War Master's Gate (3 page)

But now the drone of a Sarnesh spotter orthopter intruded, boring into his ears and as impossible to ignore as a mosquito. The distant, certain past was wrenched away. At his back stood the
Sarnesh camp – hundreds of those tan-skinned Ant-kinden bustling there, armoured in chainmail with their rectangular shields slung across their backs. They were all of them busy, the
logistical weight of keeping an armed force in the field divided precisely across all their shoulders. They cooked, cleaned, sharpened, practised, patrolled, slept, relaxed, raised tents and stood
watch, all with the exactness of clockwork, each in touch with the minds of their fellows, as content in their busy Aptitude as Amnon himself had ever felt back in Khanaphes. He envied them.

The Imperial Eighth under General Roder had already bested the Sarnesh once, toppling their fortress at Malkan’s Folly and rebuffing their ground forces at the same time. After that, the
Wasps had made swift progress until they began to pass south of this forest, where skirmishing raids from the Mantids had brought them to a halt.

Unlike most Ant city-states, Sarn knew the value of allies. Hence this camp at the edge of the forest. Hence Amnon, arrived here from Collegium as the bodyguard of a Beetle diplomat, because
nobody there could think of much else to do with him. The Ants and their allies were planning their next move.

‘Hey, big man!’

Thus warned, Amnon did not start as a small form dropped down beside him, the blurring wings fading away to nothing as the figure touched the ground.

‘You coming back to us any time soon?’ the diminutive newcomer asked him. Amnon was indeed a big man: the Fly-kinden barely came up to his waist.

‘Back to you?’ For a moment Amnon thought he meant something more, some meaning connected with the dark, unrippled past between the trees.

‘Only, herself is starting to fret again. All these Mantids about: I don’t know why she wanted to come, if she’s so weird about them. Or maybe the weird is the why of
it.’ The Fly cast his eyes over the shadow-hung forest, the haunt of a thousand years of history.

‘Spooky, isn’t it,’ was his verdict.

On the journey up from Collegium Amnon had found the man a troubling travelling companion, his abrasive good cheer matching poorly with Amnon’s own thoughts. Troubling, mostly though,
because remarks like that last one could still drag a smile onto Amnon’s face, whether he wanted it or not. ‘You have no heart, Laszlo. You’re too Apt.’

‘You’re just as Apt as me,’ the Fly countered. ‘Now, seriously, Helma Bartrer is getting that look in her eye again, and there’s that Moth-kinden about and, without
your sober and overly serious gaze on her, she’s likely to do something stupid.’

Amnon grunted, and turned away from the pensive regard of the dark trees. There was a core of lead within him since Praeda had died, and sometimes he felt that he should just cling to it and
turn his back on the rest of the world. But Laszlo seemed an antidote to that, and the only way to shut off the little man’s irrepressible talking would be to kill him. Or perhaps remind the
Fly of his own troubles.

‘Any luck?’ he asked quietly, and for a moment the question did seem to decant some of his own seriousness into the Fly.

‘Not yet, but the Sarnesh skipper hasn’t shown yet, and I’m betting she’s still with him. Hoping so, anyway.’ Laszlo was part of the Collegiate delegation on
utterly false pretences, as only Amnon knew. Not that he was a spy, or rather a spy for any party other than Collegium, but he had his own agenda.

They picked their way back into the camp, following a curious order of precedence. The Ants got out of their way smoothly, each tipped off by a dozen pairs of eyes in advance, and finding it
simply more efficient to get clear of these clumsy, closed-minded foreigners. Laszlo and Amnon could have run straight at a dense mob of them and not jostled an elbow on the way through.

The Mantids were different. When their paths crossed, Amnon and Laszlo stopped to let the locals stalk haughtily by. True, the Etheryen were at least somewhat used to outsiders, given
Sarn’s proximity, but this was their home and to cross them here was to challenge them. The formal alliance between the Inapt and Apt was very new; nobody wanted to test its limits.

They were tall and graceful, and every one of them armed, even the youngest and the oldest who had ventured from the forest. Pale and sharp-featured, most of them looked on all who were not
their kin with arch condescension. They were the masters of battle whose steel had once ruled the Lowlands in the name of their Moth-kinden masters. That five centuries of progress had erased that
world, beyond their borders, was not hinted at in their expressions.

