I have lost Sol. There is nothing but the forest. Something is hunting me. I am close now.
Patcher and I searched everywhere for some sign of Sol, but he is gone. The green has eaten him.
Frowning, he turned back, comparing entries. Of course, the writing by now was wild and spiky, the hand behind it trembling as the mind that guided it came undone.
I know I will never see the College again now. Nobody will find this journal. I shall be just one more academic who never came back. I cannot even remember if I said where I was going. They will remember me for one derided study of folklore. Folklore. I do not believe in folklore. There is no folklore. There is only the real.
Argastos. I hear Argastos.
It was the last of it. She had heard Argastos, and she had died. Corver stared down at the skull, flensed to the bone by all the myriad agents of decay that peopled the forest floor. Did he feel a kinship with the dead woman? If so, it was something they could never have shared while she was alive – before they had both come here, they would have been enemies, from different worlds. Now . . .
When he heard the clatter of steel, Corver did not even look up. He said nothing, made no attempt to stop Vrant as the man ran for the sound, hunting fervently for something he might understand. Corver just stood there, with the bones and the last words of an unknown Collegiate scholar.
By the time Vrant came back, the other two had come looking for them, to stand staring at Corver and his unwelcome find, silent and watchful. With the big soldier returned, unspeaking, the silence between the four of them grew quickly unbearable, and Corver forced himself to speak to forestall some other voice breaking it, perhaps that of the dead woman, perhaps of someone else entirely.
I hear Argastos.
‘Report, soldier,’ he snapped.
‘I saw fighting, sir.’ Nothing but the ghost of Vrant’s usual voice, hushed and uneven.
Corver just stared down at the bones until the inevitable thread of the other man’s thoughts drew the rest of the words out.
‘There was an Ant-kinden, sir,’ Vrant explained, and Corver nodded, for he had expected that. The report, such as it was, dragged on: ‘He looked like from that place, what’s it called, off on the island off south of here. He was fighting, I think it was Mantis-kinden, sir. I think.’
They would have been just shadows and movement, in the dark beneath the trees. Corver nodded again.
‘He saw me – the Mantids were gone by now, sir. He saw me, looked me right in the eye. He . . .’ For a moment Vrant’s voice lost its way, fading into a shaking breath like that of a dying man. ‘He put his sword through his own throat, sir. Just rammed it straight in there. Never took his eyes off me, sir.’ There was something childlike in Vrant’s tone that wanted Corver to reassure him that everything was going to be fine.
‘We had better get moving,’ the sergeant decided.
‘Yes, sir. We’d—’ Vrant made to head off for where they had left the canopy bag, but Corver lifted a hand to stop him.
‘Not that way.’
‘But sir, the—’
‘Do you think we’ll find our way back to the crash?’
Vrant stared at him dumbly. They all did. Corver felt that he should apologize for somehow bringing them to this, but that was another thing that Imperial sergeants never did.
‘What do you think is happening right now, soldier?’ he asked, mildly, and watched the expressions shunt and jostle on Vrant’s face until the man finally found some way of saying it that made sense to him.
‘Someone’s pissing us about, sir.’ Don’t ask who or by what means, but that simple sentiment was like a lifeline.
‘So we need to go sort them out,’ Corver finished for him. A Moth-kinden name echoed in his head like distant thunder but he would not voice it. ‘This hall, this mound or whatever, we’re closer now than we were, yes?’ Despite all our efforts to avoid it.
‘Yes, sir.’ Barely a tremble, barely a flinch.
‘Then it looks as though we’re going there, so let’s go. Come on, swords out, stings ready. Soldiers of the Empire, right?’ And if his own voice faltered behind the false courage, there was little Corver could do. Certainly the sentiment seemed to buoy Vrant a little, if not the others.
Corver drew his own blade, seeing an answering glint of steel in the hands of the others, even a dagger in Sterro’s tiny fist. He was about to ask Vrant to take a bearing, to see which way to go, but then he remembered: it didn’t matter.
