War Master's Gate

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Thalric’s eyes sought out Che’s. ‘Sorry,’ he managed. ‘I’m afraid the only War Master I know is your uncle, and I can’t quite see him saying any of that stuff to the Assembly.’

  It was not funny. Nothing about their situation was funny, but Che felt a near-hysterical laugh build up inside her nonetheless.

  Argastos’s face was set in stone. No, it was as though he had simply abandoned it, its last expression just sitting there like a slack-stringed puppet, because whatever was behind it had no further use for it. ‘You dare,’ he hissed, ‘to mock the War Master?’

  It was the worst thing he could possibly have said, for Che burst out with a horrified whoop of laughter despite herself, despite everything. She caught a glimpse of Seda’s face, too, bewildered but no longer bewitched.

  And only then could she see, beyond that smoothly handsome exterior, that warrior’s frame in its archaic armour. Just for a second she saw the dried-stick thing that was Argastos, the corpse a thousand years in the ground, decaying and renewed like one of those Mantis icons, until only some hideous stub of a man endured, leathery and preserved and barely larger than a child, its face locked into the same expression of dismay that it must have worn as they sealed the man in his tomb, so very long ago.

  And he shrieked, a high, inhuman sound, knowing that she had seen. Although she tried to muster her power to resist him, he was correct about his superior skill, for he cast her down with ease and banished her into the far reaches of his nightmare.

  Thirty-Five

  That morning Captain Vrakir of the Red Watch awoke and finally understood the meaning of the insistent dreams he had been having.

  With trembling hands he went and opened the orders that his Empress had given him before he set off to find General Tynan.

  ‘So you see, Master Maker, matters have advanced somewhat,’ Eujen finished.

  Stenwold regarded him calmly, whilst all about them the business of the College infirmary carried on, just as it had to. The beds were close-packed here – a room designed to deal with a handful of ill students now catering to some thirty injured soldiers, and even to the city’s War Master.

  He was sitting up, at least, though he still felt leaden and tired. If he tried to do anything active, he ran out of strength pitifully fast, but he was alive and getting stronger. They called the stuff they had pumped into him ‘Instar’, something concocted by the College chemists. They would not have dared trying it on humans save for the war, and even then it was administered to those who would have died anyway, in the surgeons’ opinion. Kill or cure it most certainly was. They had even branded Stenwold on the shoulder, adding further injury to injury, as the mark of someone who had received a dose of this Instar, to warn off future doctors. All indications suggested that two doses would be painfully fatal. Two doses in how long? Stenwold had asked them. Tests on animals had not shown an upper limit, he was told. Two doses in a man’s lifetime was one too many.

  Eujen stepped back to let the Fly-kinden nurse take a reading of Stenwold’s pulse. As she did so, her hard, accusing eyes lanced into her patient. Balkus lay in the next bed, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, and Sperra plainly blamed Stenwold for his condition, perhaps not unjustly. The War Master was perhaps the only man who could now help Princep Salma, though, so she was bitterly and ruthlessly doing her bit to keep him alive. Much more of that guilt-laden care, and Stenwold would force himself to get out of bed, even if it killed him.

  ‘Do you have anything resembling a plan?’ he wheezed at Eujen, already trying to think of how to salvage the current situation. Was this why Jodry brought the war to a close, just so some pack of students could go and poke the Wasps’ nest? And for what?

  ‘I do,’ Eujen confirmed, plainly nettled by Stenwold’s tone. ‘I have sent messengers to some of the major magnates and artisans of the neighbouring districts – community leaders that my own people believe are loyal to the city. Some are here already, but they want to talk to you of course, not to me. The Wasps went on the rampage last night, and there have been arrests all through today. Whole areas of the city are just off boiling point. They hanged Jodry Drillen, Master Maker. I wouldn’t have believed that his death would spark such fires, but everywhere people are talking about it.’

  Stenwold stared at him, thinking, You bloody fool, Jodry, and wanting to say something disdainful, to knock this arrogant young man back down. He’s, what, eighteen years, nineteen, and what does he think he knows? I remember him when he was saying we should be avoiding a war, and now look at him trying to start . . .

