War Master's Gate

Epilogues

The Antspider

They had kept her imprisoned for more than a day, with a little brackish water but no food at all. The pain in her eye, where a sword-guard had been rammed into her face, had fallen into its own stubborn, unvarying rhythm, fading until she almost forgot about it, then flaring up just as she did. She had not dared to take the matted cloth from it to see. . to see if there was anything to see.

Her hand felt better: if she did not move it, then it was almost painless. The Imperial surgeon in charge of fixing her up enough to be worth torturing had done his job well there, at least.

Sometimes, soldiers passed by, and she found herself flinching away from them, despite herself, pain from her eye and hand stabbing at her together.

There was almost no light down here, and it was damp, and sometimes she could hear cries and begging from above, where the interrogators plied their trade.

She had discovered in herself a terrible fear of yet more pain and, although she tried to shrug it off flippantly and find some quip or dismissive remark to distance herself from it, she could not.

When at last she heard heavy footsteps descending to her cellar, and saw the sway of a lamp as one of her jailers approached, she shrank back into the corner they had penned her in, hearing her own breath grow ragged, and hating herself for it.

The lamp was hung up on the wall, to cast its uncompromising light across them both, and she saw that General Tynan himself had come to give her the bad news.

‘Your friends failed,’ he told her, ‘but you knew that.’ She could not fathom his expression, for none of the pieces seemed to fit together to make the man she had seen before.

‘There’s peace in Collegium tonight,’ he said. ‘First time in a while. We won. We won it all. We beat all of them.’ He sat down heavily across from her, the light gleaming on his bald head. He looked anything but triumphant. ‘What d’you think about that, eh?’ He yelled it without warning, as though the Wasp victory was a crime and she was somehow responsible.

She had shrunk away from that yell, but now she turned her wide eye back to him and found him still staring at her, apparently wanting an answer.

Something surfaced in her that had been buried for too long. ‘Should I be saying hooray for the Empire?’ she whispered, her voice hoarse.

‘Hooray,’ Tynan echoed, and put his head in his hands. With a sudden lurching of perspective, she realized that he was the sort of pure clear drunk that even Collegiate students seldom aspired to, and comfortable enough with it that he had been walking straight and speaking without slurring his words.

‘I killed her,’ he stated, without qualification. ‘I followed my orders. What else was I supposed to do? You can’t go against the throne. Who would obey a general who hadn’t obeyed his own orders, eh?’ Looking up again, his reddened eyes challenged her. ‘I couldn’t have just walked away, could I? I couldn’t have just said no.’

And then, losing focus on her. ‘I thought she was going to kill me, when she summoned me back to Capitas. When she said she was giving me my Second back, I felt so proud. .’

Straessa was now completely lost, unsure even how many women the general was talking about, whether he was claiming to have killed the Empress herself, or any of it.

‘When we were at the walls the first time,’ he rambled on, ‘I captured Stenwold Maker. You remember that? I had his woman, and he walked out to save her from the pikes, gave himself to me. I had him in my hands. And then the orders came to head for home, but I could have had him shot. I could have rid the world of Stenwold Maker!’ A theatrical gesture, as though he had an audience of thousands. ‘But I let him go — and you know why? I liked him. I respected him. He had the sort of courage a Wasp should have. . and that I’ve seen a good few officers lack! He abandoned his city, put himself in the jaws of the trap, just to save his woman pain. She betrayed him later, he told me. And she died for it.’

Tynan reached around, fumbling at his belt, and she thought he was going for a weapon — absurd, as he could have stung her through the bars with ease. Then there was a flask in his hand and he knocked back a long swig of it, and held it out to her as if she was just another soldier he was drinking with.

She took it with her uninjured hand and drank from it cautiously, recognizing a fiery brandy that sent a jab of pain down her parched throat.

She handed it back, shaking only a little.

‘And now we find,’ Tynan remarked, ‘that I am not as brave as Stenwold Maker. That I would not walk away from my city to save my woman. That is what we learn.’ He drained the flask and threw it away, so that it clattered on the steps. ‘Tell me about him.’

