War Master's Gate sota-9

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The Beetle was looking at her, and Seda had the impression that she wanted to find a reason to trust her opposite. They led odd, privileged lives in Collegium, after all.

  And surely that was her hidden weapon, to bring out into the open now. ‘Che, General Tynan’s Second Army has taken your home city.’

  The Maker girl went completely still.

  ‘I do not know how matters stand there. A great deal will depend on what your people do. Tynan is a rational, cautious man. Furthermore, he has one with him to whom I can speak, after a fashion. Cheerwell. . you could be governor of Collegium. My very word could make it so.’

  ‘And a subject of your Empire?’

  ‘Would it not be our Empire? For all that I am Empress, you are my sister. If you spoke to me about Collegiate ways, would I not listen?’

  And Che was backed into that corner, with the fate of her people in the palm of her hand, offered a future wherein she might temper Seda’s Wasp steel and find power for herself. She might deny it in her own mind, but Seda had felt Che Maker’s ambition. It was an indivisible part of becoming a powerful magician to want more.

  ‘Good,’ the Empress said softly. ‘This is it, Cheerwell. If all of this was for anything, then this is what it was for: to bring us together, to show us that hand in hand we are more than we could ever be while at war with one another.’

  And even as Che was nodding, she beckoned archly. ‘Thalric, to me.’

  There was a fraught moment: the Wasp man had taken a single step, but no more, and he was now looking at the Maker girl.

  ‘Thalric,’ Seda repeated. ‘You are my consort, have you forgotten? You were saved a traitor’s death for no other reason than that. You are mine.’

  She extended her power — the lightest touch should have sufficed against his Apt mind — but found an opposing push of equal strength: Cheerwell Maker.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ the Empress stated, cold and regal. ‘He is mine. He has always been mine. How could it be otherwise?’ The contest was not for the man himself, that perennial renegade she hardly knew. For the principle of it, though, she must fight. Here was something they had both laid claim to, and if she was to have a sister working by her side, she must still be the wiser, the stronger. Thalric was the man both had claimed. He was their battlefield.

  But, step by faltering step, Thalric was retreating from her, until he stood beside the Maker girl.

  Something began to fray, inside her, and Seda called out, ‘Her, Thalric? I understand why you went to her once you were out of my sight. She has power, of course, and it is akin to mine, but I am here now.’ But he would not move, and so she turned her narrowing eyes upon Cheerwell. ‘Stop this,’ she demanded. ‘Release him.’

  Che shook her head slightly. ‘I don’t believe in using chains to hold anyone.’

  ‘Then withdraw your power from him, and I will take him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

  Che’s chin jutted stubbornly. ‘No.’

  ‘Cheerwell, if we are to work together-’

  ‘No,’ for a second time. Three would be final.

  ‘I hold your city in the palm of my hand, Maker. Give up Thalric, now, or the history of your kinden in the Lowlands will be a book of torment.’

  A terrible, harsh expression came over the Beetle’s face, even as she shook her head. She took Thalric’s arm in exactly the possessive manner that the Empress herself might have used, in claiming some thing she owned, and for the last time she said, ‘No.’

  ‘Thalric. .?’ And Seda saw him shake her head, and the words came spitting from her mouth: ‘For this? When I’m ready to forgive you, to welcome you back, you turn to this? This, stunted, dark, ugly creature, instead of me?’ And she realized that fate would have her after all, for surely all the legends sang the same song, and what else should two rival sisters come to blows over but this.

  A rage welled up inside Seda, not merely the inherent temper of her kinden but the fury of a magician thwarted, and in that instant she had all her strength at her fingertips, and had ripped up everything left of Argastos too, holding it above her like a boulder, desperately reaching for her self-control before she-

  The words came from her mouth unwanted, as though reading from a script: ‘He’s mine!’

  And she released it all, a monstrous, bludgeoning expenditure of power hammering down upon Maker and all around her, screaming as she did so.

  And she felt the ground crack beneath them — not the earthen barrow floor, but what lay beneath.

