place, lest someone decided that made you their property. You stuck with your family because they were all you could rely on.
Sfayot’s family had been in the little village of Nalfers — Nal Fra as was — when something had gone wrong. It was an occupied town with a garrison, but the Wasps had apparently decided it needed sacking anyway. Perhaps orders had been misunderstood, perhaps the local troops had gotten drunk and leery. In any event, nobody would be visiting either Nalfers or Nal Fra any more, and when Sfayot’s family had finally regrouped the next morning, within sight of the rising smoke, he discovered that a cousin and a nephew were dead, and that his daughter was missing. A niece had seen her dragged off by a slaver, the man’s trade made unmistakable by his full-face helm.
His family had begged Sfayot not to go looking for her, since it soon became clear where the slaver was headed. The Roach families did not go near the warfront: there was nothing for them there. The advancing plough- blade of war made a barrier they could not cross, and what was left exposed on the upturned earth behind it was rumoured to be worse than the fighting itself. The Wasps were a hard, wild people. Their army forced them to obey orders when they were on duty, and so when they were released from it they became monsters.
But Sfayot had left his younger brother to take the caravan east, and had set off in slow pursuit. He was old, and it had seemed unlikely he would ever achieve any great thing in his life. Perhaps retrieving his daughter could be that thing. Certainly if he died, and he accepted this was likely, then the loss to his family would not be great: one less mouth to feed during a harsh season.
The roads to the front were clogged with soldiers and army transports: reinforcements heading for the front, slaves and plunder being escorted home again. Sfayot passed smoke-belching automotives with cages full of thin, dispirited Dragonfly- and Grasshopper-kinden, men and women destined to feed the Empire’s infinite capacity for human servitude. He did not approach the slavers, for there was room enough in those cages for an inquisitive old Roach-kinden, but he asked many questions of others about a white-haired girl, and sometimes he got answers.
He found a military camp a few nights later, and peddled his wine to the Wasp officers, showing them his papers. Malic had been better than his word, it seemed. The conduct passes were faultless, and he was neither robbed nor beaten, more than a Roach-kinden would normally expect from Wasps anywhere. Eventually he fell in with a squad of Bee-kinden Auxillians from Vesserett in the East Empire, who were surely hundreds of miles further from home than anyone else. The Bees of Vesserett had a proud and embattled history, and at one time had looked to be in a position to destroy the burgeoning Wasp Empire almost before it began. These men, though, short and dark and weatherbeaten, were simply tired. When Sfayot was able to talk of their homeland, that he had seen more recently than they, they let him into their circle and drank his health. After his questions had gone around the fire someone called over a tiny Fly-kinden man because ‘Ferro knows everything’. Ferro was not in uniform, and Sfayot understood he was a freelance hunter engaged in tracking down absconding or hiding Dragonfly nobles. The Empire had determined that certain Commonweal bloodlines must be terminated without scion, and so experienced professionals like Ferro were making a healthy living.
Ferro was as good as his reputation. He had seen such a girl, and he named Sergeant Ban without prompting. They had gone to Shona, he said, Shon Aeres as had been, and maybe Ban was going to fill his string of slaves there. A bad place, Shona, Ferro confided — did Sfayot know it?
‘Only before the war,’ the Roach replied guardedly.
Ferro nodded, abruptly nostalgic. ‘Ah, before the war this was a beautiful country. I stayed at the castles of the nobility, at their summer retreats. I tracked brigands for them.’ He drank more of Sfayot’s wine with the expression of a connoisseur. ‘Now it is those same nobles I hunt down like animals, so the Wasps can hang them on crossed pikes. So the wheel turns.’ It was clear that Ferro’s sense of balance enabled him to walk the wheel as it ground over those less fortunate.
Sfayot set out for Shona the next morning, though Ferro’s talk of the Dragonfly nobility had stirred no nostalgia in his breast. There were plenty of times his family had been moved on by the lords of the Commonweal, or when they had been taken up, too, for crimes they had or had not committed: whipped, punished, lectured, put to work. The Commonwealers did not have the cruelty and savagery of the Wasps, but they did not like a people who wandered where they would and did not fit in. Sfayot himself had been hauled before some headman or prince enough times, and seen in those aristocratic eyes a keen loathing of any man who was neither servant nor master.