Straessa started. ‘What?’

‘Your man, the one I killed. What was he, to you?’

She took a moment trying to collect her thoughts but they were scattered all about her head, defying order. ‘He was a fool who meant well,’ she said at last. ‘He never knew how to keep his mouth shut. He once almost got killed by Stenwold Maker. His best friend was a Wasp. He wanted there to be peace, and the fact that he hadn’t the faintest idea how to make that happen hurt him more than anything — more than almost anything.’ Her voice remained level only through a great exercise of will. ‘He would have been the best Speaker the Assembly ever had,’ she went on. ‘He could have healed the whole world.’

General Tynan, master of the Gears, stared past the bars at her. ‘And when he was on the point of death, you came here for me, rather than staying by him,’ he observed.

She nodded, but at that point could not trust herself to speak.

‘Then we neither of us have the courage we should have had,’ was his verdict, and next a great sigh. ‘And now I have orders still: every Spider in Collegium who’s still alive and hasn’t fled, every Spider must die. The Empress, she now hates Spiders so much, and nobody can tell me why, not even her creature Vrakir. I have my orders.’ And he stood up abruptly. ‘Not one Spider must remain alive in Collegium.’

‘I see,’ Straessa acknowledged.

‘But perhaps half a Spider, nobody will miss.’

When he unlocked the bars, fumbling messily with the keys and then lifting the whole cage section away with more strength than she would have credited him with, she was not sure what to do. Here was General Tynan, the man she had come to kill. Here he was, drunk and off-balance, and surely he had a knife somewhere she could snatch. She could cut the head off the whole Second Army.

But the injured parts of her cringed away at the thought of it, and besides, We neither of us have the courage we should have had. And how true.

She tried to slip past him, not trusting her luck to bear her weight another moment, ready for the inevitable reversal. And he seized her wrist — her bad hand — dragging her back with a screech of pain.

In that moment, all her defiance was overwritten by a desperate begging need to live, and to be free from pain, and nothing else was real to her but that.

He tried to stuff something into her broken fingers, obviously not understanding why she was writhing and twisting in his grip, but at last she grabbed at it with her good hand, finding an untidy fold of papers.

‘Pass,’ he managed to explain. ‘Or you’d not get ten yards from here. But, more, you’re my messenger now. You’re going to Sarn — official Imperial courier.’

Sarn still stands? If there was ever a point in her life when she had needed the feeblest spark of hope, it was now.

‘Just go,’ Tynan gave her a shove towards the stairs. ‘Get out of my city before I change my mind.’

She went.

Jen Reader

The message had been written in haste, perhaps intended for the hand of some messenger already halfway out of the door on a greater errand.

Jen

Safe in Sarn and hoping against hope this reaches you. Sarn safe for now. Eighth Army driven off at cost. Another Wasp force somewhere out there, so no immediate chance of marching to liberate Collegium, but hold on! A lot of expatriates here, and Sarnesh must come south sooner than later, before Empire can reinforce. That’s my understanding, anyway. Meantime sorting out Ants’ air power, of course.

Any word of Stenwold Maker much appreciated. Lot of people say he is dead, like poor Jodry.

If you get this, tell little Jen I’m fine, and coming home as soon as I can.

Will send more word.

W.

The message had been slipped under the door of her store cupboard at the library, and she could only assume that a reply might be dispatched the same way. When she tried to put pen to paper, her hand shook too much. Willem was safe, and in Sarn! That was enough.

She had thought life in Collegium was settling down. Having destroyed all resistance, the Wasps seemed to be lapsing to a sullen, constant oppression. Those few who were still foolish enough to aggravate them paid the price, but the business of the city was slowly resuming, each move tentative and wary of repercussions. There had been some trade with Helleron, although the prices were horrendous. In the markets, traders set out their pitiful wares and charged the earth. The Wasps, who had initially just taken what they wanted, were now supplied by airship and seemed to have actual money to spend, becoming the clientele that every Collegiate business must be ready to cater to. The boldest restaurants and tavernas and even theatres had reopened their doors, gingerly sounding out the Wasps’ tastes. The city was not thriving, but it lived.

