Everything around him was too still, too silent. It was slowly winding the fear up tighter inside him. Find it, get out, but easier said than done. He flitted from tree to tree, trying to get his bearings, then hopping back up past the canopy for another look from on high. Back up there, battered by the wind, he felt he was in a different world.
Again there was that glimpse of something. Stone – natural or worked? Either way it would be something for the Empire’s maps. He cast himself through the turbulent air towards it, but lost it almost immediately, passing over where he was sure he had seen something, seeing nothing but more of the same.
Cursing, he fell back into that green abyss, plunging past the surface to the stifling silence.
He saw it. For a moment, just as he broke through, there was something there, off between the trees. He saw a mound plated with a carapace of great stones. Did Mantids build like that? Not in the Commonweal, they hadn’t. And old, it had looked old and cracked and moss-grown. A fort, perhaps: some ancient Mantis strongpoint. Now that was something to go back and tell his superiors.
He let himself drift forwards carefully, keeping an eye out for traps or webs or any movement that was not of the forest itself. He kept catching glimpses of the place, and then losing it, and he was unhappily aware that the comings and goings of that mound were not particularly accounted for by his own movements or by the placement of the trees. Magic. But his superiors would not accept ‘magic’ as a reason for failure.
The utter stillness all around him was becoming a horror. He could not even hear the wind, that had been so insistent up above.
There: he had it. He froze, seeing it clearly for the first time, and only then realizing that the whisper, the little insidious voice that he had been trying to ignore, had been calling to him all that time, and calling from here.
It had a name, that voice. It called itself Argastos.
He saw the place now, that stone-clad barrow, and the sight sent a chill chasing through him, because he would swear this was no fort, no haunt of living men. It was a tomb.
That was it: he’d had enough. He’d report this thing, and his superiors would have to be happy with that, because there was no way that Hanto was staying a moment longer.
He turned, wings flurrying, and toothed, raptorial arms plucked him from the air in one swift motion. His last sight was of vast, coolly intelligent eyes and the blades of its mandibles as it brought him towards them.
One
To stare into the forest was to stare into the heart of time.
The darkness between those trees had not changed for centuries. Here had come no revolution, nor busy-handed Apt with their machines. The old ways still held sway in those green depths. The reclusive denizens lived by the bow and the spear, hunting and gathering what the forest gave up to them. Sometimes, in their season, they were hunted in turn by the great beasts they took their name from: Mantis-kinden, fierce and free.
And they fought. They honed their skills from the earliest age by practising against each other and against the world. Although the Apt kinden had shone their bright light across most of the Lowlands, here was a bastion of the old darkness that even the Ant-kinden had considered too costly to conquer. Generations of Sarnesh tacticians had turned their eyes to that brooding presence on their eastern horizon, then shaken their heads and turned away.
The forest itself was nameless, or else had a secret name as all the greatest of the Inapt things had secret names. The only labels the Apt ever recorded belonged to the two Mantis holds that held dominion within the trees: Etheryon to the west, Nethyon to the east.
They held to themselves, mostly, although a steady trickle of young Etheryen had broken tradition enough to take Sarnesh coin in exchange for the use of their skills. More recently they had gone to war, and the first tremor of change had disturbed the leaves of their forest. A conflict not of their own making: a war against the Wasp-kinden, because an Apt threat had finally arisen that would not just shake its head and go away.
If he stared into the trees long enough, Amnon felt that he could feel a faint connection, a path back to the same certainties he had once lived by, which had made him happy to serve, happy to lead, happy to know his place . . . His homeland was a city by a river a thousand years ago, the past held in gentle stasis as the seasons turned, all the sons and daughters of Khanaphes busy at their allotted tasks. He had lived most of his life with no question in his head that could not be answered by, Because it is so.
Then the Empire had come, the world he had been born to overwritten in just a pitiful few days: all the certainties crumbling to the touch. He had not missed it, not then. Instead, he had despised the old ways because they had failed his people. He had seen his exile from Khanaphes as a badge of honour.