The going was easier, then, the very forest standing aside to let them past, and they moved faster and faster, breaking into as much of a run as Corver’s armour and Vrant’s ribs would allow, until at last they burst out of the trees and saw the hall before them.
Hall. Tomb. Something.
A great hill had been raised here – too regular and singular to be natural, and roofed with flat stones, irregular and yet fitting together to make a weirdly makeshift dome. Grass and weeds sprouted in the cracks, and in places the paving had come away entirely, levered up by roots and the grasping hands of ferns, and fecund sprays of shapeless yellow fungus. There were designs of sorts cut into the slabs, stylized figures, abstract geometries, spirals on spirals repeated over and over. Corver had no wish to inspect them closer.
Facing them, as though mere chance had brought them unerringly on the correct approach, were the gates: standing almost as tall as the dome’s apex, the mound’s contours deforming outwards to accommodate them, they were framed in vast slabs of grey rock, but the doors themselves were faced with thousands of scales of wood, chipped and worm-chewed and discoloured, seeming less a barrier than the hide of some unthinkable monster. There was no breeze, and yet the scales seemed to shiver as the Imperials approached.
‘Argax,’ Corver said softly, and when the others stared at him he explained, ‘The Beetle woman wrote it, in her diary.’ He did not say that the name, the knowledge, had seemed to come to his mind unbidden – that the Beetle woman’s journal had occurred to him only a moment later.
She had written of a ‘Walk of Statues’ too, and ‘Cold Gates’, and surely these were they.
‘He’s in there, is he?’ Vrant demanded, clinging to belligerence for all it was worth, ‘Whoever’s pulling our chain?’
‘That seems certain,’ Corver agreed. In truth he could almost feel the presence within, beating like a heart, waiting for him.
There seemed nothing else to do. He put his hands to the gates, searching for some way to push or pull, feeling the fragile shards of wood break free under his touch.
Something squirmed beneath his fingers.
A moment later Corver was yelling – a sergeant’s dignity be damned – as the broken fabric of the doors exploded beneath his hands in a seething swarm. In seconds he was elbow-deep in a writhing, knotting host of grubs and centipedes and beetles, boiling about his hands, dripping in twisting clots to the ground, spraying in individual looping bodies to scatter through the air. Corver fell back, flapping his hands to be rid of them, watching the entire front of the doors crawl with voracious life, forming patterns and words and hideous images second on second, as though some composite thing was trying to make itself known. A hand, eyes, a face . . .
‘It’s all right, sir! It’s just bugs, nothing but little bugs!’ Vrant was shouting, sweeping the crawling things off him. ‘No harm in them! It’s all right, sir.’ The other two were backing away, and so nobody was keeping watch.
The strike, when it came, was a blur, a moment of discontinuity and then Vrant was simply not there. Corver started from his horror into a new one, scrambling to his feet to see it, the mantis, right there overhanging them, clinging to the very curve of the mound, and with Vrant clasped in its thorned forearms.
The solder was bellowing, but it was more rage than pain, hands outstretched and loosing his sting wildly at the creature that had him. In that moment, seeing Vrant’s mail buckle where the creature gripped, Corver threw off all the leaden despair that had d
ragged him to this place, all the helpless resignation that had walked him here like a slave to the auction block. Instead he thrust out his own hand and let his sting crackle and spit, searing across the great insect’s thorax and leaving dark smears of char.
He knew how mantids took their prey: a single surgical bite at the neck to kill off all resistance before it fed. He heard something crack as Vrant twisted in the creature’s grasp – armour or bone? – and saw the angular head tilt, one eye glittering green and the other dark and dull, as it searched for its opening.
Corver hacked at its nearest leg, at the clawed foot where it rested on the gate’s lintel, and with lunatic strength he sheared straight through. The mantis lurched forwards, abruptly off balance, and he put a stingshot into its other eye.
It reared up, wings snapping out again and Vrant tumbled clear from its grip as its arms were flung wide. Corver was still shooting, bolt after bolt, and the leap it took into the air went awry, bringing the colossal beast down not ten feet away, just clear of the treeline, on its back with limbs flailing.
