She halted, staring at him, her eyes flicking briefly to the crates. ‘I told the Consensus you were coming yourself. They didn’t believe me. They couldn’t see why some rich, fat Collegiate Beetle would bring his hide this close to the Empire, if he didn’t have to. They don’t know you.’
‘It’s good to see you too,’ Stenwold replied drily. In fact, the last time he had set eyes on her, her city had been under the Imperial boot and she had only just been freed from the governor’s cells. Since the war’s end, however, there had been a clandestine communication between them, through agents and go-betweens and shipments of arms.
‘This is all I could raise, and it’s stretched my funds to the limit,’ he told her.
She shrugged. ‘I’ll get them distributed. More than half our forces are still using crossbows, and I don’t think Maynes and Szar have much at all in the way of this kind of weaponry.’
‘How do you stand with the other members of the Alliance?’ he asked her, as she turned on her heel and stalked back the way she had come, trusting him to follow her.
‘Solidly, for now. We have a detachment of Maynesh Ants on our walls already, and if you thought we hated the Empire, you should listen to them. I understand that there are troops on their way from Szar, as well, although they won’t be here for a while.’
‘It sounds as though you think this is it, then,’ Stenwold observed.
She stopped and looked back at him; her expression was a thousand years old. ‘Master Maker, it’s been it every day since the Wasps ousted the last of their traitor-governors. Today, tomorrow, next tenday. Me, I don’t know what they’re waiting for.’
She monopolized his attention for the next two hours, hauling him into a spartan office that had not a single fingerprint of her personality to mark it. Looked at objectively, Stenwold realized, Kymene was a frightening creation: a child of the occupation, whose every waking moment was still devoted to keeping her city free. The rebellion that had seen the Empire’s garrison thrown out and governor killed had not changed her, and for her it had not changed much in the world either. She had never lost sight of the black and gold horde just over the horizon, and in that Stenwold had to admit to a kinship with her. Still, watching her as she dealt with her underlings, giving them curt orders, receiving their reports with a stern face, dismissing them with new instructions, he felt he was watching a woman on a battlefield, not one safe in her own city. She was so striking, so young, and yet he had no sense that she had any connections with another living soul other than those directly required for the continued existence of her city.
She caught his look, and held his gaze for a moment, almost hostile despite everything, meeting everything in the world as though it was just one more challenge. Then business resumed, and she was explaining what they knew of Imperial troop positions, their distances from Myna, their expected marching time and how much warning her city might receive. Myna was the most easterly of the Alliance’s three cities, for all that its strength at the time had made it the last to fall in the Empire’s first invasion. This time, the hammer would fall here first, and the border was not so very far away. Myna was on high alert, all the reserves called up, orthopters standing ready on the airfields, artillerists constantly manning the walls.
She introduced Stenwold to a close-faced Ant-kinden from Maynes, the officer in charge of the detachment that had already arrived. The man had little to say to Stenwold, little use for anyone except soldiers: polite enough, but it was plain that his mind was forever focused beyond the walls, watching and waiting. Stenwold understood that there were a few score Ant-kinden scattered out towards the border, forming a chain of linked minds that would relay word of any hostile move back to the city as fast as thought.
‘What good is he? What is he here for?’ the Ant asked, at last, having endured several minutes of strained conversation.
Stenwold sighed, thinking how Ant-kinden were the same the world over. ‘If nothing else, I’m here to show the Alliance that you’re not alone. Kymene has asked me to speak to the Mynan Consensus, and I’ll do so. I’ll show them that the Treaty of Gold means something more than just paper.’ The thought took him back to that windswept day outside the gates of Collegium — the Empire, the Lowland cities, the Alliance, Solarno and the Spiderlands, all of them putting their mark to a great-worded document of peace. A hostile move by the Empire against one signatory would mean war with all, or so said the treaty. Such documents mouldered quickly, however, and Stenwold hoped — he dearly hoped — that Collegium would remember the signing of it as vividly as he did.
The hour was late when he managed to barter some time for himself, heading out into Myna to catch up with another old friend, and mostly because he had heard that his truant niece Cheerwell had passed through Myna at the start of winter, possibly heading into the Commonweal by underhand means. That meant Hokiak’s Exchange, of course. Hokiak was a decrepit old Scorpion, and Stenwold had known him years ago, back before the Empire’s first invasion. He was a fixture of Myna, venal and greedy, selling to both sides during the occupation and yet always walking a fine line that had avoided reprisals from either. He would know all the details of where Che Maker had gone, and Stenwold was willing to bet that he would know something new worth hearing about the Imperial forces, too. Hokiak had always been one to keep his options open.
Stenwold had known for some time that he stood on the brink of a great fall, and all the world with him. Every figure on Myna’s streets seemed to be in a desperate hurry, rushing for shelter, for loved ones. There were soldiers everywhere, many of them obviously new to the uniform, and the recruiting still going on. Even back in Collegium the murmur was of war just over the horizon, casting a faint shadow over everyone, subtly changing the investments merchants made, the books the scholar read, the goods the artisan crafted. Here, though, was the true sign of the times, an omen he needed no seer to interpret for him.
Hokiak’s Exchange was boarded up. The old man, who had weathered conquest, occupation and liberation with equanimity, had seen the writing on the wall, wrapped up his business of over twenty years, and gone.
The orthopter descending on the makeshift landing field was of a design none of the watching Wasps had seen, although if any of them had been posted to Solarno recently they might have found it familiar: two-winged, with a hook of a body balancing between. Almost vertical in flight, it tacked and backed as it came down, adjusting its positioning minutely, skilled pilot and well-calibrated machine working in tandem. The Imperial aviators there exchanged glances, wondering if they could have jockeyed their own Spearflights down as neatly, especially at night.
The machine’s landing gear snapped out, and it came down neatly on a tripod of slender legs, leaving it upright, the round windows of its cockpit seeming to survey the other fliers there with a predatory air. Then they were hingeing upwards, and two men emerged, one clambering heavily to the ground and the other coasting awkwardly down on Art wings.
They were not exactly unexpected, but the assembling Imperial Eighth Army was in sufficient flux that they were aggressively challenged anyway, a score of the Light Airborne dropping down all around them with palms out. The duty sergeant muscled up to them, ready to demand answers; poor communications meant that he, of all people, had not been forewarned.