Tomasso had plotted their course in advance, leading Stenwold from Life Sciences to the river, and then through the rundown and unregarded streets that led along its course towards the sea. The Collegium river trade had been killed off almost entirely by the rails and the airships, and those parts of the city that had once relied on it had been dying for decades. There were plenty of shadowed places for Stenwold to fight for breath.
Sometimes they saw Wasps in the air above them, and once a Farsphex, and there were the occasional patrols on the ground too, and all the while they had to stop to rest more and more frequently.
Stenwold never knew whether the Wasps had spotted them from the air — a Fly and a Beetle out in daylight was surely not the most suspicious sight in Collegium that day — or whether one of the riverside locals had recognized his face and betrayed his own city’s War Master, but, as they neared the docks, there seemed to be more and more of the Light Airborne overhead, until their progress was a punctuated series of hops and dashes from cover to cover — more and more suspicious by the minute until, if any Imperial did see them, he would guess instantly that they were fugitives. Tomasso was cursing now, under his breath but Stenwold could hear him. He had obviously intended to be out of the city by now.
‘You go to the ship,’ Stenwold told him. ‘It’s not as if I can’t find the docks myself. You get going.’
‘Not a chance, Maker. I made a promise I’d see this through, and I’ve been paid for it. When I give my word, I see it’s kept.’
They were holed up no more than three streets from the docks by now, ducked into a storage shed that held nothing but scrap metal.
Then there was a hollow knocking sound that both of them recognized at once: the discharge of a leadshotter.
Tomasso was out of the shed immediately, with Stenwold lurching in his wake. There seemed little doubt about what the Wasps might be shooting at.
Stenwold shambled along the river’s course for another warehouse-length before following Tomasso’s abrupt left turn, cutting eastward for the main sea docks. There were fliers overhead, and shouting from somewhere behind. A noose was drawing tight, and he wondered if they had specific orders to keep him alive, or whether he was just some faceless fugitive to them.
Sooner than expected, he lurched out within sight of the docks, his lungs hammering with the strain and his head swimming with nausea. Whatever good work the Instar had done, he thought he might be undoing it with all this exertion. He staggered forwards again, then stumbled almost instantly to one knee, the world spinning about him.
Hands found his arm, hauling him upright. Tomasso was shouting in his ear: ‘Almost there, Maker. Don’t you give up here, you fat old bastard. Come on!’
Tisamon, in Myna, came the thought from somewhere, and it gave Stenwold a sudden new lease of strength, able to push himself to his feet and weave towards the sea and the piers and. .
And no ship. The docks were empty.
Behind the sea wall? For that had been the Tidenfree’s trick before, and what Wasp would think to look there, that even the Collegiate Port Authority had contrived to overlook.
Except there was a Wasp leadshotter positioned out on the sea wall already. And, even as he spotted it, an exhalation of smoke burst from it, with the sound following like thunder soon after.
Out across the harbour, out on the open sea, a tiny ship was riding, forced well out of artillery range.
‘Tomasso!’ he gasped.
‘I see it. Just keep going, you fool!’
There were Wasps coming now — not many, not just yet, but a dozen was more than enough. Stenwold found he no longer even had his snapbow. He had abandoned it some time during their trek.
‘I understand.’ And he was still running, forcing himself forwards one stride at a time, onto a pier now, a ramshackle old one with a storage hut at the far end, a place he had gone to before.
‘Good!’ Tomasso cried — and then he was abruptly no longer at Stenwold’s side. His small body spun under the snapbow bolt’s impact and then he was gone, knocked off the pier into the water. Two more bolts fell past Stenwold, like errant drops of rain.
And Stenwold had run out of places to go.
He stopped there, with the heels of his boots at the furthest edge of the pier, and watched as the Wasps feathered down out of a clear sky. Some of them must have known who he was, and communicated it to the rest, because the shooting had stopped now. They were just advancing across the docks, snapbows levelled.
Behind them, he saw his city as if for the first time: the newest subject state of the Wasp Empire, the furthest encroachment of the Black and Gold, despite all the blood and tears that had gone into keeping it free.
He raised a fist in the air. ‘Liberty!’ he cried.
As they reached the landward end of the pier, he took one step back, and let the water take him.
Epilogues
The Antspider
They had kept her imprisoned for more than a day, with a little brackish water but no food at all. The pain in her eye, where a sword-guard had been rammed into her face, had fallen into its own stubborn, unvarying rhythm, fading until she almost forgot about it, then flaring up just as she did. She had not dared to take the matted cloth from it to see. . to see if there was anything to see.
Her hand felt better: if she did not move it, then it was almost painless. The Imperial surgeon in charge of fixing her up enough to be worth torturing had done his job well there, at least.
Sometimes, soldiers passed by, and she found herself flinching away from them, despite herself, pain from her eye and hand stabbing at her together.
There was almost no light down here, and it was damp, and sometimes she could hear cries and begging from above, where the interrogators plied their trade.
She had discovered in herself a terrible fear of yet more pain and, although she tried to shrug it off flippantly and find some quip or dismissive remark to distance herself from it, she could not.
When at last she heard heavy footsteps descending to her cellar, and saw the sway of a lamp as one of her jailers approached, she shrank back into the corner they had penned her in, hearing her own breath grow ragged, and hating herself for it.
The lamp was hung up on the wall, to cast its uncompromising light across them both, and she saw that General Tynan himself had come to give her the bad news.
‘Your friends failed,’ he told her, ‘but you knew that.’ She could not fathom his expression, for none of the pieces seemed to fit together to make the man she had seen before.
‘There’s peace in Collegium tonight,’ he said. ‘First time in a while. We won. We won it all. We beat all of them.’ He sat down heavily across from her, the light gleaming on his bald head. He looked anything but triumphant. ‘What d’you think about that, eh?’ He yelled it without warning, as though the Wasp victory was a crime and she was somehow responsible.
She had shrunk away from that yell, but now she turned her wide eye back to him and found him still staring at her, apparently wanting an answer.
Something surfaced in her that had been buried for too long. ‘Should I be saying hooray for the Empire?’ she whispered, her voice hoarse.
‘Hooray,’ Tynan echoed, and put his head in his hands. With a sudden lurching of perspective, she realized that he was the sort of pure clear drunk that even Collegiate students seldom aspired to, and comfortable enough with it that he had been walking straight and speaking without slurring his words.
‘I killed her,’ he stated, without qualification. ‘I followed my orders. What else was I supposed to do? You can’t go against the throne. Who would obey a general who hadn’t obeyed his own orders, eh?’ Looking up again, his reddened eyes challenged her. ‘I couldn’t have just walked away, could I? I couldn’t have just said no.’