War Master's Gate

Six

‘Look at this, though.’

Sartaea te Mosca glanced politely at the scroll Gerethwy had unrolled for her. ‘Two matters, dear one,’ she replied. ‘Firstly, what in the world do you think that I would make of that, save for tinder? Secondly this would be considerably easier for me if you kept still. Consider that I am slightly smaller than your arm: every slightest twitch throws me about as though I’m in a hurricane.’

She exaggerated slightly, but he was an enormously tall, long-limbed man, a Woodlouse-kinden, perpetually hunched like an old man, but a young and sprightly student where the few others of his kinden that anyone had ever seen seemed to have been ancient forever, old as the stones of Collegium. He had come from the east with an esoteric but impressive understanding of machines that had won him a place at the Great College, and he had stayed on for the war.

Te Mosca herself was a Fly-kinden, and someone who had also turned up begging at the College gates, though in her case she had come from the Moth-kinden at Dorax, and had been looking for work. The old chair for Inapt studies — meaning those parts of the world that the Apt neither understood nor cared about — had been gathering dust, but even then they had not made her a full master, just had her marking out her time as though a replacement was expected at any moment. There had been votes in Assembly, she knew, to abolish the position entirely, but respect for tradition had thus far allowed her field of study to cling on by its fingernails.

She was small even for a Fly, delicate of frame and with a faint ashen tint to her skin, for her kinden often looked a little like those they grew up amongst. She taught the histories of the Inapt as they themselves would tell it, and she taught a little of the principles of magic, but her few students were mostly Apt and, however diligently they took notes, they could never grasp even the most basic tenets. It was a curiously futile existence, but she enlivened it by offering her skills as a doctor. Inapt kinden often fared far better under the care of an Inapt healer and, when it came to it, she could stitch a wound almost as well as any Collegiate surgeon.

She took Gerethwy’s long hand in both of hers and inspected the stumps where an exploding weapon had torn off two fingers. ‘Healing nicely,’ she said, ‘but it would heal far quicker if you’d not use the hand. It must hurt you, surely?’

He shrugged, something his bony hunchbacked frame was made for. ‘But there’s too much work. I’m due to drill with the Companies, and I need every moment I can get at the workshops. Nobody else will.’ He thrust the paper at her again, then dragged it back, recognizing the pointlessness of it. Gerethwy himself was a man who seemed to understand everything. He sat through her lectures as attentively as any Inapt scholar, seeming to take it all in, but then went off to the workshops to work on his devices. Her own masters had always muttered that the Woodlouse-kinden were a law unto themselves.

‘Rational machinery,’ Gerethwy insisted, and she recognized that doomed passion to explain from her own classes, in trying to hammer home some patently obvious point into skulls simply not designed for it. Now she was on the receiving end, and could only blink politely as his words gushed out — for he who had been so quiet and self-contained now had something he needed to speak of.

‘It’s the future,’ he insisted. ‘It’s very simple.’ His eyes were begging her to agree with him. ‘It’s all down to putting information in, and getting information out. It’s all in the gear trains that convert one to the other. You can do anything with it, if you just work out the gearing. Machines that can do things for themselves in response to what you tell them.’

‘As far as I’m aware, that works only indifferently with human beings,’ she remarked, yanking on his arm to stop him gesturing with it, then immediately feeling guilty as he winced. She began to apply fresh bandages, not that the healing wound really needed them any longer, but more as a mnemonic so that Gerethwy would remember he was hurt, and therefore take more care.

‘But, look. . as a doctor, surely you can. . It must look familiar?’

At last she squinted at the plans, seeing something resembling an explosion, a thousand little pieces scattered in random profusion.

She did not have to say it: he nodded resignedly. ‘Ten years ago, before anyone in Collegium had even thought of the idea, someone in the Empire — some mad genius — was already building rational machines of a complexity that nobody has matched since. This work. . it’s beautiful, perfect. And I can learn from it, duplicate it even. .’

