‘Shut up now, Gereth. They’re coming.’
His head snapped up. ‘But I’m not ready.’
‘So sorry, I’ll tell them to come back in an hour, shall I?’ She looked at the heap of loose pieces inside his pack or scattered about him. ‘Or would tomorrow suit you better? Inbound, everyone! Looks like grenadiers are back, too!’
All around her, the soldiers of the Student Company, plus a few veterans of her own Coldstone troops, levelled their snap-bows or their pikes, whilst a few checked the always delicate mechanisms of their nailbows in preparation for close-in work. The Wasps were massing three blocks away from the barricades, and snapbow shot was already being exchanged, inaccurate on both sides. Straessa saw Castre Gorenn draw back her bowstring, kneeling under cover of the barricade, and then launch an arrow up at a ridiculous angle. The Antspider was quick enough to see it descend, striking a Wasp who looked as if he had been giving orders just a moment before from the shelter of a doorway.
Gorenn selected another arrow, her expression all business, devoid of pride. The fact that, at full draw, she could outrange a rifled snapbow with an accuracy that Straessa could not have matched at ten feet, had become a tenet of faith amongst the Collegiate insurgents.
‘They’re coming!’ someone shouted, helpfully announcing what was evident to absolutely everyone.
The Antspider levelled her snapbow, butt to the shoulder to steady it, sighting down the barrel and then up a little to adjust for the range, leading the Airborne as they took wing. Her own shot was lost in the general explosive release all around her, like a round of spontaneous applause for the Wasps’ grim perseverance. And that was the thing, because they were not going away, not even slightly. The Empire had been prodding at them all morning, taking light casualties, dealing considerably lighter ones, and all that while the bulk of their forces were not even fighting the Collegiates at all, but brawling with their erstwhile allies four districts away.
This latest attack turned out to be more tentative than most, and the score of grenadiers, whose approach the Airborne had presumably been intended to cover, lost four of their number almost immediately and broke off. Not a single flying assailant’s shadow crossed the line of the barricade, and one Beetle student of agricultural economics took a bolt through the arm and was ordered to get herself off to the infirmary. The massing Wasps down the street had not gone, though, although Gorenn was still making their lives unpredictable and interesting.
Then someone was shouting her name, and she turned to see that Fly friend of Stenwold Maker’s – Laszlo? – spiralling down towards the barricade amidst Wasp snapbow shot zipping past him.
‘Get down!’ she ordered him, ‘What’s . . .?’ But the look on his face shook her, transformed from the usual easy-going man she remembered.
‘You’ve got to get out!’ he told her. ‘Pull back for the College right now!’
‘What? No, we’ve—’
‘Shaw Street’s gone. Half of them are dead and the rest are running.’
‘That’s—’ That’s right next to us. Shaw Street ran parallel to Albamarl. ‘Gone how?’
‘Just pissing move, will you?’ the little man yelled at her. ‘How much time do you think you have?’
And if they flank us, they can just come over the roofs anywhere they want. ‘Everyone pull back! Get out of the buildings and head back for the College!’ She saw Gerethwy frantically packing up his kit, gathering all those delicate gears and pieces. ‘Gereth, there’s no time!’ But he would not be dissuaded, his hand and a half moving as deftly as he could to get everything back into his pack.
The thoroughfare behind her was emptying swiftly, her soldiers retreating further down the street, whilst keeping their eyes fixed on the sky. Those at the barricade, however, were ignoring her orders, and she belatedly realized this was because she herself had showed no signs of going.
Hold for another minute. Give the rest a chance to make some distance. ‘What in the pits happened in Shaw Street?’ she demanded.
‘It’s not just Shaw Street . . .’ he started, and then pointed: ‘That.’
A familiar metal bulk was moving smoothly onto the far end of Albamarl Street. The sun reflected off its articulated carapace, that one blind eye.
‘Gorenn, got grenades?’ Straessa called.
‘Only works if I can get it in the eye,’ the Dragonfly replied tersely.
