War Master's Gate sota-9

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘I’m not even convinced the Mantids could manage it,’ Kymene allowed. ‘The Wasps will keep a good watch, and their Spider-kinden allies see well in the dark.’

  ‘Well, what then. .?’ Jodry put in uncertainly.

  ‘So we bring them in supported by our troops, and we provide a distraction so that they’re on the Wasps before the Second even knows it. And we let them run wild, as they will — for there’ll be no controlling them — while our people strike at those same targets that the Stormreaders have been trying to get their bombs to. And then perhaps we get out again. Anything’s possible.’

  Jodry opened his mouth again, but the cast of his expression had changed. He had been a man vociferous in opposition, now he was on the edge of a chasm, staring fearfully into it but becoming resigned to the drop.

  Before he could voice the question, Kymene answered it. ‘By air. We do it by air. The Mantids won’t like that but, if it gets them to the Wasps faster, and means they can shed more blood, then they’ll live with it.’

  ‘We need more than the four of us, to make this decision.’ Jodry’s voice was hollow. ‘The Assembly-’

  ‘Hasn’t met since this action started, not in any real sense,’ Stenwold told him. ‘And if we’re to make this happen, we need to start now. You’re the Speaker, I’m the War Master, and we have the authority. Or if we don’t, who’s going to tell us so?’

  Jodry was still shaking his head, holding on by his fingertips to the trailing edge of his lost argument, but his words had run dry.

  ‘I’ll speak with Akkestrae,’ Kymene announced. ‘Chief Officer Padstock, would you ask for volunteers from the Company soldiers for a night attack? No more information than that, at this point. Master Maker, Master Drillen, perhaps you would see what airships you can commandeer.’

  ‘Brace yourself,’ Averic advised, hand extended.

  The Beetle girl behind the shield looked scared to death, cringing away, so that, when the Wasp student’s hand flashed fire, the impact nearly took her off her feet. The watching members of the Student Company recoiled collectively — not at the light or the crackling sound, but at the very concept. This, this was the symbol of the Wasp Empire, if anything was: their killing Art.

  Straessa and Gerethwy, off duty this morning, had come out early to watch the students train. The Antspider tried to see how Averic took it: the way they looked at him as though he ate children. That old familiar closed expression held sway on the Wasp’s face, though, the same that had got him through a year’s study at the College before the war broke out.

  ‘Every one of my people can do this,’ the Wasp explained. ‘Some are stronger at it, but every single Wasp becomes armed from the moment this Art begins to show. But I have to concentrate — even a soldier with a score of battles under his belt must concentrate — and so it’s not ideal for close-in fighting much of the time. Unless, of course, your enemy falls back from you, like you’re falling back from me right now. Give me room, and you give me the advantage.’

  Quick and easy lessons on how to kill your own kin, Straessa thought. But, if he thought about it that way, Averic was letting nothing out.

  ‘And the range is nowhere near that of a crossbow or a snapbow,’ Averic went on, stalking about in front of them. ‘And you see — it’s scorched the wood and you must have felt how it’s not just flame but a real physical force there. Nevertheless, the shield has held, and good armour such as we’re issued with will hold as well, most of the time. That’s the sting of my people, and don’t forget it. But don’t forget that Aptitude has given you better weapons.’

  ‘He’s good at this,’ the Antspider admitted.

  ‘He hates it.’ Eujen was standing beside her in his purple sash, as chief officer of the Student Company. She had barely seen him these last few days, what with her shifts and his meetings, and now, having sought him out, she found instead someone she did not quite know.

  Averic was going on to explain about the composition of an Imperial army, the likely tactics of the Light Airborne and infantry. Straessa shook her head.

  ‘It doesn’t feel right somehow,’ she said.

  ‘He told me that he’s made his stand now,’ Eujen murmured. ‘I think he wants to prove himself to. . to them. To show them he’s on their side.’

  ‘I think that’s a losing battle.’

  ‘Oi, Antspider!’

  A loud, slightly slurred voice had cut across Averic’s patient lecturing, drawing all eyes. A gaunt Ant-kinden was striding over to them, seemingly on the point of lurching off balance at every step, and yet making swift progress despite it. Chief Officer Madagnus of the Coldstone Company was paying a visit.

