She did not have much to work with here, it was true. Three kinds of soldiers, in brief, and only one of any use. Those actual members of the Merchant Companies who had been able and willing to depart Collegium were her core, but most of that city’s soldiers had stayed there, after surrendering their arms. Even under the Black and Gold, Collegium was home, and the exiles in Sarn lived in agony daily, knowing that they could not help their fellows, that they could do nothing to stay the Wasp lash, because they themselves had . . .
She still had to catch herself, to prevent the words abandoned their city from coming to mind. We’re going back. We’re here to work with the Sarnesh, so that we can free Collegium. We’ll do more good if we’re free over here than if we’re slaves over there. They were words she had heard from Eujen, from plenty of others. They were all equally desperate to justify themselves.
The second and third batches of her recruits were equally ill at ease with weapons, armour and discipline, but she was not choosy. By simply turning up, they had passed the one test that mattered. Some were inhabitants of Sarn’s Foreigners’ Quarter, Collegiate expatriates who had made a living here in the Lowlands’ most enlightened Ant city-state, but who still remembered their old home. The rest were genuine Collegiates: citizens who had fled before the siege, or who had got out somehow after the city was taken. They were not soldiers but they were hurting. The Wasp boot was on the neck of their beloved home. It was unthinkable, and it moved them to do unthinkable things, such as volunteering to fight.
They were nobody’s idea of soldiers: middle-aged men and women with a trade or a shop left behind them, and often family as well. They were driven, though. No drillmaster ever had more willing raw material. Under the stern governance of their Tactician Milus, the Sarnesh had given them snapbows and chain hauberks and swords, and left them to it. At this stage in the war, the Ants were not going to turn away any help at all.
The Imperial Eighth Army had been defeated, that much was fact. The field battle had seemed inconclusive, and everyone had assumed that the Wasps had pulled out with a sizeable slice of their forces intact, but then Ant scouts had found . . .
. . . Something. They had found something, although they were not sharing the details with their allies, which was concerning. Balkus – the renegade Sarnesh attached to the Princep Salma forces – said that they were sure the Eighth were no longer a threat, but what he could glean from eavesdropping around the edges of the Sarnesh linked minds suggested that the precise fate of the Imperial army was a matter of concern.
Eastwards from Sarn, the Empire was still about. The Wasp reserve force sent to support the now-defunct Eighth had been reinforced by elements of the Imperial First and was keeping pressure on the Ant city by its very presence. That meant that the Sarnesh was not preparing for the liberation of Collegium. The Ants were very glad to have allies to fight alongside them, and even more grateful to have the cream of Collegiate artificers modernizing their air power, but their chief tactician would always change the topic when pressed about a return to Collegium.
Well, maybe today will be different. There was another delegation heading to him soon, Straessa knew. And this time Eujen had said he would be going.
‘Officer Antspider!’ The call came from her blind side, so she had to cast about before she spotted a Fly-kinden boy she vaguely recognized as a Foreigners’ Quarter local.
‘What is it?’
‘Deliveries, Officer.’
‘Already?’ Her tenuous hold over the recruits had broken and they were out of formation, milling about and pressing closer to hear, but she could hardly blame them. ‘Deliveries’ meant a courier had run the Wasp gauntlet from Collegium: word from home. ‘Reading at Bor’s Pit?’
‘And soon,’ the Fly confirmed, then kicked off into the air to go and spread the news.
‘Class dismissed!’ Straessa called. ‘Bor’s Pit – if you want to hear the latest. Time to yourself, otherwise.’ They would almost all be there, cramming the theatre offered up by its expatriate owner as a surrogate Amphiophos, providing the seat of Collegiate government in exile. ‘Volunteer to let the Mynans know? They like to hear word, too.’
Someone put his hand up for that task, leaving Straessa free to hotfoot it back to her lodgings, because they would be opening the first letter in the Pit in perhaps half an hour, and it was a full street away from where she lodged. That left her just enough time to cover the ground.
Eujen was awake when she got there, which was just as well. They were sharing the storeroom of a machinist whose spare stock had been eaten up by the appetites of the war. It would have been intimate, had they not also been sharing it with a drunken Spider and a pair of printers whose presses had been smashed by the Empire.
He had got himself dressed, although it must have taken him some effort, and his robes were twisted about him, with nothing hanging straight. He occupied the room’s only chair as she came in, using a crate as a writing desk, crossing out as much as he put down. A speech, probably, knowing him.
He looked up sharply as she entered. He had recovered a lot of his colour in the last month, although there was still a greyness about his eyes and cheeks.
‘Is it Milus?’ he demanded. ‘Has he—?’
‘He hasn’t anything, at the moment,’ she told him, because Eujen had been waiting for word from the Sarnesh tactician. ‘It’s deliveries. You said you wanted to be there this time.’
‘Right.’ He put a hand out for his sticks, which as usual he had managed to leave out of reach somehow. She let him stretch for them because he hated it when she would not let him win these battles against his own weakness. At last he snagged them, and levered himself upright, wrestling their padded forked upper ends under his arms.
That looked easier even than yesterday. Eujen was, after all, one of the lucky ones. He had gone to death’s country, to the very border, stared at its grey horizon and then turned back. Instar, the drug that the Collegiate chemists had concocted during the war, had worked its kill-or-cure miracle with his failing body. He would, however, never be quite the same – never quite rid of the injuries or the effects of the drug. He would be stronger, but he would probably not walk again without the crutches, or so the doctors said. There were many who were not even that lucky.
‘We’re going to Milus tomorrow,’ he told her, setting off on the long voyage to the doorway.
‘Are you?’
‘Whether he wants to see us or not,’ he said firmly.
‘He has a war to run. He’s a busy man.’
‘He has hundreds of our people whom he’s happy to employ in that war – our own, Mynans, Princeps. Retaking Collegium is the logical first step.’
‘Perhaps not to him.’ She nodded a greeting to some of the machinist’s apprentices as she and Eujen crossed the shop floor. They worked here all day and most of the night, making parts for all the machinery of war. It made sleeping difficult, at times, but it was the only place she’d found that didn’t involve climbing stairs.
‘The closest Imperial force is short on siege engines, all the reports agree,’ huffed Eujen, already starting to make heavy going of it. ‘So it’s not going to invest the city any time soon.’
‘The Second was short on siege too,’ Straessa pointed out darkly: Collegium had been taken with sheer aerial manpower and the new Sentinel automotives that the Empire had acquired. Of course, following the mysterious scattering of the Eighth, the Sarnesh had a handful of Sentinels as well.