War Master's Gate

Nine

The drone of Imperial machines was all that was left in the sky now. The deceptively quiet Collegiate Stormreaders had been and gone and, from his position dug into a hollow alongside a handful of Spider mercenaries, Morkaris could not have said how much the new Farsphex had helped. He had heard a fair number of bombs going off, for all their efforts.

Cautiously he crept out of the hollow. Morkaris was a cadaverously thin Spider-kinden, seeming pale as the grave in his articulated black mail, with a double-handed axe across his back that looked too heavy for him to wield. He had been a mercenary all his adult life, though, fighting for every coin and at every station, from lone warrior to captain, from captain to captain of captains. Now he had signed on with the Aldanrael family as their adjutant, the man who kept all their varied mercenary forces in line — and damned if he wasn’t regretting it.

I should have stayed in the Spiderlands.

The last few days had been a harsh lesson about how well the sort of war he was used to travelled. The Spiderlands Aristoi fought all the time, with various levels of deniability, and mercenaries were a common commodity over there, with a good company never short of work — sometimes taking the coin of three families in as many days — sometimes all on the same day, or even in the same battle. In the Spiderlands, war was something Morkaris understood. Here, though. . between the Collegiates’ cursed flying machines and the Wasps’ own murderous devices, he was feeling old and out of his depth.

‘Chief,’ one of his men said, and he looked up to see another Spider approaching, and not one he was pleased to see, either. There had just been an attack, with the Collegiates quartering the sky and dropping explosives on any target that presented itself, and here was Jadis of the Melisandyr, his full armour gleaming as though the man had sat polishing it throughout the bombardment.

Jadis was commander of the Aldanrael’s regular forces, hence Morkaris’s opposite number, chief rival and constant foil. Here was a man born with all the advantages Morkaris had been denied: good looks, good family, respect that didn’t require the daily shedding of blood. . Morkaris spat wearily as the man strode over.

‘You’re a hard man to find,’ Jadis told him.

‘I like to think the Collegiates say the same. What do you want?’ Morkaris demanded. ‘Worried about my health?’

The two men sized each other up, not for the first time, as the mercenaries moved out in a loose semicircle behind their leader. Jadis had come alone, but nothing in his pose or expression suggested that he was remotely worried about his safety.

If I thought that was just arrogance. . Challenges between individuals of comparable rank was not uncommon in Spider armies. Just as Morkaris was here to keep the infighting of the mercenaries at an acceptable level, so he himself could kick up some trouble if he wished, and had Jadis been the powdered major-domo he would have expected, then perhaps a little accident might have been arranged. Jadis could fight, though. The Melisandyr trained their sons well. When the Felyen Mantis-kinden and their allies had attacked the camp, Morkaris had witnessed the man at work: sword and shield and mail, protecting his mistress. The sight had been an education.

‘We’re moving,’ Jadis told him flatly. He was sharp enough to know just what Morkaris thought of him, and not to care overmuch. Being liked by mercenaries was plainly not an ambition of his.

‘Who’s we, and where to?’

‘All of us. To Collegium.’

Not entirely unexpected, but no more welcome news for that. ‘And once they pull the army together, what about the Collegiates? What do we give them, save for a target?’ Morkaris pointed out. His hands itched for the haft of his axe, just on general principles.

‘A moving target, at least,’ Jadis replied. ‘Those are your orders. Get your rabble together. What’s left of it.’

Morkaris grimaced despite himself. It was no secret that, regardless of all he could do, more than a quarter of the mercenaries had deserted, companies and individuals deciding that living under daily bombardment had not been what they signed on for. To keep those who remained, he had personally fought four duels in the last few tendays. Whether going on the march under that continued aerial assault would help morale at all was an arguable point.

‘The new machines will help, they say,’ Jadis offered. ‘They will keep off the worst of the attacks.’

‘If they don’t just explode, like the last lot,’ the mercenary spat. The fate of the Second Army’s last fliers was well known by now.

‘This will not happen, they say,’ Jadis continued implacably.

