The military power of Ant-kinden city-states has dominated the Lowlands since the revolution. Using their Art to link minds, to fight and work together with flawless discipline, they would have conquered the world by now, save that they reserve their most abiding loathing for Ant-kinden of any other city but their own. Renegade Ants, those who wish to do anything other than follow orders, live bitter, lonely lives cut off from the minds of their fellows.

The Inapt Model Army: the Warband and the Levy

The traditional Inapt or pre-revolutionary army, as might have been fielded by the Moth-kinden before they were cast down by their slaves, is one of inequality. A minority of the troops on the field were skilled warriors, of whom the bards sang and the poets spoke: their rivalries, duels and clashes were recorded in frankly interminable detail by the wordsmiths of the time, and, of the balance of the soldiers brought to battle, it was only said that these heroes slew their hundreds, and their tens of hundreds.

The chief warriors of the Moth armies were Mantis-kinden, and their way of making war has changed little over the centuries. They form their warbands, loose-knit mobs of however many warriors have the inclination. They move swiftly over the countryside, using all stealth despite their numbers, and they launch sudden ambushes or attacks against an unwary foe, or simply meet a wary one head on in the field. Each Mantis, with all the skill of his or her kind, fights alone: spear, claw, bow, rapier and the spines of their arms are their weapons. They carry the day by speed, ferocity and individual prowess. This is the old way, the way they would still practice, should anyone bring an army against them.

Whilst Mantids prefer to fight alone, in the old days their Moth masters often massively reinforced their (never great) numbers with slave levies: Ants and Beetles of the Lowlands were pressed into service and sent out to be butchered by the champions of the other side. The great hero-warriors were the deciding force in the battle, and the levy were merely used to slow them down.

Even before the revolution this was changing. Although Beetle-kinden were never destined to be great warriors, the Ants had a strong martial tradition, and they began to produce their own arms and armour in readiness for the wars their masters would commit them to: they developed tall shields and forged their own mail and practised their combat manoeuvres, honed to iron discipline by their mind-sharing Art. The reason the Moths prevailed so often against their Inapt rivals, back in the murky Dark Ages, was often that their levy was markedly superior to the rabble fielded by the other side. Although the Mantis-kinden remained unmatchable for individual skill, Moth strategists began to adapt their battle plans to take account of their slaves' greater efficiency. Ironically, of course, those same efficient slaves would soon after overthrow them and banish them to their high, dark places, spelling the end for their way of war.

The Dragonfly Commonweal

The Commonweal armies still fight in much the same way: they have a small core of Dragonfly and Mantis warriors who are warriors from birth, lethally skilled with sword and bow, and they have a mass of levy who, in peacetime, are farmers, artisans and craftsmen and seldom if ever take up a weapon. These levy, mostly Grasshopper and Dragonfly peasants, are generally armed with long spears, mobbed together in great rambling units, and sent towards the enemy, whilst the noble warriors run and fly amongst and over them. This style of war was what the Commonwealers brought to the Twelve-year War when the Wasps invaded their lands. The Commonweal armies fielded were vast, frequently outnumbering the attackers ten to one or more, and it was the sheer size of these forces that stretched the war out so long, rather than their effectiveness.

The Commonweal has one other noteworthy tradition: it is one of the only armies in the known world to make much use of land-based cavalry. Whilst most armies have a small mounted scout force, Dragonfly nobles often charge into combat ahorse, en mass, casting spears and loosing arrows as they go. After the initial contact the ;riders would take to the air (2), leaving their ;well-trained mounts to fight on their own behalf whilst they ;shot arrows from above. ;Against surprised or ill-disciplined forces, such as the bandit armies they were formerly used to combating, such a solid strike is often a swift battle-winner, but if the enemy holds then disciplined infantry and archers, such as the Wasps possess in abundance, will generally prevail. Although some ancient Dark Age armies also used cavalry, and even chariots, their modern use as a significant part of an army is limited to the Commonweal.

