Empire in Black and Gold

Forty

Tynisa awoke slowly, knowing pain. She had shifted position, and sleep had cast her out of its welcome embrace at once. The world was now contracted to a dull throb in her side, a slightly sharper one in her arm. But of course, though the latter cut was shallower, she had worked with that arm, fighting that last squad of soldiers beside her father, and then she had been running, his weight bearing down on her, and there had been that cataclysmic explosion of light and metal. .

And she remembered precious little more. Her strength had not lasted much past that moment.

She had no idea where she was. Perhaps the Wasps caught me!

That forced her to open her eyes. The room was dim, lit only by windows high in the walls. For a moment she thought she was back in the resistance shelter in Myna, but the architecture here was different, only the mood was the same.

She propped herself up on one elbow, discovering that someone had cleaned and dressed her wounds. To one side there was a woman she recognized vaguely as one of Scuto’s crew who had fought alongside her. She was still asleep, or unconscious, and there were blotched bandages neatly wrapped about her head and chest. To Tynisa’s unprofessional eye the woman looked in a bad way.

Beyond her was Tisamon. He slept, too. Tynisa sat up, feeing her side twinge, the stitches pull, but hold. He lived, then. His bare chest rose and fell, and she saw the extent of the burn that he had taken, a shiny blemish across his skin from waist almost to collarbone, all up one side. But he lived: she had not known, in those confused last moments, if any of them would.

She looked to the other side, and saw a Moth’s back as he knelt beside another pallet. Somehow she knew it was Achaeos, and realized this because he no longer held himself quite like others of his race. Something had opened up in him.

She shifted round, and as he turned at the sound she saw that he was tending to Che.

The girl was awake, but she had dozens of tiny wounds, small patches of bandage across her face and shoulders and body. Tynisa gaped at the extent of it.

‘Is that what the. . the explosion. .?’

There was a chuckling cough from near the foot of Che’s bed, and Tynisa saw that a second row of pallets had been laid toe to toe with her own row, and that Scuto was there. He lay, improbably, on his front, and she saw his back was a war of blisters across the blasted landscape of his spines.

‘I’m afraid that scattershot was me,’ the Thorn Bug said. ‘We’d only got a second, and I just grabbed ’er up and jumped. Sometimes I forget my own shape, you know. All shallow, though, and they’ll heal good as new, mind, ’cos Beetles is tough buggers, but they had to cut her armour off ’er before they could prise it off me.’

‘And. .? How did we do? Who did we lose?’

‘Enough,’ said Scuto soberly. ‘Rakka’s gone. Pedro and Halyard Brighter. Archedamae, who took a hit when we got out of the workshop, she died while we were fighting at the Pride. More, more and more. Easier to name the survivors. Balkus didn’t get scratched, the bastard, but Sperra’s all cut up. You’ve seen Hadraxa to your right, and she’s not so good. All in all I’ve got five left, including me. That’s the Helleron operation. I mean, we did our bit, in the end, made it worth the chief putting us here, but we paid for it. The lad’s lot there, they took their cuts as well.’ Achaeos just nodded. Tynisa saw that he held one of Che’s hands anxiously in both of his.

Thalric gritted his teeth as the field surgeon dealt with his leg, the heated needle passing deftly back and forth as Thalric bit down on the softwood bar and winced.

‘You were lucky with this one, sir,’ the surgeon announced, and Thalric knew that he had dealt with many less lucky men before this particular job. ‘A little off and the big blood vessel would have been cut. Dead in minutes then, sir.’

And there were two suits of armour riven before that blade even bloodied me. Not quite true, of course. In the way of ripping both his prized copperweave and the regulation imperial light cuirass, it had drawn a pretty scar from his nipple to his navel, but he had taken worse than that and still fought on.

Beside the failure of the previous night, any injury short of death was light work. There was a blank scroll waiting for him, and what he wrote there would go to Colonel Latvoc or General Reiner or some other Rekef official, who would decide just how much he had lost the Empire by his failure.

The Wasps were already packing up their camp beside Helleron. There were impatient delegations from the Council of Magnates, who were becoming more difficult to fob off with misdirection. They wanted to know whether it was the Empire that had destroyed Helleron’s Pride. Telling them that they, the Wasps, had been trying to save it only posed further awkward questions. This setback might claim Thalric’s career. It might even claim his life, politics being what they were, but it would barely dent the Empire’s ambition.

He had often wondered how he would take an occasion like this, when his star had fallen but the Empire still peopled the night sky with its lights, and he was both surprised and relieved to find he took comfort in that. He could be lost, but he was only one small piece of the machine, and the machine itself would go on forever. To the south the assault on Tark would be starting any day, if it had not begun already. Tark would fall as Ant cities always fell to the Empire, with a bloody, brutal, no-quarter fight, but overwhelmed by an enemy more numerous, more mobile, broader of thought, and ruthless of purpose.

