War Master's Gate (73 page)

And he haunted the window like last month’s cut flowers, staring out towards the conflict, towards the College library and his friends, and Serena was beginning to wish that they had sent
her out with Gorenn the Dragonfly, because at least that long streak of exoticism had something appropriately harsh to say about the Empire.

What’s the matter, Averic? Wondering if you picked the right side?
Which was a mean thing to think, but he
was
a Wasp, and it had been hard to accept him at the
start.

Then she heard the door of the backroom open, and one of the local big men – maybe it was Vollery the plumber – was shouldering his way out, a slice of argument from within still to
be heard as he shut the door.

‘You’re all set, then?’ Serena asked him brightly, in absolute defiance of his expression.

Vollery glanced about. ‘You’d better get going,’ he told her.

‘That’s fine. When can we expect you?’ She could read it all on his face – having been put there specifically for her to read – but yet she was cursed if she would
accept it just like that.

‘We . . . Just go now. It’s not going to happen,’ Vollery replied heavily.

‘You must be mistaken. It
is
happening.’
Our people are out there, fighting and dying right now, while you’ve made me wait for this?

‘No, it’s not.’ Vollery sighed, a tradesman confronted with something he couldn’t fix. ‘Some students have got some stupid idea that it’s not too late. It was
too late as soon as the gate fell.’

‘It’s not just some students, it’s the
Company
,’ Serena insisted. ‘Averic, come over here. Tell him.’

But Averic barely glanced at her, and she ground her teeth in frustration.

‘Students,’ Vollery repeated, and she read so much into that one word: how it was not just the Wasps who had overlooked the existence of the Student Company, or at least failed to
take it seriously. ‘Students, what do they know? They really think calculus and philosophy are going to get anyone out of this?’

‘They’re your own people, your sons and daughters, and they’re fighting for your freedom
right now
!’ Serena hissed.

Vollery’s expression turned hard. ‘My son died defending the gate,’ he said. ‘My daughter was raped by the Wasps on that first night.’

She stared at him, flinching in the face of his lack of expression. ‘Then surely you . . .?’

‘What do you know?’ he asked her. ‘You understand nothing. Fly-kinden? You lot can always just leave, can’t you. And him? I’m sure there’s a place waiting for
him back home, when he stops playing.’ And even that barb failed to hook Averic’s attention. ‘But me? I have a home here, and a trade. I have a wife and a daughter who need me.
And I should take up a crossbow and fight the Empire’s armies on the say-so of some fool students who think they know anything?’

Serena opened her mouth and closed it, her words had unaccountably dried up.

‘Go,’ Vollery told her. ‘Go, and be thankful I care enough to come out and get rid of you before they finish debating whether to hand you over to the Wasps.’

‘We have to go,’ Averic declared. Serena looked between the two men for a moment, realizing that Averic had not been paying attention to a word Vollery had said, that his focus had
been elsewhere entirely.

‘We’re going,’ she confirmed, already backing towards the taproom door, and a moment later she and Averic were out on the street.

‘It’s changed,’ he told her hollowly.

‘What has?’

‘The sound of the fighting. Come on.’ His wings flashed from his shoulders and he was in the air in an instant, leaving her to catch him up.

They had held the Light Airborne off with some success for most of the morning. The students had thrown a barricade across Albamarl Street and put snapbowmen at every window,
and on the roofs, with more snipers dotted in buildings halfway to the College. When the Empire had dropped soldiers behind them, the Wasps had found themselves being shot at from every direction,
and for hours now they had been driven off, over and over.

Word from the neighbouring streets had been encouraging. Everyone was holding their ground, and the Wasps did not seem to have the sheer manpower to force the issue. A bloody stalemate had
gripped the streets around the College library.

Straessa was commanding the Albamarl barricade, for want of anyone better. Gerethwy, standing beside her, had a repeating snapbow leaning on the barricade as he fiddled awkwardly to fit a new
tape of ammunition into its feeder. Since the last such device had blown his fingers off, she’d have thought he wouldn’t want to touch the thing, but apparently he had new plans. A
bulky pack of machinery rested beside him, and he was murmuring an explanation of what it was that he intended doing with it.

