War Master's Gate

Twenty-One

I’ve had this conversation before, on a smaller scale. Not a reference to Laszlo’s size, but here were Balkus and Sperra, freshly arrived from Princep Salma, both complaining about exactly the same man.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ Stenwold asked them.

Balkus folded his arms. ‘I don’t know. Something. Thinking of what to do is supposed to be your strong point.’

Stenwold crossed to the window of his current office, staring out over his city, with special reference to the scars of the bombing, the conscripted soldiers below being taught battle formation, the factories turning out Stormreader parts and new artillery for the walls. This is what my home has become.

‘Seriously, Master Maker,’ Balkus persevered from behind him, ‘it’s an attack on Princep’s sovereignty, is what it is. He just about annexed us on behalf of Sarn. You’ve got to do something.’

‘Why me?’

‘I can’t think who else that man might listen to,’ Sperra put in, speaking from around Balkus’s waist level.

Stenwold took a deep breath. ‘He is the military leader of my city’s foremost ally. He is dedicated to fighting the Wasps. What am I supposed to say? Do I tell him we’re not his friends any more because of one girl?’

‘One what?’ Sperra and Balkus exclaimed almost together, high and low like two-part harmony.

For a moment Stenwold lost track of the present conversation. He had been making do with perilously little sleep this last tenday. Not the girl this time, that was Laszlo. ‘For just one city. Princep Salma. Do I call off the alliance?’

‘Threaten to do it,’ Sperra insisted.

‘And he’ll know I’m bluffing, and all I’ll achieve is to alienate the Sarnesh.’

‘Then don’t bluff!’ Balkus had his turn now.

At that, Stenwold turned round, sitting back on the windowsill. Something in his expression tapped the big Ant’s anger and drained it, leaving the man almost fearful.

‘It would be a bluff, because we cannot afford to do without Sarn,’ Stenwold said simply. ‘They cannot do without us, it’s true, but our need is mutual. It’s an alliance, after all.’

‘But it’s wrong,’ Sperra said, sounding almost childlike.

‘We need to win this war, Sperra. We need to defeat the Empire, or what has it all been for? We need to. . somehow we need to bring this to a close. I’m being frank with you. Believe me, Sarn could go much further down that path, and I’d still back them. I have to.’ And good sense told him to stop there, but his mouth continued speaking. ‘And a lot of people would ask whether Princep should not be expected to fight to defend its freedom.’

Balkus stared at him. ‘They came to my city and they turned my people into their soldiers, under their orders, at their command. How is that different from the Auxillians of the Empire?’ And then, before Stenwold could riposte: ‘Maker, I thought we were friends. Is this it, then? Were we only ever just hirelings of yours? To be cast off when you don’t need us?’

Of course not.

It’s not like that.

You’re not seeing the whole picture.

Balkus, just see sense for once. This is bigger than. .

But Stenwold said none of those things; he just looked at Balkus and Sperra and said nothing at all, with no real idea of how cold and hostile his expression might have become. He saw Balkus balling his fists, Balkus the Ant mercenary, with a sword at his belt and a nailbow slung over his shoulder.

But he knew Balkus. The Ant was no danger to him. They were friends, after all.

The Sarnesh renegade’s face twisted in some strangled expression obviously taught to him by living amongst other kinden. Then Sperra was tugging gently at his arm, her eyes regarding Stenwold sadly.

‘Bye, War Master,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave you to your war.’ She did not even remind him of the time the Sarnesh had tortured her on his account. Not a word, not a facial tic to recall it, and yet the thought might almost have leapt straight from her mind to his. And as for Balkus: the Ant had led Collegium’s own forces in the last war, had been a hero to the people of Stenwold’s city.

But I don’t need them now. I need Tactician Milus and the Sarnesh. So he simply watched them go, the two of them, and knew that he had betrayed them utterly, unreservedly.

Tactician, we have each considered your plans.

