The Air War

Eight

To anyone observing Stenwold — which meant a dozen others in the Sontaken ’s passenger hold — he would seem to be composing a coded missive, a curiously blatant piece of espionage, as he sat there with papers spread about him. On one sheet were some sparse notes in plain script, on another a laboriously translated piece made of baffling symbols. The other pages comprised his lexicon, a book of all those familiar words that he had been able to scratch down the glyphs for. At least a couple aboard the Sontaken must recognize him, and several were staring and whispering, no doubt imagining the infamous War Master compiling secret orders to his minions.

In fact, he was writing a letter to a woman, as delicate and awkward a piece of wordsmithing as ever went into a student’s love poem.

This was not a love letter, of course. He was too old for that sort of thing and so was she, and neither of them were in love. If there had been anything as fiery and fierce as love between them, then surely they would not be so utterly separated now, living amongst different kinden in different worlds. Stenwold’s days as a lover had come and gone when he was a College student, and left no marks or traces behind. Even his dalliance with Arianna, the Spider-kinden girl who had deserted from the Rekef for him, had not quite been love, after all — her ambition, his hubris, and a passion born of war overwhelming any fear of danger. She had betrayed him, later, then died trying to save him. It had not been a happy business. He still missed her, but he knew full well it had not been love.

The Sontaken was a new design of airship, a streamlined canopy above, some powerful outrigger engines and a newly designed system of stabilizers meant that the little vessel could make the Collegium to Helleron run in four days of mild discomfort, when it had once been the boast of the great Sky Without to make the same trip in ten. Four days sitting in the same place without bureaucracy demanding his time was a luxury to Stenwold, which was why he had started abandoning the city for his clifftop refuge, where he could look out over the sea and brood, and shudder.

He had been to places few other landborn had ever seen, but he would never go back. That sunless, alien abyss offered no life for one such as him, just as his parched and dusty world was a terrible place for the woman he now wrote to.

He consulted his lexicon once again, but he had found another gap in his knowledge, another word he did not know the sigil for, nor any cognate of it. If he could have simply written to her, with all the Collegiate eloquence at his command, then things might have been different. Perhaps he could have baited the hook sufficiently to draw her up to shore again. The Sea-kinden spoke the same words that he did, but their writing was utterly different, each word a picture. Each time the sea-traders returned with more gold and more intricate clockwork, he learned another few dozen signs from them to add to his book, but even now he could write only the most halting and awkward things and, besides, what could he say? Not mawkish talk of feelings, certainly. He was Stenwold Maker, middle-aged and calloused by time and loss, and he could not open himself wide enough to admit that kind of youthful foolishness. And besides, they were both too solemn and set in their ways, and they both had responsibilities.

So instead he wrote about duty, to the wretched extent that he could. After all, he had his duty to Collegium, and she had hers to her new leader, the boy Aradocles. Perhaps even the differences of land and sea might not have sufficed to separate them had they not both been so busy.

Her name was Paladrya, this woman he did not love. Her letters came back to him, sometimes, infrequently, partly in her confident pictograms, partly in crude letters that he had a hard time deciphering. He could ask the Sea-kinden who brought them to translate, of course, or to write down for him what he wanted to say in return, but his words were for Paladrya alone, for all that they were of such everyday things. He did not want to share them with anybody else.

Without ever really thinking about it, he had disclosed such things to her that the Assembly might have exiled him for treason. When he thought of her, when he painstakingly fumbled out those complex glyphs, he had no secrets.

He sensed a change in the Sontaken ’s progress, felt his stomach shift with a gradual loss of height, and knew that they were now coming in to Helleron. He would secure transport to Myna there, but first he would meet up with an old friend. The business of the world was pressing on him again. Stenwold gathered up his papers and stowed them back in the pack at his belt, ready for the next rare opportunity for contemplation.

He was far from the sea here but, as he listened to the wind whistling past the hull outside, to the drone of the engines changing pitch, he thought he heard breakers for a moment, on a distant shore.

Helleron was as he remembered it, save that perhaps there was now more of it. The city’s innards sprawled in mounds and tangles of ghettos, factories, slums and tenements, all beneath the pall of smoke and soot that arose from the belching throats of a thousand chimneys. The grander houses of the magnates themselves were mostly located on higher ground, and where they could hope to remain upwind of the industry for as much of the time as possible.

