War Master's Gate (83 page)

And so she had turned her back on survival at such a cost. For her, there was more merit in this ending, entering battle like mummers from some ritual drama, all bright colours and heraldry
whose meaning had been lost to the world for centuries.

Seeing her there, on one knee with her sword in one hand, bloodied and bruised but unbowed, his heart was broken. He wanted to weep in that moment. He wanted to throw himself on her mercy, to
beg her forgiveness. He wanted to howl out his bitter anger to the sky.

An Imperial general was denied all these things.

He could not say her name, yet looked her in the eye even so, felt her Art wash over him and then ebb, the force of her will fading before him until she was just a woman after all. Just another
victim of his campaigns. He knew then that she truly had not betrayed him, that whatever the Empress intended, the Spiders – and what historian would ever believe it? – had not earned
their allies’ wrath. He knew that Mycella had been true to him, after all.

He felt as though the whole of Collegium was watching him as he lifted his arm, the palm of his hand directed towards her.

How can I live, after this?

The expression on her face was infinitely sad, and he knew it would remain there in his mind, sleeping and waking, for the rest of his days.

His hand flared as his sting discharged.

The refugee students broke away from the Living Sciences building in a rush. Stenwold stood by the door, leaning on his stick and hoping he looked like a stern warden guarding
the retreat of the others, whilst trying his best to catch his breath.

The plan was simple, and encapsulated in the phrase:
It’s a big city.
All those students able-bodied enough to do so were now going to ground. The Wasps could not know who had
been in the contingent that had started the insurrection, and either they would round up every student of the College or they would not. Some would leave the city as soon as they could. Others
– and by far the majority – would stay and wait their chances. Collegium would need them, Stenwold had promised. Their time would come.

The words had almost choked him, because their young faces had been so full of trust and hope.

The badly wounded were another matter – unable to move from place to place and with too much chance of their injuries being linked to the insurrection. They, and an escort, were going to
join Tomasso’s mercenaries. Word had been sent to the bearded Fly’s mercantile contacts to smuggle them out of the city, posing as guards or servants, hidden within goods wagons, stowed
away on ships. Tomasso had been working hard since his return to the city.

For Stenwold himself there were other plans.

The stretchers were coming out now. Tomasso had a quick word with the first bearers, to ensure they knew where they were going. It was not far but they must hurry, he was saying. The Wasps
would—

Even as he was saying it, the Wasps had discovered them – a dozen of them bundling hurriedly from a side-street and stumbling to a halt at this sudden exodus of students. Stenwold felt the
snapbow kick in his hands and a man in the centre of the squad went down, and then a handful of students were shooting too.
But it only takes one Wasp to raise the alarm!
And the last of
the wounded was only just being brought out of Living Sciences.

Then the reason for the Wasps’ initial hurry caught up with them: a handful of Spider-kinden, led by a lean man in black armour, ploughed into them and cut down two or three in those first
moments. The Wasps scattered, some trying for the sky, but a couple of Spiders carried bows and, between them and the students, the entire squad was accounted for.

‘Morkaris!’ Tomasso called over. ‘Still alive?’

The armoured Spider eyed him bleakly. ‘There are more coming,’ he said. ‘We are the last. I hope you’ve spent our lives wisely.’ He glanced at the last stretcher
rounding the corner, at the handful of students even now backing away, about to run for their hiding places.

‘Curse you all, Wasps and Flies and Beetles!’ Morkaris declared, but a wild exaltation seemed to have taken hold of his expression, and a moment later he brandished his axe high in
the air and went charging back the way he had come, his meagre handful of followers right behind him.

‘Laszlo, pay attention, boy,’ Tomasso barked. ‘Get your wings up, and get off with you – the
Tidenfree
’s out past the sea wall, waiting for my word, so you
go tell them we’re on our way.’

‘Right, Skipper.’ And Laszlo was airborne in an instant, darting away at roof level.

‘Come now, Master Maker.’ Tomasso turned to Stenwold. ‘The rest are trusting to their luck, so we must trust to ours.’ He regarded Stenwold doubtfully.
‘You’re up for a brisk run, Maker?’

