‘They were invaluable,’ he said.
‘But they did not fight,’ the tactician noted.
‘I had other uses for them,’ Salma replied. He had spread the Sarnesh throughout his troops, and used their ability to speak mind to mind, to coordinate the various wings of his disparate force. Without them it was certain that some part of his attack would have been too late, too early, caught out or over-extended. He had thus made the Lorn detachment his strategic eyes and ears, giving orders and receiving reports to dozens of scattered detachments.
‘Sarn requires your services once again,’ the tactician informed him. The other commanders were watching closely. This was not a council of war, but the officers of the Sarnesh main army gathered to meet with him.
‘We have our agreement,’ he replied, with an easiness he did not feel.
‘We wish to meet them on the field,’ she then told him. ‘The Royal Court has determined that a field battle represents our best chance of victory.’
‘Despite the Battle of the Rails?’ Salma asked, seeing the same question in other faces around the table.
‘We are better prepared now that we have snapbows of our own,’ the tactician said. ‘Even so, we recognize the risk. A field battle will at least allow us to retreat to the city walls if all goes badly. However…’
Salma waited for her words, already putting together in his mind what would come next.
‘However,’ the Sarnesh woman continued, ‘we will be leaving our city poorly defended, if we commit the full force that this venture requires. If matters do not fall out according to plan,’ she explained, and perhaps there was the tiniest tremor in her voice that translated, if we all die on the field, ‘our people – and yours – will have no protection save the walls and defences of Sarn itself. We have heard from our ally of Tark,’ she picked out Parops. ‘Wasp-kinden are no strangers to breaking sieges. In order to risk a proper confrontation with the Empire, we require an assurance that our walls can stand, at least until a relieving force can be brought home.’
Salma nodded slowly. He might not understand the mechanics of the machines involved, but he knew what a siege entailed. He had seen that already at Tark. ‘And so, before you meet them, you want their… what, their…?’
‘Artillery,’ Parops intervened in a clipped tone. ‘A strike against their siege engines.’
‘Indeed,’ the tactician confirmed. ‘We can provide material and artificers to assist, but your own force has the greatest chance of achieving this end.’
Salma looked around the table, from face to face: Parops was grimacing, not liking the odds; the two Ants beside him exchanged uneasy glances; Cydrae the Mantis gave him a single, respectful nod.
Oh, Stenwold, if you could see me now.
‘I must trust that your artificers will know what to destroy and how to do it,’ Salma replied finally. ‘I confess that I know nothing of that skill. I can get them in, though, with a swift, sudden strike. That I can do.’
‘We understand what it is we are asking of you.’
‘So long as you understand what I have asked of you.’
The tactician, and by extension the city-state of Sarn, nodded. ‘What you ask shall be accomplished in every particular, so long as Sarn survives to undertake it.’
He began calculating, on the hard ride back, his mind working through days and numbers. Are we ready for this? If we are not ready for this, what then? His special project, this meant, which had drained Sarn and its surrounding countryside of riding beasts. His people had been training since the spring, or at least every one of them with any aptitude for the saddle.
I am trying to fight a Commonweal war with Lowlands soldiers. That was not quite true, for the war he was fighting had never been fought before in anyone’s histories.
Phalmes greeted him as he rode into camp. The Mynan looked as though he had not slept much since Salma had seen him last, for the Wasp advance was forcing Salma’s irregulars to fall back before them, still harassing scouts, setting traps and deadfalls for their automotives, and never letting the Wasps forget about them or think themselves safe.
There must have been something in Salma’s face, because Phalmes bared his teeth unhappily as soon as he saw his leader.
‘That bad, is it?’ he asked. ‘They’ve cut us loose?’
‘Not quite,’ Salma said. ‘Sarn is on its way. They intend a field battle.’
‘Cursed Ants never learn,’ spat Phalmes. ‘Another field battle.’
Salma shrugged. ‘I’m not going to try to teach warfare to the Ant-kinden. They and we both need Sarn to remain safe, whilst the city’s army is abroad.’
‘I don’t like this.’
‘I don’t think anyone does,’ Salma told him. ‘I can see the logic, though.’
‘That means we’re where the metal meets, aren’t we?’
‘We have been that way for some time,’ Salma sighed. ‘You’ve scouted the army, yes? Its disposition, how it’s broken up?’
Phalmes nodded. ‘You want me to get the lads together for this?’
‘It might be best.’
‘The lads’ were Salma’s officers, such as they were: as ragged a band as his army itself was, without uniform or discipline, and yet they were devoted to him. More, they were devoted to what he was trying to achieve. Phalmes and the Fly-kinden woman Chefre had been with him from the start, as had a Maynesh Ant-kinden who had been one of Phalmes’ bandits. There was a laconic Mantis-kinden hunter, hooded always, who was incomparable with his bow, which was six and a half feet from point to point. Morleyr, the hulking Mole Cricket, was an Auxillian deserter, just as Phalmes himself was, and had been crucial to their land-engineering, his people carving out trenches and pits underground with their Art and their bare hands. There was an elderly Fly-kinden who was a skilled artificer, and a Beetle-Ant halfbreed from Helleron who was a solid infantry officer. To this jumbled rag-bag Salma had added the Sarnesh officer in charge of the Lorn detachment, and now the leader of the artificers that the King of Sarn had sent them.
He explained it all to them as concisely as possible. In fact there was not much to say. We must destroy their machines of war. He listened to them talk, one speaking over the other, ideas being hammered out, picked over, discarded. This was his governance: the melting pot of thought that he could skim from. He ladled out the best of it: the diversion, the reserve, the sudden strike, the aerial attack.
‘Their general will expect something like this,’ Chefre warned. ‘He’s no fool.’
‘That’s only because it is the strategy that we must accomplish,’ Salma told her. ‘And we shall.’
Eleven
I’m getting too old for this.
The old Scorpion-kinden known as Hokiak paused a moment, leaning on his stick, his other hand, with the thumb-claw broken off, resting on the handle of the door to his back room. He could just turn away, he knew. This was not a matter of profit. He had been in the game long enough to profit from anyone and everyone, and no man had ever accused him of being partisan.
Business had not been good recently. The Wasps knew that there was constant trouble on the streets, even if Kymene’s resistance groups kept eluding them. The response of the new governor was to employ an iron hand. Where old man Ulther would have set traps to lure them in, the new man’s response was almost panicky, and made more enemies than it intimidated.
The new man in question was Colonel Latvoc, who Hokiak knew for a fact was Rekef Inlander. Latvoc was not a man with any interest in Myna, and he made that clear in his every move. He did not hold audiences, he did not consult with Consortium merchants, but instead remained holed up in the palace like a man waiting for a siege. That was something that Hokiak expected Kymene’s people would eventually oblige him in.