War Master's Gate

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather die for something?’ Tomasso asked him.

  Over the years, Ant tacticians had devoted much time to the unfolding of an army, the perfect elegance of thousands of soldiers moving as one, representing the highest expression of Ant-kinden culture.

  So it was that the Sarnesh came in sight of the Imperial Eighth Army towards evening, and began ordering themselves by pitching a cursory camp from which they could mobilize within moments, assembling their artillery, arranging themselves in a widespread formation in case the Empire decided to bring its greatshotters to bear. It was a sight to make an Ant poet weep.

  Tactician Milus was unmoved. The purest expression of the Ant way of life meant nothing to him unless he won.

  It was entirely possible that the Wasps would have a go at any moment with their superior artillery – the Sarnesh were well within range. A lot depended on whether the Wasps wanted to fight now at twilight, when nobody was at their best but when the Ant-kinden’s superior discipline and linked minds would add up to a significant advantage, or whether they would wait until morning. It was a decision Milus was not happy leaving in the hands of the enemy, but he himself did not want to try an immediate attack. Therefore it would be the decision of General Roder instead.

  Lissart had known something about Roder, at least, and he would question her again after he retired to his tent. He had ordered her brought along for a number of reasons: she could advise on anything unexpected the Empire might do, or she could even be used as a bargaining counter, perhaps. In the hidden darkness of Milus’s mind, where his fellows were not allowed, there was also the reason that she made him feel better: a tame Imperial agent he could bully and intimidate, and yet a woman who possessed a quick, biting conversation that none of his kin was likely to reward him with. And also expendable – useful but ultimately expendable. What more could a man ask for?

  His commanders were reporting in, one by one, confirming their readiness, their part within the plan – whether that plan called for a battle now or tomorrow. Milus himself had obsessively pored over the reports of the first clash between his people and the Eighth at the siege of Malkan’s Folly. There the Wasps had been securely dug in, and the Ants had tried their traditional frontal assault against that well-defended position. Here, however, the Eighth had been marching to meet them, so would have only the most cursory fortifications. Here also, the Ants were ready to disperse over an enormous area and come at the Wasps from all sides, giving no target for the Wasps to mass their superior artifice against . . . well, perhaps one target, but that was all part of the plan. Attacking in open order like that would be suicide for any other kinden and, because he was not so trapped in the usual thinking of his kinden, Milus was still concerned about the rush of casualties that his men would suffer when they did form up in the moments before they struck. Even with perfectly linked minds, it was a formidable piece of manoeuvring to get right, and there would be an uncomfortably long period when the Ants were still not quite together, and yet were packed close enough for the Wasps to unleash everything they had.

  But that was the plan, and he had no better one. If he was lucky, his distraction would draw a lot of Imperial attention and buy his soldiers a little more time, saving a few lives. Sarnesh lives, of course.

  There was one section of his army that would not be attacking in open order – because it lacked the hard discipline required for such niceties. They would go marching in shoulder to shoulder – or as close to that as non-Ants could ever manage. They would form the centre of Milus’s attack. If he could have painted targets on them, he would have done so.

  Tell me about Roder, he had encouraged Lissart. And, with a little encouragement, she had. Was he a clever man? She wouldn’t say clever, precisely. Not a stupid man and nobody’s fool. He was a solid planner of battles but not a man to rely on untested ingenuity. That had proved to be a strength when he had been fighting the Spiders at Seldis. It was a fool’s game to try and out-weave Spider-kinden, after all – your clever plans would turn out to be part of their even more devious ones. Instead, he had trusted to the known capabilities of his troops and his armaments, and beaten them on the field deftly and brutally, before moving to invest their city. He had left precious little room for all their vaunted plots and trickery.

  Milus could predict, therefore, that Roder would understand exactly how the Ants intended to come at him. And yet, at the same time, a tempting target for the Wasp artillery would not go unheeded, for even if those close-grouped soldiers were not Sarnesh, they were still a threat. All those Mynans, all that rabble from Princep Salma, they would still kill Wasps if they got close to them. Roder could not ignore them, therefore.

  That they would die in their droves did not concern Milus. It was a battle, after all, and non-Sarnesh casualties did not overly worry him.

  And there was one more thing he had learned from Lissart. Roder carried a grudge born from a narrowly failed assassination attempt outside Seldis.

  Every Spider-kinden that Princep had vomited up for military service – and there were quite a few of them – would be positioned front and centre in that nice, tempting block of miscellaneous infantry. Oh, probably Roder was too much the professional to let that sway him, but Milus lost nothing by offering such a bait.

  By nightfall it appeared that Roder would be spending the hours of darkness digging in, putting up what makeshift fortifications he could. The scouts of both sides would have a busy night of it, with Fly-kinden trying to dodge each other’s attention to get a good look at the enemy. The entire Sarnesh force would be sleeping in its armour, ready to wake at a moment’s notice, but by then Milus reckoned he had the measure of his opponent. He told his commanders to move the artillery three hours before dawn, and to expect the Wasp engines to start pounding them an hour after that.

  History in the making, Milus knew. On such decisions rests the fate of Sarn and, by extension, all the Lowlands.

  It was a shame – a predictable shame – that Collegium had not been able to hold out, but, if tomorrow’s battle gave him the opportunity, he would enjoy the gratitude on the Collegiates’ faces when he came to their aid. Sarn had been following the Beetle lead meekly for far too long. It was now about time that they renegotiated the details of their partnership.

  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 ca
me 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,’ Euj
en 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.’