War Master's Gate

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Paladrya, her name was. Every old man needed some romance in his life, and Stenwold’s was separated from him by a barrier neither of them could cross for long. The land was too harsh and hostile for her, the sea a place of nightmares for him. Even their letters were cast in foreign alphabets.

  ‘I hear the Wasp lads are keeping their distance, since you took the air from them,’ Tomasso noted. As a Fly-kinden, control of the air was something he thoroughly approved of, and the Collegiate orthopters were currently the undisputed masters of the skies above the city.

  ‘Still,’ Stenwold observed, ‘they’re not going away.’ At last he dragged his eyes away from the waves. ‘What will you do, if it comes to that?’

  Tomasso shrugged easily. ‘The sea’s an open road. We’ll ship out when the time comes, and no hard feelings. You’re welcome to take a berth with us. We’ve space for you.’ Even as Stenwold opened his mouth, the Fly held his hands up. ‘I know, I know, your place is here – noble War Master and all that. I’m just saying, though. The crew wouldn’t begrudge the room if your Assembly decided to give you a kick.’

  ‘It’s kind of them,’ Stenwold allowed, and then a scuffle sounded from somewhere below and a younger Fly burst into the room.

  ‘Mar’Maker, there you are!’

  ‘Laszlo,’ Stenwold acknowledged him, abruptly tense. ‘What news?’

  ‘Oh, they need you right now back in the city, Mar’Maker. It’s not the Wasps but, from the look on half the faces there, it might as well be.’

  Stenwold nodded heavily, knowing immediately who the Fly meant. ‘They’ve made good time then, but Ants always could march.’

  ‘There’s an automotive waiting to get you to the city, and I really think you should be there before this mob arrives. Otherwise someone’s going to do something stupid.’

  ‘Almost certainly right,’ Stenwold agreed, and then he was clumping down the stairs, with Laszlo buzzing at his shoulder.

  At the west wall of Collegium, Jodry Drillen watched the approaching force, and all around him were the city’s Merchant Company soldiers, very pointedly not doing anything about it but plainly wishing that they could.

  ‘Brings back memories,’ someone could be heard to say, even as Stenwold stomped his way up the steps to the summit of the wall.

  ‘Where’s their representative?’ he demanded.

  Jodry turned and inclined his head to indicate a silent, dark figure standing at the battlements, given a wide berth by the locals.

  ‘I hope you’re sure of what you’re doing, is all.’ The Speaker for the Assembly was still a fat man, but the stresses of recent events had made all that weight hang on him as though it was sloughing off, from the pouchy bags under his eyes to the way his clothes all seemed ill-fitting. He and Stenwold had clashed a few times during the Wasps’ last offensive, but now they were friends again, just about.

  Stenwold made his way along the parapet to the Ant that stood alone there: short, ebony-skinned, and armoured against the world in a mail hauberk.

  ‘Termes,’ he named him, and the Ant nodded.

  ‘War Master.’

  Together they looked out at the Vekken army.

  The last time a force from that Ant city had come to Collegium, it had been for conquest, and the time before that, as well. The Ants had been the city’s enemies for most of Stenwold’s life, certainly far longer than the Wasps had. It was a matter of scale, though. Vek was only one city, the Empire was many. Stenwold had worked extremely hard to bring the Vekken to a point where they might consider their Beetle neighbours as something other than a threat or a prize. He had worked even harder to convince his own people that such a change of heart in their old foes was even possible. Now here were the fruits.

  ‘How many?’ he asked.

  ‘Eight hundred,’ Termes told him. ‘That was thought reasonable.’

  Not enough for an invasion, but enough to be useful. The Vekken had considered their gesture seriously. They had no love for the Wasps and they knew that, if Collegium fell, the Empire would be outside their gates soon enough.

  ‘They’ll camp . . .?’

  ‘Outside the city,’ Termes confirmed. He did not say, As we did last time, but Stenwold almost heard the echo of the words.

  ‘There are boats from Tsen on their way, I’m told.’

