The Seal of the Worm (29 page)

‘At a similar distance to the west, General, and a good space between them and the Sarnesh. The Collegiate orthopters are still providing air cover for them.’

But not the Sarnesh fliers.
Although the Ants and the Beetles flew the same model of craft, Bergild’s Farsphex pilots could tell whose hands were on the stick just from the flying styles.

‘Fine, back to your squad.’ He dismissed the scout because his headquarters was crowded at the moment, with friends and enemies both. ‘They can only be waiting for an uprising from the populace,’ Tynan decided. ‘Double patrols, no exceptions to the curfew, and break up any gatherings of more than a dozen. Let’s have some keen-eyed lads up on the roofs as well, to keep a lid on it. Prepare a sally force of about a third of our strength. We’ll hit the Vekken first.’

‘General, no.’

Tynan’s head snapped round, to see the eternal thorn in his side.

‘Major Vrakir, you have something to say?’

‘Do not dilute our forces within the city, sir. They will be needed.’

Vrakir had that curiously set look to his face that Tynan had learned to expect, as though the man was trying to disassociate himself from his own mouth.

‘No doubt this is the Empress’s wisdom we’re hearing?’

Vrakir locked eyes with him. ‘Her own words, General. Our forces will be called upon to defend Collegium. There must be no sorties. You’ve said yourself that they have neither the numbers nor the engines to take the walls.’

‘Unless some concerned citizen opens the gates to them, and the longer they sit out there unchallenged, the more chance there is of that happening,’ Tynan shot back.

‘Even so, General.’

Each time this happened, each time Vrakir came out with some new proclamation, Tynan braced himself, wondering if this was the moment that he would break loose from these ridiculous shackles and call the man’s bluff. But then came the thought, always:
Remember what it is you have already done
. And, in the echo of that, he just nodded and gritted his teeth.
Bend over for Vrakir and the Empress.

He put a hand to his forehead. He had been drinking last night, when the dreams had got too much for him, and the aftereffects were proving stubborn.

‘So our ground forces sit still, and yet you want most of our air cover pissing off east to escort who knows what, leaving us open to their orthopters?’

‘Yes, General. It is necessary.’

‘What does she tell you, Vrakir?’ he asked roughly. ‘Why can’t we just smash the Vekken and the Sarnesh, given they’ve delivered themselves up to us in such convenient numbers?’ He had long since given up questioning how it was that the Empress’s words reached this man. Secret agents, messenger insects, some tiny ratiocinator engine surgically implanted in Vrakir’s skull: all of these he might believe.

Vrakir swallowed, and Tynan raised an eyebrow, seeing that even he was having difficulty forcing the words out.

‘Fear death by water,’ was all he had in reply.

After dismissing the lot of them, Tynan returned to his quarters in disgust, to meet with his guest.

When she had been brought in – not long before the scouts returned – he had assumed this was the herald of some great insurgency amongst the Collegiates. After all, the Fly Sartaea te Mosca was reckoned to be some manner of agitator by the Moths.

She had denied that, and so he had her placed under guard while he went to deal with more important matters. He had left her food and wine, though, and refrained from putting her in a cell or binding her. He felt that she had become one of those curious unknown quantities – not one of
ours
, and yet perhaps not one of
theirs
either, someone who might prove useful. Tynan was no intelligencer, but governing a city was fast turning him into one.

‘Now,’ he addressed her, as he strode in, ‘what was it?’

She had been sitting at his table and pouring the last of the wine, and now she started guiltily. ‘General, no doubt you’re wondering what’s about to happen with the Sarnesh and the Vekken.’

‘Forgive me if I don’t actually believe you’re going to tell me.’

‘I don’t know, not exactly, but I know that they have come to retake the city, General. I’ve come here to give you some advice, if you will take it.’

He stared at her for a moment. ‘Is that advice to leave the city?’

‘It is, I’m afraid.’

‘Then that’s not an option. I have my orders.’

‘General, I . . .’ She bit at her lip. ‘I’d be getting nowhere if I said that I was a magician, would I?’

