Salute the Dark

Ten

Maintaining a force of cavalry was not part of the Wasp army’s mandate but General Praeter had seen enough of it during the Twelve-Year War to learn its uses. Regular horses were too fragile for a Wasp-kinden war, and so he now observed his men from the high-fronted saddle of an armoured beetle, extending ten feet from its mandibles to its tail. Around him the heavy war machines of the Sixth Army were grinding forwards with a mechanical determination that he knew was illusory. Machines regularly stopped working in the middle of battles, and he had never known a combat without some automotive simply falling silent at the worst possible time. He had therefore learnt not to rely on them.

The automotives nevertheless formed the central push of his advance, screened from attack by a curtain of the light airborne winging ahead. His infantry – and the Sixth was more infantry-reliant than most – was contained in great curved wings to either flank. Praeter himself kept pace with the slowest of the machines in the centre, a score of his personal bodyguard mounted alongside him and the rest keeping good time behind despite their heavy armour.

His thought, on sending his soldiers forward, was that this was all a lot of fuss over nothing, for General Malkan’s scouts had indicated a force of no more than 2,000 men, possibly fewer, and not even Sarnesh soldiers, either, but mere vagrants and brigands. Even so, Praeter had taken upon himself the task of disposing of them. It would not do to let Malkan win too much honour in this campaign, and the young general must be constantly reminded who was in charge.

This would not be like Masaki, though. He remembered the glitter of the Dragonfly soldiers as they had swarmed forth, clouding the air, till the ground below seethed with their shadows. He often thought of those colours, the reds and golds, iridescent greens and blues. He remembered them in their glorious, furious charges, and also when they lay dead, like blossom and leaves after a storm, carpeting the battlefield before the withering volleys of his ballistae and his crossbows.

The land here was not good for an open conflict: hilly and broken, undercut by streams and rivers that his automotives would make heavy work of. The hillsides themselves were scrubby and piebald with patches of woodland, and dotted with the huts of goat-farmers or aphid-herders. The lay of the land had put Praeter’s left wing up on a hillside and hilltop, slowed down and pushing its way through spiny bushes, whilst his right wing was almost in a valley, just creeping up the hill on the far side, with a screen of scouts to their own right, looking out for enemy skirmishers. The automotives themselves were pressing down the centre of the valley itself, progressing either side of the stream that over the ages had somehow worn this crease in the map. Somewhere else, General Malkan would be taking the Seventh in a long, curving path north of him, intending to encircle what enemy survived, to make sure not a man of them escaped. Mopping up is all that man is fit for…

The enemy were not in his sight yet, but he saw a signal from the advance airborne and, from that, knew that the foe must have been spotted. The enemy had strung wooden fences and barricades across the valley, which would be of no protection against the airborne and merely be ground beneath the wheels and tracks of the automotives. Praeter wondered why they were even bothering to make a stand.

He frowned, holding tighter to the boss of his saddle as his beetle negotiated a rocky patch. There was the matter of the scouts, though. Whoever these enemy were, they had been remarkably good at killing General Malkan’s scouts, and yet this time the scouts had seen this little holdout. They had been allowed to see it.

He had worried away at that thought for a long time, but come up with no solution save to spread out his forces to enclose as wide an area as possible while keeping aerial screens to either side in case of ambush. But who could aim to ambush an entire army?

One of the automotives lurched awkwardly and he assumed it had gone into the streambed, but it was well clear of that: struggling for no reason at all in the dusty ground with its wheels spinning, and then sinking to its axles, throwing up a vast curtain of dust so that Praeter was blinded, covering his eyes against the grit. His ears told him that the stricken automotive was not alone. Another to his left was abruptly in difficulty, too. He brought his crop down on the beetle, driving it towards the labouring machine, and the insect stumbled, the ground giving way beneath it, its claws scrabbling for purchase before it dragged itself out. Pits, everywhere: the valley floor had been undercut. There had been no sign of it until now, and the men on foot had been too light, but all around him now he could hear the wheeled and tracked automotives grinding helplessly, choking on the earth, whilst those that walked on metal legs must be striding too far ahead.

