War Master's Gate (2 page)

Back home in the Empire there were no forests like this. The Wasps had no use for them: such places were grown to harbour sedition and inferior kinden. Trees in the Empire behaved themselves,
planted in neat rows ready for axe and saw.

For Hanto, this endless wind-rolled canopy reminded him only of the war in the Commonweal; he was just old enough to have seen the last years of it. There had been so much wasted land up in the
north, untilled and uncut. There had been forests like this, where the Mantis-kinden lurked, against which the armies of the Emperor had broken when they first marched forth.

Only the first time, though. After that, they had destroyed each knot of stubborn resistance with fire and the sword, with the ingenuity of war machines and the cunning infiltration of the
Pioneers. And that was where Hanto came in.

He had been barely more than a boy, in that war. Now, he was a veteran, and the army had called him up to take on this new challenge.

He had been flying for too long, letting that unrelieved green ocean pass beneath him, and now he let himself drop, coming down lightly in the top reaches of the canopy, still without any useful
intelligence to bring back to his masters. Crouched in the branches, beneath the shadow of the leaves, he scanned the ground far below with his strung shortbow at the ready. Not a snapbow, not for
Hanto: he was of that minority of Fly-kinden, the Inapt. Crossbows and all the other paraphernalia of the modern war were a closed book to him. His early life had been a hard one, all taunts and
closed doors, but there were compensations. A place like this, an old place, an Inapt place that had preserved its secrets for centuries – his Apt comrades would never get this far, not for
all their craft. Stealth here was a matter of blending in, and any of the Apt would stand out by a thousand years of hostile progress.

Not that Hanto was feeling particularly welcome right now. This was a bad place, he knew it in his bones. This was a magic place. All his life he had laughed at the idea, and always a little
louder than his fellows, to cover the fact that he knew full well it was real. His mother had whispered it to him from his youngest days, to beware a place like this. He wished he had the option,
but the Eighth Army desperately needed an eye within these trees.

The precise military situation was somewhat confused to Hanto – intelligence that a scout could never quite get hold of always concerned the doings of his own side. General Roder’s
proud Eighth had made fierce and fleet time on its westward march. Myna had been beaten into submission by superior technology, Helleron had opened its legs like a whore, and the Sarnesh fortress
at Malkan’s Stand had been reduced to rubble. Roder had fast been writing himself into the history books as one of the most successful generals the Empire had ever known.

And then . . . what? They had been skirting the southern edge of the forest, fending off constant angry attention from the Mantis-kinden who lurked there, but the army were making strong
progress towards Sarn itself, one of the Lowlands’ two key cities. And then they had stopped. And then they had actually retreated for a bit, as though some army was just past the horizon
that even General Roder didn’t fancy clashing with. And they had set up camp and sat around – had been doing so for some time now – and nobody knew why except, presumably, Roder
himself.

Some said it was to do with the way things had gone to the south. Solid scuttlebutt claimed that the Second Army under General Tynan had been pushed back from Collegium with bad losses: the
“Gears”, as they were known, suddenly breaking their teeth against the hard walls of the Beetle city. What precisely had gone wrong was harder to pin down. Some said that Tynan’s
Spider-kinden allies had betrayed him and, though this would hardly be much of a surprise given the reputation of that race, other reports suggested that the Grand Army of the Aldanrael – or
whatever they were called – was still beside the Second in the field, its treacheries undischarged as yet. Some aviators Hanto had overheard were saying instead that Collegium had won the air
war, smashed Tynan’s pilots over the city. That made halfway sense of Roder’s halt, to Hanto. It seemed unlikely that a Collegiate column was about to come marching out of the south to
take Roder in the flank, but the skies suddenly playing host to a mob of Beetle-kinden orthopters was entirely more probable.

