling their own dead. Some stopped to shoot upwards, and he fell to his knees once again, looking into that asylum sky full of fighting men, beasts and machines.

Hands found him and helped him to his feet. He leant back into them, feeling shaken and sick, the impact of the grenade still thundering in his head.

‘Che!’ he got out. ‘You found me.’

‘You better get your head on straight!’ And Che turned into Skrill, her voice high with fear. ‘Where’s your piece?’

He looked around, but Scuto’s marvellous crossbow was now nowhere to be seen. He plucked another — a Tarkesh soldier’s — from its dead owner’s hand, dragging a quiver off a second body.

They had moved further from the breach, he saw, but the gate itself was now open. Or rather there were splintered pieces of it left barely clinging to the hinges. There was the great engine there that had powered through the gateway before it had finally been stopped and disabled. Ants and Wasps were fighting there. Totho stumbled towards the machine.

‘Where’re you going?’ Skrill shouted after him. She had lost her bow, he noticed. She should find herself a crossbow as he had, but of course she surely derived from some primitive old race that didn’t know about crossbows and how clever they were.

The ramming engine was partly blocking the gateway. Wasp spearmen were trying to push through, but the Ants were holding them back. The engine itself looked really interesting, though, and that seemed the most important thing to Totho’s addled mind. As the Ants swarmed around it, he struggled to make his way to its battered head. It had not been intended for this use, he now saw. Some brilliant hand had cunningly reshaped it.

There was a litter of bodies about it, mostly Wasp-kinden. Some were still moving, and he eyed them dully. The engine was slewed a little on its side, and he saw corpses in Wasp colours scattered there, but not actually Wasps. Artificers? Of course they were the machine’s artificers. The Wasps themselves had no respect for such skills.

He reached out and, as the Ants continued fighting all around him, he put his back to the skewed machine and forced it up, working to free one of his brother artificers from under its weight.

Skrill was yelling again, and he glanced around in time to see the city wall by the gate begin to shift. He suddenly felt so very calm about it, because he was right in the wall’s shadow, and there was nothing he could do about it in time.

Stones began to bulge out of it, only one at first, and then in whole fistfuls. A man emerged: Totho could see his shape by the light of the fires, but it seemed impossible, for it was a man ten feet tall, armoured in great metal plates and wielding an eight-foot mattock. There were others behind him, and they lumbered out of the gap as still more Ants rushed in to engage them. Just before they clashed Totho was struck by the expression of hopeless misery on those giants’ faces.

The huge creature in the lead swept his spade-headed spear around him like a club, flinging three or four of the Ants aside with ruined shields, but then the soldiers were on him, and their attack-insects as well. Totho watched with numb amazement, seeing how easily the giants fell. There were Wasps following behind them though, armoured Sentinels pressing forward, their plate-mail easily turning the swords of the defenders. Some dozen of them plunged into the Ant line and shattered it, even as the last giant fell, and then there were savages bursting out along with them, shrieking and casting their spears. Behind them, in turn, came the armoured Wasp infantry, already lancing out with its stings.

Totho felt the fallen man he held stir in his arms and he forced the ruined engine an inch further off him. The man clutched at him as Totho pulled him free, now seeing the wreckage the fallen engine had made of his legs.

With conflict still all about him he dragged the dying man away, aware only that this was an artificer, and therefore a brother in craft.

‘My queen!’ the man cried. ‘I am done at last.’

Totho lowered him to the ground. He felt cold and getting colder, but his eyes found Totho’s. ‘You, Lowlander. I am sorry-’

Totho nodded, not knowing what to say. The man’s hands tugged at his coat, and perhaps there was some returning recognition there, on feeling the pockets lined with tools. ‘You must know. the air. airships! It is the end. I have. died for them, never to be home again. But the airships. you must guard.!’

There was nothing more said, just one more death amidst so many.

Salma dived through the sky like a mad thing, slashing at every Wasp that came near him, though missing most of them. The aerial forces of Tark were token only. They had their orthopters and their flying insects, but coming against them the entire sky was dense with Wasps.

He pulled out of his dive on coming level with a handful of the winged ants. Ahead of them a mass of the Wasp savages was gathering like a cloud, spiralling upwards. Salma looked over to the lead Ant rider, and for a moment there was a touch of mindlink with him, two soldiers in perfect accord, as if he saw the man’s thoughts and passed back his own.

