Something was moving amongst the dead: he saw children, searching over the bodies of both their own kin and the enemy. He watched them, saw them gathering crossbow quarrels that had not been broken, saw them pulling swords from cold hands, meticulously undoing the buckles of armour. They called out to each other to announce their finds. It shocked him at first, to hear those thin, high voices in this silent place. They were too young, he realized, to have learned the Ancestor Art of the Ants, so they must have been taught these words by their parents, mouth to ear, before they would be able to speak them back mind to mind.

They were gathering only what was valuable. Not the mere flesh that was spent, not even the purses or effects of the dead. Only the harder metals, that could be used again or smelted and reforged. It seemed to him so fitting, what they did, for they were cogs, and war was the machine. Here on the battlefield was where the machine’s wheels ground hardest, where the metal met and the end process was written in bodies and blood. Had he not seen, in Helleron, where the raw materials of war were cast, all the swords and bolts and engines? Here was where the process came full circle, where the discarded pieces of a war were made as new, ready to go back into the mix. Only the meat, transient and replaceable, would not be saved. There was always more of that. Meanwhile, here came Ant-kinden soldiers to carry the stripped corpses to the pyres, and who knew whether the next ones to fall in this very place would be the same men who now hauled the bodies away? Interchangeable, the living and the dead. All meat.

He had not intended, when he left the others, to see this. His world had been complete without this. He had been happy in his ignorance, for ignorant Totho had been. But he was an artificer and this war was an artificer’s thing, a mechanical process cranked over and over by the constant refinement of the weaponsmith and the armourer, the automotive engineer and the volatiles chemist. Seen in that light, in that harsh but clear light, the whole business became somehow admirable. If he looked past the meat, contrived not to see it, then it was just another process that sharpened and honed itself each time it was set in motion.

‘Hey, Beetle-boy!’

He looked up without curiosity to see Skrill picking her way over to him, with Salma following a little way behind. Her arm was bandaged tightly, bound up in a sling. ‘I ain’t pulling any bow no time soon,’ she informed him. ‘Got me good, they did. Thought they’d got you too, when you took off.’

Totho merely shook his head. It seemed so long since he had spoken that the words had dried up inside him, making him envy the Ant-kinden and their voices of the mind.

‘Well, if this ain’t a right mess,’ Skrill decided, dismissing the butchery with that. The air was thickening with flies, an intrusion Totho had not noticed before, from the littlest ones to fist-sized blood-drinkers. Where do they come from? Was there some machine churning them out? Surely all these insects had not been just waiting around in Tark for a massacre.

‘The Ants think they won, last night,’ Salma said, ‘though I’m not so sure. The Wasps eventually pulled back, but to their own tune, not ours.’ He used to smile a lot, Totho remembered, but his face was tired now, without even the ghost of that grin left.

‘They’re all over the gaps in the wall, our lot, putting up stuff to fill ’em,’ Skrill added. ‘Ain’t going to make much difference is my thinking.’

‘Parops reckons they can hold against one more attack before the Wasps take the wall, anyway,’ Salma continued. ‘Their soldiers got the measure of the Wasp infantry last night, and the Tarkesh think they’re superior. If the Wasps want the wall they’ll have to pay for it, or that’s what they’re saying.’

Totho surprised himself by laughing. Salma stared at him.

‘What? Is something funny?’

‘You,’ said Totho, feeling his voice rasp in his throat. ‘You, fighting an Ant war. Where’s Parops?’

Wordlessly, Salma pointed to where a squad of Ants was labouring at one edge of the breach, fixing stone and wood into place to make some kind of a barricade.

‘Let’s talk to Parops,’ said Totho, but Salma gripped him by the shoulder.

‘Are you hurt, Toth?’

The halfbreed artificer looked him right in the eye, but without quite focusing. ‘I’ve just… seen… Salma, I made a mistake. You know why I came?’

‘I think I do.’

‘How could…? Surely this isn’t what I meant, by coming here.’

Salma let out a long breath. ‘I don’t think anybody meant this. I never saw it, but I heard reports during the Twelve-Year War. There were single days of fighting that you could have fitted these corpses into five times. And if Tark falls, then where next? Helleron? Collegium? This is why we have to fight them.’

Totho shook his head, feeling it throb in response. ‘If we wanted to stop this, then we should just not fight them at all. We should just give in. But we don’t, and so we don’t want to stop it. We fight them to create war, and this’ – a vague gesture across the strewn ground – ‘is just a byproduct. War is what it’s about, and we all work hard at it.’

‘Listen to you, Beetle-boy,’ Skrill said nervously. ‘You got knocked on the head or something?’

‘There may have been a grenade,’ Totho said vaguely. ‘Close, perhaps. We should speak to Parops.’ Without a further look at them he wandered away.

Parops glanced up as they came over. Helping build barricades, he still had his armour on and it was still unfastened at the back. In all the night’s chaos there had been nobody yet to secure it for him. Nero was sitting nearby, watching the busy activity but pointedly taking no part in it.

‘You’re wasting your time, Commander,’ Totho announced for all to hear. Parops raised an eyebrow.

‘And why’s that?’ he asked. Salma came up quickly and took Totho’s arm.

‘He’s taken a beating,’ he explained. ‘You shouldn’t mind him.’

‘They won’t come in by this door. They wanted to draw you out. I’ve understood it,’ Totho explained.

‘Since when were you a tactician, lad?’ Nero asked him.

‘I don’t have to be. There was a man… a slave of the Wasps. He told me. He warned me, I think. “Airships,” he said. I would use airships, if I could.’

Staring at Totho, Parops had gone very still. ‘Airships,’ he echoed.

Totho shrugged, still finding it difficult to concentrate. None of it seemed that important. ‘That was what he said. I think it was what he said.’

‘Totho!’ Salma took him by the shoulders and pulled at him. ‘Come back to us,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying, but if it’s important…’

The world shifted and slid sideways in Totho’s head, and he blinked. ‘He said airships,’ he told Salma softly. ‘I pulled him out from under the engine. He was an artificer, Salma, like me.’

‘You’d better come with me,’ said Parops, and set off for his guard tower at a jog.

He took them up to his arrowslit, noticeably slanted now. Parops’s entire tower seemed to be at a slight tilt. His commandership there might be living on borrowed time, Salma reckoned.

Out beyond the wall they could see the broad swathe of the imperial camp, and there was little new there, save that their numbers seemed barely touched by the atrocities of the previous night.

At the camp’s far end, though, lay the enemy’s makeshift airfield, where a few of the heliopters could be made out. There, beyond those blocky, graceless things, something was now rising up.

Several things, in fact. Half a dozen bloated shapes were slowly, imperceptibly swelling. Already they were bigger than the heliopters ranged before them, and Salma had the impression they still had a way to expand yet.

Parops had passed round his telescope, which Salma had no idea what to do with. It showed him nothing but blurs but Totho took it and peered into it keenly, seeming more focused than he had been since Skrill had first found him.