War Master's Gate (85 page)

The classes were now smaller: this was te Mosca’s unavoidable observation as she moved through the College. There were missing faces – dead or fled – and everyone was quieter.
Where before those students out of lectures had been raucous in their debate and merriment, now they went about their business with a soft step and whispered voice, because nobody wanted to be
noticed any more.

Faced with Tynan’s unexpected acquiescence, the administration beneath him had done their best to stamp the entire venture with black and gold. Every class would include an observer,
nominally there to allow the Imperials to understand their new subjects better. In some classes, indeed, this unwanted new addition was very attentive indeed, more so even than the students
themselves. When the College Masters gathered together behind closed doors, those who taught artifice agonized at the fact that they must either cripple their own teaching, or pass
Collegium’s mechanical knowledge piecemeal to the Engineering Corps. Teachers of social history had a worse time. One of them had simply disappeared early on, after forgetting herself during
her lectures. The only sort of philosophy and political theory that the Empire would tolerate was its own.

Other observers seemed to be simple soldiers drafted in to make up the numbers, especially for such subjects as the Empire plainly had no use for and considered trivial. Their impact on classes
was disconcertingly random – some simply knocked off for a drink at the start, or sat there and read, or just stared into space. Others took too much of an interest, such as the sergeant who
had decided he was an art critic and used his sting to torch an entire class’s life-painting efforts.

One of the Living Sciences lectures on anatomy had supposedly been commandeered by a Wasp who displayed a knowledge of the human body, its breaking points and tolerances, far in excess of the
lecturer himself.

But Sartaea te Mosca, Associate Master and teacher of Inapt studies, was lucky, and she had pushed that luck a very long way indeed. After all, she was teaching a subject that the Wasp-kinden
could not understand and did not care about. So far, her observer had been a Wasp soldier who had plainly been bored to tears by her ramblings, so usually just fell asleep.

And, all the while, she and her students spoke treachery. They spoke in the language of the Moths, who used the same words as everyone else but employed them very differently. They conferred
about events within Collegium as though they were dry old histories, nicknamed living men and women with the monikers of ancient heroes. At first her class had been the usual handful of awkward
Inapt and clueless Apt, but by now she was ‘teaching’ to a score of the city’s finest, who came and mastered the conventions and the subterfuge they employed because nowhere else
could they talk freely under the noses of their oppressors.

Sartaea te Mosca had never dreamt that her insignificant little class might ever provide so much of a service to the world.

She stepped into her classroom now – still the same cramped, high-ceilinged room as before, although it was getting difficult to fit everybody in these days – and she halted.

The expected bored Wasp soldier was not there. Instead, she faced a lean Moth-kinden man in grey robes, who looked at her with disdain.

‘You are the lecturer in “Inapt studies”, called te Mosca?’ he inquired.

‘Yes, that’s me.’ Sartaea had been trained by Moths, accepted into their halls because she had some magical talent, and yet never truly made welcome because that talent was not
great. This man’s arch and penetrating scrutiny brought those cold and unhappy days back to her with a vengeance. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I have been sent to Collegium from Tharn to assist our allies in the Empire with matters that Wasps themselves might not quite comprehend,’ he said, pointedly offering her no name.
‘I will be sitting in on your teaching, although what could possibly pass for true learning in a den of the Apt such as this eludes me. Perhaps you will surprise me. Perhaps your students are
all budding magicians. We shall see.’ His blank, white eyes seemed to see into every corner of her. ‘I look forward to your words, te Mosca. And, rest assured, I shall be reporting to
the administration on your fitness to teach.’

After her students had filed in, she stood before them, and began stammering her way through an old lecture, some genuine tangled Moth-kinden philosophy that most of those assembled there would
never be able to grasp. Every time the Moth coughed, or shuffled, or just looked at her in a certain way, she trailed off into silence.

The day after that, she cancelled her classes.

General Roder

It could have been worse.