Milus waited, standing on the battlements of Sarn, whilst all about him a city was preparing for war. Not an army but a city. Every Ant-kinden became a warrior in time of need, and now the artisans, the labourers, the merchants among his people were being kitted out with hauberk, crossbow and shortsword, forming a citizen militia to hold the walls and support the main army.

His mind was linked with the Royal Court, the King and the other tacticians, those who had given him oversight of the campaign against the Empire. That they were not instantly agreeing with him was a point of concern, but he allowed them time. They had shown their faith in him when they appointed him. His was a rare mind for an Ant, able to chew over many problems at once, able to see unusual solutions to difficult problems — and often to simplify those problems by tearing right through them where a lesser man might get mired in detail.

We could have done with the Collegiates pressing their advantage after they drove the Second off, one of Milus’s peers mused. A relief column from the Beetles would be very welcome now.

For the record, the Collegiates have done their best with what is available to them: superior artifice and inferior warriors, Milus stated firmly. It was not his place to speak thus, but he had little care for propriety now. It was all part of that same eccentricity of mind that saw some Ants exiled and a very few raised high. He had made few friends and yet, to date, nobody could disagree with his methods or his results.

Within the mental space between him and the Court hovered a dream of their forces, represented simply and surely: the Sarnesh main army, the citizen militia, the auxiliary militia from the Foreigners’ Quarter, the makeshift warriors from Princep — present but palpably unhappy to be so — and several hundred Mynan warriors who had fled the fall of their city — basically the great majority of their remaining land army. Of the non-Sarnesh forces, it was only those same Mynans that Milus had any great faith in, and even then they were an expendable resource. They would fight well, but their long-term aims did not necessarily chime with those of Sarn. Best therefore to spend them now.

We cannot see that there is anything more that can be done. We have gathered all we can, made every preparation. That was the voice of the King himself. All about Milus, the wall was crowded with engines, every piece of artillery mounted and ready to strike at the enemy as they approached. Much of it was antiquated, but Milus was bleakly aware that this would not matter, because even the most modern Sarnesh engines possessed only a fraction of the range of the new Imperial machines, if the Mynans could be believed.

So, therefore, attack. A bitter but inescapable conclusion, the same decision that had won the last war, and then cost them so dearly at Malkan’s Folly.

Beneath the ground stretching before Sarn, the ant-nest was digging at the behest of its Art-gifted handlers: creating a network of reinforced tunnels with sally points ready for Sarnesh troops to spring out of, into the midst of the enemy, and some of those tunnels ran for miles. Explosive mines had been set, as well, and a large force of Sarnesh scouts and wildsmen was already lying in wait, hidden as best they could in the hope of catching the enemy in the flank once battle was joined. The Imperial advantage in technology would have to be matched by Sarnesh superiority in discipline and organization.

I have done my best, he reflected, in that quiet corner of his mind fenced off from all others. Circumstances have been inopportune, but I have played the hand I was dealt as well as anyone could.

If the Mantis-kinden had only held firm, if the Moths had not lost control of their Nethyen lackeys, then this would all be very different. Burdened with a hostile northern front, the Wasps would be far slower to advance; and the Ancient League and Sarn together could have taken them, just as they had at Malkan’s Folly the first time. But the Nethyen had turned, and now Milus was having to expend Sarnesh blood in the forest just to make sure that the Wasps did not gain control of it. He had read Sentius’s reports, that it was becoming a bloody business in there — for the Wasps and for Milus’s soldiers, but most of all for the locals. They were falling on one another as though they had been waiting five hundred years for this opportunity. Could they not have waited one year more?

And yet even there he had done his best. He had reinforced the Etheryen and there was still some chance that battle would be won, although by that time there might not be enough Mantis survivors to make useful allies. He had even sent that deranged Beetle girl in, Maker’s niece. The Mantids obviously respected her somehow, and surely that had been the right thing to do for she could hardly make matters worse.

