‘Ants are too straight for that, aren’t they?’ Totho asked. ‘I thought they’d just line up and fight.’
‘Don’t believe it, Beetle-boy,’ she told him. ‘Ants’ll play the dirty tricks same as anyone. They do war, Beetlie, and war means day and night work. Nobody ever won a war just by fighting fair.’
‘Don’t call me that,’ Totho said, for the nicknames she used were starting to gall him. ‘I’m no more a Beetle than you are a. a whatever it is you are, or aren’t.’
‘Am I a Beetle? No. Is His Lordship a Beetle? No. Then you get to be Beetle-boy unless we can get a better Beetle than you,’ she told him without sympathy.
‘Will the pair of you be-’ Salma had started to hiss, and then the Wasps were in sight, skimming at just a man’s height and touching the tops of the sword-grass as they came. In that same moment they had clearly spotted the three spies.
There were half a dozen of them, light airborne out merely on a scouting mission, but Wasps were a pugnacious lot and never ones to shirk a fight. Their leader shouted an order and two of them broke off, arrowing back towards their camp. The others sped towards Salma with swords drawn and palms outstretched to unleash their energy stings.
Skrill shot one straight off, leaping up with her sudden speed and loosing an arrow that split the second oncomer’s eye. The Wasp flier recoiled in the air and then dropped from sight amidst the tall grass.
Salma had no time to string his own bow. As the three remaining soldiers launched the golden lightning of their stings he let his wings take him straight upwards, his shortsword — stolen Wasp-make itself — clearing its scabbard.
Skrill had already dashed to one side but Totho had no option but to cast himself to the ground and hope. He felt one sting lash across his pack as though he had been punched there by a strong man. Then he was up with a magazine slotted into his crossbow.
One of the men had skimmed upwards in pursuit of Salma and it struck Totho how they seemed nimbler in the air than most Wasps, obviously hand-picked as scouts. He raised his bow and loosed.
The man coming for him jinked aside and the bolt sped past him. Totho saw the man’s face split into a grin in the knowledge that there would be no reloading of such a cumbersome weapon as a crossbow in time. By then Totho was racking back the lever and shooting again and again, seeing surprise and dismay splash across those same features. The man dodged the second shot but not the third, nor the fourth or fifth, and he ploughed dead into the earth six feet away. They were a race of builders and artificers, the Wasps, but for all their numbers and ingenuity they were behind the Lowlands yet in craft.
He heard a shout nearby and saw Skrill fighting furiously with another enemy, sword to sword. She was swift, her blade lunging and darting like a living thing, but her opponent was a professional, and the metal plates of his armour kept turning aside her blows. Totho knew he couldn’t risk a shot in their direction and drew his own blade, breaking cover to run to her aid.
Above them Salma dived and spun in a deadly aerial ballet with his opponent. For them, distance was alclass="underline" too close and they would foul each other, too far and the Wasp would have more chance to use his sting. Amidst their aerobatics their swords flashed rarely, each seeking a second’s opening to strike against side or back.
Salma was Dragonfly-kinden, born to the air, and his race prided themselves on their grace and control while on the wing. The Wasp, for his part, was as fleet and nimble as his kind ever were, but there was a distance even so. Salma had abruptly cut away, seeming to falter in the air, allowing the Wasp to draw up to shoot at him. In that same moment Salma reversed his motion, wings powering him forwards. The man tried to angle down to face him head-on, sword sweeping in a broad parry, but Salma was through his guard on the instant, driving the blade between the Wasp’s ribs where his armour left off, and then using the pull of the man’s heavy descent to drag the steel from his corpse.
He touched down, looking around for more enemies just in time to see Totho and Skrill finish off the last Wasp scout together.
‘Get your kit together!’ Skrill urged him. ‘There’ll be more!’
Salma scooped up his satchel, seeing Totho shoulder the big canvas bag that held his tools and belongings. I travel very light these days, the Dragonfly thought wryly, but of course, being captured and stripped of your possessions would do that to a man. He had only what the Mynan resistance had been able to find for him.
Skrill’s kitbag was already strapped on her back, a position it never left save when she was using it as a lumpy pillow. She pelted past him even as he and Totho were collecting their gear, and they ran after her, knowing it was vain to try to catch up.
The Wasp armies had yet to invest the city of Tark in siege. But for us the war has already started.
He remembered his talk with Aagen, the Wasp artificer whose information had originally sent him south to Tark — the same who had been given the Butterfly dancer named Grief in Chains and then released her with the name Aagen’s Joy. Salma had now killed another Wasp, his first since then. There had been no hesitation at the time. After all, the man had been trying to kill him.
And yes, the Wasp had been another human being with all a man’s hopes and aspirations, and now snuffed out by eighteen inches of steel. But also, there had been enough Dragonfly dead during the Twelve-Year War to make the numbers now massed outside Tark pale into insignificance. Amongst them, his own father and three cousins, including his favourite, Felipe Daless. Not just kinden but kin: blood that called out for a levelling of the scales; three principalities of the Dragonfly Commonweal that groaned under the boot of the Empire.
He hardened his heart. There would be more blood spilled before the end of this, and some of it could easily be his own.
Skrill had stopped ahead, waiting for them. Totho blundered up to her.
‘And how did they find us?’ he demanded.
‘Scouts, Beetle-boy. What do you think they were doing?’
‘They followed you.’
‘You take them words back, or we’re lookin’ to have a disagreement right here,’ she said hotly. ‘Nobody asked you to link with us.’
Totho swallowed whatever words he had been going to utter and, after a moment’s thought, said, ‘Well it’s just as well I did, or you’d have been spitted right back there. What do you think of that?’
‘Will the pair of you be quiet?’ Salma grumbled without much hope.
‘I was playing with him,’ Skrill said. ‘I was-’ Suddenly she fell silent, turning away from Totho with her hand plucking an arrow from her quiver.
‘Put the bow down! Put the swords down! Put the crossbow down!’ barked a voice from somewhere within the grass. There was an uncertain pause, and then a bolt spat out of a nearby thicket, ploughing the earth at Totho’s feet. Even as they watched men began emerging in a crescent formation in front of them, swathed in cloaks of woven grass and reeds, but all with crossbows levelled. For a moment Salma thought it was the Wasps that had them, but they were Ants — Tarkesh Ants — with their pale faces smeared with dirt and green dye. Beneath the cloaks they wore armour of boiled leather and darkened metal.
‘Weapons down!’ shouted their leader. ‘Or I shoot the lad with the crossbow. This is your last chance.’
Totho dropped the bow quickly enough, and his sword as well. Salma did the same, trying to gauge his chances of taking to the air. He counted ten Ants in all, and they would be in each other’s minds. The least wrong move and they all would see it. Salma did not rate his chances of dodging so many bolts.