War Master's Gate

Thirty-Nine

They left Averic in an interrogation room — not strapped to the table, yet, but with his wrists chained to the wall above his head, his hands bound palm to palm to stifle his sting.

He and Eujen had been marched under heavy escort across half the city to the district around the north gate, which was securely Wasp-held. Despite Imperial caution, there had been almost no sound of fighting on the still night air — and what little he had noticed came from the wrong direction, presumably the ongoing squabble between the Wasps and their erstwhile allies.

He was detained in a counting house off the market square, which the Second Army had seized for its use — appropriated seeming too polite a phrase. He assumed that the paraphernalia of interrogation that he had been left to ponder on had been installed recently. It seemed unlikely to have been a previous fixture.

They wanted him to reflect on all the ways they could persuade him, he knew. Even though he had never operated such machines himself, nor even watched another subjected to their mercies, he still had a clearer idea than any Collegiate as to just what extent his interrogators would go to. The physiology he had learned here at the College further established his grounding in just how much varied damage the human body could sustain.

But they had given him time. As a student of the College, solving intellectual problems was supposedly something he could do. So he stared at the table, at the rack of implements — none of them exactly spotless, for he was not the first citizen to find himself at the sharp end of the Empire’s inquiries — and he considered his options.

After half an hour, by his best reckoning, an engineer came in to glance cursorily over the tools, while an officer came to look similarly over Averic. A captain, he noted. That told him precisely how important or otherwise the Empire felt he was.

‘Well, now,’ the captain remarked, eyes studying Averic, assessing tolerances. ‘I’m going to ask you a set of questions, boy — once as you are now, and once on the table. After that I’ll go and consider your answers, and then perhaps we’ll go over everything again and put the table to some use, just to ensure that there’s nothing you’re holding back. But, then, I’d guess you already expected that, being what you are?’

‘To be honest I expected a debriefing,’ Averic said. His voice was steady, almost conversational.

The engineer stopped, a tool under his hand clicking metal on metal.

The captain’s face remained without expression. ‘Repeat.’

‘I apologize. I expected a debriefing, sir. I’ve been amongst the Beetles for a year, sir. Proper procedure is hard to hold on to.’

‘You expect me to believe that you’re on the books?’ The captain’s insignia marked him as Army Intelligence, but he could easily be Rekef Inlander as well.

‘My name is Averic, sir. You’ll find it there.’ Still so very steady, every breath measured carefully and his fear fought down. Because he might just live. Because they might just leave him intact. Because it might be true.

They had approached him, when the Second had marched on Collegium the time before. First a Wasp woman, then a Beetle man, calling him one of their own, telling him that he had been sent into Collegium under cover, the best sort of cover. He had believed himself a student but instead he had been intended as a spy.

They had told him the time had come to betray his fellows. He had believed them then. Perhaps he still did. Perhaps it was true.

He was unlikely to find out any other way than this.

His family, he had believed, were liberals who disagreed with the Empire’s belligerent relations with its neighbours. He had therefore been sent to Collegium to learn the Beetles’ ways, so that he could bring them back to the Empire.

Or else he had been sent to Collegium as an agent, living a lie all unknowingly, but the purpose was the same: to learn the Beetles’ ways and bring them back. The seeming and the real danced about each other like Spider-kinden Aristoi, and he could not say which was true. For sure, he had turned aside from the Black and Gold when called on, but that bridge might not be burned. He could yet live. They might not torture me.

The captain’s face was still as blank as glass. ‘Why didn’t you come forward once we took the city?’

‘There wasn’t the chance, before this kicked off,’ he found himself saying. ‘And when it did, there was no chance of getting word out.’ A lie, an unbelievable lie. ‘So I did what I could, sir.’

A snort. ‘And what was that?’

‘I brought their leader to you, didn’t I, sir?’

The captain considered him like an anatomist regarding a cadaver. ‘Did you,’ he said without inflection. ‘Averic, is it? Well, perhaps we’ll get you to the table right away, boy, just in case, mind. Because if you turn out to be trying to save your worthless hide by lying, I’m going to take it out of you a finger-joint at a time. You don’t mind, do you, soldier? You don’t mind my going to make sure?’

