War Master's Gate

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Autumn 51st Day

  I am getting somewhat desperate. I had not realized that it was possible for forest to be so dense. It is impossible to see anything but green from any height, and twice now, when we ventured low enough to make out details, parties of Mantis-kinden erupted from the trees and tried to board us. It was only by Sol’s quick thinking that we were able to ascend swiftly enough to avoid them, and I am glad they are not strong fliers by habit. I have no telescope. I am, after all, in a profession that normally looks at small things from a very close distance. I had not thought that I would need one.

  Master Patcher’s temper is growing fouler by the moment, but I cannot go from the Etheryon without something to show the department, or I’m ruined. So far I am staving off Patcher, but I am concerned that he may have his suspicions about Sol and I, and this will worsen his temper. So far I have managed to fend him off, but each day’s search is a daily effort in handling his deteriorating moods.

  The next entry – the last entry – was different, the handwriting wild, trailing off into a shaking scrawl at the end:

  There is a storm. Sol says it’s like nothing he’s seen. We’ve lost our way. I am writing this in case the journal is found. I would like my research notes given to the library for posterity. Please remember me as someone who died in the name of scholarship.

  ‘And what’s that?’

  Sterro looked up sharply. He had grown too absorbed in the account, and now Corver was staring at him from the aft doorway.

  ‘Just some diary that got left behind,’ he said defensively, although it wasn’t as though he had done anything wrong. ‘Some Beetle from Collegium. She was coming here to study the Mantids.’

  ‘She got more than she bargained for, then,’ came Vrant’s voice, as he shouldered his way out after Corver, dragging a huge canvas sack in his wake.

  ‘So what’s that?’ the Fly asked.

  ‘Spare balloon,’ Corver told him. ‘Looks like Sandric had the right idea of it after all. We take it back to our ship. We try to get the gas machine working, so we can float out of here. Worst case, we let the wind carry us away from the forest then just come down. Anywhere’s better than here.’

  ‘No argument from me, sir,’ Sterro said, heartfelt, then Corver was reaching for the scroll, and for a moment he was about to be possessive about it, for no other reason than that he had been the one to find it. It was just trash, though, useful to no one, so he gave ground with the best grace he could. Corver’s eyes flicked over the scroll, bleak and uninterested, and Sterro caught the precise moment that they stopped dead, muscles crawling on the man’s face. The Fly was uneasily certain that it was that same Moth name that had halted his own progress.

  ‘Right.’ Corver wrenched his eyes from the writing and shoved something into his hand, and Sterro saw it was the compass.

  ‘What’s this for?’ he demanded.

  ‘You know what it’s for,’ Corver told him sharply. ‘Now go and get aloft, take a reading for our own crash site.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because I’m telling you!’ the sergeant yelled at him, nerves finding the same aggressive outlet that everything always seemed to, for Wasps.

  Sterro added another few items to his mental list of what he was going to arrange to happen to Corver – and Corver’s family, should he have any – and then kicked off for the hatch above, having to make a couple of tries before he could manage it against the drag of his illicit riches.

  Corver stared at the scroll he had confiscated from Sterro. Argastos. Every time his mind touched on the name it was like a loose tooth: something moved and shifted within his head. From somewhere cavernous and distant he thought he heard a voice, whispering secrets to him. He so desperately did not want to hear.

  ‘Sandric, you’re sure you can get this balloon filled up, when we’re back at our own ship?’

  ‘No problems, sir,’ the pilot confirmed.

  ‘Good. Because we’re getting out of here.’ Corver wasn’t sure who he was trying to reassure. ‘Vrant, let’s get this thing out into the open.’

  Between them, the two of them manhandled the heavy bag out of the hatch, although the effort of it had Corver wheezing and Vrant pale and holding his injured ribs. It seemed perverse that something so fundamentally connected with lighter-than-air flight should be so heavy.

  Then Sterro screamed.

  They were standing instantly, letting the canopy bag roll down the sloping deck. A moment later, Corver picked out the little man pelting through the trees for them, and after him . . .