‘They’re wise to that, believe me,’ Laszlo told her. ‘It can shove this whole barricade aside and mow the lot of you down with its piercers. It doesn’t need its leadshotter at all. Now are you bloody leaving or what?’
The Antspider stared at the gleaming flanks of the Sentinel as it settled itself to face the barricade. The soldiers around it were obviously preparing to advance, but the way they were massing showed that the war machine would provide their vanguard.
She had seen how fast those things could move.
‘Back,’ she ordered, just the one word. She had a hand on Gerethwy’s shoulder, but the Woodlouse was already straightening up, his toys all cleared up.
The Sentinel shook itself with a clatter of metal and she heard its engine roar even at that distance.
‘Run!’ she decided, and followed her own advice.
By the first sight of evening, the insurgents held the single College building from where their revolt had started, and no more.
They were the students, in the main. The neighbouring townsfolk who had risen alongside them had fled for their homes and workshops, those of them still alive to do so. The Wasp response had been brutal. Any Collegiate had been fair game for the snap-bows, armed or not. Street by street, with their Sentinels at the fore, they had crushed any resistance until only the College itself was left.
The students still held the courtyard wall, their line of snap-bows defended by more archers at every little window, and the Wasps seemed to think they had achieved enough for the day. They had built some barricades of their own, gutting a score of nearby buildings for material, and cordoned off every street surrounding the gate, out of easy snapbow range of the students but well within sight.
They were still fighting the Spiders, by most recent accounts. The soldiers of the Second had not even broken stride, it seemed.
The early evening quiet was broken now only by sporadic demands from the Wasp barricades that the Collegiates surrender, and that any non-combatants trapped on the wrong side of the barricades give themselves up now.
Anyone within our cordon at dawn will be treated as an enemy of the Empire and no mercy will be shown, came the warning. Since the call had gone out, a steady trickle of locals unfortunate enough to live too close to the College had been emerging: men, women and children shuffling hesitantly towards the Wasp lines with their heads bowed, not looking back at the College.
In the corridor outside the infirmary, Stenwold was laboriously pacing, despite the objections of the medical staff, working strength into his ragged muscles, his stick clacking and clicking on the floor.
‘Any ideas from the War Master would be much appreciated,’ Eujen observed.
The sound of the stick stopped. ‘I have none,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘We could try to break out, but the cost would be terrible – their barricades will slow us far more effectively than ours ever slowed the Wasps. We could hold out here until they bring some artillery to bear. Or until they decide the lives of their soldiers are cheap enough for them to force entry. Or we could surrender.’
‘On what terms?’ Eujen asked bitterly.
‘Whatever they offer, which aren’t likely to be attractive,’ Stenwold admitted. He looked the student leader in the eye. ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this, Eujen. You deserved better.’
‘And you?’
Stenwold was silent for a long while. ‘Perhaps this is what my life has been leading to. If I was a Wasp commenting on the life of Sten Maker, I’d say it was a fitting end.’
‘This isn’t just about you,’ Eujen pointed out, clearly nettled.
Stenwold leant heavily on his stick, hearing it creak. ‘I’m glad I can walk with some confidence now,’ he remarked.
‘Well, I’m happy for you, Master Maker,’ Eujen replied acidly.
‘It means I could walk out of the College doors and hand myself over to the Wasps.’
The silence between the two men dropped like a curtain, and held for some time,
‘I’m right there at the top of their list,’ Stenwold observed. ‘I’ve earned that, frankly. I know there are others within these walls they want – probably everyone by now – but I’m the man whose name has been on the lips of the Rekef for ten years. I’m the notorious War Master. And our one bargaining counter is that, if they want to come and get me, they know full well my loyal followers will make them pay in bodies. And the Wasps are not quite so heedless of their lives that they would welcome the chance to cover every inch of this building in blood when there is another way.’
Eujen’s expression was almost frightened, as he looked on Stenwold. ‘And when the Rekef get you?’
