War Master's Gate sota-9

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Oski found the other two instinctively drawing close to him, because this flying monstrosity did not seem like a healthy place to be. Still, I’m the chief of Engineers for the Second Army and I don’t care how big a secret this idiocy is supposed to be. I’m betting they can’t afford to just do away with me. He was not a gambling man by nature, but it was time to start measuring rank badges with these men, and to make them forget that he was only half their size.

  ‘Who’s in charge here?’ he demanded.

  Nistic took a few steps forward, looking down at the Fly-kinden as though he was some species of prey not usually worth the hunting, but it was the Red Watch lieutenant who spoke.

  ‘Your general has forced us to allow your presence here, Major, but this is a classified matter. All you need to do is to go back and report to him that help is on its way.’

  ‘Help?’ demanded Oski. ‘Lieutenant, this is. . what is this? It’s a bad joke. The Second has been attacked for tendays now, day in, day out, by a foe with superior air power, and one which’ll make short work of our entire army once a siege begins. We’ve been promised some means of defending ourselves, of taking back the air!’

  ‘And you shall have it, Major,’ the lieutenant told him grandly. ‘Tell your general so.’

  Oski glanced up at his companions, feeling as if he and the Red Watch man were simply having two quite separate conversations. ‘I’m headed below decks,’ he announced. ‘I’m going to see how far this stupidity goes.’

  ‘I’ll show you myself, Major,’ the lieutenant offered, with mocking smile. ‘Please follow me, sir.’

  ‘You keep your stinging hands ready,’ Oski murmured back to Bergild. ‘This reeks. First sign that it’s a set-up, we’re out of the nearest bomb-hatch, or whatever they are, and we’ll take our chances.’

  ‘My flier-’

  ‘Your life, Captain. You can’t requisition a new one of those from stores.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Under Nistic’s barbed gaze, they descended into the interior of the vessel, which turned out to be minute.

  The entire innards had been reworked. Oski knew what he had expected from this pattern of vessel, but he found almost none of it. It was as though the interior of a far smaller gondola had been transplanted inside, offering narrow corridors and cabins, a galley and the engine room, all cramped enough to make a Fly-kinden feel at home. And no windows, save for portholes at the very rear, where the engines were. Everything else was as closed in as a cave.

  ‘How do we get to the bomb deck?’ Oski demanded, once they had traversed the entire little warren twice.

  ‘There is no bomb deck,’ the lieutenant told him smoothly. ‘Have you seen enough, sir?’

  ‘Enough is just what I haven’t seen,’ Oski insisted. ‘There must be a way. How do we get the other side of this?’ And he banged on the curve of the wall.

  The gesture had just been to make a point: he had not expected anything to come of it. A moment after his small fist thudded against the wood, though, there was a sound. It froze them in their tracks, a deep rumble growling out from behind the wall, like the muted roar of some manner of engine which Oski had never encountered before. There was something about the pitch of sound, too — something that affected him at a deep and primal level. It spoke only one word to him: fear. Abruptly he was sweating in those claustrophobic quarters — afraid without understanding why — as that deep throbbing sound built and built. .

  And it multiplied. All around them, through that false wall, they heard a legion of voices, soft at first, but rising to an air-trembling thunder that shook the very substance of the ship.

  Not leadshots, not bombs. . Oski tried to think. Machines? Some manner of machines designed to fight orthopters? His head swam with half-formed ideas. Can you make a flying machine without a pilot? Can they do that with ratiocinators, now? Or is the sound itself the weapon? Will this drive them mad, or shake their machines apart? What have we created here? He found he did not know. His own trade had outstripped him.

  By then he had his hands clamped to his ears, because the sound was virtually shaking the very air around them. But then someone was shaking his shoulder hard enough almost to batter him against the wall.

  Ernain: he saw Ernain. The Bee-kinden looked ashen, his eyes as wide with fear as Oski had ever seen on any man — not just the instinctive reaction which this resonating pitch had struck in all of them, but more. Ernain plainly knew what was going on, and it terrified him beyond all reason.

