War Master's Gate (Shadows of the Apt)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Other observers seemed to be simple soldiers drafted in to make up the numbers, especially for such subjects as the Empire plainly had no use for and considered trivial. Their impact on classes was disconcertingly random – some simply knocked off for a drink at the start, or sat there and read, or just stared into space. Others took too much of an interest, such as the sergeant who had decided he was an art critic and used his sting to torch an entire class’s life-painting efforts.

  One of the Living Sciences lectures on anatomy had supposedly been commandeered by a Wasp who displayed a knowledge of the human body, its breaking points and tolerances, far in excess of the lecturer himself.

  But Sartaea te Mosca, Associate Master and teacher of Inapt studies, was lucky, and she had pushed that luck a very long way indeed. After all, she was teaching a subject that the Wasp-kinden could not understand and did not care about. So far, her observer had been a Wasp soldier who had plainly been bored to tears by her ramblings, so usually just fell asleep.

  And, all the while, she and her students spoke treachery. They spoke in the language of the Moths, who used the same words as everyone else but employed them very differently. They conferred about events within Collegium as though they were dry old histories, nicknamed living men and women with the monikers of ancient heroes. At first her class had been the usual handful of awkward Inapt and clueless Apt, but by now she was ‘teaching’ to a score of the city’s finest, who came and mastered the conventions and the subterfuge they employed because nowhere else could they talk freely under the noses of their oppressors.

  Sartaea te Mosca had never dreamt that her insignificant little class might ever provide so much of a service to the world.

  She stepped into her classroom now – still the same cramped, high-ceilinged room as before, although it was getting difficult to fit everybody in these days – and she halted.

  The expected bored Wasp soldier was not there. Instead, she faced a lean Moth-kinden man in grey robes, who looked at her with disdain.

  ‘You are the lecturer in “Inapt studies”, called te Mosca?’ he inquired.

  ‘Yes, that’s me.’ Sartaea had been trained by Moths, accepted into their halls because she had some magical talent, and yet never truly made welcome because that talent was not great. This man’s arch and penetrating scrutiny brought those cold and unhappy days back to her with a vengeance. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I have been sent to Collegium from Tharn to assist our allies in the Empire with matters that Wasps themselves might not quite comprehend,’ he said, pointedly offering her no name. ‘I will be sitting in on your teaching, although what could possibly pass for true learning in a den of the Apt such as this eludes me. Perhaps you will surprise me. Perhaps your students are all budding magicians. We shall see.’ His blank, white eyes seemed to see into every corner of her. ‘I look forward to your words, te Mosca. And, rest assured, I shall be reporting to the administration on your fitness to teach.’

  After her students had filed in, she stood before them, and began stammering her way through an old lecture, some genuine tangled Moth-kinden philosophy that most of those assembled there would never be able to grasp. Every time the Moth coughed, or shuffled, or just looked at her in a certain way, she trailed off into silence.

  The day after that, she cancelled her classes.

  General Roder

  It could have been worse.

  For Roder himself it almost certainly would become worse. The Eighth had been facing nothing short of extinction when the Sarnesh had barrelled in to catch his forces between themselves and the Mantis-kinden. And it had been all the Mantis-kinden, as far as he could work out, the Eighth’s mere presence having apparently mended a rift that had stood between Etheryon and Nethyon for longer than histories recorded.

  The defences that his men had put in place had slowed the Sarnesh charge and, had the Wasps been able to concentrate their efforts, then Roder was confident that the Ants would have been scythed down in their ranks and thrown back, just as they had been before Malkan’s Stand. By that point, though, there had been several hundred Mantis-kinden running rampant behind the lines – and they were swift and deadly, able to fly or just leap over any trenches or barriers the Wasps had put up. They had the same grasp of tactics that Roder had marked in their clashes with the Eighth before the supposed alliance with the Nethyen – making effective use of their archers to bedevil the Wasp Light Airborne, continually disrupting any attempt to contain or flank them.

  Had it been just the Mantids, or just the Sarnesh . . . but the two of them together had squeezed and squeezed until the basic ability of the Eighth to coordinate and function as an army had come apart at the seams, individual officers and detachments being swamped and destroyed, or falling back without orders.

  Even then, Roder had done his best, sending out messengers by the minute to turn a threatened rout into a halfway disciplined retreat. He had saved as much as he could of his men. He had pulled the Sentinels back, and even salvaged some of the lighter artillery pieces.

  He had been forced to abandon the greatshotters, however, those marvels of Iron Glove Cartel artifice, and now the Sarnesh engineers would be all over them. He had thus given one of the Empire’s greatest weapons into the hands of the enemy. At least General Tynan, when he had been forced back from Collegium that first time, had possessed the decency to have his artillery destroyed by aerial bombardment.

  He wondered where the Empress was now. If she was dead, then he might yet get to live, though hardly in glory. Did this new Mantis business mean her own insane errand into the forest had been fatal for her? Was the Empire even now rudderless?

