Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

And there’s the joke because, a month before, Collegium’s

own diplomatic staff wouldn’t have let me in the door. ‘You were right,’ he told Sperra. ‘She’s a tough one.’ The Fly nodded. ‘Rather you than me, chief.’

‘I take it not so good, Sten?’ This came from the last man there, a fleshy creature with pale, bluish skin – an Ant from some western city-state at the fringes of the Lowlands proper. His name was Plius and he was nominally Stenwold’s man here in Sarn. Stenwold had been in the game a long time, cutting his teeth on agent-running in a half-dozen cities, and way back when he had first recruited Plius, Stenwold had taken him for what the world usually saw: an outcast trying to make his difficult way in a hostile city. Now, his customary pipe in his hands, Plius managed a wan smile at Stenwold, who smiled back and nodded.

With his extra years of experience, Stenwold had known as soon as he reacquainted himself with the man. He knew the telltale signs now of a man with divided loyalties. Either he had been blind to it before, or Plius had been turned fairly recently. They were still both playing the game as though it was not so but, somewhere along the line, someone else had put their mark on Plius, and Stenwold knew he could not trust the man any more, only keep him close and wait.

Who is this man? the Queen asked, and this time the silent answers came more hesitantly.

– A nobleman from the northlands. He has been a student at the College.

– Reports suggest he was at Tark during the siege.

– He may be a spy.

– We have heard unconfirmed reports of irregular resistance to the imperial advance being linked to his name.

– Our knowledge of the Commonweal is almost nonexistent.

– Save that they, too, have fought the Wasps.

With no clear vision from her Tacticians, she used her own eyes, seeing a young man, too young to be standing before her in this weighty role. He wore a long leather hauberk reinforced with metal plates that would ill become the worst of her own soldiers, and yet he carried himself with a casual authority. Apart from that he was golden-skinned, handsome, clear-eyed, and he stood before her war council as though he was the lord of a realm and not just the chief of a ragged pack of bandits and refugees.

‘Prince Salme Dien,’ she said, pronouncing the foreign name carefully. She was aware that he was studying her in return, unsurprised at seeing nothing but a woman of Sarn of middling years, with the same close features, brown skin and short-cut dark hair as all her kin. No doubt the lords in his homeland wore gaudy flowers of gilt and gems, compared with the token regalia she bore to identify her. Her look told him flatly that in Sarn they valued other things.

‘Your Majesty.’ He sketched a bow that was obviously a shadow of something more formal.

‘Your name is known to us, to my council and myself,’ she told him. ‘It has therefore won you this time, when our time is precious to us. Who are you, Dragonfly, and why should we heed you?’

‘In the Commonweal it is customary to bring gifts when currying the favour of great men and women,’ Salma declared. ‘I have something you should appreciate, and also may serve as your answer.’

She sent out a query, but discovered no aide awaiting him with bundles in the antechamber. ‘Speak clearly,’ she advised.

‘In the Foreigners’ Quarter I have, under lock and key, three Wasp scouts my men have caught. I have questioned them all I need to. They are now yours.’

There was a murmur in her head, a sound of cautious re-evaluation. ‘You are in the habit of catching Wasps without being stung?’ the Queen asked.

– This may yet be a trap. Misinformation is easy to plant. – Wasps are hard to take alive. They are more mobile than our own scouts.

‘There is,’ said Salma, ‘a knack to it.’

The Queen frowned at him. ‘And who are your men, exactly? Do you hold yourself a tactician now?’ She said it with a glance of mockery at his travel-stained dress, the stitched repairs to his armour.

‘Yes,’ Salma replied, quite seriously.

That stilled the voices in her head for a moment, and he let his voice step into the breach.

‘The Empire has wrought a great change east of here. They have displaced hundreds, thousands, from their homes: people from Tark, from Helleron, from all the little communities between there and here. The roads are full of refugees, escaped slaves, wilderness folk: a great tide of humanity that the Wasps have driven before them, to shiver and starve through the winter. Now the Wasps have halted their advance so that they can accumulate more reserves of men and weapons, and we have regrouped too. We are the dispossessed, your Majesty, and we fight.’

‘You fight the Empire.’

‘We turn upon our creator.’

– This is preposterous.

– There is no precedent for this.

– He is no more than a brigand with ideas above his station.

Because she was Queen of Sarn, one mental word silenced them. ‘And what are your plans, this winter, Prince Dien?’

He smiled at her. It was a smile baked hard and sharpened to an edge. ‘We are attacking the Wasps, your Majesty. We are attacking them, even as I speak, in all the little ways we can. My soldiers have disrupted their supply lines. My artificers have broken up the rails between their camp and Helleron. My Fly-kinden pass over their camp and lure out their soldiers into ambush or capture. My foragers take everything from the land before the Wasps can harvest it. My spies become their slaves in order to discover their plans. Can you say as much of your own people, your Majesty?’

The outrage about the table was almost tangible to him, loudly audible to her, but she felt as though, despite the others present, there were now only the two of them truly there in that room: the Queen of Sarn and this young man with his disturbing smile.

‘You are here with a proposal, young prince,’ she informed him.

‘Certainly,’ he agreed. ‘For the moment, the city of Sarn presents a line across which the Wasps dare not go, not until they are fully ready for their great battle. I have with me thousands who cannot fight: the young, the old and the wounded. I know Ant city-states well enough, and you will have hoarded enough within your walls to withstand a siege lasting years. You have therefore enough to provide for those of my people that I cannot.’

‘And in exchange you will make yourselves soldiers of Sarn?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Under no circumstances. We know what that would mean: to be the least valued, the first sent into the fire. We are free, your Majesty, no subjects of yours, nor of any ruler’s.’

‘So, in return, what?’ Her Tacticians were now hanging on her words, trying to keep up with the way the world around them had suddenly shifted.

‘In exchange we will do what you cannot. We will tell you all that we discover about the Wasps. When they advance, we will harry their vanguard and ambush their baggage train. We are woodsmen, trackers, thieves and brigands, your Majesty, and we will become the very land about them, which turns upon them. We are not many, but we are still an army. More, we are an army without shield-wall or formations, an army that moves swiftly, that has no home, that cannot be pinned or broken against a solid line. They do not know how to fight us. This is what you shall have, in return.’

‘And where will this proud independence of all rulers take you at the last, young prince?’ she asked him, and he knew from the question that he had won, that she would agree.

‘A city, your Majesty. A city west of here, where my people can stop running. We do not know where it is, yet, or what it shall be called, but when we see the land just so, we shall build there.’