But then she had hold of it and she twisted, with little finesse, but drawing upon that strength that she had been given, to make up for all that she had lost.

She felt the Masters of Khanaphes, sensed their slow minds come to a decision, and then they struck- Che opened her eyes, expecting to find the fight still ongoing, but there was no sound of it. She was not even on the barge.

'Ah . . .' She hurt, but it was all inside. She bore no wounds.

At her faint sound, Thalric was kneeling again beside her. 'Che!'

'What's happening?'

'You tell me! You were . . . it was as though you were sleeping, but I couldn't wake you.'

She sat up painfully, seeing that they were camped beside the ca.n.a.l: Thalric, Varmen, Skelling and his crew. The crew was two men short, she noticed. 'We're . . .'

'Right up near the border, in so far as there's a definite "border" at all,' Thalric confirmed. 'Che, what in the wastes happened to you?'

'Thalric, she's there.'

He opened his mouth to question her, but the pieces fell into place before he had to.

'She's seeking the Masters,' Che told him urgently, as though there was something he could do about it. The world around her now seemed different, but then she realized that it was her senses that had changed. She had become charged with magic, connected to the world's weave like a spider at the heart of its web, feeling the strands tug and twitch. Not only was she still aware of Seda as a dull and distant ache in her mind, but she felt that, if she could turn her mind just so, then she would be able to sense each and every magician, each ancient site of power across the hills of the Commonweal and beyond, even to the furthest horizon. Her mind remained locked inside her skull, but only just.

'Thalric, I can . . .'

But an old, familiar taint had just touched the edge of her consciousness, snapping her back to the business at hand.

Is it . . .. is it him . . .?

Pressing on Thalric's shoulder for purchase, she stood up abruptly, staring wildly about. For a moment there she thought she had caught a glimpse of . . .

Tisamon . . .

Why is it so hard for me to remember what I came here for? Her quest to control her dreams, to know more about the magic that seemed to be engulfing her, that was secondary. She had come to save Tynisa from the spectre of her father. Only now did her roving mind fix on that task again and only because she sensed the Mantis-kinden's ghost ahead of them, for the very first time since inside the tombs of Khanaphes.

There was no mistaking the touch. She had carried that twisted presence in her mind for a long time, believing it to be the bitter shade of her lover, Achaeos. Only through the power of the Masters of Khanaphes had the truth come out and by that time the creature was freed from her. Immediately, Tisamon had set off to find his daughter. In life he had been an intimidating man, a fierce killer whose life was hedged about by an untenably harsh code of conduct that had, in the end, left him no other goal but to seek his own death. Oh, he had been an honourable man, and loyal to a fault, but the spectre that Che had faced seemed to have been pared down, cut away until only that self-destructive slayer remained.

Che reached out, trying to ascertain how far ahead the spectre was, though in truth she was unsure whether such a concept had any real meaning for what Tisamon now was. Again, as she touched him, there was a feeling of bitterness and ashes, but this time she heard his voice inside her head.

What will you do, Beetle child?

I will stop you, she told him flatly. Tynisa does not deserve this.

She is mine. What can you do to stop me?

From nowhere, or perhaps from some forgotten conversation with Achaeos, the word surfaced. I shall bind you in a tree perhaps. I shall lock you away.

I shall kill you before you have the chance, came his cold reply.

Will you so? She had thought long and hard on how she might compel this creature, on the journey from Khanaphes. Would you kill Stenwold's kin?

The silence that followed told her that she was right; that some vestige of the man he had once been still remained within Tisamon.

She gathered her strength then, while he seemed uncertain, for she was not sure herself how long such a leash would hold him. She tried to reach out again. Almost, almost there, and then at least Tynisa can find her own way . . .

-she was hiding under her bed, because she knew the bad man was coming, the man that had called her father 'friend' and never meant it- 'No!' cried Che, feeling the shade of Tisamon slip away from her. 'Thalric!'

'I'm right here,' the Wasp snapped in frustration. 'Che, what is happening to you?'

