I have something I may need of you, the King had told him directly.
‘Looks like your man on the right there is losing ground,’ Nero called down, though Parops was not sure quite why he bothered. Parops knew exactly the disposition of the officer and his forces, and that Nero was indeed correct.
He sensed another detachment, across the far side of the royal palace, being committed, and saw a change in the movements of the airships as one lazily meandered further in. The outside of the palace was already blackened and burned. The King himself was down below, in the ant tunnels. People had tried the same trick elsewhere in the city, attempting to shelter from the fire, but Wasps had merely approached the tunnel mouths with hand-held firecasters, pouring their searing liquid flame down until everything within, human and insect, was burned or suffocated. Dying in the dark, but not dying alone, because they were dying a death whose agonies were felt by a whole city.
Parops felt his hands begin to shake even at the memory.
They are within the palace. The thought came to him with the voice of one of the King’s tacticians, though Parops had the feeling it had not been intended for broadcast. He tensed, getting ready to lead his men forwards. Another firebomb exploded two streets away from the palace walls, no doubt attacking Ant-kinden reinforcements.
Let it be over with, thought Parops, keeping the words to himself. Let us go in. Let us die. Just let it be over with. He could not bear to live like this any more.
All officers, report your strengths and position, came the tactician’s call.
Here we go, Parops decided, and relayed back that he had eight hundred and sixty-two men under his command, and that he now was at Forty-fifth-Seventh.
And he waited for the call. His tension was clear to his men even if his words had been kept silent from them. They began cocking their crossbows, taking up their shields.
Commander Parops, came the call, and this time it was the King.
Your Majesty, Parops replied, almost breathless with anticipation.
I must issue two commands today that are unthinkable, came the voice of the city’s ruler. I tell you this so that you do not think you have mistaken what you will hear. No monarch of our kind should ever be forced to give such orders.
Your Majesty? Parops queried uncertainly. We are all ready to die for you. With the exception of Nero it was no more than the truth.
I know you are, but I will not have it. Commander Parops, you are ordered to take those men currently in your command to the west gate, and leave the city by that route. Then break through the Wasp cordon and-
Your Majesty? Parops broke in, agonized. You cannot mean it.
These are your orders! snapped the voice in his head. He was seeing shock on the faces of his soldiers now, and realized that the King was making sure that some of them, at least, would hear what they must do. Break through the cordon. The Wasps are not expecting it. Leave our city. Find somewhere else for yourself and your men. And when the time is right, Parops, whether it be you and your men, or your children or their children, reclaim our city from the invader. That is the task I give to you. That is your order. There is no more than that.
A great silence had fallen over the city of Tark. It was not any of the normal silences of an Ant city going about its day-to-day business. It was a silence born of loss and shock. In its resounding, thunderous absence one could hear the faint echoes of ten thousand squandered lives.
Half the Royal Court buildings were covered in char, the stone beneath cracked and riven by the sheer heat of the incendiaries. The gates had been staved in during the last reaches of the fighting, splintered by a ram borne by six great Mole Cricket-kinden. The ram-bearers had all died in the attempt, or immediately after it, and their colossal bodies had only just been removed. Not one of their kind was left living in the Wasp army. Every one had given its sad life for the taking of this city.
Before the gates stood two dozen Ant-kinden, still wearing their armour. Their hands and their scabbards were empty. They stood in precise ranks, watching. They were all of the Tarkesh royal staff that remained. It seemed likely that they would be executed, but it was less likely that they cared very much, at this point.
It was Colonel Carvoc who now approached them, with a guard of a hundred light and medium infantry. His face, seeing those defeated men and women, held no sympathy, nor even much triumph. The day did not belong to the Fourth Army, the glorious Barbs. The day belonged to science, and that left a sour taste in the mouth.
He signalled to his men, who remained as wordless as the Ants themselves. One of the light airborne stood forwards and saluted him, carrying a cloth-wrapped lance in his off-hand.
As Carvoc nodded to him the man’s wings flared, and he launched into the air, tracing a graceful curve up onto the roof of the Royal Court. There had been no insignia kept there, no emblem or banner to be cast down, so the soldier was forced to hunt across the rooftop, to the gathering silence of the men below, before he found a crack in the stonework that would fit his ambitions. With a decisive gesture he jammed the lance’s pointed ferrule in, forcing it down until it was firmly rammed in, lodging deep in the substance of the Tarkesh heart. Then he loosed the cords, and the wind caught the cloth, streaming it out in a billowing gust of black and gold.
The city of Tark had fallen to the Empire after only five days of bombardment.
The Wasps then took control with a firm hand born of long experience. They appointed their deputies amongst the conquered people, giving their orders and leaving the delegation of them to the Ant-kinden mindlink, so that by speaking to a single Ant they could effectively command the whole city. Drephos and General Alder were able to walk through the streets of the conquered city, watching the disarmed inhabitants set to clearing the ruins of their own homes. They worked in silence, and both men felt the shocked quiet that filled the space between their minds: How could it have come to this?
‘I must confess, I do not trust this silence,’ Alder remarked. He had an honour guard of a dozen sentinels, implacable in their heavy plate armour.
‘That is because you do not understand Ant-kinden, General,’ Drephos told him.
‘And you do?’
‘I make an effort to know who my machines are to be used against, so that I can better direct that use. They have come to the conclusion for now that to resist the Empire is only to invite greater wrack, so they surrender.’
‘They’ll rebel in time, then.’
‘Every subordinate always does, when given the opportunity,’ Drephos said airily, and then qualified it. ‘Except for the Bee-kinden. They don’t seem to have the knack.’
‘And that squad that got away.’ Alder shook his head, his plan having not provided for that. Eight hundred men suddenly breaking from the west gate and running his blockade – which, needless to say, had not been expecting any assault and broke almost instantly. He had himself been there to witness the tail end of the fighting and the Ant soldiers making their orderly retreat from their own city, flanked by nailbowmen and heavy crossbows. The pursuing airborne had been cut to pieces, and he had realized that he could not spare more men to go after them just as the Royal Court was being cracked open. So he had reinforced the western perimeter and waited for them to make their vengeful return to attempt to break the siege, but they had not come back. They had simply gone. ‘Did they run?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Did their nerve break, at the end?’