Despite his position, Averic managed an awkward shrug. ‘I’d expect it, sir.’

A couple of soldiers marched in at the captain’s direction and, without complaint, Averic let them strap him to the table, his hands secured palm-down on the metal surface, where he would burn only himself if he tried to sting.

Then they left him to his thoughts.

He thoughts were mostly, Eujen, I’m sorry.

Eventually the captain came back, engineer and all, and stared at him, and Averic met his stare levelly, all his fear and regret pushed deep down. There was nothing more he could do for himself now.

‘You,’ the captain told him, ‘are now going to have to answer more questions than anyone actually lying on the table.’ Responding to an irritable gesture, the engineer began releasing him, a band at a time, grumbling under his breath. ‘Such as what the pits you’ve been doing all this time. And don’t give me that rot about your precious cover. A spy that won’t break cover ever is no use to anyone.’ From the man’s disgusted tone, it seemed that Averic’s case was only reinforcing the man’s past experience with agents. ‘For now, get yourself cleaned up. Get some food inside you. We can go over your sorry story in the morning.’

Something rang leaden in Averic’s heart, on hearing that. So it’s true, he thought numbly. I was a spy after all. And my family: were they victims of this trick, too? Or did they know? Perhaps my own family didn’t trust me enough, but let me come here still believing that I was merely seeking peace and understanding.

And that is what I found.

Small wonder, then, that I became what they intended me to feign.

He swung his legs over the side of the table, gripping his hands together to work the stiffness out of them.

They must have reckoned that weak, insipid Collegiate philosophy could never overcome my kinden’s love of Empire.

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’d like very much to return to uniform.’

The nod the captain gave him was proprietorial and pleased, and it made Averic hurt inside.

He didn’t have time to go rouse a quartermaster for some armour, but they found him a uniform tunic that fitted well enough, and then he received directions to the barracks which, as soon as he was out of sight, he totally ignored. Instead, he circled back to the repurposed counting house, doing his best to look like a soldier who had every business to be there.

The rear door was left unguarded — a low little affair meant for deliveries, leading to a cramped backroom store that the Wasps had cluttered with furniture removed from elsewhere in the house. Averic stepped lightly through it, constructing in his mind the layout of the place. The clerk’s room he had been taken to could not be too far from here, and if they were now questioning Eujen. .

Ahead of him, someone crossed the main counting house floor, an engineer from the look of him. Averic ducked back out of sight, realizing he would not have the nerve to bluff this out. Stealth it must be.

There came voices from outside, but just the usual murmur of soldiers in a camp, he guessed. The thought of what he would do once he had Eujen out of the building was something he was staving off, moment to moment. They were a long way from anywhere that could be called safe, and even though there were Beetles in the Imperial army, Eujen would never pass for one. .

In front, a line of four doors, two of them standing open. If Eujen was to be found easily, it would be here. Averic inched closer, ears alert for the sound of anyone else entering the building.

He heard a clatter of metal from behind one of the closed doors.

Before his thoughts could deflect him, he was at the door and hauling it open, a hand extended to sting. The suddenness of his action surprised him, leaving him bewildered and shaken.

There lay Eujen, right there.

They had him secured to a table, and the injuries he bore so far were shallow and superficial, the result of a precise art that aimed at combining longevity with pain. They had not got to that later stage, where a subject’s willpower is broken by irreversible damage. Two fingers of one hand were splayed at broken angles with exacting care, but the rest of the work had mostly been pressure on joints and a little surface cutting.

Eujen was weeping quietly. He had been stretching the fingers of his other hand towards the torturer’s tools — knives and clamps and irons — that had been left almost within reach. One was on the floor, nudged perhaps by the furthest extent of one finger. His eyes were pressed closed, his body shaking with misery.

Averic set to work instantly, loosening his friend’s bonds, ignoring the blood on Eujen’s dark flesh. The Beetle’s shuddering calmed, as he worked until the last manacle loosened. Then Averic met his eyes.

‘You’re here,’ Eujen whispered, his eyes flicking to the black and gold uniform.

‘Don’t you doubt me, not ever,’ the Wasp told him. ‘We’re getting clear now.’ An awkward pause. ‘Can you walk?’

