War Master's Gate

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Your friends failed,’ he told her, ‘but you knew that.’ She could not fathom his expression, for none of the pieces seemed to fit together to make the man she had seen before.

  ‘There’s peace in Collegium tonight,’ he said. ‘First time in a while. We won. We won it all. We beat all of them.’ He sat down heavily across from her, the light gleaming on his bald head. He looked anything but triumphant. ‘What d’you think about that, eh?’ He yelled it without warning, as though the Wasp victory was a crime and she was somehow responsible.

  She had shrunk away from that yell, but now she turned her wide eye back to him and found him still staring at her, apparently wanting an answer.

  Something surfaced in her that had been buried for too long. ‘Should I be saying hooray for the Empire?’ she whispered, her voice hoarse.

  ‘Hooray,’ Tynan echoed, and put his head in his hands. With a sudden lurching of perspective, she realized that he was the sort of pure clear drunk that even Collegiate students seldom aspired to, and comfortable enough with it that he had been walking straight and speaking without slurring his words.

  ‘I killed her,’ he stated, without qualification. ‘I followed my orders. What else was I supposed to do? You can’t go against the throne. Who would obey a general who hadn’t obeyed his own orders, eh?’ Looking up again, his reddened eyes challenged her. ‘I couldn’t have just walked away, could I? I couldn’t have just said no.’

  And then, losing focus on her. ‘I thought she was going to kill me, when she summoned me back to Capitas. When she said she was giving me my Second back, I felt so proud . . .’

  Straessa was now completely lost, unsure even how many women the general was talking about, whether he was claiming to have killed the Empress herself, or any of it.

  ‘When we were at the walls the first time,’ he rambled on, ‘I captured Stenwold Maker. You remember that? I had his woman, and he walked out to save her from the pikes, gave himself to me. I had him in my hands. And then the orders came to head for home, but I could have had him shot. I could have rid the world of Stenwold Maker!’ A theatrical gesture, as though he had an audience of thousands. ‘But I let him go – and you know why? I liked him. I respected him. He had the sort of courage a Wasp should have . . . and that I’ve seen a good few officers lack! He abandoned his city, put himself in the jaws of the trap, just to save his woman pain. She betrayed him later, he told me. And she died for it.’

  Tynan reached around, fumbling at his belt, and she thought he was going for a weapon – absurd, as he could have stung her through the bars with ease. Then there was a flask in his hand and he knocked back a long swig of it, and held it out to her as if she was just another soldier he was drinking with.

  She took it with her uninjured hand and drank from it cautiously, recognizing a fiery brandy that sent a jab of pain down her parched throat.

  She handed it back, shaking only a little.

  ‘And now we find,’ Tynan remarked, ‘that I am not as brave as Stenwold Maker. That I would not walk away from my city to save my woman. That is what we learn.’ He drained the flask and threw it away, so that it clattered on the steps. ‘Tell me about him.’

  Straessa started. ‘What?’

  ‘Your man, the one I killed. What was he, to you?’

  She took a moment trying to collect her thoughts but they were scattered all about her head, defying order. ‘He was a fool who meant well,’ she said at last. ‘He never knew how to keep his mouth shut. He once almost got killed by Stenwold Maker. His best friend was a Wasp. He wanted there to be peace, and the fact that he hadn’t the faintest idea how to make that happen hurt him more than anything – more than almost anything.’ Her voice remained level only through a great exercise of will. ‘He would have been the best Speaker the Assembly ever had,’ she went on. ‘He could have healed the whole world.’

  General Tynan, master of the Gears, stared past the bars at her. ‘And when he was on the point of death, you came here for me, rather than staying by him,’ he observed.

  She nodded, but at that point could not trust herself to speak.

  ‘Then we neither of us have the courage we should have had,’ was his verdict, and next a great sigh. ‘And now I have orders still: every Spider in Collegium who’s still alive and hasn’t fled, every Spider must die. The Empress, she now hates Spiders so much, and nobody can tell me why, not even her creature Vrakir. I have my orders.’ And he stood up abruptly. ‘Not one Spider must remain alive in Collegium.’

