formidable Fly-kinden matron named Drasse as the woman to cosy up to, and after running errands for the woman for a day, he had found himself and Liss safely under her protection. Liss herself could charm the stripes off a Rekef colonel, when she wanted to, and soon Drasse had found her a berth on the wagon, and some medicine besides.
The wagon was a stroke of luck they had not known that they needed, for the army was not what either of them had expected. General Tynan and the Lady-Martial Mycella were moving fast.
The entire Imperial contingent travelled by automotive, as did their supplies, ammunition and the disassembled pieces of such machines that could not move under their own power, including considerable quantities of artillery. Wasp soldiers sat inside and on top of great wheeled transporters that belched smoke and steam, and ground up the miles mercilessly without ever tiring. Their Spider allies slowed them down a little, but far less than might be expected. The Apt amongst them, and the unluckier of the Inapt, were in similar conveyances, a motley fleet of various walkers, rollers and tracks dredged from every vehicle foundry from Chasme to Fort Tamaris. The rest had either brought mounts — an equally varied menagerie of horses, beetles, spiders and crickets — or travelled in wagons pulled almost universally by strong hauling beetles. Travelling alongside the supplies was a luxury, as it meant that Liss was not forever jostling elbows with dozens of others.
They had swarmed past Tark not long ago, and Laszlo had only teased out the fact of the city’s surrender in retrospect: not surrender to the Empire as conquerors, but a subtler and perhaps more permanent concession. Tark had become part of the Spiderlands, its king sworn to the Aldanrael as a vassal. Already the city was crawling with Spiders taking census of Mycella’s new gains.
Liss told him that Spider-kinden maps had always been ambitious, when it came to the Lowlands. Most of them marked out large sections of the coast as already being under Spider control. It seemed that Mycella was rapidly making that fiction a reality.
They had coursed on south past the hills of Merro and Egel, two interlinked Fly-kinden warrens whose loyalties in the past had been a feather for every wind. Nobody had shown any great surprise when the leading families of both had assured everyone concerned that, of course, they had always been part of the Spiderlands. The richly dressed little magnates had put up a very convincing display of confusion that anyone should even have to ask. Mycella had received their declarations of fealty and loyalty with appropriate magnanimity.
But this was different. The army had barely slowed for the Fly-kinden, but now Laszlo found himself at the coast, the dangerous forest of the Felyal at his back and looking out at the fortified island of Kes.
The Ant-kinden of Kes had a chequered history recently. The last time the Wasps had sent an army down the coast, the Ants had declared themselves uninterested, hiding behind their walls and their fleet, and saving the Empire the considerable effort of investing their island in siege. There had been much speculation amongst the followers of the current army — the Grand Army, as the Spider contingent was calling it, at least — as to whether Kes would represent the first genuine military engagement of this war.
The Ants had certainly not been keen to come out with either violence or diplomacy, but a telescope turned towards their island revealed that every artillery emplacement was manned, and the ships in the harbour were fully crewed.
General Tynan had not ordered his aviators into action, as many had anticipated. Instead he had apparently decided to take defensive measures against any Kessen attack by setting up his own artillery at the cliff edge. The engines that his engineers assembled, however, were of a scale that Laszlo had never seen before, enormous leadshotters that seemed to point more at the sky than anything else. He had surmised that they would drop rocks down on any Kessen ships that sallied forth from the Ants’ harbour.
The preliminary shelling of Kes had then lasted three hours, with the greatshotters finding their precise mark after only twenty minutes, to the great exuberance of Tynan’s Colonel Mittoc. After that point the dozen engines had spoken in a constant ground-shaking thunder, pounding solidly at their targets, cracking walls and sinking ships, launching flame-canisters over the docks and the city. The artillery on the Kessen walls had, of course, only a fraction of their range. There was no retaliation.
After the greatshotters had finally fallen silent, though remaining a menacing silhouette on the cliff for any Kessen observer, a small vessel had put out from the harbour.
An hour later, the entire population of Kes had understood that it, too, was become a satrapy of the Spiderlands. Spider ships were already coasting in, summoned by who knew what signal of Mycella. Soldiers and assessors were disembarking at the Kessen docks that no hostile force had ever taken.
‘We will come back,’ Tynan had told the Ant-kinden diplomats and, through them, their king. ‘If you rise up against our allies, then our engines shall never pause until your island city is just a stump of rock in the sea. We might have bombarded you until you begged me to send over my slavers. Think on how much more fortunate you are that the Lady Mycella wants you for her own.’
Laszlo had found a place quite close to the negotiations. He had heard the words plainly.
The army was moving again the very next day. The Imperial Second was known as ‘the Gears’, and General Tynan was not going to let them stop turning for anything, it appeared.
That night, however, Laszlo had decided that the time had come to risk everything. He had not told Liss what he was doing, in case she tried to stop him, or in case she pointed out what a stupid thing he had resolved on. Instead, while she slept, he skipped out from the wagon and flew away.
He was a sailor by training: he knew the seas and, more, he knew how sailors thought. Kes was not just a military power: it lived on trade, and there would be those sea-traders who would want to avoid the reach of the Aldanrael, for whatever reason.
Three times he let his wings carry him off the cliff, scouring the seas for sight of a sail, battling gusting wind and sudden squalls of rain before clawing his way back to land, before his strength failed. On the third venture, pushing himself further, risking more, he was lucky. A little Beetle-kinden steamer was out there on the waves, stolidly making its way towards Kes. He dropped down on to its deck, sending its crew scrabbling for swords and crossbows, and demanded, between gasping breaths, to speak to their master.
He had only moments to explain himself, but the news that the Aldanrael held Kes soon had the Collegiate skipper’s full attention. Every Beetle-kinden sailor knew how the Spiders’ tame pirates had been preying on the sea trade until Stenwold Maker put a stop to it.
The ragged message Laszlo delivered was wild, out of order, everything he could dredge from his mind about Solarno, Tark, Merro, Kes. He could only hope that it was enough, and would reach Stenwold in time to do some good.
Then, after a wistful thought about simply remaining on board, he took wing again and returned, dodging sentries and searchlamps, to get back to Liss’s side. He could not leave her, and there would be more to learn and to report on, before he was done.
He slept not at all that night, holding Liss close to him, feeling the terrible fragility of her and, beyond the wagon’s cloth walls, the commensurate fragility of everything else.
Twenty
‘You must do something to control your Mynans,’ Jodry said, around a mouthful of honeybread. Although most of his face was engaged in eating, his eyebrows contrived to glare at Stenwold meaningfully.
‘They’re not my Mynans.’ Stenwold had no appetite, as he stood by the window of Jodry’s office and stared out at the city, trying desperately to calculate rates of advance. He had received a message by ship from Laszlo, at last, which meant that he could at least assure the man’s extended family of rogues and pirates that he was still alive. The contents of the message more than offset the relief, though, for General Tynan’s Second and his Spider allies were practically tearing up the coast towards Collegium.
At the same time, he had received word that the Eighth Army, which had taken Myna, was already past Helleron, meaning all chance of stoppering the bottle on the Empire was already gone while the Assembly debated and the Merchant Companies recruited. The Sarnesh had sent ambassadors to Collegium, but not to debate. Malkan’s Folly was manned and ready for the Empire, with a Sarnesh army already mustering in the city to mount an attack as soon as the Eighth got bogged down in besieging the fortress. The Sarnesh had told the Assembly, somewhat patronizingly, that this was a soldier’s war, and real soldiers would deal with it.
