War Master's Gate

Twenty-Four

She had sold him her story, just as she had sold it to the Nethyen, and for a while she had convinced him, even though she must have been unaware just who it was she was convincing.

Esmail had been sent by the Tharen to the Empress’s court as a spy and assassin, the one by training, the other supposedly an inalienable quality of his blood.

Kill her, they had told him. There had been more in terms of qualifiers and conditions, but it all boiled down to that. They had loosed him from the string, and, curve as he might, his course was intended to bring him point-first to the Empress.

Even when he read his orders, he had guessed that Tharn was riven with factions — and how true that had turned out to be — what with two Tharen emissaries actually accompanying the Wasp woman, and even those two splitting from each other, so that only one remained and the other had been sacrificed to aid their progress. He had no idea if the splinter faction that had given him his original orders still existed.

Since he had followed the Empress into the forest, he had thought a lot on his family: his Dragonfly wife, his pureblood children. He had thought about them deliberately, so that events could not push them from his mind. He was now in the rush of the game, after so long — and how the game had broadened. They had sent him to kill an Empress, and instead he had bent the knee. He had helped her against her enemies. He had been given the chance, more than once, to drive an Art-deadly hand straight into her heart, and he had failed.

She had not given him her speech about the renewed glories of the old days, nor had she needed to. Back in Capitas he had discerned it in her: the Inapt and sorcerous Empress of a great Apt nation. He had hidden long amongst the Moths, and his main impression was that they lived only in the past tense and that, protest as they may, some part of them had already given up the fight. They lived in their own shadows, fought their empty factional games, and did their best to pretend that the world beyond their grey halls did not exist. If anything of the gloried past was to return — or even survive — they would not be responsible. Empress Seda the First, however. .

That was the promise she had made by her mere presence, and he had drunk blood for her, and sworn allegiance to her, not from any compulsions she had laid on him — his kinden and his profession alike were skilled in slipping such chains — but because he had believed.

But he had forgotten that the past was not just the glories of Inapt rule — the age of magicians, wisdom and great deeds — and now, after hearing those words, he could not banish them from his mind.

The Seal of the Worm.

He could claim no great knowledge of his people’s lore, for the Assassin-kinden were scattered, their ways lost. He had lived and studied amongst Moths, though. That the Empress should seek the power hoarded by Argastos was no surprise. Esmail was no seer but his senses were ever honed for the moment, and he could feel that dark, bloated knot of power ahead. If it was corrupt and decayed, well, find any great node of the old power that was not. The Moths had always loved darkness, and used fear as their weapon, and time would have rotted that into something worse. It was power, though, and he could not fault Seda for seeking it.

He could feel the Seal, however, and that was a different matter. The Seal, whose stony grey absence was pinned down by Argastos’s decomposing weight, and, beyond it. .

In truth, Esmail could not say what lay beyond it, but he knew the tales. That great war which had encompassed all the known world, just as the Empire’s current conflict seemed to. . That great foe which had united the powers of the day against it, so that deadly enemies could clasp hands and put aside their enmities in order to defeat this common adversary: the Worm. Call them that, and not by their true name, for names are power.

They had sought to make all other races the same as them, said the stories. Meaning conquest? Meaning the extermination of all other kinden until only they themselves remained? Not even that, the stories insisted: they sought to make all the same as them, and it was such a perversion of the fundamentals of nature that in the end all were united against them, and there followed a war the like of which the world would never see again.

And when they were defeated but not destroyed, when they were cast down into their subterranean lairs, the cost was so great that the Moths — the leaders of this great host, for even then the Khanaphir Masters were already in decline — knew that no repeat of this war could be allowed. The Worm must not be permitted to regain its strength and bring such horrors again. But the Moths and their allies could not purge that underground realm of them, though armies of thousands were sent down, never to return. So there had been a ritual, the Moths’ ultimate sanction, one of a power and a cost unprecedented. In its wake the ancient world was forever changed, some powers exhausted and near destroyed by the cost of the war. And it was a shameful victory, too — as Esmail had read in secret tomes the Moths had never intended him to find. The Moths had banished the Worm, and sealed the path of its return, but not only the Worm, Esmail discovered. The Moths had failed, in the end, and that ritual had been nobody’s first choice.