Morkaris scowled. ‘I may not understand their machines, but I can still count. The new fliers are very few.’

‘This is irrelevant. Gather your companies for the march, or be ready to explain your failure to the Aldanrael.’ Not quite a challenge, not quite a personal insult and nothing that Morkaris could not ignore, but still. . for just a moment the mercenary wondered about quitting, which would certainly mean taking on Jadis then and there. The odds were too wide open, though, and he was still owed pay.

Instead he decided to stick a knife in where he knew the man’s mail didn’t protect him. ‘Oh, well, if the Wasps say to Herself that they’ve won the skies back, who am I to argue? If Herself’s that won over by the Wasps, then tell her that her mercenaries will be ready for the march, no worries.’ The barb went home and Morkaris saw the other man twitch a little. ‘After all, no point arguing with you. You’re not the one she listens to any more.’

Jadis’s face remained very set, but he was a Spider Aristos and master of his own emotions. It was an open secret that his mistress, Mycella of the Aldanrael, was bedding the Wasp general, and it was similarly known that Jadis was eating himself with jealousy about it. There was barely a flicker, though, to betray the man’s feelings. In spite of himself, Morkaris was impressed, for here was Aristoi reserve at its finest. Shame that it wouldn’t save any lives when they got close to Collegium.

‘Listen, Jadis,’ he pointed out, feeling weary and old with the tedious predictability of the statement. ‘The Wasps don’t like us, and they can’t be trusted, and they don’t share power. Tell me she knows this. Tell me that her. .’ For a moment he nearly descended into an insult, an indelicate remark about Jadis’s blessed mistress, and that would have meant a duel whether Morkaris felt ready for it or not. ‘Tell me that her coming to an accommodation with the Wasp general is all about her twisting him around to do her bidding. Because my men have been talking.’

‘Mercenaries.’ One word to dismiss all that Morkaris and his followers were, but any mercenary captain learned to read his employers, and he could see the slightest flicker deep in Jadis’s eyes.

‘She had just better be in a position to sell him out before he does the same to us,’ the mercenary adjutant muttered. ‘And yes, we’ll march. We’re ready. As ready as we’ll ever be.’

General Tynan had rough hands, not the hands of a man in command but those of a man who did things for himself. He had a soldier’s scars, where a Spider in his position would have skin unblemished and smooth as silk. Spiders knew how to avoid fights they could not win, mostly, although her own family’s great battle against the Empire had given the lie to that, as had her subsequent campaign against Collegium. Against the Wasps, she had lost countless soldiers. Against the Beetles she had lost family. The greatest loss had been the esteem of her peers. The Aldanrael family was not what it had been, which had led to Mycella being here at the head of an army in a last-ditch attempt to regain by brute war what they had lost.

Leading an armed force was not a position of great honour for the Spider-kinden, since they gave it over to their menfolk and their Hoipolloi. Great ladies of great families did not dirty their hands with such business unless they were as desperate as Mycella had become. It had been the only path left to her: to take up the mantle of Lady-Martial, to sail for Solarno with her force of loyal followers, allied minor families and a rabble of mercenaries, and it had almost destroyed her pride. On the ship, she had contemplated ending her own life, because that would at least have won a moment’s approval of her peers.

To the Wasp-kinden, on the other hand, to lead an army was the highest accolade, the position that every man of them seemed to covet and work towards. She knew that they, too, had their greater and their lesser families, but success in battle could raise up even the lowliest of them. General Tynan himself had started life with a few advantages, but he had not been anything that Mycella might call nobility. His merit, his skill and judgement had effected a transformation in his status that would have been unthinkable in the Spiderlands. There, the best that a low-born could hope for was patronage by a greater family or to become a freelance for hire, like that oaf Morkaris.

She had sat up late with General Tynan for many nights, now, in her expansive tent, listening to him talk about war. He was not a bloodthirsty monster, the way his kinden were so often portrayed, but he loved warfare. It had been his life since he was a child of five, being taught the first principles of swordsmanship. War and the Empire to which he was so loyal. When he spoke of his passion he seemed fifteen years younger, filled with the burning zeal of the true adherent. He told her of his battles against the Lowlanders, against the Commonweal, against cities within the Empire. He spoke of men he had commanded — almost all of them dead by now — and of enemies he had met both on the field and off it. He showed her what a Wasp general’s world looked like, and the values that he cherished — so alien, and yet how they had struck a chord in her!