  Oski could see his mouth working and, although the words went unheard, he read: ‘We have to get out of here! Now!’

  Moments later the three of them were stumbling out on deck again, that terrible sound following them — and, at its heart, the laughter of the Red Watch lieutenant.

  When the Second Army was approaching along the sea road, where its path curved south about the bay on its final leg to Collegium, it met the Vekken.

  Repeated air attack meant that the army was still scattered, but Tynan had men watching out for a sortie from the city. The Ant-kinden had been in place for days, though, concealing themselves in dugouts and holes and waiting with the silent patience of their kind, unsuspected until it was too late.

  They let the airborne scouts pass over them, each hiding Ant almost blind, but together combining hundreds of little scraps and pinholes of sight to put together a picture of the world outside. When the main body of the Wasp force got close, the entire Vekken force, a good eight hundred Ant-kinden soldiers, attacked as one, springing out with crossbows and Collegiate snapbows and butchering every Wasp within reach.

  The loose marching order of the Second Army meant that the casualties were lighter than might have been expected, but the Wasps could not bring their forces together to bottle up the Ants, not in the time they had. Though the Light Airborne did their best, they took heavy losses from the Vekken marksmanship, and were unable to contain the more heavily armoured Ants on the ground. Wasp orders were reaching parts of the Second Army piecemeal, and for over an hour this solid block of Ants effectively held off an army many times its own size.

  By then someone had sent for the Sentinels, and the Vekken were well enough briefed to know that they had outstayed their welcome. Their formation disintegrated, spreading out into a far-flung net of Ants more efficiently than the Wasps had managed, but grouping in squads of twenty and fifty when threatened. They made short work of the miles to Collegium, and made the vanguard of the pursuing Light Airborne regret their diligence. Ant casualties totalled just under one hundred.

  To the Beetle-kinden this was an education. Stenwold stood on the walls with the Vekken commander, Termes, knowing that two thoughts would dominate every Collegiate mind at that moment. Firstly, Isn’t it a good thing that the Vekken are on our side just now? and secondly, When did they learn to do that? It seemed that defeat at the hands of mere Beetles could spur even the most insular of Ants to innovate.

  The Second was bloodied. The Second was slowed. The army was named ‘the Gears’, though, and it ground on, visible from the walls, marching south towards the great maze of earthworks that defended the city from its enemies.

  Everything we have thrown at them — burning their orthopters over the city, all those air assaults, destroying their supply airships, the Felyen, the Vekken, and yet here they are.

  Madagnus of the Coldstone Company had readied the wall artillery — the new magnetic bows with a range to match the greatshotters of the Empire — save that the Empire seemed not to have any left. The Collegiate attacks had devastated the enemy siege engines, and those losses did not seem to have been replaced. Stenwold was left to scan his telescope over the arriving enemy and think, What do they know that we do not? Because, if I were in the position I see them in, I would not have come. Or is that because I am a Beetle, and sane, and these Wasps are so mad for battle they would throw themselves into a fire for it? Are they worse even than the Mantids?

  He heard Madagnus make a disgu
sted sound nearby, and glanced up. The cadaverous Ant had his own glass out and trained on the enemy.

  ‘Far enough away that we’d fall short, by my calculation,’ the man declared. ‘I was hoping to give them a bit of fun, after they’d set camp.’

  ‘And their own range?’ Stenwold called over to him.

  ‘They were a good two hundred yards closer when they set up their artillery last time,’ Madagnus told him. ‘They were hurrying, back then, so we reckoned they’d put the shotters at their extreme range — which is comparable to ours. If they do manage to hit us from right out there, though. .?’ He shrugged. ‘Then the aviators get to take them. Either way, anything as big and stationary as those artillery pieces of theirs isn’t going to last long.’