Save one, perhaps.

Esmail had fallen a long way short of his purpose, and even that purpose had been someone else’s. He himself possessed nothing but that fragile family — no kinden, no agenda. He had almost forgotten that he was not truly one of the Empress’s Red Watch. That was an inherent peril of taking another’s face and voice: it was easy to become too engrossed in the role.

And the Empress was here for Argastos, and not the Worm.

Not the Worm yet.

For he felt he knew the Empress now, and even if she consumed Argastos entirely she would still be hungry. It was in her nature — perhaps in the nature of all absolute tyrants — to want more.

Do I turn on her? But, despite his years, she frightened Esmail, with her power and her ruthlessness, and there was still that dream, that impossible promise of a return of the old ways. If those days could return, then perhaps even the Assassin-kinden might walk the world again as they once had.

It was when his thoughts were so thoroughly caught in such a vice, unable to claw their way to any action, that he considered the other. The Empress, she who could consider breaking the Seal of the Worm with equanimity, was still frightened by one thing.

Esmail had felt her presence, and hidden from it, just as he hid from Seda and from the trailing tendrils of Argastos himself. Like Seda, the other had a strength that lacked subtlety, allowing Esmail to spy on her, sensing a power that was sister to the Empress’s own, but with a very different mind behind it.

However, she was distant now, almost untraceable, and perhaps that was the end of it. Perhaps nothing could stand between the Seal and the Empress, if she chose to undo the work of all those past ages. But Esmail found that he had not entirely given up hope. Beetles had surprised a lot of people, over the years. Just ask the Moths.

How the Nethyen might have taken it, had Maure’s song not changed their mood, Tynisa could not say. But, of course, the halfbreed claimed to have seen this moment coming, and perhaps the woman had genuinely been working towards preparing Che’s entrance.

The Beetle girl stood at the clearing’s edge, her dark skin rubied under the leaping firelight, and she had seized the attention of every Mantis-kinden there. A Nethyen man stood beside her, unkempt and long-haired, and looking over her other shoulder was surely the very mantis that had abducted her in the first place, the largest of its kind Tynisa had ever seen.

The Mantids were gathering close together, many with weapons in hand, and she could see Thalric trying to move towards Che and being excluded again and again, walled away from her by the bodies of the Nethyen. Amnon stood back and watched, snapbow in hand.

‘Wait,’ Tynisa instructed them both. Thalric threw her a desperate glance, but something in her expression must have got through to him. Whether it was because of Maure’s song or Che’s newfound presence, for once the Mantids had something on their minds other than blood.

‘I understand now,’ said Che. The moment she opened her mouth, the only competition for their ears was the cracking of wood on the fire.

‘My sister has spoken to you,’ the Beetle girl declared, at which Tynisa twitched but, of course, Che did not mean her. She meant that other sister, Seda. ‘Will you let me speak now as well?’ It seemed unnecessary to ask, as everyone was already hanging on her every word, but Tynisa sensed some additional significance to the question — a magician asking permission? She glanced at Maure, and saw a profoundly serious expression on the necromancer’s face. Whatever Che was doing, there was more to it than Tynisa either saw or could understand.

No word was spoken, but Che plainly took that silence as assent. ‘She has promised you, I don’t know what: power, the redress of old grievances. I suppose it’s the way of things that I should make promises as well.’ There was a calm assurance to Che standing before that armed host, something that Collegiate Assemblers would envy. ‘But I have spoken to Amalthae.’ Here she made a brief gesture towards the insect towering beside her, and Tynisa saw its huge-eyed head cock minutely as it followed the movement.

