War Master's Gate (79 page)

If the Ants stayed back, then the fighting would get bogged down into a long-range pissing contest with snapbows, which Roder reckoned he would eventually win, given his superior numbers and
what he predicted would be a Wasp advantage in speed and accuracy. That would be a costly way to bring the battle to a close, though, and one that would be likely to allow the Ants to disperse and
meet him again before their walls – or even attack him from behind as he invested the city. The painstaking progress the Eighth had made towards Sarn, with the Ants using minimal forces to
cause maximum delay, had given him a new respect for whoever was planning their war.

Still, the Sarnesh resistance was all for nothing, since a messenger had arrived from Tynan’s Second to confirm that Collegium had capitulated. The reinforcements that Sarn had presumably
been hoping for were not coming. Sarn now stood alone.

There was a concentration forming in the centre of the Sarnesh lines, but his scouts suggested these were Auxillian troops, not the Ants themselves.
A distraction for the greatshotters,
then.
But each death would still be one less enemy on the field, and so there was no reason not to oblige the Ants rather than attack their wide-spaced forces and squander the potency of the
engines. It was as if he and the Sarnesh commander were following the same textbook, both seeing a different advantage in the same tactic, so that there were really no losers. Or nobody important,
anyway.

A messenger landed nearby and ran up to him. ‘General, word from the forest!’

For a moment he could not imagine what the man meant, but then it fell into place. ‘The Mantids?’

‘One of their women is here to speak with you, General.’

He peered through the unrelieved grey, trying to pinpoint her, but spotted her only when she was almost within a spear’s reach: a lean, weathered, hard-faced woman, dressed in a chitin
cuirass.

‘You’re of the Nethyen? How do things stand in the forest?’

‘I am of the Nethyen,’ she confirmed. ‘The fighting is over.’

His heart leapt. ‘Can you bring your forces to bear on the battle?’

‘We can.’ A small smile that made him uneasy. ‘We have put aside our differences, the Etheryen and ourselves. From now on there is but one hold in the wood. Netheryon, it shall
be called.’

Roder shrugged off the nuances of Mantis nomenclature. ‘When can you strike?’ he asked, acutely aware that the Ants would be closing the distance to his lines already.

‘Now,’ she explained, and went for him.

She nearly had him, too. Her blade rammed into his armour, biting into the metal but not penetrating, yet still knocking him from his feet. She wore one of those claw gauntlets, and he had not
even noticed.

He thrust a hand out, but the soldiers around him were creditably alert and, even as she drew back her arm to finish him off, three or four snapbow bolts and a sting had found her, battering her
from both sides so that she twisted and fell in a spray of blood.

‘Pits-cursed Inapt!’ Roder swore furiously, as one of his men helped him up. ‘What was that . . .?’ There was shouting, he realized.
Within
the camp there was
shouting. In the pre-dawn he could make out nothing of it. ‘Someone find out what that is!’ he ordered.

But even as he said the words, he understood what it must be. He saw that the Mantis woman had not come alone; that her people, the Netheryen, were indeed ready to strike.

They had reached almost to the edge of the camp itself, and not one sentry or scout had spied them. All eyes had been focused on the Ants.

They had come, all of them, in their steel-edged hundreds.

Roder opened his mouth to cry out some command –
any
command – that might save the situation, and the might of the forest surged into the heart of his army, like a tide.

In that fractured second, Milus weighed many commodities within his soul, not least his surprisingly strong attachment to the original plan, however inappropriate. The Mantids
had finally made their move; they were attacking the Wasps even now. They were hopelessly outnumbered, and yet when had that ever bothered them? He could now let them spend themselves against the
black and gold, then strike at his own convenience. Or he could take full advantage of this unlooked-for intervention and hurry his men over to the Wasp lines as fast as they could be shifted, and
construct a new battle plan while the fighting continued. It was another advantage of being an Ant, of course: he could change his orders at any time and the whole army would know and
understand.

He made his decision in that same fraught second.
Forwards, all speed. Close with the Wasps as swiftly as possible.

