War Master's Gate

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  A Mantis woman approached Maure, and Thalric and Amnon were both instantly on edge once more, but Tynisa put a hand up to calm them. What was offered was not sharp steel, but a cup.

  Then the Mantis singers started up again, their song subtly different but still wordless, and something invisible that was all around them had been inverted like a coat, so that the strangers – the trespassers – were somehow in now, their passage bought by Maure’s song, or by Tynisa’s badge, or something.

  When the chitin cup came to Tynisa, she drank deeply, and knew it for mead mixed with blood and bitter herbs – something distantly akin to the draught they had offered her when she earned her Weaponsmaster’s brooch. It did not come to the two Apt men, and she sensed that was for the best. She could already feel her awareness shifting – in some ways sharpening, in others blurring – but who knew how Thalric and Amnon might take that? She glanced back towards them, seeing that the Wasp was plainly ill at ease, still suspecting a trap, a betrayal. But why not, for that is the meat he has served others with for so long. Now he is slower to trust than the Nethyen themselves. Amnon had sat down before the fire, though, and she saw tears glinting on his cheeks. Maure’s song had included them all in this wake, and so it had included their dead also. Amnon stared into the flames and mourned his lost Praeda, as perhaps he had never been able to, before now.

  And I? She had done her mourning back in the Commonweal. No weeping left for her now. The lack of it felt hollow within her, and worse was that she shared her dry eyes with Thalric. If he ever had any tears, they were burned out of him long before we first met.

  Then the Wasp had twitched back, a movement sharp enough for half the Mantids near him to be instantly on their guard. His cry was lost amid the song but Tynisa read it on his lips.

  ‘Che!’

  Twenty-Three

  ‘Do you see it?’ Bergild demanded, the first words spoken in some time. Oski and Ernain, cramped together in a space not intended for two, had been bearing their discomfort stoically as the pilot followed the Red Watch machine towards wherever it was that they were going. Now, apparently, they had arrived.

  Oski tried to crane past Ernain’s shoulder to look down the length of the crawlspace leading to the cockpit, but could make out nothing, and said so loudly.

  ‘I’ll fly past,’ Bergild called back. ‘Get the side hatch open.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘You’ve both got your wings, haven’t you? Just open the cursed thing. You’re going to want to see this!’

  ‘Don’t be so pissing cryptic, woman,’ the Fly snapped, but Ernain was already fumbling at the catch, bracing himself against the walls to resist the sudden rush of wind trying to drag them both out.

  For a moment Oski could see nothing but sky – then Bergild banked, and something incredible slid into view.

  It was an airship, and the base model was one he knew well. This was a big cargo-hauler that had already seen service for twenty years and more, not unlike the vessels that were now attempting to keep the Second supplied. When the original had been constructed, its designers had cared for little save storage space and not having it fall out of the air: certainly a more innocent age of warfare.

  Some fool had been busy with this one, though. The broad and rounded boat-like hull had been attacked savagely, and now there were rows and rows of circular hatches studding the vessel’s exterior so densely that the entire ship looked as though it had been hobnailed. Bergild let their craft drift closer, and Oski had a fine view of them, hundreds of sealed ports each perhaps three feet across. The effect was ugly and warlike and dangerous. And useless.

  ‘Oh, balls,’ the Fly engineer cursed. ‘Oh, piss on it. General Tynan’s going to have a fit.’

  ‘It’s a city-breaker, it must be.’ Bergild had plainly been thinking along the same lines. ‘Bomb-chutes . . . or modified leadshotters, maybe. You could pulverize whole districts with the thing.’

  ‘If you got it to fly over them,’ said Oski in a horrified whisper. ‘Oh, sod me, some bright spark’s spent fifty thousand in gold solving the wrong problem!’

  ‘One look at that thing and the Collegiate fliers’ll be all over it. Or they’ll be above it, rather, shredding the airbag and loosing bombs,’ the pilot agreed. ‘I don’t see any of those hatches pointing up, after all. And there’s no way my people can protect this thing. It’s huge, and the Collegiates’ll see it just like we do. Nothing we can do will pull them off it until they’ve dropped the cursed thing right in Tynan’s lap.’