For Roder himself it almost certainly would become worse. The Eighth had been facing nothing short of extinction when the Sarnesh had barrelled in to catch his forces between themselves and the
Mantis-kinden. And it had been
all
the Mantis-kinden, as far as he could work out, the Eighth’s mere presence having apparently mended a rift that had stood between Etheryon and
Nethyon for longer than histories recorded.

The defences that his men had put in place had slowed the Sarnesh charge and, had the Wasps been able to concentrate their efforts, then Roder was confident that the Ants would have been scythed
down in their ranks and thrown back, just as they had been before Malkan’s Stand. By that point, though, there had been several hundred Mantis-kinden running rampant behind the lines –
and they were swift and deadly, able to fly or just leap over any trenches or barriers the Wasps had put up. They had the same grasp of tactics that Roder had marked in their clashes with the
Eighth before the supposed alliance with the Nethyen – making effective use of their archers to bedevil the Wasp Light Airborne, continually disrupting any attempt to contain or flank
them.

Had it been just the Mantids, or just the Sarnesh . . . but the two of them together had squeezed and squeezed until the basic ability of the Eighth to coordinate and function as an army had
come apart at the seams, individual officers and detachments being swamped and destroyed, or falling back without orders.

Even then, Roder had done his best, sending out messengers by the minute to turn a threatened rout into a halfway disciplined retreat. He had saved as much as he could of his men. He had pulled
the Sentinels back, and even salvaged some of the lighter artillery pieces.

He had been forced to abandon the greatshotters, however, those marvels of Iron Glove Cartel artifice, and now the Sarnesh engineers would be all over them. He had thus given one of the
Empire’s greatest weapons into the hands of the enemy. At least General Tynan, when he had been forced back from Collegium that first time, had possessed the decency to have his artillery
destroyed by aerial bombardment.

He wondered where the Empress was now. If she was dead, then he might yet get to live, though hardly in glory. Did this new Mantis business mean her own insane errand into the forest had been
fatal for her? Was the Empire even now rudderless?

The Eighth had pulled back south-east, away from the forest, away from Sarn. Subsequent scouting suggested that his forces had, against all odds, inflicted sufficient damage on the Sarnesh that
the Ants were leery of immediately renewing hostilities, and the Mantids had not ventured far beyond their forest borders. Probably the two kinden were cautiously feeling out just where they stood
with each other.

He had dutifully sent word to Capitas that he had failed, and asking for fresh orders. The temptation to falsify his report had been strong, but he suspected that the Rekef would have people
amongst his officers who would ensure the truth was told back home, and hence honesty became perforce the best policy.

Yesterday those orders had arrived. The Empress’s personal seal was missing, but the word was brought by one of those Red Watch types, stating as always how he was the Empress’s own
mouth. There was no suggestion that the Empress had gone missing, and Roder sensed that to ask the question would be even more hazardous than losing a battle to the Sarnesh.

From a lack of contrary word, he could only assume that he was still in command, and still in the war.

That night he had slept better than he had for a tenday, only to be woken before dawn by a commotion that he knew could mean only one thing. The Sarnesh were attacking. They had fooled his
sentries and scouts somehow. He could hear shouts and screams already within the camp.

There was no time for armour, but he grabbed his sword from its scabbard and stumbled out into the grey half-light, demanding reports.

For a moment he could only see his own men rushing about, hear the crackle of stingshot, panicking cries from all around. He had no sense of which direction the attack was coming from.

Then he saw a man fall ten yards away, just tripping on nothing, then a moment later he had half-vanished, the ground beneath him caving in, tents nearby collapsing as their guy ropes flew free.
Roder gaped, any words dying in his mouth, trying to understand what he was seeing.

Another soldier rushed forwards to help the stricken man, but something lashed out at him, a lithe, whip-like strike from the pit, and the rescuer fell back and then collapsed, convulsing and
screaming.

Roder found his feet taking him nearer, despite a horrible atavistic fear that had sprung up in him. He had to know; he had to see.