She had set out to seduce him, succeeding despite his innate caution. He had known what she was about, she guessed, and yet he had given before her soon enough. The day she could not lure a Wasp-kinden soldier to her bed would be her last day. . and yet. . she had found something in General Tynan that made him far more valuable to her than a mere puppet to be manipulated. More, she had found emotions awoken in her that were unwise and unlooked for. Not just those rough hands and her explorations of the battle-map of scars he bore, for such physical pleasures were merely expedient and useful, nothing to truly move her. The true gift he had given her, all unknowing, was a return of her self-respect.

She was Lady-Martial of the war-host of the Aldanrael, but that was a mark of disgrace, as though the other families had branded their disdain onto her skin.

To General Tynan, however, for all that she was a woman who could never have attained such rank within the Empire, she counted as a peer, someone deserving admiration. Through his eyes she was a general, and that was a thing worth being.

She had chosen a robe of deep blue edged with gold, complementing the Imperial colours without matching them. Beneath, she wore a hauberk of delicate copperweave chain backed with felt, flashing in the sun when the wind caught at her gown and flurried it aside. As the Second and its allies prepared to move out, she sought out General Tynan, finding him already atop his personal automotive, scouts and messengers landing beside him for orders, then being sent off within seconds.

His eyes shone, alighting on her. Still mine then, for now. It was an uneasy relationship, though, for she shared him with an Empress.

He extended a hand to her, even as his driver made the engine roar. With a light step she vaulted atop the machine, a moment’s climbing Art serving to keep her footing on the sloping armoured plates, and she took her place beside him.

She could feel the eyes of his army fixed on her, some of them doubtless bitter that she — a foreign woman after all — took such pride of place, whilst others would be making lewd jokes later on and drinking to the success of their general’s love life. The Imperial reaction would pale in comparison to the net of gossip, scheming and speculation amongst her own followers.

Around them, much of the army was already on the move: scouts and Light Airborne taking wing and casting themselves forwards to hunt out traps and ambushes. The slower-moving infantry were marching, having lost much of their own mechanized transport in the retreat from Collegium a month before. The remaining troop automotives were being rotated through the squads of Tynan’s army by some arcane logistical calculations performed by the quartermasters. Mycella’s own forces had fewer machines, but some of them were cavalry, and on average they were faster than the Wasps, if more prone to spread out and lose cohesion.

‘Now comes the test!’ Tynan told her, over the engine’s growl. ‘They’ve seen us massing and, if I were them, I’d step up the air attacks now that we’re giving them a better target. If they can take out our new artillery before we arrive, we’ll look like fools in front of their gates.’ A fresh consignment of the vaunted great-shotters had arrived straight from the foundries of the Iron Glove Cartel, but for now the devices lay disassembled on transport automotives, which had been split into groups and scattered throughout the army.

‘And how are your new air machines?’ she asked him. There were a few shapes in the sky overhead, but she knew they were the older vessels.

‘Ready,’ he told her briefly. ‘They’ll do their best to keep the enemy away from our transporters, but they’ll have a fierce time of it, and it’ll get worse the closer we get to Collegium. At which point we’ll see if we still have artillery superiority.’

She frowned, because that was a new thought. She had a hard time keeping up with which machines were better, between the Wasps and their foes, but so much evidently turned on this that she was working very hard to understand, Inapt or not. ‘Is there some doubt of that?’ she demanded.

‘Don’t underestimate the Collegiates. They’re very clever people, and they’ve seen what we can do. For all the Iron Glove assures us its advances can’t be replicated just from watching the machines in use, or even examining the components, I have a great deal of respect for Beetle ingenuity.’