‘Going to have to.’ Eujen lurched off the table, grabbing one-handed at it for support, and stood a moment with his face twisted in pain. After a deep breath, he forced himself to stand upright. ‘I’ve had worse.’ And the patent untruth of it almost made Averic weep. ‘We’re moving?’

‘We are.’ Averic was already at the door leading to the counting-house floor, and still nobody had come to continue their work on Eujen. They were leaving him to stew, of course, to consider his fate, and the door was unguarded because. . well, because Averic’s kinden were contemptuous of anything a manacled Beetle might achieve.

‘Averic,’ Eujen whispered. ‘I’m sorry, I told. . I told them. .’ His eyes glinted bright with fear and the memory of pain.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Averic told him, and led him by the arm towards the rear door. At every moment he knew that someone would walk in, that he would have to fight: kill or be killed. His luck, stretched beyond credibility, would snap back at him, surely.

He opened the door and they stepped out into the night, and his luck snapped there and then, and irrevocably.

They left Eujen standing, but the threat of Averic’s sting meant that three men jumped him immediately as he stepped out into daylight, wrestling him to the ground with professional viciousness, wrenching his arms back at the joints to keep him down.

Half a dozen soldiers were what he and Eujen rated, he saw. There was the captain, too, and no less a man than Colonel Cherten himself had come to witness the entertainment, but there was no indication that either intended to get their hands dirty. Half a dozen soldiers, two of them standing back with levelled snapbows, all waiting outside the back door.

‘Well done, Captain,’ Cherten acknowledged. ‘I applaud your instincts.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ The captain looked moderately pleased with himself, but not over much. It was not so great a triumph as all that. ‘Back to the tables with them?’

‘No, I have another use for them, and I need them for it now,’ Cherten told him. ‘I think we need to break the morale of their friends in the College. Have them secured and I’ll take them off your hands.’

By the time the Antspider ascended to the courtyard wall there was already quite a crowd there, jostling and craning, and most of them with snapbows loaded and directed towards the Imperial lines.

‘Are they mustering?’ she demanded, though she could hear no sound of it. Surely there would be the rumble of the Sentinel engines; surely the movement of a large number of men could he heard on such a still night.

‘Lighting up the place, is what they’re doing,’ Castre Gorenn told her.

Straessa opened her mouth to question that, but it was true. On a rooftop just overlooking the Imperial barricade directly facing the College gate, the Wasps had set out lanterns and lamps as though they were celebrating something.

‘What does it mean?’ she asked quietly.

‘Nothing good,’ the Dragonfly guessed, and Straessa had to agree.

Out of uniform, wearing only a nightshirt that hung short of his knees, Gerethwy stumbled into place beside her. He carried his snapbow, for what it was worth, and for a moment she was tempted to order him straight back down again. His face was drawn, hollow-cheeked through lack of sleep and from the recurrent stabs of pain he felt from the fingers he no longer possessed. Right now, he was plainly of no use to anyone.

But it would shame him, she knew, and so she left it. See, I’m a terrible officer. Why does nobody else realize that?

‘Is that a flag they’re bringing?’ someone asked, and her attention returned to the rooftop. There were a fair number of soldiers there, and they carried some sort of bundle of staves. Her stomach went cold, wondering what new kind of weapons the Empire’s engineers might have dreamt up.

‘Should I try a shot?’ Gorenn asked.

‘At this range? Too far even for you, surely?’ Straessa pointed out.

Gorenn shrugged irritably, and Straessa was about to suggest she try it anyway, when a Fly-kinden piped up, ‘Spears. They’ve got spears.’

‘Have to be bloody long ones, then,’ a Beetle youth remarked. Whilst he earned himself a murmur of laughter, Straessa felt something grip her far beyond the nebulous threat of a new invention.

Not new. . A real old-fashioned Wasp tradition, isn’t that right?

‘What are they doing?’ More than a few people were asking the question, as the Wasps began setting out the long, barbed-headed weapons in pairs, fitting them to sockets they had already set in the flat roof. Four spears, forming two crosses.

Straessa was gripping the edge of the courtyard wall so tightly that her knuckles were white. Her whole world had contracted to that one bright spot ahead where the Wasps had cast out the darkness so that they could put on a show.

