The Air War

Twenty-Four

‘Te Pelle? I didn’t know her much,’ Pingge said. ‘That’s two of us dead.’

Kiin nodded. She looked worn out, and had only slept for a handful of hours since her return from the second mission over Collegium. The flight had been a mixed squad, half of them Aarmon’s originals, half from the new trainees, but Kiin reported that all the pilots had worked together with the same effortless coordination as before.

Pingge and Gizmer had stolen away from the main body of the bombardiers, now holing up in a store cupboard for a serious discussion of what had happened. It had taken some persuasion for Gizmer to accept Sergeant Kiin into their counsels. Since her promotion he had kept a suspicious eye on her, as though expecting her to metamorphose into a Wasp at any moment. Still, the fact that she actually had first-hand knowledge of what had happened was enough to twist his arm. Gossip was always better for a little fresh information.

‘The pilot was… Bresner, I think. One of the newer ones.’

They considered this information. Te Pelle had been a somewhat haughty girl, not a factory-line worker but an overseer, and of decent family, who had not taken well to being drafted simply for her artificer’s skills. Still, the woman had been one of them, and that should be enough.

‘Aarmon said something odd,’ Kiin added uncertainly.

‘He actually spoke?’ Pingge asked her. ‘Other than to give an order?’

‘He said she had done well — no, not like that. He said that Bresner had said that te Pelle had done well. Even when they were getting shot up, she got the bombs away, blew up the fuel store, right on the mark.’

‘He said that Bresner said?’ Pingge frowned.

Kiin nodded, wide-eyed. ‘His last message, somehow.’

Gizmer looked from one to the other and grinned, unexpectedly. ‘You surprise me, the pair of you. You hadn’t worked that out?’ He cackled at their expressions. ‘Come on, now, look at our lords and masters, eh? Pride of the Air Corps, only not one of them’s a pilot by training save for our Captain Aarmon. The rest are just Light Airborne or artificers, Consortium men, all sorts. By basic inclination we’re more fit for the job than they are. So didn’t you ever wonder why?’

‘I assumed they’d had some test, some latent gift for it, or.. ’ Pingge scowled at him. ‘So tell us, big mouth.’

‘They have an Art,’ Kiin put in, spoiling Gizmer’s moment.

He nodded grudgingly. ‘Worked it out, then?’

‘I’d thought… I wasn’t sure until you put it that way. They have a mindlink.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Pingge said, straight away.

‘What else then, eh?’ Gizmer pressed.

‘But the Rekef… the generals… Who knows?’ Pingge’s voice had descended to a whisper. Everyone knew that the Wasp-kinden sometimes manifested the same Art that enabled Ants to speak mind to mind, but it was rare. More than that, it was dangerous. Back in the reign of Alvric, First Emperor of the Wasps, there had been troubles, perhaps an attempted coup. The Rekef, then led by the same man who had given the service his name, had flexed its muscles for the first time. Anyone suspected of the mindlink had been hunted down, except for those wretched traitors who had thrown their lot in with the hunters. The Rekef Inlander had chosen its first battlefield: it could not countenance a hidden, unified fifth column within the Empire: the danger to the Emperor’s rule was too great to ignore. Hundreds were arrested, tortured for the names of any others they knew, then strung on the crossed pikes. It had been a forging time in the Empire’s history. A great many traditions had been born.

After that, anyone who developed the Art kept quiet about it, and tried never to use it in case some fellow pariah betrayed them. Yet it continued to manifest itself, that part of the Wasps’ collective soul refusing to be ignored.

‘They all know,’ Gizmer stated. ‘It’s a secret but not a conspiracy. Times change. There’s a book out there that I snuck a look at — top-secret air tactics and everything. Colonel Varsec’s work, all of it. He sets out the Farsphex design in it, but he also sets out the new pilots too. He said they used mindlinked troops to coordinate the taking of Solarno, apparently. So people have been thinking for a while, only it took Varsec to shift the idea over to pilots. No bloody wonder our lot have become the wonders of the air, eh, if they’re all inside each other’s minds. No wonder we get such a ragbag of recruits, too — women and all. They must have mindlinkers scouting every city in the Empire for more of the same.’

