War Master's Gate (56 page)

‘We need more bracing!’ he was shouting, as he reached the ground and started running in earnest. ‘Padstock! Termes! More bracing!’

Then he felt the impact through his feet even as he heard it, realizing that the Sentinel had scrabbled its way forwards, visualizing the great weight of articulated metal rushing on with that
horrifyingly sudden speed. Ahead of him, he saw the gate shutters bow, the inner wood of the doors crunching under the tremendous impact, the five bars straining in their sockets, and the metal
shutters themselves – all that Stenwold could actually see – warping visibly. One of the braces – a girder of solid steel angling out from the gate’s centre to the ground
– buckled all at once, and instantly Vekken soldiers went rushing forwards, manhandling its redundant weight out of the way so that a new one could be put in place.

The next impact came even as they were at it, and Stenwold had only a moment to think,
Impossible! There can’t have been time for it to back up!
But of course there had been more
than one Sentinel out there, and a new one had come thundering in even whilst the first rammer was backing away. The gates groaned like a wounded giant, and abruptly the Vekken had dispersed,
splitting into neat units to fetch more bracing forwards, abandoning any idea of a quick sally out to rout the enemy.

Then the Airborne came.

This was their plan, he understood: they must have abandoned the wall top altogether, for suddenly the air and ground on this side of the gates was full of them, Wasp soldiers came shooting and
stinging and stabbing – and dying from the very moment they arrived, but fighting to keep the gate from being reinforced. In their midst, the crazed insects brought by their airship still
blundered and savaged, men and beasts alike in their utter carelessness for their own lives. For that first brief moment, the Vekken and the soldiers of Maker’s Own were caught unawares,
ceding the Wasps a tenuous foothold before the gates, but then the Ants had adjusted to circumstances, descending on their enemies with silent determination, swords out and wreaking a terrible
carnage in that enclosed space. Stenwold saw the Mynans hurrying down the nearest steps to provide reinforcement, and the Student Company archers on the overlooking rooftops were taking advantage
of every clear shot they could. But the Wasps would not be driven back – the Airborne and their insects driving themselves into a killing frenzy to hold their ground – and all the time
the rhythm of the Sentinels pounding against the gate was quickening, each driving in at top speed, with a force that seemed to rock the very foundations of the wall, before rattling smoothly back
even as the next one charged.

His was a kinden steeped in treachery and cunning from the very dawn of history. To those Inapt scholars who knew of the Assassin Bug-kinden legacy, his kin were a byword for
duplicity – and they had paid the price, but the Moths still shuddered to think how
close
they had come to ruling the world. His Art made even his hands into killing weapons that
could shear through steel.

He was of a profession, an old and honoured profession, that made deception its watchword, that wore the faces – the
minds
even – of others as easily as another might put on
a coat. And he was a veteran who had honed his magical and his physical skills over decades.

And, beyond that, he was learned. He had been a parasite within the archives of the Moth-kinden, who had kept him half prisoner and half guest, as a tool to be used in dire need only. More
recently, he had worn an Imperial rank badge and seen how the gears of the Empire turned.

All Esmail knew now was that he was woefully out of his depth, meddling in – no, not even meddling but being dragged into – matters that no sane man would ever want anything to do
with.

He should have backed out when he first met the Empress . . . or perhaps followed his orders and tried to kill her –
tried
, he suspected, being the relevant word. Instead he had
listened to her golden words, her promises; he had studied her and seen the bewildering potential that chance and fate had somehow hatched within her. A queen amongst magicians, the inheritrix of
the ancient world: what could such a woman not achieve?

And he had been a fool, an overawed fool.

And too late the Worm had been mentioned, and he had understood the flaw in that plan, just as had old Gjegevey. He had previously counted himself lucky that Seda was power without finesse
– for how else could he have hidden from her, after all? But that same power, yoked to the driving acquisitiveness of an Empress, lacked the discernment to know what to reach for, and what to
hold back from. And she knew about the Worm, and she saw there just
power
, because they had been powerful.