And she had returned to the College library, dreading what she might find there after the fighting, after its occupation by the city’s valiant, doomed defenders. The shelves and their precious burdens, the stacked cellars, all of them seemed intact, and she had been able to pass through all those familiar halls and turn a blind eye to the dark stains on the stonework, or the black charring left by stingshot.

The College itself would reopen soon, someone had claimed. She was not sure about that, but the library needed her.

Then, today, she had found an intruder there.

The fright had nearly killed her. She had been walking between the shelves, pushing a trolley of books that had needed filing since before the gates fell, and there he was: a tall, arrogant-looking Wasp soldier wearing red armour at his shoulders and neck.

‘You are the librarian?’ he demanded.

She had been about to give her name, but decided against it, settling for a nod.

‘I am Captain Vrakir, and I am the voice of the Empress,’ he told her, as a statement of fact. ‘You are in a position to serve my mistress. Rejoice, therefore. Your loyalty to the Empire will be noted.’

He wants me to betray Willem, she had thought instantly, gripped rigid by terror. What will he do? What will I do?

He thrust a scroll at her. ‘Here is a list of works known to be in your collection somewhere.’ His other hand encompassed the entire library, the gesture of a man who had no patience with her elaborate cataloguing systems. ‘You will find them quickly and present them to the main barracks.’

She cast an eye down the list, then looked up at him, frowning. ‘You’re sure? Only these are-’

‘You will address me as sir!’ he snapped. ‘And you will not question me. This is the Empress’s will. These volumes are to be shipped to Capitas immediately.’

The sacrilege of that, to remove such volumes from the library, from the very city, almost had her protesting, but she realized just in time how close he was to violence. And, besides, these titles were mouldering tomes of ancient lore, worm-eaten histories of the Bad Old Days. Considering the alternative, she could almost convince herself that she would not be betraying her trust by letting them go to the Wasps. Odds were that they probably had not been read at all in living memory.

But nonetheless it was wrong, though she knew she had no choice but to comply. Amid the shock of carving off pieces of the College’s collection at the whim of a Wasp, the question of why the Empress should require such reading matter wholly passed her by.

Bergild

With Collegium finally secure, the Second Army settled into what was anticipated to be a temporary custodianship of the city until the newly appointed governor and his occupation forces arrived.

Save for Wasp forces, the streets of the city were dead for the first tenday after the fighting finally ended. The locals stayed inside, and hoped that the next door to be kicked in would not be theirs. Imperial soldiers were out on the streets, trying to search the entire city for Spider-kinden and suspected insurgents. There were some executions, but surprisingly few by Bergild’s reckoning. Still, everyone knew the Collegiates were soft, so they would probably never realize the disconcerting leniency with which they were being treated.

As the pilot understood it, the problem lay at the top. General Tynan, who had been expected to mastermind whipping the Empire’s new possession into line, was ill. Or some said not ill but just brooding. His officers and men waited for him to let them off the leash, but such orders as did come simply reined them in. Even now, there were probably rebellious students and fugitives hiding in the garrets and the cellars of the city, yet Tynan would not give the requisite orders. Bergild had heard that, after setting out the limits of the army’s conduct prior to the students’ revolt, he had given relatively few orders since. She had also heard he was practically at war with Captain Vrakir of the Red Watch. She had heard far too many things for them all to be true. Her pilots, with little enough to do, were getting restless and uneasy, well aware of how they were regarded by the regular army as something of a necessary freakshow.

So it was that she had been deputized by her followers to go and seek out her best source of information within the army: Major Oski.

The little engineer was remarkably difficult to track down, but she eventually found him sitting outside a taverna near the Gear Gate — as the Second now called the entrance to Collegium which it had forced. She recalled the place had been damaged in the fighting and then sacked by soldiers after the surrender, and certainly the taverna was no longer opening its doors in any meaningful sense. And yet here was Oski sitting on a folding stool outside it as though he was enjoying the weather, a bottle of wine beside him.

‘Captain,’ he remarked, as she approached.

‘You seem to have time on your hands,’ she noted.