As Laszlo had observed, Helma Bartrer, Collegiate Assembler and Master of the College, was constantly twitchy. A jumpy look came into her eye every time she caught sight of a Mantis or a Moth.
Amnon had thought at first it was fear, curious in a woman who had volunteered herself for this duty. By now he had a sinking feeling that it might instead be academic curiosity, as if Bartrer was
forcibly restraining herself from stuffing each Mantis-kinden in a pickling jar for further study. He understood she belonged to the College history faculty, which covered a multitude of sins.

‘Ah, aha.’ She offered them a vague wave as they approached. ‘Good, in the nick of time. I think we’re close to getting under way.’ She was a broad, dark woman,
solidly built as most Beetles were, with her hair drawn back into a bun and wearing formal College robes that somehow remained approximately white despite her living out of a tent. A delicate pair
of spectacles sat on the bridge of her nose. Beside her was a man of around the same height, but of a slender build, grey of skin and with eyes of blank white: the ambassador from the Moths of
Dorax. He had no name that Amnon had ever heard mentioned, and was dressed more like a scout than a diplomat, wearing a banded leather cuirass under his loose grey robe, and a bandolier of throwing
knives over his narrow chest. Helma Bartrer became especially twitchy when Moths were about. If Amnon were to discover her dissecting the man for posterity, he would not be much surprised.

‘Is the Sarnesh fellow here, then?’ Laszlo asked eagerly,

‘The tactician? Just arrived, I think,’ Bartrer confirmed. ‘And Master . . . tells me that the Nethyen delegates are expected any moment.’

The Moth, whom Bartrer consistently addressed as ‘Master . . .’, in a pointed attempt at fishing for a name, nodded smoothly.

‘He says it’s a sign of how grave matters have become that the Nethyen have actually agreed to send someone,’ Bartrer went on, ‘They’re insular even for
Mantids.’

‘I’ll be properly honoured, then,’ Laszlo said. ‘Look, I’ve got some official business to sort out for Sten Maker – you mind if I make myself scarce for a
moment?’

Bartrer studied him narrowly through the lenses of her spectacles. ‘You seem to have a lot of official business that nobody told me about,’ she pointed out. ‘I
am
the
ambassador.’

‘Mar’Maker’s a busy man, Helma Bartrer,’ Laszlo pointed out merrily, and with that he was off and winging on his way.

Bartrer made an undiplomatic grimace, then turned back to the Moth. While Amnon had a good idea why she always sought the man out when she could, why ‘Master . . .’ stood around for
it was less clear. Perhaps, under the man’s unflappable exterior, he was frantically trying to navigate an imagined maze of Collegiate etiquette. Perhaps the Moths were as frightened of
alienating their allies as was everyone else?

He missed what Bartrer said next, though, because of a commotion starting up to the north of the camp, and because all the Ants around them had abruptly drawn their swords.

Balkus was not having a good time of it.

He was surrounded by his own people, and that was the problem. All those dun-coloured faces he could see were sufficiently like his own to have been sisters and brothers – indeed they
had
once been as close as sisters and brothers. Just like in any family, though, shared blood did not mean that you got on. Whilst most Ant-kinden knuckled down and let the mill of their
peers grind all the awkward edges off them, a few found that what such a process would leave behind would no longer be
them
.

You did not abandon a city-state and then come back later. That decision was made once, and never revisited. To become renegade meant never going home.

Balkus liked life simple, and that had mostly involved going to the opposite end of the Lowlands to Sarn and selling his services as a fighter and nailbowman to anyone who had enough coin. Then
he had gone into politics.

He hadn’t realized that he was doing it, at the time. He had merely signed on with a Helleren crew that had turned out to be run by an agent of Stenwold Maker, the Collegiate spymaster.
Then there had been a fight with the Wasps that had killed off several of Balkus’s friends, and going along with Maker’s plans to scupper the Empire had seemed the right and proper
thing to do.