‘Of course, I want you to stop fighting the Empress’s war,’ Che addressed them. ‘And I should be standing here like a daughter of Collegium, and telling you about our cause and how right we are, and all the same things she has told you, whatever they were. I should bully and taunt and bribe you into becoming my foot-soldiers instead of hers. Sorry, but can I have some water or something?’

Tynisa snorted with laughter, horribly loud in that silent clearing, but that was more like the Che she knew. That was her sister, sure enough.

There was an awkward pause, until one of the Nethyen cautiously approached her and proffered a cup. It was not water, Tynisa knew, but Che took a gulp without hesitating, and in doing so she sealed her safe conduct for that night, or at least for the length of her speech. More invisible walls and customs.

‘I’m not going to tell you to march out and fight alongside the Sarnesh,’ Che explained to them. ‘It’s something much more important than that.’ She held up a hand quickly, though nobody had spoken. ‘And it’s not about Argastos.’ At the name, a ripple of disquiet ran through them. ‘The Empress seeks Argastos for his power, but that’s between me and her, and not your problem. But you do have a problem.’ She was looking about at them, peering amidst the trees as though trying to estimate just how many Mantis-kinden were listening, and Tynisa saw her bracing her shoulders. ‘Change,’ she announced. ‘You won’t change, yet the world must. Your nature is to fight, so you’ve tried to fight time just as you’d fight any other enemy. And you’ve lost, and been reduced to this — to this forest, these holds.’ The intensity of their regard was frightening, all those sharp eyes lancing into her, but Che took it in her stride.

‘We’ve come to the last sand in the hourglass, I think,’ she told them. ‘That’s what I have to tell you. Whether you fight for the Empress because she’s promised you your old glories back again, or because you agree with Imperial aims, or for any other reason, it doesn’t really matter. You already know her promises can’t be trusted, as much as I do. In your hearts, you do. And if you had subjugated yourselves to the Sarnesh, or even still obeyed the Tharen, it would make no real difference. You’d still be serving someone. Servants of the Green, that’s how the Moths used to put it. And maybe, in those days, doing what the Moths wanted was a good thing. They were great magicians and wise, after all. But it seems to me that ever since those days, you’ve just been waiting for them to return and tell you how to get it all back. And they haven’t, because they don’t know.’

Thalric had managed to find his way through to her by then, and when he rested a hand on her shoulder she squeezed it gratefully.

‘Then the Empress came instead, and I can understand why you’ve ended up fighting for her — because fighting is what you do, and because nobody had a better offer. Until now, I hope.’ She was speeding up a little, sensing that her claim on their attention might be shorter than she thought. ‘But I think that you never did quite believe her. Instead, she came as a sign — the sort of sign the Moths once prophesied of — a sign of the end. I have walked through your forest, and witnessed you and the Etheryen tearing one another apart. I have seen an entire hold slaughtered by its own kin, and I have felt the horror and despair that you all feel. The whole forest is rank with it. The Empress’s very arrival made you face the world, her world. She was something new that you couldn’t ignore. She gave you an excuse to die, and you jumped at it — for, in your deepest selves, you saw this as an escape from a world that had gone so far wrong as to create her. And me, too, I suppose. I’m certainly not something that the great magicians of old might have envisaged or approved of.’

She let the silence linger, and the Mantids were still angry and resentful but it was that sort of anger that only truth can provoke. Che’s words had sunk barbed hooks in them.

‘No matter what the Empress promises, the Days of Lore will never come again,’ said Che, in that silent glade. ‘And now that past is sufficiently far gone that it’s a Wasp who comes to broker deals with you as though she was one of your old masters — and a Beetle-kinden stands here to lecture you about what you should and shouldn’t do.’ She shrugged. ‘If you want to pass on, if the world’s so intolerable to you now, then that’s your right. The great Mantis tradition of the Lowlands could be snuffed out quite easily, if that’s what you want. All those centuries of history just gone, and by your own hands. If you want to make a start by cutting my throat, I can hardly stop you.

