‘But they did their job, General,’ came Drephos’s voice in his ear, and Alder glanced back to see the hooded man reading over his shoulder. His instinct to strike the man or flinch away was ruthlessly surpressed. Instead he met the shadowed gaze calmly.

‘You witnessed it all, I suppose.’

‘I saw as much as I needed. What will they be flying, when tomorrow comes? You have destroyed most of the artillery on their eastern walls, and the walls themselves have seen better days. Endgame, General. Their air cavalry, their flying machines – what remains of them?’

Alder nodded soberly. It had indeed been a bloody night. The Mercy’s Daughters were filling every bed, giving help to the less wounded and last comfort to the dying, but Drephos was right: the endgame was at hand. He was glad of it. He had seen the Maynesh rebellion a few years back and he hated fighting Ant-kinden. Still, he felt a glowing coal of pride that it was him they had chosen to crush this first Lowlander city. Even if I have had to rely on this wretched monster to do it.

‘What do you want from me, Drephos?’ he growled. ‘You’ll get yourself a fair report, don’t worry. They’ll know what you’ve accomplished.’

A little cackle of a laugh came from within the cowl. ‘Oh, General, not so soon. Write nothing yet, I implore you. I’ve only started. Write your eulogies when the city has surrendered.’

For he has his scheme, Alder knew. I’d ask if it will work, but when has he been wrong yet? The entire military establishment despises this man, and yet it seems we cannot do without him.

‘I was at Maynes,’ Alder said. ‘I remember Ant-kinden.’

‘Maynes was a lesson to be learned, General,’ Drephos told him. ‘A lesson I have learned from. Tark shall be yours in a fraction of the time.’

‘For a fraction of the loss?’

Drephos paused as though considering. ‘Imperial losses? Almost certainly. Tarkesh losses? Alas no, but in war one must always anticipate a little destruction, mustn’t one?’

He then went on his limping way, and Alder knew the man was fully aware of the stares of hatred he attracted, the narrowed eyes and curses from the other men. Aware, and enjoying it.

Later, Alder permitted himself a visit to the Daughters. They had lashed three long tents together end to end and the wounded were crammed into them shoulder to shoulder. There were Wasps here, and Ants from Anadus’s contingent, a few of the Bee-kinden engineers and a couple of Fly messengers who had been just plain unlucky. He caught the eye of Norsa, the most senior Daughter here, looking tired and drawn. She and her coven had been labouring all night, bandaging the lucky and holding the hands of the rest. It would do no good, he knew, to insist she took the Wasp wounded in first. The Daughters made no distinction between kinden, just as they accepted into their ranks any penitent who showed herself willing to serve. Norsa had all kinds here to help her, from across the Empire and beyond.

They exchanged a look, he and Norsa, that was familiar to both of them, and then he turned to that part of his duty that he felt signified a true officer: to walk amongst the wounded, to acknowledge their whimpers and cries and not to shy away from them. To take ultimate responsibility for the inevitabilities of war.

In dawn’s unforgiving light, Totho found himself wandering along the line of the ruined wall, trying to find some way in which to account for what he was seeing. The smoke gusting past him was a fickle mercy: for every scene it concealed there were a dozen more clearly visible wherever the eyes turned – the tangible testament to the events of the night.

The sheer numbers of the dead! The dead were everywhere, all across the city, but mostly here by this stretch of wall and non-wall. To his right were three houses staved in like eggshells by the twisted hulk of a crashed heliopter. The metal of the machine and the stone of the buildings was smoothed off into one tangled whole by the soot, with a single rotor blade jutting proud like a standard above the jagged roof-edges. The ground that he picked his way across was a litter of windfall dead, some savage encounter between the light airborne of the enemy and the defenders’ crossbows. Fallen to the earth like so much rotten fruit, Wasp soldiers and the savage Hornet bolt-fodder lay twisted all over the place, so that he had no clear footing, but stumbled on over broken limbs and the spines of quarrels, spears snapped like matchwood, swordblades sheared from their hilts, and everywhere the vacant, empty faces of once-angry men. Wasp-kinden, certainly, but here in death that stigma was gone from them. They were brothers now with the fallen of the city: all members of that great and inclusive society of the dead.

Totho paused beside the corpse of a great ant, its wings shattered to shards, its legs curled in on themselves. The crossbow had been shorn from the saddle-mountings, the rider also. Not so far from it lay most of the wing of a Tarkesh orthopter, and for a moment Totho stopped, unable to conceive of any string of events that could leave just the wing, with the bulk of the craft falling elsewhere. He crouched by the great twisted vane, examining where its cables and struts had sheared. Just one more casualty, but it came to him that this wing could serve again, could even be reunited with its original body to fly again, unlike the broken wings of the insect. Thus the artificer became a magician beyond the dreams of the Moth-kinden.

But in the end it had been those Moth dreams she had preferred.

And here was where the giants had broken through the wall, the gap they had excavated with their Art and their hands. Their bodies lay, overlapping, where the quick swords of the Ants had found the gaps in their armour. In death, sadness still ruled their faces, not the anger or hatred of the other combatants. The breach they had carved still supported itself, a rough but perfect arch within the wall. Around them the bodies of the defenders and of the Wasp soldiers who had followed after them seemed paltry, like children.

Now the footing became trickier because here was where the gate had been and gone. The charred corpse of the great ramming engine was still here and Totho looked for, but did not find, the body of the man he had dragged clear – the artificer. It had seemed strange to him, then, that artificers should go to war. Now it was all beginning to make sense.

Despite their engine, the Wasps had not made it through the gate, though the gap between the strained hinges was choked with their corpses and their enemies’. Besieger and besieged lay over and beside one another in a frozen jumble of black and silver, black and gold, pale skin and the dark stains of dried blood.

And beyond there, the wall gave out entirely of course. Here was where it had started, and at the broken edge of stone closest to him he could see some of the lower stones squeezed out of shape where the reagent of the Wasps had softened and distorted them. Here was where the defenders’ main force had met the Ants of Maynes, and the slain were piled so high that Totho could not see past them to the field beyond. There was no sense to be made of it, this tangle of arms and legs, shields and swords. It was like one of those clever pictures where a series of shapes interlocks so perfectly that there is no gap between them that does not form another shape, another Ant body. He found himself backing away from the sight but, even as he did, he was thinking, Meat, just meat. The Ant-kinden had been killing each other like this since history cared to record. If the Wasps wanted to join in that pointless bloody round, why should they be dissuaded? The Tarkesh were fighting for their homes now, but how many years would he have to track back before he found them assaulting another city’s gates? Certainly, had Totho been caught outside their walls at any other time, halfbreed and foreigner that he was, he would have been chained as a slave here without hesitation. There could be no special plea for Tark’s virtue.