‘I’m making vital Engineering Corps calculations,’ he told her, and took up the bottle with both hands to offer her some. ‘Anyway, last I heard, nothing needs fixing or blowing up, so here I am.’

‘Tynan doesn’t need you?’ she ventured.

‘Don’t know what the man needs, but it’s clearly not me,’ he confirmed. ‘That’s all, is it?’

‘We want to know what’s going on,’ she ventured.

‘Doesn’t everyone?’ As he spoke, she became aware of a faint murmur of voices from inside the taverna. She leant closer to eavesdrop, but abruptly Oski rose before her, wings flickering.

‘So let’s go and discuss,’ he said, a little too loudly. ‘I’ll wager I’ve got something for your pilots to chew on.’

‘Oski, what is going on?’ she asked, not moving.

‘Nothing, Captain. Engineering Corps business, therefore none of yours.’ He was right up close to her, forcing her to step back out of instinct, for fighting room.

‘Major-’

‘Bergild,’ he told her. ‘Never you mind. Not your concern. You know what your lads want to hear? About how Sarn kicked the arse of the Eighth Army all of a sudden. About how our pissing relief column, Collegiate governor and all, is now stuck out at Malkan’s Stand to keep the Ants pinned down. Meaning we’re not going anywhere, and Tynan’s acting governor — which you can be sure he’s just mad about.’

And that was what her people wanted to know about and, of course, if a superior officer said it was none of her business, then that was true. Yet something in his manner, some furtive guilt, had communicated itself to her, so as she stepped aside with him, she was already detailing one of her pilots to get a glass and keep a more distant eye on the derelict taverna.

She was not disappointed. A half-hour later, as she saw it through her man’s eyes, a unusual half-dozen crept out of the place, one by one, and headed off in separate ways. She recognized Ernain the Bee-kinden, and there was a Beetle there, and another couple of Flies, and all of them in uniform, though she suspected few were actually attached to the Second. The last one out was a Grasshopper-kinden, though, and that set the seal on her suspicions, because she was sure enough that the Engineers weren’t recruiting from the Inapt these days.

A conspiracy, she decided, but that thought she kept to herself.

Sartaea te Mosca

Nobody was entirely sure who had dared go to General Tynan and ask if they could resume lectures at the College. Had it been someone possessed of great courage, or with a keen eye as to the mood of the reclusive acting-governor? Or had it simply been one of those academics so wrapped up in their studies that the perils of the world beyond their books failed to register?

But General Tynan had taken a moment away from his introspection to give the proposal the nod, and a tenday later there were students cautiously creeping into the College’s halls once again.

Of course, things were not the same. How could they be? Even with Tynan himself practically a recluse, Collegium had a new administration. All the Consortium factors and clerks and bureaucrats that the Empire had sent to take over the running of Collegium had arrived on schedule, and the Imperial machine had long experience of taking conquered cities in hand with brutal efficiency. What had not arrived, of course, was the garrison that had been due to take the weight of Collegium off Tynan’s shoulders. Instead it — and the colonel originally awarded the governorship — had been diverted in order to counter any move by the Sarnesh, and to reinforce the surviving strength of the Eighth Army, and so Tynan had been denied his chance to march away towards Vek and leave this city he plainly detested behind him.

The classes were now smaller: this was te Mosca’s unavoidable observation as she moved through the College. There were missing faces — dead or fled — and everyone was quieter. Where before those students out of lectures had been raucous in their debate and merriment, now they went about their business with a soft step and whispered voice, because nobody wanted to be noticed any more.

Faced with Tynan’s unexpected acquiescence, the administration beneath him had done their best to stamp the entire venture with black and gold. Every class would include an observer, nominally there to allow the Imperials to understand their new subjects better. In some classes, indeed, this unwanted new addition was very attentive indeed, more so even than the students themselves. When the College Masters gathered together behind closed doors, those who taught artifice agonized at the fact that they must either cripple their own teaching, or pass Collegium’s mechanical knowledge piecemeal to the Engineering Corps. Teachers of social history had a worse time. One of them had simply disappeared early on, after forgetting herself during her lectures. The only sort of philosophy and political theory that the Empire would tolerate was its own.

