She began to sing, not quite after the style that the Nethyen had given voice to, but something akin to it, and with words that Tynisa could now follow. Maure sang with her eyes closed, her frame as still as when she had been seeking out Che.
‘Take wing, take wing,
Between the trees the horn is calling
It summons you
It summons you to your great battle
Look not back
For we shall come to you
And we shall bear your name
Until the day we meet once more
Take wing, take wing
The gates of night are open
And we shall bear your deeds
That they shall be known evermore
Go, warrior,
Go, great hunter,
Take wing, take wing.’
Maure paused, opening those strange, iris-less eyes. Other than the crackling of the flames, the forest was utterly stilled. Tynisa saw the necromancer’s gaze shift, focusing on something that she herself could not discern, or perhaps just the smoke that shrouded the fire and twisted upwards towards the night sky.
A Mantis woman approached Maure, and Thalric and Amnon were both instantly on edge once more, but Tynisa put a hand up to calm them. What was offered was not sharp steel, but a cup.
Then the Mantis singers started up again, their song subtly different but still wordless, and something invisible that was all around them had been inverted like a coat, so that the strangers — the trespassers — were somehow in now, their passage bought by Maure’s song, or by Tynisa’s badge, or something.
When the chitin cup came to Tynisa, she drank deeply, and knew it for mead mixed with blood and bitter herbs — something distantly akin to the draught they had offered her when she earned her Weaponsmaster’s brooch. It did not come to the two Apt men, and she sensed that was for the best. She could already feel her awareness shifting — in some ways sharpening, in others blurring — but who knew how Thalric and Amnon might take that? She glanced back towards them, seeing that the Wasp was plainly ill at ease, still suspecting a trap, a betrayal. But why not, for that is the meat he has served others with for so long. Now he is slower to trust than the Nethyen themselves. Amnon had sat down before the fire, though, and she saw tears glinting on his cheeks. Maure’s song had included them all in this wake, and so it had included their dead also. Amnon stared into the flames and mourned his lost Praeda, as perhaps he had never been able to, before now.
And I? She had done her mourning back in the Commonweal. No weeping left for her now. The lack of it felt hollow within her, and worse was that she shared her dry eyes with Thalric. If he ever had any tears, they were burned out of him long before we first met.
Then the Wasp had twitched back, a movement sharp enough for half the Mantids near him to be instantly on their guard. His cry was lost amid the song but Tynisa read it on his lips.
‘Che!’
Twenty-Three
‘Do you see it?’ Bergild demanded, the first words spoken in some time. Oski and Ernain, cramped together in a space not intended for two, had been bearing their discomfort stoically as the pilot followed the Red Watch machine towards wherever it was that they were going. Now, apparently, they had arrived.
Oski tried to crane past Ernain’s shoulder to look down the length of the crawlspace leading to the cockpit, but could make out nothing, and said so loudly.
‘I’ll fly past,’ Bergild called back. ‘Get the side hatch open.’
‘Seriously?’
‘You’ve both got your wings, haven’t you? Just open the cursed thing. You’re going to want to see this!’
‘Don’t be so pissing cryptic, woman,’ the Fly snapped, but Ernain was already fumbling at the catch, bracing himself against the walls to resist the sudden rush of wind trying to drag them both out.
For a moment Oski could see nothing but sky — then Bergild banked, and something incredible slid into view.
It was an airship, and the base model was one he knew well. This was a big cargo-hauler that had already seen service for twenty years and more, not unlike the vessels that were now attempting to keep the Second supplied. When the original had been constructed, its designers had cared for little save storage space and not having it fall out of the air: certainly a more innocent age of warfare.
Some fool had been busy with this one, though. The broad and rounded boat-like hull had been attacked savagely, and now there were rows and rows of circular hatches studding the vessel’s exterior so densely that the entire ship looked as though it had been hobnailed. Bergild let their craft drift closer, and Oski had a fine view of them, hundreds of sealed ports each perhaps three feet across. The effect was ugly and warlike and dangerous. And useless.
‘Oh, balls,’ the Fly engineer cursed. ‘Oh, piss on it. General Tynan’s going to have a fit.’
‘It’s a city-breaker, it must be.’ Bergild had plainly been thinking along the same lines. ‘Bomb-chutes. . or modified leadshotters, maybe. You could pulverize whole districts with the thing.’
‘If you got it to fly over them,’ said Oski in a horrified whisper. ‘Oh, sod me, some bright spark’s spent fifty thousand in gold solving the wrong problem!’
‘One look at that thing and the Collegiate fliers’ll be all over it. Or they’ll be above it, rather, shredding the airbag and loosing bombs,’ the pilot agreed. ‘I don’t see any of those hatches pointing up, after all. And there’s no way my people can protect this thing. It’s huge, and the Collegiates’ll see it just like we do. Nothing we can do will pull them off it until they’ve dropped the cursed thing right in Tynan’s lap.’
‘The stupid bastards,’ Oski swore. ‘Is that. . Where’s our boy gone? Is that his craft landed on their top deck there?’
‘It is.’
‘Well we better go down after him, and see if someone can tell us just what the hell they’re playing at.’
Landing on the gondola of an airship was tricky, but nothing to tax Bergild’s skills, and she soon had them down neatly, facing the Red Watch Farsphex in a somewhat confrontational way. The three of them extricated themselves from their vessel and took a moment to look about the deck.
Oski noted three distinct divisions of crew, none of which brought him much joy. There were a half-dozen Beetle-kinden who looked like Consortium aviators, men more used to cargo runs than any sort of fighting. Overseeing them were a trio of Wasps with Red Watch badges, all of whom were regarding the newcomers coldly. Lastly, Captain Nistic had gone to join a gang of men who looked every bit as wild as he did. Their gaze was scarcely more friendly than that of the Red Watch men, and the amused comments they muttered to one another were plainly at the expense of their visitors.
Oski found the other two instinctively drawing close to him, because this flying monstrosity did not seem like a healthy place to be. Still, I’m the chief of Engineers for the Second Army and I don’t care how big a secret this idiocy is supposed to be. I’m betting they can’t afford to just do away with me. He was not a gambling man by nature, but it was time to start measuring rank badges with these men, and to make them forget that he was only half their size.
‘Who’s in charge here?’ he demanded.
Nistic took a few steps forward, looking down at the Fly-kinden as though he was some species of prey not usually worth the hunting, but it was the Red Watch lieutenant who spoke.
‘Your general has forced us to allow your presence here, Major, but this is a classified matter. All you need to do is to go back and report to him that help is on its way.’