-steps echoed outside the children's bedchamber, and the door pushed open- The world was sliding away from her, or she was falling aside from it, as though some giant hand had tilted it upon its side. She clutched impotently at Thalric, trying to stay with him. 'Hold me! Don't let me go, please!'

His arms were about her, but she could feel his bafflement in every movement. 'Che, I'm right here . . .'

'I'm losing you . . .' she got out.

And then she was gone.

Eighteen.

Airborne war has been conducted for too long by airship. The fates of our Starnest and the Collegiate Triumph show how foolish that is. The age of the war-dirigible is past. Orthopters and fixed wings will rule the skies . . .

Va.r.s.ec's treatise, Towards an Efficient Mechanized Air Force, was a light enough burden in Angved's hands, but he found that if he read it for too long, his fingers began to tremble ever so slightly. Between the cheaply printed words, History was waiting. Angved wondered how much he would be able to sell this crude copy for, by the time he finally retired. The book itself would be required reading for the Engineering Corps, but a discerning collector would no doubt advance a considerable sum for one of its very few first editions. He turned the page, needing no lamp: the thick material of his tent still admitted enough light in the mid-afternoon to read by.

He could not imagine the promises and bribes or the favours Va.r.s.ec must have called in to get this work printed in even so coa.r.s.e a form. Yet the man had known what he had been about, for both his future and the Empire's were set out in that book. The words had secured the former, and would now go about building the latter.

Approximately half the Solarnese air fleet was composed of orthopters, compared to perhaps eight out of ten among the Imperial flying machines. At the end of the battle, according to my personal observations, perhaps two fixed-wing fliers remained operational with the entire balance of the surviving machines on both sides being orthopters. It is my experience and that of every fellow aviator I have spoken with, and the inescapable conclusion from examining the reports of other conflicts where flying machines have confronted one another, that mobile-winged aeromotive craft have a substantial superiority in manoeuvrability that will, all things being equal, give them command of the air.

Angved was no aviator, but then Va.r.s.ec had not been writing for his fellow pilots. He had been writing instead for the technically educated body of the Engineers as a whole, those men like Colonel Lien that he would have to convince. Still, his cool language somehow managed to convey the strength of his belief in the future. Angved looked down over the man's figures, anecdotes, facts and comparisons: airships could carry greater loads but were too vulnerable to aerial attack; the heliopters that the Imperial army had relied on from the first could achieve a delicacy of positioning in the air but were slow and c.u.mbersome compared with other fliers, unable to escape or give chase and incapable of engaging in the aerial duelling that Va.r.s.ec was a personal exponent of.

Angved flicked on towards the book's heart, those key paragraphs that had set his own heart racing.

And yet the demands of a future aerial war are more than simply about which flying machine will outperform its rivals in an airborne fight. There is a world of potential in air war that remains untapped, because the mechanical capabilities of the machines that we rely on, even our most sophisticated designs such as the Spearflight orthopters that were used at Solarno, are too limited. While they are so greatly limited in range, orthopters will only ever hold a supporting role. The fuel demands of mobile-winged flight are great, resulting in an air force tied closely to a ground base of operations: a flying force with clipped wings, therefore. Conversely, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that fixed-wing engines are capable of a far greater fuel efficiency, and therefore a greater striking range from their base, had they only the ability to survive against enemy air resistance once they arrived . . .

After that, the book descended into theory and dream: Va.r.s.ec's hypotheses, his 'if only' thoughts, his tentative sketches of joints and mechanisms, his list of requisite developments that would make his future come to pa.s.s.

If I had not come along, with what I know, he would be in a prison cell still, or dead. He had spoken with Va.r.s.ec on that very subject, and they both knew it, just as the reverse was surely true. Their projects were mutually reinforcing innovations, and they had fallen into the hands of ambitious Colonel Lien, who was aware that the Engineers should have been taking a greater place on the Imperial stage, but had previously been at a loss as to how to further his cause. The resurrection of Drephos, not dead but only defected, could have been the death knell for the Engineers' rise, with the Empire coming to lean more and more on outside inventions and becoming dependent on creatures like the loathed halfbreed. Even though Drephos seemed to have won the argument as far as ground-based machines went, however, Va.r.s.ec and Angved had given Lien just enough ammunition to paint the skies of the future in pure black and gold.

