Part 34 (1/2)

'No words,' he said tiredly. 'No thanks, even. I'm sorry but I don't even know if I could believe that.'

He turned and walked out, and then told the warden that she could go. As he reached the door he looked back and saw her emerging cautiously from the cell, testing the first steps of her freedom.

He left then, set off for his house at last. He had probably made a mistake, and he hoped he would be the only one to suffer for it. It had been lies and pretence, and he had been a fool, as he still was, but for the few days that she had been with him she had made him feel young, and made him happy.

Nothing he had done in the defence of his city had sat well with him, the horrors of the naval a.s.sault recurring over and over, but he found that, when he remembered that he had freed her, the p.a.w.n of his enemies, he slept easily.

The next day the Vekken came against the wall in force. During the night they had brought up their remaining artillery, and the dawn saw great blocks of their infantry a.s.sembled behind their siege engines. There were ma.s.sive armoured ramming engines aimed, three each, at the north and west gates, and both those walls already had a full dozen automotive towers ready to bring the Ant soldiers to the very brink of the walls.

The harbour mouth was still blocked by the pair of ruined armourclads, and the buildings nearest the wharves had been abandoned after the incendiary sh.e.l.ling from the Vekken flags.h.i.+p. Stenwold had Fly messengers on the lookout who would fetch him if the s.h.i.+ps started moving again, but he could not meanwhile just sit idle. Against Balkus's protests he made his way over to Kymon on the west wall.

There had been some fighting here the previous day. The Ants had made a.s.saults at the gate, and one of the siege towers stood at half-extension, a burned-out sh.e.l.l only ten yards from the wall itself. The wall artillery had obviously been busy, and would be still busier today.

Stenwold made his hurried way along the line of the defenders. Most of them now had s.h.i.+elds, he saw, which he knew was a reaction to the crossbow casualties of the previous day. The Ants had advanced far enough on one earlier a.s.sault that some of those s.h.i.+elds were the rectangular Vekken type the attackers used.

'War Master,' some of them acknowledged him, to his discomfort. Others saluted, the fist-to-chest greeting of the city militia. They all seemed to know him.

Out beyond the wall, without any signal that could be perceived, every Ant-kinden soldier suddenly started to march. The engines of the rams and towers growled across towards the defenders through the still air.

'They're coming in faster this time,' Kymon said, striding up to him, and it did seem to Stenwold that the engines were making an almost risky pace of it, bouncing over the uneven ground. Close behind them the Ant soldiers were jogging solidly in their blocks.

'Ready artillery!' Kymon called, and the same call was taken up along the wall. 'They're going to rush us!'

'Master Maker!' someone was calling in a thin voice, and Stenwold turned to see a man he vaguely recognized from the College mechanics department.

'Master Graden,' he now recalled.

'Master Maker, I must be allowed to mount my invention on the walls!'

'This isn't my area, Master Graden.' But curiosity pressed him to add, 'What invention?'

'I call it my sand-bow,' said Graden proudly. 'It was made to clear debris from excavations, but I have redesigned it as a siege weapon.'

'I'm not an artificer. Do you know what he's talking about?' Kymon growled.

'Not so much,' Stenwold admitted.

Then the Ant artillery started shooting, and abruptly there were rocks and lead shot and ballista bolts falling towards the wall, and especially towards Collegium's own emplacements. Stenwold, Kymon and Graden crouched under the battlements, feeling more than hearing as their wall engines returned the favour. Stenwold risked a look at the advancing forces and saw, almost in awe, that Kymon had been right. Behind the speeding engines, the Ant soldiers were no longer in solid blocks that would make such tempting targets for the artillery. Instead they were a vast mob, a loose-knit mob thousands strong, surging forwards behind their great machines.

And they would be able to form up on command, he knew, each mind instantly finding its place amongst the others.

'Can it hurt? His device?' he shouted at Kymon over the noise.

Kymon gave an angry shrug and then ran off down the line of his men, bellowing for them to stand ready, to raise their s.h.i.+elds.

'Get the cursed thing up here!' Stenwold ordered Graden, and the artificer started gesturing down to where his apprentices were still waiting with his invention. It looked like nothing so much as a great snaking tube thrust through some kind of pumping engine.

'What will it do?' Stenwold asked. Another glance over the wall saw the Ants' tower engines ratcheting up, unfolding and unfolding again in measured stages, with Ant soldiers thronging their platforms and more climbing after them. Crossbow quarrels started to rake the wall, springing back from s.h.i.+elds and stone, or punching men and women from their feet and over the edge, down onto the roofs of the town.

'It will blow sand in their faces!' Graden said enthusiastically. 'They won't be able to see what they're doing!'

