War Master's Gate

Forty-One

‘There are two hundred and seventeen of them, sir. The rest are either dead or scattered throughout the city, hiding or holding out.’

‘And her?’ No need for General Tynan to qualify that, for he had made his liaisons no secret. Everyone in the Second Army knew whose company their general had sought out on the road to Collegium.

‘Not yet, sir. She evades us, still.’ The watch officer was standing with his back to the prisoners, all two hundred and seventeen of them. Many were wounded, and all were bound firmly and on their knees, out here under Collegium’s morning sky in some square boasting the jagged stonework and broken metal of what had once been a fountain before the bombs fell.

To Tynan’s eyes, how unsuited they looked to be soldiers! All so young and so delicate, handsome where their wounds hadn’t marred them and proud still, despite it all. Even when defeated. Even when captured and lined up for execution.

‘General.’ It was Vrakir’s voice, which Tynan had begun to loathe.

These men and women — yes, women! — had recently fought alongside his own. Spider sailors had brought his army food after the Collegiate pilots had made his airships their playthings. Spider troops had taken the brunt of the Felyal when they attacked, exposing themselves to the blades of their greatest enemies to give their Wasp allies time to regroup. They had stormed the wall using only their climbing Art. Their spilled blood had brought him here, as much as that of his own soldiers.

‘General, it seems appropriate that a sufficiently public spectacle be made of this,’ Vrakir murmured. ‘Crossed pikes along the walls, perhaps. After all, they betrayed the Empress, did they not?’

‘Did they?’ Tynan stared at him, stony-faced.

‘Do you doubt it?’ The Red Watch officer looked unmoved.

If Cherten were here, he would agree with him. He would tell me to do the right thing, the Imperial thing. But Cherten had got himself killed by a student, somehow, in an unforgivable lapse of discipline. I had not thought the time would come when I would lament the lack of Colonel Cherten, but I would he were here to do this business instead of me.

‘They are soldiers,’ Tynan stated. ‘We owe it to them to give them a soldier’s death.’

‘A traitor’s death, General-’ Vrakir stated, moving in too close, and Tynan smashed him across the mouth, backhanding him into the wall.

He was onto the younger man instantly, a solid punch driving Vrakir to the ground and then hooking his boot into the man’s stomach. And though the banded armour had taken the brunt, the Red Watch man skidded five feet across the ground, rolling and coming up on one knee, hand out and palm open.

Tynan was just the same, ready to sting, and for a moment the two of them were frozen in place, before the horrified stares of the soldiers.

‘Do it, or stand down,’ Tynan growled, and Vrakir bared his teeth, but lowered his hand.

‘The Empress will know of this,’ he hissed.

‘Take Captain Vrakir somewhere he can calm down and perhaps remember that most officers who threaten a superior get a pair of pikes for their own personal use,’ Tynan spat. His gaze swept around to the ranks of defeated Spider-kinden.

This is where I free them, isn’t it? Exile them from the city, tell them never to go near the Empire again, and everyone keeps quiet, a conspiracy of mercy, and the Empress never knows. But orders were orders, and the Empress had left him no leeway. And she would get to know, he had no doubt of it.

‘Have them shot, quick and clean,’ he ordered the watch officer. ‘They’ve earned that much.’

He stalked away, and heard the killing start.

There was a counting house, or something similar, that Cherten had commandeered for interrogations, and the engineers had removed all the paperwork and the remaining money from the cellars and converted them to holding cells, probably without being asked to, just standard work for junior artificers wherever the Empire established itself even for a short while. Tynan had some business there now, left over from the previous night. Another loose end that Cherten should be picking up. He found that he did not feel particularly upset that the intelligencer had met his end, but it was undeniably inconvenient.

The interrogators were not at work — it would clearly take them a while to get back to routine without Cherten — and Tynan found he had the place to himself, his footsteps echoing back from the stripped walls.

Probably I should keep a bodyguard about me, he considered. The situation remains fluid, after all, and you never know who might choose to have a go.

He glanced about the counting house’s interior, and reflected that he might almost welcome an assassin just about now.

But some great traditions could simply not be relied on these days.

He descended to the cellar, firing up a chemical lantern on the way, and casting a spitting white light ahead of him. Word had reached him just around dawn: there had indeed been an assassin, just not a very good one.

She was now the sole resident, hunched in the corner of the furthest cell as though driven there by the intrusion of the light. The artificers’ work allowed her no privacy: just a set of bars cordoning off one corner of the cellar, padlocked to eyebolts set in the stone walls on either side.