  She had time for one brief, despairing thought: The Seal! The Seal of the Worm! And then the darkness rose up with many mouths, and swallowed them.

  Forty-One

  ‘There are two hundred and seventeen of them, sir. The rest are either dead or scattered throughout the city, hiding or holding out.’

  ‘And her?’ No need for General Tynan to qualify that, for he had made his liaisons no secret. Everyone in the Second Army knew whose company their general had sought out on the road to Collegium.

  ‘Not yet, sir. She evades us, still.’ The watch officer was standing with his back to the prisoners, all two hundred and seventeen of them. Many were wounded, and all were bound firmly and on their knees, out here under Collegium’s morning sky in some square boasting the jagged stonework and broken metal of what had once been a fountain before the bombs fell.

  To Tynan’s eyes, how unsuited they looked to be soldiers! All so young and so delicate, handsome where their wounds hadn’t marred them and proud still, despite it all. Even when defeated. Even when captured and lined up for execution.

  ‘General.’ It was Vrakir’s voice, which Tynan had begun to loathe.

  These men and women — yes, women! — had recently fought alongside his own. Spider sailors had brought his army food after the Collegiate pilots had made his airships their playthings. Spider troops had taken the brunt of the Felyal when they attacked, exposing themselves to the blades of their greatest enemies to give their Wasp allies time to regroup. They had stormed the wall using only their climbing Art. Their spilled blood had brought him here, as much as that of his own soldiers.

  ‘General, it seems appropriate that a sufficiently public spectacle be made of this,’ Vrakir murmured. ‘Crossed pikes along the walls, perhaps. After all, they betrayed the Empress, did they not?’

  ‘Did they?’ Tynan stared at him, stony-faced.

  ‘Do you doubt it?’ The Red Watch officer looked unmoved.

  If Cherten were here, he would agree with him. He would tell me to do the right thing, the Imperial thing. But Cherten had got himself killed by a student, somehow, in an unforgivable lapse of discipline. I had not thought the time would come when I would lament the lack of Colonel Cherten, but I would he were here to do this business instead of me.

  ‘They are soldiers,’ Tynan stated. ‘We owe it to them to give them a soldier’s death.’

  ‘A traitor’s death, General-’ Vrakir stated, moving in too close, and Tynan smashed him across the mouth, backhanding him into the wall.

  He was onto the younger man instantly, a solid punch driving Vrakir to the ground and then hooking his boot into the man’s stomach. And though the banded armour had taken the brunt, the Red Watch man skidded five feet across the ground, rolling and coming up on one knee, hand out and palm open.

  Tynan was just the same, ready to sting, and for a moment the two of them were frozen in place, before the horrified stares of the soldiers.

  ‘Do it, or stand down,’ Tynan growled, and Vrakir bared his teeth, but lowered his hand.

  ‘The Empress will know of this,’ he hissed.

  ‘Take Captain Vrakir somewhere he can calm down and perhaps remember that most officers who threaten a superior get a pair of pikes for their own personal use,’ Tynan spat. His gaze swept around to the ranks of defeated Spider-kinden.

  This is where I free them, isn’t it? Exile them from the city, tell them never to go near the Empire again, and everyone ke
eps quiet, a conspiracy of mercy, and the Empress never knows. But orders were orders, and the Empress had left him no leeway. And she would get to know, he had no doubt of it.

  ‘Have them shot, quick and clean,’ he ordered the watch officer. ‘They’ve earned that much.’

  He stalked away, and heard the killing start.

  There was a counting house, or something similar, that Cherten had commandeered for interrogations, and the engineers had removed all the paperwork and the remaining money from the cellars and converted them to holding cells, probably without being asked to, just standard work for junior artificers wherever the Empire established itself even for a short while. Tynan had some business there now, left over from the previous night. Another loose end that Cherten should be picking up. He found that he did not feel particularly upset that the intelligencer had met his end, but it was undeniably inconvenient.