  The Eighth had pulled back south-east, away from the forest, away from Sarn. Subsequent scouting suggested that his forces had, against all odds, inflicted sufficient damage on the Sarnesh that the Ants were leery of immediately renewing hostilities, and the Mantids had not ventured far beyond their forest borders. Probably the two kinden were cautiously feeling out just where they stood with each other.

  He had dutifully sent word to Capitas that he had failed, and asking for fresh orders. The temptation to falsify his report had been strong, but he suspected that the Rekef would have people amongst his officers who would ensure the truth was told back home, and hence honesty became perforce the best policy.

  Yesterday those orders had arrived. The Empress’s personal seal was missing, but the word was brought by one of those Red Watch types, stating as always how he was the Empress’s own mouth. There was no suggestion that the Empress had gone missing, and Roder sensed that to ask the question would be even more hazardous than losing a battle to the Sarnesh.

  From a lack of contrary word, he could only assume that he was still in command, and still in the war.

  That night he had slept better than he had for a tenday, only to be woken before dawn by a commotion that he knew could mean only one thing. The Sarnesh were attacking. They had fooled his sentries and scouts somehow. He could hear shouts and screams already within the camp.

  There was no time for armour, but he grabbed his sword from its scabbard and stumbled out into the grey half-light, demanding reports.

  For a moment he could only see his own men rushing about, hear the crackle of stingshot, panicking cries from all around. He had no sense of which direction the attack was coming from.

  Then he saw a man fall ten yards away, just tripping on nothing, then a moment later he had half-vanished, the ground beneath him caving in, tents nearby collapsing as their guy ropes flew free. Roder gaped, any words dying in his mouth, trying to understand what he was seeing.

  Another soldier rushed forwards to help the stricken man, but something lashed out at him, a lithe, whip-like strike from the pit, and the rescuer fell back and then collapsed, convulsing and screaming.

  Roder found his feet taking him nearer, despite a horrible atavistic fear that had sprung up in him. He had to know; he had to see.

  The earth was falling away a
nd there was a tunnel there, and surely this meant the Sarnesh had found some new way to employ their ant minions . . . or they had some new machine, or . . .

  A knot of things was writhing within, long and twisted, segmented, and bristling with legs. Some raised their heads as he approached, barely more than two whipping antennae and a pair of curved, poisonous claws.

  The world was full of venomous creatures, of course. There were spiders and scorpions aplenty, and many of them pressed into service as riding or draught animals, guards and even pets. There was one beast that no one had tamed, however, and those were killed on sight as often as not. There were stories and legends regarding them that the Apt scholars scoffed at, and that the Hornet-kinden told one another about their campfires in their superstitious, credulous way. Those stories were all running through Roder’s mind right then, watching this writhing mass disentangle and uncoil itself. And, beyond them, in the pit . . .

  He saw them, the kinden, as they emerged from the earth in a rapid column, one after another moving with a sinuous coordination, each practically on the heels of the one before. They were like no people he had ever seen, and a dreadful similarity occupied all their faces, enough to make an Ant shudder.

  For all their discipline, they made a weirdly primitive show. They had armour of chitin plates and short blades and some were wielding slings, not even a crossbow amongst them. A laughable threat, said those rational parts of Roder’s mind that were currently in the minority.

  He saw his soldiers reacting, and most of them held snap-bows – and surely these soil-dwellers wouldn’t even know what a snapbow was.

  And yet his men were not shooting. Most stood there and held their snapbows as though they had never seen them before, jabbing them at the enemy as though they knew the devices were weapons, but not what to do with them. Others were already resorting to their stings, but by then the subterranean warriors were upon them, and there were more crawling from the earth all around, snaking lines of them issuing from tents or just rising from the dusty ground, along with their murderous beasts.

  Someone ran past Roder, one of the Bee-kinden that drove the Sentinels, and the general grabbed for the man’s shoulder, spinning him round. ‘Get in your machine!’ he demanded, for surely those killer automotives would serve to scatter these attackers.

  But the man just stared at Roder as though some part of his mind had been excised. ‘My . . .?’ he mouthed. ‘Machine . . .?’

  And Roder stared at him and realized that he now had no idea of what he himself meant. He and the Bee-kinden gaped at one another, while all around them the remnants of the Eighth Army disintegrated.

  Raullo Mummers

  And life in Collegium settled and found its new level. The Wasps had turned from a threat to a terror to a fact that must be lived with.

  There were arrests still. A month after the final quashing of the student insurgency they were no longer common, but not a tenday went by without word of someone’s broken door found hanging open, someone vanishing into the Imperial administration district that had been established around the Gear Gate. Some few were next seen on the crossed pikes, others were not seen again at all. Some were released again, and it was a different kind of horror to see their family and colleagues and acquaintances react to them: What did you tell them, that they let you go?

  Raullo Mummers had expected to be arrested before this, because he had been in the College library building, because he had been part of the crowd that had lynched Helmess Broiler, simply because he had been there.