‘That’s…’ Pingge shivered. ‘So they could be talking to each other all the time, and we’d never know.’

Gizmer gave her a patronizing look. ‘They’re Wasps, so what does it matter? It’s not as though they’d be running everything by us otherwise, eh?’

The door to the store cupboard was abruptly thrown open, and the three of them jumped guiltily, expecting the stern, pale face of Aarmon. Instead it was just one of the newer Fly recruits.

‘Sergeant, been looking all over for you!’ the girl squeaked. ‘Everyone’s to assemble. New orders come in.’

The three of them exchanged looks.

‘Don’t like the sound of that,’ Gizmer muttered, and then they set off, half-running, half-flying, to join their fellows.

They met in the barracks common room that Gizmer had dubbed ‘the wasteland’ because, aside from formal times such as this, neither Fly-kinden nor Wasps spent any time there. A quick head count suggested that just about everyone was there from both camps. Pingge pushed her way into a mob of other Flies, not wanting to be at the back, nor to end up where she might be picked out by Aarmon, who was standing on a table to look them all over. It really was everyone here, she realized, including the trainees, because she could spot the female Wasp recruits interspersed amongst the men. That had been an arrangement that everyone had thought would go badly wrong, and in fact there had been one incident, when an engineer — an outsider serving as ground crew — had tried to rape one of the Wasp girls. What happened next only really made sense to Pingge now with the benefit of what Gizmer had told her. The assaulted woman had not even cried out, but Aarmon and another two pilots had appeared almost immediately. They had stung the rapist to death without sparing a moment for his panicky denials.

‘Listen up,’ Aarmon stated flatly. ‘New orders. We’re to step up the attacks.’

Everyone waited, but Pingge could sense a stir amongst the Wasps, some additional information passing between them.

‘From now on, returning crews get one day of turnaround and then they’re out again. The engineers reckon the Farsphex can be repaired and refuelled in time. We’ll be rolling missions so, even before one’s back, the next shift will be in the air. Collegium’s had it too easy, they tell me.’

Collegium’s too cursed good at defending itself, Pingge added, thinking of te Pelle. One of the Wasps must have had the same idea, because Aarmon was nodding.

‘Yes, the Collegiates are good in the air, better than anyone thought. Yes, we’re going to take losses. It’s war.’ His voice was hard, flat, bleak. ‘Do you think that when the land battle starts, none of our soldiers will die? We have a duty to perform. We will look after our own as much as is humanly possible,’ and his gaze made no distinction between Wasp or Fly, man or woman, ‘but we will do our duty nonetheless. We will make the Empire proud of us.’

There was something behind his words, and Pingge knew enough to understand now: They culled the mindlinkers once and they can do it again, especially now they’re all here and out in the open. If we get it wrong, if we give them cause, then this whole experiment could end up in the Rekef cells. She shivered. And it’ll be us along with them, sure enough. I know how the Rekef think.

‘We’ve authority to increase the Chneuma dosing,’ Aarmon added. ‘Double for pilots, and a single for the bombardiers now.’ Seeing the looks on some of the Fly-kinden faces, he added, ‘It’s something the Engineering Corps alchemists cooked up. We use it to stay awake for the days of the flight. You’ll all need it too, now. Sergeant Kiin, see me after, and I’ll sort out a supply.’

None of the Flies dared ask what other effects this Chneuma might produce, but it was evident in most expressions there, and no doubt some of the Wasps were posing that silent question, but Aarmon was not being drawn.

‘There’s one other thing,’ he added, ‘a change to the operation. We’ll be bringing some more of your training into the war.’ This time he was looking straight at the Flies and, as he told them what he meant, the idea was both terrifying and strangely attractive.

Yes, Pingge found herself thinking, with a curiously detached feeling of professionalism, The Collegiates won’t know what hit them.