No!
‘Going to have to be,’ Stenwold replied curtly, and then Tomasso was off, half running and half in the air, leaving the Beetle War Master to lurch after him.

He was not up for even a brisk walk, so Tomasso had to keep returning to him, and Stenwold began to see the first spark of worry in the man’s eye, fearing that he had miscalculated,
ignorant of how badly Stenwold had been hurt. From the College to the docks proved a long haul, especially while avoiding all the city’s biggest thoroughfares.

Tomasso had plotted their course in advance, leading Stenwold from Life Sciences to the river, and then through the rundown and unregarded streets that led along its course towards the sea. The
Collegium river trade had been killed off almost entirely by the rails and the airships, and those parts of the city that had once relied on it had been dying for decades. There were plenty of
shadowed places for Stenwold to fight for breath.

Sometimes they saw Wasps in the air above them, and once a Farsphex, and there were the occasional patrols on the ground too, and all the while they had to stop to rest more and more
frequently.

Stenwold never knew whether the Wasps had spotted them from the air – a Fly and a Beetle out in daylight was surely not the most suspicious sight in Collegium that day – or whether
one of the riverside locals had recognized his face and betrayed his own city’s War Master, but, as they neared the docks, there seemed to be more and more of the Light Airborne overhead,
until their progress was a punctuated series of hops and dashes from cover to cover – more and more suspicious by the minute until, if any Imperial
did
see them, he would guess
instantly that they were fugitives. Tomasso was cursing now, under his breath but Stenwold could hear him. He had obviously intended to be out of the city by now.

‘You go to the ship,’ Stenwold told him. ‘It’s not as if I can’t find the docks myself. You get going.’

‘Not a chance, Maker. I made a promise I’d see this through, and I’ve been paid for it. When I give my word, I see it’s kept.’

They were holed up no more than three streets from the docks by now, ducked into a storage shed that held nothing but scrap metal.

Then there was a hollow knocking sound that both of them recognized at once: the discharge of a leadshotter.

Tomasso was out of the shed immediately, with Stenwold lurching in his wake. There seemed little doubt about what the Wasps might be shooting at.

Stenwold shambled along the river’s course for another warehouse-length before following Tomasso’s abrupt left turn, cutting eastward for the main sea docks. There were fliers
overhead, and shouting from somewhere behind. A noose was drawing tight, and he wondered if they had specific orders to keep him alive, or whether he was just some faceless fugitive to them.

Sooner than expected, he lurched out within sight of the docks, his lungs hammering with the strain and his head swimming with nausea. Whatever good work the Instar had done, he thought he might
be undoing it with all this exertion. He staggered forwards again, then stumbled almost instantly to one knee, the world spinning about him.

Hands found his arm, hauling him upright. Tomasso was shouting in his ear: ‘Almost there, Maker. Don’t you give up here, you fat old bastard. Come on!’

Tisamon, in Myna
, came the thought from somewhere, and it gave Stenwold a sudden new lease of strength, able to push himself to his feet and weave towards the sea and the piers and . .
.

And no ship. The docks were empty.

Behind the sea wall?
For that had been the
Tidenfree
’s trick before, and what Wasp would think to look there, that even the Collegiate Port Authority had contrived to
overlook.

Except there was a Wasp leadshotter positioned out on the sea wall already. And, even as he spotted it, an exhalation of smoke burst from it, with the sound following like thunder soon
after.

Out across the harbour, out on the open sea, a tiny ship was riding, forced well out of artillery range.

‘Tomasso!’ he gasped.

‘I see it. Just keep going, you fool!’

There were Wasps coming now – not many, not just yet, but a dozen was more than enough. Stenwold found he no longer even had his snapbow. He had abandoned it some time during their
trek.

‘I understand.’ And he was still running, forcing himself forwards one stride at a time, onto a pier now, a ramshackle old one with a storage hut at the far end, a place he had gone
to before.

‘Good!’ Tomasso cried – and then he was abruptly no longer at Stenwold’s side. His small body spun under the snapbow bolt’s impact and then he was gone, knocked off
the pier into the water. Two more bolts fell past Stenwold, like errant drops of rain.

