To Totho’s eye, they were something like leadshotters, but more delicate and longer in the barrel, cluttered with mechanisms to give their artillerists as much control over force and aim as artifice could provide. Instead of volatile firepowder, they housed steam engines for a less violent discharge of their ammunition. There were high watch platforms built beside them, from which engineers could see the lie of the city and thus make precise calculations of their exacting trajectories. When these engines loosed their loads, the shot would sail serenely overhead to land far inside the rebel-held districts of the city. Beside them sat canisters of the same stuff that had killed the soldiers, an invention of the Beetle twins, the dreadful potency of which had driven them to suicide. In assisting with the construction, Totho had seen enough to understand the plan. True to his stated aims, Drephos had taken war to a new level.
They had not been meant for this eventuality, however. Drephos had intended to deploy them against the defenders of Sarn, or the Sarnesh field army if it was foolish enough to venture forth. However, little adaptation had been needed to comply with the Emperor’s present wishes. Drephos had done most of the work himself with almost indecent speed, eager to return to what he saw as his true place on the front line itself.
The Szaren resistance assumed that there was a stalemate, and meanwhile the Bee-kinden were gathering their forces, making themselves strong. Scouts’ reports came back now with news that, as well as the stolen arms and armour of the Empire, more and more of the Szaren were wearing their own traditional styles: breastplates and helms freshly painted in russet bands, or great, intricately articulated suits of sentinel plate. Some of these had lain in storage these past fifteen years, waiting as patiently as their owners for the call to arms, others were newly smithed. The Bee-kinden were rediscovering their heritage.
But there was no stalemate, of course, as Totho knew well. There was just a peculiarity of the weather, for the wind was currently adverse. The breeze was gusting against the imperial forces, enough for them to hear the clatter and scrape of armed locals from ten streets away. The engines only sat idle while Drephos waited for a favouring wind, and he would not have to wait long.
The thought of what would then happen made Totho tremble. Even stretching his mind, he could not quite fit the concept in. There were hundreds of thousands of Bee-kinden here in Szar. It was formerly one of the industrial workhorses of the Empire. The Emperor had taken its rebellion personally, and he wanted an example made.
There would indeed be an example made, and it would be Drephos’ example of how war would be fought from now on. For Drephos had invented a war that needed no soldiers, only artificers, and his machines would soon make full-scale armies obsolete. The very concepts of war would change. Conquest would become devastation, attack would become annihilation: cities turned to cemeteries, farmland to wasteland. What would be seen here in Szar would stop the world in its tracks. In the wake of it, every artificer, every military power, every Ant city-state would be striving to copy what Drephos had done, and without possession of such weapons there would be no chance of continued liberty, or even survival. It was not simply a case of an improvement on an old idea, as the snapbow was to a crossbow, the crossbow to a thrown spear, the spear to a rock. It was a whole new method of warfare.
Totho sat in a corner of a workshop that he had marked out for himself, and tinkered with his new snapbow design, feeling obsolescence creeping over him already. This was not a war that he understood any more.
Kaszaat was kept under watch most of the time. This was not by Drephos’ orders but those of Colonel Gan, who could not accept that she was Drephos’ creature and not a spy of the rebellious locals. Totho knew that Gan was right to doubt her, and he was only thankful that he himself remained trusted enough that the spies would keep their distance when Kaszaat sought him out.
He had expected her to try to recruit him in her own tiny rebellion but, when she was with him, she made no mention of the great engines, of the poison or of Drephos. He did not know whether it was because she was uncertain of what move to make next, or whether she simply did not trust him.
I do not care what the history books will say.
But that was not entirely true, because Drephos had not managed to cut himself off from ordinary human feelings quite as thoroughly as he might have wished.
Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos now stood atop one of his observation platforms and looked out over the city of Szar, all those little low buildings, those innumerable factories and workhouses. It was evening now, late and getting later, but a strong breeze was predicted to begin before dawn, blowing in from behind him. Daylight would then see the engines begin their work.
In his mind’s eye, which was always sharper and more vivid than his actual sight, he could see it alclass="underline" the canisters, full of poison held under immense pressure, would be hurled almost gently, tipping end over end into the sky. The locals would look up and wonder, at first. Only on impact would their casings crack open, their tight-pressed contents escape.
With Drephos’ arrival, Colonel Gan and his soldiers had ceased trying to break the rebel lines. With typical Bee-kinden thinking the locals had simply hunkered down and refortified, defensive to the last. They were a simple, industrious and inoffensive people, strong in their unity but in little enough else. That was the reason the world was not overrun with them. They were now waiting for the anticipated Wasp reinforcements to come, having heard there were 10,000 soldiers marching from the Capitas garrison. Drephos knew those men had now been diverted, however, redeployed to keep the lid on the situation at Myna, which he heard was deteriorating.
Let them first hear the news from Szar, and then let them think about their revolution, he reflected, but he felt oddly uncomfortable with the concept. This is war simply forpolitics’ sake. I prefer the reverse.
The canisters would burst asunder, and the gas would be let loose in the city. The natural breeze would keep the heavy gas from spreading back towards the Wasps, and the chemicals would pass through every window, into every cellar. Death would be relatively swift, but agonizing. The gas, once taken into the lungs, began to dissolve the very tissues, so that the victims died while trying to inhale the fluid of their own bodies. The Beetle twins had been great innovators in the field of alchemy, and Drephos had been lucky to have grabbed them for his own service.
Dead now, of course. He was disappointed in them for that, but he always failed to allow for basic human sentiment. It was such a weakening force. Besides, when it came to culpability, it would not be their names written in the history books.
Perhaps the Bee-kinden would seek shelter underground, considering so much of their city was dug into the earth. It would avail them naught since the gas, to be effective at all, needed to be heavier than air. It would sink inevitably into every cellar and tunnel and crevice, and if the Bees managed to board themselves up so tightly that the poison could not get in, well, neither could the air. Colonel Gan had already planned to send men in straight after the gas, to ‘clear up any remaining resistance’. His comprehension of what was about to happen was so blatantly limited that Drephos had not even begun to explain. He had simply warned that, wherever the gas lay, in any depression or hole or bunker, it would remain potent for many tendays.