  ‘The stupid bastards,’ Oski swore. ‘Is that . . . Where’s our boy gone? Is that his craft landed on their top deck there?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Well we better go down after him, and see if someone can tell us just what the hell they’re playing at.’

  Landing on the gondola of an airship was tricky, but nothing to tax Bergild’s skills, and she soon had them down neatly, facing the Red Watch Farsphex in a somewhat confrontational way. The three of them extricated themselves from their vessel and took a moment to look about the deck.

  Oski noted three distinct divisions of crew, none of which brought him much joy. There were a half-dozen Beetle-kinden who looked like Consortium aviators, men more used to cargo runs than any sort of fighting. Overseeing them were a trio of Wasps with Red Watch badges, all of whom were regarding the newcomers coldly. Lastly, Captain Nistic had gone to join a gang of men who looked every bit as wild as he did. Their gaze was scarcely more friendly than that of the Red Watch men, and the amused comments they muttered to one another were plainly at the expense of their visitors.

  Oski found the other two instinctively drawing close to him, because this flying monstrosity did not seem like a healthy place to be. Still, I’m the chief of Engineers for the Second Army and I don’t care how big a secret this idiocy is supposed to be. I’m betting they can’t afford to just do away with me. He was not a gambling man by nature, but it was time to start measuring rank badges with these men, and to make them forget that he was only half their size.

  ‘Who’s in charge here?’ he demanded.

  Nistic took a few steps forward, looking down at the Fly-kinden as though he was some species of prey not usually worth the hunting, but it was the Red Watch lieutenant who spoke.

  ‘Your general has forced us to allow your presence here, Major, but this is a classified matter. All you need to do is to go back and report to him that help is on its way.’

  ‘Help?’ demanded Oski. ‘Lieutenant, this is . . . what is this? It’s a bad joke. The Second has been attacked for tendays now, day in, day out, by a foe with superior air power, and one which’ll make short work of our entire army once a siege begins. We’ve been promised some means of defending ourselves, of taking back the air!’

  ‘And you shall have it, Major,’ the lieutenant told him grandly. ‘Tell your general so.’

  Oski glanced up at his companions, feeling as if he and the Red Watch man were simply having two quite separate conversations. ‘I’m headed below decks,’ he announced. ‘I’m going to see how far this stupidity goes.’

  ‘I’ll show you myself, Major,’ the lieutenant offered, with mocking smile. ‘Please follow me, sir.’

  ‘You keep your stinging hands ready,’ Oski murmured back to Bergild. ‘This reeks. First sign that it’s a set-up, we’re out of the nearest bomb-hatch, or whatever they are, and we’ll take our chances.’

  ‘My flier—’

  ‘Your life, Captain. You can’t requisition a new one of those from stores.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Under Nistic’s barbed gaze, they descended into the interior of the vessel, which turned out to be minute.

  The entire innards had been reworked. Oski knew what he had expected from this pattern of vessel, but he found almost none of it. It was as though the interior of a far smaller gondola had been transplanted inside, offering narrow corridors and cabins, a galley and the engine room, all cramped enough to make a Fly-k
inden feel at home. And no windows, save for portholes at the very rear, where the engines were. Everything else was as closed in as a cave.

  ‘How do we get to the bomb deck?’ Oski demanded, once they had traversed the entire little warren twice.

  ‘There is no bomb deck,’ the lieutenant told him smoothly. ‘Have you seen enough, sir?’

  ‘Enough is just what I haven’t seen,’ Oski insisted. ‘There must be a way. How do we get the other side of this?’ And he banged on the curve of the wall.

  The gesture had just been to make a point: he had not expected anything to come of it. A moment after his small fist thudded against the wood, though, there was a sound. It froze them in their tracks, a deep rumble growling out from behind the wall, like the muted roar of some manner of engine which Oski had never encountered before. There was something about the pitch of sound, too – something that affected him at a deep and primal level. It spoke only one word to him: fear. Abruptly he was sweating in those claustrophobic quarters – afraid without understanding why – as that deep throbbing sound built and built . . .

