War Master's Gate sota-9

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She froze. She could not help it. Her mind had choked on the utter certainty that had come to her, even as her sword parried three more strokes and her feet carried her backwards.

  Around her, the Empress’s followers were falling back after their mistress. The Wasp with the red badge and a Beetle snap-bowman passed her, retreating with professional care.

  She took three more blows numbly, the last scratching her shoulder before she was able to turn it.

  The name the Empress had shouted had been Tisamon. And even had the name been unspoken, she would still have known. She had fought her father before, and she had lived with his barbed ghost in her mind, and she knew him, and here he was.

  Then Amnon was there, lashing a blade out at the armoured form, and the claw that had been stooping towards her veered aside to block his stroke. With a shriek of nameless emotion Tynisa lunged for him, for his very throat, but he had fallen back a step, her lunge failing to reach him, even as he nicked Amnon’s arm and deflected the big Beetle’s next blow.

  Then there was some summons — Tynisa did not hear it, but it was plain from the armoured man’s — Tisamon’s — stance, and he was turning and sprinting away, in full mail but fast enough that neither she nor Amnon had the chance to strike at him. She was after him a moment later, barely enough of a delay to slide a knife blade into, but the forest around seemed suddenly very dark, shadows hung on every bough, and she was blundering into the gloom. And where was the Empress?

  And. .?

  She stopped, hearing the others catching up with her, Amnon almost at her elbow, staring about in confusion.

  Where is she?

  Of the Empress and her entire retinue there was neither track nor trace.

  Nineteen

  ‘This is such a stupid idea,’ was Gerethwy’s informed opinion.

  The night was unseasonably chill, or perhaps it was just due to the altitude. There were no clouds above, the stars clear as cut glass, and only the faintest sliver of moon to detract from them.

  ‘Wasn’t my first choice either,’ the airship’s master grunted. ‘Beats training on those deathtrap Stormreaders, though.’ His name was Jons Allanbridge and he seemed to be some kind of associate of Stenwold Maker, although he didn’t exactly speak of the War Master fondly. His vessel, the Windlass, was carrying the two Company volunteer officers and a fair number of their soldiers. Nobody had explained to Straessa that she would be one half of the Collegiate command team on this mission, and she had the unhappy feeling that possibly nobody had really thought about it either. Apparently the non-Mantis side of the operation would be spearheaded by the Mynans, and she and her people would just have to try and keep up. Although the overall plan might not be as foolish as Gerethwy claimed, the details really did seem to be lacking.

  They put this one together in a hurry, and surely the Wasps’ll see us coming, and then. . But if the Imperial Air Force caught them aloft in these big, slow airships, that would be a death sentence for anyone who couldn’t take wing and fly. Gerethwy was right in that — all the artificers were in agreement that airships as a tool of war had had their day.

  Until now, apparently, because heavier-than-air fliers just could not have carried this many people to the enemy.

  There were a dozen other dirigibles blotting out the night sky around them, which were doing their best to be stealthy. They kept no lights, and were coasting on a westerly wind so that the nocturnal quiet was not defiled by the sound of engines. Even the enormous Sky Without, its elegant staterooms now the squatting ground of the Mantis warriors, was coursing through the upper air like a great, bloated ghost.

  ‘You’re sure you can even find the enemy? I never really appreciated just how much land there is until I saw it from up here,’ Straessa put in.

  ‘They’re coming along the coast, so it won’t be hard,’ Allanbridge told her. ‘More important for us not to overshoot.’ He checked his instruments. ‘Not much further, if reports can be believed.’

  ‘We’re going to get shot down. This is ridiculous,’ Gerethwy complained, from his post at the bow, but then a Fly-kinden messenger spiralled out of the sky to land at Allanbridge’s left side, making the man curse furiously.

  ‘Time,’ the small woman announced. ‘Down, now.’ Then she was off for the next ship: an old fashioned way of passing the word, but lamp signals had been judged too risky.

  The other Company officer, a Fly-kinden named Serena from the Fealty Street Company, had come up on deck. ‘We’re going down?’

  ‘The easy way,’ Allanbridge confirmed. All around them, the airship fleet was descending, and there was still no sense that the Empire had noticed their coming.

