mercenary Morkaris and his Scorpions shouldering Wasps out of their way, and her chief of camp, the Melisandyr, strode alongside her in gleaming plate armour, holding a shield aloft as though it would protect anyone from anything.
‘What are you still doing here?’ Tynan demanded.
‘You have to get clear. You have to order a retreat, Tynan!’ she shouted to him. To his shock, he detected real concern in her eyes: not for his army, or their chances of winning the war, but solely for him.
And she was right, and he had known that truth for several minutes now, even as his men died.
‘Sound the retreat! Head east and regroup with the Spider-kinden!’
Instantly messengers and soldiers began spreading the word, the chain of command reasserting itself. It made him weep with frustration, but there was nothing else for it. He had the superior land force, but half his artillery was smashed and the Collegiates could destroy the rest at their leisure as long as they controlled the air. Under the withering barrage of their bombing, an attempt on the walls did not bear thinking about.
‘Come on,’ Mycella urged him. He saw she had a sword out as if to fight off the air assault by hand, and the impotence of the gesture touched him.
By degrees, and still under a flagging bombardment from the Collegiate fliers, the Second Army began to retreat from Collegium.
Last to turn round were the Sentinels, which stood before the bombardment unmoved, barely dented even when the bombs fell close. Their blank round eyes stared hungrily westwards, towards Collegium, before they finally turned, with an insolent slowness, and followed after the rest of the Second.
Forty-Two
Returning to their city, the army of Collegium met a hero’s welcome. Most of them did not know what to do with it.
There were enough that just accepted what they were given — waving back, kissing the girls or boys that presented themselves, acknowledging the heartfelt thanks of the populace, but Straessa’s face remained set tight, and she saw the same look all about her.
This is a sham, she thought. We lost. If that battle had been an apprentice piece or a student dissertation, they’d have kicked us onto the street. Strong start, lacking discipline in the middle, and chaotic finish failing to prove what you set out to. All in all, shows a lack of preparation. There was fear in her heart still, from this lesson taught. They’re better soldiers, and they have a better army. We accomplished nothing save get more sons and daughters of Collegium killed.
Behind the automotive in which she rode marched the Mynans, Kymene at their head. The woman’s grim expression mirrored Straessa’s thoughts exactly.
So what the pits is everyone cheering for, eh?
And then, as she had got that far in her thoughts, she realized that many of them were not. Those at the front were the enthusiastic ones, but even then she recognized a strain in their eyes, a desperation to make this procession something worthy of celebration. They cheered and they waved, trying to find familiar faces in the exhausted ranks, and those that flung themselves forward for an embrace were those that had found one, rather than simply carried away on the tide of victory.
On all sides loomed the buildings of Collegium, the gaps and rubble like missing teeth, as raw and unfamiliar as if they’d come home to some other city altogether.
There were surprisingly few officers left, the individual commands hopelessly intermingled, When her people had formed up raggedly in front of the wreck of the Amphiophos, Straessa sought out Kymene, as did various other officers and sub-officers. She found out then that Marteus had indeed been killed just before the battle, and Elder Padstock wounded during it, though not severely. In the interim, Collegium’s army was looking to a Mynan fugitive for leadership.
Kymene appeared as though she had been awake for a tenday, watching her new subordinates through red eyes as a surgeon re-bound her injured arm.
‘Go find your people,’ she advised. ‘Go show them you’re alive. Take that opportunity.’ She coughed, grimacing as it jarred her injury. ‘Keep your weapons to hand, though, and your uniforms. Don’t get so drunk you can’t fight.’ She did not need to say, They are still out there.
That evening took Straessa, eventually, to the run-down study from which te Mosca had taught Inapt studies not so long ago. There, she glanced from face to face and realized how lucky she herself had been.
Gerethwy was there, his hand bandaged so heavily that the loss of two fingers was barely noticeable, and his calm due more to the herbal philtres they had given him than to his usual demeanour. In that he matched Raullo Mummers, who had drunk himself comatose before Straessa even arrived. The homeless artist’s face was gaunt and ravaged, finding no rest even in sleep.
Sartaea te Mosca herself, the eternal hostess, arrived late, appearing only after she had done all she could in the infirmaries. She turned up at her own door with a bloodied apron under one arm, ready for washing pending the morrow. Collegium had few Inapt doctors, so she insisted on treating patients of certain kinden when she could. The regular surgeons muttered and snorted, but her results spoke for themselves. As she arrived, Straessa found her a drink, and the Fly woman slumped down on the floor with it.
Eujen and Averic arrived together, wearing the sashes of the Student Company, having been busy since the army’s return. While the regular soldiers rested, it had been the youthful Students who had manned the walls and kept watch on the skies. The aviators had continued to harry the Second Army, driving it further and further, and even now they were flying out into the night, showing the Empire all that Collegium had learned from the Wasps about modern warfare. Still, as each modified Stormreader could carry only one or two bombs, and as the city’s stocks of munitions were fast drying up, there was a limit to the amount of pressure they could keep up. An hour before, though, word had come to the Students that they could stand down. The Empire’s forces were sufficiently far off, and in sufficient disarray, that no attack could be expected tonight.
The Antspider and Eujen eyed each other, probing the wedge between them that time and war had hammered in.
‘You’ve been keeping the place tidy while I was gone, then.’ Such flippancy was all she had left to her. Her hand’s idle gesture encompassed the bomb-scarred city outside the shutters. Seeing his face, noticing the gulf between them only increase rather than close, she felt a sudden panic, more severe than anything she had experienced on the field. What did I say? Why have the rules changed?
Then he held his arms out, hugging her to him. ‘I know…’ she heard him say, ‘I know such things.’ But he would not disclose them, the revelations of the last few days: Imperial assassins, Stenwold Maker’s ruinous game of chance with the city, Banjacs’s death and incidental triumph, all of it sealed in his mind.
Outside, across the city, the citizens of Collegium sat in the shadow of one question: Will they be back? Would the Empire — so vast and inexorable and hungry, so often rebuffed and yet seemingly never defeated — would it return for them? They tried to tell themselves that Collegium’s freedom was assured; everybody said so, but nobody believed it.
Somewhere else, Laszlo was still trying to find some trace of his vanished Lissart, not knowing whether she was alive or dead, hunting for any rumour that a flame-haired not-quite-Fly girl might have made it safely to the city.
In the College infirmary, lying amongst so many others, Amnon awoke in pain and grief but alive despite it all. They told him that they had found him crawling back towards the Collegium lines, trailing blood, but he remembered none of it.
In his townhouse, the windows boarded up since the glass was blown in, Jodry Drillen slept at his desk, jowl pressed into a half-drafted agenda for the next meeting of the Assembly, wherever that might actually take place. His Fly-kinden secretary, Arvi, glanced in, crept over to remove Jodry’s empty bottle and bowl, then tiptoed from the room.
In the hushed chambers allotted to the College librarians, the artificer Willem Reader, co-designer of the Stormreaders that had helped save Collegium, looked in on his sleeping wife and daughter, and thought about the future.