Helleron to Myna was not the most reliable journey, as the newly freed Three-city Alliance was not rich enough to make a good export market, nor particularly trusting of where Helleren sympathies lay. The factory-city had rolled over quickly enough when the Empire had reached it the first time, and there was no suggestion that the magnates would put up much more of a fight should the Wasps come again. Whether this was just due to the legendary neutrality of the city, or whether there was something deeper working in those cluttered and grimy streets, was something that Stenwold was hoping to uncover.

He had secured passage on a freight fixed-wing that was making a quick round-trip to Myna, and that only because he had chartered it and paid for its cargo himself. He had a few hours, though, and furtive messages had brought him to an eating house in a moderately affluent part of town, a street of prosperous artisans and middling shopkeepers, not amongst the great and the good nor yet in the gutter. In Helleron, the distance between the heights of luxury and the depths of despair could be very small indeed.

Stenwold recognized him immediately, but then the man’s bodyguards did rather draw the eye. Greenwise Artector was a man too grand for this sort of place, and it showed even though he had dressed down. Turning up with a couple of Ant-kinden at his shoulders, who pointedly took a table near the door and stared at every other patron as though they were all assassins, could not help but make an impression, and Greenwise was well known enough that word would soon spread. By that time, however, he and Stenwold would have concluded their business, and the idea was that people would remember the great and wealthy merchant but not the hooded man in the artificer’s canvas whom he spoke to.

Greenwise Artector had never quite been Stenwold’s friend, but he had been a covert supporter for years. The two of them saw eye to eye on the problem of the Empire, and Artector had done a lot of good hidden work when Helleron had seen Imperial occupation. His information had been vital in fuelling the anti-Imperial resistance.

He looked thinner than Stenwold recalled, the clothes hanging off him a little, clearly tailored for more expansive days. The expensive cosmetics that smoothed out the signs of age and wear on his dark face no longer quite hid the worry around his eyes.

‘Sten,’ he said. ‘Just like old times.’

‘The wheel has rather come full circle,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘At least this time round, Collegium will be ready.’ There had been moments, before the war, when it had seemed his home city would simply ignore the entire situation, turn its back on the Imperial advance until the Wasps had reached their very doorstep, and it was too late. ‘Where will Helleron be?’

‘Officially?’ Greenwise grimaced. ‘We are proud of our neutrality. We bow to no man. Listen to most of the magnates and you’d never realize we had an Imperial governor not that long ago, and that our factories were given over to their war effort.’

‘Unofficially?’

‘There are a lot of Imperial dignitaries turning up at the airfields, Consortium merchants mostly. They turn up for a desultory bit of trade, and end up staying on to dine and chat with this magnate or that. More than half the Council plays host to them, and they talk about lucrative contracts, but there’s more going on. I have a few servants here and there that take my coin. Occupation terms for Helleron are already drafted, or as good as. The Empire’s diplomats are getting clever, and everyone’s going to end up subscribing to the same convenient lie: Helleron will get to keep its autonomy, so long as it does everything the Empire tells it.’

Stenwold nodded soberly, and then they paused while the wine arrived. The nervous waiter’s insistence that it was on the house told them that they had only a short interval before all the spies caught up with them.

‘Nothing there to surprise me,’ the War Master noted. ‘Greenwise, what do you hear from Myna in the last few days?’

‘I’d not go to Myna for all the gold in the mint,’ the magnate told him straight off. Seeing Stenwold’s expression, he nodded grimly. ‘But, as that’s where you’re going now, nothing good, Sten. The Empire’s had troops at the border for months now, on manoeuvres if you can believe it. Myna — the whole Alliance — is strung like a bow, ready to loose at any moment. I hear there have been a dozen separate border incidents in the last two months, crossing both ways, and that’s not to mention the Principalities throwing their lot in with the Empire, which means the Alliance are all over that border, too. The Wasp diplomats are complaining loudly that the Mynans can’t let go and will keep pushing them until there’s another war. Or, to translate, the Wasps will use that logic as their excuse to bring one about. It’s all firepowder over that ways, Sten. One spark will set it all off.’

‘But when?’ Stenwold asked him, feeling the sands of their conversation running out. ‘You must have sources there.’