  ‘Scouts!’ someone called, and Stenwold watched a haze of Light Airborne rising up from the Second Army, which was still deployed in a somewhat dispersed formation. A scattering of flying Wasps darted through the air — too few for an assault — and spent twenty minutes overflying the earthworks, but none of them getting close enough to the walls to become a target. As they returned home, Stenwold fancied they had something of a downtrodden air.

  ‘We going out there to poke them?’ Madagnus asked.

  ‘You’re keen?’

  ‘Not me. Give me walls and artillery any day.’

  Stenwold nodded. ‘Eminently sensible. We’ve no plans for a serious sortie, now that the Vekken are back. The Stormreaders will keep on at them, though.’

  ‘Scouts!’ someone called out again, and then, ‘Just the one!’

  Stenwold frowned quartering the sky to try and find the errant enemy but, before he did, the original spotter had added, ‘Carrying a flag — black and gold.’

  ‘Going to stick it on the College and then tell us we’re conquered?’ Madagnus suggested.

  ‘They want to talk.’

  ‘Don’t blame them. I don’t see they’ve got any other way in but sweet-talking.’

  ‘Keep the artillery in readiness. It could just as easily be a trick,’ Stenwold warned the Ant. ‘Someone bring the messenger to me! I want to hear this.’

  Collegium’s full Assembly had not been brought together in any one place since the start of hostilities, Stenwold recalled. Certainly not since Imperial bombs had destroyed much of the Amphiophos, formerly the heart of government in the Beetle city.

  They had returned to old haunts, though, despite the devastation. Jodry Drillen had summoned them, and here they were, at least two-thirds of the Assemblers who had been present there to hear the declaration of war. This part of the ruin was partially cleared, creating an uneven floor to speak from, and the gathered Masters of the College and merchant magnates, the townsmen and gownsmen of Collegium, now sat on broken stone and tumbled walls, finding a place for themselves wherever the devastation allowed it. It was a melancholy sight.

  Jodry stood before them, a great, sagging hulk of a man, his formal robes creased and stained, having been stored uncleaned by a man who had not thought to need them, and whose servants had mostly gone to serve their city instead.

  ‘You have heard,’ he addressed them. Without walls, his voice was a lost thing denied its customary authority. ‘I have given you the best picture I can of our circumstances.’ Indeed he had already trotted before them a whole string of experts to report on the city’s fortunes. Madagnus had discoursed on the wall engines, barely a slur to his words. Elder Padstock had reported, in a smart military manner, on the troops of the Merchant Companies. Willem Reader had spoken of Collegium’s air strength and successes. There had been others, too: the city’s stores, its walls, the latest noncommittal word from Sarn. Stenwold gazed all about him at faces he had not seen for some time. They looked worn: older and more haggard, testimony to sleepless nights and days of unaccustomed strain and labour.

  ‘They have offered to meet with a delegation from the city,’ Jodry explained. ‘You’ll have heard that, and I’ll call for a vote in a moment. I don’t honestly imagine we’ll refuse, though. Collegiate citizens not fond of the sounds of their own voices? Of course we’ll talk. The reason we’re here, after all this time, is to do a little cribbing and prepare some answers ahead of the moment. There aren’t many topics likely to come up, after all. We can second-guess most of them.’

  Stenwold let him talk, eyes still moving from face to face. Some met his gaze with a nod or a wan smile, while others avoided it, or simply did not look at him at all.

  One man locked stares with him, frankly hostile, and the expression on his solid, sour face suggested, How did you let it come to this? Hardly a fair question when Stenwold might ask, in return, How much of this did you help bring about? The man was Helmess Broiler, long a political adversary of both Stenwold and Jodry, but more than that. Stenwold knew well enough that the man had been in the Empire’s pocket, and possessed other transient loyalties that were not in the city’s best interests. He had kept mainly to his townhouse until now, for word had filtered among the Companies of what sort of man he was, and they had made their feelings plain on several occasions. But here he was, like a cursed object in an old story, always turning up when least wanted.