  ‘We are aware of that.’ Termes’s face revealed nothing. Tsen was another Ant city, further west still, and no friend of Vek’s save that both cities now found themselves friends of Collegium. ‘We suggest they stay on the water. We will keep to the land.’

  ‘It might be for the best.’ Stenwold nodded and returned to Jodry’s side. ‘We’ll need them, if the worst comes to the worst,’ he pointed out, watching the immaculately disciplined Ants break their column and begin to pitch camp tactfully outside artillery range. But, then, the Vekken would have no fond memories of the effectiveness of Collegiate artillery.

  ‘We’ve Sarnesh in the city also,’ Jodry informed him. ‘I thought it best not to invite them up onto the wall. More Ants around than we know what to do with, these days.’

  ‘A messenger?’

  ‘More than that – a full-blown tactician, as I understand it. I think our northern neighbours want to make a move. After this business at Malkan’s Folly, I think the Sarnesh are starting to hate the Wasps more even than you do, Sten.’

  There were still plenty of soldiers left on the walls as Jodry and Stenwold descended. They had not been posted there, and each would have given some humdrum excuse for his presence, but they were keeping an eye on the Vekken, and no mistake. It took no great leap of imagination to envisage those enemies of recent memory being in league with the Wasps, forming part of some grand betrayal. Stenwold could only hope that he had done his work well enough or, at worst, that the Vekken also hated the Wasps more than they hated their traditional foes.

  The customary place to meet with foreign dignitaries was the Amphiophos, of course, but where those hallowed halls of white stone had once stood was now just one of the city’s many new scars, bombarded by the Imperial air force into a warren of rubble and broken walls. Instead, a lecture hall at the College served, and it was there that Stenwold and Jodry, and a handful of other Beetle-kinden who had become Collegium’s de facto high command, met with Milus of Sarn.

  The Sarnesh tactician looked close to Stenwold’s own years, belonging to that generation that, on all sides, was determining the course of the war. He had a small staff with him: three close-featured Ants of his own city and a pale Fly-kinden girl with gleaming red hair.

  ‘You’re making a mistake, of course,’ Milus told the Beetles, even as they came in through the door.

  ‘You mean the Vekken?’ Stenwold looked him straight in the eye.

  ‘I do, and you’ll regret it in time. For now . . . who knows? The times are certainly unprecedented.’ He made a grand gesture with his hands, just one shade from being spontaneous. Ants had little use for body language or expressions amongst themselves, which made them both hard to read and hard to relate to, but Milus had obviously learned a stock of conversational tools for occasions such as this. The fact that he was not making more capital out of the Vekken arrival was also telling. Here was a new sort of Sarnesh leader.

  ‘Tactician,’ Jodry addressed him, ‘you have us here, the best of us. I assume you don’t want the full Assembly convened? It’s been a while since we last did that, and we’re short of somewhere to put them. It’s just the War Council making most of the key decisions at the moment.’

  Milus nodded approvingly. ‘I have official business to discuss but, before that, I want to give you my personal congratulations. You’ll be well aware that, while my people value our friends in Collegium for many reasons, your martial prowess has never been one of them. Yet you’ve scored more victories against the Empire than we have, of late, and I hear their Second Army is still hiding from your orthopters. Well done. Sarn takes great heart from your successes.’ It was a prepared spee
ch, but it was not what one expected, from Ant-kinden, and the Collegiates exchanged glances, reconsidering.

  ‘You’re kind,’ Jodry spoke for them. ‘We’re left in the same position as you, though, with an army on our doorstep that is just not attacking yet. Do we take it that your presence here indicates a shift in Sarnesh tactics?’

  ‘We’re gathering our forces and we’ll strike soon. Why the Eighth is just sitting there at the wrong end of the Nethyon, we don’t know, but we intend to throw everything we have at them – our soldiers, our machines, our allies and all the tricks we can come up with,’ Milus announced, raising a hand to forestall any comment. ‘And I realize that you will not be able to lend substantial aid to us, just as we could not aid you. We each have our own worries, right now. However, I invite you to send some of your people to our councils, so that at least you know what we intend.’

  ‘You will be directing this assault yourself, Tactician?’ Stenwold asked him.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘You did not need to come in person simply to invite us to your conference.’