A soldier tugged the tent flap open a little, but without looking inside. 'Sir, the enemy's moving. You said you wanted to see.'

'I did, thank you, Lieutenant.' Angved closed the book and stuffed it back into one of his belt pouches. A true artificer could never have too many pouches.

He let his wings carry him to the wooden parapet so that he could get a commanding look at the surrounding terrain. There he discovered the book's author sitting in a folding chair, one hand holding a little board with a sheet of paper tacked on to it, the other wielding a pencil. When not revolutionizing the world of mechanical flight, Va.r.s.ec fancied himself as a landscape artist.

The landscape here was not what Angved considered inspirational, however. They had made considerable progress towards the heart of the Nem, the desert lying between Khanaphes and the cities of the Exalsee. Angved knew it well, for he had lived out here for tendays as a guest of the violent and unruly Many of Nem, the local Scorpion-kinden, while his then commander had armed them and pointed them towards Khanaphes. The Imperial force was now in what was referred to as the mid-Nem, which the Scorpions claimed as their own territory. The fringe of the desert remained a constant skirmishing zone between the Many and their neighbours, whereas the desert's heart . . .

Well, perhaps we'll see. They had made remarkable progress inwards, and the first drilling site they had chosen was nudging the inner edge of the mid-desert, closing on the central reaches. The Scorpions would not go there, so the ruined cities remained free of their scavenging, and Angved only knew that they feared it. Well, we shall see just how much they fear it, then.

Setting up their machinery where they had could not but be viewed as provocation by the Many, and Angved was surprised only that it had taken the locals three clear days to put a force together. Of course, the Many aren't that 'many' any more, not after the Khanaphes debacle. Not only had the Scorpions failed to take the city, despite the Empire handing them every advantage, but they had ended up getting a few thousand of their warriors killed, which was a serious blow to their overall population. And in the end that's worked out nicely.

Extending his gla.s.s, he put his eye to it and let his gaze rake the sandscape, watching the host of Scorpion-kinden advance determinedly, with stragglers still coming out of the dunes to catch up with them. Angved reckoned that there might be perhaps six hundred, a sizeable force indeed, almost three times that of the Wasp Light Airborne currently ranged against them. The Nemean tactics were plain: they were fanning out in a loose crescent already, obviously intending to sweep away anything that stood in their path before pillaging the camp, destroying, killing and stealing whatever presented itself.

The camp itself was not overly ready to oblige them. The Wasps had a.s.sembled a travelling fort, the sort of ready-made fortifications that had served the Second Army so well on its march to Collegium during the war. The walls that the soldiers had fitted together were angled, barbed with stakes, defendable by a fraction of the soldiers available, and easily large enough to encompa.s.s the drilling and pumping engines. Angved had discussed the best means of defence with the captain in charge of the Airborne, however, and it had been agreed that cringing behind walls was not the Imperial way.

Two-thirds of their Airborne were now standing in loose ranks between the camp and the Scorpions, and Angved knew that they would look like a pitiful force to the eyes of the locals, even those who had fought alongside Wasps at Khanaphes. The Scorpion force was already breaking up into individual war bands, he noticed, the main thrust gaining speed as it rushed for the camp's defenders, but substantial numbers breaking off left and right, looking to encircle their enemy and fall on them from all sides. Angved noted a remarkable amount of cavalry there or rather insectry, as the proper term went, for horses were unknown in the Nem. Given his choice of animals, a scorpion would never have been his chosen mount or any beast that might impale the back of his head if he had to rein it in suddenly. However, the Many of Nem had long ago designed a sort of offset saddle to put them out of harm's way, and now a full score of these creatures were scuttling along on either flank, not much faster than a running man, but considerably more dangerous.