‘Send to the lead automotives, tell them to reduce to half speed!’ he ordered, and immediately one of his men spurred his animal into motion, guiding it between the beached metal hulks. ‘Call some engineers here to free the automotives,’ Praeter added, and another man rode off.

‘General!’ A soldier dropped beside him, choking through the dust. ‘General, the left flank is under attack.’

‘From where?’

‘Enemy concealed in the woodlands ahead, sir.’

‘Then charge them and drive them out.’

‘We’re taking heavy losses, sir.’

‘How?’ Praeter leant down towards the man. ‘How many enemy?’

‘Unknown, sir. But they’re armed with snapbows, sir. We’re closing on them now, but they’re picking off our fliers.’

Praeter opened his mouth to reply to that, but even as he did so something exploded ahead, both to the left and to the right, showering stones and dust down on them.

I need to see what’s going on. ‘With me!’ he shouted, and turned his beast to grapple its way up the hillside, knowing that his bodyguard would follow close. The air was solid dust, and he guessed that the charges detonated ahead had not been intended to injure but to throw up as much cover as the enemy could manage, in order to conceal whatever it was they were actually doing.

Something else then flashed within the dust cloud behind him, thundering dully. The sound was familiar enough to him: he had not worked with engineers all those years to fail to recognize a grenade now. He could even tell from the sound that it was one with a hatched casing, rather than a simple smooth one, so that the metal shards would fly outwards in an even rain of shrapnel.

Before he was clear of the cloud, there were another five retorts behind him. He found it maddening, to be thus blinded to what was going on, not knowing if his entire force was being wiped out or whether this was just a gnat’s sting. There was now a chaos of men flying around him as Wasp soldiers took to the air to escape the dust. He could hear the crackle of sting-shot, and the solid thump of one of the motorized leadshotters that he had brought for artillery support. Then finally he was cresting the hill, the dust falling away behind him.

‘They’ll be fighting now,’ Parops remarked.

‘Who? Oh, you mean Stenwold’s friend, whatever his name is.’ Balkus frowned. Up on the walls of Sarn, he had a good view of the great town of refugees that the Sarnesh were slowly letting into their city, in groups of ten or fifteen at a time. The Ants of Sarn were caught on a two-pronged fork of dilemma. On the one hand, the last thing they wanted in time of war was a vast crowd of clamouring, hungry and suspect foreigners within their walls. On the other hand, as Parops said, that Dragonfly boy would be fighting for them even now, trying to slow the Wasp advance so that the Sarnesh could perfect their defences. The Sarnesh were pragmatic, as Ant-kinden always were, but because of that they understood an obligation and, if they cast out Salma’s people now, the remembrance of that betrayal would taint all Sarnesh dealings with foreigners for decades to come.

‘They call him the Captain of the Landsarmy, Lord of the Wastes,’ Parops observed.

‘The Prince of the Wastes,’ agreed Balkus, savouring the foreign word. ‘Boy’s done good. Let’s hope he lives through it.’

Parops turned to watch a new siege engine being slowly winched up to the wall-top. It was a giant repeating ballista with two sets of alternating arms and a shield before and above, slotted for vision. It was far more effective than the big catapult that had graced his own tower back in lost Tark.

If we had been better artificers, then…? But the fall of Tark had been so decisive that he was not sure anything could have saved them. Then, of course, there was the history: centuries of isolation, and more dealings with the Spiderlands and the Scorpions of the Dryclaw than with the rest of the Lowlands. Sarn had the edge with weaponry because it was arm in arm with the Beetle-kinden, abandoning some of its Ant-kinden heritage to take up the Beetles on their strange ideas. More foreigners on the streets, more foreign ideas in the city-mind. No slaves, either. No slaves! Parops, though he had personally had little use for them, could still barely imagine that. How did things get done?

As well as Salma’s refugees, there were the new arrivals from the north. Many of them had yet to even request entrance to the city, and if they decided they wanted in, the chances were they would just fly over the walls and put the new Sarnesh anti-airborne defences to the test. It had taken a long time for the so-called Ancient League to gather its forces, and even longer, so the story went, for them to decide how many to send. Balkus had joked that he half expected to see a single Mantis warrior turn up at the gates of Sarn one morning, claiming to be the army of Nethyon.

