It was their voice that led me away, to come here…
'Trallo, I can't come with you-' she started, but his face took on an ugly cast.
'Petri's dead, Che.'
She stared at him, wordless.
'Is that immediate enough for you, Bella Cheerwell? Has that got through to you?'
'Dead?'
'They found her on the steps of that pyramid in front of the Scriptora – I saw her body, before the locals took possession of it. Broken neck. She'd fallen backwards off it. But I saw her face.' He shook his head, unable to properly describe it.
Petri's dead? Petri Coggen's babbling tirades about this city being out to get her, her delusions, her fears, her pleas to be taken out of Khanaphes. And she confided in me, and I did nothing. It was like cold water washing the dust away from her. The last ebbing of the trance was falling from her. 'Poor woman,' she said, hollowly. 'Poor, poor woman.' When she met Trallo's gaze again, her eyes were steady. 'Let's head for the embassy. We can talk on the way.'
As they approached the side arch leading through to the Place of Foreigners, her thoughts turned inevitably to the maze of diplomacy she saw awaiting her. And what am I going to do with Thalric now? 'What's the Imperial reaction been, Trallo?'
'Blatant guilt,' he said, from her elbow. She halted, frowning down at him,
'Explain.'
'They've gone, Bella Cheerwell. They've upped and left. If they're still even in the city, they're keeping their heads down.'
'All of them?'
'Every single stripy one of them.'
The news seemed oddly leaden. Trallo was right: it indicated guilt, surely, to leave so suddenly and secretly, once the news was announced. Have they gone to join their fellows amongst the Scorpions? And then: So I will not talk this over with Thalric, then. I suppose he has made his decision, once again. It seemed incredible that one man had been given so many choices in life, and made them all so differently.
'What's the feeling among the others?' she asked.
'Manny wants out of Khanaphes yesterday. Our great warrior has decided that war isn't for him, after all,' Trallo said drily. 'They raised the chain on the river, though – that big old gate your lot were so interested in? Worked like it was made only last tenday in Solarno. Old Ethmet has said they'll let you out, when you're ready to go. He's very apologetic. And distracted, too, what with suddenly having a war to run.'
'What about Berjek and Praeda?'
'Berjek is being patient, but I get the impression he's about ready to pack his bags as well. As for Bella Rakespear…' Trallo grimaced. 'Well, that there's gotten complicated.'
They were at the door of the embassy, as Che gave Trallo a sidelong look. 'Meaning him? '
'He does appear to have got to her somehow,' Trallo murmured. 'It was all that dancing he did, I reckon.'
Che tried to envisage them: cool, detached Praeda Rakespear with the giant, vital Amnon. They seemed utterly opposite. Then again, at least they're of the same kinden. I'm no one to judge.
'So what does she want to do?' she asked the Fly.
'Bella Che, I don't think she knows herself. We were all hoping you could talk her into making a decision.' The city of Khanaphes resounded to the tread of marching feet.
From atop the wall it was a spectacle, but Totho found that he could no longer appreciate mere spectacle. The regiments of Khanaphir soldiers were still leaving the city, each parading in mighty armed pomp through the streets before assembling in front of the west gates. Totho was no novice when it came to armies, and his mind afforded plenty of comparisons. In fact I am probably the best-qualified person in the city to say to Amnon what must be said. Except for some of the fugitive Imperials, perhaps, and they were unlikely to be handing out strategic advice.
It was not a Lowlander army, that much was clear. Correction: it is not a Lowlander army such as has been seen these last three centuries. The troops were still arriving by barge from the tributary towns further upriver, but the city itself had mustered a surprising number of soldiers. They were not Ant-kinden here, where every citizen would take up a sword at a moment's unspoken notice, but the Ministers had been able to mobilize a lot of the city's population in the short time they had been given. That would be Amnon's first boast: We are used to fighting off these savages.
The sands have finally begun to move in the glass, though, Totho thought. What you are used to, friend Amnon, is what was, not what is. Time, that long-denied guest, was finally marching on Khanaphes.
Amnon leant on the parapet, looking down with a broad smile as his soldiers assembled. He was dressed in his full armour, the scaled hauberk and the crested helm. He would be better served by what we tried to give him, Totho knew, but the Ministers had forbidden it, of course. Totho watched another unit of neighbourhood militia leave the gates. The Khanaphir army looked a strange amalgam to his eyes, unwieldy and awkward and lacking in vital parts. The core was Amnon's Royal Guard and some other heavy infantry: scale-armoured shield-and-spearmen backed by armoured archers. They were greatly outnumbered by the light militia, vast expanses of men and women without armour, with only shields and spears or leaf-bladed swords, or archers who could back up their bows with nothing but a dagger. Although they could stand in neat enough rows, Totho doubted they had seen much of a battle before. It is not an army, rather it is a levy. A levy of citizens that the Khanaphir can ill afford to lose.
There was cavalry on either side of the main force, and Totho was unused to seeing that. The swift, long-legged sand-beetles were ranged in their skittish, twitching ranks, each bearing a lancer and an archer. Smaller beasts were yoked to little two-wheeled carts which carried a pair of archers apiece to keep the driver company. Totho had never seen the like of them.
'The Marsh people have answered our call at last,' Amnon rumbled, pointing them out. A straggling column was heading upriver from the delta, and Totho turned a glass on them to see them better. They were the silvery-skinned Mantis-kinden from the swamps, perhaps a couple of hundred men and women wearing no armour, but armed with spears and recurved bows and the Art-given barbs of their arms. Mantis-kinden, still, thought Totho, but he had seen how the Mantids fell at the Battle of the Rails, and he knew he would be seeing it again, if he was fool enough to march alongside Amnon.
And if the Emperor had not died, then this would be a full Imperial army coming. He had not considered that before, but the timing felt right. The expansion of the Empire would have reached this far south by now, had it not been for all the internal squabbling. Perhaps the Khanaphir stood a chance against their age-old Scorpion-kinden enemies, even re-equipped and retrained as they now were, but if it had been the Imperial Eighth Army…? Twenty or thirty thousand Wasp-kinden and Auxillian soldiers descending on this lumbering mass of Beetle-kinden and their allies? Even if the Khanaphir and the Many of Nem could have put their differences aside, the Empire would still sweep across them and leave not a man. There would be no room for a battle in amongst all the slaughter.
He looked upon the army of Khanaphes and his artificer's mind cried: Where is their air-power? Where is their mechanized support? Where the engines of war? Where the crossbows and nailbows and snapbows and all the other accoutrements of modern battle? Drephos's heart would break if he saw this. Even the new toys of the Scorpions were merely old war-surplus, by Meyr's reckoning, outdated and obsolete weapons and engines that the Empire was well rid of. It seemed the unmaking of all of the great artificer's work in advancing the science of war. Small consolation that all this, this very way of life, now stood to be unmade in turn.