War Master's Gate (60 page)

‘We cannot give up our independence,’ the Fly spoke into the silence, and Eujen could just see Stenwold’s lips moving and prompting him. ‘Mar’Maker says –
listen to me! – what you’ve lost up till now is nothing . . . Yes, they have killed your people and destroyed your homes but, if you let them, they will destroy your freedom. Collegium
was a slave city once, he says . . . slaves of the Moths, before the revolution. For five centuries this city’s been free, the jewel of the world . . . in trade, in learning, in the
philosophy of its government,’ he stumbled a little over the words, but his voice sounded strong and clear. ‘Give in to the Wasps, he says, and you will end that era. You will close
that book of history, and you’ll let the Wasps write the next.’

Stenwold lifted his head with visible effort, and a shudder went through him, a sign of the physicians’ serums still at work within his body, either to mend or to ruin him.

Jodry’s eyes flicked to Helmess Broiler once more. The man was keeping a keen eye on proceedings, but still he made no sign that he intended to speak. Instead another man stood up, across
the gathering, some merchant magnate from the look of him, and he was speaking before Jodry could invite him to.

‘Speaker, War Master.’ No ranting agitator this, just a sad, worn-down man on the wrong side of middle age. ‘We know this. We all know the stakes. You put this war before us,
and we went into it with our eyes open. I voted for it myself. And we’ve accomplished so much. We broke their air power, and we cast them back the first time. We fought them on the field, and
we’ve made their lives miserable all the way back here. And yet they’re here. We’ve done everything, and they’re still here.’

He had the whole Assembly listening, and Eujen wondered whether this man had ever before enjoyed such a rapt audience.

‘I lost a warehouse to their bombs,’ the Assembler continued. ‘Others lost their homes, their workplaces. Many lost their lives. And when we went out to meet them on the field
. . . well, there were plenty who didn’t come back. And how many young men and women have gone up in one of those Stormreaders, never to land safely?’ The tremble in his voice,
valiantly fought down, spoke of some personal loss. ‘There are no Felyen left.
None
. An entire culture, yet they broke against the Second Army, and now they’re no more –
not their home, nor any of them, not a one. And the killing at the wall just today, my friends, my children . . .’ For a moment he did lose control, his voice cracking and the raw, molten
grief glaring out from within it. But then he paused for breath and was his own man again, forcing all that terrible depth of loss away, holding it at arm’s length. ‘And, yes, we can
make them pay for every street. We can fight them for each house. But they will destroy those streets and those houses, just to take them from us. They will destroy the whole city, if they must, if
we will not give it to them. Look at what they have done so far, and look at everything they have taken from us. Masters, we do not have so much to lose, now. The men and women whose lives we would
throw at them, there are not so very many of them left. Please . . .’

‘What are you saying?’ Jodry demanded, but the man was already breaking down, sitting with his face in his hands, no more words left in him. The Speaker looked about, trying to
assess the mood of his fellows. ‘Listen to me. Listen!’

‘A vote!’ A new voice, crisp and clear and hard-edged.

Jodry turned to face his old enemy. Helmess Broiler had chosen his moment.

‘A vote!’ the man repeated, now standing. ‘Come, you’ve had your say, Jodry, and the War Master has had his, by surrogate. And we’ve all heard what Master Wisden
has had to say. Furthermore, we’ve all been out there! We’re seen it, the war and its leavings. So let’s bring this to a close and vote. Do we take what mercy General Tynan has
offered us? Choose wisely, or you may not get another chance to wear these robes.’

There were many there who looked to Stenwold, but the War Master just stared at the ground, and the Fly-kinden beside him stood mute, and at the last Jodry could put it off no longer.

Before nightfall the Assembly of Collegium, by a reasonable majority, had agreed to accept what terms the Empire might offer, word to be sent to General Tynan at first light. The war was
over.

‘Through the Gate’

–
MOTTO OF MAKER
’
S OWN MERCHANT COMPANY

In the air hung curtains of dawn mist and Che could hear, all around, an army standing quietly, so absurdly quietly. She heard the creak of leather and the scrape of metal, the
stamp and snort of horses and the click of chitin. Such small noises, and yet she knew that there were thousands assembled here, a great war-host gathered on a strange, sparsely wooded hillside in
the half-light, waiting to fight the greatest battle of their lives. They had come here to save the world.