  ‘I see,’ Straessa acknowledged.

  ‘But perhaps half a Spider, nobody will miss.’

  When he unlocked the bars, fumbling messily with the keys and then lifting the whole cage section away with more strength than she would have credited him with, she was not sure what to do. Here was General Tynan, the man she had come to kill. Here he was, drunk and off-balance, and surely he had a knife somewhere she could snatch. She could cut the head off the whole Second Army.

  But the injured parts of her cringed away at the thought of it, and besides, We neither of us have the courage we should have had. And how true.

  She tried to slip past him, not trusting her luck to bear her weight another moment, ready for the inevitable reversal. And he seized her wrist – her bad hand – dragging her back with a screech of pain.

  In that moment, all her defiance was overwritten by a desperate begging need to live, and to be free from pain, and nothing else was real to her but that.

  He tried to stuff something into her broken fingers, obviously not understanding why she was writhing and twisting in his grip, but at last she grabbed at it with her good hand, finding an untidy fold of papers.

  ‘Pass,’ he managed to explain. ‘Or you’d not get ten yards from here. But, more, you’re my messenger now. You’re going to Sarn – official Imperial courier.’

  Sarn still stands? If there was ever a point in her life when she had needed the feeblest spark of hope, it was now.

  ‘Just go,’ Tynan gave her a shove towards the stairs. ‘Get out of my city before I change my mind.’

  She went.

  Jen Reader

  The message had been written in haste, perhaps intended for the hand of some messenger already halfway out of the door on a greater errand.

  Jen

  Safe in Sarn and hoping against hope this reaches you. Sarn safe for now. Eighth Army driven off at cost. Another Wasp force somewhere out there, so no immediate chance of marching to liberate Collegium, but hold on! A lot of expatriates here, and Sarnesh must come south sooner than later, before Empire can reinforce. That’s my understanding, anyway. Meantime sorting out Ants’ air power, of course.

  Any word of Stenwold Maker much appreciated. Lot of people say he is dead, like poor Jodry.

  If you get this, tell little Jen I’m fine, and coming home as soon as I can.

  Will send more word.

  W.

  The message had been slipped under the door of her store cupboard at the library, and she could only assume that a reply might be dispatched the same way. When she tried to put pen to paper, her hand shook too much. Willem was safe, and in Sarn! That was enough.

  She had thought life in Collegium was settling down. Having destroyed all resistance, the Wasps seemed to be lapsing to a sullen, constant oppression. Those few who were still foolish enough to aggravate them paid the price, but the business of the city was slowly resuming, each move tentative and wary of repercussions. There had been some trade with Helleron, although the prices were horrendous. In the markets, traders set out their pitiful wares and charged the earth. The Wasps, who had initially just taken what they wanted, were now supplied by airship and seemed to have actual money to spend, becoming the clientele that every Collegiate business must be ready to cater to. The boldest restaurants and tavernas and even theatres had reopened their doors, gingerly sounding out the Wasps’ tastes. The city was not thriving, but it lived.

  And she had returned to the College
library, dreading what she might find there after the fighting, after its occupation by the city’s valiant, doomed defenders. The shelves and their precious burdens, the stacked cellars, all of them seemed intact, and she had been able to pass through all those familiar halls and turn a blind eye to the dark stains on the stonework, or the black charring left by stingshot.

  The College itself would reopen soon, someone had claimed. She was not sure about that, but the library needed her.

  Then, today, she had found an intruder there.

  The fright had nearly killed her. She had been walking between the shelves, pushing a trolley of books that had needed filing since before the gates fell, and there he was: a tall, arrogant-looking Wasp soldier wearing red armour at his shoulders and neck.

  ‘You are the librarian?’ he demanded.

  She had been about to give her name, but decided against it, settling for a nod.