And Seda took one step forwards and threw out a stingshot at the seated figure of Argastos.

It was supposed to be that simple. However he chose to appear, the gnarled-stump body of the Moth War Master was there and had always been there, at the root-hung, earth-ceilinged centre of the
barrow. This was the chamber they had dined in. This was where they had been imprisoned and threatened. This was the entirety of Argastos’s world.

But he was quicker to react than that, and more clever. For all that he had atrophied into, he had been one of the great magicians of his people, with a millennium of scheming even after that.
The space around them became instantly folded and convoluted so that, although he was physically almost close enough to touch, he had contrived a mile of tangled forest between them, and dropped
Seda and Che inside it. And it was not empty.

‘His ghost-soldiers are here with us, all around,’ Che recognized.

‘Keep them back. Misdirect them. Lose them within the landscape,’ Seda directed, taking command because . . . who else was there? Gratifyingly, she felt the Beetle girl’s
immediate acquiescence.
Perhaps there is some potential in her that I missed. If I can make a servant of my enemy, what could we not do together?
And then she was pursuing Argastos, even
as he tried to widen the apparent space between them, hauling swathes and handfuls of mismatched, misremembered land from his mind to cram into place.

But Seda had assessed his limits: his imagination was as dried-up as his body. Everything he raised up was brooding forest, fragments of ruined castle, clods of the deep underground. She had
seen it all before and she flew through it like an avenging ghost, fire trailing from her hands.

Yet his memories, however limited, encompassed his days as War Master, his military campaigns, the great battles of the Inapt, and suddenly she was veering away, falling back, because she had
met Argastos’s armies.

The actual ghost soldiers, the remains of Argastos’s real victims that could take on enough form to injure or kill her and the Maker girl – just as she herself had given
Tisamon’s ghost such form – were still being kept away, led into the dense, gnarled thickets of Argastos’s own mind, constantly turned away by the Beetle’s will. But that
could not last forever. Seda had to tear her way past all the mummery that Argastos had thrown up, before those dead killers fought through Che’s diversions enough to cross the few feet of
actual real space that separated them from their intended victims. The two women became hunter and hunted all at the same time.

And here now was what kept her from her quarry: Argastos had ransacked his mind and cast up this recollection of the war-host of the Inapt. She had seem some fraction of it in the visions he had
shown her, while wooing her, but this was it entire or as close as his memory could call forth. The forest was filled with moving soldiers: Moth, Mantis, Spider, Dragonfly, Woodlouse and others,
great loose formations of them, armoured and armed, a dark glass being held up to the glory of another age.

Hurry!
came Che’s voice, in her mind. The Beetle was losing ground.

Useless creature.
And Seda stood before Argastos’s recreated host and called out, ‘I am Seda, Empress of the Wasp-kinden. Do you presume to teach me about armies?’

She took a deep breath and clawed power out of the very tapestry that Argastos had raised to stop her, and she gifted him with her own thoughts on the subject.

She gave him the Barbs, General Alder’s Fourth Army; she gave him Malkan’s Winged Furies and Tynan’s Gears. She gave him the Eighth, which General Roder was even now leading
against Sarn. She gave him the artillery of the Engineers and the flying machines of the Aviation Corps. She gave him the Rekef assassins she had once lived in fear of. She gave him snap-bows and
the bright dawn of the new Apt age.

His remembered soldiers, a thousand years dead and obsolete, began their work, butchering her followers by the thousand, slaughtering the Wasps wholesale as she watched, and not all her powers
or inspiration could inspire into that ersatz Black and Gold any semblance of the discipline and indomitable might of the Imperial armies that she recalled.

She had miscalculated. There was a hollow, clutching feeling inside her, and at last she was forced to recognize it as fear.

Hurry!
Che Maker again, not realizing how Seda’s plans had just collapsed in upon themselves. And then Seda was forced to confront two equally unpalatable options: lose to
Argastos; confess to Maker that she was failing.