‘History will sing of this day for all the centuries to come,’ said a voice from beside her, almost conversationally. ‘We will be heroes, every one of us.’

‘Let us hope history has the chance,’ from another voice, but receding, and she hurried after it, into the mist that was even now beginning to thin. The shadows of the soldiers all
around her were filling out with details. Mantis-kinden, she saw, rank on rank of them, and all clad in intricately crafted mail of chitin and steel. She cowered before their massed regard,
expecting any moment for one of them to call her out. She did not belong here, that much was plain, and Mantis-kinden were notorious for their intolerance of intruders.

But they ignored her, as if beneath their notice, and yet, as she stepped amongst them, she felt there were memories submerged somewhere in her mind . . . Had she not had dealings with the
Mantids only recently, and from a position of strength?

The realization that she was dreaming came creeping on her, not quite confirmed yet but well on its way. She had been through too many visions and wonders to be held in ignorance for too long.
For now, though, she followed the two speakers through the Mantids’ silent ranks, because they were her only point of reference.

‘We have driven them this far,’ said that the first voice, so rich and smooth, a voice of character and power. ‘Across the world, we have driven them. They have brought all
their armies together to face us, in their last stand. When we break them now, they must come to terms. Even a hate as mad as theirs must know limits.’

‘Must it?’ The other voice was female, older and more melancholy, and Che had caught up with them now, stepping absurdly close because now she had understood that nobody here would
notice her. She was inviolate because she was only an afterthought, a spectator to someone else’s thoughts.

When she saw him, that first speaker, she knew whose thoughts they were. He was a Moth-kinden, but nothing like the breed she knew from Tharn or Dorax. Tall and broad-shouldered from a life of
action, with a long sword hanging low and horizontal behind him, everything about him spoke
warrior
. His white stare was fierce and proud, and when it turned on her she felt a jolt of
contact even though he was gazing straight through her. His features sent a shiver through her, too: something in them of Achaeos, her dead lover. Here were the grey skin and blank eyes of his
kinden, yes, but more than that. Here was the face of a man who had lived and fought, known triumph and defeat, and had conquered both. Infinitely human, fallible and yet a man who had faced his
own failings.

He was one of the most handsome men she had ever seen. Perhaps only Salme Dien had been a more beautiful specimen of humanity.

He wore a hauberk of chitin scales that fell to his knees, with a loose, open robe slung over it, and in the crook of his arm rested a high, crested helm set with glittering iridescent wings,
the very picture of a warrior prince from the distant past, back when even the Days of Lore were young. And he was a magician, too, for she could smell it on him.

Argastos in life, seen through his own recollections.

The woman beside him was taller, hunched and bald, her pasty skin banded with grey: a Woodlouse-kinden but a warrior as well. Che had never seen the like, for she was encased in great
articulated lames of bronze, a metal carapace that must weigh two hundred pounds or more, and yet the woman moved easily inside it, for all her apparent years.

And now the mist was blowing away.

‘We must triumph today,’ Argastos declared. ‘There must be an end to it.’

The army took shape about them, in between the scattered trees, and Che caught her breath. She had never seen such a sight, nor had anyone else for a thousand years.

The Mantis-kinden were all around them, and she realized that these were Argastos’s personal guard, all five hundred of them; and beyond them were ranged the other war bands, together
making up a host of the Inapt such as she had never seen. She saw more Mantids, and groups of Moth-kinden in leather and chitin mail, with arrows to their bows. There was the glittering finery of
Dragonfly nobles on horseback, lifting their long swords towards the ascending dawn and shouting out their battle cries. She saw whole blocks of armoured Woodlouse-kinden bristling with pikes and
halberds, and knots of large-framed Scorpions trailed by packs of their beasts, claws agape. Haughty Spider-kinden in bright silks stalked forwards with bow and spear, giving the Mantids a wide
berth. And there were more, too: here was a score of lean, lightly armoured men and women she knew for Assassin Bugs, and there – she shuddered to see them out in the morning light, but there
was no mistaking those red eyes set in pallid faces – Mosquito-kinden, armed and armoured for battle, standing almost shoulder to shoulder with a dozen kinden who hated them with a
passion.

