‘We’re going to fly to Helleron in that?’ he asked Drephos.
‘I want to waste as little time travelling as possible. Whatever I have here, I will have sent on. Helleron will have to provide in the meantime, and no doubt it shall do so splendidly.’ He reached the flier and ran his metal hand along the imaginary line that would define its flank. ‘My beautiful
‘We shall be in Helleron in two days, three at the most.
Do you believe that?’
‘It hardly seems possible, Master Drephos.’
And the smiled broadened, and lost its warmth. ‘But we are artificers, Totho. We shall make it possible.’
Twenty-Four
In the chasm of silence throughout the stateroom Sperra clasped her hands together to stop herself fidgeting. They were all looking at her, and most of all the stern-faced woman who was enthroned in their centre, so that Sperra felt very small and frightened.
This was all Scuto’s fault and she should never have agreed to it. They had been waiting days now for an audience. Plius the milliner had been doing his best but the Queen and much of her court had left the city of Sarn on the very day that Scuto had met with him. Instead, he had secured a brief interview with some minor official at the Royal Court, and that was when the problem had occurred.
‘We’ve waited long enough,’ had been Scuto’s position. ‘I’ll go and see this fellow, whoever he is, and we’ll squeeze a better audience out of him and pull ourselves up the chain. By the time the Queen’s back, we’ll be camping out on her doorstep.’
‘Scuto,’ Plius had said, ‘you might want to rethink yourself.’ There had been an odd, slightly amused expression on his face.
‘What’s wrong with the plan?’ Scuto had challenged him.
‘The plan, nothing. The planner, on the other hand. ’
Scuto had folded his hook-studded arms. ‘What?’
‘Listen to me,’ Plius had said. ‘I’ve done my level best to get you this far, and you are not going to ruin it by going in there and being. well how can I put this, Scuto? By being all ugly and spiny.’
‘Now, you listen here. I know I ain’t any picture, but-’
‘Scuto, you’ve been working where? In the slums of Helleron? And why’s that? I know you’re a decent grade of artificer,’ Plius said. ‘So why not get in with the magnates, the propertied classes? No, you’re not that kind of fellow, Scuto. And this isn’t some Helleron mining baron here, this is the Queen of Sarn. And she won’t want to see
And then he and Scuto had turned and looked at Sperra, but she had refused. She had flat-out refused, protested, complained and objected and, at the end of the day, she had found herself going to meet with a dismissive Ant officer who had sneered down at her because she was a Fly and a foreigner. The next day there had been a better officer who had been sympathetic, but unhelpful, and then there had been a commander who seemed to have something to do with the Royal Court, but very little time. Then there had been a smiling woman, who Sperra had later discovered was a commander involved in counterintelligence, and who had suspected her of being a spy, although spying for whom, Sperra never found out. In any event their conversation had been manipulated so carefully that Sperra realized that she had learned nothing new at all and told everything that she knew, just about.
And then the next day half a dozen soldiers had marched her to the Royal Court, which was where she had been trying to get to all along, but at that moment decided she would rather avoid. She had spent two hours waiting to talk to a serious-faced Ant-kinden who was one of the Queen’s tacticians, therefore the highest of the high amongst the city-states. She spoke to him for a full ten minutes, but he seemed not in the least interested in what she had to say. Instead, he quizzed her about the assassination attempt on the Queen.
That was the first she had heard about it, and her surprise must have seemed genuine enough because he did not question her for long. She understood that, whilst the Queen was out hunting with her bodyguards and some of her court, there had been a surprise encounter with a pair of Vekken crossbowmen. The would-be assassins had died resisting capture and understandably everyone was concerned to know what this was all about.
At around that same time the news had come to Sarn that the Vekken were indeed on the march, but that Collegium was their objective. Since then Sarn had been in an uproar, mustering its armies and breaking out its automotives, ready to defend the alliance the city-state had made with its Beetle neighbours.
And the day after, Sperra had been sent for by the Queen. So here she was, a woman of three foot nine inches, in plain and darned clothes, appearing before the Royal Court of Sarn.
Ant-kinden did not need hundreds of spectators to witness their deeds of state. Mind-to-mind, the whole city could be allowed to hear what words were said when it was deemed necessary. There were merely fifteen men and women in that room, gathered around one long table. The height of the table itself demanded that a servant fetch a stool for Sperra to stand on, just so she could be seen.
In the middle of the table’s far end sat the Queen herself, and there could be no doubt of her identity. Since their increased dealings with other kinden, the Sarnesh had fully learned the use of symbols and insignia to distinguish themselves. The Queen of Sarn was the one with the crown sitting in the gilded chair, Sperra had divined. Other than that she looked just like any other Ant woman, her unwelcoming features in no way dissimilar from any of her kin. The Sarnesh were a dark-haired, brown-skinned people, but the severe set of their faces was that of Ant-kinden everywhere.
The others around the table were mostly more of the same: tacticians of Sarn, the governing body from among whom, and by whom, the ruling monarch was selected. They were men and women wearing armour, even here, and none of them with a smile to offer her. The grim drabness of this array was broken by a pair of darker Beetle-kinden, both women, whose garments were dreary by Collegium standards but looked positively flamboyant here. They had clearly been around Ant-kinden too long and had borrowed their paucity of expression.
The silence had stretched on for a while now, and Sperra realized that she should probably be saying something. ‘Your Majesty,’ she began, and her voice was shaking. ‘I have come here with a very urgent message from Collegium.’
‘We have received messengers from Collegium only yesterday,’ noted one of the tacticians. ‘We understand that you have been petitioning for this audience for almost a tenday. It seems news has outstripped you.’
‘Yes and no, masters,’ Sperra said wretchedly. ‘I am come from Master Stenwold Maker of the Great College to bring a warning of war.’
‘War has come,’ a female tactician intervened, almost dismissively. ‘We will go to the aid of Collegium and fight the Vekken. You should have no concern over that.’
Sperra coughed, finding her voice dry up. ‘There is a greater war than that, ah, Your Majesty and esteemed masters.’ She had no idea of the proper address for an entire Royal Court at once, or even whether there was one. ‘You must have heard of the Wasp-kinden and their Empire, as they call it.’
That took them a little longer to consider, and Sperra sensed the thoughts flashing between them. At last it was one of the Beetles that spoke up, after a nod of assent from the Queen.
‘The city-state of Sarn is not without resources,’ she said. ‘We have of course had intelligence of these people, and know that they are currently investing Tark, the result of which we await keenly. The extent of their ambitions is unknown but we are considering what threat they may pose to us, should they continue to expand and their ambitions remain unchecked.’
‘Then could I say something about what I have seen, and about Master Maker, and Scuto, who’s the person that recruited me.’ She was aware she was now jumbling it all horribly. ‘Only I can tell you what the Wasps want. They’re planning to take over all of the Lowlands. They’ll do it city by city, you see, and they hope that everyone will
