‘Vanguard forward!’ Stenwold snapped. ‘Sperra, get the infirmary cleared. Get everyone down here as quick as you can. Get. .’ but she was already gone.
And whatever Fassen’s found, don’t let it be another wall, he begged, as he pushed forwards with Laszlo at his heels.
He skidded down into the gripping chill of the cellar, and saw the wall ahead of him almost completely fallen, enough space for two people to squeeze through side by side. The work of the acids was plain, but there was a great deal of physical cracking that made him wonder if there had somehow been some movement of the earth that had touched only here. Or had Fassen other methods at her disposal than the chemical?
Whatever the reason, there was certainly a gap there, and it led somewhere.
The vanguard had waited for him, and he unslung his snapbow as he glanced around at them, at Fassen and her artificers, at Laszlo.
‘Master Maker,’ Fassen started.
‘Let me see.’ And he pushed his way to the edge of the hole.
He could see the cellars of Living Science, pungent with the reek of preservative because a lot of the jars and canisters there were broken open. That explained the chill and the smell that had tainted the Cold Cellars, and, for it to have done so, those cellars must have abutted here precisely, only this single thickness of wall separating two distinct College buildings.
He stepped across, and it took a long stride, because there was a gap below him, an impossible gap, and that was what Fassen had exclaimed about.
It was not large, just six inches in width, but for a long moment Stenwold stared down into it, and tried to understand what he was seeing. Darkness, yes, and the barrel of a snapbow poked into it encountered no resistance. Just a flaw in the earth, then? And yet. . if he strained his eyes were there lights, at some unfathomable distance down below? As though this little crack gave onto a vast, echoing cavern extending impossibly beneath Collegium itself.
He drew back, feeling sudden vertigo. He had no idea what this was, whether it had always been there or had only manifested during this last night, in time to help Fassen in her work. He had more prosaic matters to hand.
‘Living Science cellars look clear,’ he announced, trying for his old booming Assembly voice, but low enough in the end for his words to have to be relayed back. ‘Come on, we need to secure the floors above.’
Behind him, as they crossed, there wasn’t a member of the vanguard who didn’t pause and shiver a little, while crossing that inexplicable gap.
The narrow corridors leading down to the lower levels had never been intended for stretcher-bearers. Te Mosca and Sperra had got the wounded out of the infirmary easily enough, but navigating them to the Cold Cellars was an agonizingly slow business of knocks and bottlenecks, whilst everyone else in the building was desperately trying to hurry to the same place.
The sounds of fighting — and dying — were closing in on them. The Wasps were inside the building, and Berjek’s gallant few were fighting them from room to room, spending blood and buying time at whatever rate of exchange they could get.
Another flight of stairs, but the stolid stretcher-bearers knew their business now — mostly Beetles, and many of them former wounded now strong enough to help their comrades. One stretcher at a time they descended as swiftly as was safe, their faces tight with concentration, blotting out the shouting and the fighting from just a few rooms away.
Sperra had gone on ahead, a faithful escort to Balkus’s stretcher, but at the rear was Sartaea te Mosca, who perhaps had planned to provide an infinitesimal barrier between her charges and the Empire.
She brimmed over with exhortations to hurry that were utterly pointless. Nobody knew better than the men and women with the stretchers just how little time they had, and it was to their lasting credit that none of them cast aside their burdens to safeguard their own lives.
Most of the wounded were now on the level below, the last stretcher just about to begin its descent. Its rear bearer was Raullo Mummers, bag-eyed and hungover, but he had volunteered quickly enough.
‘Please go,’ he asked her, setting his foot on the top step. There was room for her to slip through above him, if she flew nimbly enough, but she shook her head.
‘I shall see you to the foot of the stairs, Master Mummers, and then I shall be right behind you.’ She risked a glance at Raullo’s burden: he had insisted on carrying Eujen, and she hadn’t had the heart to deny him the task. The chief officer of the Student Company looked. .
Dead, he looked dead, and in Mummers’s shaking grip there was no chance of detecting that infinitesimal rise and fall that earlier had betrayed some spark of life yet clinging to him. Simply shifting him might already have finished him off.
Running feet, and te Mosca wondered if there was any wretched magic that this heart of the Apt world would permit her, or if she had ever known any trick that could salvage a situation such as this.
‘Knife. . I’ve got a knife,’ Mummers gulped out, stumbling on the stairs but keeping his balance. She just shook her head. One knife against the Empire was not going to tip any scales.
Rounding the corner came a couple of soldiers in Collegiate colours, but neither of them locals: Gerethwy and Castre Gorenn.
‘You need to make better time!’ the Dragonfly shouted at her.
‘I am well aware of the situation, thank you,’ te Mosca said tightly. ‘We are evacuating as quickly as possible.’
‘I’ll hold here for them,’ Gerethwy announced. ‘This is a perfect position for my surprise.’
Gorenn gave him a nod. ‘There will be no more of us coming this way. Those that remain are drawing the Wasps away, for as long as they can.’
‘Perfect.’ Gerethwy had dropped to one knee and unslung his kitbag, dragging out his repeating snapbow and a tangle of mechanism.
‘Gorenn, what about you?’ te Mosca asked. Behind her, Mummers had wrestled Eujen’s stretcher down to the foot of the stairs, sparing her one last look back before he went lurching off with it.
‘I shall fight the Wasps,’ the Dragonfly said, and all the fires of the Twelve-year War leapt in her eyes. ‘And then, when that bores me, I shall leave, for there is no son of the Empire alive who can pursue me in the air. And I shall go to Sarn, and from there I shall fight them again.’
‘May the sun be in the eyes of your enemies,’ Gerethwy told her, his hands fitting components together deftly now, practice compensating for his lost fingers. Already the repeating snapbow was mounted on a low, bulky tripod, with some viciously toothed mechanism set in place to feed in its bolts.
Then the Dragonfly was gone, and Sartaea te Mosca was left staring only at the hunched back of her friend. ‘Gereth, come with me now, please.’
‘Not just yet,’ he told her. ‘But I will, believe me. Because I’ve solved the war problem.’ A momentary grin appeared over his shoulder. ‘Believe me, you won’t catch me sticking around for the Wasps, but I won’t need to once this is ready. My weapon will fight here without me.’ Abruptly a dozen slender wires lashed out, unspooling themselves down the corridor. ‘Ratiocinators, Sartaea, the future of artifice. Machines that can do things by themselves, react, calculate, even fight. And so simple — we could have done it ten years ago, if only anyone had thought!’ His hands flickered over the mechanisms, making minute, final adjustments. ‘Wars without soldiers, how about that? And we’re done!’
Then a Wasp appeared at the far end of the corridor, with snapbow levelled. There was a frozen moment of shock on both sides and then the Wasp, seeing an enemy with a weapon directed at him, shot Gerethwy through the chest.
He rocked as the bolt tore through him, eyes wide, a single audible breath escaping from him. Then the Woodlouse fell back with a perplexed expression. Sartaea dropped beside him, keening with loss because he was dead. She could see instantly that he was dead.