There was no time to waste. Salma got his hands around the hilt of the stunned new arrival’s blade and drew it clear; easier to pluck a sword from a scabbard than from a man’s ribs. The messenger goggled at him and Salma gritted his teeth and drove the sword into the man’s throat. Honour was like a coat: sometimes one did not have time to put it on.
He spun back towards the tent, seeing Morleyr aim another great sweep of the mace at General Malkan. Mole Crickets were monstrously strong, but also ponderously slow, and Malkan drove his sword forwards once, twice, in the time it took Morleyr to strike. The first lunge carved into the great man’s side and his blade came out spilling red, but the second went up to the hilt in Morleyr’s armpit, making the Mole Cricket cry out in shock. Then the huge body was collapsing, sword still deeply embedded, and by then Malkan had a knife in his other hand and had slit the tent behind him. Another man, Salma could not see which of his followers it was, lunged at the general with a dagger, but Malkan grabbed his wrist almost contemptuously and then stabbed him in the eye before backing out of the command tent altogether.
Salma darted out of the tent and pursued him with sword in hand. Within the tent, the light was growing ever brighter and he did not want to see her here in this place where death was moments away in any direction. But of course, how else could Morleyr have found me, save by her?
This was not the plan. A mad rescue was not the plan. We’re right in the middle of their army! But the army currently seemed to have other things on its mind. Soldiers were everywhere, but they were all heading somewhere else, and most of them were running towards the western edge of the camp. It occurred to Salma suddenly that, of course, this was the plan after all.
The Sarnesh possessed their own time-keeping machine to count the moments for them. They would have sprung up, every one of them, at a single thought, and begun their approach. Dawn had not begun to lighten the eastern sky, and already the Sarnesh assault had reached the Wasp camp.
The dust-coated fighters Morleyr had brought with him were now spilling out from the tent, twenty of them at least, a chaotic rabble raggedly engaging any black and gold that they could find. General Malkan grabbed a passing sergeant, shouting orders at him, dragging the man’s sword from his hand. Before the sergeant could pass on the word Salma was on them both. Distantly he heard the roar of field artillery, a leadshotter loosing its shot, the tremble of the ground as a catapult missile landed. Salma jammed his sword in under the sergeant’s arm, swiftly and cleanly, dragged it clear and turned towards Malkan.
That he was amazed meant only that Balkus had been away from his own kind too long.
When the moment came, every Sarnesh in the camp had woken simultaneously by virtue of the tactician’s call to arms. Balkus himself had leapt up, snapped instantly from his sleep, hauling on his chainmail by old instinct, in exact step with thousands of Sarnesh soldiers.
By the time he had the hauberk on, he had come fully to his senses. He had first kicked awake Parops and Plius, thus wrenching their entire detachments from sleep into instant wakefulness. Then he had run about amongst his own men, shouting and striking them, telling them to go and wake others. They would be the anchor dragging at the attack, he realized. The last to be ready, the last to get in line. Still, his urgency got through to them, and they strapped on their armour as swiftly as they could, readied their snapbows and crossbows and pikes. Beyond them, Balkus saw the Moth and Mantis-kinden warriors spreading out to take up their staggered skirmish line ahead of the army. By day there had been Wasp scouts lurking nearby, keeping an eye on the Sarnesh force. By the time Balkus’ men had assembled they would all be dead.
The Sarnesh fell smoothly into place by their nature and instinct. Balkus meanwhile was left shouting and harassing his people to do the same, hearing them blunder into one another in the dark. Then the Sarnesh were moving. He heard the command in his mind, called it out to his men. It was still night but they were bringing the war to the Wasps.
Ant-kinden could not see in the dark, of course. They were like Wasp-kinden in that, and the Wasps knew it. Their scouts had already noted the approach of the Sarnesh force. The morrow, everyone knew, would see the opposing forces close enough to do battle.
Ant-kinden were constantly within each others’ minds, though: it was a much-vaunted ability. It made them fight as one, defending each other, seeing through each others’ eyes. The more obvious applications of the mindlink were well known. It also allowed for a certain degree of logistics that other kinden could not match. In this case it allowed for 10,000 Sarnesh soldiers to move out from their camp some hours before dawn, in perfect order, and march on the Wasp encampment. It had never been done before, but then the threat posed by the Empire was just as unprecedented. The Sarnesh King and his tacticians had quietly made their decision the previous day, and the entire army had instantly known and understood.
The logistics, though! Ten thousand men in the dark of a clouded night, but each one with an absolute knowledge of where his neighbours were and where his feet were going, so that not an elbow jostled, not a foot was trodden on. They had muddied their armour, smeared lampblack on their blades. For a vast mass of heavy infantry they moved absurdly quietly, not a word spoken or needed, just the gentle clink of mail.
In advance of them, in the air and on the ground, went their screen of skirmishers: scores of Mantis warriors from the Ancient League, Moth-kinden archers, Flies, men and women to whom the dark was no barrier, sent ahead to find and silence the Wasp scouts and pickets. They were utterly silent, invisible by skill and Art and the cloak of night. They were merciless, killing by arrow or blade without warning, without fail. General Malkan had not stinted on his scouts, supplementing his own people’s poor eyes with the keener vision of Fly-kinden and fielding enough watchmen to give him every warning of raid or ambush, and not one of them lived to report to him.
And then there was Balkus and the other allies who were here, but whom nobody knew what to do with. After plans were laid, the tacticians had found themselves with three commanders that had no obvious place in their scheme, but whose numbers were such that it would be imprudent to leave them out. They had in the end given the right flank to Balkus: the trailing right flank that straggled back behind the main line of advance in case some Beetle loudly fell over his neighbour. Here were Parops’ Tarkesh expatriates and the little contingent of Tseni that Plius had called for. Here were the Collegium merchant companies, with their snapbows at the ready, and nailbowmen interspersed throughout in case the Wasps got too close.
The Collegium contingent did not have a mindlink to keep them together and, as they drew closer, Balkus could not risk shouting at them the way an officer of such a rabble would normally need to. He was uncomfortably aware that they were getting strung out, unable to match the brisk pace that the Sarnesh had set, but there was nothing he could do about it. He would just have to trust that not too many of them would get lost. At least, back here, they were not likely to sound any alarms.
In Balkus’ own head were the Sarnesh officers. He had tried to block them out, but it was a constant rattle of orders and reports, relaying information he needed to know. It had been a long time since he had counted himself a son of Sarn but the wider family had closed about him seamlessly. He was dragged along with their advance, hearing the tacticians convey out their orders to adjust the facing of the line, to increase the pace, and hearing the reports come back from the officers at the front – enemy scouts down, the lights of the camp now in sight.