And of course there was his own ‘special adviser’ regarding the Inapt: the Fly halfbreed Lissart, as her real name was. Milus spared her a thought, incarcerated now in the secure cells beneath the Court. She was an intriguing, damaged creature. The interrogator’s art had yielded a surprising bounty of Imperial practice and information from her but, being an erratic little monster, there were still secrets to plumb there, especially as to who might have sent her to spy on him in the first place. However, if this battle could be won, there would be both the time and the machines to fillet out what she knew. She could be a valuable asset indeed if the war could be carried further east.

If he could defeat the Empire in front of Sarn.

I have done all within my power.

And still the Eighth Army was drawing closer, although constant Sarnesh ambushes had slowed its advance to a crawl. It was Milus’s faint hope that Collegium might manage a decisive strike against the Second, and be able to send a force north just in time — perhaps some of their new orthopters to counter the crushing air power that the Empire was able to field.

And still final confirmation from the Court did not come. He badly wanted it to approve. He wanted his city’s full confidence.

In the end, he realized that such total confidence simply did not exist. There was doubt and fear rooted deep in the Court. Not doubt in him, Milus — for he had truly done all that was possible to give his city every chance of survival. No, it was doubt in the odds, doubt that even all this mustered strength, all this strategy, could win the day. They have taken Tark. They have taken Kes. Those cities were the traditional enemies of Sarn, their peers who had for centuries held the balance of power in the Lowlands. Now the hungry Empire had swept the map clean.

Within the privacy of his own head, Milus considered the future. This was his hour, he knew, and he was history’s man. In his own mind there could be no room for doubt. What was the use of it? The King and his Court wasted their thoughts on the possibility, or even the probability of defeat. To resist was all: to resist and to triumph, odds be damned. I would rather see my city in ruins and every one of my people dead than for us to lose. If the Mynans thought like me, perhaps they would never have lost their city to the Empire. Or they would be dead, with their honour and pride still intact.

We will win. Milus could countenance no other choice, if only because he would be dead himself before the Empire claimed his home. And when we have won, when I have brought about that future, then Sarn will recognize me. The current King had not been in office long, but he was no young man. Milus, strange and slightly disaffected Milus, had never been a contender for the throne but, with a victory over the Empire under his belt, who would say no?

I am only glad that I have lived to see times such as these. How I might have been wasted otherwise!

The Second Army’s new arrivals very nearly failed to arrive entirely. A Farsphex and two Spearflights, they appeared at the tail end of a Collegiate air attack, in danger not so much from the retreating Stormreaders as from their fellow Imperials, who simply saw them as enemy. Only a rapid reassessment by the first attacking pilot, after his initial run, managed to call the rest off. Long before she landed, Bergild had already begun cursing the fools who let non-mindlinked aviators blunder about the sky. The Collegiate air attacks had grown more and more frequent as the Second neared the city. They appeared twice, sometimes three times a day at random intervals, and occasionally at night, although the Beetles were plainly not keen on flying after dark if they did not have to. The link shared by the Farsphex pilots gave them a far better mental map of a dark sky. In response to this escalation, Tynan had his army march and camp in dispersed formations as much as possible, individual elements of it operating almost independently. The entire force covered square miles of countryside, with supplies being spread out across each individual infantryman, leaving only the remaining artillery pieces as tempting targets. Fly-kinden messengers shuttled constantly between the army’s constituent parts, carrying orders to pick up the pace, to slow down, to pull in or fall back. Thankfully, the Beetles had shown no signs of wanting to risk another field battle after the last one went so badly for them.

This new marching order slowed them a little, but they managed it, despite nobody having ever tried such an advance before in recorded history. There are few forces in the world that could achieve this without simply disintegrating, Tynan considered with a spark of pride. Stab me, but I’m not sure which other Imperial armies could manage it, for that matter.

He had an automotive available, but for the moment he was marching alongside his men — it was good for morale and it stopped him becoming a target. The illusion of being just another soldier was somewhat tarnished by the constant stream of Flies and Wasps who dropped down around him to report or to receive orders, but he did his best to pretend. I remember when I used to do this for real. And he did remember, but only just.

