measure everything against her technical performance, the clinical gauge of accuracy and effect. How easy it would be to assess each explosion on how well she had placed it, how grand the result: Look, that was a big one — must have been a workshop or a brewery, plenty for the incendiary to work on! In just the same way, she imagined, a Rekef interrogator would go about his work, and see the agonies of his subject as merely the proper dues of his craft.
So she concentrated only on the mechanisms and the movements, the calm exercise of her skill, and desperately hoped that the after-effects of the Chneuma would not bring her dreams.
Castre Gorenn dropped from the sky almost into the midst of the Antspider’s detachment, nearly getting herself spitted on a pike. The Dragonfly-kinden had turned up at Collegium’s gates claiming to be the Commonweal Retaliatory Force, and demanding to sign up with the city’s defenders. Marteus had assigned her to the Antspider because Straessa was, to quote, ‘Sub-officer in charge of freaks’. Since then Gorenn had refused to use Collegiate weapons or tactics, roving about with her longbow behind the formations of pike and shot. Only her speed and accuracy with the weapon had given the Antspider any hope that this woman would be useful at all.
Now, however, she was proving her worth, if only because Straessa had few Fly-kinden to call on for quick scouting and messaging, and Gorenn could fly as fast and see as well as they could.
‘Whole street gone up that way,’ the Dragonfly reported. ‘Thropters just gone overhead, probably coming back soon.’
‘ Which street?’ the Antspider demanded.
‘A street. The one over there. Five streets between us and it.’ Because to Castre Gorenn the idea of naming streets — of having a city that was big enough to need it — was wholly new. There were no Flies about, though, and Straessa was trying to sort out her mental map of the city even as she and her followers began to run, the pattering of their boots eclipsed as Gerethwy got the pumping engine under way, clack-clacking on its four clockwork legs.
We’re on Fen Way, now crossing Parthell, next is Worry Lane, then the Broads, then… but the Antspider’s mind was already racing ahead, because these were familiar names, not so far from the College. She could name tavernas and chop houses, a music hall she had been to, closer and closer to…
She doubled her speed abruptly, heedless of the heft of her Company-issue breastplate, leaving the rest of them behind in a clatter of pikes and snapbows. ‘Gerethwy!’ she was shouting, as though only he mattered, but he was busy guiding the pumping engine, and surely they’d need the pumping engine…
She burst on to Wallender Street, skidding on the uneven paving, a blast of heat striking her as though it were a fist. No, no, no — there was the Wall Taverna, tongues of flame roaring from the sockets of its windows, that brightly coloured awning she knew so well already nothing more than floating, embering scraps of cloth, and the chairs and tables like bright skeletons within the crackling interior. That was the tenement next to it, four storeys converted to five, where all the Fly-kinden had lived: the factory workers and the rail-side workers and the musicians who had practised late evenings out on the roof. And now the same little people were frantically darting in and out with whatever possessions they could salvage, or being driven back by the fire and the smoke.
Castre Gorenn was already touching down next to her, a bow in her hand as though she could fight any of this. Her long, golden face was cast in ruby by the leaping flames.
There, beyond the tenement, blazing like a pyre, was Raullo Mummers’s studio, and the apartments above it, all leaping with gorging fire, the artist’s circular window blazing forth like a raging eye. The Antspider tried to yell some order, at who she knew not, but all that came out was a choked sob as she rushed forward, heedless of the heat. Elsewhere in the city, other bombs were falling, and not so far away, but she barely registered them.
The street was clogged with people, hurt and frightened, panicking about those they could not find, milling and screaming and shouting at each other. Straessa passed from face to face, grabbing out to spin people so that the fire could light up their features, shouldering her way through the crowd. She was trying to shout out names, but nothing coherent would emerge. Then she stood before the building itself, and the fire shouted right back at her, roaring and consuming, gutting everything down to the bare stone. The Empire’s incendiaries burned as no natural fire could have done.
