‘Well what is it, this glorious whatnot of yours?’ Te Mosca was ready for it to be a weapon. Every artificer in the city was talking weapons just now and, given that they had only just beaten the Imperial Second Army back, she supposed that was entirely reasonable.
‘It’s an arm,’ Gerethwy told her simply. ‘He constructed a rational arm: a mechanical arm that would translate the motions of his stump.’
She looked at him, from his mangled hand to the frank, innocent and slightly off-balance look in his face, and felt very sad because, despite the long and learned pedigree of his kinden and the mystery of his origins, he was still little more than a boy, and they had made him a soldier, and he still thought it could all be put right.
The tragedy was, she knew, that he was telling her precisely because she could not understand. Amongst his friends and his comrades, he would remain as taciturn as ever, unwilling to let them in on his secret projects for fear he would be told that none of them would work.
‘Officer Antspider, orders for you.’
The Fly-kinden pressed the scroll into her hand and was off into the skies of Collegium before Straessa could object. She was left standing in the street, just twenty feet from the bookbinder’s that Eujen lodged over. If she had been a little brisker on her way, then the missive might never have found her.
Straessa — called the Antspider because, whilst Collegiates might be fair to halfbreeds, they still tended to point at them in the street — had a strong urge to cast the scroll in a fire and deny it had ever found her, but she was not the feckless student she had once been. Putting on the uniform of the Merchant Companies had taken half her naivety from her, and going out to fight the Wasps had done the rest. Under the banner of the Coldstone Company she had shed blood for Collegium. Her commanding officer had been assassinated. Her maniple and its neighbours had been routed. Her friend Gerethwy had been maimed by his own weapon. She had rallied her troops and gone back, with the lunatics from Myna, to try and slow the Wasp advance, to attack their artillery, to do something other than simply wait for the end. Memories like that could be expected to leave their mark on a girl, she reckoned.
Since General Tynan’s Second had been forced to retreat by Collegiate air-power, the soldiers of the Merchant Companies had been training and recruiting, or at least trying to recruit. Numbers were still down — hardly surprising after the beating they had taken at the hands of the more disciplined Wasp soldiers. Everyone was pulling double shifts: Straessa had little enough time to herself, and this should have been one of those times. She had wanted to take off the breastplate and the buff coat, just for a little while; to make it up with Eujen and pretend she was just a student again, with no more to worry about than the end-of-year exams and making a little money on the side as a sword instructor.
Orders were never a good thing. Orders meant that something had changed.
The Second is on the move again. That was the most obvious conclusion. For a moment, her mind’s eye superimposed the battlefield over the tidy little Collegiate street, the shouting and the screams, the thunderous clatter of the monstrous Imperial automotives, the chaos of the retreat.
She steadied herself, by which time her hands had broken the seal. There was nothing for it now but to read.
That done, she read it all again, and even checked the signature for authenticity.
‘Madness,’ she murmured, and then hurried towards the bookbinder’s shop, opening the side-door and taking the stairs to Eujen’s lodgings three at a time.
Eujen already had company, but she expected that. It was Averic the Wasp scholar — the Wasp renegade, she supposed he was now, for he wouldn’t be going home any time soon — and the two of them were plainly midway through planning something, judging by the quantity of paper strewn about the small room.
‘What’s this? Plotting to overthrow the Assembly?’ she observed, rather too heartily.
Eujen regarded her warily. ‘Those plans were laid a long time ago,’ he said, trying to match her jovial tone. ‘Just training schedules for the Student Company.’ Meaning his own project: that odd little band of amateur soldiers he had raised after she had persuaded him not to follow her into the regular military. Eujen Leadswell was a conflicted man: he had spent his life protesting against war — war with the Empire especially. He had debated constantly on the subject, accusing those who vilified the Wasps of bringing closer the very conflict claimed to be guarding against. Now that war was upon them, Eujen did not know whether he had been a prophet or a fool.
‘That’s going well?’ She had always adopted an acerbic manner even amongst her friends, and normally it was accepted no more seriously than she meant it, but she and Eujen had not been seeing eye to eye recently.
‘We’re fine. We may not be your regulars, but we’re making real progress.’ His answer was too quick and too defensive. He was frightened for her, and resentful of the Companies that took her away from him, and so they argued, and were reconciled, and argued yet again. Averic was already looking ill at ease, and she guessed he might start making his excuses soon.
She wanted a fight with Eujen because at least she knew the rules to that game. She wanted to joke with him. The orders in her hand felt like they were burning her fingers.
‘They were saying that, now you’ve got your Student Company, you’ll be forming a Student Assembly next,’ she put in. Anything to lighten the mood.
Eujen fixed her with a solemn stare. ‘Were they?’
‘You’re not, are you?’ Because that would be ridiculous. Because it would also be just like Eujen.
‘Do you know it’s more than a month since the Assembly last met properly?’ Eujen asked her. ‘The elected government of Collegium?’
‘Yes, but-’
‘Do you know who’s now running the city? Making all the important decisions?’ he pressed her. ‘Because I can give you a handful of names — Maker, Drillen, Padstock — but of the rest? Nobody knows. It’s whoever they call on, their friends and allies, and whoever the new chief officers are. The whole basis of our city-state just gone.’
‘Since the Amphiophos was bombed-’
‘Let them meet at the College. Let them meet in a marketplace,’ Eujen contested hotly. ‘The place wasn’t important. The institution was. And now they’ve done away with it!’
‘Only until the Wasps-’ She was getting angry now at being talked over, but he had built his momentum and was running with it.
‘And if we beat the Empire back, what then?. Some other threat? Some other excuse?’
‘Eujen, we are at war! War needs swift decisions, firm leadership.’ Even as she shouted the words at him, she realized that she did not necessarily believe them, but he was casting her as the establishment by virtue of her rank within the Companies. She had become an apologist for Stenwold Maker without ever being asked — and that, of course, just made her angrier.
‘Right,’ Averic stood up, as she had known he would, ‘I’ll just-’
‘You stay right there.’ Her mere glower halted him. ‘I’ve got work to do.’
Eujen, who had a lot of argument in him yet and who had probably assumed that they would make peace later in the evening, went still. ‘No you don’t. You said that. . wait, look. .’
‘No, really.’ She attempted a smile, just about managed one. ‘You think I’d back out of a fight with you just because I’ve been shouldering a snapbow all day? But it’s orders, Eujen. New orders. They want me to go recruiting.’
‘I thought they’d already done that to death,’ Eujen replied, after a pause. ‘I thought they’d pretty much squeezed out every volunteer the city had to offer.’