  ‘Let’s go and get the troops,’ Serena suggested. ‘I’ll go over to the Sky and make some order there.’ At the end of those words, she was already standing on the Windlass’s rail, and kicked off with her wings flashing from her shoulders, catching the air and arrowing off towards the larger vessel.

  ‘They can’t not have seen us,’ Gerethwy muttered, as though bitter about Imperial failings.

  ‘Plan is to give them other things to worry about, lad, never you mind,’ Allanbridge replied, then added awkwardly, ‘And you try to get your hide and your mob back to us intact, right? Now get ready to jump off and secure us, why don’t you?’

  Straessa went below decks to find the soldiers there mostly ready, strung out on that combination of tension, excitement and fear that she knew so well herself. Before they felt the Windlass’s keel scraping and bumping at the ground, they were out on deck and casting rope ladders over the side, even as Gerethwy fought with the anchor. The airship was emptied of troops with more efficiency than the Antspider would have bet on and, looking about, she could see other craft bobbing low, with swarms of Mantis-kinden flying or climbing from them, forming up into one turbulent, angry mob that was plainly itching to get at the enemy.

  ‘Over there, quickly,’ she ordered her people, and set a fast pace, well aware how the entire Felyen force might just vanish off into the night, leaving their allies too far behind to support them.

  By the time she arrived, so had everyone else. She picked out the Mynans because their leader was already stalling the Mantis-kinden.

  ‘Kymene?’

  The Mynan leader glanced towards her. ‘Your people are ready?’

  Serena had made herself known by then, and Straessa nodded, shouldering her snapbow. ‘I hadn’t thought you’d be here yourself, Commander.’

  ‘Neither did Sten Maker,’ Kymene acknowledged. ‘Too late for him to do anything about it now, though, isn’t it? We’re waiting a signal. .’ And then, with a fierce look at the woman who led the Felyen, ‘Yes, we are.’

  ‘Your signal is late,’ the Mantis spat.

  ‘No, it’s not. Just listen,’ Kymene shot back. ‘Everyone, quiet and listen!’

  Straessa shook her head, hearing nothing at all but not wanting to state the obvious, but Gerethwy squeezed her shoulder, cocking his head.

  He was smiling — a little thinly perhaps but she was glad of any smile from him just the same.

  And then she heard it, though scarcely a moment before the Stormreaders started passing overhead. The clatter of their clockwork engines was so much quieter than the noisy oil-driven motors favoured by the Empire.

  They circled almost invisibly save where they occasionally blotted out the stars, and Straessa heard one coming in to land, the thunder of wind thrown up by its wings hitting them with shocking suddenness as the nimble machine cornered and hovered for a moment, before choosing its spot.

  Kymene went running over and, without much thought, Straessa ran after her, Serena and the Mantis leader following on her heels.

  The cockpit was hinged open by the time they got there, and the Antspider recognized the Fly-kinden pilot seated inside as the Solarnese, Taki, who seemed to be in charge of Collegium’s air defences.

  ‘You’ve about a mile of ground to cover still to reach their pickets,�
�� the pilot told them as they approached, and Straessa could hear the clockwork still ticking over, ready to take off again the moment the wings were engaged. ‘We’ll allow you a decent countdown and then move in to give them something to think about. But you’re going to have to make good time.’

  ‘We’ll be there,’ Kymene told her. ‘Just make sure you’re not late.’

  The Fly grinned at her, then waved them away, and even though they were running back to the massed strike force, the downbeat of the Stormreader’s wings almost knocked them off their feet.

  ‘We run!’ the Mantis leader was shouting at her followers, and Straessa expected a great roar of approval that would probably be heard over in Capitas. Instead, the Mantis-kinden just moved off silently, the entire pack breaking into a ground-eating lope, leaving the others to catch up.

  General Tynan made do with very little sleep, so he was still awake and poring over quartermasters’ reports when the camp around him suddenly exploded into life. He heard the Farsphex engines start up, and knew that the engineers would be dragging the cloaking tarpaulins off them even as the pilots crawled into their seats. A night attack. With the continued valiant resistance put up by the Imperial pilots and artillery, he had expected such a move. It was exactly the pattern that the Second’s own fliers had fallen into when dropping their bombs, denied free rein over Collegium during daytime.