‘And your grand plan for when we get to the walls-’ she flashed him an almost exasperated grin — ‘assuming we still have an army left by then? What about their air power?’ She needed no Aptitude to envisage the long days of a siege under constant bombardment from the air.

Tynan scowled and leant in close to divulge news he was unwilling to share even by chance. ‘There is a plan, but my own cursed intelligence officer insists he hasn’t been told. Which means that it’s something that the enemy could spike with ease, if they find out what it is. Which means it’s a trick, and nobody in my position wants to rely on their very, very clever enemies not seeing right through some arse-backwards piece of misdirection, when the time comes. And, besides, tricks only work once.’

‘I’m relying on you and your Empire a great deal,’ she replied flatly. Seeing him unhappy with his own orders sent a chill down her spine. Is he such a slave to what that woman in Capitas says? Or is it her plan, even? Some Wasp clerk with a grand opinion of his own wit may even now be dooming all of us.

‘I’ll strive to be worthy of your trust,’ he told her simply. The army was breaking out from the scorched remnants of the Felyal forest now and, as the ragged tree cover fell away, more and more soldiers were revealed. It was like some conjuror’s trick, some play with mirrors: even though she could have had the precise numbers before her at a word, the sheer scale of the combined Spiderlands-Empire force humbled her. The fact that it was all moving in the same direction was a tribute to a great many hardworking people on both sides.

Their automotive jolted over the uneven, dusty ground, and then Tynan was pointing to the sky ahead. ‘Here they come,’ he said.

The few Imperial machines already in the air were changing course, moving to put themselves in the way — and there would be a few of her own motley flying machines up there too, whatever she had been able to scrounge from the Spiderlands’ Apt satrapies. From surprisingly close behind, she heard the deep-throated thunder of the Farsphex, which were being carried, complete and ready for launch, on flatbed automotives that should ideally have been used for food and tents. She craned back to watch them rising, one by one, from within the vast expanse of the army, feeling that familiar disconnection she always did when faced with such ponderously heavy machines defying logic in order to throw themselves at the sky.

The army itself had orders, so the flanking detachments were already moving aside and making room, whilst those companies towards the army’s centre were spreading out, no longer shoulder to shoulder but trying to adopt a looser formation to minimize potential losses. This inevitably slowed the army down, and different companies would get intermingled, sent into disarray, even scattered completely. She and Tynan had already weighed up the odds and decided they could not afford the casualties if every ill-aimed bomb could wipe out entire squads of close-packed men.

The Collegiate Stormreaders were skittering overhead even now, and she knew that they would be making for the larger automotives. They could kill soldiers with ease, but the force set against them was so large that they might as well spit into a gale. Collegium’s easiest victory would be to destroy the Empire’s means to mount an attack when it arrived, or to cripple the army’s ability to advance by destroying its supplies.

The Farsphex scattered across the sky in packs of two or three, feinting and threatening, and Mycella could see the patterns they made, even if she could not appreciate the machinery behind them. There was a collective grace to the Imperial pilots that their Beetle enemies lacked, for all their skill and the agility of their orthopters. And yet there were so many more Stormreaders clattering overhead.

Tynan had gripped her hand, still looking upwards. The game was joined, and for all he was a general and she a great lady of the Spiderlands, all they could do was watch.

The Collegiate fliers were coming in on three distinct fronts, and Bergild cross-referenced their attack pattern with the plan of the army’s advance she had memorized, guessing at the most likely targets.

A thought from her and two Farsphex were peeling off on her right, gaining height to dive down on the enemy, with a third hanging back.

Another thought, and a further trio fell away to her left, to fend off what she guessed was probably a feint by the Collegiates, but which would no doubt turn into the real thing if she ignored it.

Her pilots spoke in her head, each in turn, confirming their assignments. There was no time for anything more. The men and women, Wasps and half-Wasps that she had trained with, were about to be put to the test.

Behind their words she could hear their confidence in her as a leader. Echoes of long tendays of training, when she and the other women, the halfbreeds too, had started off at the bottom: despised and distrusted by men who had been taught since birth that they were better.

