Part 13 (1/2)

'Little enough,' Parops agreed. 'Most of the nest crop is gone, and we only have a couple of orthopters that could even be repaired on time. They threw a lot at us last night.'

'Of course, and for that very reason,' Totho murmured, still scrutinizing the distant gasbags. 'An artificer's war.' He looked back at the others, seeming more himself, more the avid student Salma had known. The animation with which he spoke of his trade was macabre. 'Airs.h.i.+ps are very vulnerable to any flying attack. That's why they've not been used much in warfare.' Right now he might have been a College master delivering his lecture.

'So what are are those things out there?' Skrill demanded. Totho gave her a frustrated look. those things out there?' Skrill demanded. Totho gave her a frustrated look.

'They're airs.h.i.+ps airs.h.i.+ps, of course, because there will be no airborne opposition to them now. They just have to float them over the city. It makes perfect sense. It's just that the Tarkesh don't think like Wasps. Parops, your people fight ground wars, and so your air power is secondary, kept just for spotting and the occasional surprise attack, but the Wasps think like you should think, Salma. They think in the air and now they've opened the city on the ground, and stripped its wings away, they'll proceed to attack it from above. Those heliopters are too heavy, and they fly too low. You could shoot them down with your wall artillery, maybe even with sufficient crossbows. The airs.h.i.+ps, though . . . they can go so high, only the best fliers could reach them. So what will you do?'

'But what can they they do?' Nero asked. 'They can spy us out, but we can shoot their troops if they drop down-' do?' Nero asked. 'They can spy us out, but we can shoot their troops if they drop down-'

'They can do whatever they want,' Totho said, leaning back against the wall, his mind still full of airs.h.i.+ps. 'The whole of Tark will be spread below them. Explosives, incendiaries it would be like dropping boiling oil onto a map, you see. Drop drop drop, and three buildings gone. And all we will be able to do is shake our fists at them.'

Twelve.

Che had never before seen an Ant-kinden who was actually fat. If it were not for Plius's distinctive Ant features she would have thought him some kind of halfbreed. That was not the only surprise about him. He was not a Sarnesh Ant, which was even more remarkable given the Ants' propensity to make war on others of their own kind. His skin was icy blue-white while the irises of his eyes were dead black, which had the effect of making them seem huge. She had seldom seen such colouring before, and had no idea what city-state he might have come from.

'Scuto,' he called out from the table he had to himself in the taverna, leaning back in a capacious chair. He wore an open robe over an expensive-looking tunic that strained over his belly, but there was a shortsword slung over the chair-back, to show he had not entirely left his belligerent roots behind.

Scuto glanced about, but none of the other patrons, few enough of them, seemed interested. It was still before midday and most of the inhabitants of Sarn's foreign quarter were out taking care of business.

'It's been a while,' Plius remarked, as the Thorn Bug approached. He kicked another chair out for him, and then glanced quickly from Che's face to Sperra's. 'Pimping now, are you?' he asked. Despite his louche appearance, he spoke in an Ant's voice, with its characteristic clipped precision.

'This lady here is Cheerwell Maker. You remember Sten Maker? Well this is his niece. The other's called Sperra.'

Plius waved the introductions away. 'So I heard you were looking for me, Scuto. It's been a while,' he repeated.

'It has that,' Scuto admitted. 'Didn't know how much of the old cadre would still be here for me.'

Plius shrugged. 'There's Dola over at the Chop Ketcher Importing place but, if you've not heard from her, she's probably keeping her head down. As I said, Scuto, it's been a while since then, and we've all had the chance to make some money here in Sarn.'

Scuto's pause for breath, his moment of hesitation, opened a book for Che on his relations with Plius: revealing that they had never really trusted one another, and that Scuto had no guarantee that the other man would be of any use to them.

'So where are we now?' Scuto asked.

Plius shrugged. 'We're in a city where I have a good business going, Scuto, but if you want something, then ask and, if it's not too much out of my way, maybe it will happen.'

