War Master's Gate (61 page)

‘War Master,’ said the Moth, ‘we have thought on what you say.’ Her face was twisted with uncertainty, doubts bubbling to the surface and about to be raised, but a hand
raised by Argastos brought silence.

‘Give me another option,’ he challenged them. ‘Show me another way that does not leave the Worm free to return. I will
not
repeat the slaughter of this war, nor would
I wish it on the future.’

‘The cost,’ the Dragonfly observed. ‘You do not just condemn the Worm. Think of their slaves – and those of our own people trapped below . . .’

‘And yet the more we send to rescue them, the more we lose in trying to fight the Worm on its own ground,’ Argastos replied flatly. ‘I know. Nethonwy is down there, my closest
counsellor, lost trying to free her kin from the yoke of the Worm. Do not think that I don’t know, but there is no other way – and now, whilst the magicians of the Worm are weak, and
cannot prevent us.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘And they gain in strength even now. We all realize this.’

They were all of them unhappy, but Che could feel them yielding to his logic.
In war, sometimes one must do terrible things
, but she knew that what they would enact now would be the
most terrible thing of all: a magical violation of the world never before seen, never attempted since, that would make the harrowing of the Darakyon seem like a handful of dust in comparison. In
this age, with magic waxing at its highest and these great practitioners banded together – at no other time in history could such a thing have been done.

And, hearing her thoughts, Argastos looked from his allies back to her and said, ‘Be grateful, then, for that.’

The world around them was fading out, as though a curtain had been drawn over the sun. The others – those magicians of the elder days – withdrew into the gathering shadows, falling
back into a history that had forgotten them, until she stood alone before Argastos in utter darkness, and her night-seeing Art could find nothing to relieve it.

‘You sealed them off,’ she accused him. ‘You stopped up their tunnels and buried them, is that it?’

He regarded her, at once imperious and tragic and damned. ‘Bury the Worm? Bury those that live in the earth? And how would that have helped? They were sovereign lords of their realm, as we
discovered when we tried to bring the war to them. They knew that, even if we had defeated them beneath the sun, we could not hope to triumph below. They knew that all they had to do was wait.
There would always be another chance.’

Che searched his face, trying to elicit some truth from it – from that image of himself that he chose to show her. Had he been a good man? He had been courageous and strong, she guessed,
but those qualities were independent of vice or virtue.
What alternatives did they actually try, before resorting to their ultimate sanction?

‘Oh, you censure me, Cheerwell Maker,’ he said softly. ‘You pass judgement on the victories that made your whole world possible. You cannot imagine the hate, though. You cannot
know how they hated us – all of us, every kinden other than their own. Your Wasp Empire would seem a kindness compared to the Worm.’

‘And yet they were human, a whole kinden, men, women and children – and slaves, too. And you killed them all.’

His face was a cipher. ‘But we did not kill them, Cheerwell Maker. We rid the world of them, but we did not kill them. They are still there – or whatever they have become in their
long centuries of exile. You cannot bury the Worm, so we enacted our ritual of last resort. We took their domain and everything in it – the Worm and their slaves and all those we had sent
down and who could not return – and we excised them from the world entirely. We folded the weave of the cosmos around them and seared the join shut. And, as they had always wanted to be sole
masters of creation, we gave them what they wished. We made their realm its own separate and sealed creation. We removed them from the world.’

Che felt that she should make some remark about how impossible that surely must be, but instead she found herself understanding the principle. The strength required to accomplish it, she could
not guess at, but the magician in her recognized the theory behind it to be sound.

‘Such power it demanded, and the war itself had already cost so many lives, and our guilt regarding so many lost beneath the earth – lost through our own ritual . . . Perhaps that
was when the world began to turn, the magic to fade from it. The grand alliance between the great powers broke up almost immediately. Some never recovered: the Woodlouse-kinden abandoned their
domains and retreated to their rotting heartland. The Khanaphir were already failing. There was civil war amongst the Spider-kinden. My people’s doom came slower, for they had taken upon
themselves the mantle of protector of the world, and in that cause they would fight slow-burning wars against many of their erstwhile allies, confident in their vision of a better future. Except it
was not their future they were fighting to bring about – it was yours.’ And he said this with no rancour, without any bitterness at all.

