The Air War (43 page)

All the while, the greatshotters continued their determined work.

The Sarnesh had brought a flight of orthopters, old Collegium designs and the products of the Ants’ own artificers, workmanlike but unimaginative vessels, mostly still equipped with the
repeating ballistae of yesterday’s air forces. The Spearflights outnumbered them more than two to one, but the first day of aerial duelling was not won easily nonetheless, the Ant pilots
selling each broken machine dearly, taking a toll on the enemy despite the shortcomings of their technology. At the same time the Sarnesh ground forces advanced the long march towards the Imperial
lines, rank upon rank of armoured Ant-kinden armed with shield, sword and snapbow, backed by the trundling of tracked automotives.

The traditional Imperial response should have been to send the Light Airborne out en masse, coursing over the marching formations to lash down on them with their stings – tactics that had
failed miserably in living memory. Instead, Roder held the bulk of his force in place, taking full advantage of the cover they had built up.

The automotives formed the initial point of their charge, grinding forwards at the pace of a man running. They met the Imperial Sentinels coming the other way. The articulated machines fairly
vaulted the Wasp earthworks, rushing the Ant lines with bolts and light artillery bounding from their shells, only pausing with legs braced to loose a leadshotter round that ploughed through the
Ant soldiers or punched into the armour of a Sarnesh automotive. Faster and more agile and vastly better armoured, as the battle progressed they hunted down the Sarnesh machines mercilessly,
crushing any soldier luckless enough to get in their way.

When the Ants got within snapbow range they mounted their charge, breaking their solid formations into a scattered skirmish line to best avoid the incoming bolts. It was at that moment that they
came closest to winning, had they only known.

The snapbows and the leadshotters tore into them, scattered or not. The Ants were still trusting to their heavy armour that would carry the day if they could only get into the close combat that
they were so skilled at, but it weighed them down, and it did little to slow the incoming shot, despite the silk and felt they had lined it with.

Once the Ants were committed to their charge, Roder sent detachments of Light Airborne out – not over the enemy, where they might be picked off, but in solid groups landing to the left or
right flank, shooting directly into the sides of the enemy formations.

The Ant-kinden tacticians knew all this, of course. They were able to send detachments left and right to chase off the flanking forces, although the Wasps always came down out of reach, shooting
even as they landed. They were able to exhort their soldiers onwards into the flaying lash of the massed snapbows, in the knowledge that, if they could only gain the first earthworks, the
Empire’s soldiers would surely fold, and the Ant infantry could rush through and reach the incessant greatshotters behind. By then, though, some of the last surviving Sarnesh pilots had
relayed their views of the Wasp camp: trench on bank on trench, no fit terrain for armoured soldiers to clamber over into the barrels of snapbows. And, of course, the Wasp Airborne would be able to
hop from trench to trench with ease.

There was a moment, a fulcrum moment, when the casualties mounted to such a level, within mere yards of the first earthworks, that even the tacticians suffered a crisis of faith. The cost was
too great. Hearts as solid and dutiful as iron broke in that same moment. They felt every death, and it was too much.

They tried again over the next few days, sometimes with reinforcements, sometimes with new orthopters, but they never came as close as on that first day. The knowledge of what awaited them
blunted each successive attack, never quite able to grasp the nettle now they had felt its sting. Meanwhile, the Wasps made the best use of their undisputed ownership of the sky to send their
Spearflights, and even some airships, out to bomb the Sarnesh camp and to bedevil any advance.

On the twelfth day, even as another attack was aborted before it even reached snapbow range, the inner walls of Malkan’s Folly suddenly caved in, changing from impregnable fortress to
stone eggshell in a minute of cracking and dust. It was enough. The Sarnesh army fell back, and continued falling back because the greatshotter artillerists were already gambling with new
calculations, trying to chase them back towards Sarn.

As one of the younger armies, the Eighth had not yet earned a name for itself but, with the fortress fallen and the Ants in full retreat, Roder put out the word. From now on, the glorious Eighth
Army would be ‘the Hammer’, just as Tynan’s Second was ‘the Gears’ and the fallen Seventh that Malkan had commanded – that Roder had now avenged – had
earned the name of ‘the Winged Furies’.