He laughed at her although, by the time he had sat across from her, the sound had something broken about it. ‘Is that something you’re likely to tell me? Are you the Empress’s voice, too?’ Even as he said it, he knew that those words should sound like some wild non-sequitur, but instead they seemed to follow on perfectly naturally.

‘General—’

‘Listen to me, Fly-kinden,’ he told her, harsher than he had intended, simply to cover up his unease. ‘Your Ant friends are too few to help you, and they can’t even join forces to work together against us. Vekken and Sarnesh, they hate each other worse than they hate us! They’ll be at each others’ throats within a tenday, if we don’t destroy them first.’
Which we can’t, because Vrakir says that the Empress says . . .
That curious tone in which the Red Watch man uttered,
Fear death by water
, as though he could not believe his own mouth, as though he was a prisoner to some barbed thing inside his head, which was making him say such things.

‘They will not fight each other,’ te Mosca told him. ‘Your scouts will tell you soon, if you have not heard already.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Stenwold Maker has been seen in the Ant camps. He will keep them in line.’

‘Maker’s dead,’ Tynan spat back immediately.

‘Then show me his body.’

Abruptly he kicked back from the table, as though this small woman was venomous. Her words, Vrakir’s words, the scout’s report of the emptied village, everything rattled and jumbled in his mind, and for a moment he felt that it almost came together to make some terrible, unthinkable sense, some pattern that his mind was simply not prepared to accept.

‘Tell your people that if they rise up, I will make an example of them,’ he hissed to te Mosca. ‘Every man or woman who takes up arms will be on the crossed pikes, and their families shipped east as slaves. Tell them!’ His own threats sounded hollow in his ears.

Taki was proud that at least half of her pilots got into the air ahead of the Sarnesh. Certainly, the Ants had the benefit of their mindlink, but defending Collegium from the Empire had meant that being kicked out of bed and straight into the cockpit had become second nature to her.

Barely half an hour before, a Stomreader scout had skidded to a hasty landing, the pilot leaping out to warn that there was trouble on the way. The Empire was getting reinforcements.

At around the same time, the Imperial Second Army’s Farsphex were all lifting off and heading eastwards to shepherd the new arrivals in. That meant it was time for Taki and her comrades to go and pick a fight.

Rising up now from the Sarnesh camp, she craned left and right to see the swiftest of her comrades falling into place around her – Collegiate Beetle-kinden and Mynan airmen, most of them veterans of a dozen aerial skirmishes. The Sarnesh were below, just warming their wings, all about to leap from the earth at the same unheard signal.

Airships
, the scout had said, and that covered a multitude of sins. Taki had given very clear orders on how to react if the Empire was trying the same trick as last time – a ship that was basically nothing more than a mobile hornet hive. When the Second had taken the city, Collegium had lost the bulk of its aerial forces to that ruse, although the Imperial pilots had hardly come out unscathed either.

Still, it doesn’t make sense to do it twice.
Not only because their opponents would be expecting it, but because the overwhelming air superiority the Empire had been countering then simply did not exist now. Perhaps Collegium and Sarn did have a bit of an edge in the air, but both sides had nowhere near the number of craft that earlier clashes had seen. In the end, neither the Empire nor its enemies had been able to match production to the intervening attrition, and now Taki guessed that the flower of the Wasp Air Corps was being deployed elsewhere.

Three big airships, though? Can’t just be a supply run.
And the only answer to that was:
Better take a look, the hard way.

She had them in sight: whatever they were, the dirigibles were big enough that she could see the three dots in the sky even at this distance, and she flashed her wingmen to draw their attention.

It was an agonizing wait for the vessels to come into range and, at the same time, the last few hundred yards seemed to dash by far too fast. By then she had had a good look at the airships, seeing some of the largest freighters her considerable experience had encountered, but certainly not the specialist piece they’d shipped the insect hive in.

The Second Army’s complement of Farsphex circled and dived about them, already fanning out to take on the enemy. Whatever this business was about, the Wasps wanted to protect it.

