War Master's Gate (47 page)

Mycella of the Aldanrael was smiling slightly, and the Wasps were clearly at the very limits of their patience, but Tynan still regarded the War Master without obvious emotion. Stenwold thought,
He knows. I tell him the Empress is insane, and it’s no news to him.

‘We should destroy the Second,’ Stenwold declared, ‘to the last man, if we can. We should take away the Empress’s sword, because at least there will be a pause before she
forges a new one. Nevertheless, I am authorized by the Assembly to make
you
an offer, General. Walk away. We both know the losses your army has suffered in getting here, and now we are in
the same position as we were when you fell back the last time. We have the advantage in the air and in artillery, and we still have our walls. You cannot sustain a siege long, and we can prevent
supplies coming to you by air or sea – whilst the Tseni navy will ensure that food and ammunition keep coming in for us. Go now and, so long as you keep retreating, Collegium shall not harass
your forces. But keep on retreating, for we are coming to liberate Tark and Myna and those other places that you have shackled. Go now, for if you try to take our city, you can be sure that the
skies will never be clear for whatever is left of your army, all the way back to Capitas.’

Tynan nodded slightly, and for a long moment there was quiet. Reading the expressions of the other Wasps, it was plain that they were concerned what Tynan’s response might be. The man with
the red badge kept shifting restlessly, as though reminding the general of his presence, and of his invisible authority.
Typical Rekef – or whatever he is.

‘This will not seem a compliment, to you,’ Tynan said at last, ‘but the Empire has never had a Beetle-kinden general – not artificer, diplomat, merchant or soldier. If
you had been born under the Black and Gold, I think that things might have been different. I think that matters might have fallen out in very different way, had you been in a position to advise the
Empress, or advise the Emperor before her. The world might be a better place.’

All eyes were fixed on him, and the convulsive jerk that ran through the man with the red badge almost seemed like a spasm. It was, Stenwold realized a moment later, a man at the extremes of
self-restraint, fighting down the impulse to sting his own general.
Treason
, he thought.
Was that treason we heard, from General Tynan? Does he doubt his Empress?
And it was plain
that he did, and that Tynan knew that everything Stenwold said was true, yet . . .

‘I have my orders,’ the Wasp stated. ‘I have never disobeyed an order from the crown. That same quality took my Second away from your gates the first time. It will keep me here
now. I thank you for your offer, but I cannot accept.’

She had sold him her story, just as she had sold it to the Nethyen, and for a while she had convinced him, even though she must have been unaware just who it was she was
convincing.

Esmail had been sent by the Tharen to the Empress’s court as a spy and assassin, the one by training, the other supposedly an inalienable quality of his blood.

Kill her
, they had told him. There had been more in terms of qualifiers and conditions, but it all boiled down to that. They had loosed him from the string, and, curve as he might, his
course was intended to bring him point-first to the Empress.

Even when he read his orders, he had guessed that Tharn was riven with factions – and how true that had turned out to be – what with two Tharen emissaries actually accompanying the
Wasp woman, and even those two splitting from each other, so that only one remained and the other had been sacrificed to aid their progress. He had no idea if the splinter faction that had given
him his original orders still existed.

Since he had followed the Empress into the forest, he had thought a lot on his family: his Dragonfly wife, his pureblood children. He had thought about them deliberately, so that events could
not push them from his mind. He was now in the rush of the game, after so long – and how the game had broadened. They had sent him to kill an Empress, and instead he had bent the knee. He had
helped her against her enemies. He had been given the chance, more than once, to drive an Art-deadly hand straight into her heart, and he had failed.

She had not given him her speech about the renewed glories of the old days, nor had she needed to. Back in Capitas he had discerned it in her: the Inapt and sorcerous Empress of a great Apt
nation. He had hidden long amongst the Moths, and his main impression was that they lived only in the past tense and that, protest as they may, some part of them had already given up the fight.
They lived in their own shadows, fought their empty factional games, and did their best to pretend that the world beyond their grey halls did not exist. If anything of the gloried past was to
return – or even survive – they would not be responsible. Empress Seda the First, however . . .