In the aftermath of the Collegiate attack, he saw the new arrivals being escorted down by Bergild’s pilots, in slow looping circles over the far-spread army until they found a suitable landing site. Tynan eyed them: News from home? A mixed blessing normally, but right now he was desperate for some kind of explanation, some magic reversal of the picture that would present him with the tools for a successful siege of Collegium. He had insufficient air support, precious little artillery, and supplies by air and sea were easy targets for the Collegiate orthopters.

This must be it, he decided. ‘Find me Cherten, Oski — and get me Captain Bergild, if she’s down yet’

Captain Vrakir of the Red Watch had a way of staring at Tynan that made the general’s scalp itch. He had no need to present himself and salute, for the fact of his presence imposed itself gradually until it was impossible to ignore.

Tynan sighed. ‘Sound a general halt and let the trailing companies catch up. Double watch for the Collegiates coming back.’ And his messengers sprang away to pass on the word. Stopping an army so spread out was the hardest part. It was easy for hundreds of men to simply march off without realizing that they were inadvertently deserting.

He considered sending for Mycella, but he wanted to hear this for himself first. Under her scrutiny, he found his own ignorance of the Empire’s wider plan a hard thing to bear.

He had his little court of officers assembled soon enough: all those he had called for save Bergild — and with Vrakir as well, unsummoned and unwanted but impossible to get rid of. The captain of aviators appeared at the last moment with the new guests in tow, and at first glance they did not seem to be the answer to Tynan’s hopes. One was a young lieutenant with Red Watch mail, who sought out Vrakir and started murmuring to him without even acknowledging the general’s presence. The other. .

He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, but there his resemblance to a soldier of the Empire stopped. He had a sash dyed black and gold about his waist, but no other nod to the uniform. Instead he had a long leather coat, patched more than once, and a cuirass of chitin scales, as though the armourer’s craft had not intruded these last few centuries on wherever he came from. A cord about his neck was strung with a selection of barbs and spines and shards that Tynan recognized as being trophies from dead animals. The man himself, though he might have passed for a civilized Wasp if he had been cleaned up and dressed properly, must be from the northern hill-tribes, the half-savages who still eked out a barbarous living in the way that Tynan’s own great-grandfather might have done. He had a gaunt, unshaven face, and his pale hair was long and ragged and filthy.

He was not Tynan’s idea of the man who might drive the enemy from the skies, nor was he the obvious solution to any other problem currently facing the Second Army.

‘What is this?’ the general demanded.

The newcomer managed an approximate salute. ‘Captain Nistic, sir.’ His voice was hoarse and scratchy, as though from disuse.

‘Captain?’ Tynan reined himself in before he said something unwise, but if this man had earned a captain’s badge, then something had gone badly wrong back home.

‘It should have been major, sir, but they wouldn’t have it,’ this Nistic agreed. Now he had spoken more than a couple of words, there was something definitely odd about him, something unhealthy that made Tynan uncomfortable. He made no eye contact, and it almost seemed that he was carrying on some other conversation inside his head. And this was a captain!

‘General.’ Vrakir broke away from his conference to step over to Nistic’s side. ‘Captain Nistic here is in charge of the force that Capitas is sending to defeat the Collegiate fliers.’

‘Is he now?’ Tynan stared at the two of them. ‘Perhaps you could explain to us just how that’s to be accomplished.’

‘No, sir,’ Vrakir said smartly. ‘The captain’s mission is one of utmost secrecy. Orders are that you simply meet Nistic and be informed that his troops are on their way. Estimated arrival is in a tenday, by which time I would think the Second will be outside Collegium’s gates.’

With no air support or artillery and precious little capability of maintaining a siege. Tynan locked eyes with Vrakir. ‘These are the Empress’s orders?’

‘I speak with her voice, sir,’ the Red Watch captain declared, not forcibly but firmly. ‘You are to bring the assault against Collegium, and their air forces will be dealt with.’

