as she was. Skrill hopped along at the back, her arm still bound up, looking nervous.
‘Listen, Your Highness,’ she said. ‘I ain’t sure about this.’
‘Just get to Stenwold,’ Totho insisted. ‘Tell him what’s going on.’
‘And what if the Wasps see me?’
‘Then run,’ Salma said. ‘I’ve seen how you run. You’ve a turn of speed a horse would envy. Wasps tire fast once in the air, most of them. So run and keep running, and hope.’
‘Hope,’ she echoed, without much of it in her voice.
They entered one of the city barracks, and almost immediately were heading underground, down into rounded tunnels that the insect colony must have dug under Tarkesh orders.
Nero and Parops had been there to see them off, like a mismatched pair of mourners. Parops had just clasped Salma’s hand and wished him luck. There had been little enough hope in his eyes either.
Underground, Salma had no way of keeping track of where they were heading. The Ants seemed to be finding their way simply by touch, for it was so dark that even his keen eyes could make nothing of it. Often they heard the scratchings and skitterings of insects as they scurried out of their way ahead.
‘Here,’ Basila’s voice came to him, and Salma knew they had stopped when he ran into the back of the man preceding him.
A lantern glowed into life, the dimmest of faint glows. There were two Ant-kinden waiting for them there who had probably even been guiding Basila in with their minds’ voices. They carried shovels, and Salma now saw that the tunnel ceiling had a shaft dug into it, with metal bars serving for handholds.
‘We have these radiating in every direction from the city,’ Basila told him. ‘The Wasps have no watch near this one, yet it is close enough to their camp to strike there before we are seen. The Wasps have little light beyond their camp, and we know they do not see well in the dark, no more than we do. These men and I, we have stayed in darkness below the ground since the plan was conceived, making our eyes fitter for this moment.’
One of the Ant engineers was now crawling up the shaft, legs straddling the gap at a painful-looking angle. He began to dig up at the earth above, showering dirt down on them.
‘The earth left is shored up, enough to bear the weight of a man,’ Basila told them, ‘but we will be digging through in minutes. Then we begin.’
She and her team bore their swords, together with little crossbows that were double-strung to give them the power of a normal bow whilst being small enough to shoot one-handed. They had little wheel-locks set above the handle to tension the sprung steel arms.
The Ants waited in silence as the engineer above them dug towards the surface. Totho and Salma exchanged glances, but at this stage neither had anything to say.
Then the lamp was extinguished, and Salma realized the man digging above them must be nearly through. He put a hand to his sword, made sure it was loose enough in its scabbard.
There was a final rattle of earth and the engineer came back down, and went past them with his colleague and, without a word, off into the dark tunnels. Basila was ascending already, hand over hand in a perfect rhythm that all her team picked up, each man climbing with his hands almost under the boots of the man before, and yet not one slip, not one hand trodden on, until they were all above and it was time for Salma and Totho to follow them with far less assurance.
Basila looked between them. ‘From now on,’ she instructed in a low voice, ‘there is no more speaking. I will hear nothing from you, nor you from me. Watch what we do and follow it. No more than that.’
They nodded. Salma drew his sword, painted with weaponblack, and Totho put a magazine into the top of his repeating crossbow. Skrill clasped both of them on the shoulder, a weak gesture intended for what comfort it could give, and then she was off into the night, swathed in her cloak, following the long road to Collegium.
The Wasp camp was lit by picket lamps, a ring of them, twenty yards out from its furthest-flung tent and spaced widely. There were some sentries standing a little in front of them, mere silhouettes to the approaching raiders, and yet others who patrolled along the whole perimeter. Beyond the lamps, after an interval stretch of clear ground, the tents of the camp itself started. Now it was dark there was little activity within.
He saw that several of the Ants had gone, and he moved to ask Basila, but remembered at the last moment that he should not speak.
It was going to be a long night.
There was a sentry out there. Salma wondered at first why they had not attempted to sneak through between the widely spaced guards, but guessed that then the chances of detection would be doubled. The Wasps would know precisely their own perimeter and would leave no gaps.
Another sentry was moving past him now, and Salma watched his progress. The man should probably have been beyond the lights and looking out, but he was walking within them, and so unable to see a thing of the night, but obviously too sullen about his tedious duty to care.
And then he was past, trudging on his way and, even as the patrolling soldier passed the next light, a man rose up out of the night and shot the stationary sentry in the throat. In fact two bolts hit him, the second striking beneath one eye, and he toppled without a word. Quickly a pair of Ants materialized to grab him and then dragged him back to their main group.
Salma heard steps approach behind them, and turned to see a tall Spider-kinden in a short tunic approaching. He looked profoundly unhappy.
‘You understand your task?’ Basila whispered to him, and the man nodded. Salma realized he must be a slave of Tark. He was taller than most Ants, though, and slave work had broadened his Spider-kinden physique, so when he started to don the dead Wasp’s armour Salma understood. A missing sentry would raise questions. Still, as he and the others dashed through the ring of light into the darker shadows of the camp, Salma wondered what they had promised him to make a slave do such a thing. Did they offer him freedom or had he a family under threat? Salma would never know.
The camp was vast, and even at night there were plenty of lone figures moving about it. Many were soldiers, some were slaves of the Wasps or perhaps Auxillians. Basila’s little band moved in a series of stops and starts, far more quietly than Salma would have expected. Each tent shadow offered sanctuary, and the dim lights of the sleeping camp were enough for them to find their way. Even Totho seemed to be managing some kind of stealth.
They were making their way gradually around the periphery of the tents, where the least nocturnal activity was. There were lamps glowing through the walls of some of the tents, and low voices talking inside. Salma heard the rattle of dice from one and someone humming an unfamiliar song inside another. These barracks-tents would be carpeted with Wasp soldiers, he guessed. Perhaps others would house the Ant-kinden the Empire had suborned or those giants who last night had carved through Tark’s city wall. It would be best, Salma thought, if none of those great creatures were met with tonight.
Miraculously, they had not been spotted. By the ring of lights there were sentries staring outwards, just as their Spider-kinden decoy would now be staring outwards, but the lamps would blind them to what was going on in their own camp.
There was a scuffle ahead but it was over before Salma had a chance to see. A Wasp-kinden had walked within arm’s reach of them and paused, casting a bemused glance into the shadows. Basila and another had grabbed him, stopped his mouth and stabbed him into silence. They stowed the body under the eaves of a tent and carried on.
There were lights all over the airfield, so Salma could see the monstrously pale and bloated ghosts that were the airship balloons. They were floating high already, straining at their steel cables, ready to fly at the dawn, no doubt. Totho had tried to explain them to him, how they were not just hot air but some complicated-sounding alchemical air that was better, and which did not need to be hot before it could lift them. Salma had understood none of it.
The Ant-kinden had explosives, he knew. The plan called for them to creep aboard each of the airships and plant them with decreasing fuse lengths, so that they would all explode more or less simultaneously and give the Wasps no warning of their intent. Again, Salma had to take all this on faith as it was beyond his understanding.
They paused again, but this time the shadow they borrowed was cast by one of the heliopters, its squared-off
