War Master's Gate (Shadows of the Apt)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Right then, what—

  But as he lifted his head it was immediately obvious what. They had a new passenger, hitching a belligerent lift atop the balloon. Vrant, not a man prone to fear, felt it touch him nonetheless, before angrily shaking it off.

  There was a praying mantis twenty feet long lying along the top of the balloon, the weight of the beast deforming the silk into a sagging bowl-shape. Its legs were spread wide, claw-feet digging for purchase, and it stared right back at Vrant with more self-possession than he himself could muster just then. The huge, glittering eyes that made up so much of its triangular head kept a steady hunter’s gaze on him, even as its slender antennae were lashed about like whips by the wind.

  Its wing-cases were part-folded, the wings themselves protruding unevenly from underneath, and he guessed that the storm had caught it in mid-flight, cast it through the air until this unhappy meeting of aircraft and insect.

  But it was staring at him like a man stares, with that shock of contact, consciousness to consciousness, that Vrant had only ever known looking into the eyes of another human being. Impossible: it was only an animal, no matter how dangerous, but as it clung to the balloon, shifting its spread-eagled pose slightly as the wind howled, it watched Vrant with a calmly malign intelligence.

  ‘Pits with you,’ he snarled, and shot it: holding tight with his left, he whipped his right hand up, palm outwards, spitting a bolt of golden fire straight into the thing’s face. He had an instant’s image of one huge eye caved in, a scorched ruin. In the next moment, rather than rearing up or going for him, the great insect just flung its wings wide open, as if readier to trust the storm than his sting.

  But he thought, in that moment, of the way it had looked at him, the depths of understanding that gaze had spoken of.

  The wind grabbed at the mantis immediately, the wings like sails hauling it back along the balloon’s sagging length and away, and the insect’s barbed forearms, which had been dug into the silk, unseamed half the canopy as it left.

  Abruptly the motion of the airship was not a valiant struggle against the hostile elements, but a lurching, shuddering descent, barely slower than falling, towards the great, grim green beneath.

  At the end of all the screaming and shouting and wild plummeting, Corver’s head was ringing hard enough that there was a blur at the edges of everything he looked at, whilst some part of the gondola’s inner hull had fetched him a crack to the ribs hard enough that just drawing breath seemed a privilege reserved for higher ranks. He was wedged near the pilot’s seat, bracing himself as best he could against the curve of the hull and waiting for the next lurch to send him the length of the cabin. The inevitability of it, the sudden dislodgement, the bone-breaking impact, crowded his mind and monopolized his attention. Only slowly did he become aware that the much-abused airship was no longer moving.

  No longer moving at all, that was – neither that mad, murderous fall nor the gentle sway of its proper operation. They had come down at last.

  There was a boot close to his head, and he clutched at it, and nearly got himself kicked in the face for his trouble. The rush of relief at this surprised him: he had not appreciated it, but some part of him had plainly written off everyone else on the airship already. He had taken himself as the lone survivor.

  It would not be the first time.

  ‘Sergeant?’ came a hoarse voice from the other end of the boot.

  Corver levered himself out, holding onto the pilot’s seat and – as it turned out – the pilot. Sandric was still in place, the battered emperor of a broken world, one of the control levers snapped off in his hand. Aside from a great florid bruise across his forehead he seemed in one piece. His vessel was less lucky.

  Everything was tilted, enough that Corver would have found himself sliding towards the stern hold had he let go. They had come down, but on nothing level. It was hard to get any idea of the damage, for the only light was a broad splash of it from the open side-hatch – the cover now forever torn away – and a little peering in from Sandric’s viewport, which was mostly occluded by trees. The rear of the cabin was in darkness. So, survivors? Is it just Sandric and me? Vrant had been outside, Corver recalled, and he felt a sudden stab of loss at that. The two of them had served together for some years.

  Then someone groaned from down there, and Corver remembered that he was a sergeant of the Imperial army.

  ‘Sandric, get a lantern going.’ He was trying not to think about that mess of green beyond the viewport, that forest landscape he had seen in the storm. I’ve had enough trees to last me a lifetime.