She was not a Spider, as he had been told, but a halfbreed with a lot of Ant blood in her as well, pale of skin and with dartlike blemishes on cheeks and forehead. She had been caught sneaking across the rooftops by sentries from the Airborne, whereupon she had apparently put up a fierce struggle to defend herself. She had injured two men before they got her sword off her, and they had not been gentle in subsequently expressing their grievances. He could see where her left hand had been stamped on, swollen and ugly, and the surgeon had merely knotted a strip of cloth over her bloodied right eye after cleaning out the wound.

When the soldiers had taken her down, she had called out Tynan’s name, they claimed. That was the only reason she still lived: because it was personal.

‘You’re the best the Spiderlands could send, are you?’ he asked. ‘Did. . did she send you?’ And what would I prefer to hear, precisely? He almost found he wanted her to say yes, to confirm that Mycella was still thinking of him, if only to dispatch this half-trained killer.

The prisoner mumbled something through bruised and bloody lips.

‘Louder!’ he snapped, not going closer to the bars, just in case.

‘Not Spiderlands,’ he made out. ‘Collegium.’

Tynan gave a surprised grunt. ‘Didn’t realize the locals did that sort of thing. Or maybe it’s just you, is it? Well you’re piss-poor at it, you know? Even as a murderer, you fail.’

That got a reaction and she bared her teeth impotently at him, her one good eye staring wildly.

‘What did you hope to accomplish?’ Tynan asked her. ‘Killing me wouldn’t free your city, anyway. Unless you were going to work your way down the chain of command, from the top.’

‘You killed Eujen.’

He frowned. The words made no sense to him.

‘He was my friend. He was the best man I knew. And when he came to talk to you, you took him and tortured him. . and then you shot him.’ As she spoke, her voice was low and dull, but her eye flashed fire when she looked up. ‘You killed my friend. You killed lots of my friends, but Eujen. . Coming to kill you was easier than staying to watch him die.’

When he came to talk. .? ‘This isn’t that student nonsense, is it?’

He could have put another knife in her, and it would have hurt less. The dismissal of everything there ever was about her cause and her friends, this man who would write the history books deeming them a trivial irrelevance.

‘Well, never mind about them. We’ll wrap them up today,’ he told her, thinking it more to himself than to torment her. ‘As for you, though, I’ll give you a choice. How much do you want to keep on living?’ Recognizing that traitor — hope — in her eye, he shook his head. ‘Oh no, don’t start down that road. There are two fates for you, girl. One is that we gift you a pair of pikes of your own, and you’ll die today, eventually. The other’s if you think you know something that we might be interested in. That way you live much longer, though, given the circumstances, you may come to regret it. That’s your choice, and that’s all of your choices.’ His voice had become rough and ugly, saying it. ‘I’ve just had two hundred good soldiers executed, assassin. Their deaths were quick and underserved. At least when I see your corpse, I’ll know yours was neither.’

Stenwold was managing to walk more easily now, although occasional waves of dizziness still swept over him, so he kept his stick handy. He had even been out to climb the courtyard wall at dawn, to look at the size of the problem.

It was a suitably large problem, too. There were plenty of Wasps out there, and some Sentinels, and it seemed likely that they would stir themselves soon, and then matters would get awkward.

If the Wasps were of a mind to break the building open, then a little artillery — perhaps even the leadshotters of the Sentinels — would suffice to do it, and then the students’ defence would last only minutes under the descending host of the Light Airborne.

On the other hand, the Wasps had declined to do any such thing so far, although similar tactics had been used against entrenched insurgents elsewhere in the city, and so there seemed some chance that the Empire might have to do things the old-fashioned way, and take the building by storm. In that case, it was possible that the students might still be in possession of it by dusk, for the main door was the only real approach, and there were plenty of small windows overlooking it that student snap-bowmen might use. But the next day would probably see the end, Stenwold realized. They were short of ammunition. The Empire was not short of men.

The Dragonfly Castre Gorenn was in charge up on the wall — any command structure had come down to strength of personality, and the Commonwealer had become a near-mythic figure amongst the students owing to her feats of aim.

‘I want only people who can fly stationed on this wall,’ Stenwold told her. ‘So yourself, Flies, any Beetles who’ve got their wings. When their advance comes you need to pull back to the main building in good time — get inside so we can shut them out. Or else, if you can’t get in, just take off, get clear of the fighting.’

Gorenn nodded coolly.

‘And no fool heroics. I mean in good time, Dragonfly.’ Stenwold had heard a great deal about the Commonweal Retaliatory Army.

She met his eye warily, as if ascribing some legendary characteristics to him herself. ‘Understood, War Master.’

Stenwold took another look over the wall, noticing movement about the Wasp lines, but a lazy sort of movement suggesting they had a little time in hand before any assault.