Spiderlands armies

Spider-kinden armies have developed in a very different direction, more varied and decidedly more haphazard. When a Spider-kinden Arista wishes to raise an army, she has at her own disposal those small forces, house guards and the like, that her family keeps on retainer. For substantial forces she must then ;turn to the various cities that her family has influence in, and to other families that owe her house favours or obligations. Raising an army is a matter of bitter argument, negotiation, promises and threats, and each city provides a different array of troops, depending on the kinden and the local speciality. A Spider-kinden host, therefore, is usually a patchwork affair, with a very broad variety of troop types, none of which are usually present in tactically useful quantities. Supplementing this the Spider Lady-Martial will raid the family coffers to hire mercenary bands, which are never in short supply in the Spiderlands. These can range from the dregs of banditry to highly-skilled elites.

As an example, a Spider-kinden host could see, side-by-side: Spider skirmishers with sword and bow, Scorpion line-breakers with two-handed swords and axes, Fire Ant engineers, Fly-kinden slingers, Ant mercenary heavy infantry, Dragonfly airborne archers, spider-mounted scout cavalry, dragonfly-mounted archers, Beetle-kinden mercenary artificers with armoured automotives and savage jungle Ant warriors along with several hundred of their insect friends.

Spider armies, although disorganised, slow to muster, slow to march, can grow to remarkable sizes, as once a war effort appears to be underway, formerly uncommited Aristoi houses will decide that they have no wish to be left out, and turn up with their own troops whether invited or not. Government and direction of these forces often devolves to a collection of equal-ranked representatives of the major houses present. Despite this picture of waste and inefficiency, Spiders are a clever people, and their history is replete with a number of ingenious strategists. Their ability to out-think and predict their opponents is notable.

The New Model Army: Ant-kinden after the revolution

Ant-kinden are arguably the best soldiers in the world, standing shoulder to shoulder. Their linked minds allow entire armies to react as one, and give commanders the ability to deal with battlefield developments as they happen, with no possibility of lost news, misunderstood commands or confusion. As against this, Ants have two major problems. Firstly, they are not great innovators. They have been masters of war in the Lowlands for long enough that they have settled into particular ways of doing things. As a kinden they lack the imagination and curiosity that marks out their Beetle neighbours. Secondly, their style of fighting has developed to deal with other Ants. Ants fight Ants. Their city-states have been in mutual opposition since anyone can remember, and their warfare is designed to deal with the strengths of their own kind.

The great bulk of any Ant army is heavy infantry: tall shields that interlock easily, reinforced chainmail, short swords. Every third man or so will carry a crossbow, and frequently there will be a rank of crossbowmen behind the shields in a battle-line, shooting bolts into the faces of the enemy shieldmen. The Ant heavy infantryman is a versatile, capable and undaunted soldier, and for five centuries the Ants have done little but tweak their soldiers' armour and weapons.

As well as these great blocks of infantry, the Ants field scouts, either horsemen, Fly-kinden or simply lightly-armoured infantry. As Ant scouts can report back to their officers instantly, their reconnaissance is usually extremely good. There are also units of specialists equipped with more powerful weapons, such as nailbows or repeating crossbows, who can be concentrated or spread throughout the army at need. There are also a few other specially-trained units, such as engineers, extra heavy 'sentinel' infantry and animal-handlers.

Ants are also skilled artillerists, although their actual machines, catapults, ballistae and trebuchet with a few more recent leadshotters, are often not of the most recent designs. The Sarnesh army, which owing to its ties to the Beetles of Collegium is somewhat more advanced in its technology, has begun to field armoured automotives in battle, using them as weapon-carrying battering rams to break enemy lines.

Most Ant armies will also have a limited airborne contingent, usually of armed orthopters or similar flying machines, but to date Ant wars are ground wars, and airpower has played at most a minor role.

The Black and Gold

Only a few Wasp-kinden manifest the mindlink that is universal amonst Ants, and so they have little of that iron and all-encompassing discipline. However, the Art gives Wasps two major advantages over their neighbours. Most of them can fly, and all of them can use the burning energy of their Sting, allowing them to strike at range. Wasp armies use very little heavy infantry, usually just a core of massively-armoured sentinels and some units of armoured spearmen that make up from a tenth to a fifth of the army proper (3). The vast majority of Wasp soldiers are the Light Airborne, warriors armed with sword, sting and sometimes spear, wearing a cuirass of banded mail, and fully capable of attacking from the air. The Wasp army is therefore extremely mobile, with large numbers of troops able to ignore enemy positions and fortifications and attack where they choose. This flexibility and speed is often sufficient in and of itself to defeat slower armies such as earthbound Ant-kinden and, although the Empire has sought out many more modern advantages, this remains their greatest strength.