  ‘Sergeant?’ came a voice from the darkness, and Corver reflected that men like Captain Ordan had a staying power that roaches and beetles would marvel at.

  ‘Here, sir,’ he called dutifully, at around the time that Sandric found that the second lamp stashed by his controls was still intact. Abruptly the cabin was filled with a burned smell and the hissing and crackling as the white chemical fire threw a cold radiance across everything.

  Ordan was down the far end, as unscathed as could be, glowering up at his subordinates. Beside him – and below him, now – the hold alcove had plainly taken the brunt of their descent – or at least shared it with a couple of trees. The combined shattered woodwork – natural and artificial – was such a mass of splinters, jagged edges and spars that Corver only saw the blood and mangled bodies a moment later. Lucen and Tarvoc, Ordan’s two cronies, had been in the midst of all that when the airship had met the forest the hard way.

  Ordan followed Corver’s gaze, and swore furiously at the sight. For a moment he had almost redeemed himself by showing an iota of sorrow over the two dead men, but then he was shouting, ‘Get down here and free the chest, Sergeant!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You heard me!’

  The chest – that one apparently filled with lead from Corver’s recollections – had taken a fierce blow that dented one metal-bound corner, but it was still there, plainly visible amongst the bloody wreckage.

  He glanced at Sandric, his expression plainly indicating that no amount of a-pilot’s-place-is-at-the-controls was going to keep the man from pitching in, but then something darkened the hatchway.

  In that moment, all three of them, even Sandric, had a palm directed at the intruder.

  ‘No way to welcome a war hero,’ the newcomer muttered, and Sandric’s chemical lamp lit on the brutish features of Vrant.

  Corver just stared at him for a moment, noting the cuts and bruises that had made the man’s face, none too lovely to begin with, a child’s nightmare. ‘Present yourself for duty, soldier,’ was all he said, but there was no keeping the relief from his voice.

  ‘Just get down here and move the cursed chest!’ Ordan spat at the lot of them, and then, ‘And that goes for you as well, you sniveller!’ He was jabbing a finger up at the canted ceiling, and they saw Sterro the Fly-kinden there, clinging to a bulkhead.

  The chest had been hard enough to shunt into its alcove. Slick with the remnants of the dead men, wedged in amongst the splintered wood, it was a nightmare to haul the weight of it out, but the Imperial army was nothing if not bloody-minded about things, and eventually the dented, battered object was in the centre of the cabin, courtesy of three Wasps’ efforts and in spite of Sterro’s getting in the way.

  ‘Now get it out of the wreck. We’ll need to carry it overland,’ Ordan decided.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, but we haven’t looked at salvaging the airship yet,’ Sandric spoke up, unexpectedly.

  Ordan, halfway to the hatch, stared back at him as if he were mad. ‘Salvage? Look at the thing!’

  ‘But, sir!’ Sandric tried, but Ordan had already hauled himself outside. The pilot glanced about, plainly unhappy with any orders that would take him out of the airship’s sheltering hull and into the green beyond. It was a sentiment that Corver could only sympathise with.

  ‘Get the chest out here!’ Ordan bellowed from outside.

  Corver looked at the m
alignant weight of the chest, and then at Vrant, whose expression was murderous, and who looked as though he was about to have one of his occasional lapses of military discipline. Swearing to himself, Corver abandoned the chest and followed Ordan outside.

  He was met with the immediate and expected, ‘I thought I gave you an order!’ Ordan looked pale and unwell – not the crash nor the walls of over-arching forest that rose on all sides, Corver judged, but the man’s own inner fears gnawing at him.

  ‘Sir, have you thought this through—?’ he started, and Ordan rounded on him furiously, a hair’s breadth away from violence.

  ‘An order, Sergeant! You remember those? I need that chest up here, right away! I need—’ And for a moment, as Ordan choked on the word, it was evident that, whatever he needed, it had driven him to his absolute limit. The next instant there was a slender shaft quivering in his throat, flaring his eyes wide with shock, and yet suddenly unseeing. The captain pitched backwards over the sloping rail and Corver dropped back through the hatch with a yell.

