opening arc. His head was still ringing, and the house itself rang, too, the bombardment continuous and close. For a moment Stenwold balanced himself, one foot on the cabinet, a hand on the door, before flinging the door wide and kicking the cabinet out as hard as he could. He heard it reach the stairs, with surprised oaths from below.
Then he went after it, standing at the balcony rail with his snapbow levelled. ‘Weapons down!’ he yelled, murder in his voice,
There was a Beetle youth below him, also the Wasp, both with their hands held in sight, the Wasps’ clenched into fists. They wore some sort of Company sash, and the Beetle looked like a student. They both looked like students.
Eujen Leadswell and Averic, his errant memory recalled, and further reminded him that the snapbowman dead behind him had the charring of a Wasp sting in his back. There was a short-sword at Eujen’s feet that had blood on it, too, and that other body at the foot of the stairs had presumably supplied the blood.
For a moment Stenwold simply stood there, trapped in the moment, weapon levelled and listening to the sound of his city being destroyed, until chains of logic fell into place, and he jammed the snapbow in his belt.
Nine dead men downstairs, and Stenwold was shaken now to think how he might have been one more. Step by step, he stomped his way down the stairs. ‘What’s going on? Why are you here?’ he demanded. He could not find it within himself to thank them — not these two.
They exchanged nervous glances, guilty almost. He felt the screw turn within him at the unfairness, given what they had done, but he could not stoop. He found his pride would not let him.
Some consensus was reached, and Eujen spoke first. ‘Master Maker, Averic was approached by Imperial agents who tried to recruit him. They had a list of victims to kill tonight. We have passed on details, best guesses as to targets. But you were surely top of the list. We tried to get here sooner. The streets…’ By the end of his speech he had recognized the corpse of Janos Outwright and was staring at it in horrified fascination.
Thereby saving my life twice over. But still the gracious words would not come. ‘I need to know everything they told you,’ he snapped at Averic, making the Wasp twitch. ‘Come with me, both of you.’ He stomped past them, heedless of the blood underfoot, collecting his sword. He was in command, he assured himself. The roar and crash from without gave the lie to that thought, but he clung to it, building a self-righteous anger to defend himself, which led on to the words: ‘And Master Leadswell, I trust you have reconsidered your stance on the Empire.’
He was so much the mighty engine of state, right then, that he had stepped onto the street outside before realizing that the two students were not simply pattering in his shadow. He looked back, and the flash and gout of the next bomb showed Eujen Leadswell’s face all too clearly, standing motionless beside that small fragment of the Empire that had cast its lot in with Collegium this night.
‘Master Maker,’ Leadswell stated, ‘when this is done, I will put myself forward at the Lots and get myself made Assembler, however long it takes. And when I do, I shall fight you at every bloody turn.’
‘Let us hope you that have the opportunity. If the Wasps win I don’t imagine anyone will be casting Lots any time soon,’ Stenwold retorted instantly, even though part of him was listening to his own words and shouting, Give it a rest! Just unbend and put a hand out to them. Except that putting a hand out meant friendship only in Collegium. To a Wasp it was a prequel to killing.
Averic’s hand was out already, and Stenwold flinched, reaching for his snapbow. The Wasp was pointing, though, his face bloodless and horrified in the ruddy glare of flames.
Stenwold turned, without expectations, and the sight struck him like a blow. There was a colossal conflagration at the centre of the city. The Amphiophos was burning.
Thirty-Four
Reaching the Amphiophos was a nightmare journey through disintegrating streets, encountering the dispossessed, the grieving, the blank-faced Merchant Company soldiers who could not help. The city’s familiar landmarks had been picked up and strewn like a child’s toys. Collegium was large and the enemy orthopters had been few, relatively speaking. The Beetle-kinden would survive, but still the scale of the damage was daunting. An unopposed incursion finally served to show what the hard work of the Collegiate airmen and women had been achieving as the nightly fruits of their failing defence.