Mantis-kinden were a notoriously stand-offish race and, although the men and women of Etheryon often hired themselves out to Sarn, the hold of Nethyon was perhaps the most isolated and insular state in the Lowlands. Still, they had come in the end, and they were still coming. They had arrived with their customary arrogant disdain, singly and in twos and threes, and then in dozens, and twenties, until there was a loose camp of many hundreds of them, always shifting and moving around, impossible to count. They were still arriving and nobody knew, perhaps not even the old women who led them, how many there would eventually be.

The Moth-kinden had come with them: fewer, but still a few hundred grey-skinned, blank-eyed men and women. Not just crabbed quacks or scholars, either: the people of Dorax came attired for war in armour of layered leather and cloth, with their bows and knives, but above all with their wings, with their dark-piercing eyes. The possibilities had the royal court of Sarn almost frothing with new thought.

‘Commander Balkus!’ someone was calling from halfway up a stairway running up the inside of the wall. They leant over to see a corpulent Ant-kinden with bluish-white skin, wearing wealthy Beetle-styled clothing. Two Sarnesh soldiers had stopped him there, and he stood looking up at them with a baggy hat in his hands. ‘Commander Balkus! I need to speak with you urgently!’

‘And who are you supposed to be?’ Balkus demanded, stomping over to the stair-top.

‘My name is Plius. I am known to your master, Stenwold Maker.’

Oh yes, you are, Balkus thought. And he suspected you were up to something. He went down the stairs towards the small group, knowing that Parops was backing him up almost as certainly as if he could feel the man’s mind.

‘What do you want?’ he asked. The new arrival was smiling too much, plainly someone desperate to inspire ill-placed trust. Balkus felt his hand drift towards his sword.

‘I want to speak to a tactician of Sarn at the very least. The King would be better, but one of his court otherwise.’

‘Why?’ Balkus demanded, and even as he said it, he felt the stir, a sudden rustle in the mind of Sarn. His erstwhile people kept him out, but their thoughts leaked in nonetheless, and something was happening now. He became aware of soldiers suddenly spurred into action, armoured men and women running.

‘I think we are about to see why,’ Plius explained helpfully.

Ten minutes later saw the three Ants, from three different cities, standing up on the west wall with a grey-haired Sarnesh woman, a genuine tactician of the Royal Court. They were watching the approach of more soldiers. The distance was too great to see in any detail, but there were already Fly-kinden being sent out as scouts to assess their strength and nature. One thing was clear, at any distance: by their regimented order they were Ant-kinden.

‘Six hundred soldiers,’ Plius explained. ‘Soldiers of Tsen.’

‘Where or what is Tsen?’ Parops asked.

‘A city on the western coast of the Lowlands, beyond even Vek,’ the tactician said slowly. ‘Explain yourself,’ she instructed Plius.

‘Easily. I am not, or not only, an agent of Master Maker of Collegium, but also an agent of the Queen of Tsen. Since I came to Sarn, that role has not encumbered me with any actual duties save for my reports, but a month back I received new orders. Specifically, I am appointed their ambassador, if you will have me.’

‘And what does the spy-turned-ambassador have to say to us?’ the tactician demanded sharply. What Plius said to her, he would be saying to the King – and to the whole city if that was deemed wise.

The fat Ant-kinden shrugged. ‘Tsen is a long way off,’ he said. ‘Tsen is small and friendless. If the Wasps destroy your city, then eventually they will come against us, and we will not be able to defend ourselves. There, that’s a frank admission of our position that your own sources can surely confirm.’

The tactician nodded.

‘Well, then, Tsen now sends you these soldiers to assist in the defence of your city. We can spare no more, and we know this gesture will not sway the battle, but we need to do something. We have not been part of your counsels, nor would we make ourselves part of the Lowlands, because we are happy in our distance from the stormy centre. However, we recognize the need.’ He crushed and tugged at the hat in his hands, and it was only this that told them of his nervousness. ‘The need,’ he confirmed, ‘is great.’

