And here now was what kept her from her quarry: Argastos had ransacked his mind and cast up this recollection of the war-host of the Inapt. She had seem some fraction of it in the visions he had shown her, while wooing her, but this was it entire or as close as his memory could call forth. The forest was filled with moving soldiers: Moth, Mantis, Spider, Dragonfly, Woodlouse and others, great loose formations of them, armoured and armed, a dark glass being held up to the glory of another age.
Hurry! came Che’s voice, in her mind. The Beetle was losing ground.
Useless creature. And Seda stood before Argastos’s recreated host and called out, ‘I am Seda, Empress of the Wasp-kinden. Do you presume to teach me about armies?’
She took a deep breath and clawed power out of the very tapestry that Argastos had raised to stop her, and she gifted him with her own thoughts on the subject.
She gave him the Barbs, General Alder’s Fourth Army; she gave him Malkan’s Winged Furies and Tynan’s Gears. She gave him the Eighth, which General Roder was even now leading against Sarn. She gave him the artillery of the Engineers and the flying machines of the Aviation Corps. She gave him the Rekef assassins she had once lived in fear of. She gave him snap-bows and the bright dawn of the new Apt age.
His remembered soldiers, a thousand years dead and obsolete, began their work, butchering her followers by the thousand, slaughtering the Wasps wholesale as she watched, and not all her powers or inspiration could inspire into that ersatz Black and Gold any semblance of the discipline and indomitable might of the Imperial armies that she recalled.
She had miscalculated. There was a hollow, clutching feeling inside her, and at last she was forced to recognize it as fear.
Hurry! Che Maker again, not realizing how Seda’s plans had just collapsed in upon themselves. And then Seda was forced to confront two equally unpalatable options: lose to Argastos; confess to Maker that she was failing.
But she was not like her brother. She was not so insecure.
I need your help. A bitter confession, yet she shoved the situation facing her into Che’s mind, and the girl understood immediately. What can you give me?
In the real world, the Wasp armies would have destroyed Argastos’s barbaric rabble without slowing. Their orthopters and automotives, greatshotters and snapbows would have reaped that enemy like wheat and turned an army into an abattoir within two hours. But Seda had no understanding of such devices. She knew that they existed, but she left the details to her generals and her engineers. Here, with only her own mind to draw on, all the great machinery of the Wasps, their tactics and their innovations, might as well just be theatrical props. Argastos had led armies: he knew full well the strengths and weaknesses of his troops.
Change places with me, Che told her instantly, and Seda swallowed her pride and fell back, taking on the task of throwing Argastos’s real soldiers into confusion, whilst Che hunted the man himself. It was the only chance they seemed to have.
In the midst of this twisted landscape that Argastos had summoned into being, Che could not see her own physical body, but she had the uncomfortable feeling that some of the Moth’s dead slaves were practically standing over her with blades raised. She had tried all she had — misdirection, flight, lengthening the imagined terrain that they must cross, even calling on Amnon once again, and having him throw himself against their blades — and it was foul work, to do so, but she was dead if she did not.
In passing that task to Seda, she could only hope that the Empress would put her ruthlessness and her Wasp minions to good use, because Che herself had played that game as far as she could.
Here was a different battle, though, and one she had a new perspective on. She saw exactly what Argastos had thrown between them to protect himself — his great remembered army — and she understood why Seda had failed.
And what do I have?
She reached into her mind and peopled Argastos’s battlefield with her own forces, marvelling at the irony that she should be more suited to such an attack than Seda herself. Here were the Dragonflies that she had seen in the Commonweal; here were the Moth-kinden of Tharn; here were the Mantids of the Nethyon and Etheryon — Argastos’s own people turned against him by her will. And here. . here was the Grand Army of Khanaphes, the great host of her own kinden, with chariots and cavalry and Amnon’s heroic guard at its centre. And if they were Apt, it mattered little, because they were still waging war in a way that had barely changed since the Bad Old Days.
These were her troops, and she sent them off to war.
Argastos’s own forces outnumbered hers to the extent that she reckoned his memories had multiplied the actual numbers who had ever fought under his command. Still, this was his battle, and played by his rules. Even if his mind was a liar, he would still manage to destroy her soldiers in time.
But that was not what she was trying to accomplish. She had another reason to take the initiative from Seda: a secret weapon.
The tide of battle swayed, and washed back and forth, her Khanaphir legion driving forward into the heart of the enemy, a bold thrust to get even a single arrow as far as Argastos himself. He countered perfectly, of course, concentrating his forces to block her at every point, but at the same time she was leading him on, stripping him of his reserves and his bodyguards, until he had committed everything he had in order to meet her threat.
And she called out, I know you’re there. Time for you to do what your people do.
The bitter thorn of Esmail’s mind revealed itself to her: Do not believe all the Moths wrote in their histories.
I don’t care, she told him. That reputation is what I need now. Be a scholar or a poet some other time. Can you reach him? And if Esmail’s answer was ‘no’ then everything would be for naught.
But then she felt him inching his way through the interstices of Argastos’s mind, stepping behind and within, but never directly interacting with it: like a spider raiding another’s web, each step desperate not to start the vibrations that might trigger an alarm.
And she continued to throw her soldiers at the enemy with a reckless disregard for their lives, suicidal and ludicrous enough to shame every general or tactician there had ever been. But either Argastos took it for her inexperience, or perhaps back in his day that was all battle had been about. He met her and crushed her forces, almost forgetting himself, losing his real purpose in this excuse he had manufactured to play War Master one last time. And, as he committed his imaginary troops to the fray, complicating and convoluting the distance between him and Che, so the ground immediately around him became simpler and simpler to traverse until one could have just walked across it.
I’m here, came the voice of Esmail in her mind. But. . I need to break into the real, where his body is. I — he sounded shaken — I hadn’t thought — I can’t get out myself. I’m not strong enough.
Strength is something I have, and she watched the last of her forces torn apart, felt Argastos exalt at his apparent triumph, and reached out to un-seam his world and let her assassin out.
Hurry! This time it was Seda who was pressing her, but Che just sat back, imagining herself staring at Argastos over a chessboard. Her pieces were gone, he had achieved the perfect victory, and yet he had not won.