The opposing lines were closing, the telescope told her. She felt Sperra and Achaeos take wing to drop down from the automotive, and realized that the first casualties were being carried in, but she could not stop watching. There was crossbow- and sting-shot being exchanged all the way down the line, with the Wasps taking the worst of it. Their shields were smaller, and they lacked the Ants’ great advantage that every man was looking out for all the others as the enemy shot came in.
The Ants at the rear of the advance suddenly reversed face, raising their shields against incoming airborne that had swung round behind them, and the crossbow quarrels started sleeting up again. Then the Mantis-kinden who had been holding back were suddenly there, dashing across the ground more swiftly than Che could believe, or leaping into the air with a flare of wings, and the Wasp light airborne broke as the Mantids tore through it, and individual Wasps were darting away, trying to get back to their own side.
She dragged her attention to the lines, and caught them just as they clashed, the Sarnesh suddenly upping their pace to a thundering run, hundreds of armoured men throwing their weight behind their shields and crashing into the Wasp line. Some fell to the Wasps’ levelled spears but their shields managed to turn most of the spearheads or even shattered the shafts, and then they were smashing into the Wasp line, swords stabbing frenziedly, and to either side the second-rank formations were deploying, turning the line of the Ant army into a pincering curve.
Another heliopter — and she thought it might be the last — trailed fire over the Ant ranks, and the Wasps were fighting furiously, their line buckling slowly but hundreds of their soldiers coursing back and forth over the heads of the enemy, lancing down with their stings at any visible weak point. The telescope was revealing too much to her now, all the bloody work that war was, dripping red swords and faces twisted in pain. More and more Wasps were rushing into the fray to shore their line up, until their full numbers had been committed and they could stop the Ants from encircling them. The warriors of the Ancient League were scattering all over the field in knots of ten or twenty, launching sudden attacks against the Wasp flanks and then falling back, or sending arrows high to kill unsuspecting soldiers in the centre of the Wasp lines. Che sensed that all that had gone before was but prologue to this moment, the soldiers of both sides now dying in their hundreds. In the air were the remaining flying machines, surrounded by the Wasp light airborne that latched onto them and cut at their cables and controls, and also by giant insects — the Wasps’ own namesakes — that were urged on by unarmoured riders brandishing lances and crossbows.
She heard the roaring of the automotives even over all the clamour of battle, and then the Ant lines were splitting, as if by some pre-planned clockwork mechanism. A lead-shot strike caved in the front of one vehicle, which began to gout smoke. Another shot punched into the packed Ant lines, smashing through the centre of one formation, and then raking the side of the one immediately behind, leaving three dozen dead at a stroke. The Wasps surged forwards at some points, held back at others, and the automotives drove on like hammers, nailbows shooting until they jammed, and the Wasp line was broken like porcelain, all its unity lost.
In the centre the remaining sentinels had formed a fighting square and were contesting to the last with pike and shield, seeming nigh-invulnerable in their all-encasing armour, but there were Wasps fleeing backwards all along the line, getting in each other’s way, even fighting with one another, and the Ant advance continued as steadily as before.
Thirty-Seven
The city was running short of places to house the wounded, let alone the dead. Where the messenger took Stenwold was one of the College’s workshops where apprentice artificers had toiled and studied in happier times. Into a small room beyond a long hall that was almost carpeted with the ice-packed dead they had brought the body, and laid it on an artificer’s work table. This unknowingly appropriate gesture affected Stenwold more deeply than anything else.
They had not been able to get Scuto’s body to lie flat, of course, what with the hunchback and the man’s other deformities, and so it was resting on its side, looking as awkward in death as life, propped up on its own projections that had scratched long lines into the wood as they had worked him off the stretcher. Amidst all those spines and thorns and burned, blistered skin, they had not cared to remove the three quills of crossbow bolts that were sunk deep into Scuto’s flesh. Stenwold was sure that they had been the final death of him, and not the grenade that had scorched across his nut-brown skin and smashed one of his hands. Scuto had always been a tough one.
His mockery of a face, that had resembled nothing more than a grotesque puppet carved idly from wood, was locked in a grimace that showed all his hooked teeth. Stenwold put a hand out to close his friend’s eyes, but managed only to spike himself on one of the Thorn Bug’s points.
Scuto had been pulled from the Sarnesh automotive that had blocked the breach, and Stenwold realized that if he had stayed a moment longer he would have witnessed it himself. Scuto had been dead before they had ever drawn him out, though. There would have been no last words, no farewells. Stenwold understood that only one of the Sarnesh Lorn detachment had survived, and she was not expected to live long despite all the doctors were doing for her.
‘Why?’ Stenwold asked. ‘Why did he come?’ He looked up at Balkus, and saw the man’s normally solid features twisted in grief. Balkus, he recalled, had known Scuto a long time, at least as long as Stenwold himself.
‘He always looked after his people,’ the Ant said. ‘He must have heard about the siege here. We were his people, Stenwold — you and me. Waste and blast the bloody man. Did he think I couldn’t take care of myself?’ Balkus’s fist slammed down on the table. ‘You stupid, stupid bastard! What did you think you were doing?’ There were no tears on the big man’s face, but his voice, the utter loss in his voice, more than made up for it. Ants grieved privately and mind to mind, Stenwold knew, but Balkus had been away from his own kind for many years, had forgotten the touch of their company, and his pain came out in words just like any other kinden’s.
Stenwold tried to picture those last terrible moments in the automotive, the desperate fighting hand to hand, the grenade’s explosion, the driver trying to keep control of the racing vehicle, trying to get it within the walls of Collegium, past the Vekken soldiers and their crossbows.
It came to him that for once he had done the right thing in sending all the others off: Che and Achaeos, Tisamon and Tynisa. For once, at least, where Stenwold now was had become the place not to be.
I am running out of friends. Scuto was the oldest and the closest of the dead, but he had Kymon on his conscience too, and poor Doctor Nicrephos, and so many of the faces that he had been introduced to so recently, only to have them snuffed out in the fighting — people like Joyless Greatly, like Cabre who had manned the harbour defences, or Tseitus in his submersible.
‘What time is it?’ he called out. ‘Anyone know?’ ‘I think I heard the third clock not long ago,’ Arianna said. She had been keeping prudently out of the way, by the door.
‘Until dawn, then?’
‘Two hours and half an hour more, Stenwold. No more.’
‘We should try for at least some sleep,’ he said tiredly.
‘The Vekken will be back with the dawn, and they have
made a breach now. I do not know how we can keep them
out of it.’
‘I’m not going to sleep, not tonight,’ Balkus said flatly. ‘I’m going to go to that breach, and when they come I’m going to kill every bloody Vekken I see. And when I run out of ammunition I’ll use my sword, and when that breaks I’ll use my fists.’ He was a stranger then, broad-shouldered and threatening, an Ant setting about doing what Ants were best at, which was killing their own kind.