War Master's Gate (34 page)

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.’

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.

Syale had gone ahead, yet another thing Tynisa was not happy with, but Che seemed to trust her to find whatever she was looking for. The rest had just kept plodding on, Tynisa and her deputies
ahead, a block of Sarnesh loaned by Sentius bringing up the rear. Then Che had suddenly broken out of some reverie and announced that there was fighting, and that they had to get there.

So where is everyone?
Tynisa was more than conscious that there might be thirty Nethyen ahead, hidden on their home ground and watching this Spider-looking girl intrude. No sign,
though, and she could hardly stay here forever. The rest would probably have caught up with Maure already, and be closing on Terastos’s position.

Forward.
If there was an ambush, let her flush it out. With sword in hand, she was ready for anything.

In her final dash forwards she realized that she was rushing straight into a Mantis hold: faint glimpses of round-walled, organic buildings on all sides, but woven in between the trees so that
no line could be drawn between
within
and
without
. Except the Mantids
would
draw just such a line. To be in their home uninvited would be to draw sufficient ire that even
Tynisa and her blade might not be able to fend it off.

She was part way through glancing back to signal Terastos, still moving forwards as she did so, when the rest of the scene around her began to register on her senses. She stuttered to a stop,
hopelessly exposed to any archer who wanted her, while trying to match up expectation and discovery.

The smoke in her nose, the greedy buzz of flies, the smell of death, the corpses.

She had her blade ready, as though this sight itself was an enemy. There had been fighting here, surely, but not recently enough for Che to have heard any of it. The nearest buildings were
charred; she saw the blackened foundations of the smithy – the only stonework the Mantids would have needed – and guessed that the fire had leapt from there, chewed through a handful of
the nearest wooden homes and then wasted its guttering strength against the indomitable trees themselves. The true destruction had been in lives, not architecture.

Just as the inhabitants had not lived in a close-knit Apt village, so they had not fought an Apt battle. Instead, everywhere she looked there were Mantis dead, and when she looked beyond them,
between the trees further away, more dead still. They were scattered as they had died, weapons mostly still to hand, strewn disjointedly in knots of four and five, the ragdolls of history. They
bore their wounds with pride, she reckoned.
Live by the sword.

At a movement behind her, she turned, already registering Terastos before her sword could threaten him. The Moth’s blank eyes were wide, head twitching from side to side as he took it all
in.

‘Oh, this is wrong,’ he murmured, just loud enough for her to hear.

‘It’s war.’ Tynisa tried to sound hardened to it all.

‘No.’ The Moth shook his head. ‘No, this is not the way. Mantis-kinden, they don’t . . . they wouldn’t . . .’

Tynisa shrugged, still holding tenuously on to her composure. ‘The Wasps did it, then?’
Maybe the Sarnesh
, but that was a thought she did not voice aloud.

Terastos stalked past her, looking from body to body. ‘I see arrows, blade wounds . . . no stingshot burns, nothing from a snapbow bolt. They died fighting each other.’ As he looked
back at her, centuries of hidden history were hiding behind those white eyes. ‘What have they been driven to?’ he whispered. ‘Between the Sarnesh and the Empire, they are going
mad. This kinslaying . . . Mantis has always shed the blood of Mantis, it is their way, but with respect and by consent.’

‘Consent . . .?’ Tynisa stopped, because some pieces of the picture that she had been keeping at arm’s length were coming to her now, and refusing to be denied. She was
standing by one of the larger sprawls of Mantis dead, and she could see now that more than warriors had died here. Many of the bodies were so small, thin limbs and faces surely too young to display
such expressions of determination and defiance. Whoever had swept through here had been as mad as Terastos said. They had given no quarter.

‘Whose was this, Etheryen or Nethyen?’ she asked.

‘Does it matter?’ Terastos spread his hands. ‘I can’t say.’

Maure was approaching them now, and Tynisa thought for a moment that the sight would be too much for the other woman. She had forgotten the magician’s calling, though. The necromancer
slowed as she neared them, and what her eyes registered there, in the heart of that dead hold, Tynisa did not want to know.
Enough ghosts for a dozen lifetimes.

‘Tell me,’ Terastos said, and Tynisa realized with surprise that he was deferring to the halfbreed like a student seeking the advice of the learned.

‘Despair, nothing but despair.’ Maure’s eyes were closed, her voice was barely audible. ‘Those who attacked here, they had been broken in the hands of the outsiders, sick
of fighting the wars of others, sick of promises of a better future, sick of hearing the justifications of the Apt for why they must kill their own kin, sick of the doubt of their leaders. All they
had left was their honour. Mantis honour, which always has one last resort left to it. And so they came home.’

Terastos and Tynisa were both staring at her. ‘Home?’ the Moth echoed.

‘To salvage what they could of their way of life. To protect their people from the outside world that had changed them.’ Maure’s voice was precise and calm. ‘To save
their children from the future they had seen.’

Then the others began turning up, stepping cautiously through the trees and each one slowing as they realized where they were. Che was the only one to step past Tynisa, Amnon and Thalric
trailing to a halt in her wake.

‘Che . . .?’

But the Beetle girl was staring out into the trees, as if she had not seen any of it, as though her sight was focused entirely elsewhere.

The Sarnesh were now spreading out, searching for . . . survivors? Clues? Tynisa could not guess.

They came home
. Maure’s words kept going round and round inside her skull. Not a clash between Etheryen and Nethyen, but . . .

‘Miss Maker!’ It came from one of the Sarnesh, rousing Che from her introspection, and Tynisa actually
saw
her glance about, clearly bewildered at where she was, and then
seeing it as if for the first time.

The Sarnesh were clustered about one of the burned-out and broken huts, and Tynisa approached with trepidation, dragged unwillingly along at Che’s heels. There had been another faceless
act of extinction here, she discovered. The victims who had holed up in that cramped space had been children, for all that they had plainly fought to the last with knives and teeth. One body stood
out: the only non-Mantis there, lying convulsed across the threshold, pinned by the spear that had killed both her and the infant she held.

Syale had forfeited her neutrality.

Che stared at the corpse for a long time, and Tynisa was becoming more and more unsettled by just how
little
emotion was evident on her foster-sister’s face. The Che of old, that
soft and insecure child of Collegium, would fly into fits of passion at just about anything. Now . . . there was more expression on even Thalric’s face than on Che’s.

‘We need to move on,’ was all the Beetle woman said. Even the Sarnesh were looking uncertain now.

‘Che . . .’ Tynisa gestured at the scene. ‘We can’t . . .’

‘They made their choice. What do you think we can do?’

Tynisa flinched away, because there was something in Che now that frightened her badly, that had hold of her sister’s face and throat and made her say words that just did not belong to
her. The worst was that Tynisa’s own ready and angry answer just died in her throat. She felt some clawing thing deep within her, closing off her voice.
Fear
. That same old Mantis
fear of magic that had kept them as the Moths’ lackeys in the Days of Lore.
But I can’t be scared of Che . . .
And in that moment she saw just how far her sister had travelled
from their childhood.
I thought I’d changed, but she is something different now. A magician of the Bad Old Days?