War Master's Gate (14 page)

It was Laszlo’s turn to be silent.

‘I read you so well. I know every page. How you ever thought you’d be an agent for anyone taxes the mind.’ But her tone was cautiously fond. ‘I don’t want you
carrying the weight of betraying this Stenwold Maker of yours. I won’t be struck with the blame for that. You promise too much in return for too little. I want you free of guilt.’

‘And you’re breaking with the Sarnesh?’

‘If I do, your man Maker had better be able to protect me. Or I swear I’ll go back to the Wasps. Just be ready for me, when the time comes for you to fly back to Collegium. Watch out
for me.’ She leant in to him abruptly, lips brushing his cheek light as air, and then she was off, with the same jerky, stop-start flight, for all that they must have detected her by now.

Tonight was one for farewells.

The Etheryen had not responded to Che’s request to enter their domain. According to the Roach, Syale, the Loquae who led them were debating it even now, but the Mantids had only the
loosest organization within the wood, and a response could come either tonight or in a tenday.

I would prefer not to go in uninvited.
That would be classed as suicide by more resilient survivors than she, and she would be entrusting her life, and the lives of her fellows, to the
nebulous strength of her own magical authority, a branch she did not want to put her full weight on just yet.

She would be walking in with the dawn, though, if the Mantids had sent no message meanwhile. The Empress would not hesitate, after all.

And what is it, that’s in there? What is she after?

Che was uncomfortably aware that Empress Seda already knew of her presence. Each of them was like a needle in the mind of the other, impossible to ignore. Her best guess was that she had sensed
the Empress first, or at worst they had recoiled from each other at the same moment. But, if Seda had become much more accomplished in her divinations, it was possible that she had set a trap for
Che here.

In fact, it was possible that the entire business here was a trap. It sounded like hubris to think so, but Che remembered her last encounter with the woman, the unbridled hatred revealed just
because Che found herself sharing in the woman’s strange legacy.

Sharing was not something that the Empress was well suited for, Che had discovered. In that linked moment, Seda had nearly destroyed her mind out of reflexive fury, and that rage was still alive
and well. Che could feel the heat of it.

But she could not afford to believe this was just a trap, because if the Empress unlocked some great power here, the entire world would suffer.

Thalric had laid a fire, and they were camping up near the trees, waiting for any word at all. The Sarnesh were keeping clear, but Balkus and his Roach girl had come to join them. Che had
expected more remonstrations about her uncle, but the Ant stayed silent on that point. He himself was departing in the morning to take word to Princep.

‘I remember you in Helleron,’ she observed. ‘You weren’t half as serious, back then.’

His expression was a little hurt, a little sad. ‘War does that,’ he said solemnly, and then spoiled it by failing to suppress a smile. ‘No, forget that. Finding somewhere you
care enough to want to protect, that’s what does it. I mean, anywhere that’s mad enough to have me basically running its defence, that place deserves keeping around just for the laughs,
doesn’t it?’ His sigh was wistful, a moment’s requiem for the older, more carefree days. ‘I’ll pass word to Sperra for you: she always liked you. And Syale . .
.?’

‘I’m for the forest again,’ the Roach girl replied.

Balkus grimaced, but made no attempt to talk her out of it.

‘How?’ Tynisa said, abruptly. ‘I don’t understand. You’re . . . what are you, to the Mantids? Why don’t they just kill you?’ The words probably came out
sounding more hostile than she intended.

‘With the Mantis-kinden, there is only ever one reason,’ Syale told her, rising to the challenge enough to look Tynisa in the eye. ‘Why do they obey the Moths? Why do they hate
your kinden so? History. Even if they don’t remember the reason, they remember that it was thus in the Days of Lore, and so it cannot be any other way now. They have only their traditions
left. Everything else has been stripped from them by time. If you don’t understand that . . .’ ‘
Then you’ll die in there
,’ was plainly on the tip of her
tongue, but the words never came, the girl’s eyes flicking to Tynisa’s brooch: the sword and circle of the Weaponsmasters. ‘You
do
understand that, even if you
don’t know it,’ she said instead, frowning at Tynisa now. ‘Enough to know that we were their friends and kin, long ago, and even if they’ve forgotten how or why, they have
not forgotten that it was so.’

