War Master's Gate

Twelve

Sergeant Gorrec of the Pioneers was crouching low, his huge frame almost tucked into the tangled roots of one of the vast old trees, while all around him the Mantis-kinden were fighting.

It had come on very suddenly. The three Pioneers chosen to spearhead the Empress’s expedition had been carefully breaking new ground, pressing deeper into the forest, and there had been some Nethyen Mantids with them, keeping pace. Gorrec hadn’t liked that, but they weren’t part of his chain of command, and he was cursed if he was going to go crying to the Empress about them. They had faded in and out: now gone from his sight, then a moment later there would be a full half-dozen just ghosting between the trees. No friends of mine. But friends weren’t something that Gorrec was overly supplied with. A man didn’t go into the Pioneers because he liked the company.

Then the other Mantids had turned up and everything had gone rapidly out of his control, if control was something he had ever actually had. There were Mantids everywhere, leaping out and trying to kill one another, and then instantly gone, sometimes leaving a body behind, sometimes not, as though their own irresistible momentum would not allow them to keep still long enough to finish the job. Gorrec saw the fight around him in frenzied slices, the dim air beneath the canopy briefly flaring into a vicious skirmish of blades and then falling still again, the combatants gone. He had his axes ready, those two huge Scorpion-made pieces with their curved hafts, which could be thrown some distance if the wielder was a man as big as Gorrec. So far he had not struck a blow: in the blur of those brief, deadly pairings he found he had no way to tell friend from foe. To him, the Etheryen and the Nethyen Mantids looked just about the same.

He would have followed Icnumon if he could. The halfbreed was Mantis as much as Wasp, and he seemed to have no difficulty knowing whom to kill — either that or he simply did not care. Keeping up with Icnumon was like chasing smoke, though, and Gorrec saw less of him than of the Mantids themselves.

Crouching in his hiding place, eyes almost useless in the gloom, with opponents that were here one moment and gone the next, he had been honing his other senses. When the sudden rush came at him out of nowhere, he was ready for it, kicking away from the tree with one axe arcing back to cleave the air between him and his attacker. Thank you for letting me know which side you’re on. For all he knew, this could be a Nethyen Mantis who had turned coat, or maybe all the Mantids were his foes now, but for the moment being attacked was all the identification he needed.

His heels dug furrows into the forest floor as he changed direction, twisting suddenly to meet the oncoming Mantis. He had a fleeting image of a rangy man in greens and browns, trying to bring a spear down on him, but his own sudden reversal — and the sheer speed with which a man of his size had moved — gained him time enough to bat the needle point aside and bring his other axe about in an attempt at cutting the man in two. The Mantis leapt over the scything blade, dragging his spear up to skewer Gorrec like a fish, but the Wasp was still moving, letting his impetus carry him out of the spear’s path and bringing both axes about so that they nearly crossed. There was a moment when the Mantis should have backed off, but the man’s face was twisted with rage and loathing, finding this intruder in his people’s hidden halls, and he just drove on forwards. The spearhead gouged a shallow line across the Wasp’s shoulder, despite all Gorrec’s weavings, but then came the moment when the two axe-heads were just too large, too fast, to be avoided, taking up all available space about the Mantis warrior. Even then the man almost won free, diving through a gap that seemed too small to let a Fly through, but Gorrec and the twin axes went back a long way, and they knew each other well. Just as the Mantis was almost clear, there they were again, and this time their victim had nowhere to go.

Gorrec shook the blood from the blades, and the next Mantis was on him without warning, following the steel course of her rapier blade directed at his throat. He fell backwards — the only move that would keep him out of the weapon’s path — and the woman had vaulted him, turned even as she landed, lunging back at his chest as he scrambled on his elbows to try and get out of the way.

Then she had pitched backwards, her deadly blade spinning from her hands, while Gorrec jumped to his feet, axes still in hand. Ten yards away, almost lost amidst the trees, the Beetle Jons Escarrabin was reloading his snapbow, hands working automatically as his eyes raked their surroundings.

Gorrec tensed, awaiting the next challenger, but there came nothing. Either the fight had moved on, or it had simply broken up. He and Escarrabin had the forest to themselves, save for the corpses.

Apparently satisfied, the Beetle Pioneer dropped to one knee by the closest body, essaying a quick search for anything of value. A moment later Icnumon sloped out of the shadows, sheathing his blades.

Just another day in the service, Gorrec considered, reaching into his pouch for his medicine kit, because he reckoned this was the sort of place wounds would turn bad fast, if you let them.

He put one axe down and issued his orders by way of hand gestures: You two keep watch, advance slowly, I’m falling back to report. I’ll catch up. Pioneers weren’t the talkative type.

I just hope Her Majesty has a free hand with the rewards, when we get back, was all he thought about it. Just because he had trained for this sort of work didn’t mean he had to like heading into the darkest depths of a Mantis hold. Even amongst the Pioneers that approached as close to suicide as any of them cared to tread.

