Later, they had tried sending no scouts at all beyond clear view of the main army, and thus the force had crawled on and found bridges smashed, terrain spiked with caltrops, wells poisoned. The army’s progress, mere days from the camp, had slowed to a crawl. So they had started sending out scouts again.
This did not inspire confidence, and everyone knew General Malkan was spitting fire about it. Two days before they had captured a couple of men believed to be part of the bandit army, whereupon Malkan had personally overseen their questioning, racking them pitilessly until they divulged the location of a camp.
They found nothing there, of course. There was nothing that even suggested there had ever been a camp there.
The prisoners, before they died, had also said that there was a bandit king. He was a great magician, one of them had claimed. He knew everything, and could not be beaten in a fight. He could walk through walls and read minds.
Malkan had let it be known that there would be a reward of 400 gold Imperials for the man’s capture, or half that sum for his death. Nobody had been over-keen to claim it, though, save that perhaps the scouts who disappeared had let the bounty tempt them a step too far.
Whenever the bandits were seen, by men who survived to report back, they often wore repainted imperial armour, carrying Wasp swords and spears. Each squad that vanished was making the enemy a little stronger. Malkan had tried using Auxillians as scouts, reasoning that the Seventh could stand to lose some of its conscripted slave-soldiers more than its regular Wasp-kinden. When the Auxillians disappeared, it was rumoured that they were seen alive later amongst the bandits’ ranks. So that put a stop to that.
The sergeant pushed his way into the farmhouse, not wanting to be the first inside but not wanting to be far behind in case anything valuable had been left there. It was an unspoken rule that sergeants got the best of the loot. The officers were too proud to look and the common soldiers had to wait their turn for plunder.
‘You round the back!’ he called out. ‘I hope you’re keeping your eyes open.’
He used his dagger to lever open the drawers of a table, finding a few loose coins there. He took them without hesitation, pride being no issue in this job. One of his men was meanwhile clumping up the stairs.
As the army advanced on Sarn there would, of course, be richer pickings, places not already abandoned, extra prizes for the diligent sergeant. Women perhaps? The Sixth Army was bringing in a detachment of the Slaver Corps, and they would pay a finder’s fee, and not enquire too hard as to the captives’ condition.
In the next room there was a chest tucked in under the bed. The sergeant went over to it and found it locked. He knelt down beside it, something nagging at him. There was just room between case and lid to get the thick blade of his dagger in, and he began levering, trying to either snap the bar of the lock or pry the lock from the wood.
He grunted with the effort, and the thought came to him that the men out back had not acknowledged his earlier order. Bad discipline, that was. ‘Hey, out back!’ he called again.
Still silence.
He kept up the pressure on the chest, but something was beginning to worm its way into him.
‘On the roof!’ he called out, at the top of his voice. ‘Anything there?’
Silence.
He stared at the wall, continuing to lever, feeling something finally give within the chest. His heart was quickening, still hearing nothing from the floor above.
‘Soldier, report!’ he shouted out, not caring which of them should answer him.
None of them answered him.
The lid of the chest came free suddenly, and he lurched forward. He saw at once that he had, at last, struck lucky. The chest was full of plate, both gilded and silver, obviously too heavy for the hoarding farmer to take with him.
He saw himself reflected in the top plate, a hunched figure against its tarnished silver. There was a man behind him.
He reached down for his sword-hilt, moving his hand very slowly. His other hand opened, ready to sting. Without making any sudden move, or anything else to trigger an attack, he very carefully stood up and turned around.
The man before him was not much beyond a boy: a gold-skinned Dragonfly-kinden from the northern Commonweal, wearing a banded leather cuirass, bracers and greaves, and Spider silks beneath them. He had a simple Beetle-kinden helm, open-faced but for a three-bar visor, and he held a sword of Ant-manufacture loosely in one hand.
Beyond him, the sergeant saw the bodies of three of his own men. He had heard nothing of it. How could they…?
It did not matter, he realized. Kill this boy, dash outside and take to the sky. Back to the army, and bring a hundred of the light airborne back here as quick as you can.
‘Looks like it’s you and me then, son,’ he said, making a show of readying his sword whilst bringing his offhand up to loose a sting-shot.
‘No,’ said the Dragonfly simply, and just then the sergeant felt something slam into his back, punching him forwards so that the boy had to step back quickly to avoid his pitching body.
Salma looked down at the dead soldier, seeing the tiny nub of steel where the bolt had gone into his back. Outside the window, a Fly-kinden woman raised an open palm for him, the Wasp sign of defiance that had since become their adopted salute. There was a snapbow in her hand: such a useful weapon, for all that he did not understand it, especially since the more inventive of his people had found that, if they ‘undercranked’ it, whatever that was, it was as quiet as a crossbow. Still, most of their work was still down to knives and wires and shortswords.
I have gone from bandit to assassin, he reflected, but he could not afford moral scruples now. Too many people were depending on him.
Outside, he gathered his people, a mere dozen of them but most of them skilled stalkers and wilderness-runners. The one exception, and their one non-combatant, came up to him now and embraced him, as she did after every mission like this. She was Prized of Dragons, his love, his soul, the Butterfly-kinden with lambent, glowing skin who had brought him back from the gates of death. He knew that she hated bloodshed but she knew that he only did what he had to. They had established an equilibrium, and she would not let herself be left behind. They had been apart too long.
‘We should go and see how far the army’s got,’ he said. The Wasp advance would be moving into more broken territory, a land riddled with gullies and canyons that were thick with undergrowth and forest. He could no longer afford to just hit isolated bands of scouts, and must soon commence attacks against the leading edge of the army itself. After all, he had made a bargain with the Sarnesh, and he only hoped that they were keeping their part of it.
It was a long haul back to his own camp, but they were used to that, running and flying over terrain that was becoming as familiar as home to most of them. When they were close enough, Fly-kinden messengers began dropping down towards them, keeping pace with Salma and rattling off reports.
‘Have the Wasps found us here?’ he cut through them.
‘We’ve killed a patrol. Fifteen men,’ one of the Flies replied. ‘We’re packing up. We’ll be gone before they even miss them.’
Always the same, always on the move, dodging the blade of the enemy, and impossible to predict. His people were split up, linked only by the diligence of the Fly-kinden who ran the gauntlet in all weathers to keep each leader informed of the others. They left almost no trace: when they had broken their camp, their own woodsmen muddled and obliterated their tracks. The Wasps’ advance was blind. And now time to take advantage of that.