Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

Varmen threw him down, seeing the flash of wings as Tserro caught himself. ‘This isn’t over,’ he promised. ‘But, in case you hadn’t noticed, they’re trying to kill us. If we get out of this, we’re going to have words.’

‘Oh, for sure,’ said Tserro, half-mocking, but with fear still in his voice.

‘And, in case you get any daft ideas, you just remember who’s standing between you and the Commonweal.’

The rest of the night passed under light showers of arrows: long, elegant shafts that broke off the sentinels’ armour or rattled against the ruined coping of the heliop-ter. One of Varmen’s men took a hit to the elbow, the arrowhead lodging through the delicate articulation of his mail and digging three inches into the joint. He let Tserro’s field surgeon remove the missile, the Fly doctor’s hands tiny as they investigated the wound, and got his arm strapped up. In just over an hour he was back in place, wielding a single mace in his left hand. Another arrow, arcing overhead, resulted in one of Arken’s men officially dying of bad luck, as it came from nowhere to spit him through the eye. There were no other casualties. By mid-afternoon the next day it had become plain to all sides that this occasional sniping was getting nowhere. The Dragonfly-kinden mounted another sally.

That they had been reinforced since was unwelcome and immediately obvious news. After a fierce volley of more arrows, one of which came in hard enough to put its point through the inside of Varmen’s shield, the first wave out of the trees were not Dragonflies but a rabble of Grasshopper-kinden. They were lean, sallow men and women without armour, wielding spears and long knives, clearly a levy sent to the front from some wretched peasant farmland somewhere. They were very quick, rushing and bounding towards the heliopter in no kind of order, but nimble on their feet. Several had slings that they were able to loose whilst running. A stone dented Pellrec’s helm over his forehead, staggering him, and for a moment Varmen was bracing himself for a real fight to hold them, but then Arken’s voice was shouting to aim and loose, and a concentrated lash of short arrows and the golden fire of sting-shot ripped through them. Varmen reckoned that almost a score of them went over in that first moment, and the others scattered instinctively: no trained soldiers they. Arken called to shoot at will and another score of the Grasshoppers were picked off as they tried to get away. There was precious little left of them but a crowd of frightened farmhands by the time they lost themselves in the trees.

‘Good work,’ Varmen called back. ‘Now let’s have some proper fighting.’

The Dragonflies themselves had massed. Varmen guessed they had expected to ride the wave of their Grasshopper levy and break up an imperial line already engaged. There was a pause now while they re-evaluated their tactics. Varmen tried to see if he could make out either of the envoys, the woman especially, but when they stood shoulder to shoulder they were all too alike.

‘Here they come,’ muttered Pellrec, and they came. Again there was a mass of spearmen in the vanguard, and the individual archers, the Dragonfly nobles and their retainers, vaulted up into the air, Art-spawned wings glittering, to slice down shafts at the Wasps. The sentinel line braced, arrows and sting-fire lancing past and between them from behind. Although they were no more professional soldiers than the Grasshopper-kinden had been, the Dragonflies weathered the volley without breaking and smashed against the thin line of black-and-gold armour that held the entryway to the crashed heliopter.

The fighting was more fierce this time. Varmen took a dozen strikes to his mail in the first few moments, each one sliding off to the armourer’s design. There were a lot of them, jabbing and stabbing furiously at him and his men. He had the uncomfortable realization that if they had been Ant-kinden or even Bees, used to fighting in solid shoulder-to-shoulder blocks, then the fight would be halfway over by then. The Dragonflies were accustomed to mobile, skirmishing wars and, although the Wasps could match them in that, the locals had nothing suitable to meet the hard core of an imperial battle formation, the core that Varmen had drawn up in miniature here. The Commonweal spearheads were long and narrow, but narrowing only very close to the tip, not the needle-point lances that Varmen would use against heavy armour. These Dragonflies were summer soldiers, their first love and training in some peaceful trade, mostly farming. They had neither the mindset, training nor gear for this war. Every Wasp-kinden man of the Empire was foremost a soldier. It was the slaves and the subject races that did the tedious business of actually making the Empire run.

He saw it only in retrospect. One of the Commonweal archers had been scorched out of the sky even as he dived in for a shot. He came skidding into the mass of spears, bowling a couple of peasants over, still trying to regain his feet with feebly flickering wings even as he ended up at the very feet of the sentinel line. His chest and side was a crisped mass of failed leather and chitin armour, with boiled flesh beneath. His arrow was still to the string.

Varmen raised his sword, point-downwards, to spit him, and the man’s fingers twitched, the arrow spearing upwards. From the limited window of his eyeslit Varmen did not actually see Pellrec struck, nor did he hear him cry out. Even as his broadsword chopped solidly into the archer’s chest, his honed senses were telling him of a gap to his right, the abrupt absence.

The worst was that he could not turn, could not look to see what had happened to his friend, whether the man was even alive. He stood his ground. He kept his shield high, and redoubled his swordwork to make up for the gap, the man on his right doing the same. For Varmen the man it was loss and horror, but for Sergeant Varmen it meant a change to the tactical situation.

The Commonwealers kept up the assault for another twenty savage minutes before the back of their offensive was broken and they made a messy retreat under the fire of Arken’s stings. Varmen forced himself to watch them go, to be sure that they would not suddenly rally and return. The very moment he was assured of that, he turned, barking the name, ‘Pellrec!’

The man lay prostrate, but the field surgeon had taken his helm off. The sight made Varmen’s innards squirm. The arrow had pierced the mail under Pellrec’s chin, lancing up into his jaw. One corner of the arrowhead glinted out of his left cheek.

‘Report,’ Varmen got out.

The surgeon looked up resentfully, and Varmen spared a brief moment, only a brief one, to acknowledge that a good eight more men were wounded or dead around them, victims to the Commonwealer arrows.

‘He lives,’ the surgeon said. ‘But whether he’ll live much longer-’

‘Make him live,’ Varmen snapped, further endearing himself by spitting out, ‘He’s worth ten of the others.’ And I need Pellrec around to stop me saying things like that.

‘No guarantees.’ The little Fly-kinden seemed to be watching the steam dial of Varmen’s temper, knowing how essential his skills were. ‘I need to find how deep it’s gone. Then I need to take it out.’ Pellrec’s eyes were staring, unfocused. Varmen guessed the surgeon had already forced something on him to strip the pain away. The wounded man’s breathing was skipping, ragged. There was a scream there, waiting for its moment.

‘Do it.’

‘No guarantees.’

‘ Do it! If he-’ dies I’ll kill every last one of you midget bastards. . But he managed to bite down on that comment. ‘What can be done to help?’

The surgeon shook his head disgustedly, glanced sidelong at Tserro, beside him. The sergeant of scouts had a clumsily tied bandage about his forehead, a narrow line of blood seeping through it.