The Air War

Forty-One

What are they doing?

The question flashed at Aarmon from all sides as the battlefield in the air disintegrated. Everywhere the Collegiate orthopters were breaking away, even braving the Imperial shot to ditch in the streets of their city. Aarmon’s aviators reported the enemy pilots scrambling from their machines and simply running, leaving the downed Stormreaders as sitting targets for bolt or bomb. Several orthopters were clipped from the sky in their frantic attempts to get clear.

Aarmon put the Farsphex through two more tight turns, swinging wild of the line his target was taking but dragging his craft back on course with a sure hand, pushing his skill and his machine’s tolerances to their limits but feeling his quarry start to tire, the panic of the chase in her throat. She was trying to get free, too — she tried to reach the ground again and again, but he was waiting for her each time, as his cohorts hedged her in on either side.

They know they’ve lost. They’re hoping to preserve their air strength for the siege, came the offering from one of his pilots.

They’re out of power, their clockwork’s run down, from another.

Other speculations kept battering at his mind, when he needed all his concentration to stay with her, his prize.

How he knew it was a she he could not say, but this enemy pilot he knew intimately, through a bond as close as that he shared with his comrades. Her orthopter was different, a slighter, nimbler piece of elegance than the admittedly admirable Collegiate standard, and her style was impeccable: a fierce, thrilling blend of excellence and inspiration that took possession of the sky wherever she flew.

She had been responsible for more deaths amongst his fellows than any other Collegiate pilot, her unique ship putting that knowledge beyond doubt. He had sought her out, and sought her out, night after night in the frenzied chaos of their aerial engagements. Now here she was, fleeing him in broad daylight.

It is not revenge; the thought passed through his mind and he knew it had gone out to his fellows, that Scain would be mouthing it even now. It was not hatred that moved him, either, or a desire for conquest. He remembered, when he was a boy, watching the hunting wasps take their prey on the wing, and feeling that moment where the destinies of predator and prey intersected, as though by consensus, each to its role. The dream of living that moment had taken him through the Light Airborne, and into the Aviation Corps when that new institution had formed. Not vengeance nor spite, but perfection.

His comrades were still engaging the enemy, of whom fewer and fewer were left to engage. Two-thirds of the surviving Collegiate force had reached the ground, or died trying, and the rest would plainly join them if the Wasps allowed them the opportunity. Still shifting his craft through the impossibly tight and dancing turns that his opponent sped into, he felt a clutching sensation inside him. A trap. But what? They had control of the skies, with the Second on its way, and what could Collegium do about it?

Commence bombing as soon as you’re free to do so, he ordered. Let’s see if we can’t sting them into the air again.

Then he saw something flash in the heart of the city: a tall house capped with a dome, nothing out of the ordinary save for a circular skylight that Lightning leapt and flashed from there, darting and reaching for the vault of sky above. And Aarmon’s mind said, Weapon.

He had a fraction of a second to realize, out of all his flight, that it was he whose course could be twisted to pass by that sparking roof, and he broke his pursuit off instantly, with only a moment’s regret, for sentiment was something he could suddenly not afford to indulge.

‘Sergeant!’ he snapped back towards Kiin, ‘Ready bombs, target domed house dead ahead.’

He hauled the Farsphex about, wings pausing for a moment in their beat, to let it hang and slew in the air, then regaining their pace as he slung his craft towards his mark.

A moment later the first impact rattled against them, and he knew, without needing confirmation, that his former prey had rounded on him; one of those precise dancing-step turns putting her on his tail the moment he abandoned the chase.

Get her off me! He sent to his fellows, because the roof ahead was spitting and flashing like a miniature storm now, and he knew that there could be only one chance.

Taki felt the absence of pursuit as a physical void behind her, freedom from shackles, and her instant thought was to find a place to put down. She was surely in that seconds-long limbo that must come just before whatever storm Stenwold Maker would now unleash on their enemies. And yet… and yet…

And yet the Collegiate pilots had ceded the skies to the Empire, and nothing had happened. No great stroke of genius from the War Master had manifested itself.

The ground screamed out for her, but she was a thing of the air first and foremost, and she flipped the Esca about for one last glance at her erstwhile pursuer.

She picked him out immediately, taking a recklessly straight course so that she found herself following him by sheer fighting pilot’s instinct, and ahead she saw a bright flare and spray of pure white light. A bomb? No, that’s something he’s aiming for. He’s on an attack run.