The Wasps are also more versatile thinkers than Ant-kinden, and quick to make use of new tactics and toys. When they conquer a subject race they take anything of use and incorporate it, either as new technology for their artificers or as new auxillian troops for their armies. Wasps are very good at using the strengths of their slave races to their advantage, usually with very little care over those slaves’ longevity. From the efforts of their own artificers, and from the pillaged designs of their victims, they have also built up a respectable tally of artillery and a crude but efficient mechanised airforce of heliopters to supplement their Airborne and insect-riders.

As their Empire has developed, the Wasps have had to organise on a greater scale than the individual Ant city-state, and this has further strengthened their armies by allowing them to develop specialist corps that recruit and prosper independently of any given force: engineers, slavers, provisioners and merchants, all contribute to the war effort. Least spoken of, but perhaps most significant amongst these is the Rekef, the imperial secret service, whose outlander forces precede the army proper, weakening the enemy by sabotage, rumour-mongering, agitating and assassination.

(1) Their subsequent encounters with the Wasp Empire will put a fair-sized dent in this supremacy.

(2) No horsemen amongst the kinden have yet come up with the idea of stirrups. The Dragonflies use a "castled" saddle with high front and rear to absorb the shock of the charge, and stirrups would prevent them from taking to the air freely from horseback.

(3) Towards a fifth if the army is reinforced with auxillian heavies such as Ant or Bee-kinden warriors.

;

The “low” of the Lowlands was in relation to its northern neighbour, the slowly-disintegrating Commonweal, whose southern border was and is a vast fault-line running for hundreds of miles roughly east-west, from the Atoll Coast as far as the Tharen Mountains and the forest of the Darakyon (1). As recently as fifty years ago a party of scholars from Collegium made the difficult journey to the relatively uncultivated lands south of the fault to view the high, stratified cliffs that had been brokered as a border between the Moth and Dragonfly territories. Drilling and digging satisfied them that the bands of rock beneath their feet were the very bands reproduced in the highest reaches of the Barrier Ridge. At some point in the incalculably distant past, some colossal shudder of the earth had sent the entire Lowlands slipping down, or raised the Commonweal up, forming the fault and ensuring that the divided land would never be whole again, not to mention probably sending an area of land of the same size again slumping into the sea. This time of catastrophe, which must have come close to seeing the end of human occupation within a thousand miles of the fault, was reckoned to predate even the Moth-kinden records, although the Moths would neither confirm or deny it. In conclusion, the scholars said, no recollection or myth exists that echoes this ancient disaster (3).

The Lowlands, the distinct region defined between the Barrier Ridge and the sea, is of a dry, warm climate. Where the weather and the lie of the land allow it, there are discreet areas of forest, some of them very large, and the Mantis-kinden that dwell there claim that their domains were once much greater in the Days of Lore, but they are prone to exaggerate the scope of their own grandeur. Certainly the logging activities of the Apt races, as they moved inexorably into a semi-industrial age, have made resented inroads into such forests as remain.

Where the earth is bare of trees, the natural landscape is one of scrubby, low vegetation, tough shrubs and bushes with spiny leaves, yellowing grass and lots of dust. The land is often broken up where water courses through it, making a badlands of little gullies and canyons, the latter sometimes choked by stunted vegetation. Summers are hot and dry, with rain coming mostly in the spring and autumn, and then not plentifully. Winters are mild, and it is a matter of record if even a little snow is seen.

Civilisation, or that version of it that currently holds sway in the Lowlands, spread from the city of Collegium (formerly Pathis) swiftly, and five of the six main Apt city-states were essentially in place from the beginning: Collegium and its four Ant-kinden neighbours.