She waved away the big Pioneer’s report as soon as he started to make it, simply saying, ‘I know,’ to his brutish, uncomprehending face. ‘I know it all,’ and she sent him back to his comrades, to continue breaking ground, to keep up with the rush of the Nethyen.

‘Majesty. .?’ Gjegevey queried uncertainly. He did not feel it, she realized. Neither did Tegrec, the Wasp in Moth’s clothing. They were both magicians in their way, but their power was wan and tepid, rusted from disuse in the one case, and newly minted and shallow in the other. Seda’s speculative gaze moved on, past Tisamon and Ostrec, until she met the blank eyes of Yraea, the Moth ambassador, and in that featureless gaze she felt some kindred echo. Of course, the Moths had ruled over the Mantids for millennia, and now she, Seda, was treading where once they had held sole dominion.

And she does not like it. Seda found herself reading that much into those white eyes. I wonder what orders she has been given by her Skryre masters? Find some way of taking my inheritance from me, and then down with the mistress of the Empire, no doubt. She knew from her own researches that the Days of Lore had not been filled with peace and brotherhood between the Inapt powers. They had fought, jostled for dominance, destroyed one another. By the time the Apt began to climb from the mud, their masters had already exhausted themselves.

A failure I do not plan to repeat. I may have to destroy the Moths, if I cannot find a way to rule them. The same went for the others: she would brook no rivals. Will I be safe only when I am the last magician left in the world?

But let me start with the Beetle girl. Perhaps when she is gone the world will dance to my liking. I will brook no rivals, but especially not her.

And the girl was close, Seda was well aware. Closer and closer, weaving through the dense and haunted trees of this place, and seeking out Argastos for the power that the old shade held. More, she must feel just the same as Seda felt, as the forest spoke to her, as its convolutions and depths made themselves known.

Just as a map of a mountain range can only hint at the complex creases and folds the real earth is twisted into, so the visible forest was a mere gloss over a tightly knotted magical landscape centuries old. Here the Mantids had begun, here they had stretched out their mailed and spiny arm to overshadow the Lowlands, at the Moths’ will. From here had sprung their poets and champions, Weaponsmasters, seers and heroes. Here they had shed blood, their own and that of others, offering by duel and feud so many delicious sacrifices to the wood’s dark and rotten heart. Here their idols stood, drinking the lives of the fallen. And here they had retreated, once the world had turned. In the last days of their power, here they were to be found, in this place that had been theirs, and only theirs. This was the unconquered past, the last sanctuary of their histories, and it spoke to her. The forest was like a vast, malevolent mind dispersed and parcelled out between the trees, the beasts, even the people. She could sense it, this great and ancient thing that did not acknowledge the progressive world without. When the Pioneers and the Nethyen had fought, she had known of it. When blood was shed, she had rejoiced and grown stronger with it.

She stared into the face of Yraea, sounding out how far that kinship went, and found that she had outstripped the Moth already. Moth-kinden magic was different, more refined, more cautious, ever playing the long game: a thousand pieces on a board that reached to infinity. The Moths had mastered their Mantis servants, but they had left them their sacred places, their savagery and their bloody-handed pride. Wasps knew all about that. We are the true inheritors of the Mantis-kinden, more than any other.

And her spread senses resounded to the encroachment of the Etheryen, already flanking the Pioneers, and she called out ‘To arms!’ Her little band of magicians jumped, startled and unsure, but Tisamon was moving, as were her Mantis bodyguards in their black and gold mail. And there were Wasps beyond them, soldiers who knew what to do when an order came.

She levelled her hand, feeling the swift flurry through the dark that was the approaching enemy, knowing them as a part of her, tied by the same cords to the vast sounding board of the forest. When her sting spat, the gold fire searing into the chest of the leading Etheryen warrior, that death was her gift to the forest, and she and her victim were enacting a ritual as old as time.

The Mantis band was small, no more than half a dozen, but they were very swift, and she guessed they had been hunting for her, trying to hack the head from their enemy. Tisamon cut two arrows from the air that had been loosed at her, and then her soldiers were rushing forwards to interpose themselves, even as her bodyguards engaged. Mantis fought Mantis with all the grace and ferocity of their training, claw versus claw. Seda simply stood and waited, watching that handful of them eddy and sway, seeing Tisamon strike and strike again, swift and deadly, but meeting a skill that had the same roots as his own. A handful of Wasps had run in also, and two were dead already, but they had killed off the momentum of the Etheryen charge. For a moment it seemed that nothing was left except for the killing, but then a silver-haired Mantis man broke free of the melee, dancing aside from Tisamon’s lunge with a young-man’s nimble step, and he was driving at Seda the next moment.

