War Master's Gate

Forty

Milus had barely slept, or perhaps not at all. That was another thing that marked him out amongst his people — placed him on that razor-edged line between prized thinker and freak. His troops slept soundly, and would wake in an instant. Only he felt compelled to run his plans over and over, to build increasingly redundant fallback scenarios for remote possibilities. What if they. .?

He went to speak with Lissart, because he could kick her awake at any hour, but she stared at him sombrely as though death had entered the tent alongside him.

‘Come morning, is it?’ she asked.

He nodded, his eyes on her but his mind working elsewhere.

‘Good luck, then. I’m sure you Ants don’t put faith in mere luck, but my people live by it.’

‘I would have thought your wishes would be with the other side,’ he said drily.

‘That, Tactician, is because you’re a humourless bastard and you don’t understand me. You won’t, either, however much you twist and pry.’ She was in one of her brave moods, and that lifted his spirits. When she was too miserable with her lot, there was no talking to her. Her emotions seemed to swing wildly, and at their nadir they were more of a torment to her than anything he had inflicted.

‘Your people out there,’ he pointed out.

‘Not my people now. The people I used to work for, yes. Several minutes of inquiry teased that one out of me. I’m no Imperial. I was born in the Spiderlands.’ She grimaced.

‘Also the enemy,’ he observed.

‘Well, Tactician, let me put it this way, shall I? If the Eighth beats your army and sacks your camp and gets their hands on me, and if I can’t persuade them otherwise — if they recognize who I am — then what the Rekef have at their disposal will make all your instruments and freezings and beatings look like the work of amateurs, believe me.’

She said it quite matter-of-factly, and he found her conviction genuine.

‘Believe me, Tactician,’ she went on, gathering speed a little, her heavy shackles clinking as she leant forward, ‘I will go and act against the Wasps, I will. Set me free and I’ll be yours. I’ll go into their camp, I’ll sabotage their machines and burn their supplies. You know how I can.’

He studied her for a long time, and into his mind crept a seditious thought, Is that it? Have I misused this piece all this while?

The barrier he would have to clear before trusting her to go about with her hands free was high, but had he been given enough time to think, then perhaps he could have surmounted it with sufficient safeguards. At that moment, though, he felt the ground shake and heard the distant thunder of the Wasp greatshotters.

Awake and to arms! Go rouse the cursed Mynans and that rabble from Princep! To battle, my siblings! And he was already striding out into the grey pre-dawn, with the leadshotters stalking their shells across the land, whilst his men were awake and in motion, thousands of them like gears in a perfect machine.

Behind him, Lissart’s cry of frustration went almost unnoticed.

His soldiers would remain dispersed, even widening their front, daring the Wasps to sweep them aside; whilst the others — the foreigners he could not rely on — would be forming into solid ranks because they lacked the Art and the discipline to do anything else. Let the Imperial engines track them down and reap them like wheat as the Sarnesh advanced.

He strode through the effortlessly mobilizing camp, drawing his cloak tighter about him against the chill.

The battle for the Lowlands was beginning.

Tactician, change in the situation, a hurried report from one of his sentries, and an image — the hours before dawn still grey enough that he could not discern what the man was looking at. There were the campfires of the Wasps, and that blackness was. .

Was something he had not foreseen.

He froze, letting the wheels of his mind spin, and trusting them to come up with the best solution in the seconds he had before he was required to give an order.

General Roder listened to the greatshotters as they found their rhythm, pounding out their percussion against the distant Ants. He knew what his opposite number was about, of course. The Ants would stay spread out as long as they could, to deny him a good target. Those huge engines were not really made for field battles, but he was looking forward to giving them their head before the walls of Sarn. Afterwards, perhaps, he would write a brief report on the relative merits of Mynan and Sarnesh architecture.

But, for now, the Sarnesh had made the sound decision to test him on the field, and the Eighth Army had nowhere near the fortifications it had been able to rely on at Malkan’s Stand. He had set out his lines as best he could, nevertheless, with enough trenches and sharpened stakes to make any movement by the enemy a constant trial. He was also guessing that the Ants would have to mass up as they neared the Wasp lines, and that they would want to engage in close fighting, where they had an undeniable superiority. In that case the Wasps would trust to their own manoeuvrability, using the Light Airborne’s wings to simply relocate the battlefield again and again, refusing to lock swords.

