Axrad pulled up at the very last moment, pulled up late because he had been so determined to bring her down that he had not realized he had already succeeded.
She was nearly caught between the two craft. Only a Fly-kinden’s swift reflexes saved her as the empty, abused Esca Volenti drove straight into Axrad’s flier, their wings snarling instantly, the Esca’s nose snapping on Axrad’s underside and then breaking through.
She did not notice if he was able to fly clear, as the two dying ships span madly down towards the earth.
She had a dagger, and the Starnest, which blotted out her sky, was very large, but even so it was all right because someone else had a larger blade than that.
She should have known that Hawkmoth, the old pirate, had preyed on airships before. Who knew how many he had assailed in the sky, and sent plummeting down to the Exalsee, where his shipbound confederates would be waiting? Over the Starnest’s taut canvas the Bleakness dipped low, a black and evil-looking flying machine, armoured and squat, with all the natural grace of a scarab in flight. From beneath it had unsheathed two curving blades, each the length of a man. There was no subtlety in it. The pirate simply threw his machine against the airbag and unseamed it, from stern to fore, with twin gashes seventy feet from end to end.
At first it seemed that even this had not affected this pride of the Wasp airforce, but then the difference told, the lighter gas venting out from the violated compartments, until the colossal bulk of the Starnest was dipping, sagging, and then falling down upon the city it had been sent to conquer.
He would not come to bed. Stenwold, instead, sat at his desk with reports and maps and tried to make sense of it.
‘You must sleep, surely,’ Arianna urged him. She was standing at the door to his study, wrapped in a robe of his that was vastly too large for her. ‘Stenwold, they will want you on the walls again tomorrow.’
‘And I shall go,’ he said. She noticed his hands were shaking. ‘Look at all this they have given me. The curse of this city is paper! We have a war on, and every man feels he must put it down on paper for me to read!’
‘Then don’t read them,’ she said. ‘They’ll tell you nothing you don’t already know.’
‘But there might be something,’ he said. ‘How could I go to the wall tomorrow knowing that I might have missed the one thing, the flaw, the gap…’ His fists clenched.
She approached him, put her hands on his shoulders. ‘Stenwold, please, come to bed.’
His whole frame was shaking. ‘What am I going to do?’ he demanded.
‘Sten… We fought the Vekken, didn’t we?’
‘The Empire aren’t the Vekken. Their general even told me as much, but I didn’t listen. The Vekken never hit us this hard so soon. The Vekken had not so many men who could just leap over our walls. I have lost…’ He choked. ‘I have lost one man in three of my own command already, after just two days’ full fighting. We cannot hold them.’
‘But-’
He blundered up out of his chair with a cry of rage and anguish, turning the entire desk over, scattering papers across the room. His face was distraught. She recoiled from him and he smashed a fist into a wall.
‘In the Amphiophos they are already talking about surrender,’ he said, staring at the plaster where he had just cracked it. ‘They are already saying that we only managed to hold off the Vekken until Teornis came to save us. They say that, and it is true. But who will save us this time, Arianna? We have spread this war across all the enemy. We… I made sure that the wasps would fight on all fronts: here, Sarn, the Commonweal, Solarno, the Spider-lands. Now we pay the cost! Who do we call on when our own walls shake? There is nobody!’
He had resumed a mask of calm, but she saw him shaking still behind it.
‘There must be a way,’ he whispered. ‘Somewhere, there must be a way… But we are losing our air defences. We are a kinden never meant to fly, and our Mantids, our Dragonflies, our flying machines – the Wasps are destroying them. It is Tark all over again. Unless we surrender soon they will burn my city, Arianna. Collegium represents five hundred years of learning, of progress, and they will burn it.’
She came to him, putting her arms around him. ‘You’ll think of something.’
He shuddered. ‘I have no more thoughts. My mind is hollow. Who can I turn to? Who do I have left? I sent Balkus to Sarn; Tisamon is fled, and Tynisa after him; Che is in Tharn, they tell me! Even Thalric, damn him, is gone! Any one of them might have the secret that would save us, but they’re not here! Look at me, Arianna. I am a spymaster without agents! Was there ever such a wretched thing as that?’
She drew back from him. ‘Sten, you have to sleep,’ she said again. ‘You’ll be good for nothing tomorrow.’ If there was a curious flatness to her voice he did not notice it. Inside her, his words had struck something cold. Can Collegium be doomed, really? She pictured the Wasps triumphant in these familiar streets, a victory that she herself had once worked so hard to bring about.
Stenwold righted his desk with a grunt and stared about at his scattered papers. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he said wretchedly. ‘I have work…’
She looked at him: the fat and frantic Beetle now abandoned by everyone. Has it come to this? Had he been nothing but the sum of his friends?
She retreated downstairs, feeling shaken. She had assumed, as did all Collegium, that they would grind the Empire down at their gates. But the Empire had no use for gates. The Beetles were better prepared than the Tarkesh had been but the Imperial Army had not stood still either.
She began to consider that remaining here inside the walls of Collegium might not be the wisest thing to do. She began to think of what options she had left open for herself.
An hour later she returned upstairs to Stenwold, bringing him a mug of herb tea, which he drank gratefully, once again fully absorbed in his papers. It was bare minutes later that he fell asleep.
General Tynan yawned and stretched, subduing his temper. It had flared automatically when he was woken not much past midnight by one of his aides, but he had faith in their good sense, knowing they would not risk his anger on anything trivial.
His body-servants dressed him in a loose robe and sandals, with a swordbelt girded over it. ‘This had better be good,’ he warned them. ‘Who’s outside?’
‘Major Savrat, sir.’
Tynan’s eyes narrowed. Savrat was Rekef Outlander, he had been given to understand. This unwelcome intrusion meant that either the Rekef would now give him some long-buried instructions, or that some intelligence had come to the Rekef that they wanted to share. If it was the latter, he certainly wanted to know about it. He had scouts spread out over several square miles north of Collegium in anticipation of a Sarnesh relief force. News from General Malkan and the Seventh was overdue.
Savrat was ushered into his tent and Tynan stared at him balefully. There was always the chance this man was Rekef Inlander keeping an eye on Tynan himself.
‘What is it?’ he demanded shortly. ‘I’ve a war to run.’
‘Then I may be able to win it more swiftly for you,’ Savrat told him with a smug little smile. ‘We have a visitor from the city.’
Tynan scowled at him. ‘It’s late. No guessing games.’
Savrat ducked out of the tent briefly, and when he returned it was with a young Spider-kinden girl in dark, close-bound clothing.
‘What’s this?’ Tynan asked, and then directly to her face, ‘Who are you supposed to be, that I should care?’
‘Arianna of the Rekef Outlander, General. Stationed in Collegium.’