‘Hey, Beetle-boy!’
He looked up without curiosity to see Skrill picking her way over to him, with Salma following a little way behind. Her arm was bandaged tightly, bound up in a sling. ‘I ain’t pulling any bow no time soon,’ she informed him. ‘Got me good, they did. Thought they’d got you too, when you took off.’
Totho merely shook his head. It seemed so long since he had spoken that the words had dried up inside him, making him envy the Ant-kinden and their voices of the mind.
‘Well, if this ain’t a right mess,’ Skrill decided, dismissing the butchery with that. The air was thickening with flies, an intrusion Totho had not noticed before, from the littlest ones to fist-sized blood-drinkers. Where do they come from? Was there some machine churning them out? Surely all these insects had not been just waiting around in Tark for a massacre.
‘The Ants think they won, last night,’ Salma said, ‘though I’m not so sure. The Wasps eventually pulled back, but to their own tune, not ours.’ He used to smile a lot, Totho remembered, but his face was tired now, without even the ghost of that grin left.
‘They’re all over the gaps in the wall, our lot, putting up stuff to fill ’em,’ Skrill added. ‘Ain’t going to make much difference is my thinking.’
‘Parops reckons they can hold against one more attack before the Wasps take the wall, anyway,’ Salma continued. ‘Their soldiers got the measure of the Wasp infantry last night, and the Tarkesh think they’re superior. If the Wasps want the wall they’ll have to pay for it, or that’s what they’re saying.’
Totho surprised himself by laughing. Salma stared at him.
‘What? Is something funny?’
‘You,’ said Totho, feeling his voice rasp in his throat. ‘You, fighting an Ant war. Where’s Parops?’
Wordlessly, Salma pointed to where a squad of Ants was labouring at one edge of the breach, fixing stone and wood into place to make some kind of a barricade.
‘Let’s talk to Parops,’ said Totho, but Salma gripped him by the shoulder.
‘Are you hurt, Toth?’
The halfbreed artificer looked him right in the eye, but without quite focusing. ‘I’ve just. seen. Salma, I made a mistake. You know why I came?’
‘I think I do.’
‘How could.? Surely this isn’t what I meant, by coming here.’
Salma let out a long breath. ‘I don’t think anybody meant this. I never saw it, but I heard reports during the Twelve-Year War. There were single days of fighting that you could have fitted these corpses into five times. And if Tark falls, then where next? Helleron? Collegium? This is why we have to fight them.’
Totho shook his head, feeling it throb in response. ‘If we wanted to stop this, then we should just not fight them at all. We should just give in. But we don’t, and so we don’t want to stop it. We fight them to create war, and this’ — a vague gesture across the strewn ground — ‘is just a byproduct. War is what it’s about, and we all work hard at it.’
‘Listen to you, Beetle-boy,’ Skrill said nervously. ‘You got knocked on the head or something?’
‘There may have been a grenade,’ Totho said vaguely. ‘Close, perhaps. We should speak to Parops.’ Without a further look at them he wandered away.
Parops glanced up as they came over. Helping build barricades, he still had his armour on and it was still unfastened at the back. In all the night’s chaos there had been nobody yet to secure it for him. Nero was sitting nearby, watching the busy activity but pointedly taking no part in it.
‘You’re wasting your time, Commander,’ Totho announced for all to hear. Parops raised an eyebrow.
‘And why’s that?’ he asked. Salma came up quickly and took Totho’s arm.
‘He’s taken a beating,’ he explained. ‘You shouldn’t mind him.’
‘They won’t come in by this door. They wanted to draw you out. I’ve understood it,’ Totho explained.
‘Since when were you a tactician, lad?’ Nero asked him.
‘I don’t have to be. There was a man. a slave of the Wasps. He told me. He warned me, I think. “Airships,” he said. I would use airships, if I could.’
Staring at Totho, Parops had gone very still. ‘Airships,’ he echoed.
Totho shrugged, still finding it difficult to concentrate. None of it seemed that important. ‘That was what he said. I think it was what he said.’
‘Totho!’ Salma took him by the shoulders and pulled at him. ‘Come back to us,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying, but if it’s important. ’
The world shifted and slid sideways in Totho’s head, and he blinked. ‘He said airships,’ he told Salma softly. ‘I pulled him out from under the engine. He was an artificer, Salma, like me.’
‘You’d better come with me,’ said Parops, and set off for his guard tower at a jog.
He took them up to his arrowslit, noticeably slanted now. Parops’s entire tower seemed to be at a slight tilt. His commandership there might be living on borrowed time, Salma reckoned.
Out beyond the wall they could see the broad swathe of the imperial camp, and there was little new there, save that their numbers seemed barely touched by the atrocities of the previous night.
At the camp’s far end, though, lay the enemy’s makeshift airfield, where a few of the heliopters could be made out. There, beyond those blocky, graceless things, something was now rising up.
Several things, in fact. Half a dozen bloated shapes were slowly, imperceptibly swelling. Already they were bigger than the heliopters ranged before them, and Salma had the impression they still had a way to expand yet.
Parops had passed round his telescope, which Salma had no idea what to do with. It showed him nothing but blurs but Totho took it and peered into it keenly, seeming more focused than he had been since Skrill had first found him.
‘They would do the job,’ the artificer observed. ‘I can see that. Now there are no air defences left.’
‘Little enough,’ Parops agreed. ‘Most of the nest crop is gone, and we only have a couple of orthopters that could even be repaired on time. They threw a lot at us last night.’
‘Of course, and for that very reason,’ Totho murmured, still scrutinizing the distant gasbags. ‘An artificer’s war.’ He looked back at the others, seeming more himself, more the avid student Salma had known. The animation with which he spoke of his trade was macabre. ‘Airships are very vulnerable to any flying attack. That’s why they’ve not been used much in warfare.’ Right now he might have been a College master delivering his lecture.
‘So what are those things out there?’ Skrill demanded. Totho gave her a frustrated look.
‘They’re airships, of course, because there will be no airborne opposition to them now. They just have to float them over the city. It makes perfect sense. It’s just that the Tarkesh don’t think like Wasps. Parops, your people fight ground wars, and so your air power is secondary, kept just for spotting and the occasional surprise attack, but the Wasps think like you should think, Salma. They think in the air and now they’ve opened the city on the ground, and stripped its wings away, they’ll proceed to attack it from above. Those heliopters are too heavy, and they fly too low. You could shoot them down with your wall artillery, maybe even with sufficient crossbows. The airships, though. they can go so high, only the best fliers could reach them. So what will you do?’
‘But what can they do?’ Nero asked. ‘They can spy us out, but we can shoot their troops if they drop down-’
‘They can do whatever they want,’ Totho said, leaning back against the wall, his mind still full of airships. ‘The whole of Tark will be spread below them. Explosives, incendiaries — it would be like dropping boiling oil onto a map, you see. Drop — drop — drop, and three buildings gone. And all we will be able to do is shake our fists at them.’