Laszlo darted between wagons and automotives, flicked up twenty feet for a brief look at the evolving layout of the camp around him, then dropped down again. There were plenty of flying troops in the Grand Army — as even the Imperials were calling it now — but this was still a good way to attract undue attention. The Wasps made it plain that they took full responsibility for the skies above the army, and they were inclined to ask questions.

Progress had slowed over the last few days, though not because of any active resistance. Instead, an order had come from General Tynan that each night everyone would dig in, forming the vehicles into a circle and deploying a remarkable number of ready-made barricades which the Wasps had brought with them. Laszlo understood that Tynan had employed far more complete fortifications the first time he led the Second this way, but the combined force was now simply too large and disunited to protect thoroughly. The Wasps did what they could with what they had, though, and, in addition, every night saw the raising of three skeletal towers within the camp, each with what looked to Laszlo like some enormous sort of lamp.

They had now definitely entered Mantis territory, he understood. The precautions started even as they moved off from the cliffs above Kes, but it was a bitter part of recent Imperial history that the Fourth Army had been destroyed even further out than that, the Mantis-kinden able to travel swiftly by land and water, night and day. Of course, everyone knew that the Second had driven the Mantids out last time, and whether there were any left in the forest was unknown to the Grand Army’s leadership, but it was plain that Tynan wasn’t taking chances.

Laszlo tried to remember what he knew about the local Mantis-kinden. In fact, he had few fond thoughts of them, because of the actions of one particular individual, but in general he recalled them idling all over Collegium, refugees from their forest domain after Tynan’s depredations. Surely those few who might have returned home to rebuild could not pose a threat to the army that was advancing.

He hopped up once again to locate his target, then dropped back quickly. Just now he was in the loose following of Morkaris, the Aldanrael’s mercenary adjutant. The lean Spider-kinden was a busy man, constantly meeting with the leaders of various sell-sword companies, settling disputes, disbursing coin and occasionally punching faces. For all his stringy build he seemed to possess a prodigious strength. The demands on his time meant that he could find a use for someone like Laszlo, and just now that meant fetching food from the latest shipment. The Grand Army could never have lived off the land, so there were airships — both Imperial black and gold and smaller many-coloured craft from the Spiderlands — constantly ferrying back and forth with the supplies they needed for the march. When a shipment arrived, the camp cooks descended on it to cook up or preserve everything in danger of going off, and so Laszlo descended on Morkaris with a covered bowl of spiced horsemeat and a jug of soup, which the man grabbed from him the moment he was within arm’s reach.

‘Good work.’ The Spider upended the jug, heedless of the steaming heat of it, and then wiped his mouth on the back of a gauntlet. He was plainly not the kind of mannered Aristos that his counterpart Jadis was, but then the mercenaries obviously appreciated a plain-speaking man as their liaison. The next group with a grievance was approaching him even now: a quartet of hulking Scorpions.

‘Watch and learn,’ Morkaris remarked, because Laszlo knew how to make himself likeable, and the adjutant had taken a shine to him. The next ten minutes provided a masterclass in Spider- Scorpion relations, and ended with the adjutant sinking an axe into the company leader’s skull.

The other three Scorpions had regarded this action with little emotion.

‘Fine,’ Morkaris had told them. ‘You’re mine for now, until I say otherwise. Or does someone else want to try their luck?’ Nobody had felt that lucky.

Now Laszlo skimmed back over the camp, aiming for home — meaning the wagon that he and Lissart slept in. Running errands for Morkaris had meant a long and busy day, and he would still be hard put to report to Stenwold that he had found any fatal vulnerability in the way the Spider-kinden soldiers operated. The only logical advice would be, Kill their leaders, and that would hardly be something Stenwold had not thought of.

He ducked in, and, had he not ducked out again immediately, Lissart would have stabbed him. Hanging in the air outside, his mind was full of the flash of steel, her abrupt, savage movement.

Some part of him found that he was not surprised in the least.

‘Laszlo…?’ came her quiet voice from under the cloth awning. She sounded shaken, although he felt that he deserved that particular privilege.

A moment later she peered out, and the knife was nowhere to be seen. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was you.’

