‘Averic,’ Eujen whispered. ‘I’m sorry, I told. . I told them. .’ His eyes glinted bright with fear and the memory of pain.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Averic told him, and led him by the arm towards the rear door. At every moment he knew that someone would walk in, that he would have to fight: kill or be killed. His luck, stretched beyond credibility, would snap back at him, surely.
He opened the door and they stepped out into the night, and his luck snapped there and then, and irrevocably.
They left Eujen standing, but the threat of Averic’s sting meant that three men jumped him immediately as he stepped out into daylight, wrestling him to the ground with professional viciousness, wrenching his arms back at the joints to keep him down.
Half a dozen soldiers were what he and Eujen rated, he saw. There was the captain, too, and no less a man than Colonel Cherten himself had come to witness the entertainment, but there was no indication that either intended to get their hands dirty. Half a dozen soldiers, two of them standing back with levelled snapbows, all waiting outside the back door.
‘Well done, Captain,’ Cherten acknowledged. ‘I applaud your instincts.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ The captain looked moderately pleased with himself, but not over much. It was not so great a triumph as all that. ‘Back to the tables with them?’
‘No, I have another use for them, and I need them for it now,’ Cherten told him. ‘I think we need to break the morale of their friends in the College. Have them secured and I’ll take them off your hands.’
By the time the Antspider ascended to the courtyard wall there was already quite a crowd there, jostling and craning, and most of them with snapbows loaded and directed towards the Imperial lines.
‘Are they mustering?’ she demanded, though she could hear no sound of it. Surely there would be the rumble of the Sentinel engines; surely the movement of a large number of men could he heard on such a still night.
‘Lighting up the place, is what they’re doing,’ Castre Gorenn told her.
Straessa opened her mouth to question that, but it was true. On a rooftop just overlooking the Imperial barricade directly facing the College gate, the Wasps had set out lanterns and lamps as though they were celebrating something.
‘What does it mean?’ she asked quietly.
‘Nothing good,’ the Dragonfly guessed, and Straessa had to agree.
Out of uniform, wearing only a nightshirt that hung short of his knees, Gerethwy stumbled into place beside her. He carried his snapbow, for what it was worth, and for a moment she was tempted to order him straight back down again. His face was drawn, hollow-cheeked through lack of sleep and from the recurrent stabs of pain he felt from the fingers he no longer possessed. Right now, he was plainly of no use to anyone.
But it would shame him, she knew, and so she left it. See, I’m a terrible officer. Why does nobody else realize that?
‘Is that a flag they’re bringing?’ someone asked, and her attention returned to the rooftop. There were a fair number of soldiers there, and they carried some sort of bundle of staves. Her stomach went cold, wondering what new kind of weapons the Empire’s engineers might have dreamt up.
‘Should I try a shot?’ Gorenn asked.
‘At this range? Too far even for you, surely?’ Straessa pointed out.
Gorenn shrugged irritably, and Straessa was about to suggest she try it anyway, when a Fly-kinden piped up, ‘Spears. They’ve got spears.’
‘Have to be bloody long ones, then,’ a Beetle youth remarked. Whilst he earned himself a murmur of laughter, Straessa felt something grip her far beyond the nebulous threat of a new invention.
Not new. . A real old-fashioned Wasp tradition, isn’t that right?
‘What are they doing?’ More than a few people were asking the question, as the Wasps began setting out the long, barbed-headed weapons in pairs, fitting them to sockets they had already set in the flat roof. Four spears, forming two crosses.
Straessa was gripping the edge of the courtyard wall so tightly that her knuckles were white. Her whole world had contracted to that one bright spot ahead where the Wasps had cast out the darkness so that they could put on a show.
‘Crossed pikes,’ someone observed, and the conversation died, word by word, until almost everyone was silent. Of course, there were a few who had neglected their studies, but Straessa did not feel like educating them just then.
She remembered Averic talking about this, once — he had so seldom spoken about his home. He had been a little drunk, his pale face discoloured with bruises from a beating he had received, but had not risen to. She — or was it Raullo? — had said something about wagering that sort of thing wouldn’t go on back where he had lived. He had then explained to them just what did go on. It had been a lapse, of course, and once the over-hasty words were spoken he had plainly wanted to take them back.
There was a skill to it, he had explained. To drive the spearhead into the side of the abdomen by careful degrees, so that whatever damage it did would agonize without killing — to lever it through the ribs without gashing the lungs, and then to ram it into the tricep and biceps, so that, once the crossing was complete, the victim hung from the spear-shafts, with the hooked heads embedded in the solid flesh of the upper arms. A soldier who could perform all that reliably was guaranteed a sergeant’s rank badge.
Someone — either slow on the uptake or just absurdly optimistic — now moaned with horrified realization, as two new figures were led up onto the roof.
Eujen. Averic.
‘I can’t see Serena,’ someone was saying, some friend of the Fly-kinden officer’s.
‘Then she’s the lucky one,’ Straessa whispered. ‘Gereth. .’
The Woodlouse was staring out at that illuminated rooftop, fingering his snapbow, but even on his best day he couldn’t have made the shot.
. . rammed through the body, inch by searing inch, an anatomy lesson for sadists, then hung. .
The officer in charge seemed to be taking some pains explaining to his prisoners what was going to happen to them. Of course, Averic must already know in great detail. . while Eujen always did have a quick imagination.
Straessa levelled her snapbow, sighting it on those distant figures. The previous day’s exchange had demonstrated that she could not possibly hit her mark, or probably even make the roof at all, and she would get in only one — perhaps two — shots, before the Wasps made sure she could not spoil their fun.
And she couldn’t shoot Eujen. She didn’t have it in her, despite everything. How many times had she joked that the thing he needed most was a shot in the head, and here they were. . and she couldn’t.
‘Gorenn, you said. .’ She watched as Eujen and Averic had their hands freed, but of course you would have to have unbound wrists to go up on the pikes. ‘You said you could manage the shot. Can you?’
The Dragonfly looked round as though noticing Straessa for the first time. ‘Of course. Why not?’
Straessa saw them unsocket the spears again, in preparation for their bloody work. Setting the weapons up in advance like that was part of the rituaclass="underline" to make the victims — and the onlookers — understand and know fear.
‘Founder’s Mark, do it,’ she spat. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Eujen. I wish you a clean death. That’s all I can do now.
Atop the roof overlooking the barricade, Cherten peered into the night, over at the College, seeing movement without detail along the wall.
‘Well, why not?’ he addressed his prisoners. ‘After all, you came to negotiate a surrender. I will now show your fellows what terms they can expect if they continue to resist the Empire.’