'They make quite a show, don't they,' Va.r.s.ec remarked mildly. Angved glanced down to see that he had sketched a bristling dark stain across the desertscape that he had already pencilled out: no details but just a riot of aggressive motion worked into the simple lines of the drawing.

'A show is all they'll make,' Angved declared.

'I see more than a few crossbows.'

The engineer shrugged. 'They have no idea, none at all.'

Abruptly, in almost perfect unison, the Wasp soldiers out beyond the walls were airborne. No doubt a few crossbow quarrels were even now winging their way, but the Scorpion-kinden had no experience of hitting targets in the air, and it was unlikely that any of them would be learning any useful lessons here for the future. The Imperial force split off into four groups, as the drill required. Two detachments flew left and right, in order to threaten the Scorpions' own flank, and the balance ended up in two cl.u.s.ters behind the charging ma.s.s of the Many. A good two-thirds of the Scorpions ignored them and continued on towards the walls, while the balance turned to face their relocated enemy.

'I notice you haven't sketched that.' Angved pointed out the single most dramatic feature of their surroundings. To the west stood a great ruin, half sand-swallowed, its maze of walls and the sh.e.l.ls of its buildings worn down by the wind, buried in some places and stark like unearthed bones in others, the whole giving the impression of a nest of broken skulls. It meant they had come close enough to the desert's heart to see one of the cities of the Inner Nem.

'It's worth a picture all its own.' Va.r.s.ec put down his drawing board with care and took up a snapbow. All around them, those of the Airborne left in the compound were already sighting. Angved himself, as commanding officer, had decided it was beneath his dignity to actually do any of the killing today. And besides, he was not much of a shot.

Not that long ago the Empire had introduced the Scorpions to their future, gifting them with leadshotters and crossbows and rousing them against their ancient enemies, the Khanaphir. The joke was that the future the Scorpions had then reached out for was already in the Wasps' past. There was not an Imperial soldier on the field or behind the walls who had not been training for the best part of a year with a snapbow, and most of them had been given plenty of chance to practise during the Empress's campaigns against the various pretender governors.

Angved had no love for the Scorpions in fact he had a considerable amount of dislike for them but even he flinched a little when the first volley of snapbow shot struck home and slapped the Scorpion charge to a standstill by killing them three-deep all the way across their front line. At the same time, the other detachments also began loosing their weapons, sergeants shouting out the orders so that their weapons discharged all at once, not as individual pinp.r.i.c.ks but a collective hammerblow.

'At will,' bawled the lieutenant commanding the defence, and the Wasp snapbowmen picked their targets, even as the ma.s.s of Scorpions seethed and milled. Va.r.s.ec raised his own weapon, aiming along the length of the barrel with an artificer's exacting care before loosing a shot, then calmly reloading and recharging.

Out beyond the wall, the Scorpion flanks had caved in, leaving a scatter of dead men and animals. Angved read the patterns in the corpses as though he was a seer, noting where the insectry had tried to charge the newly landed Wasps, only to have their targets simply take to the air again, shooting all the while. The two detachments at the rear had been exacting a similar toll, preventing the Many from retreating to regroup. In all honesty we could wipe them out to a man, right now, and I'm being too clever by half, he told himself, but the plan was laid, and he was going to have his curiosity a.s.suaged whether he liked it or not.

One of the Wasp detachments waited until the Scorpions pulled together some semblance of unity, and then they broke away, taking wing and making a wide circle until they had landed within the walls of the encampment. Abruptly the deadly box had been compromised. The Scorpions now had somewhere to go, away from the lethal needles of the snapbow darts.

They were reluctant to take it, though, and Angved was not surprised. Once they were on the move the survivors of the Many repeatedly tried to break north and south, but the Wasps moved faster, always setting down in front of them and killing a few more herding the Scorpions ever west.

To the west lay ruin, the half-hidden carca.s.s of a dead city, and Angved wanted to see what would happen when the savages were finally forced to confront their fears.

