War Master's Gate

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Excuse me,’ she put in, feeling a sudden stab of fear. ‘Those are my soldiers out there beyond the walls.’

  They all looked at her as though she was simple-minded, and the old man aiming the machine chuckled indulgently.

  ‘This is intended to counter the Wasp artillery, girl. At this elevation nobody within a mile of the city’s going to be in any danger.’

  Straessa blinked at him, and at last the contraption began making an audible sound, a high whining just at the edge of hearing, which the old man clearly took as a good sign.

  ‘And . . . loose!’ He got it wrong, said it again, and then, a second later, the bolt was simply gone. Straessa had the faint sense of very swift motion, and no more. Of the missile’s eventual impact there was no sign.

  ‘Of course we’ll tip the bolts with explosives when Wasps arrive,’ the old artillerist said cheerily, ‘but it’s all about magnets and the new steel and good old College know-how.’ And then the others were crowding in to study the device.

  Straessa plucked at the sleeve of her chief officer’s coat as he tried to elbow his way in. ‘You’re wanted, Chief.’

  The Ant looked annoyed at that, but he glanced off over the walls – east, towards the Wasps, she thought – then nodded, and they descended together.

  She accompanied him as far as the Prowess Forum, for fear that he would end up back on the walls again if she left his side. The College’s old sparring ground had been decked out with banners, she saw, which meant that this gathering was not just another in the interminable series of committees that seemed to be Collegium’s answer to everything. This was it. The great minds of the city had come together, and were about to impart their wisdom to their martial servants.

  She saw Stenwold Maker within, sitting on the tiered seats as though waiting to watch a practice match. The sagging bulk of Jodry Drillen lurked in one doorway, speaking to another couple of Assemblers, and at least a score of others were already sitting in small cliques and factions, some there to speak and some to listen. She recognized the small form of Willem Reader, the aeronautics artificer, and a few others she could put a name to. One was Helmess Broiler, Collegium’s least favourite son in many quarters, and a man often claimed to be on the Imperial payroll. The Prowess Forum was public, though, and many people had come to see the leaders of their city’s armed might. A morale exercise, then, more than anything. No state secrets here.

  She ticked off the banners, seeing the various chief officers and other military leaders arrive and assemble beneath them: five Companies and four others, nine men and women to direct the battle.

  The Companies first. Red scarab was the badge of Maker’s Own, and their chief officer, Elder Padstock, was the senior military figure there. Through the Gate was their motto, and Padstock was known to be a fervent, even fanatical supporter of Stenwold Maker.

  Madagnus himself was standing beneath the banner depicting a white helm in profile – not the original Vekken design but an Imperial infantry helmet now, for reasons of politics. Their motto, and Straessa’s own, was In Our Enemy’s Robes, after the original inhabitants of Coldstone Street had taken arms and armour from Vekken dead to throw back the invaders.

  Outwright’s Pike and Shot had a wheel of pikes and snap-bows as its device, whose intricacy must have left the embroiderers cursing. Outright Victory or Death went their words, and the original Outwright had indeed died defending Stenwold Maker from Imperial assassins. His nephew, someone-or-other Outwright, looked far too young for the job, but his soldiers had elected him out of fondness for his martyred uncle. Beside him stood sweating Remas Boltwright of the new Fealty Street Company, his banner simple crossed crossbow bolts, his words To End the Quarrel. He was doing his best but, like Outwright Junior, he did not look the soldier.

  Eujen Leadswell stood at his shoulder, beneath the purple banner displaying the open book. He and Averic had been devoting every waking moment to turning their rabble of malcontents into something approximating a fighting company, but some wit amongst the students had seen to it that the words Learn to Live had been added to their flag. In Straessa’s experience it was entirely possible that Eujen, beneath them, had not even noticed. So very focused, always.

  And curse me, but he looks the part. Eujen Leadswell, student of social history and outspoken detractor of no less a man than Stenwold Maker, stood straight-backed and proud in his breastplate, and if any had been ready to mock the idea of the Student Company, or to slight him for his political beliefs, they held their tongues now.