Other observers seemed to be simple soldiers drafted in to make up the numbers, especially for such subjects as the Empire plainly had no use for and considered trivial. Their impact on classes was disconcertingly random — some simply knocked off for a drink at the start, or sat there and read, or just stared into space. Others took too much of an interest, such as the sergeant who had decided he was an art critic and used his sting to torch an entire class’s life-painting efforts.

One of the Living Sciences lectures on anatomy had supposedly been commandeered by a Wasp who displayed a knowledge of the human body, its breaking points and tolerances, far in excess of the lecturer himself.

But Sartaea te Mosca, Associate Master and teacher of Inapt studies, was lucky, and she had pushed that luck a very long way indeed. After all, she was teaching a subject that the Wasp-kinden could not understand and did not care about. So far, her observer had been a Wasp soldier who had plainly been bored to tears by her ramblings, so usually just fell asleep.

And, all the while, she and her students spoke treachery. They spoke in the language of the Moths, who used the same words as everyone else but employed them very differently. They conferred about events within Collegium as though they were dry old histories, nicknamed living men and women with the monikers of ancient heroes. At first her class had been the usual handful of awkward Inapt and clueless Apt, but by now she was ‘teaching’ to a score of the city’s finest, who came and mastered the conventions and the subterfuge they employed because nowhere else could they talk freely under the noses of their oppressors.

Sartaea te Mosca had never dreamt that her insignificant little class might ever provide so much of a service to the world.

She stepped into her classroom now — still the same cramped, high-ceilinged room as before, although it was getting difficult to fit everybody in these days — and she halted.

The expected bored Wasp soldier was not there. Instead, she faced a lean Moth-kinden man in grey robes, who looked at her with disdain.

‘You are the lecturer in “Inapt studies”, called te Mosca?’ he inquired.

‘Yes, that’s me.’ Sartaea had been trained by Moths, accepted into their halls because she had some magical talent, and yet never truly made welcome because that talent was not great. This man’s arch and penetrating scrutiny brought those cold and unhappy days back to her with a vengeance. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I have been sent to Collegium from Tharn to assist our allies in the Empire with matters that Wasps themselves might not quite comprehend,’ he said, pointedly offering her no name. ‘I will be sitting in on your teaching, although what could possibly pass for true learning in a den of the Apt such as this eludes me. Perhaps you will surprise me. Perhaps your students are all budding magicians. We shall see.’ His blank, white eyes seemed to see into every corner of her. ‘I look forward to your words, te Mosca. And, rest assured, I shall be reporting to the administration on your fitness to teach.’

After her students had filed in, she stood before them, and began stammering her way through an old lecture, some genuine tangled Moth-kinden philosophy that most of those assembled there would never be able to grasp. Every time the Moth coughed, or shuffled, or just looked at her in a certain way, she trailed off into silence.

The day after that, she cancelled her classes.

General Roder

It could have been worse.

For Roder himself it almost certainly would become worse. The Eighth had been facing nothing short of extinction when the Sarnesh had barrelled in to catch his forces between themselves and the Mantis-kinden. And it had been all the Mantis-kinden, as far as he could work out, the Eighth’s mere presence having apparently mended a rift that had stood between Etheryon and Nethyon for longer than histories recorded.

The defences that his men had put in place had slowed the Sarnesh charge and, had the Wasps been able to concentrate their efforts, then Roder was confident that the Ants would have been scythed down in their ranks and thrown back, just as they had been before Malkan’s Stand. By that point, though, there had been several hundred Mantis-kinden running rampant behind the lines — and they were swift and deadly, able to fly or just leap over any trenches or barriers the Wasps had put up. They had the same grasp of tactics that Roder had marked in their clashes with the Eighth before the supposed alliance with the Nethyen — making effective use of their archers to bedevil the Wasp Light Airborne, continually disrupting any attempt to contain or flank them.