‘All I have’s a pair of low-ranking Consortium men with gambling habits, and they know next to nothing. Sten, there’s been most of an army at the border for a good while now, and it’s kept well supplied. They could march at any time. But all the orders come from Capitas. There’s no general on the ground there yet to make the decision. That means that when the call comes…’

‘It’ll come without warning,’ Stenwold finished. ‘Greenwise, give me your best guess, then?’

The magnate seemed to have shrunk into his robes even further since the beginning of their conversation. ‘Yesterday.’ He shrugged. ‘Today. Now. I don’t know, Sten. And…’

His new tone caught at Stenwold, sensing real despair in the wreckage of the pleasant, avuncular man he had known all those years ago.

‘Sten, it’s all up for me when the Empire gets here. I’m selling everything I can here, shunting it south and west. What I did during the war… I got away with it at the time, but I know some of the others have put it all together since. They know where I stand, even if they don’t know all the details. If the Wasps get here, then I get out or my life’s not worth a Moth’s curse.’

He stood abruptly, and the two Ants were on their feet in the same instant. ‘Goodbye, Sten. See you in Collegium, maybe, or Sarn. Anywhere but here.’

They were forced down before they even reached Myna, two orthopters sliding across the sky in front of the fixed-wing freighter Stenwold had chartered. There was a scattered flash of light, the heliograph signals that were slowly becoming a crude language between aviators. In this case, Stenwold’s pilot had no idea of the message, but the hostile behaviour of the Mynan fliers was unmistakable, so he brought the freighter down at a dirt airstrip outside a tiny village within sight of Myna’s walls.

It turned out to be something approximating a customs inspection, with a squad of Mynan soldiers muscling up to the craft with the clear intent of searching every inch of it. Stenwold showed them his papers, and just whose name was at the foot of them. It would be pleasant to say that their attitude turned at once to helpful benevolence, but the best they could manage was a kind of stand-offish annoyance.

Stenwold considered how this was what Myna seemed like coming from the west. Had they flown in from the Imperial east, he guessed that the freighter would have been shot down without warning.

They made the short hop to Myna, coming down over its top airfield, of persistent memory. Stepping out onto that open space, seeing the flat-roofed warehouses and merchants’ offices surrounding it, Stenwold was twenty years younger for a second, fleeing here from the city itself even as the Wasp soldiers coursed overhead.

Ah, Tisamon. His friend, the Mantis Weaponsmaster, had been trying to get himself killed that day, an ambition realized only a few years ago.

He showed the same papers to the Mynan official that approached him, while his pilot supervised the unloading. There were five modest crates, each containing a dozen snapbows and ammunition. Too little, too late, but what could he do? That Myna would be first on the Empire’s list was clear to anyone who cared to look at a map, whether the Wasps turned for the Lowlands or the Commonweal. The Three-city Alliance sat at the flashpoint of the known world, so Stenwold could excuse them a little paranoia.

He had almost expected to find the city under siege even as he arrived. He could fool himself that, if he concentrated very hard, he could sense the Imperial forces massing to the east, just across the nebulous and ill-defined border.

‘Master Maker, you know you’re finding your own way back?’ It was his pilot, at his shoulder. ‘I’m not staying here, you understand.’ There was neither cowardice nor disloyalty in the sentiment. The man was a Helleren merchant, not some partisan.

‘Fair weather to you,’ Stenwold told him. ‘The Mynans will get me back to Helleron.’

‘Stenwold Maker in the flesh!’ The hailing voice caught his attention, and the pilot took the opportunity to make himself scarce and go to start his engines.

The woman striding across the airfield, outstripping her retinue and making them run to keep up, was a striking sight. Like the other Mynan Beetles she had blue-grey skin and blue-black hair, but there was something of the Ant-kinden in her physique, leaner and more compact than Beetles usually were. She was young, perhaps closing on thirty these days, though she looked less than that, and had she been anyone else she would have been called beautiful. As it was, the sheer fire and drive to her overrode all other assessments. Here was a woman who had raised a rebellion, endured captivity and driven out the Empire. All of it more complex than that, of course, but she was the woman the Mynans looked to, the reason that their newly liberated state had held together — indeed the reason that the entire Alliance had remained in one piece. Kymene, the Maid of Myna: Stenwold instinctively looked for the mail beneath her black and red robes, and found it, a knee-length hauberk of fine links and a breastplate over that bulking out the cloth. One hand was always close to the hilt of her shortsword, despite the fact she was in the midst of her people and that a half-dozen bodyguards were vainly trying to catch her up.