Praeter took quick stock of the situation. Here was his left wing, with solid formations of his heavy infantry making slow progress across the thorny, uncertain terrain, their shields raised. The light airborne were above them, making sallies forward, but then recoiling back. There was no sign of the enemy, just a patch of woodland that extended back along the ridge of the hill and down, but already there was a litter of Wasp bodies between his advancing infantry and the trees.

Damn Malkan for letting them get the new weapon. He tried to estimate how many soldiers could be hidden in those woods, and guessed that if they were crammed full it could even be a full thousand.

The leadshotter spoke from nearby, arcing a solid ball of stone over the infantry to crash into the trees. I need more of those here. But there was no chance that the right-flank artillery could get over here in time and, besides, they might need it themselves. He cropped his beetle, sending it skittering behind the slowly advancing infantry. Too slow. He saw them ducking behind their shields. At this range the snapbow bolts were dancing off them, but his soldiers obviously knew that would not continue to be the case if they got much closer.

‘Signal me the officers of the airborne,’ Praeter ordered, and one of his bodyguard unfurled a red flag and began waving it in great sweeps. ‘And get me some of our own snapmen up here.’ That now proved to have been his first true tactical mistake. He had not sufficiently trusted the new weapon, and so the snapbowmen were bringing up the rear.

The leaders of the airborne were dropping down around him, and he twisted round in his saddle to regard them. He saw Wasp soldiers in armour light enough for flight, equipped with swords, spears and the fire that their Art gave them. These were the mainstay of the Wasp army, but they died, he knew. They died in their hundreds to give the infantry a chance to close. It was their purpose in his plan of attack, however, so he could spare them scant sympathy.

‘It’s time, men!’ he shouted to them. ‘I need the heavies into those trees and rooting out the enemy, but if our fight with the Sarnesh told us anything, it’s that snapbows can cut down an armoured line without pausing for breath. You know where that leaves you, so I want you to rush the woods, all the way along its extent, and get as many of you as possible into the trees where they won’t be able to get clear aim at you.’ Even as he spoke, there were more explosions down the hillside. His head jerked that way automatically, which was bad. He should be able to ignore it and thus show them his strength in doing so. ‘You understand your duty,’ he admonished the airborne. ‘Now go to it.’

He saw more than one hollow gaze amongst them as they cast their wings out again and launched up to rejoin their men. Praeter wheeled his steed and sent it scuttling back along the rear of the line, calling out, ‘The airborne is going to buy you the time to move! Don’t waste that time! As soon as they dive in, I want to see every man of you running!’

He looked into the sky, seeing the airborne mass there. As he had known they would, the enemy had predicted the move and, even before that great dive had started, dozens of Wasp soldiers were dropping, spinning helplessly out of the sky. Praeter watched them because it was his duty, in return, to observe the carnage that his orders had created.

Then they dived, a great cloud of them, hundreds of soldiers sweeping in for the trees, packing closer and closer as they came, until the snapbow shot of the defenders was mauling whole clumps of men out of the air at once. Praeter was only peripherally aware of the clatter as the heavy infantry began to rush forwards as best it could, spears held high to clear the brush.

‘General!’

He turned to see a messenger alighting beside him, so coated with dust it was impossible to make him out clearly.

‘What is going on down there?’

‘Fly-kinden, General,’ the messenger reported. ‘They’re passing over us, dropping bombs on us. They’re targeting the automotives.’

The only thing they could make out, in this dust. ‘Press forwards,’ Praeter instructed. ‘Press forwards with infantry and engage their fortified positions from ground and air. Have the airborne keep the skies clear. That’s the only way to counter grenadiers.’

‘Yes sir.’ The messenger leapt into the air again, but began falling instantly, twisting desperately with a bolt clear through him.

‘General!’

But Praeter was already turning to see where the missile had come from.

A hammerblow of shock hit him. There was a new airborne coming in now, but it was not imperial. Instead it was a ragged assortment of men and women: Flies, Moths, Mantids, even Beetles and halfbreeds. With the most immediate Wasp airborne of this flank already engaged in the trees, they had the sky to themselves for just enough time to drop onto the advancing heavy infantry and take them in the flank, scattering across them, shooting crossbows and shortbows or simply throwing things. This was no disciplined attack, nothing an imperial officer would suffer from his men, but there was nevertheless a core of unity there. This ragged pack of brigands had obviously trained together.