Then Laszlo landed close to him. ‘Mar’Maker, you need to come now.’

Trouble, was his first thought, but Stenwold could read Laszlo well, and the Fly was excited rather than worried. Something had happened.

There was a gathering in one of the rooms off the infirmary — a band of about twenty, but they were the leaders. Stenwold marked Berjek Gripshod, now in a buff coat and carrying a snapbow, and a couple of other College Masters. The rest were students wearing their purple sashes, save for Gerethwy the Woodlouse, who still wore the colours of the Coldstone Company.

And in the middle of all this, a newcomer. A Fly-kinden with a riot of black beard, whom Stenwold had assumed was long shipped out of the city.

‘Tomasso?’

‘And here’s himself!’ the ex-pirate declared. ‘Right then, let me speak my piece, for we’ve not much time.’

‘How did you get in here?’ Stenwold demanded.

Tomasso looked pained but said, ‘Your little windows here will fit one of mine, just about, Master Maker. And fear not, your lads and lasses had a bow trained on me as I came in. They’re sharp enough. Now, time for you to be going, though, don’t you think? I can’t imagine what you’re waiting for, but it hasn’t appeared.’

‘That’s not much of a joke, Tomasso,’ Stenwold told him.

‘Nonsense. I’ve a distraction lined up. Your people here look light on their feet. They can nip out and lose themselves in the streets. Meanwhile, you can come with me.’

‘You obviously haven’t seen how things are looking on the ground out there,’ Stenwold replied flatly. ‘The Wasps have a cordon set about the entrance to the College, and you’d need a remarkable diversion to stop them simply shooting us all down.’

Tomasso was nodding, a grin flashing from amidst his beard. ‘Oh, that you can bet on. You’ll all just need to be nimble in getting out.’

‘And the wounded?’ The voice came from the doorway: Sartaea te Mosca was standing there in a bloodied apron. ‘We have eleven who can’t walk, some who shouldn’t even be moved.’

‘Better to move them than let the Jaspers have them,’ Tomasso pointed out.

‘Nobody’s nimble when they’re carrying a stretcher,’ she told him.

Tomasso looked exasperated, as though his audience didn’t quite understand what he was offering. Nobody actually voiced the idea of abandoning the wounded, although it must have done the round of most heads there.

‘Excuse me,’ one of the students piped up eventually, a broad Beetle girl in chemical-stained overalls. ‘We can get out another way, I think.’

Everyone stared at her and she shuffled back a little, obviously not happy with being the centre of attention.

‘Cornella Fassen, isn’t it?’ Berjek Gripshod said kindly. ‘Tell us what you mean, please.’

‘Well, Master Gripshod, do you know the Cold Cellars?’

There was a murmur of bafflement and even laughter at that, as though she had told a joke just to defuse the tension. Those cold, slick, allegedly haunted chambers had been a part of student folklore for many years.

Even Berjek raised half a smile. ‘What of them?’ He remained painfully polite and correct, for all that there was an army gearing up outside even as he spoke.

‘Last year, some friends of mine worked out that it’s just. . they’re adjacent to the Natural History vaults underneath the Living Sciences faculty. That’s where they keep the samples, and where all the preservatives tanks. . and the cooling machinery.’

Stenwold and Berjek exchanged glances.

‘What are you saying?’ the War Master asked.

‘For the last day we’ve been working on the wall there. We reckon there can’t be that much that separates the two cellars. We had acids on it, and we were chipping away. If we could just get into Living Sciences, we could come out through the Old Workshops, and that means outside the Wasp cordon. We thought it would be useful, but we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. But this morning there’s a crack. . In the wall, Masters. I think we must be almost through.’

A shudder went through them on hearing that. It meant the insertion of hope, like a needle. A way out?

Almost immediately there was shouting upstairs, and moments later a Fly skidded down, calling out to them, ‘They’ve started! They’re moving for the wall!’

‘Get through to Living Sciences any way you can!’ Stenwold almost shouted at Fassen, who was out of the door the next instant. ‘Everyone else. .’ Wheels spun in his mind. ‘I need a detail to man the windows — cover for the wall guards. And then. . and then. .’ And then hold your ground until they kill you, he thought, as he realized what he was asking.

‘I’ll take volunteers for that,’ Berjek said calmly.

‘No-’

‘Oh, shut up, Maker. Give someone else a chance.’ The old man smiled wanly. ‘Less to lose here, and less of a loss. Who needs one more historian, eh?’

Stenwold took a deep breath. ‘I need a detachment ready to go through the breach in the wall as soon as it’s made. We don’t know who might be on the far side — the place could already be packed with Wasps.’