‘And you?’ she asked him. ‘Where were you in all this?’

He laughed, without much humour. ‘Watch.’

She was further off now, watching the next proceedings from the trees – not quite the tangled, knotted old woodland that the Nethyen and their neighbours called home in
her time, but a younger, greener place, more innocent to her eyes. She wondered if all the world had been that way once, before the Inapt and later the Apt had come, to corrupt and to despoil
it.

In front of her was a clearing, and she saw quite a crowd gathered about a mound. Ant-kinden workers were busy laying stone slabs over it, as though trying to armour the earth itself. She saw a
gaping mouth there, a gap that was being turned into a door.

‘They tore down Argax, my beloved hall.’ The voice of Argastos sounded clearly in her mind, though he was nowhere near her. ‘They broke it apart, timber by timber, and they
brought its golden gates here, where they had raised this abomination of a barrow over the Great Seal – the key Seal that kept the Worm forever elsewhere. It was necessary, they claimed.
After all that had been lost, after all we had done, they could not risk some fool breaking the Seal and letting them out.’ His voice had changed, grown older, bitter and angry.

She saw them there: a score or more of Moths in their grey robes, and at least twice that number of Mantis-kinden. The latter were armed and armoured, just as they had been on the battlefield,
and yet there was a terrible air of defeat hanging about them, also dread. Even as she watched, they were filing into the mound, one by one.

‘My people, my followers,’ Argastos whispered. ‘Betrayed, as I was betrayed, sacrificed to keep me company in my vigil. So necessary, they insisted, and all the while I looked
into their minds and saw how they simply wanted rid of me, because of what we had done. I was too great a reminder of the lengths we had gone to, in order to win the war.’

And Che watched Argastos, in bright, unblemished mail, turn to face those other Moths, and she watched as his shoulders slumped, and then he turned and stepped into darkness.

‘They left me no choice,’ continued the voice in her mind.

She watched the great gates being raised, with their scales of gilded wood gleaming in the sun, and she knew that Argastos and his followers had been bound, within the heart of the hill, bound
over the Seal of the Worm for all time. After that, the Moths had gone some way towards removing his name from any histories the outside world might uncover. And he was still there – still
here
– even in this late age when hardly anyone even remembered his name.

And the vision faded once more, leaving her again in that vacant blackness with Argastos.

‘And here you are,’ he remarked and, knowing what she did, she could read any amount of terrible intentions in those elegant features.

‘Do you mean to break the Seal, after all this time?’ she asked. It seemed the natural way for him to punish those that had turned on him.

‘No!’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Of all things not that – not after the cost that we all paid. Not after the friends I lost – the friends I had to abandon because
they had gone below and never returned. But I will escape this place, believe me. I will be avenged.’

A sudden thought occurred to her. ‘And you’re showing all of this to
her
as well, aren’t you?’ There was no need to specify whom she spoke of.

Argastos’s smile should have pleasant, but it sent a shudder down Che’s spine.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘When wooing two sisters, it is not gallant to show a preference, after all.’

‘When
what
?’ she demanded, but he was already walking away, and she had no way of following him into the void.

‘We will speak again, in the flesh. You have seen what you must, in order to know the justice of my cause. Now I shall show you what they left me with!’

Then he was gone: a sudden flurry of robes and he had become part of the darkness. And, with a sudden start, Che awoke.

She woke with a start just as someone virtually kicked in the door of the infirmary. All around her people were jolting awake, and those that could do so were already reaching
for weapons that weren’t there.

‘Taki!’ Her name. There were other names, too – at least half a dozen Company soldiers had burst in, each seeking someone else, and she recognized most of those names because
they were pilots – the ones who had escaped the swarm, either with their Stormreaders or without.