  He could not quite believe that a mantis of such size could move so fast. Where the space between the trees allowed it, it flexed its wings for a sudden hop forwards, and then it was just striding – its stride leisurely but its long, arching limbs eating up the ground. Sterro was struggling, trying to get into the air, and Corver even thought, The gold will be the death of him. But without a moment’s regret the Fly had shed his coat and kicked off desperately, wings a-flurry. In that moment the mantis struck.

  Its forearms lashed out, extending and unfolding to the limit of their appalling reach, the hooked tips catching Sterro at the very apex of their arc to swat him out of the air.

  Then Vrant was charging it, half on foot, half flying, roaring and sending searing bolts of Art energy at the creature. Its triangular head cocked towards him and it reared up – Corver caught his breath – arms outstretched like the jaws of a barbed trap, wings snapping out to flare their warning colours at him. Even back on the airship’s deck Corver could feel the sheer force of it – a savage, furious presence where no presence should be – and Vrant skidded to a halt, sword drawn tight into his body, his stinging hand crooked into a claw as he fought against the sheer wave of fear that emanated from the creature.

  It had one good eye, Corver saw. The other was a blackened ruin. The sight filled him only with a kind of resigned dread.

  Then the wings thundered forward in a single beat that threw Vrant to the ground and shuddered the mantis into the air, and moments later it was gone.

  ‘Sterro!’ Corver called, clambering down from the airship with Sandric backing him up – both of them on the advance with sword and sting now the monster was actually gone. Vrant was standing off, watching the sky and waiting for a reprise, but Corver was only relieved to see the Fly-kinden man sitting up, examining the rents in his tunic. There was a little blood, but the wounds had been shallow, Corver saw.

  ‘Get up,’ he ordered. For once Sterro did not argue.

  ‘My coat . . .’ he muttered.

  ‘Forget it. Vrant, we need to get the new balloon! We’re getting out of here. We are.’

  The big soldier stomped over. ‘It’ll be back for us.’

  ‘Then let’s not be here. Where’s the . . .’ He glanced at Sterro. ‘Compass . . .?’

  The Fly grimaced and shook his head, still seeming dazed.

  ‘Get aloft and take a bearing on our crash,’ Corver told Vrant, and then, ‘Do it!’ when the man wanted to argue. ‘We’ll just have to keep hopping up for a look.’

  Vrant took to the air reluctantly, because his ribs were already pressing a hand of pain against his lungs each time he drew breath, but right now he reckoned that one more questioned order would send the sergeant over the edge entirely. Man’s owed some time back home. Back in the Twelve-year War that had become a running joke.

  He let his wings carry him up through the hole that the Collegiate airship had made when it came down, which the forest would take many decades to close. He was not a strong flier – certainly not now at any rate – but he was able to wobble and lurch in the air until he could make out some landmarks. There looked like that creepy village they had gone through during the night – he could even see a faint line of smoke, as though someone had been stoking the brazier there. Beyond it must be their own crash, although he was cursed if he could make it out.

  He wheeled in the air, trying to keep an eye open for the killer mant
is that was probably watching him right then, and saw something else.

  Hadn’t there been something said about buildings and construction? And surely the hovels of the Mantis-kinden hardly counted as that. Across the roof of trees, Vrant saw something that reared out of their clutches: stone and wood thrust together to make something substantial – not civilization, quite, and yet head and shoulders over anything a Mantis ever made.

  By then his Art was failing him, and a measured descent was the best he could make of it. He took a final look towards the abandoned village, his landmark, and then returned to Corver, indicating their path.

  Between them, they shouldered the heavy canopy bag, and set off into the trees without further words. Nobody wanted to point out how vulnerable they would be to attack.

  The Collegiate crash had vanished behind them into the trees by the time the screaming started.