  Two tendays later, he had finally come to terms with the fact that nobody cared. Nobody had been making a list of names back then, and in any event he had not been on the walls with a snapbow. Carrying a stretcher had been the greatest blow he had struck for the freedom of Collegium, and even that experience had terrified him close to death.

  The only tangible upshot of his ineffectual, inebriate presence during the fighting had been this room he now occupied, situated over a taverna: a low-ceilinged garret a fraction of the size of his old studio, which had burned down during the bombing of the city. The taverner had a daughter, a student who had played a rather more active part in the insurgency, and she had spoken up for him. Otherwise, Raullo would have found himself without even a roof over his head.

  His landlord’s tolerance was a limited resource, though, just like any commodity in Collegium right now. Raullo knew that the man would come muttering for rent soon enough. There were plenty of other dispossessed in the city, and most of them better able to pay their way than an artist who no longer painted.

  He had not put brush to canvas since his studio burned, save that one crude sketch for Eujen’s doomed pamphlet. His life had been contained there, in the sum accumulation of his sketches, roughs and drafts curling and cindering from the walls in the wake of the incendiary. His entire career had burned, quite separate from this lumpen body of his that Eujen had dragged from the building. Apart from that, when he reached into himself for that piece of him from which inspiration grew, he found only a cracked, charred void.

  Last night, though, he had dreamt: the first dream he could recall since the fires. He had woken shouting, fighting against the thin blanket, seeing it all ablaze, his careful linework, his life studies, his friends.

  He had dreamt of Gerethwy and Averic, of Straessa and Eujen. But his dreams had given them all over to the flames. He had abandoned them there and fled the building, only to find the city outside roasting on the same pyre.

  Now he stood with a canvas before him, in the poor light of the garret room, holding a brush in his hand. He had begged these meagre materials, drained the city of any residual goodwill it might hold for him, because there was a new flame lit in that burnt-out core of him – and it hurt, and it seared him, and he had to get it out.

  He took some black paint up on his brush and set to work.

  What he made of the canvas was not art, at least not any art that he recognized. Collegiate patrons had always known what they liked: imitate life, capture the truth of a likeness or a landscape, and the plaudits would follow. Everyone knew that.

  What Raullo created that day was something even he would barely own to. It was a horror of jagged shapes, the black of shadow, the red of leaping flames, twisted faces merging half into fallen walls, and the press of rushing human forms. Not what life looked like, but how it felt.

  When it was done, he felt that he had vomited something up, purged himself painfully of a corruption that would only well up again in time.

  He took it down to show the landlord, and the man and his daughter both stared at it for a long time.

  ‘I can’t look at it,’ his landlord admitted at last, still staring. ‘What is it?’

  Raullo could only shrug.

  ‘Take it away,’ the man insisted, but he stopped Raullo when the artist tried to leave. ‘Hammer and tongs, what have you done?’

  He hung it up in the taverna’s taproom two days later. He claimed he could not stop thinking about it. He even bought Raullo more canvas, without being asked.

  Two days later the landlord knocked at the door of the garret. ‘Mummers, come out. There’s someone here.’ His voice sounded strained.

  Raullo put his head round the door blearily – late rising and wine were two habits, at least, that had survived the ending of the war. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Someone wants to see you.’ There was a warning note in the taverner’s tone. ‘He wants to buy your painting.’

  The taproom was silent, when Raullo descended. Those few drinkers still present would not look at him.

  ‘You are the artist?’ The man at the bar had been staring at his painting, but now he turned. The captain’s rank badge on his uniform flashed as it caught the sun.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Raullo breathed raggedly. Everyone knew the correct way to address Wasps these days.

  ‘How much?’ the Wasp asked him. And Raullo was about to refuse to sell, or say something even more rash, but he lo
oked the man in the face and saw what he had missed the first time: that gaunt, hollow expression about the eyes. Here was a man, of no matter what kinden, who had seen enough of what the artist had seen to understand.

  Raullo named a sum.

  Eujen Leadswell

  When he awoke, there was a hand in his that he knew.

  She screamed when he squeezed it, for all that it was a faint and pitiful motion, and was across the room from him, shaking and choking, staring at him as though . . .

  As though I’ve come back from the dead.

  The eyepatch suits her. Such a random thought, at such a moment.

  Later on she would tell him everything: how they were now in the Sarnesh Foreigners’ Quarter, which was thronging with Collegiate expatriates and Mynan exiles, all agitating to take back their own and each other’s cities; how Castre Gorenn was now calling herself the Collegiate Retaliatory Army, and she wasn’t the only one. She would tell him how the Mantids of the forest – the Netheryon it was now – had suffered some kind of radical change of policy, and were now negotiating with the Sarnesh high command.

  She would explain how the Sarnesh had chased off the Imperial Eighth, but got a bloody nose in the bargain, and how a new force of Wasps appearing from Helleron had led to a complex chess game between the Ants and the Empire which neither side was ready to bring to an endgame, especially now that fighting had erupted between the Wasps and the Spiders down along the Silk Road. Seldis was ablaze, they said.