Behind him, he heard Straessa hurl a scream at him — wordless, frustrated, agonized, loud enough that the Wasps must be wondering what horrors were going on inside the Collegiate camp. Just the usual, the way we always go about things. It was a single, short, ugly sound, but it stayed with him.
There was a whisper of wings before he was twenty feet from the gates, and he thought for a moment it would be some overbold Light Airborne come to escort him in, and about to get shot for his pains. Serena dropped down beside him, though, matching his pace.
‘Chief,’ she acknowledged.
‘Get back inside.’
‘What’re they going to think, if you just pitch up on your own, Chief?’ she asked. ‘Man needs staff, a retinue, or they won’t take you seriously. We thought at least we should show them you’re worth listening to.’
‘Are you serious? Wait — “we”?’
‘Eujen.’
The expected Wasp face, but set above a Collegiate uniform. Averic strode out of the shadows.
‘Not a chance. Back behind cover, the both of you.’
‘I’ll be able to help you. They’re my people.’
‘And you’re a traitor to them. That means. . what is it, crossed pikes?’
Averic sighed. ‘I’m not Straessa.’
Eujen frowned at him. ‘I didn’t think you were.’
‘So insult me, tell me I’ll spoil things, call me out for my kinden or my character. I’m still going with you.’
Eujen opened his mouth, but there was something in the man’s voice, his face, that rendered any response he could make seem trivial. And he had already parted from one of his friends on poor terms. And he had no way of making Averic go, even if he tried to insist on it.
And, anyway, we’re coming back. This is a diplomatic errand, like when Maker met with their general outside the walls.
He nodded, not trusting himself to find words, and continued on towards the Wasps with Serena to one side of him, and Averic to the other.
He had thought it hard to leave the gates. He had been wrong. Hard was approaching the Wasp-made barricades, seeing that long stretch of snapbowmen all giving him and his escort their undivided attention, seeing the great shell of a Sentinel reflecting the light of their sentry lamps, its scratched metal hide flaring silver. They all seemed unnaturally quiet and still, and he realized that it was because of him. He had their utter concentration. If he had been Stenwold Maker himself, in that moment, he could not have commanded the focus of the Wasps more completely.
As he neared them, two score soldiers dismantled a section of the barricade in front of him, with an efficiency that put his own troops to shame. He looked at their faces — Averic’s kin, pale, tough-faced men, soldiers and conquerors. They did not spit at him or call insults, but there were thirty stings and as many snapbows trained on him at all times, and the same on his companions. This was what professional soldiers looked like: men whose entire livelihood was the uniform and the Empire’s orders. How different from a Collegiate tradesman-turned-soldier, or even the Ant infantry who were citizens before they were warriors. War was what these men were made of.
He stepped on past them, Averic and Serena crowding closer without meaning to. There was a fire ahead, burning in the lee of a machinesmith’s shop front to retain the heat. The only clear path through the Wasp troops led to it.
For some reason he had expected General Tynan. That bald, stocky old man, seen only once, had become the face of the Wasp command for him. Instead the officer he found there was a little younger, taller, vaguely familiar from that meeting outside the walls.
‘You are not Stenwold Maker, I see,’ were the first words out of the man’s mouth. Apparently he had been labouring under a similar misapprehension.
‘My name is Eujen Leadswell, Chief Officer of the Student Company.’
‘I am Colonel Cherten of Imperial Intelligence,’ the Wasp told him. He glanced briefly at Eujen’s two followers, eyes lingering on Averic. ‘Tell me, before we start, do you have Stenwold Maker, back there?’
All Eujen could think at first was, Curse me, it really is all about him. But, of course, it was just as the man himself had said. There was a list, but his name topped it. And I have his permission to conjure with that name. Eujen had thought long and hard about that, before embarking on this foolishness.
‘We do not,’ he replied, with the utter candour of the student debater. ‘I thought he had escaped the city.’
If he was expecting Cherten to fly into a rage at being thus thwarted, he was disappointed. The man simply nodded curtly. ‘Very well.’ Barely a moment’s more consideration on the colonel’s part, then: ‘Take them.’
Eujen’s mouth was still open to speak when three soldiers grabbed him and slammed him to the ground hard enough to rattle his teeth. He heard Averic snarling, had brief glimpses of scuffling feet. A sting went off — he heard the crackle but saw barely a flash of it — but then the Wasp beside him was down, his hands pinned behind his back.
Eujen gave a great wrench and half threw off the men leaning on him. It was then he saw Serena drive a knife into the leg of the man who had laid hands on her, and a moment later she was in the air, wings driving her as hard as they could back towards the barricade and the College beyond.
He heard a sharp retort, without seeing the shooter, but Serena’s scream was unmistakable. And then Eujen was shouting, fighting, throwing awkward punches at everyone within reach, clutching for a sword already taken from his scabbard. A Wasp punched him in the face, the Art-grown bone spike jutting from the edge of the man’s hand laying open Eujen’s cheek, and then he was being forced to his knees, arms twisted back as far as they would go, looking up at Colonel Cherten.
‘We came to talk!’ he spat, aware of how weak the words sounded. ‘We came to make a deal.’
Cherten’s face succumbed to contempt. ‘The Empire may negotiate honourably with enemy combatants, boy, but your city has surrendered. That makes this a rebellion. That makes you all traitors to the Empress’s rule. No negotiation, no mercy. Now get them back to the gatehouse. I have questions to ask.’
Thirty-Eight
Helma Bartrer came from an old, old family.
Of course, everyone came from an old family: nobody’s family was older than anyone else’s, but hers was superior to the rest, she knew. Her family had remembered the traditions and remained true. Generation to generation they had told the stories of their own heritage, all through the time of forgetting that followed the revolution in Pathis and the breaking of the Days of Lore.
Collegium, Pathis-that-was, had forgotten, but she remembered, as did some very few families else. Down through the harsh, bright centuries they had not abandoned their purpose or their faith.
And all it said in the Collegiate history books was that the Beetles had been slaves once, and the Moths had been their masters. They made that sound like such a bad thing. They compared it with being a slave for the Ants, for the Wasps, just hard drudgery in service of the uncaring, of the banal. They had forgotten how it was.
But Helma knew better, for the secret annals of her family made it plain. Perhaps even the Moth-kinden these days did not know the truth, mired as they were in their inward-looking squabbles. But there really had been a golden age: a golden age of night.
True, the Moths of Dorax did send word now and then, praising Helma’s kin for their ongoing service, offering some scrap of lore in return for intelligence on the internal workings of Collegium. She was cynical enough to recognize that for what it was: mere espionage, the regular business of modern nations. In itself that was an admission of failure: confession that their ancient skills had withered to the extent that they had to ask, and could not simply know. Helma’s kin remembered what they had once been, better than the Moths did themselves.