War Master's Gate (68 page)

But she was still there, that girl. Her expression, when she found him, had been fond. There had been no recriminations, and for a moment he had been about to go to her as though he had never
left, as though she had never become the creature she now was. The traitor thought had been there in his mind:
How simple life would have been if only . . .

For all that he had bitten it back, fought it down, it was there still. He had lived a long time as a servant of the Empire, and here was the Empire itself in human form.

He was therefore very glad when Che had turned up soon afterwards. Seeing the Beetle girl, almost absurd in her lack of the majesty and threat that practically radiated from Seda, grounded him
back in reality, reminded him where his loyalties – and his affection – now lay.

‘Who’s that?’ Seda demanded sharply, and Thalric snapped back to the here and now. They had been making a cautious progress through the tunnel that Argastos had revealed, but
now there was someone ahead of them, plainly visible despite the darkness, as though a lamp were shining only on her.

‘Is that . . .?’ Tynisa murmured.

‘Mistress Bartrer?’ Che exclaimed.

Thalric looked again. Was it? He realized he had not paid much attention to the academic, but this apparition did seem to bear her face. She had shed her Collegiate robes, though, and was
wearing something simpler but of an antique cut, a long sleeveless brown tunic, ornamented with delicate black stitching at every edge. There was also some lavish piece of gold at her throat,
perhaps a torc.

Not a torc: a collar.

‘I’ve seen depictions of clothes like that in old books,’ Che said softly. ‘Slaves’ garments, from long before the Revolution. Maure, what are we looking
at?’

‘Some trick,’ Thalric tried, but not sure whether he believed it.

‘No image, no ghost, just the living woman,’ Maure confirmed.

‘But how can she be here? How can you . . .?’ Che walked forward to stand before the other woman. ‘Helma, can you hear me?’

The eyes swivelled to follow her, and abruptly Helma Bartrer’s face assumed an unexpected expression: pure spite. ‘Oh, I hear you, Maker,’ she acknowledged. ‘The master
has sent me to bring you to his table.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ Che insisted. ‘Why are you here? How did you even get here?’

‘By hard work, by guessing, by faith in my master,’ Bartrer hissed. ‘By knowing my place and staying true to our betters.’

‘The Moth-kinden?’

‘Do you deny it now that you are here?’ Barter challenged her.

‘She’s Arcanum,’ Thalric guessed, speaking of the Moth intelligence service. ‘She has been all this time.’

‘More than that.’ Seda spoke from right beside him. ‘Your people were slaves once, Maker. Small wonder, then, if there’s some remnant cult who want those days back. Never
underestimate how much some people want to be led.’

Helma Bartrer stared at the Empress. ‘Your kinden were slaves, too, Wasp girl, and they still are. It’s just that their taste in masters has deteriorated.’

‘Wait, you came all this way . . . how could you even know this was going to happen?’ Che demanded of her.

‘Oh, I hoped.’ Again that ugly look. ‘Everything to do with the Moths, I tried to associate myself with. We have been faithful, generation on generation, waiting for this day
when we could present ourselves to our masters. Perhaps all but I had given up any hope. But
you
!’ And the sudden venom was startling. ‘You had it all given to you, by mere
chance! You’ve become something special, something that
he
’s interested in . . . and how is that just, that you could blunder into such a thing when I’ve been loyal in my
heart all my life?’ She would have gone on but something stayed her, a reprimand audible to her only snapping her head back. ‘Come with me,’ she muttered, and hurried off into the
darkness, with that reflected light never quite leaving her, making the woman a beacon for them to navigate by.

It lit up nothing else, though, so they had arrived before they realized it. When the green-white lanterns sprang up around them, they all froze. Thalric felt meanly glad to see the same
startled, fearful look on Che’s and Maure’s faces as he knew must have appeared on his own.

‘Please be seated,’ Helma Bartrer declared flatly.

There was a table there, its top a single slab of black-varnished wood, its edges uneven and ragged with the contours of the tree it had been hacked from. The chairs were little better, just
slats and wands of wood twisted and grown together as though their maker, in striving to ape the natural, had finished up with something utterly unearthly. The walls pressed in on all sides,
allowing barely room to drag the chairs back. Thalric could see them only dimly and, when he brushed one with his elbow, he felt angled metal there, and he shivered without quite knowing why.

