War Master's Gate

Eleven

They were all waiting for Eujen when he walked in. He suspected that the lecture hall had never been so full as now, housing his new recruits.

Standing at the lectern, he did not feel the expected authority of a chief officer drop on his shoulders. He was still Eujen Leadswell, a mere student who had conceived the stupid idea of a Student Company, mostly because the girl he was sweet on had gone off and joined the Merchant Companies and then refused to allow him to do the same. Stab me, but is this sort of rubbish what history is actually made of? Idiot people like me making bad decisions for all the wrong reasons?

Oh, and sod Stenwold bloody Maker for taking me seriously, while I’m on the subject.

He had Averic standing beside him, and a stout Beetle girl who had been one of the first to sign up, so had de facto become a sort of officer. They all three wore the purple sashes that Eujen had adopted because he had known a clothier trying to shift an excess of that colour. The lectern bore a big pile of similar sashes, and a single snapbow.

His audience watched him as though expecting him to do tricks for their amusement. These were not his volunteers, who had rallied willingly to his banner out of a desire to protect their home. Before him instead were conscripts: those able-bodied individuals amongst the student population who had been forced to take up arms by Maker’s Draft, and who had been assigned to him rather than to the Merchant Companies, because he was reckoned to be on their level or some such.

‘Right,’ he croaked, the acoustics of the room carrying his nervousness to the very back. ‘You know why you’re here, I suppose.’

He had a speech prepared, but one of the students was already standing. Eujen recognized him as Howell Graveller, a year older and one of Eujen’s frequent detractors, who had mocked him when he tried to advocate peace with the Wasps, and yet had not come forward to volunteer for the Company when Eujen had started to talk about fighting. And he’s now going to walk out. And they’re going to follow him, all of them. They don’t take me seriously, and why would they? And what am I supposed to do then? Have them arrested or something? Go squeak to Stenwold Maker that my soldiers won’t do what I tell them?

But Graveller was still standing there, shuffling from foot to foot, glancing sidelong at his fellows. ‘Look, Leadswell,’ he said, after an awkward moment. ‘I just wanted to say. . this Student Company of yours, we’re grateful for it, we really are.’ His accompanying gesture defined the ‘we’ as those closest to him, his little clique of cronies. ‘The conscription. . we could have been stuck in Maker’s Own or the Coldstone or something, right now. This. . at least this isn’t the front line.’

Eujen stared at him for a long moment, then took up the snapbow from the lectern, aimed at Graveller’s chest and shot him.

The harsh snap! echoed about the lecture hall like the end of the world, along with Graveller’s agonized gasp.

They had all frozen, and Eujen noted who had leapt up to act, who were still stupefied in their seat, finding himself already sorting them into grades and categories of soldier. ‘The next one,’ he said quietly into the utter silence that had gripped the room, ‘will be loaded.’

Graveller looked as if he had pissed his robes. ‘But why?’ he got out.

‘Because a Wasp will be holding it,’ Eujen explained. And now I have my audience, and they’re taking me seriously, and none of them even glanced at my Wasp friend Averic when I said that. I would win golden honours in rhetoric from that sentence alone, were a Master here to mark me.

‘Listen to me,’ he explained to them. ‘This is not the alternative to fighting for real. You are all going to learn how to fight, to use one of these, and to work together. You’re going to learn how to build barricades, how to shoot from cover, how to patch wounds, how to use artillery, and a whole lot more. And you’re going to learn as much as you can as fast as you can, faster than any of us ever had to learn basic mechanics or the Collegium-Helleron social deficit, because the Imperial Second Army is on the move right now. And if you don’t know what that means, then go to the library, get out a map and measure the distance between the Felyal and here, because that’s how much time you have.’

They were still staring at him as though he was some horrible dream brought on by too much bad wine.

‘Barricades and. . what else?’ someone asked, her voice petering out.

‘Don’t you understand what this is for — the Student Company?’ Eujen spat out. ‘The others, Outwright’s, Maker’s Own and the rest, may well go out to meet the Second in the field — wiser heads than mine decide that, and I’m glad of it — but we’re the last line. When we commit to the fighting, we will be on the walls. If that’s not enough, we will be on the streets, in the marketplaces, in the courtyards of the College itself. Because we are Collegium’s final hope — and I’m cursed if I’m going to let that fail because you all thought this was the easy class to take.’