And it was here her feet had led her – or the idiot
Gjegevey
had led her – to the Master Seal, the keystone in the edifice that had rid the world of the Worm.

And still he had held back because of that promise, that potential . . . for when would the world see such a chance to restore the balance of history, but in her?

He could still hear the conflict as he moved through the mist-shrouded forest, and a little focus sufficed to gain a hazy picture of it. He sensed Tisamon hard pressed, being forced to give
ground to keep between his increasingly mobile enemies and his mistress.

Everything had changed.

He was keeping his mind tight shut now. It had been a shock when that other voice had bludgeoned its way in, with the same raw, clumsy power as the Empress. More of a shock had been the
understanding behind it, which had caught him unprepared and
seen
what he was – cracking Ostrec’s stolen shell by elegant and unconscious intuition. As she did so, he had seen
small shards of her, too: yes, she knew of his profession and had faced such spies before. Yes, she knew of his kin, even. That same power as Seda’s, but yoked to a very different and more
contemplative mind.

The Empress had spoken about her, the hated Beetle girl, who had somehow assumed the same mantle: her sister, her joint heir. Esmail had not understood until now.

And he had a terrible, seductive thought,
Perhaps something may be saved? Perhaps this girl, this Cheerwell Maker, might be manipulated. Surely easier than trying to steer the
Empress?

And another thought – one that no man in his position ought to allow himself:
Perhaps she would not even need manipulating.

And she had survived. The Empress’s minions had gone for her, and had fallen one after the other, until now only Tisamon barred the way.

And here stood Esmail, between them and the Empress, using all his craft to cloak himself from
anyone
’s attention.

If he returned to Tharn right now, or somehow found a way to share thoughts with one of their Skryres, what orders might he be given?
Depends on which Skryre
, arose the depressing
thought. He was on his own now, as a spy always was in the end: cut off from his masters and with only his faltering judgement to rely on.

And here was the Empress herself, just ahead, with that fool old Woodlouse and the turncoat Wasp in Moth’s robes, brought to bay at last. Any moment now, Tisamon must surely give way, and
then the Beetle girl’s followers would break through and kill the Empress themselves, and what would Esmail have gained?

He found inside himself an unending supply of fear. The Empress terrified him. To take action and lose his cover terrified him. To do nothing terrified him even more. He stepped forwards.

Seda’s head swung towards him almost blindly, and he braced himself for an assault, magical or physical. He underestimated his spycraft and her own distraction, because her expression
revealed only relief.

‘Ostrec, get over here!’ she snapped. ‘Tisamon can’t hold them off for long.’

And indeed he could hear the clatter of steel, and imagined the followers of the Beetle girl twisting and turning, and Tisamon giving ground step after step.

‘Majesty,’ he said heavily.

‘Draw your sword,’ she instructed him, and he did so, to allay her suspicions. He was more dangerous without it, with both hands free. He closed the distance between them in three
easy strides.

‘This way.’ And she was off, and now he felt that pulling point, the centre of this place, so that Seda trod a spiral path towards it like a moth to a candle.
Argastos
. Of
course, because if she could subvert and appropriate that power, she might still win,

Unless I stop her.

Gjegevey went labouring after her – she had surely stopped only to give the old man time to catch his breath – and his face wore the set and despairing expression of a teacher whose
student had gone beyond him without learning important truths.
Well, your fault, Woodlouse, if that is so.
Tegrec had been helping him along, but now he was running after Seda too, and
Esmail read in him the nervous gait of a man close to breaking.
All the better.

‘Ostrec!’ Gjegevey wailed and, despite himself, he turned back, virtually hauling the old man’s arm up about his shoulders and hustling this wheezing, hunched encumbrance
along.
To get me closer to the Empress
, he reassured himself, but just then his motives were so muddled as to be beyond divination.

Ahead . . .

