War Master's Gate

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Thirty

  In the air hung curtains of dawn mist and Che could hear, all around, an army standing quietly, so absurdly quietly. She heard the creak of leather and the scrape of metal, the stamp and snort of horses and the click of chitin. Such small noises, and yet she knew that there were thousands assembled here, a great war-host gathered on a strange, sparsely wooded hillside in the half-light, waiting to fight the greatest battle of their lives. They had come here to save the world.

  ‘History will sing of this day for all the centuries to come,’ said a voice from beside her, almost conversationally. ‘We will be heroes, every one of us.’

  ‘Let us hope history has the chance,’ from another voice, but receding, and she hurried after it, into the mist that was even now beginning to thin. The shadows of the soldiers all around her were filling out with details. Mantis-kinden, she saw, rank on rank of them, and all clad in intricately crafted mail of chitin and steel. She cowered before their massed regard, expecting any moment for one of them to call her out. She did not belong here, that much was plain, and Mantis-kinden were notorious for their intolerance of intruders.

  But they ignored her, as if beneath their notice, and yet, as she stepped amongst them, she felt there were memories submerged somewhere in her mind . . . Had she not had dealings with the Mantids only recently, and from a position of strength?

  The realization that she was dreaming came creeping on her, not quite confirmed yet but well on its way. She had been through too many visions and wonders to be held in ignorance for too long. For now, though, she followed the two speakers through the Mantids’ silent ranks, because they were her only point of reference.

  ‘We have driven them this far,’ said that the first voice, so rich and smooth, a voice of character and power. ‘Across the world, we have driven them. They have brought all their armies together to face us, in their last stand. When we break them now, they must come to terms. Even a hate as mad as theirs must know limits.’

  ‘Must it?’ The other voice was female, older and more melancholy, and Che had caught up with them now, stepping absurdly close because now she had understood that nobody here would notice her. She was inviolate because she was only an afterthought, a spectator to someone else’s thoughts.

  When she saw him, that first speaker, she knew whose thoughts they were. He was a Moth-kinden, but nothing like the breed she knew from Tharn or Dorax. Tall and broad-shouldered from a life of action, with a long sword hanging low and horizontal behind him, everything about him spoke warrior. His white stare was fierce and proud, and when it turned on her she felt a jolt of contact even though he was gazing straight through her. His features sent a shiver through her, too: something in them of Achaeos, her dead lover. Here were the grey skin and blank eyes of his kinden, yes, but more than that. Here was the face of a man who had lived and fought, known triumph and defeat, and had conquered both. Infinitely human, fallible and yet a man who had faced his own failings.

  He was one of the most handsome men she had ever seen. Perhaps only Salme Dien had been a more beautiful specimen of humanity.

  He wore a hauberk of chitin scales that fell to his knees, with a loose, open robe slung over it, and in the crook of his arm rested a high, crested helm set with glittering iridescent wings, the very picture of a warrior prince from the distant past, back when even the Days of Lore were young. And he was a magician, too, for she could smell it on him.

  Argastos in life, seen through his own recollections.

  The woman beside him was taller, hunched and bald, her pasty skin banded with grey: a Woodlouse-kinden but a warrior as well. Che had never seen the like, for she was encased in great articulated lames of bronze, a metal carapace that must weigh two hundred pounds or more, and yet the woman moved easily inside it, for all her apparent years.

  And now the mist was blowing away.

  ‘We must triumph today,’ Argastos declared. ‘There must be an end to it.’

  The army took shape about them, in between the scattered trees, and Che caught her breath. She had never seen such a sight, nor had anyone else for a thousand years.

