‘What is this about, please?’ te Mosca asked, her voice quavering slightly, and the lead Wasp punched her hard, a straight downward blow that knocked her flat to the floor to cradle her bruised face.
‘Slaves don’t get to ask questions,’ he spat – and then Raullo hit him with a chair.
For a moment there was chaos, and Sartaea remained curled into a ball, terrified of being stepped on but unable to scramble out from between that tangle of legs. Poll was trying to get upright or to drag Wasps down to his level, and Metyssa was in there with her dagger. Then there was a flash of stingshot, and abruptly all was quiet. The Slave Corps was well used to keeping its inferiors in line.
From her vantage point on the floor, Sartaea te Mosca stared over into the face of Raullo Mummers her friend, gone ashen now and quite still. His hands were crooked like claws about the charred crater in his chest.
She, who had always been so mild, let out a howl of loss that surprised her. If she had been some great magician of olden days then she would have summoned a spell to wipe the lot of them off the face of the earth in that moment. She was barely even a magician of the current age, though, and a Fly-kinden to boot, and all she could do was beat at them with her tiny fists as they laid hands on her. Then they hauled up Metyssa and bound her for transport as well.
‘What about this one?’ One of them indicated Poll, hanging between a pair of Wasps, his face bruised and bloody. ‘Doesn’t look Inapt to me.’
‘So they’ll get some gold amongst the dross, and who cares?’ the lead slaver replied carelessly. ‘Bring him along. We’ve got a quota to hit.’
She did not look at the corner where Sperra had been sitting, knowing only that the woman was neither a living prisoner nor a corpse. One of them, at least, had possessed the sense to duck for cover when the Wasps burst in.
Then the slavers were hauling Sartaea away, wrenching her head around when she tried for a final glimpse of Raullo’s still form.
All over Collegium the same scene was being played out. Anyone even suspected of being Inapt was sought by the slavers, and soon they simply ceased discriminating, used as they were to fulfilling orders of quantity rather than quality. After all, the Empire had an inexhaustible need for slaves of all types, and they had the Empress’s writ. Besides, as a number of Tynan’s officers agreed, Collegium was well overdue for a humbling.
Bergild found Major Oski supervising a team of sweating Engineers as they manhandled a leadshotter down the streets of Collegium towards the docks.
‘Shipping out?’ she called over to him.
He gave her a filthy look, then a second glance. ‘You look wrecked.’
‘Two straight sorties against the Stormreaders.’ She had seen her own face in a dented mirror not long ago: grey with fatigue, as dark about both eyes as though she had some possessive husband to beat her. Perhaps the war’s my husband.
‘Get some sleep,’ the Fly advised her curtly, then turned to yell at his charges as the bulk of the leadshotter threatened to crash into a shop front.
‘Tried that. No good,’ she muttered. ‘Where’s your man Ernain, anyway. Don’t think I’ve seen you without him tagging at your heels before.’
‘Elsewhere. Engineer business.’
‘Air Corps is still engineers, Major.’
He scowled at her. ‘My apologies, Captain. Should have said “terrestrial engineer business”.’
For a moment she was just about to go, but she needed to be taken out of herself; the company of pilots, the same constant round inside her head over and over, was anything but that. Oski was the only company she knew outside her comrades. She settled on, ‘Keep your secrets, then.’
‘No secrets to keep,’ he replied, before the business at hand claimed his attention. ‘Piss on the lot of you, do I have to—? All right, I’m going to—’ And his wings took him over to stand on the leadshotter’s barrel. ‘Now you steer this thing straight or I will kick each one of you in the head!’ A little man, half the size of the Wasps he was abusing, but how else was a little man to get things done?
‘You’re a funny man, Major,’ she called to him.
‘What can I say? It’s a funny war.’
Then they were in sight of the docks and she swore outright. ‘What the pits is this?’
‘Oh, this?’ He turned around on the trundling leadshotter, wings glimmering in and out of being as he caught his balance. ‘This is the old man and Major Vrakir having another pissing contest, only I guess this time Red Watch pissed higher, because we’re moving all these sodding engines off the walls – y’know, where they’re going to do us any good – to the seafront. And why not? Artillery crews need a bit of sea air, just like every man, right?’
The docks of Collegium had become a siege front waiting to happen. Bergild watched as several hundred of the Second’s soldiers dragged out furniture from every nearby building, to pile it into barricades, whilst leadshotters and other engines were wheeled into position as if to repel an armada. On the rooftops overlooking the docks there were soldiers with piercers and nail-bows and repeating ballistae, whilst a pair of huge, articulated Sentinels picked their way between the labouring men with absurdly dainty movements.
‘All I can say is,’ Oski shouted over the noise, ‘that if those couple of hundred Tseni marines out there try sailing in, they’re in for one pissing enormous surprise!’
‘This is insane!’ she yelled back, unable to take it all in.
‘You’re going to tell that to the Red Watch?’ Then he was bending down and, pointing, directing his men to where the leadshotter needed to go.
Bergild opened her mouth, about to embark on a sentence that started with, ‘But why don’t you . . .?’ and had no conceivable ending, then she shrugged.
‘Exactly,’ Oski confirmed, hopping down. ‘That’s fine there. Make sure it’s braced.’ He swung through the air back to her. ‘Got just about all my boys here in full clank. Got the artillery we hauled all the way to Collegium. Got a load of stuff like that heavy bastard that the Collies helpfully left on the walls for us, including some real special toys and games. I almost want the Tseni to make a go of it now, just for the laughs.’ He looked her over again. ‘Seriously, Captain, get some sleep.’
‘Tried.’ She shrugged. ‘They broke out the Chneuma five nights ago, and now we’re all buzzing about inside our own heads like flies in a bottle. None of us can get our heads down.’
He shrugged. ‘I know what that’s like, though for me it’s more as if there’s only one of me but enough engineering work for three majors and a colonel.’
‘So ask for a promotion.’
With that, she raised a smile from him. ‘Yeah, well . . .’ He glanced over the line of artillery, the soldiers camped out in all the dockside buildings. ‘“Fear death by water.”’
‘Say again?’
‘Supposed to be what Red Watch said.’
After that the two of them just stared across the unquiet sea.
‘I dreamt of Che last night,’ Totho said.
‘No, you didn’t.’ Maure barely glanced up from the fire. He had found out that her woodscraft was significantly better than his after they had struck out away from the lakeshore, in case anyone else came looking for refugees from Chasme.
Her reply made him angry. ‘So you know what I dream now, do you? That’s another Inapt lie you want me to believe?’