And Helleron? Thalric would return home with the balance of his two thousand soldiers, but either he, or his successor, would be back with five thousand, or perhaps he would counsel fifty thousand. The Helleron Beetles were already telling themselves that the entire Imperial Army was at Tark — for the news was finally breaking here — but the men who were in sight of Tark’s walls were only the Fourth Army, supported by a few Auxillian battalions and some detachments of the Engineering Corps. The Empire had plenty of armies to spare, as Helleron would discover.

As the surgeon swabbed off the stitched wound and closed his toolbag, Thalric began to compose his report, without emotion or fear.

Stenwold gathered up those who could travel. After the two days that had passed, that included Che, Tynisa and even Tisamon, although the Mantis was still pained by his wound and kept his chest bare, his arming jacket slung open over his shoulders.

‘Now comes the time,’ Stenwold told them simply. ‘We have struck a small victory against a great enemy, not for Helleron, or Collegium, or revenge, or justice, or anything so small. We have done it for all the Lowlands, so the Lowlands retains a chance to lock shields against the foe.

‘But of course it is only one blow struck. There is now war in Tark as you know, and the Empire is sending more troops westwards, I guarantee it. We must carry the word ahead of them. Unity or slavery, these must be our watchwords, for they are no more than the flat truth. The future of the Lowlands: unity or slavery. The unity, if we achieve it, will never last. The slavery, however, might lie on our shoulders forever.

‘So I myself am bound for Collegium, which is the best soil we have for unity to grow in. Collegium is already allied with the Ants of Sarn, and that net can spread. If Tark does fall, as I fear it will, it will serve as an example, burning letters ten feet high that state: The Empire Must Be Stopped.

‘And there will be danger aplenty, for the Wasps will have their agents in Collegium and Sarn and Merro, and all the other places, and they will be preaching to the great and the good of all those places that the Empire comes only to attack their enemies, not them. They will tell each city to rub its hands as its ancient rivals fall, and in this way they will seek to eat the Lowlands bit by bit, and they may even succeed.

‘Ours will not be a war of swords, but of words. The swords are there, but we must convince the hands that hold them to draw them from the scabbard, to let them flash defiance in the sun.

‘I have sent messengers already, to Collegium, to Sarn, even to the Spiderlands, whose denizens have always worked against Lowlander unity in the past. There is no hand from which I would not take help at this point. I would write to the underground halls of the Centipede kingdom or the Mosquito Lords if they were anything more than a myth. Perhaps, if matters grow much worse, I will do so anyway.’

He looked over his audience, battered and bruised as they were. His niece and his adopted daughter, and her true father; the ever-faithful, durable Scuto, and Balkus the mercenary Ant-kinden, who had not been paid and yet was here; Achaeos, forever inscrutable, here amidst his traditional enemies; Sperra the Fly-kinden, who had insisted on being carried from her convalescence to hear his words.

He thought of that other fellowship, so long ago, of dead Marius and of Tisamon’s lost love.

Not in vain. He swore it to himself. Each sword raised against the Empire, each word spoken, would be added to the scales. He would rally and rouse, he would wake the sleeping, open the eyes of the blind, to gain those swords for his cause, and in the end, if the scales did not tip, if the tide of the Empire drowned all the lands he knew of, then it would not be because he had spared an ounce of effort in resisting it.

‘Will you come with me to Collegium?’ he asked them all, and not one face, not even Achaeos’s, told him ‘no’.

The first shots were yet to be loosed but, when Salma and the others came within sight of Tark, the Wasps were already there. Their camp half-encircled the city’s walls, and it seemed incredible, impossible, that so many had come so swiftly, and making their way through the desert’s fringe.

Skrill shielded her eyes, tracking down the banners and the symbols, the machines and the formations. ‘I see serious artillery. Wall-pounders and leadshotters are the least of it. Looks like Bee-kinden Auxillian engineers from Szar, if I’m a judge; Cricket diggers from Delve; some wild-boy Wasps from the hill tribes for shock value; even Maynes Ants under arms there, guess they know how much Ants like killing Ants. And there’s a whole row of somethings under canvas, autos or the like. Cut me open, that’s the whole Fourth and then some. Bloody flux!’

Salma and Totho simply took in this sight in silence. They had never seen so many men of war in one place, let alone their equipment, machinery, earthworks, slaves, mounts, camp followers and sutlers.

Neither had Tark, they realized. Neither had anywhere in the Lowlands, ever before.