‘Here.’ She had been almost dead from exhaustion by the time she regained the city – her Art had not proved strong enough to carry her the whole distance and she had dropped to
the ground virtually within arm’s reach of the walls. They had carried her in, and the time from then until now was a haze of half-waking, of doctors, of nightmares of tearing mandibles and
thrusting stings.

The soldier before her looked about sixteen and bore the sash of the Students. ‘Can you fly?’ he demanded, without introduction.

The impact of her ordeal showed in her initial assumption that he was referring to her Art, but who would be asking after that? ‘I can pilot a Stormreader, if that’s what you
mean.’ She got her legs over the side of the bed, feeling each muscle and joint resist her, and hoped her words were true.

‘Then you’re needed,’ the boy continued, and she was struck by the discontinuity of him speaking to her as if he was a blunt veteran.

‘The Farsphex are back? They’re bombing the city? What’s the situation there?’

Something in his face caved then, under the weight of everything she did not know. He had not expected to be the one to tell her.

He told her it all, and she just sat there, aghast. All around her, the news was spreading through the infirmary – and through the city, no doubt. How many would refuse to believe it? How
many would be secretly relieved?

‘So what the piss do you want from me?’ she spat bitterly. ‘You want me flying loop-the-loops over the Second Army’s triumphant entry into the city?’

‘We want you out of the city, because your name is included on their list as an enemy of the Empire,’ the student told her flatly. ‘And we want you flying escort for if they
come after.’

‘After? Look, did nobody tell you how to put your thoughts in order over at the College?’ But she was already scrabbling for her clothes and not finding them, standing wearing
nothing but a shift before this adolescent, and she did not care, and he did not even blink at it. ‘Piss on it, get me some artificer’s overalls, at least. And some sort of goggles.
What time is it?’

‘Three past midnight, and a half. There are Farsphex over the city, but we’ve a flight of Stormreaders ready to go up, enough to shield an airship. Everyone who we reckon’s on
the Empire’s list, we’re trying to get them to Sarn.’

‘One airship?’

‘We have eleven Stormreaders able to fly, all with the new clockwork so they can last to Sarn,’ he told her. She did the calculations herself and nodded. Touch and go, if the
Farsphex were up for it. Two airships would be indefensible, just handing the Empire an easy kill.

‘I’ll fly,’ she told him. ‘Get me something to wear and get me to an orthopter.’

Space aboard the
Windlass
had already run out. Jons Allanbridge had emptied his hold of everything but the water barrels in order to stuff people in, calculating
weights and flight tolerances with each new passenger. His vessel was larger than its predecessor, but even so it had never been intended for bulk. He traded in small-volume valuable goods.

He had some of the Assemblers on board – a fraction of the number who had actually
wanted
to come, and only those who had played a significant part in the city’s defence. He
had a similar slice of the College’s staff, mostly those who possessed artificing knowledge that nobody wanted the Empire getting hold of. The number turned away by the Company soldiers was
large, so there was still an angry, frustrated crowd of the great and the good and the learned milling around the airfield, getting in everyone’s way.

The next figure was ascending, just as Jons guessed he had got as many down below as he could. The woman clambering up the rope ladder now – rather than waiting for the airfield’s
hoist crane to swing up its platform – was well known to him.

‘Commander Kymene,’ he noted.

The Mynan leader did not refuse his hand, once she got to the rail, although he had thought she might. Now he saw her close up, she appeared as though she had already been under the Wasp
interrogators for a week, bruised and tired and drawn.

‘My people.’ Her voice came in a rasp.

‘All on board, those who’ve come to me.’ There had been an outcry amongst those denied passage when they found that every surviving Mynan was getting out of Collegium on the
Windlass
, a substantial proportion of Allanbridge’s living cargo, standing virtually shoulder to shoulder below and a good dozen above decks still. It had been the whispered words of
Stenwold Maker, Jons had heard, that had settled the matter. He had observed that, to the Wasps, Mynans were rebellious slaves, and that meant the crossed pikes for every single one – and
probably worse for Kymene herself. Had anyone else advanced this argument, Jons guessed the Mynans would have been told to take their chances, but Maker’s will still bore just enough weight
to carry the vote.