He was a man made for and unmade by war: lean and grey, though athletic still. He remembered a time when the title ‘General’ was reserved for men commanding armies. Now back at the imperial court there were generals of this and that who had never even taken the field. In his mind he preserved the purity of the position.

He was of good family, in fact. That had taken him to a captaincy. After that each rung of the ladder had been hard-won, climbed under enemy shot, and slick with blood. His face had a rosette of shiny burn-scar across nose and right cheek. His right arm had been amputated by a field surgeon who had not expected him to live.

That surgeon still received, at each year’s end, twenty-five gold Imperials from the amputee’s personal coffers. General Alder remembered the competent and the skilled.

So why, he asked himself, am I left with these misfits as my command staff? He lowered himself into one of the four folding chairs, watching his staff file in. The Officer of the Camp was Colonel Carvoc, an excellent administrator though an almost untried soldier, now seating himself to the general’s left. His armour was polished and unblemished. To Alder’s right came the Officer of the Field, Colonel Edric. Edric was a man of strange appetites and humours. An officer of matchless family, he spent his time amongst the hill-tribe savages that passed for shock troops in this army. He always went into battle, by his own tradition, in their third wave. He even wore their armour, and a chieftain’s helm with a four-inch wasp sting as a crest. With coarse gold armbands and a mantle of ragged hide, he looked every inch a tribal headman and not at all an imperial colonel.

The fourth chair remained empty, but Alder’s third and most problematical colonel was usually late and kept his own timetable. The general’s hand itched to strike the man every time he saw him, but some talents were precious enough for him to suffer a little insolence. For now at least.

The others were assembling in a semicircle before those seats: field brigade majors, the head of the Engineering Corps, the local Rekef observer posing as military intelligence. Behind them were the Auxillian captains from Maynes and Szar, their heads bowed, hoping not to be singled out.

Still Alder waited, whilst Colonel Edric fidgeted and played with the chinstrap of his helm.

His missing colonel remained absent, but she came at last. He had not ordered her to attend. Supposedly he could not, although he could have had her marched into his tent or out of the camp any time he wished. Instead, he kept a civil accord with her because an officer who was seen to drive away any of the Mercy’s Daughters was an officer soon disliked by the men.

‘Norsa,’ he said, although he had greeted none of the others.

‘General.’ Norsa was an elderly Wasp-kinden woman in pale lemon robes, walking with the aid of a plain staff. Alder’s respect for her was based in part on that staff and the limp it aided, which had been gained in battle, retrieving the wounded.

‘Colonel Edric. The morale amongst your… adherents?’ Alder asked.

‘Ready to make a second pass on your word, General,’ Edric confirmed.

‘I suppose we should be grateful that they’re all so stupid,’ Alder said, noticing the sudden crease in Edric’s forehead. The fool believes it. He’s gone native. In that case it was an illness that time would soon cure.

‘Major Grigan. We lost three engines, I counted.’

The Engineering Corps major nodded, not meeting Alder’s eyes. ‘We can retrieve parts, and we have enough spares in the train to construct six new from the pieces.’

‘Your estimation of their defences?’

Grigan looked unhappy. ‘Maybe we could go against them again tomorrow. Don’t think we made too much impression. Can’t be sure, sir.’

‘I want your opinion, Major,’ Alder said sternly.

‘But he doesn’t have one, General,’ snipped out a new voice, sharp and sardonic. Here was the errant colonel at last and, despite the man’s usefulness, Alder always preferred a meeting where he did not appear.

‘Drephos,’ Alder acknowledged him.

‘He prefers to defer to my opinions, since my judgment is sounder.’ The newcomer swept past Grigan with a staggering disrespect for a man of his heritage. He wore an officer’s breastplate over dark and decidedly non-uniform robes. A cowl hid his face. ‘General, the normal engines just won’t dent those walls.’

‘Well, Colonel-Auxillian Drephos, just what do you suggest?’

‘I have some toys I’m longing to set on the place,’ Drephos’s voice rose from within the cowl, rippling with amusement, ‘but I’ll need the cover of a full assault to do so. Specifically, throw enough men at those emplacements atop the towers, as their crews are too skilled for my liking.’

‘Well we wouldn’t want to see any of your toys broken,’ Alder said.

‘Not when they’re going to win your war for you.’ With his halting tread Drephos took up the final seat, on the other side of Colonel Carvoc. ‘We all know the plan, General,’ he continued. ‘And the first part of the plan is to knock a few holes in those walls of theirs. Give me the cover of a full assault and I’ll work my masterpiece. Stand back and watch me.’

‘A full assault will cost thousands of lives,’ Carvoc noted, ‘and it will be difficult to sustain it for long.’

‘Don’t think I’ll need all that long. Mine are exquisitely clever toys,’ Drephos said, delighted with his own genius as usual. ‘I’d suggest that you start by putting your usual tedious engines up front, give them something to aim at. While you’re at it, give the archers on the inside something to think about. We all know Ant-kinden: if it works, they won’t change it. Which always means they only try to mend something after it breaks. And if something breaks messily and finally enough, well, we artificers know that sometimes things just can’t be fixed.’

Salma awoke as she slipped from his bed. There was wan light spilling sullenly from the two slit windows up near the ceiling, and it caught the paleness of her skin. He had never known skin so pale, like alabaster with ashen shadows. In that grim, colourless light she seemed to glow, picked out from all the surrounding room.

Her name, he recalled, was Basila. Her second interrogation had been gentler than the first, and the third, after the hours of night, gentler still. He had not believed, quite, that these Ant-kinden even possessed a concept for the soft arts, as his people called the intimate act. They seemed all edges and planes and cold practicality. There had been heat aplenty, though, until he wondered just how many women across the city he was making love to simultaneously. She was stronger than he was, and fierce, constantly wresting control from him, an officer commandeering a civilian. For a man used to casually seducing women, it had been quite an experience.

He watched, eyes half open, as she pulled on her tunic and breeches. She was lacing her sandals before she noticed his watching attention.

‘You might as well sleep,’ she said.

‘I’m awake now. It’s dawn already?’

‘It is. I have duties.’

He watched as she shrugged on her chainmail, twisting for the side-buckles from long practice. He knew, or at least suspected, that they would not lie together again, that it had been merely curiosity that had drawn her to him. For his part it had been, at least, a way of showing the world and this city that his destiny had not escaped entirely from his own grasp.

Back in Collegium his liaisons had been the titillation and scandal of the Great College, scandal most particularly among those he had passed over or those who would have indulged in the same liaisons if they had dared. The strait-laced of Collegium would not have believed it, but Salma’s own kinden had a strict morality of coupling. It divided the world of the preferred gender into two parts, not based on race or social standing or anything other than the subjective feelings of the individual concerned: sleep where you wish, amongst those who mean little to you, and amongst those to whom you mean little. Amuse yourself as you will, but with those close to you, those who love you or those you love, bestow your affections only where they are sincerely meant.