  The interrogators were not at work — it would clearly take them a while to get back to routine without Cherten — and Tynan found he had the place to himself, his footsteps echoing back from the stripped walls.

  Probably I should keep a bodyguard about me, he considered. The situation remains fluid, after all, and you never know who might choose to have a go.

  He glanced about the counting house’s interior, and reflected that he might almost welcome an assassin just about now.

  But some great traditions could simply not be relied on these days.

  He descended to the cellar, firing up a chemical lantern on the way, and casting a spitting white light ahead of him. Word had reached him just around dawn: there had indeed been an assassin, just not a very good one.

  She was now the sole resident, hunched in the corner of the furthest cell as though driven there by the intrusion of the light. The artificers’ work allowed her no privacy: just a set of bars cordoning off one corner of the cellar, padlocked to eyebolts set in the stone walls on either side.

  She was not a Spider, as he had been told, but a halfbreed with a lot of Ant blood in her as well, pale of skin and with dartlike blemishes on cheeks and forehead. She had been caught sneaking across the rooftops by sentries from the Airborne, whereupon she had apparently put up a fierce struggle to defend herself. She had injured two men before they got her sword off her, and they had not been gentle in subsequently expressing their grievances. He could see where her left hand had been stamped on, swollen and ugly, and the surgeon had merely knotted a strip of cloth over her bloodied right eye after cleaning out the wound.

  When the soldiers had taken her down, she had called out Tynan’s name, they claimed. That was the only reason she still lived: because it was personal.

  ‘You’re the best the Spiderlands could send, are you?’ he asked. ‘Did. . did she send you?’ And what would I prefer to hear, precisely? He almost found he wanted her to say yes, to confirm that Mycella was still thinking of him, if only to dispatch this half-trained killer.

  The prisoner mumbled something through bruised and bloody lips.

  ‘Louder!’ he snapped, not going closer to the bars, just in case.

  ‘Not Spiderlands,’ he made out. ‘Collegium.’

  Tynan gave a surprised grunt. ‘Didn’t realize the locals did that sort of thing. Or maybe it’s just you, is it? Well you’re piss-poor at it, you know? Even as a murderer, you fail.’

  That got a reaction and she bared her teeth impotently at him, her one good eye staring wildly.

  ‘What did you hope to accomplish?’ Tynan asked her. ‘Killing me wouldn’t free your city, anyway. Unless you were going to work your way down the chain of command, from the top.’

  ‘You killed Eujen.’

  He frowned. The words made no sense to him.

  ‘He was my friend. He was the best man I knew. And when he came to talk to you, you took him and tortured him. . and then you shot him.’ As she spoke, her voice was low and dull, but her eye flashed fire when she looked up. ‘You killed my friend. You killed lots of my friends, but Eujen. . Coming to kill you was easier than staying to watch him die.’

  When he came to talk. .? ‘This isn’t that student nonsense, is it?’

  He could have put another knife in her, and it would have hurt less. The dismissal of everything there ever was about her cause and her friends, this man who would write the history books deeming them a trivial irrelevance.

  ‘Well, never mind about them. We’ll wrap them up today,’ he told her, thinking it more to himself than to torment her. ‘As for you, though, I’ll give you a choice. How much do you want to keep on living?’ Recognizing that traitor — hope — in her eye, he shook his head. ‘Oh no, don’t start down that road. There are two fates for you, girl. One is that we gift you a pair of pikes of your own, and you’ll die today, eventually. The other’s if you think you know something that we might be interested in. That way you live much longer, though, given the circumstances, you may come to regret it. That’s your choice, and that’s all of your choices.’ His voice had become rough and ugly, saying it. ‘I’ve just had two hundred good soldiers executed, assassin. Their deaths were quick and underserved. At least when I see your corpse, I’ll know yours was neither.’

  Stenwold was managing to walk more easily now, although occasional waves of dizziness still swept over him, so he kept his stick handy. He had even been out to climb the courtyard wall at dawn, to look at the size of the problem.

  It was a suitably large problem, too. There were plenty of Wasps out there, and some Sentinels, and it seemed likely that they would stir themselves soon, and then matters would get awkward.