  Straessa shot an apologetic look at Eujen.

  ‘Whose eyes did you inherit, halfbreed?’ Madagnus demanded.

  Straessa found herself stiffening in outrage, biting back hasty, angry words. Oh, surely she had come in for that sort of abuse before, and worse, and told herself none of it mattered, but she had been in Collegium for over a year now, and if people looked down their noses at miscegenation, still they practised what they preached enough not to give rein to their inner bigots. Madagnus was drunk, though, and more so than usual.

  With an exercise of will she restricted her response to, ‘Chief?’

  He stopped in front of her. ‘See in the dark much, Antspider?’

  ‘Some, Chief.’

  ‘Madagnus, what do you want?’ Eujen demanded and Straessa flinched inwardly, waiting for an explosion. But she was thinking of her friend as being no more than he had been when a vociferous student. Of course, now, Eujen ranked alongside the man, one chief officer to another, and a shifty, shamefaced look came over the Ant’s face.

  ‘Looking for my officer here, Leadswell,’ he explained, a little steadier. ‘Got some work for her.’

  ‘I’m off duty, Chief,’ Straessa put in, but he spoke over her.

  ‘Nobody’s off duty, right now — not even me. Ma Padstock herself slapped me awake and hauled me out of bed to tell me that. You see in the dark? Good for you. They’re wanting volunteers like you from all Companies. Going to make a go of it by night, Padstock says. She’ll come for you, too, Leadswell, you just mark me.’ He found a crate of armour that Eujen had wheedled out of the armouries and sat down on it in a mess of angular shoulders, knees and elbows. ‘Go find the Company, Antspider. Go fish for volunteers who can see in the dark. Have them ready by the third hour after noon, urgent as urgent. You see in the dark, Leadswell?’

  Eujen shook his head wordlessly.

  ‘Me neither.’ Madagnus levered himself upright and turned about, before striding off with as much dignity as he could muster.

  ‘How did your lot ever come to choose him?’ Eujen wondered aloud, even as Averic came over to join them.

  ‘He’s a good artificer even when drunk. A really good one if you can get him sober. And brave, too. Besides he was one of the few who would stand.’ Straessa felt abruptly angry with herself for defending the man. ‘Anyway, I didn’t cast my lot for him, but he’s the one we’ve got.’

  ‘A night attack?’ Averic pondered, and then, ‘Will you. .?’

  ‘I can’t. .’ She felt Eujen’s hand on her shoulder, and leant herself against him despite all the Student Company gawking. ‘I can’t ask people to volunteer if I won’t go myself. I just can’t.’ She managed a weak smile. ‘How about you, Gereth? You see in the dark.’

  ‘Better than a Moth,’ the Woodlouse replied.

  ‘And you can spare time from your whatever that you’re working on?’

  ‘The rational bow?’ He shrugged his hunched shoulders. ‘You think I’d let you go off and get yourself lost in the dark?’

  She reached out and squeezed his arm. ‘Thought not. So, let’s go and find the troops and see who’s up for it.’ She kept her voice deliberately light, but it was a long moment before she would shrug off Eujen’s hand.

  The darkening sky was crowded with slow-moving, rounded shadows, as thou
gh all the Masters of the College had come together to construct the world’s grandest orrery. Watching those vast shapes circle and glide lazily was a curiously awe-inspiring sight, even for Collegium. Straessa had never before seen so many airships together.

  ‘Of course, they’ve rather overdone it,’ she pointed out. ‘Unless we get one each or something.’

  She exaggerated but, even so, the Company volunteers would have fitted easily aboard one of the larger dirigibles. The great passenger liner the Sky Without, for example, could have held every one of them in high style until it was time to fight.

  ‘Forty-three Mynans, all explosives-trained I think,’ Gerethwy confirmed. ‘And I make it two hundred and forty-seven Company soldiers.’

  ‘The Empire must be shaking in its sandals,’ the Antspider remarked, desperately trying to be droll. They had gathered in the broad square that had once fronted the Amphiophos, Collegium’s seat of government, before the Imperial bombs had turned the place into a sea of rubble, toppled columns and walls rising like broken teeth.