In their eyes he read their accusation of him, echoing Graveller and his friends’ taunts of yesteryear. ‘Oh, yes, I know I was always for reaching out to the Empire, and I will maintain unto death that we could have handled the Wasps better, and even avoided this war entirely had our elected masters possessed the will to do anything other than agitate. But the war is here, now. It takes two for peace, and so now we need to break the back of the Empire’s advance to the point where peace becomes even a possibility, and to do that we need to stop them. We need to stop them out there, if we can. We need to stop them right here, if we cannot.’ He looked at them and felt despair. And where the plague were you lot, when I called for volunteers? ‘I’m not some Makerist firebrand frothing about a just war. I’m talking about the survival of all that we are. Your city, your history, casting Lots, classes in the College, drinks in the taverna: all those things that we all took for granted just a year ago.’ He turned. ‘Officer Averic.’

The Wasp stepped forward and Eujen noted, with almost scholarly interest, the ripple that went through them all as they tried to adjust.

‘Tomorrow morning, one hour after dawn, you will assemble in the Briar Quad to commence training,’ Averic told them. ‘If you have access to weapons, bring them, please. Equipment is at a premium.’ He glanced at Eujen for approval, got a brief nod. All words that Eujen himself could have said, but it was important for the new recruits to know which faces to take orders from, even when those faces bore pale Wasp features.

When they had filed out, with expressions ranging from stunned to incredulous to determined, Eujen sagged forward against the lectern.

‘Well done, Chief Officer,’ the Beetle girl commended him, laying a hand briefly on his shoulder. Her name was. .? Not a good start for a chief officer, he realized, because he could not recall it.

‘Now we have to work out how we’re even going to train them,’ he moaned.

‘I, ah, took the liberty of finding some veterans — old fellows from the first war with the Vekken. They haven’t used snapbows, but at least they’ve fought. And one of the artificing Masters can come and teach us about artillery. And. . I thought we could improvise, after that.’ She drew most of herself up, seeking for a military bearing. ‘Is that all right?’

Ellery Heartwhill, that was her name. ‘That’s superb,’ Eujen told her, and she beamed at him a little too eagerly.

‘I can get someone from the Merchant Companies to train them with snapbows,’ a new voice sounded from the door, making all three of them jump. Eujen twitched up to see none other than Stenwold Maker himself standing there.

‘How much did you hear?’ he demanded of the older man, as though he had been caught plotting some sort of sedition.

‘Enough,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘You did well.’

I didn’t do it for you. But to Eujen’s surprise, the words remained locked up in his mind. Now was not the time. ‘Any help in getting them ready would be appreciated,’ he managed.

‘War Council will be meeting tomorrow. .’ A moment of calculation on Stenwold’s part. ‘Let’s call it noon. You’ll be ready for a break by then, though I’m not sure I can promise you one. I’d give you an agenda, except it would be out of date by dawn.’

Eujen nodded. Surely there’s an old Inapt saying, ‘May you get what you ask for.’

Taki brought her oft-repaired Esca Magni down messily on the airfield, the rest of her flight skewing their Stormreaders to a halt around her. She slapped up her cockpit lid and kicked herself out of her seat, her wings carrying her halfway across the field, battered by the wind of the landing orthopters.

A quick glance about located a familiar figure in Willem Reader, artificer and aviation scholar — and current object of her ire.

As she approached, she could see him counting the surviving sets of wings, and he met her grim expression with one of his own. He was a small-framed Beetle-kinden — though still bigger than herself — with a mild face set off by a small moustache. Perhaps no man’s image of a great war hero, but his orthopter designs were all around them.

‘We should have had them!’ she exclaimed to him, as she touched down. ‘Even with the Farsphex screen, we had several clear runs at their supplies!’

‘Then what went wrong, Taki?’ came his measured response.

‘What went wrong is that the Stormreaders can only carry a handful of underpowered explosives, and lining them up for the strike is painstaking fiddly work when you’re being shot at. They may not have many Farsphex, but they know their business! When we were doing the same favour for them, not so long ago, they still got plenty of bombs on the ground — you know why?’

