War Master's Gate

Thirty-Six

‘So, what now?’ Che demanded. ‘Come on, Argastos. What’s your next sally?’

Another dark place, and she received a sudden insight that there might be nothing else left in the man’s withered mind. He had lain bound in the earth for so long that he could not remember the sun. Here was some gloomy cavern, with her placed on a ledge beside a drop that fell in folds of rock for three hundred feet. Down there, she could see faint signs of fire, in pinpoints like stars.

‘This is the place of my enemy,’ came his voice, and he faded into existence almost within arm’s reach, and with none of the excessive drama he had used at the table. What illuminated him, she could not say, but he cut a stark figure of grey and black and white, the scales of his mail glinting like moonlight, his skin like stone, his cloak merging seamlessly into the darkness.

‘Some might say you’re too obsessed with them,’ Che pointed out, ‘given they’re a thousand years gone.’

‘But they’re not gone. They endure, on the far side of the Seal. And I was sacrificed to a living death to keep them there — not because it was needful, for in a thousand years the Worm have never tried to break through, nor could they ever. I was buried and forgotten because they thought they could bury their own guilt along with me.’ He eyed her bitterly. ‘Do you not agree, just for one moment, that I have been treated poorly? Am I not deserving of some sympathy, Beetle girl?’

Che folded her arms, trying to stretch out her power as subtly as she could in order to find the edges of this charade he had woven about her, and so tear it down, but he was always ahead of her, dancing where she must lumber, forever extending the world beyond her reach. ‘And for this I become your whore, do I? And relinquish all I have to you?’

‘You will be my concubine, valued and treasured,’ he told her. ‘And as for “all you have”, if you will only use your power as I direct, what might you then learn about how to control it? See: you are the stronger, I freely admit, and yet you are like your kinden’s namesake, a beetle blundering blindly about while I lead you one way and another. You have so much to learn, and do you think that there is anyone left in the world to teach you, save me? And you know I am no mean power myself, for why else did you and the Wasp girl come here, save to steal what is mine? With our strengths combined, what might we not accomplish?’

‘Nothing good,’ she decided, and, when he just stared at her, she went on, ‘Argastos, yes, you are hard done by. What a terrible thing they did to you, all those years ago. And had you not spent all the years in-between in dooming everyone who came here to that exact same fate, then you might be able to presume on my sympathies. But I have seen your collection of victims, and I am not at all sure that your solution for dealing with the Worm does not deserve some guilt and expiation. And I still do not believe that anything you intend is for the good. For anyone’s good — least of all mine.’

She felt strong, while saying that, and for a moment the shadowy world around her seemed to waver.

Then he was on his feet, glowering at her. ‘You self-righteous child! How can you know how it was? How can you know what I thought, or what might have been! I was there! Someone had to make the choice, and I was the only one strong enough to do it! And you stand here, with your unearned inheritance, your life of freedom that I bought for you with my everlasting torment, and you dare to judge? You should come to me on your knees in gratitude for what I have done for the world!’

Che sighed. ‘So, you have tried to draw on my better nature, and now you try to threaten me. What next, Argastos? For if you could simply take what you wanted from me, then you would have done so without hesitation. I am just a slave girl who has stolen something that’s of value, to you. If you must woo me, it is for that reason only.’

For a long moment their gazes locked, and she felt relieved at the honesty visible there, the open acknowledgement that everything she had said was true. And then he nodded, and the hard-edged expression that came across his face almost made her want to withdraw her words.

‘Perhaps you think I will beg?’ he suggested. ‘No, I will wait for you to beg me. You are right. I have not been content to suffer alone. I have always had followers, and all those who have come to this place are my rightful prey. I have gathered them all to me. Now I give you to them. They remember what it is like, to live. Their appetites have been starved these long years, but they will awake again if I give the order. You may possess your strength, Beetle girl, but I will wager that here I can hold you down while they slake their lusts on you. And I have many hungry servants these days — many! You are proud, Beetle girl, just like the little Wasp is proud, and I will break you both as proud slaves should be broken. I shall return in a day or so, as the time shall seem to you. For now, I go to rouse my servants to the heights of their vigour. Enjoy the wait, Beetle girl, for it shall be the last peace you will know for some time.’