‘We do not forget,’ a new voice agreed, ‘but nor do we submit. Even the Moths must learn that lesson sometimes.’ A Mantis woman was suddenly there beside their fire,
springing startled oaths from Balkus and Thalric. She studied them, the Ant’s drawn sword and the Wasp’s out-thrust palm, and dismissed them as irrelevant. She was a lean, hard figure
clad in dun and russet leathers, with a cuirass of chitin scales. Her pale hair was bound back tautly against her skull, and her features could have been carved from white wood, so immobile were
they even when she spoke. Her yellow eyes moved constantly between the people about her as though looking for a victim, and the intelligence burning there seemed to belong to something other than
human. ‘You would be wise, Roach girl, to remember that our history recounts its share of those outsiders who went too far.’

Syale shrugged, doing her best to seem calm, but Che noticed her swallow.

Time to see what their price is, I suppose.
She hauled herself up to face the Mantis woman across the fire. ‘You’ve been sent to me?’

That cold, yellow gaze flicked towards her, then away. ‘No.’ The slender length of a rapier blade gleamed in her hand, and Che could not have said whether it was there a moment
before. ‘To her.’

She did not even need to indicate whom she meant, for Tynisa was already levering herself to her feet.

‘Your people sought this already,’ Che insisted. ‘I forbade it then and I forbid it now.’

The Mantis spared her barely a moment’s regard. ‘We do not know what you are. We do not know from where your authority stems. I say to you what I said to the Roach. You, too, can go
too far. Enter the woods with this one at your side, untested, and you will never be safe from us, nor will we ever be your allies. We call her out for bearing that badge and wearing that
face.’

‘Call me out for my father’s blood as well as my mother’s, then,’ Tynisa told her flatly. ‘I am ashamed of none of it.’

For a moment the Mantis’s eyes finally stopped, narrowed as though she was trying to see into Tynisa’s soul. At last she said, ‘So,’ a single word crammed with venom.

‘Tynisa, this isn’t necessary,’ Che insisted, but her sister held up a hand to stop her.

‘In this, Che, I know better than you, and it would happen sooner or later. Let it be now rather than when we’ve more important things to concern us.’ Tynisa had not looked
away from the Mantis woman, and those last words were pointed. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

Che opened her mouth a few times, as Tynisa limped away from their camp, moving closer to the trees.
I have magic
, she thought.
They have to listen to me!
But she was at the
limits of her understanding, and whatever power had been invested in her, she was still growing into it. She only hoped the Empress found herself in the same position.

The others were watching her, but she could only shrug. Tynisa had taken up a stance, the elegant, Mantis-worked rapier in her hand levelled at her opponent. This would be the first time she had
fought seriously, since taking her wounds. Another Mantis, another Weaponsmaster, had cut her up savagely in a duel in the Commonweal and, though she had won, the injuries had stayed with her, the
scar-tissue stiffening her movements, making every day a trial of pain.

The Mantis woman had her own blade levelled, taking her place with an enviable, easy grace. For a moment the two of them stood motionless, the duel taking shape, silent and still, between
them.

The Mantis struck first, darting in along the line of Tynisa’s blade and thrusting for her heart. The lightest of parries knocked the strike away, nothing of Tynisa moving but the wrist,
There was no riposte, and the Mantis ended up out of distance as she stepped back to avoid the counter-attack that never came. Another poised moment fell.

A few feints followed, the Mantis’s sword flicking in from either side, testing her opponent’s defences. Each time Tynisa turned her enemy’s steel aside with a minimum of
motion. Her arm did all. Her feet might as well have been nailed down.

Here it comes
, Che thought, for the Mantis had got the measure of her opponent now and was gathering herself, the exploratory feints becoming more and more aggressive, her attacks
fiercer and fiercer, and from more angles, stepping left and right to make her opponent move.

Tynisa moved. Abruptly she was dodging sideways to match the Mantis, and it was like a crippled beggar suddenly taking to his heels to avoid the guard. The limp, the stiffness, all were gone
without trace, and Tynisa’s old grace was back with her, born of her varied heritage and her long practice, of her own perfect affinity with the fight. The Mantis fell back, trying to open
some space in which to adjust, but Tynisa flowed with her, sword dancing, clattering and scraping as it stooped and clashed with the other woman’s blade.

