His fliers were taking off: some veteran Spearflights and half a dozen of the new Farsphex loaded with bombs. The Ant orthopters would be able to keep an impressive discipline and coordination in the air, but their machines were a generation out of date, by Imperial standards, and Roder was looking to secure control of the air relatively swiftly.
If the Ants stayed back, then the fighting would get bogged down into a long-range pissing contest with snapbows, which Roder reckoned he would eventually win, given his superior numbers and what he predicted would be a Wasp advantage in speed and accuracy. That would be a costly way to bring the battle to a close, though, and one that would be likely to allow the Ants to disperse and meet him again before their walls — or even attack him from behind as he invested the city. The painstaking progress the Eighth had made towards Sarn, with the Ants using minimal forces to cause maximum delay, had given him a new respect for whoever was planning their war.
Still, the Sarnesh resistance was all for nothing, since a messenger had arrived from Tynan’s Second to confirm that Collegium had capitulated. The reinforcements that Sarn had presumably been hoping for were not coming. Sarn now stood alone.
There was a concentration forming in the centre of the Sarnesh lines, but his scouts suggested these were Auxillian troops, not the Ants themselves. A distraction for the greatshotters, then. But each death would still be one less enemy on the field, and so there was no reason not to oblige the Ants rather than attack their wide-spaced forces and squander the potency of the engines. It was as if he and the Sarnesh commander were following the same textbook, both seeing a different advantage in the same tactic, so that there were really no losers. Or nobody important, anyway.
A messenger landed nearby and ran up to him. ‘General, word from the forest!’
For a moment he could not imagine what the man meant, but then it fell into place. ‘The Mantids?’
‘One of their women is here to speak with you, General.’
He peered through the unrelieved grey, trying to pinpoint her, but spotted her only when she was almost within a spear’s reach: a lean, weathered, hard-faced woman, dressed in a chitin cuirass.
‘You’re of the Nethyen? How do things stand in the forest?’
‘I am of the Nethyen,’ she confirmed. ‘The fighting is over.’
His heart leapt. ‘Can you bring your forces to bear on the battle?’
‘We can.’ A small smile that made him uneasy. ‘We have put aside our differences, the Etheryen and ourselves. From now on there is but one hold in the wood. Netheryon, it shall be called.’
Roder shrugged off the nuances of Mantis nomenclature. ‘When can you strike?’ he asked, acutely aware that the Ants would be closing the distance to his lines already.
‘Now,’ she explained, and went for him.
She nearly had him, too. Her blade rammed into his armour, biting into the metal but not penetrating, yet still knocking him from his feet. She wore one of those claw gauntlets, and he had not even noticed.
He thrust a hand out, but the soldiers around him were creditably alert and, even as she drew back her arm to finish him off, three or four snapbow bolts and a sting had found her, battering her from both sides so that she twisted and fell in a spray of blood.
‘Pits-cursed Inapt!’ Roder swore furiously, as one of his men helped him up. ‘What was that. .?’ There was shouting, he realized. Within the camp there was shouting. In the pre-dawn he could make out nothing of it. ‘Someone find out what that is!’ he ordered.
But even as he said the words, he understood what it must be. He saw that the Mantis woman had not come alone; that her people, the Netheryen, were indeed ready to strike.
They had reached almost to the edge of the camp itself, and not one sentry or scout had spied them. All eyes had been focused on the Ants.
They had come, all of them, in their steel-edged hundreds.
Roder opened his mouth to cry out some command — any command — that might save the situation, and the might of the forest surged into the heart of his army, like a tide.
In that fractured second, Milus weighed many commodities within his soul, not least his surprisingly strong attachment to the original plan, however inappropriate. The Mantids had finally made their move; they were attacking the Wasps even now. They were hopelessly outnumbered, and yet when had that ever bothered them? He could now let them spend themselves against the black and gold, then strike at his own convenience. Or he could take full advantage of this unlooked-for intervention and hurry his men over to the Wasp lines as fast as they could be shifted, and construct a new battle plan while the fighting continued. It was another advantage of being an Ant, of course: he could change his orders at any time and the whole army would know and understand.
He made his decision in that same fraught second. Forwards, all speed. Close with the Wasps as swiftly as possible.
And Seda took one step forwards and threw out a stingshot at the seated figure of Argastos.
It was supposed to be that simple. However he chose to appear, the gnarled-stump body of the Moth War Master was there and had always been there, at the root-hung, earth-ceilinged centre of the barrow. This was the chamber they had dined in. This was where they had been imprisoned and threatened. This was the entirety of Argastos’s world.
But he was quicker to react than that, and more clever. For all that he had atrophied into, he had been one of the great magicians of his people, with a millennium of scheming even after that. The space around them became instantly folded and convoluted so that, although he was physically almost close enough to touch, he had contrived a mile of tangled forest between them, and dropped Seda and Che inside it. And it was not empty.
‘His ghost-soldiers are here with us, all around,’ Che recognized.
‘Keep them back. Misdirect them. Lose them within the landscape,’ Seda directed, taking command because. . who else was there? Gratifyingly, she felt the Beetle girl’s immediate acquiescence. Perhaps there is some potential in her that I missed. If I can make a servant of my enemy, what could we not do together? And then she was pursuing Argastos, even as he tried to widen the apparent space between them, hauling swathes and handfuls of mismatched, misremembered land from his mind to cram into place.
But Seda had assessed his limits: his imagination was as dried-up as his body. Everything he raised up was brooding forest, fragments of ruined castle, clods of the deep underground. She had seen it all before and she flew through it like an avenging ghost, fire trailing from her hands.
Yet his memories, however limited, encompassed his days as War Master, his military campaigns, the great battles of the Inapt, and suddenly she was veering away, falling back, because she had met Argastos’s armies.
The actual ghost soldiers, the remains of Argastos’s real victims that could take on enough form to injure or kill her and the Maker girl — just as she herself had given Tisamon’s ghost such form — were still being kept away, led into the dense, gnarled thickets of Argastos’s own mind, constantly turned away by the Beetle’s will. But that could not last forever. Seda had to tear her way past all the mummery that Argastos had thrown up, before those dead killers fought through Che’s diversions enough to cross the few feet of actual real space that separated them from their intended victims. The two women became hunter and hunted all at the same time.