Eujen and Averic arrived together, wearing the sashes of the Student Company, having been busy since the army’s return. While the regular soldiers rested, it had been the youthful Students who had manned the walls and kept watch on the skies. The aviators had continued to harry the Second Army, driving it further and further, and even now they were flying out into the night, showing the Empire all that Collegium had learned from the Wasps about modern warfare. Still, as each modified Stormreader could carry only one or two bombs, and as the city’s stocks of munitions were fast drying up, there was a limit to the amount of pressure they could keep up. An hour before, though, word had come to the Students that they could stand down. The Empire’s forces were sufficiently far off, and in sufficient disarray, that no attack could be expected tonight.
The Antspider and Eujen eyed each other, probing the wedge between them that time and war had hammered in.
‘You’ve been keeping the place tidy while I was gone, then.’ Such flippancy was all she had left to her. Her hand’s idle gesture encompassed the bomb-scarred city outside the shutters. Seeing his face, noticing the gulf between them only increase rather than close, she felt a sudden panic, more severe than anything she had experienced on the field. What did I say? Why have the rules changed?
Then he held his arms out, hugging her to him. ‘I know…’ she heard him say, ‘I know such things.’ But he would not disclose them, the revelations of the last few days: Imperial assassins, Stenwold Maker’s ruinous game of chance with the city, Banjacs’s death and incidental triumph, all of it sealed in his mind.
Outside, across the city, the citizens of Collegium sat in the shadow of one question: Will they be back? Would the Empire — so vast and inexorable and hungry, so often rebuffed and yet seemingly never defeated — would it return for them? They tried to tell themselves that Collegium’s freedom was assured; everybody said so, but nobody believed it.
Somewhere else, Laszlo was still trying to find some trace of his vanished Lissart, not knowing whether she was alive or dead, hunting for any rumour that a flame-haired not-quite-Fly girl might have made it safely to the city.
In the College infirmary, lying amongst so many others, Amnon awoke in pain and grief but alive despite it all. They told him that they had found him crawling back towards the Collegium lines, trailing blood, but he remembered none of it.
In his townhouse, the windows boarded up since the glass was blown in, Jodry Drillen slept at his desk, jowl pressed into a half-drafted agenda for the next meeting of the Assembly, wherever that might actually take place. His Fly-kinden secretary, Arvi, glanced in, crept over to remove Jodry’s empty bottle and bowl, then tiptoed from the room.
In the hushed chambers allotted to the College librarians, the artificer Willem Reader, co-designer of the Stormreaders that had helped save Collegium, looked in on his sleeping wife and daughter, and thought about the future.
Kymene walked amongst her people with a quiet word here, clasping a shoulder there, giving them heart, giving them hope. Far from home, fighting under another city’s flag, they thought only about freedom.
And Stenwold, out on the walls and looking eastwards, brooded on the Empire, as did so many other people.
The Second Army was slowly cohering, preparing the most defensible camp that it could after having left its travelling walls behind it, spreading its fires wide to mitigate the next attack. General Tynan was counting his losses.
Between the fighting itself and the disastrous retreat, he had lost some one in six of his soldiers. This engagement, which the more level heads of Collegium were already characterizing as a draw, was the most crushing defeat the Second had ever suffered.
There was a wing of Spearflights on the way to them from Solarno, the reliable old workhorses of the Imperial air force. They were better than nothing but no match for Collegium’s machines. There was already a fresh class of the Aviation Corps training in Capitas, with new-built Farsphex and all their other advantages, but nobody knew what had happened to their predecessors. Some catastrophe, some secret Beetle weapon, had swept the sky clear of them, and they were no more.
And General Tynan made fitful plans and growled at his subordinates, or calmed himself in Mycella’s company as he waited, always waited, for word from the Empress.
Then, tendays after the battle, and even as fresh Stormreader forays were forcing the Second to move camp further east still, a Fly-kinden woman flew up to the camp’s sentries and demanded to be taken to the general himself.
On the southern coast of the Exalsee sat Chasme, the pirate artificing town that had been a thorn in the side of respectable Solarno for generations. Selling its services to all bidders, producing orthopters and pilots, weapons and the men to use them, it had danced a fine line between the other cities that ringed the great lake, useful to each in turn whilst being a venomous annoyance to the others, but never so much to bring about its own destruction.
In recent years, Chasme had changed, though, and while the people of Solarno might have thought they hated it for its piracy, now they found it all the more loathsome for its honest competition. Chasme was one man’s town. He had made it a power on the Exalsee, and was working on making it a power in the wider world. His name was Dariandrephos, known as Drephos to his one confidante and as the Colonel-Auxillian to the Empire, and he commanded the Iron Glove trading cartel.
Here the Sentinels had been born, both their physical frames, their ratiocinator-guided mechanisms and the spun-steel metallurgy that made them light enough to move. Here the greatshotters had been built and tested and refined. Drephos and his second-in-command, Totho, were nothing if not prolific in their industry, and such was their reputation for rewarding genius that even proud Solarnese artificers crept cap in hand to them, begging for the chance to serve them.
The Empire had represented a great well of gold to the Iron Glove and, better still, it had given Drephos and Totho the chance to have their inventions used, which was worth more than all the riches of the world. Now, unheralded, a new Wasp delegation had come to visit them.
Drephos kept no audience chambers, so he chased apprentices out of one of the forges and had the great hammers and wheels stilled, and there he awaited his visitors, with Totho standing at his metal shoulder. He wore only his plain robe, and a leather apron over it, as though he had been surprised while working on some personal project. His mottled grey face, its features subtly distorted, held a mocking smile. Totho wore the hardwearing canvas of a Collegiate artificer and the closed expression of any halfbreed who has grown up in a city not enamoured of his kind.
The delegation was small, no great Imperial pomp but a practical-looking Wasp colonel, unusual in his beard and tied-back hair. With him came a handful of soldiers and a Consortium factor, and a single Fly-kinden woman in the uniform of the Aviation Corps.
Drephos had gone quite still on seeing the colonel, and the two men studied each other, both of them the Empire’s failures and both dealing with the rejection in different ways. Drephos had made himself a new empire here on the Exalsee, whereas this man had fought hard, under the threat of a death sentence, to win himself another chance.
‘Varsec, is it not?’ Drephos asked.
‘That is correct, Colonel-Auxillian.’ Imperial colonels were forceful and aggressive and ambitious, but this man — young for a colonel — seemed to have an edge of desperation about him.
‘They call you the father of the Imperial Aviation Corps,’ Drephos noted. ‘Your results speak for themselves. Impressive.’
‘You have heard the news from Collegium,’ Varsec stated.