War Master's Gate

Thirty-Four

‘We’re at the crossroads of history, you know?’ Tactician Milus remarked softly. It was dark here, in the cell, but he knew her eyes were better than his for such gloom, just like the Fly she resembled. ‘The Empire. . it’s like some new treatment for a formerly incurable disease. Either it kills us, or. . or our future becomes something. . different.’

There was a single high window, just a handful of inches across and set at what was ground level outside. The grey light filtering through it was continually crossed and recrossed by shadows as people moved past, all of them at a smart pace. Sarn was mobilizing, and if Milus let his mind out, he would feel it, the immaculate perfection that was an Ant city-state going to war. But he chose not to. His plans made, his orders given, he permitted himself to sit down here with his prisoner, only to be disturbed if some lightning move of the Empire broke through the confines of his expectations.

He could feel the woman who called herself Lissart staring at him and, if he deigned to glance her way, perhaps he would see the light glinting in her eyes. She was well secured — a dangerous creature, for sure, because of the Art she could call upon. Valuable, though. Precious, even.

‘But your city is strength eternal, surely,’ she whispered. ‘What possible disease could the Wasps be coming to cure?’

He chuckled indulgently. Because here he could talk rather than just share thoughts that ceased to be his in the moment of their thinking. Here he could say words and get a reaction, and hear words that originated from outside, from another, separate mind. And if the result of those words was that she was sent back to the questioners, to be reminded of their deal, then so be it. They both knew the game by now.

‘Stagnation is the disease that kills cities. It’s killed Tark and Kes, and came close to killing Vek. Collegium saved us once, although they hardly meant to, by teaching us their ways: no slaves, tolerance of foreigners, and of course the tide of trade and technology that comes gushing in once you open your doors to Beetles. There must have been a lot of resistance at the time, but the queen back then was truly a visionary. Change and growth: just what the Ant-kinden city-states of the Lowlands haven’t experienced for centuries. We’ve sat and fought each other, without any great gain or loss, and we’ve been in a rut, ground deeper and deeper year to year. And now the Empire. Thanks to Collegium enlivening us a generation ago, we have a chance. And if we can beat the Eighth back, then. .’

‘Then what? What do you imagine you’ll achieve, even if you can? Which you won’t,’ she hissed, but he let her have her little tantrums: it made her easier to work for information. These days she hardly needed encouragement.

Once the interrogators had confirmed that there seemed to be no practical upper limit to her tolerance for heat, it would have been down to the knives and the rack, under normal circumstances. A shame, Milus had thought. Ruin someone irrevocably and you start the sands running on their usefulness as a resource,

Collegium had come to the rescue once again, though. Their clever academics had long before devised a way to make things cold, so as to assist them in their researches, and Sarnesh artificers had been able to apply this to the case in hand. Milus supposed that what they had ended up with was the reverse of a branding iron, but with the additional advantage that, no matter how excruciating the pain it inflicted, the icy blue-white marks it traced about the woman’s body faded after a tenday or so, leaving a blank slate for further inscription.

He had not been given much time, what with his principal work devoted to slowing the Eighth Army’s advance as much as possible, but he had been present when they had first broken her, searing coldly through her remarkable reserves of strength and leaving her twitching and sobbing, begging for release.

Then had come the questions, with the machine ever on hand to remind her to tell the truth. But then again, how else were Ant-kinden to have any chance of believing a hostile outsider?

‘I’ll have to leave you,’ he told her. ‘It won’t be for long.’

‘I’ll be waiting for you.’ He liked the fact that at least a ghost of her defiance came back to her so readily. It was the reason he came down here to talk to her on the rare occasions the war could spare him. And he knew he could crack her wide open just by bringing the machine back, just by letting her look at it. Such was the game they played.

She had not known much about the Eighth Army itself, but there was no reason why she should. He already knew she had been stationed in Solarno, a different operation altogether. In fact she turned out to know relatively little even about the Second Army that had set off from there — and only from her time spent hiding amongst them.

But she had been questioned for hour after long hour about Imperial Intelligence: everything she knew about their methods, their agents, their means of communication. She had not understood at first, because — like so many — she had not realized the scope of Milus’s ambitions, which were the ambitions of Sarn itself.