‘Then I’ll regret we ever had this conversation. If I don’t get the chance to do myself in first, of course. I’ve not had the chance to find out how quickly I can open my own veins, but there’s always a first time. But if taking me alive will buy anything for everyone here, then I will go, Eujen. Because I am responsible.’
‘Again, it’s not just about you—’
‘Eujen.’ A reprimand within the utterance of the name, not War Master to soldier but College Master to student. ‘I have been fighting the Wasps for more than a decade, and I have been inciting my city to fight them, also. I believed that it was the right thing to do. I am the man who built the Lowlands’ resistance to the Empire. And, you know, it seemed to work. It seemed . . .’ His arm was shaking, with the effort of just standing there, but he took a deep breath and calmed it. ‘But they came back, despite everything. They kept coming, swarm after swarm. And I can’t imagine how it must be to be General Tynan, just throwing an army at a problem over and over, machines and men and all the bloody waste of it, until you win. And if I’d known that before, known what an Imperial general – an Imperial army – was really like, then what would I have done?’
He looked at the silent Eujen and managed an ashen smile.
‘And some idiot student was saying only recently, should we not have been treating with the Wasps, working on them, trying to work with them, to change them from within rather than resisting them from without. Maybe someone should have listened, eh?’
‘Master Maker,’ Eujen said, almost a whisper. ‘I don’t know. I no longer know what’s right.’
‘I think we can both drink to that.’ Stenwold took a shuddering breath. ‘You yourself have to bargain with them, Eujen. Tell them they can have me. If they . . . any concession is better than none. Tell them I’ll come out alive, if they let everyone else just go home. I don’t know . . . Tell them something.’
Eujen stared at him for a long time, and then looked away. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said. ‘You need to go sit down now, War Master.’
The sky was already heavy with evening when Serena dropped back into the College courtyard. She had been gone the best part of an hour and Eujen had been as taut as a wire every minute of it, wondering if he had sent her to her death.
‘Right, Chief,’ she said to him, sounding shaky. ‘Well, that went about as well as it was ever going to.’
She had not been the first to volunteer as messenger to the Empire. Castre Gorenn had put herself forward, but Eujen reckoned the Wasps would shoot a Dragonfly far quicker than they would a Fly-kinden and, besides, the Commonweal Retaliatory Army was nobody’s idea of diplomatic.
‘Report,’ he told her, fully aware that these might be some of the last words he ever spoke as chief officer of the Student Company.
‘Their officer in charge will meet with one of our leaders, Chief. To talk terms.’
It would not be fair to say that a great weight fell from Eujen’s shoulders, but at least it shifted position. ‘Now?’
‘Well, I don’t think they’re going anywhere until dawn, you know, but I reckon they’re expecting you sooner than that,’ Serena observed.
Eujen nodded. He wished now that he presented a better image: a breastplate that was clean and undented, a buff coat that wasn’t holed and stitched. Perhaps a more heroic physique. Perhaps a better man entirely, to handle this more adeptly.
But there was only him.
‘Then I think it’s time I went. Get ready to open the gates. Close them the moment I’m through.’
‘Eujen!’
He closed his eyes. He had hoped to avoid this moment.
The Antspider stormed across the courtyard towards him. ‘Have you been avoiding me, you child? What are you doing out here?’
He just looked at her. In fact he drank her in, those halfbreed features that were beautiful, to him, even flushed with annoyance, and the way she carried herself, the long-limbed grace of her.
‘I’m going to talk to the Wasps. I won’t be long.’
She made a strange noise that had probably started off as a word.
‘I’m going to see what can be salvaged. I’ve got a few things to bargain with. Otherwise nobody’s going to do well out of tomorrow, but least of all us here.’
He saw the sea-change pass across her face, Straessa automatically reaching for antagonism, because that was how she dealt with the world when she caught it cheating. ‘You’re doing what, now? Tell me I misheard you, Eujen, because that sounds about the most stupid thing I ever heard said on College grounds – and, believe me, that’s including the entire philosophy department.’