The road to Shona was many days towards the front, and Sfayot could only guess as to how much faster Ban and his captive were travelling. He examined keenly every slaver troop that passed back towards the Empire, seeking a head of white hair. Slaves a-plenty there were, and a few dozen of his kinden, but none was his daughter.
Shon Aere, as was, had been torn up by the roots. Not a sign of any Dragonfly buildings remained, and the fields had been churned up by war and marching feet. Now there was a veritable city there of tents and shacks and lean-tos. A large proportion of the Imperial Third was currently billeted there, either waiting to take the few days’ march to the current fighting, or else taking a rest from the front. Shona was no simple soldiers’ camp but a Consortium town, it quickly became clear. Here the Empire’s merchants set about the business of fleecing the Empire’s soldiers of their pay and their booty.
It was growing dark by the time that Sfayot arrived at the tent-town’s edge, but he had been able to hear Shona for miles: the sound of an army off duty and riotous with it. The guards who stopped him had the surly, miserable expressions of men on punishment detail, and a gratis jug of wine bought more ready admittance than all the papers in the world.
He saw three fights before he had gone thirty yards, all of them between Wasps and one of them clearly fatal. The makeshift, mud-rutted street he walked down was lined with taverns, gaming houses and brothels, or so the signs outside various tents advertised. Soldiers were everywhere, most out of armour, but Wasps were never unarmed. The expressions on those faces were almost desperate, determined to lose themselves in any vice rather than think about what tomorrow might bring.
Further progress with the cart was going to be impossible, Sfayot saw. He sold it and most of his remaining stock to a taverner, and for a price that told him just how much the soldiers were being overcharged. He retained as many jugs as he could safely string from his belt or bed down in his pack, because his bribing work was surely not done yet.
He made for the centre of Shona, adopting a careful, skulking walk that put him beyond the notice of the rowdy Wasps. Malic had not been entirely wrong in his characterization of the Roach-kinden people. They had a knack for hiding and for stealth born of long years of spite from most other races.
He could see (for Roach eyes were good in the dark) that the centre of Shona, perhaps the entire original area occupied by Shon Aeres itself, was an open square, and that there was some manner of entertainment there. Vague, wild strains of music drifted towards him, and he followed them around the edge of a crowd until he saw a set of mismatched Grasshopper-kinden minstrels plucking and piping as best they could, enduring the occasional kick and missile from the jostling crowd. The square boasted a series of raised wooden platforms, Sfayot saw, and on the nearest there were women dancing. They wore rags only, and he soon saw why: when any of them got too close to the crowd, hands reached for them to tear off whatever remained. An old, bald Wasp with a pike kept watch, and jabbed at them when they clustered too close to the centre. They were Dragonfly-kinden all, with that people’s slender grace and elegance, and they wept and shook and went on dancing, unfettered and with the wide sky above them, and for a long time Sfayot could not understand why they did not simply fly free and risk the Wasp stings.
He saw, at last: at one edge of the platform was an unexpected row amongst the audience: a dozen children sat cross-legged there, some crying, some stony faced and blank eyed. They watched, he saw: they watched their mothers or sisters humiliated for the pleasure of their captors. They themselves would be too young to have learned their airborne Art, and their presence held their relatives in captivity more surely than locks and chains. Sfayot felt ill, and shouldered on past this spectacle. Other platforms boasted fighters, men and women hobbled, bound together, forced to fight each other, or to fight beasts. He saw a nine-foot dragonfly, its wings mere broken stubs, slicing savagely into a pair of unarmed Grasshopper women with its razor mandibles. He saw a tethered, raging Mantis-kinden, one eye put out and the rest of her face a mask of blood, kill slave after slave in a heedless, mindless frenzy, carving each up with the spines of her arms until an officer flew from the crowd and seared her with the bright fire of his sting. The expression on the officer’s face as he killed her was the only compassion Sfayot