She was already flying in his wake and she saw the whole picture, stitched into whole cloth partly from her guesses at Maker’s plan, partly just from the Wasp’s reaction.

A moment later, she let fly with her rotary piercers, seeing at least a scatter of hits reaching the enemy and knowing that the sky was full of his friends.

The sky was full of her friends, too, those who had not been able to get clear. The sky was about to become a very dangerous place, probably a fatal one. She could only hope that enough of the defenders had managed to touch the ground before now, and that there was someone left who could lead them.

At least I’ll end in the air. And she loosed again, her twinned weapons hammering, feeling the vibration coming to her through her feet. Her enemy was trying to dodge her, but at the same time was committed to his own attack. If she could nudge him just a little way, he would lose his chance.

He would have just the one chance, that much she had guessed.

Then she felt the impact of shot punching into her own hull, and she knew that one of the Wasp’s friends was on her, and close, so she was abruptly in the same trap as her enemy, caught by her own dedication to her offensive. Her pitiful twists and lurches — all she could allow herself, without losing her line — shrugged off some of the incoming bolts, but she felt a punishing rain against her poor Esca ’s shell, the tail riddled and shot striking around the gears of the engine, against the pistons of the wings, whose silk spans were instantly peppered with holes, each one a tiny wound bleeding away her machine’s grace in the air.

Then there was another Collegiate craft coming in from ahead of her, and she thought, No! Don’t help me! Just take my target! But she had no mindlink, as the Wasps did, and the Mynan-painted Stormreader — it was Edmon’s own — flashed past the Farsphex she was chasing, two more Imperial orthopters in hot pursuit of him, his rotaries ablaze with bolts as he came to her rescue. For a fragment of a second, Taki saw them all like flies in a web, locked into their individual destinies, each devoted to their chosen attack, and each defenceless as the price of that devotion.

Edmon’s shot must have rattled the pilot behind her, at least temporarily, for she felt no further impact on her hull, but she saw a hail of sparks and broken wood and metal as his own machine suffered for it under the weapons of his shadows. She did not know, then, whether the damage to his machine was so great that he could not pull away, or whether Edmon chose his path, simply trusting that, whatever she was about, it had to be done and so her pursuer had to be stopped.

Edmon flew so close over her that he blotted out the sky for a blurred second, their wings close to touching, and she neither felt nor heard the impact as he rammed his craft into the vessel behind her, but it echoed in her all the same.

Aarmon cried out in shock in that same instant, a light winking out in his mind. None of his fellows was able to take up the attack, to drag the little Collegiate pilot from his tail, her shot already punching through his craft’s hull.

The building ahead, its crown alive with searing argent fire, was in his sights.

‘Kiin!’ he shouted, and a blistering salvo of shot ripped through the cabin behind him. He heard the Fly-kinden woman shout — not in pain but in rage.

‘Reticule’s smashed!’ the words came to him. ‘Sir-!’

‘Do it by hand!’ he called. ‘I have faith in you.’

And their time was up. He was still in the air and over the target, so surely…

Bolts scythed through the back and top of his vessel. He felt one wing go still instantly, all connection to the engine severed. He heard Kiin’s scream — brief and agonized, cut short almost as as soon as it started.

‘ Kiin! ’

The sky was filled with light.

The sky filled with light for Taki, too.

One moment she was in hot pursuit of the Farsphex, and a moment later she was fighting blindly with every part of the Esca ’s controls, wheeling madly across an unseen roofscape. The gears stuck and stuttered, the wing joints seemed to freeze, falling out of phase, every moving part on the cusp of being welded to its neighbour. And Taki cringed, shrinking into her seat, waiting for the flesh-searing fire that must surely follow.

But the Esca coughed and rattled, and kept on flying, and she could see again, albeit with a great negative blotch before her eyes that was already fading. She nearly died anyway, finding herself pitching downwards in a wild whirl before she could drag the stubborn stick back and get herself level. Then she was still airborne and alive, and as intact as her last skirmish with the enemy had left her.

And all about her the sky was dotted with orthopters, and most of them were the Empire’s — all still there. Only the fading skein of sparks crawling about every part of her machine told that anything had happened at all.

Oh, you stupid bastard, Maker. It didn’t work.

Then came the first explosion, a Farsphex simply erupting from within, and she stared and stared, as the sky over Collegium played host to a new and fleeting constellation.

And, on the ground, Stenwold Maker and his fellows rushed out of Banjacs’s house to stare upwards. The fierce, pale light of the lightning engine behind them was momentarily the god of all shadows, brighter than the sun, and the its charge was gone, hurled impartially into the heavens that were thronging with flying machines.

