The Dragonfly stood stock still, staring out at that massed atrocity with a fixed expression. She had no arrows left in her quiver, Straessa noticed. In her hands was the same Collegiate shortsword that almost everyone there had ultimately resorted to.
Gorenn had no words, no words at all.
The enemy had just dropped, all at once, like manikins with their strings cut, across the whole of the battlefield, so that the chasm they had been surging from in such numbers was now glutted and blocked with the tangled mass of dead. But not their dead.
‘Get me a Sarnesh here!’ Straessa pleaded. Please, someone tell me what we do now. ‘What does Milus say? Is he seeing this?’
It was a strained, ghastly minute before an Ant-kinden woman staggered over, her eyes full of the sight before them. ‘Milus is dead,’ she got out.
‘Lucky bastard,’ Straessa said, with feeling. ‘So where does that leave us? What do we do?’
By now she could see that the Wasps were returning to defend their wall, albeit reluctantly. At the same time she became aware again that the snapbow slung over her back was something more than just a weight of metaclass="underline" it was a weapon, fit for her hands and her mind.
But nobody was yet moving across that hideous charnel field. Nobody had the heart. The Sarnesh woman was shaking her head. There were no orders.
Before them lay a carpet of fallen children.
There were dozens of different kinden among them – Beetles, Woodlice, Moths, Mole Crickets, and some Straessa could not even name. Not one of them looked to be more than eleven, and most were younger, far younger. They lay still amongst the wreckage of arms and armour crafted for far larger bodies. There were thousands of them; tens of thousands. They were uncountable.
Straessa felt something within her close to breaking point. At no time before had she ever wanted less to be in command of anything, or to bear any kind of responsibility than now, facing this.
She could not even understand it. She could not know what the sight meant. She thought Gorenn might, from her expression, but the Dragonfly was not putting it into words.
So what the pits happens now?
‘We’ve got it all back?’ she asked the Sarnesh woman. ‘Auto-motives, artillery, all that?’
The Ant nodded numbly.
So what? Do we just . . .? We came here for a reason, didn’t we . . .?
It was the thought of trampling across that vast mass of dead children, of grinding them beneath the tracks of the automotives, of climbing that mound of small corpses that had banked up before the breach.
I don’t know if I have it in me to do that, or to order anyone else to do it, but someone has to issue some sort of order. We can’t just stand here till we starve.
What would Eujen do?
The thought was inexpressibly calming. Eujen would know exactly what to do.
‘Fetch me a messenger. I need someone to take word to the Wasps.’
‘I’ll go,’ Gorenn volunteered immediately, but Straessa shook her head.
‘I think sending a Commonwealer over to them would give entirely the wrong message,’ she decided. And, when the Dragonfly made to protest, she added, ‘It’s not you. I just don’t want any dumb Wasp having flashbacks to what you did to them in the Twelve-year War, right?’ It was the world’s weakest joke, and Straessa could barely muster the ghost of a smile, but Gorenn returned it, in just about the same degree, and nodded in resignation.
In the end, it was Sperra who went. She had not fought in the battle but arrived afterwards, seeming a strange mix of defiance and misery. But when Balkus explained what was going on, she volunteered. She had run enough messages between cities before Collegium was liberated, after all. What was one more?
And at least she could fly. Nobody was about to tread that body-cluttered distance lightly.
By then, Straessa had the full attention of all the Lowlander contingents: Sarnesh, Vekken, Tseni, Netheryen, Princep and Collegiate. Staring round at them all, she thought, How mad are you all, that you’re going to let me do this? Don’t you know who I am? They didn’t make me chief officer even when I was the only officer left in the entire Coldstone Company – that’s how unreliable I am.
‘Go and tell the Wasps,’ she said, her voice stumbling over the words, ‘that the army of the Lowlands will offer them terms . . .’
And in the dark of the underworld the sounds of fighting and massacre went abruptly silent.
‘What is it?’ demanded Thalric. ‘What’s happened.’
Che held him very tight, so that he could feel her shaking. She had no answer for him.
Then the wailing started as the slaves surveyed what had become of the enemy, and began recognizing faces.
Esmail was left in pitch darkness after the flash of Totho’s explosives had blazed across the cavern above him. The force of the blast was enough to knock him flat, and everyone else as well, but he was prepared for the onslaught of dark-adapted Centipede warriors descending on him, taking advantage of his blindness.
Yet they did not come. Only silence came, and silence and darkness were, for a stretched-out moment, his only companions.
Until at last the cries began, fearful and incredulous. They started as a terrified murmur and rose to shrieking denial, to rage, to utter babbling madness. At least one voice rushed past him, and then receded as it pitched over the brink, surely at the owner’s intent.
And then his name was called: ‘Esmail!’
‘Who . . .? Hermit?’
‘Come here. Come here, man.’ There followed the sound of a solid impact. ‘Not you! Get back!’
Esmail limped over, feeling half broken by his fall. ‘I need light. Can you hold them off?’
‘Easily,’ the Hermit grunted, which surprised Esmail at the time because he still expected the Worm’s warriors to be present.
He had tinder with him, and some dry mushroom stalks, and flint and steel, but it took him a long scrabbling time in the dark to get anything ignited. There was meanwhile the occasional whack of the Hermit’s staff, and the babble of distressed voices did not let up, but no pitched battle flared up. Esmail was utterly bewildered until he finally got the torch lit and cast a look around.
He saw at once that the Hermit had herded a little knot of Scarred Ones together, and was keeping them hemmed in under the threat of his staff. But of the warriors . . .
He saw the bodies, and what they had become. He understood.
Totho . . .
There was no sign of the Lowlander, just as there was no sign of the Worm, but these corpses gave testament as to its fate. Artifice had triumphed in the end. The new world had undone the follies of the old.
Esmail felt weak, and then another thought struck him: what he would see when they ventured above into the city. So many . . .
But there was no other way out. He could either subject himself to that or go blind and let the Hermit guide him, and it was the thought of the old man’s scorn at such cowardice which decided him.
‘What about these?’ he demanded, staring at the Scarred Ones, because he dearly wanted to kill them all. He held them responsible for their own actions, and for the actions of all their kin back into the depths of history. His own kind was now but a memory, a footnote, poised on the very brink of extinction, but if ever a kinden deserved complete annihilation, it was the Worm, for all they had done, and for all they had brought into and taken from the world.