The men of the Eighth were ecstatic, and Roder let them celebrate because he did not want them thinking too much about what was to come. The game only got harder, the further
west they marched. Partly this was because of supply lines. Partly it was that, the closer they got to Sarn, the more the Ant-kinden themselves could complicate a day’s travel. Mostly,
however, it was the great brooding mass of trees that would shortly eclipse their northern horizon.

This was the joke, the limitation of the Sarnesh tactical view on the world. Ant-kinden were self-sufficient, in this case actually to a fault. Their great fortress, in which they had placed so
much faith, was the least of Roder’s worries, for the land beyond it was guarded by a threat he took far more seriously: the Mantis-kinden.

In the last war, the Mantids of the Felyal, on the southern coast, had essentially destroyed the Imperial Fourth Army, and when General Tynan had marched that way with his Second, he had taken a
great many precautions to ensure that history did not repeat itself. His advance had been slowed by the need to fortify every night, until he actually got the Mantids where he wanted them, killed
their warriors and burned their forest.

The Etheryon was the largest single forest north of the Alim, containing two separate Mantis holds and a population several times that of the Felyal, and all of them killers by nature who could
walk as silently as the breeze and see in the dark. Roder had dealt with his fill of assassins when he had fought the Spiders at Seldis, but it was a matter of recent record that enough
Mantis-kinden could assassinate an entire
army.
It was going to be a long road to Sarn, and that was even before he considered the surprise the Ants themselves had managed to leave for
him.

After the fortress fell, the Sarnesh relief force had quit the field, but the defenders of Malkan’s Folly had not. Those who had survived – an uncertain number, and Roder had no way
of finding out just how many – were still there because, of course, the Ants had undermined their own creation with cellars and tunnels and subterranean barracks, and probably a living
ant-colony as well, full of vicious three-foot biting insects ready to scuttle to their masters’ bidding. The fortress had fallen, but its architects had the last laugh: it still fulfilled
its function as a threat that Roder was unwilling to leave at his back. For all he knew, those tunnels could run all the way to Sarn itself.

He had conferred with Ferric on whether sustained greatshotter bombardment could cave the earth in on the whole nest of them, but the engineer was not optimistic, and the idea of sending troops
into those tunnels to try and root an unknown number of Ants, quite possibly many hundreds of the tenacious bastards, was not appealing as a use of either time or materiel. Ants couldn’t see
in the dark, but their mindlink would give them a good enough picture of their surroundings, built up from a consensus of sound and touch and shared proximity.

Roder let his men celebrate – save for those drawn as sentries, of course – because it was an excuse not to move on while he wrestled with the main problem. He did not want the
Eighth to realize that they were not yet done here.

Then, on the dusk of the second day, his visitor arrived. The first he knew of it was a watch sergeant bursting into his tent, as he sat with plans and notes regarding a tentative assault with
sappers.

‘Sir!’ A smart salute. ‘Someone here with papers, sir.’

Roder knew what
that
normally meant – some off-the-books Imperial dignitary, Rekef likely as not, come to make his life more complicated. He suppressed his sour look and nodded
tiredly. ‘Send him in,’ he said, clearing up his papers.

‘Excuse me, sir, but he’s . . . I don’t think he wants to come in, sir.’

‘But he has papers.’

‘The seal of the
Empress
, sir,’ the sergeant said, plainly awed by the thought.

Roder stood sharply. ‘Show me,’ he ordered.

The visitor stood on one of their embankments, looking out at the ruin of the Folly, and Roder’s pace slowed as he appreciated just what the wind had blown into his camp. Not a Rekef man,
not some Consortium profiteer or Slave Corps major, not a Wasp at all. In all his years of soldiering, he was willing to bet that a figure like this had not graced an Imperial camp, or at least not
with official papers.