He wished he could go back, now, but there was nowhere to return to. The Khanaphes that was marked as a protectorate on Imperial maps did not resemble the home of his younger days.
There had been a woman of Collegium, a machine-handed and clever beauty, and, as long as he had her, the past could blow away with the desert wind for all he cared. Praeda Rakespear, her name had been, and he had loved her, and she him. And the Wasps had killed her, and left him marooned in this island of the harsh present with no way back and nowhere to go.
When he stared into the Mantis forest, he almost felt that the dark past those trees harboured was somehow also the past of his youth, and that the bright sun of Khanaphes was what cast those deep shadows. Surely all pasts eventually converged on one another, if you walked far enough back down that river?
But now the drone of a Sarnesh spotter orthopter intruded, boring into his ears and as impossible to ignore as a mosquito. The distant, certain past was wrenched away. At his back stood the Sarnesh camp – hundreds of those tan-skinned Ant-kinden bustling there, armoured in chainmail with their rectangular shields slung across their backs. They were all of them busy, the logistical weight of keeping an armed force in the field divided precisely across all their shoulders. They cooked, cleaned, sharpened, practised, patrolled, slept, relaxed, raised tents and stood watch, all with the exactness of clockwork, each in touch with the minds of their fellows, as content in their busy Aptitude as Amnon himself had ever felt back in Khanaphes. He envied them.
The Imperial Eighth under General Roder had already bested the Sarnesh once, toppling their fortress at Malkan’s Folly and rebuffing their ground forces at the same time. After that, the Wasps had made swift progress until they began to pass south of this forest, where skirmishing raids from the Mantids had brought them to a halt.
Unlike most Ant city-states, Sarn knew the value of allies. Hence this camp at the edge of the forest. Hence Amnon, arrived here from Collegium as the bodyguard of a Beetle diplomat, because nobody there could think of much else to do with him. The Ants and their allies were planning their next move.
‘Hey, big man!’
Thus warned, Amnon did not start as a small form dropped down beside him, the blurring wings fading away to nothing as the figure touched the ground.
‘You coming back to us any time soon?’ the diminutive newcomer asked him. Amnon was indeed a big man: the Fly-kinden barely came up to his waist.
‘Back to you?’ For a moment Amnon thought he meant something more, some meaning connected with the dark, unrippled past between the trees.
‘Only, herself is starting to fret again. All these Mantids about: I don’t know why she wanted to come, if she’s so weird about them. Or maybe the weird is the why of it.’ The Fly cast his eyes over the shadow-hung forest, the haunt of a thousand years of history.
‘Spooky, isn’t it,’ was his verdict.
On the journey up from Collegium Amnon had found the man a troubling travelling companion, his abrasive good cheer matching poorly with Amnon’s own thoughts. Troubling, mostly though, because remarks like that last one could still drag a smile onto Amnon’s face, whether he wanted it or not. ‘You have no heart, Laszlo. You’re too Apt.’
‘You’re just as Apt as me,’ the Fly countered. ‘Now, seriously, Helma Bartrer is getting that look in her eye again, and there’s that Moth-kinden about and, without your sober and overly serious gaze on her, she’s likely to do something stupid.’
Amnon grunted, and turned away from the pensive regard of the dark trees. There was a core of lead within him since Praeda had died, and sometimes he felt that he should just cling to it and turn his back on the rest of the world. But Laszlo seemed an antidote to that, and the only way to shut off the little man’s irrepressible talking would be to kill him. Or perhaps remind the Fly of his own troubles.
‘Any luck?’ he asked quietly, and for a moment the question did seem to decant some of his own seriousness into the Fly.
‘Not yet, but the Sarnesh skipper hasn’t shown yet, and I’m betting she’s still with him. Hoping so, anyway.’ Laszlo was part of the Collegiate delegation on utterly false pretences, as only Amnon knew. Not that he was a spy, or rather a spy for any party other than Collegium, but he had his own agenda.