  The Mantis-kinden were all around them, and she realized that these were Argastos’s personal guard, all five hundred of them; and beyond them were ranged the other war bands, together making up a host of the Inapt such as she had never seen. She saw more Mantids, and groups of Moth-kinden in leather and chitin mail, with arrows to their bows. There was the glittering finery of Dragonfly nobles on horseback, lifting their long swords towards the ascending dawn and shouting out their battle cries. She saw whole blocks of armoured Woodlouse-kinden bristling with pikes and halberds, and knots of large-framed Scorpions trailed by packs of their beasts, claws agape. Haughty Spider-kinden in bright silks stalked forwards with bow and spear, giving the Mantids a wide berth. And there were more, too: here was a score of lean, lightly armoured men and women she knew for Assassin Bugs, and there – she shuddered to see them out in the morning light, but there was no mistaking those red eyes set in pallid faces – Mosquito-kinden, armed and armoured for battle, standing almost shoulder to shoulder with a dozen kinden who hated them with a passion.

  And, as she kept looking, she saw the others as well: less bright, less magical, less prominent, but gathered in numbers nonetheless. Ant-kinden with wooden shields and leather armour; Beetles – her own ancestors – in bronze mail of a style that recalled Khanaphes; Great Mole Crickets; the darting forms of Flies. Here was the whole world, and it had come to do battle.

  And now there was a great woman striding between those war bands, tall as a Mole Cricket but of a less massive build, robed and partly armoured in chitin plate, pointing a staff down the hillside and calling out to Argastos, ‘War Master! They come!’

  The huge woman’s helm was open, and Che looked upon her face and knew her name. Elysiath Neptellian, Lady of the Bright Water, She whose Word Breaks all Bonds, Princess of the Thousand. Last seen by Che in the catacombs beneath Khanaphes, a millennium later, but here she was young and far from the great city of her people – a people who must already be in decline – and she had come to fight. They had all come to fight.

  And Che could see, further down the hill, another host that seemed to be forming out of the very earth itself: a vast horde of armoured figures. A fear arose at the sight of them – the fear of all about her regarding that terrible enemy. She understood – because Argastos understood – that many of those out there had been their kin, somehow, before falling into darkness. For this was the army of the Worm that sought to make everything like itself.

  ‘Their seers block ours,’ the Woodlouse woman announced. ‘We cannot know their full strength.’

  ‘They are many, what else do we need to know?’ Argastos asked her. ‘We have forced them to this battle. We can hardly leave them hungry now, can we?’

  The host of the Worm was beginning to move, though Che could make out scant detail of them. She saw the war bands jostle amongst themselves, archers moving forwards and readying their arrows, and the others forming no real line, nothing like a modern battle order, each war band to its own. But she understood, having been in those same shoes, that there were magicians here – many, many magicians of all kinden. Each would direct a band, and speak to his or her fellows, for thus were the wars of the Inapt conducted back in the days of great magics.

  And Argastos turned to her and smiled, lifting his helm to his head. ‘You do not want to see this,’ he told her. ‘What is a battle, after all? And this battle, above all others, with no quarter given, no mercy, no call to hold until we had driven the Worm entirely from the land. And even then, even then they would not yield, but massed in their underground fastnesses and swore vengeance. And try as we might . . . what could we do, other than what we did?’

  She found him again, seated on a fallen tree and staring at a hole in the ground.

  A change had come over him in however long the battle had lasted. His armour was battered, scales cracked and los
t, and his helm had lost its crest. His robe was torn, and she saw a wound in his shoulder, now patched over with a poultice in the style of Moth medicine. The real change was in his face, though, and she wondered how many years the battle could have taken, to leave him looking so drawn and lined.

  But his pale eyes discerned her, despite the fact that she was not there. ‘What else can we do?’ he asked. ‘Even now, my fellow war leaders consider my proposal. But we must win. We must have outright victory, or what was it all for?’

  The hole was ten feet across and rimmed with stone, she saw, and there were soldiers there – the mixture of kinden that she had seen before. Even as she watched, some were descending – flying or climbing as their Art permitted – and others were emerging. She knew, by that same dream logic by which all knowledge came to her here, that there was still fighting taking place below, that the Worm was holding out, just as Argastos had said, and planning its return.