He descended warily, keeping out of arm’s reach, but remembering that she had more weapons than the blade, anyway. She could simply blast him with that fire Art of hers, if she so wished. He reckoned she was certainly strong enough to use it by now.

‘Who were you intending to stab?’ he asked her, trying to adopt a light tone.

‘Laszlo, she’s here,’ Lissart told him flatly. ‘Get under cover, quickly.’

She was frightened, he realized, or at least feigning it, but he made a snap decision, hoping his instincts were being trustworthy, and ducked under the wagon’s cover to nestle in beside her. She pressed herself against him and he found she was trembling slightly. The rush of gratitude he felt to the world, that she did not appear to want to kill him just yet, was stronger than he had expected.

Still under her spell, he thought wryly, putting his arms around her. ‘Who’s here?’

‘Garvan,’ she said, and he allowed a pause for explanation, but none came.

‘Should I know what that means?’

‘Garvan, or whatever her real name is,’ she persisted, ‘the Wasp woman who stabbed me. The Rekef one.’

He went quite still, thinking hard. The urge to say, Are you sure? was very strong, but she would not have thanked him for doubting her. ‘When, where?’

‘She must have come in with the supplies. I saw her just walking through the camp, mid-afternoon.’

‘Looking for you?’

‘I don’t know,’ she snapped, but she was trembling even more now. ‘She’ll know me, though, and she’ll kill me.’

‘We can’t stay here, then. Can you fly?’

‘I don’t know.’

There was something in her response that did not quite ring true. ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ Laszlo pressed gently, ‘that you’ve not experimented while I’ve been out and about?’

‘A short hop, maybe, nothing more,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll leave tonight.’ He made a doubting sound, and she twisted her neck to glare at him. ‘What?’

‘Ever since we got within spit of the Felyal, camp security’s right up, especially at night. They have a lot of sharp eyes doing sentry duty now. If you could fly, then I’d say risk it, but…’

‘But what? ’ she demanded.

‘But let me think about it. Stay under cover meanwhile. This Garvan of yours is a Wasp, so no reason for her to poke about the Spider-kinden camp. She won’t know me, so I can keep an eye out. Maybe we can stir trouble up against her, especially if she’s Rekef. Just.. wait. Don’t do anything we’ll regret. Just let me think of something.’

She lay in his arms, facing away from him. In her mind, no doubt, she was reliving the blade going in. She’s crazy, he told himself. She’s a killer, an enemy agent, the most dangerous woman you’ve ever got hold of. Just go. Leave her and just go. But he knew he would not depart without her, even so.

‘Think of something quickly,’ she said softly. ‘I can’t hold out forever.’

‘Our lack of progress is causing a lot of friction,’ Mycella observed. Tynan watched her with grudging admiration, because she was examining her appearance in a mirror while her elaborate tent was raised around her, the one still point in a whirl of carefully orchestrated chaos. Her servants, Spiders and Fly-kinden both, were practically dancing to a common rhythm that allowed them to coordinate with one another to set up poles and guys and embroidered canvas without so much as obstructing their mistress’s light, until she stood in a reddening beam of sunset in the midst of an eight-chambered portable palace, with furniture being moved into position as nimbly as though her staff were scene-shifters at the theatre.

‘Join me?’ she asked him, meeting his eyes in the mirror. A Fly-kinden was already at her elbow with a bottle of dark glass.

‘I see your kind’s reputation for vanity isn’t misplaced,’ he observed, although without vitriol.

She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘You never feel the need to see your own face, General?’

‘Not since I stopped needing a comb,’ he told her. It was true, too. Even without his own slaves, he could have shaved himself by touch these days.

‘I envy you. Mine holds a grim fascination for me, but it isn’t vanity.’ She turned towards him at last and collapsed back onto a couch that had not been there a moment before, even as the mirror was spirited away. ‘Time, General Tynan… I watch it advance on my position, and each day all my armies lose a little ground. I’m older than you, you realize?’

He shrugged, although inwardly he was surprised and then annoyed at letting anything these Spiders did surprise him. ‘I’ve seen less friction than I’d expected.’ He found a camp stool placed neatly beside him, standard army issue, and lowered himself into it, accepting a glass of what turned out to be Imperial brandy.

