Not that this last was likely to be an honour unique to the Auxillians, Brakker knew. Hold until further notice was not the sort of order any commanding officer looked forward to receiving. At least their force now equalled a more respectable fraction of the Sarnesh in numbers, and perhaps the Ants’ firebrand tactician might take a moment to consider the potential losses on both sides when he came hoping to prise the Wasps from their makeshift fortifications.
Milus looked over the entrenched Wasps and their allies and laughed briefly.
‘What’s amusing you, Tactician?’ Stenwold asked him. He and Kymene had been trailing the Sarnesh leader as he stalked through the camp, and at last as he came to view the enemy. Even with the Wasps in sight, Milus was not being very forthcoming about his plans.
‘Don’t you see how the tide’s turned?’ the Ant asked them. ‘For too long the Empire’s had the initiative, but now look at them repeating our mistakes. We couldn’t hold out here when there was still a fortress to hide inside. What chance have they got?’
‘They have the chance to buy time for the balance of their forces,’ Kymene pointed out.
Milus made a doubtful noise. ‘I don’t see any of the Second. It looks as if the Gears are on the run. I’d hoped to find them here as well.’
‘You were hoping to be outnumbered?’
Milus smiled pleasantly. ‘Tomorrow we will smash the Wasps. I’d rather we smashed as many of them as we can. I’d rather that balance of their forces was as small as possible.’
‘You seem very confident. Perhaps you might tell us why so, given that you no doubt expect us to commit our own forces,’ Kymene put forwards.
‘I am confident, and you have agreed to abide by my battle plans,’ he told them implacably. ‘Have your forces ready for a fight tomorrow, that’s all I ask.’
‘No night attack?’ queried Stenwold.
‘Not this time.’ That smile of his was maddening, and no doubt Milus knew it. ‘In fact, we’ll give them a couple of hours to watch us getting ready, just to rub it in. I want them to know exactly what we’re doing.’ He looked at their expressions and then laughed again; the sound was chilling to Stenwold, because Ants didn’t laugh. Not out loud, not like that. Milus was playing at being a human being for their benefit: jovial Uncle Milus.
‘If you didn’t trust me, what are you doing here with your soldiers?’ the tactician asked them both. ‘You have some other war to fight? There are a great many Wasps out there, War Master, Commander. We will devour them piece by piece, but I will still need all our forces. I’m not going to waste any bodies on foolishness.’
But you may waste them on what you consider necessity, Stenwold filled in silently, guessing that Kymene was thinking the same. And if so, it won’t be your own Sarnesh that you waste, I’ll wager.
‘Tomorrow I’ll give out the battle order, and you’ll see what I intend. Master Maker, I have a great respect for you . . . I hear the Wasps call you “General” and you are truly a tactician amongst your people. But a Beetle-kinden tactician all the same, and there are reasons nobody ever heard of such a thing. I know you consider my people simple and direct and predictable, but we understand war and the use of weapons – all manner of weapons. Trust me, and we will carry the battle tomorrow.’
Stenwold would have to be satisfied with that, because the tactician was now pointedly busying himself with the administration of his army, and so any other discussion would have to wait.
With dusk on its way, Milus retreated to his tent in the midst of the Sarnesh camp, and it was there that Stenwold went looking for him, guided in by silent sentries and knowing that unspoken word of his arrival would have reached the tactician the moment he made his presence known.
‘War Master,’ Milus greeted him. ‘Only an hour out of my company and here you are once more.’ Again such an utterly un-Ant-like comment that Stenwold was momentarily thrown. He had caught Milus sitting on a folding stool inside his tent, reading by the light of a hanging lamp – not a scout’s report or a quartermaster’s tally but what looked like a Collegiate novel, some lurid tale. He was quite sure that the whole odd impression had been planned purely to unbalance him, constructed even while he still picked his way through the camp.
‘There is one other matter that I wished to speak about with you in private,’ Stenwold confirmed, refusing to be discomfited.
Milus shrugged. ‘Speak.’
‘You have a prisoner, a Fly woman named Lissart. I am aware that she has travelled with the army and is here in this camp.’
For a moment he saw a change: the false expression freezing on Milus’s face, the body language grinding unattended to a halt. Then: ‘What of it?’ and a little more caution, perhaps, in the way the words came out.
‘I would like her released.’
‘She’s a Wasp agent.’
‘Nonetheless.’
Milus rolled his eyes, back in full mummery now, but Stenwold wondered just what the Fly girl meant to him, that mention of her had momentarily dragged him out of his charade.
‘This is because of that man of yours, is it?’ the Ant asked him. ‘The awful spy – the one who was in Solarno with her.’
‘His name is Laszlo,’ Stenwold stated. ‘I admit he’s far from the perfect spy, but there is a difference between spy and agent, and he excels in the field of action. The recovery of my city owes a great deal to his hard work.’
‘And he’s put you up to this.’
‘Before Collegium fell, he asked for my help, my intervention,’ Stenwold replied. ‘Since then, he’s not pressed hard but I know he still wants her back, and I owe him, Milus.’
No doubt the Ant had a great deal of uncomplimentary things to say about that sort of thinking, but he kept them to himself and just remarked, ‘She worked for the Wasps. I still have a use for her.’
‘I’m told you’ve tortured her.’
Again that momentary stillness, leaving Stenwold wondering, increasingly uneasily, about why Milus cared – about why this conversation was even necessary.
‘What of it?’ The same careless response, but with a sharp edge ready to be unsheathed. And then, before Stenwold could speak, ‘It is a tool of statecraft and of war. Or it is everywhere else except Collegium.’
‘Some would say that is what makes us better than the Empire.’
Milus cast the book aside in a single, swift motion, one of incredible contained violence, so that the bundle of pages almost exploded against the tent wall, its bindings splitting at the spine. When he stood, he seemed quite calm, but that brief abandon was all the more shocking for that.
‘The goal of Sarn in this conflict is not to be better than the Empire. It is to be more victorious, War Master. Any measure to achieve that end is permitted. Sarn will survive, and for that to happen it appears that the Wasp Empire must fall. If the Wasps had come to us at the start and started talking terms, then perhaps you and I would be standing in very different places, but history has given you me as an ally, and for that you should be grateful. I am not interested in the navel-gazing of Beetle philosophers. I am interested in winning.’