‘Because otherwise you have to change as the world has changed. Yes, it’s an Apt world, but it still recognizes Mantis-kinden fighting skill. There is a place for you in it, yet, if you’ll take it. Wait another generation, and maybe there won’t be. Maybe then a good death will be all you can hope for.

‘You must decide, all of you, whether you want to live. I won’t insult you by telling you that living is harder than dying, that continuing to fight is more worthy than a good end. I’m not Mantis, I can’t weigh these things for you.’

She took a deep breath. ‘But know that, if you pass from this world, you will be remembered. But it will not be in your old songs. Gone will be the stories you tell of your heroes, gone the legends of the Days of Lore. None will be left to tell the histories as you once told them. Instead, you’ll be remembered by my people. Can you imagine what Beetle-kinden stories of your people are like? Can you conceive just how wrong we get it all? How we turn all your glories and your tragedies into farce and bathos? And yet, if you are gone, nobody will ever know any better. Our clumsy Apt retellings will be all anyone ever knows of the Mantis-kinden.’

She seemed to shrink, then, before the gaze of her audience, discarding some invisible mantle of authority that she had donned simply to hold their interest. ‘I’ve said my piece,’ she finished. Then she reached out and hugged Thalric to her, plainly more glad than she could say to have him there. The others made their way over, too: Tynisa, Amnon, Maure. None dared break the silence, but she hugged each in turn.

There was a stir amongst the Nethyen. One of the older women was picking her way through them, her eyes fixed on the Beetle girl. Her hair was silver-white, but she stood straight and there was a rapier at her hip and spines jutting from her forearms.

‘Loquae,’ Che addressed her, for this must be one of the leaders of the Mantids.

The old woman regarded her with a mixture of hostility, respect and that fear of the magical that the Moths had taken pains to instil in their servants. ‘You, too, may as well style yourself Loquae here, although you have nothing but harsh words for us.’

‘True words,’ Che corrected.

‘Those are often the harshest. What do you want, child of Collegium? What is it you want from us?’

Che glanced back towards Ceremon and Amalthae. ‘When I came to your forest, it was for two reasons. I needed to stop the Empress finding Argastos and assuming his power, and that’s my personal goal still. I also came to help the Sarnesh and the Etheryen fight off the Empire. If the Sarnesh leader was here he’d tell me to try and persuade you to fight the Empire too — as you did under the Ancient League. But I won’t.’

The Loquae cocked an eyebrow, waiting.

‘I’m not going to tell you what to do. Being told what to do has already done too much damage to your kinden, whether it’s by heeding the Moths or the Empire. I’m asking you to consider your options while you still have them, but I won’t beg on behalf of the Sarnesh. I won’t even beg for Collegium. I am not a child of Collegium any more.’ It seemed only as she said it that she realized it was true. ‘I am here as the inheritrix of the old ways, for all that I never chose to be. Amalthae has asked me to intercede, to try and help you, not Sarn, and not myself. I want you to live. I want there to be Mantis-kinden in the Lowlands in a generation’s time.’

‘Why do you care?’ It was an accusation, the way the woman said it.

‘Because what I have become carries a responsibility. Because it was Mantis magic as much as anything that made me this way. Because it’s right.’

The woman’s hand rested on her sword hilt, but there was no suggestion that she meant to draw the blade. Despite her age and her warrior’s bearing she seemed lost, almost bewildered. ‘We must speak about what you have said, and we are only one hold here.’

‘Then I ask that you pass my words on, to all the others, Nethyen and Etheryen alike. And maybe some will choose to live and some prefer to die. Or all to die. I don’t know.’ She tried a brittle smile. ‘And what do you yourself intend, now I’ve said my words?’

The old Loquae looked about the firelit clearing as though seeking volunteers, but there seemed no will for violence amongst the Mantids, for once.

‘We will talk,’ she said. ‘And you should go. Your presence is like salt on a wound. Perhaps that is what we need, but I am not sure.’