  I am not going to cry. But, looking at him, Straessa felt so very aware of how fragile he was, just as any man or woman was fragile. One bolt, one sword, and all that young promise would be gone.

  The others came as no surprise, those defenders of the city who were not formally part of the Companies. She saw, standing beneath a sky-coloured banner without device or motto, the little Fly-kinden pilot who was everyone’s darling after the Wasp Air Corps had been brought down last time.

  Kymene the Mynan leader had her city’s red arrows on black, one pointing up, one down, expounded by the words below them: We Have Fallen. We Will Rise Again. Straessa had a lot of time for Kymene save that she had always felt that the woman was so fiercely opposed to the Wasps that she might get a great many people killed for it one day.

  Some close-faced, midnight-skinned Vekken stood, with no banner at all, representing that company of his kinsfolk who had come reluctantly to the aid of their new – and only – ally. Lastly, beneath a plain green flag, there was a Mantis-kinden woman Straessa did not know, standing for the Felyen exiles within Collegium, those last tatters of the Felyal hold destroyed by the Second Army on its last advance.

  And that’s it, thought the Antspider. That’s all of us, Beetle and non-Beetle, citizens and guests. These nine are the hope of the city in miniature.

  By that time the crowd was quite large, packing themselves in at every door, concerned men and women of Collegium who were ostensibly here to see history performed, but in reality just wanted to be told that everything would be all right.

  Twelve

  Sergeant Gorrec of the Pioneers was crouching low, his huge frame almost tucked into the tangled roots of one of the vast old trees, while all around him the Mantis-kinden were fighting.

  It had come on very suddenly. The three Pioneers chosen to spearhead the Empress’s expedition had been carefully breaking new ground, pressing deeper into the forest, and there had been some Nethyen Mantids with them, keeping pace. Gorrec hadn’t liked that, but they weren’t part of his chain of command, and he was cursed if he was going to go crying to the Empress about them. They had faded in and out: now gone from his sight, then a moment later there would be a full half-dozen just ghosting between the trees. No friends of mine. But friends weren’t something that Gorrec was overly supplied with. A man didn’t go into the Pioneers because he liked the company.

  Then the other Mantids had turned up and everything had gone rapidly out of his control, if control was something he had ever actually had. There were Mantids everywhere, leaping out and trying to kill one another, and then instantly gone, sometimes leaving a body behind, sometimes not, as though their own irresistible momentum would not allow them to keep still long enough to finish the job. Gorrec saw the fight around him in frenzied slices, the dim air beneath the canopy briefly flaring into a vicious skirmish of blades and then falling still again, the combatants gone. He had his axes ready, those two huge Scorpion-made pieces with their curved hafts, which could be thrown some distance if the wielder was a man as big as Gorrec. So far he had not struck a blow: in the blur of those brief, deadly pairings he found he had no way to tell friend from foe. To him, the Etheryen and the Nethyen Mantids looked just about the same.

  He would have followed Icnumon if he could. The halfbreed was Mantis as much as Wasp, and he seemed to have no difficulty knowing whom to kill – either that or he simply did not care. Keeping up with Icnumon was like chasing smoke, th
ough, and Gorrec saw less of him than of the Mantids themselves.

  Crouching in his hiding place, eyes almost useless in the gloom, with opponents that were here one moment and gone the next, he had been honing his other senses. When the sudden rush came at him out of nowhere, he was ready for it, kicking away from the tree with one axe arcing back to cleave the air between him and his attacker. Thank you for letting me know which side you’re on. For all he knew, this could be a Nethyen Mantis who had turned coat, or maybe all the Mantids were his foes now, but for the moment being attacked was all the identification he needed.