‘Crossed pikes,’ someone observed, and the conversation died, word by word, until almost everyone was silent. Of course, there were a few who had neglected their studies, but Straessa did not feel like educating them just then.

She remembered Averic talking about this, once — he had so seldom spoken about his home. He had been a little drunk, his pale face discoloured with bruises from a beating he had received, but had not risen to. She — or was it Raullo? — had said something about wagering that sort of thing wouldn’t go on back where he had lived. He had then explained to them just what did go on. It had been a lapse, of course, and once the over-hasty words were spoken he had plainly wanted to take them back.

There was a skill to it, he had explained. To drive the spearhead into the side of the abdomen by careful degrees, so that whatever damage it did would agonize without killing — to lever it through the ribs without gashing the lungs, and then to ram it into the tricep and biceps, so that, once the crossing was complete, the victim hung from the spear-shafts, with the hooked heads embedded in the solid flesh of the upper arms. A soldier who could perform all that reliably was guaranteed a sergeant’s rank badge.

Someone — either slow on the uptake or just absurdly optimistic — now moaned with horrified realization, as two new figures were led up onto the roof.

Eujen. Averic.

‘I can’t see Serena,’ someone was saying, some friend of the Fly-kinden officer’s.

‘Then she’s the lucky one,’ Straessa whispered. ‘Gereth. .’

The Woodlouse was staring out at that illuminated rooftop, fingering his snapbow, but even on his best day he couldn’t have made the shot.

. . rammed through the body, inch by searing inch, an anatomy lesson for sadists, then hung. .

The officer in charge seemed to be taking some pains explaining to his prisoners what was going to happen to them. Of course, Averic must already know in great detail. . while Eujen always did have a quick imagination.

Straessa levelled her snapbow, sighting it on those distant figures. The previous day’s exchange had demonstrated that she could not possibly hit her mark, or probably even make the roof at all, and she would get in only one — perhaps two — shots, before the Wasps made sure she could not spoil their fun.

And she couldn’t shoot Eujen. She didn’t have it in her, despite everything. How many times had she joked that the thing he needed most was a shot in the head, and here they were. . and she couldn’t.

‘Gorenn, you said. .’ She watched as Eujen and Averic had their hands freed, but of course you would have to have unbound wrists to go up on the pikes. ‘You said you could manage the shot. Can you?’

The Dragonfly looked round as though noticing Straessa for the first time. ‘Of course. Why not?’

Straessa saw them unsocket the spears again, in preparation for their bloody work. Setting the weapons up in advance like that was part of the ritual: to make the victims — and the onlookers — understand and know fear.

‘Founder’s Mark, do it,’ she spat. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Eujen. I wish you a clean death. That’s all I can do now.

Atop the roof overlooking the barricade, Cherten peered into the night, over at the College, seeing movement without detail along the wall.

‘Well, why not?’ he addressed his prisoners. ‘After all, you came to negotiate a surrender. I will now show your fellows what terms they can expect if they continue to resist the Empire.’

Eujen did not look at him, staring at his own feet, but Averic glowered, twisting in the grip of the soldiers who held him.

Cherten favoured him with a cold smile. ‘Yes, the greater of the two traitors first. Put the pikes in him now.’

He turned back to regard the dark bulk of the College and opened his mouth to shout something at his audience there, and an arrow pierced his throat, through to the fletching.

And on the College wall, Straessa cursed and demanded, ‘What did you do?’

Castre Gorenn stared at her. ‘Wasn’t that. . Wait, what did you mean for me to do?’

There was a moment when that single arrow became a full-scale attack in the minds of most of the Wasps there, and Averic seized on it.

He tried to put an elbow in the throat of the man holding him, but slammed it painfully into the soldier’s chest instead. It was enough, sending his captor reeling away from him, and then Averic’s hands flashed, knocking down the man with the pike who stood right next to him, still staring dumbly at Cherten’s body. The barbed spear ended up in Averic’s hands, and he lashed it across the face of the man holding Eujen.

‘Go!’ he shouted, and because Eujen plainly had no idea how or where to go, he grabbed the Beetle student tight and threw them both off the roof towards the splintered architecture of the barricade.