The infantry was responding with sting-shot, the air above them crackling with it, but the enemy fliers were already fleeing, leaving behind them a formation that was stationary and broken up.

Praeter grimaced. ‘Get me a unit of the heavies back here!’ he shouted at one of his men. ‘Make that two.’

‘General-?’

‘Do it!’

He turned his animal, because he had the plan now. At last, when it was almost too late, he had an understanding. Where would the earth now erupt with them? Why, from behind – or from the far slope of the hill he was watching from. The enemy had been given ample time to work the land, to sap and mine it with remarkable skill. The advance scouts had seen none of these flanking forces.

Those earthworks and palisades ahead would be deserted: he would stake his rank on it. But then he had known it was a trap from the start, and at last he had seen the way the jaws of it hinged.

The infantry was clattering back around him now, and he called for them to form ranks before him.

‘Sir, the airborne…’ one of their officers began.

Praeter spared one glance for the light airborne, who were still battling at the forest verge. He had thought that the enemy there might flee once their bait was taken, but that did not seem to be so. The enemy general was a cursed mix of evasion and bravado, which in a Wasp would have been admirable, but in an enemy was something to be crushed as quickly as possible.

Behind him, amidst the ranks of the infantry, the hill suddenly exploded. His beetle lurched forwards, then reared back on to four legs, antennae flicking madly. He clung to the tall saddle with his thighs, looking up for the grenadiers, but there were none.

He heard the hollow knock of a leadshotter, but not close. A spume of smoke rose from a neighbouring hilltop also swathed in greenery.

Artillery? His own leadshotters were tilting towards the smoke, his engineers frantically taking measurements, calculating angles.

It was then that the enemy appeared, swarming along the ridge of his own hill with a motley of fliers above them. Praeter found his throat instantly drier even than the dust could make it. They were coming at a run, all shapes and sizes of them: armoured Ant-kinden soldiers, Mantis archers and swordsmen, Spiders, Beetles, Scorpions, Mynan Soldier Beetles, lumbering Mole Crickets. These were the dredgings of the Lowlands and the Empire both, a great froth of angry men and women now rushing the Wasp position.

His eye counted, even while his mind reeled. Two thousand, perhaps three – and how many of them wearing pillaged Wasp armour or using imperial weapons? Have we come this far just to arm every ruffian in the Lowlands?

‘Set your spears!’ he shouted, leading his cavalry between the infantry blocks. ‘Someone call some airborne from the other flank. We need them here! This must be the main attack!’ Send word to Malkan. But he bit down on that last unspoken command. He would not do so, not for all the soldiers who might die here. He would not bend his pride so far as to ask for Malkan’s aid.

Taking his entire force into account, he outnumbered this enemy ten to one, but here, right here and now, he unfortunately did not.

She, the one who had been Grief in Chains and was now Prized of Dragons, watched as the flying soldiers of Salma’s army dived in again, plunging down into the dust. Her blank white eyes followed their course, and she wondered how many they would lose. She hated fighting. She hated all war.

She loved Salma, who had come after her, even into the teeth of the Wasp army. For that she called herself Prized of Dragons now, who had been Grief in Chains, and then briefly Aagen’s Joy. One of the things that she loved most about Salma was that he, too, had no love of war. Perhaps he did not hate it as she did, but he took no joy in it. He was doing this, mounting this savage assault on the Wasp advance, because in his heart was his love for her and a prince’s love of his subjects. He had thousands of people in Sarn who needed his protection, and this battle was the price – as would be all the battles still to come.

Salma touched down lightly near to her, glancing about. She ran to him, her robes flapping. His smile, when he saw her, was like the sun to her.

‘Surely you must flee now, Salma,’ she said to him. ‘Their army, all their other soldiers, will be coming.’

‘That’s precisely what I need to know.’

There were warriors of Salma’s ragtag army passing back and forth all the time – busy hurrying the injured away or rushing in from other engagements. Salma peered through them until he saw a squad of horse cavalry galloping in.

‘Phalmes!’ he cried, and the Soldier Beetle reined his horse in, skidding slightly on the loose sand and stones.