‘It’s in my camp, mostly, the discontent,’ she admitted. ‘The mercenaries get paid more for fighting, so they want to start besieging Collegium yesterday, and even our regular soldiers are… impatient. Jadis and Morkaris are keeping discipline, but perhaps your scouts have some news that might settle matters a little.’

He gave her an amused look. ‘And yours?’

She matched his expression. ‘Very well, then. As we skirt the Felyal, it looks increasingly as though there’s a fair-sized body of people moving ahead of us — soldiers, not refugees. Much sign of Mantis-kinden, by my trackers’ expert opinion, but others as well in fair numbers, certainly hundreds. If they were simply going to join up with the Collegiates, they’d have outpaced us easily, but they’re hanging about ahead of our advance, and some of my scouts haven’t come back. Some of yours, too, I’d wager? And one of your little airships is late as well, unless you sent it somewhere especially far.’

He nodded grudgingly. ‘You’re right, of course. Always the bloody Felyal. You weren’t here to see the bloodshed last time. You’d think they’d take a hint. But you’re correct: it’s not just Mantids either. Cherten reckons it’s an advance force from the city come to take a poke at us, while they’ve got the trees to operate from.’

‘My intelligence suggests it’s unlikely to be directly from Collegium. But what’s your plan?’

‘Depends how much history repeats itself. So far we’ve been moving past the Felyal that I burned the last time, but shortly we’ll be at the green. If there’s going to be trouble, it’ll be then, and at night most likely. Or it could be tonight, for that matter, or it might just as easily have been yesterday. Hence our walls and towers and caution — and your friction. My bet is that your mercenaries get to earn their blood money before a tenday’s out, though. And if we can break the back of the locals, then we can pick up speed again.’

‘You’ve thought this out, obviously.’

He suspected that she was flattering him rather than being overly sincere, but he could not quite suppress a smile. ‘They call my Second Army the Gears, Mycella. We don’t stop grinding until there’s nothing left but pieces. In order to maintain that reputation, in order to make sure nothing does stop us, you have no idea of the amount of forward planning I have to do.’

‘Just you? No council of tacticians?’

‘Some day I’ll get it wrong, and they’ll bury me and find another name for my army,’ he replied flatly.

‘You’re grim all of a sudden.’

He felt a jab of annoyance that this smooth, elegant woman should presume to know him — but reminded himself that he had spent quite a few nights sharing a bottle of one thing or another with his co-commander. It was not that he disdained the company of his officers, but they all had their own jobs to do, and she was right — he had nobody to share responsibility with. An army needed a single mind to direct it, and growing too familiar with his subordinates, even Mittoc and Cherten, would take the edge of his orders. Mycella represented a rare opportunity to talk matters over with someone outside his chain of command.

She’s up to something. She’s using her Art on me, manipulating me somehow. Yet he did not feel manipulated, and he found himself fascinated not by her appearance or her charms, but by the odd glimpse of weakness that she let him see, quite calculatedly: her fear of time, or the past failures that had put her where she was — a battlefield general’s role viewed as a spider punishment rather than a Wasp reward.

And she was beautiful, it was true, and all the more so because she was plainly not making the effort she could have done. She faced him instead as soldier to soldier.

This is going to turn out very badly, he knew, and he was too old to play that sort of fool. He should, he was well aware, restrict his meetings with her to daylight business: brief, curt discussions over the running of the army. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do that.

He was gazing at her, he knew — or almost through her, at the warring ghost of his own mind. He brought his eyes back into focus quickly, expecting to find her eyeing him with a touch of mockery, but she was not looking at him at all, just peering into the growing shadows of her tent, weighing her glass in her hand.

The attack, when it came, justified Tynan’s caution. The first Laszlo knew of it was a confused shouting coming from outside, which could have been just about anything. Despite all that the commanders of the Grand Army did to enforce discipline, Spider and Wasp ethics did not rub along easily. Most especially the Wasps had certain views on women, and many of the Spiders, in all fairness, had equally derogatory opinions about men. There had been brawls, rapes, revenge killings, and the wonder of it was that these incidents were isolated and ruthlessly investigated, rather than becoming so widespread as to swallow the entire camp. Imperial discipline and the Spider officers’ strength of personality held the entire complex organism together, and pointed in the right direction.

