Adrian Tchaikovsky

Empire in Black and Gold

After Stenwold picked up the telescope for the ninth time, Marius said, ‘You will know first from the sound.’

The burly man stopped and peered down at him, telescope still half-poised. From their third-storey retreat the city walls were a mass of black and red, the defenders hurrying into place atop the ramparts and about the gates.

‘How do you mean, the sound?’

Marius, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, looked up at him. ‘What you hear now is men braving themselves for a fight. When it starts, they will be quiet, just for a moment. They will brace themselves. Then it will be a different kind of noise.’ It was a long speech for him.

Even from here Stenwold could hear a constant murmur from the gates. He lowered the telescope reluctantly. ‘There’ll be a great almighty noise when they come in, if all goes according to plan.’

Marius shrugged. ‘Then listen for that.’

Below there was a quick patter of feet as someone ascended the stairs. Stenwold twitched but Marius remarked simply, ‘Tisamon,’ and went back to staring at nothing. In the room beneath them there were nine men and women dressed in the same chain hauberk and helm that Marius wore, and looking enough like him to be family. Stenwold knew their minds were meshed together, touching each other’s and touching Marius too, thoughts passing freely back and forth between them. He could not imagine how it must be, for them.

Tisamon burst in, tall and pale, with thunder in his expression. Even as Stenwold opened his mouth he snapped out, ‘No sign. She’s not come.’

‘Well there are always-’ Stenwold started, but the tall man cut him off.

‘I cannot think of any reason why she wouldn’t come, except one,’ Tisamon spat. Seldom, so very seldom, had Stenwold seen this man angry and, whenever he had been, there was always blood. Tisamon was Mantis-kinden, whose people had, when time was young, been the most deadly killers of the Lowlands. Even though their time of greatness had passed, they were still not to be toyed with. They were matchless, whether in single duel or a skirmish of swords, and Tisamon was a master, the deadliest fighter Stenwold had ever known.

‘She has betrayed us,’ Tisamon stated simply. Abruptly all expression was gone from his angular features but that was only because it had fled inwards.

‘There are… reasons,’ Stenwold said, wishing to defend his absent friend and yet not turn the duellist’s anger against himself. The man’s cold, hating eyes locked on to him even so. Tisamon had taken up no weapon, but his hands alone, and the spurs of naked bone that lanced outward from his forearms, were quite enough to take Stenwold apart, and with time to spare. ‘Tisamon,’ Stenwold said. ‘You don’t know…’

‘Listen,’ said Marius suddenly. And when Stenwold listened, in that very instant there was no more murmur audible from the gates.

And then it came, reaching them across the rooftops of Myna: the cry of a thousand throats. The assault had begun.

It was enough to shout down even Tisamon’s wrath. Stenwold fumbled with the telescope, then stumbled to the window, nearly losing the instrument over the sill. When he had the glass back to his eye his hands were shaking so much that he could not keep it steady. The lens’s view danced across the gatehouse and the wall, then finally settled. He saw the black and red armour of the army of Myna: men aiming crossbows or winching artillery around. He saw ballista and grapeshot-throwers wheel crazily through the arc of the telescope’s eye, discharging their burdens. There was black and gold now amongst the black and red. The first wave of the Wasp divisions came upon them in a glittering mob: troops in light armour bearing the Empire’s colours skimming over the tops of the walls, the air about their shoulders ashimmer with the dancing of nebulous wings. For a second Stenwold saw them as the insects they aped, but in reality they were armoured men, aloft in the air, with wings flickering from their backs and blades in their hands. They swooped on the earthbound defenders with lances and swords, loosing arrows and crossbow bolts and hurling spears. As the defenders turned their crossbows upwards towards them, Stenwold saw the bright crackle as golden fire flashed from the palms of the attackers’ hands, the killing Art of the Wasp-kinden.

‘Any moment now,’ Stenwold whispered, as though the enemy, hundreds of yards away, might overhear him. From along the wall he heard a steady thump-thump-thump as Myna’s huge rock-launchers hurled missile after missile into the ground troops advancing beyond the wall.

‘They’re at the gate.’ Marius was still staring into space, but Stenwold knew that one of his men was positioned on a rooftop closer to the action, watching on his behalf.

‘Then it must be now,’ Stenwold said. ‘Now.’ He tried to focus the jittery telescope on the gates, saw them flex inwards momentarily and heard the boom of the battering ram. ‘Now,’ he said again uselessly, for still nothing happened. All that time he had spent with the artificers of Myna, charging the earth in front of the gates with powder, and nothing.

‘Perhaps they got it wrong,’ Marius suggested. Again the ram boomed against the metal-shod gates, and they groaned like a creature in pain before it.

‘I was practically looking over their shoulders,’ Stenwold said. ‘It was ready to go. How could they have… Someone must have…’

‘We are betrayed,’ said Tisamon softly. ‘By Atryssa, clearly. Who else knew the plan? Or do you think the people of Myna have sold their own to the slaver’s block?’

‘You… don’t know…’ But Stenwold felt conviction draining from him. Atryssa, so expected but so absent, and now this…

‘Spider-kind,’ Tisamon spat, and then repeated, ‘Spider-kind,’ with even keener loathing. On the walls the vanguard of the Wasp army was already engaged in a hundred little skirmishes against the shields of the defenders. Tisamon bared his teeth in utter fury. ‘I knew! I knew you could never trust the Spider-kinden. Why did we ever let her in? Why did- Why did we trust her?’ He was white knuckled, shaking, eyes staring like a madman’s. The spines flexed alarmingly in his forearms, seeking blood. Stenwold stared into his face but barely heard the words. Instead he heard what Tisamon had left unsaid, and knew not fear but a terrible pity. Spider-kinden, as Tisamon said. Spider-kinden, as subtle and devious as all that implied, and still Tisamon, with a thousand years of race-hatred between them, had let her into his life and opened the gates of his soul to her. It was not just that Atryssa had betrayed her friends and betrayed the people of Myna; it was that she had betrayed Tisamon, and he could not bear the hurt.

‘It has been a long time,’ Marius said quietly. ‘A lot can happen that even a Spider cannot predict.’

Tisamon rounded on him, livid with anger, but just then with a great scream of tortured metal, a thundercrack of splintering wood, the gates gave way.

The ramming engine was first through, no telescope needed to see its great brass and steel bulk as it blundered over the wreckage it had created, belching smoke from its funnels. A ballista atop its hood hung half off its mountings, mangled by the defenders’ artillery, but there were eyelets in its metal sides from which spat crossbow bolts and the crackling energy of the Wasps’ Art. Swarming either side of it were their line infantry, spear-armed but shieldless. Clad in armour too heavy to fly in, they pushed the men stationed at the gate back through sheer force, whilst their airborne divisions were beginning to pass over the city. The guardians of Myna were a disciplined lot, shield locked with shield as they tried to keep the enemy out. There were too many of them, though; the assault came from before and above, and from either side. Eventually the defenders’ line buckled and fell back.