  And it multiplied. All around them, through that false wall, they heard a legion of voices, soft at first, but rising to an air-trembling thunder that shook the very substance of the ship.

  Not leadshots, not bombs . . . Oski tried to think. Machines? Some manner of machines designed to fight orthopters? His head swam with half-formed ideas. Can you make a flying machine without a pilot? Can they do that with ratiocinators, now? Or is the sound itself the weapon? Will this drive them mad, or shake their machines apart? What have we created here? He found he did not know. His own trade had outstripped him.

  By then he had his hands clamped to his ears, because the sound was virtually shaking the very air around them. But then someone was shaking his shoulder hard enough almost to batter him against the wall.

  Ernain: he saw Ernain. The Bee-kinden looked ashen, his eyes as wide with fear as Oski had ever seen on any man – not just the instinctive reaction which this resonating pitch had struck in all of them, but more. Ernain plainly knew what was going on, and it terrified him beyond all reason.

  Oski could see his mouth working and, although the words went unheard, he read: ‘We have to get out of here! Now!’

  Moments later the three of them were stumbling out on deck again, that terrible sound following them – and, at its heart, the laughter of the Red Watch lieutenant.

  When the Second Army was approaching along the sea road, where its path curved south about the bay on its final leg to Collegium, it met the Vekken.

  Repeated air attack meant that the army was still scattered, but Tynan had men watching out for a sortie from the city. The Ant-kinden had been in place for days, though, concealing themselves in dugouts and holes and waiting with the silent patience of their kind, unsuspected until it was too late.

  They let the airborne scouts pass over them, each hiding Ant almost blind, but together combining hundreds of little scraps and pinholes of sight to put together a picture of the world outside. When the main body of the Wasp force got close, the entire Vekken force, a good eight hundred Ant-kinden soldiers, attacked as one, springing out with crossbows and Collegiate snapbows and butchering every Wasp within reach.

  The loose marching order of the Second Army meant that the casualties were lighter than might have been expected, but the Wasps could not bring their forces together to bottle up the Ants, not in the time they had. Though the Light Airborne did their best, they took heavy losses from the Vekken marksmanship, and were unable to contain the more heavily armoured Ants on the ground. Wasp orders were reaching parts of the Second Army piecemeal, and for over an hour this solid block of Ants effectively held off an army many times its own size.

  By then someone had sent for the Sentinels, and the Vekken were well enough briefed to know that they had outstayed their welcome. Their formation disintegrated, spreading out into a far-flung net of Ants more efficiently than the Wasps had managed, but grouping in squads of twenty and fifty when threatened. They made short work of the miles to Collegium, and made the vanguard of the pursuing Light Airborne regret their diligence. Ant casualties totalled just under one hundred.

  To the Beetle-kinden this was an education. Stenwold stood on the walls with the Vekken commander, Termes, knowing that two thoughts would dominate every Collegiate mind at that moment. Firstly, Isn’t it a good thing that the Vekken are on our side just now? and secondly, When did they learn to do that? It seemed that defeat at the hands of mere Beetles could spur even the most insular of Ants to innovate.

  The Second was bloodied. The Second was slowed. The army was named ‘the Gears’, though, and it ground on, visible from the walls, marching south towards the great maze of earthworks that defended the city from its enemies.

  Everything we have thrown at them – burning their orthopters over the city, all those air assaults, destroying their supply airships, the Felyen, the Vekken, and yet here they are.

  Madagnus of the Coldstone Company had readied the wall artillery – the new magnetic bows with a range to match the greatshotters of the Empire – save that the Empire seemed not to have any left. The Collegiate attacks had devastated the enemy siege engines, and those losses did not seem to have been replaced. Stenwold was left to scan his telescope over the arriving enemy and think, What do they know that we do not? Because, if I were in the position I see them in, I would not have come. Or is that because I am a Beetle, and sane, and these Wasps are so mad for battle they would throw themselves into a fire for it? Are they worse even than the Mantids?

