War Master's Gate (21 page)

‘How much did you hear?’ he demanded of the older man, as though he had been caught plotting some sort of sedition.

‘Enough,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘You did well.’

I didn’t do it for you
. But to Eujen’s surprise, the words remained locked up in his mind. Now was not the time. ‘Any help in getting them ready would be
appreciated,’ he managed.

‘War Council will be meeting tomorrow . . .’ A moment of calculation on Stenwold’s part. ‘Let’s call it noon. You’ll be ready for a break by then, though
I’m not sure I can promise you one. I’d give you an agenda, except it would be out of date by dawn.’

Eujen nodded.
Surely there’s an old Inapt saying, ‘May you get what you ask for.’

Taki brought her oft-repaired
Esca Magni
down messily on the airfield, the rest of her flight skewing their Stormreaders to a halt around her. She slapped up her
cockpit lid and kicked herself out of her seat, her wings carrying her halfway across the field, battered by the wind of the landing orthopters.

A quick glance about located a familiar figure in Willem Reader, artificer and aviation scholar – and current object of her ire.

As she approached, she could see him counting the surviving sets of wings, and he met her grim expression with one of his own. He was a small-framed Beetle-kinden – though still bigger
than herself – with a mild face set off by a small moustache. Perhaps no man’s image of a great war hero, but his orthopter designs were all around them.

‘We should have had them!’ she exclaimed to him, as she touched down. ‘Even with the Farsphex screen, we had several clear runs at their supplies!’

‘Then what went wrong, Taki?’ came his measured response.

‘What went wrong is that the Stormreaders can only carry a handful of underpowered explosives, and lining them up for the strike is painstaking fiddly work when you’re being shot at.
They may not have many Farsphex, but they know their business! When we were doing the same favour for them, not so long ago, they still got plenty of bombs on the ground – you know
why?’

‘Because they have a second crew member doing the aiming, Taki,’ Willem broke in. ‘And because the Empire built them with that in mind, and a cursed good job they did of it.
Stormreaders are built to fight in the air. I
can’t
make you good against the ground. We’d need a whole different type of orthopter – and you’d need to give me the
time to work out the design. I won’t say I haven’t looked into it, but even if I’d started work straight after they left last time, we’d barely have a prototype when the
Second arrive again. And as for reverse-engineering the Farsphex . . . we have a handful of their crashed vessels whole enough to study, and nobody around here seems to realize just how
complex
the things are – let alone their fuel, which we don’t have, and which the chemical artifice department can’t even guess at. Taki . . .’

She had been ready to shout at him for failing her, but she saw from his face that he had already spent nights and days trying to overcome mountains, and that nobody was more aware of the stakes
than he was.

‘I’m sorry, Willem,’ she said. ‘What can you give me?’

‘There’s a big consignment of the new steel just shipped in, and I can get another dozen or so Stormreaders fitted with replacement springs. About half your strike force, by
then.’

She was shaking her head. ‘No point having half our machines that can stay over the enemy for a day at a time, if we’re still out of bombs in three passes.’

‘I know, I know, but it’s better than nothing. It’s
something
.’ Neither of them bothered to raise the obvious fact that, the closer the enemy came, the less
important the simple staying power of the Stormreaders would prove. ‘A lot of the city’s resources are going elsewhere. They’ve new artillery on the walls, for example . . . and
if it does come down to a siege, it shouldn’t just be you standing between victory and defeat.’

‘Let them keep telling themselves that,’ Taki grumbled. ‘I don’t trust fancy new untested artillery, and those Wasp big leadshotters already have two cities to their
tally is what I hear.’ She waved over at one of the ground crew. ‘Get them all re-tensioned, right away. Training flights in two hours!’

‘You push yourself too hard,’ Reader said softly.