‘I’ll sort that,’ someone volunteered, and Stenwold nodded in gratitude. ‘Te Mosca, ready the wounded for movement. Yes, I know you don’t want to move them, but you must. Tomasso’s right. And, as for your distraction. .’

‘You make the call,’ Tomasso told him, ‘and I can signal them, no problems.’

‘What are we talking about?’

‘Suicidal counter-attack on the Wasps. Spider-kinden lorn detachment.’

Stenwold shook his head, impressed despite himself. ‘We will have to talk about how you managed that.’

‘Well, on the same subject, I have a whole bunch of former Spiderlands mercenaries hiding out with some trading friends of mine, at great expense, who will be getting themselves out of the city as soon as the Wasps open the gates to trade. I recommend you get your wounded, and anyone on the Empire’s lists, to hook up with them. Best chance they’ll get, believe me.’

‘And me?’

‘Master Maker, you’re with me and Laszlo. We’ve got a boat to catch.’

‘General!’

Tynan found that he had been expecting it, even as he sat taking reports and checking over the seemingly endless details of the Second’s assimilation of Collegium. He looked at the sergeant who had burst in on him, here on the second floor of some ousted magnate’s townhouse.

‘An attack?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The sergeant took a deep breath. ‘Best guess, about four hundred, sir. They must have been sneaking as close as they could, but as soon as we spotted them, they formed up. Sir. . my lieutenant said you’d want to see.’

Did he, now? But Tynan put down his pen and shoved his chair back. Four hundred, formed up, and I have a thousand snap-bowmen right here, right now, and so many more ranged across the city. Is this all you could manage?

‘Send out orders — to keep all eyes out for lone archers and assassins,’ he instructed, though if none was found it would not surprise him. An attack of any kind was madness. Surely she could have escaped over the walls? We can’t watch everything all of the time. Did I not leave even that much of a gap for you? In his heart he felt he knew. What would she be returning home for, if she escaped? Already in disgrace in the Spiderlands, her family humiliated and brought low, this campaign had been her last chance to redeem herself in the eyes of her peers. Tynan had crushed that hope — Tynan and his orders.

‘Let me see her,’ he said.

The Spider-kinden had not attacked, and the Wasps of the Second had held their positions, waiting for their general’s command, and so it was a motionless tableau that awaited him, as perfect as if they were holding still for some artist of epic talent, come to capture this moment in history.

They had their banners up, too. That was something the Spiderlands troops had eschewed while fighting alongside the Wasps, for perhaps Mycella had believed it would appear old-fashioned. Now, with nothing left to lose, flags billowed over the Spiderlands ranks, the bright silks of a dozen houses, with the Aldanrael at their heart.

She has come to say goodbye, Tynan thought. He could not see her, and it would have been perfect Spider planning for the woman herself to be elsewhere, perhaps sneaking over the walls even now, but he believed fiercely that she was somewhere in front of him, that she had chosen this way to finish their relationship with true Arista style.

‘I want her alive,’ he said, at first too quietly for anyone to notice, and then louder so his officers could hear.

‘Sir. . with a snapbow volley. .’ one of them ventured.

‘Do what you can,’ Tynan instructed. ‘Two volleys, and then send the Airborne in and, if she lives, bring her before me.’

‘Think your skipper can pull this off?’ Stenwold asked, just because he needed to say something.

‘Tomasso? There’s nothing he sets his mind to that he can’t do,’ Laszlo declared loyally.

The stench of chemicals was overpowering as Fassen and her friends worked on the wall. Even far down the corridor, Stenwold kept a rag to his mouth and nose to block it out. He had stopped asking how much longer. Nothing he could do would achieve anything but to distract the artificers. Around him, the vanguard force shuffled and rechecked their snapbows or fingered swords ready in scabbards. Laszlo shuffled from foot to foot.

Word had come, soon after the start of the attack, that the courtyard wall had fallen, Gorenn pulling back as instructed, for once. The main gates had been punched in by a Sentinel’s lead-shot, and the machine had muscled up to the wall and sent a shot through the gateway to stave in the College building’s inner doors as well. Since then, Berjek Gripshod’s lorn detachment had been keeping the Wasps off, making the final approach a nettle that the Empire was still steeling itself to grasp.

Beyond the wall, Tomasso’s distraction had now arrived, a ragged band of Spider-kinden hurling themselves at the rear of the Wasp position, massively outnumbered but pushing as far as they could with the benefit of surprise, so that Laszlo had reported fighting deep within the Wasp camp. The Empire had drawn its forces back to eliminate these new challengers, whereupon the students had dragged out all manner of broken furniture to block up the doorway and the courtyard gate.

