Blood of the Mantis (18 page)

‘I have not brought the plans with me to Sarn,’ he said.

–
He is lying.

– He should be persuaded to send back to Collegium to collect them.

– I concur that he is lying. The Beetles clearly do not trust us.

– We cannot therefore trust them.

– We need allies now if we are to stave off the Wasp-kinden when they come.

‘Master Maker,’ the Queen said softly. ‘We understand that you have been the man to cut through philosophical procrastination at Collegium, and to impart a keener view of reality than your people might otherwise have achieved. Allow me to do the same for you. We must defeat the Wasps at all costs. If Sarn falls, the Lowlands has lost its heart. We cannot stand on niceties or other such considerations. I wish you to think very carefully about how much our need for victory outweighs any other needs of your own just now.’

‘I understand, your Majesty. I have another proposal, though. I would like to use Sarn as a rallying point for those cities willing to send troops and aid in order to resist the Wasps. You are correct that Sarn is the keystone of the Lowlands, as matters now stand, and I am also aware that there is an alliance of Moth and Mantis-kinden north of here. So, as well as Collegium, we can hopefully bring several others to the table. We can then plan a unified strategy regarding how best to fight and how best to hamper the imperial advance. Would you be willing to consider this?’

‘You do not deflect us so easily, Master Maker,’ the Queen remarked acidly. ‘You must come to accept that this weapon you have discovered is wasted in the hands of Collegium. You are builders and inventors but not warriors. That is our profession here in Sarn. To pass weapons into our hands is simply an efficient division of labour. However, I am confident that you will, after due thought, come to make the correct decision on this point. As to your own request, we are agreed. Let those who are prepared to stand against the Wasps send their Tacticians and embassies here in safety. We shall receive them all.’

Stenwold backed out of the war room, feeling off-balance and ill at ease. He had expected that Sarnesh agents would have sniffed out Collegium’s new acquisition, and he had come armed with the authority of the Collegium Assembly to deny the Queen’s logical request, but she had ambushed him with it before he was ready, launching him into the pitched diplomatic battle he had been hoping to defer. Nor was that battle won yet.

He wondered uneasily how far news of the snapbow had spread.

Back in the antechamber he rejoined Arianna, hugged her briefly, and then turned to look at the next petitioner ready to enter the war room.

It was Salma.

Stenwold blinked at him, seeing the same lean, hard-edged man he had encountered when recovering his niece. Salma all grown up, calloused and lean, standing here still in his brigand’s armour as though he were not about to speak to a queen.

‘Hammer and tongs,’ Stenwold said softly. ‘What are
you
doing here?’

‘Merely a prince calling on fellow royalty, what else?’ Salma said. His smile was the same old smile gleaming through a filter of time and pain. ‘It’s good to see you, Sten.’

‘It’s good . . . very good to see you,’ Stenwold told him. ‘I wish I’d been able to bring along Che or Tynisa.’

The smile lingered, now sadder. ‘Those were the days, weren’t they?’ said the Dragonfly. ‘How little we knew. Except you, of course. I listened to everything you said, and I still wish I’d listened harder.’

‘At least you listened. It took my own people a lot longer.’ Stenwold looked him up and down, this most unlikely of royal petitioners. ‘You’re here on the business of your . . . surrogate people?’

Salma nodded. ‘My followers, yes. I come to barter like any tradesman. To horse-trade, in fact.’ Seeing Stenwold’s expression he waved a hand dismissively. ‘It’s a Commonweal expression, although more fitting than you’d think. Your own business here is your grand alliance, of course.’

‘Let us hope it’s more than just
my
business,’ Stenwold said, and at that moment an Ant functionary was at Salma’s elbow. The two old friends clasped hands, and Stenwold said, ‘Good luck,’ before returning to Arianna.

She raised the wrapped bundle questioningly, but he shook his head at her, relieved to be out of here without having to unsheathe it. She kept her questions to herself until they were well clear of the royal palace and pacing back through the well-ordered streets of Sarn proper towards the Foreigners’ Quarter.