He boiled away into nothing, leaving her staring at the dark that he had gone back to. She could feel fear hovering at the edge of her attention, in case she had need of it, but her mind was working as analytically as if she was faced with a logic problem back at College. That Argastos intended to carry out his threat, she had no doubt. She was no helpless girl, though, and his mastery of her was reliant on her being unable to use her strength properly.

Her surroundings had now changed from the caverns of his memory to something better fitting the fate he intended for her: a small cell, but with its walls formed of knotted roots as if she was buried beneath some colossal tree. Perhaps this, too, was some place Argastos recalled from his long-ago life.

She tried to change the walls, but they would not bend for her. In her mind they were unaccountably slippery, impossible to bring her strength to bear on. Well, then, that was only her most obvious and crude application of power. He would have anticipated that. She must keep one step ahead of his imagination.

She heard movement from without, and for a moment her mind threw up an image: a column of dead Mantis men approaching, their hollow eyes hungry for even the cruellest memento of life. Fear clawed at her, but she stepped back from it, holding tenuously on to her calm. And she moved her cell.

This was no physical place, of course, even though it imprisoned her. It was set within a matrix of Argastos’s thoughts. There were no hard laws that determined the relationship of one mind-place to another. If she could not escape her cell, she could relocate it, sliding the idea of it through Argastos’s mouldering mind, and thus giving herself more time.

It was a temporary solution, but one that she could perhaps repeat a few times before he realized what she was doing. He had not prepared for it. She had the idea that, just as his backdrops were always gloomy and enclosed, so his ability to think like a human being had been decaying for a long time. He would find it hard to predict her.

With a little time in hand, she cast her mind out, reaching for anything she could use, and found a familiar mind reaching back to her.

She recoiled in shock, but a moment later she was groping forward again, worried that she might have lost him entirely. He was still there, though, and she envisioned him behind closed eyelids: a gaunt man with a high forehead, hair grey like iron, skin like bronze, a figure owning to no particular kinden the modern world would recognize. . save that she did.

You are Cheerwell Maker, the girl the Empress hates, he identified her.

Although the Empress and I appear to have made common cause, if you can believe that, she replied.

He digested that. I would ask you: do not tell her of me. I tried to kill her — tried and failed, but I tried. Because of you.

She did not need to question him. He had been in her mind, as one of her pieces. She understood. So, who are you? And how are you here, even?

There was a pause before he answered, and she guessed he was weighing up the merits of being honest. My name is Esmail. I was a spy placed near the Empress, but I lost my way. As for here, I was drawn here with the rest of you, when Argastos came. But I was already trying to hide from the Empress. I am good at hiding. It is in my blood and my training. Besides Argastos was not interested in me. He wanted you.

You’re hurt, she understood.

By the Empress. I’ll live.

She had a sense of him moving with a freedom denied her. Where are you now, if the question means anything here?

I am. . behind the scenes, perhaps. A dark place, but untended, untenanted save for myself. I can feel. . my magical skill is just enough to know that there are other places just next to me, and yet unreachable. But I’m working on them. You must be imprisoned in one of them, the Empress in another.

There were others as well, she told him. My friends and the Empress’s bodyguard.

I found them. A pause. Or where Argastos put them, he added. I saw him take them. . They are like statues, now, where they are: statues of wood, grown into the floor. I think he is only keeping them at all because they may be useful to work on you. I had thought your halfbreed would resist him, in the end but, though she is clever, she is weak. He overpowered her.

She shifted her prison again, whilst maintaining her link to Esmail. The sound of approaching feet diminished, but did not fade away entirely. Can you help me?

I don’t know. I am trying to locate you but. . the internal architecture of where I am seems. . broken down, falling apart. There is no logic here.

The mind of Argastos, she considered, and then the tenuous connection with him was severed, gone in an instant, at his will, and a moment later a very different voice sounded loud in her head.

Beetle girl!

Seda? Che flinched, because if Argastos was carrying out his threat, this might be an agonized cry for help, a window onto the other woman’s pain.

Instead, the Empress’s tone sounded properly imperious. Listen to me, while you can. No doubt the creature has made the same threats against you as he has to me. Focus on me and I will tell you how to defend yourself. Che had the mental image of. . fighting, blade on blade.

Argastos has his legions of slaves, Seda said contemptuously. But he was a fool, and he has taken on more than he knew or understood. Seek them out: there will be those you can suborn to your purpose.