  A strange cross-section of the city’s defenders, this. It was the requirement to be able to fight at night that had winnowed them down to this few, rather than any lack of courage. Here was a good number of Fly-kinden, who made small targets but could pull a trigger as well as anyone. Here were Spider-kinden renegades and the odd urbanized Mantis. Here were Moths who had evidently turned their backs on their heritage; two Roaches, three Scorpion-kinden, the Dragonfly Castre Gorenn. The rest were Beetles, the lucky or unlucky few, who had manifested the rare Art of shrugging off darkness entirely to see the midnight world in shades of grey.

  They were all armed and armoured as best their city could equip them: buff coats stuffed with rags to slow a spinning snapbow bolt, overlain with breastplates and lobster-tail helms now being enthusiastically blacked up to stop the wan moonlight glinting on them. The Apt amongst them carried snapbows, the more skilled amongst the Inapt bore bows, and the rest made do with spear and sword.

  ‘Here you are.’ Suddenly, from nowhere, a small figure tugged at Straessa’s belt, making her twitch: Sartaea te Mosca, Fly-kinden lecturer in Inapt studies, possible magician, and healer. ‘How did I know I’d find you here?’

  ‘Eujen told you?’ Straessa suggested. She had a momentary surfacing of unbidden memories: nights spent in Sartaea’s rooms, their diminutive hostess filling each glass as it was emptied; evenings at Raullo Mummers’s studio — burned out now — back when the war was just a thing that people talked about; te Mosca, after the battle, frantically trying to save as much as possible of Gerethwy’s maimed hand.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Gerethwy asked. ‘Or is this it? Are we so desperate that we’re going to send a handful of soldiers off against the Second, travelling in technology that the last war showed us was useless?’

  ‘Oh, more than that,’ te Mosca stated. ‘They’ve roused every Inapt healer they can get their hands on, so it’d better be more than that. . See there.’ She pointed to where the reinforcements were arriving.

  Mantis-kinden of the Felyal, they saw: the refugees that had started to take up residence after the Second Army ousted them in the first war, and had only grown more numerous as the Empire trampled over their forest home, tore up their trees and burned their holds. Here they came, tall and lean and sour-faced, with bow and spear, rapier and metal claw. Some had beautifully crafted carapace mail, and others wore chitin or leather, or just an arming jacket. Many had no armour at all. And they were many, a column snaking right back into the city, marching soft-footed to stand before the corpse of the Amphiophos, as though they were about to storm it.

  ‘Oh,’ said Straessa quietly, as they kept coming — and ‘Oh,’ again, realizing slightly before the rest just what was going on. ‘No. .’

  And the Felyen continued to arrive, every single one of them.

  Stenwold had already taken his stand where the steps ascended to the churned debris that had been the Amphiophos’s main entrance, with Akkestrae beside him. Seeing the Mantids arrive in such numbers, and with so little sound, he could not suppress a shiver. They were so grave, so solemn, a sight out of another time. And like nothing Collegium has known since the Bad Old Days, and perhaps not even then.

  So many warriors, he thought. Every Felyen who can bear a sword must be gathering for their piece of the Empire.

  And then he saw it, too, and his breath stilled as the Felyen continued to march in and assemble. He looked from face to face, those stern and unforgiving masks — but such faces. He had not known, before this. He had not understood.

  The tail end of their procession was now trailing in, and he took them in by the lamplight and by the moon: the Mantids of the Felyal — their surviving warriors, yes, but more. He saw old men and women who must have seven decades to their names, grown thin and haggard with age even for a long-lived kinden. He saw children — fourteen years, twelve. . And the more he looked, the younger they seemed to be: a boy of ten with a short spear in his hands, a girl of eight clutching a little hunting bow, a child of five with a dagger, her expression just a clouded mirror of the adults’. He saw women with babies in arms, or slung across their backs, and those women were armed as warriors.

  He saw the Felyen, all of them, and the sorrow of it was laid out plain. The very young, the very old, they were in the majority. Those men and women of true fighting age were barely two or three in ten, such had been their losses to the Wasps.

  ‘This was not what we spoke about,’ he told Akkestrae, hearing his voice shake slightly.