It was invisible the moment Banjacs’s engine discharged it, and yet every sense screamed with it, a moment of monumental wrongness when each hair stood on end, and the sky seemed to bend and boom with energies never meant to have been chained by the hand of man.

In the next breath, it had all been for nothing, and Stenwold felt his heart almost stop with the unfairness, the bitter knowledge of a defeat that his own actions had made so much worse.

Then Eujen was yelling and pointing, and he saw the first explosion: one of his enemies ripping apart as though old Banjacs’s ghost was up there tearing the machine asunder with invisible hands.

And another. And more, and Stenwold stared up as the skies caught fire over his city.

Scain screamed.

Pingge could not make out the words. He seemed to have gone mad, wrenching at the stick and yet taking them only in circles. But outside…

She saw the sudden bloom of flame as a nearby Farsphex went up, fragments of hull and wing forming momentary silhouettes against the blast.

‘Aarmon!’ Scain cried out, and Pingge thought, Kiin! knowing that her friend of so many years was dead.

Something blew in the engine behind and above her, and she shrieked. Scain was wrestling with his straps, finding them stubborn.

There was no time.

‘Scain!’ she shrilled, and he was turning back towards her, mad desperation in his tear-streaked face. Even as another shudder rocked them, he had his hand extended back, not seeking help but palm held outwards to sting.

She screamed at him. She saw that he was going to kill her in some Wasp idea of mercy. She felt the searing heat as his Art discharged, and then the fuel tank ruptured and the blast picked her up.

In that last moment, unable to get himself free, the fire of his sting had cracked her chain apart, and she was flung bodily from the Farsphex, out past the ballista — the bolts behind her popping and cracking like fireworks — out into the open air, borne away on the vanguard of the explosion.

Her last sight of Scain was a pale face seen through the cockpit’s faceted window, before the flames came.

Taki guided her battered Esca through a slow, spiralling descent — in truth the absolute best the machine was capable of just then, while watching the other Collegiate pilots still aloft follow her down. She had, she confessed to herself, no idea what had just happened, and no leap of inspiration could conquer the gap. Apt as she was, it seemed to her as though some great sorcerer of old had waved a hand, invoking an untold power simply to rid the sky of the enemy, leaving herself and her fellows intact.

Only later would she learn that Banjacs’s machine had not worked as intended, that the grand obliteration had never come, that even a genius’s calculations could harbour errors. Later scholars would suggest that, to fulfil his dream, ten times the charge of raw lightning energy would have been needed, and its backwash would have flash-cooked every living thing in Collegium. As it was, although the Stormreaders that had flown through that particular storm would need refitting, countless small components slightly deformed or melted as the lightning had leapt about them on its way to repatriation with the sky above, they had all landed safely, their pilots shocked and shaky, but alive.

For the Farsphex, however, the residual sparks of that same discharge had, within a varying number of seconds, coursed through the fuel tank and turned all that volatile and devastatingly efficient mineral oil into an instantly detonating bomb.

The Collegiate pilots, those who had reached the ground before then, and those only just now touching down, looked up into a sky that they had won, and around them at a city their path to victory had scarred almost beyond recognition. Even then the messengers were being sent out from Stenwold Maker and Jodry Drillen to tell them their work was not yet done, that the College artificers were waiting for them to complete emergency modifications to the Stormreaders, that the war was still going on.

She had given the order to run once they seemed to have put an acceptable distance between them and the front line — that chaotic tangle of men and vehicles that had given Straessa’s maniple the chance to win clear. There were other maniples that had failed to break free, or whose officers had decided on some misguided stand, and she understood she was abandoning them. There was no right answer.

Shortly after she had allowed her people to break formation and just flee, one of the transport automotives rumbled up, the driver vaguely recognizable from amongst the ranks of the camp artificers.

‘Get in!’ the man said, his face a mask of dust covering goggles and a face scarf.

‘Where are you headed?’ Straessa demanded. Throughout the mass of retreating Collegiate soldiers, she could see other vehicles performing the same service.

She had a horrible feeling that the driver was about to take them back to the fighting, but he just gestured towards the city, and home.

Straessa did not even need to give the order. By the time she had hauled her aching body on board, most of her maniple were already there, and the nearest stragglers from other units were heading over as well. The driver kept his eye on the churning dust that must be the Imperial forces on the march again. The sky to the east was dark with the Airborne, beginning to range out over the fleeing Beetles to pick them off.