‘There’s no reason for any of this barbaric spectacle,’ she caught him saying. ‘This is just sheer atavism. We’ve scarcely moved on from the Days of Lore. But
devices like ratiocinators have shown us that there’s no limit to the tasks a machine can be set, which might have required a man to handle just a few years ago. Even fighting wars can be
left to them, so long as we can work out sufficiently complex calculations fitting the task . . .’

‘Shut up now, Gereth. They’re coming.’

His head snapped up. ‘But I’m not ready.’

‘So sorry, I’ll tell them to come back in an hour, shall I?’ She looked at the heap of loose pieces inside his pack or scattered about him. ‘Or would tomorrow suit you
better? Inbound, everyone! Looks like grenadiers are back, too!’

All around her, the soldiers of the Student Company, plus a few veterans of her own Coldstone troops, levelled their snap-bows or their pikes, whilst a few checked the always delicate mechanisms
of their nailbows in preparation for close-in work. The Wasps were massing three blocks away from the barricades, and snapbow shot was already being exchanged, inaccurate on both sides. Straessa
saw Castre Gorenn draw back her bowstring, kneeling under cover of the barricade, and then launch an arrow up at a ridiculous angle. The Antspider was quick enough to see it descend, striking a
Wasp who looked as if he had been giving orders just a moment before from the shelter of a doorway.

Gorenn selected another arrow, her expression all business, devoid of pride. The fact that, at full draw, she could outrange a rifled snapbow with an accuracy that Straessa could not have
matched at ten feet, had become a tenet of faith amongst the Collegiate insurgents.

‘They’re coming!’ someone shouted, helpfully announcing what was evident to absolutely everyone.

The Antspider levelled her snapbow, butt to the shoulder to steady it, sighting down the barrel and then up a little to adjust for the range, leading the Airborne as they took wing. Her own shot
was lost in the general explosive release all around her, like a round of spontaneous applause for the Wasps’ grim perseverance. And that was the thing, because they were not going away, not
even slightly. The Empire had been prodding at them all morning, taking light casualties, dealing considerably lighter ones, and all that while the bulk of their forces were not even fighting the
Collegiates at all, but brawling with their erstwhile allies four districts away.

This latest attack turned out to be more tentative than most, and the score of grenadiers, whose approach the Airborne had presumably been intended to cover, lost four of their number almost
immediately and broke off. Not a single flying assailant’s shadow crossed the line of the barricade, and one Beetle student of agricultural economics took a bolt through the arm and was
ordered to get herself off to the infirmary. The massing Wasps down the street had not gone, though, although Gorenn was still making their lives unpredictable and interesting.

Then someone was shouting her name, and she turned to see that Fly friend of Stenwold Maker’s – Laszlo? – spiralling down towards the barricade amidst Wasp snapbow shot zipping
past him.

‘Get down!’ she ordered him, ‘What’s . . .?’ But the look on his face shook her, transformed from the usual easy-going man she remembered.

‘You’ve got to get out!’ he told her. ‘Pull back for the College right now!’

‘What? No, we’ve—’

‘Shaw Street’s gone. Half of them are dead and the rest are running.’

‘That’s—’
That’s right next to us.
Shaw Street ran parallel to Albamarl. ‘Gone how?’

‘Just pissing
move
, will you?’ the little man yelled at her. ‘How much time do you think you have?’

And if they flank us, they can just come over the roofs anywhere they want.
‘Everyone pull back! Get out of the buildings and head back for the College!’ She saw Gerethwy
frantically packing up his kit, gathering all those delicate gears and pieces. ‘Gereth, there’s no time!’ But he would not be dissuaded, his hand and a half moving as deftly as he
could to get everything back into his pack.

The thoroughfare behind her was emptying swiftly, her soldiers retreating further down the street, whilst keeping their eyes fixed on the sky. Those at the barricade, however, were ignoring her
orders, and she belatedly realized this was because she herself had showed no signs of going.

Hold for another minute. Give the rest a chance to make some distance.
‘What in the pits happened in Shaw Street?’ she demanded.

‘It’s not just Shaw Street . . .’ he started, and then pointed: ‘That.’