  The next few moments were brutal. The attackers were right behind Corver, and two of them got in through the hatch before the Wasps could even think of holding it against them. They were swift and slender, a man and a woman, angular-framed, one with a spear and one with a dagger in each hand, ferocious as beasts. Vrant had his sword in his hand immediately, but the spearpoint was already at him, skittering from his banded mail more by luck than judgement. The blow knocked him back, though, and he was gritting his teeth against a sudden pain – not the spear but the battering he had received in the storm.

  The woman with the daggers shrieked and leapt for Corver, but the soldier part of the sergeant’s mind was working smoothly. He fell back, cutting at her with his own blade – in his grip without him having any memory of drawing it – and his left hand coming up open-palmed to sting, burning her across the body and throwing her back, twisting and hissing.

  Sterro shouted out a warning, and Corver turned to see another lean man twisting in through the wreckage at the cabin’s rear, leading with a long, slender blade. The Fly fled before him, hands covering his head, and Corver’s stingshot flew wide as the new assailant lunged in.

  Vrant found himself fighting over the spear-shaft with his opponent. He was the bigger man, and stronger, but he was trying to work around some cracked ribs, and the fierce-faced enemy was trying to lance the spines of his forearms into the Wasp’s hide, scraping and scratching as they dug at his mail. Then Sandric turned up behind the man and put a bolt of crackling energy into the small of his back, which solved that problem. Corver fell back to join them, only inches ahead of the rapier’s point, and Sandric surprised all three of them by turning and reflexively killing the swordsman too, searing half the man’s face off.

  The quiet that followed stretched out for a long time, as the Wasps waited to see whether there would be any more of them. Vrant and Corver had a soldier’s stillness, but Sandric was pale and shaking in the aftermath of his heroics, and it was plain that he had gone a long time, as a pilot, without having to dirty his hands with actual killing.

  ‘Mantis-kinden,’ Vrant grunted, as though it was some great revelation. The three bodies looked ragged and half-staved, to Corver, and one had surely been no older than fourteen, but Mantis-kinden nonetheless, and therefore the enemy.

  ‘We must be in the middle of the Nethy or whatever it’s called,’ he said heavily. ‘So of course Mantis-kinden. And more than just three out there. Sandric.’

  The pilot watched him warily.

  ‘Get out there and find some cover. We need a lookout,’ Corver told him.

  ‘Me? Sergeant, it’s solid forest out there, you can’t see a thing.’

  ‘Then you’d better keep a really good watch, is all.’

  Sandric’s eyes darted madly about the cabin until they found Sterro. ‘Him, Sergeant! Why can’t he go?’

  This was a classic command decision, as far as Corver was concerned. Sandric was probably right: as a Fly, Sterro had better eyes than any of the Wasps. Still, the little maggot had even less nerve than Sandric – and besides, Corver had given an order, and stopping for debate was not what they taught you in the army.

  ‘Just get on up there and do what you’re told,’ the sergeant snapped, and Vrant loomed in to back him up, so that Sandric cringed away, and then clambered through the hatch very much under protest, muttering to himself.

  ‘Right.’ Corver took a deep breath, and the words he did not say were, What the pits are we going to do? Instead he stared down at the chest balefully. ‘Get this thing open. Let’s see what’s so important.’

  Sterro began to squawk an objection, but Vrant was already laying in with a will, stamping where the wood was already damaged, his hobnailed soldier’s standard issues thundering down in a solid rhythm and finishing what the crash and subsequent manhandling had already started. The eighth or ninth kick stove in one side of the chest, and ruptured two of the cloth bags inside, so that an insidious little trickle of bright metal spilt out onto the cabin floor.

  Sterro stopped making noises, his hands twitching. They probably taught the expression on his face to all Consortium men under the heading of naked greed.

  ‘Oh, stab me,’ Vrant groaned, and took hold of the broken wood, tearing away three sides of the chest to reveal the hoard within. That the little sacks were all stuffed with gold coin, nobody doubted for a second. It was all Imperial mint, and Corver wondered just how much of the Seventh Army’s pay was sitting there in front of them.

