War Master's Gate (35 page)

Then Maure hooked a hand about Che’s arm. ‘We cannot go yet. I have work to do.’

Che turned on her, and Tynisa could clearly see the balance of power – how the Beetle had become a vessel overflowing with it, ready to rain thunder on this halfbreed upstart – and
how Maure, who had known magic all her life, was just a leaf on the wind before her.

I am thinking like the Inapt
, Tynisa realized.

Yet the hand remained on Che’s arm, the channel for some revelation that Maure was willing Che to listen to, and a moment later the Beetle’s face practically disintegrated, all that
fierce resolve falling away, and Che sagged, letting out a single ragged breath, and became the girl Tynisa recognized once again.

‘Of course. Do what you must. Do what you can.’ Che put a hand to her temple. Thalric stepped in, and for a moment she gestured him off as though she did not want to corrupt him with
her touch. Then she was in his arms – and Tynisa turned away, supplanted and resentful, and mean-spirited for feeling so.

For more than an hour, Maure sat amongst the ruins in the centre of a circle she had made from the weapons of the fallen, her head bowed and unmoving, and doing who knew what. Tynisa, who could
no longer deny that fragments of the dead might be pinned to the world – things of raw emotion, anger and loss – hoped that the woman could accomplish something here, and did not envy
her the task.

She tried to approach Che, meanwhile, but the Beetle girl would barely speak to her, fighting battles inside her head, mumbling to herself in a rambling monologue that abruptly stilled whenever
Tynisa approached.

At last Maure was done, standing up smoothly and kicking at the ring of swords and spears to disperse it. The Sarnesh gathered themselves and, one by one, their expedition reassembled.

Che was the last, and something of that proud, hard look was back on her face, despite her best efforts.

‘We must move now,’ she told them. ‘I can feel her.’ Seeing their blank looks she elaborated. ‘The Empress – she’s close.’

Argastos had come to Seda last night, walking in past the vigilant Pioneer sentry to stand before her fire.

She had not seen him, quite – no more than a troubling of the darkness – but she had known him as that same shade that had reached out to her aboard the airship.

Oh, bravely done
, had come a voice formed from the sounds of the forest itself.
You have pierced the walls they built about me. You are truly the one.

She had taken this in her stride. ‘So walk out and greet me, old man.’

Surely he must have been off balance after that, but the roiling shadow had communicated nothing save its continued presence.

‘You are a prisoner, or whatever’s left of you,’ she had told him. ‘Play the great lord all you like. There is power where you are now, but you are not its master. You
need me to come and rescue you.’

Again just silence from the spectre. A faint grate of metal indicated Tisamon moving, and she knew his helm would be turned towards this intruder.

Then:
Please . . .
faint as a breeze.

‘Does the great Argastos beg?’ she had demanded.

It has been so long.
And, with that distant utterance, a wave of emotion had passed over her, far more eloquent than mere words: abandonment, loneliness, frustration, injustice. For a
moment she had been rocked, the feelings riding on her own emotions to strike behind her defences. Then she had shaken them off.

‘Oh I am coming to you, never fear,’ she had replied sharply, ‘but how I deal with
you
, once I have emptied your treasury, will depend on how you approach me. Keep
begging, old Moth. Get used to being on your knees. I may find a use for you but, if you try to manipulate me, to pry at my mind with such weak games, I will leave behind not even memories of
you.’

He had vanished then, snapped back to the inner forest where he was penned, and she had found herself gazing about the fire at her companions, meeting their uneasy eyes and forcing them to look
away. They had heard every word she had said.

Only old Gjegevey understood, she decided, but his expression was anything but reassuring.

However, she had opened the way, now. After battering so long at the forest’s defences, the blood sacrifice had unbarred the door. The day after, and they were at last on their way
inwards, and all she had to worry about was . . .

A thorn pricked in her mind, even as she thought it, and her eyes flicked wide.

Her!