Milus was planning for the battle against the Eighth, certainly, but more than that he was planning for a war against the Empire, and he intended to take that all way to the gates of Capitas itself.

If Thalric had been plunged into this place during the last war, as the man he had then been — the hard-minded Rekef killer — he would surely have broken before now. It was the greatest expression of his not being the same man, that he could be surrounded by so much smoke and shadow, so little that made sense, and retain his mind intact. Not easy, no, but his world had been sliding away from the rational and the sane for long enough that he could keep his balance on the slope. Seda and her unwholesome appetites; the catacombs beneath Khanaphes; the Commonweal; Che.

That had been his first glimpse of Argastos but he had not doubted for a moment who the man was. The warlike Moth-kinden had appeared there without warning; just as suddenly he was gone, and where the gloom-hung wall had stood behind him, now there was a ragged, shroud-hung corridor that they were plainly intended to walk along. Thalric’s disbelief was in suspension, awaiting some more stable time when he might make use of it to begin covering over these memories and restoring his world view, but for now he was deep in the nightmare and clinging on.

And Seda. There had been a shock he was not prepared for. The woman he had fought so hard to get clear of, and who he had irrevocably made his enemy when he threw his lot in with Che, and yet he had not been able to kill her when given the chance, and now here she was again.

When she had found him, in this dark, shifting place. When she had found him, not Che, he had been ready for the explosion, the lash of vengeance. In the time since he had left her, surely the rapacious Empress would have driven out any sign of the girl he once knew, that fading spark in Seda’s eyes that had spoken of when she had been vulnerable, merely a pawn of her brother.

But she was still there, that girl. Her expression, when she found him, had been fond. There had been no recriminations, and for a moment he had been about to go to her as though he had never left, as though she had never become the creature she now was. The traitor thought had been there in his mind: How simple life would have been if only. .

For all that he had bitten it back, fought it down, it was there still. He had lived a long time as a servant of the Empire, and here was the Empire itself in human form.

He was therefore very glad when Che had turned up soon afterwards. Seeing the Beetle girl, almost absurd in her lack of the majesty and threat that practically radiated from Seda, grounded him back in reality, reminded him where his loyalties — and his affection — now lay.

‘Who’s that?’ Seda demanded sharply, and Thalric snapped back to the here and now. They had been making a cautious progress through the tunnel that Argastos had revealed, but now there was someone ahead of them, plainly visible despite the darkness, as though a lamp were shining only on her.

‘Is that. .?’ Tynisa murmured.

‘Mistress Bartrer?’ Che exclaimed.

Thalric looked again. Was it? He realized he had not paid much attention to the academic, but this apparition did seem to bear her face. She had shed her Collegiate robes, though, and was wearing something simpler but of an antique cut, a long sleeveless brown tunic, ornamented with delicate black stitching at every edge. There was also some lavish piece of gold at her throat, perhaps a torc.

Not a torc: a collar.

‘I’ve seen depictions of clothes like that in old books,’ Che said softly. ‘Slaves’ garments, from long before the Revolution. Maure, what are we looking at?’

‘Some trick,’ Thalric tried, but not sure whether he believed it.

‘No image, no ghost, just the living woman,’ Maure confirmed.

‘But how can she be here? How can you. .?’ Che walked forward to stand before the other woman. ‘Helma, can you hear me?’

The eyes swivelled to follow her, and abruptly Helma Bartrer’s face assumed an unexpected expression: pure spite. ‘Oh, I hear you, Maker,’ she acknowledged. ‘The master has sent me to bring you to his table.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ Che insisted. ‘Why are you here? How did you even get here?’

‘By hard work, by guessing, by faith in my master,’ Bartrer hissed. ‘By knowing my place and staying true to our betters.’

‘The Moth-kinden?’

‘Do you deny it now that you are here?’ Barter challenged her.

‘She’s Arcanum,’ Thalric guessed, speaking of the Moth intelligence service. ‘She has been all this time.’

‘More than that.’ Seda spoke from right beside him. ‘Your people were slaves once, Maker. Small wonder, then, if there’s some remnant cult who want those days back. Never underestimate how much some people want to be led.’

Helma Bartrer stared at the Empress. ‘Your kinden were slaves, too, Wasp girl, and they still are. It’s just that their taste in masters has deteriorated.’