  ‘I am Captain Vrakir, and I am the voice of the Empress,’ he told her, as a statement of fact. ‘You are in a position to serve my mistress. Rejoice, therefore. Your loyalty to the Empire will be noted.’

  He wants me to betray Willem, she had thought instantly, gripped rigid by terror. What will he do? What will I do?

  He thrust a scroll at her. ‘Here is a list of works known to be in your collection somewhere.’ His other hand encompassed the entire library, the gesture of a man who had no patience with her elaborate cataloguing systems. ‘You will find them quickly and present them to the main barracks.’

  She cast an eye down the list, then looked up at him, frowning. ‘You’re sure? Only these are—’

  ‘You will address me as sir!’ he snapped. ‘And you will not question me. This is the Empress’s will. These volumes are to be shipped to Capitas immediately.’

  The sacrilege of that, to remove such volumes from the library, from the very city, almost had her protesting, but she realized just in time how close he was to violence. And, besides, these titles were mouldering tomes of ancient lore, worm-eaten histories of the Bad Old Days. Considering the alternative, she could almost convince herself that she would not be betraying her trust by letting them go to the Wasps. Odds were that they probably had not been read at all in living memory.

  But nonetheless it was wrong, though she knew she had no choice but to comply. Amid the shock of carving off pieces of the College’s collection at the whim of a Wasp, the question of why the Empress should require such reading matter wholly passed her by.

  Bergild

  With Collegium finally secure, the Second Army settled into what was anticipated to be a temporary custodianship of the city until the newly appointed governor and his occupation forces arrived.

  Save for Wasp forces, the streets of the city were dead for the first tenday after the fighting finally ended. The locals stayed inside, and hoped that the next door to be kicked in would not be theirs. Imperial soldiers were out on the streets, trying to search the entire city for Spider-kinden and suspected insurgents. There were some executions, but surprisingly few by Bergild’s reckoning. Still, everyone knew the Collegiates were soft, so they would probably never realize the disconcerting leniency with which they were being treated.

  As the pilot understood it, the problem lay at the top. General Tynan, who had been expected to mastermind whipping the Empire’s new possession into line, was ill. Or some said not ill but just brooding. His officers and men waited for him to let them off the leash, but such orders as did come simply reined them in. Even now, there were probably rebellious students and fugitives hiding in the garrets and the cellars of the city, yet Tynan would not give the requisite orders. Bergild had heard that, after setting out the limits of the army’s conduct prior to the students’ revolt, he had given relatively few orders since. She had also heard he was practically at war with Captain Vrakir of the Red Watch. She had heard far too many things for them all to be true. Her pilots, with little enough to do, were getting restless and uneasy, well aware of how they were regarded by the regular army as something of a necessary freakshow.

  So it was that she had been deputized by her followers to go and seek out her best source of information within the army: Major Oski.

  The little engineer was remarkably difficult to track down, but she eventually found him sitting outside a taverna near the Gear Gate – as the Second now called the entrance to Collegium which it had forced. She recalled the place had been damaged in the fighting and then sacked by soldiers after the surrender, and certainly the taverna was no longer opening its doors in any meaningful sense. And yet here was Oski sitting on a folding stool outside it as though he was enjoying the weather, a bottle of wine beside him.

  ‘Captain,’ he remarked, as she approached.

  ‘You seem to have time on your hands,’ she noted.

  ‘I’m making vital Engineering Corps calculations,’ he told her, and took up the bottle with both hands to offer her some. ‘Anyway, last I heard, nothing needs fixing or blowing up, so here I am.’

  ‘Tynan doesn’t need you?’ she ventured.

  ‘Don’t know what the man needs, but it’s clearly not me,’ he confirmed. ‘That’s all, is it?’

  ‘We want to know what’s going on,’ she ventured.

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ As he spoke, she became aware of a faint murmur of voices from inside the taverna. She leant closer to eavesdrop, but abruptly Oski rose before her, wings flickering.