Oh I’m not going to enjoy learning about this in history classes, thought Straessa, because humour had always before been her armour against the world. The following thought was even less funny: I don’t think Collegium’s going to be writing the histories.

When the transport was full, with soldiers hanging off the sides, the driver wrenched it about and headed for the camp at best speed. There were no orders, Straessa understood. Everyone who could was trying to assist with the retreat, to preserve some vestige of armed strength for… nobody seemed to be sure for what.

She was the highest-ranking officer on the automotive, which was to say the only one.

‘What the blazes is this?’ their driver demanded. Ahead of them was a block of soldiers that seemed to be forming up, as though they had arrived late and somehow contrived to overlook what was happening all around them. The sheer idiocy of it offended their driver enough for him to grind the transport to a halt and begin shouting at them.

‘What are you doing? Get moving, you fools. They’re right behind us!’

There were a fair number of them, Straessa saw — a few hundred at least — and although they were as dust-smothered as everything else she saw that they were mostly all of a piece. These were Mynans, standing in a close block, shoulder to shoulder just as though the snapbow had never been invented, falling back on what they knew.

Someone was approaching the automotive, and Straessa blinked to recognize the Mynan leader, Kymene. The woman looked exhausted, her right arm bandaged up and a sword in her left hand, but a mad fire burned in her eyes.

‘We attack!’ she snapped. ‘What else is there?’

The driver just gaped at her, but Straessa leant past him. ‘Commander, we’ve lost! We have to get back behind our walls before they catch us in the open.’

‘They’re not trying to catch us in the open, and your walls will not save you,’ Kymene declared flatly. She pointed out towards the enemy ‘They’ve halted, Sub-officer.’

Straessa stood, frowning, then stepped on the back of the driver’s seat. The trailing mass of fugitive soldiers was still being harried by the Airborne but, now that she looked, the main body of the Imperial army did seem to be holding their ground.

‘Well that’s…’ she began uncertainly. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means their artillery is in range of the city,’ Kymene informe her. ‘There is no other reason for them to stop.’

‘But they’re…’ She could just about make out what might be Collegium over to the west, although the dust made that uncertain. ‘You can’t… Seriously?’ And then came the unwelcome knowledge that, of course, Kymene had been through all this before.

‘If we do not act now, the city is lost,’ Kymene said, and it was plain that she had no intention of finding herself in this position again, one way or the other. ‘We will break into the enemy camp and destroy their engines, just as the automotives were supposed to do. It is the only way. Or else, if you decide to run, just keep running. There’s no point stopping once you reach Collegium.’

Coward, was her unspoken implication, just as Straessa’s mind was screaming, Madwoman. But it stung, that accusation. It stung beyond any veneer of common sense or tactical consideration. And the woman was right, as well, as far as Straessa could weigh the odds.

‘Sub?’ asked one of her people, or perhaps one of those from another maniple.

‘I resign my commission,’ said the Antspider, only realizing afterwards that she’d said it aloud. A lot of people were staring at her.

‘I’m staying,’ she called out, pitching her voice to carry. ‘I’m giving no orders. Your choice.’ With that inspiring speech, she slung herself over the side of the automotive and went to stand by the Mynans.

Perhaps a little under half made the same choice, forming themselves into makeshift, patchwork maniples. Their entire armed strength was just a mote before the great storm that the Empire was bringing.

Punch our way in. Destroy artillery. Get out. Oh, yes, can see all of that happening. Straessa was beginning to hope that Chief Officer Marteus really was dead, because otherwise she was going to kill him for promoting her.

‘Let’s go,’ ordered Kymene, and a moment later the Mynans were moving off: black and red armour and peaked helms, blue-grey faces set in expressions that spoke of being driven to the wall one too many times. After an awkward pause, the rallied Company soldiers followed suit. Straessa shouted at them to spread out, to make themselves more difficult targets, but she barely had the voice for it, nor the heart.

Then there was a buzzing, a murmuring sound that swelled behind them, familiar to them but new to the battlefield, and a moment later the orthopters were racing overhead, wings ablur. The soldiers began to scatter immediately, fearing the worst, but Kymene just stood and stared upwards. Then her sword was pointing high in triumph.

‘They’re ours!’ she cried, to those already with her, and to the others who were still streaming past. ‘Collegium to me!’

Amnon hauled himself to his knees, wiping blood from his mouth.

We gave them a chase, though, didn’t we?