'What is is your business, if I can ask?' Che put in. This man seemed so corrupt, but she knew the Ants were ruthless with crime, even here in Sarn. your business, if I can ask?' Che put in. This man seemed so corrupt, but she knew the Ants were ruthless with crime, even here in Sarn.

'Ah, well.' Plius coughed and grinned. 'It happens I'm the most successful milliner in Sarn.'

'The most successful what? what?' Che asked.

'I used to be the only one, but now there are two more, which shows you how profitable the trade's become.'

'A milliner? You mean hats?'

Plius's grin widened. 'The way it was, you see, there weren't any here, because Ants would wear helms or go bare-headed, but of course Sarn has a foreign quarter that covers almost a third of the city these days, and Sarn is half again as big as most Ant states. So there was a call for them, and business was good. And you know what? Now the Ants have started buying as well. Now they can see the foreigners having a good time, they themselves start to change how they dress and the like. They still all look like they're ready for a funeral, but at least they're not all dressed exactly the same.' He turned his attention back to Scuto. 'So what is it, then? What brings you back here for me?'

'You know what,' Scuto told him. 'It's happening, Plius. It's time.'

'Yes, well, I've heard the news.' Plius spread his hands. 'The Empire, which was your man Sten's bedbug back in the old days, is away battering Tark even as we speak. Things may have changed in this city, but not that much. n.o.body in Sarn's going to lose sleep about the Tarkesh taking a few punches.'

'We ain't here to ask for Tark's sake,' Scuto said flatly. 'It's too late, anyway, by my reckoning. This lot'd never get there in time. Now I ain't a diplomat or a pretty speaker, so I'll put it plain as I can. Sure, you've heard about Tark. Well, soon enough you'll hear about h.e.l.leron, too.'

'What about h.e.l.leron?'

'Soon enough,' Scuto said again. 'And probably Egel and Merro, once they're done with Tark. Who knows where next? They'll be marching up the coast towards Collegium, and from h.e.l.leron it's not such a jump to take Etheryon. Or even Sarn.'

Che expected Plius to laugh this off, but something in Scuto's tone, maybe his very lack of emphasis, had drawn the Ant's face longer and longer. 'You mean it, don't you?' Plius said. 'You're serious?'

'Ain't never been more,' Scuto confirmed, sounding tired. 'Look, Plius, I saw the start of it at h.e.l.leron, when they tried to get a thousand men by rail into Collegium to shake the place up. They're not really after Tark. It's the Lowlands they want. The whole of it, from h.e.l.leron all the way to Vek and the west coast. They've got more fighting men than five Ant cities put together, and a dozen slave-towns to pull more soldiers from. You know the Commonweal?'

'Yes, I know the Commonweal,' Plius said testily.

'Well then you know they've spent the last dozen years carving out a great lump of that, and now they're ready for us,' said Scuto. Plius's easygoing manner had evaporated entirely now, and he was looking a little stunned.

'So what do you want?' he asked, and Scuto replied, 'We need to speak to the top, Plius. To the Royal Court.'

Plius let out a long breath. 'If you'd asked that straight off I would have said you were mad. Now, though . . . I have some contacts. Not high-up contacts, but they're there. I can try for an audience, but it'll use up just about all my credit with them.'

'What,' Scuto said pointedly, 'were you saving it for?'

On their arrival, Che's first view of Sarn had been of a city split by the line of the rail track. As the automotive pulled in to the depot it had seemed to her that somehow by Achaeos's magic perhaps there were two cities, as close as a shadow to each other, but each blind to its neighbour.

To the right was Sarn, the Ant city-state comprised of low, spartan buildings, pale stone and flat roofs without decoration. The people there moved briskly but without haste, and they did not stop to speak to one another or gather to converse. Everyone knew precisely where they were going. Soldiers were on hand to watch the automotive and make sure, she suspected, that only native Sarnesh alighted through the right-hand doors. Everything looked clean and orderly and the streets of the city ran at precise angles to one another, all in the shadow of the city wall.

