‘General, none of the scouts has returned.’

Alder stood slowly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘No scouts have returned, General,’ Maan said, tongue licking his lips nervously. ‘I’ll let you know-’

‘But it’s dusk already,’ Alder remarked. He put his head out of his tent and then corrected himself. ‘It’s dark. You’re telling me that none of our scouts is in?’

Maan gaped at him. ‘I… I have spoken to at least half of the watch lieutenants…’

Alder just stared at him and then went back inside his tent.

His swordbelt was hanging to one side and he went over to it and drew the blade.

At the periphery of the Wasp encampment, sentries patrolled outside a regular ring of lit torches, stopping to exchange a brief word whenever they met. They relied on the fires behind them for their night-vision, because Wasp-kinden were day creatures.

The first arrow came out of the night without warning, silent on chitin-shard fletchings, burying itself in a soldier’s neck above the line of his armour. He gaped at it, spear falling from his hand, and fell, and the two sentries nearest to him just stared.

The sound of three hundred shafts splitting the dark air was just a whisper, just a whisper, until they struck.

General Alder heard the first screams as he emerged from his tent. ‘What-?’ he started, and stopped, the words drying on his lips. He could see, through the line of tents, the torches of the west perimeter and they were winking out, and there was now a wave of darkness surging into his camp. A wave of dark bodies that could see clearly by the waning of the moon and held blackened steel in their hands.

He heard officers try to sound the alarm, to call them to the defence, but he heard none of them even finish the sentence. Arrows were slicing down around him, punching randomly through the sides of tents, or picking off men as they struggled, half-armoured or even unarmed, into the open.

‘To me!’ Alder shouted. ‘Form on me!’

‘Form on the General!’ Maan added his voice. ‘All troops form up and-’ Then he was down, clutching at an arrow that had gone so far through him it had pinned him to the ground.

There were soldiers enough, though, some in armour and some near-naked, and he saw the flashes of stings crackling into the tide of the attackers, and caught split-second revelations across their line. They were spread out, no disciplined block of troops, and he was aware of Wasps trying to form a line ahead of him, to defend him. It would not be enough, surely, though he still had no idea who was attacking his camp. The Spider-kinden, it must be.

He noticed the Ant-kinden of Captain Anadus formed up with more discipline, but they now were making a slow retreat, shields locked and manoeuvring between the tents, losing men to arrows even as they did so. If there had been more of them left from the siege of Tark then perhaps they could have made a difference, but now all that Anadus was trying to do was leave.

The invaders struck the Wasps’ half-formed line and Alder’s soldiers began to go down. He raised his blade and lunged forwards, parrying a rapier as it snaked towards him and, with a skill that belied his years, binding under the enemy thrust to drive the blade into his opponent. There was a further volley of flashes as several of his men fired their stings at once, and looking down he saw the face of a Mantis-kinden man ashen in death.

Mantids? he thought, utterly bewildered. From the woods beyond Merro? What have we done to provoke them? All around his camp was falling. The Mantids were in amongst the packed artillery now, firing whatever they could with oil spilled from the Wasps’ own smashed lanterns. Major Grigan and his artificers were being hacked down even as they ran to douse the flames.

‘Form up on me!’ Alder shouted again, feeling his voice hoarse with the smoke that was heavy on the air. He saw another group of men trying to join up with his own, with Colonel Carvoc at their head, but they were getting whittled away like wood. They were still ten yards away when Carvoc himself reeled back with an arrow through him, and his squad immediately disintegrated.

Alder’s sword came up swiftly, catching the curved blade of a claw as it sliced down on him, but then a spear drove into his side, shattering ribs and embedding itself deep into his body. He cried out and tried, with his last strength, to kill the man – no, the woman – before him, but the spear-wielder pinned him to the ground, stamping on his chest to free the spear-point and, as she passed over him with barely a pause, the Mantis woman stabbed again, this time through his throat.

‘We asked them how many warriors Felyal could muster, all told,’ Tynisa explained to Stenwold, ‘and they thought about a thousand or fifteen hundred, meaning everyone except the children, really. And they agreed that even a thousand warriors could not hold off the army of Wasps that was out there, if it attacked, since it was an army of about twenty, thirty times that number.

‘And then we asked them how many Wasps they could kill if they themselves attacked. Attacked without warning, at night, after a long wait had left the enemy distracted, bored…’

‘And they thought about thirty each,’ Tisamon finished, and he was smiling now, a particularly Mantis smile.

*

And across the field of the Wasp encampment the warriors of Felyal raged, and where they found Wasps or their allies they killed, never slowing or stopping or giving their foe any time to realize that the force that attacked them was barely an army at all. A mere warband a fraction of their size, but that ravaged through their tents with a ferocity born of long years of smouldering grudges against the Apt masters of the sunlit world.

They left nothing untouched. They were Mantis, so they took no prisoners, they kept no slaves. They expected no mercy and they gave none. When they came to the tent of Mercy’s Daughters, Norsa faced them in its doorway, unarmed, and for a moment it seemed that she would turn them aside, but they were mad for blood, and not known for leniency, and neither healers nor wounded escaped their blades.

Those soldiers who escaped, for the Mantids were not equal to their boast in the end, would make conflicting and broken reports to their interrogators, and none would forget that night. Even those that questioned them would thereafter sleep uneasily, their imaginations fired by the dreams of blood and shadows, as though the night itself had teeth and they had fallen into its jaws.

Of the soldiers of the Fourth Army, the Barbs as they had been known, scarcely one in four survived.

Stenwold shook his head at this news. The Wasp army that had been ready to rampage up the coast was gone. Teornis had already told the story of how it had been held back, first by the Lord-Martial himself, and then by a close cousin of his whose face would pass, when suitably made-up, for Teornis’s own, with a mere two hundred men. He had only hinted at other plans for the Fourth Army, because he did not wish to boast about matters still in the brewing.

Stenwold found that he was grinning at Tisamon. ‘You chose a good time to show Tynisa her heritage.’

Tisamon did not smile in return. ‘They will not fight for Collegium, Sten – but they will fight. The south coast road has gatekeepers, and the Wasps will come again.’ The thought of that future was grim in Tisamon’s eyes, and Stenwold was about to find some reassuring words to offer when Arianna plucked at his robe.

‘Stenwold!’

She was staring back up the steps leading towards the Amphiophos entrance, which still saw a fair traffic even at this hour.

‘What is it?’ Assassins, he thought instantly. Who has she recognized?