He hoped that Balkus would be enough for them. The big Ant was still standing, splashed with blood, working himself into a frenzy.

‘Take me there!’ he commanded, and the harbour man ran off, leaving him to lurch in his wake, with Arianna holding his good arm to help him along.

The sight that met him at the harbour was worse than he had feared, though, and worse than he had dreamed possible. There were already two tugs dragging the drowned armourclad out of the way, and beyond it the sea was full of ships, painted across with dozens of sails.

A

Thirty-Eight

The bulk of the Wasps could retreat far faster than the Ants could follow, and they took flight down the rail track towards their camp, their rail automotives and their massed artillery. The sentinels and many of the armoured shield-men, however, could not simply fly away. Faced with no choice, and with a fierce desperation that left a lasting impression on their enemies, they stood their ground, holding up the Ant advance still further so that their comrades could escape. In a tight square of armoured men, surrounded on all sides by the implacable Sarnesh soldiers, they fought on with bitter determination until every last man of them was dead.

The Ants re-formed their lines, their shield-lined formations, with some of them that had sustained heavy casualties breaking up to form new groups. Others near the back began to move the wounded out. Two automotives had been smashed before the leadshotters had been silenced, and a third had ground to a halt with artificers hurriedly prying armour off to get at its engine. The Sarnesh went about reassembling their battle order with the minimum of fuss, with calm deliberation. The Wasps were allowed to fall back, to exhaust themselves in the panic of flight. The Ants would follow at their own inexorable pace.

The warriors of the Ancient League were another matter. They had not stopped when the Sarnesh had redrawn their lines. They harried the Wasp-kinden mercilessly, chasing them in the air, raking them with arrow-shot. It seemed at first that they might continue their hunt all the way to Helleron. Che, trying to focus her telescope on the nimble figures in green and grey, abruptly overshot them. There was nothing but black and gold now in her field of view. She took the glass away, trying to see what was going on.

The Mantids and their allies were now falling back, surging to meet up with the plodding Sarnesh lines. Beyond them the Wasps were making a new stand, rallying into another wall of shields and ready airborne. Behind them…

She felt just then that things had started to tip, although she could not have said why. She was no tactician, but something spoke inside her.

A rail automotive had pulled in to the broken end of the rails in a great plume of steam. More Wasp soldiers were rushing out of it, hurrying forwards to join the battle. Reinforcements from Helleron, she saw, but something new had communicated itself to her. She could not be sure what.

There were Ants all around. One word to them would be a word to the whole army. She had no words, though. She had nothing she could warn them of.

Still. ‘You should take care,’ she said to the nearest Ant surgeon, ‘your people at the front.’

He was washing blood from his hands and he stared at her as if she were mad. Out on the field, transport automotives were removing the bulk of the wounded. The worst would be treated here, the rest removed to Sarn. The surgeons were hard pressed to keep the pace.

‘The Queen is consulting with her tacticians,’ the surgeon said suddenly, and Che realized that she had been heard after all. The man’s eyes unfocused for a moment, and then he said. ‘We will press ahead. We must destroy them, drive them until they can fly no more, and then wipe them out. We must break their siege engines in order to protect our walls.’ He nodded. ‘It will be a long, hard fight.’ She realized the last words were his, and the rest had been the Queen’s.

During the first clash of the battle the Wasps had been able to bring forward more of their siege train, another batch of leadshotters and a few of the smaller catapults that could be wheeled out intact rather than needing assembly on the spot. The Sarnesh automotives would have a harder time of it from now on. Even as Che watched, the first artillery engines began to discharge, their shot mostly flying wide or short, and the Sarnesh advance continued with the same patient progress, the wide sweeping wings of scattered Mantids and Moths surging a little ahead of it.

The next batch of the wounded had now arrived, and she gave up her watching, went to do what good she could with bandages and needle. It unnerved her, tending these wounded Ants. They did not curse or scream, because each was taking strength from all the others, from their suffusing solidarity. Somehow a show of pain would have been more reassuring to her. All around her the Ant surgeons worked in skilled communion, linked with each other and with their patients. It made Che feel clumsy and awkward. They even gave her the least of the wounded to tend.

There was a moment – she remembered it well later – when all the soldiers around them stopped, just for half a second, all at once, and she knew that out on the battlefield something new had happened. She tied off the wrapping on the man she had been working with, and took up her glass again.

The Ant advance had stopped as they tried to work out what had happened. The fresh Wasp troops from the rail automotive had formed a double line ahead of them, but at a range that a heavy crossbow would find stretching. They had loosed some manner of weapon, though. The rattle of missiles had struck all the way along the Ant line, short darts like nailbow bolts that had bounced from shields or got stuck in armour, although a few unlucky soldiers had been injured in the face. Beside them, a few of the lightly-armoured Mantids had fallen.

The Sarnesh started their march again, the automotives grinding solidly along beside them. Wasp artillery-shot was falling sporadically about them, and another of the armoured vehicles was brought to a halt when a stone shattered its left track. The advance was undaunted, though between the officers at the leading edge of the Sarnesh army a quick analysis was taking place of what new weapons the Wasps possessed and how they might work.

The twin archer lines of the Wasps suddenly sprang forward in a flurry of wings, covering ten yards in a great flying leap. It was a chaotic display, obviously unpractised. For a moment they were everywhere, in utter confusion, and then they were struggling to get themselves in place as the other troops, who had so recently fled, moved forwards again to back them up.

As one the Ant soldiers picked up their pace. The leading officers could see more of the weapons now, and they seemed to be firepowder bows of some sort, like nailbows, but there had been no smoke and no sound other than a distant crackle when they had loosed.

Drephos had driven him hard in order to be here now. It was only because the foundries of Helleron were so well supplied, so easily turned to any mechanical endeavour, that it had worked at all. Totho had been working day and night, and forcing his workforce through the same punishing schedule. Towards the end he had allowed them three or four hours of sleep at most. How they had hated him, the halfbreed that fate had set over them, and now Dre-phos’s right-hand man.

The factories were still working now, of course, but Totho had left them to the care of other hands. Drephos had come to him one day, after his life had become just a murderous round of unceasing manufacture, and told him, ‘It’s time.’

‘Time for what?’ Totho had asked dully.