Had it been just the Mantids, or just the Sarnesh. . but the two of them together had squeezed and squeezed until the basic ability of the Eighth to coordinate and function as an army had come apart at the seams, individual officers and detachments being swamped and destroyed, or falling back without orders.

Even then, Roder had done his best, sending out messengers by the minute to turn a threatened rout into a halfway disciplined retreat. He had saved as much as he could of his men. He had pulled the Sentinels back, and even salvaged some of the lighter artillery pieces.

He had been forced to abandon the greatshotters, however, those marvels of Iron Glove Cartel artifice, and now the Sarnesh engineers would be all over them. He had thus given one of the Empire’s greatest weapons into the hands of the enemy. At least General Tynan, when he had been forced back from Collegium that first time, had possessed the decency to have his artillery destroyed by aerial bombardment.

He wondered where the Empress was now. If she was dead, then he might yet get to live, though hardly in glory. Did this new Mantis business mean her own insane errand into the forest had been fatal for her? Was the Empire even now rudderless?

The Eighth had pulled back south-east, away from the forest, away from Sarn. Subsequent scouting suggested that his forces had, against all odds, inflicted sufficient damage on the Sarnesh that the Ants were leery of immediately renewing hostilities, and the Mantids had not ventured far beyond their forest borders. Probably the two kinden were cautiously feeling out just where they stood with each other.

He had dutifully sent word to Capitas that he had failed, and asking for fresh orders. The temptation to falsify his report had been strong, but he suspected that the Rekef would have people amongst his officers who would ensure the truth was told back home, and hence honesty became perforce the best policy.

Yesterday those orders had arrived. The Empress’s personal seal was missing, but the word was brought by one of those Red Watch types, stating as always how he was the Empress’s own mouth. There was no suggestion that the Empress had gone missing, and Roder sensed that to ask the question would be even more hazardous than losing a battle to the Sarnesh.

From a lack of contrary word, he could only assume that he was still in command, and still in the war.

That night he had slept better than he had for a tenday, only to be woken before dawn by a commotion that he knew could mean only one thing. The Sarnesh were attacking. They had fooled his sentries and scouts somehow. He could hear shouts and screams already within the camp.

There was no time for armour, but he grabbed his sword from its scabbard and stumbled out into the grey half-light, demanding reports.

For a moment he could only see his own men rushing about, hear the crackle of stingshot, panicking cries from all around. He had no sense of which direction the attack was coming from.

Then he saw a man fall ten yards away, just tripping on nothing, then a moment later he had half-vanished, the ground beneath him caving in, tents nearby collapsing as their guy ropes flew free. Roder gaped, any words dying in his mouth, trying to understand what he was seeing.

Another soldier rushed forwards to help the stricken man, but something lashed out at him, a lithe, whip-like strike from the pit, and the rescuer fell back and then collapsed, convulsing and screaming.

Roder found his feet taking him nearer, despite a horrible atavistic fear that had sprung up in him. He had to know; he had to see.

The earth was falling away and there was a tunnel there, and surely this meant the Sarnesh had found some new way to employ their ant minions. . or they had some new machine, or. .

A knot of things was writhing within, long and twisted, segmented, and bristling with legs. Some raised their heads as he approached, barely more than two whipping antennae and a pair of curved, poisonous claws.

The world was full of venomous creatures, of course. There were spiders and scorpions aplenty, and many of them pressed into service as riding or draught animals, guards and even pets. There was one beast that no one had tamed, however, and those were killed on sight as often as not. There were stories and legends regarding them that the Apt scholars scoffed at, and that the Hornet-kinden told one another about their campfires in their superstitious, credulous way. Those stories were all running through Roder’s mind right then, watching this writhing mass disentangle and uncoil itself. And, beyond them, in the pit. .

He saw them, the kinden, as they emerged from the earth in a rapid column, one after another moving with a sinuous coordination, each practically on the heels of the one before. They were like no people he had ever seen, and a dreadful similarity occupied all their faces, enough to make an Ant shudder.

For all their discipline, they made a weirdly primitive show. They had armour of chitin plates and short blades and some were wielding slings, not even a crossbow amongst them. A laughable threat, said those rational parts of Roder’s mind that were currently in the minority.