‘Wait, you came all this way. . how could you even know this was going to happen?’ Che demanded of her.

‘Oh, I hoped.’ Again that ugly look. ‘Everything to do with the Moths, I tried to associate myself with. We have been faithful, generation on generation, waiting for this day when we could present ourselves to our masters. Perhaps all but I had given up any hope. But you!’ And the sudden venom was startling. ‘You had it all given to you, by mere chance! You’ve become something special, something that he’s interested in. . and how is that just, that you could blunder into such a thing when I’ve been loyal in my heart all my life?’ She would have gone on but something stayed her, a reprimand audible to her only snapping her head back. ‘Come with me,’ she muttered, and hurried off into the darkness, with that reflected light never quite leaving her, making the woman a beacon for them to navigate by.

It lit up nothing else, though, so they had arrived before they realized it. When the green-white lanterns sprang up around them, they all froze. Thalric felt meanly glad to see the same startled, fearful look on Che’s and Maure’s faces as he knew must have appeared on his own.

‘Please be seated,’ Helma Bartrer declared flatly.

There was a table there, its top a single slab of black-varnished wood, its edges uneven and ragged with the contours of the tree it had been hacked from. The chairs were little better, just slats and wands of wood twisted and grown together as though their maker, in striving to ape the natural, had finished up with something utterly unearthly. The walls pressed in on all sides, allowing barely room to drag the chairs back. Thalric could see them only dimly and, when he brushed one with his elbow, he felt angled metal there, and he shivered without quite knowing why.

It did not help that those corpse-light lanterns lacked sconces: just fitful, pallid flames guttering in the air.

At the head of the table, he saw one seat they were plainly not being invited to sit in. It was more a throne, intricately carved with intertwining briars, beetles and grubs, centipedes and woodlice and all things associated with decay, while its arms resembled the crooked claws of a mantis. As if that was not grand enough for their host, suspended behind it was the complete, hollow exoskeleton of just such a beast, battle-scarred and one-eyed, and long enough dead for the light to lend it a translucent glow.

Barbaric trophies, Thalric decided, and the gaudy ostentation gave him back some of his lost control, because here, at least, was a human thing, if only a desire to show off. Whatever Argastos now was, this was a part of him Thalric could relate to. He had seen similar trophies even in the possession of Imperial officers, and they had been mere bragging boasts of their owner’s self-importance.

Che’s hand found his arm and squeezed it slightly, and then she was sitting down, calmly and confidently, the first of them to do so. Seda followed suit a second behind, choosing a seat across the table from her, with Tisamon inevitably taking station at her shoulder. With that, there was nothing else but for Tynisa to do likewise, but Thalric was cursed if he was going to hover on his feet like a house-slave. Maure had already slipped in beside Che, and so he ended up at the end of the table facing that throne.

Their host arrived, just not all at once. Thalric had the best view of its progress, which he regretted. There was a scuttling and a massing within the intricate carving of the throne, and the things previously only represented there were now springing from the wood, a dusty swarm of empty shells, wing-cases, sightless eyes and hollow mandibles, the tiny bloodless cadavers of a thousand crawling things amalgamating and writhing, and growing ever greater until they had transformed into the slouching shape of a seated man. Thalric just stared, tightly motionless but unable to tear his eyes from the sight.

Then the scuttling dead things began disintegrating, a shedding rain of chitin flakes and segments drifting away, and revealed was Argastos, clad in his mail, with his easy, empty smile and those blank white eyes.

From somewhere inside him, a part of Thalric rose up and gave himself a slap, because he had been staring like some superstitious Commonwealer peasant at this show. And it was a show. What was the point of this, if not to play to the crowd? We’ve seen him pop in and out like a sergeant in a brothel. Why the grand entrance, if not to awe the newcomers? And with that thought he managed to muster a reasonable head of contempt sufficient to take the edge off his fear. Well, maybe you can still be taken down a step, Argastos.

There was a bowl in front of him. He assured himself it had always been there. In this bad light, who knew? Now Helma Bartrer, Mistress of the Great College, was fetching some sort of cauldron, and Thalric realized that, of all things, she was about to serve them.

But, of course, that’s her place in Argastos’s world.

What she decanted into his bowl looked, in the unhealthy light, like greasy grey dishwater tinted with rot.