Then the Wasps had come back, the Spiders clearly dealt with. The sands were running fierce and fast in the glass now.

‘Maker!’ It was Sperra barrelling down into the cellars, her eyes wide. ‘They’re in! They’re through the doors, Maker!’

A cold weight settled itself in Stenwold’s gut.

‘How are the wounded?’

‘We’re still getting them ready to move,’ Sperra reported. ‘Tell me we have somewhere to move to.’

He opened his mouth to confess that he stood between her and nothing but a dead end, that the end had found them.

There was a whoop, a veritable howl of triumph, from Fassen back in the Cold Cellars. ‘Through! We’re through!’ followed by ‘Hammer and tongs, what’s that?’

‘Vanguard forward!’ Stenwold snapped. ‘Sperra, get the infirmary cleared. Get everyone down here as quick as you can. Get. .’ but she was already gone.

And whatever Fassen’s found, don’t let it be another wall, he begged, as he pushed forwards with Laszlo at his heels.

He skidded down into the gripping chill of the cellar, and saw the wall ahead of him almost completely fallen, enough space for two people to squeeze through side by side. The work of the acids was plain, but there was a great deal of physical cracking that made him wonder if there had somehow been some movement of the earth that had touched only here. Or had Fassen other methods at her disposal than the chemical?

Whatever the reason, there was certainly a gap there, and it led somewhere.

The vanguard had waited for him, and he unslung his snapbow as he glanced around at them, at Fassen and her artificers, at Laszlo.

‘Master Maker,’ Fassen started.

‘Let me see.’ And he pushed his way to the edge of the hole.

He could see the cellars of Living Science, pungent with the reek of preservative because a lot of the jars and canisters there were broken open. That explained the chill and the smell that had tainted the Cold Cellars, and, for it to have done so, those cellars must have abutted here precisely, only this single thickness of wall separating two distinct College buildings.

He stepped across, and it took a long stride, because there was a gap below him, an impossible gap, and that was what Fassen had exclaimed about.

It was not large, just six inches in width, but for a long moment Stenwold stared down into it, and tried to understand what he was seeing. Darkness, yes, and the barrel of a snapbow poked into it encountered no resistance. Just a flaw in the earth, then? And yet. . if he strained his eyes were there lights, at some unfathomable distance down below? As though this little crack gave onto a vast, echoing cavern extending impossibly beneath Collegium itself.

He drew back, feeling sudden vertigo. He had no idea what this was, whether it had always been there or had only manifested during this last night, in time to help Fassen in her work. He had more prosaic matters to hand.

‘Living Science cellars look clear,’ he announced, trying for his old booming Assembly voice, but low enough in the end for his words to have to be relayed back. ‘Come on, we need to secure the floors above.’

Behind him, as they crossed, there wasn’t a member of the vanguard who didn’t pause and shiver a little, while crossing that inexplicable gap.

The narrow corridors leading down to the lower levels had never been intended for stretcher-bearers. Te Mosca and Sperra had got the wounded out of the infirmary easily enough, but navigating them to the Cold Cellars was an agonizingly slow business of knocks and bottlenecks, whilst everyone else in the building was desperately trying to hurry to the same place.

The sounds of fighting — and dying — were closing in on them. The Wasps were inside the building, and Berjek’s gallant few were fighting them from room to room, spending blood and buying time at whatever rate of exchange they could get.

Another flight of stairs, but the stolid stretcher-bearers knew their business now — mostly Beetles, and many of them former wounded now strong enough to help their comrades. One stretcher at a time they descended as swiftly as was safe, their faces tight with concentration, blotting out the shouting and the fighting from just a few rooms away.

Sperra had gone on ahead, a faithful escort to Balkus’s stretcher, but at the rear was Sartaea te Mosca, who perhaps had planned to provide an infinitesimal barrier between her charges and the Empire.

She brimmed over with exhortations to hurry that were utterly pointless. Nobody knew better than the men and women with the stretchers just how little time they had, and it was to their lasting credit that none of them cast aside their burdens to safeguard their own lives.

Most of the wounded were now on the level below, the last stretcher just about to begin its descent. Its rear bearer was Raullo Mummers, bag-eyed and hungover, but he had volunteered quickly enough.

‘Please go,’ he asked her, setting his foot on the top step. There was room for her to slip through above him, if she flew nimbly enough, but she shook her head.

‘I shall see you to the foot of the stairs, Master Mummers, and then I shall be right behind you.’ She risked a glance at Raullo’s burden: he had insisted on carrying Eujen, and she hadn’t had the heart to deny him the task. The chief officer of the Student Company looked. .