  Stenwold tried to read in his expression just what Helmess might know of the Empire’s prospects, but either the man was as clueless as everyone else or he could hide his knowledge all too well.

  After the gathering, Stenwold retired to converse with Jodry, as the two of them had so often before. Their appropriated study now was a wall short of the set, and roofless to boot, but beggars must take what they were given.

  ‘You’ll go, of course,’ Jodry pressed him.

  ‘It’s about time I renewed my acquaintance with General Tynan, yes,’ Stenwold agreed.

  ‘I’d like to lay eyes on the man myself. After all, there’s supposed to be some benefit in knowing your enemy.’

  ‘You’re not going,’ Stenwold said firmly. Seeing Jodry’s outrage begin to bloom, he raised a conciliatory hand. ‘This could easily be a trap, and eliminating the two of us together would be too tempting. I would greatly prefer it, let’s say, if you stayed on the walls and watched the general through a glass.’

  Jodry summoned all his authority, jowls quivering, but then he subsided. ‘Well, perhaps you’re right at that. Eight, though? You’ve some names in mind?’

  The War Master nodded. ‘Enough.’

  There was a pause, then: ‘Look, if it’s worrying you, why don’t you stay home and I’ll go for once.’

  That brought a faint smile to Stenwold. ‘No. Tynan and I. . when we spoke at the end of the last war, we understood each other. If anyone can get through to him, it’s me.’ It’s just that. . Stenwold had been at war with the Wasps for almost two decades more than anyone else in Collegium, but these last years spent facing the Empire’s actual assaults, its repeated attempts to devour the Lowlands entire, which could be repulsed but seemingly never ended. . And here they were, full circle, as the blind determination of the Second Army, the Gears, came grinding towards their gates yet again. I just want it over with. More and more, in those few moments of private time that life allowed him, he was thinking of the sea — of Paladrya and the sea. To escape from all this. To be free. .

  The votes been had passed without difficulty, motion after motion, so that Jodry had seemed less a statesman and more a ringmaster, trotting out each proposal to do its trick and then pass on. Still, there had been a surprising number of abstentions, and Stenwold could see his own tiredness in those faces — not of people who objected or opposed, but those for whom simply getting here had removed their last drachm of public spirit; who had been hammered by war and loss until they could not bring themselves to fight any further, not for any cause.

  A hasty exchange of Fly messengers hammered out a location that resulted in one solitary soldier of the Light Airborne planting a flag out there amongst the earthworks, on a patch of cleared ground that would be in plain sight to both sides.

  Stenwold flew out by orthopter, s
o as not to give the Second any assistance in navigating Collegium’s end of the earthworks. Crouching in the belly of a cargo flier that nonetheless looked fleet enough for a quick getaway, he fought off the tides of weariness that were already threatening to sap his concentration. Around him, his picked team were restless and tense — and armed, of course. Wasps never went unarmed, so bringing snapbows and swords had been non-negotiable.

  The last time he had left Collegium to parlay with General Tynan had been in markedly different circumstances, and he had then done his best to divest himself of the honour guard that had attached itself to him. That time, as now, Elder Padstock had refused to be shaken off, and it was only fitting that she follow him into this particular piece of folly as well.

  He had a second chief officer with him, which was probably not in the city’s interests, but Stenwold had wanted Eujen Leadswell of the Student Company along, because the man was intelligent and was almost certainly going to end up a player in the Assembly soon enough. He should be here, if only to hear what was said.

  And perhaps also because of his ongoing and dogged refusal to accept that Stenwold was right about everything. There used to be plenty of other people like that. It had been the majority view in the Assembly for years. Now even Helmess Broiler kept his mouth shut, and everyone else just nodded, every time the War Master opened his mouth. War Master? I almost feel that the War Master is my real enemy: the man who stands between me and what I want. And is that how Leadswell sees things? Stenwold knew he was unlikely ever to win Eujen over, but something in him kept trying, and until then it was good to have someone who would protest, if the War Master went too far.