But all Totho could think about now was that armoured figure falling, some innocent Beetle man or woman who had caught the foreman’s ire. And then they had all been dropping, and the spears of the soldiers had stopped them fleeing, and in the end the last few had tried to rush towards the waiting line of artificers, giving Drephos his chance to see the damage of a point-blank shot.

I did this. He, Totho, had brought this thing into the world. I have found my place here now. I have earned it.

He clutched at his head. He felt as though that part of him he had always thought of as himself was dropping further and further away, slipping down some well or shaft, never to be seen again.

He must flee. He must escape from Helleron.

And do what? His own mocking voice in his head. And go where?

I will find Che.

Who is in the arms of her savage lover even now, and does not think of you.

I don’t care. I love her.

Fine way to show it, joining her enemies and sleeping with a Bee girl.

His fingers knotted in his hair, unable to blot the thoughts out. I love Che! I always have!

You cast-off. You sorry failure. All your life you have been nothing, despised and ignored. Now you have been offered something real: a place, a reason to live. Drephos understands you.

He cannot. He doesn’t even know what love is.

Of course he does. He loves with a passion you have never known. He loves his work. He loves progress. All the things you once professed.

I am not like him.

You are his heir in all things.

He threshed on his bed, kicking at the blanket. The voice in his head was like a person there in the same room, calmly and patiently dismantling everything he had ever thought. It was all the worse because the thoughts came from nowhere save within him. This cold world that had opened up to him in Tark, when he had seen what war and artifice could really do, had become the world he must live in.

I cannot go on, he insisted. The guilt will destroy me.

Guilt? hissed the voice in his head. Do you not realize that you can let go of guilt now, and shame, and love? You have been clawing at them all this while, when there was a chance you would return to what you were, but you have taken the final step now. You can never be the man you used to be. Your hands have become true artificer’s hands, to build or destroy without conscience or remorse. You can let go of guilt, now, and relax. You are across the barrier of mere humanity and over the other side. It’s all meat now, expendable and replaceable meat.

And Totho writhed and twisted, but had no answer to that.

A

Thirty-One

Master Graden had taken his own life.

Stenwold sat in the War Council’s chamber with his head cradled in his hands and thought about that.

They had put the sandbow, Graden’s much vaunted invention, up on the wall. The enemy crossbows had raked the battlements even then, and shafts had stuck into shields and sprung from stone, or punched screaming men and women off the edge of the wall. Kymon had been shouting for them to ready themselves for the strike. The tower engine had almost reached the height of the walls, with sixty Ant-kinden warriors waiting on its platform and more ascending from below. Another two towers were close by, the Ants hoping to swamp and then hold this section of the wall. Ant artillery was pounding at the wall emplacements which were returning shot, or scattering loads of scrap and broken stone into the Ant soldiers below.

Graden had been so enthusiastic, running his apprentices ragged to get the sandbow into position, the great tube and its fan engine. Then he had told them to turn it on.

The great engine had started, and the mountain of sand below the wall had begun to disappear. Once he had seen it work, Kymon had been shouting for those below to fetch more sand. Sand, grit, stones, anything.

On the north wall the fighting had been fiercest, and the defenders had died in their droves to prevent the Ants keeping a foothold on the walls. It was guessed, because there were men in Collegium who were ready to count anything, that two of the city’s impromptu militia had died for every Ant casualty, quite the opposite of the normal balance of a siege.

On the west wall, where Kymon commanded, the numbers had favoured the city much more. Master Graden had saved the lives of hundreds of his fellows. Those Ants that had gained the walls were shaken by what they had seen, and their legendary discipline bent and broke before the defenders. Stenwold himself had sent one man hurtling over the edge.

In the retreat, when the Ants conceded the day, the sandbow had been destroyed by artillery fire before it could be brought down from the walls, its casing smashed by lead shot, and two of Graden’s apprentices had been killed.

And, a day later, Graden had quietly mixed a solution of vitriolic aquilate and drunk the lot, and died quickly if not painlessly. It was not the deaths of his apprentices, however, that had driven him to it, but the sight of what he himself had wrought with his artificer’s mind and his own two hands.

It was an image that would stay with Stenwold until his last days, as with so much he had seen lately. Nobody on the west wall would ever forget those Ant soldiers with the flesh pared from their bones, faces blasted into skulls in the instant that the sandbow loosed, or the armour and weapons ground into unbearable shiny perfection, the mechanisms of the siege tower whittled to uselessness, the entire host of organic and inorganic detritus that was all that was left after the arc of the sandbow passed across them.

Graden had been shouting at them to turn it off, even as Ant crossbow bolts rattled on the stones near him, but Kymon had taken charge of it, and had it aimed at the next-nearest tower, and thus saved the wall.

It was two days later: two days of desperate fighting on the wall-tops. The shutters over the gates were bent, holding, but never to open properly again. Artillery had cracked the north and west walls but they still stood. The Vekken flagship had almost razed the docklands, burning the wharves and the piers, the warehouses and the merchants’ offices. Collegium would never be the same again.

Today they had come by air. Vekken orthopters flapping thunderously over the walls as their artillery started launching once again, dropping explosives on the men on the wall, masking the oncoming rush of the infantry. The aerial battle had been as bloody as any other. Stenwold had stood impotently and watched as the Ant fliers had duelled laboriously with Collegium’s own, that were more numerous and more varied. The Ant machines had flamethrowers and repeating ballistae, and of course they never lost track of their comrades in the confusion of the skies. The defenders had been joined by a swarm of aid from the city: Fly-kinden saboteurs, Joyless Greatly’s cadre of one-man orthopters, clumsy Beetle-kinden in leaden flight, Mantis warriors attacking the armoured machines with bows and spears. Because he was War Master now, Stenwold had forced himself to watch, and he had no excuse to turn his head when Fly-kinden men and women were turned into blazing torches by the Ant weapons, or when flying machines spiralled from the sky to explode in the streets of his city.

It had made him ill. He had barely eaten these last days. He felt that he had brought this down on them, for all he knew that it would have happened anyway, whether Wasps or Vekken.

Joyless Greatly was dead. He had died in the fighting that day, unseen and uncounted until a reckoning could be made later, just one more mote falling from the sky. He had been a genius artificer and a pilot without equal, and the thought that he had died as he would have wished was no counterbalance to the loss that Collegium had suffered in his death. Joyless Greatly was dead, and Graden had killed himself, and Cabre the Fly artificer had died defending the last remaining harbour tower, even after she had so narrowly escaped from the other. Hundreds on hundreds of other people of Collegium had fallen in the air and on the walls or out over the sea.