  His heels dug furrows into the forest floor as he changed direction, twisting suddenly to meet the oncoming Mantis. He had a fleeting image of a rangy man in greens and browns, trying to bring a spear down on him, but his own sudden reversal – and the sheer speed with which a man of his size had moved – gained him time enough to bat the needle point aside and bring his other axe about in an attempt at cutting the man in two. The Mantis leapt over the scything blade, dragging his spear up to skewer Gorrec like a fish, but the Wasp was still moving, letting his impetus carry him out of the spear’s path and bringing both axes about so that they nearly crossed. There was a moment when the Mantis should have backed off, but the man’s face was twisted with rage and loathing, finding this intruder in his people’s hidden halls, and he just drove on forwards. The spearhead gouged a shallow line across the Wasp’s shoulder, despite all Gorrec’s weavings, but then came the moment when the two axe-heads were just too large, too fast, to be avoided, taking up all available space about the Mantis warrior. Even then the man almost won free, diving through a gap that seemed too small to let a Fly through, but Gorrec and the twin axes went back a long way, and they knew each other well. Just as the Mantis was almost clear, there they were again, and this time their victim had nowhere to go.

  Gorrec shook the blood from the blades, and the next Mantis was on him without warning, following the steel course of her rapier blade directed at his throat. He fell backwards – the only move that would keep him out of the weapon’s path – and the woman had vaulted him, turned even as she landed, lunging back at his chest as he scrambled on his elbows to try and get out of the way.

  Then she had pitched backwards, her deadly blade spinning from her hands, while Gorrec jumped to his feet, axes still in hand. Ten yards away, almost lost amidst the trees, the Beetle Jons Escarrabin was reloading his snapbow, hands working automatically as his eyes raked their surroundings.

  Gorrec tensed, awaiting the next challenger, but there came nothing. Either the fight had moved on, or it had simply broken up. He and Escarrabin had the forest to themselves, save for the corpses.

  Apparently satisfied, the Beetle Pioneer dropped to one knee by the closest body, essaying a quick search for anything of value. A moment later Icnumon sloped out of the shadows, sheathing his blades.

  Just another day in the service, Gorrec considered, reaching into his pouch for his medicine kit, because he reckoned this was the sort of place wounds would turn bad fast, if you let them.

  He put one axe down and issued his orders by way of hand gestures: You two keep watch, advance slowly, I’m falling back to report. I’ll catch up. Pioneers weren’t the talkative type.

  I just hope Her Majesty has a free hand with the rewards, when we get back, was all he thought about it. Just because he had trained for this sort of work didn’t mean he had to like heading into the darkest depths of a Mantis hold. Even amongst the Pioneers that approached as close to suicide as any of them cared to tread.

  She waved away the big Pioneer’s report as soon as he started to make it, simply saying, ‘I know,’ to his brutish, uncomprehending face. ‘I know it all,’ and she sent him back to his comrades, to continue breaking ground, to keep up with the rush of the Nethyen.

  ‘Majesty . . .?’ Gjegevey queried uncertainly. He did not feel it, she realized. Neither did Tegrec, the Wasp in Moth’s clothing. They were both magicians in their way, but their power was wan and tepid, rusted from disuse in the one case, and newly minted and shallow in the other. Seda’s speculative gaze moved on, past Tisamon and Ostrec, until she met the blank eyes of Yraea, the Moth ambassador, and in that featureless gaze she felt some kindred echo. Of course, the Moths had ruled over the Mantids for millennia, and now she, Seda, was treading where once they had held sole dominion.

  And she does not like it. Seda found herself reading that much into those white eyes. I wonder what orders she has been given by her Skryre masters? Find some way of taking my inheritance from me, and then down with the mistress of the Empire, no doubt. She knew from her own researches that the Days of Lore had not been filled with peace and brotherhood between the Inapt powers. They had fought, jostled for dominance, destroyed one another. By the time the Apt began to climb from the mud, their masters had already exhausted themselves.

  A failure I do not plan to repeat. I may have to destroy the Moths, if I cannot find a way to rule them. The same went for the others: she would brook no rivals. Will I be safe only when I am the last magician left in the world?

  But let me start with the Beetle girl. Perhaps when she is gone the world will dance to my liking. I will brook no rivals, but especially not her.

  And the girl was close, Seda was well aware. Closer and closer, weaving through the dense and haunted trees of this place, and seeking out Argastos for the power that the old shade held. More, she must feel just the same as Seda felt, as the forest spoke to her, as its convolutions and depths made themselves known.

