War Master's Gate (67 page)

‘Very well,’ he proceeded. ‘Master Gripshod,
kindly
fetch me my old friend Stenwold Maker at once, or I’ll have Leadswell here executed. How about that?
I’ll give you a slow count of ten to allow you to make your choice.’
And either way I win, I think. And if I do get Maker now, Leadswell can have a tragic accident at some other
time.
And then occurred a blink: a sudden disconnection between the world as Helmess knew it to be and what his eyes were seeing.
Why does that student have a snapbow?

There was a general motion now in the crowd, and it was not the vacillating of a confused and unhappy mob. It was military.

His eyes kept alighting on the glint of steel: barrels, air-batteries, swords.

‘Sergeant,’ he hissed. ‘The Student Company was disarmed along with the rest, wasn’t it?’

The sergeant’s head snapped round to reveal an expression entirely blank. ‘What’s a Student Company, sir?’

In Helmess’s mind there rapidly coalesced a possible train of events, a series of communications between agents and the army, detailing Collegium’s strength, and then the order
coming back to disarm the Companies. Which Companies? The Merchant Companies, of course.

Because students were students, and soldiers were soldiers, and really, with their entire male population pressed into the army, what an ironic slip it was for some Wasp to make.

That was a broken second’s worth of thought, as the soldiers around him caught sight the same weapons, but they were not sure what his orders were. The sergeant was staring at him, perhaps
coming to the same abysmal conclusion, and—

Half the sergeant’s head was suddenly gone, a fist of blood and broken bone leaping from the cavity that was left, and the shooting started. Helmess dropped to his knees, hands over his
head, hearing shouts and screams – but all of it so brief, so brief. The dozen men he had brought along were horribly outmatched from the start, and by mere
students
! Even as they
tried to discharge their own snapbows they were cut down, and then the Dragonfly vaulted straight over him, ending up on the wall and shooting down at the two sentries even as they burst in to see
what was going on, one arrow piercing straight down alongside the collar of each man’s armour, loosed almost faster than Helmess could register.

In moments, only moments, Helmess was cowering alone before that great angry host of the young.

‘Who shot?’ Eujen demanded. And then, because the question was plainly twenty snapbow bolts too late, he amended it to, ‘Who loosed first?’

A terrible silence had otherwise fallen now that the Wasps were dead. The mood of the mob tilted between feeling aghast at what they had done to being fully determined to do more.

One man pushed his way forwards, his eyes locked on Eujen. Pale among the Beetle majority, he was an alien that fate had surely never intended to be standing there, not in that uniform and with
a Collegiate snapbow in his hand.

‘Averic,’ Eujen identified him.

‘I couldn’t let them take you,’ the Wasp said flatly. There was a great deal of emotion in his voice, but none of it suggested regret. ‘I
know
what they’d
do to you.’

‘You couldn’t—’ Eujen started, but Mummers broke in.

‘They’d have picked you apart, man! And what about the War Master?’ the artist slurred.

‘Since when were you such an admirer of Stenwold Maker?’ Eujen demanded of him.

‘But he’s right,’ old Berjek Gripshod put in. ‘So what now?’

Why are they all staring at me?
was Eujen’s only thought. But he wore the sash still, chief officer’s badge and all, and something iron and businesslike descended like a
gate inside his mind. ‘How many hurt on our side?’

‘Peddic Gorseway and Laina Mowwell are dead,’ reported Sartaea te Mosca promptly. ‘Four injured beyond that – one seriously.’

‘Get them to the infirmary,’ Eujen ordered.
Yes, ordered. That was the word for it.
‘Get . . . there’s a Student Company armoury in the blue dormitory. Anyone
who’s with us, wherever the pits we’re going, and wants a snapbow and bolts, go get them.’ Then: ‘Straessa?’ For of course, the Coldstone Company had been disarmed
just like all the regulars.

‘Oh, count on me, Chief,’ the Antspider told him, already turning to go. Gerethwy threw Eujen a nod of affirmation as he followed at her heels.