You lead, we follow, was the man’s message, because Salma was vastly more at home in the air than they were.

Sword extended, Salma kicked out towards the circling Hornets, sword extended, and he got close, very close, before they even saw him. Then crossbow bolts from the insect-mounted weapons started punching into the flight of Wasps and they scattered wildly. Salma veered to the left, seeing spears and bolts of light dash past him. Briefly something caught his eye about their formation, then he was lancing through them, bloodying his sword on at least three before turning to dance back towards them. The insects were on them by now, thrumming heavily through the air, jaws clacking at their nimbler opponents. The crossbows were never silent, funnel-fed bolts from their hoppers cracking out every second into the mass of the enemy. Then two of the insects were down and in a moment Salma saw why.

The Ants were not the only airborne cavalry deployed above the field. Diving directly past his view came a giant wasp the size of a horse, with a soldier clinging gamely to its back. There was no crossbow, in fact no weapon at all, but the man’s hands yanked and tugged to get the monster to cooperate. It dodged and spun in the air and then fell on one of the ant-riders, lancing the insect he rode on with its sting, and crushing the rider’s shoulder with wedge-shaped jaws.

Another buzzed past, spinning Salma in its wake. Its rider tried to let loose his energy sting, but the beast began bucking the moment he took a hand from its harness. And then he was gone, and Salma was slicing through the air towards the scattered savages.

He saw what had snagged his attention before. There was a leader amongst them, a man in a spike-fronted helm bawling out orders that sent them hurtling across the city. Salma adjusted his angle, so as to come in from above and put his sword through their commander.

Colonel Edric continued sending his Hornet soldiers out to loot and burn, to create as much confusion as possible, when one of the men pointed over his shoulder and began shouting a warning. Edric turned in the air, wings dancing, to see a man — a Commonwealer! — almost upon him. He threw himself aside, losing his hold in the air and dropping ten feet before his Art caught him, and the Dragonfly flashed past him, slicing open the soldier who had warned him. Edric was after the Commonwealer in a moment, knowing that a score of Hornets would follow faithfully, and then had to hurl himself backwards as a great dark shadow roared down from above. It was one of the Empire’s own heliopters, and for a second Edric’s entire sky was obscured by its metal-plated hull. He heard a bitter shearing sound as several of his men met the rotors, and then the machine was trying sluggishly for height, spilling out grenades in a non-stop cascade.

He tried to locate the Dragonfly, saw the man again spearing towards him. Edric shot a blast of his sting, but his adversary flitted out of the way. The bulk of the heliopter was still clawing for height, and he dropped beneath it to give himself space to think and manoeuvre.

But the Dragonfly was veering off suddenly, and Edric looked about to see what he was avoiding.

It was a Tarkesh orthopter with red flames blazing from its cockpit. The heliopter shuddered in the air as it tried to correct its course, but the orthopter, even as its wing cables were snapping, shifted its aim lazily and struck against the bigger machine’s side, staving it in. A second later and one or the other had exploded, and then they both had, and Edric was hurled head over heels through the air and across the city.

Feeling a wave of hot air roll over him, Salma caught himself in the air, still seeking out his target. There he was, blown almost up against the wall by the force of the two dying machines. He was right at the gatehouse, amongst the wrecked artillery. Even as the colonel got to his feet on the stones of the wall, Salma was stooping down on him.

Barely in time, Edric saw him coming and dragged his sword from its scabbard. It was a Hornet piece, big and heavy-edged, and he slashed furiously at Salma as the Dragonfly fell on him, but Salma was a natural in the air, pitching aside to let the great blade pass him. His own lunge scored across the colonel’s side and then he had knocked the man down, and the two of them went tumbling end over end towards the broken edge of the wall. Edric was now on top and with one hand to his side he straightened up, raising his sword to split Salma’s skull. At the same time, Salma stabbed upwards, his blade punching through his opponent’s light armour and up to the hilt beneath the man’s ribs. The Wasp colonel’s sword fell from his hand, spinning through the air until it struck the ground far below. A moment later, Salma sent the man’s body heading in the same direction.