  ‘Revolt,’ he said, and then one of those irresistible spasms went through him and he wasted a valuable half-minute coughing up what felt like a whole lung. His eyes never left Eujen Leadswell’s face, though, and this latest attack gave his thoughts the chance to turn the wheel once more.

  Like: What might have happened, if we had worked harder to avoid this war? Because it surely doesn’t seem to have turned out well for any of us. And: If any man should be saying, ‘I told you so,’ it’s him. But there was nothing but earnestness on Eujen’s face, a man determined to meet the challenge the world has burdened him with.

  ‘What news from Sarn, anyone?’ He tried to look around. ‘Laszlo?’

  The Fly-kinden glanced up from his hushed conversation with Sperra. ‘Nothing, Mar’Maker. But I reckon they’re fighting about now, must be. Or maybe the Mantids have seen sense and pitched in at last.’

  ‘If we can hold out until Sarn relieves us . . .’ Stenwold murmured, almost too quietly to be heard. ‘If the city is still up in arms, then Sarn must come to our aid. Or even Vek. Someone.’ He was aware that his gaze fixed on Eujen was almost beseeching, but the student was nodding agreement.

  ‘We need the city, though. Not just us,’ he replied. ‘We need the whole city to rise. And the city needs the War Master.’

  Stenwold took a deep breath. ‘Where the pits is my stick?’ he demanded.

  Laszlo passed it over: a heavy length of wood bound in brass with a hooked head, as warlike a support as any War Master could require.

  With a great effort, Stenwold levered himself to his feet, expecting Sperra to protest and try to stop him. She just stared, though, as if she would not be entirely unhappy to see him spilling onto his backside. He managed to get upright, despite some trembling, and took another breath, conscious of its shallowness. The Instar was still working, but he was not sure that he would be the same again, not ever.

  At last one of the medical staff was bustling over to protest – Sartaea te Mosca, and why so many of the healers were Flies he had no idea – with her hands extended, insisting that he at least sat back down. The resistance she provided was gratifying. It gave him something to lean against.

  ‘Chief Officer Leadswell,’ he snapped, ‘who do we have here?’

  ‘Master Vendall of the Vendall Balkhead workshops. Storvus the machinist from Faculty Row. Someone from Grounder Imports. A couple from the Messengers’ Guild. Possibly more by now.’ Eujen shrugged.

  ‘You’ve been busy,’ Stenwold remarked.

  ‘We have very little time.’

  ‘Then let me speak to them.’

  ‘Hard to think that from this dismal ruin ruled the power that might once have challenged the Empire,’ General Tynan observed. Around them extended the broken teeth of the Amphiophos: half-crumbled walls, caved-in domes, a maze of back rooms mostly roofless, everywhere tumbled, fire-blackened stones.

  ‘They probably think it still is,’ Mycella remarked, standing at his elbow. There was a cordon of Wasp soldiers strung about the place, looking out for any Collegiate citizen showing an unhealthy amount of civic pride, but Tynan had little fear of that.

  He was here, at last, in the heart of the enemy’s city. After so long, he had broken them.

  ‘I know you were here before, with your fleet – sorry, your armada is the term in the Spiderlands, isn’t it? I know that they’ve wounded you – and I can’t even guess at the situati
on back home that forces you to be here. Even though you’ve told me about it, I still can’t really guess.’ He smiled at her, and some of her Fly servants appeared with a decanter and small glasses and set them up on one of the toppled stones, casting a cloth down first so as not to contaminate the vintage with the dust of Collegium’s fall. ‘What you may not understand, though, is what this means to me to be here at last. Three times, I’ve marched against this city. Three times I’ve taken the road from Tark, fought the bloody Felyen, got right to their walls, and . . . the Emperor dies, or we lose our Air Corps and I give the order to fall back, because maintaining a siege in such conditions would be suicide. And then the Empress tells me, no, straight back in you go. And we rewrote the textbooks when we took that gate: Light Airborne and the Sentinels and no real artillery? They’ll be saying we set the science of war back twenty years. But we did it, my boys and your followers.’ He chose a piece of overturned Collegiate government to sit on and received his tiny glass with its oil-black contents. ‘Here we are,’ he concluded.