  ‘They would make us all like them,’ Argastos explained. ‘That is what they want, just segment after identical segment of a single whole, until they become the entire world.’

  A small group was approaching him now, and Che studied them. Leaders, warlords and great magicians, surely: a Moth woman in a silver skullcap who must have been a Skryre; a Dragonfly prince; a Spider Arista; a Mosquito with a fluid red birthmark blemishing his pallid forehead; a Mantis Weapons-master, with a brooch that would hardly have changed by Tisamon’s day, though everything else about them was made unfamiliar by all the years that stood between their time and hers. At the back, poling himself along with a staff, another of the ponderous Masters of Khanaphes, this one a stranger to her. The mighty and powerful of this early age, and yet their attitude to Argastos was one of wary deference.

  ‘War Master,’ said the Moth, ‘we have thought on what you say.’ Her face was twisted with uncertainty, doubts bubbling to the surface and about to be raised, but a hand raised by Argastos brought silence.

  ‘Give me another option,’ he challenged them. ‘Show me another way that does not leave the Worm free to return. I will not repeat the slaughter of this war, nor would I wish it on the future.’

  ‘The cost,’ the Dragonfly observed. ‘You do not just condemn the Worm. Think of their slaves – and those of our own people trapped below . . .’

  ‘And yet the more we send to rescue them, the more we lose in trying to fight the Worm on its own ground,’ Argastos replied flatly. ‘I know. Nethonwy is down there, my closest counsellor, lost trying to free her kin from the yoke of the Worm. Do not think that I don’t know, but there is no other way – and now, whilst the magicians of the Worm are weak, and cannot prevent us.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘And they gain in strength even now. We all realize this.’

  They were all of them unhappy, but Che could feel them yielding to his logic. In war, sometimes one must do terrible things, but she knew that what they would enact now would be the most terrible thing of all: a magical violation of the world never before seen, never attempted since, that would make the harrowing of the Darakyon seem like a handful of dust in comparison. In this age, with magic waxing at its highest and these great practitioners banded together – at no other time in history could such a thing have been done.

  And, hearing her thoughts, Argastos looked from his allies back to her and said, ‘Be grateful, then, for that.’

  The world around them was fading out, as though a curtain had been drawn over the sun. The others – those magicians of the elder days – withdrew into the gathering shadows, falling back into a history that had forgotten them, until she stood alone before Argastos in utter darkness, and her night-seeing Art could find nothing to relieve it.

  ‘You sealed them off,’ she accused him. ‘You stopped up their tunnels and buried them, is that it?’

  He regarded her, at once imperious and tragic and damned. ‘Bury the Worm? Bury those that live in the earth? And how would that have helped? They were sovereign lords of their realm, as we discovered when we tried to bring the war to them. They knew that, even if we had defeated them beneath the sun, we could not hope to triumph below. They knew that all they had to do was wait. There would always be another chance.’

  Che searched his face, trying to elicit some truth from it – from that image of himself that he chose to show her. Had he been a good man? He had been courageous and strong, she guessed, but those qualities were independent of vice or virtue. What alternatives did they actually try, before resorting to their ultimate sanction?

  ‘Oh, you censure me, Cheerwell Maker,’ he said softly. ‘You pass judgement on the victories that made your whole world possible. You cannot imagine the hate, though. You cannot know how they hated us – all of us, every kinden other than their own. Your Wasp Empire would seem a kindness compared to the Worm.’

  ‘And yet they were human, a whole kinden, men, women and children – and slaves, too. And you killed them all.’

  His face was a cipher. ‘But we did not kill them, Cheerwell Maker. We rid the world of them, but we did not kill them. They are still there – or whatever they have become in their long centuries of exile. You cannot bury the Worm, so we enacted our ritual of last resort. We took their domain and everything in it – the Worm and their slaves and all those we had sent down and who could not return – and we excised them from the world entirely. We folded the weave of the cosmos around them and seared the join shut. And, as they had always wanted to be sole masters of creation, we gave them what they wished. We made their realm its own separate and sealed creation. We removed them from the world.’