‘Anyone who wants to have not been here can go now,’ Eujen told the assembly. ‘And I mean that. We’ve a short breathing space before the Wasps come to investigate.’
He gave a nod of acknowledgement towards Castre Gorenn, who had been quick to cut off any chance of the alarm getting out. ‘But they’ll be here soon enough, and this could go any number
of ways. None of you asked to be party to this, so go now, and I only ask you keep your mouths shut.’

And some went, only a handful, with averted eyes and muttered apologies, but he would remember just how few they were, remember this with bafflement and pride for the rest of his life.

‘Get the Wasp dead taken away . . . one of the cold rooms in the cellars should do. Officers, I want people stationed at every window.’ The old Moth architecture rose above them,
built at the command of a race who thought in terms of entry by air, and therefore how best to deny it. There were a handful of balconies and windows big enough to be forced by determined
opposition, but not so many, and not so hard to hold. ‘I want a few fast fliers up on the courtyard wall, to keep watch and let us know the moment things turn bad.’ Castre Gorenn,
already in position, signalled her approval, and a couple of Fly-kinden were already winging up to join her.

‘And as for me,’ Eujen finished, ‘I need to speak to Stenwold Maker.’

‘And what about this turncoat here?’ Raullo Mummers demanded, and Eujen followed the direction of his finger to see Helmess Broiler slowly uncurling, his eyes on the weapons of the
students around him.

‘Now listen,’ the new Speaker of the Assembly said. ‘You’ve all just signed your death warrants, you must know that –
unless
I somehow plead mitigation to
the general on your behalf. If you want to get out of this with
anything
, then you have to listen to me very carefully and do everything I say.’

He was standing up, hands held out for calm, and that damnable smile creeping back on to his face, not a sign that he saw the bodies around him, the soldiers who had died in his defence. Eujen,
mildest of men, who had spent the last however many years preaching peace to a world on the brink of war, felt that gate in his mind lock tight.
If I had to choose between you and the Empress,
to speak on my behalf, then I’d place my faith in her before I ’d trust it to you.

‘Averic,’ he said. ‘We have all seen just how Speakers of the Assembly are served by the new administration.’ He could not believe it was his voice, saying such things,
but the words came out regardless. ‘Find some room with a sufficiently robust ceiling, and serve Master Broiler just the same.’

‘We’re at the crossroads of history, you know?’ Tactician Milus remarked softly. It was dark here, in the cell, but he knew her eyes were better than his for
such gloom, just like the Fly she resembled. ‘The Empire . . . it’s like some new treatment for a formerly incurable disease. Either it kills us, or . . . or our future becomes
something . . . different.’

There was a single high window, just a handful of inches across and set at what was ground level outside. The grey light filtering through it was continually crossed and recrossed by shadows as
people moved past, all of them at a smart pace. Sarn was mobilizing, and if Milus let his mind out, he would feel it, the immaculate perfection that was an Ant city-state going to war. But he chose
not to. His plans made, his orders given, he permitted himself to sit down here with his prisoner, only to be disturbed if some lightning move of the Empire broke through the confines of his
expectations.

He could feel the woman who called herself Lissart staring at him and, if he deigned to glance her way, perhaps he would see the light glinting in her eyes. She was well secured – a
dangerous creature, for sure, because of the Art she could call upon. Valuable, though. Precious, even.

‘But your city is strength eternal, surely,’ she whispered. ‘What possible disease could the Wasps be coming to cure?’

He chuckled indulgently. Because here he could
talk
rather than just share thoughts that ceased to be his in the moment of their thinking. Here he could say words and get a reaction,
and hear words that originated from outside, from another, separate mind. And if the result of those words was that she was sent back to the questioners, to be reminded of their deal, then so be
it. They both knew the game by now.

‘Stagnation is the disease that kills cities. It’s killed Tark and Kes, and came close to killing Vek. Collegium saved us once, although they hardly meant to, by teaching us their
ways: no slaves, tolerance of foreigners, and of course the tide of trade and technology that comes
gushing
in once you open your doors to Beetles. There must have been a lot of resistance
at the time, but the queen back then was truly a visionary. Change and growth: just what the Ant-kinden city-states of the Lowlands haven’t experienced for centuries. We’ve sat and
fought each other, without any great gain or loss, and we’ve been in a rut, ground deeper and deeper year to year. And now the Empire. Thanks to Collegium enlivening us a generation ago, we
have a chance. And if we can beat the Eighth back, then . . .’