  Mycella was regarding him with a curious expression, but it was mostly fond. Of course, he had to remind himself, what are such expressions worth? But that was only form, for he had relaxed with her in slow stages, and now he wanted to interpret the outer show for the inner thought.

  ‘Is Aldanrael honour now avenged?’ he asked her.

  At that, her face lifted slightly. ‘Thank you for believing that we have any. The Mantids would tell you we’ve none – the Collegiates too, most likely. Treachery and deceit are bred into our bones, they say. But, yes, here I stand, joint mistress of all I survey, and the voices of my slain son and niece are quieted for me. And when I return home again it shall be as a conqueror, with my power and influence restored. I shall have redeemed my family with a currency my people must recognize: success.’

  ‘And the alliance with the Empire?’

  ‘That also. Given the mess that came out of our states actually locking swords last time, I think it’s in everyone’s interest, except the rest of the world’s.’ And she raised her glass and rolled the contents over her tongue, savouring the liquid. Tynan did likewise – finding it was something like sweet vinegar, far beyond his normal taste and yet he knew it was a vastly expensive delicacy for her people.

  An acquired taste, but I am fast acquiring it.

  ‘There is an occupation force mustering – perhaps already on its way,’ he remarked. ‘Then some lucky colonel will be made governor of this place. And the Second will resupply and reinforce and set off towards Vek, assuming Roder can do his job up north. And you?’

  She gave a delicate little one-shouldered shrug. ‘If you’d asked me that a month ago, I’d have said the Spiderlands for sure, but who knows . . . it would be stretching credibility to say that I’d heard Vek was lovely at this time of year, or at any time, but perhaps I’ll see its walls with you, nonetheless.’

  When he placed a hand to her chin, the better to admire her, he heard the slight shift of her bodyguard, Jadis. But the man was not close by, and Tynan could virtually plot the intimacy of his relationship with Mycella on a graph by assessing the distance off that Jadis stood over time, each day a little further away.

  Then there was a new Fly-kinden at her elbow, slipping in so swiftly and suddenly that half the Airborne there were still trying to take aim at him even as he got too close for them to do so. He was dressed in a tunic of Collegiate fashion, but he knelt before Mycella nevertheless.

  ‘General, one moment.’ There was a shadow of worry on her face as she stepped aside.

  The report her agent made to her was brief and to the point, murmured low enough that Tynan caught none of it. But the moment the man had finished, she returned to his side.

  ‘We may be a little premature, it seems. My man has received details of some considerable unrest near the College. He thinks that your soldiers might have some work to do there yet.’

  Tynan wanted to scoff, because the city was his, and in his hands, and he had known himself to be the master of it. He had not come this far, though, without discovering that her sources of intelligence – and her instincts – were superior to his own. A gesture, and he had a soldier before him, ready for orders.

  ‘Get me Colonel Cherten, and I don’t care what he’s doing,’ he commanded. ‘He needs to hear this.’

  Castre Gorenn, Commonweal Retaliatory Army and currently feeling every inch of it, crouched atop the courtyard wall, keeping an eye on the street below. To her left was Officer Serena, formerly of the Fealty Street Company before it was disbanded, with another Fly-kinden to her right. Both had snapbows, held out of sight, and both were out of uniform and doing their level best to appear simply interested in the view. Gorenn herself was sufficiently foreign that, though she kept her bow below the level of the wall top – with a half-dozen arrows lying ready on the stonework for swiftness – she had kept her buff coat and sash on, because it hardly seemed that they would make much of a difference.

  And still the Wasps did not arrive. She had assumed that there would be a patrol, or a fly-over, or even just someone putting their Wasp-kinden head around the corner, but her sharp eyes had seen none of that, though by now everyone in the district must be aware that something had happened. After all, there had been a lot of shouting and dying only two hours ago, and even these lumpen Beetle-kinden had ears.

  But nothing, and she began to wonder about the turncoat Beetle nobleman – or however the hierarchy worked here – who had turned up with those soldiers in tow. Could it be that he hadn’t told anyone he was coming here?