He saw his soldiers reacting, and most of them held snap-bows — and surely these soil-dwellers wouldn’t even know what a snapbow was.

And yet his men were not shooting. Most stood there and held their snapbows as though they had never seen them before, jabbing them at the enemy as though they knew the devices were weapons, but not what to do with them. Others were already resorting to their stings, but by then the subterranean warriors were upon them, and there were more crawling from the earth all around, snaking lines of them issuing from tents or just rising from the dusty ground, along with their murderous beasts.

Someone ran past Roder, one of the Bee-kinden that drove the Sentinels, and the general grabbed for the man’s shoulder, spinning him round. ‘Get in your machine!’ he demanded, for surely those killer automotives would serve to scatter these attackers.

But the man just stared at Roder as though some part of his mind had been excised. ‘My. .?’ he mouthed. ‘Machine. .?’

And Roder stared at him and realized that he now had no idea of what he himself meant. He and the Bee-kinden gaped at one another, while all around them the remnants of the Eighth Army disintegrated.

Raullo Mummers

And life in Collegium settled and found its new level. The Wasps had turned from a threat to a terror to a fact that must be lived with.

There were arrests still. A month after the final quashing of the student insurgency they were no longer common, but not a tenday went by without word of someone’s broken door found hanging open, someone vanishing into the Imperial administration district that had been established around the Gear Gate. Some few were next seen on the crossed pikes, others were not seen again at all. Some were released again, and it was a different kind of horror to see their family and colleagues and acquaintances react to them: What did you tell them, that they let you go?

Raullo Mummers had expected to be arrested before this, because he had been in the College library building, because he had been part of the crowd that had lynched Helmess Broiler, simply because he had been there.

Two tendays later, he had finally come to terms with the fact that nobody cared. Nobody had been making a list of names back then, and in any event he had not been on the walls with a snapbow. Carrying a stretcher had been the greatest blow he had struck for the freedom of Collegium, and even that experience had terrified him close to death.

The only tangible upshot of his ineffectual, inebriate presence during the fighting had been this room he now occupied, situated over a taverna: a low-ceilinged garret a fraction of the size of his old studio, which had burned down during the bombing of the city. The taverner had a daughter, a student who had played a rather more active part in the insurgency, and she had spoken up for him. Otherwise, Raullo would have found himself without even a roof over his head.

His landlord’s tolerance was a limited resource, though, just like any commodity in Collegium right now. Raullo knew that the man would come muttering for rent soon enough. There were plenty of other dispossessed in the city, and most of them better able to pay their way than an artist who no longer painted.

He had not put brush to canvas since his studio burned, save that one crude sketch for Eujen’s doomed pamphlet. His life had been contained there, in the sum accumulation of his sketches, roughs and drafts curling and cindering from the walls in the wake of the incendiary. His entire career had burned, quite separate from this lumpen body of his that Eujen had dragged from the building. Apart from that, when he reached into himself for that piece of him from which inspiration grew, he found only a cracked, charred void.

Last night, though, he had dreamt: the first dream he could recall since the fires. He had woken shouting, fighting against the thin blanket, seeing it all ablaze, his careful linework, his life studies, his friends.

He had dreamt of Gerethwy and Averic, of Straessa and Eujen. But his dreams had given them all over to the flames. He had abandoned them there and fled the building, only to find the city outside roasting on the same pyre.

Now he stood with a canvas before him, in the poor light of the garret room, holding a brush in his hand. He had begged these meagre materials, drained the city of any residual goodwill it might hold for him, because there was a new flame lit in that burnt-out core of him — and it hurt, and it seared him, and he had to get it out.

He took some black paint up on his brush and set to work.

What he made of the canvas was not art, at least not any art that he recognized. Collegiate patrons had always known what they liked: imitate life, capture the truth of a likeness or a landscape, and the plaudits would follow. Everyone knew that.

What Raullo created that day was something even he would barely own to. It was a horror of jagged shapes, the black of shadow, the red of leaping flames, twisted faces merging half into fallen walls, and the press of rushing human forms. Not what life looked like, but how it felt.