  ‘So let’s go and discuss,’ he said, a little too loudly. ‘I’ll wager I’ve got something for your pilots to chew on.’

  ‘Oski, what is going on?’ she asked, not moving.

  ‘Nothing, Captain. Engineering Corps business, therefore none of yours.’ He was right up close to her, forcing her to step back out of instinct, for fighting room.

  ‘Major—’

  ‘Bergild,’ he told her. ‘Never you mind. Not your concern. You know what your lads want to hear? About how Sarn kicked the arse of the Eighth Army all of a sudden. About how our pissing relief column, Collegiate governor and all, is now stuck out at Malkan’s Stand to keep the Ants pinned down. Meaning we’re not going anywhere, and Tynan’s acting governor – which you can be sure he’s just mad about.’

  And that was what her people wanted to know about and, of course, if a superior officer said it was none of her business, then that was true. Yet something in his manner, some furtive guilt, had communicated itself to her, so as she stepped aside with him, she was already detailing one of her pilots to get a glass and keep a more distant eye on the derelict taverna.

  She was not disappointed. A half-hour later, as she saw it through her man’s eyes, a unusual half-dozen crept out of the place, one by one, and headed off in separate ways. She recognized Ernain the Bee-kinden, and there was a Beetle there, and another couple of Flies, and all of them in uniform, though she suspected few were actually attached to the Second. The last one out was a Grasshopper-kinden, though, and that set the seal on her suspicions, because she was sure enough that the Engineers weren’t recruiting from the Inapt these days.

  A conspiracy, she decided, but that thought she kept to herself.

  Sartaea te Mosca

  Nobody was entirely sure who had dared go to General Tynan and ask if they could resume lectures at the College. Had it been someone possessed of great courage, or with a keen eye as to the mood of the reclusive acting-governor? Or had it simply been one of those academics so wrapped up in their studies that the perils of the world beyond their books failed to register?

  But General Tynan had taken a moment away from his introspection to give the proposal the nod, and a tenday later there were students cautiously creeping into the College’s halls once again.

  Of course, things were not the same. How could they be? Even with Tynan himself practically a recluse, Collegium had a new administration. All the Consortium factors and clerks and bureaucrats that the Empire had sent to take over the running of Collegium had arrived on schedule, and the Imperial machine had long ex
perience of taking conquered cities in hand with brutal efficiency. What had not arrived, of course, was the garrison that had been due to take the weight of Collegium off Tynan’s shoulders. Instead it – and the colonel originally awarded the governorship – had been diverted in order to counter any move by the Sarnesh, and to reinforce the surviving strength of the Eighth Army, and so Tynan had been denied his chance to march away towards Vek and leave this city he plainly detested behind him.

  The classes were now smaller: this was te Mosca’s unavoidable observation as she moved through the College. There were missing faces – dead or fled – and everyone was quieter. Where before those students out of lectures had been raucous in their debate and merriment, now they went about their business with a soft step and whispered voice, because nobody wanted to be noticed any more.

  Faced with Tynan’s unexpected acquiescence, the administration beneath him had done their best to stamp the entire venture with black and gold. Every class would include an observer, nominally there to allow the Imperials to understand their new subjects better. In some classes, indeed, this unwanted new addition was very attentive indeed, more so even than the students themselves. When the College Masters gathered together behind closed doors, those who taught artifice agonized at the fact that they must either cripple their own teaching, or pass Collegium’s mechanical knowledge piecemeal to the Engineering Corps. Teachers of social history had a worse time. One of them had simply disappeared early on, after forgetting herself during her lectures. The only sort of philosophy and political theory that the Empire would tolerate was its own.

  Other observers seemed to be simple soldiers drafted in to make up the numbers, especially for such subjects as the Empire plainly had no use for and considered trivial. Their impact on classes was disconcertingly random – some simply knocked off for a drink at the start, or sat there and read, or just stared into space. Others took too much of an interest, such as the sergeant who had decided he was an art critic and used his sting to torch an entire class’s life-painting efforts.