And the forest did not care, of course. Blood was blood, and if she fell to this man’s steel claw, that would also be fitting.

She exerted herself, however, focusing her attention on him in the brief second before he reached her. Fear me, worship me, adore me. Time slowed about her, and she wrestled with the arrowhead of his mind even as her palm spread, sting heating in her fingers.

Or am I too slow? As if in a dream, she saw him falter but not stop. The claw was drawn back, ready to drive itself down into her, and still she had no belief in it. I am Seda, Empress of the Wasps. I cannot die.

Then Ostrec was there, ducking in low under the Mantis’s guard with shocking speed: no sting, not even a sword, but ramming a dagger home to the hilt, sending the Mantis staggering, keeping him just out of blade range of the Empress. The man refused to fall, but by then it was too late because Tisamon had caught him up, that one second making all the difference, and Seda let her sting cool again as her armoured ghost opened the silver-haired Mantis’s throat with a hooking strike.

It was over by then. She had lost three soldiers and two of her six bodyguards, a steep price to pay. The small band of Etheryen had gambled all they had on killing her, on excising her from their world.

I am here to stay, and this is my world now. She hurled the thought out into the forest, and felt its answering response: approving, darkly amused and greedy for blood. She knew then that it would do its best to kill her, by the blades of its people, by the hooked arms of its monstrous beasts, by its sheer darkness — but it would do so with love. It would gather her to it, if she let it, and perhaps in a hundred years someone would come questing here to find her ghost.

But she was Seda the Empress, and she would master it, and make it hers, to enjoy or destroy as she saw fit. Here she had come at last into her true kingdom.

And, somewhere out there, Argastos.

There were few non-Ants in Sarnesh service, the lack of a mind-link proving an insurmountable failing for most. Ants could not fly, though, and whilst that link allowed them the coordination to move without error through the semi-dark of the Mantis forest, their vision could not pierce it the way those of the natives could. In their logical way, therefore, even the Ant-kinden kept a few outsiders on the payroll.

It must be hard, Che decided, as she stepped carefully through the tangled undergrowth. There’s nowhere in which to be an outsider quite like an Ant city-state.

The chief scout’s name was Zerro, and he must have lived amongst the Ants a long time, for he even had their look: that closed-mouthed, hard-eyed Ant expression that told of an untouchable internal world. No such world, of course, for a Fly-kinden like Zerro, but he almost acted as if there was, reading the thoughts of his comrades from their stance, from the minute traces of expression even Ants were prone to. As a scout, he led a weird backwards existence, creeping ahead of the line, but putting as much effort into remaining in sight of the Sarnesh as he did in keeping hidden from the enemy. If something happened to him, it was imperative that the Ants had warning, and being seen was the only way he could communicate that to them.

They had outstripped the main body of the Sarnesh — who were making a steady and careful advance behind them, meeting up with the Etheryen and skirting the locals’ concealed tree-villages, trying to create an expanding frontier to force the Nethyen back. The Ant commander, Sentius, had been at absolute pains to work with the Mantis-kinden, to humour them and to respect their wishes. No Beetle diplomat could have done a better job, Che thought, and it was all just another facet of Ant-kinden efficiency, the easiest way for them to achieve their goal.

Zerro and his Sarnesh scouts were meanwhile already past all of that and into contested territory, though Che had witnessed no fighting yet. The Fly had not been at all happy about bringing her and her followers along with him, seeing them as a noisy, clumsy liability. She thought that his opinion might have changed by now. With the exception of Helma Bartrer, who was still stumbling along at the back even though she had changed her Collegiate robes for a tunic and cloak of muted brown, the rest of them moved through the forest with surprising ease. Oh, no surprise that Tynisa was at home here, or even the Moth, Terastos; and Che supposed that Thalric had done enough sneaking about in his time, and Maure too. Even big Amnon had always had a smooth grace about him, whether hunting the Jamail delta of his homeland, or here so many miles away from it. I suppose it is just me that actually surprises me; Beetle stealth was the butt of a hundred Fly jokes. How do you know a Beetle’s breaking into your house? He knocks first. Here, though. .

The forest was a dark, cruel place, stained with old blood, but it knew her. ‘Welcomed’ would be a step too far, but the anointing she had received in Khanaphes was good currency here. The forest might kill her, in the end, but it would do so with respect, and she moved through the chest-high ferns and briars with a dancer’s step, and her eyes knew no darkness.

The Sarnesh around them stopped, not a sudden jolt but a collective fading into stillness at some signal sent from ahead. Che closed her eyes and let herself take in the rhythms of the trees about her, the forest’s slow old heartbeat. There were Nethyen hunting parties out there, she knew. She could not have told Zerro quite where they were, but she felt them impinge on her mind like tiny thorns. None so close as to be a threat, although there was already blood on the air from skirmishes and brief flashes of violence between the trees.

