She heard the roaring of the automotives even over all the clamour of battle, and then the Ant lines were splitting, as if by some pre-planned clockwork mechanism. A lead-shot strike caved in the front of one vehicle, which began to gout smoke. Another shot punched into the packed Ant lines, smashing through the centre of one formation, and then raking the side of the one immediately behind, leaving three dozen dead at a stroke. The Wasps surged forwards at some points, held back at others, and the automotives drove on like hammers, nailbows shooting until they jammed, and the Wasp line was broken like porcelain, all its unity lost.

In the centre the remaining sentinels had formed a fighting square and were contesting to the last with pike and shield, seeming nigh-invulnerable in their all-encasing armour, but there were Wasps fleeing backwards all along the line, getting in each other’s way, even fighting with one another, and the Ant advance continued as steadily as before.

A

Thirty-Seven

The city was running short of places to house the wounded, let alone the dead. Where the messenger took Stenwold was one of the College’s workshops where apprentice artificers had toiled and studied in happier times. Into a small room beyond a long hall that was almost carpeted with the ice-packed dead they had brought the body, and laid it on an artificer’s work table. This unknowingly appropriate gesture affected Stenwold more deeply than anything else.

They had not been able to get Scuto’s body to lie flat, of course, what with the hunchback and the man’s other deformities, and so it was resting on its side, looking as awkward in death as life, propped up on its own projections that had scratched long lines into the wood as they had worked him off the stretcher. Amidst all those spines and thorns and burned, blistered skin, they had not cared to remove the three quills of crossbow bolts that were sunk deep into Scuto’s flesh. Stenwold was sure that they had been the final death of him, and not the grenade that had scorched across his nut-brown skin and smashed one of his hands. Scuto had always been a tough one.

His mockery of a face, that had resembled nothing more than a grotesque puppet carved idly from wood, was locked in a grimace that showed all his hooked teeth. Stenwold put a hand out to close his friend’s eyes, but managed only to spike himself on one of the Thorn Bug’s points.

Scuto had been pulled from the Sarnesh automotive that had blocked the breach, and Stenwold realized that if he had stayed a moment longer he would have witnessed it himself. Scuto had been dead before they had ever drawn him out, though. There would have been no last words, no farewells. Stenwold understood that only one of the Sarnesh Lorn detachment had survived, and she was not expected to live long despite all the doctors were doing for her.

‘Why?’ Stenwold asked. ‘Why did he come?’ He looked up at Balkus, and saw the man’s normally solid features twisted in grief. Balkus, he recalled, had known Scuto a long time, at least as long as Stenwold himself.

‘He always looked after his people,’ the Ant said. ‘He must have heard about the siege here. We were his people, Stenwold – you and me. Waste and blast the bloody man. Did he think I couldn’t take care of myself?’ Balkus’s fist slammed down on the table. ‘You stupid, stupid bastard! What did you think you were doing?’ There were no tears on the big man’s face, but his voice, the utter loss in his voice, more than made up for it. Ants grieved privately and mind to mind, Stenwold knew, but Balkus had been away from his own kind for many years, had forgotten the touch of their company, and his pain came out in words just like any other kinden’s.

Stenwold tried to picture those last terrible moments in the automotive, the desperate fighting hand to hand, the grenade’s explosion, the driver trying to keep control of the racing vehicle, trying to get it within the walls of Collegium, past the Vekken soldiers and their crossbows.

It came to him that for once he had done the right thing in sending all the others off: Che and Achaeos, Tisamon and Tynisa. For once, at least, where Stenwold now was had become the place not to be.

I am running out of friends. Scuto was the oldest and the closest of the dead, but he had Kymon on his conscience too, and poor Doctor Nicrephos, and so many of the faces that he had been introduced to so recently, only to have them snuffed out in the fighting – people like Joyless Greatly, like Cabre who had manned the harbour defences, or Tseitus in his submersible.

‘What time is it?’ he called out. ‘Anyone know?’ ‘I think I heard the third clock not long ago,’ Arianna said. She had been keeping prudently out of the way, by the door.

‘Until dawn, then?’

‘Two hours and half an hour more, Stenwold. No more.’

‘We should try for at least some sleep,’ he said tiredly.

‘The Vekken will be back with the dawn, and they have

made a breach now. I do not know how we can keep them

out of it.’

‘I’m not going to sleep, not tonight,’ Balkus said flatly. ‘I’m going to go to that breach, and when they come I’m going to kill every bloody Vekken I see. And when I run out of ammunition I’ll use my sword, and when that breaks I’ll use my fists.’ He was a stranger then, broad-shouldered and threatening, an Ant setting about doing what Ants were best at, which was killing their own kind.

Stenwold had thought that the Vekken would have to come over the crashed automotive to take control of the breach, and he had his soldiers lined up with crossbows ready to shoot them as they crested the top, but his lookout had just called from the broken wall and told him that they were bringing up a ram. A ramming engine, if they could coax it up the mound of debris, would punch the automotive aside in just a few blows, leaving the breach wide open for the Vekken infantry to rush in. Taking over Kymon’s command, Stenwold had gathered every man and woman who could hold the line and placed them here, but the Vekken soldiers were better at close work by far. This would be the last stand, he knew, the last moment before the Vekken surged into the city and overran it.

The Great College, he thought, the Assembly, the Sarnesh alliance. All the centuries of innovation, philosophy, art and diplomacy that had been hatched within these walls, and now the ignorant hands of the Vekken would carry it away and dismantle it.

‘Artillery’s ready, War Master,’ one of his artificers reported. The wall had been judged too unsteady to mount more engines on it, but they had found from somewhere a pair of ballistae, and he had them flanking his forces on either side now. One was a light repeater, the other a massive and ancient Ant-made piece they must have dredged from a museum. It would probably do no more than loose a single bolt.

‘Angle so that you can hit the ram, when it starts to push the automotive out of the way,’ he told them, knowing that by then it would already be too late, that the breach would be well opened.

On the walls, in place of the artillery, he had posted everyone else: old men and women, the injured, the young and a plethora of Fly-kinden who would only get trampled underfoot in a ground-level melee, all up there with whatever they could get their hands on. Some had crossbows, but others had hunting bows, stonebows, even slings and rocks for throwing. Some industrious citizens had even carried a few dozen of the fallen stones from the wall up to its top, to pitch over onto the Vekken.

Even as he looked up at them the shooting started, men and women of Collegium putting their heads over the battlements to let slip a bolt or arrow or stone and then ducking down fast. The clatter of answering quarrels came fast after, and Stenwold saw several, the slow or the unlucky, hurled back from the wall within the first few seconds.