For that reason Laszlo just lay awake listening to the commotion, trying to work out whether it was a diplomatic incident or just some internal Spider dispute. Then Lissart stirred beside him and he realized that the shouting seemed a little too widespread: he could hear voices deep into the camp.

‘Get up,’ he hissed.

‘Get dressed,’ Lissart urged him almost at the same moment.

They stared at one another in the darkness, and then they were both scrambling for their clothes, Lissart hissing in pain, as she hunched over the healing scar of her wound.

Laszlo was just pulling his boots on when the first explosion sounded, just a cracking sound, like wood snapping, but he recognized it at once as some sort of grenade.

He buckled on his belt, feeling the comforting weight of his knife against his hip. A bow would have been grand, but his role as camp follower and freelance servant had not warranted it. Lissart, at least, was armed by default.

‘We go,’ he decided and she nodded with a single, determined jerk of her head. Then they were dropping out of the wagon, as the sleepers around them roused themselves or panicked or hid.

There are thousands of soldiers here, Laszlo was thinking. You’d be mad to attack an army like this. What can they hope to gain? It was a rhetorical question, though, for so long as the attackers gained him and Lissart a moment’s breathing space to get out of the camp, he could ask for no more.

General Tynan woke instantly as the first alarms were called. Some part of him had been waiting for this for a tenday or more, sleeping lightly in the absolute certain expectation that just this would happen. The Mantis-kinden are here at last. What kept them?

There was a plan, of course, and he had made sure that the duty sergeants and lieutenants knew what to do. At this moment his sentries and night watch would be doing everything they could to contain and assess the attack: numbers, direction, intention. They would be fighting for a breathing space in which to take control, just as they had back in the first war. Many of them would even be veterans of that same battle, where the invincible Mantids of the Felyal were taught about the sharp end of progress.

It came as no surprise that a kinden that had unchanged over five hundred years would not have learnt from that defeat either.

He dragged on a banded cuirass, standard Airborne issue, and snatched up his sword as he strode outside, even as the first officers arrived to report.

‘You,’ he snapped, picking a captain from the pack of messengers, trusting that senior rank equated to more critical news. Even as the man started to speak, though, there were Mantis-kinden amongst them, a handful of warriors just dropping from the sky and laying into whoever was closest. The captain was their first victim.

Tynan had no time to be startled by the attack, for there was a lean, savage-looking woman driving for him with a spear in the next moment, her fluid lunge little more than a suggestion of motion in the fickle lantern light. Long years of soldiering lent him enough instinct to save himself, anticipating her attack before he properly saw it, falling aside from the bright dart of the spearhead and lashing at the woman with his left-hand sting, staggering her. His right arm was already slamming forwards, and if he had been the young, strong major of fifteen years ago he would have killed her with the sword blow. As it was, he felt the blade grate off chitin armour, and she jumped back to get him again at her spear’s point, but another of his men blasted her from behind, the fire of his sting landing in the small of her back.

By that time it was over: four Mantis corpses, half a dozen dead Wasps, but the sounds of fighting still came from all directions.

‘Get the towers lit, you idiots!’ Tynan shouted at his army in general, judging that the time for receiving reports was probably past. In that moment he heard the sharp retort of a grenade, and his mind flipped the scenario it had been devising, turning it on its head. Mantis-kinden were among the Inapt, grenades were not in their arsenal. Mycella said there were others. Mantis-kinden are insane, and they’d attack a thousand with a dozen, but why would anyone in their right mind go along with them for the ride? What are they after?

‘All of you!’ he snapped at the men still present. ‘Get men to defend the baggage train — the munitions, fuel stores, automotives, supplies. Go, go!’