‘So I carried this along for nothing then?’ she said eventually.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘We knew they knew that we knew how to make it, so to speak, but the Queen is not going to be derailed from her intentions.’ He grimaced about him at the perfectly grid-patterned streets, at the silent Sarnesh going about their lives without fuss or haste, at soldiers trooping past them carrying material to the walls. ‘I suppose I can’t blame them, given that they were on the receiving end, but they really, fiercely want Totho’s invention. I’m starting to worry about precisely what they’ll do if I don’t willingly give them the plans.’

‘The Assembly opinion seemed to be fairly unified on that point,’ she noted.

‘The Assembly of Collegium, lucky fellows, aren’t here facing the Queen of Sarn.’ He sighed. ‘I know it’s an artificial situation. Old Thadspar wanted to keep it out of the wrong hands, and yet the Wasps already have it. And, anyway, the Sarnesh will capture one eventually, build their own copy, and then they’ll have it too, and they’ll only remember that
we
didn’t want them to get it. And they want it
now
. They want to be able to put it to use against the Wasps next spring, and for the short term, of course, that’s the best idea.’

‘And for the long term . . .’

‘They will turn it against the world, sooner or later. No doubt about that. The temptation to win a few battles over their old enemies will prove too much. This weapon is dangerous enough in Wasp hands, but in Ant hands the possibilities are even worse.’

Now they were securely inside the Foreigners’ Quarter, approaching the elegant Beetle-style two-storey that was the Collegiate embassy. Once inside, past the guards and the functionaries, Stenwold retired to the suite of rooms that had been made available to him.

And there’s the joke because, a month before, Collegium’s

own diplomatic staff wouldn’t have let me in the door.
‘You were right,’ he told Sperra. ‘She’s a tough one.’ The Fly nodded. ‘Rather you than me, chief.’

‘I take it not so good, Sten?’ This came from the last man there, a fleshy creature with pale, bluish skin – an Ant from some western city-state at the fringes of the Lowlands proper. His name was Plius and he was nominally Stenwold’s man here in Sarn. Stenwold had been in the game a long time, cutting his teeth on agent-running in a half-dozen cities, and way back when he had first recruited Plius, Stenwold had taken him for what the world usually saw: an outcast trying to make his difficult way in a hostile city. Now, his customary pipe in his hands, Plius managed a wan smile at Stenwold, who smiled back and nodded.

With his extra years of experience, Stenwold had known as soon as he reacquainted himself with the man. He knew the telltale signs now of a man with divided loyalties. Either he had been blind to it before, or Plius had been turned fairly recently. They were still both playing the game as though it was not so but, somewhere along the line, someone else had put their mark on Plius, and Stenwold knew he could not trust the man any more, only keep him close and wait.

Who is this man?
the Queen asked, and this time the silent answers came more hesitantly.

–
A nobleman from the northlands. He has been a student at the College.

– Reports suggest he was at Tark during the siege.

– He may be a spy.

– We have heard unconfirmed reports of irregular resistance to the imperial advance being linked to his name.

– Our knowledge of the Commonweal is almost nonexistent.

– Save that they, too, have fought the Wasps.

With no clear vision from her Tacticians, she used her own eyes, seeing a young man, too young to be standing before her in this weighty role. He wore a long leather hauberk reinforced with metal plates that would ill become the worst of her own soldiers, and yet he carried himself with a casual authority. Apart from that he was golden-skinned, handsome, clear-eyed, and he stood before her war council as though he was the lord of a realm and not just the chief of a ragged pack of bandits and refugees.

‘Prince Salme Dien,’ she said, pronouncing the foreign name carefully. She was aware that he was studying her in return, unsurprised at seeing nothing but a woman of Sarn of middling years, with the same close features, brown skin and short-cut dark hair as all her kin. No doubt the lords in his homeland wore gaudy flowers of gilt and gems, compared with the token regalia she bore to identify her. Her look told him flatly that in Sarn they valued other things.

‘Your Majesty.’ He sketched a bow that was obviously a shadow of something more formal.

‘Your name is known to us, to my council and myself,’ she told him. ‘It has therefore won you this time, when our time is precious to us. Who are you, Dragonfly, and why should we heed you?’

