Kymene walked amongst her people with a quiet word here, clasping a shoulder there, giving them heart, giving them hope. Far from home, fighting under another city’s flag, they thought only about freedom.
And Stenwold, out on the walls and looking eastwards, brooded on the Empire, as did so many other people.
The Second Army was slowly cohering, preparing the most defensible camp that it could after having left its travelling walls behind it, spreading its fires wide to mitigate the next attack. General Tynan was counting his losses.
Between the fighting itself and the disastrous retreat, he had lost some one in six of his soldiers. This engagement, which the more level heads of Collegium were already characterizing as a draw, was the most crushing defeat the Second had ever suffered.
There was a wing of Spearflights on the way to them from Solarno, the reliable old workhorses of the Imperial air force. They were better than nothing but no match for Collegium’s machines. There was already a fresh class of the Aviation Corps training in Capitas, with new-built Farsphex and all their other advantages, but nobody knew what had happened to their predecessors. Some catastrophe, some secret Beetle weapon, had swept the sky clear of them, and they were no more.
And General Tynan made fitful plans and growled at his subordinates, or calmed himself in Mycella’s company as he waited, always waited, for word from the Empress.
Then, tendays after the battle, and even as fresh Stormreader forays were forcing the Second to move camp further east still, a Fly-kinden woman flew up to the camp’s sentries and demanded to be taken to the general himself.
On the southern coast of the Exalsee sat Chasme, the pirate artificing town that had been a thorn in the side of respectable Solarno for generations. Selling its services to all bidders, producing orthopters and pilots, weapons and the men to use them, it had danced a fine line between the other cities that ringed the great lake, useful to each in turn whilst being a venomous annoyance to the others, but never so much to bring about its own destruction.
In recent years, Chasme had changed, though, and while the people of Solarno might have thought they hated it for its piracy, now they found it all the more loathsome for its honest competition. Chasme was one man’s town. He had made it a power on the Exalsee, and was working on making it a power in the wider world. His name was Dariandrephos, known as Drephos to his one confidante and as the Colonel-Auxillian to the Empire, and he commanded the Iron Glove trading cartel.
Here the Sentinels had been born, both their physical frames, their ratiocinator-guided mechanisms and the spun-steel metallurgy that made them light enough to move. Here the greatshotters had been built and tested and refined. Drephos and his second-in-command, Totho, were nothing if not prolific in their industry, and such was their reputation for rewarding genius that even proud Solarnese artificers crept cap in hand to them, begging for the chance to serve them.
The Empire had represented a great well of gold to the Iron Glove and, better still, it had given Drephos and Totho the chance to have their inventions used, which was worth more than all the riches of the world. Now, unheralded, a new Wasp delegation had come to visit them.
Drephos kept no audience chambers, so he chased apprentices out of one of the forges and had the great hammers and wheels stilled, and there he awaited his visitors, with Totho standing at his metal shoulder. He wore only his plain robe, and a leather apron over it, as though he had been surprised while working on some personal project. His mottled grey face, its features subtly distorted, held a mocking smile. Totho wore the hardwearing canvas of a Collegiate artificer and the closed expression of any halfbreed who has grown up in a city not enamoured of his kind.
The delegation was small, no great Imperial pomp but a practical-looking Wasp colonel, unusual in his beard and tied-back hair. With him came a handful of soldiers and a Consortium factor, and a single Fly-kinden woman in the uniform of the Aviation Corps.
Drephos had gone quite still on seeing the colonel, and the two men studied each other, both of them the Empire’s failures and both dealing with the rejection in different ways. Drephos had made himself a new empire here on the Exalsee, whereas this man had fought hard, under the threat of a death sentence, to win himself another chance.
‘Varsec, is it not?’ Drephos asked.
‘That is correct, Colonel-Auxillian.’ Imperial colonels were forceful and aggressive and ambitious, but this man — young for a colonel — seemed to have an edge of desperation about him.
‘They call you the father of the Imperial Aviation Corps,’ Drephos noted. ‘Your results speak for themselves. Impressive.’
‘You have heard the news from Collegium,’ Varsec stated.
‘News travels fast, especially when my own people were able to carry it up the coast and past your Second Army, wherever that might be now.’ The Colonel-Auxillian was picking his words with care, observing as fine a line as Chasme had ever walked.
‘Then you know why I am here.’ Varsec spread his hands bitterly. ‘I am…’ He gave a glance back at the other Wasps. The soldiers stood silently, whilst the Consortium man seemed to be making a mental manifest of everything that he saw. ‘I am on a knife-edge. My corps has suffered a terrible defeat.’
‘However did you convince them not to make an example of you?’ Drephos murmured.
‘I am still doing so, day to day.’ And, without visibly changing at all, the guards behind Varsec assumed a different aspect: not escorts but jailers.
‘And you need to fortify your Corps against whatever happened, and you need to do so now — ready for the next engagement of the war. And so you come here, to the Empire’s bastard son.’ It was not clear whether he meant himself or Chasme and the Iron Glove. ‘But I was under the impression that what happened to your Farsphex was not understood.’
‘Pingge, step forwards,’ Varsec beckoned, and the Fly-kinden woman did so. ‘Pingge flew in the assault on Collegium. She is the sole survivor. She saw it all.’
The Fly spoke at length, sometimes faltering with emotion, but pushing herself on. Whatever she had been before, there was a steely determination to her now. It demanded revenge — revenge for all the friends and comrades lost over Collegium. As she made her report, describing Collegium’s new weapon, Drephos became more and more focused, his iris-less eyes gleaming, gesturing for Totho to bring him pen and paper.
And, when she had finished, Drephos turned to confer with Totho, his guests utterly forgotten, the two artificers muttering together as excitedly as two young students. The Colonel-Auxillian even got as far as sketching three or four figures, before remembering that he had an audience, and at last he said, ‘Why, yes, I believe I see the problem.’ He was striving for calm now, but it was plain that Pingge’s news had inspired him.
‘And your price?’ Varsec pressed.
‘Can be negotiated with your factor there but’ — Drephos’s tone made it clear that this was the real prize — ‘I will have to see the full schematics for your orthopters, of course.’ Varsec’s great triumph of mechanics had been denied to Drephos’s insatiable curiosity until now.
But Varsec had thought that far ahead. ‘Of course. I have them here,’ he said, without a pause. ‘But it must be soon — even now.’ Here was a man in whose future loomed the crossed pikes of the executioner.
Drephos smiled, seldom a pleasant sight. ‘It is an invitation I extend to few, Colonel Varsec, but will you join us, then? For I see what must be done, and we had better get to work.’
