And now they were somewhere behind Imperial borders, over lands she had never wanted to visit, and the airship was descending.
She could get an eye to the slats and stare out, and see great expanses of open country: the mosaic of fields, with no sign of any town or city nearby. Nobody near her had any idea how far a vessel such as this might have travelled. They might be just inside the border or over the far side of the Empire by now.
But there was something down there. She could just catch sight of it if she contorted herself at the crack. There was what looked like a camp. During the descent she was naive enough to assume it was for the mustering of armies.
And then the airship had been tied off with its keel ten feet from the dusty ground, and the slavers had come and opened the hatches in its underbelly. They had gone from compartment from compartment, dragging out the captives and just throwing them down, let them land how they may. With Fly-manacles killing her Art, the drop was terrifying to te Mosca.
Looking around after her bruising landing, that terror did not go away.
A hand fell on her shoulder, and she saw that Metyssa had fought her way through the crowd to her. Numbly, she let herself be dragged over to where Poll was sitting, clutching at a twisted ankle.
‘Can you help him?’ the Spider asked desperately, and of course te Mosca should have become the instant professional, kneeling down to offer what healing she could. But she just stood there, with her mind full of what she had seen before Metyssa had grabbed her. Her only thought was, No. I can’t help any of us.
There had been cages. A great host of cages, stacked two and three tall as though some Wasp had seen the poorest ghettos of Helleron and been determined not to be outdone. They had been full of human bodies – many of them Spider-kinden, but plenty of others too. Then there had been the rings of people just sitting out in the open, ankles manacled to great metal stakes driven into the hard earth. And, after them, there had been a pit like a strip mine, and she had known without looking that it, too, had been thronging with people, people on top of people.
And even now, the airship was disgorging the last of its human cargo, and more slavers were moving in to shift them towards that great maw in the earth. Te Mosca had a horror, then: a horror of being just one tiny mote in a vast mass of the dehumanized, the disenfranchised, the faceless. She had thought about what it might be like to be a slave, sometimes. She had wondered idly – oh, the luxury of the Collegiate life! – what master her own skills might attract. She was valuable, of course: a scholar and a doctor. No doubt she would be plucked out, bought at a good price. She had imagined how she might nobly change the Empire from within, given half the chance.
Now she saw the reality: here were not hundreds but thousands of people, surely. Each face, each body, had its history, its special skills, its memories, its reasons for being cherished and preserved. And, just as obviously, they were nothing to the Wasps but a bulk commodity, something to be shipped and sold by the hundredweight. The slavers played no favourites. Whatever they sought from this appalling morass of massed captivity, they cared nothing whatsoever about who their victims were. The cages, the pit, they were like some Apt machine designed to strip the individuality and humanity from whoever was thrust into them.
And then there was another officer coming up, waving his hands and shouting. His helm was pushed back, revealing a puffy red face. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘What do you think you’re up to?’
Plainly he was a superior officer and te Mosca felt a sudden rush of relief, because of course this must be a mistake. All of this had been some terrible error. And – she was not proud of the thought, but it came to her from the meanest part of her being – even if it was not an error for the rest, surely it was an error for her. Did they not know who she was?
And then she listened to the conversation between the slavers, the camp staff and those who had come on the airship, and she understood. It was just that the pit was already so full that they could not possibly fit so many new slaves in. The camp commander had a wild expression on his face, a man close to the end of his leash, but apparently for logistical reasons and not humanitarian ones.
‘What are we supposed to do with them, then?’ the airship slavers demanded.
And the answer was simple: as there was no material for new cages, they needed a second pit. That was when the shovels were passed out to the stronger-framed of the slaves, for Imperial policy forfend that the inferior kinden should have their mass grave dug by their betters.
Thirty-One
Reinforcements were coming down the rail line from Helleron; troops rushed in from all points of the Empire, whoever could be mobilized in time. The Sarnesh were on their way, too, with a pan-Lowlander army and a new tactician.
The core of the force taking a stand against them in the ruins of Malkan’s Stand had originally been intended as a garrison force for Collegium and had since become a field army by default. The colonel in charge, a man named Brakker, had arrived not long before with elements of the First Army, and his feints and manoeuvres had kept the Sarnesh confined in their city up until Collegium had fallen. After that, and with Tynan’s orthopter messengers even then turning around and refuelling, they had fallen back eastwards. They were operating almost entirely without orders, but the colonel knew that the Sarnesh could not be allowed to march unimpeded towards the Imperial border. He sent daily for more troops and artillery, and asked that General Tynan be allowed to come and take command, bringing the veteran Second with him.
For more than a tenday, Brakker’s forces had been on the retreat, but they had done everything in their power to make the Sarnesh advance difficult: poisoned wells, broken up the rail line, littered the terrain with mines and traps. All that while, the Ants’ own pilots were flying almost constantly overhead in their ersatz Stormreaders, making strafing runs and clumsily dropping the occasional bomb. Brakker was no tested battlefield officer, but a good logistician and planner, and he did everything he could to slow the Sarnesh, apart from actually taking a stand against them.
Word had come from Tynan. He and his army had been called to the capital – the Second to defend it, he himself to account for his decisions. It was a chilling thought that, even in this moment of crisis, they were all still being judged by the Rekef, by the Red Watch, by the Empress herself.
The Sarnesh had been closing the distance steadily, and once the lost garrison force reached the ruins of the Stand their colonel knew that they would get no better terrain to turn and hold the Ants at sword point for as long as possible. This place had once been the pride of Sarn, an indestructible fortress intended to last the ages, save that the Eighth had brought it low with the newest artillery, and now only craggy ruins were left. Ruins were better than an open field, though, so Brakker started refortifying as best he could, and setting up what little light artillery he had been left with.
Then, with the Sarnesh now absurdly close, the reinforcements had arrived down the rails from Helleron: a ragbag of disassociated units with brief orders to hold firm until further notice. The newcomers had real artillery, at least, and a good number of engineers, plus half a dozen Farsphex orthopters to at least dull the edge of the Sarnesh air superiority. The troops themselves included two thousand Light Airborne, who were so new to the uniform that the colonel considered it a wonder that half of them could even fly. To give them some backbone, General Marent of the Third had detached a couple of hundred heavy infantry from his own men and sent them along – strictly without orders, the colonel surmised. Then there were the Auxillians: Ants from Maille and Monas, Grasshoppers from Jhe Lien, all come to join the colonel’s own sizeable contingent of Vesserett Bee-kinden and give their lives for the Empire.