  Just as a map of a mountain range can only hint at the complex creases and folds the real earth is twisted into, so the visible forest was a mere gloss over a tightly knotted magical landscape centuries old. Here the Mantids had begun, here they had stretched out their mailed and spiny arm to overshadow the Lowlands, at the Moths’ will. From here had sprung their poets and champions, Weaponsmasters, seers and heroes. Here they had shed blood, their own and that of others, offering by duel and feud so many delicious sacrifices to the wood’s dark and rotten heart. Here their idols stood, drinking the lives of the fallen. And here they had retreated, once the world had turned. In the last days of their power, here they were to be found, in this place that had been theirs, and only theirs. This was the unconquered past, the last sanctuary of their histories, and it spoke to her. The forest was like a vast, malevolent mind dispersed and parcelled out between the trees, the beasts, even the people. She could sense it, this great and ancient thing that did not acknowledge the progressive world without. When the Pioneers and the Nethyen had fought, she had known of it. When blood was shed, she had rejoiced and grown stronger with it.

  She stared into the face of Yraea, sounding out how far that kinship went, and found that she had outstripped the Moth already. Moth-kinden magic was different, more refined, more cautious, ever playing the long game: a thousand pieces on a board that reached to infinity. The Moths had mastered their Mantis servants, but they had left them their sacred places, their savagery and their bloody-handed pride. Wasps knew all about that. We are the true inheritors of the Mantis-kinden, more than any other.

  And her spread senses resounded to the encroachment of the Etheryen, already flanking the Pioneers, and she called out ‘To arms!’ Her little band of magicians jumped, startled and unsure, but Tisamon was moving, as were her Mantis bodyguards in their black and gold mail. And there were Wasps beyond them, soldiers who knew what to do when an order came.

  She levelled her hand, feeling the swift flurry through the dark that was the approaching enemy, knowing them as a part of her, tied by the same cords to the vast sounding board of the forest. When her sting spat, the gold fire searing into the chest of the leading Etheryen warrior, that death was her gift to the forest, and she and her victim were enacting a ritual as old as time.

  The Mantis band was small, no more than half a dozen, but they were very swift, and she guessed they had been hunting for her, trying to hack the head from their enemy. Tisamo
n cut two arrows from the air that had been loosed at her, and then her soldiers were rushing forwards to interpose themselves, even as her bodyguards engaged. Mantis fought Mantis with all the grace and ferocity of their training, claw versus claw. Seda simply stood and waited, watching that handful of them eddy and sway, seeing Tisamon strike and strike again, swift and deadly, but meeting a skill that had the same roots as his own. A handful of Wasps had run in also, and two were dead already, but they had killed off the momentum of the Etheryen charge. For a moment it seemed that nothing was left except for the killing, but then a silver-haired Mantis man broke free of the melee, dancing aside from Tisamon’s lunge with a young-man’s nimble step, and he was driving at Seda the next moment.

  And the forest did not care, of course. Blood was blood, and if she fell to this man’s steel claw, that would also be fitting.

  She exerted herself, however, focusing her attention on him in the brief second before he reached her. Fear me, worship me, adore me. Time slowed about her, and she wrestled with the arrowhead of his mind even as her palm spread, sting heating in her fingers.

  Or am I too slow? As if in a dream, she saw him falter but not stop. The claw was drawn back, ready to drive itself down into her, and still she had no belief in it. I am Seda, Empress of the Wasps. I cannot die.

  Then Ostrec was there, ducking in low under the Mantis’s guard with shocking speed: no sting, not even a sword, but ramming a dagger home to the hilt, sending the Mantis staggering, keeping him just out of blade range of the Empress. The man refused to fall, but by then it was too late because Tisamon had caught him up, that one second making all the difference, and Seda let her sting cool again as her armoured ghost opened the silver-haired Mantis’s throat with a hooking strike.

  It was over by then. She had lost three soldiers and two of her six bodyguards, a steep price to pay. The small band of Etheryen had gambled all they had on killing her, on excising her from their world.