‘General!’ the Mynan acknowledged. It was a title that Salma did not want, a Wasp title, but to his men he had become a general, and there was nothing he could do about that.

‘Where is their main force now?’ he asked.

‘The harriers have done what they could,’ Phalmes reported. Prized of Dragons noticed how his horse panted. Phalmes must have ridden miles back and forth today.

‘We’ve pulled out?’

‘Broken, almost. We’re gone, though.’ The harriers had been squads of men designed to make the far flank of the Wasp army assume that it was the main point of attack. They had been instructed to sow as much confusion as possible, while the real assault would come at the opposite corner of the advance.

‘We need to finish here. How do we stand?’ Salma asked.

‘You need to see for yourself,’ Phalmes said. ‘There’s only one group standing here, but they won’t budge.’

‘Show me.’

Phalmes wheeled his horse, and his men – mostly his original bandit followers from before he met Salma – rode after him. Salma’s wings flared and he coasted over Phalmes’ head, and Prized of Dragons let her own bloom into the air in a rainbow splendour of dancing light to follow him.

Phalmes’ words were instantly clear. The Wasps had been thrown off this side of the valley, killed and scattered or simply retreating in good order. Smoke from burning automotives still thickened the dusty air. Only one band of black and gold remained, a few hundred men surrounded by a loose cordon of Salma’s people. Prized noticed that only a few of them were Wasps.

‘Auxillians, Salma,’ she observed. ‘They are Bee-kinden.’

‘I see them.’

‘We have little time, General,’ Phalmes reminded him.

Salma nodded, walking forwards. He saw a few crossbows lift, but trusted to his reactions and the obvious threat of retribution to safeguard him.

‘Who commands here?’ he demanded.

There was a stir amongst the soldiers, and then an old Wasp-kinden walked forth. Salma, who had been hoping that these would be unattended Auxillians ripe for desertion, grimaced.

‘You must be the Lord of the Wastes,’ the Wasp said, his clear voice cutting across the distance. ‘I am General Praeter of the Sixth Army.’

There was a stir through Salma’s troops at that news. A general? A real Wasp general!

‘General,’ Salma said, aware that, all the time, the rest of the Wasp army would be moving. ‘I have one chance to offer you and your men. Surrender now, throw down your arms, and I will spare you.’

‘I must congratulate you on your conduct of this war, Commonwealer,’ General Praeter said, with all the time in the world. ‘I see now how little of resources you had, and how far you have marched on it.’

‘Will you surrender?’ Salma demanded of him.

‘You know I will not.’

Salma ground his teeth. ‘Then I call upon your Auxil-lian troops gathered here. You have no reason to stand and die for your oppressors. You may join us, or simply go back to your homes or wherever you choose, but you must drop your arms, and do it now. I have not the time to give any of you a second chance. Why die for the Empire when you can live for your own people?’

Silence then, with the Bee-kinden staring at him. Not a one of them moved, and Salma read quite clearly the pride, the almost tearful pride, on General Praeter’s face.

‘You have your answer,’ said the Wasp. ‘You must come and take us.’ He walked back into the ranks of his men, who closed their shields protectively after him.

‘Salma, their army will have regrouped by now. We have no time.’

I cannot let them live, Salma thought coldly. Not with a general. Ah, the things we must do in war.

‘Bring up the snapbowmen,’ he said quietly, and Phalmes galloped off without hesitation, crying out the order.

‘I am sorry, General,’ Salma said, stepping back. ‘For what it is worth, I salute you.’

‘Come away,’ Prized of Dragons advised him, one hand on his shoulder. ‘You do not wish to see this.’

‘No, I do not,’ Salma agreed. ‘That is why I must.’

The new king did not meet with him, which Salma took at first for a bad sign. He had come to Sarn as fast as he could, wearing a horse out to make the distance, and with two of Phalmes’ ex-bandits acting as escort. He had left Phalmes himself to hold the Landsarmy together until he came back.

Out there, the Wasp army was stalking forwards, making good time despite the constant attacks of Salma’s people. The death of General Praeter had halted them for two days, while General Malkan made the necessary reorganization, but now they were ploughing forwards again.