That mindlink, the fugitive Art that Wasps threw up so rarely, quickly changed all that. Speech mind to mind was shorn of masks, so that she could only wonder why the Ants had not conquered the world and made a perfect paradise of it for themselves. Ants had only their own minds, was her guess. Unlike Bergild and her fellows, they had never been hunted, therefore had never had to hide, never had to work to communicate with others whose minds were closed to them. Ants took for granted what Bergild and her kind were only now able to enjoy.

She was leader because she understood flying as none of the rest of them did, and that was it: a meritocracy at a stroke. The Engineer officers had tried to place a man over her, but their candidate had refused. In the end, Colonel Varsec, father of the new Air Corps, had pinned the captain’s badge on her himself. Of all of them there, all those army officers and engineers and Consortium magnates, only Varsec had understood. When he had designed his Farsphex machines, he had specified who would be needed to fly them, focusing on that inviolable link from pilot to pilot that would make them the masters of the air. He had known what he was doing, even if his superiors had not appreciated it. He was changing the Empire in a small way, but at a fundamental level.

She veered left, cutting upwards in the air, seeing a knot of Stormreaders break apart, some heading for the artillery transports and others rising up to screen them. Two of her pilots were already stooping down out of the sky, rotary piercers blazing with spent firepowder, and she saw one of the Stormreaders rock and slide, recovering a moment later, but out of place as the Farsphex cut past, heading for the bombers.

The Stormreaders had never been designed for ground assault, she knew. They were made to fight other orthopters, and they were superb at it. They needed a good, unhindered run to drop an accurate bomb, though, and so the diving Farsphex scattered them, only one charge loosed, and falling wide of the automotives — to the detriment of a unit of infantry. But, then, everything down there was army, and there would always be a loser.

And away! And her pilots were already dragging out of their dive, not engaging the furiously circling enemy but locking their wings for extra speed and breaking away ready to swing back the moment they were not being chased.

She set her own course, seeing her targets fall into what must be their final approach. There was a wing of Stormreaders waiting above, she knew, which meant that she and her fellows would have company the moment they tried to intervene. No choice, let’s go.

She had been a pilot’s daughter. Her mother dead while bearing her, she had sat beside her father from a tender age, watching most of the Twelve-year War from a heliopter’s cockpit. Two years before that war’s end, her father had been killed in the air. A mad dragonfly-rider had actually put an arrow through his viewslit and through his eye as he sat right next to her. She had been fifteen. She had brought the heliopter down — not immediately, but where it had needed to go, perched on her dead father’s lap to reach the controls. After that, a desperate quartermaster, who needed a pilot then and there, had written down the name ‘Bergen’ on his books, and she had been a man for the last two years of the war, drawing pay and flying supplies to the front.

In the Maynes rebellion that had brought the Commonweal war to a close, ‘Sergeant Bergen’ had dropped grenades on the insurrectionists and fought off their clumsy orthopters in the air.

They’re right on you, came the thoughts of one of her spotters, packaged with a concise picture of how many and what trajectories, and she returned a response immediately, spreading her calculations to her flanking pilots so that they and she could split and rejoin in perfect coordination, throwing off the pursuing Collegiates, altering course and sheering through the air towards the bombing Stormreaders even as they made their approach. Her weapons hammered away, the vibration of them felt through the stick, through the frame of the machine, entirely distinct from the rapid and regular beats of the engine.

After Maynes was subdued, she had been arrested, and for three tendays she had sat in a cell awaiting execution, with or without Rekef torture. She had seen it as her last victory then, for it had been a military prison, a man’s place.

The man who came to let her out had been the same quartermaster who had invented poor Bergen, and later promoted the imaginary soldier to sergeant. She would learn later how hard he had fought to keep her alive, but he was a major by then, in recognition for his keeping his allotted part of the war effort in one piece, and he paid his debts.

‘Go home, girl,’ he had told her. For her, the war was now over.

But, of course, she had possessed two maverick gifts, not just the one.

Her shot raked the side of the lead Collegiate flier, and the Stormreader banked violently, almost into the path of one of its fellows. She ignored it, let her shot stray to the next, but its pilot had already realized the danger and was climbing so as not to be caught between the enemy and the ground. Another two had already broken off. That left. .