It had been a long time since there had been so much killing within this wood, she discerned, and she could feel the whole place waking up by increments, something primitive and sluggish gathering its wits.

For a moment her mind touched something else, and in a start of panic she thought it must be the Empress, but the texture of the mind that she sensed was not Seda the Wasp’s. It lacked her fierce fire, but there was a great wellspring of power there nonetheless. Then it was gone in an instant, unlocatable, just a chance brushing of consciousness, but Che formed the name Argastos in her mind. And if I know your name, old Moth, does that give me power over you? Or have you transcended that?

She had asked Maure what might be left of this ancient Moth hero-sorcerer by now. The halfbreed necromancer had just shaken her head. ‘This whole place is just built of ghosts,’ had been her response. ‘I’d say “all of him” but I’ve a feeling that there might be more of him, now, than there ever was when he was alive. Just because we get to him first doesn’t mean that we’ll enjoy it a moment later. Maybe better to let the Wasp woman have that honour?’

But Che knew Seda’s strength and indomitable will. I cannot let her have Argastos — or whatever he left behind him. If that means I must take the risk myself, then so be it. And, in the wake of that, she reflected: I am thinking like a magician now. Where did all this ambition come from?

They were moving again, heading off at an angle, very slowly, and she tried to work out what was going on. At first she used her mere eyes, as any slave of Aptitude might, and there was nothing. Then the Ants had frozen again, and she saw them readying their weapons, crossbows mostly because those were quieter than snapbows. What is it? Tell me. .

Tynisa was moving forwards ahead of her, and already identifying the problem, but Che caught up effortlessly. Now I see. A strange, reckless feeling had overcome her, a need to discover what she could do in this new place. There is magic concentrated here, layer on layer of old ritual and belief encrusted about the roots of every tree, far more than ever there was in the Commonweal.

Zerro was right ahead, but he was not looking back at her. Instead, he had one hand out to the Ants, fingers moving in a slow, deliberate code. His eyes were fixed on the beast.

It stood one and a half times the height of a tall man. The tree cover here was dense, and yet a lush, strangely pallid undergrowth extended all about them, as though living on something other than sun and air. The mantis itself had an ivory sheen to it, and was near invisible in its perfect poise. Tynisa was already limping forwards, and Che recalled she had faced down just such a creature in the Commonweal, but she put a hand on her foster-sister’s arm, stilling her.

‘Che, don’t play around,’ Tynisa murmured from the corner of her mouth, eyes fixed firmly on the insect. Its killing arms were still drawn in tight, and its vast, pale eyes saw everything.

Che was acutely aware of all of them in that moment. The scout, Zerro, was signalling her, but she did not know his sign language, and she was not under his command. She could sense the sharp scrutiny of the Moth Terastos, his fear and uncertainty, and something like a bitter envy from Helma Bartrer, frustrated Apt scholar. Here was Maure, calm amidst the darkness because she understood what Che was about, and here she felt Thalric’s concern, his slowly escalating tension that might lead him to do something rash. .

She stepped forwards, one slow deliberate pace, and then another that put her closer to the mantis than either Tynisa or Zerro. She knew that the Ants all had their weapons levelled towards it, but the status of such creatures was uncertain. The locals held them in high esteem, so killing one might have repercussions. Or not: the Mantids never seemed to have the same attitudes towards death and killing as did civilized peoples.

From every facet of the creature’s vast eyes, the forest watched her.

Go, she told it. We are not your prey. You are not ours. We pass through like the wind. We leave not even footprints in our wake. The forest wanted blood, she knew. Like a crowd at a Wasp arena, it wanted them to fight for its amusement, but she was Cheerwell Maker of Collegium, and nobody’s pit-slave.

Its arms shifted, unclasping a little, reaching towards her in readiness for a strike, but she read the animal, and the immense semi-consciousness around her, as though they were a human face. My time is not now, and this is not the agent of my death. She stared into that compound gaze. Enough hollow threats. For a moment she actually felt a connection with the insect itself, a sharp and calculating mind with more understanding and contemplation than any simple animal should be able to own to.

‘Pass on,’ she told Zerro, just quiet words, but she could feel a faint shiver in the air and in the trees as she spoke, reacting to the authority she had taken on. Even the Fly and his Ants, the blind and deaf Apt, must have felt some change. From that moment on, she knew that they would look to her. She had taken command in a bloodless coup.

That distant presence, the eye of Argastos, had seen it all, she knew, and was evaluating her even now. What is he like? Is there enough left to even be thought of as ‘he’? Do we go to the man himself, or the ghost, or just his tomb?

They were moving off again, and Che found herself keeping pace some half-dozen yards behind Zerro, Tynisa by her side. Her sister was eyeing her as though she had gone mad or turned into a stranger. Che smiled at her, but she had the feeling that her smiles were no longer the amiable and reassuring ones she had once worn.