What the others perceived, Che could not know, but her eyes saw the trick, the Weaponsmaster’s discipline that Tynisa drew on. It was almost as if her rapier was fixed in the air, moving
of its own accord and lending its wielder the strength to move with it. The sword led and Tynisa followed, an equal partnership of its strength and her direction. If she let go of the hilt, Che
felt that her sister would collapse like a puppet.

The Mantis woman hissed in fury and tried to reclaim the initiative, losing out to her emotions for only a moment: that this halfbreed, this abomination and trickster, was making a mockery of
her people’s ways. In that moment Tynisa had shrugged past her guard, rapier point dipping past the Mantis’s quillons to gash her hand, to slice a thin line of red up her arm, to come
to rest at the hollow of her throat. Now they were still again, just as they had started. For a long moment nobody spoke, nobody moved.

‘Finish it,’ the Mantis said quite calmly, as though the blade was pressed at someone else’s neck.

‘Cut your own throat, if you want,’ Tynisa answered carelessly, and abruptly she stepped back, sword lowering, and turned her back on her opponent. The access to speed and poise that
had possessed her drained away, and it was plain that her next few steps pained her. The sword had done its work, and now abandoned her to the aftermath.

‘If you claim that badge, you claim our ways!’ the Mantis shouted at her retreating back.

‘I have lived by Mantis ways,’ Tynisa said flatly, not looking at her. ‘I have seen where they lead and I am amazed there are any of your kinden left alive. Save that I know
that it is because
nobody
can live up to those iron rules you set yourselves. It is only by constant, concealed failures, day by day, that the Mantis-kinden can survive at all. I know this
from my father and I know this from myself. And yet the badge is still with me, as is the sword, and I am worthy of both. Can you deny that?’ At last she turned, inviting challenge.

The Mantis woman bared her teeth and braced herself, twice seeming on the very point of leaping at Tynisa and recommencing the duel. At the last, though, she could not.

‘Che, we go into the wood tomorrow?’ Tynisa asked.

‘That’s my plan.’ Che did not even bother with the usual platitudes of,
You don’t have to go with me.
‘The Sarnesh want to send soldiers in as well, so as
to help the Etheryen counter the Wasps. It’ll make sense to travel with them at first, but we’ll need to go faster, and deeper, soon enough.’

‘Then tell them we are coming. Tell them a Weaponsmaster is coming. And tell them that all the rest, my blood, my face, none of it matters if I have earned this badge.’ And Tynisa
stared at the Mantis woman until she had retreated back into the woods, looking baffled and angry but unable to deny it.

His name was Esmail. His name was Ostrec. He had two faces and two lives, one lurking invisible beneath the other, like a fish hanging in dark waters with its eyes fixed on the
surface.

The waters ran deeper still, for that outer shell of Ostrec was itself a many-layered thing. Lieutenant Ostrec of the Quartermasters Corps: ambitious young officer, pushy, arrogant, competitive,
all the virtues the Wasps so loved. No doubt his outmanoeuvred or fallen rivals had all wondered what his secret was. It was that behind the outer face of Lieutenant Ostrec lurked Major Ostrec of
the Rekef, hunter of traitors. He had been on close terms with great men until recently, had Major Ostrec, but then there had been a culling amongst those grandees of the secret police, a sudden
dying off of the Rekef’s leadership to isolate their General Brugan. His plots to control the Empress had gone awry, Brugan’s allies were dead, and the Rekef itself was lessened. And
Ostrec? Major Ostrec had seamlessly transferred his loyalty to the Empress, and nobody in the know had been much surprised. Who would not have done so, under the circumstances?

Now he was Major Ostrec of the Red Watch, a company of the elite created by the Empress herself. Most assumed that its members were all ex-Rekef spies and killers, or similar terrors, but there
was a stranger secret at the heart of it as the man behind Ostrec’s face knew only too well.

He knew the Empress was Inapt and a magician. She had hunted out Wasp-kinden with some faint touch of the old days in them – from mixed blood or some far-distant ancestor of power. These
Wasps she had made her own, bound them to her by blood and named them her Red Watch. Each had a mere drop of magic in them, but together they fed their mistress by their deeds. Seda had come late
to her power, by the slow decline of magic, but she was reinventing lost traditions at a frightening rate. She understood that darkness and fear and pain were not just tools of the arcane, they
were weapons of statecraft.