The bombing was tailing off by the time Stenwold reached the first rubble foothills of the Amphiophos, and it was a bitter thought that only a shortage of bombs could be behind their retreat.
They will come in greater numbers tomorrow. That is what this has all been about. If I am wrong about Banjacs’s machine, though… then I will have invited the end. The thought of that same end being inevitable sooner or later, if Banjacs failed, was not one to comfort him.
Like little ants whose nest has been kicked over. That was the image that came to Stenwold as he set eyes on Collegium’s fallen heart of governance. Visible in the light of those fires still blazing, the shell and rubble of the place was crawling with the living, and he knew they were searching for the dead. He saw clerks and Company soldiers, servants, cleaners, concerned citizens, some still in nightshirts, all of them picking over the collapsed grandeur of the sprawling building. The Amphiophos’s heart was of ancient Moth construction, and succeeding generations had re-edified it, adding wings and rooms, domes, gardens, spires and suites, but all with surprising taste, preserving the pre-revolution elegance of the original white stone, so that the whole formed a bridge to a distant past that the Beetles had otherwise turned their backs on. From these halls the Moth-kinden had ruled their coastal city of Pathis, and the subject people who would, in the end, overthrow them. From these same white halls the founding parents of Collegium had set their course: embracing not arms and grudges and feuding like their Ant neighbours, but learning and tolerance and thought. The College and the Amphiophos, and the whole of Collegium sprang from that source, mind and heart.
One of the new wings was still standing, its windows just jagged empty sockets, but the interior merely singed rather than gutted. The rest had been laid waste. Domes had cracked like eggshells, often one wall and a section of curved roof still tottering, the rest fallen amidst a devastation of tapestries and murals and mosaics and art, and of lives too. The western end was still on fire, the water crews fighting to beat down the flames. The rest… Stenwold had never seen such a wasteland, not even in Myna. The attack on that city had been brutal but swift, but Collegium had been pounded and pounded, night after night, and now…
The expressions on the faces of those around him were haggard and gaunt with grief and incredulity, thoughts retreating deep inwards as the hands worked, shifting stones, searching for survivors or for simple confirmation of mortality. There were sobs from a few, but most simply forced themselves to it like automatons, building up a head of grief that would strike them the moment they rested.
In the midst of all this, he found Jodry.
The Speaker for the Assembly came shambling out from between roofless walls, his formal robes torn and soot stained, skin disfigured with bruises. There was a gash on his scalp that had been clumsily, hastily dressed. He stumbled and tripped over the fallen stones, hugging to him a burden that Stenwold could not identify for a moment, and then realized was a mass of papers bundled together awkwardly, charred and ripped and sodden in turn.
Jodry dumped them to the ground, and Stenwold saw that there was already a couple of other similar mounds, a meagre harvest of scrolls and books that were now in too poor a state to be sold in a Helleron street market.
‘Jodry,’ he called, and the man looked up, eyes bloodshot with the smoke, haunted by knowledge.
‘Sten.’ The fat man’s voice was the ghost of its former self.
‘What are you…?’ For a moment Stenwold wondered if the Speaker had gone mad.
‘The records, Sten. The minutes, laws, Assembly debates… our government, Sten.’ Jodry gestured helplessly at the ruined papers, even as his secretary, Arvi, staggered out with another pile, looking as battered and begrimed as his master.
‘But these…’ Stenwold crouched to begin leafing through the nearest pile. Loose pages from manifests, transcripts, judgements, accounts, but nothing connecting to its neighbours, nothing complete or whole, each pile almost whimsical in its juxtaposition, books compiled by idiots for illiterates.
‘It’s all we have. It’s Collegium,’ Jodry whispered. ‘It just needs… sorting out and filing, Sten…’
‘Jodry, for the world’s sake, sit down. Get something to drink. Arvi, surely you can…?’
Wearily, the Fly reached into his tunic and produced a flask. Stenwold had the impression that it was not from