A runner came in, and nearly got himself killed by some of the more eager soldiers keen to guard their general now that he had no immediate need of them. Thankfully the long march with the Spider-kinden had given their allies just enough familiarity to slow the Wasps’ instinctive responses.

‘General, message from the Lady-Martial.’ The Spider was a lean, long-limbed youth, presumably picked for his running speed. ‘Large force of Mantis-kinden are in the north-camp.’ He was breathing heavily, forcing the words out.

‘Lieutenant!’ Tynan called, on the good officer’s principle that there was always a lieutenant within earshot. ‘Get me-’

‘General, no. We have them contained. I am to say that the flank is secure. My lady urges you to look to the east. Our spotters have seen other movement there.’

East? That’s their quickest route to the supplies and vehicles. ‘Already being taken care of,’ Tynan told him. ‘What do you mean “contained”?’ Even as he asked it, one of the tower lamps flared up, casting a bright white glare across the camp, Tynan looked about for the other two towers, finding one standing but dark, the last one.. He blinked, for the easternmost tower was down, somehow. The attack there must be fiercer than he had realized.

‘We know about fighting Mantis-kinden, general. We have numbers and we can see in the dark as well as they.’ The Spider messenger bowed. ‘I must rejoin my lady.’

Tynan waved him away. ‘You heard him,’ he growled. ‘Get men over to the east. Form up and sweep the vermin out of camp — and take some prisoners.’

‘But, General, we’re to trust these Spiders to hold?’ one of his bolder officers demanded.

‘We’re marching to war alongside them, so we’ll have to lean on them eventually. Now’s better than before the Collegiate gates,’ Tynan snapped. ‘Now move!’

How close did I just come to dying? a tiny voice said at the back of his mind, but he was a soldier and he fought it down.

All around them, in the maze of alleys and pathways running between the tents of the Spider camp, the fighting twisted and turned. There seemed to be Mantis-kinden everywhere, singly or small packs of them, and wherever the attackers went they met the Spiders, sallying forth to defend their own. That the Mantids wanted nothing more than to shed the blood of their most hated enemies was abundantly clear. This was no line-against-line soldier’s engagement, but a mad whirling skirmish, hundreds of individual duels and brawls, small bands of Spiders against smaller number of Mantis-kinden, whilst the more heavily armoured mercenaries formed up into solid units that became reference points for the fluid, unpredictable conflict going on around them. The Mantis-kinden were the deadlier, practically berserk, swifter than sight and utterly intent on blood. The Spiders gave before them, surged in on flanks and from behind, feinted and feigned and lured them into ambushes. The toll on both sides was fearsome.

Laszlo and Lissart dashed from shadow to shadow, tent to tent. The nearest edge of the camp was where the Mantis-kinden were coming from — so no escape to that quarter for certain. Instead they were forced further into the camp, looking for some other way out.

Then the tower lamp flared on, and its blinding glare froze the two Flies in their tracks, instantly feeling guilty as though the whole business was aimed only at them. It was an impartial beacon, though, and it stripped away half the hiding places they had been counting on, exposing them under its fierce fire. Above them and before them were Wasp-kinden, the night shift assembling into detachments and deploying, ground or air, wherever the sergeants sent them, the day shift donning their armour as swiftly as they could.

‘You! Identify yourselves!’ a Wasp sergeant snapped at them, palm forward and plainly keen to remove any further complications the night might offer him.

‘Messengers from the Aldanrael,’ Lissart shot back at him. ‘Which way to the general?’

For a second the man was not buying, but then he nodded briefly, gesturing further into the camp, seeing they had nothing more than knives on them. They passed through the Wasp ranks, constantly jostled and pushed as the soldiers formed ranks.

‘We need to get a good look around,’ Laszlo stated. ‘From down here it’s impossible to guess where we can make a break for.’ He glanced up, but the sky was busy with Light Airborne and Mantis-kinden both, and flying into that kind of meat-grinder did not appeal to him.

‘Head for the tower!’ Lissart told him sharply.

‘What?’