There was one of them a little more dogged than the others, now alone as it streaked towards the transporters. There was a rapid shuttling of thoughts between Bergild and her companions, which she ended with, Mine.

The pursuing Stormreaders were right behind her, and her flankers split up to draw them away. Two remained with her, because the Collegiates weren’t fools, and she let her Farsphex dance before them, denying them a clear shot whilst calculating her own. The Imperial machines were as fleet and nimble as could be — no bombs, no bombardiers, not a pound of spare weight that might mean the difference between life and death.

Stray shot sparked from her hull, one of her pursuers getting far too close, but then she was ready, falling into that moment when she would have to commit, and thus be at the mercy of her enemy.

Seconds only until the Stormreader would unleash its cargo. All those dumb minds down there watching that swift approach and desperate to live.

Now. And she was on her line, piercers opening up with their juddering roar, and she saw the constellation of sparks about the Stormreader’s engine casing, punching a string of bolts towards the left wing.

Three hard strikes punched into her hull, but then one of her fellows was coming straight at her pursuers, shooting wildly and putting them off their aim.

For a moment, just one of those split seconds she was living between, she thought she had lost it and that the determination of the bomber would surpass the accuracy of her own flying, but then his wing splintered apart as her shot knifed into the joint, and the Stormreader was spinning away, end over end, ploughing into the ground behind its intended target. She saw a sudden plume of fire as his bomb detonated within the bay.

Then came the counter-attack, and she dragged her machine away, taking a half-dozen holes through the silk and wood of one wing. Her fellows were there to cover for her, but abruptly the fighting had become something new — not the fencing match of threat and counter-threat, but life and death as the Collegiates gave up on their ground targets to deal instead with their annoyances in the air. Her pilots had superior coherence and discipline, but the Stormreaders were arguably better machines for this duelling, and they had twice the numbers.

She took in her pilots’ views of the air, formed them into a whole, found their best chance for survival, scattered her people across the sky without any of them ever being alone for a moment, all efforts now concentrated on evasion and yet refusing to be driven away, always there and never ceding the air to the enemy.

As one of her fellows died, she felt the stab of pain as if it was her own. His mind, within hers, was a briefly burning red-hot spark of pain and fear, snuffed out instantly as his Farsphex nosedived into the ground.

One less. And they could hardly spare it. Her thoughts rallied the others, spurred them on. The Empire is counting on us.

Her father had possessed the same poisoned gift: that mindlink Art whose known practitioners had been rounded up and executed just a generation before, by the Rekef secret police. Never tell, he had insisted. You must never let them know. But when she heard what the Empire wanted her kind for, she had turned herself in to the Engineers without a second thought.

Give me back the sky, had been her only desire,

The intervention of the other Imperial machines came as a surprise, not a part of her mental battle plan at all. They had most of them not been ready for immediate launch but, the moment the Stormreaders had been spotted, the ground crews would have been working towards it. Now that uneven clutter of old Spearflights and the flying rabble of the Spiderlands was all about, still not quite evening the numbers, but complicating matters for the Collegiates. The Stormreaders outmatched them badly, but there had been a clock ticking ever since the attack started. Most Stormreaders had a limited fighting range, and their forays over the Second Army were on a strict leash — and the more they had to fight, the more spring-stored power their clockwork hearts used up. The older Imperial machines could refuel when they needed it, and the Farsphex had been able to fly from the Empire to fight over Collegium itself, and then return in safety, so efficient was their fuel.

Her pilots called it in all at once, the moment the Stormreaders began flashing their signals to each other. Fall back, she instructed. No heroics. They could not risk losing another Farsphex to a sudden ambush. Defence of the army was all.

She pictured the pilot who had died, not so much the face as the feel of his mind. What they would do when they got closer to Collegium, when the Stormreaders would be able to fight for as long as they needed, she did not know.

So I hear that command has a plan: the thought of one of her fellows, filled with discontent.

We can only hope, came her reply.