‘You have no idea,’ Argastos stated, ‘how long I have been waiting for you. Long enough that I ceased searching the future for some hope of deliverance, centuries ago.’

Che and Seda exchanged glances and the Beetle inquired, ‘And who did you think you were waiting for?’

The Moth smiled easily. He possessed the sort of confident, self-satisfied manner and elegant good looks that made Thalric’s palms itch. ‘You, exactly you. A new kind of magician, not tied to the old and yet with power, true power. I see the mark of the old Masters on the two of you, clear as day, and yet just look at you! Are you Skryres of my kinden? Are you Manipuli of the Spiders or Mosquito Sarcads? You are not.’

He did not sound damning about that, either. Thalric might have expected contempt, but Argastos was playing a deeper game.

‘Beetles, Wasps, Ants — the inheritors of the world,’ the Moth continued admiringly. ‘Look at you. Look at him, a typical specimen.’ He jabbed his finger at Thalric himself, who twitched in response, and had to press his hands down against the table to keep his Art in check.

‘Not a grain of magic in him,’ Argastos went on, ‘and yet his kind, your kin — the Apt — are the great masters of today, swarming over the earth, lords and ladies of the new world. Don’t think I have not witnessed it, even locked away in here. Between then and now, I have had visitors whose minds have shown me all.’

There’s a pleasant thought, Thalric reflected unhappily, as he cast a glance around at the oppressively confining walls. They only rose to around head-height, with the cave-like ceiling arching high above, and they seemed. . less than solid, as though there were gaps and holes in them, or shapes. . His skin crawled.

‘You don’t resent us for taking away the world you knew, then?’ Seda asked the Moth haughtily. ‘Or the diminishing of your people?’

‘You overestimate how much I care about my kinden,’ Argastos replied sharply, making Helma Bartrer twitch. ‘I owe them a great deal, yes indeed, and it will be paid back, every drop. I do not begrudge you, Empress of the Wasps. Your kind and her kind, all the Apt, you have built well. You have built more than we ever did, perhaps. And, believe me, I am the only man in the world who can say this, for I remember my own time clearly — no false nostalgia for me. I am a thousand years of watching the world turn, and everything you have built is built on my triumphs. If not for me, there would be nothing but the Worm.’

‘That’s a grand claim,’ Che observed cautiously.

‘Is it?’ Argastos still sounded very pleasant, very well-mannered, but Thalric kept hearing something hollow resonating in the man’s words, some agenda prowling behind them as if trying to fight its way clear. He tried to catch Maure’s eye, in the hope that the woman had some insight, but the halfbreed was staring down at her bowl and keeping her eyes well away from Argastos.

‘That was their sole intent, to cover the world with their kind, to leave nothing else under the sun or beneath the earth but themselves — not even their slaves once they had no more use for them,’ Argastos explained. ‘The long wars of the Inapt kinden led them to that. In the end they could not feel safe while any other kinden shared their world. And I stopped them. I was War Master of the great host, I won the battles, I drove them back into their holes. And, when the time came, it was I who made the decision to rid the world of them entirely, no matter the cost, so that we could have a future secure from their resurgence.’

The hard tone creeping into that rich voice was exactly what Thalric had been expecting.

‘Are we supposed to applaud you?’ Seda enquired.

‘Why not? Is what I accomplished to be considered nothing? To have been the saviour of the whole world? Who else could say that, before or after me? You must see this — especially you two, the magician-queens of this latter age. You must understand me. I have brought you here so that you can know me.’

‘You did not bring us here,’ Che said, almost half-heartedly. Seda was merely looking thoughtful.

‘I have brought you here,’ Argastos repeated, ‘and I appeal to you both. To the Beetle, for justice; to the Wasp, for revenge. Is it just that I should be trapped here for all eternity, become a martyr to my own life’s work? Should I not plot my vengeance?’

And something must have happened to the light, then, though it hardly seemed brighter, because now Thalric could see the walls around them in detail, and saw that they were not walls at all, and that the maze had not been a maze. The great mantis shell strung behind Argastos’s throne was only one trophy amongst hundreds.