‘Because they have a second crew member doing the aiming, Taki,’ Willem broke in. ‘And because the Empire built them with that in mind, and a cursed good job they did of it. Stormreaders are built to fight in the air. I can’t make you good against the ground. We’d need a whole different type of orthopter — and you’d need to give me the time to work out the design. I won’t say I haven’t looked into it, but even if I’d started work straight after they left last time, we’d barely have a prototype when the Second arrive again. And as for reverse-engineering the Farsphex. . we have a handful of their crashed vessels whole enough to study, and nobody around here seems to realize just how complex the things are — let alone their fuel, which we don’t have, and which the chemical artifice department can’t even guess at. Taki. .’

She had been ready to shout at him for failing her, but she saw from his face that he had already spent nights and days trying to overcome mountains, and that nobody was more aware of the stakes than he was.

‘I’m sorry, Willem,’ she said. ‘What can you give me?’

‘There’s a big consignment of the new steel just shipped in, and I can get another dozen or so Stormreaders fitted with replacement springs. About half your strike force, by then.’

She was shaking her head. ‘No point having half our machines that can stay over the enemy for a day at a time, if we’re still out of bombs in three passes.’

‘I know, I know, but it’s better than nothing. It’s something.’ Neither of them bothered to raise the obvious fact that, the closer the enemy came, the less important the simple staying power of the Stormreaders would prove. ‘A lot of the city’s resources are going elsewhere. They’ve new artillery on the walls, for example. . and if it does come down to a siege, it shouldn’t just be you standing between victory and defeat.’

‘Let them keep telling themselves that,’ Taki grumbled. ‘I don’t trust fancy new untested artillery, and those Wasp big leadshotters already have two cities to their tally is what I hear.’ She waved over at one of the ground crew. ‘Get them all re-tensioned, right away. Training flights in two hours!’

‘You push yourself too hard,’ Reader said softly.

‘Me? I’m a Fly, Willem. We just keep buzzing.’ She was aware that her grin was too bright and cheerful, to the point of cracking about the edges. ‘Maker’s Draft has given me three score Collegiates who think they can fly an orthopter. By the end of today I reckon at least a score of them will be wearing the sashes of the Merchant Companies and praying never to leave the ground again. The rest perhaps I can use.’ But they’ll never have a chance to get good at it, was another unspoken but shared thought. ‘How’s the family?’ An awkward digression. Taki had lived in a world of feuding pilots most of her life and the small talk of other people baffled her. Only after coming to Collegium had she started to care about the earth-bound masses: men such as Willem Reader or Stenwold Maker. Only after running foul of the Empire had she started to appreciate the bigger issues and what they meant to the individuals around her.

‘Jen’s grumbling that they want to use her library as a hospital, if the worst comes to the worst. I swear she’d let the Empire in through the gates if they showed a thorough knowledge of indexing. Little Jen has been learning emergency drill at school, She always used to draw me pictures of orthopters, but now, when she does, they’re fighting. Everything’s gone mad.’ He said it matter-of-factly, but there was a world of weariness there.

I’m not the only one pushing myself too hard, Taki decided. ‘Come on, Willem, you don’t need to oversee all this personally.’

‘Better than the committees.’ He shrugged. ‘Which reminds me, the War Master wants a report from both of us. Now there’s a man, I swear, who never sleeps.’

Outside Collegium’s walls, another grand project was under way. The approach to the city was a broad and shallow slope of land that the river had ground out with its meanderings over thousands of years, the cliffs on either side dipping down gently towards the sea. This was the bowl that held Collegium, and it had been a coastal resort for the Moth-kinden once, but was now a seat of trade, rich farming and comfort for the Beetles. Defence had never been something the city had been sited for, and recent years had seen too many enemies simply come walking up to the city’s gates. Now a great force of men and machines and animals was working on both sides of the river, and the rail line, to complicate the Second Army’s last few hundred yards of advance.

Straessa was well aware that a battery of cartographers, architects, engineers and mathematicians had been up for nights working out the perfectly calibrated defence against the marching feet of the Wasps. Taking into account the arcs of the city’s artillery, the strengths of the wall and the natural lie of the land, they had set out a complex maze of artificial topography to trip and slow, funnel and compress; to force the hand of the Imperial general and make his soldiers victims of Collegium’s wall engines. The theory was all there and, as a student of the College, she could probably have done some of those calculations herself.

