Blood of the Mantis

‘I’ll freely confess that I don’t know too much about them,’ Destrachis said. There had been enough of them about in the Commonweal, but their Lowlander cousins’ hostile reputation against his kind had led him to keep his distance.

‘Shame, when you think about it. Both as mad as each other, both widowed,’ Balkus mused. ‘Do well together that pair.’

Destrachis sent him a stern frown, to make known his disapproval of such thoughts directed at his patient. Inwardly, his mind was spinning. Of course, Felise could easily know far more than he about the Mantids: as a Dragonfly, as a Mercer especially. The Spider-kinden doctor’s former uneasiness now had a focus at last. He remembered when Tisamon and Felise had fought, how perfectly matched they had been. How there had been a connection, in the dance of blades, that neither of them could ever have managed by speech or expression or anything civilized.

So, in her mind, they would fight again – and she would win him, or else she would kill him, or he would kill her.

Perhaps, he thought wryly, she was approaching it right. Perhaps that was what Mantis-kinden meant by ‘love’.

College engineers had restored the rail line between Sarn and Collegium within a tenday of the Vekken defeat, and the floods of returning refugees, mostly frightened-looking children, served to remind the people of Collegium that, although their Sarnesh allies had been able to send precious little armed support, they had yet played their part.

It was to be a time of confirming old alliances and, as Stenwold hoped, making new ones. The crisis point was reached, for the Lowlands must stand united now, or within the year to come the Wasps would roll over them, city by city.

It had been some time since he had visited Sarn, several years even. He suspected that the changes he now saw in the city were only months in the making, because Ant-kinden changed nothing that did not need it. They were a people of traditions, of set ways of doing things. Now someone had kicked over their nest.

It was easy to see how the Wasps had upset that familiar way of life. It almost seemed that a third of the walls of the city was spun in scaffolding, as though some great metal spider was saving the city for a later meal. The buildings along the road running beside the rails had all gone, demolished and then levelled to strip any enemy of cover, despite the fact that the main assault would most likely come from the air. The walls themselves were changing shape, from the original smooth curve that encircled the city to something spiky, with sloping, pointed buttresses jutting out to give defending archers more inroads into any besieging force, also battlements that curved up and out and then in again, so that sheltered crossbows could fire through slots above them at any airborne enemy. The summit of the wall was studded with siege engines and, as the rail-automotive drew closer, Stenwold watched an impossibly spindly crane winching one of these into position. Some were heavy-barrelled leadshotters, some repeating ballistae plated in steel. There were others still that were new to him – racks of tubes that must be the new serial scrap-shotters he had heard about, which would fill a space of air with enough loose metal to bring down anything flying through it. He saw the machines tilt and turn experimentally with hisses of steam leaking from their joints. All the wall emplacements were armoured with shields before and above to protect the engineers. Too heavy to be winched by hand, the engines were kept grinding back and forth by steam or clockwork.

They don’t really know what they’re doing, Stenwold decided, but it was still a hopeful sight. At least they were doing something. The Sarnesh, backed by the ingenuity of the Collegiate artificers, were preparing for a conflict with the Wasps that would come all the way to the walls of their city.

And he saw further emplacements beyond the walls, too: bunkers and entrenched weapons, that might or might not be connected underground to the city’s subterranean levels where the ant hive housed the working insects that the city used as beasts of burden. He hoped this activity would impress the others as much as it impressed him.

Across from him dozed a pale-skinned Ant. His name was Parops and he was from Tark, and normally a Tarkesh would be risking death merely by coming to Sarn. Tark was in the hands of the Wasps, however, and Parops had been almost eager to come along with Stenwold. The last chance for Tark would be the utter defeat of the Wasps, and he was willing to break centuries of xenophobia to achieve that. It was enough to give a man hope.