What he did was climb on up to join his master. He wanted to talk.

‘I anticipated I would be seeing you at some point tonight,’ Drephos said. ‘You have brought another sample of your work, I notice.’ He held a hand out and automatically Totho unslung his piece and held it out to show him.

‘You have perfected the loading mechanism, I see,’ Drephos remarked.

The repeating snapbow lay slender and silver in Totho’s hands. ‘I adapted one from a nailbow,’ he explained. ‘It’s too complex for mass-production, though, and it jams too easily. It needs more modification.’

‘Even so, I am impressed. Good work.’ Drephos’ hand touched the weapon briefly, but he made no protest as Totho reslung it, continuing, ‘I know why you’re really here.’

‘And why is that?’ It had been an unexpectedly hard climb, or perhaps Totho’s own nerves were running him fierce and ragged.

‘You are not yet one of my cadre, not fully. That is only to be expected. Everyone needs time to settle in and learn the routines.’

‘Routines?’

‘Both physical and ideological.’

Totho grasped the rail, looking out towards the Szaren barricades. How many thousands of people…? ‘And the Twins?’

Drephos shrugged unevenly, joining him at the rail. ‘I was surprised by that,’ he admitted. ‘I had not judged the limits of their stresses and their tolerances as well as I might.’

That brought a bitter smile to Totho’s lips. ‘So they were just a piece of your machine that failed.’

‘After their task was done, thankfully.’ If Drephos had heard any accusation in his underling’s words there was no sign of it.

‘They killed themselves rather than see you do this.’ Totho knew that he had to force a confrontation now, before his own nerve failed altogether.

Drephos’ hands found the rail, one of them with a subtle scrape of metal. It looked for all the world as though he and Totho were simply sharing the view. ‘If that was the choice that they set themselves,’ the Colonel-Auxillian replied, ‘then I am disappointed, but it was their own choice to make.’ His voice hardened slightly. ‘You will note that they did not attempt to interfere with my work. Is that the choice that you have set yourself, Totho?’

Totho took a long breath. ‘I have merely come to ask you to reconsider.’ It sounded absurd to him, a pathetic anticlimax, but Drephos was nodding.

‘Good. Rational debate, I never tire of it. I always knew that you were trying to install yourself as my conscience. I am glad that you felt you could bring your problem to me rather than dwelling on it in silence, as the Twins did. You have already learnt your lesson, after the issue with the girl.’

The girl: Che. The mention of her jarred in Totho, wrong-footing him. ‘I cannot believe that you would willingly do what you are about to do, if you had… if you had properly considered the consequences,’ he got out.

‘Consequences,’ echoed Drephos. ‘Do you mean political? Technical?’

‘Moral,’ Totho blurted out. ‘What you’re about to do is immoral. It’s wrong.’

‘Why?’ Drephos asked. Totho just stared at him. After a beat had passed without an answer, the master-artificer added, ‘There is a matter of scale, undoubtedly. I have found certain… obstacles within my own mind. Morality does not enter into it, but there are other matters that have given me pause.’ For the first and only time in Totho’s knowledge, he sounded uncertain.

‘You are a war-artificer,’ Totho said, ‘and you know it is not flattery if I say that you are the greatest I have known. This is not war, however. This is beneath you. You constructed these weapons for the battlefield.’

Drephos smiled with the pure, simple expression of a clever man who is understood. ‘I have considered this myself. War, though – war is not a static thing. A war is not just the sum of its battles and skirmishes, Totho. It is the same as the difference between strategy and tactics: the great war and the little one. This is the great war.’

‘But most of those people who will die tomorrow will not be warriors,’ Totho pointed out. ‘They will be… just citizens of Szar: the young, the old-’

‘And on the field against the Sarnesh, my opponents would be soldiers?’ Drephos finished for him. ‘Yes, I asked myself that. What is the great war, though, if it is not the Empire against the world? That world is not built on soldiers. The soldiers are merely the sword, not the hand that holds it, nor the body to which that hand belongs. Those people out there, you consider them as innocents in war? Mere bystanders, detached and uninvolved? Surely you were better schooled in logic than that.’

Drephos’ manner made Totho think of his studies at the College, the same dry approach to theory, and here it was trotted out with a whole city’s fate resting on it.

‘Have they fed a soldier? Then they are the war,’ Drephos elaborated. ‘Have they clothed one? Taught one? Given birth to one? Will they grow to be one? Have they lived their lives fed and aided by the achievements of the soldiers gone before? You cannot say that they are not the war, Totho. The soldiers themselves are merely the tip of it, but beneath the waters is a great mountain building towards them. You see, Totho, I have already considered all this. I am not some irrational tyrant.’

‘Yes, but-’

‘If they survive, they shall rise up again, the next generation, or the next. If they are whipped down by main force, they shall merely nurse their wounds and resharpen their blades. If a single Szaren still stands after tomorrow, then the Empire is doomed sooner or later, for inevitably the war will be lost, in ten years or a hundred or a thousand. If we wish to win the war, then we must make war on all our enemies – not only those that now present themselves with a blade in their hand. Can you honestly refute my logic?’

‘But there are other ways to solve a problem, surely?’

‘Now that is an old argument, and you are merely echoing it,’ Drephos replied, as mildly admonitory as a schoolteacher. ‘Yes, there are truces and treaties and accords and concords and all of that, but they are merely games, Totho. They are games to give both sides time to prepare for the real thing, and that is war. Treaties can be broken. In fact most are made with that in mind. There was a philosopher of Collegium a hundred years ago who thought that, instead of wars, your Ant cities could resolve their differences by playing games, thus saving the loss of countless lives. You must see the inevitable flaw in his idea, for what if the losing side refused to accept its defeat? In war there is no such uncertainty. The bodies left on the field give a finality to what happened, however each side dresses it up in its reports. And in this war, my new war, I will expunge even the most lingering doubt. The Empire will win and Szar will lose, and the proof of it will be that there will be no Szar left, no Szaren people, no trace of those who defy the Empire.’

‘So that the other cities, Myna and the others, they’ll never rebel again, is that it?’ Totho asked him. ‘Surely-?’

‘Surely I can see that it isn’t the case? Yes, the Maynesh and the Mynans and the rest, they will rise up again, and, when they do, do you know what they will have? They will have weapons of their own to counter this one, to bring a new war against the Empire, and we will have to find weapons more terrible still to defeat them. Don’t you see, Totho? That’s the point. This is war, and it is also progress, the living, breathing engine of war. Your snapbows, the incendiaries that took Tark, they’re just stopgaps. This is the next step, and that, beyond any other reason, is why I must take it. One cannot deny history its prize, Totho.’

Totho opened his mouth, once or twice, but no words came out. Drephos’ smile, kindly enough in its way, broadened.