So, there’s a jolly thought
, Hanto considered. Perhaps it was jollier than the other rumour, which was that Roder’s suddenly arrested progress had been ordered: that the
Empress herself had sent one of those new Red Watch types – cockier and far more dangerous than the old secret police of the Rekef had ever been – and just told the entire army to back
up and then sit tight. For what reason?
Does the Empress need to explain herself to you, soldier? No? Didn’t think so.

Still, Roder was doing his best with the limited opportunities. They were going to make a fight of it soon enough and, although no doubt the general would have preferred that fight to be closer
to Sarn’s gates, he was going to be ready for it when it came. Hence Hanto’s presence as a mote in the vast green eye of the forest.

Out there to the west the Ant-kinden of Sarn were mustering, no doubt, good soldiers but behind the Empire in artifice, mobility and imagination. Alone, Hanto would have bet two months’
wages on the outcome and not sweated much over the chance of losing. Sarn had its allies, however, and here was where they dwelled.

The Mantis-kinden: savages, superstitious and barbaric, but nobody ever said they weren’t dangerous. Hanto knew that Tynan’s Second had clashed repeatedly with the Mantids of the
southern coast, and destroyed swathes of their forest home, tree by tree. Well, here to the north of Roder’s Eighth were far more trees and, presumably, far more Mantids – two entire
communities of them – invisible beneath that green shade, organized and swift and deadly.

The Pioneers were out in force right now. It was plain that Roder was already bracing himself to send soldiers into that killing tangle of trees to suppress his unseen enemies. Every ragged
fragment of information that men like Hanto could bring back would mean Wasp lives saved.

Except it wasn’t as easy as that, and Hanto knew why. Most of the other Pioneers didn’t. Most of them were Apt, or the Inapt who had fought their heritage so hard that they had
learned not to listen to it. Hanto had seen a dozen Mantis holds in the Commonweal but nothing quite like this. He didn’t like to think about the word ‘evil’, but this was no
healthy place to be. This was a place that ate Pioneers, a place of more than just killer natives and killer beasts. Roder wanted maps, but Hanto knew in his heart you could not map a place like
this any more than you could map the mind of a maniac.

It spoke to him.

When he heard that whispering voice, he wished he had not listened to his mother. He wished he did not believe in magic. It spoke to him and sometimes it spoke a name.

He was a veteran and he had a job to do. No Wasp, but he was a soldier of the Empire even so. He had come here, further than any other Pioneer, seeking signs of Mantis dwellings, of war-musters,
of Sarnesh Ants already within the trees. He had ranged far, looking for landmarks and reference points for the cartographers of the Intelligence Corps. By now, he had a feeling that the topography
of the forest was twisting and writhing every time he turned his back, like a nest of worms.

He wanted to go back, but he had spotted something on his last pass: something that looked like a building, perhaps. One little shard of intelligence and he could surely return to the Eighth: if
he had something to show for himself then he could at least pretend to have done his duty.

The wind-tossed canopy was an exercise in misdirection, so now he descended, a branch at a time. He moved as the tree moved, arrow nocked and ready and his wings shimmering for balance. The
forest beneath the branches was eerily quiet.

The trees were densely grown here, roots entangled, swollen trunks fighting each other for space. Hanto’s eyes were good enough to cut through the gloom, but still he could see no more
than a dozen yards before the forest closed him out.

Everything around him was
too
still, too silent. It was slowly winding the fear up tighter inside him.
Find it, get out
, but easier said than done. He flitted from tree to
tree, trying to get his bearings, then hopping back up past the canopy for another look from on high. Back up there, battered by the wind, he felt he was in a different world.

Again there was that glimpse of something. Stone – natural or worked? Either way it would be something for the Empire’s maps. He cast himself through the turbulent air towards it,
but lost it almost immediately, passing over where he was sure he had seen something, seeing nothing but more of the same.

Cursing, he fell back into that green abyss, plunging past the surface to the stifling silence.

He saw it. For a moment, just as he broke through, there was something there, off between the trees. He saw a mound plated with a carapace of great stones. Did Mantids build like that? Not in
the Commonweal, they hadn’t. And old, it had looked old and cracked and moss-grown. A fort, perhaps: some ancient Mantis strongpoint. Now
that
was something to go back and tell his
superiors.