  They dropped the bag at once, when they heard it: a long, raw, agonized sound, not a man injured, but a man systematically being injured by his fellow men. Every soldier did a stint bringing prisoners to the interrogation table: they were more than familiar with the sound. For a moment they were motionless, listening to that long drawn-out wailing, the sobbing gasp for breath, and then the shriek again.

  Then Corver got a look on his face that Vrant didn’t like, and a moment later he was leaping off into the trees – and what to do then, but follow?

  The canopy-bag was abandoned behind them, but Corver had forgotten it for now. Let Sandric and Sterro hang back to guard it, cowards that they were. Corver was rushing through a different forest, hearing the screams of yesterday – his men in the Commonweal, whom the Mantids had taken alive.

  He caught scattered glimpses ahead: the great idol the locals had raised up, that rotting wooden figure with its hooked arms, and, within its grasp, a human figure held there by wooden pegs or nails driven through his body, hanging in the arms of their totem, his blood soaking into its raddled frame and feeding the thousand scions of decay that lived within.

  Not a soldier, he realized. Not a Wasp. He had a moment’s clear glimpse as he tripped down a hollow, seeing a Beetle-kinden man in aviator’s leathers, howling and thrashing against his own pinned flesh, against the shadowy tormentors who bent over him . . .

  And Corver burst out into a clearing, and it was there.

  Chest heaving, he stared, and knew that he was truly going mad.

  The idol was there, all seven foot of it, but so fragile and worm-eaten that it seemed the slightest push would see it crumble and fall, The body that it held was still in place, the pins and pegs clearly visible amidst the bones and withered, part-eaten tissue, but the man had not been screaming these last months. Vacant sockets regarded the sky out of a jawless skull, but the clothes – holed and ragged but more durable than the man who had worn them – they were surely the canvas and leather of an aviator, just as he had seen.

  ‘Vrant.’ Corver turned, expecting the dour expression the man habitually wore, but this time the soldier’s look was shaken, utterly undone.

  ‘Sir, I thought I saw . . . I heard . . .’

  ‘Back, back to the canopy,’ Corver cut him off fiercely. ‘Come on! Move, now! This is nothing, nothing for us at all!’

  Vrant swallowed and nodded, and they fought their way back to the dropped bag, where Sandric and Sterro were waiting for them wanly, true to form. Corver had halfway thought that he might never find them again, once separated.

  ‘Take another bearing,’ he told Vrant.

  The man looked aggrieved, but laboured up into the air again.

  Corver looked at the other two. Their mute gazes seemed to accuse him. You led us to this. He wanted to beg for their understanding, to ask what he could have done, in the end. Imperial sergeants did not say such things.

  Then Vrant was down again, and there was a dreadful, haunted look on his face. ‘We’re off course, sir.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘I swear, sir, we were heading for that village place – I reckoned we’d see our ship from there, you know – it was on the way. Only . . .’

  Corver just waited, although he almost felt that he could finish the man’s report himself.

  ‘There was this place – some big hall, or a mound or something – stones, some sort of gates . . . I saw it before.’ Vrant got the words out through a visible effort of will. ‘We’re closer to it. We’ve gone off, somehow.’

  Of course we have. Of course. ‘You took another bearing? Good, then let’s go.’ Because those were the words a sergeant said, for all that they were no part of the wheeling turmoil within Corver’s head.

  After that they were waiting for the next shock, each one of them on edge as they pushed through the forest, Vrant and Corver stopping frequently to rest from the weight of the canopy bag. Somewhere close, the great scar-headed mantis was stalking them invisibly, ghosting between the trees. They knew it, and none of them said anything.

  ‘Another bearing,’ Corver ordered, after a time, and a distance, he seemed completely unable to keep track of. A muscle pulled at Vrant’s mouth, but the man lumbered up into the air again, the others staring after him.

  They were being watched, First Sandric felt it, then Sterro, and at last Corver saw a faint flutter of white in the corner of his eye. He did not want to look. Whatever it was, he had no wish to see it, and yet something, some machinery within his neck, was grinding his head round to take it in.