  The Wasps wouldn’t just overlook a dozen missing soldiers when they were tallying up their troops – she knew enough about how they did things – but what if they had no clues, what if . . .?

  Then some Wasps arrived just as she was pondering this, a little squad of five, and she froze, one unseen hand reaching deftly for her first arrow. But the Wasps were approaching without any overt caution, so maybe in their minds missing had not yet become dead. Even so, the moment they drew near, surely everything was going to go to the black pit, because none of these Beetle-kinden could dissemble worth a damn.

  ‘Good day, soldier . . . Sergeant?’ Serena’s high, clear voice sang out, and she projected just the right combination of nervous good humour and concern. ‘Can we . . . can we help you?’

  The lead soldier stared up at her, and then made a short, ugly gesture to beckon her down. For a second Serena hesitated, hands still on her snapbow below the wall’s lip, but then she silently set it down and hopped over the edge, drifting down on her Art wings.

  Gorenn crouched even lower and listened intently.

  ‘I’m looking for your chief, Boiler the Speaker,’ the sergeant stated. ‘He’s somewhere around here with a dozen soldiers he’s not entitled to. You seen him?’

  ‘Helmess Broiler?’ Serena appeared all bafflement. ‘Why would he be here?’

  ‘Why the piss would I know?’ the sergeant demanded. ‘Have you seen him or haven’t you? He came this way, for sure.’

  ‘Not a sight of him,’ Serena insisted and, at the man’s suspicious look, added, ‘What?’

  He moved in closer, forcing her to skitter back a couple of paces. ‘You’re lucky one of yours is being trusted like he is. If he’s been cooking up some business with you here, then you’ll be having a Wasp as the Speaker of your whatever-it-is, and no mistake.’

  Serena’s incredulity was unfeigned. ‘Believe me, we’re not covering up for Helmess Broiler. He’s not popular around here.’

  That last sounded altogether too heartfelt for Gorenn’s liking, especially given that Broiler’s mortal remains were still suspended from a beam inside, but the sergeant seemed to take it in good humour.

  ‘Sounds as it should be. You see him, tell his sergeant to get the man straight back to command. I imagine you’ll be glad to be rid of him, to hear you.’

  Serena nodded. ‘You know how it is, Sergeant,’ and he certainly seemed
to, and Gorenn saw Serena’s wings flicker into being to carry her back to the wall. But there were more Wasps suddenly, a half-dozen running out of the machine shops down Faculty Row, and Gorenn could hear a noise – a sort of liquid, rumbling sound – that at first she did not realize emerged from human throats.

  ‘Sergeant, trouble!’

  ‘Report like a soldier!’ the sergeant snapped back. He had forgotten Serena but she lingered down there beside him, because this was obviously news.

  ‘Looks like some of the locals are having a go, Sergeant. There’s a mob – maybe two score – and it’s all artificers’ workshops down there, so who knows what they’ve got.’

  The sergeant swore. ‘Go, contain the situation if you can, pull back to here if you can’t. I’ll fetch more some men.’ At his brief gesture, the soldiers were hurrying back the way they had come, the sergeant’s four alongside them. Left alone, the Wasp’s own wings flicked out and . . .

  Gorenn shot him. Coming up from behind the cover of the wall in one smooth motion, she lanced an arrow straight through his open mouth, then dropped back on one knee to fit another shaft to the string.

  ‘You . . . what . . .?’ Serena turned a pale face up towards her, showing a spatter of blood across one cheek. ‘We were just—’

  ‘Go tell the War Master they’ve started without him,’ Gorenn ordered her, even though the diminutive woman had been an officer not long before. ‘They’re all still inside there. Beetles, always talking at the wrong times. Go tell them it’s started.’

  ‘You think Helmess Broiler has started a rebellion?’ Tynan demanded.

  Colonel Cherten shook his head hastily. ‘It’s the last thing I’d believe . . . but the fact remains that we can’t find him, and our men have just been thrown out of everywhere within three streets from the College library – with casualties. There are Beetles out in force, and most of them armed – not with snapbows, mostly, but they don’t lack for crossbows, and some have worse.’