That had led to his becoming a sort of unofficial lieutenant to Maker, which had in turn led, somehow, to Balkus leading the Collegiate detachment at the Battle of Malkan’s Folly –
the first scrap there, where the Sarnesh and their allies had smashed the Imperial Seventh and won the war, rather than the more recent one where events had gone somewhat the other way.

Leading a group of non-Ants in an Ant-led battle had been hard, but not because of the hostility of his former kinsmen. In the heat of battle, Balkus had lost it. Instead of being the defiant
renegade, he had been seamlessly taking mental orders from the Sarnesh tacticians and shouting them out to his Collegiate followers, never stopping to question them. He had become one of the colony
again, for all that they said you could never go back. Memory of the experience still woke him up at night in a cold sweat, convinced he was losing himself in a great sea of everyone else.

He had left Maker’s service for that reason, gone off with a friend to the new city of Princep Salma, which a rabble of idealistic refugees had been building west of Sarn. He should have
known better. He should have gone far, far away.

Of course, he had turned out to be one of the most experienced fighting men that the young city possessed. Before he could really think about matters, he had ended up in charge of the defence of
a part-built town with no borders and no real soldiers.

And when word came that the Wasps were coming again, and that the Sarnesh were gathering their allies, Balkus had found himself with a minuscule delegation sent to keep an eye on things. Princep
had neither the capability nor the inclination to wage war, even on the Wasps, but Sarn was its shield, closest neighbour and greatest potential threat if things went wrong. It was imperative for
Princep to know just what plans and promises were being made.

So here he was again – a big Ant, a head taller than most of his kin – had it been just that, in the end, that had marked him out as somehow wrong? – walking through an
invisible sea of their comment and criticism, breathing in ill wishes while exhaling his own profound dislike of his native people. The pressure of them all around him kept him constantly on his
guard – against the chance that they might decide that his being here was an insult demanding answer, against that small traitorous part of himself that wanted to give it all up and go home,
even though he never could.

His delegation was all of two other people: his heliopter pilot and a Roach-kinden girl who was something approximating an agent of Princep’s government, if the place could be said to have
one. Her name was Syale, she was no more than twenty, and most of the time Balkus had no idea where she was or what she was doing. He would have worried, except that it turned out Roaches seemed to
have some weird understanding with the Mantids. At least, if she was in their company, she was in no danger from anyone else.

Sperra, his friend from Maker’s service, had not come, but Balkus reckoned that was mostly because the Sarnesh had tortured her last time she had been a guest of theirs, which tended to
stick in the memory.

Balkus’s own self-determined mission here was to not get into any trouble or come to anyone’s attention, and he had just failed it.

He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, basically. The Princep trio had set up their own little camp just beyond the outer ring of Sarnesh tents, and he had been crossing between them
when he had seen the returning patrol: a dozen Ant-kinden cloaked and surcoated in grey-green over their mail, scouts out keeping watch for intruders. Now it looked as though they had caught
someone.

Balkus had drifted closer, despite the immediate angry warnings he heard inside his skull. The prisoners seemed an odd lot to be Wasp spies, that was for sure.

The hammer-blow of recognition came a moment later.

There was a halfbreed woman there – some mangling of Moth and something else – whom he did not know; dressed like an itinerant beggar in a battered old Imperial long-coat, she seemed
about as happy with the Sarnesh as Balkus himself was. He took her for old at first, for her hair was streaked with white and her oddly mottled skin and iris-less eyes misled him, but as he neared
he saw that she was much younger than he was. A stranger, though – none of his business. The rest of them, however . . .

There was a Beetle girl there, a short, solid daughter of Collegium for all that she looked older than the mere passage of years could account for. Not really the awkward girl he recalled from
Helleron and Collegium any more, but a serious-faced woman with enough of her uncle’s authority about her that the Ants at her side seemed to be her escort and not her captors. She wore
robes, but not Collegiate ones: layered garments of silks in green and black and dark blue.

There was a Spider, too, and it took Balkus a moment longer to recognize her. She slowed the whole party by walking with an awkward limp, and her face – which he recalled as beautiful and
mischievous – had been savaged by a scar running down one side of it, gashing the corner of her mouth and narrowly missing her eye. She was dressed after the Mantis fashion, arming jacket,
breeches and boots and a Spider anywhere near this forest as much as promised bloodshed . . .