Standing with a spade in her hand, overlooking the toiling soldiers of the Coldstone Company working alongside the machines of a dozen professionals who had made moving earth their business, it all looked like a colossal mess to her. She could not shake off the feeling that this entire grandiose venture was simply to give the city’s massed soldiery something to do.

‘Water!’ came a shout, and she turned gratefully. A draught beetle was dragging out what had been a fire engine until recently, but had now been pressed into service to quench the thirst of Collegium’s defenders.

‘Gorenn, get cups and buckets down the line,’ she called, and a Dragonfly woman took off from a nearby mound of earth, glad to be out of it, and started to organize a bucket chain.

I should probably tell everyone how well they’re doing, but for all I know we’re going to have to shift everything ten feet to the left or something. Plans on paper were all very well, but putting them into action on the ground was another matter.

‘Officer Antspider!’ Another demand for her attention, but at least it gave her an excuse not to start shovelling again. All the privilege of rank had not stopped her underlings shaming her into doing her bit.

She had not recognized the voice but, turning, she knew the man. ‘Gerethwy!’ she cried, delighted. If her voice wavered very slightly over the last syllable of his name, well, he had changed somewhat since losing half a hand to an exploding snapbow. He had always been freakishly tall — long-limbed, long-faced, with that stooped hunch that all Woodlouse-kinden apparently had. Now his cheeks were hollow, and his grey skin seemed to show something beyond just his kinden’s natural hue.

‘Reporting for duty,’ he told her, striding over the uneven ground. ‘If you’ll have me.’

‘Te Mosca let you go, did she?’

‘I need to do something.’ And he was saying more than he used to, as well. Single words, nods and wry expressions had always seemed enough before. Now all those unspoken words were leaking out. ‘What in the pits is this?’ His eyes raked over all that grand effort of earth-moving.

‘Second-to-last line of defence against the Wasps,’ she told him. ‘Get the ground all rucked up so that they can’t just march over it without getting in the way of our artillery, and pack a load of the soil up against our walls to shield us from theirs.’

She thought he would go along with it, for a moment. She dearly wanted him to just nod along, as he always had done. That long face was swinging back and forth, though, the banded brow furrowing.

‘All of this just for that?’ he pressed her.

‘It’ll help: every little thing. .’ She should just be giving him orders, but he had been her friend longer than she had been his officer.

‘Straessa,’ he challenged her, still speaking in his quiet and gentle way, but now as if explaining something to a child, ‘two-thirds of the Wasp army can fly. And their artillery can hit us from well beyond any of this stuff. And their orthopters. .’ He looked like a man trying to work out whether he was caught in a nightmare or not. ‘We’re fighting yesterday’s war. What will all of this achieve?’

‘I said that, too,’ the Dragonfly woman, Gorenn, said, dropping down for more water. ‘Would they listen? They would not.’

She wasn’t the only one. Straessa had heard that Kymene, the leader of the Mynans in exile in Collegium, had got into a blazing row over that very same issue, having witnessed her own city fall to the Wasps, and of course half of Gorenn’s homeland had been Wasp-occupied for years. It seemed their voices counted for little.

‘They have ground troops,’ she insisted, listening to herself defend a decision of her superiors that she had not really agreed with in the first place. ‘You remember their infantry as well as I do.’ Better, probably, under the circumstances. ‘Their Spiderlands mob won’t be in the air, either. So it’ll help, and it’s better than not having it.’ There were a lot of soldiers listening in now, who had been slaving away in the sweat-harvesting sun for hours, and she was abruptly aware how tenuous the whole structure of Collegiate authority was, how much it relied on the consent of all concerned. ‘Look, you said you were reporting for duty,’ she pointed out, more harshly than she had intended.

He just looked at her, and she guessed he might walk away, but then he had grabbed a spade, fumbling with it a little, and set to work, driving at the earth as though it was a surrogate for all the things he could not just bludgeon into place. He was half a hand short, but he was stronger than he looked, and soon everyone was back to following orders. Thanks to me. Hooray for me.