‘Well what is it, this glorious whatnot of yours?’ Te Mosca was ready for it to be a weapon. Every artificer in the city was talking weapons just now and, given that they had only just beaten the Imperial Second Army back, she supposed that was entirely reasonable.

‘It’s an arm,’ Gerethwy told her simply. ‘He constructed a rational arm: a mechanical arm that would translate the motions of his stump.’

She looked at him, from his mangled hand to the frank, innocent and slightly off-balance look in his face, and felt very sad because, despite the long and learned pedigree of his kinden and the mystery of his origins, he was still little more than a boy, and they had made him a soldier, and he still thought it could all be put right.

The tragedy was, she knew, that he was telling her precisely because she could not understand. Amongst his friends and his comrades, he would remain as taciturn as ever, unwilling to let them in on his secret projects for fear he would be told that none of them would work.

‘Officer Antspider, orders for you.’

The Fly-kinden pressed the scroll into her hand and was off into the skies of Collegium before Straessa could object. She was left standing in the street, just twenty feet from the bookbinder’s that Eujen lodged over. If she had been a little brisker on her way, then the missive might never have found her.

Straessa — called the Antspider because, whilst Collegiates might be fair to halfbreeds, they still tended to point at them in the street — had a strong urge to cast the scroll in a fire and deny it had ever found her, but she was not the feckless student she had once been. Putting on the uniform of the Merchant Companies had taken half her naivety from her, and going out to fight the Wasps had done the rest. Under the banner of the Coldstone Company she had shed blood for Collegium. Her commanding officer had been assassinated. Her maniple and its neighbours had been routed. Her friend Gerethwy had been maimed by his own weapon. She had rallied her troops and gone back, with the lunatics from Myna, to try and slow the Wasp advance, to attack their artillery, to do something other than simply wait for the end. Memories like that could be expected to leave their mark on a girl, she reckoned.

Since General Tynan’s Second had been forced to retreat by Collegiate air-power, the soldiers of the Merchant Companies had been training and recruiting, or at least trying to recruit. Numbers were still down — hardly surprising after the beating they had taken at the hands of the more disciplined Wasp soldiers. Everyone was pulling double shifts: Straessa had little enough time to herself, and this should have been one of those times. She had wanted to take off the breastplate and the buff coat, just for a little while; to make it up with Eujen and pretend she was just a student again, with no more to worry about than the end-of-year exams and making a little money on the side as a sword instructor.

Orders were never a good thing. Orders meant that something had changed.

The Second is on the move again. That was the most obvious conclusion. For a moment, her mind’s eye superimposed the battlefield over the tidy little Collegiate street, the shouting and the screams, the thunderous clatter of the monstrous Imperial automotives, the chaos of the retreat.

She steadied herself, by which time her hands had broken the seal. There was nothing for it now but to read.

That done, she read it all again, and even checked the signature for authenticity.

‘Madness,’ she murmured, and then hurried towards the bookbinder’s shop, opening the side-door and taking the stairs to Eujen’s lodgings three at a time.

Eujen already had company, but she expected that. It was Averic the Wasp scholar — the Wasp renegade, she supposed he was now, for he wouldn’t be going home any time soon — and the two of them were plainly midway through planning something, judging by the quantity of paper strewn about the small room.

‘What’s this? Plotting to overthrow the Assembly?’ she observed, rather too heartily.

Eujen regarded her warily. ‘Those plans were laid a long time ago,’ he said, trying to match her jovial tone. ‘Just training schedules for the Student Company.’ Meaning his own project: that odd little band of amateur soldiers he had raised after she had persuaded him not to follow her into the regular military. Eujen Leadswell was a conflicted man: he had spent his life protesting against war — war with the Empire especially. He had debated constantly on the subject, accusing those who vilified the Wasps of bringing closer the very conflict claimed to be guarding against. Now that war was upon them, Eujen did not know whether he had been a prophet or a fool.

‘That’s going well?’ She had always adopted an acerbic manner even amongst her friends, and normally it was accepted no more seriously than she meant it, but she and Eujen had not been seeing eye to eye recently.

