Blood of the Mantis

If we beat the Wasps, Stenwold reminded himself. ‘If’ was a poisonous word. Let’s beat the Wasps first. For, in fact, even welding together a unified front against the Wasps seemed to be almost impossible, for everyone was pulling in different directions. It was like trying to shoo flies out of a window: no sooner had you swept them into the open air than they were back again.

Aside from Parops, he had come with only two of his staff: Sperra, who was now sleeping curled along the length of one seat and quite oblivious to the roar of the engine and the rattle of the wheels, and Arianna. Looking a little queasy, she sat pressed up against him with her head resting on his rounded shoulder. Travel by rail was the fastest and most efficient way to get anywhere these days, but it was a rough experience for the Inapt.

He reached for her hand and squeezed it, and she managed a wan smile. Before them, just then, the walls of Sarn opened up to swallow the train of open-roofed carriages in which they travelled.

When the automotive pulled in, they were ready waiting for him: it was hard to fault the Ant-kinden for organization. A small delegation had obviously been passed his mental image by some Ant that had once met him, and so they singled him out easily even as his little company disembarked.

‘War Master Stenwold Maker.’ He found himself addressed by a Sarnesh woman robed in the Collegium style, which counted as a token of high respect.

‘I suppose I must be.’

‘You have requested an audience with our Queen,’ he was further informed. ‘It is granted. Even now rooms are being prepared at the Royal Court for you and your fellows. Kindly follow me.’

Nothing would have singled the Queen out from her fellows, save for the ornament that she adopted out of pity for the foreigners’ confusion. She had not been born royal. Unlike Spider Aristoi the Ant-kinden put no stock in hereditary dynasties. The Queen’s childhood had displayed in her an aptitude for command, decision-making, leadership. Such traits were watched out for, among the Ant-kinden. They were discouraged, in most cases, but sometimes these gifts shone in exactly the right way, and in such children they were cultivated.

She had been young for the post when made an officer, and very young when given her commander’s rank, stepping easily up through the simple hierarchy that was all the Ants needed. Her ability, and the soundness of her judgment, marked her as exceptional in a race where conformity was the rule, but it was that rare breed of ‘exceptional’ that managed to complement the whole rather than challenge it.

At thirty they had made her a tactician. She had been chosen from a hundred candidates, her every thought and action having been carefully scrutinized without her ever knowing that the Court was watching her. Never let it be said that the Ants could not keep any secrets from their own.

When she was thirty-eight the old King had died, and she had joined his other tacticians as they put their minds together even as his body cooled. The decision had been unanimous. In putting herself forward she had showed no personal ambition. They had simply measured one another by the standards of each other, and she had stood taller than the rest.

The absolute trust of an Ant city-state was a burden she was proud to bear, for all it weighed on her heavily. For eleven years she had lived with such iron responsibility, but never to this degree. It was the time of crisis that any Ant regent dreaded.

The Queen of Sarn now sat at her war table, on which maps and charts were pinned in immaculate order, updated daily by the clerks of her army. Eleven years ago she had been chosen as the supreme voice of Sarn, the fount of all authority, the ultimate origin of all orders. She knew that outsiders considered the Ant city-states to be merely autocracies but the truth was richer than that, infinitely more complex. The mindlink that laced them all together did not exclude her, nor did it make them her unthinking slaves. She was constantly present in the minds of her subjects as they were also an influence in hers. The Beetles of Collegium thought they had achieved government by the people in choosing their quarrelsome leaders by the casting of lots, but in reality they had no idea, no idea at all.

And speaking of Beetles, here was one arrived to see her, she was informed, and it was a name she had heard before.

She did not even need to glance at them for their reactions. She felt the presence of her tacticians supporting her. They were eight Ant-kinden men and women, the keenest military minds in the city, with a pair of Beetle women, an artificer and a merchant, to advise on matters less warlike. There would, she guessed, be little need of those last two in the next months.