When it was done, he felt that he had vomited something up, purged himself painfully of a corruption that would only well up again in time.

He took it down to show the landlord, and the man and his daughter both stared at it for a long time.

‘I can’t look at it,’ his landlord admitted at last, still staring. ‘What is it?’

Raullo could only shrug.

‘Take it away,’ the man insisted, but he stopped Raullo when the artist tried to leave. ‘Hammer and tongs, what have you done?’

He hung it up in the taverna’s taproom two days later. He claimed he could not stop thinking about it. He even bought Raullo more canvas, without being asked.

Two days later the landlord knocked at the door of the garret. ‘Mummers, come out. There’s someone here.’ His voice sounded strained.

Raullo put his head round the door blearily — late rising and wine were two habits, at least, that had survived the ending of the war. ‘What is it?’

‘Someone wants to see you.’ There was a warning note in the taverner’s tone. ‘He wants to buy your painting.’

The taproom was silent, when Raullo descended. Those few drinkers still present would not look at him.

‘You are the artist?’ The man at the bar had been staring at his painting, but now he turned. The captain’s rank badge on his uniform flashed as it caught the sun.

‘Yes, sir,’ Raullo breathed raggedly. Everyone knew the correct way to address Wasps these days.

‘How much?’ the Wasp asked him. And Raullo was about to refuse to sell, or say something even more rash, but he looked the man in the face and saw what he had missed the first time: that gaunt, hollow expression about the eyes. Here was a man, of no matter what kinden, who had seen enough of what the artist had seen to understand.

Raullo named a sum.

Eujen Leadswell

When he awoke, there was a hand in his that he knew.

She screamed when he squeezed it, for all that it was a faint and pitiful motion, and was across the room from him, shaking and choking, staring at him as though. .

As though I’ve come back from the dead.

The eyepatch suits her. Such a random thought, at such a moment.

Later on she would tell him everything: how they were now in the Sarnesh Foreigners’ Quarter, which was thronging with Collegiate expatriates and Mynan exiles, all agitating to take back their own and each other’s cities; how Castre Gorenn was now calling herself the Collegiate Retaliatory Army, and she wasn’t the only one. She would tell him how the Mantids of the forest — the Netheryon it was now — had suffered some kind of radical change of policy, and were now negotiating with the Sarnesh high command.

She would explain how the Sarnesh had chased off the Imperial Eighth, but got a bloody nose in the bargain, and how a new force of Wasps appearing from Helleron had led to a complex chess game between the Ants and the Empire which neither side was ready to bring to an endgame, especially now that fighting had erupted between the Wasps and the Spiders down along the Silk Road. Seldis was ablaze, they said.

And about the raids, of course: villages not far from Sarn that had been found empty, with not a witness, not a body, only disturbed earth — so that people were talking about some terrible new Imperial weapon, save that some scouts had found Wasp camps similarly deserted.

And, at last, she would tell him that he had been lost to the world for almost three tendays, while the Instar fought against the injury within him, although she would never tell him how she had despaired, back in Collegium, and had abandoned him. And she would tell him of Averic, and Gerethwy, and all their other friends who had not left Collegium. And she would tell him that Stenwold Maker himself was believed dead, though nobody would admit to having seen a corpse. There would come a time for all these revelations.

But, for now. .

‘Hello, the Antspider.’ His voice sounded faint in his own ears.

‘Hello, Chief Officer Eujen.’ Her smile seemed the most fragile thing he had ever seen, himself included. ‘Where the pits have you been, eh?’

The Others

Across the Lowlands and the Empire and beyond, cracks had begun to show.

Tiny fissures, hairline fractures in stone, like the unexpected gap that those students had crossed to escape the doomed College. But they were deep. Look down into that sliver of abyss, and there might be distant lights, movement.

Sometimes the cracks were more than that, chasms rupturing wide into caves, the earth abruptly hollow. . and then things came out.

They took the living and the dead. They left no bodies. They cared nothing for Empire or Lowlands, Apt or Inapt.

They had been away a long time, but they had not forgotten.