‘Then what? What do you imagine you’ll achieve, even if you can? Which you won’t,’ she hissed, but he let her have her little tantrums: it made her easier to work for
information. These days she hardly needed encouragement.

Once the interrogators had confirmed that there seemed to be no practical upper limit to her tolerance for heat, it would have been down to the knives and the rack, under normal circumstances. A
shame, Milus had thought. Ruin someone irrevocably and you start the sands running on their usefulness as a resource,

Collegium had come to the rescue once again, though. Their clever academics had long before devised a way to make things cold, so as to assist them in their researches, and Sarnesh artificers
had been able to apply this to the case in hand. Milus supposed that what they had ended up with was the reverse of a branding iron, but with the additional advantage that, no matter how
excruciating the pain it inflicted, the icy blue-white marks it traced about the woman’s body faded after a tenday or so, leaving a blank slate for further inscription.

He had not been given much time, what with his principal work devoted to slowing the Eighth Army’s advance as much as possible, but he had been present when they had first broken her,
searing coldly through her remarkable reserves of strength and leaving her twitching and sobbing, begging for release.

Then had come the questions, with the machine ever on hand to remind her to tell the truth. But then again, how else were Ant-kinden to have any chance of believing a hostile outsider?

‘I’ll have to leave you,’ he told her. ‘It won’t be for long.’

‘I’ll be waiting for you.’ He liked the fact that at least a ghost of her defiance came back to her so readily. It was the reason he came down here to talk to her on the rare
occasions the war could spare him. And he knew he could crack her wide open just by bringing the machine back, just by letting her look at it. Such was the game they played.

She had not known much about the Eighth Army itself, but there was no reason why she should. He already knew she had been stationed in Solarno, a different operation altogether. In fact she
turned out to know relatively little even about the Second Army that had set off from there – and only from her time spent hiding amongst them.

But she had been questioned for hour after long hour about Imperial Intelligence: everything she knew about their methods, their agents, their means of communication. She had not understood at
first, because – like so many – she had not realized the scope of Milus’s ambitions, which were the ambitions of Sarn itself.

Milus was planning for the battle against the Eighth, certainly, but more than that he was planning for a war against the Empire, and he intended to take that all way to the gates of Capitas
itself.

If Thalric had been plunged into this place during the last war, as the man he had then been – the hard-minded Rekef killer – he would surely have broken before
now. It was the greatest expression of his not being the same man, that he could be surrounded by so much smoke and shadow, so little that made sense, and retain his mind intact. Not
easy
,
no, but his world had been sliding away from the rational and the sane for long enough that he could keep his balance on the slope. Seda and her unwholesome appetites; the catacombs beneath
Khanaphes; the Commonweal; Che.

That had been his first glimpse of Argastos but he had not doubted for a moment who the man was. The warlike Moth-kinden had appeared there without warning; just as suddenly he was gone, and
where the gloom-hung wall had stood behind him, now there was a ragged, shroud-hung corridor that they were plainly intended to walk along. Thalric’s disbelief was in suspension, awaiting
some more stable time when he might make use of it to begin covering over these memories and restoring his world view, but for now he was deep in the nightmare and clinging on.

And Seda.
There
had been a shock he was not prepared for. The woman he had fought so hard to get clear of, and who he had irrevocably made his enemy when he threw his lot in with Che,
and yet he had not been able to kill her when given the chance, and now here she was again.

When she had found him, in this dark, shifting place. When
she
had found him, not Che, he had been ready for the explosion, the lash of vengeance. In the time since he had left her,
surely the rapacious Empress would have driven out any sign of the girl he once knew, that fading spark in Seda’s eyes that had spoken of when she had been vulnerable, merely a pawn of her
brother.