  If the Wasps were of a mind to break the building open, then a little artillery — perhaps even the leadshotters of the Sentinels — would suffice to do it, and then the students’ defence would last only minutes under the descending host of the Light Airborne.

  On the other hand, the Wasps had declined to do any such thing so far, although similar tactics had been used against entrenched insurgents elsewhere in the city, and so there seemed some chance that the Empire might have to do things the old-fashioned way, and take the building by storm. In that case, it was possible that the students might still be in possession of it by dusk, for the main door was the only real approach, and there were plenty of small windows overlooking it that student snap-bowmen might use. But the next day would probably see the end, Stenwold realized. They were short of ammunition. The Empire was not short of men.

  The Dragonfly Castre Gorenn was in charge up on the wall — any command structure had come down to strength of personality, and the Commonwealer had become a near-mythic figure amongst the students owing to her feats of aim.

  ‘I want only people who can fly stationed on this wall,’ Stenwold told her. ‘So yourself, Flies, any Beetles who’ve got their wings. When their advance comes you need to pull back to the main building in good time — get inside so we can shut them out. Or else, if you can’t get in, just take off, get clear of the fighting.’

  Gorenn nodded coolly.

  ‘And no fool heroics. I mean in good time, Dragonfly.’ Stenwold had heard a great deal about the Commonweal Retaliatory Army.

  She met his eye warily, as if ascribing some legendary characteristics to him herself. ‘Understood, War Master.’

  Stenwold took another look over the wall, noticing movement about the Wasp lines, but a lazy sort of movement suggesting they had a little time in hand before any assault.

  Then Laszlo landed close to him. ‘Mar’Maker, you need to come now.’

  Trouble, was his first thought, but Stenwold could read Laszlo well, and the Fly was excited rather than worried. Something had happened.

  There was a gathering in one of the rooms off the infirmary — a band of about twenty, but they were the leaders. Stenwold marked Berjek Gripshod, now in a buff coat and carrying a snapbow, and a couple of other College Masters. The rest were students wearing their purple sashes, save for Gerethwy the Woodlouse, who still wore the colours of the Coldstone Company.

&nbs
p; And in the middle of all this, a newcomer. A Fly-kinden with a riot of black beard, whom Stenwold had assumed was long shipped out of the city.

  ‘Tomasso?’

  ‘And here’s himself!’ the ex-pirate declared. ‘Right then, let me speak my piece, for we’ve not much time.’

  ‘How did you get in here?’ Stenwold demanded.

  Tomasso looked pained but said, ‘Your little windows here will fit one of mine, just about, Master Maker. And fear not, your lads and lasses had a bow trained on me as I came in. They’re sharp enough. Now, time for you to be going, though, don’t you think? I can’t imagine what you’re waiting for, but it hasn’t appeared.’

  ‘That’s not much of a joke, Tomasso,’ Stenwold told him.

  ‘Nonsense. I’ve a distraction lined up. Your people here look light on their feet. They can nip out and lose themselves in the streets. Meanwhile, you can come with me.’

  ‘You obviously haven’t seen how things are looking on the ground out there,’ Stenwold replied flatly. ‘The Wasps have a cordon set about the entrance to the College, and you’d need a remarkable diversion to stop them simply shooting us all down.’

  Tomasso was nodding, a grin flashing from amidst his beard. ‘Oh, that you can bet on. You’ll all just need to be nimble in getting out.’

  ‘And the wounded?’ The voice came from the doorway: Sartaea te Mosca was standing there in a bloodied apron. ‘We have eleven who can’t walk, some who shouldn’t even be moved.’

  ‘Better to move them than let the Jaspers have them,’ Tomasso pointed out.

  ‘Nobody’s nimble when they’re carrying a stretcher,’ she told him.

  Tomasso looked exasperated, as though his audience didn’t quite understand what he was offering. Nobody actually voiced the idea of abandoning the wounded, although it must have done the round of most heads there.