The great engine had started, and the mountain of sand below the wall had begun to disappear. Once he had seen it work, Kymon had been shouting for those below to fetch more sand. Sand, grit, stones, anything.
On the north wall the fighting had been fiercest, and the defenders had died in their droves to prevent the Ants keeping a foothold on the walls. It was guessed, because there were men in Collegium who were ready to count anything, that two of the city’s impromptu militia had died for every Ant casualty, quite the opposite of the normal balance of a siege.
On the west wall, where Kymon commanded, the numbers had favoured the city much more. Master Graden had saved the lives of hundreds of his fellows. Those Ants that had gained the walls were shaken by what they had seen, and their legendary discipline bent and broke before the defenders. Stenwold himself had sent one man hurtling over the edge.
In the retreat, when the Ants conceded the day, the sandbow had been destroyed by artillery fire before it could be brought down from the walls, its casing smashed by lead shot, and two of Graden’s apprentices had been killed.
And, a day later, Graden had quietly mixed a solution of vitriolic aquilate and drunk the lot, and died quickly if not painlessly. It was not the deaths of his apprentices, however, that had driven him to it, but the sight of what he himself had wrought with his artificer’s mind and his own two hands.
It was an image that would stay with Stenwold until his last days, as with so much he had seen lately. Nobody on the west wall would ever forget those Ant soldiers with the flesh pared from their bones, faces blasted into skulls in the instant that the sandbow loosed, or the armour and weapons ground into unbearable shiny perfection, the mechanisms of the siege tower whittled to uselessness, the entire host of organic and inorganic detritus that was all that was left after the arc of the sandbow passed across them.
Graden had been shouting at them to turn it off, even as Ant crossbow bolts rattled on the stones near him, but Kymon had taken charge of it, and had it aimed at the next-nearest tower, and thus saved the wall.
It was two days later: two days of desperate fighting on the wall-tops. The shutters over the gates were bent, holding, but never to open properly again. Artillery had cracked the north and west walls but they still stood. The Vekken flagship had almost razed the docklands, burning the wharves and the piers, the warehouses and the merchants’ offices. Collegium would never be the same again.
Today they had come by air. Vekken orthopters flapping thunderously over the walls as their artillery started launching once again, dropping explosives on the men on the wall, masking the oncoming rush of the infantry. The aerial battle had been as bloody as any other. Stenwold had stood impotently and watched as the Ant fliers had duelled laboriously with Collegium’s own, that were more numerous and more varied. The Ant machines had flamethrowers and repeating ballistae, and of course they never lost track of their comrades in the confusion of the skies. The defenders had been joined by a swarm of aid from the city: Fly-kinden saboteurs, Joyless Greatly’s cadre of one-man orthopters, clumsy Beetle-kinden in leaden flight, Mantis warriors attacking the armoured machines with bows and spears. Because he was War Master now, Stenwold had forced himself to watch, and he had no excuse to turn his head when Fly-kinden men and women were turned into blazing torches by the Ant weapons, or when flying machines spiralled from the sky to explode in the streets of his city.
It had made him ill. He had barely eaten these last days. He felt that he had brought this down on them, for all he knew that it would have happened anyway, whether Wasps or Vekken.
Joyless Greatly was dead. He had died in the fighting that day, unseen and uncounted until a reckoning could be made later, just one more mote falling from the sky. He had been a genius artificer and a pilot without equal, and the thought that he had died as he would have wished was no counterbalance to the loss that Collegium had suffered in his death. Joyless Greatly was dead, and Graden had killed himself, and Cabre the Fly artificer had died defending the last remaining harbour tower, even after she had so narrowly escaped from the other. Hundreds on hundreds of other people of Collegium had fallen in the air and on the walls or out over the sea.
And now Stenwold sat with his head in his hands after the War Council had adjourned, and there was a long- faced Beetle youth waiting to see him.
‘What is it?’ he demanded at last, because this young man was another of the lives in his hands and he had no right to ignore him.
‘Master Maker — excuse me, War Master, you should see this. In fact, you have to.’
Stenwold stood up, seeing that the youth was torn between emotions, unable to know what to think next. Stenwold had seen him before, but could not place him.
‘Take me, then,’ he said, and the young man darted off.
‘It’s Master Tseitus, War Master,’ the youth explained, and Stenwold placed him then: an apprentice of the Ant-kinden artificer.
‘What does he want?’ Stenwold asked.
‘He has. he. I’m sorry, Master Maker-’
Stenwold stopped him. ‘Just tell me. It has been a long day. I have no time.’
‘He made me promise to say nothing, Master Maker,’ the youth blurted. ‘But now he’s gone and-’
‘Gone?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘Gone where?’
‘You have to come and see!’ And they were off again, and the youth was definitely heading for the blasted wastes of the docks.
‘He was desperate to do something,’ the youth explained. ‘The bombardment was all around here. So he took her out.’
‘Her? What? You mean the submersible?’
‘An hour ago, Master, only we didn’t know if there was enough air. enough range. We never had a chance to properly test her.’
What he had to show Stenwold was an empty pool with access to the harbour. A lack of submersible.
‘What has he done?’ Stenwold asked, and the apprentice spread his hands miserably.
It became apparent the next morning, when Stenwold was dragged from his bed by an excited messenger who pulled him all the way back to the charred docks.
The Vekken flagship was sinking. It was sinking slowly, but by the dawn a full half of it was below the waves, despite all the pumps the Ants could lay on it. Supply ships and tugs were taking on men and material as fast as they could, but the vast vessel itself was foundering, slipping beneath the waves, heeling over well to one side so that the water was grasping at the closest of its great catapults that had wreaked so much damage across the harbourside of Collegium.
Of Tseitus and his submersible there was no sign. Whether he simply had not had the stocks of air, or had been destroyed by the Ants, or whether he had become locked to the metal hull of his victim and gone with it to the bottom, it was impossible to say.
Doctor Nicrephos was an old man, and very badly in fear for his life. He had listened for days now to the stories from the wall, about the patience and gradual Ant advance, the implacable faces of the Vekken, the diminishing resources of the city. He had lived in Collegium for twenty-five years. He knew no other home. For twenty of those years he had been the College’s least regarded master, clutching to the very periphery of academia, teaching the philosophy and theory of the Days of Lore to a handful of uninterested and uncomprehending students each year. Magic, in other words: something in which Collegium, as a whole, did not believe. There had always been calls to remove his class from the curriculum. It was an embarrassment, they said. There were always those Beetle scholars who believed that the past should stay buried, and that it was an insult to the intelligence of their people that a shabby old fraud like Doctor Nicrephos should be given his tiny room and his pittance stipend.
And yet it had never happened. There was too much inertia in the College, and he still had a few friends who would speak up for him. He had clung on, year in, year out, in this nest he had made for himself, and expected to die in office and then never be replaced. For a man who did not love the company of his own kinden, that would have been enough. His business was the past. He had no care for posterity.
And now it was all falling down. He would suffer the same fate as all the others if the Vekken breached the wall, either put to the sword or sold into slavery, and who would buy such a threadbare thing as he?
But he could not take up arms and walk the wall. He was barely strong enough to fly and his eyes were weak save when the room was darkest. There was something he could do, however, or there might be something: to gather his pitiful philosophy with both hands and make a weapon of it, and brace himself for the inevitable disappointment. He had been a seer of Dorax once, but throughout his years of teaching it had been a rare thing to even attempt to pluck at the world’s weave. He feared that, after so long, true magic was beyond him.