  Of course, the Beetles won’t have the same night vision as our Fly bombardiers had. And, of course, he had kept his camp without lights, despite the chill, to deny them any clear targets, but even a random bombardment would do its inevitable damage.

  From the back of his tent, he heard Mycella stir, and she joined him moments later, swathed in a silk robe, even as the first watch officers rushed in to report. The first man had just time to salute before Tynan himself could hear the clatter of the enemy orthopters.

  ‘Our pilots?’ he snapped out.

  ‘Taking to the air, sir. Artillery as well, but we-’

  The first dull boom signified that one of the Collegiates had been a little too enthusiastic, unloading surely somewhere far short of the confines of the camp. The soldiers of the Second and their allies would be rushing from their tents, scattering and spreading.

  ‘No dedicated bombers seen amongst them,’ the watch officer continued. ‘Just their Stormreaders, like before.’

  The Air Corps will have to do its best, Tynan decided.

  ‘Sir, there was a report of airships, too, but-’

  Just then the real bombardment started, a half-dozen explosions, and one close enough to punch in the wall of the tent, leaving the poles leaning at drunken angles, pulling the ropes from the ground. There were cries of pain on the air, and a secondary retort as something caught fire and went up. Tynan looked skywards, gritting his teeth. Luck’s the emperor of this battlefield. He knew the Airborne would be taking wing, but much of the army did not have that luxury.

  ‘What do airships signify?’ Mycella pressed him. Another explosion sounded further off, and he knew that the Stormreaders would be turning to make another approach, despite the best efforts of the Farsphex pilots.

  ‘If they start to position airships over the camp, we’ll give the order to scatter. They can carry more bombs than any number of orthopters. Slow, though, so we’ll have warning. And perhaps the Farsphex will manage to bring some down.’

  ‘Yes, sir, but I don’t think. .’ The watch officer flinched as another bomb landed somewhere off towards the coast. ‘They’ve not been seen again. . I’d thought’ — flinch — ‘our scouts must be mistaken.’

  ‘Then go and get me better intelligence!’ Tynan snapped, and the man backed out hurriedly. The Wasp general sighed and buckled on his swordbelt, more for the comfort it would give him than anything else.

  ‘Tynan, these ships. .’ Mycella began said pensively.

  ‘If there were any.’ But he found himself believing that there were. It would have to have been a very curious trick of the moonlight, otherwise. .

  ‘They can carry more than bombs,’ she pointed out.

  Their eyes locked, communication passing between them as efficiently as through an Ant’s Art. In the next moment they were both shouting for their underlings.

  ‘Duty officer! Reinforce the perimeter. I want the reserve watch mustered now!’ And what a gamble — because if there’s a force coming for us, we must huddle close so as to repel it — and make ourselves easy meat for their bombs. And if we don’t. . But he found that he accepted Mycella’s intuition without question.

  Meanwhile the Spider Arista had called in her man Jadis. ‘Have all our people to arms and ready to fight!’ she ordered. ‘Get the mercenaries up and ready. We’re under attack.’

  Even as she said it, a Fly messenger fought her way into the tent and dropped down by Mycella’s feet.

  ‘Mantis-kinden!’ she got out.

  Before they reached the camp, the Fly-kinden returned in her Stormreader, wheeling wildly over the Mantis onrush before setting down practically on top of Kymene’s people, the cockpit already open.

  ‘Here!’ she called, pitching her voice high over the crump of explosives beyond. ‘Map!’

  Straessa struggled over, her chest heaving and already envying the solid endurance of the Beetle-kinden. The Fly proffered a tattered piece of paper, on which she had drawn a rough sketch of the camp’s layout — something she must have done while in the air — marking out whatever looked as if it needed blowing up. ‘Remember, strike fast, then pull out!’ she shouted to Kymene. ‘The airships will be coming in, and we’ll cover them while you get away!’

  The Mynan woman took a second to stare at the scribbled map, committing it to memory. She made no promises about the retreat, Straessa noted. Then the Antspider found the map in her own hands, and Kymene and her squad were off again, and so must she be if she did not want to get left behind.

