‘To think that the only reason I’m in this fix is that I didn’t want to go work amongst Spiders,’ Liss remarked to him one night, as they lay close together in the wagon, surrounded by the whispering breath of sleepers. Her smile, just visible in the starlight, was wistful, so Laszlo kissed it gently. When he pulled away, her expression was the usuaclass="underline" happy, glad to have him there, and yet her eyes demanding to know, Are you mad? Don’t you know how untrustworthy I am yet? He knew, of course. He was in the jaws of the enemy here, a step away from exposure at every moment. Each day seemed a weird dream-run, sailing through treacherous waters without chart or compass, and yet he was alive and unrevealed each dusk, and so was she. The danger that she would betray him seemed only a small voice amongst all the clamouring perils that surrounded him.
They had been aided by the Spider army’s structure, for although the lady of the Aldanrael was their leader, few of the actual soldiers were sworn to her family. Instead there seemed to be a typically piecemeal construction about the Spiderland forces: a number of mercenary bands and Satrapy forces from several different cities, together with Spider-kinden units donated by various different Aristoi houses, few of whom seemed to be actual friends of the Lady-Martial Mycella. Two figures strode through this chaos and made some kind of order from it. One was Jadis of the Melisandyr, some small family that remained closely loyal to the Aldanrael, whose force of personality and — on one occasion — lethal response to an attempted assassination, kept the other Spiders under Mycella’s orders. Lissart had determined to avoid his notice at all costs. He looked, she said, like someone who remembered the names and faces of any who served under him.
Instead, they had inveigled their way into the camp of Morkaris, the mercenary adjutant. There was less discipline amongst the mercenaries, and also less jockeying for position between underlings. In their baggage train of clerks, entertainers, whores and factotums, individuals changed allegiance all the time, with few hard feelings. Everyone was in it for the money, and personal honour was less of a barrier. Laszlo had quickly identified a formidable Fly-kinden matron named Drasse as the woman to cosy up to, and after running errands for the woman for a day, he had found himself and Liss safely under her protection. Liss herself could charm the stripes off a Rekef colonel, when she wanted to, and soon Drasse had found her a berth on the wagon, and some medicine besides.
The wagon was a stroke of luck they had not known that they needed, for the army was not what either of them had expected. General Tynan and the Lady-Martial Mycella were moving fast.
The entire Imperial contingent travelled by automotive, as did their supplies, ammunition and the disassembled pieces of such machines that could not move under their own power, including considerable quantities of artillery. Wasp soldiers sat inside and on top of great wheeled transporters that belched smoke and steam, and ground up the miles mercilessly without ever tiring. Their Spider allies slowed them down a little, but far less than might be expected. The Apt amongst them, and the unluckier of the Inapt, were in similar conveyances, a motley fleet of various walkers, rollers and tracks dredged from every vehicle foundry from Chasme to Fort Tamaris. The rest had either brought mounts — an equally varied menagerie of horses, beetles, spiders and crickets — or travelled in wagons pulled almost universally by strong hauling beetles. Travelling alongside the supplies was a luxury, as it meant that Liss was not forever jostling elbows with dozens of others.
They had swarmed past Tark not long ago, and Laszlo had only teased out the fact of the city’s surrender in retrospect: not surrender to the Empire as conquerors, but a subtler and perhaps more permanent concession. Tark had become part of the Spiderlands, its king sworn to the Aldanrael as a vassal. Already the city was crawling with Spiders taking census of Mycella’s new gains.
Liss told him that Spider-kinden maps had always been ambitious, when it came to the Lowlands. Most of them marked out large sections of the coast as already being under Spider control. It seemed that Mycella was rapidly making that fiction a reality.
They had coursed on south past the hills of Merro and Egel, two interlinked Fly-kinden warrens whose loyalties in the past had been a feather for every wind. Nobody had shown any great surprise when the leading families of both had assured everyone concerned that, of course, they had always been part of the Spiderlands. The richly dressed little magnates had put up a very convincing display of confusion that anyone should even have to ask. Mycella had received their declarations of fealty and loyalty with appropriate magnanimity.
But this was different. The army had barely slowed for the Fly-kinden, but now Laszlo found himself at the coast, the dangerous forest of the Felyal at his back and looking out at the fortified island of Kes.
The Ant-kinden of Kes had a chequered history recently. The last time the Wasps had sent an army down the coast, the Ants had declared themselves uninterested, hiding behind their walls and their fleet, and saving the Empire the considerable effort of investing their island in siege. There had been much speculation amongst the followers of the current army — the Grand Army, as the Spider contingent was calling it, at least — as to whether Kes would represent the first genuine military engagement of this war.
The Ants had certainly not been keen to come out with either violence or diplomacy, but a telescope turned towards their island revealed that every artillery emplacement was manned, and the ships in the harbour were fully crewed.
General Tynan had not ordered his aviators into action, as many had anticipated. Instead he had apparently decided to take defensive measures against any Kessen attack by setting up his own artillery at the cliff edge. The engines that his engineers assembled, however, were of a scale that Laszlo had never seen before, enormous leadshotters that seemed to point more at the sky than anything else. He had surmised that they would drop rocks down on any Kessen ships that sallied forth from the Ants’ harbour.
The preliminary shelling of Kes had then lasted three hours, with the greatshotters finding their precise mark after only twenty minutes, to the great exuberance of Tynan’s Colonel Mittoc. After that point the dozen engines had spoken in a constant ground-shaking thunder, pounding solidly at their targets, cracking walls and sinking ships, launching flame-canisters over the docks and the city. The artillery on the Kessen walls had, of course, only a fraction of their range. There was no retaliation.
After the greatshotters had finally fallen silent, though remaining a menacing silhouette on the cliff for any Kessen observer, a small vessel had put out from the harbour.
An hour later, the entire population of Kes had understood that it, too, was become a satrapy of the Spiderlands. Spider ships were already coasting in, summoned by who knew what signal of Mycella. Soldiers and assessors were disembarking at the Kessen docks that no hostile force had ever taken.
‘We will come back,’ Tynan had told the Ant-kinden diplomats and, through them, their king. ‘If you rise up against our allies, then our engines shall never pause until your island city is just a stump of rock in the sea. We might have bombarded you until you begged me to send over my slavers. Think on how much more fortunate you are that the Lady Mycella wants you for her own.’
Laszlo had found a place quite close to the negotiations. He had heard the words plainly.
The army was moving again the very next day. The Imperial Second was known as ‘the Gears’, and General Tynan was not going to let them stop turning for anything, it appeared.
That night, however, Laszlo had decided that the time had come to risk everything. He had not told Liss what he was doing, in case she tried to stop him, or in case she pointed out what a stupid thing he had resolved on. Instead, while she slept, he skipped out from the wagon and flew away.