In these moments — in these last moments, she reckoned — the Empire had taught her something new about fighting in the air.
A Stormreader wheeled past, spinning out of control with its wings still powering, a hornet clinging to its underside, mindlessly jamming its sting into the machine’s guts. A second Collegiate machine, cutting ahead of her, simply crashed into another insect, the orthopter’s blurred wings cutting the creature in two but faltering a moment later, one vane half smashed by the collision.
Taki tried for height, catching a brief glimpse of an Imperial Spearflight weaving desperately through the host — not being attacked but still barely able to navigate the thronging sky.
Got to get clear. She knew she could outrun these creatures with ease, but she was boxed in, insects diving on her from every side, almost brushing wingtips with her as the Esca slipped by them. She had given up trying for targets. Her world had condensed into trying to survive the next half-minute intact.
Bergild kept trying to get above, into clear air, but there were just too many insects clogging the heavens, more appearing everywhere she tried to fly. The sky about her became a chaos of horrific sights: everywhere she tried to fly she saw Collegiate machines locked in combat with the hornets — sometimes two or three of the creatures clinging to a single flier, chewing, grappling, stabbing, heedless that their simple weight was dragging the machines out of the sky.
We can’t fight in this — get on the ground. But her crystal-clear link with the other pilots was cluttered by that surrounding buzz, the deep fear it provoked coming back to her from every one of her pilots. They were losing their coordinated picture of the battle, and losing control.
Then one of her own pilots was screaming, because a hornet had slammed into his Farsphex and had thrust its jagged mandibles through the glass of the cockpit, and perhaps the engineers had stinted on the foul-smelling paint or perhaps the hornets were just mad now, and jealous of anything else in the sky.
Down! she cried out mind to mind, and just hoped the Spearflight pilots and the others would register her intentions. Down, all! Then she followed her own advice, dropping as fast as she could and hoping nothing would get in her way.
She had already lost perhaps one in three of her pilots to the superior numbers of the Stormreaders, and who knew how many she would now lose to the Empire’s own secret weapon. Was this the plan? Whose stupid plan was this?
Then she had broken through into a clear sky, and was dropping, for once in her aviator’s career wanting nothing more than the safety of the ground.
In the moment before impact, Taki had simply lost track of everything, her concentration funnelling down to encompass only the sky directly ahead, trying to turn back for Collegium and hoping that her comrades would reach the same conclusion. This is not a fight we can win. This is barely even a fight.
Then something slammed into her, skewing the Esca sideways in the air, its weight suddenly monstrously loaded to the right, and she realized that one of them had her.
Two hooked claws scratched across the cockpit, and she was limping sideways across the sky, still somehow keeping height and her aircraft’s wings working freely. But then the hornet must have rammed its sting home, because something slapped the Esca hard enough to make Taki’s teeth rattle, and in the wake of that she had no steering at all and the Esca was making a grand slow circle that was going to bring it round into. .
Into the side of the airship. She had come all the way back.
She wrestled with the stick, but it was loose, all control severed. Then there was a splintering, grinding sound from behind her, and she knew that the beast had started chewing away with its jaws, blindly tearing through wood and metal to get at whatever was inside.
She was inside.
Despite all of this, and her very rational realization that she was dead in any number of ways if she stayed put, it still took supreme willpower to reach for the cockpit release. Even then she had to fight: the single barbed foot the insect had grappled to it was keeping it closed, and she had to put both hands up and push with all her strength to prise it open far enough to let her out.
Out into that busy, hungry sky, and whilst the swarm should not have been able to take on orthopters the way it was doing, it was most certainly well suited for taking living things on the wing.
The side of the airship’s gondola was coming up fast.
With a cry of despair over the loss of her flier, the loss of the battle and her fellows, but most of all out of sheer terror, she squeezed out of the cockpit and abandoned her machine, tumbling over and over into that terrible sky.
Twenty-Six
Esmail had already worked out that they would have been having a very different time of it here without her. These grey woods, the inner forest, this was not abandoned empty ground. Things dwelt here. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that things were remembered here. The landscape was composed of knots and snarls of memory — particularly the memory of Argastos that slowly decayed year to year, like one of the Mantids’ idols, and yet never went away.
The three Pioneers, who should have been breaking new ground ahead of the rest, had seen it too. They clung close to the Empress, divining correctly that if they strayed from her notice, they might never get the chance to stray back.
Esmail had seen a great mantis stalking between the trees, its carapace scarred and battered, its eyes like intricate stained glass. He had seen the rushing shadows of Mantis-kinden all clad in ancient armour — war bands of centuries past, perhaps Argastos’s own followers from when he drew breath and knew the sun. There were others, too, barely glimpsed, and Esmail knew that they must be those unfortunates who had found their way here in more recent times — who had slipped in so easily, without needing even a blood sacrifice to open the way, back before the Mantis-kinden were riled up and the forest suddenly bristled with hostility. He had seen Moths and Ants, Collegiate Beetles, Imperial soldiers: the forest’s many victims, still caught in image, here in the web of Argastos’s thoughts. Perhaps being killed by the Nethyen without would have been a mercy.
And will they see us here, too, those who come after us? If the Empress fails, I am afraid they will.
And that was another reason to stay his hand, should he ever find that combination of courage and motivation to carry out his Tharen orders. For, if he killed her here, there was no guarantee that he was magician enough to find his own way out.
Gjegevey had been leading the way. Seda had more raw power in one fingertip than the old slave had in his whole weary body, but he was wise. He had a skill and application that only years of experience could bring, and he had been guiding them through this tormented forest with patience and care, step by step. Now he leant on his staff, looking well past his time to die, plainly exhausted beyond all measure. Seda’s hands twitched angrily, and Esmail thought she would berate the haggard old man, but she visibly restrained herself, and something unfamiliar and awkward touched her expression. Seen on the face of the Empress of the Wasps, it was hard to recognize anything approaching compassion.
‘Rest now,’ she ordered, and Gjegevey sank down gratefully. Esmail knew he would need help getting up, too. Since entering the forest they had been travelling for so long that it seemed they should have passed every tree within it at least twice. Here, in this bleak place, where the sun never quite rose, the air was chill enough to leach away a body’s warmth and Gjegevey had been funnelling all his fading strength into finding a path for his mistress. He was indeed old, but old was a feeble word compared to just how many years the man must have resting on his shoulders. Esmail knew little of the Woodlouse-kinden save that they had been a Power once, and had declined irrevocably centuries before ever a Beetle thought of revolution. With a jolt, some more of the old histories came to him: had it been the war with the Worm that had done for Gjegevey’s people, left them the hermits and recluses that they now were? And did that mean the ancient magician had his own reasons for being here?