Dead, he looked dead, and in Mummers’s shaking grip there was no chance of detecting that infinitesimal rise and fall that earlier had betrayed some spark of life yet clinging to him. Simply shifting him might already have finished him off.

Running feet, and te Mosca wondered if there was any wretched magic that this heart of the Apt world would permit her, or if she had ever known any trick that could salvage a situation such as this.

‘Knife. . I’ve got a knife,’ Mummers gulped out, stumbling on the stairs but keeping his balance. She just shook her head. One knife against the Empire was not going to tip any scales.

Rounding the corner came a couple of soldiers in Collegiate colours, but neither of them locals: Gerethwy and Castre Gorenn.

‘You need to make better time!’ the Dragonfly shouted at her.

‘I am well aware of the situation, thank you,’ te Mosca said tightly. ‘We are evacuating as quickly as possible.’

‘I’ll hold here for them,’ Gerethwy announced. ‘This is a perfect position for my surprise.’

Gorenn gave him a nod. ‘There will be no more of us coming this way. Those that remain are drawing the Wasps away, for as long as they can.’

‘Perfect.’ Gerethwy had dropped to one knee and unslung his kitbag, dragging out his repeating snapbow and a tangle of mechanism.

‘Gorenn, what about you?’ te Mosca asked. Behind her, Mummers had wrestled Eujen’s stretcher down to the foot of the stairs, sparing her one last look back before he went lurching off with it.

‘I shall fight the Wasps,’ the Dragonfly said, and all the fires of the Twelve-year War leapt in her eyes. ‘And then, when that bores me, I shall leave, for there is no son of the Empire alive who can pursue me in the air. And I shall go to Sarn, and from there I shall fight them again.’

‘May the sun be in the eyes of your enemies,’ Gerethwy told her, his hands fitting components together deftly now, practice compensating for his lost fingers. Already the repeating snapbow was mounted on a low, bulky tripod, with some viciously toothed mechanism set in place to feed in its bolts.

Then the Dragonfly was gone, and Sartaea te Mosca was left staring only at the hunched back of her friend. ‘Gereth, come with me now, please.’

‘Not just yet,’ he told her. ‘But I will, believe me. Because I’ve solved the war problem.’ A momentary grin appeared over his shoulder. ‘Believe me, you won’t catch me sticking around for the Wasps, but I won’t need to once this is ready. My weapon will fight here without me.’ Abruptly a dozen slender wires lashed out, unspooling themselves down the corridor. ‘Ratiocinators, Sartaea, the future of artifice. Machines that can do things by themselves, react, calculate, even fight. And so simple — we could have done it ten years ago, if only anyone had thought!’ His hands flickered over the mechanisms, making minute, final adjustments. ‘Wars without soldiers, how about that? And we’re done!’

Then a Wasp appeared at the far end of the corridor, with snapbow levelled. There was a frozen moment of shock on both sides and then the Wasp, seeing an enemy with a weapon directed at him, shot Gerethwy through the chest.

He rocked as the bolt tore through him, eyes wide, a single audible breath escaping from him. Then the Woodlouse fell back with a perplexed expression. Sartaea dropped beside him, keening with loss because he was dead. She could see instantly that he was dead.

‘You, away from the weapon, halt there!’ the Wasp shouted at her. And then she was up, wings flashing about her shoulders, screaming at him for giving the warning one death too late.

Face fixed, he sighted on her and took one step forwards, and Gerethwy’s snapbow twitched on its mount and shot the man two or three times, spilling him back against the wall.

She stared at it, then at Gerethwy. It was as if his ghost was animating the weapon, in some impossible bridging of the Apt and Inapt.

Then another half-dozen Wasps were there, also shouting at her, and she flew back from the weapon and watched as it attacked them, barrel jerking precisely left and right, spitting out handfuls of bolts at a time, the chattering gears feeding through the tape of ammunition with meticulous economy.

She left Gerethwy there and set off after the stretchers, knowing that her friend, even dead, was guarding their retreat.

Her bodyguard had been the last man standing.

With all the rest dead around him, Jadis of the Melisandyr had stood over his wounded mistress’s body in his gleaming mail, shield up and sword ready to defy the entire Second Army. A Spider Sentinel, something out of another time, he had shown no fear nor even acknowledged the possibility of defeat. The sheer temerity of his defiance, backed by all the Spider Art he could muster, had held back the snapbow shot for a long count of ten.

And then they had gone amongst the bodies, giving the Spider wounded a swift, merciful death rather than have them fall into the hands of Vrakir or the interrogators. Save for Mycella — she, they had left for Tynan.

She had taken a snapbow bolt through the leg, he understood, but even then her sheer force of personality — the Art of her kinden — had held them back beyond the reach of her rapier. She had made laying hands on her person unthinkable, a sacrilege.

