War Master's Gate (77 page)

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’d like very much to return to uniform.’

The nod the captain gave him was proprietorial and pleased, and it made Averic hurt inside.

He didn’t have time to go rouse a quartermaster for some armour, but they found him a uniform tunic that fitted well enough, and then he received directions to the barracks which, as soon
as he was out of sight, he totally ignored. Instead, he circled back to the repurposed counting house, doing his best to look like a soldier who had every business to be there.

The rear door was left unguarded – a low little affair meant for deliveries, leading to a cramped backroom store that the Wasps had cluttered with furniture removed from elsewhere in the
house. Averic stepped lightly through it, constructing in his mind the layout of the place. The clerk’s room he had been taken to could not be too far from here, and if they were now
questioning Eujen . . .

Ahead of him, someone crossed the main counting house floor, an engineer from the look of him. Averic ducked back out of sight, realizing he would not have the nerve to bluff this out. Stealth
it must be.

There came voices from outside, but just the usual murmur of soldiers in a camp, he guessed. The thought of what he would do once he had Eujen out of the building was something he was staving
off, moment to moment. They were a long way from anywhere that could be called safe, and even though there were Beetles in the Imperial army, Eujen would never pass for one . . .

In front, a line of four doors, two of them standing open. If Eujen was to be found easily, it would be here. Averic inched closer, ears alert for the sound of anyone else entering the
building.

He heard a clatter of metal from behind one of the closed doors.

Before his thoughts could deflect him, he was at the door and hauling it open, a hand extended to sting. The suddenness of his action surprised him, leaving him bewildered and shaken.

There lay Eujen, right there.

They had him secured to a table, and the injuries he bore so far were shallow and superficial, the result of a precise art that aimed at combining longevity with pain. They had not got to that
later stage, where a subject’s willpower is broken by irreversible damage. Two fingers of one hand were splayed at broken angles with exacting care, but the rest of the work had mostly been
pressure on joints and a little surface cutting.

Eujen was weeping quietly. He had been stretching the fingers of his other hand towards the torturer’s tools – knives and clamps and irons – that had been left almost within
reach. One was on the floor, nudged perhaps by the furthest extent of one finger. His eyes were pressed closed, his body shaking with misery.

Averic set to work instantly, loosening his friend’s bonds, ignoring the blood on Eujen’s dark flesh. The Beetle’s shuddering calmed, as he worked until the last manacle
loosened. Then Averic met his eyes.

‘You’re here,’ Eujen whispered, his eyes flicking to the black and gold uniform.

‘Don’t you doubt me, not ever,’ the Wasp told him. ‘We’re getting clear now.’ An awkward pause. ‘Can you walk?’

‘Going to have to.’ Eujen lurched off the table, grabbing one-handed at it for support, and stood a moment with his face twisted in pain. After a deep breath, he forced himself to
stand upright. ‘I’ve had worse.’ And the patent untruth of it almost made Averic weep. ‘We’re moving?’

‘We are.’ Averic was already at the door leading to the counting-house floor, and still nobody had come to continue their work on Eujen. They were leaving him to stew, of course, to
consider his fate, and the door was unguarded because . . . well, because Averic’s kinden were contemptuous of anything a manacled Beetle might achieve.

‘Averic,’ Eujen whispered. ‘I’m sorry, I told . . . I told them . . .’ His eyes glinted bright with fear and the memory of pain.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Averic told him, and led him by the arm towards the rear door. At every moment he knew that someone would walk in, that he would have to fight: kill or be
killed. His luck, stretched beyond credibility, would snap back at him, surely.

He opened the door and they stepped out into the night, and his luck snapped there and then, and irrevocably.

They left Eujen standing, but the threat of Averic’s sting meant that three men jumped him immediately as he stepped out into daylight, wrestling him to the ground with professional
viciousness, wrenching his arms back at the joints to keep him down.

Half a dozen soldiers were what he and Eujen rated, he saw. There was the captain, too, and no less a man than Colonel Cherten himself had come to witness the entertainment, but there was no
indication that either intended to get their hands dirty. Half a dozen soldiers, two of them standing back with levelled snapbows, all waiting outside the back door.