Che glanced at her fellows briefly, as though canvassing their unspoken thoughts. ‘You know where I must go.’

The Loquae nodded unhappily. ‘You go to Argastos.’

‘Not for myself but only because the Empress must not have him.’

For a long while the Loquae’s eyes searched Che’s expression over and over. Tynisa was waiting for Che to give some reassurance, to draw out some proof of her virtuous intent, and yet the Beetle girl seemed momentarily frightened that she could find no such evidence within herself. Magicians and power, came the unwelcome thought. Can she be so sure she will not use it?

The Loquae plainly saw the same, but merely shrugged. ‘You go wherever you must. The Nethyen will not stop you.’

‘Will they open the way for me?’ Che pressed.

The old woman’s eyes widened. ‘The way is open for you, Beetle Skryre. How can you not know that? The blood price has already been paid, for you and yours.’

Che mastered her expression quickly, perhaps with a queasy twitch over just whose blood that might have been, which had opened the gate.

‘Your followers, though, have further business with us.’ And was that the sharp edge of a smile on the Loquae’s lean face? Tynisa sensed the lurching moment that Che stumbled over her own ignorance.

‘Explain,’ the Beetle got out.

‘The duel,’ Amnon stated flatly, and Tynisa echoed him a moment later.

‘What have you done?’ Che demanded of them.

‘Bought time by issuing a challenge,’ Thalric drawled. ‘The Commonweal trick.’

And now we come to pay for the Commonweal trick, Tynisa decided. ‘Well that’s fine,’ she declared, loud enough to draw all eyes. ‘So let’s get it over with now, and we can be on our way. Which of you is champion?’

‘Tynisa. .’ Che started, but this was Mantis business, and she could not prevent it.

‘Amalthae stands for us,’ the Loquae stated, and Che froze.

Tynisa had heard the name, and not quite connected it with a face. ‘Fine, so which of you is she? Let’s see her.’ She looked from face to pale Mantis face, as they shuffled aside, expecting to see a human opponent revealed by their eddying movement. Instead. .

‘Ah.’

The cleared fighting ground stretched from her to the trees, and she saw the great mottled shape that swayed there, glittering eyes casting back the firelight.

Tynisa felt her bravado dry up. She would face any human opponent without flinching, but she knew full well the creature’s sheer speed and strength. She was Mantis enough to know the creature at once as something not merely physically powerful, but supernatural as well, an incarnation of her father’s kinden made armoured flesh.

But she stood, blade outstretched, and in a quiet, calm voice got out, ‘Well come on, then, for my sister would be gone.’

The long-haired Mantis beside the creature cleared his throat. ‘Amalthae bids you: go with your sister, for she will need you. A duel pledged cannot be taken back, and she and you shall meet. But not now, nor at dawn. Go, for she knows you will return to honour your word.’

Tynisa lowered her blade slowly, and the very character of the air seemed to change around her, the Mantids reacting to this validation of her badge and her blood. They might still hate her, but never again could they deny her.

Che glanced about, testing the quality of the silence. ‘Then there is one thing I will ask, then, if you can grant it.’

The Loquae’s eyes narrowed and she waited.

Che drew herself up as tall as she could — not physically, but gathering together the trailing folds of a power that, here at this pyre, Tynisa could almost see. ‘Give me your blessing on my journey,’ the Beetle asked. ‘Let my steps be light until I find the Empress, for if I catch her before she catches Argastos, then we need never know what I might do with him.’

‘Our blessing?’

‘These are your lands,’ and it was a recognition of sovereignty the Empress had surely never granted them. ‘I walk here as your guest now. Give me your blessing, wish me well, speed me on my way.’

And Tynisa saw, at last, something like approval in the old Mantis woman’s face, because Che had said the right thing. Just words, but words have power. Ancient compacts had been brought to light, a respect for the Mantis-kinden that the ages had not shown them — and so elegantly expressed.

‘I give you our blessing,’ the Loquae breathed, and the forest breathed with her. ‘Now go on your way.’