  Milus smiled, with that same slight edge of formality. ‘But I did to offer my plaudits, War Master. Some things can only be said in one’s own voice.’

  ‘So, aren’t we the fast mover?’

  The red-haired Fly-kinden woman froze in the midst of unpacking her satchel, kneeling on the bed the Collegiates had found for her at the College. For a second she was motionless, and Laszlo recognized that coiled-spring quality to her, ready for betrayal, for fight or flight.

  Then she glanced up at the window where he was crouching. ‘If the Sarnesh were to come in now, they’d shoot you. I don’t care what you are in Collegium, to the Sarnesh an intruder’s still an intruder.’

  He swung his legs in and perched on the window sill. ‘Te Liss,’ he named her. ‘Otherwise Lissart, or is there another name for you now?’

  For a moment she just stared at him, acknowledging no past acquaintance, a hair’s breadth away from violence – and he knew full well how dangerous she was. Then the very corner of her mouth twitched, and she said, ‘Alisse, special adviser to Tactician Milus on matters of the Inapt. On account of how he doesn’t trust Moths, and Mantids are rotten advisers. It’s a long story.’

  ‘It can’t be that long. We were with the army only a month ago,’ Laszlo pointed out. ‘You must have already had a fallback in Sarn planned out somehow. But you never said.’ He was aware how he was drinking her in but, then, she spent so little time staying in one place, acting civilly or even being trustworthy, that he wanted to make the most of her.

  ‘I have lots of fallbacks. It’s a spy thing. Stop staring at me like that.’ She was trying to be flippant, and Laszlo had certainly planned to appear cool and witty and blithely unconcerned. After she left him, with the Collegiate army just about to clash with the Wasp Second, he had gone a long way towards convincing himself that this little infatuation of his was done with. There had been work to do, after all, and he was not the kind of fool to waste time mooning over some girl. Especially when that girl had been a Wasp agent when he first met her, and something of a madwoman – and, beyond all of that, not a true Fly at all but someone who could shoot fire out of her hands. Best left well alone, best forgotten. He had worked hard to tell himself that.

  And then, just today, she had come trotting back into his life, as bold as the sun, at the heels of Tactician Milus as though she had every reason to be attached to the Sarnesh command staff. And something within him, some dam, had cracked and now he was here and staring at her.

  She stood carefully, and he saw in that movement the last traces of the wound she had taken in Solarno, the one that had severed her from Wasp service. ‘Oh, Laszlo, don’t be such a fool. The world turns, surely you know that?’

  ‘Some of us are quick enough to keep up with it. And here you are.’ Unable to read her expression, he pressed on. ‘I killed the Wasp that was hunting you – their spy woman. And I looked for you, I did. Don’t think you could just slip out of my mind. You’re not as sneaky as all that. And here you are. And . . . with Sarn? Seriously?’

  ‘Why not Sarn, when they pay their spies as well as anyone else?’

  He thought there was a minute hesitation in there somewhere, and his stomach sank because abruptly he was convinced that simply being on the Ants’ payroll was far too simple a web for her.

  ‘And you’re off back to Sarn with their tactician,’ he prompted, feeling like a real spy for once, as he probed the edges of her infidelity.

  ‘Or wherever Milus chooses. Or wherever I do, if I tire of him.’

  Laszlo had seen Milus perform for the Collegiates, as smooth and dangerous as any Spider noble. ‘He’s a good man to tie your fortunes to, is he?’

  ‘I’m not one to be tied, Laszlo . . .’ Some mockery died on her lips. ‘You’ve been thinking of me, truly?’

  ‘Oh, well, sometimes. Once or twice when I wasn’t busy.’

  He thought she would come to him then – but a moment later he thought she would back away and be gone, feeling a cage closing about her. Then she found her equilibrium, and he had a glimpse of some inner layer of her – perhaps still not the true woman beneath, but something more closely overlying it than the face she showed the world most of the time. ‘It won’t work, Laszlo.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I’m leaving with the Sarnesh.’