Armour, ranks and ranks of it, stretching back into the gloom on every side, hanging empty and hollow like the insect carapace suspended above. Thalric’s eyes flicked from suit to suit. The vast majority of it was Mantis-kinden work, that ornate and intricately worked mail and plate that collectors paid ridiculous sums for, but here was a collection that all Helleron would have beggared itself to acquire, each suit unique, yet each following the same aesthetic. How many Mantis dreams lie buried here? And his eyes moved on from helm to faceless helm, over glittering gold, enamel in green and black, spines and blades and elegantly shaped curves, that no smith now living could perhaps have wrought.

And there was more, alongside that antique host. He saw plenty in amongst them that seemed to be relics of a more recent time: the same chitin and leather as had been worn by the Nethyen still living outside, back where the world was at least nominally sane. They hung from their stands right alongside their elder cousins and, if he had been minded, he could have traced the evolution: the decline of Mantis culture from its glory days to the remnants of the present.

Black and gold caught his eye, and he realized that Argastos had welcomed more visitors than just the locals.

There was the dark chainmail of Sarnesh Ants, too, a variety of designs as though this was some armourer’s museum. He saw Collegiate robes draped slack and empty, now they were gutted of their Beetle owner, and aviator’s canvas, helm and goggles and all. And of course there were the Wasps, for the Seventh Army had been this way in recent memory. A handful of the Light Airborne, some heavier infantry plate, the light mail they had distributed to Imperial pilots during the last war, so that he thought of that downed airship they had taken refuge in.

Che gave a shuddering breath, and he spotted it just as she did. Here was a Collegiate Company soldier’s armour built for a massive frame, and around it the others: the loose, discarded gear of Seda’s Pioneers. The Empress’s eyes were fixed on a ragged old robe, scarcely worthy of a stand of its own.

‘I have had many visitors over the years,’ Argastos intoned. ‘They are no more than memories now, my trophies. But you! You are special. You have come to bring me my revenge, the two of you. Such strength you possess, and yet so little idea how to use it, and here I am, with a millennium’s experience, just waiting for that burst of power to set me free.’

He was standing now, leaning forward over the table.

‘And, believe me, when I am free the world shall know it. Between us, we three shall shake it to its foundations. We shall cast down my kin, and right all wrongs, and all things that displease us shall be banished from this world, even as the Worm was. No mercy! You, the inheritors of the old days, you shall be my brides, my lovers, and we shall use your power to remake the world in our image.’

And surely Che or Seda were bound to laugh at him then, or at least slap him down somehow, and yet the two of them seemed to be paying Argastos far too much heed. And so Thalric decided to play to his own strengths and puncture the man’s expanding self-esteem.

‘Revenge on the Moths? A bit late, no? And if anything you Inapt were capable of could achieve anything, why wouldn’t they have done it already? It’s not for want of trying that they’re next to extinct.’

He succeeded in getting Argastos’s attention then, which was the most he could claim. The Moth was suddenly staring at him as though one of the chairs had piped up of its own accord. And. .

With a single crash, in perfect unison, every suit of armour, every set of garments there had taken a step forward, raising dust from the floor which had gone undisturbed since the start of time, and they were now all occupied, every one. Thalric froze in place, his further words dying inside his mouth. A grey face in every helm, curdled eyes staring out at him. Lean, sharp Mantis faces, the brown of Beetles’ skins now charred to coal, the brother-sister likenesses of Ants and the death-pallor of his own kinden, and all staring out at him with expressions of such hopeless, terrifying misery that it shook him, it shook everything he called his own.

He met the gaze of the nearest Wasp, a man in the armour of the Airborne, and saw the man’s lips moving over and over: Help me, help me, help me. .

And Thalric felt his innards turn to water, a fear twisting inside him that was as old as his kinden, as old as the darkness itself, and he said no more.

Che could not bring herself to look at Amnon’s armour, not now that he would be occupying it once again. Trapped here like all of them, so many, I had not thought. . Was this what the ancient Skryres had intended, when they had devised this place? That it should be a pitcher plant trap for the ghosts of all who came here during the years to come?

She decided that they had. She knew that much at least about the Moth-kinden. And she could even appreciate why, for below her, directly below her, was the Great Seal, the capstone of Argastos’s grand plan, which kept the Worm trapped in whatever half-world had been curled about it. Argastos had wrought it, using all the might of the Inapt, and then his own people had doomed him to guard it forever, and she did not know whether that was justice or not. His followers had come, too, in their loyal, unthinking ranks, his Mantis war band taking their place for all eternity at their master’s side, likewise everyone else who had been drawn here, and died here. .