I should demand to see those orders, Tynan considered, but he knew there would be nothing written down. Perhaps the newly arrived lieutenant had not even brought any orders, but they had come to Vrakir from the same place all the rest of the Empress’s words seemed to emerge from — some space within his own mind.

And yet when Tynan had complained to Colonel Cherten about the maddening influence of the Red Watch his intelligence officer had become very solemn very quickly. ‘Don’t cross them, sir,’ had been his hushed advice. ‘I hear word from Capitas — they really are the Empress’s voice there, now that she’s off with the Eighth. You remember how it was with the Rekef at the end of the last war — men being arrested for treason, from soldier up to general, and most of them never to be seen again? And you remember how it was always the Rekef man you didn’t see who was the dangerous one, how the open Rekef officers at least trod carefully? Well, the Red Watch are all out in the open, and even the Rekef’s scared of them now — and, believe me, there’s a whole mess of high-ranking Rekef who haven’t been seen recently.’ Cherten’s eyes had been wide. ‘A general’s rank badge won’t save you, Tynan, if you go against them. For me, I intend to do exactly as they say, just as if they were the Empress herself.’

But Tynan was still a soldier, an officer, a man with thousands of subordinates depending on him. ‘Unacceptable,’ he stated softly, feeling Cherten twitch beside him at the word. ‘I cannot go into battle blind.’

There was a physical force in Vrakir’s stare that was now wrestling with his own, trying to get him to look away. But Tynan was an old campaigner, with the force of will to bend an army to his purpose, and he held firm. ‘Once he has carried out his orders here, Captain Nistic is no doubt returning to his “troops”, who are somehow approaching us without being spotted by either our own scouts or the Collegiates. Well, then: Captain Bergild, can your pilots spare you a day’s absence?’

The woman tensed immediately on being drawn into the confrontation, but she managed a ‘Yes, sir,’ because there was plainly no other suitable answer as far as Tynan was concerned.

‘Good,’ the general pronounced, still matching Vrakir stare for stare. ‘Then you will take Major Oski and escort Nistic back to wherever he happens to be going. Our major of Engineers will take a look at whatever reinforcements we can expect, and report back to me. This is my order as a general, and if the Empress herself were here I’d tell her the same. I will win this war for her, if it can be won. I will take Collegium, if it can be taken. But I will not be crippled by my own side.’

He felt his palms itch for stinging, so kept his hands clenched into fists, noting how Vrakir was doing just the same. And what a web of mutiny that would be, if we just killed each other stone dead. He well knew he was sowing a great deal of trouble to harvest later, just as if he had gone about tweaking the nose of the Rekef back when they were at the height of their power and paranoia. But here and now, he could stand on one unshakable fact: he was the general of the Second. The Empire needed him more than it needed this cold-eyed man with his red badge. Let Vrakir nurse his grievances in silence and look to tomorrow. Today’s victory was Tynan’s.

‘Very well, sir,’ the Red Watch captain said softly, and finally blinked.

For a moment Tynan thought he saw uncertainty in the other man — a second of wondering, Where did I get all that from? But then his mask was back in place and Vrakir was taking a step back. ‘Captain Nistic,’ he stated. ‘Make what preparations you need.’

‘I’ll have orders for the quartermasters right enough, and the engineers,’ the Hornet-kinden officer pronounced. His expression was still weirdly distant, as if the sparring match between Vrakir and the general had passed him by.

‘And, Major Oski, before you leave, I want to have your brightest artillerist brief me on our best approach to damage Collegium’s walls and engines,’ Tynan instructed, mentally adding, what little we have left. ‘Get me one of the Sentinel handlers, too. It’s about time they started to earn their keep.’

‘So,’ Oski ventured, as the group of officers set about their individual orders, ‘your ’thopter’s bomb hold, or whatever, can it fit me and a Bee-kinden?’

‘Your captain?’ Bergild asked, a little amused. ‘It’d be cosy. You’d not keep many secrets from each other, but yes.’ As they headed off towards the nearest band of engineers, who had gathered to inspect some damage to one of the remaining greatshotters, she levelled a shrewd stare down upon him. ‘Are you and he. . Ant-lovers?’