‘We’re fine. We may not be your regulars, but we’re making real progress.’ His answer was too quick and too defensive. He was frightened for her, and resentful of the Companies that took her away from him, and so they argued, and were reconciled, and argued yet again. Averic was already looking ill at ease, and she guessed he might start making his excuses soon.

She wanted a fight with Eujen because at least she knew the rules to that game. She wanted to joke with him. The orders in her hand felt like they were burning her fingers.

‘They were saying that, now you’ve got your Student Company, you’ll be forming a Student Assembly next,’ she put in. Anything to lighten the mood.

Eujen fixed her with a solemn stare. ‘Were they?’

‘You’re not, are you?’ Because that would be ridiculous. Because it would also be just like Eujen.

‘Do you know it’s more than a month since the Assembly last met properly?’ Eujen asked her. ‘The elected government of Collegium?’

‘Yes, but-’

‘Do you know who’s now running the city? Making all the important decisions?’ he pressed her. ‘Because I can give you a handful of names — Maker, Drillen, Padstock — but of the rest? Nobody knows. It’s whoever they call on, their friends and allies, and whoever the new chief officers are. The whole basis of our city-state just gone.’

‘Since the Amphiophos was bombed-’

‘Let them meet at the College. Let them meet in a marketplace,’ Eujen contested hotly. ‘The place wasn’t important. The institution was. And now they’ve done away with it!’

‘Only until the Wasps-’ She was getting angry now at being talked over, but he had built his momentum and was running with it.

‘And if we beat the Empire back, what then?. Some other threat? Some other excuse?’

‘Eujen, we are at war! War needs swift decisions, firm leadership.’ Even as she shouted the words at him, she realized that she did not necessarily believe them, but he was casting her as the establishment by virtue of her rank within the Companies. She had become an apologist for Stenwold Maker without ever being asked — and that, of course, just made her angrier.

‘Right,’ Averic stood up, as she had known he would, ‘I’ll just-’

‘You stay right there.’ Her mere glower halted him. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

Eujen, who had a lot of argument in him yet and who had probably assumed that they would make peace later in the evening, went still. ‘No you don’t. You said that. . wait, look. .’

‘No, really.’ She attempted a smile, just about managed one. ‘You think I’d back out of a fight with you just because I’ve been shouldering a snapbow all day? But it’s orders, Eujen. New orders. They want me to go recruiting.’

‘I thought they’d already done that to death,’ Eujen replied, after a pause. ‘I thought they’d pretty much squeezed out every volunteer the city had to offer.’

‘Well, yes, and it looks like they — whoever, as you say, they are — have kind of come to the same conclusion.’ She pitched him the incriminating scroll, because this news would be all over the city soon anyway, and because he would hear of it soon enough.

His eyes flicked over it, and the initial paragraphs had him so instantly exercised that she knew he would miss the other gems buried further in.

‘They can’t do this.’

‘It’s done.’

‘And you agree with it? You’ll do it?’ he demanded of her.

‘I’m going to do it.’ She shrugged. ‘Agree with it? Between orders like these and you deciding I’m Maker’s lackey, I’ve lost track of what I agree with.’

‘Conscription,’ Eujen hissed. ‘Not recruitment, conscription.’

Averic had taken the scroll and was reading assiduously. ‘“That all Collegiate citizens should play their part in the defence of their mother city,”’ he quoted, ‘“whether by artifice, feat of arms or such other aid.” And you get to go door to door, asking?’

‘While the Wasps are licking their wounds, this looks like our main assignment,’ the Antspider confirmed. The mood in the room had been calmed as if water had been thrown on a fire, the previous argument gone stone cold now that Eujen had something real to react against.

‘Which means forced conscription into the Companies, for whoever they choose? Anyone they can point at and claim isn’t pulling their weight,’ he stated. ‘Is this aimed at us?’

She had expected that. ‘No, Eujen, it’s not.’