  Che felt that she should make some remark about how impossible that surely must be, but instead she found herself understanding the principle. The strength required to accomplish it, she could not guess at, but the magician in her recognized the theory behind it to be sound.

  ‘Such power it demanded, and the war itself had already cost so many lives, and our guilt regarding so many lost beneath the earth – lost through our own ritual . . . Perhaps that was when the world began to turn, the magic to fade from it. The grand alliance between the great powers broke up almost immediately. Some never recovered: the Woodlouse-kinden abandoned their domains and retreated to their rotting heartland. The Khanaphir were already failing. There was civil war amongst the Spider-kinden. My people’s doom came slower, for they had taken upon themselves the mantle of protector of the world, and in that cause they would fight slow-burning wars against many of their erstwhile allies, confident in their vision of a better future. Except it was not their future they were fighting to bring about – it was yours.’ And he said this with no rancour, without any bitterness at all.

  ‘And you?’ she asked him. ‘Where were you in all this?’

  He laughed, without much humour. ‘Watch.’

  She was further off now, watching the next proceedings from the trees – not quite the tangled, knotted old woodland that the Nethyen and their neighbours called home in her time, but a younger, greener place, more innocent to her eyes. She wondered if all the world had been that way once, before the Inapt and later the Apt had come, to corrupt and to despoil it.

  In front of her was a clearing, and she saw quite a crowd gathered about a mound. Ant-kinden workers were busy laying stone slabs over it, as though trying to armour the earth itself. She saw a gaping mouth there, a gap that was being turned into a door.

  ‘They tore down Argax, my beloved hall.’ The voice of Argastos sounded clearly in her mind, though he was nowhere near her. ‘They broke it apart, timber by timber, and they brought its golden gates here, where they had raised this abomination of a barrow over the Great Seal – the key Seal that kept the Worm forever elsewhere. It was necessary, they claimed. After all that had been lost, after all we had done, they could not risk some fool breaking the Seal and letting them out.’ His voice had changed, grown older, bitter and angry.

  She saw them there: a score or more of Moths in their grey robes, and at least twice that number of Mantis-kind
en. The latter were armed and armoured, just as they had been on the battlefield, and yet there was a terrible air of defeat hanging about them, also dread. Even as she watched, they were filing into the mound, one by one.

  ‘My people, my followers,’ Argastos whispered. ‘Betrayed, as I was betrayed, sacrificed to keep me company in my vigil. So necessary, they insisted, and all the while I looked into their minds and saw how they simply wanted rid of me, because of what we had done. I was too great a reminder of the lengths we had gone to, in order to win the war.’

  And Che watched Argastos, in bright, unblemished mail, turn to face those other Moths, and she watched as his shoulders slumped, and then he turned and stepped into darkness.

  ‘They left me no choice,’ continued the voice in her mind.

  She watched the great gates being raised, with their scales of gilded wood gleaming in the sun, and she knew that Argastos and his followers had been bound, within the heart of the hill, bound over the Seal of the Worm for all time. After that, the Moths had gone some way towards removing his name from any histories the outside world might uncover. And he was still there – still here – even in this late age when hardly anyone even remembered his name.

  And the vision faded once more, leaving her again in that vacant blackness with Argastos.

  ‘And here you are,’ he remarked and, knowing what she did, she could read any amount of terrible intentions in those elegant features.

  ‘Do you mean to break the Seal, after all this time?’ she asked. It seemed the natural way for him to punish those that had turned on him.

  ‘No!’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Of all things not that – not after the cost that we all paid. Not after the friends I lost – the friends I had to abandon because they had gone below and never returned. But I will escape this place, believe me. I will be avenged.’

  A sudden thought occurred to her. ‘And you’re showing all of this to her as well, aren’t you?’ There was no need to specify whom she spoke of.