‘Bookworm,’ said Gorenn, drawing the final bucket of water, and Straessa looked up to see a wobbling figure weave unsteadily through the air until it had dropped down on the ground in front of her. This was Jodry Drillen’s Fly-kinden secretary, who had taken to going about with a breastplate on, so heavy he made hard weather of even the short hop from the city walls. Does he just want to look like a soldier, or does he know something about the range of the Wasp engines?

‘Where’s your chief officer?’ he demanded, not so much of the Antspider as of everyone.

‘On the walls with the artillerists,’ Straessa told him. ‘You probably just passed him.’

The little man choked down his annoyance, smoothing his face over with his usual slightly superior expression. ‘Well, kindly go and get him and send him on to the War Council. They need everyone.’

We’re not even trying for a field battle, are we? Straessa wondered, but she remembered the last one quite well enough, most especially the way that all the courage, imagination, armament and righteousness of the Collegiate forces had been ground down and broken against the numbers and discipline of the Wasps. And that discipline is something they learn from the womb, most likely. It’s not something we can just work out from first principles. And then there had been the Sentinels, the great armoured wood-louse-shaped machines armed with leadshotters and rotary piercers, proof against just about anything that the Collegiates had been able to throw at them, including aerial bombardment. And has anyone got a clever plan for those, I wonder? Because, if so, nobody’s said what it is.

‘I’ll get him, don’t worry,’ she promised.

‘To the Prowess Forum, that’s where they’re meeting. And now’s not too soon,’ the Fly snapped at her, and then he was clawing for the air again, touching down a couple of times as he built up speed, before lurching away back towards the city. Easier for you to find him yourself, you overdressed little prig, Straessa reflected, but no doubt the Speaker’s vaunted secretary had better things to do. She glanced at Gerethwy, contemplating taking him along with her, but, looking at the fragile set of his face, she decided wretchedly that she couldn’t cope with him just then, so she left him digging.

The new chief officer of the Coldstone Company was indeed up on the walls. Straessa uncharitably decided that he was playing with artillery rather than doing the job he had been elected to but, truth be told, Madagnus had come to Collegium ten years ago as a very skilled artillerist, and had only been honing his skills since. Now the College was installing its new toys on the walls, and wrestling him away was likely to be a full-time job.

Like his assassinated predecessor, Madagnus was an Ant, although from some Spiderlands city nobody had ever heard of. He was a gaunt man on the wrong side of middle years, his skin the colour of rusting iron, and he disdained armour save for the Company-issue buff coat, which he left open down the front. In a crowd of Beetle-kinden artillerists he was easy to spot.

She hung back to watch for a moment, seeing only a disappointingly small machine, something looking like a ballista with no arms mounted on a big wooden box. The elderly Beetle demonstrating it was saying something about building up a magnetic differential between the two ends of the device, therefore she gathered that the box contained something in the way of a dwarf lightning engine. Which means I’m standing about three streets too close to it for comfort. She was no artificer, though, and the details passed her by. By then the demonstrator had slipped an all-metal bolt into the thing, and declared it ready for a test.

The box beneath the machine began not making a noise. The Antspider could tell it was not making a noise because it was making the stones beneath her feet vibrate with all the silence it was putting out.

‘Excuse me,’ she put in, feeling a sudden stab of fear. ‘Those are my soldiers out there beyond the walls.’

They all looked at her as though she was simple-minded, and the old man aiming the machine chuckled indulgently.

‘This is intended to counter the Wasp artillery, girl. At this elevation nobody within a mile of the city’s going to be in any danger.’

Straessa blinked at him, and at last the contraption began making an audible sound, a high whining just at the edge of hearing, which the old man clearly took as a good sign.

‘And. . loose!’ He got it wrong, said it again, and then, a second later, the bolt was simply gone. Straessa had the faint sense of very swift motion, and no more. Of the missile’s eventual impact there was no sign.

‘Of course we’ll tip the bolts with explosives when Wasps arrive,’ the old artillerist said cheerily, ‘but it’s all about magnets and the new steel and good old College know-how.’ And then the others were crowding in to study the device.

Straessa plucked at the sleeve of her chief officer’s coat as he tried to elbow his way in. ‘You’re wanted, Chief.’

The Ant looked annoyed at that, but he glanced off over the walls — east, towards the Wasps, she thought — then nodded, and they descended together.