‘Disband the students, then parcel them out between the formal Companies?’ he insisted.

‘No, Eujen, it is not,’ she repeated, more emphatically. ‘Just read the thing properly, would you?’

He snatched the paper back from Averic, but Eujen was already so full of objections that his eyes simply slid off the relevant words, despite the Wasp trying to point them out to him.

‘“All those of age not yet contributing to the defence shall be duly assigned between the Companies currently under arms,”’ Straessa quoted from memory, ‘“namely the Coldstone Company, Outwright’s Pike and Shot, Maker’s Own, Fealty Street Company. .”’ She inserted the appropriate pause, enjoying making him wait. ‘“. . and the Student Company.” Your people, Eujen.’

Eujen’s eyes danced from the written words to Straessa’s face, and back again. ‘What is this supposed to mean?’ he asked quietly.

‘It means congratulations, Chief Officer Leadswell,’ she told him. ‘It means that the next time Stenwold Maker and his shadowy conspiracy meet to decide the fate of the city, you’ll have a seat reserved for you. It also means, I’d guess, that those student citizens who haven’t already signed will end up under your jurisdiction, which by my reckoning means you’ve inherited a tremendous bagful of problems to keep you busy.’

‘They must be mad,’ he murmured.

‘There we agree, but it’s done now. Maybe Sten Maker reckons he needs a conscience. After all, you did your bit during the last scrap.’

He was staring at her as though he had received a death sentence or a court summons; as if it were he who would now be called to go off and fight when the Wasps returned, rather than she. He had always been a statesman in training, she knew: a man of powerful ideals and few compromises who was itching to shake up the Collegiate establishment once he was old enough and influential enough to win a seat on the Assembly. Abruptly, at the age most students were securing an apprenticeship, he found himself at the heart of government.

‘Well done, Eujen, you earned it — which is more than most Assemblers could say. Now you have to actually do it, rather than just talking a good fight.’

She had not meant the words to come out sounding like a jibe, but any antagonism washed over him without sticking.

‘Yes,’ he said, visibly shaken. ‘I suppose I do.’

Collegium’s pilots were led by a Solarnese Fly-kinden named te Schola Taki-Amre, a name that had been long forgotten by everyone else in favour of just ‘Taki’. She was young, as most of them were. In fact, following the great cost with which the Collegiates had repulsed the Imperial air force the last time, it seemed to most people that the city’s airmen and women were working to some bizarre backwards mathematics in which one could plot combat flight time against average age, and draw a line where one increased and the other only ever seemed to fall.

Taki had been flying against other pilots for years — over in now-occupied Solarno it had been a way of life — and she had become the leader of the pilots because they would accept nobody else. In their fast, fierce world, they had shaken off the steadying control of any land bound superiors. Stenwold Maker and his War Council might give them objectives and orders, but once in the air they recognized only their own. Taki was not the only one of them to consider that they had more in common with their airborne foes than with the people they left behind on the ground.

Now she was reporting to what passed for the Council — meaning whatever handful of luminaries could be convened at short notice to listen to her. In truth Eujen Leadswell did not know the half of it. Everyone in a position of importance was so busy actually fighting the war that citywide decisions were being made on the strength of whoever could find the time to turn up.

This time she found herself before Stenwold Maker himself, besides Remas Boltwright of the new-formed Fealty Street Company, some College woman she didn’t know, and Willem Reader of the aviation department, who was co-creator of the Stormreader orthopters that most of her pilots flew. No Jodry Drillen, no Padstock of the Maker’s Own, nor either of the two who had been promoted to fill dead men’s shoes for the unrepresented Merchant Companies. The other absent faces that came to Taki’s mind were of those already fallen in battle.

‘So, they’re back in business,’ she finished, setting it out in terms a landsman could understand. ‘We think there are around a dozen Farsphex with the Second now, which isn’t enough to cause us problems, however good they are, but there’ll be more.’

‘Any chance of catching them on the ground?’ Reader asked her.