His wings flashed, but Eujen was heavy, and the two of them barely cleared the barricade at all, before tumbling to the ground. There were shouts from behind and above — at least some of them directed at the escaping prisoners and-

Averic’s heart soared. Eujen was on his feet and already beginning to lumber towards the College, stumbling at first, but gaining momentum as he went. And Averic flew after him, turning in the air to spit a scatter of stingshot at those he knew must be following.

‘Get the doors open!’ Straessa yelled. ‘Get. .’ and then she had simply vaulted the edge of the wall, hanging by her hands for a moment and then dropping. Gorenn was with her, and a couple of Fly-kinden, and she heard the rattle and groan as the doors were unbarred and opening behind her.

Her feet pounded the flagstones, and she was already trying to level her snapbow, but it was a futile effort. Ahead she saw bright flashes that must be Averic’s sting — and they were answered in kind, for the Wasps were in the air and descending fast on the fugitives. The distance between them — from Straessa to the escapees — seemed immense and ever-growing however fast she ran, like in some terrible dream.

Beside her, Gorenn was loosing another arrow, yet barely slowing.

She saw Averic turn again, kicking into the air, hands on fire with golden light. Then he had lurched sideways, and she realized he had been struck. There were snapbowmen still on the roof, and they had a clear shot. Averic was down on one knee, and she saw Eujen falter, slowing as if to turn — slowing to be caught.

‘Run!’ came Averic’s high, clear voice. He had not even looked back, but his hands flashed and flamed, burning up his life in crackling Art.

He was down. It was so sudden Straessa did not even see the transition, but her Wasp friend was a motionless heap on the ground when her eyes found him again. . and Eujen was still labouring towards her. He had spotted her now, and his expression was like a drowning man’s.

There were Wasps behind him, practically hovering over his shoulders. One spun away with an arrow punched through his mail. The other dropped down to the ground, snapbow levelled.

‘Eujen!’ Straessa shouted. ‘Go left!’

He lurched — it was nothing more than that — but she was already bringing her own weapon up, pulling the trigger, her hands so steady they should have belonged to someone else. The Wasp soldier stood up suddenly, then fell back down, and Eujen. .

Eujen was picking himself up unsteadily, weaving oddly. His lurch had not been in response to her call. He had been shot.

She tried to run faster to reach him, to compensate for the fact that he was no longer running at all. The next two bolts that struck him, she saw only in the shuddering of his body before he collapsed.

She was screaming, and there were other Wasps ahead, but she had brought a boiling mass of students in her wake, and now the snapbow bolts were flying in both directions and the Wasps had not been ready for a Collegiate sally.

She reached Eujen’s body, saw him still moving, still clawing to stand up, and she took his hand, took his arm, but the sound he made when she tried to get him to his feet curdled her insides, and she let go.

‘Gereth!’ she called out, and of course the Woodlouse was there, without even a snapbow in hand. But he had come after her, and now he was gathering up Eujen, lifting the Beetle’s bulk as though it was nothing, while soldiers of the Student Company flanked him and loosed their bolts at the Wasps to keep them back.

Straessa spared one look for Averic, but he was too far away, and lying too still. . and she knew that to go after his corpse would be to run into a killing ground.

‘Fall back,’ she spat. ‘Back for the College.’

The surgeons had been and gone before she was allowed to see him, coming and going behind closed doors as if they were merely ghosts or rumours. When Straessa finally forced her way in, after she had exhausted the protests of the staff, she found the same two Fly-kinden tending him as had watched over Stenwold Maker earlier. Sperra, the woman from Princep, and of course Sartaea te Mosca, her friend. Eujen’s friend.

There was such grief on the little woman’s face that Straessa thought he must have died.

When she crouched beside him, though, kneeling on the floor by his mattress, she could just hear his breathing, picking it out from the laboured breath of the other casualties there because she recognized it, even diminished as it was.

‘Tell me,’ she whispered.

Te Mosca shook her head slightly. ‘We can’t know, dear one, I’m sorry. There’s hope. .’ Her tone belied her words.

‘They said if he hadn’t been a Beetle, he’d not have made it as far as the walls,’ Sperra explained, briskly businesslike because Eujen was just one more injured Collegiate to her. ‘They’ve dosed him up with Instar but sometimes it doesn’t take, and sometimes it makes things worse.’