It did not help that those corpse-light lanterns lacked sconces: just fitful, pallid flames guttering in the air.

At the head of the table, he saw one seat they were plainly not being invited to sit in. It was more a throne, intricately carved with intertwining briars, beetles and grubs, centipedes and
woodlice and all things associated with decay, while its arms resembled the crooked claws of a mantis. As if that was not grand enough for their host, suspended behind it was the complete, hollow
exoskeleton of just such a beast, battle-scarred and one-eyed, and long enough dead for the light to lend it a translucent glow.

Barbaric trophies
, Thalric decided, and the gaudy ostentation gave him back some of his lost control, because here, at least, was a human thing, if only a desire to show off. Whatever
Argastos now was, this was a part of him Thalric could relate to. He had seen similar trophies even in the possession of Imperial officers, and they had been mere bragging boasts of their
owner’s self-importance.

Che’s hand found his arm and squeezed it slightly, and then she was sitting down, calmly and confidently, the first of them to do so. Seda followed suit a second behind, choosing a seat
across the table from her, with Tisamon inevitably taking station at her shoulder. With that, there was nothing else but for Tynisa to do likewise, but Thalric was cursed if he was going to hover
on his feet like a house-slave. Maure had already slipped in beside Che, and so he ended up at the end of the table facing that throne.

Their host arrived, just not all at once. Thalric had the best view of its progress, which he regretted. There was a scuttling and a massing within the intricate carving of the throne, and the
things previously only represented there were now springing from the wood, a dusty swarm of empty shells, wing-cases, sightless eyes and hollow mandibles, the tiny bloodless cadavers of a thousand
crawling things amalgamating and writhing, and growing ever greater until they had transformed into the slouching shape of a seated man. Thalric just stared, tightly motionless but unable to tear
his eyes from the sight.

Then the scuttling dead things began disintegrating, a shedding rain of chitin flakes and segments drifting away, and revealed was Argastos, clad in his mail, with his easy, empty smile and
those blank white eyes.

From somewhere inside him, a part of Thalric rose up and gave himself a slap, because he had been staring like some superstitious Commonwealer peasant at this show. And it
was
a show.
What was the point of this, if not to play to the crowd? We’ve seen him pop in and out like a sergeant in a brothel. Why the grand entrance, if not to awe the newcomers?
And with
that thought he managed to muster a reasonable head of contempt sufficient to take the edge off his fear.
Well, maybe you can still be taken down a step, Argastos.

There was a bowl in front of him. He assured himself it had always been there. In this bad light, who knew? Now Helma Bartrer, Mistress of the Great College, was fetching some sort of cauldron,
and Thalric realized that, of all things, she was about to serve them.

But, of course, that’s her place in Argastos’s world.

What she decanted into his bowl looked, in the unhealthy light, like greasy grey dishwater tinted with rot.

‘You have no idea,’ Argastos stated, ‘how long I have been waiting for you. Long enough that I ceased searching the future for some hope of deliverance, centuries
ago.’

Che and Seda exchanged glances and the Beetle inquired, ‘And who did you think you were waiting for?’

The Moth smiled easily. He possessed the sort of confident, self-satisfied manner and elegant good looks that made Thalric’s palms itch. ‘You, exactly you. A new kind of magician,
not tied to the old and yet with power, true power. I see the mark of the old Masters on the two of you, clear as day, and yet just look at you! Are you Skryres of my kinden? Are you Manipuli of
the Spiders or Mosquito Sarcads? You are not.’

He did not sound damning about that, either. Thalric might have expected contempt, but Argastos was playing a deeper game.

‘Beetles, Wasps, Ants – the inheritors of the world,’ the Moth continued admiringly. ‘Look at you. Look at
him
, a typical specimen.’ He jabbed his finger
at Thalric himself, who twitched in response, and had to press his hands down against the table to keep his Art in check.