‘Well done, Captain,’ Cherten acknowledged. ‘I applaud your instincts.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ The captain looked moderately pleased with himself, but not over much. It was not so great a triumph as all that. ‘Back to the tables with them?’

‘No, I have another use for them, and I need them for it now,’ Cherten told him. ‘I think we need to break the morale of their friends in the College. Have them secured and
I’ll take them off your hands.’

By the time the Antspider ascended to the courtyard wall there was already quite a crowd there, jostling and craning, and most of them with snapbows loaded and directed towards
the Imperial lines.

‘Are they mustering?’ she demanded, though she could hear no sound of it. Surely there would be the rumble of the Sentinel engines; surely the movement of a large number of men could
he heard on such a still night.

‘Lighting up the place, is what they’re doing,’ Castre Gorenn told her.

Straessa opened her mouth to question that, but it was true. On a rooftop just overlooking the Imperial barricade directly facing the College gate, the Wasps had set out lanterns and lamps as
though they were celebrating something.

‘What does it mean?’ she asked quietly.

‘Nothing good,’ the Dragonfly guessed, and Straessa had to agree.

Out of uniform, wearing only a nightshirt that hung short of his knees, Gerethwy stumbled into place beside her. He carried his snapbow, for what it was worth, and for a moment she was tempted
to order him straight back down again. His face was drawn, hollow-cheeked through lack of sleep and from the recurrent stabs of pain he felt from the fingers he no longer possessed. Right now, he
was plainly of no use to anyone.

But it would shame him, she knew, and so she left it.
See, I’m a terrible officer. Why does nobody else realize that?

‘Is that a flag they’re bringing?’ someone asked, and her attention returned to the rooftop. There were a fair number of soldiers there, and they carried some sort of bundle of
staves. Her stomach went cold, wondering what new kind of weapons the Empire’s engineers might have dreamt up.

‘Should I try a shot?’ Gorenn asked.

‘At this range? Too far even for you, surely?’ Straessa pointed out.

Gorenn shrugged irritably, and Straessa was about to suggest she try it anyway, when a Fly-kinden piped up, ‘Spears. They’ve got spears.’

‘Have to be bloody long ones, then,’ a Beetle youth remarked. Whilst he earned himself a murmur of laughter, Straessa felt something grip her far beyond the nebulous threat of a new
invention.

Not new . . . A real old-fashioned Wasp tradition, isn’t that right?

‘What are they doing?’ More than a few people were asking the question, as the Wasps began setting out the long, barbed-headed weapons in pairs, fitting them to sockets they had
already set in the flat roof. Four spears, forming two crosses.

Straessa was gripping the edge of the courtyard wall so tightly that her knuckles were white. Her whole world had contracted to that one bright spot ahead where the Wasps had cast out the
darkness so that they could put on a show.

‘Crossed pikes,’ someone observed, and the conversation died, word by word, until almost everyone was silent. Of course, there were a few who had neglected their studies, but
Straessa did not feel like educating them just then.

She remembered Averic talking about this, once – he had so seldom spoken about his home. He had been a little drunk, his pale face discoloured with bruises from a beating he had received,
but had not risen to. She – or was it Raullo? – had said something about wagering that sort of thing wouldn’t go on back where he had lived. He had then explained to them just
what did go on. It had been a lapse, of course, and once the over-hasty words were spoken he had plainly wanted to take them back.

There was a skill to it, he had explained. To drive the spearhead into the side of the abdomen by careful degrees, so that whatever damage it did would agonize without killing – to lever
it through the ribs without gashing the lungs, and then to ram it into the tricep and biceps, so that, once the crossing was complete, the victim hung from the spear-shafts, with the hooked heads
embedded in the solid flesh of the upper arms. A soldier who could perform all that reliably was guaranteed a sergeant’s rank badge.

Someone – either slow on the uptake or just absurdly optimistic – now moaned with horrified realization, as two new figures were led up onto the roof.

Eujen. Averic.

‘I can’t see Serena,’ someone was saying, some friend of the Fly-kinden officer’s.