She halted, staring at him, her eyes flicking briefly to the crates. ‘I told the Consensus you were coming yourself. They didn’t believe me. They couldn’t see why some rich, fat Collegiate Beetle would bring his hide this close to the Empire, if he didn’t have to. They don’t know you.’

‘It’s good to see you too,’ Stenwold replied drily. In fact, the last time he had set eyes on her, her city had been under the Imperial boot and she had only just been freed from the governor’s cells. Since the war’s end, however, there had been a clandestine communication between them, through agents and go-betweens and shipments of arms.

‘This is all I could raise, and it’s stretched my funds to the limit,’ he told her.

She shrugged. ‘I’ll get them distributed. More than half our forces are still using crossbows, and I don’t think Maynes and Szar have much at all in the way of this kind of weaponry.’

‘How do you stand with the other members of the Alliance?’ he asked her, as she turned on her heel and stalked back the way she had come, trusting him to follow her.

‘Solidly, for now. We have a detachment of Maynesh Ants on our walls already, and if you thought we hated the Empire, you should listen to them. I understand that there are troops on their way from Szar, as well, although they won’t be here for a while.’

‘It sounds as though you think this is it, then,’ Stenwold observed.

She stopped and looked back at him; her expression was a thousand years old. ‘Master Maker, it’s been it every day since the Wasps ousted the last of their traitor-governors. Today, tomorrow, next tenday. Me, I don’t know what they’re waiting for.’

She monopolized his attention for the next two hours, hauling him into a spartan office that had not a single fingerprint of her personality to mark it. Looked at objectively, Stenwold realized, Kymene was a frightening creation: a child of the occupation, whose every waking moment was still devoted to keeping her city free. The rebellion that had seen the Empire’s garrison thrown out and governor killed had not changed her, and for her it had not changed much in the world either. She had never lost sight of the black and gold horde just over the horizon, and in that Stenwold had to admit to a kinship with her. Still, watching her as she dealt with her underlings, giving them curt orders, receiving their reports with a stern face, dismissing them with new instructions, he felt he was watching a woman on a battlefield, not one safe in her own city. She was so striking, so young, and yet he had no sense that she had any connections with another living soul other than those directly required for the continued existence of her city.

She caught his look, and held his gaze for a moment, almost hostile despite everything, meeting everything in the world as though it was just one more challenge. Then business resumed, and she was explaining what they knew of Imperial troop positions, their distances from Myna, their expected marching time and how much warning her city might receive. Myna was the most easterly of the Alliance’s three cities, for all that its strength at the time had made it the last to fall in the Empire’s first invasion. This time, the hammer would fall here first, and the border was not so very far away. Myna was on high alert, all the reserves called up, orthopters standing ready on the airfields, artillerists constantly manning the walls.

She introduced Stenwold to a close-faced Ant-kinden from Maynes, the officer in charge of the detachment that had already arrived. The man had little to say to Stenwold, little use for anyone except soldiers: polite enough, but it was plain that his mind was forever focused beyond the walls, watching and waiting. Stenwold understood that there were a few score Ant-kinden scattered out towards the border, forming a chain of linked minds that would relay word of any hostile move back to the city as fast as thought.

‘What good is he? What is he here for?’ the Ant asked, at last, having endured several minutes of strained conversation.

Stenwold sighed, thinking how Ant-kinden were the same the world over. ‘If nothing else, I’m here to show the Alliance that you’re not alone. Kymene has asked me to speak to the Mynan Consensus, and I’ll do so. I’ll show them that the Treaty of Gold means something more than just paper.’ The thought took him back to that windswept day outside the gates of Collegium — the Empire, the Lowland cities, the Alliance, Solarno and the Spiderlands, all of them putting their mark to a great-worded document of peace. A hostile move by the Empire against one signatory would mean war with all, or so said the treaty. Such documents mouldered quickly, however, and Stenwold hoped — he dearly hoped — that Collegium would remember the signing of it as vividly as he did.