His fliers were taking off: some veteran Spearflights and half a dozen of the new Farsphex loaded with bombs. The Ant orthopters would be able to keep an impressive discipline and coordination in the air, but their machines were a generation out of date, by Imperial standards, and Roder was looking to secure control of the air relatively swiftly.

If the Ants stayed back, then the fighting would get bogged down into a long-range pissing contest with snapbows, which Roder reckoned he would eventually win, given his superior numbers and what he predicted would be a Wasp advantage in speed and accuracy. That would be a costly way to bring the battle to a close, though, and one that would be likely to allow the Ants to disperse and meet him again before their walls — or even attack him from behind as he invested the city. The painstaking progress the Eighth had made towards Sarn, with the Ants using minimal forces to cause maximum delay, had given him a new respect for whoever was planning their war.

Still, the Sarnesh resistance was all for nothing, since a messenger had arrived from Tynan’s Second to confirm that Collegium had capitulated. The reinforcements that Sarn had presumably been hoping for were not coming. Sarn now stood alone.

There was a concentration forming in the centre of the Sarnesh lines, but his scouts suggested these were Auxillian troops, not the Ants themselves. A distraction for the greatshotters, then. But each death would still be one less enemy on the field, and so there was no reason not to oblige the Ants rather than attack their wide-spaced forces and squander the potency of the engines. It was as if he and the Sarnesh commander were following the same textbook, both seeing a different advantage in the same tactic, so that there were really no losers. Or nobody important, anyway.

A messenger landed nearby and ran up to him. ‘General, word from the forest!’

For a moment he could not imagine what the man meant, but then it fell into place. ‘The Mantids?’

‘One of their women is here to speak with you, General.’

He peered through the unrelieved grey, trying to pinpoint her, but spotted her only when she was almost within a spear’s reach: a lean, weathered, hard-faced woman, dressed in a chitin cuirass.

‘You’re of the Nethyen? How do things stand in the forest?’

‘I am of the Nethyen,’ she confirmed. ‘The fighting is over.’

His heart leapt. ‘Can you bring your forces to bear on the battle?’

‘We can.’ A small smile that made him uneasy. ‘We have put aside our differences, the Etheryen and ourselves. From now on there is but one hold in the wood. Netheryon, it shall be called.’

Roder shrugged off the nuances of Mantis nomenclature. ‘When can you strike?’ he asked, acutely aware that the Ants would be closing the distance to his lines already.

‘Now,’ she explained, and went for him.

She nearly had him, too. Her blade rammed into his armour, biting into the metal but not penetrating, yet still knocking him from his feet. She wore one of those claw gauntlets, and he had not even noticed.

He thrust a hand out, but the soldiers around him were creditably alert and, even as she drew back her arm to finish him off, three or four snapbow bolts and a sting had found her, battering her from both sides so that she twisted and fell in a spray of blood.

‘Pits-cursed Inapt!’ Roder swore furiously, as one of his men helped him up. ‘What was that. .?’ There was shouting, he realized. Within the camp there was shouting. In the pre-dawn he could make out nothing of it. ‘Someone find out what that is!’ he ordered.

But even as he said the words, he understood what it must be. He saw that the Mantis woman had not come alone; that her people, the Netheryen, were indeed ready to strike.

They had reached almost to the edge of the camp itself, and not one sentry or scout had spied them. All eyes had been focused on the Ants.

They had come, all of them, in their steel-edged hundreds.

Roder opened his mouth to cry out some command — any command — that might save the situation, and the might of the forest surged into the heart of his army, like a tide.

In that fractured second, Milus weighed many commodities within his soul, not least his surprisingly strong attachment to the original plan, however inappropriate. The Mantids had finally made their move; they were attacking the Wasps even now. They were hopelessly outnumbered, and yet when had that ever bothered them? He could now let them spend themselves against the black and gold, then strike at his own convenience. Or he could take full advantage of this unlooked-for intervention and hurry his men over to the Wasp lines as fast as they could be shifted, and construct a new battle plan while the fighting continued. It was another advantage of being an Ant, of course: he could change his orders at any time and the whole army would know and understand.

