‘She wants us to attack, because it’s our duty,’ Gorenn explained, as though everything was so very self-evident. ‘Orders—’ the Sarnesh intoned.
And Straessa snapped at him, ‘Will you just shut your yap while I work out what’s going on? Gorenn, please?’
‘Officer, those out there –’ the Dragonfly’s tremulous gesture took in all of the seething mass heaving its way clear of the earth – ‘they are the enemy. The real enemy. The true enemy. The only enemy.’
‘How can you know that?’ Straessa wanted to know.
‘How is it that you do not?’ Gorenn shouted back in her face. ‘How blind are you Apt, that you cannot know in your bones, in your hearts, in your . . . everything that you must oppose what we see there?’
Straessa just stared at her thinking, Yes, you are right. All of me is saying just that, except for my brain, which has the casting vote. The brain just doesn’t know what the pits is going on, frankly.
‘I’m going,’ Gorenn informed her. ‘I’m going, and the Mantids are going, and if your people want to come, Balkus, then they won’t be alone.’
‘There are thousands of the bastards,’ Straessa said weakly. ‘You’ll be pissing into a storm.’
‘At least we’ll be pissing somewhere,’ Gorenn declared, and the bizarre discrepancy between her furiously sincere tone and what she had actually said was the final straw for Straessa. It was officiaclass="underline" the world was either mad or ending. Either way, why not?
‘Let’s go!’ she bellowed, in her officer’s voice. ‘Pikes front, swords out, trust to your mail. We’re going to kill some what-ever-the-pits-they-are!’
‘No!’ the Sarnesh liaison protested. ‘Orders—’And then Balkus punched him in the face, as hard as a big Ant can punch, and the man went down.
‘I’ll get my lot.’ He drew a pair of shortswords from his belt and weighed them in his hands. ‘Maybe that turd Milus will die of apoplexy as a bonus.’
‘Right.’ Straessa looked past Gorenn towards the Mantis woman. ‘I’m trusting you pissing Inapt bastards,’ she warned. ‘I seriously don’t understand just what is going on right now, but you’re telling me we have to fight because it’s the right thing to do? Well, Collegium’s played that card enough times in the last few years. So, fine, let’s go at it.’
In his command carriage, Milus stood up suddenly, watching the left flank of his army ripple and bulge and then break forwards, in a weird mirroring of the Capitas wall. Then they began marching – the Collegiate maniples pulling closer to one another and presenting a bristling face of pikes towards the earth-kinden that were already spilling their way.
His liaison had been struck down! And what were the Beetles doing? Had the loss of their Aptitude stripped away their reason as well?
And then the Mantids were on the move as well, setting the pace and bringing the Collegiates to a steady jog to keep up. And the whole left side of his battle order was abruptly operating on its own recognizance, and no longer under his control.
He swore fiercely, his displeasure crackling across the face of the Sarnesh force.
All others hold! he insisted, aware that there were those amongst his own who dearly wanted to attack as well, moved by some urge, some revulsion at what they were seeing that they could not account for and yet could not deny. Milus’s hold over his army was weakening, so he browbeat them, he forced his mind upon them: You are mine! You have no say! You are just bodies who march to my plan, or we lose everything!
Then the Vekken went. Through the eyes of his soldiers he watched, open-mouthed, as the dark-skinned Ants formed up into that same solid block of shields that he had been trying to dissuade them from all the way from Collegium. Suicide, of course, to march that kind of close-packed formation directly into enemy shot and artillery. Except that there was no shot or artillery, and this traditional Ant fighting formation was perfect for taking on superior numbers in close combat. Milus stared as they set off, keeping a brisk pace to catch up with the Collegiates.
Hold! Have the Tseni hold! There was a furious argument going on between his liaison and the Tseni commander – the woman demanding to know what Milus was doing and expressing a growing lack of faith in her allies.
Milus smelt smoke.
His head snapped up, his mind abruptly returning to the interior of the carriage. Smoke . . .?
There was a wisp of it coiling about the carriage ceiling. Yet the carriage itself was detached from any automotive, and there was no machinery that might have overheated or caught light.
The smoke was rising in leisurely coils from the wooden floor at one end of the carriage – and now he was reminded just how much of his surroundings were just wood, after all, and therefore flammable. He stepped a little closer, hunching down. Yes, between the planks of the floor there was a dull red glow.
‘So this is your revenge, is it?’ he murmured. Lissart, of course. The little firebug had not fled, after all. ‘More fool you for staying around.’
Wood would burn, but not fast, and the fire had only just started. He stormed towards the door to the carriage and flung it open.
There was a brief tug of resistance halfway through the motion, as of a broken thread.
Facing him was a placard nailed to the carriage rail, hastily painted white letters stating, ‘A present from Despard.’ His eyes had time to register those words, though not to understand them, when the explosives went off virtually underneath his feet, flinging him back into the carriage.
A second later, the fire Lissart had set hit the fuel barrels the Flies had hidden beneath the carriage, and the resulting fireball lifted the entire carriage off its wheels and tore it – and Milus – apart.
Forty-Seven
Stenwold glanced back at the silent vacant city as he paused in the doorway of that remembered Mynan townhouse. The sky above, which he had assumed to be morning, was greying over to evening already. He could see no sun up there, only a uniform layer of ragged clouds.
Bad weather on the way. But, if he was true to himself, he knew it was not that, not really.
He shivered. If he listened very hard, he could just discern distant voices, and hear that woman, whose name he could not quite bring to mind, calling out his name.
I’m sorry, he thought. She sounded further away than previously, blown on the wind. He could only just make her out.
Paladrya. That was it. I don’t think I can come back to you.
He pushed at the taverna door, half expecting it not to give way, for the entire building just to be solid stone, preserving its secrets from him.
But it swung open, and he stepped into that remembered taproom. For a moment his mind supplied the bustle of a Mynan taverna of two decades before but, no, it was as abandoned as the rest of the city. Abandoned but clean and intact, as though the Wasps had never arrived.
Here was where the soldiers of his Ant friend Marius had sat awaiting the start of the siege.