She thought he would go along with it, for a moment. She dearly wanted him to just nod along, as he always had done. That long face was swinging back and forth, though, the banded brow furrowing.
‘All of this just for that?’ he pressed her.
‘It’ll help: every little thing. .’ She should just be giving him orders, but he had been her friend longer than she had been his officer.
‘Straessa,’ he challenged her, still speaking in his quiet and gentle way, but now as if explaining something to a child, ‘two-thirds of the Wasp army can fly. And their artillery can hit us from well beyond any of this stuff. And their orthopters. .’ He looked like a man trying to work out whether he was caught in a nightmare or not. ‘We’re fighting yesterday’s war. What will all of this achieve?’
‘I said that, too,’ the Dragonfly woman, Gorenn, said, dropping down for more water. ‘Would they listen? They would not.’
She wasn’t the only one. Straessa had heard that Kymene, the leader of the Mynans in exile in Collegium, had got into a blazing row over that very same issue, having witnessed her own city fall to the Wasps, and of course half of Gorenn’s homeland had been Wasp-occupied for years. It seemed their voices counted for little.
‘They have ground troops,’ she insisted, listening to herself defend a decision of her superiors that she had not really agreed with in the first place. ‘You remember their infantry as well as I do.’ Better, probably, under the circumstances. ‘Their Spiderlands mob won’t be in the air, either. So it’ll help, and it’s better than not having it.’ There were a lot of soldiers listening in now, who had been slaving away in the sweat-harvesting sun for hours, and she was abruptly aware how tenuous the whole structure of Collegiate authority was, how much it relied on the consent of all concerned. ‘Look, you said you were reporting for duty,’ she pointed out, more harshly than she had intended.
He just looked at her, and she guessed he might walk away, but then he had grabbed a spade, fumbling with it a little, and set to work, driving at the earth as though it was a surrogate for all the things he could not just bludgeon into place. He was half a hand short, but he was stronger than he looked, and soon everyone was back to following orders. Thanks to me. Hooray for me.
‘Bookworm,’ said Gorenn, drawing the final bucket of water, and Straessa looked up to see a wobbling figure weave unsteadily through the air until it had dropped down on the ground in front of her. This was Jodry Drillen’s Fly-kinden secretary, who had taken to going about with a breastplate on, so heavy he made hard weather of even the short hop from the city walls. Does he just want to look like a soldier, or does he know something about the range of the Wasp engines?
‘Where’s your chief officer?’ he demanded, not so much of the Antspider as of everyone.
‘On the walls with the artillerists,’ Straessa told him. ‘You probably just passed him.’
The little man choked down his annoyance, smoothing his face over with his usual slightly superior expression. ‘Well, kindly go and get him and send him on to the War Council. They need everyone.’
We’re not even trying for a field battle, are we? Straessa wondered, but she remembered the last one quite well enough, most especially the way that all the courage, imagination, armament and righteousness of the Collegiate forces had been ground down and broken against the numbers and discipline of the Wasps. And that discipline is something they learn from the womb, most likely. It’s not something we can just work out from first principles. And then there had been the Sentinels, the great armoured wood-louse-shaped machines armed with leadshotters and rotary piercers, proof against just about anything that the Collegiates had been able to throw at them, including aerial bombardment. And has anyone got a clever plan for those, I wonder? Because, if so, nobody’s said what it is.
‘I’ll get him, don’t worry,’ she promised.
‘To the Prowess Forum, that’s where they’re meeting. And now’s not too soon,’ the Fly snapped at her, and then he was clawing for the air again, touching down a couple of times as he built up speed, before lurching away back towards the city. Easier for you to find him yourself, you overdressed little prig, Straessa reflected, but no doubt the Speaker’s vaunted secretary had better things to do. She glanced at Gerethwy, contemplating taking him along with her, but, looking at the fragile set of his face, she decided wretchedly that she couldn’t cope with him just then, so she left him digging.
The new chief officer of the Coldstone Company was indeed up on the walls. Straessa uncharitably decided that he was playing with artillery rather than doing the job he had been elected to but, truth be told, Madagnus had come to Collegium ten years ago as a very skilled artillerist, and had only been honing his skills since. Now the College was installing its new toys on the walls, and wrestling him away was likely to be a full-time job.
Like his assassinated predecessor, Madagnus was an Ant, although from some Spiderlands city nobody had ever heard of. He was a gaunt man on the wrong side of middle years, his skin the colour of rusting iron, and he disdained armour save for the Company-issue buff coat, which he left open down the front. In a crowd of Beetle-kinden artillerists he was easy to spot.
She hung back to watch for a moment, seeing only a disappointingly small machine, something looking like a ballista with no arms mounted on a big wooden box. The elderly Beetle demonstrating it was saying something about building up a magnetic differential between the two ends of the device, therefore she gathered that the box contained something in the way of a dwarf lightning engine. Which means I’m standing about three streets too close to it for comfort. She was no artificer, though, and the details passed her by. By then the demonstrator had slipped an all-metal bolt into the thing, and declared it ready for a test.
The box beneath the machine began not making a noise. The Antspider could tell it was not making a noise because it was making the stones beneath her feet vibrate with all the silence it was putting out.
‘Excuse me,’ she put in, feeling a sudden stab of fear. ‘Those are my soldiers out there beyond the walls.’
They all looked at her as though she was simple-minded, and the old man aiming the machine chuckled indulgently.
‘This is intended to counter the Wasp artillery, girl. At this elevation nobody within a mile of the city’s going to be in any danger.’
Straessa blinked at him, and at last the contraption began making an audible sound, a high whining just at the edge of hearing, which the old man clearly took as a good sign.
‘And. . loose!’ He got it wrong, said it again, and then, a second later, the bolt was simply gone. Straessa had the faint sense of very swift motion, and no more. Of the missile’s eventual impact there was no sign.
‘Of course we’ll tip the bolts with explosives when Wasps arrive,’ the old artillerist said cheerily, ‘but it’s all about magnets and the new steel and good old College know-how.’ And then the others were crowding in to study the device.
Straessa plucked at the sleeve of her chief officer’s coat as he tried to elbow his way in. ‘You’re wanted, Chief.’
The Ant looked annoyed at that, but he glanced off over the walls — east, towards the Wasps, she thought — then nodded, and they descended together.
She accompanied him as far as the Prowess Forum, for fear that he would end up back on the walls again if she left his side. The College’s old sparring ground had been decked out with banners, she saw, which meant that this gathering was not just another in the interminable series of committees that seemed to be Collegium’s answer to everything. This was it. The great minds of the city had come together, and were about to impart their wisdom to their martial servants.