‘Garvan, or whatever her real name is,’ she persisted, ‘the Wasp woman who stabbed me. The Rekef one.’
He went quite still, thinking hard. The urge to say, Are you sure? was very strong, but she would not have thanked him for doubting her. ‘When, where?’
‘She must have come in with the supplies. I saw her just walking through the camp, mid-afternoon.’
‘Looking for you?’
‘I don’t know,’ she snapped, but she was trembling even more now. ‘She’ll know me, though, and she’ll kill me.’
‘We can’t stay here, then. Can you fly?’
‘I don’t know.’
There was something in her response that did not quite ring true. ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ Laszlo pressed gently, ‘that you’ve not experimented while I’ve been out and about?’
‘A short hop, maybe, nothing more,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll leave tonight.’ He made a doubting sound, and she twisted her neck to glare at him. ‘What?’
‘Ever since we got within spit of the Felyal, camp security’s right up, especially at night. They have a lot of sharp eyes doing sentry duty now. If you could fly, then I’d say risk it, but…’
‘But what? ’ she demanded.
‘But let me think about it. Stay under cover meanwhile. This Garvan of yours is a Wasp, so no reason for her to poke about the Spider-kinden camp. She won’t know me, so I can keep an eye out. Maybe we can stir trouble up against her, especially if she’s Rekef. Just.. wait. Don’t do anything we’ll regret. Just let me think of something.’
She lay in his arms, facing away from him. In her mind, no doubt, she was reliving the blade going in. She’s crazy, he told himself. She’s a killer, an enemy agent, the most dangerous woman you’ve ever got hold of. Just go. Leave her and just go. But he knew he would not depart without her, even so.
‘Think of something quickly,’ she said softly. ‘I can’t hold out forever.’
‘Our lack of progress is causing a lot of friction,’ Mycella observed. Tynan watched her with grudging admiration, because she was examining her appearance in a mirror while her elaborate tent was raised around her, the one still point in a whirl of carefully orchestrated chaos. Her servants, Spiders and Fly-kinden both, were practically dancing to a common rhythm that allowed them to coordinate with one another to set up poles and guys and embroidered canvas without so much as obstructing their mistress’s light, until she stood in a reddening beam of sunset in the midst of an eight-chambered portable palace, with furniture being moved into position as nimbly as though her staff were scene-shifters at the theatre.
‘Join me?’ she asked him, meeting his eyes in the mirror. A Fly-kinden was already at her elbow with a bottle of dark glass.
‘I see your kind’s reputation for vanity isn’t misplaced,’ he observed, although without vitriol.
She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘You never feel the need to see your own face, General?’
‘Not since I stopped needing a comb,’ he told her. It was true, too. Even without his own slaves, he could have shaved himself by touch these days.
‘I envy you. Mine holds a grim fascination for me, but it isn’t vanity.’ She turned towards him at last and collapsed back onto a couch that had not been there a moment before, even as the mirror was spirited away. ‘Time, General Tynan… I watch it advance on my position, and each day all my armies lose a little ground. I’m older than you, you realize?’
He shrugged, although inwardly he was surprised and then annoyed at letting anything these Spiders did surprise him. ‘I’ve seen less friction than I’d expected.’ He found a camp stool placed neatly beside him, standard army issue, and lowered himself into it, accepting a glass of what turned out to be Imperial brandy.
‘It’s in my camp, mostly, the discontent,’ she admitted. ‘The mercenaries get paid more for fighting, so they want to start besieging Collegium yesterday, and even our regular soldiers are… impatient. Jadis and Morkaris are keeping discipline, but perhaps your scouts have some news that might settle matters a little.’
He gave her an amused look. ‘And yours?’
