‘Who’s we, and where to?’
‘All of us. To Collegium.’
Not entirely unexpected, but no more welcome news for that. ‘And once they pull the army together, what about the Collegiates? What do we give them, save for a target?’ Morkaris pointed out. His hands itched for the haft of his axe, just on general principles.
‘A moving target, at least,’ Jadis replied. ‘Those are your orders. Get your rabble together. What’s left of it.’
Morkaris grimaced despite himself. It was no secret that, regardless of all he could do, more than a quarter of the mercenaries had deserted, companies and individuals deciding that living under daily bombardment had not been what they signed on for. To keep those who remained, he had personally fought four duels in the last few tendays. Whether going on the march under that continued aerial assault would help morale at all was an arguable point.
‘The new machines will help, they say,’ Jadis offered. ‘They will keep off the worst of the attacks.’
‘If they don’t just explode, like the last lot,’ the mercenary spat. The fate of the Second Army’s last fliers was well known by now.
‘This will not happen, they say,’ Jadis continued implacably.
Morkaris scowled. ‘I may not understand their machines, but I can still count. The new fliers are very few.’
‘This is irrelevant. Gather your companies for the march, or be ready to explain your failure to the Aldanrael.’ Not quite a challenge, not quite a personal insult and nothing that Morkaris could not ignore, but still. . for just a moment the mercenary wondered about quitting, which would certainly mean taking on Jadis then and there. The odds were too wide open, though, and he was still owed pay.
Instead he decided to stick a knife in where he knew the man’s mail didn’t protect him. ‘Oh, well, if the Wasps say to Herself that they’ve won the skies back, who am I to argue? If Herself’s that won over by the Wasps, then tell her that her mercenaries will be ready for the march, no worries.’ The barb went home and Morkaris saw the other man twitch a little. ‘After all, no point arguing with you. You’re not the one she listens to any more.’
Jadis’s face remained very set, but he was a Spider Aristos and master of his own emotions. It was an open secret that his mistress, Mycella of the Aldanrael, was bedding the Wasp general, and it was similarly known that Jadis was eating himself with jealousy about it. There was barely a flicker, though, to betray the man’s feelings. In spite of himself, Morkaris was impressed, for here was Aristoi reserve at its finest. Shame that it wouldn’t save any lives when they got close to Collegium.
‘Listen, Jadis,’ he pointed out, feeling weary and old with the tedious predictability of the statement. ‘The Wasps don’t like us, and they can’t be trusted, and they don’t share power. Tell me she knows this. Tell me that her. .’ For a moment he nearly descended into an insult, an indelicate remark about Jadis’s blessed mistress, and that would have meant a duel whether Morkaris felt ready for it or not. ‘Tell me that her coming to an accommodation with the Wasp general is all about her twisting him around to do her bidding. Because my men have been talking.’
‘Mercenaries.’ One word to dismiss all that Morkaris and his followers were, but any mercenary captain learned to read his employers, and he could see the slightest flicker deep in Jadis’s eyes.
‘She had just better be in a position to sell him out before he does the same to us,’ the mercenary adjutant muttered. ‘And yes, we’ll march. We’re ready. As ready as we’ll ever be.’
General Tynan had rough hands, not the hands of a man in command but those of a man who did things for himself. He had a soldier’s scars, where a Spider in his position would have skin unblemished and smooth as silk. Spiders knew how to avoid fights they could not win, mostly, although her own family’s great battle against the Empire had given the lie to that, as had her subsequent campaign against Collegium. Against the Wasps, she had lost countless soldiers. Against the Beetles she had lost family. The greatest loss had been the esteem of her peers. The Aldanrael family was not what it had been, which had led to Mycella being here at the head of an army in a last-ditch attempt to regain by brute war what they had lost.
Leading an armed force was not a position of great honour for the Spider-kinden, since they gave it over to their menfolk and their Hoipolloi. Great ladies of great families did not dirty their hands with such business unless they were as desperate as Mycella had become. It had been the only path left to her: to take up the mantle of Lady-Martial, to sail for Solarno with her force of loyal followers, allied minor families and a rabble of mercenaries, and it had almost destroyed her pride. On the ship, she had contemplated ending her own life, because that would at least have won a moment’s approval of her peers.
To the Wasp-kinden, on the other hand, to lead an army was the highest accolade, the position that every man of them seemed to covet and work towards. She knew that they, too, had their greater and their lesser families, but success in battle could raise up even the lowliest of them. General Tynan himself had started life with a few advantages, but he had not been anything that Mycella might call nobility. His merit, his skill and judgement had effected a transformation in his status that would have been unthinkable in the Spiderlands. There, the best that a low-born could hope for was patronage by a greater family or to become a freelance for hire, like that oaf Morkaris.
She had sat up late with General Tynan for many nights, now, in her expansive tent, listening to him talk about war. He was not a bloodthirsty monster, the way his kinden were so often portrayed, but he loved warfare. It had been his life since he was a child of five, being taught the first principles of swordsmanship. War and the Empire to which he was so loyal. When he spoke of his passion he seemed fifteen years younger, filled with the burning zeal of the true adherent. He told her of his battles against the Lowlanders, against the Commonweal, against cities within the Empire. He spoke of men he had commanded — almost all of them dead by now — and of enemies he had met both on the field and off it. He showed her what a Wasp general’s world looked like, and the values that he cherished — so alien, and yet how they had struck a chord in her!
She had set out to seduce him, succeeding despite his innate caution. He had known what she was about, she guessed, and yet he had given before her soon enough. The day she could not lure a Wasp-kinden soldier to her bed would be her last day. . and yet. . she had found something in General Tynan that made him far more valuable to her than a mere puppet to be manipulated. More, she had found emotions awoken in her that were unwise and unlooked for. Not just those rough hands and her explorations of the battle-map of scars he bore, for such physical pleasures were merely expedient and useful, nothing to truly move her. The true gift he had given her, all unknowing, was a return of her self-respect.
She was Lady-Martial of the war-host of the Aldanrael, but that was a mark of disgrace, as though the other families had branded their disdain onto her skin.
To General Tynan, however, for all that she was a woman who could never have attained such rank within the Empire, she counted as a peer, someone deserving admiration. Through his eyes she was a general, and that was a thing worth being.
She had chosen a robe of deep blue edged with gold, complementing the Imperial colours without matching them. Beneath, she wore a hauberk of delicate copperweave chain backed with felt, flashing in the sun when the wind caught at her gown and flurried it aside. As the Second and its allies prepared to move out, she sought out General Tynan, finding him already atop his personal automotive, scouts and messengers landing beside him for orders, then being sent off within seconds.