  He heard Madagnus make a disgusted sound nearby, and glanced up. The cadaverous Ant had his own glass out and trained on the enemy.

  ‘Far enough away that we’d fall short, by my calculation,’ the man declared. ‘I was hoping to give them a bit of fun, after they’d set camp.’

  ‘And their own range?’ Stenwold called over to him.

  ‘They were a good two hundred yards closer when they set up their artillery last time,’ Madagnus told him. ‘They were hurrying, back then, so we reckoned they’d put the shotters at their extreme range – which is comparable to ours. If they do manage to hit us from right out there, though . . .?’ He shrugged. ‘Then the aviators get to take them. Either way, anything as big and stationary as those artillery pieces of theirs isn’t going to last long.’

  ‘Scouts!’ someone called, and Stenwold watched a haze of Light Airborne rising up from the Second Army, which was still deployed in a somewhat dispersed formation. A scattering of flying Wasps darted through the air – too few for an assault – and spent twenty minutes overflying the earthworks, but none of them getting close enough to the walls to become a target. As they returned home, Stenwold fancied they had something of a downtrodden air.

  ‘We going out there to poke them?’ Madagnus asked.

  ‘You’re keen?’

  ‘Not me. Give me walls and artillery any day.’

  Stenwold nodded. ‘Eminently sensible. We’ve no plans for a serious sortie, now that the Vekken are back. The Stormreaders will keep on at them, though.’

  ‘Scouts!’ someone called out again, and then, ‘Just the one!’

  Stenwold frowned quartering the sky to try and find the errant enemy but, before he did, the original spotter had added, ‘Carrying a flag – black and gold.’

  ‘Going to stick it on the College and then tell us we’re conquered?’ Madagnus suggested.

  ‘They want to talk.’

  ‘Don’t blame them. I don’t see they’ve got any other way in but sweet-talking.’

  ‘Keep the artillery in readiness. It could just as easily be a trick,’ Stenwold warned the Ant. ‘Someone bring the messenger to me! I want to hear this.’

  Collegium’s full Assembly had not been brought together in any one place since the start of hostilities, Stenwold recalled. Certainly not since Imperial bombs had destroyed much of the Amphiophos, formerly the heart of government in the Beetle city.r />
  They had returned to old haunts, though, despite the devastation. Jodry Drillen had summoned them, and here they were, at least two-thirds of the Assemblers who had been present there to hear the declaration of war. This part of the ruin was partially cleared, creating an uneven floor to speak from, and the gathered Masters of the College and merchant magnates, the townsmen and gownsmen of Collegium, now sat on broken stone and tumbled walls, finding a place for themselves wherever the devastation allowed it. It was a melancholy sight.

  Jodry stood before them, a great, sagging hulk of a man, his formal robes creased and stained, having been stored uncleaned by a man who had not thought to need them, and whose servants had mostly gone to serve their city instead.

  ‘You have heard,’ he addressed them. Without walls, his voice was a lost thing denied its customary authority. ‘I have given you the best picture I can of our circumstances.’ Indeed he had already trotted before them a whole string of experts to report on the city’s fortunes. Madagnus had discoursed on the wall engines, barely a slur to his words. Elder Padstock had reported, in a smart military manner, on the troops of the Merchant Companies. Willem Reader had spoken of Collegium’s air strength and successes. There had been others, too: the city’s stores, its walls, the latest noncommittal word from Sarn. Stenwold gazed all about him at faces he had not seen for some time. They looked worn: older and more haggard, testimony to sleepless nights and days of unaccustomed strain and labour.

  ‘They have offered to meet with a delegation from the city,’ Jodry explained. ‘You’ll have heard that, and I’ll call for a vote in a moment. I don’t honestly imagine we’ll refuse, though. Collegiate citizens not fond of the sounds of their own voices? Of course we’ll talk. The reason we’re here, after all this time, is to do a little cribbing and prepare some answers ahead of the moment. There aren’t many topics likely to come up, after all. We can second-guess most of them.’

  Stenwold let him talk, eyes still moving from face to face. Some met his gaze with a nod or a wan smile, while others avoided it, or simply did not look at him at all.