True enough, Stenwold saw that one end of the tube had a vast pile of sand by it. The other was being hauled onto the wall, with the great engine, the fan he supposed, hoisted precariously onto the walkway.

The nearest tower was almost at the level of the wall-top as Graden's apprentices wrestled the sandbow into place, and then the artificer called out for it to start. All around them the defenders of Collegium, militia, tradesmen, students and scholars, braced themselves for the coming a.s.sault.

Twenty-Nine.

Parosyal had white beaches, a sand that gleamed as brightly in the sun as the sun itself. Nothing on the mainland could match it, nor any other isle along the coast. A hundred Beetle scholars had written theories to explain it.

There was only one safe harbour at Parosyal, Tisamon had explained, and she had understood that by 'safe' he was not referring to anchorage or the elements.

Parosyal was a mystery, and one that history had ignored: the sacred isle of the Mantis-kinden. The slow march of years had seen Collegium scholars baffled by it, Kessen fleets avoid it, and opportunistic smugglers or relic-hunters disappear there, never to be seen again.

'Every one of my kinden seeks to come here, once at least in a lifetime,' Tisamon explained, and she knew he was confirming that she, too, was his kinden. 'They come from Felyal, from Etheryon and Nethyon. From across the sea, even. From the Commonweal.'

'That's a long haul,' she said.

He nodded. 'This is our heart.'

'But why?' she asked. 'Surely not . . . G.o.ds?' She knew that, long ago, some ancient peoples had tried to make sense of the world by giving faces to the lightning and the sea. Perhaps some savages still did, in lands beyond known maps, but in these days n.o.body halfway civilized held that they were subject to the will of squabbling and fickle divinities. Achaeos had told her that the Moth-kinden believed in spirits, but ones that could be commanded, not ones that must be obeyed. And then of course there were the avatars of the kinden, the philosophical concepts that were the source of the Ancestor Art, but they were just ideas ideas, aids to concentration. n.o.body thought that they actually existed existed somewhere. somewhere.

'An ancient and inviolate communion,' whispered Tisamon, and a s.h.i.+ver went through her. It was not the words themselves, but because she heard quite clearly some other voice saying that exact phrase to him, when he was younger even than she, and as some previous boat was approaching this same harbour.

She felt sand sc.r.a.pe at the boat's shallow draft. The vessel's master, an old Beetle-kinden, called for any to disembark that were intending to.

She took up her single canvas bag, slung her swordbelt over her shoulder, and splashed down into thigh-deep water.

The bay of Parosyal held a single fis.h.i.+ng village that was huddled between the water and the treeline, facing south across the endless roll of the ocean as though it had turned its back on the Lowlands and the march of history. The houses were constructed of wood and reeds, and built on stilts to clear the high tides. The villagers were a strange mixture that Tynisa had not been expecting.

There were only half a dozen Mantids there, and they seemed mostly old, their hair silvered, and with lines on their faces. The other villagers comprised a whole gamut of the Lowlands population: quite a few Beetles, including one in the robes of a College scholar, some Fly-kinden, a few Kessen Ants. There were a surprising number of Moths pa.s.sing back and forth between the huts and the boats, or conferring in small groups.

No Spider-kinden, though, she had expected that.

She set foot now on the sand of the beach, shaking a little water from her bare feet, and she was aware that many of them were staring at her. Staring at her, especially, in company with Tisamon. Her blood was mixed, but her face was her mother's. In fathering her, Tisamon had dealt his own race the worst blow, having committed the ultimate sin against their age-old grievances.

But she had expected worse than she received. Looks, yes, and a few glares even, but nothing more. Tisamon was standing in the centre of the little village now, watching a pair of young Moths put a small dinghy out onto the water. He was waiting for something, she could see.

Where is it all? she asked herself, because surely this collection of hovels could not be she asked herself, because surely this collection of hovels could not be it it. This was not what all the fuss was about. And then she looked past the huts towards the wall of green that was the forest that covered most of Parosyal and she knew that that was it. was it.

Tisamon's stance changed, just slightly, alerting her to the approach of an ageless, white-eyed Moth-kinden man. His blank gaze flicked to Tynisa, but her appearance drew no change of expression to his face.

'Your approach is known,' he said softly to Tisamon. 'Your purpose also.' He looked to her again. 'It is not for me to judge, but . . .'

'The Isle will judge,' Tisamon said firmly, but his glance at his daughter was suddenly undermined by uncertainty.

'Indeed it will,' said the Moth. 'It always does. The Isle has never seen one such as her. We can none of us know what may be born, or what may die . . . even if she has made the proper preparations.'