Tisamon shrugged again.
‘You don’t understand,’ Ult observed.
‘So they’d rather I was dead,’ Tisamon said. ‘What else is there to understand?’
‘It’s about race,’ Ult said. ‘I never been to your lands, but I been to the Commonweal, and I seen a few other places before the Emperor rounded them up. It’s different here. You know any Ants, Mantis-man?’
‘I’ve known a few.’
‘We’re like them, really. You know how Ants reckon everyone else is off the mark, not as good as they are? We’re like that, too. Me, I seen all sorts – not greatly in love with any of ’em, me. Don’t care for my kin nor yours, nor anyone’s. I understand the punters, though. What they want to see is foreign blood shed. You take me for a philosopher, Mantis?’
‘No.’
Ult chuckled, then coughed. ‘Oh, I know my trade. It makes a philosopher out of you. This isn’t just a whole round of fun, see? There’s a point here, when you get to it. There’s meaning, Mantis.’
Tisamon shuffled closer, despite himself. ‘Meaning? To all the slaughter?’
‘Right.’ Ult closed his eyes, as though the whole circus of all the fights he had seen could thus be summoned up to parade about his mind. ‘This is all about us and you, us Wasps and everyone else. We go out to your lands, see? We catch you, we drag you back in chains. You fight for our pleasure. We bring in your beasts and make you fight them. We chain up the whole world and bring it here. That makes it ours, see? There are people out there who only see a slice of the Empire, a smaller slice still of what lies beyond, but here they see it all, and the end has to be the same. A dead foreigner – dead by our hands, or by beasts, or by each other, but dead foreigners all the way.’
‘What an art form you have here,’ Tisamon commented dryly.
‘You’ll understand soon enough. It’s why you’ve become a problem, old Mantis.’
‘Because I don’t die?’
‘Right,’ Ult said. ‘I’ve got the big games coming up, and you deserve your spot in them, but what am I supposed to do with you to keep them happy? You’ll kill beasts and you’ll kill men, and about the only way I could bring you down would be to stick so many people against you that nobody’d see what was going on. And don’t forget, it’s all for show. If there’s no show there’s nothing.’
‘You want me to throw a fight, then?’ Tisamon asked him. ‘Fatally?’
Ult grinned at that, revealing teeth stained yellow. ‘I don’t reckon that’s going to happen, though. I’ll just have to keep you for some other day. But it’s a shame, you’re just too good.’
‘So what’s happening, that’s so important?’
‘Coronation Day.’ Ult stood. ‘Nine years since Himself took the throne. And I mean took.’ Ult glanced about him, taking a wary step back after he saw that Tisamon was on his feet.
‘In that case I want to fight there,’ the Mantis announced.
‘I want you to, as well,’ said Ult. ‘But I just can’t see how.’
‘I’ll go in barehanded. I’ll go against men, beasts, machines, whatever you-’
‘Mantis, old Mantis,’ Ult interrupted him, ‘if I got nothing else from all my years, it’s an eye for the fighting man. What have I got available here, now, that would give you a run? I’m sorry, really. I want to see you killed as much as you want to die.’ His smile was genuinely friendly. The camaraderie might have seemed absurd, but was just as real. ‘Let me think about it. You deserve your audience, I’ll grant you that.’
When the Wasp Second Army arrived within striking range of the Felyal, it began building its fortifications without delay. The engineers of the Empire lifted their pre-measured wooden wall sections from their hauling auto-motives, and constructed themselves a camp great enough to encompass the whole army. They had a workforce of thousands, and General Tynan, who commanded the Second, had made them all practise this decidedly non-standard procedure. He was an intelligent man, Tynan, and he had nothing but respect for the late General Alder, who had made this part of the Lowlands a graveyard for 20,000 imperial soldiers and Auxillians. Oh, there had been mitigating circumstances, of course. Alder had been played for a fool by the Spiderlands, crippled by a lack of firm instruction from Capitas, so his men had been kept in a state of uncertainty, forever hovering in their temporary camp, forever made ready for marching orders that never came. Then they had most of them died, and the remnants had been so little fit for purpose as an army that they had been broken up, dispersed across the whole Empire. The Barbs had ceased to exist.
It was a mistake that General Tynan did not intend to repeat. By nightfall his men were already settled behind their makeshift walls, and he kept half of them awake all night, with sting and crossbow and snapbow ready for the assault. Under his eight-year command, the Second Army had gained the nickname of the Gears, because whatever they got their teeth into, they milled and crushed until it was nothing but dust. And because they stopped for nothing.
That first-night assault did not happen, the Mantis-kinden being slow to venture forth from their forest haunts. The next day Tynan had his men continue their preparations, creating a great camp of angled walls and machines, with a ring of spindly towers inside it. He knew that inevitably the hammer would fall and sooner rather than later. And sooner was better, for the Empire had a timetable for him to keep to.
From the second day onwards he sent out men to the treeline with firethrower automotives, clearing the trees as they came to them. As an exercise, he thought of it as a duellist calling out his enemy. He would not have long to wait.
If he could have got a scout into the trees at twilight and out again alive, he would not have been disappointed by the news. The war host of the Felyal was indeed mustering, for the elders of the Mantids had already sent out the call to gather their people. Women and men, lean and fair, in green cloth or black-scaled armour, they came in their hundreds to the holds of their leaders. They brought their bows and spears, their rapiers and claws, and the deadly spines on their forearms. They came with their insect allies, from beasts that flew from the wrist to great armoured killers larger than a horse. The Mantids of Felyal fought constantly. They sparred amongst themselves and ambushed the unwary in their forest, and they savaged Spider-kinden shipping off the coast. Now they were going to war, and the mechanical sounds of the enemy would be drowned in their war-hymns, their oaths and battle-cries.
They were silent for now, though, merely waiting in the trees. There were so many of them, too, more even than had marched against Alder’s Fourth, more than had ever stood together in living memory – and they were a long-lived breed: male and female, from callow youths to grey elders, and each one a killer of excellence. They had buckled on armour that had been made before any hill chieftain had arisen to start building an Empire: cuirasses of dark scales, suits of elegant plate and delicate mail links, spine-crested helms. They had put aside their feuds and enmities, blood-hatreds generations old, to stand together now as siblings.
The elders – the Loquae of the hold of Felyal – met together, but there was little to plan. The Mantis-kinden had no use for formations, vanguards, rearguards or shield-walls. That was their strength: individually there was not a warrior to match them in all of the Lowlands, in all the world. The Wasps and their slaves could not stand against them, with blade or bow. This was their heritage, and they believed in it with an iron-shod faith.
Parents bid their children be strong in their absence, brother and sister parted company: the older and more skilled on their way, the younger staying at home. The very oldest watched their entire families step out into the dark and head off to war.