If he squinted, he could make out a sail far out on the waves. Maybe he could fly the distance, if they were making poor headway. Maybe he could chase after them and call them back. Maybe he could make everything right again. Even as he had the thought, the Tidenfree slipped further and further away.
He knew the other gates to the city were already blockaded by Imperial and Spider troops, and anyone trying to escape the city would get a snapbow bolt for his pains — as some had already found out.
Laszlo slumped into the automotive as the driver called, ‘Where next?’
Where indeed? He met Stenwold’s eyes, hearing his short, painful words.
‘Get us back to the College,’ Laszlo translated. Where else was there?
He had kept watch through the last hour of the night from the roof of this rundown little house. Not his own grand townhouse, close to the College, which everyone knew as the home of Jodry Drillen. This ramshackle place, kept in careful disorder, which he disappeared to when he was ducking official business or keeping clandestine assignments. Or he had done, when he was younger, and less a prisoner of his own sagging flesh.
Now he stood up and went downstairs into the house itself, calling for his secretary.
Arvi appeared, looking as though he was already attending Jodry’s funeral, and the Speaker for the Assembly scowled at him. ‘Nobody has any faith,’ he muttered. ‘Get my Assembly robes, will you? Might as well make a good impression.’ And that was not just provincial Lowlander thinking, either. The robes of an Imperial diplomat might be edged in black and gold, but even they were modelled on the Collegiate Assembly’s particular style. We have led the world in times of peace, he reflected. Could we have done more with that influence? He thought of Eujen Leadswell, unregarded demagogue and chief officer of the Student Company. He would say yes to that, and perhaps he was right, after all. Our chosen path doesn’t seem to have brought us anywhere useful.
By that time, Arvi had attired him as a man worthy of his position, every fold and drape immaculate, Jodry was embarrassed to hear the normally unflappable little man snivelling as he did so.
‘Now get off to your family,’ he directed.
‘My mother died two years ago, Master,’ Arvi reminded him in a shaky voice.
‘Of course she did, I’m sorry. Get to. .’ Jodry found that the world had become a place short of safe harbours. ‘I don’t know. You’ll be all right. Even the Wasps value a good secretary.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ the Fly-kinden hissed, horrified.
Jodry didn’t have the energy to argue with him. ‘I’d write you a reference, but I don’t imagine that would do much good. For what it’s worth, you’ve been a useful fellow to have around.’
Arvi had stepped back, and was staring at his feet, as if not trusting himself to reply, whereupon Jodry gave a great sigh and stepped out of the house, into the grey dawn air.
The walk, the few streets to the gate, seemed the longest of his life. Emerging from the buildings out onto that square was almost too much for him. The bodies of the previous day’s fighting had been taken away, but three Sentinels kept silent watch, like monumental effigies in steel. Above them, the top of the wall was now lined with Wasp-kinden soldiers, snapbows at the ready, hundreds of them, and all with their eyes fixed on him. There were more at ground level, men in heavier armour, with spears shouldered, stepping out from the gate’s shadow cautiously, to watch this one fat old Beetle-kinden man approach them.
Jodry fought to retain his dignity, that smooth progress that was the mark of a confident, self-contained man. He kept his head high, meeting their massed gaze as best he could. For all that his feet wanted to slow down as he neared the Sentinels, he kept up a steady but unhurried pace.
Then the leftmost Sentinel moved, just a fluid, irritable shifting of its legs. He jumped back with a brief cry of alarm, and a ripple of derisive jeering coursed across the wall top.
The armoured infantry had meanwhile formed two lines, an honour guard of sorts, funnelling him into the gatehouse. With a deep breath, Jodry approached them, feeling his heart knocking harder and harder in his chest, his guts turning to water. They had such hard, pale faces! Surely even the Felyen had been gentler of aspect when they marched off to their deaths.
He halted. He could not help himself. He could see through the gate now to the far side, to the camp of the Second Army, the thousands that backed up the hundreds already on the wall. His eyes sought some sign from the soldiers beside him, but they seemed to be staring past him, waiting for him to step within.
I could just walk away. But he felt they would shoot him for cowardice if he did.
Mustering his courage, gathering great handfuls of it and clutching it to him, Jodry walked through the gate of his own city, and into the enemy’s camp.
Some manner of officer approached him, and he called out, ‘I bring the word of the Assembly!’ The Wasps all around him seemed so different from his own people, such a fierce warrior breed, that he almost felt that they would not understand human speech.
‘With me,’ the officer said. ‘You’re expected.’ And he was already marching off at a pace that made Jodry hustle to keep up, out of breath after only half a dozen steps.
General Tynan met him in a tent, perhaps the finest that Jodry had ever seen, multi-roomed, its heavy fabric woven with gold thread. It seemed more opulent by far than the house he himself had spent a sleepless night in. Possibly it was worth more, too.
The Wasp general wore armour, and presented a surprisingly down-to-earth figure: just a bald, ageing soldier after all, with a few scars and a steady gaze, sitting on a camp stool. Before him was a folding table on which paperwork sat half completed, reservoir pen only now laid down, as though the master of the Gears was just some quartermaster’s clerk. Or, perhaps, the Speaker for the Assembly.
The woman beside him provided all the glamour he lacked, elegantly beautiful in armour of white-dyed leather ornamented with gold arabesques, and Jodry knew that this must be Mycella of the Aldanrael, the Spiderlands Arista. A heavily armoured Spider man stood at her shoulder, staring at Jodry as though his bulk hid a team of assassins. At Tynan’s shoulder was another Wasp officer, a colonel but with some corps insignia that Jodry could not place.
‘My name is Jodry Drillen,’ he began, keeping his voice admirably calm. ‘I am the Speaker of the Assembly, duly elected by the will of the people of Collegium, and come here to answer your demands.’
‘Of course you are.’ Tynan did not seem surprised. ‘No War Master Maker this time?’
Jodry shrugged. ‘The Assembly has voted to accept your generous offer, General. With no war, why would we need a War Master?’ He held his breath at his own flippancy, but Tynan grudged him a small smile.
‘We will begin moving our troops in to secure the city immediately, then. I trust that the Assembly’s decision has been fully communicated to your citizens? Anyone who decides that their personal war is still ongoing will find the repercussions wide-ranging. I’m glad,’ he added quietly. ‘I would rather lives had been spared by your accepting my offer before the walls, but this is better than nothing. You have spared your city a great deal.’
And your army, too, Jodry thought but did not say. Does he know how I argued against it? He had a bleak certainty that the name of every speaker at that ragged Assembly was in the books of the Rekef already. ‘If I may speak, General. .’