Salute the Dark (30 page)

All through this, engineers were at work. They did not rush forth as soldiers would, and the Mantids did not mark them, perceiving no threat in them. Even when the great engine within the ring
of towers grumbled to life they were not hindered. They threw their levers and the generators whirred into motion, and abruptly there was light. The apex of each tower had burst into a blinding
white flame that left the inside of the camp – and a hundred yards beyond – as bright as day. The shock of it brought the Mantis influx to a halt, the attackers reeling back, launching
into the air, covering their eyes.

Wasp stings and Wasp crossbowmen now loosed at will. The new snapbows, hundreds of them shipped from Helleron and Sonn, cracked and spat their bolts, too swift and small to be cut aside or
dodged. The Mantids were too widely spread for volley fire and so each of the Wasp soldiers picked a target and loosed on his own volition, and the real slaughter started.

The Mantids did not understand, and with speed and fury they kept mounting the wall and launching themselves into that steel rain of shot, and dying. They died and died. It should have been the
end of them, but such was their swiftness that twice more they swept over the inside of the camp once again, lashing and stabbing indiscriminately, reaping whole blocks of Wasp soldiers with their
blades. Their steel claws rent flesh and dug around armour, a spinning, lashing dance of blood that carried death to all within their reach. Their archers loosed arrows at the snapbowmen, each shot
deadly, but it was like spitting into the storm. Their beasts, the terrible forest mantids, lashed out their killing arms, crushing and severing limbs or taking up whole screaming soldiers and
snapping them, their knife-blade mandibles rending steel effortlessly. The Mantis war host fell on the Wasp lines with their spears, their swords and their antique armour that could not protect
them.

There were too few, in the end. Against that scythe of shot, too few ever came together within the walls to break the Wasps, but they tried over and over, until the bodies of their warriors were
scattered like wheat after a storm. Their armoured beasts lay still with the fletching of snap-bow bolts riddling their carapaces, eyes dull and barbed limbs stilled. The Mantids shouted their
defiance of the invader, each one of them honed to a degree of skill that no Wasp soldier could ever know, masters of a fighting art a thousand years old and more. The snapbows and the crossbows
did not care: they found their mark, automatic as machines. And the Mantids charged and died, and charged and died, until even their spirits failed, their proud hearts broke, and they could come no
more.

The flower of the Felyal had fallen that night, and in the morning there were over 1,700 Mantis dead. Despite their technical advantages and their weapons, the imperial slain numbered 173 men
more.

The next day the Felyal was burning. Mantis holds that had stood for a thousand years were going up in flames. Tens of thousands of soldiers and machines, artillery and firethrowers were working
their way through the Felyal, torching everyone and everything they came across. The Mantis-kinden still fought back, and every Mantis that died within those trees had already shed the blood of
many Wasps, but there were always more Wasps. The burning only stopped when the survivors at last turned and fled, leaving their homes, their lives and their history beneath the Wasp boots. They
fled west – where else? They fled towards Collegium, or maybe to Sarn. They had no other choice available.

In his study in Seldis, Teornis of the Aldanrael perused the news almost dispassionately. The Mantids had served their purpose, and now they were gone. It was a small loss, at
least one that no Spider would be sad about. If the war was won, then perhaps they would re-establish themselves, or perhaps not.

He had been arguing for almost a tenday now. He had been arguing with men of other families, with the women of his own. The time was right to strike and suddenly they were turning away from war.
The Wasp force garrisoned north of Seldis, now comprising most of the Eighth Army, made them uneasy.

‘Now is the time, only
now
!’ he had urged them. His agents were ready to ignite Solarno. The Sarnesh were marching. Collegium was bristling with siege engines. The Empire was
fighting on all its borders. ‘Now!’ he had repeated.

They had not seen his ‘now’. The matter was still being wrangled over, their endless circular arguments merely a blind for the political manoeuvres behind the scenes. Everyone wanted
to be sure who would be on top, come the end of this.

Teornis looked again at the news he had received, the grievous blow to his chances and his future.