A familiar metal bulk was moving smoothly onto the far end of Albamarl Street. The sun reflected off its articulated carapace, that one blind eye.

‘Gorenn, got grenades?’ Straessa called.

‘Only works if I can get it in the eye,’ the Dragonfly replied tersely.

‘They’re wise to that, believe me,’ Laszlo told her. ‘It can shove this whole barricade aside and mow the lot of you down with its piercers. It doesn’t need its
leadshotter at all. Now are you bloody leaving or what?’

The Antspider stared at the gleaming flanks of the Sentinel as it settled itself to face the barricade. The soldiers around it were obviously preparing to advance, but the way they were massing
showed that the war machine would provide their vanguard.

She had seen how fast those things could move.

‘Back,’ she ordered, just the one word. She had a hand on Gerethwy’s shoulder, but the Woodlouse was already straightening up, his toys all cleared up.

The Sentinel shook itself with a clatter of metal and she heard its engine roar even at that distance.

‘Run!’ she decided, and followed her own advice.

By the first sight of evening, the insurgents held the single College building from where their revolt had started, and no more.

They were the students, in the main. The neighbouring townsfolk who had risen alongside them had fled for their homes and workshops, those of them still alive to do so. The Wasp response had
been brutal. Any Collegiate had been fair game for the snap-bows, armed or not. Street by street, with their Sentinels at the fore, they had crushed any resistance until only the College itself was
left.

The students still held the courtyard wall, their line of snap-bows defended by more archers at every little window, and the Wasps seemed to think they had achieved enough for the day. They had
built some barricades of their own, gutting a score of nearby buildings for material, and cordoned off every street surrounding the gate, out of easy snapbow range of the students but well within
sight.

They were still fighting the Spiders, by most recent accounts. The soldiers of the Second had not even broken stride, it seemed.

The early evening quiet was broken now only by sporadic demands from the Wasp barricades that the Collegiates surrender, and that any non-combatants trapped on the wrong side of the barricades
give themselves up now.

Anyone within our cordon at dawn will be treated as an enemy of the Empire and no mercy will be shown
, came the warning. Since the call had gone out, a steady trickle of locals
unfortunate enough to live too close to the College had been emerging: men, women and children shuffling hesitantly towards the Wasp lines with their heads bowed, not looking back at the
College.

In the corridor outside the infirmary, Stenwold was laboriously pacing, despite the objections of the medical staff, working strength into his ragged muscles, his stick clacking and clicking on
the floor.

‘Any ideas from the War Master would be much appreciated,’ Eujen observed.

The sound of the stick stopped. ‘I have none,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘We could try to break out, but the cost would be terrible – their barricades will slow us far more
effectively than ours ever slowed the Wasps. We could hold out here until they bring some artillery to bear. Or until they decide the lives of their soldiers are cheap enough for them to force
entry. Or we could surrender.’

‘On what terms?’ Eujen asked bitterly.

‘Whatever they offer, which aren’t likely to be attractive,’ Stenwold admitted. He looked the student leader in the eye. ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this, Eujen.
You deserved better.’

‘And you?’

Stenwold was silent for a long while. ‘Perhaps this is what my life has been leading to. If I was a Wasp commenting on the life of Sten Maker, I’d say it was a fitting
end.’

‘This isn’t just about you,’ Eujen pointed out, clearly nettled.

Stenwold leant heavily on his stick, hearing it creak. ‘I’m glad I can walk with some confidence now,’ he remarked.

‘Well, I’m happy for you, Master Maker,’ Eujen replied acidly.

‘It means I could walk out of the College doors and hand myself over to the Wasps.’

The silence between the two men dropped like a curtain, and held for some time,

‘I’m right there at the top of their list,’ Stenwold observed. ‘I’ve earned that, frankly. I know there are others within these walls they want – probably
everyone by now – but I’m the man whose name has been on the lips of the Rekef for ten years. I’m the notorious War Master. And our one bargaining counter is that, if they want to
come and get me, they know full well my loyal followers will make them pay in bodies. And the Wasps are not quite so heedless of their lives that they would welcome the chance to cover every inch
of this building in blood when there is another way.’