‘Not a grain of magic in him,’ Argastos went on, ‘and yet his kind, your kin – the Apt – are the great masters of today, swarming over the earth, lords and ladies
of the new world. Don’t think I have not witnessed it, even locked away in here. Between then and now, I have had visitors whose minds have shown me all.’

There’s a pleasant thought
, Thalric reflected unhappily, as he cast a glance around at the oppressively confining walls. They only rose to around head-height, with the cave-like
ceiling arching high above, and they seemed . . . less than solid, as though there were gaps and holes in them, or shapes . . . His skin crawled.

‘You don’t resent us for taking away the world you knew, then?’ Seda asked the Moth haughtily. ‘Or the diminishing of your people?’

‘You overestimate how much I care about my kinden,’ Argastos replied sharply, making Helma Bartrer twitch. ‘I owe them a great deal, yes indeed, and it will be paid back, every
drop. I do not begrudge you, Empress of the Wasps. Your kind and her kind, all the Apt, you have built well. You have built more than we ever did, perhaps. And, believe me, I am the only man in the
world who can say this, for I remember my own time clearly – no false nostalgia for me. I am a thousand years of watching the world turn, and everything you have built is built on my
triumphs. If not for me, there would be nothing but the Worm.’

‘That’s a grand claim,’ Che observed cautiously.

‘Is it?’ Argastos still sounded very pleasant, very well-mannered, but Thalric kept hearing something hollow resonating in the man’s words, some agenda prowling behind them as
if trying to fight its way clear. He tried to catch Maure’s eye, in the hope that the woman had some insight, but the halfbreed was staring down at her bowl and keeping her eyes well away
from Argastos.

‘That was their sole intent, to cover the world with their kind, to leave nothing else under the sun or beneath the earth but themselves – not even their slaves once they had no more
use for them,’ Argastos explained. ‘The long wars of the Inapt kinden led them to that. In the end they could not feel safe while any other kinden shared their world. And I stopped
them. I was War Master of the great host, I won the battles, I drove them back into their holes. And, when the time came, it was I who made the decision to rid the world of them entirely, no matter
the cost, so that we could have a future secure from their resurgence.’

The hard tone creeping into that rich voice was exactly what Thalric had been expecting.

‘Are we supposed to applaud you?’ Seda enquired.

‘Why not? Is what I accomplished to be considered nothing? To have been the saviour of the whole world? Who else could say that, before or after me? You must see this – especially
you two, the magician-queens of this latter age. You must understand me. I have brought you here so that you can know me.’

‘You did not bring us here,’ Che said, almost half-heartedly. Seda was merely looking thoughtful.

‘I have brought you here,’ Argastos repeated, ‘and I appeal to you both. To the Beetle, for justice; to the Wasp, for revenge. Is it just that I should be trapped here for all
eternity, become a martyr to my own life’s work? Should I not plot my vengeance?’

And something must have happened to the light, then, though it hardly seemed brighter, because now Thalric could see the walls around them in detail, and saw that they were not walls at all, and
that the maze had not been a maze. The great mantis shell strung behind Argastos’s throne was only one trophy amongst hundreds.

Armour, ranks and ranks of it, stretching back into the gloom on every side, hanging empty and hollow like the insect carapace suspended above. Thalric’s eyes flicked from suit to suit.
The vast majority of it was Mantis-kinden work, that ornate and intricately worked mail and plate that collectors paid ridiculous sums for, but here was a collection that all Helleron would have
beggared itself to acquire, each suit unique, yet each following the same aesthetic.
How many Mantis dreams lie buried here?
And his eyes moved on from helm to faceless helm, over
glittering gold, enamel in green and black, spines and blades and elegantly shaped curves, that no smith now living could perhaps have wrought.

And there was more, alongside that antique host. He saw plenty in amongst them that seemed to be relics of a more recent time: the same chitin and leather as had been worn by the Nethyen still
living outside, back where the world was at least nominally sane. They hung from their stands right alongside their elder cousins and, if he had been minded, he could have traced the evolution: the
decline of Mantis culture from its glory days to the remnants of the present.

Black and gold caught his eye, and he realized that Argastos had welcomed more visitors than just the locals.