‘It seems that medical science has come full circle, until it’s as vague as my magic,’ te Mosca murmured.

Sperra bent over Eujen’s chest and listened carefully, before noting something down on a scroll. ‘Don’t do anything stupid. Just let him lie there. . and let whatever happens happen. Make a nuisance of yourself, and it’ll make him worse.’ She stood up for a moment, swaying slightly, and Straessa wondered when this woman had last slept.

Te Mosca squeezed the other Fly’s arm — small support but all she could wring from the situation — and Sperra nodded and moved on to the next bed, where her big Ant friend was sitting halfway up and sipping gingerly at a jug of water.

Eujen’s dead weight lay beside Straessa, and she would have needed the instruments of the Apt to register his chest rising and falling. His colour was a ghastly greyish hue, as though the blood had congealed inside him. His exposed skin bore at least a score of lacerations, many still weeping.

She took his good hand, finding it clammy and too cold, and she sat there beside his bed for as long as she could stand it, listening to the weakening falter of his breath. Nobody was counting, but she reckoned that she lasted less than twenty minutes before she wanted to scream out her anger and frustration at the vaulted ceiling.

She stood up without warning, and te Mosca looked up at her, concerned.

‘Straessa?’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t just. . I can’t just sit here and wait.’

The Fly took in her expression. ‘Please, he needs you.’

‘I can’t. Not for him, not for you.’ She was shaking a little, with a chill that had come from his cool hand.

‘Straessa, please, don’t go and do anything-’

‘I can’t just wait for him to die!’ she burst out — heedless of the other patients, or of Eujen himself. But it was a true confession, and every moment she spent there, wondering if there would even be a next breath, was winding her up like a clockwork, tighter and tighter, until she could not remain still any longer. Until she had to act.

Out on the courtyard wall again, with the night sky above her — was it only a couple of hours past midnight? — she stared out towards the Wasp lines. She had escaped Eujen’s deathbed, but the scratchy, failing whisper of his breathing had come outside with her, as though his comatose body was hung just behind her, whichever way she turned.

And she knew only this one thing: I have to act.

Castre Gorenn, who seemed to need no sleep at all, was eyeing her doubtfully, but then she used that same expression for so much she encountered in Collegium. She had left her home and come to an alien world of Beetle-kinden politics and artifice, and for her the Wasps were probably the only familiar faces in the whole city.

‘I’m going over the wall,’ Straessa told her, and the look that appeared on the Dragonfly’s face was one of pure understanding. ‘I’m going to fight the war.’

No objections, no raising of the alarm. Gorenn just nodded because it made sense to her.

‘I’ve fought as an Ant for long enough,’ the Antspider stated, unbuckling her breastplate. ‘Now I’m going to fight as a Spider.’ She set the metal down carefully and stripped away her buff coat as well, leaving only her dark tunic beneath. ‘Besides, I’m far better with a sword than I ever was with a snapbow.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m going to kill General Tynan.’ There, the words were said.

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

Straessa stared at the Dragonfly. She had already considered the likely outcome of her mission, and it was plain that Gorenn concurred, but that offer had still been made.

And it seemed so tempting, but Straessa wanted no more weighing on her conscience, not just then. ‘You hold your post, soldier. I’ll be back before morning.’

And then she was over the wall and away, with assassination on her mind.

In the extensive cellars of the College library building there was one spur of rooms never used to store books. The chill was insidious there, far more so than any obvious factor could account for, and the walls ran perpetually with an acrid condensation. The College had tried to use the little chambers there as an ice room, but the resulting ice always smelled odd. People reported hearing strange scratchings sometimes. It had become a standard student dare to spend the night there: the Inapt claimed it was haunted, and the laughing Apt found it a safe place to titillate themselves with daring thoughts of the old days once the lanterns were put out.

But, being a place of education, among each generation of students there had always been a few inquiring minds who had been curious and analytical enough to work out precisely what was going on, to solve the mystery and declare it anything but supernatural, although they were largely ignored.

As luck would have it, a couple of such inquiring minds were in the Student Company garrison trapped inside the College, even then.