The hour was late when he managed to barter some time for himself, heading out into Myna to catch up with another old friend, and mostly because he had heard that his truant niece Cheerwell had passed through Myna at the start of winter, possibly heading into the Commonweal by underhand means. That meant Hokiak’s Exchange, of course. Hokiak was a decrepit old Scorpion, and Stenwold had known him years ago, back before the Empire’s first invasion. He was a fixture of Myna, venal and greedy, selling to both sides during the occupation and yet always walking a fine line that had avoided reprisals from either. He would know all the details of where Che Maker had gone, and Stenwold was willing to bet that he would know something new worth hearing about the Imperial forces, too. Hokiak had always been one to keep his options open.

Stenwold had known for some time that he stood on the brink of a great fall, and all the world with him. Every figure on Myna’s streets seemed to be in a desperate hurry, rushing for shelter, for loved ones. There were soldiers everywhere, many of them obviously new to the uniform, and the recruiting still going on. Even back in Collegium the murmur was of war just over the horizon, casting a faint shadow over everyone, subtly changing the investments merchants made, the books the scholar read, the goods the artisan crafted. Here, though, was the true sign of the times, an omen he needed no seer to interpret for him.

Hokiak’s Exchange was boarded up. The old man, who had weathered conquest, occupation and liberation with equanimity, had seen the writing on the wall, wrapped up his business of over twenty years, and gone.

The orthopter descending on the makeshift landing field was of a design none of the watching Wasps had seen, although if any of them had been posted to Solarno recently they might have found it familiar: two-winged, with a hook of a body balancing between. Almost vertical in flight, it tacked and backed as it came down, adjusting its positioning minutely, skilled pilot and well-calibrated machine working in tandem. The Imperial aviators there exchanged glances, wondering if they could have jockeyed their own Spearflights down as neatly, especially at night.

The machine’s landing gear snapped out, and it came down neatly on a tripod of slender legs, leaving it upright, the round windows of its cockpit seeming to survey the other fliers there with a predatory air. Then they were hingeing upwards, and two men emerged, one clambering heavily to the ground and the other coasting awkwardly down on Art wings.

They were not exactly unexpected, but the assembling Imperial Eighth Army was in sufficient flux that they were aggressively challenged anyway, a score of the Light Airborne dropping down all around them with palms out. The duty sergeant muscled up to them, ready to demand answers; poor communications meant that he, of all people, had not been forewarned.

He saw two halfbreeds, unescorted and out of uniform, and under normal circumstances that would have been enough for him to have them arrested first, and work out what was going on later. There were certain individuals in Imperial lore who were sufficiently notorious for their description to filter down as far as sergeants, however.

One of the two newcomers was nothing much to look at: a young man who looked as though he had Beetle and Ant blood in him, solidly built and with a brooding expression on his dark face. Like his companion, he wore dark artificer’s leathers, with a surcoat over that displaying a grey open gauntlet on a grey field, the device standing clear from its surrounds by some trick of the cloth. The resemblance between them ended there. The other man was taller, standing awkwardly with a curiously lopsided posture. His face was mottled, grey on pale, and his eyes were all white and pupil, with no visible iris. His features themselves were lean and severe and somehow gave the impression of deformity for no concrete reason. One of his hands was gauntleted in steel, and it was by this, more than anything else, that the sergeant knew him.

He was a bright man, that sergeant: being faced by a figure who was renowned as genius, traitor and dead, all at once, gave him pause for thought. At last he compromised on, ‘You have papers, of course, sir,’ as neutral a challenge as a Wasp had ever made.

The pale halfbreed smiled slightly, and his associate reached into one of a score of pouches and brought out a crumpled document with a seal on it. The Empress’s seal, the sergeant noted. This dog-eared and maltreated piece of paper had once been in her own hands.

A moment’s reading had confirmed either the best or the worst. Yes, this was the infamous Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos. Yes, he had never been a deserter, after all, nor dead, but had been released from his official duties by the Empress, a pleasant fiction given that he had surely abandoned his post before she had ever assumed the throne. Yes, he had every business being here. After the rest, the sergeant could have guessed that. After all, there had been a contingent of the mercenary Iron Glove artificers working alongside the reforming Eighth for the last month.

‘Welcome to Malek Camp, sir.’

‘You’ll go far, sergeant.’ Drephos, as those closest to him called him, cast his gaze about, seeing the ragged bustle of a more than usually chaotic Imperial camp: several thousand soldiers and their slaves and supporters and — most importantly — their machines. ‘Two questions. Where are my men, and where is your Major…?’ He snapped the fingers of his armoured hand with a hollow click.

‘Ferric,’ the other halfbreed filled in for him.