‘Me? I’m a Fly, Willem. We just keep buzzing.’ She was aware that her grin was too bright and cheerful, to the point of cracking about the edges. ‘Maker’s Draft has
given me three score Collegiates who think they can fly an orthopter. By the end of today I reckon at least a score of them will be wearing the sashes of the Merchant Companies and praying never to
leave the ground again. The rest perhaps I can use.’
But they’ll never have a chance to get good at it
, was another unspoken but shared thought. ‘How’s the
family?’ An awkward digression. Taki had lived in a world of feuding pilots most of her life and the small talk of other people baffled her. Only after coming to Collegium had she started to
care about the earth-bound masses: men such as Willem Reader or Stenwold Maker. Only after running foul of the Empire had she started to appreciate the bigger issues and what they meant to the
individuals around her.

‘Jen’s grumbling that they want to use her library as a hospital, if the worst comes to the worst. I swear she’d let the Empire in through the gates if they showed a thorough
knowledge of indexing. Little Jen has been learning emergency drill at school, She always used to draw me pictures of orthopters, but now, when she does, they’re fighting. Everything’s
gone mad.’ He said it matter-of-factly, but there was a world of weariness there.

I’m not the only one pushing myself too hard
, Taki decided. ‘Come on, Willem, you don’t need to oversee all this personally.’

‘Better than the committees.’ He shrugged. ‘Which reminds me, the War Master wants a report from both of us. Now there’s a man, I swear, who never sleeps.’

Outside Collegium’s walls, another grand project was under way. The approach to the city was a broad and shallow slope of land that the river had ground out with its
meanderings over thousands of years, the cliffs on either side dipping down gently towards the sea. This was the bowl that held Collegium, and it had been a coastal resort for the Moth-kinden once,
but was now a seat of trade, rich farming and comfort for the Beetles. Defence had never been something the city had been sited for, and recent years had seen too many enemies simply come walking
up to the city’s gates. Now a great force of men and machines and animals was working on both sides of the river, and the rail line, to complicate the Second Army’s last few hundred
yards of advance.

Straessa was well aware that a battery of cartographers, architects, engineers and mathematicians had been up for nights working out the perfectly calibrated defence against the marching feet of
the Wasps. Taking into account the arcs of the city’s artillery, the strengths of the wall and the natural lie of the land, they had set out a complex maze of artificial topography to trip
and slow, funnel and compress; to force the hand of the Imperial general and make his soldiers victims of Collegium’s wall engines. The theory was all there and, as a student of the College,
she could probably have done some of those calculations herself.

Standing with a spade in her hand, overlooking the toiling soldiers of the Coldstone Company working alongside the machines of a dozen professionals who had made moving earth their business, it
all looked like a colossal mess to her. She could not shake off the feeling that this entire grandiose venture was simply to give the city’s massed soldiery something to do.

‘Water!’ came a shout, and she turned gratefully. A draught beetle was dragging out what had been a fire engine until recently, but had now been pressed into service to quench the
thirst of Collegium’s defenders.

‘Gorenn, get cups and buckets down the line,’ she called, and a Dragonfly woman took off from a nearby mound of earth, glad to be out of it, and started to organize a bucket
chain.

I should probably tell everyone how well they’re doing, but for all I know we’re going to have to shift everything ten feet to the left or something.
Plans on paper were all
very well, but putting them into action on the ground was another matter.

‘Officer Antspider!’ Another demand for her attention, but at least it gave her an excuse not to start shovelling again. All the privilege of rank had not stopped her underlings
shaming her into doing her bit.

She had not recognized the voice but, turning, she knew the man. ‘Gerethwy!’ she cried, delighted. If her voice wavered very slightly over the last syllable of his name, well, he had
changed somewhat since losing half a hand to an exploding snapbow. He had always been freakishly tall – long-limbed, long-faced, with that stooped hunch that all Woodlouse-kinden apparently
had. Now his cheeks were hollow, and his grey skin seemed to show something beyond just his kinden’s natural hue.

‘Reporting for duty,’ he told her, striding over the uneven ground. ‘If you’ll have me.’

‘Te Mosca let you go, did she?’

‘I need to
do
something.’ And he was saying more than he used to, as well. Single words, nods and wry expressions had always seemed enough before. Now all those unspoken
words were leaking out. ‘What in the pits is this?’ His eyes raked over all that grand effort of earth-moving.