Oski stopped and stared up at her. ‘It’s nothing like that,’ he snapped. ‘We’ve just been through a lot and, the way things are going around here, I don’t want to get back and find something’s happened to him.’

She spread her hands. ‘It’s no big deal to me, Major. I know they’re meant to whip you for it, the rules say, but I grew up amongst soldiers and I know it goes on.’

‘Well, you think whatever you want, Captain,’ Oski replied pointedly, before hailing one of the engineers. ‘Lieutenant Brant, compile a report on precisely what engines we can still field for the general, will you? With special reference to the fact that we won’t stand a hope against Collegium’s bloody walls.’

The man he had singled out looked mutinous, but saluted, and Oski spared no more time on him, already setting off on his next errand. Bergild saw the way the other engineers stared at his departing back, then hurried to catch up.

‘Always angling for the love of your subordinates?’

‘I’m a Fly-kinden and a major, and they’re never going to swallow that one easily. If I was regular army, I’d have been stabbed in the back during action by now. But it’s different in the Engineers: if you’re good at your job, then they have to respect you. A strong grasp of artifice is too precious to waste. How’d you think the old Colonel-Auxillian got away with it?’ Oski grinned. ‘Curse me, but he was a fine man to learn the trade under. A real bastard, but you could pick up more just by walking in his shadow than sitting in any classroom back in Capitas. And now he turns up again on the Exalsee, Lord of the Iron Glove, eh?’ He chuckled. ‘I like that. Man’s done well for himself.’

Bergild made a noncommittal noise, but by then they had reached two of the great articulated shells belonging to the Sentinels — the new war-automotives built for the Empire by that same Iron Glove Cartel. Even at rest they looked imposing, segment after overlapping segment of formidably durable armour making that high-prowed woodlouse shape with its single blank eye that served as the cover for a leadshotter barrel. Twin piercers, mounted low at the front, gave the impression of blunt and vicious mandibles, and the whole was mounted on ten jointed legs controlled by a ratiocinator that translated the driver’s controls into smooth, almost organic motion.

Though not ‘driver’, for the term used was handler, as if the Sentinels had crossed some fine line from mere metal into something that lived and thought.

‘Hoi, you two!’ Oski called. The handlers turned to him in unison: a pair of Bee-kinden from some lengthily named city on the Exalsee, with closed, dark faces. Unsurprisingly, they did not mix with the Imperial forces, and the Wasps did not come near them out of respect for the murderous devices they commanded. The distance that surrounded them was more than that, though, for they almost never spoke even amongst themselves. They had no dealings with anyone save to draw rations, and seemed barely more approachable than the machines that they tended.

‘General wants to see one of you, don’t care which,’ Oski told them. ‘I reckon he’s going to put you through your paces, so maybe you’d better think about what your toys can do when we reach the Beetle city, hm?’

The two men gave him identical stares, then one of them nodded and marched off without a word.

Oski shrugged. ‘I’ll go get Ernain.’

Bergild nodded; the flat regard of the remaining Sentinel handler did not encourage her to linger. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she decided. ‘They’re already refuelling my ’Sphex, so I’m just baggage until we set off.’

As they left the shadow of the Sentinels, Oski jerked a thumb backwards. ‘You’ve worked it out, surely — what’s up with them?’

She nodded soberly. ‘I’ve heard that mindlinking turns up in Bees about as often as with Wasps — which is to say, not often. The Iron Glove was obviously thinking along the same lines.’

‘And if we managed to spot it, then it’ll be common knowledge back at Severn Hill,’ Oski agreed, naming the headquarters of the Engineering Corps. ‘The Colonel-Auxillian’s name is on more than a few people’s lips since he came back from the dead, and not in a good way, either. I hope he knows what he’s doing. . Hoi, Ernain!’

Midway into a hand of cards with some of the Quartermaster Corps, the Bee-kinden looked up.

‘Finish up,’ Oski told him. ‘We’ve got a flight to make.’