His surviving automotives had simply not slowed, but rushed like maddened animals back and forth, a mobile barrier of steel to shield the Collegiate retreat, moving swiftly to give the Imperial artillery — and the Sentinels — a difficult time in bringing their weapons to bear. The Airborne had swooped on them. The infantry had tried to board them. Vehicles had been falling out of the chase from the start, swarmed or smashed. They had failed from the beginning, Amnon understood. They had not been able to get close to the artillery that was even now being erected in the heart of the Imperial camp.

The last wreckage of the Collegiate automotive assault was strewn all around him. His own machine, faithful to the last, had thrown him clear as it turned over, the engine and front axle destroyed by a Sentinel’s leadshot, and the driver along with it.

Amnon lurched to his feet. Barely a hundred yards away, well within snapbow range, were the enemy. They had ceased their advance and were putting up slanting barriers of wood and metal about their perimeter, against any Collegiate counterattack.

Closer, outside that evolving compound, was one of the Sentinels, probably the very one that had finally brought down his automotive. It shifted position minutely as he looked at it. Whatever slots or lenses the driver used to view the world were, he felt, fixed on him. He, who knew the secrets of hunting every living thing in the Jamail delta back home, understood when he had become the quarry.

He found a sword amidst the wreckage — not the leaf-bladed Khanaphir implement he would have preferred, nor even a crescent-guarded Collegium weapon, but a cross-hilted Imperial piece. It would be enough.

The Sentinel came closer, many feet picking a path through the strewn metal. The great blind eye regarded him imperiously.

He was not First Soldier of Khanaphir now, nor was he the partner of Praeda Rakespear, whom he had loved. He was not even an officer of the Collegiate army, given that it was either dead or fled. He was Amnon, though, the warrior and the hunter, and he still had a sword.

He gathered himself with all his strength and then he was running, a handful of swift steps towards the Sentinel and then a leap, even as its rotary piercers started spitting bolts.

The shots almost clipped his heels, then he was grappling with the smooth side of the machine, finding purchase between plates in the moments before those gaps clenched shut. He kept kicking and scrabbling until he was crouched atop the Sentinel, the one place that it could not attack him.

It spun left and right in search of him, then began bucking and lurching, somehow knowing where he was. Amnon clung on, though, hacking at its steel hide until the sword broke, and then slamming his hands down against the metal shell. The first snapbow bolt skipped off the hull nearby, Light Airborne wondering what he thought he could achieve.

Praeda was dead, and Amnon knew he would follow her soon enough, but he had one thing to accomplish first. Getting his fingers underneath one of the great articulated plates of the Sentinel’s casing, he planted his feet firmly and heaved. There had never been a beast so fierce that he could not kill it, nor so well armoured that he had not found its weak spot. He refused to give in, or admit that his life and skills were obsolete.

Another couple of bolts struck nearby, indicating that the Imperial soldiers were taking more of an interest. Amnon ignored them and continued to strain at the metal, the prodigious strength that had made him the wonder of the age in Khanaphes focusing in the single task of prising the machine’s armour up and exposing its innards.

In his mind was Praeda, and his city, and Collegium, all hovering over a solid core of effort, every sinew and every muscle pushed to its limit in seeking the impossible.

It gave an inch in his grip, bolts shearing, and he bellowed, a great anguished yell of loss and defiance, and ripped up the casing in a scream of tortured metal. Triumph flared within him: he was again the First Soldier of Khanaphes and, in that moment, he was the equal of anything this new world could throw at him.

He looked down, and almost laughed at feeling the hope drain out of him. Beneath the armour was just steel, more steel, as invulnerable as the rest.

Then the Wasp soldiers, who had suddenly begun taking him seriously, put a bolt through his leg and another through his shoulder, punching him off his perch atop the machine. He never saw the Stormreaders coming.

Speeding across the bright open sky felt like being in another world: no longer the ravaged city below them, but Collegium’s army forming a blurred host, and the enemy ahead.

Oh, now, here we go, Taki thought, because she could see some Farsphex already lurching into the air with unseemly haste, desperate to intercept the oncoming Collegiate fliers. She gritted her teeth, waiting to see whether the Empire had somehow mustered yet another great assembly of orthopters to stop them in their tracks. If they could not carry out their mission here, then the war was lost, despite every price they had paid so far.

A hard, savage smile came to her face. Five, I see just five.

Collegium had been able to put thirty-four Stormreaders in the air, twenty-seven of them modified to the latest specification, including this borrowed craft of Taki’s. The Esca Magni had been too abused to take to the air again with any certainty of it staying there.