And, as she kept looking, she saw the others as well: less bright, less magical, less prominent, but gathered in numbers nonetheless. Ant-kinden with wooden shields and leather armour; Beetles
– her own ancestors – in bronze mail of a style that recalled Khanaphes; Great Mole Crickets; the darting forms of Flies. Here was the whole world, and it had come to do battle.

And now there was a great woman striding between those war bands, tall as a Mole Cricket but of a less massive build, robed and partly armoured in chitin plate, pointing a staff down the
hillside and calling out to Argastos, ‘War Master! They come!’

The huge woman’s helm was open, and Che looked upon her face and knew her name.
Elysiath Neptellian, Lady of the Bright Water, She whose Word Breaks all Bonds, Princess of the
Thousand.
Last seen by Che in the catacombs beneath Khanaphes, a millennium later, but here she was young and far from the great city of her people – a people who must already be in
decline – and she had come to fight. They had all come to fight.

And Che could see, further down the hill, another host that seemed to be forming out of the very earth itself: a vast horde of armoured figures. A fear arose at the sight of them – the
fear of all about her regarding that terrible enemy. She understood – because Argastos understood – that many of those out there had been their kin, somehow, before falling into
darkness. For this was the army of the Worm that sought to make everything like itself.

‘Their seers block ours,’ the Woodlouse woman announced. ‘We cannot know their full strength.’

‘They are many, what else do we need to know?’ Argastos asked her. ‘We have forced them to this battle. We can hardly leave them hungry now, can we?’

The host of the Worm was beginning to move, though Che could make out scant detail of them. She saw the war bands jostle amongst themselves, archers moving forwards and readying their arrows,
and the others forming no real line, nothing like a modern battle order, each war band to its own. But she understood, having been in those same shoes, that there were magicians here – many,
many magicians of all kinden. Each would direct a band, and speak to his or her fellows, for thus were the wars of the Inapt conducted back in the days of great magics.

And Argastos turned to her and smiled, lifting his helm to his head. ‘You do not want to see this,’ he told her. ‘What is a battle, after all? And this battle, above all
others, with no quarter given, no mercy, no call to hold until we had driven the Worm entirely from the land. And even then, even then they would not yield, but massed in their underground
fastnesses and swore vengeance. And try as we might . . . what could we do, other than what we did?’

She found him again, seated on a fallen tree and staring at a hole in the ground.

A change had come over him in however long the battle had lasted. His armour was battered, scales cracked and lost, and his helm had lost its crest. His robe was torn, and she saw a wound in his
shoulder, now patched over with a poultice in the style of Moth medicine. The real change was in his face, though, and she wondered how many years the battle could have taken, to leave him looking
so drawn and lined.

But his pale eyes discerned her, despite the fact that she was not there. ‘What else can we do?’ he asked. ‘Even now, my fellow war leaders consider my proposal. But we must
win. We must have outright victory, or what was it all for?’

The hole was ten feet across and rimmed with stone, she saw, and there were soldiers there – the mixture of kinden that she had seen before. Even as she watched, some were descending
– flying or climbing as their Art permitted – and others were emerging. She knew, by that same dream logic by which all knowledge came to her here, that there was still fighting taking
place below, that the Worm was holding out, just as Argastos had said, and planning its return.

‘They would make us all like them,’ Argastos explained. ‘That is what they want, just segment after identical segment of a single whole, until they become the entire
world.’

A small group was approaching him now, and Che studied them. Leaders, warlords and great magicians, surely: a Moth woman in a silver skullcap who must have been a Skryre; a Dragonfly prince; a
Spider Arista; a Mosquito with a fluid red birthmark blemishing his pallid forehead; a Mantis Weapons-master, with a brooch that would hardly have changed by Tisamon’s day, though everything
else about them was made unfamiliar by all the years that stood between their time and hers. At the back, poling himself along with a staff, another of the ponderous Masters of Khanaphes, this one
a stranger to her. The mighty and powerful of this early age, and yet their attitude to Argastos was one of wary deference.