And Stenwold had run out of places to go.

He stopped there, with the heels of his boots at the furthest edge of the pier, and watched as the Wasps feathered down out of a clear sky. Some of them must have known who he was, and
communicated it to the rest, because the shooting had stopped now. They were just advancing across the docks, snapbows levelled.

Behind them, he saw his city as if for the first time: the newest subject state of the Wasp Empire, the furthest encroachment of the Black and Gold, despite all the blood and tears that had gone
into keeping it free.

He raised a fist in the air. ‘Liberty!’ he cried.

As they reached the landward end of the pier, he took one step back, and let the water take him.

The Antspider

They had kept her imprisoned for more than a day, with a little brackish water but no food at all. The pain in her eye, where a sword-guard had been rammed into her face,
had fallen into its own stubborn, unvarying rhythm, fading until she almost forgot about it, then flaring up just as she did. She had not dared to take the matted cloth from it to see . . . to see
if there was anything to see.

Her hand felt better: if she did not move it, then it was almost painless. The Imperial surgeon in charge of fixing her up enough to be worth torturing had done his job well there, at least.

Sometimes, soldiers passed by, and she found herself flinching away from them, despite herself, pain from her eye and hand stabbing at her together.

There was almost no light down here, and it was damp, and sometimes she could hear cries and begging from above, where the interrogators plied their trade.

She had discovered in herself a terrible fear of yet more pain and, although she tried to shrug it off flippantly and find some quip or dismissive remark to distance herself from it, she could
not.

When at last she heard heavy footsteps descending to her cellar, and saw the sway of a lamp as one of her jailers approached, she shrank back into the corner they had penned her in, hearing her
own breath grow ragged, and hating herself for it.

The lamp was hung up on the wall, to cast its uncompromising light across them both, and she saw that General Tynan himself had come to give her the bad news.

‘Your friends failed,’ he told her, ‘but you knew that.’ She could not fathom his expression, for none of the pieces seemed to fit together to make the man she had seen
before.

‘There’s peace in Collegium tonight,’ he said. ‘First time in a while. We won. We won it all. We beat all of them.’ He sat down heavily across from her, the light
gleaming on his bald head. He looked anything but triumphant. ‘What d’you think about that, eh?’ He yelled it without warning, as though the Wasp victory was a crime and she was
somehow responsible.

She had shrunk away from that yell, but now she turned her wide eye back to him and found him still staring at her, apparently wanting an answer.

Something surfaced in her that had been buried for too long. ‘Should I be saying hooray for the Empire?’ she whispered, her voice hoarse.

‘Hooray,’ Tynan echoed, and put his head in his hands. With a sudden lurching of perspective, she realized that he was the sort of pure clear drunk that even Collegiate students
seldom aspired to, and comfortable enough with it that he had been walking straight and speaking without slurring his words.

‘I killed her,’ he stated, without qualification. ‘I followed my orders. What else was I supposed to do? You can’t go against the throne. Who would obey a general who
hadn’t obeyed his own orders, eh?’ Looking up again, his reddened eyes challenged her. ‘I couldn’t have just walked away, could I? I couldn’t have just said
no.’

And then, losing focus on her. ‘I thought
she
was going to kill me, when she summoned me back to Capitas. When she said she was giving me my Second back, I felt so proud . .
.’

Straessa was now completely lost, unsure even how many women the general was talking about, whether he was claiming to have killed the Empress herself, or any of it.

‘When we were at the walls the first time,’ he rambled on, ‘I captured Stenwold Maker. You remember that? I had his woman, and he walked out to save her from the pikes, gave
himself to me. I had him in my hands. And then the orders came to head for home, but I could have had him shot. I could have rid the world of Stenwold Maker!’ A theatrical gesture, as though
he had an audience of thousands. ‘But I let him go – and you know why? I liked him. I respected him. He had the sort of courage a Wasp should have . . . and that I’ve seen a good
few officers lack! He abandoned his city, put himself in the jaws of the trap, just to save his woman pain. She betrayed him later, he told me. And she died for it.’