They picked their way back into the camp, following a curious order of precedence. The Ants got out of their way smoothly, each tipped off by a dozen pairs of eyes in advance, and finding it simply more efficient to get clear of these clumsy, closed-minded foreigners. Laszlo and Amnon could have run straight at a dense mob of them and not jostled an elbow on the way through.
The Mantids were different. When their paths crossed, Amnon and Laszlo stopped to let the locals stalk haughtily by. True, the Etheryen were at least somewhat used to outsiders, given Sarn’s proximity, but this was their home and to cross them here was to challenge them. The formal alliance between the Inapt and Apt was very new; nobody wanted to test its limits.
They were tall and graceful, and every one of them armed, even the youngest and the oldest who had ventured from the forest. Pale and sharp-featured, most of them looked on all who were not their kin with arch condescension. They were the masters of battle whose steel had once ruled the Lowlands in the name of their Moth-kinden masters. That five centuries of progress had erased that world, beyond their borders, was not hinted at in their expressions.
As Laszlo had observed, Helma Bartrer, Collegiate Assembler and Master of the College, was constantly twitchy. A jumpy look came into her eye every time she caught sight of a Mantis or a Moth. Amnon had thought at first it was fear, curious in a woman who had volunteered herself for this duty. By now he had a sinking feeling that it might instead be academic curiosity, as if Bartrer was forcibly restraining herself from stuffing each Mantis-kinden in a pickling jar for further study. He understood she belonged to the College history faculty, which covered a multitude of sins.
‘Ah, aha.’ She offered them a vague wave as they approached. ‘Good, in the nick of time. I think we’re close to getting under way.’ She was a broad, dark woman, solidly built as most Beetles were, with her hair drawn back into a bun and wearing formal College robes that somehow remained approximately white despite her living out of a tent. A delicate pair of spectacles sat on the bridge of her nose. Beside her was a man of around the same height, but of a slender build, grey of skin and with eyes of blank white: the ambassador from the Moths of Dorax. He had no name that Amnon had ever heard mentioned, and was dressed more like a scout than a diplomat, wearing a banded leather cuirass under his loose grey robe, and a bandolier of throwing knives over his narrow chest. Helma Bartrer became especially twitchy when Moths were about. If Amnon were to discover her dissecting the man for posterity, he would not be much surprised.
‘Is the Sarnesh fellow here, then?’ Laszlo asked eagerly,
‘The tactician? Just arrived, I think,’ Bartrer confirmed. ‘And Master . . . tells me that the Nethyen delegates are expected any moment.’
The Moth, whom Bartrer consistently addressed as ‘Master . . .’, in a pointed attempt at fishing for a name, nodded smoothly.
‘He says it’s a sign of how grave matters have become that the Nethyen have actually agreed to send someone,’ Bartrer went on, ‘They’re insular even for Mantids.’
‘I’ll be properly honoured, then,’ Laszlo said. ‘Look, I’ve got some official business to sort out for Sten Maker – you mind if I make myself scarce for a moment?’
Bartrer studied him narrowly through the lenses of her spectacles. ‘You seem to have a lot of official business that nobody told me about,’ she pointed out. ‘I am the ambassador.’
‘Mar’Maker’s a busy man, Helma Bartrer,’ Laszlo pointed out merrily, and with that he was off and winging on his way.
Bartrer made an undiplomatic grimace, then turned back to the Moth. While Amnon had a good idea why she always sought the man out when she could, why ‘Master . . .’ stood around for it was less clear. Perhaps, under the man’s unflappable exterior, he was frantically trying to navigate an imagined maze of Collegiate etiquette. Perhaps the Moths were as frightened of alienating their allies as was everyone else?
He missed what Bartrer said next, though, because of a commotion starting up to the north of the camp, and because all the Ants around them had abruptly drawn their swords.
Balkus was not having a good time of it.