Che blinked, trying to discover what the woman meant. The exasperation of the Empress at such slow uptake came through to her clearly.

Just look! And for a few seconds she had the Empress’s eyes, and she was watching a vicious melee where the grey-faced, dead-eyed Mantis-kinden that Argastos had sent were kept away from Seda’s person by a handful of Imperial soldiers. Che recognized some of them as those who had come with Seda herself to this place, and died at the hands of Che’s own people. But there were others, too, in a motley selection of black and gold uniforms, Wasp soldiers who must have marched with General Malkan and the Seventh in the last war, and gone too far into the wood.

They are mine, Seda declared proudly. In life, in death, they are mine. You must find your own protectors from amongst Argastos’s collection.

But why?

I will need you to destroy Argastos, Beetle girl. Our truce holds until then. Quickly!

Che felt an innate revulsion at the idea: disturbing the dead who were already held in unnatural imprisonment here. And who amongst them could she move? She was no magician-empress to command loyalty beyond the grave.

And yet the sound of feet was coming nearer, and the darkness admitted movement closing in on her cell. The long march of Argastos’s servants was nearing its end.

Do they still feel lust? she wondered emptily. Or is it just cold loyalty to him that drives them?

A tremor within her, and for a moment she was almost crying out for someone to help her. . anyone. And perhaps that was just what Argastos had hoped for. Then she gathered her resolve and plunged her mind into the charnel house that was Argastos’s realm, like thrusting a hand into a rotting carcass. With a convulsive effort that seemed to turn her entire mind on its side, she drew forth a protector.

Seeing him, all she could say was, ‘I’m sorry. This is my fault. I’m sorry I brought you to this.’

The expression on his charcoal-grey face was one of mild reproach, but only because of the apology, not for her part in dooming him to this. He squared his shoulders, and she saw him not in his Company uniform, but in the armour he had worn in Khanaphes, that impenetrable suit of fluted plates that Totho had made for him. In one hand was his shield, in the other his leaf-bladed Khanaphir sword. This was Amnon prepared to do battle.

But he was not alone. To her surprise she saw that she had hauled up others, too — those whose faces she did not even know. There were a couple of aviators, and a woman in a College robe, and there were a dozen at least sporting the same sort of garb Helma Bartrer had worn when serving at dinner: clothes fit for a slave before the Revolution. Many were Beetle-kinden, but some were Ants from various cities, and they had knives and clubs and staves, all the makeshift weapons of the downtrodden.

None of them looked at her, but when the Mantids, the oppressors, emerged amongst them, Che’s guardians fell on them with a determination and a fury that startled her. Amnon was at their centre, immovable and unyielding, and the ghosts of the Apt — and what an irony! — flowed about him but held their line, and kept her safe.

And the voice of the Empress spoke to her once again. Good, but we won’t have much time now before Argastos realizes something’s gone wrong with his tawdry little plan. We need a weapon to use against him. All this around us is born of his own mind. We need something outside of him to distract him. Just a moment should be sufficient for us to break away from here, and then we will see if the two of us together can crack him.

He has had centuries to perfect his skills, Che cautioned.

What do you suggest we do, then? Seda demanded. Give in to him and become his creatures, even as these slaves are? No, we fight. Even if we must lose, we fight.

I haven’t been able to find anything solid here to break out from, Che admitted. When I try to focus my strength, it’s just like fog.

He is like a swordsman fighting stronger opponents. He cannot afford to pitch his might directly against ours, but he is fast and skilled. He can deflect where he cannot block. There was a particularly expressive pause, and Che received the impression that Seda’s defenders were hard-pressed.

She delicately stepped back from her link with the Empress, seeking out Esmail instead. We need to distract Argastos, she told him. Can you reach him from where you are?

She thought she had lost him, but after a moment his voice came to her distantly. No. I am inside, as you are. I am just in. . a suite of abandoned rooms, not set for visitors. Or maybe the servants’ quarters that run all the way through an Arista’s house. But, no, I cannot find him.

Che took a step back, because Amnon was being forced to give ground, no matter how determinedly he tried to hold it.

Seda. . she relayed carefully, because it seemed fully possible that Argastos might seize on any incriminating thought the moment it had left her head.

Speak, the Empress snapped back, tensely.

I have it, Che revealed. I know how it can be done.