He made his decision in that same fraught second. Forwards, all speed. Close with the Wasps as swiftly as possible.

And Seda took one step forwards and threw out a stingshot at the seated figure of Argastos.

It was supposed to be that simple. However he chose to appear, the gnarled-stump body of the Moth War Master was there and had always been there, at the root-hung, earth-ceilinged centre of the barrow. This was the chamber they had dined in. This was where they had been imprisoned and threatened. This was the entirety of Argastos’s world.

But he was quicker to react than that, and more clever. For all that he had atrophied into, he had been one of the great magicians of his people, with a millennium of scheming even after that. The space around them became instantly folded and convoluted so that, although he was physically almost close enough to touch, he had contrived a mile of tangled forest between them, and dropped Seda and Che inside it. And it was not empty.

‘His ghost-soldiers are here with us, all around,’ Che recognized.

‘Keep them back. Misdirect them. Lose them within the landscape,’ Seda directed, taking command because. . who else was there? Gratifyingly, she felt the Beetle girl’s immediate acquiescence. Perhaps there is some potential in her that I missed. If I can make a servant of my enemy, what could we not do together? And then she was pursuing Argastos, even as he tried to widen the apparent space between them, hauling swathes and handfuls of mismatched, misremembered land from his mind to cram into place.

But Seda had assessed his limits: his imagination was as dried-up as his body. Everything he raised up was brooding forest, fragments of ruined castle, clods of the deep underground. She had seen it all before and she flew through it like an avenging ghost, fire trailing from her hands.

Yet his memories, however limited, encompassed his days as War Master, his military campaigns, the great battles of the Inapt, and suddenly she was veering away, falling back, because she had met Argastos’s armies.

The actual ghost soldiers, the remains of Argastos’s real victims that could take on enough form to injure or kill her and the Maker girl — just as she herself had given Tisamon’s ghost such form — were still being kept away, led into the dense, gnarled thickets of Argastos’s own mind, constantly turned away by the Beetle’s will. But that could not last forever. Seda had to tear her way past all the mummery that Argastos had thrown up, before those dead killers fought through Che’s diversions enough to cross the few feet of actual real space that separated them from their intended victims. The two women became hunter and hunted all at the same time.

And here now was what kept her from her quarry: Argastos had ransacked his mind and cast up this recollection of the war-host of the Inapt. She had seem some fraction of it in the visions he had shown her, while wooing her, but this was it entire or as close as his memory could call forth. The forest was filled with moving soldiers: Moth, Mantis, Spider, Dragonfly, Woodlouse and others, great loose formations of them, armoured and armed, a dark glass being held up to the glory of another age.

Hurry! came Che’s voice, in her mind. The Beetle was losing ground.

Useless creature. And Seda stood before Argastos’s recreated host and called out, ‘I am Seda, Empress of the Wasp-kinden. Do you presume to teach me about armies?’

She took a deep breath and clawed power out of the very tapestry that Argastos had raised to stop her, and she gifted him with her own thoughts on the subject.

She gave him the Barbs, General Alder’s Fourth Army; she gave him Malkan’s Winged Furies and Tynan’s Gears. She gave him the Eighth, which General Roder was even now leading against Sarn. She gave him the artillery of the Engineers and the flying machines of the Aviation Corps. She gave him the Rekef assassins she had once lived in fear of. She gave him snap-bows and the bright dawn of the new Apt age.

His remembered soldiers, a thousand years dead and obsolete, began their work, butchering her followers by the thousand, slaughtering the Wasps wholesale as she watched, and not all her powers or inspiration could inspire into that ersatz Black and Gold any semblance of the discipline and indomitable might of the Imperial armies that she recalled.

She had miscalculated. There was a hollow, clutching feeling inside her, and at last she was forced to recognize it as fear.

Hurry! Che Maker again, not realizing how Seda’s plans had just collapsed in upon themselves. And then Seda was forced to confront two equally unpalatable options: lose to Argastos; confess to Maker that she was failing.

But she was not like her brother. She was not so insecure.