He was surrounded by his own people, and that was the problem. All those dun-coloured faces he could see were sufficiently like his own to have been sisters and brothers – indeed they had once been as close as sisters and brothers. Just like in any family, though, shared blood did not mean that you got on. Whilst most Ant-kinden knuckled down and let the mill of their peers grind all the awkward edges off them, a few found that what such a process would leave behind would no longer be them.
You did not abandon a city-state and then come back later. That decision was made once, and never revisited. To become renegade meant never going home.
Balkus liked life simple, and that had mostly involved going to the opposite end of the Lowlands to Sarn and selling his services as a fighter and nailbowman to anyone who had enough coin. Then he had gone into politics.
He hadn’t realized that he was doing it, at the time. He had merely signed on with a Helleren crew that had turned out to be run by an agent of Stenwold Maker, the Collegiate spymaster. Then there had been a fight with the Wasps that had killed off several of Balkus’s friends, and going along with Maker’s plans to scupper the Empire had seemed the right and proper thing to do.
That had led to his becoming a sort of unofficial lieutenant to Maker, which had in turn led, somehow, to Balkus leading the Collegiate detachment at the Battle of Malkan’s Folly – the first scrap there, where the Sarnesh and their allies had smashed the Imperial Seventh and won the war, rather than the more recent one where events had gone somewhat the other way.
Leading a group of non-Ants in an Ant-led battle had been hard, but not because of the hostility of his former kinsmen. In the heat of battle, Balkus had lost it. Instead of being the defiant renegade, he had been seamlessly taking mental orders from the Sarnesh tacticians and shouting them out to his Collegiate followers, never stopping to question them. He had become one of the colony again, for all that they said you could never go back. Memory of the experience still woke him up at night in a cold sweat, convinced he was losing himself in a great sea of everyone else.
He had left Maker’s service for that reason, gone off with a friend to the new city of Princep Salma, which a rabble of idealistic refugees had been building west of Sarn. He should have known better. He should have gone far, far away.
Of course, he had turned out to be one of the most experienced fighting men that the young city possessed. Before he could really think about matters, he had ended up in charge of the defence of a part-built town with no borders and no real soldiers.
And when word came that the Wasps were coming again, and that the Sarnesh were gathering their allies, Balkus had found himself with a minuscule delegation sent to keep an eye on things. Princep had neither the capability nor the inclination to wage war, even on the Wasps, but Sarn was its s
hield, closest neighbour and greatest potential threat if things went wrong. It was imperative for Princep to know just what plans and promises were being made.
So here he was again – a big Ant, a head taller than most of his kin – had it been just that, in the end, that had marked him out as somehow wrong? – walking through an invisible sea of their comment and criticism, breathing in ill wishes while exhaling his own profound dislike of his native people. The pressure of them all around him kept him constantly on his guard – against the chance that they might decide that his being here was an insult demanding answer, against that small traitorous part of himself that wanted to give it all up and go home, even though he never could.
His delegation was all of two other people: his heliopter pilot and a Roach-kinden girl who was something approximating an agent of Princep’s government, if the place could be said to have one. Her name was Syale, she was no more than twenty, and most of the time Balkus had no idea where she was or what she was doing. He would have worried, except that it turned out Roaches seemed to have some weird understanding with the Mantids. At least, if she was in their company, she was in no danger from anyone else.
Sperra, his friend from Maker’s service, had not come, but Balkus reckoned that was mostly because the Sarnesh had tortured her last time she had been a guest of theirs, which tended to stick in the memory.
Balkus’s own self-determined mission here was to not get into any trouble or come to anyone’s attention, and he had just failed it.
He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, basically. The Princep trio had set up their own little camp just beyond the outer ring of Sarnesh tents, and he had been crossing between them when he had seen the returning patrol: a dozen Ant-kinden cloaked and surcoated in grey-green over their mail, scouts out keeping watch for intruders. Now it looked as though they had caught someone.
Balkus had drifted closer, despite the immediate angry warnings he heard inside his skull. The prisoners seemed an odd lot to be Wasp spies, that was for sure.
War Master's Gate (Shadows of the Apt) Page 2