They were running short of trees, ahead, which meant he was running out of time. The ground suddenly rose there, forming a hill too rounded to be natural, faced and plated with slabs of grey
stone: a piecemeal carapace whose gaping cracks sprouted weeds and briars and even stunted trees. There was a gate there, too, set into an outcrop of the hill and framed in stone, the doors
themselves made of thousands of little flakes of wood, suspended off a frame, like the scales of a moth’s wing, wormy and blackened by age.

They had been gilded once
, he understood.
For this is Argax, seat of Argastos, greatest war leader of the ancient world.
The knowledge came unbidden and unwanted.
Not a
barrow, but a hall once. Nobody builds doors into a barrow.

Gjegevey broke from him and actually outstripped him, hobbling frantically with his staff, ‘Majesty!’ he called out, and Esmail knew this was his moment – if moments existed
for misbegotten creatures such as himself.

Seda turned, and on her face there was a strange mixture of elation and desperation. She had found Argastos’s lair and yet, at the same time, she had only moments left to discover how to
draw power from it, and even Esmail himself could sense no obvious breach in the place’s armour. The undoubted magic was not simply for the taking.

Because it’s in someone’s hands already?
But he was speeding up now, hard on Gjegevey’s heels, and cast that thought aside.

‘Help me, Gjegevey,’ the Empress commanded. ‘Quickly – they’re coming.’

And Esmail found it in his heart to pity her then, just a young Wasp girl risen higher than ever a woman of her kinden had before, but frightened, at the end of her resources. Who would not have
done the same as she had, in her position.

Perhaps it was that pity that gave him away, for Ostrec had never allowed any for anyone save himself.

He was almost in reach of her when he saw her eyes widen . . . and abruptly Ostrec was in tatters, the falseness of his guise showing through at every edge. Seda cried out in shock and Esmail
lunged forwards – one Art-edged hand extended to cut her heart out.

It was the old man that got in the way. He had that much idiocy left in him, or perhaps it was courage. Whatever the Empress had been to him, he threw his tired bones before the Assassin’s
stroke, so that Esmail’s hand cut his staff in two, and then sawed into his ribs, shearing them apart, opening his chest in a sudden rush of ruptured blood. Gjegevey collapsed like a bundle
of sticks, and Seda screamed in rage and grief. Esmail, trying to close those last paces of distance, was braced for the magical lash of her temper, but the flash of light he saw was something far
more prosaic than that. Her sting struck him about the shoulder and side, with a searing blow that staggered and stopped him, slapping him to the ground, and he knew he had failed.

Not dead, though – not dead yet. And he was lurching up on one elbow, knowing another sting must come, and desperate to live despite it all, even as Ostrec was sloughing off him like
moulting chitin. And then he opened his eyes to see her standing there, a hand thrust out to kill him, but her temper restrained by reins of iron. Her eyes were the coldest things Esmail had ever
seen.

‘Show me your true face, spy,’ she spat. ‘Before you die, let me see my enemy, I
command
it.’

And he felt her magic take hold of him with clumsy fingers, prising and straining, so that he screamed with the pain of violation that was worse even than the burning of her sting. But in the
midst of it, a little jewel of calm remained, because resisting pain, staving off torture, was part of his training, and Seda was not skilled enough to break his mask with mere force alone.

But if he did not give her something, she would simply kill him, destroy his mind by trying to unlock it. He must choose a face for her.

He almost showed her the grey skin and white eyes of a Moth. It would have been appropriate, for it would have placed blame where it was due. He had no love for the people who had been his
jailers for all those years, in all but name.

But his family, his wife, his children, they were still under the shadow of the Moths. Whatever else he might wish, whatever vengeance might be his due, he could not endanger them further.

When he gave her a face, just another face that was not his own, he saw Seda recoil, but she accepted it. It was one of the few options he had that would be believed implicitly, and he put all
his skill into it, presenting such a perfect and polished likeness that it would have been accepted over the real thing. He gave her the lean and elegant features of a Spider-kinden.