A man, he could tell, tall and slender, but the rest was just armour – and what armour! Roder knew a little of the collector’s trade, and what he was looking on would have driven a
half-dozen rich men back in the capital mad with greed. A full set of sentinel plate, enamelled black and gold, but not Imperial craftsmanship. The ancient Inapt smith who had wrought this had
worked to an alien aesthetic, crafting something elegant and spined and deadly, producing a carapace more than a suit of armour.

There was a clawed gauntlet on the newcomer’s hand, its narrow blade folded back along his arm, where the armour was slit so as to allow the barbs of his Art to jut out. As Roder
approached more and more cautiously, fearing some lethal trap set by the Etheryen Mantids, the figure’s free arm thrust towards him, with crumpled papers proffered in its gauntleted
fingers.

Roder had no intention of getting
that
close, but the sergeant pattered ahead of him and retrieved the documents, handling them as though they were gold dust. Roder glanced down at the
seals, and then again.
The Empress’s highest recommendations
, he thought.
Her own personal seal.
Nobody so important as to merit all of this would risk themselves by coming out
to visit an army in the field. Until now.

One of the Empress’s bodyguard
, he realized, for he had seen that band of Mantis-kinden at the palace, but were they not all women?

‘I give you welcome to the camp of the Eighth Army,’ Roder said carefully, watching for the slightest suggestion that this figure was about to turn on him. ‘Can I ask your
purpose here?’ The so-impressive credentials gave no hint of it, simply expressed the Empress’s utmost trust and faith in the bearer, who was identified only by the armour he wore.
Could be just about anyone in there . . .

The armoured Mantis raised an arm and unhinged the metal claw, letting it flick out to point towards the shattered shell of Malkan’s Folly.

‘You’ve come to see the result of the battle for the Empress?’ Roder hazarded.

For a moment the helm turned towards him. In the failing light there was the suggestion of a ghostly pale face beneath the raised visor, and the man’s stare had a cold force that sent
Roder back a step.

Then the Mantis was striding forwards, towards the edge of the camp and then beyond it, heading for the fallen fortress, and for its hidden defenders waiting in the darkness below.

That night, some of the sentries reported hearing screams.

‘She certainly makes a good show,’ Colonel Harvang commented. For once he was not eating, although his fleshy lips twitched and moved when he was not speaking, as
though still savouring something.

The senior members of General Brugan’s conspiracy were meeting in the palace itself, a room buried deep in the cellars, one of a complex of chambers that the Rekef traditionally used for
storing useful prisoners and parting them from their secrets with the aid of machinery. It said a great deal about the Empire that such concerns were already in the architects’ minds when the
edifice was first planned.

General Brugan grunted. He had been with the Empress last night, during another of her debauches. He felt physically drained now, as he always did, and the blood that so obviously fed her seemed
only to leach something vital from himself. He had tried, so very hard, to see it all as just the ruler of the Wasps exalting in her power, but he knew that it was more, and that he would never
understand.

He shuddered, visibly enough that Harvang raised an eyebrow.

‘These tapes . . .’ Colonel Vecter was poring over his reports, and had not noticed. ‘These cloth things the halfbreed makes . . .’ If a machine was not intended for
excruciation, he had little time for it. ‘They take her voice all over the Empire, inspirational messages to the troops. I have good reports – morale and fighting spirit all kept high.
The personal touch.’ He tutted. ‘General, I was unsure why you were so insistent on keeping her, rather than simply replacing her, but I think I understand. It is a bitter thought but
the Empire
does
need her.’

Brugan stared at him.
Oh, you do not understand.
The intrinsic division within him warred constantly. He hated Seda, he feared her: she was unnatural, terrifying, something from the old
stories. Yet he could not live without her. The best compromise he could make was to possess her, control her. He could diminish her into a proper example of Wasp-kinden womanhood, and so regain
some vestige of control over himself.

They had not brought many of their confederates here; this was Rekef territory after all, and outsiders were seldom welcome. Only Harvang’s man, Ostrec, was here to listen in, and that
only because the conversation would eventually turn to his orders.