War Master's Gate

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  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 Che
erwell. ‘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.

  Forty-One

  ‘There are two hundred and seventeen of them, sir. The rest are either dead or scattered throughout the city, hiding or holding out.’

  ‘And her?’ No need for General Tynan to qualify that, for he had made his liaisons no secret. Everyone in the Second Army knew whose company their general had sought out on the road to Collegium.

  ‘Not yet, sir. She evades us, still.’ The watch officer was standing with his back to the prisoners, all two hundred and seventeen of them. Many were wounded, and all were bound firmly and on their knees, out here under Collegium’s morning sky in some square boasting the jagged stonework and broken metal of what had once been a fountain before the bombs fell.

  To Tynan’s eyes, how unsuited they looked to be soldiers! All so young and so delicate, handsome where their wounds hadn’t marred them and proud still, despite it all. Even when defeated. Even when captured and lined up for execution.

  ‘General.’ It was Vrakir’s voice, which Tynan had begun to loathe.

  These men and women – yes, women! – had recently fought alongside his own. Spider sailors had brought his army food after the Collegiate pilots had made his airships their playthings. Spider troops had taken the brunt of the Felyal when they attacked, exposing themselves to the blades of their greatest enemies to give their Wasp allies time to regroup. They had stormed the wall using only their climbing Art. Their spilled blood had brought him here, as much as that of his own soldiers.

  ‘General, it seems appropriate that a sufficiently public spectacle be made of this,’ Vrakir murmured. ‘Crossed pikes along the walls, perhaps. After all, they betrayed the Empress, did they not?’

  ‘Did they?’ Tynan stared at him, stony-faced.

  ‘Do you doubt it?’ The Red Watch officer looked unmoved.

  If Cherten were here, he would agree with him. He would tell me to do the right thing, the Imperial thing. But Cherten had got himself killed by a student, somehow, in an unforgivable lapse of discipline. I had not thought the time would come when I would lament the lack of Colonel Cherten, but I would he were here to do this business instead of me.

  ‘They are soldiers,’ Tynan stated. ‘We owe it to them to give them a soldier’s death.’

  ‘A traitor’s death, General—’ Vrakir stated, moving in too close, and Tynan smashed him across the mouth, backhanding him into the wall.

  He was onto the younger man instantly, a solid punch driving Vrakir to the ground and then hooking his boot into the man’s stomach. And though the banded armour had taken the brunt, the Red Watch man skidded five feet across the ground, rolling and coming up on one knee, hand out and palm open.

  Tynan was just the same, ready to sting, and for a moment the two of them were frozen in place, before the horrified stares of the soldiers.

  ‘Do it, or stand down,’ Tynan growled, and Vrakir bared his teeth, but lowered his hand.

  ‘The Empress will know of this,’ he hissed.

  ‘Take Captain Vrakir somewhere he can calm down and perhaps remember that most officers who threaten a superior get a pair of pikes for their own personal use,’ Tynan spat. His gaze swept around to the ranks of defeated Spider-kinden.

  This is where I free them, isn’t it? Exile them from the city, tell them never to go near the Empire again, and everyone keeps quiet, a conspiracy of mercy, and the Empress never knows. But orders were orders, and the Empress had left him no leeway. And she would get to know, he had no doubt of it.

  ‘Have them shot, quick and clean,’ he ordered the watch officer. ‘They’ve earned that much.’

  He stalked away, and heard the killing start.

  There was a counting house, or something similar, that Cherten had commandeered for interrogations, and the engineers had removed all the paperwork and the remaining money from the cellars and converted them to holding cells, probably without being asked to, just standard work for junior artificers wherever the Empire established itself even for a short while. Tynan had some business there now, left over from the previous night. Another loose end that Cherten should be picking up. He found that he did not feel particularly upset that the intelligencer had met his end, but it was undeniably inconvenient.

  The interrogators were not at work – it would clearly take them a while to get back to routine without Cherten – and Tynan found he had the place to himself, his footsteps echoing back from the stripped walls.

  Probably I should keep a bodyguard about me, he considered. The situation remains fluid, after all, and you never know who might choose to have a go.

  He glanced about the counting house’s interior, and reflected that he might almost welcome an assassin just about now.

  But some great traditions could simply not be relied on these days.

  He descended to the cellar, firing up a chemical lantern on the way, and casting a spitting white light ahead of him. Word had reached him just around dawn: there had indeed been an assassin, just not a very good one.

  She was now the sole resident, hunched in the corner of the furthest cell as though driven there by the intrusion of the light. The artificers’ work allowed her no privacy: just a set of bars cordoning off one corner of the cellar, padlocked to eyebolts set in the stone walls on either side.

  She was not a Spider, as he had been told, but a halfbreed with a lot of Ant blood in her as well, pale of skin and with dartlike blemishes on cheeks and forehead. She had been caught sneaking across the rooftops by sentries from the Airborne, whereupon she had apparently put up a fierce struggle to defend herself. She had injured two men before they got her sword off her, and they had not been gentle in subsequently expressing their grievances. He could see where her left hand had been stamped on, swollen and ugly, and the surgeon had merely knotted a strip of cloth over her bloodied right eye after cleaning out the wound.

  When the soldiers had taken her down, she had called out Tynan’s name, they claimed. That was the only reason she still lived: because it was personal.

&nbs
p; ‘You’re the best the Spiderlands could send, are you?’ he asked. ‘Did . . . did she send you?’ And what would I prefer to hear, precisely? He almost found he wanted her to say yes, to confirm that Mycella was still thinking of him, if only to dispatch this half-trained killer.

  The prisoner mumbled something through bruised and bloody lips.

  ‘Louder!’ he snapped, not going closer to the bars, just in case.

  ‘Not Spiderlands,’ he made out. ‘Collegium.’

  Tynan gave a surprised grunt. ‘Didn’t realize the locals did that sort of thing. Or maybe it’s just you, is it? Well you’re piss-poor at it, you know? Even as a murderer, you fail.’

  That got a reaction and she bared her teeth impotently at him, her one good eye staring wildly.

  ‘What did you hope to accomplish?’ Tynan asked her. ‘Killing me wouldn’t free your city, anyway. Unless you were going to work your way down the chain of command, from the top.’

  ‘You killed Eujen.’

  He frowned. The words made no sense to him.

  ‘He was my friend. He was the best man I knew. And when he came to talk to you, you took him and tortured him . . . and then you shot him.’ As she spoke, her voice was low and dull, but her eye flashed fire when she looked up. ‘You killed my friend. You killed lots of my friends, but Eujen . . . Coming to kill you was easier than staying to watch him die.’

  When he came to talk . . .? ‘This isn’t that student nonsense, is it?’

  He could have put another knife in her, and it would have hurt less. The dismissal of everything there ever was about her cause and her friends, this man who would write the history books deeming them a trivial irrelevance.