The Lowlander army had reached Sonn, the predominantly Beetle city that was one of the Empire’s great centres of industry.
In actual fact, there had been fighting. The local garrison force, or whatever, had come out and destroyed the rails west of Sonn and then fortified themselves as best they could outside the city. They had fought doggedly and well, but the Lowlanders had outflanked and heavily outnumbered them. The Sarnesh had got in close because the Wasps had not been willing or able to retreat from their positions, and that had been that. At the time nobody had understood why they had not retreated back to the city.
Now it seemed that the good people of Sonn had ideas of their own.
The army of the Lowlands was currently mustering, division by division, in the city’s rail yards, embarking on the carriages of rail automotives about to head east with all the speed of the Apt age. The local Beetles had only seemed apologetic that the Empire had already stripped them of their great lifter airships.
‘You remember Helleron, Gorenn?’ Straessa enquired, watching the Collegium contingent begin to climb aboard.
‘Disgusting place,’ the Dragonfly spat. ‘But much like this one, yes. Like twins that were separated.’
‘Well, you might not know, but Helleron got a bit of a reputation after the first war,’ the Antspider explained to her. ‘Basically, for kissing the arse of whoever turns up with more soldiers. Now, I remember hearing that the Wasps were putting a lot into modernizing this place, Sonn – factories and the like, and all built with Helleren knowhow. Every tramp artificer from west of here was guaranteed a good salary, if the Rekef didn’t take them up and torture them to death, you know.’
Gorenn made a rude noise.
‘At the time, I remember, everyone was saying how this meant that Helleron wouldn’t even pretend to think about it when the Wasps came knocking again and, sure as death, that was the right call. But there was something Eujen said. He was all for the exchange. He said that whatever Helleron learned from the east, the Sonnen would learn just as much from the west.’ There had even been a rumour that the Sonnen had been ordered to destroy the rail line east of their city and had mysteriously failed to do so, as a gesture of appeasement towards Milus. In return, aside from some requisitioning of supplies and automotives, their city had been left almost unmolested.
Meanwhile the soldiers of the Coldstone Company were starting to file aboard, shouldering their kit. Gorenn looked around her, past the throng of soldiers, to the locals themselves. They were mostly Beetles, with some Flies and even a few Wasps standing in carefully passive poses. There was a remarkable lack of black and gold, as though everyone had been stockpiling spare clothes of neutral hues.
‘Thing is,’ Straessa went on, ‘the Wasps were basically as fed up with Helleron’s weathervane thing as everyone else, and so they wanted their own tame Helleron right here in the Empire. And that’s what they got, I reckon. Perfect in every detail – right up to the surrendering.’
Gorenn let out a brief yap of laughter at that but, when Straessa turned to nod her on to the carriage, the Dragonfly looked sad.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s . . . is this it? Is this the world, now, outside the Commonweal borders?’
The Antspider blinked. The Gorenn she knew was bright, hard, almost insanely optimistic. The Commonweal Retaliatory Army, she had called herself, and had appeared to believe it. Straessa had not seen this solemn Dragonfly face before.
‘We fought the Wasps,’ Gorenn said softly. ‘It was hopeless. We fought and we fought. My whole family . . . everyone I knew. But we fought, because that is what one does. That is how it is in the stories. That’s how it’s always been. And now you clever Apt have invented a new way of being invaded, a clever way that means you do not have to fight. Like all your Apt things –’ she waved a hand at the automotive that they were about to board – ‘it makes your lives easier and more comfortable, and at the same time it robs you of something of worth that you do not know enough to miss.’
‘We’re fighting,’ Straessa reminded her, giving her a shove to get the woman into the carriage.
‘Are we?’ Inside, Gorenn turned back to her. ‘I don’t know what the tactician is doing. Fighting is part of it, yes.’
There was one carriage reserved for Milus himself, guarded by his soldiers and only accessed with his direct orders. The tactician spent most of his time elsewhere, however, sitting amongst his troops, just one anonymous Ant amongst many. He would be able to receive reports from every soldier in his army, keep an eye on all the others – the Mantids and the Lowlanders and the like – and take reports from the scouts who were checking the integrity of the rail line ahead. Sometimes he spoke face to face with Ants of the other cities, such as Tsen and Vek. It was the first time that military leaders of different Ant-kinden city-states had done so in living memory.
The interior of Milus’s private carriage had been stripped bare – no comforts here, and certainly not anything too flammable. Some machinery had been installed – a few unique pieces brought by Milus himself, but also a good deal of equipment that had been freely available in Imperial Sonn. The artificers who tended it were specialists, equally at home with the anatomies of metal and flesh.
Lissart shivered. Her world was reduced to this. She had fought and fought to preserve her freedom, defying every master who would lay a hand on her. She had defied the Empire, and she had fled poor Laszlo, and all in the name of not being bound by the world or anyone in it.
The other tenet of her life – that she was cleverer than the rest – had been the one to break under her small weight and to land her here. She had hooked on to Milus as a useful source of amusement – why should she be not be able to play some dull Ant with titbits of knowledge about the Empire and the Inapt? Everyone knew that Ants were plodding unimaginative creatures, and that it took a dozen of them to have an idea between them. She had out-thought Wasps and Spiders and Fly-kinden. Ants should have been no challenge. She had not reckoned on Milus, however.
He had seen through her. He saw through most things. Having now had a proper opportunity to study him from the unenviable vantage point of being his prisoner, she knew what he was. Ant or not, he was a kindred spirit to her. He walked through the world as though he was the only solid thing in it, as though everything else was just a kind of mist that he could shape as he liked. She knew him better than the other Ants who shared his mind, because he never let them into the main parts of it. He was a singularity amongst his kinden: a man who could feign sharing and yet hold himself private and aloof.
He had got information from her, at first. He had found new ways to torture her – utilizing the cold machines that she was staring at even now. Then the information had run dry, the Sarnesh war effort expanding beyond her knowledge of the Empire. But the machines had not stopped. He had come sporadically, when his busy schedule allowed it, and made her scream for him. He had taught her what he wanted, what would spare her the worst – not complete acquiescence, but a carefully judged combination of defiance and surrender. He liked her to fight him.
Only because he thinks I can’t win.
But, right now, she could not win. They had long ago found the limits of her fiery Art, and now her hands were kept locked away in gloves, as her wings were suppressed by the Fly-manacles across her back.
When they moved her into this carriage, she had been desperately on the lookout for some sign of hope, but she had not even spotted Laszlo in the brief moments before she had been bundled in here.