But she was not like her brother. She was not so insecure.

I need your help.
A bitter confession, yet she shoved the situation facing her into Che’s mind, and the girl understood immediately.
What can you give me?

In the real world, the Wasp armies would have destroyed Argastos’s barbaric rabble without slowing. Their orthopters and automotives, greatshotters and snapbows would have reaped that
enemy like wheat and turned an army into an abattoir within two hours. But Seda had no understanding of such devices. She knew that they existed, but she left the details to her generals and her
engineers. Here, with only her own mind to draw on, all the great machinery of the Wasps, their tactics and their innovations, might as well just be theatrical props. Argastos had led armies: he
knew full well the strengths and weaknesses of his troops.

Change places with me,
Che told her instantly, and Seda swallowed her pride and fell back, taking on the task of throwing Argastos’s real soldiers into confusion, whilst Che
hunted the man himself. It was the only chance they seemed to have.

In the midst of this twisted landscape that Argastos had summoned into being, Che could not see her own physical body, but she had the uncomfortable feeling that some of the
Moth’s dead slaves were practically standing over her with blades raised. She had tried all she had – misdirection, flight, lengthening the imagined terrain that they must cross, even
calling on Amnon once again, and having him throw himself against their blades – and it was foul work, to do so, but she was dead if she did not.

In passing that task to Seda, she could only hope that the Empress would put her ruthlessness and her Wasp minions to good use, because Che herself had played that game as far as she could.

Here was a different battle, though, and one she had a new perspective on. She saw exactly what Argastos had thrown between them to protect himself – his great remembered army – and
she understood why Seda had failed.

And what do I have?

She reached into her mind and peopled Argastos’s battlefield with her own forces, marvelling at the irony that she should be more suited to such an attack than Seda herself. Here were the
Dragonflies that she had seen in the Commonweal; here were the Moth-kinden of Tharn; here were the Mantids of the Nethyon and Etheryon – Argastos’s own people turned against him by her
will. And here . . . here was the Grand Army of Khanaphes, the great host of her own kinden, with chariots and cavalry and Amnon’s heroic guard at its centre. And if they were Apt, it
mattered little, because they were still waging war in a way that had barely changed since the Bad Old Days.

These were her troops, and she sent them off to war.

Argastos’s own forces outnumbered hers to the extent that she reckoned his memories had multiplied the actual numbers who had ever fought under his command. Still, this was his battle, and
played by his rules. Even if his mind was a liar, he would still manage to destroy her soldiers in time.

But that was not what she was trying to accomplish. She had another reason to take the initiative from Seda: a secret weapon.

The tide of battle swayed, and washed back and forth, her Khanaphir legion driving forward into the heart of the enemy, a bold thrust to get even a single arrow as far as Argastos himself. He
countered perfectly, of course, concentrating his forces to block her at every point, but at the same time she was leading him on, stripping him of his reserves and his bodyguards, until he had
committed everything he had in order to meet her threat.

And she called out,
I know you’re there. Time for you to do what your people do.

The bitter thorn of Esmail’s mind revealed itself to her:
Do not believe all the Moths wrote in their histories.

I don’t care
, she told him.
That reputation is what I need now. Be a scholar or a poet some other time. Can you reach him?
And if Esmail’s answer was
‘no’ then everything would be for naught.

But then she felt him inching his way through the interstices of Argastos’s mind, stepping behind and within, but never directly interacting with it: like a spider raiding another’s
web, each step desperate not to start the vibrations that might trigger an alarm.

And she continued to throw her soldiers at the enemy with a reckless disregard for their lives, suicidal and ludicrous enough to shame every general or tactician there had ever been. But either
Argastos took it for her inexperience, or perhaps back in his day that was all battle had been about. He met her and crushed her forces, almost forgetting himself, losing his real purpose in this
excuse he had manufactured to play War Master one last time. And, as he committed his imaginary troops to the fray, complicating and convoluting the distance between him and Che, so the ground
immediately around him became simpler and simpler to traverse until one could have just walked across it.