That was the promise she had made by her mere presence, and he had drunk blood for her, and sworn allegiance to her, not from any compulsions she had laid on him – his kinden and his
profession alike were skilled in slipping such chains – but because he had
believed.

But he had forgotten that the past was not just the glories of Inapt rule – the age of magicians, wisdom and great deeds – and now, after hearing those words, he could not banish
them from his mind.

The Seal of the Worm.

He could claim no great knowledge of his people’s lore, for the Assassin-kinden were scattered, their ways lost. He had lived and studied amongst Moths, though. That the Empress should
seek the power hoarded by Argastos was no surprise. Esmail was no seer but his senses were ever honed for the moment, and he could feel that dark, bloated knot of power ahead. If it was corrupt and
decayed, well, find any great node of the old power that was not. The Moths had always loved darkness, and used fear as their weapon, and time would have rotted that into something worse. It was
power
, though, and he could not fault Seda for seeking it.

He could feel the Seal, however, and that was a different matter. The Seal, whose stony grey
absence
was pinned down by Argastos’s decomposing weight, and, beyond it . . .

In truth, Esmail could not say what lay beyond it, but he knew the tales. That great war which had encompassed all the known world, just as the Empire’s current conflict seemed to . . .
That great foe which had united the powers of the day against it, so that deadly enemies could clasp hands and put aside their enmities in order to defeat this common adversary: the Worm. Call them
that, and not by their true name, for names are power.

They had sought to make all other races the same as them, said the stories. Meaning conquest? Meaning the extermination of all other kinden until only they themselves remained? Not even that,
the stories insisted: they sought to make all the same as them, and it was such a perversion of the fundamentals of nature that in the end all were united against them, and there followed a war the
like of which the world would never see again.

And when they were defeated but not destroyed, when they were cast down into their subterranean lairs, the cost was so great that the Moths – the leaders of this great host, for even then
the Khanaphir Masters were already in decline – knew that no repeat of this war could be allowed. The Worm must not be permitted to regain its strength and bring such horrors again. But the
Moths and their allies could not purge that underground realm of them, though armies of thousands were sent down, never to return. So there had been a ritual, the Moths’ ultimate sanction,
one of a power and a cost unprecedented. In its wake the ancient world was forever changed, some powers exhausted and near destroyed by the cost of the war. And it was a shameful victory, too
– as Esmail had read in secret tomes the Moths had never intended him to find. The Moths had banished the Worm, and sealed the path of its return, but not only the Worm, Esmail discovered.
The Moths had failed, in the end, and that ritual had been nobody’s first choice.

Save one, perhaps.

Esmail had fallen a long way short of his purpose, and even that purpose had been someone else’s. He himself possessed nothing but that fragile family – no kinden, no agenda. He had
almost forgotten that he was not truly one of the Empress’s Red Watch. That was an inherent peril of taking another’s face and voice: it was easy to become too engrossed in the
role.

And the Empress was here for Argastos, and not the Worm.

Not the Worm
yet.

For he felt he knew the Empress now, and even if she consumed Argastos entirely she would still be hungry. It was in her nature – perhaps in the nature of all absolute tyrants – to
want more.

Do I turn on her?
But, despite his years, she frightened Esmail, with her power and her ruthlessness, and there was still that dream, that impossible promise of a return of the old
ways. If those days could return, then perhaps even the Assassin-kinden might walk the world again as they once had.

It was when his thoughts were so thoroughly caught in such a vice, unable to claw their way to any action, that he considered the
other
. The Empress, she who could consider breaking the
Seal of the Worm with equanimity, was still frightened by one thing.

Esmail had felt her presence, and hidden from it, just as he hid from Seda and from the trailing tendrils of Argastos himself. Like Seda, the
other
had a strength that lacked subtlety,
allowing Esmail to spy on her, sensing a power that was sister to the Empress’s own, but with a very different mind behind it.