  ‘This was what I spoke about,’ she told him impassively. ‘What you chose to hear is your own business.’

  ‘No, wait. . you’re mad,’ he insisted. ‘You can’t send this against the Empire! What can you possibly hope to accomplish?’

  Her face, that glass-calm Mantis facade, regarding him coolly. ‘You know exactly what.’

  ‘But we’ve made you welcome here — don’t you trust us to look after them? Why. .?’ Stenwold was aware that his voice was carrying across the square, but he decided he did not care.

  For a moment, Akkestrae’s expression remained fixed, but then he saw the cracks appear, fractures widening and widening until something raw gaped at him, like an unhealable wound. ‘Because there is no place for us in your cursed city!’ she yelled, screaming the words into his face. ‘Because you have taken our time from us! Because your Apt world has written itself over ours, as if we had never been! And there is nowhere left under the sun that your kind, you Apt, have not corrupted with your industry.’ That last word she spat out like an insult, leaving her drained and swaying. ‘And we have come to the end,’ she said more quietly, ‘and we seek only that end, which is to fight and die as we were meant to do — all of us. All my people, Maker. If your people may derive some profit from it, then so be it, but know that you have already won. You have made a world we cannot live in. You have made a memory of us, at last. And soon not even that.’

  ‘But I. . the Wasps. .’ Stenwold stammered. ‘We didn’t burn your forests-’

  ‘I would rather face the blades of the Empire than Collegium’s good intentions,’ she replied flatly. ‘At least the Wasps understand that their progress destroys. Now bring down your machines, and take us to the fight.’

  Eighteen

  Tynisa was almost running, weaving her way through the dense trees. She could smell smoke from ahead, although the fighting that Che had somehow divined must be over, for there was no sound of it now. That said ambush to her, and she felt the forest all around her, reaching her by channels other than mere eyes and ears. Something in this place had accepted her, tasting the blood in her that came from her father Tisamon. She was going native.

  None of the others could move as she could through this place — certainly not the Sarnesh, and not her companions either. The Bartrer woman was hopeless, Thalric barely better, and Che, though she had an ease here that surprised Tynisa, was yet no scout. This was why the Sarnesh employed
men like Zerro, and now she had taken on his mantle.

  She would not let herself be yoked to the Ants, though, for all that they kept insisting she stay in sight. How could she scout the way ahead with them dragging virtually at her heels? Instead, she had chosen her deputies, the two of her companions least clumsy and most at home here, and let them trail her, ready to send word back if the worst came to the worst.

  When she stopped to listen, as she did now, she felt the taut pain of her ravaged hip settle back on to her like stiff clothes, enough to nearly cripple her. When she gave in to sleep, the pain was a deep throb in her side, chastising her for having treated it as though it was not there. But whenever she moved through the trees, or drew blade to fight, it was gone. The mystery of her discipline sustained her, just as she had witnessed her father receive wounds enough for a half-dozen men and still hunt down his victim.

  And then he died, and I may die, too, if I keep pushing my limits. But feeling alive and free like this was addictive, while being trapped in her wounded body was unbearable. Better life like this, for whatever time I have, than a long death.

  She glanced back to seek out her shadows. After a moment she located Terastos, ten yards back, kneeling with his shoulder against a tree. The Moth had a surprising tenacity about him, bearing his stingshot wound without complaint, and he had shown an aptitude for the wilds that Tynisa would not have guessed at. He was quiet, too, and not averse to hard work — quite different to the charlatan stereotype the Collegiates were fond of.

  Further back — somewhere within Terastos’s sight — would be the halfbreed Maure, a woman more than used to roughing it in the Commonweal, and Tynisa’s next best choice as least useless scout.

  With rapier in hand, she scanned the close-grown forest ahead. She could see smoke hazing the air, and yet still no sign of an enemy. They had been lost in this forest for days now. Lost, because wherever Che was trying to reach seemed utterly mythical, to the extent that Tynisa sometimes wondered if they were moving in circles. And yet, for all that they seemed to just turn left and left and left again, the forest never looked quite the same. It was as though they were staying still while their surroundings flowed and transformed around them. And still Che was searching, but not finding.