She accompanied him as far as the Prowess Forum, for fear that he would end up back on the walls again if she left his side. The College’s old sparring ground had been decked out with banners, she saw, which meant that this gathering was not just another in the interminable series of committees that seemed to be Collegium’s answer to everything. This was it. The great minds of the city had come together, and were about to impart their wisdom to their martial servants.

She saw Stenwold Maker within, sitting on the tiered seats as though waiting to watch a practice match. The sagging bulk of Jodry Drillen lurked in one doorway, speaking to another couple of Assemblers, and at least a score of others were already sitting in small cliques and factions, some there to speak and some to listen. She recognized the small form of Willem Reader, the aeronautics artificer, and a few others she could put a name to. One was Helmess Broiler, Collegium’s least favourite son in many quarters, and a man often claimed to be on the Imperial payroll. The Prowess Forum was public, though, and many people had come to see the leaders of their city’s armed might. A morale exercise, then, more than anything. No state secrets here.

She ticked off the banners, seeing the various chief officers and other military leaders arrive and assemble beneath them: five Companies and four others, nine men and women to direct the battle.

The Companies first. Red scarab was the badge of Maker’s Own, and their chief officer, Elder Padstock, was the senior military figure there. Through the Gate was their motto, and Padstock was known to be a fervent, even fanatical supporter of Stenwold Maker.

Madagnus himself was standing beneath the banner depicting a white helm in profile — not the original Vekken design but an Imperial infantry helmet now, for reasons of politics. Their motto, and Straessa’s own, was In Our Enemy’s Robes, after the original inhabitants of Coldstone Street had taken arms and armour from Vekken dead to throw back the invaders.

Outwright’s Pike and Shot had a wheel of pikes and snap-bows as its device, whose intricacy must have left the embroiderers cursing. Outright Victory or Death went their words, and the original Outwright had indeed died defending Stenwold Maker from Imperial assassins. His nephew, someone-or-other Outwright, looked far too young for the job, but his soldiers had elected him out of fondness for his martyred uncle. Beside him stood sweating Remas Boltwright of the new Fealty Street Company, his banner simple crossed crossbow bolts, his words To End the Quarrel. He was doing his best but, like Outwright Junior, he did not look the soldier.

Eujen Leadswell stood at his shoulder, beneath the purple banner displaying the open book. He and Averic had been devoting every waking moment to turning their rabble of malcontents into something approximating a fighting company, but some wit amongst the students had seen to it that the words Learn to Live had been added to their flag. In Straessa’s experience it was entirely possible that Eujen, beneath them, had not even noticed. So very focused, always.

And curse me, but he looks the part. Eujen Leadswell, student of social history and outspoken detractor of no less a man than Stenwold Maker, stood straight-backed and proud in his breastplate, and if any had been ready to mock the idea of the Student Company, or to slight him for his political beliefs, they held their tongues now.

I am not going to cry. But, looking at him, Straessa felt so very aware of how fragile he was, just as any man or woman was fragile. One bolt, one sword, and all that young promise would be gone.

The others came as no surprise, those defenders of the city who were not formally part of the Companies. She saw, standing beneath a sky-coloured banner without device or motto, the little Fly-kinden pilot who was everyone’s darling after the Wasp Air Corps had been brought down last time.

Kymene the Mynan leader had her city’s red arrows on black, one pointing up, one down, expounded by the words below them: We Have Fallen. We Will Rise Again. Straessa had a lot of time for Kymene save that she had always felt that the woman was so fiercely opposed to the Wasps that she might get a great many people killed for it one day.

Some close-faced, midnight-skinned Vekken stood, with no banner at all, representing that company of his kinsfolk who had come reluctantly to the aid of their new — and only — ally. Lastly, beneath a plain green flag, there was a Mantis-kinden woman Straessa did not know, standing for the Felyen exiles within Collegium, those last tatters of the Felyal hold destroyed by the Second Army on its last advance.

And that’s it, thought the Antspider. That’s all of us, Beetle and non-Beetle, citizens and guests. These nine are the hope of the city in miniature.

By that time the crowd was quite large, packing themselves in at every door, concerned men and women of Collegium who were ostensibly here to see history performed, but in reality just wanted to be told that everything would be all right.