‘ I’m not going,’ Eujen snapped at him.
‘No?’ Raullo blinked, bewildered, then he goggled at the Antspider. ‘You, my favourite model, off to the wars?’
Straessa’s gesture managed to indicate all the military motley she wore.
The artist was abruptly transformed into overripe gravitas. ‘Then come back, and I shall sketch you. For you alone, I will sketch. And if you don’t… never, never again.’ He lurched, hands out to forestall any help, then slouched into Averic.
A shout went up, from the head of the column, Marteus calling the lead squads to order.
‘Come back,’ Eujen echoed.
‘Do my best,’ she promised.
Averic muttered something and took a step back, still encumbered by Raullo’s weight.
‘Keep the place in one piece until we see it again,’ Gerethwy called over to them, one hand raised in salute. ‘Come on, Sub, they’re starting to move.’
Her calm snapped at that moment, and she lunged forward and threw her arms about Eujen before he could stop her, a brief, fierce embrace. ‘See you right here, I swear it,’ she hissed, and then she was running back for her own people. ‘Come on, ranks, you slipshod bastards! Oi, Gorenn! You, Commonweal Retaliation Army or whatever you call yourself! Just because you’ve got a bow’s no excuse for being out of position!’ She put some real fire into it, to burn away the tears that were threatening the corners of her eyes. By the time she had rejoined her maniple, they were in as neat a square as she could have wished, snapbows and pikes shouldered.
‘Mind if I march with you, dear?’
The Antspider glanced down to see Sartaea te Mosca, Fly-kinden associate Master of the Inapt studies department, unarmed but hefting a pack about her shoulders that seemed far too large for her.
‘They reckon we might come across some dangerous inscriptions, or something?’ Straessa asked her.
‘Seconded to the faculty of medicine, dear one,’ te Mosca revealed. ‘All hands to the pumps, I think, is the Apt phrase for it.’
‘You’d better be able to keep up,’ Straessa told her mock-sternly, and then there was nothing for it — the squads in front were stuttering into motion, a brief confusion of soldiers trying to find the right foot.
‘And off we go!’ the Antspider snapped out, and a hundred soldiers heard her words, and set out to war.
Averic watched them go, feeling paralysed, the words of the intelligence officer, Gesa, rattling about in his skull like dice. He was even glad for the wine-reeking burden of Raullo on his arm, because his new knowledge was surely written on his face in letters of shame and guilt, so that even Eujen, idealistic to a fault, would read them there.
Traitor, went the cry, and it seemed to him that the blade was cutting both ways: traitor to Collegium for not telling them what he knew; traitor to his own people for harbouring even these eroding doubts. He had tried to stand with a foot in two worlds, and ended up in neither, merely a halfbreed of the mind.
Then he saw her, marching past in the uniform of a Coldstone soldier: the same woman, Gesa the Wasp in halfbreed’s clothing, undetected and unremarked, seemingly just one more soldier. She was marching to war in Straessa’s own Company, one of the rush of recruits that had flocked to the army after the Felyal was burned. Averic felt himself shaking.
There, she’s there! Wasp spy! Wasp spy right there! And yet no words came, no accusing finger. He watched Gesa march off, practically holding a knife to Straessa’s throat, and yet he teetered on the fence between betrayals, and did nothing and let her go.
And, although he was expected now at the gates along with Jodry and the other prime movers of the war effort, Stenwold stood in Banjacs Gripshod’s house and tried to understand.
The machine loomed before him, and he knew that what he could see was only part of it. Beneath his feet the cellar was packed with a battery of glass cells that crackled and roared with stolen lightning, years of painstaking generation hidden down there, lighting up the darkness. The shock that had killed Reyna Pullard had been only an iota of it, the merest spark. Banjacs had indeed been busy. He had enough power down there to wreck more of this city than the Wasp air force already had.