‘Just go!’ She shoved him towards the light, her face looking pale and strained. Even as they passed through, utterly beneath the Wasps’ notice, a surge of fighters broke away from the fighting about the Spider camps — more Mantids but others, too: Flies, Beetles, Ants, in a ragged but determined mob. They were making for the functioning tower, and the Wasps were instantly on to them, the Airborne taking to the sky whilst stings and snapbows began to rake into the attackers even as they rushed in.

The pair of them ran, or Laszlo ran and buoyed Liss up enough for her to match his pace. Hiding was out of the question now — speed their only friend, which got them to the foot of the tower without challenge.

‘Up,’ she instructed him. ‘See what the blazes is going on, won’t you? Find us a way out of this mess.’

Even as he ascended, she turned sharply, jabbing her hand out just as a Wasp would, and he caught a flash of fire from the corner of his eye. I hope that wasn’t one of ours, came the thought, and then he felt a wrenching sense of dissociation because, of course, nobody out there was one of theirs. There were just two contending groups who might have good cause to kill the pair of them.

He was not the first up the tower, for a dozen Wasp snapbowmen were already perched there, taking long-range potshots at any enemy target that came close enough. They glanced at Laszlo, but he made a grand show of not being up to anything suspect, and apparently he passed muster. Businesslike, with nothing in his pose admitting guilt, he took a good look to all quarters, just as if he were up the topmast back on the Tidenfree. There was fighting to the east as well, a vicious melee swirling about the Imperial supply wagons there, and he guessed immediately that everything else was probably just to cover getting that strike in place. The Wasps were all over that part of the camp, though, ground and air, and the fighting was dwindling and dwindling, the remaining attackers a diminishing ripple as the Wasps stamped them out.

Then there was a savage roar, and a plume of fire launching high into the air as something exploded. It had come from the very midst of the fighting, and Laszlo flinched despite the distance. The lamp immediately above him was hot enough to slick the back of his neck with sweat, but he almost kidded himself that he could feel an extra wash of boiled air from that eruption to the north.

It’s not my business, he had to remind himself, turning his attention elsewhere, because the attack was plainly running out of steam, and the camp would be impossible to get out of once order was restored.

Moments later he had picked his compass direction and he dropped from the tower top, finding Lissart swiftly and pulling her after him. Freedom or death, he thought dramatically, though it was probably not too far from the truth.

In the aftermath, Colonel Cherten made his report: a mere hundred Mantis-kinden and around twice as many of various other insurgent kinden had fallen in or near the Spider tents, with perhaps a miscellaneous hundred breaking free and retreating in the direction of the Felyal. They were all from the forest or nearby communities, Cherten believed, who had seen the Empire burn their homes once, and had obviously thought they might make a difference with this sudden strike. Under cover of their noise, a determined band of Mynans had come in from another direction, attacking the towers and then turning towards the supplies. They had been utterly ruthless, fearless, each one selling his life as dearly as possible. As well as the towers, they had managed to ignite one fuel dump, which in itself made a spectacular end to most of the Mynans who had survived to that point, and a painful number of Tynan’s soldiers as well. The sabotage only went to prove Colonel Mittoc’s wisdom in ensuring that their fuel and munitions were not all kept in one place, as Imperial policy would normally have dictated.

Possibly more serious a loss was the discovery that one of the Sentinels had been left near that fuel store, and the explosion had tipped the machine entirely over and damaged its underside, wrecking several of its legs. Tynan’s immediate plans for the Felyal, thankfully, allowed time for repairs.

Casualties had been moderate, the Aldanrael forces bearing the brunt of it as they contained the Mantis offensive. Tynan recorded a formal vote of thanks to their Spider allies.

Regarding two errant Fly-kinden, nobody had the time to spare a thought.

Looking over the Felyal, with the old burn scars of his last visit still plainly visible and the fresh wounds of the night attack in his mind, Tynan gave his orders.

‘Burn every home, kill everyone who resists, take prisoner everyone who doesn’t. Wherever they make their stand, make it a wasteland of ash. Set the Sentinels on them. Bring explosives, firethrowers, everything we have. They’ve shown us how they won’t learn. Leave nothing behind us that will ever again dare raise a hand against the Empire.’