The Ants of Kes, that unassailable island city, were not sallying out to strike the Wasp supply lines, so as to do their bit for the salvation of the Lowlands, and the reason for the Imperial
Second bypassing them was now clear. The Ants of Kes, after thorough consideration, had signed a mutual non-aggression pact with the Empire, and betrayed the Lowlands to the sword.

‘Now!’ he insisted still, but ‘now’ was fading into the past. If he could not capitalize on all he had worked for, then he would be lost, and so, he suspected, would
everything else.

Two days later and he was regretting it all. He had grasped the nettle and got stung. His kinden always placed such stock on self-control, and yet now his hands would not stop
shaking. Teornis of the Aldanrael, Lord-Martial and warmonger, had been granted his wish.

On this bright morning, before the sun’s heat became oppressive, the combined forces of seven of Seldis’ great families had marched north from the city’s walls with the aim of
destroying the Wasp Empire’s holding force and severing the supply lines that were all that kept the Imperial Second on track towards Collegium. In this bold stroke, the Spiderlands would
secure the entire southern coast against the Wasps, and from there it would be up to Collegium and Sarn to themselves defeat General Malkan and the Seventh Army. Even this strike had taken all of
Teornis’ considerable powers of persuasion, all of the Aldanrael family’s political influence, and a great mass of Spider-kinden self-interest to produce.

The Seldis force had been levied from a dozen different satrapies within the Spiderlands. As well as a core of Spider-kinden light infantry, drawn from the lesser families or the unfriended and
the impoverished, it boasted a host of other kinden: Beetle artificers and heavy infantry with leadshotters and battle-automotives; red-skinned Fire-Ant crossbowmen in copperweave chainmail
marching beside hulking Scorpion mercenaries who were bare-chested and carried great swords and axes over their shoulders; flights of Dragonfly-kinden glittering and dancing constantly in the still
air. There were Fly-kinden archers and scouts by the hundred, Ant-infantry from far southern cities barely contemplated by the Lowlands, desert-dwelling Grass-hopper-kinden with spears and small
circular shields, hairy and uncouth Tarantula-kinden that were supposedly the Spiders’ primitive cousins. This was a mighty host for any Spider Aristos to command. Intelligence informed them
that they outnumbered the Wasp force waiting for them by almost three to one.

While the army was settling into its blocks and ranks, Teornis had conference with his co-commanders. This was the price of war: his sovereignty was usurped. A half-dozen Spider-kinden and their
aides eyed each other suspiciously and made endless suggestions about how the army should dispose itself.

Teornis grew impatient. He had engineered this war and he therefore felt that it should be his to order. He himself argued for a swift attack, light infantry and cavalry on both wings sweeping
forward whilst the heavy centre rumbled in to smash whatever defences the Wasps might put forth. They were cautious, and he was argued down. Their kinden was more suited to lying in wait, not
charging forth. Teornis was putting his case for the third time, when a Fly messenger came hurtling into the tent.

The Wasps were on the move. The Wasps were attacking.

The Spiders could not believe their luck. Agreement suddenly flowered. Orders went out to the archery companies, the artillery, the airborne. The advancing Wasps would be destroyed by massed
missile shot, then driven into the Dryclaw desert. Perhaps no foot-soldier would even need to bloody his blade.

This was not my plan
, was all Teornis could think now. He had wanted to attack: he could not be blamed for this. He clung to that excuse, for the scant good it could do
him. Even now he was trying to rally his personal guard to retreat from the field, while retreat was still an option.

It was that cursed weapon of Stenwold Maker’s. Teornis had tried to explain. He had even armed a company of his own Fire Ant-kinden with it, and they were now making a bloody accounting of
themselves. The Wasps, though, possessed thousands of the things, whole airborne companies armed with them.