  Sterro lunged forwards as though the gold was dragging him, but the sergeant cuffed him off. ‘So what was the plan? Where were we headed with – with this?’

  ‘You think I know?’ the Fly demanded. ‘You think he told me anything?’

  ‘I think you were his creature, and that’s why he brought you,’ Corver pointed out.

  ‘He wanted someone to hold his piss-pot and open bottles for him. Not like he actually let me in on anything!’ Sterro protested, but under the grim looks of both Wasps he shrugged. ‘Look, you know about the lists, right? Bad time to be on the Rekef books right now – Insider or Outsider, open agent or hidden in the army, they’ll come for you with their lists and then a quick death is the best of it. Look then, Captain Ordan, he made a piss-poor job of keeping friends.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ Corver grunted, but the pattern seemed eminently plausible. So this was the grand secret mission Ordan had dragged them on: nothing short of desertion, theft and probably treason. Where would he have ordered them to? Collegium? Sarn? Somewhere he reckoned he could buy himself an amnesty with gold and information. Being dead on the end of a Mantis arrow was too good for him.

  It was then that Sandric began to holler.

  Some years ago, the Empire’s Twelve-year War against the Dragonflies had been brought to an end when the Ants of Maynes staged a rebellion, cutting off the Wasps’ supply lines into the Commonweal. Sandric had been part of the punitive force sent to teach the Ants a harsh lesson in Imperial policy, which he had effected by overflying them in a boxy armoured heliopter whilst his crew dumped shrapnel grenades on the revolting populace through the floor hatch. That had been his sole stint as a combat pilot. The balance of his career had been ferrying supplies and men to one army or another, and although he had cut close to many a battle, none of them had ever required his personal attendance. Yes, the soldiers of the Empire spoke loud of the glory of combat, the crackle of stings and reddening of swords, but Sandric’s philosophy was that there always had to be someone to carry the freight, and no army could march without it. Sometimes it took one man with his head in the clouds to keep ten thousand men with their feet on the ground.

  This business with Ordan was not what he had looked for in a career. His professional life would have been complete without having killed two Mantis-kinden – would most certainly have been so without crouching at the rail of the airship, half-hidden in the fallen branches that had come down over the raised bow,
and straining his eyes against the impenetrable shadows of the forest.

  It was gloomy beneath the trees, and he suspected that Mantids were one of the many kinden that nature had equipped with better eyes than his own. Even beyond the threat of them, the forest was busy with life, from the mosquitoes that were after his blood to the six-foot-long segmented chain of a centipede that had come prowling about the hull, pincer-fangs gaping hungrily as it lifted its head towards him, surely venomous enough to kill a man stone dead with a single bite.

  He had just about given up the entire business for lost, was already thinking of himself in the category of never heard from again, when he saw it.

  From the vault of the heavens came the promise of salvation. The sight was so startling that Sandric stood straight up, and cover be damned. It was another airship.

  Another casualty of the storm, he decided, that had only now given up its fight with gravity – it was a rotund little craft, a small merchantman perhaps, handling badly and plainly in trouble, but the envelope looked mostly intact. He could hear the moan of its engine as it fell sideways overhead, seen through the gap in the foliage punched by their own descent.

  A moment later his wings coalesced about his shoulders, and Sandric threw himself straight up, desperate to follow the stricken vessel’s flight and already fumbling for his pilot’s instruments. He was in time, too – although the craft had moved further than he had thought it would in the moments it was out of his sight, and away from the line he had thought it was taking. Still, he saw it come down, far off in the forest, and he knew that they had to reach it – it was pure, distilled hope.

  Then he was yelling, and a moment later Corver and Vrant spilt out onto the canted deck, swords in hand and ready for trouble.

  Neither of them understood what he meant, at first. The import of it escaped them.

  ‘So some other poor bastards came down, so what?’ was all Vrant thought of it. ‘You want to go conquer them for the Emperor, or can we just get out of here?’