  ‘You’re off for some top-secret conference with the Mantis-kinden, which I’ve just so happened to get myself invited to as part of the Collegiate delegation.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ She folded her arms, but that unguarded look remained, of a woman caught between fight and flight, and not sure what to do about him. ‘And, once again, you’ve no idea what you’re getting into – the man who went to play spy in Solarno and used his real name, for the world’s sake!’

  ‘And got out of there with you after everything went wrong!’ he reminded her.

  ‘I recall getting out of there quite well enough, and being fool enough to drag you with me,’ she scoffed. Her words wanted conviction, for she had been badly injured at the time. The plan had been hers, but he had carried it out. ‘Go away, Laszlo.’ The words were spoken fondly, but they still stung. ‘I’ve made a living from moving on. The past’s a thing to put behind you.’

  And he was still perched at her window, despite that. ‘Give me something, Liss,’ he asked.

  She waved a dismissive hand, and he saw her start to turn away, and yet not quite finish the movement, pulled back to face him as though drawn by a hook.

  ‘You are a fine fool,’ she told him. ‘You scare me.’ But at last she approached the window, until she stood within arm’s reach of him. ‘I don’t worry about people. I don’t care about people. That’s not what I do. Don’t try to change me. I’ve killed men for less.’ But there was no sense of threat about her, and that look was still on her face, the masks held at bay for this one extended moment.

  ‘I’ll see you in Mantis-land,’ he told her.

  ‘You . . .’ she began, putting her hands on his shoulders. Then there was a rattling at the door and she gave him a sudden shove, pitching him backwards and away, his wings catching him a storey further down.

  He was grinning, though, as he flew off. Now he really would have to talk his way onto the Collegiate delegation, and all the while without anyone guessing that he had his own motives. Time to call on his old friend Stenwold Maker.

  Laszlo skimmed off across the face of the College, wondering where Stenwold might have got to.

  Three

  The mid-morning calm was interrupted by the hammering of engines from nearby, while the ragged tree cover shook under the beating of wings as a dozen Spearflight orthopters scrambled into the air, clawing for height. The curved-bodied machines roared overhead, their wings a blur, rotary piercers already spinning up. A handful of the Light Airborne took wing after them, but only as observers, not as fighters. No general nor artificer had yet found any
field of combat in which flying man and flying machine could realistically oppose one another.

  General Tynan was not going to be that man, he knew. That aspect of warcraft had already moved beyond his experience. He did not have enough knowledge of the science or specifications of those machines to plan an air war.

  Even he, though, knew that the Spearflights hurriedly flown to him from back home were yesterday’s models, and no match for the Collegiate Stormreaders that would even now be speeding through the skies towards his forces. His Second Army had endured daily raids for a month now, and his Spearflights had done little but slow the enemy down. What sent the Beetle pilots home was not the terrible force of the Imperial Air Corps, but the simple fact that the Stormreaders had not been designed with ground attacks in mind, and they soon ran out of munitions.

  The irony was that the last time he had been out this way, Tynan had done his best to strip the place of any real cover. Only the coveted jewel that was Collegium had hauled him away before he had finished the job. He had not realized that he himself would need to hide here before the war was done. This was the Felyal, a former Mantis hold and thorn in the side of every Imperial advance up this coast. Tynan had beaten them twice, and had finally ousted them entirely from their forest haunts. Now a quarter of his Second Army was holed up in what dubious cover the forest could provide, with the remainder spread out in camps over several square miles, to deny the Stormreaders a satisfactory target. The forest itself hid the precise location of Tynan’s surviving artillery, his paltry air defences, his supplies and the Sentinel automotives, although those last were probably sufficiently armoured to survive a direct bombing.

  He had watchers out between here and Collegium, and if a large ground force marched out to attack, he was betting his life that he could regroup before they reached him. Thus far the Beetles had not tried it. Even though they had retained command of the skies, he had given their forces a bloody enough nose in the accompanying land battle that they were wary of another clash. Instead, their orthopters, smug and inviolate, coursed over his scattered army at any time of the day or night, trailing bombs and making his soldiers endure lives of constant uncertainty and fear.