‘How seriously are they taking it?’

‘There are thirty thousand soldiers at our gates,’ Parops pointed out.

‘Yes, but you know how politics goes. Everyone’s city is the greatest, and everyone’s soldiers are invincible, at least until they get vinced.’

Parops nodded. ‘They’re taking it seriously, plentifully seriously. They’ve gone to the tunnels and spoken to the nest-queen herself, woken up the flying brood. They’re putting in readiness every machine that can take to the air. Everyone who can pilot a flier or handle artillery is getting marching orders, and it’s crossbows for everyone else. It’s a flying enemy we face, and that much we understand. It’s something new.’

And Ants did not like new things, Nero reflected, but at least the complacency had gone. The ant nest beneath the city, which produced domesticated insects that laboured for their human namesakes, was a valuable resource. To utilize the winged males and females as mounts of war would kill off an entire generation of them, a tragedy of economics which meant they were only brought out in the worst of emergencies. The Royal Court of Tark had finally conceded that this was nothing less.

‘You’ve had some dealings with these Wasps,’ Parops noted.

‘As few as I could but, yes, a long time ago.’

‘Tell me about the other kinden they have in their army. Have they formed an alliance against us?’

‘The Wasp Empire doesn’t do alliances,’ Nero said with a harsh laugh. ‘Those are slaves.’

‘They arm their slaves?’ The Ants of Tark, as with Ant-kinden almost everywhere, kept slaves for the menial work and would not dream of putting so much as a large knife in their hands. It was not so much for fear of rebellion as pride in their own martial skills.

‘It’s more complicated than that. They deal in very large armies, and they swell their ranks with the conquered – Auxillians, they call them.