‘Faster!’ she snapped. ‘Move faster!’ For her twin was approaching, that hateful Beetle girl. For a moment, even as the Pioneers ahead picked up their pace, Seda was
torn:
Turn back and catch them, ambush them between the trees? One shot, one sting, to rid me of my rival?
But the girl had grown in power since Seda had cast her down in Khanaphes, and
this time she had strong allies with her – a Weaponsmaster, magicians, not to mention whatever mundane warriors she had mustered, Sarnesh or Etheryen or both. And there was always the chance
that, during the fighting the Beetle girl herself might just . . . slip away.

She hears the call as I do, and if she gets there first, she might . . .

‘Major Ostrec, rearguard with the Nethyen!’ Seda yelled. ‘Hurry, they are almost upon us!’

The Red Watch officer snapped out orders, falling back. The handful of Nethyen Mantids who had been ever more unwillingly accompanying her went with him gladly.
Something their small minds
understand at last.
At a thought, Tisamon dropped behind as well to shield her.

The Beetle-kinden Pioneer dashed past her, snapbow halfway to his shoulder and face weirdly peaceful as he sought a target. At Seda’s side, Gjegevey was laboriously poling himself along
with his staff.

‘Come on, old man,’ she urged, but she could see that he was doing his best. She grasped the haggard slave’s arm to encourage him.
A curse on propriety. I am the Empress
and I shall do as I like.
‘You’ve come with me this far,’ she told him. ‘You’ll see it through.’

He nodded raggedly, leaning on her as he let her drag him along.

Behind she heard the unmistakable sound of a snapbow, followed by the war cries of the Mantids.

One of the Sarnesh went down immediately, a bolt tearing through his mail. Tynisa doubled her speed, spotting shapes ahead.
This time Che’s got it right.
Rushing
into a fight like this, with no clear picture of whom she fought or even where they were, reminded her of the Commonweal, when she still had been in thrall to her father’s ghost.

Oh, but those were fights, though.
Before she had broken away from him, the pair of them had been something superhuman and undefeatable. And uncontrollable, too, possessed of a
terrible, callous bloodlust, which was why she had declined that gift in the end.
I will have to be enough on my own.

There were Mantis-kinden coming against her, she saw, and already the Sarnesh crossbows were loosing, their bolts springing between the trees. There was another crack – Amnon or someone
shooting. She began hearing the sizzle of stingshot from both sides.

A fierce-faced woman of about her own age was suddenly lunging for her with a metal claw, spinning away from Tynisa’s instant parry to come back at her from the other side, twisting from
her riposte at the same time. Tynisa conceded three steps, the very forest keeping her footing for her, even as it urged the Mantis on.
Old bastard only wants its blood, doesn’t care
whose.
She snapped her arm out, drew a red line across the Mantis’s hip, then swayed back as the clawed gauntlet sliced past her eyes. The woman’s other arm came driving in, trying
to jab her with those vicious forearm spines, but Tynisa batted it away with her off hand, then stepped past her assailant and tried to cut her throat on the way. She caught only air, and then they
had parted, turning back against one another, the Mantis already trying to close the gap.

Another Mantis was coming in, spear in hand, but Amnon cannoned into him, both of them going down and then scrabbling to regain their feet. Beyond her opponent, Tynisa could see others
retreating – a flash of pale hair –
the Empress
?

The distraction nearly killed her, as the Mantis’s blade darted towards her stomach, but her own sword knew its work and slipped in the way just in time, letting her dance backwards
–
losing ground again
. And she knew that right now she was losing their best chance to win the war, to defeat the Empire in one stroke.

So go.
And she went, whipping her opponent’s steel aside, cutting just enough of an opening to get past her, kicking into a full run even as she did so, and be damned to the price
that her hip would exact later.

A snapbow bolt spat past behind her, its author not adjusting for just how fast Tynisa was suddenly moving. Then there was a Wasp in the way, raising his hand to sting, but her blade was already
in motion.

He was a dead man – just some Wasp soldier with red insignia – but somehow he put his raised hand in the way of her stroke. From the shock of impact, it seemed as though she had
struck metal, yet when he fell out of her path, there was no blood, no sense that she had wounded him.
And no time to wonder about it.