I need your help. A bitter confession, yet she shoved the situation facing her into Che’s mind, and the girl understood immediately. What can you give me?

In the real world, the Wasp armies would have destroyed Argastos’s barbaric rabble without slowing. Their orthopters and automotives, greatshotters and snapbows would have reaped that enemy like wheat and turned an army into an abattoir within two hours. But Seda had no understanding of such devices. She knew that they existed, but she left the details to her generals and her engineers. Here, with only her own mind to draw on, all the great machinery of the Wasps, their tactics and their innovations, might as well just be theatrical props. Argastos had led armies: he knew full well the strengths and weaknesses of his troops.

Change places with me, Che told her instantly, and Seda swallowed her pride and fell back, taking on the task of throwing Argastos’s real soldiers into confusion, whilst Che hunted the man himself. It was the only chance they seemed to have.

In the midst of this twisted landscape that Argastos had summoned into being, Che could not see her own physical body, but she had the uncomfortable feeling that some of the Moth’s dead slaves were practically standing over her with blades raised. She had tried all she had — misdirection, flight, lengthening the imagined terrain that they must cross, even calling on Amnon once again, and having him throw himself against their blades — and it was foul work, to do so, but she was dead if she did not.

In passing that task to Seda, she could only hope that the Empress would put her ruthlessness and her Wasp minions to good use, because Che herself had played that game as far as she could.

Here was a different battle, though, and one she had a new perspective on. She saw exactly what Argastos had thrown between them to protect himself — his great remembered army — and she understood why Seda had failed.

And what do I have?

She reached into her mind and peopled Argastos’s battlefield with her own forces, marvelling at the irony that she should be more suited to such an attack than Seda herself. Here were the Dragonflies that she had seen in the Commonweal; here were the Moth-kinden of Tharn; here were the Mantids of the Nethyon and Etheryon — Argastos’s own people turned against him by her will. And here. . here was the Grand Army of Khanaphes, the great host of her own kinden, with chariots and cavalry and Amnon’s heroic guard at its centre. And if they were Apt, it mattered little, because they were still waging war in a way that had barely changed since the Bad Old Days.

These were her troops, and she sent them off to war.

Argastos’s own forces outnumbered hers to the extent that she reckoned his memories had multiplied the actual numbers who had ever fought under his command. Still, this was his battle, and played by his rules. Even if his mind was a liar, he would still manage to destroy her soldiers in time.

But that was not what she was trying to accomplish. She had another reason to take the initiative from Seda: a secret weapon.

The tide of battle swayed, and washed back and forth, her Khanaphir legion driving forward into the heart of the enemy, a bold thrust to get even a single arrow as far as Argastos himself. He countered perfectly, of course, concentrating his forces to block her at every point, but at the same time she was leading him on, stripping him of his reserves and his bodyguards, until he had committed everything he had in order to meet her threat.

And she called out, I know you’re there. Time for you to do what your people do.

The bitter thorn of Esmail’s mind revealed itself to her: Do not believe all the Moths wrote in their histories.

I don’t care, she told him. That reputation is what I need now. Be a scholar or a poet some other time. Can you reach him? And if Esmail’s answer was ‘no’ then everything would be for naught.

But then she felt him inching his way through the interstices of Argastos’s mind, stepping behind and within, but never directly interacting with it: like a spider raiding another’s web, each step desperate not to start the vibrations that might trigger an alarm.

And she continued to throw her soldiers at the enemy with a reckless disregard for their lives, suicidal and ludicrous enough to shame every general or tactician there had ever been. But either Argastos took it for her inexperience, or perhaps back in his day that was all battle had been about. He met her and crushed her forces, almost forgetting himself, losing his real purpose in this excuse he had manufactured to play War Master one last time. And, as he committed his imaginary troops to the fray, complicating and convoluting the distance between him and Che, so the ground immediately around him became simpler and simpler to traverse until one could have just walked across it.

I’m here, came the voice of Esmail in her mind. But. . I need to break into the real, where his body is. I — he sounded shaken — I hadn’t thought — I can’t get out myself. I’m not strong enough.