He let himself drift forwards carefully, keeping an eye out for traps or webs or any movement that was not of the forest itself. He kept catching glimpses of the place, and then losing it, and
he was unhappily aware that the comings and goings of that mound were not particularly accounted for by his own movements or by the placement of the trees.
Magic
. But his superiors would
not accept ‘magic’ as a reason for failure.

The utter stillness all around him was becoming a horror. He could not even hear the wind, that had been so insistent up above.

There
: he had it. He froze, seeing it clearly for the first time, and only then realizing that the whisper, the little insidious voice that he had been trying to ignore, had been
calling to him all that time, and calling from here.

It had a name, that voice. It called itself
Argastos.

He saw the place now, that stone-clad barrow, and the sight sent a chill chasing through him, because he would swear this was no fort, no haunt of living men. It was a tomb.

That was it: he’d had enough. He’d report this
thing
, and his superiors would have to be happy with that, because there was no way that Hanto was staying a moment
longer.

He turned, wings flurrying, and toothed, raptorial arms plucked him from the air in one swift motion. His last sight was of vast, coolly intelligent eyes and the blades of its mandibles as it
brought him towards them.

To stare into the forest was to stare into the heart of time.

The darkness between those trees had not changed for centuries. Here had come no revolution, nor busy-handed Apt with their machines. The old ways still held sway in those green depths. The
reclusive denizens lived by the bow and the spear, hunting and gathering what the forest gave up to them. Sometimes, in their season, they were hunted in turn by the great beasts they took their
name from: Mantis-kinden, fierce and free.

And they fought. They honed their skills from the earliest age by practising against each other and against the world. Although the Apt kinden had shone their bright light across most of the
Lowlands, here was a bastion of the old darkness that even the Ant-kinden had considered too costly to conquer. Generations of Sarnesh tacticians had turned their eyes to that brooding presence on
their eastern horizon, then shaken their heads and turned away.

The forest itself was nameless, or else had a secret name as all the greatest of the Inapt things had secret names. The only labels the Apt ever recorded belonged to the two Mantis holds that
held dominion within the trees: Etheryon to the west, Nethyon to the east.

They held to themselves, mostly, although a steady trickle of young Etheryen had broken tradition enough to take Sarnesh coin in exchange for the use of their skills. More recently they had gone
to war, and the first tremor of change had disturbed the leaves of their forest. A conflict not of their own making: a war against the Wasp-kinden, because an Apt threat had finally arisen that
would not just shake its head and go away.

If he stared into the trees long enough, Amnon felt that he could feel a faint connection, a path back to the same certainties he had once lived by, which had made him happy to serve, happy to
lead, happy to know his place . . . His homeland was a city by a river a thousand years ago, the past held in gentle stasis as the seasons turned, all the sons and daughters of Khanaphes busy at
their allotted tasks. He had lived most of his life with no question in his head that could not be answered by,
Because it is so.

Then the Empire had come, the world he had been born to overwritten in just a pitiful few days: all the certainties crumbling to the touch. He had not missed it, not then. Instead, he had
despised the old ways because they had failed his people. He had seen his exile from Khanaphes as a badge of honour.

He wished he could go back, now, but there was nowhere to return to. The Khanaphes that was marked as a protectorate on Imperial maps did not resemble the home of his younger days.

There had been a woman of Collegium, a machine-handed and clever beauty, and, as long as he had her, the past could blow away with the desert wind for all he cared. Praeda Rakespear, her name
had been, and he had loved her, and she him. And the Wasps had killed her, and left him marooned in this island of the harsh present with no way back and nowhere to go.

When he stared into the Mantis forest, he almost felt that the dark past those trees harboured was somehow also the past of his youth, and that the bright sun of Khanaphes was what cast those
deep shadows. Surely all pasts eventually converged on one another, if you walked far enough back down that river?