Oh, they have heart, she acknowledged, because those five Imperial machines showed no hesitation: in for the kill, their rotaries ablaze with bolts, despite the odds. The modified Stormreaders were handling sluggishly too, due to all that extra weight clasped to their bellies by the modified landing legs. Still, seven of them were as nimble as they ever were, and for once, just this once, Collegium had overwhelming numbers in its favour.

She drew her craft to one side as the lead Farsphex came in, saw the enemy shift sideways, still trying for a kill as it evaded the first jabbing shots of the Collegiates. The Wasp cut up one of the laden Stormreaders badly, making it falter and lose height, before being picked off, a half-dozen different orthopters jockeying for the honour of the strike. The other enemy fared the same, giving a better account of themselves than anyone could have asked in the circumstances, and yet they accomplished nothing.

Then the Imperial army was spread below them, half-ensconced within their walls, and packed close together — just the wrong sort of security.

Some of the others were making their attack runs, but Taki took this chance to pass over and circle back, because they had a mission, and they had to get it right.

Colonel Mittoc looked up into the suddenly busy sky. All around him soldiers were lifting into the air, as though their Art wings or their little stings could make any difference at this point. Behind him were the greatshotters, mostly complete now thanks to the practised skill of his engineers, within range of the Collegiate walls, and ready to bring the city to its knees. He had been looking forward to using them.

The first bomb landed far to his left, tearing open a handful of tents and rather more soldiers. With an artificer’s appreciation he noted the way the Collegiates had adapted their vessels’ landing gear as a bomb cradle. He estimated that these charges were about half the power of the devices dropped on Collegium itself, the delivery system makeshift, and the small orthopters almost crippled by the weight.

It hardly mattered. The Collegiates had the sky. Not a Farsphex was to be seen.

The Imperial artillery commander knew that this was a time for discretion rather than valour, and that he himself was standing in exactly the wrong place, but Collegiate bombs were spiralling down all over the camp, the pilots still unfamiliar with their new toys, so where exactly was safe?

His men were shouting, and he turned to see a lone Stormreader coming on a direct line for the greatshotters from behind. Some of his engineers were still working on the siege engines, as though completing them would somehow give the huge weapons the ability to pluck those fleet little orthopters from the sky.

We were close, he thought, and he saw the bomb released even as his wings flared. But he was wearing the heavy armour designed to protect a valuable artificer from harm, and as a result he could barely manage a hop.

General Tynan noted that the Spider-kinden were already on the move, dispersing into individual groups and falling back eastwards — not exactly a rout but not an orderly retreat either. He needed to give the order, but it stuck in his throat. This was the Second Army, the Gears, and the Gears did not stop for anything. That was the point.

He could observe the walls of Collegium through a glass. For the second time, the city seemed just an inch from his grasp.

He had ordered the Airborne into the sky, to do what they could, but there had been no battle in recent history where flying men had been able to match themselves against flying machines. His own few orthopters had been destroyed within seconds of engaging the enemy.

‘Tynan!’

He spun round to see Mycella herself fighting her way through the panicking camp. She had the emaciated mercenary Morkaris and his Scorpions shouldering Wasps out of their way, and her chief of camp, the Melisandyr, strode alongside her in gleaming plate armour, holding a shield aloft as though it would protect anyone from anything.

‘What are you still doing here?’ Tynan demanded.

‘You have to get clear. You have to order a retreat, Tynan!’ she shouted to him. To his shock, he detected real concern in her eyes: not for his army, or their chances of winning the war, but solely for him.

And she was right, and he had known that truth for several minutes now, even as his men died.

‘Sound the retreat! Head east and regroup with the Spider-kinden!’

Instantly messengers and soldiers began spreading the word, the chain of command reasserting itself. It made him weep with frustration, but there was nothing else for it. He had the superior land force, but half his artillery was smashed and the Collegiates could destroy the rest at their leisure as long as they controlled the air. Under the withering barrage of their bombing, an attempt on the walls did not bear thinking about.

‘Come on,’ Mycella urged him. He saw she had a sword out as if to fight off the air assault by hand, and the impotence of the gesture touched him.

By degrees, and still under a flagging bombardment from the Collegiate fliers, the Second Army began to retreat from Collegium.

Last to turn round were the Sentinels, which stood before the bombardment unmoved, barely dented even when the bombs fell close. Their blank round eyes stared hungrily westwards, towards Collegium, before they finally turned, with an insolent slowness, and followed after the rest of the Second.