  She picked up speed, an extra burst to try and make up lost ground. Ahead, the bright flare of a bomb going off revealed the great Mantis host as stark silhouettes. Beyond them, some of the Second’s camp was on fire, and there was a brief impression of a great many Wasps rushing about, in the air and on the ground, without having a clear idea of what was going on. Then. .

  Straessa would remember this moment. She would dream of it: the Mantis-kinden of the Felyal hitting the Second Army’s camp. Not just as a mob of warriors and old men and children, not the last dregs of a culture casting themselves into the fire. In her memories they would be like a tide, a great cresting wave and, although the Wasps put a fair few soldiers in their way, nothing could stop them. They had come to finish their long history with the Second Army, one way or another.

  They let nothing stop them. The Wasp sentries were hacked down within seconds, and even though the flashes of stings and the deadly needles of snapbow bolts kept darting out from amidst the camp, there was no suggestion of strategy from the Mantids, nothing so human as a fear of death, or even an acknowledgement of it. They ran and they flew as a great barbed host, and killed everyone they encountered, even as the Wasps pulled back to form up again deeper within their camp.

  The air was alive with their arrows, and the night’s darkness to them was merely dusk. As the first reordered force of Wasps advanced to try and hold them, the wave broke, the Mantid onslaught fragmenting into war bands of a dozen or a score, each hunting its own bloody end in the streets of the tent city that the Second had built.

  ‘What’s first on the shopping list?’ Gerethwy shouted in Straessa’s ear. The bombing had stopped — and just as well! — but the camp was reduced to a chaos of random clashes of arms, with Mantids and Wasps hurling themselves at each other, neither quarter nor hesitation from either side. When Straessa’s squad halted at a crouch, quiet and still, they might as well have been invisible. The Imperials had other problems right then.

  ‘Fordyke, take a dozen and head left, that way. Velme, you cut left of centre, down that way. And you’ — and I have no ide
a who you are — ‘you’ve got straight on.’ And she parcelled out her command into tiny vulnerable pieces, just as the plan had called for, so that they could inflict the most damage for the least cost, for if the Wasps caught them all together, they would be butchered to a man. ‘I’m heading deeper in. Looks like something’s there needs setting on fire.’ She squinted again at the pilot’s map and hoped it wasn’t just an inopportune twitch of the pencil. ‘Use your grenades, but make sure you lob them away from your friends. Shoot every damn Imperial you see, and anyone else who isn’t a Mantis and doesn’t wear a sash. Blow things up. Questions? No? Get going.’

  All said far too fast to allow objections, of course, and just as well because Straessa herself could feel fear gripping her by the throat, trying to throttle her words, and only by rattling them off that quickly could she get them out at all. The expressions of those Merchant and Student Company soldiers fool enough to volunteer were wide-eyed and horrified, and if she left them a moment they would just lock up, the reality of their situation clenching like a paralysis about them. But she shouted ‘Move!’ for her own benefit as much as theirs, and then they were all going, peeling off on their separate assignments, running as if all the ghosts of the Bad Old Days were after them.

  She herself had the Dragonfly Castre Gorenn, who had brought a longbow that even the Mantids might envy. She had Gerethwy, who was holding his snapbow off-handed because he had lost his usual trigger finger in the last big fight. She had another half-dozen Beetles and Fly-kinden, and they were all waiting to follow her lead.

  She went, feeling as though she had to put a shoulder to her fear and shove it out of the way by brute force, but she went anyway. There were Mantis-kinden fighting ahead, a handful of them cutting and leaping at Wasps who were trying hard to stay out of reach until reinforcements arrived. Straessa levelled her snapbow even as she ran, her aim shaking and bouncing as she tried to steady the barrel long enough for a shot. She loosed — but her target was already out of her sights, the bolt flying wildly off into the night. Then the man was dead, just pitching over without a Mantis anywhere near him, and she only heard the thrum of Gorenn’s bowstring as the woman’s second shot took an unarmoured Wasp in the small of the back. Straessa herself was trying to reload and recharge without slowing her pace, but the Dragonfly was already ahead of her, plucking another arrow from one of her two quivers, nocking and drawing, then letting her wings lift her from the ground, steady in the air for a heartbeat as she shot, then down and running again without missing a step.