‘Second-to-last line of defence against the Wasps,’ she told him. ‘Get the ground all rucked up so that they can’t just march over it without getting in the way of our
artillery, and pack a load of the soil up against our walls to shield us from theirs.’

She thought he would go along with it, for a moment. She dearly wanted him to just nod along, as he always had done. That long face was swinging back and forth, though, the banded brow
furrowing.

‘All of this just for that?’ he pressed her.

‘It’ll help: every little thing . . .’ She should just be giving him orders, but he had been her friend longer than she had been his officer.

‘Straessa,’ he challenged her, still speaking in his quiet and gentle way, but now as if explaining something to a child, ‘two-thirds of the Wasp army can
fly
. And
their artillery can hit us from well beyond any of this stuff. And their orthopters . . .’ He looked like a man trying to work out whether he was caught in a nightmare or not.
‘We’re fighting yesterday’s war. What will all of this
achieve
?’

‘I said that, too,’ the Dragonfly woman, Gorenn, said, dropping down for more water. ‘Would they listen? They would not.’

She wasn’t the only one. Straessa had heard that Kymene, the leader of the Mynans in exile in Collegium, had got into a blazing row over that very same issue, having witnessed her own city
fall to the Wasps, and of course half of Gorenn’s homeland had been Wasp-occupied for years. It seemed their voices counted for little.

‘They have ground troops,’ she insisted, listening to herself defend a decision of her superiors that she had not really agreed with in the first place. ‘You remember their
infantry as well as I do.’
Better, probably, under the circumstances.
‘Their Spiderlands mob won’t be in the air, either. So it’ll help, and it’s better than
not having it.’ There were a lot of soldiers listening in now, who had been slaving away in the sweat-harvesting sun for hours, and she was abruptly aware how tenuous the whole structure of
Collegiate authority was, how much it relied on the consent of all concerned. ‘Look, you said you were reporting for duty,’ she pointed out, more harshly than she had intended.

He just looked at her, and she guessed he might walk away, but then he had grabbed a spade, fumbling with it a little, and set to work, driving at the earth as though it was a surrogate for all
the things he could not just bludgeon into place. He was half a hand short, but he was stronger than he looked, and soon everyone was back to following orders.
Thanks to me. Hooray for
me.

‘Bookworm,’ said Gorenn, drawing the final bucket of water, and Straessa looked up to see a wobbling figure weave unsteadily through the air until it had dropped down on the ground
in front of her. This was Jodry Drillen’s Fly-kinden secretary, who had taken to going about with a breastplate on, so heavy he made hard weather of even the short hop from the city walls.
Does he just want to look like a soldier, or does he know something about the range of the Wasp engines?

‘Where’s your chief officer?’ he demanded, not so much of the Antspider as of everyone.

‘On the walls with the artillerists,’ Straessa told him. ‘You probably just passed him.’

The little man choked down his annoyance, smoothing his face over with his usual slightly superior expression. ‘Well, kindly go and get him and send him on to the War Council. They need
everyone.’

We’re not even trying for a field battle, are we?
Straessa wondered, but she remembered the last one quite well enough, most especially the way that all the courage, imagination,
armament and righteousness of the Collegiate forces had been ground down and broken against the numbers and discipline of the Wasps.
And that discipline is something they learn from the womb,
most likely. It’s not something we can just work out from first principles.
And then there had been the Sentinels, the great armoured wood-louse-shaped machines armed with leadshotters
and rotary piercers, proof against just about anything that the Collegiates had been able to throw at them, including aerial bombardment.
And has anyone got a clever plan for those, I wonder?
Because, if so, nobody’s said what it is.

‘I’ll get him, don’t worry,’ she promised.

‘To the Prowess Forum, that’s where they’re meeting. And now’s not too soon,’ the Fly snapped at her, and then he was clawing for the air again, touching down a
couple of times as he built up speed, before lurching away back towards the city.
Easier for you to find him yourself, you overdressed little prig
, Straessa reflected, but no doubt the
Speaker’s vaunted secretary had better things to do. She glanced at Gerethwy, contemplating taking him along with her, but, looking at the fragile set of his face, she decided wretchedly that
she couldn’t cope with him just then, so she left him digging.