‘May I present Rosander, Nauarch of the Thousand Spines Train; his mechanic Chenni; the magnate Wys; and Paladrya, chief adviser to the Edmir of Hermatyre.’ He reeled off the string of titles and names as though they were supposed to mean anything to anyone. ‘The Sea-kinden,’ he finished.
Straessa looked at them and saw a middle-aged Spider woman, a couple of little bald girls about the size of Fly-kinden, and . . . and a very, very big, broad man in pale crusted armour that made Maker’s suit look as if it was made of paper.
‘Sea-kinden,’ went the murmur, passing back down the ranks, or passing invisibly between the heads of the Ants.
‘Explain,’ said Lycena, almost desperately.
He did. Concisely, and with obvious gaps in the narrative, Stenwold told them about the Sea-kinden, opening up a secret that had stayed beneath the waves since the revolution.
Listening to his calm, measured account, Straessa had to keep looking at the massive figure of Rosander, because otherwise she would not have believed any of it.
‘You, Officer.’ Abruptly Maker’s gauntleted hand was directed at her.
‘Officer Antspider, Coldstone Company.’ Probably. Whether there was still a Coldstone Company to be part of was debatable, but what else could she say?
Although he might have recalled her as Eujen’s friend, if nothing else, there was no recognition in his face.
‘Get a pilot off to Sarn to call back the Expatriates. This city’s going to need to stand on its own feet just about immediately. We can’t spare the soldiers to . . .’
‘Administrate it, War Master?’ Straessa dropped into the gap, because she was horribly sure that the unwanted word Maker had bitten back on was ‘garrison’. He said ‘this city’, not ‘our city’, she thought, but maybe she was being too hard on the man because of Eujen’s clashes with his ideology. Or perhaps going where Maker had gone could not help but change a man.
‘Officer.’ At Straessa’s elbow was the aviatrix, Taki. ‘I’ll go.’
‘Thank you. Cram everyone who wants to come aboard a rail automotive and get them over here, double time. I don’t think we’re hanging about,’ the Antspider told her. ‘Take word to Eujen and he’ll sort the logistics. I expect the Sarnesh’ll be glad to see the back of us.’
The Fly-kinden nodded, casting a sidelong look at Stenwold Maker. ‘Right you are.’ Then she was lifting herself into the air and scudding over the assembled heads towards her Storm-reader.
‘War Master, regarding your allies . . .’ Lycena indicated the Sea-kinden. ‘What do I tell the tactician? Do they march east with us? The Vekken, you have spoken for –’ no disguising of her distaste there – ‘but these?’
Straessa saw the ‘No’ on Stenwold’s face, but the Spider-looking woman at his side said, ‘Yes,’ immediately, and Rosander, the vast armoured brute, echoed her a moment later. Maker glanced at them, and she noticed his facade crack briefly.
‘Paladrya—’ he started, but the huge Sea-kinden broke in.
‘You once showed me the land, Stenwold Maker,’ he rumbled. ‘Do you think I put it from my mind, what you made me see? Those horizons you have? I want to see it, Maker. Those of my train who will follow me, I will take as far as you need to go. Chenni has my orders for the rest of my people.’
Stenwold’s gaze was still on the woman, though. No words passed between them, but she put a hand on his plated arm, eyes speaking directly to his, and at last he nodded.
‘You’re cracked,’ said the little bald woman he had called Wys. ‘Back home for me and mine, for sure.’
Straessa glanced from face to face: Ants of three cities; her own people just beginning to understand that they had won back their home; and the unfamiliar features of the Sea-kinden.
At the last, she looked back towards Maker, and was able to interpret that hard, driven expression of his in a new way. He was tired. He was a man tired almost to death, but with a long road ahead of him still.
Twenty-Eight
I should have stayed with Che.
Thalric had been a battlefield officer once, long ago, before the Rekef had recruited him. He remembered enough about the soldiering trade to know that quality of troops counted for more than just about anything. He had never seen a worse band of warriors than the rabble he was trying to marshal now. Military historians would have to invent whole new words for how appalling the slaves of the Worm were in war.
Of course this is hardly textbook stuff: the hopeless against the mindless. He had seen quickly enough that standing toe to toe with the Worm was not a game these people could win. Even wielding the weapons that they had made for their masters, they lacked all training and coordination – lacked all virtues, in fact, except for a desperation that turned too readily to panic and fear. Thalric had heard that some people believed sheer rage and righteous fury would win a fight, and he could only assume that those people had never been in one. In a massed battle, training and discipline would defeat random flailing every time, however righteous or angry.
Of course, training and discipline were not exactly what the Worm had, but what they did have would serve. Watching them fight made him feel ill – and his varied career had instilled a strong stomach. The way they moved together, the many limbs of a single presence, was utterly unlike soldiers, unlike humans. It served, though. In close combat the Worm was ferocious, unflinching, never retreating, swift and savage and unhesitating. A part of him watched that dreadful will to slaughter and thought, perfect shock troops, even whilst the rest of him was trying not to retch.
But Che wanted these hopeless victims to fight, to make their extinction costly enough that the Worm would leave them alone. After all, the driving force behind those human puppets did not understand vengeance or hatred any more than it could know of love or hope or happiness. If they could bloody the enemy enough, then it would draw back from them through sheer expedience. That was Che’s plan. Thalric did not believe it, now. After all, the bastard’s down here, isn’t it? Somehow it’s at the centre of this place – wherever you go, you reach that city, that’s what Messel said. So is it really going to give its slaves the run of the place while its armies are away? Thalric was bitterly afraid that Che had miscalculated – but not in guessing that the Worm would dispose of its entire slave population, the other kinden that had shared its banishment. No, that was patently the case, but he was less and less sure that either running or fighting would save these blighted failures from the blades of the Worm.
He wanted to tell her he had no sympathy, that those who bent their backs to the lash had chosen their place in life and deserved no more. He wanted to tell her that he and she – and Tynisa and Esmail, if she insisted – should simply find some place to hide that was as distant as they could find from any tendrils of the Worm, and there they should wait until all the slaves were devoured. Perhaps, having gutted its world, save for the four of them, the Worm would seek elsewhere for its nourishment. He wanted to say that this was the only real use that they could find for this host of useless subhumans.
He had said nothing of the sort to her. In his mind’s eye he saw the reaction in her face, the disapproval, the knowledge that, by her impossible Collegiate standards, he had failed some test of morality. But you can’t save the world, you can’t! Sometimes it’s all you can do to save yourself.