‘Oh, more than that,’ te Mosca stated. ‘They’ve roused every Inapt healer they can get their hands on, so it’d better be more than that. . See there.’ She pointed to where the reinforcements were arriving.
Mantis-kinden of the Felyal, they saw: the refugees that had started to take up residence after the Second Army ousted them in the first war, and had only grown more numerous as the Empire trampled over their forest home, tore up their trees and burned their holds. Here they came, tall and lean and sour-faced, with bow and spear, rapier and metal claw. Some had beautifully crafted carapace mail, and others wore chitin or leather, or just an arming jacket. Many had no armour at all. And they were many, a column snaking right back into the city, marching soft-footed to stand before the corpse of the Amphiophos, as though they were about to storm it.
‘Oh,’ said Straessa quietly, as they kept coming — and ‘Oh,’ again, realizing slightly before the rest just what was going on. ‘No. .’
And the Felyen continued to arrive, every single one of them.
Stenwold had already taken his stand where the steps ascended to the churned debris that had been the Amphiophos’s main entrance, with Akkestrae beside him. Seeing the Mantids arrive in such numbers, and with so little sound, he could not suppress a shiver. They were so grave, so solemn, a sight out of another time. And like nothing Collegium has known since the Bad Old Days, and perhaps not even then.
So many warriors, he thought. Every Felyen who can bear a sword must be gathering for their piece of the Empire.
And then he saw it, too, and his breath stilled as the Felyen continued to march in and assemble. He looked from face to face, those stern and unforgiving masks — but such faces. He had not known, before this. He had not understood.
The tail end of their procession was now trailing in, and he took them in by the lamplight and by the moon: the Mantids of the Felyal — their surviving warriors, yes, but more. He saw old men and women who must have seven decades to their names, grown thin and haggard with age even for a long-lived kinden. He saw children — fourteen years, twelve. . And the more he looked, the younger they seemed to be: a boy of ten with a short spear in his hands, a girl of eight clutching a little hunting bow, a child of five with a dagger, her expression just a clouded mirror of the adults’. He saw women with babies in arms, or slung across their backs, and those women were armed as warriors.
He saw the Felyen, all of them, and the sorrow of it was laid out plain. The very young, the very old, they were in the majority. Those men and women of true fighting age were barely two or three in ten, such had been their losses to the Wasps.
‘This was not what we spoke about,’ he told Akkestrae, hearing his voice shake slightly.
‘This was what I spoke about,’ she told him impassively. ‘What you chose to hear is your own business.’
‘No, wait. . you’re mad,’ he insisted. ‘You can’t send this against the Empire! What can you possibly hope to accomplish?’
Her face, that glass-calm Mantis facade, regarding him coolly. ‘You know exactly what.’
‘But we’ve made you welcome here — don’t you trust us to look after them? Why. .?’ Stenwold was aware that his voice was carrying across the square, but he decided he did not care.
For a moment, Akkestrae’s expression remained fixed, but then he saw the cracks appear, fractures widening and widening until something raw gaped at him, like an unhealable wound. ‘Because there is no place for us in your cursed city!’ she yelled, screaming the words into his face. ‘Because you have taken our time from us! Because your Apt world has written itself over ours, as if we had never been! And there is nowhere left under the sun that your kind, you Apt, have not corrupted with your industry.’ That last word she spat out like an insult, leaving her drained and swaying. ‘And we have come to the end,’ she said more quietly, ‘and we seek only that end, which is to fight and die as we were meant to do — all of us. All my people, Maker. If your people may derive some profit from it, then so be it, but know that you have already won. You have made a world we cannot live in. You have made a memory of us, at last. And soon not even that.’
‘But I. . the Wasps. .’ Stenwold stammered. ‘We didn’t burn your forests-’
‘I would rather face the blades of the Empire than Collegium’s good intentions,’ she replied flatly. ‘At least the Wasps understand that their progress destroys. Now bring down your machines, and take us to the fight.’
Eighteen
Tynisa was almost running, weaving her way through the dense trees. She could smell smoke from ahead, although the fighting that Che had somehow divined must be over, for there was no sound of it now. That said ambush to her, and she felt the forest all around her, reaching her by channels other than mere eyes and ears. Something in this place had accepted her, tasting the blood in her that came from her father Tisamon. She was going native.
None of the others could move as she could through this place — certainly not the Sarnesh, and not her companions either. The Bartrer woman was hopeless, Thalric barely better, and Che, though she had an ease here that surprised Tynisa, was yet no scout. This was why the Sarnesh employed men like Zerro, and now she had taken on his mantle.
She would not let herself be yoked to the Ants, though, for all that they kept insisting she stay in sight. How could she scout the way ahead with them dragging virtually at her heels? Instead, she had chosen her deputies, the two of her companions least clumsy and most at home here, and let them trail her, ready to send word back if the worst came to the worst.
When she stopped to listen, as she did now, she felt the taut pain of her ravaged hip settle back on to her like stiff clothes, enough to nearly cripple her. When she gave in to sleep, the pain was a deep throb in her side, chastising her for having treated it as though it was not there. But whenever she moved through the trees, or drew blade to fight, it was gone. The mystery of her discipline sustained her, just as she had witnessed her father receive wounds enough for a half-dozen men and still hunt down his victim.
And then he died, and I may die, too, if I keep pushing my limits. But feeling alive and free like this was addictive, while being trapped in her wounded body was unbearable. Better life like this, for whatever time I have, than a long death.
She glanced back to seek out her shadows. After a moment she located Terastos, ten yards back, kneeling with his shoulder against a tree. The Moth had a surprising tenacity about him, bearing his stingshot wound without complaint, and he had shown an aptitude for the wilds that Tynisa would not have guessed at. He was quiet, too, and not averse to hard work — quite different to the charlatan stereotype the Collegiates were fond of.
Further back — somewhere within Terastos’s sight — would be the halfbreed Maure, a woman more than used to roughing it in the Commonweal, and Tynisa’s next best choice as least useless scout.
With rapier in hand, she scanned the close-grown forest ahead. She could see smoke hazing the air, and yet still no sign of an enemy. They had been lost in this forest for days now. Lost, because wherever Che was trying to reach seemed utterly mythical, to the extent that Tynisa sometimes wondered if they were moving in circles. And yet, for all that they seemed to just turn left and left and left again, the forest never looked quite the same. It was as though they were staying still while their surroundings flowed and transformed around them. And still Che was searching, but not finding.