The earth was falling away and there was a tunnel there, and surely this meant the Sarnesh had found some new way to employ their ant minions . . . or they had some new machine, or . . .

A knot of things was writhing within, long and twisted, segmented, and bristling with legs. Some raised their heads as he approached, barely more than two whipping antennae and a pair of curved,
poisonous claws.

The world was full of venomous creatures, of course. There were spiders and scorpions aplenty, and many of them pressed into service as riding or draught animals, guards and even pets. There was
one beast that no one had tamed, however, and those were killed on sight as often as not. There were stories and legends regarding them that the Apt scholars scoffed at, and that the Hornet-kinden
told one another about their campfires in their superstitious, credulous way. Those stories were all running through Roder’s mind right then, watching this writhing mass disentangle and
uncoil itself. And, beyond them, in the pit . . .

He saw them, the kinden, as they emerged from the earth in a rapid column, one after another moving with a sinuous coordination, each practically on the heels of the one before. They were like
no people he had ever seen, and a dreadful similarity occupied all their faces, enough to make an Ant shudder.

For all their discipline, they made a weirdly primitive show. They had armour of chitin plates and short blades and some were wielding slings, not even a crossbow amongst them. A laughable
threat, said those rational parts of Roder’s mind that were currently in the minority.

He saw his soldiers reacting, and most of them held snap-bows – and surely these soil-dwellers wouldn’t even know what a snapbow
was
.

And yet his men were not shooting. Most stood there and held their snapbows as though they had never seen them before, jabbing them at the enemy as though they knew the devices were weapons, but
not what to do with them. Others were already resorting to their stings, but by then the subterranean warriors were upon them, and there were more crawling from the earth all around, snaking lines
of them issuing from tents or just rising from the dusty ground, along with their murderous beasts.

Someone ran past Roder, one of the Bee-kinden that drove the Sentinels, and the general grabbed for the man’s shoulder, spinning him round. ‘Get in your machine!’ he demanded,
for surely those killer automotives would serve to scatter these attackers.

But the man just stared at Roder as though some part of his mind had been excised. ‘My . . .?’ he mouthed. ‘Machine . . .?’

And Roder stared at him and realized that he now had no idea of what he himself meant. He and the Bee-kinden gaped at one another, while all around them the remnants of the Eighth Army
disintegrated.

Raullo Mummers

And life in Collegium settled and found its new level. The Wasps had turned from a threat to a terror to a fact that must be lived with.

There were arrests still. A month after the final quashing of the student insurgency they were no longer common, but not a tenday went by without word of someone’s broken door found
hanging open, someone vanishing into the Imperial administration district that had been established around the Gear Gate. Some few were next seen on the crossed pikes, others were not seen again at
all. Some were released again, and it was a different kind of horror to see their family and colleagues and acquaintances react to them:
What did you tell them, that they let you go?

Raullo Mummers had expected to be arrested before this, because he had been in the College library building, because he had been part of the crowd that had lynched Helmess Broiler, simply
because he had been
there.

Two tendays later, he had finally come to terms with the fact that nobody cared. Nobody had been making a list of names back then, and in any event he had not been on the walls with a snapbow.
Carrying a stretcher had been the greatest blow he had struck for the freedom of Collegium, and even that experience had terrified him close to death.

The only tangible upshot of his ineffectual, inebriate presence during the fighting had been this room he now occupied, situated over a taverna: a low-ceilinged garret a fraction of the size of
his old studio, which had burned down during the bombing of the city. The taverner had a daughter, a student who had played a rather more active part in the insurgency, and she had spoken up for
him. Otherwise, Raullo would have found himself without even a roof over his head.

His landlord’s tolerance was a limited resource, though, just like any commodity in Collegium right now. Raullo knew that the man would come muttering for rent soon enough. There were
plenty of other dispossessed in the city, and most of them better able to pay their way than an artist who no longer painted.