He had to wait for the captain's report, for the ruins were some distance away, and by then there was so much dust raised that his gla.s.s could not penetrate it. Still, it was not quite dusk when the officer finally presented himself, saluting smartly, as though Angved had not been working as a menial in a factory only tendays before, when Va.r.s.ec was a prisoner in a cell.

They received the report on the wall, looking out at the ruins that were now slowly sinking into twilight as though the desert itself was swallowing them up.

'What happened when the Scorpions reached there?' Angved asked.

'Not that many of them did, sir. A surprising amount tried to turn and fight, again and again. They were desperate to avoid being driven there. I'd estimate no more than forty or fifty of them reached the first stones.'

'And then?'

The captain's expression was that of a man without much imagination being faced with something that troubled him nonetheless. 'Screaming, sir.'

Angved frowned, and Va.r.s.ec murmured, 'Does that pa.s.s for a report in the army, these days?'

'I apologize, sir. It was difficult to make out what happened, and those of my men I've questioned tell contradictory stories. The Scorpions scattered amongst the buildings, losing all cohesion, as if each was looking for a different place to hide. Then we heard them start screaming, just some of them, then others. None of them for very long. I did my best to keep some in sight, but amongst the ruins it was difficult. Many of the structures there seem relatively intact, some almost completely so, and I thought I saw . . .' There was a pause, signifying a soldier trying to couch his experience in permitted language. 'Movement, sir. Terribly swift movement between buildings. Something large and fast. Others have reported the same . . .' His tone indicated that there was more, but that it would require prompting.

'Speak, Captain,' Angved duly ordered.

'One squad hasn't returned, sir. Sergeant Stasric and his people didn't come back with us.'

'You pa.s.sed on my orders for n.o.body to enter the ruins?' Angved asked sternly.

'I did, sir, word for word.'

'What's this Stasric like, would you say?'

A diplomatic pause. 'He is a man who seizes opportunities as they come, sir. He has been reprimanded in the past.'

Angved and Va.r.s.ec exchanged glances. 'Any other casualties, Captain?' the aviator asked.

'Eleven men lost, sir, all to enemy crossbows,' the captain confirmed. 'Twenty-one in total, including Stasric's men.'

Twenty-one dead to six hundred of theirs, Angved considered. A mere skirmish, but the numbers would look good when sent home. 'Have your men stay ready, since we can expect further attacks by the Many. They're a stupid, brutal people.'

Midnight was approaching when the watch lieutenant awoke Angved, sounding panicked. 'Something's outside the wall, sir.'

It took a blinking and blurred moment of recollection before the Engineer remembered where he was and what he was doing there. For a moment he had thought he was back accompanying the first Khanaphir expedition, making war on the city on behalf of the Many of Nem, rather than the other way around.

'The Scorpions are back?' he demanded, shrugging his way into a leather cuira.s.s and locating his sword.

'Sir, we're . . . we're not sure what it is. The sentries don't think so, sir.'

'We're under attack?'

'Not yet, sir.'

Angved sighed, putting him down as the sort of overexcitable type who should never be left in charge of a night watch, for the good of everyone else's sleep. Still, now that he was awake, it seemed prudent to go and investigate what had spooked the watchmen. He dragged a woollen cloak over his shoulders to keep out the night chill, and shouldered his way out of his tent.

There was barely any moon, and only the torches and lanterns of the camp repelled the night. Angved tugged his cloak closer about him and let the lieutenant lead him to the walls, where a flick of his wings got him up on to the parapet.

'I don't see anything,' he grumbled, scowling into the darkness.

'Report, soldier,' the lieutenant instructed, stepping back and patently hoping thus to disappear from the angry major's notice.

'There's something big out there, sir,' one of the sentries said promptly. 'It's been back and forth three times now.'

'An animal,' suggested Angved dismissively.

'The only glimpse I had of it, it seemed like a man, sir. Or at least a little like a man. Most of the other sentries have seen it, too.' Even as he spoke, there came a shout from further along the wall, and Angved bustled over there to peer out beyond the range of the camp lights.