Here, on the ground floor, were the controls: wheels and locks to direct the movement of that primal energy, as if it were something as tame and easily domesticated as steam. Even steam engines exploded once in a while, Stenwold reminded himself. Behind those crude-seeming controls spread the vast mechanical heart of the device, he knew, for Banjacs had shown him the designs, taken from a hidden drawer in the man’s desk that nobody had even guessed at. Stenwold himself had not been able to follow the details — his artificing was a decade out of date — but he was willing to bet that the best the College had to offer would have difficulties with Banjacs’s close script and his brilliant, cracked mind.
All this time, working on a way out of our current predicament — that’s foresight even the Moths wouldn’t credit. And Banjacs made no secret that he despised a great deal of what Collegium was, or had become during his long life, most of all because it had not given him due adulation as a genius. Stenwold had steered him away from that topic more than once, for the old man practically foamed at the mouth once he got going. His list of names — the men and women who had held him back, not given him credit, or been preferred over him — was so long that Stenwold had not heard the end of it. Half of the man’s rivals and enemies were dead, long dead in some cases, but the old artificer had no intention of forgetting any one of them.
The mechanisms of Banjacs’s machine did all that science could do to trap and channel and focus the unleashed lightning, which otherwise would have simply levelled several streets about his house, and probably turned him and his stone walls into some sort of matter that artificers had yet to discover or describe. Above them was a forest of great glass pipes, mirrors, refractors, prisms; a work of art cast in light and bound in bronze; a vast, clear, many-limbed entity frozen in mid-reach and about to burst the roof asunder.
Stenwold surveyed it all, and knew that it was all for something — not just a madman’s insane assembly of parts, but a working machine, almost finished according to its creator, ready to… to do what?
Banjacs claimed it would save the city but, if it was a weapon, there was no suggestion that it could even be aimed. The old man had been desperate to convince, spitting out sincerity and conviction. Stenwold had read no falsehood in him, but Banjacs was plainly partway mad, even if he was telling the truth — perhaps especially then — and Stenwold could not rule out the possibility that his machine would be more of a terror than the Wasps to the city Banjacs plainly felt betrayed by.
Stenwold had called therefore for the College’s most theoretical artificers to come and take their best guess, but in the end the decision would rest on his shoulders as much as anyone’s, and they had so little time.
By that evening the artificers’ reports were in. Stenwold had them on the table in front of him, sitting in a disused office in the Amphiophos. Words such as ‘colossal discharge of lightning energy’, ‘near-perfect light conductivity’ and ‘requiring flawless vertical channelling’ were underlined, alongside complex calculations comparing volumes of space with assessments of the stored power that Banjacs had accumulated. One artificer had even sketched a plan of the city in profile, lines and arcs above and around, to outline the potential for disaster.
Or for victory.
‘Or for victory,’ Stenwold murmured, forcing his own thoughts into words, and at that moment Jodry came in, and stopped. Stenwold had not been entirely sure the man would even turn up when asked. Certainly he did not look best pleased to be alone in a room with Stenwold Maker.
‘So,’ said the Speaker for the Assembly. ‘Here you are. You were looked for, when the Companies departed. You might at least have been there for your Own.’
‘I offered to march with them. They turned me down.’ Stenwold bit back on his words. ‘No, wait, Jodry: this isn’t what I wanted to talk about.’
‘What then?’ Jodry was still standing in the doorway, unwilling to commit to staying. ‘Some new way of treating prisoners? Should Spider-kinden and Wasps have to wear-’
‘Jodry!’ Stenwold snapped. ‘Listen, it’s nothing of that, I don’t want to open that wound right now. Time enough after — drag me before the Assembly, as you said. I’ll answer to anything you put before me, I swear. For the good of the city, though, I have something new and I need your help.’
For a moment Jodry looked about to go, and Stenwold said, ‘For old times’ sake, Jodry, please.’
The fat man gave a sigh every bit as big as himself, and stepped in, hauling a chair out and slumping into it. ‘Be quick.’
‘I don’t know if I can. Read these.’