It is worth taking a moment to consider the very early history of Collegium, Pathis as it was then. That history is lost to those who now walk those city streets, but speculative academics have wondered why the Lowlands was given over to the Ants, at that time, save for one colony of Beetles. Whilst most scholars simply assume that this is how things have always been, a few dissenting voices wonder if the Moths, finding the dull, dutiful Ants to be insufficiently stimulating company, had somehow bought or brought in a more lively-minded subject race for their leisure-city, and if so, from where…?

Of the Ant city-states, after the yoke of the magicians had been thrown off each of these cities turned suspicious eyes on the other three. The Lowlands, that had once been unified under the gloom-coloured wing of the Moths, fragmented into its current political patchwork. Those Moths who still cared enough about their lost power nodded knowingly and told each other that this is what happens when you let the slaves run the world.

Collegium itself owes its survival to that mutual suspicion. The early Beetles retained no monopoly on their crossbows, and they would not have been able to stave off an assault by the militaristic Ant-kinden. Had any of their neighbours tried their hand, however, more Ant armies would have set out within the tenday (4) to oppose the action, and so Collegium remained self-governing by default. This neutrality in the affairs of the Ants gave the city an unexpected power for, despite their xenophobia, their mutual loathing of their own kind, should that kind bear a different-coloured skin, the Ants still needed to trade, to gathering intelligence, and to learn more of the rapidly evolving engineering that the Beetles had pioneered. Collegium became their go-between, and Ant students attended the Great College to learn something other than warfare from Beetle masters. For their part, the Beetles of Collegium were still very much in the same stage of fierce philosophical idealism that had led them to reject slavery, and they took their responsibilities seriously. Conclaves of well-intentioned academics began trying to educate the Ants in the ways of peaceful co-existence. This work would nor bear fruit for centuries, but the dedication of those academics would, in some small way, eventually pay off when, only a generation ago, the Sarnesh Ants abandoned slavery as the price of a permanent alliance with Collegium. (5)

Around a generation after the revolution, Beetle merchant-venturers travelling north-east found spectacularly rich iron and mineral deposits in the Tharen Mountains, just at a time when the new technology was crying out for raw materials. The mining camps that formed there soon became a town, and then a major manufacturing centre, as the venturesome Beetles realised that they would only retain control over their finds if they started to use them on site, rather than simply shipping the ore back to Collegium. This new city was named Helleron, and within a century it had become the industrial powerhouse of the Lowlands, using every trick of artifice and engineering to produce goods quicker and cheaper than everywhere else, until most of the Ant-kinden started buying in extra weapons and armour from the Beetles, because it spared their manpower and saved them money. Money was another achievement of Helleron, and the Helleron mint still makes gold Centrals (“Central Mint of Helleron” is stamped on the reverse) and silver Standards (a standard fraction of a Central, and traditionally the price of an Ant-kinden shortsword from the Helleron workshops.) Each city produces its own small change, ceramic wheels that are broken into wedge-shaped fragments called “bits”, and the bits from one city are not good currency elsewhere. Travellers change up into Helleron coin at the city gates (exchange rate depending on where and who you are), with the resulting handful of worthless chips generally given to beggars, or greasing the palms of the guards.

The political stalemate in the Lowlands, that was so profitable and useful to the Beetles, continued unchanged for several centuries. The four Ant cities remained at loggerheads, each generation picking the scab off the old wounds. Every so often one city would conceive of some advantage and pitch up outside the walls of another, only to be beaten back, or forced to retreat when another army was sighted on route for their own. The city of Vek controlled access to the distant cities of the Atoll Coast (6), and the island city of Kes held most of the southern coast and the best access to the Spiderlands by sea. Tark sat close enough to the Silk Road to become rich from Spider trade, and Sarn sat close enough to Collegium to develop a stronger trading relationship with the Beetles than the others.