She had already realized that she was following the Mantis path to its logical conclusion. It was hard to see how she would survive this, success or failure, but she had to
try
.

She saw the Empress in front of her, with an old man who looked like a malformed corpse in tow. Just twenty yards – fifteen – then the Wasp woman was shouting out a word – a
name – and someone else stood in the way.

Tynisa saw a man armoured head to foot in a style she knew only from old books and museums, armour as fine and elegant as ever a Commonweal noble wore, but crafted to an entirely darker, sharper
aesthetic. She had never seen a full suit of Mantis-kinden carapace armour before.

It gave her pause, despite her entire attack plan being built on going
forwards
, and then the man was coming for her, his clawed gauntlet stooping like a hunting dragonfly –
barely turned by her own sword – then back to guard, without leaving room for a counter-attack.

She froze. She could not help it. Her mind had choked on the utter certainty that had come to her, even as her sword parried three more strokes and her feet carried her backwards.

Around her, the Empress’s followers were falling back after their mistress. The Wasp with the red badge and a Beetle snap-bowman passed her, retreating with professional care.

She took three more blows numbly, the last scratching her shoulder before she was able to turn it.

The name the Empress had shouted had been
Tisamon
. And even had the name been unspoken, she would still have known. She had fought her father before, and she had lived with his barbed
ghost in her mind, and she knew him, and here he was.

Then Amnon was there, lashing a blade out at the armoured form, and the claw that had been stooping towards her veered aside to block his stroke. With a shriek of nameless emotion Tynisa lunged
for him, for his very throat, but he had fallen back a step, her lunge failing to reach him, even as he nicked Amnon’s arm and deflected the big Beetle’s next blow.

Then there was some summons – Tynisa did not hear it, but it was plain from the armoured man’s –
Tisamon
’s – stance, and he was turning and sprinting away,
in full mail but fast enough that neither she nor Amnon had the chance to strike at him. She was after him a moment later, barely enough of a delay to slide a knife blade into, but the forest
around seemed suddenly very dark, shadows hung on every bough, and she was blundering into the gloom. And where was the Empress?

And . . .?

She stopped, hearing the others catching up with her, Amnon almost at her elbow, staring about in confusion.

Where is she?

Of the Empress and her entire retinue there was neither track nor trace.

‘This is such a stupid idea,’ was Gerethwy’s informed opinion.

The night was unseasonably chill, or perhaps it was just due to the altitude. There were no clouds above, the stars clear as cut glass, and only the faintest sliver of moon to detract from
them.

‘Wasn’t my first choice either,’ the airship’s master grunted. ‘Beats training on those deathtrap Stormreaders, though.’ His name was Jons Allanbridge and he
seemed to be some kind of associate of Stenwold Maker, although he didn’t exactly speak of the War Master fondly. His vessel, the
Windlass
, was carrying the two Company volunteer
officers and a fair number of their soldiers. Nobody had explained to Straessa that she would be one half of the Collegiate command team on this mission, and she had the unhappy feeling that
possibly nobody had really thought about it either. Apparently the non-Mantis side of the operation would be spearheaded by the Mynans, and she and her people would just have to try and keep up.
Although the overall plan might not be as foolish as Gerethwy claimed, the details really did seem to be lacking.

They put this one together in a hurry, and surely the Wasps’ll see us coming, and then . . .
But if the Imperial Air Force caught them aloft in these big, slow airships, that
would be a death sentence for anyone who couldn’t take wing and fly. Gerethwy was right in that – all the artificers were in agreement that airships as a tool of war had had their
day.

Until now, apparently, because heavier-than-air fliers just could not have carried this many people to the enemy.

There were a dozen other dirigibles blotting out the night sky around them, which were doing their best to be stealthy. They kept no lights, and were coasting on a westerly wind so that the
nocturnal quiet was not defiled by the sound of engines. Even the enormous
Sky Without
, its elegant staterooms now the squatting ground of the Mantis warriors, was coursing through the
upper air like a great, bloated ghost.