She matched his expression. ‘Very well, then. As we skirt the Felyal, it looks increasingly as though there’s a fair-sized body of people moving ahead of us — soldiers, not refugees. Much sign of Mantis-kinden, by my trackers’ expert opinion, but others as well in fair numbers, certainly hundreds. If they were simply going to join up with the Collegiates, they’d have outpaced us easily, but they’re hanging about ahead of our advance, and some of my scouts haven’t come back. Some of yours, too, I’d wager? And one of your little airships is late as well, unless you sent it somewhere especially far.’
He nodded grudgingly. ‘You’re right, of course. Always the bloody Felyal. You weren’t here to see the bloodshed last time. You’d think they’d take a hint. But you’re correct: it’s not just Mantids either. Cherten reckons it’s an advance force from the city come to take a poke at us, while they’ve got the trees to operate from.’
‘My intelligence suggests it’s unlikely to be directly from Collegium. But what’s your plan?’
‘Depends how much history repeats itself. So far we’ve been moving past the Felyal that I burned the last time, but shortly we’ll be at the green. If there’s going to be trouble, it’ll be then, and at night most likely. Or it could be tonight, for that matter, or it might just as easily have been yesterday. Hence our walls and towers and caution — and your friction. My bet is that your mercenaries get to earn their blood money before a tenday’s out, though. And if we can break the back of the locals, then we can pick up speed again.’
‘You’ve thought this out, obviously.’
He suspected that she was flattering him rather than being overly sincere, but he could not quite suppress a smile. ‘They call my Second Army the Gears, Mycella. We don’t stop grinding until there’s nothing left but pieces. In order to maintain that reputation, in order to make sure nothing does stop us, you have no idea of the amount of forward planning I have to do.’
‘Just you? No council of tacticians?’
‘Some day I’ll get it wrong, and they’ll bury me and find another name for my army,’ he replied flatly.
‘You’re grim all of a sudden.’
He felt a jab of annoyance that this smooth, elegant woman should presume to know him — but reminded himself that he had spent quite a few nights sharing a bottle of one thing or another with his co-commander. It was not that he disdained the company of his officers, but they all had their own jobs to do, and she was right — he had nobody to share responsibility with. An army needed a single mind to direct it, and growing too familiar with his subordinates, even Mittoc and Cherten, would take the edge of his orders. Mycella represented a rare opportunity to talk matters over with someone outside his chain of command.
She’s up to something. She’s using her Art on me, manipulating me somehow. Yet he did not feel manipulated, and he found himself fascinated not by her appearance or her charms, but by the odd glimpse of weakness that she let him see, quite calculatedly: her fear of time, or the past failures that had put her where she was — a battlefield general’s role viewed as a spider punishment rather than a Wasp reward.
And she was beautiful, it was true, and all the more so because she was plainly not making the effort she could have done. She faced him instead as soldier to soldier.
This is going to turn out very badly, he knew, and he was too old to play that sort of fool. He should, he was well aware, restrict his meetings with her to daylight business: brief, curt discussions over the running of the army. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do that.
He was gazing at her, he knew — or almost through her, at the warring ghost of his own mind. He brought his eyes back into focus quickly, expecting to find her eyeing him with a touch of mockery, but she was not looking at him at all, just peering into the growing shadows of her tent, weighing her glass in her hand.
The attack, when it came, justified Tynan’s caution. The first Laszlo knew of it was a confused shouting coming from outside, which could have been just about anything. Despite all that the commanders of the Grand Army did to enforce discipline, Spider and Wasp ethics did not rub along easily. Most especially the Wasps had certain views on women, and many of the Spiders, in all fairness, had equally derogatory opinions about men. There had been brawls, rapes, revenge killings, and the wonder of it was that these incidents were isolated and ruthlessly investigated, rather than becoming so widespread as to swallow the entire camp. Imperial discipline and the Spider officers’ strength of personality held the entire complex organism together, and pointed in the right direction.
For that reason Laszlo just lay awake listening to the commotion, trying to work out whether it was a diplomatic incident or just some internal Spider dispute. Then Lissart stirred beside him and he realized that the