The word had come to Tynan that they had her, though, and so rather than wait for her to be dragged before him, he had gone to her, as a true penitent should.

The Spiders had fought fiercely, but like a war band from the Bad Old Days, and he understood that this had been deliberate. Like the banners they carried, this engagement had not been about winning. Trapped in Collegium, her army destroyed and her family disgraced, what choices had lain before Mycella of the Aldanrael? Surely she could have found a way to escape if she had truly looked for one, but then what? A beggar in some strange city? A renegade without status or power? What fate, for one who had misstepped in the Spider dance?

And so she had turned her back on survival at such a cost. For her, there was more merit in this ending, entering battle like mummers from some ritual drama, all bright colours and heraldry whose meaning had been lost to the world for centuries.

Seeing her there, on one knee with her sword in one hand, bloodied and bruised but unbowed, his heart was broken. He wanted to weep in that moment. He wanted to throw himself on her mercy, to beg her forgiveness. He wanted to howl out his bitter anger to the sky.

An Imperial general was denied all these things.

He could not say her name, yet looked her in the eye even so, felt her Art wash over him and then ebb, the force of her will fading before him until she was just a woman after all. Just another victim of his campaigns. He knew then that she truly had not betrayed him, that whatever the Empress intended, the Spiders — and what historian would ever believe it? — had not earned their allies’ wrath. He knew that Mycella had been true to him, after all.

He felt as though the whole of Collegium was watching him as he lifted his arm, the palm of his hand directed towards her.

How can I live, after this?

The expression on her face was infinitely sad, and he knew it would remain there in his mind, sleeping and waking, for the rest of his days.

His hand flared as his sting discharged.

The refugee students broke away from the Living Sciences building in a rush. Stenwold stood by the door, leaning on his stick and hoping he looked like a stern warden guarding the retreat of the others, whilst trying his best to catch his breath.

The plan was simple, and encapsulated in the phrase: It’s a big city. All those students able-bodied enough to do so were now going to ground. The Wasps could not know who had been in the contingent that had started the insurrection, and either they would round up every student of the College or they would not. Some would leave the city as soon as they could. Others — and by far the majority — would stay and wait their chances. Collegium would need them, Stenwold had promised. Their time would come.

The words had almost choked him, because their young faces had been so full of trust and hope.

The badly wounded were another matter — unable to move from place to place and with too much chance of their injuries being linked to the insurrection. They, and an escort, were going to join Tomasso’s mercenaries. Word had been sent to the bearded Fly’s mercantile contacts to smuggle them out of the city, posing as guards or servants, hidden within goods wagons, stowed away on ships. Tomasso had been working hard since his return to the city.

For Stenwold himself there were other plans.

The stretchers were coming out now. Tomasso had a quick word with the first bearers, to ensure they knew where they were going. It was not far but they must hurry, he was saying. The Wasps would-

Even as he was saying it, the Wasps had discovered them — a dozen of them bundling hurriedly from a side-street and stumbling to a halt at this sudden exodus of students. Stenwold felt the snapbow kick in his hands and a man in the centre of the squad went down, and then a handful of students were shooting too. But it only takes one Wasp to raise the alarm! And the last of the wounded was only just being brought out of Living Sciences.

Then the reason for the Wasps’ initial hurry caught up with them: a handful of Spider-kinden, led by a lean man in black armour, ploughed into them and cut down two or three in those first moments. The Wasps scattered, some trying for the sky, but a couple of Spiders carried bows and, between them and the students, the entire squad was accounted for.

‘Morkaris!’ Tomasso called over. ‘Still alive?’

The armoured Spider eyed him bleakly. ‘There are more coming,’ he said. ‘We are the last. I hope you’ve spent our lives wisely.’ He glanced at the last stretcher rounding the corner, at the handful of students even now backing away, about to run for their hiding places.

‘Curse you all, Wasps and Flies and Beetles!’ Morkaris declared, but a wild exaltation seemed to have taken hold of his expression, and a moment later he brandished his axe high in the air and went charging back the way he had come, his meagre handful of followers right behind him.

‘Laszlo, pay attention, boy,’ Tomasso barked. ‘Get your wings up, and get off with you — the Tidenfree’s out past the sea wall, waiting for my word, so you go tell them we’re on our way.’

‘Right, Skipper.’ And Laszlo was airborne in an instant, darting away at roof level.

‘Come now, Master Maker.’ Tomasso turned to Stenwold. ‘The rest are trusting to their luck, so we must trust to ours.’ He regarded Stenwold doubtfully. ‘You’re up for a brisk run, Maker?’