However, she was distant now, almost untraceable, and perhaps that was the end of it. Perhaps nothing could stand between the Seal and the Empress, if she chose to undo the work of all those
past ages. But Esmail found that he had not entirely given up hope. Beetles had surprised a lot of people, over the years. Just ask the Moths.

How the Nethyen might have taken it, had Maure’s song not changed their mood, Tynisa could not say. But, of course, the halfbreed claimed to have seen this moment coming,
and perhaps the woman had genuinely been working towards preparing Che’s entrance.

The Beetle girl stood at the clearing’s edge, her dark skin rubied under the leaping firelight, and she had seized the attention of every Mantis-kinden there. A Nethyen man stood beside
her, unkempt and long-haired, and looking over her other shoulder was surely the very mantis that had abducted her in the first place, the largest of its kind Tynisa had ever seen.

The Mantids were gathering close together, many with weapons in hand, and she could see Thalric trying to move towards Che and being excluded again and again, walled away from her by the bodies
of the Nethyen. Amnon stood back and watched, snapbow in hand.

‘Wait,’ Tynisa instructed them both. Thalric threw her a desperate glance, but something in her expression must have got through to him. Whether it was because of Maure’s song
or Che’s newfound presence, for once the Mantids had something on their minds other than blood.

‘I understand now,’ said Che. The moment she opened her mouth, the only competition for their ears was the cracking of wood on the fire.

‘My sister has spoken to you,’ the Beetle girl declared, at which Tynisa twitched but, of course, Che did not mean
her
. She meant that other sister, Seda. ‘Will you
let me speak now as well?’ It seemed unnecessary to ask, as everyone was already hanging on her every word, but Tynisa sensed some additional significance to the question –
a
magician asking permission?
She glanced at Maure, and saw a profoundly serious expression on the necromancer’s face. Whatever Che was doing, there was more to it than Tynisa either saw
or could understand.

No word was spoken, but Che plainly took that silence as assent. ‘She has promised you, I don’t know what: power, the redress of old grievances. I suppose it’s the way of
things that I should make promises as well.’ There was a calm assurance to Che standing before that armed host, something that Collegiate Assemblers would envy. ‘But I have spoken to
Amalthae.’ Here she made a brief gesture towards the insect towering beside her, and Tynisa saw its huge-eyed head cock minutely as it followed the movement.

‘Of course, I want you to stop fighting the Empress’s war,’ Che addressed them. ‘And I should be standing here like a daughter of Collegium, and telling you about our
cause and how right we are, and all the same things she has told you, whatever they were. I should bully and taunt and bribe you into becoming my foot-soldiers instead of hers. Sorry, but can I
have some water or something?’

Tynisa snorted with laughter, horribly loud in that silent clearing, but
that
was more like the Che she knew.
That
was her sister, sure enough.

There was an awkward pause, until one of the Nethyen cautiously approached her and proffered a cup. It was not water, Tynisa knew, but Che took a gulp without hesitating, and in doing so she
sealed her safe conduct for that night, or at least for the length of her speech.
More invisible walls and customs.

‘I’m not going to tell you to march out and fight alongside the Sarnesh,’ Che explained to them. ‘It’s something much more important than that.’ She held up a
hand quickly, though nobody had spoken. ‘And it’s not about Argastos.’ At the name, a ripple of disquiet ran through them. ‘The Empress seeks Argastos for his power, but
that’s between me and her, and not your problem. But you do have a problem.’ She was looking about at them, peering amidst the trees as though trying to estimate just how many
Mantis-kinden were listening, and Tynisa saw her bracing her shoulders. ‘Change,’ she announced. ‘You won’t change, yet the world must. Your nature is to fight, so
you’ve tried to fight time just as you’d fight any other enemy. And you’ve lost, and been reduced to this – to this forest, these holds.’ The intensity of their regard
was frightening, all those sharp eyes lancing into her, but Che took it in her stride.