‘Then she’s the lucky one,’ Straessa whispered. ‘Gereth . . .’

The Woodlouse was staring out at that illuminated rooftop, fingering his snapbow, but even on his best day he couldn’t have made the shot.

. . . rammed through the body, inch by searing inch, an anatomy lesson for sadists, then hung . . .

The officer in charge seemed to be taking some pains explaining to his prisoners what was going to happen to them. Of course, Averic must already know in great detail . . . while Eujen always
did have a quick imagination.

Straessa levelled her snapbow, sighting it on those distant figures. The previous day’s exchange had demonstrated that she could not possibly hit her mark, or probably even make the roof
at all, and she would get in only one – perhaps two – shots, before the Wasps made sure she could not spoil their fun.

And she couldn’t shoot Eujen. She didn’t have it in her, despite everything. How many times had she joked that the thing he needed most was a shot in the head, and here they were
. . . and she couldn’t.

‘Gorenn, you said . . .’ She watched as Eujen and Averic had their hands freed, but of course you would have to have unbound wrists to go up on the pikes. ‘You said you could
manage the shot. Can you?’

The Dragonfly looked round as though noticing Straessa for the first time. ‘Of course. Why not?’

Straessa saw them unsocket the spears again, in preparation for their bloody work. Setting the weapons up in advance like that was part of the ritual: to make the victims – and the
onlookers – understand and know fear.

‘Founder’s Mark, do it,’ she spat.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Eujen. I wish you a clean death. That’s all I can do now.

Atop the roof overlooking the barricade, Cherten peered into the night, over at the College, seeing movement without detail along the wall.

‘Well, why not?’ he addressed his prisoners. ‘After all, you came to negotiate a surrender. I will now show your fellows what terms they can expect if they continue to resist
the Empire.’

Eujen did not look at him, staring at his own feet, but Averic glowered, twisting in the grip of the soldiers who held him.

Cherten favoured him with a cold smile. ‘Yes, the greater of the two traitors first. Put the pikes in him now.’

He turned back to regard the dark bulk of the College and opened his mouth to shout something at his audience there, and an arrow pierced his throat, through to the fletching.

And on the College wall, Straessa cursed and demanded, ‘What did you
do
?’

Castre Gorenn stared at her. ‘Wasn’t that . . . Wait, what did you
mean
for me to do?’

There was a moment when that single arrow became a full-scale attack in the minds of most of the Wasps there, and Averic seized on it.

He tried to put an elbow in the throat of the man holding him, but slammed it painfully into the soldier’s chest instead. It was enough, sending his captor reeling away from him, and then
Averic’s hands flashed, knocking down the man with the pike who stood right next to him, still staring dumbly at Cherten’s body. The barbed spear ended up in Averic’s hands, and
he lashed it across the face of the man holding Eujen.

‘Go!’ he shouted, and because Eujen plainly had no idea how or where to go, he grabbed the Beetle student tight and threw them both off the roof towards the splintered architecture
of the barricade.

His wings flashed, but Eujen was heavy, and the two of them barely cleared the barricade at all, before tumbling to the ground. There were shouts from behind and above – at least some of
them directed at the escaping prisoners and—

Averic’s heart soared. Eujen was on his feet and already beginning to lumber towards the College, stumbling at first, but gaining momentum as he went. And Averic flew after him, turning in
the air to spit a scatter of stingshot at those he knew must be following.

‘Get the doors open!’ Straessa yelled. ‘Get . . .’ and then she had simply vaulted the edge of the wall, hanging by her hands for a moment and then
dropping. Gorenn was with her, and a couple of Fly-kinden, and she heard the rattle and groan as the doors were unbarred and opening behind her.

Her feet pounded the flagstones, and she was already trying to level her snapbow, but it was a futile effort. Ahead she saw bright flashes that must be Averic’s sting – and they were
answered in kind, for the Wasps were in the air and descending fast on the fugitives. The distance between them – from Straessa to the escapees – seemed immense and ever-growing however
fast she ran, like in some terrible dream.

Beside her, Gorenn was loosing another arrow, yet barely slowing.