Strength is something I have, and she watched the last of her forces torn apart, felt Argastos exalt at his apparent triumph, and reached out to un-seam his world and let her assassin out.

Hurry! This time it was Seda who was pressing her, but Che just sat back, imagining herself staring at Argastos over a chessboard. Her pieces were gone, he had achieved the perfect victory, and yet he had not won.

She sensed his confusion, aware that he had missed something and yet unable to conceive of what it was. Was he not the War Master, after all?

Esmail struck.

Through him, she saw the blade of his bare hand shear through preserved flesh that had become as hard as wood, so that a withered, blasted thing hunched in an overlarge throne was abruptly lacking a head.

It went. All of it went. The mind-forest became like mist, evaporating and gone in an instant. The dark heart of the wood stopped beating.

All those hundreds, all the trapped dead — from Argastos’s original guard all the way up to those she and Seda had brought with them — were gone as though they had never been, like knots unravelling when the string is tugged. And she knew that Amnon was now free — destined for oblivion or for another life, however the universe might order such things.

And she was standing in a dome-ceilinged chamber beneath the earth, where a broken dead thing had fallen from its mouldering throne.

Che looked up from it, and she locked eyes with Seda.

That was a tense moment, the two of them, each waiting to see what the other would do. Wasp Empress;War Master’s kin. Only now that she had met Argastos did Seda appreciate that the two of them composed their own legend: the two rival sisters who would fight until one of them was destroyed.

But if there was one thing she was not, it was a slave — not to Argastos and not to some Moth idea of fate, either.

The others, the survivors, were cautiously standing up around the chamber. Seda saw Maker’s Spider Weaponsmaster retreat to her side, eyes on Tisamon, who was already at his accustomed position between her and danger. The tatty little halfbreed magician Maker had picked up from somewhere was taking a more sensible position behind her mistress.

There was another man there, the man who had done for Argastos in the end. After a moment’s concentration, she understood who he must be: the assassin, the man who had fooled her, and who had worn Ostrec’s face. The killer of her beloved Gjegevey. For a moment the flame of anger burned hot within her, but she conquered it — she was no slave to that either. If he could be kept on a leash then surely even he might prove a useful tool. Now she realized what he must be — no Spider as he had shown himself to her, but a kinden — and with a profession — out of the myths.

He flinched when she set eyes on him. That was a good start.

And over there was Thalric, hunched off to one side as though trying to avoid her notice. It was almost endearing.

‘Cheerwell Maker,’ she began, returning her attention to her rival. ‘Here we are.’

The Beetle girl was waiting for her to strike, as well she might, although obviously not prepared to attack first. Seda forced herself to relax, and the slight smile that came to her face had a touch of the genuine to it.

‘Cheerwell Maker,’ she repeated. ‘Look how far we’ve come, two Inapt girls. Is there a Moth Skryre in the world who would not tremble at our approach, either of us? The great terror that dwelt here is undone by us. His power is ours for the taking.’

Che was regarding her suspiciously, which Seda conceded to be a sensible stance.

‘Ours, is it?’ the Beetle replied.

Seda shrugged. ‘I won’t deny we’ve been enemies, and we have every right to be so. The very world seems to have gone to great lengths to cast us as eternal adversaries. And yet together we defeated Argastos, and neither one of us could have done it without the other. Does that not suggest something to you?’

Che’s eyes flicked about the dim chamber, seeking out the faces of her friends. There was still a fading fire there, a guttering corpse light left over from Argastos’s tenure.

‘What do you want, Seda?’ she said at last.

‘I want to live without threat and fear,’ the Empress told her. ‘And that’s no more than any other woman in this world wants. But, being who I am, I had to plot the death of my brother, engineer the destruction of a great magician, and have a Rekef general murdered before I could even begin to breathe easily. And since then I have set out to conquer the known world because, while it remains free, my body will be at risk from the machines of the Apt, and my mind from the magics of the Inapt. And both from you.’

‘Me?’ But Che could not quite make her surprise sound sincere. ‘Yes, well, I won’t say I don’t understand you.’

‘But what might I do if I could know you as something other than a threat to me?’ Seda pressed. ‘I had an adviser, until recently, an old man who knew much of the world, and who tried to steer me as best he could. Your creature there killed him.’ And she could not keep her voice level, the bitterness forcing its way into those few words. ‘Who do I turn to for counsel, now?’