He did not smile. He denied her that. ‘The city hasn’t risen, Straessa. The Wasps are mopping up the Spiders right now and, even without that, they’ve got the men and the machines to beat us. It hasn’t worked.’ He said it softly, reasonably. He knew it would provoke her but he could not help that.
‘And you putting yourself in the hands of the Wasps will make everything all right, will it?’
‘Of course not, but it might help. There are lives at stake. If I can do anything . . . They made me chief officer, Straessa. You remember, you brought me the note yourself. I’m responsible.’
She bit at her lip, and he thought she would break, but then she spat out, ‘You intellectual cripple, Leadswell. You self-righteous turd. And it’s all about you, is it? You nobly sacrifice yourself, and that somehow helps, does it?’
‘I’m not sacrificing—’
‘Bollocks, you aren’t.’ Her fists were clenched, perhaps to keep her hands from straying to her sword. ‘Anyway, I’m coming—’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s an order, Officer Antspider. From your Chief.’
She looked at him as though he had stabbed her. ‘You think I’m soldier enough for that to work?’
‘Straessa, don’t take this the wrong way, but what would I do with you there? You’d stab the first Wasp you saw of major or above, and piss on the whole thing. Look at you. I can’t rely on you. You stay here.’ Sorry, I’m so sorry, but you’re not coming with me, not this time. Forgive me later, but believe me now.
She was trying to speak, and failing, the intended words just coming apart in her mouth, and he saw her shaking, shoulders, hands, all of her. In the lamplight her eyes were bright and shining.
‘Open the gates,’ Eujen ordered, and he heard the bars lifted off, the creak of reinforced wood. Stepping through them was a hard thing, perhaps the hardest thing he had ever done.
Behind him, he heard Straessa hurl a scream at him – wordless, frustrated, agonized, loud enough that the Wasps must be wondering what horrors were going on inside the Collegiate camp. Just the usual, the way we always go about things. It was a single, short, ugly sound, but it stayed with him.
There was a whisper of wings before he was twenty feet from the gates, and he thought for a moment it would be some
overbold Light Airborne come to escort him in, and about to get shot for his pains. Serena dropped down beside him, though, matching his pace.
‘Chief,’ she acknowledged.
‘Get back inside.’
‘What’re they going to think, if you just pitch up on your own, Chief?’ she asked. ‘Man needs staff, a retinue, or they won’t take you seriously. We thought at least we should show them you’re worth listening to.’
‘Are you serious? Wait – “we”?’
‘Eujen.’
The expected Wasp face, but set above a Collegiate uniform. Averic strode out of the shadows.
‘Not a chance. Back behind cover, the both of you.’
‘I’ll be able to help you. They’re my people.’
‘And you’re a traitor to them. That means . . . what is it, crossed pikes?’
Averic sighed. ‘I’m not Straessa.’
Eujen frowned at him. ‘I didn’t think you were.’
‘So insult me, tell me I’ll spoil things, call me out for my kinden or my character. I’m still going with you.’
Eujen opened his mouth, but there was something in the man’s voice, his face, that rendered any response he could make seem trivial. And he had already parted from one of his friends on poor terms. And he had no way of making Averic go, even if he tried to insist on it.
And, anyway, we’re coming back. This is a diplomatic errand, like when Maker met with their general outside the walls.
He nodded, not trusting himself to find words, and continued on towards the Wasps with Serena to one side of him, and Averic to the other.
He had thought it hard to leave the gates. He had been wrong. Hard was approaching the Wasp-made barricades, seeing that long stretch of snapbowmen all giving him and his escort their undivided attention, seeing the great shell of a Sentinel reflecting the light of their sentry lamps, its scratched metal hide flaring silver. They all seemed unnaturally quiet and still, and he realized that it was because of him. He had their utter concentration. If he had been Stenwold Maker himself, in that moment, he could not have commanded the focus of the Wasps more completely.
War Master's Gate (Shadows of the Apt) Page 56