The battle had begun at long range, as his peers had planned. Specifically it had begun at twenty yards further than the Spiderlands bows or crossbows could reach. As the artillery of both
armies had traded shot with slogging patience, the snapbow bolts, fired from shoulder to shoulder, two-deep formations of Wasp infantry, simply flayed the front ranks of the Spider army, leaving
them dead in their tracks. For what must have been less than a minute, but had seemed like forever, the Spider commanders had watched the vanguard of their soldiers disintegrate, an alchemical
translation of soldiers into corpses that no magician could have matched.

They were no fools, for all their division, and their orders had gone out as fast as the Fly-kinden could carry them. The Dragonfly airborne had launched into the air, either on their own wings
or on the giant beasts they rode. The light archers and crossbowmen had been rushed forwards into range. The spider cavalry had scuttled into action with lance and fang while the automotives had
thundered forth. The artillery had perfected its elevation and begun finding the ranges on the close-ranked Wasp lines.

The Wasps were doing just the same thing, though: their own light airborne rose to meet the Dragonflies while their artillery had begun landing stones and leadshot and explosive grenades with
devastating effect amidst the Seldis army. Their snapbowmen, though, had simply shot and shot again and, even when the Spiders denied them a massed target by sending their archers out in loose-knit
skirmishing order, the Wasps had found their victims. Less than one in three of the Spiderlands archers even got into range before they died.

There were still some parts of Teornis’ army holding, and he could not decide whether they were far more loyal than he deserved, or whether they simply did not realize how badly things
were going. The Fire Ants had dug in with snapbows and repeating crossbows, and there were still some Dragonflies in the air. Meanwhile the Scorpions had actually got into close fighting, their
monstrous swords and axes hacking a bloody wedge into the enemy. Despite all this, Teornis was tactician enough to see that the day was lost.

‘Get me to the coast,’ he urged his men. No Seldis for him, because Seldis was where the Wasps would go next and, besides, his own people would hardly be glad to see him right
now.

Still, where can we sail to?
The reports received, in all their veiled language, had been plain enough. With the fires of the Felyal behind them, the Wasp army was tearing up the coast
towards Collegium, not stopping for anything but travelling as fast as its motorized siege train would let it.

Something snapped in him, just for a moment, and Teornis whipped his rapier from its scabbard and slashed it across all the papers and reports and maps he had been living with for the last two
tendays, scattering them through the air like whirling insects, like cinders. His cry of rage and frustration brought his people running, but instantly he was composed again, his face making no
admission that anything had happened.

We will lose Collegium.
Everything was for nothing if that Beetle city fell. The Lowlands would open to the Wasps like a virgin slave.

The guards came rushing out at him straight away, but Thalric had caught them just as much by surprise as he had General Reiner. Thalric knew his trade and had spotted the
sections of wall they would manhandle away and come bursting through, almost falling over themselves in their shock. They were not Rekef, so had expected threats, justifications, a warning from
him. If he had not started killing them as soon as they exposed themselves they would not have known what to do with him.

He let his sting speak for him, striking them down even as they tried to pile into the room. He expected that they would kill him despite his efforts, but there were only four of them in the
end. He had been a four-guard threat, in Reiner’s eyes. A moment later the other two from outside had crashed in, too late again, alerted only by the shouts of the first four. He killed them
too before they quite understood.

He fled to the balcony and paused there, waiting. He himself would have had guards posted either side of the balcony doorway, but Reiner had positioned himself there instead. Thalric’s
exit was clear.

There were no running footsteps, no shouts, no alarm.

With the utmost care he stepped back into the room, eyes roving dispassionately between Reiner’s corpse and those of his guards. It was over so very quickly that no word had spread. Had
nobody even heard? Where were the staff and soldiers of this palace, to come running at the sound of seven murders?

The servants would normally be locals, so perhaps Reiner did not trust them. Perhaps he was right not to, given the reports Thalric had read in Tharn. As for the soldiers and other imperial
officials who should be thronging up here, they were either off trying to crush a resistance that was already too great for them to get their fingers around or had already fallen victim to imperial
politics. Looking down at the general’s thin face Thalric wondered whether Reiner had gone a little mad, at the end, backed into a self-made corner by mounting paranoia.