‘You’ll find them both together up on the rise south of camp,’ the sergeant replied, and promptly detailed a reluctant soldier to lead the way, and thereby get both halfbreeds well away from him.

Major Ferric was presiding over a grand assembly of what must have been most of Malek Camp’s cooking staff, and the smell of some kind of stew came clearly to Totho as he and Drephos ascended. All around them, artificers were working, both Imperial engineers and the men of the Iron Glove, but Major Ferric was distinguishing himself by not getting in the way and instead making sure everyone got fed.

He was a heavily built, broad-shouldered Wasp with a face dominated by a broken nose that had never been reset properly. He had sharp eyes, though, spotting his visitors as soon as they stepped within the white light of the working lamps, and Totho saw his eyebrows lift.

‘Colonel-Auxillian!’ Ferric called, without leaving his post by the cooking fires. ‘Over here.’

It was hardly proper protocol, but Drephos was an odd man in that way, sometimes making the Wasp-kinden jump through hoops for his amusement, other times heedless of any and all degrees of rank and priority. He made a quick path over to Ferric in his slightly lurching stride, Totho tagging along at his heels.

‘Glad to see you made it, Colonel.’ Ferric gave him a casual salute. ‘You won’t remember, but I was with you and the Sixth during the Twelve-year War. Pleasure to work with you again, sir.’

Drephos nodded, plainly not recalling the man at all, but then most other people were not a particularly important part of his world. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

‘Well, sir, your men and mine are working to get the great-shotters up and ready, because I have a feeling we’re due to get orders to kick over the ant’s nest some time soon, and these beasts of yours take a lot of calibration. As there’s not a great deal I can personally contribute, and as my lads are all pulling double shifts to make up the time, I reckon the best employment for me is making sure there’s hot food for everyone.’

The Colonel-Auxillian — although his continuing right to that rank was somewhat in dispute — stared at him briefly, and then nodded in grudging approval. ‘These men are all engineers?’

‘Two-thirds of the engineers I have,’ Ferric confirmed, ‘and the rest are sleeping.’

‘A great deal of this work is menial. Why haven’t you commandeered help from the rest of the army?’

‘Ah, well, sir.’ Ferric shrugged, pragmatically. ‘Colonel Erveg, now, he’s a traditionalist. He doesn’t much hold with advances in engineering. He says they took Myna without all these toys last time, and he’ll do it again just the same, soon as orders come through.’

Drephos exchanged a look with Totho, rolling his eyes at the foolishness of the world with special reference to the Imperial command. ‘Well, then, we should change that.’

‘He won’t want to listen to you, sir. Colonel-Auxillian won’t cut anything with him.’

At Drephos’s impatient gesture Totho pulled out another creased paper bearing a set of seals.

‘Rejoice, then,’ Dariandrephos noted wryly, ‘Colonel Ferric.’ He handed the commission over to the startled officer. ‘I have been requested to make sure that the “toys” the Empire has purchased from the Iron Glove cartel are put to their best use. To that end, the Eighth Army, which this force will soon be a part of, requires a chief engineer. You seem capable, so I bestow the honour on you. Now, sir, perhaps you might send a runner for this Colonel Erveg.’

Major — Colonel — Ferric took his promotion in his stride, offering just another waggle of the eyebrows to indicate this sudden jump in his fortunes. Nonetheless he had a Fly-kinden in the air a moment later, off to wake up the man who, a moment ago, had been in sole charge of Malek Camp.

In the meantime, Totho had rounded up the chief of the Iron Glove men there. ‘Tell me you’ve got at least one of the Sentinels up and running.’

‘Only one.’ The artificer, a squat Bee-kinden from the far shores of the Exalsee, shrugged his powerful shoulders. ‘Got it in a shed down the hill. Not had the time to get any of the others into order.’

‘Take a crew, then, and go get it started up,’ Totho directed. ‘Bring it right here. We’re about to change some priorities.’ He looked up at the towering greatshotters, their brass-bound steel barrels angled as though to shoot down the moon, the metal wrapped in an intricate mesh of spider silk and wire to stop it bursting asunder. Soon, he knew, these huge weapons would speak their thunder for the first time.

Myna. But then he had no fond memories of the place, in all honesty, and even the unfond ones had been so long ago that he could not bring himself to feel any strong emotion about what would shortly happen to it.