‘You see, General? Even so simply does the Empire conquer. You understand all, now.’
‘I understand nothing,’ Roder frankly admitted, before he could stop himself. ‘I understand enough,’ he corrected himself.
‘The Nethyen are with us, as is Tharn. The Inapt that formerly declared for Sarn and Collegium are divided. Now your work begins. The hold of Etheryon has always been close to Sarn, and likely they will hold to the Ants, as will the Moth-kinden at Dorax. There will be fighting amidst the trees even tonight. You must arrange for your very best, your scouts and Pioneers and wildsmen, to enter the forest and fight alongside our new allies. You can be sure the Sarnesh will be doing the same. Whoever controls this forest controls our road to Sarn.’
Roder considered the list that he had drawn up, at Gjegevey’s urging. ‘It shall be accomplished, Empress.’
‘Of course it shall.’ She was turning back to head for the camp, but more words forced themselves from Roder’s lips.
‘Empress. . what you promised them. .?’
Her smile was still as sweet. ‘They feel betrayed, General. The Apt city-states of the Lowlands and their modern ways have made such inroads into the Mantis way of life, as the corruption of the Etheryen hold shows. Now the Nethyen will fight just for the right to be left to their own devices. Just as we do in the Empire, they value their traditions.’
Roder glanced at Seda’s armoured shadow, to find that faceless helm looking right back at him. He had an unhappy feeling that he was somehow looking right into the heart of those old Mantis traditions, but he would never be able to put it into words.
He was about to hurry back to camp and surround himself with men whose company he understood, but Seda herself had paused, and for the first time that night Roder sensed that she was in less than complete control of the world.
The Empress was looking towards the hostile west, where the skies were still faintly grey with sunset. ‘Gjegevey,’ she murmured.
‘Here, your, hm, Majesty.’ The old slave was at her elbow immediately.
‘Is it. .?’ A terrible, hard cast fell over the Empress’s face. ‘It’s her.’
Roder had no idea who ‘her’ might be, but whoever it was had better prepare herself for the end, for utter hatred was writ large in the Empress’s expression.
‘She’s here, here!’ Seda turned wild eyes on Gjegevey. ‘She is here for your Argastos, just as I am. She seeks to keep it from me.’
The slave spread long-fingered hands in demurral, but Seda would not be forestalled. ‘Then I cannot wait, nor will I be denied. General, have your soldiers ready to enter the forest tomorrow morning, in force. And have ready your very best Pioneers, your most skilled trackers and hunters and woodsmen. I will have work for them all.’
‘My Empress, no!’ Gjegevey started, showing more courage in the face of her anger than Roder himself could have mustered.
‘And wait for the leaden clash of armies while she steals what is mine?’ Seda demanded. ‘Only one of us can live, Gjegevey, the stronger of us. If she takes what is here, then it will be her. Is that what you want?’
‘Empress, no, but-’
‘Then prepare yourself, old man, for you’re coming too.’
Six
‘Look at this, though.’
Sartaea te Mosca glanced politely at the scroll Gerethwy had unrolled for her. ‘Two matters, dear one,’ she replied. ‘Firstly, what in the world do you think that I would make of that, save for tinder? Secondly this would be considerably easier for me if you kept still. Consider that I am slightly smaller than your arm: every slightest twitch throws me about as though I’m in a hurricane.’
She exaggerated slightly, but he was an enormously tall, long-limbed man, a Woodlouse-kinden, perpetually hunched like an old man, but a young and sprightly student where the few others of his kinden that anyone had ever seen seemed to have been ancient forever, old as the stones of Collegium. He had come from the east with an esoteric but impressive understanding of machines that had won him a place at the Great College, and he had stayed on for the war.
Te Mosca herself was a Fly-kinden, and someone who had also turned up begging at the College gates, though in her case she had come from the Moth-kinden at Dorax, and had been looking for work. The old chair for Inapt studies — meaning those parts of the world that the Apt neither understood nor cared about — had been gathering dust, but even then they had not made her a full master, just had her marking out her time as though a replacement was expected at any moment. There had been votes in Assembly, she knew, to abolish the position entirely, but respect for tradition had thus far allowed her field of study to cling on by its fingernails.
She was small even for a Fly, delicate of frame and with a faint ashen tint to her skin, for her kinden often looked a little like those they grew up amongst. She taught the histories of the Inapt as they themselves would tell it, and she taught a little of the principles of magic, but her few students were mostly Apt and, however diligently they took notes, they could never grasp even the most basic tenets. It was a curiously futile existence, but she enlivened it by offering her skills as a doctor. Inapt kinden often fared far better under the care of an Inapt healer and, when it came to it, she could stitch a wound almost as well as any Collegiate surgeon.
She took Gerethwy’s long hand in both of hers and inspected the stumps where an exploding weapon had torn off two fingers. ‘Healing nicely,’ she said, ‘but it would heal far quicker if you’d not use the hand. It must hurt you, surely?’
He shrugged, something his bony hunchbacked frame was made for. ‘But there’s too much work. I’m due to drill with the Companies, and I need every moment I can get at the workshops. Nobody else will.’ He thrust the paper at her again, then dragged it back, recognizing the pointlessness of it. Gerethwy himself was a man who seemed to understand everything. He sat through her lectures as attentively as any Inapt scholar, seeming to take it all in, but then went off to the workshops to work on his devices. Her own masters had always muttered that the Woodlouse-kinden were a law unto themselves.
‘Rational machinery,’ Gerethwy insisted, and she recognized that doomed passion to explain from her own classes, in trying to hammer home some patently obvious point into skulls simply not designed for it. Now she was on the receiving end, and could only blink politely as his words gushed out — for he who had been so quiet and self-contained now had something he needed to speak of.
‘It’s the future,’ he insisted. ‘It’s very simple.’ His eyes were begging her to agree with him. ‘It’s all down to putting information in, and getting information out. It’s all in the gear trains that convert one to the other. You can do anything with it, if you just work out the gearing. Machines that can do things for themselves in response to what you tell them.’
‘As far as I’m aware, that works only indifferently with human beings,’ she remarked, yanking on his arm to stop him gesturing with it, then immediately feeling guilty as he winced. She began to apply fresh bandages, not that the healing wound really needed them any longer, but more as a mnemonic so that Gerethwy would remember he was hurt, and therefore take more care.
‘But, look. . as a doctor, surely you can. . It must look familiar?’
At last she squinted at the plans, seeing something resembling an explosion, a thousand little pieces scattered in random profusion.
She did not have to say it: he nodded resignedly. ‘Ten years ago, before anyone in Collegium had even thought of the idea, someone in the Empire — some mad genius — was already building rational machines of a complexity that nobody has matched since. This work. . it’s beautiful, perfect. And I can learn from it, duplicate it even. .’