‘In the Commonweal it is customary to bring gifts when currying the favour of great men and women,’ Salma declared. ‘I have something you should appreciate, and also may serve as your answer.’

She sent out a query, but discovered no aide awaiting him with bundles in the antechamber. ‘Speak clearly,’ she advised.

‘In the Foreigners’ Quarter I have, under lock and key, three Wasp scouts my men have caught. I have questioned them all I need to. They are now yours.’

There was a murmur in her head, a sound of cautious re-evaluation. ‘You are in the habit of catching Wasps without being stung?’ the Queen asked.

–
This may yet be a trap. Misinformation is easy to plant. – Wasps are hard to take alive. They are more mobile than our own scouts.

‘There is,’ said Salma, ‘a knack to it.’

The Queen frowned at him. ‘And who are your men, exactly? Do you hold yourself a tactician now?’ She said it with a glance of mockery at his travel-stained dress, the stitched repairs to his armour.

‘Yes,’ Salma replied, quite seriously.

That stilled the voices in her head for a moment, and he let his voice step into the breach.

‘The Empire has wrought a great change east of here. They have displaced hundreds, thousands, from their homes: people from Tark, from Helleron, from all the little communities between there and here. The roads are full of refugees, escaped slaves, wilderness folk: a great tide of humanity that the Wasps have driven before them, to shiver and starve through the winter. Now the Wasps have halted their advance so that they can accumulate more reserves of men and weapons, and we have regrouped too. We are the dispossessed, your Majesty, and we fight.’

‘You fight the Empire.’

‘We turn upon our creator.’

–
This is preposterous.

– There is no precedent for this.

– He is no more than a brigand with ideas above his station.

Because she was Queen of Sarn, one mental word silenced them. ‘And what are your plans, this winter, Prince Dien?’

He smiled at her. It was a smile baked hard and sharpened to an edge. ‘We are attacking the Wasps, your Majesty. We are attacking them, even as I speak, in all the little ways we can. My soldiers have disrupted their supply lines. My artificers have broken up the rails between their camp and Helleron. My Fly-kinden pass over their camp and lure out their soldiers into ambush or capture. My foragers take everything from the land before the Wasps can harvest it. My spies become their slaves in order to discover their plans. Can you say as much of your own people, your Majesty?’

The outrage about the table was almost tangible to him, loudly audible to her, but she felt as though, despite the others present, there were now only the two of them truly there in that room: the Queen of Sarn and this young man with his disturbing smile.

‘You are here with a proposal, young prince,’ she informed him.

‘Certainly,’ he agreed. ‘For the moment, the city of Sarn presents a line across which the Wasps dare not go, not until they are fully ready for their great battle. I have with me thousands who cannot fight: the young, the old and the wounded. I know Ant city-states well enough, and you will have hoarded enough within your walls to withstand a siege lasting years. You have therefore enough to provide for those of my people that I cannot.’

‘And in exchange you will make yourselves soldiers of Sarn?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Under no circumstances. We know what that would mean: to be the least valued, the first sent into the fire. We are free, your Majesty, no subjects of yours, nor of any ruler’s.’

‘So, in return, what?’ Her Tacticians were now hanging on her words, trying to keep up with the way the world around them had suddenly shifted.

‘In exchange we will do what you cannot. We will tell you all that we discover about the Wasps. When they advance, we will harry their vanguard and ambush their baggage train. We are woodsmen, trackers, thieves and brigands, your Majesty, and we will become the very land about them, which turns upon them. We are not many, but we are still an army. More, we are an army without shield-wall or formations, an army that moves swiftly, that has no home, that cannot be pinned or broken against a solid line. They do not know how to fight us. This is what you shall have, in return.’

‘And where will this proud independence of all rulers take you at the last, young prince?’ she asked him, and he knew from the question that he had won, that she would agree.

‘A city, your Majesty. A city west of here, where my people can stop running. We do not know where it is, yet, or what it shall be called, but when we see the land just so, we shall build there.’

The flurry of conflicting voices in her head rose high, some saying that he should be instantly destroyed, others that he should be used, but still more that he was an ally worth having, now and for the future.