‘They’ve kept a solid air watch since we knocked them back,’ Taki informed him. ‘My guess is that they won’t restart the advance until they’ve got more air cover, but I could be wrong. They’ve got enough now to at least slow us down, make each raid more costly and, whilst I could harry them all day and night in my Esca Magni, many of the other Stormreaders don’t have the same staying power. Any kind of serious resistance will cut down on our efficiency.’

‘What about the new pilots?’ the Beetle woman asked.

‘Fit for defence, if we need them, but I wouldn’t want to chance them against Farsphex unless I had to.’ Taki and the best of her pilots had been training up newcomers as fast as they could, but there was a limit to the number of prospective pilots Collegium could produce.

‘The Vekken have pilots they could lend us,’ Willem Reader mused. All eyes turned to him and he shrugged. ‘Desperate times?’

‘Not that desperate,’ Stenwold decided. ‘I’ve worked harder than any to bring the Vekken into our alliance and, believe me, there are still a great many people who don’t trust them even sitting outside our walls. Give them our best machines and there will be riots. And the first suggestion the Vekken get that we might turn on them. . well, it’ll confirm all their usual fears. So, no, not yet. We’ll make do with what we have. Taki, anything more?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice.’

Stenwold nodded and, seeing that nobody else had any more questions for her, she ducked out of the room.

Stenwold himself spent an hour in debate with that husk of a council, concerning the best steps they could take next, before he tasked everyone there with some aspect of the resulting plan and sent them off. After that he settled down to read through the petitions — not the usual civilian business, but proposals from anyone in the city who thought they could help the war. There were hundreds of amateur inventors in Collegium, and most of them had nothing useful to offer and were offering it with great force. Yet there might be hidden gold amongst the dross, and they could not pass up on anything that would give them an advantage. Their last clash with the Wasps had made it plain that the Imperial artificers had not been idle.

Those proposals sorted through, he looked at his share of the endless supply of progress reports. All over the city there were men and women who had tasks allotted to them according to their talents. Builders carved trenches and earthworks; merchants stockpiled food and munitions; Company officers trained their recruits; smiths turned over their workshops to make snapbow bolts and clerks tallied how much of everyone else’s industry the city might need. A legion of planners and doers greased the wheels of Collegium’s amateur war machine, and when they had done their part, or when they encountered difficulties that blocked their way, they wrote it all down and it came to Stenwold or Jodry or a few others.

Stenwold sat patiently, leafing through them, eyes skipping over the words from long practice, pausing only where some problem had clearly identified itself, annotating and making recommendations, or passing the issue on to someone better suited. He seldom had to think much about each issue, but there was plenty to get through and, if he did not finish, there would be even more on the morrow.

He had lost track entirely of how much time had gone by, when there was a respectful cough from the doorway.

‘It’ll have to wait,’ he said, without looking up. Another half hour and I’ll have this done, and then I can sleep. And then. .

‘Master Maker, look at you,’ came a familiar, gruff voice. ‘Who’d have thought it: You, lord of all you survey, up to your nose in papers like some book-keeper’s clerk.’

‘Tomasso.’ Stenwold looked up to see the black-bearded Fly-kinden grinning at him. At least the man’s lightness of tone was guarantee that some other unlooked-for disaster was not about to come thundering down on him. ‘What do you want?’

‘Wys has been in with another shipment,’ the Fly ex-pirate explained. Wys was his opposite number beneath the waves, an enterprising Sea-kinden who was nominally Tomasso’s wife, by some bizarre pirate custom.

‘Have you. .?’

‘I’ve sent it on to the workshops, never you mind,’ Tomasso assured him. The shipment would consist of machine parts and the superior almost-steel that the Sea-kinden produced.

‘Then. .?’ Stenwold gestured at the paperwork. ‘It’s just, I have a lot to get through.’

For a painful moment he saw himself through Tomasso’s eyes, the ex-pirate looking at him and seeing a man of action and adventure crippled and pared down to this thing of paper and sums. Tomasso’s smile changed, less flippant, more calculating. ‘Put it down, Master Maker, just for one evening.’