The Beetle was looking at her, and Seda had the impression that she wanted to find a reason to trust her opposite. They led odd, privileged lives in Collegium, after all.

And surely that was her hidden weapon, to bring out into the open now. ‘Che, General Tynan’s Second Army has taken your home city.’

The Maker girl went completely still.

‘I do not know how matters stand there. A great deal will depend on what your people do. Tynan is a rational, cautious man. Furthermore, he has one with him to whom I can speak, after a fashion. Cheerwell. . you could be governor of Collegium. My very word could make it so.’

‘And a subject of your Empire?’

‘Would it not be our Empire? For all that I am Empress, you are my sister. If you spoke to me about Collegiate ways, would I not listen?’

And Che was backed into that corner, with the fate of her people in the palm of her hand, offered a future wherein she might temper Seda’s Wasp steel and find power for herself. She might deny it in her own mind, but Seda had felt Che Maker’s ambition. It was an indivisible part of becoming a powerful magician to want more.

‘Good,’ the Empress said softly. ‘This is it, Cheerwell. If all of this was for anything, then this is what it was for: to bring us together, to show us that hand in hand we are more than we could ever be while at war with one another.’

And even as Che was nodding, she beckoned archly. ‘Thalric, to me.’

There was a fraught moment: the Wasp man had taken a single step, but no more, and he was now looking at the Maker girl.

‘Thalric,’ Seda repeated. ‘You are my consort, have you forgotten? You were saved a traitor’s death for no other reason than that. You are mine.’

She extended her power — the lightest touch should have sufficed against his Apt mind — but found an opposing push of equal strength: Cheerwell Maker.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ the Empress stated, cold and regal. ‘He is mine. He has always been mine. How could it be otherwise?’ The contest was not for the man himself, that perennial renegade she hardly knew. For the principle of it, though, she must fight. Here was something they had both laid claim to, and if she was to have a sister working by her side, she must still be the wiser, the stronger. Thalric was the man both had claimed. He was their battlefield.

But, step by faltering step, Thalric was retreating from her, until he stood beside the Maker girl.

Something began to fray, inside her, and Seda called out, ‘Her, Thalric? I understand why you went to her once you were out of my sight. She has power, of course, and it is akin to mine, but I am here now.’ But he would not move, and so she turned her narrowing eyes upon Cheerwell. ‘Stop this,’ she demanded. ‘Release him.’

Che shook her head slightly. ‘I don’t believe in using chains to hold anyone.’

‘Then withdraw your power from him, and I will take him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

Che’s chin jutted stubbornly. ‘No.’

‘Cheerwell, if we are to work together-’

‘No,’ for a second time. Three would be final.

‘I hold your city in the palm of my hand, Maker. Give up Thalric, now, or the history of your kinden in the Lowlands will be a book of torment.’

A terrible, harsh expression came over the Beetle’s face, even as she shook her head. She took Thalric’s arm in exactly the possessive manner that the Empress herself might have used, in claiming some thing she owned, and for the last time she said, ‘No.’

‘Thalric. .?’ And Seda saw him shake her head, and the words came spitting from her mouth: ‘For this? When I’m ready to forgive you, to welcome you back, you turn to this? This, stunted, dark, ugly creature, instead of me?’ And she realized that fate would have her after all, for surely all the legends sang the same song, and what else should two rival sisters come to blows over but this.

A rage welled up inside Seda, not merely the inherent temper of her kinden but the fury of a magician thwarted, and in that instant she had all her strength at her fingertips, and had ripped up everything left of Argastos too, holding it above her like a boulder, desperately reaching for her self-control before she-

The words came from her mouth unwanted, as though reading from a script: ‘He’s mine!’

And she released it all, a monstrous, bludgeoning expenditure of power hammering down upon Maker and all around her, screaming as she did so.

And she felt the ground crack beneath them — not the earthen barrow floor, but what lay beneath.

She had time for one brief, despairing thought: The Seal! The Seal of the Worm! And then the darkness rose up with many mouths, and swallowed them.