He nodded grudgingly. ‘You’re right, of course. Always the bloody Felyal. You weren’t here to see the bloodshed last time. You’d think they’d take a hint. But you’re correct: it’s not just Mantids either. Cherten reckons it’s an advance force from the city come to take a poke at us, while they’ve got the trees to operate from.’
‘My intelligence suggests it’s unlikely to be directly from Collegium. But what’s your plan?’
‘Depends how much history repeats itself. So far we’ve been moving past the Felyal that I burned the last time, but shortly we’ll be at the green. If there’s going to be trouble, it’ll be then, and at night most likely. Or it could be tonight, for that matter, or it might just as easily have been yesterday. Hence our walls and towers and caution — and your friction. My bet is that your mercenaries get to earn their blood money before a tenday’s out, though. And if we can break the back of the locals, then we can pick up speed again.’
‘You’ve thought this out, obviously.’
He suspected that she was flattering him rather than being overly sincere, but he could not quite suppress a smile. ‘They call my Second Army the Gears, Mycella. We don’t stop grinding until there’s nothing left but pieces. In order to maintain that reputation, in order to make sure nothing does stop us, you have no idea of the amount of forward planning I have to do.’
‘Just you? No council of tacticians?’
‘Some day I’ll get it wrong, and they’ll bury me and find another name for my army,’ he replied flatly.
‘You’re grim all of a sudden.’
He felt a jab of annoyance that this smooth, elegant woman should presume to know him — but reminded himself that he had spent quite a few nights sharing a bottle of one thing or another with his co-commander. It was not that he disdained the company of his officers, but they all had their own jobs to do, and she was right — he had nobody to share responsibility with. An army needed a single mind to direct it, and growing too familiar with his subordinates, even Mittoc and Cherten, would take the edge of his orders. Mycella represented a rare opportunity to talk matters over with someone outside his chain of command.
She’s up to something. She’s using her Art on me, manipulating me somehow. Yet he did not feel manipulated, and he found himself fascinated not by her appearance or her charms, but by the odd glimpse of weakness that she let him see, quite calculatedly: her fear of time, or the past failures that had put her where she was — a battlefield general’s role viewed as a spider punishment rather than a Wasp reward.
And she was beautiful, it was true, and all the more so because she was plainly not making the effort she could have done. She faced him instead as soldier to soldier.
This is going to turn out very badly, he knew, and he was too old to play that sort of fool. He should, he was well aware, restrict his meetings with her to daylight business: brief, curt discussions over the running of the army. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do that.
He was gazing at her, he knew — or almost through her, at the warring ghost of his own mind. He brought his eyes back into focus quickly, expecting to find her eyeing him with a touch of mockery, but she was not looking at him at all, just peering into the growing shadows of her tent, weighing her glass in her hand.
The attack, when it came, justified Tynan’s caution. The first Laszlo knew of it was a confused shouting coming from outside, which could have been just about anything. Despite all that the commanders of the Grand Army did to enforce discipline, Spider and Wasp ethics did not rub along easily. Most especially the Wasps had certain views on women, and many of the Spiders, in all fairness, had equally derogatory opinions about men. There had been brawls, rapes, revenge killings, and the wonder of it was that these incidents were isolated and ruthlessly investigated, rather than becoming so widespread as to swallow the entire camp. Imperial discipline and the Spider officers’ strength of personality held the entire complex organism together, and pointed in the right direction.
For that reason Laszlo just lay awake listening to the commotion, trying to work out whether it was a diplomatic incident or just some internal Spider dispute. Then Lissart stirred beside him and he realized that the shouting seemed a little too widespread: he could hear voices deep into the camp.
‘Get up,’ he hissed.
‘Get dressed,’ Lissart urged him almost at the same moment.
They stared at one another in the darkness, and then they were both scrambling for their clothes, Lissart hissing in pain, as she hunched over the healing scar of her wound.
Laszlo was just pulling his boots on when the first explosion sounded, just a cracking sound, like wood snapping, but he recognized it at once as some sort of grenade.
He buckled on his belt, feeling the comforting weight of his knife against his hip. A bow would have been grand, but his role as camp follower and freelance servant had not warranted it. Lissart, at least, was armed by default.
‘We go,’ he decided and she nodded with a single, determined jerk of her head. Then they were dropping out of the wagon, as the sleepers around them roused themselves or panicked or hid.
There are thousands of soldiers here, Laszlo was thinking. You’d be mad to attack an army like this. What can they hope to gain? It was a rhetorical question, though, for so long as the attackers gained him and Lissart a moment’s breathing space to get out of the camp, he could ask for no more.
General Tynan woke instantly as the first alarms were called. Some part of him had been waiting for this for a tenday or more, sleeping lightly in the absolute certain expectation that just this would happen. The Mantis-kinden are here at last. What kept them?
There was a plan, of course, and he had made sure that the duty sergeants and lieutenants knew what to do. At this moment his sentries and night watch would be doing everything they could to contain and assess the attack: numbers, direction, intention. They would be fighting for a breathing space in which to take control, just as they had back in the first war. Many of them would even be veterans of that same battle, where the invincible Mantids of the Felyal were taught about the sharp end of progress.
It came as no surprise that a kinden that had unchanged over five hundred years would not have learnt from that defeat either.
He dragged on a banded cuirass, standard Airborne issue, and snatched up his sword as he strode outside, even as the first officers arrived to report.
‘You,’ he snapped, picking a captain from the pack of messengers, trusting that senior rank equated to more critical news. Even as the man started to speak, though, there were Mantis-kinden amongst them, a handful of warriors just dropping from the sky and laying into whoever was closest. The captain was their first victim.
Tynan had no time to be startled by the attack, for there was a lean, savage-looking woman driving for him with a spear in the next moment, her fluid lunge little more than a suggestion of motion in the fickle lantern light. Long years of soldiering lent him enough instinct to save himself, anticipating her attack before he properly saw it, falling aside from the bright dart of the spearhead and lashing at the woman with his left-hand sting, staggering her. His right arm was already slamming forwards, and if he had been the young, strong major of fifteen years ago he would have killed her with the sword blow. As it was, he felt the blade grate off chitin armour, and she jumped back to get him again at her spear’s point, but another of his men blasted her from behind, the fire of his sting landing in the small of her back.
By that time it was over: four Mantis corpses, half a dozen dead Wasps, but the sounds of fighting still came from all directions.
‘Get the towers lit, you idiots!’ Tynan shouted at his army in general, judging that the time for receiving reports was probably past. In that moment he heard the sharp retort of a grenade, and his mind flipped the scenario it had been devising, turning it on its head. Mantis-kinden were among the Inapt, grenades were not in their arsenal. Mycella said there were others. Mantis-kinden are insane, and they’d attack a thousand with a dozen, but why would anyone in their right mind go along with them for the ride? What are they after?