To the left lay the foreigners' quarter, which presented a totally different world. To start with, its limits had begun outside the walls, with stalls, wagons and tents extending a hundred yards down the road that ran alongside the rail track. Inside the walls, it fairly bustled. Even the depot's goods yard had suffered a hundred encroachments, with market stalls pitched ready to ambush the unwary visitor, peddlers and hawkers and dozens of kinds of traders converging or waiting or looking out for each other. There were a lot of Beetle-kinden amongst them, mostly Collegium-grown and many even College-educated: merchants and artificers and scholars all mingling, clasping hands, making animated conversation with frequent gestures, as though to compensate for the quiet world just across the track. There were others, too, especially Fly-kinden dozens of them, from ostentatiously well-dressed merchants to grubby peddlers of trinkets, their eyes keen for a loose purse or dropped coin. There were also some from breeds not commonly found within the Lowlands: a Commonweal Dragonfly mercenary in piecemeal armour of glittering hues and a long-faced Gra.s.shopper in College-styled robes discoursing with two Beetle scholars. Spiders, she saw, though not so many as Collegium regularly knew, and small wonder, for she had never seen so many Mantis-kinden in one place in her life. Some were in bands, lounging about and watched carefully by the guard. Many went singly, at the shoulder of some wealthy foreigner or other as a tactful and tacit warning to thieves and rivals. With their strongholds of Nethyon and Etheryon just north of Sarn, a lot of Mantis-kinden young bloods came down here looking for excitement, hiring themselves out as mercenaries or bodyguards.

The Sarnesh were to be found in the foreigners' quarter as well, of course. She had expected their armoured men and women patrolling through the throng and keeping a careful eye on exposed weapons and their owners. She was struck, though, by the many brown-skinned Ant-kinden, robed or dressed in simple tunics, doing patient business with their visitors, or simply walking through the crowd, taking a vicarious interest in all the bustle that was going on within their walls.

Scuto had found them a taverna going under the sign of the Sworded Book, which suggested that its owner, past or present, had been a duellist at the Prowess Forum. Certainly it was decked out in Collegium style, with a great clock perched over the bar in imitation of the Forum itself. Now Che sat at a window and watched the foreign-quarter marketplace, a bizarre halfbreed venue that seemed wrenchingly close to home and yet completely distant. Meanwhile, only three streets away, the Sarnesh proper continued to hold their normal silent communion with one another.

'I've never really visited an Ant city before,' she admitted. 'It's not at all what I expected.'

Sperra, virtually sitting in her shadow, snorted. 'This isn't just any Ant city. Sarn's different. I've been in Tark and Kes before and it wasn't fun.'

'But they have their foreign quarters too,' Che recalled from her studies.

'They do, only there're guards watching every wretched thing you do, waiting for you to take a step out of line, and n.o.body talks any more than they have to, so's to be like the locals. And if you're Fly-kinden like me, you're on double guard, because if something goes wrong and they don't know who did it, they just hang the first person they don't like, and they always a.s.sume it's us. And, ah! The slaves. There are slaves everywhere, and what their masters overlook, the slaves'll spot. And you just know they'll tell their owners, because the Ants don't have any use for slack slaves.'

Che grimaced. However bad Ant-kinden masters might be, a severity surely bred of frugality and efficiency, she had herself become a slave to the Empire, and she was willing to wager that was worse. 'Your kinden don't keep slaves do you?' she enquired. The Fly-kinden fielded no armies, nor had any great repute as artificers, scholars or social reformers. They tended to slip off the edge of the College curriculum.

'Oh they'd tell you that in Egel or Merro,' Sperra said disdainfully. 'But don't you believe them. It's all about the money families owing other families. And if your family can't settle what's due, they'll sell you. Indenture, it's called, only basically it's slavery.'

'Was that what happened to you?'

'Would have done,' the Fly replied, 'only I was smart enough to skip out. Everyone thinks it's so homey to be one of my kinden: all family and sticking together and everyone mucking in, all rosy cheeks and cheeky banter. If it's so wonderful, why do you think so many of us are living anywhere but home?'