Can there be anyone inside there? She braced herself, but there couldn’t, of course. It was impossible. Nothing could have lived and yet, and yet Gorenn grabbed her as she pushed forwards, the roasting air like a physical barrier. For a moment she was wrestling with the Dragonfly, then thrusting her away, not to the ground but upwards, as Gorenn’s wings flashed to regain her balance. Then someone else had hold of Straessa, trying to manhandle her away, shouting something meaningless over and over, and the Antspider punched the newcomer in the shoulder, and then had her sword out because she couldn’t just stand there — she had to do something, surely, or who else would?
The sound the interfering man uttered resolved itself into ‘Straessa!’ and his face into Eujen’s, smoke- smeared, with a livid bruise at one temple. Heedless of her blade he gripped her by her arms. ‘You can’t!’ he was insisting. ‘It’s too late!’
‘How can you say that?’ she shrieked at him. ‘Raullo… he’s-’
‘He’s out, I got him out!’ Eujen insisted. ‘He’s over there, just look!’
At last he got through to her, but she had almost to wrench her eyes off the hungry blaze, hunting the crowd until she spotted the crumpled form. The artist huddled against a wall on the street’s far side, shoulders shaking, his hands before him, fingers crooked into claws. There was a small figure beside him, barely a grey shadow — the Fly te Mosca, trying to comfort him. There was not comfort enough to be had. Raullo’s entire world was burning, feeding the flames with his history, the sketches he had layered his walls with.
When Straessa looked away, her detachment were already there at hand, Gerethwy detailing them to start clearing the street. The pumping engine rattled to itself as he directed it — but not at the studio or the taverna or the tenement. The jet of water shot out onto the workshop beside the doomed Wall Taverna, whose shutters were just starting to catch fire. For those buildings already alight, their little engine could do nothing but waste what precious water they had.
‘Eujen, help get these people out of here,’ she snapped. ‘Get them off the streets. Get them into the College cellars.’
She saw the outrage on his face, his eyes taking in her breastplate, her buff coat, all the trappings of her office. Rhetoric welled up inside him, and she wished she had not spoken, but then in an instant his anger was gone.
‘I’m deputized, am I?’ he asked, and she barely caught the words.
‘Please.’
But he was already nodding, heading towards Raullo and te Mosca, waving his arms at them, and at everyone, shooing them as though they were sheep.
Then the next Farsphex barrelled overhead, low enough for its underside to reflect the firelight, and Gorenn had an arrow to her bow, trying to aim even as the flying machine flashed past.
Someone shouted a warning. It might have been Straessa herself.
The bomb hit a building on the side of Wallender Street that was as yet untouched, striking its roof off-centre. Beetles knew how to build solidly in stone, but not even Ants would have made their everyday homes proof against bombardment. The sheer impact cracked the house’s facade, and then half the upper storey’s front was sloughing away in a great sheet of bricks, into the street, onto the crowd. A moment later the incendiary itself touched off, gouting a broad sheet of searing orange across the sky overhead, dropping flaming chemical gobbets impartially on everything and everyone below.
Raullo was standing now, raising his hands after the orthopter as though he had some Art that would call it back, enact vengeance on it. His mouth was open and screaming, his face contorted by grief and rage, even as te Mosca frantically stripped away his burning tunic. His invective, his howling, whatever sound he made, was lost utterly in the chorus of pain and panic on all sides.
‘Get these bloody people off the streets!’ Straessa shouted, and it was just as well that her followers were already engaged in just that, because nobody could have heard her.
Another flying machine dashed overhead, but Straessa saw enough of it: the two wings, the more compact frame. One of ours, thank Providence.
‘Pump’s out of water!’ Gerethwy communicated by yelling in her ear. ‘We’re doing nothing here! If there was more wind we’d be dead already!’
People were starting to move at last, the able doing what they could to support the wounded. The faces all