The Lowlands was able to develop without much intercession from beyond its borders. To the north the Commonweal had been falling apart since before the revolution, slowly being consumed by rebellious princes and bandit-chieftains. To the east there was the Dryclaw desert, and whilst marauding bands of Scorpion-kinden might make life difficult for their neighbours, there was never any chance of a major incursion there. To the south and the west there was the sea. The Silk Road to the Spiderlands was long, and the Spiders themselves viewed the emerging cities of the Lowlands as a crude backwater of no real interest: being Inapt themselves the Spiders could not predict how the new mechanistic sciences would change the world. To the north and east, where the Dryclaw left off into more arid scrubland, a scattering of small cities and a lot of savage hill tribes. The Beetles did travel this way from the start, trading and teaching and founding new cities, but the road was difficult, and the merchant-lords of Helleron always looked inwards, towards the rest of the Lowlands, viewing the cities to the east, Myna and Szar and Maynes, as of little real value. (7). Of course, nobody foresaw at the time that those squabbling, barbaric hill tribes would one day be united by a man who would coin the title “Emperor”. The Lowlands’ insular mindset, its firm belief that, as the cradle of civilisation, the world should come to its door rather than the other way round, allowed the Wasp-kinden to unify, to conquer their neighbours, to put even close cousins like the Soldier Beetles of Myna in chains, and all without any outcry being raised. Until, of course, the Black and Gold colours were brought even to the Lowlands’ very borders.

(1)   There is no getting away from fantasy fiction names. The trick is not to mention more than two in a sentence, and ideally only one if you can get away with it. The number of times I’ve picked up a new book in the shop and read the blurb on the back to see something like “Vloscodd, Prince of Hnaarf, has long sought the Voopsrod of Quango, for only the rod can prevent Ipsum, Falxlord of Loobroomdin (2)…” and the brain, battered by such inanity, turns off. I’ve had sight of the back-text for Empire, and there is one name therein, just one name. It should be possible to give the gist of a book’s flavour or story without getting out the scrabble board. But for now I’ll have to sprinkle this entry with a few place names because, frankly, it is a geography lesson.

(2)   Gene Wolfe, in his admirable Sun novels, had a very clever twist on fantasy names, titles and the like. At first his writing seems dense with neologisms, sometimes almost opaque with unfamiliar terms which are never explained. The joke is that none of the words he uses are new. They are all real words, used correctly. Mr Wolfe expects his readers to keep up with him on the hunt, and the chase is rewarding in itself thereby.

(3)   They were wrong, as one son of Collegium would eventually discover…

(4)   The Apt races, being of a logical mindset, tended to decimalise pretty much anything they got their hands on. Before the revolution the Inapt races relied on a complex calendar of irregular intervals and festivals that their slaves could not remotely comprehend.

(5)   The result was a lightning Vekken assault and siege on Collegium which the Beetles staved off, by ingenuity and bloody-mindedness, for long enough that the relief force from Sarn was able to put the Vekken to flight. The Ants of Vek would feel very keenly what they felt as a defeat by an inferior kinden, the peaceful and scholarly Beetles, and would not forget it. Even now they nurse their hatred of Collegium as much as they do their loathing of other Ants, if not more.

(6)   The Atoll Coast was never the Moths’ domain, and the large tracts of inhospitable land separating those cities, clinging as they are between ocean and desert, even from Vek has ensured that very little traffic goes on between them and the Lowlands proper. The presence on the coast of another Ant city-state has prevented Vek from exercising its territorial inclinations in that direction.

(7)   These lands had also been part of the Moth’s domain, but the Moths themselves had never felt comfortable here. Many centuries before the revolution they had wrested these lands from a great evil, or at least a great rival, the ill-favoured Mosquito-kinden, with their blood-magic and their hungers. Although the Mosquito-people were supposedly exterminated to the very last, the Moth-kinden never quite believed it, and even before the revolution they had been relinquishing their hold on these places, abandoning them to their fate. It seems likely, though, that a lot of the Beetles now living in this region can trace their ancestry back to slaves imported by the Moths from Collegium, rather than to the later adventurers from Helleron. Similarly, the Soldier Beetle folk of Myna, who are of a kinden that exhibits traits of both Ants and Beetles, are reckoned to be the stabilised result of Moth-kinden underlings becoming acquainted with the local Ants of nearby Maynes. One scholar has hypothesised that the initial inhabitants were an all-male workforce brought in by the Moths to rebuild the city.