He had met with the Roach-kinden, Sfayot, after entering Sarn, hearing the old man’s account of how the refugees had been treated. Phalmes might order his army, but here was his nation: three times as many non-combatants led by an elderly Roach.

The meeting in Sarn was barely a council of war, more of a military briefing. The time for idle talk, rather than orders, was almost done. The room was small, with a single table hosting a mere dozen of them. These were not the statesmen or the leaders on whose words war was unleashed or reined in, but rather the commanders who would enact the war itself. Here was Salma of the Landsarmy himself; Balkus, Parops and Plius the foreign Ant-kinden; Cydrae, a lean, hard-faced Mantis woman commanding the Ancient League warriors, along with a silent Moth-kinden in layered armour who did not give her name; a fat Beetle-kinden man representing something called the Sarnesh militia that was a force of irregulars put together of their own volition by the inhabitants of Sarn’s Foreigners’ Quarter. To these were added a single Sarnesh woman, a tactician from the Royal Court, with grey-speckled hair. Salma had been hoping for the King himself.

But of course the King will be listening. That would have to be enough. Salma nodded a greeting to Parops, whom he had not seen since the ravaged streets of Tark.

‘Commanders,’ the Sarnesh said, addressing them all equally. ‘They are upon us. The fight is, by our estimates, a tenday away at most.’

‘Probably less,’ Salma interrupted. ‘By my reckoning.’

The Sarnesh woman regarded him without expression. Am I expendable now? Have I outlived my usefulness? In the face of that blankness, concealing all the thoughts of the city of Sarn, he felt himself shrinking: from a prince and a military leader to a mere brigand and retainer of the greater Ant city-state.

Then she said, ‘You are more soundly placed to know, tactician.’

He almost missed it, although the other Ants at the table went quite still on hearing the word. What was in a word, though?

‘My people say that you have cared for them well,’ he said. ‘I was not sure, after the death of the Queen, how we might stand.’

She was expressionless, still, but surely he was used to that from Ants: expressions or visible mannerisms did not come naturally to them. He had no other clues.

‘The movement of the crown is not succession, but continuity,’ the tactician said. ‘The King was party to the agreement made with you and your forces, and he considers himself bound by it. We understand that you have been doing good work in the east. You received our Lorn detachment, we believe?’

A hundred Sarnesh soldiers, that was all that they could spare him. They had clearly expected him to meet the Wasps nose to nose, and for all to die in a glorious waste of time. He hoped he had not disappointed them by surviving and by not losing a man of their Sarnesh suicide force.

‘They were invaluable,’ he said.

‘But they did not fight,’ the tactician noted.

‘I had other uses for them,’ Salma replied. He had spread the Sarnesh throughout his troops, and used their ability to speak mind to mind, to coordinate the various wings of his disparate force. Without them it was certain that some part of his attack would have been too late, too early, caught out or over-extended. He had thus made the Lorn detachment his strategic eyes and ears, giving orders and receiving reports to dozens of scattered detachments.

‘Sarn requires your services once again,’ the tactician informed him. The other commanders were watching closely. This was not a council of war, but the officers of the Sarnesh main army gathered to meet with him.

‘We have our agreement,’ he replied, with an easiness he did not feel.

‘We wish to meet them on the field,’ she then told him. ‘The Royal Court has determined that a field battle represents our best chance of victory.’

‘Despite the Battle of the Rails?’ Salma asked, seeing the same question in other faces around the table.

‘We are better prepared now that we have snapbows of our own,’ the tactician said. ‘Even so, we recognize the risk. A field battle will at least allow us to retreat to the city walls if all goes badly. However…’

Salma waited for her words, already putting together in his mind what would come next.

‘However,’ the Sarnesh woman continued, ‘we will be leaving our city poorly defended, if we commit the full force that this venture requires. If matters do not fall out according to plan,’ she explained, and perhaps there was the tiniest tremor in her voice that translated, if we all die on the field, ‘our people – and yours – will have no protection save the walls and defences of Sarn itself. We have heard from our ally of Tark,’ she picked out Parops. ‘Wasp-kinden are no strangers to breaking sieges. In order to risk a proper confrontation with the Empire, we require an assurance that our walls can stand, at least until a relieving force can be brought home.’