  Vrant landed then. When he said, ‘Sir . . .’ his voice was shaking like that of a man on the rack.

  ‘I know,’ Corver told him softly.

  ‘Sir, we’re off course, sir.’

  ‘I know.’ Corver was looking at a Beetle-kinden woman, and she was looking back at him. Short, dark, wearing a tattered robe of that Collegiate style that even Imperial diplomats had started adopting. There was a look on her face like . . . Back in the war Corver had seen that expression on a soldier caught by the insurgents in the Maynesh rebellion. The man had been staked out as bait, looking as though he was just standing there, but the locals had put a wire noose about his neck, razor-sharp and tight enough to draw blood. He had just stood there, not daring to move or speak, as his comrades had approached. Then the ambush had been sprung and one of the Maynesh Ants had yanked on the handle, and the man’s head had just come clean off.

  They had made the Maynesh pay tenfold for every act of rebellion. Corver didn’t think that there would be any such retribution here.

  Slowly, he approached the woman, finding it hard to tell how far she was, how many trees away, through the forest. Vrant trod carefully behind him, his breath ragged, sword quivering in his hand. Corver felt oddly calm, though. They were off course? Of course they were. What else had he expected?

  When something crunched under his foot he looked down, knowing that the woman would be gone from his sight in that moment. There were bones down there, and through the brittle ribcage a centipede moved sinuously, lifting its head almost to waist height to gape its fangs at them. Vrant’s hand spat fire, incinerating those jaws and two sets of legs, and sending its long, segmented body into spasms of rage as it died.

  Corver knelt down, staring at the remains. Enough of the robe had survived to confirm what he already knew. Just another victim. Gone and yet still here. He looked for some semblance of reason amongst the bones, some clue that would allow him to unlock this situation and find his way out into the world that he knew.

  In one bone hand still flaking with dried skin there was a scroll case, clutched to the broken ribs as though this had been the woman’s promised salvation. Corver’s mind flicked to the account that Sterro had found, to the name it had contained. I don’t want it, was on his tongue, but how would that look, before a soldier under his command? Every sergeant knew that you had to be braver, tougher, bloodier than any of your men.

  Vrant was shuffling, eager to go, but Corver twisted open the waxed chitin of the case to reveal the account within. The writing was uneven, the lin
es trailing off, the letters larger and more uneven as the balance of the account descended towards its inevitable conclusion. Standing there over the remnants of its author, he followed her through her last few entries, undated, sporadic, inconclusive.

  We are down, and all three of us alive, although the Plain Sailing will never sail again. We are in the midst of the Etheryon. I have suggested that we should light a very smoky fire and wait for the locals to discover us and guide us out. Master Patcher was most uncomplimentary, and said that if the locals had not seen our vessel crashing then nothing would bring them out, and that it were better for us that they never found us. He wanted to leave at once, but Sol wanted to salvage more from the wreck, and they have argued a lot, nearly coming to blows on one occasion.

  It was another world, and one that Corver could barely have imagined even before coming here, even before the war. How the rest of the world live, outside the Empire. He read on.

  We have been attacked. Mantis-kinden came from the trees at night and drove us from the wreck. Patcher has taken an arrow through the leg. We are hiding in the trees. Movement everywhere. Mantis-kinden, dressed in full armour. Archaic in look. We keep moving. They are all aro

  And then a blank turn of the scroll, as though the woman was playing some literary joke, the writing tailing off into blots, but eventually, in ever degenerating script:

  Magnus Patcher is dead. They caught him. I saw it all. He could not keep up, and at last they caught him. There was a statue, some kind of wooden thing, stylized mantis? They took him to it. They had skewers, steel. They hammered them in, pinned him to the idol while he was still alive. We could not get to him. Sol took me away. We could hear him screaming. They kept him screaming all night.

  The forest around them seemed very silent, as intent on the words as Corver himself was. Vrant alone was restless, shuffling from foot to foot, wanting to be off even if they were so irredeemably off course, but Corver would not be rushed.