The soldiers nearest to Helmess had their snapbows levelled, and he recalled that thrusting out a hand at someone was tantamount to an assassination attempt where they came from. ‘Enough!’ he boomed out, in his best public-speaking voice, and gestured the soldiers’ weapons down. ‘Who is this sot?’
‘He’s Raullo Mummers. He’s an artist, Master Broiler,’ said a student from the front of the crowd. ‘Forgive him. He’s drunk.’
‘Shut him up, then, or he’ll be the worse for drink.’ Helmess realized that he recognized the speaker. ‘Hold on, aren’t you Leadswell?’
The chief officer of the ridiculous Student Company nodded. Like many there, he still bore his sash, but he had stripped off his armour.
‘Why that’s marvellous,’ Helmess beamed. ‘Sergeant, grab this one for a start. Master Leadswell, you must know that the Empire wishes a word with you.’
‘I’d guessed as much.’ Leadswell replied calmly. There was a surprising upsurge of discontent amongst the surrounding students, but when the sergeant and a couple of other soldiers stepped forwards to lay hands on him, he did not resist. And as well for everyone else here that he didn’t. Sensible lad. . But then the Leadswell boy always had a good mind and a gift for speeches, didn’t he? Helmess’s eyes narrowed as he studied him. Hadn’t Leadswell been the one to go on about coming to an accommodation with the Empire, and avoiding war? Maybe he and the Wasps really would have something to talk about, after all. An image was quick to find a place in Helmess’s mind: Eujen Leadswell leaving General Tynan’s presence with a rank badge and a mandate to bring Collegium and its conquerors closer together. A rival, in other words.
He stared at Leadswell in a colder light. Make an example of him, maybe? But the crowd was still unruly, if not quite rebellious, and there was such a thing as pushing your luck.
‘Eujen!’ A halfbreed woman from the crowd came shouldering forwards, almost barging into the sergeant. She was still in uniform, Coldstone Company again, and for a moment Helmess thought that everything might ignite there and then, as the sergeant shoved her backwards.
‘Straessa, peace,’ Leadswell was saying, even though Helmess was willing for him to incite his own execution. ‘It’s going to be fine.’
There was a garbled exclamation to the contrary from the reeling artist Mummers, and the halfbreed woman — the Antspider, is it? — looked as though she was going to attempt something unwise. Then Leadswell said something more, and she backed off reluctantly.
Ah, shame.
‘Now, Master Gripshod, I see there.’ Helmess mentally washed his hands of the altercation and turned to more important matters. ‘I take you for the senior hand here, so why don’t you arrange to go and bring me out Stenwold Maker.’
The old historian Gripshod retained a creditable card-player’s face, but the ripple of anger and shock passing among the rest of the students betrayed him. Yes, Maker was here. Yes, they all knew it.
Even so, Gripshod raised his head and declared, bold-facedly, ‘The War Master has surely fled the city, Master Broiler.’
‘Master Speaker, you’ll address me as,’ Helmess replied venomously. ‘Or Major Broiler if you prefer, Master Gripshod. And I know full well that Maker’s here and, given that you’re already marked as his accomplice, I’ll ask again that you have him brought out. Or else I’ll have you executed right here and now for resisting the Empire’s authority.’
There were two snapbows already levelled at Gripshod, and those closest to the old man began shuffling aside, staring at him, staring at the Wasps.
‘It’s true, Maker’s not here,’ Leadswell protested, whereupon the sergeant backhanded him across the face, viciously hard yet utterly impersonally, as though this was some habitual gesture of his that he had no real control over. Helmess noticed the sudden surge of students towards their captive leader — just a minor ripple in the crowd, but the situation was clearly becoming undisciplined.
‘Very well,’ he proceeded. ‘Master Gripshod, kindly fetch me my old friend Stenwold Maker at once, or I’ll have Leadswell here executed. How about that? I’ll give you a slow count of ten to allow you to make your choice.’ And either way I win, I think. And if I do get Maker now, Leadswell can have a tragic accident at some other time. And then occurred a blink: a sudden disconnection between the world as Helmess knew it to be and what his eyes were seeing. Why does that student have a snapbow?
There was a general motion now in the crowd, and it was not the vacillating of a confused and unhappy mob. It was military.
His eyes kept alighting on the glint of steeclass="underline" barrels, air-batteries, swords.
‘Sergeant,’ he hissed. ‘The Student Company was disarmed along with the rest, wasn’t it?’
The sergeant’s head snapped round to reveal an expression entirely blank. ‘What’s a Student Company, sir?’
In Helmess’s mind there rapidly coalesced a possible train of events, a series of communications between agents and the army, detailing Collegium’s strength, and then the order coming back to disarm the Companies. Which Companies? The Merchant Companies, of course.
Because students were students, and soldiers were soldiers, and really, with their entire male population pressed into the army, what an ironic slip it was for some Wasp to make.
That was a broken second’s worth of thought, as the soldiers around him caught sight the same weapons, but they were not sure what his orders were. The sergeant was staring at him, perhaps coming to the same abysmal conclusion, and-
Half the sergeant’s head was suddenly gone, a fist of blood and broken bone leaping from the cavity that was left, and the shooting started. Helmess dropped to his knees, hands over his head, hearing shouts and screams — but all of it so brief, so brief. The dozen men he had brought along were horribly outmatched from the start, and by mere students! Even as they tried to discharge their own snapbows they were cut down, and then the Dragonfly vaulted straight over him, ending up on the wall and shooting down at the two sentries even as they burst in to see what was going on, one arrow piercing straight down alongside the collar of each man’s armour, loosed almost faster than Helmess could register.
In moments, only moments, Helmess was cowering alone before that great angry host of the young.
‘Who shot?’ Eujen demanded. And then, because the question was plainly twenty snapbow bolts too late, he amended it to, ‘Who loosed first?’
A terrible silence had otherwise fallen now that the Wasps were dead. The mood of the mob tilted between feeling aghast at what they had done to being fully determined to do more.
One man pushed his way forwards, his eyes locked on Eujen. Pale among the Beetle majority, he was an alien that fate had surely never intended to be standing there, not in that uniform and with a Collegiate snapbow in his hand.
‘Averic,’ Eujen identified him.
‘I couldn’t let them take you,’ the Wasp said flatly. There was a great deal of emotion in his voice, but none of it suggested regret. ‘I know what they’d do to you.’
‘You couldn’t-’ Eujen started, but Mummers broke in.
‘They’d have picked you apart, man! And what about the War Master?’ the artist slurred.
‘Since when were you such an admirer of Stenwold Maker?’ Eujen demanded of him.