No! ‘Going to have to be,’ Stenwold replied curtly, and then Tomasso was off, half running and half in the air, leaving the Beetle War Master to lurch after him.

He was not up for even a brisk walk, so Tomasso had to keep returning to him, and Stenwold began to see the first spark of worry in the man’s eye, fearing that he had miscalculated, ignorant of how badly Stenwold had been hurt. From the College to the docks proved a long haul, especially while avoiding all the city’s biggest thoroughfares.

Tomasso had plotted their course in advance, leading Stenwold from Life Sciences to the river, and then through the rundown and unregarded streets that led along its course towards the sea. The Collegium river trade had been killed off almost entirely by the rails and the airships, and those parts of the city that had once relied on it had been dying for decades. There were plenty of shadowed places for Stenwold to fight for breath.

Sometimes they saw Wasps in the air above them, and once a Farsphex, and there were the occasional patrols on the ground too, and all the while they had to stop to rest more and more frequently.

Stenwold never knew whether the Wasps had spotted them from the air — a Fly and a Beetle out in daylight was surely not the most suspicious sight in Collegium that day — or whether one of the riverside locals had recognized his face and betrayed his own city’s War Master, but, as they neared the docks, there seemed to be more and more of the Light Airborne overhead, until their progress was a punctuated series of hops and dashes from cover to cover — more and more suspicious by the minute until, if any Imperial did see them, he would guess instantly that they were fugitives. Tomasso was cursing now, under his breath but Stenwold could hear him. He had obviously intended to be out of the city by now.

‘You go to the ship,’ Stenwold told him. ‘It’s not as if I can’t find the docks myself. You get going.’

‘Not a chance, Maker. I made a promise I’d see this through, and I’ve been paid for it. When I give my word, I see it’s kept.’

They were holed up no more than three streets from the docks by now, ducked into a storage shed that held nothing but scrap metal.

Then there was a hollow knocking sound that both of them recognized at once: the discharge of a leadshotter.

Tomasso was out of the shed immediately, with Stenwold lurching in his wake. There seemed little doubt about what the Wasps might be shooting at.

Stenwold shambled along the river’s course for another warehouse-length before following Tomasso’s abrupt left turn, cutting eastward for the main sea docks. There were fliers overhead, and shouting from somewhere behind. A noose was drawing tight, and he wondered if they had specific orders to keep him alive, or whether he was just some faceless fugitive to them.

Sooner than expected, he lurched out within sight of the docks, his lungs hammering with the strain and his head swimming with nausea. Whatever good work the Instar had done, he thought he might be undoing it with all this exertion. He staggered forwards again, then stumbled almost instantly to one knee, the world spinning about him.

Hands found his arm, hauling him upright. Tomasso was shouting in his ear: ‘Almost there, Maker. Don’t you give up here, you fat old bastard. Come on!’

Tisamon, in Myna, came the thought from somewhere, and it gave Stenwold a sudden new lease of strength, able to push himself to his feet and weave towards the sea and the piers and. .

And no ship. The docks were empty.

Behind the sea wall? For that had been the Tidenfree’s trick before, and what Wasp would think to look there, that even the Collegiate Port Authority had contrived to overlook.

Except there was a Wasp leadshotter positioned out on the sea wall already. And, even as he spotted it, an exhalation of smoke burst from it, with the sound following like thunder soon after.

Out across the harbour, out on the open sea, a tiny ship was riding, forced well out of artillery range.

‘Tomasso!’ he gasped.

‘I see it. Just keep going, you fool!’

There were Wasps coming now — not many, not just yet, but a dozen was more than enough. Stenwold found he no longer even had his snapbow. He had abandoned it some time during their trek.

‘I understand.’ And he was still running, forcing himself forwards one stride at a time, onto a pier now, a ramshackle old one with a storage hut at the far end, a place he had gone to before.

‘Good!’ Tomasso cried — and then he was abruptly no longer at Stenwold’s side. His small body spun under the snapbow bolt’s impact and then he was gone, knocked off the pier into the water. Two more bolts fell past Stenwold, like errant drops of rain.

And Stenwold had run out of places to go.

He stopped there, with the heels of his boots at the furthest edge of the pier, and watched as the Wasps feathered down out of a clear sky. Some of them must have known who he was, and communicated it to the rest, because the shooting had stopped now. They were just advancing across the docks, snapbows levelled.

Behind them, he saw his city as if for the first time: the newest subject state of the Wasp Empire, the furthest encroachment of the Black and Gold, despite all the blood and tears that had gone into keeping it free.

He raised a fist in the air. ‘Liberty!’ he cried.

As they reached the landward end of the pier, he took one step back, and let the water take him.