‘It’s not as easy as that-’ Stenwold stopped talking immediately, because a woman was peering shyly around the doorframe, her expression equal parts trepidation and concern.

He almost kicked over his chair in getting to his feet, then stood there, feeling embarrassed by the vigour of his reaction, watching her even as she was watching him.

Her name was Paladrya, and she was Sea-kinden — although to the uninitiated she could pass as a Spider woman. When he had first met her they had both been prisoners, and torture and deprivation had left her bruised and gaunt. The marks of that ill-treatment were still there in the lines on her face, but she was now adviser to the new Sea-kinden ruler, and those days of incarceration and false accusations were behind her.

Tomasso slipped away while they were still gazing at each other, leaving Paladrya to walk carefully into the room, as though feeling out the borders of Stenwold’s domain. He remembered their last parting, the mutual realization that they were creatures of different worlds. The crushing, lightless depths of the sea filled him with horror and despair, whilst the parched and barren land was utterly inhospitable to one of her people. And here she was.

‘Wys said you were fighting,’ she said, stopping out of arm’s reach.

And in the end, being people of responsibilities and both well past the impetuous foolishness of youth, they had parted. She had sent letters, and so had he, but neither of them had made much headway with the alphabet of the other. What words they had exchanged that way had remained simplistic and unsatisfying. With a Beetle’s Apt pragmatism, Stenwold had resigned himself to the task in hand — knowing that he would live with a little piece of himself forever out of balance, because of her, but aware that he could live that way for as long as was needed. He had assumed that she would have said the same.

‘Not me personally. They wouldn’t let me go. But fighting, yes.’ The paperwork lurked at his elbow, waiting to drag him down once again. ‘And soon to resume, I believe.’

‘I just. .’ A pause. ‘I forced Wys to bring me. She didn’t want to — and Aradocles almost forbade me. But I had to come. Stenwold.’

‘It’s good to see you.’ Weak words, he realized, but he did not know what to do with her, or where he was with her, and it was plain that she was caught in the same no-man’s land. His mind sprang formal options at him: show her the College, the preparations, the soldiers drilling. Talk to her in bluff, unconcerned tones of the war to come, to lay her mind at rest. Draw her into discussions of politics, land and sea.

Instead, he found himself standing very close to her, his hand just brushing her pale cheek. Her expression held a great deal of fear but, in amongst her fear of the land and its dangers, there was fear for him.

‘We will hold, don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘I could show you a hundred things — inventions, fortifications, engines — that would convince you how we will hold. We have thrown them back twice before. We shall do so again.’

She was Inapt, of course, so all his inventions and engines would mean nothing to her, but perhaps she had some touch of prophecy about her, because his words failed to reassure.

‘I think of you a great deal in Hermatyre,’ she whispered. ‘Aradocles could use your counsel and your artifice, and I. . Do you dream of the sea, Stenwold?’ She must have seen it in his eyes: the nightmares he had still of chasmic depths, the churning tentacles of sea-monsters, drowning in the dark.

He saw, in her face, that she had faced just such fears in coming here, and only out of concern for him; a kind of selfish madness gripped him, and he said, ‘When this is done, I will come to you.’

The words hung there between them, and he was shaken by his pledge, despite the vast weight of war that now stood between him and any chance of fulfilling the promise. He was shocked by the words, but he could not disown them. To his great surprise, they were sincere. To the pits with the city and its government and Jodry Drillen. When the Wasps were beaten back, he had earned himself a retirement. Thinking of those midnight waters was less terrible now, with Paladrya there beside him. He would adapt. Beetle-kinden always did.

The paperwork was abruptly an unbearable burden, and he found that he was no longer shackled to it. ‘Let’s leave here,’ he decided. ‘This is no place to be.’ Collegium, even under threat of war, offered a hundred diversions and yet, just then, the only place he wanted to take her was home.