Salma nodded slowly. He might not understand the mechanics of the machines involved, but he knew what a siege entailed. He had seen that already at Tark. ‘And so, before you meet them, you want their… what, their…?’

‘Artillery,’ Parops intervened in a clipped tone. ‘A strike against their siege engines.’

‘Indeed,’ the tactician confirmed. ‘We can provide material and artificers to assist, but your own force has the greatest chance of achieving this end.’

Salma looked around the table, from face to face: Parops was grimacing, not liking the odds; the two Ants beside him exchanged uneasy glances; Cydrae the Mantis gave him a single, respectful nod.

Oh, Stenwold, if you could see me now.

‘I must trust that your artificers will know what to destroy and how to do it,’ Salma replied finally. ‘I confess that I know nothing of that skill. I can get them in, though, with a swift, sudden strike. That I can do.’

‘We understand what it is we are asking of you.’

‘So long as you understand what I have asked of you.’

The tactician, and by extension the city-state of Sarn, nodded. ‘What you ask shall be accomplished in every particular, so long as Sarn survives to undertake it.’

He began calculating, on the hard ride back, his mind working through days and numbers. Are we ready for this? If we are not ready for this, what then? His special project, this meant, which had drained Sarn and its surrounding countryside of riding beasts. His people had been training since the spring, or at least every one of them with any aptitude for the saddle.

I am trying to fight a Commonweal war with Lowlands soldiers. That was not quite true, for the war he was fighting had never been fought before in anyone’s histories.

Phalmes greeted him as he rode into camp. The Mynan looked as though he had not slept much since Salma had seen him last, for the Wasp advance was forcing Salma’s irregulars to fall back before them, still harassing scouts, setting traps and deadfalls for their automotives, and never letting the Wasps forget about them or think themselves safe.

There must have been something in Salma’s face, because Phalmes bared his teeth unhappily as soon as he saw his leader.

‘That bad, is it?’ he asked. ‘They’ve cut us loose?’

‘Not quite,’ Salma said. ‘Sarn is on its way. They intend a field battle.’

‘Cursed Ants never learn,’ spat Phalmes. ‘Another field battle.’

Salma shrugged. ‘I’m not going to try to teach warfare to the Ant-kinden. They and we both need Sarn to remain safe, whilst the city’s army is abroad.’

‘I don’t like this.’

‘I don’t think anyone does,’ Salma told him. ‘I can see the logic, though.’

‘That means we’re where the metal meets, aren’t we?’

‘We have been that way for some time,’ Salma sighed. ‘You’ve scouted the army, yes? Its disposition, how it’s broken up?’

Phalmes nodded. ‘You want me to get the lads together for this?’

‘It might be best.’

‘The lads’ were Salma’s officers, such as they were: as ragged a band as his army itself was, without uniform or discipline, and yet they were devoted to him. More, they were devoted to what he was trying to achieve. Phalmes and the Fly-kinden woman Chefre had been with him from the start, as had a Maynesh Ant-kinden who had been one of Phalmes’ bandits. There was a laconic Mantis-kinden hunter, hooded always, who was incomparable with his bow, which was six and a half feet from point to point. Morleyr, the hulking Mole Cricket, was an Auxillian deserter, just as Phalmes himself was, and had been crucial to their land-engineering, his people carving out trenches and pits underground with their Art and their bare hands. There was an elderly Fly-kinden who was a skilled artificer, and a Beetle-Ant halfbreed from Helleron who was a solid infantry officer. To this jumbled rag-bag Salma had added the Sarnesh officer in charge of the Lorn detachment, and now the leader of the artificers that the King of Sarn had sent them.

He explained it all to them as concisely as possible. In fact there was not much to say. We must destroy their machines of war. He listened to them talk, one speaking over the other, ideas being hammered out, picked over, discarded. This was his governance: the melting pot of thought that he could skim from. He ladled out the best of it: the diversion, the reserve, the sudden strike, the aerial attack.

‘Their general will expect something like this,’ Chefre warned. ‘He’s no fool.’

‘That’s only because it is the strategy that we must accomplish,’ Salma told her. ‘And we shall.’