Probably it had already been dying then, but Corver advanced on it, stinging and stinging even though the drain of it made him stumble and stagger. By the time he reached it, its only movements were a spasmodic twitching. Smoke rose faintly from its ruined eyes.
For a moment he thought that was it: kill the mantis, escape the trap. Even as he turned back though, even before he saw that the gates stood open now, he felt that presence once again, in the depths of the mound, and knew that nothing he had done here had accomplished anything other than to amuse it.
‘Vrant?’ he called.
The man groaned, and Corver lurched over to help him to his feet. He could not stand straight, and there was blood at the corners of his mouth. His armour, the banded mail of the Light Airborne, was creased and dented, the metal holed and gashed where the barbs of the mantis’s arms had bitten.
Sandric and Sterro moved in, but neither made any move to help, and Corver struggled in silence until he had Vrant’s arm over his shoulders, and his own about the man’s back, feeling the jagged edges left in the metal. All the while the great dark gape of the gates breathed cold air before them, but they could wait. They had waited a long time, after all.
‘Ready?’ Corver pressed, and Vrant nodded, face taut with pain. Nobody asked where they were going. Nobody asked why.
When they crossed the threshold, there was no light whatsoever within the mound, and they stepped into a featureless midnight void where their scraping footsteps struck distant echoes from walls that seemed miles distant. Then Corver’s straining eyes caught a faint suggestion of illumination from ahead – nothing so healthy as firelight, but a cold, green-white corpse light, the luminescence of decay. Still he laboured forwards, hearing Vrant’s pained and halting breath in his ear, the weight of the soldier dragging at him both a burden and a reassurance.
With each step, by subtle gradations, the light grew stronger, until Corver could see that there were figures all about then, rank upon rank standing in a military order. For a moment he imagined pale, gaunt faces, hungry eyes, but then he looked again, and saw the truth. He was treading a straight clear path between stands of armour, row after row of it, receding into a distance that the mound surely did not contain.
He saw Mantis-kinden work, above all, and, had he been a collector and possessed of any illusions, he might have been thinking about how rich even one such suit might make him back home. It was the old carapace plate, an elegant, sharp-edged creation of another time, enamelled and gilded, sculpted into crests and whorls. Each vacant suit that he passed represented years of an armoursmith’s life back in the days when everything was made only once and by hand, before the Apt world of factories and mass production.
There were others, mixed in with those silent Mantis husks: he saw cuirasses of time-rotten leather, in designs he did not recognize, or hauberks of orange chitin scales painted over with hatched spirals. There were great heavy suits of overlapping plates and light harnesses of scintillating metallic shine such as he had seen stripped from Dragonfly corpses in the Twelve-year War. Most of all, though, there was Mantis armour, surely more fine and delicate mail than was worn by all the living members of that kinden together in the present day.
He glanced ahead, and saw that he was nearing the hall’s end, and what awaited him there, and he looked away again. Now the suits that flanked him had lost something of the earlier pieces’ elegance and craft, practicality starting to outweigh artistry, and he knew that he was witnessing the history of a decline. Here and there he saw chitin and steel that had been punched in, holed by the crossbows of the Apt. Now the mail of the intruders was more familiar: he knew Ant-kinden work when he saw it, and Beetle too. Despite all he had been through and all he was, he could feel the fading echo of loss about him: a mourning for a world that had passed, the defeat of the formerly invincible, the end of a dream.
And he was almost there.
When the edge of the dais was creeping into his sight he gave in, and lifted his head to the throne.
Above it was another suit of armour, though none that the hand of man had ever made. The vacant, slightly translucent carapace of a mantis hung there, great arms gaping wide. One of its eyes was a fractured ruin, but the damage looked centuries old, as antique as the desiccated carcass itself.
The throne, an age-weathered lump of stone that barely seemed a seat at all, was still just about empty, but Corver could see a darkness gathering there, proof against the unhealthy light that fell on everything else and came from nowhere at all.