She looked at Maure, and found the woman staring out over that dead host, the tears running down her face, and she understood. Not just cast-off shells, not just left-over cocoons where the real occupant had fled. Like Argastos himself, these were the true minds and essences of the dead.

And his fate was not just. He was right about that. But surely he was part of this injustice, the disease and not the remedy.

But he was staring at her and at Seda, and his attention, his strength of personality, was all around her, and she found she could not venture to speak.

‘Your slave thinks I am deluded,’ he said, in almost a whisper. It was not clear to which of them he was attributing Thalric’s servitude. ‘But I am no fool, and I know the world has moved on. I have my army here, my legion of the undying, but what would that count for against the wide Apt world?’ He really did have a very compelling smile. ‘But I will not have to rely on anything so antiquated. You yourselves have shown me that.’ And he nodded companionably at Seda, who was staring at him with the same unwilling fixation as Che herself. ‘For I will have myself an Empire,’ Argastos breathed. ‘And I will have a city of the Apt to serve my will. And I do not need to understand it, so long as my slaves know their trades — and so long as I have you as my consorts.’

Che tried to open her mouth to respond, but there was an invisible hand laid on her that stopped her words, censoring her very thoughts. She reached out for her power, but Argastos stood firmly between her will and her ability. She was stronger than him, she knew, for she had been crowned in Khanaphes, and Seda too. But they were in Argastos’s realm now, and he had been working on them, unthought-of and unsuspected, ever since they had come there.

And he really did have a presence about him, a strong, smooth confidence. She found herself staring into his face, marking those elegant Moth lines. Had Achaeos ever looked like that? She did not think so. And Thalric? Thalric was some ugly Apt creature, a servant, a slave. Not like us. For of course the world was divided into Apt and Inapt for a reason, and she should simply be grateful that she had somehow crossed onto the right side.

So when he said, ‘With your aid, I shall regain my proper place in the world,’ she found herself nodding along with it, even though a panicking undercurrent in her mind was desperately trying to fight him off. He must have known that he had her in thrall, then, for his smile broadened as he declared, ‘All shall know that the War Master is returned.’

And Thalric snickered.

The world seemed to stop around them, and in this single moment Argastos’s self-control fractured. The one thing he had never been anticipating was mockery.

Then his minions came marching forwards, and they had blades in their hands, and Thalric was pinned to his seat by Argastos’s mere stare as they closed in. But Che felt that hand being lifted from her, its grip broken during that one brief moment when someone had looked on Argastos and found him not terrible, but ridiculous. With enormous effort she clawed for her strength as the blades went up. . but it was Seda who got there first, casting enough raw, untutored force out to send the dead Mantis-kinden staggering.

Thalric’s eyes sought out Che’s. ‘Sorry,’ he managed. ‘I’m afraid the only War Master I know is your uncle, and I can’t quite see him saying any of that stuff to the Assembly.’

It was not funny. Nothing about their situation was funny, but Che felt a near-hysterical laugh build up inside her nonetheless.

Argastos’s face was set in stone. No, it was as though he had simply abandoned it, its last expression just sitting there like a slack-stringed puppet, because whatever was behind it had no further use for it. ‘You dare,’ he hissed, ‘to mock the War Master?’

It was the worst thing he could possibly have said, for Che burst out with a horrified whoop of laughter despite herself, despite everything. She caught a glimpse of Seda’s face, too, bewildered but no longer bewitched.

And only then could she see, beyond that smoothly handsome exterior, that warrior’s frame in its archaic armour. Just for a second she saw the dried-stick thing that was Argastos, the corpse a thousand years in the ground, decaying and renewed like one of those Mantis icons, until only some hideous stub of a man endured, leathery and preserved and barely larger than a child, its face locked into the same expression of dismay that it must have worn as they sealed the man in his tomb, so very long ago.

And he shrieked, a high, inhuman sound, knowing that she had seen. Although she tried to muster her power to resist him, he was correct about his superior skill, for he cast her down with ease and banished her into the far reaches of his nightmare.