Taki’s mind spun through its unconscious mathematics, one hand clicking signals left and right at her comrades, detailing plans of attack, the codes all second nature to her now. She knew that the Sarnesh would work to their own agenda, but she had spotted the line they were taking and simply kept her people out of that quarter. The Ants fought together impeccably, as she would have expected, but they tended to huddle as a pack despite everything she had tried to teach them – deadly, but of limited impact in a battlefield as vast as the sky.

Planning done, the burdens of leadership discharged, she again became Taki the pilot, skimming her Stormreader through the sky at her first target, aiming to scatter the enemy and dive at the closest of those airships.
Let’s put a few holes in one and see what colour it bleeds.

After the fight, there were more questions than answers. The Wasp Farsphex pilots had put up a spirited defence, keeping the pressure on the attackers to deflect them from the slow-moving dirigibles. They had lost four, which Taki reckoned was a good catch. One Collegiate pilot had been struck from the air, and the Sarnesh had lost one as well.
That
had been an education – the Ants all over the air for almost ten minutes, as if they had abruptly remembered the drop beneath them, the utter hostility of the surrounding element to a kinden without wings. They had pulled themselves together after that, but Taki reckoned that from now on they wouldn’t be so stuffy about taking advice from kinden more at home in the air.

They had brought down one of the three airships by concerted and determined strafing, and that
had
been mostly due to the Sarnesh, who had been able to coordinate their attack runs faultlessly. The other two had lumbered on until they were over Collegium itself, and Wasp soldiers began rising up from the walls, whereupon Taki had finally called off the attack.

She had gone straight back to that one downed craft to get a good look at it before the Imperials tried to rescue whatever it had been carrying. She had been ready for just about anything: soldiers, beasts, more artillery, all the materiel that General Tynan might need to hold off a siege.

What she had not expected was nothing. Nothing at all.

‘What do you mean,
nothing
?’ Tynan demanded.

‘Just that, sir,’ Captain Bergild reported, sounding just as incredulous as he did. ‘I lost four of my pilots to bring these things in, and they’re empty – great big freight-carriers, and it looks as if the Quartermasters forgot to load up before they took off.’

Tynan stared past her for a second as he fought his temper down. ‘Get me Vrakir.’

‘He’s already here, General, awaiting your pleasure.’

‘Then he’ll be waiting a long time.’ Tynan glowered about his headquarters. ‘Send the man in. I want to hear this.’

Major Vrakir entered smartly. There was a look on his face that Tynan recognized immediately: the look of a man whose duty it was to bear unwelcome news. Vrakir had looked like that when he had come to order Tynan to act against their Spider allies.

‘You’ve some explaining to do,’ the general growled. ‘First, I hear your threat from the sea has resolved itself into a fleet of a dozen ships hanging back down the coast. Apparently the land forces practically at our gates don’t take precedence over a few hundred Tseni marines. “Fear death by water” indeed.’

Vrakir regarded him impassively, rising to none of it.

‘And now your empty airships that we diverted our entire air strength to defend. Is there a nagging feeling in the back of your mind, Vrakir? Did your people forget something back in Capitas, perhaps? Is their plan still sitting back at the airfield, all neatly crated and waiting to fly?’

‘I need to speak with you, and only you, General,’ Vrakir replied.

Tynan looked at him, thinking,
Is this it then? Is this when we come to blows, the two most senior Wasps in Collegium trading sting-shot across a small room?

Would I welcome that, if it was?

With a sick feeling he realized that he would. If Vrakir tried to kill him, then he would take that as a fair excuse for killing Vrakir right back.
Is this something Mycella did to punish me, when I killed her? Is this some Art – some Inapt thing – that has hold of me? Or is it just me? Come on, Tynan, you don’t
need
anything more than that to want this man dead. You’re already an unnatural bastard for having let him live this long.

He flexed his fingers, shrugged his shoulders. He wore a leather cuirass under his tunic, and it might deflect the fire of a stingshot, if he was lucky. Vrakir, on the other hand, looked unarmoured.

‘Get out, all of you,’ he murmured.

‘General—?’

‘All of you, out now. Out into the next room, but wait for my shout.’
Because if he is quicker than me, then by the Empress I’ll trust you to kill him before he can get out of this place.
‘You too, Captain Bergild.’