At his side, Vrant gave a long sigh and fell away, kneeling awkwardly, his strength spent. Corver sensed Sandric and Sterro at his back, pressing close as the darkness closed in, but he could not take his eyes off the throne.
First there was just the one, the scuttling shadow of a tiny woodlouse disfiguring the pristine grey, but then his eyes were pulled left and right, the creatures seeming to emerge from the very stone itself: worms and millipedes, deathwatch beetles and their fat, white larvae, all the things of rot and reclamation that had infested the Mantis-kinden icons, fed upon the Collegiate scholar and seethed from the material of the gates. Spiders descended on filaments picked out by that bleached light, blood-coloured centipedes coiled and reared, and all of them, every mote of that host, coming together in a nest of twisting bodies and sheets of dirty silk, until something mounded and composed itself upon the throne, weaving itself into the form of a man, building and anatomizing from the inside out, bones, organs, thoughts and all. Then one by one the little architects were gone, and Corver found himself meeting the blank white gaze of a Moth-kinden man.
Corver thought he knew Moths: they were the pale, effeminate bookish creatures, comically superstitious and fearful, whose world had been taken from them centuries before by strong, Apt kinden like Wasps and Ants and Beetles. They were tatty fortunetellers, beggars promising blessings or threatening empty curses, or figures of ridicule in a hundred jokes and stories. The few he had ever seen had been weak, starveling-thin, bewildered almost to death by the technological world the Apt were building.
This man – Argastos, Corver’s mind insisted – was not the same. He had the broad frame of a warrior, and beneath his open-fronted robe he wore armour of leather and chitin, and if that mail was enamelled in black and edged with gold, Corver knew for a certainty that the man had taken those colours for his own long before there ever was an Empire to contest them with him.
His lean, hollow-cheeked face was grey, the eyes the featureless white of his kind, His chin was spiked with a sharply pointed beard such as Corver had not seen anyone wear in his lifetime, and the Moth’s pale hair fell long onto his shoulders. He seemed a figure from an ancient portrait, a statue of the Bad Old Days brought to life . . . or perhaps not life, for Corver was bitterly sure that this revenant before him had surely not drawn breath these five centuries or more.
‘Keep close now,’ he whispered, ost
ensibly for the benefit of his men, but mostly because he had hoped that the sound of his own voice would banish some of the crippling fear that was running wild through him. Any temporary relief was dispelled when the Moth’s own voice came to him.
I have waited for you.
Corver’s lips moved, but no further sounds came from them. It was the same voice that had been murmuring just beneath the threshold of hearing ever since they left their crash site. It had been the same voice that . . .
In the Commonweal, yes. The voice of Argastos did not require anything so mundane as lungs or breath, but gusted about the great space, making the standing armour shiver and rustle. There was less humanity in his gaunt, grey face than there was in the chitin mask of the great mantis mounted above him.
I have brought you here to bear a message for me back to your Empire, warrior.
And a wretched little croak of laughter finally escaped from Corver, because the thought that he might ever return to the Empire, in whatever capacity, was surely nonsense. He, whose disbelief had been stabbed at and stabbed at until it lay dying on the floor, could not bring himself to credit that.
Oh, fear not; nothing will harm you when you leave this place, came the icy voice of Argastos. No beast of the forest, no ghost or spectre, most especially not the Mantis-kinden, who will know well whose mark you bear. I lay the way open for you all the way to the edge of the trees, and from there you will have to find your own way home.
‘And my men?’ Corver whispered, and when there was no response he repeated himself, almost boldly, almost desperately. ‘And my men? What of them?’
Oh, warrior . . . Those blind-seeming eyes might have been looking anywhere, but the man’s head tilted, ever so slightly, and dragged Corver’s own gaze onto the nearest armour trees.
Ragged aviators’ leathers, he saw there; a tattered robe hanging from one stand, cut in the Collegiate fashion; buckled mail in the black and gold bands of the Light Airborne; a cuirass with an Imperial pilot’s insignia; a Consortium greatcoat with its pockets still leaking stolen Imperial gold: all rusty with blood from the wounds that had done for their owners.
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