Adrian Tchaikovsky - War Master's Gate

The words had almost choked him, because their young faces had been so full of trust and hope.

The badly wounded were another matter — unable to move from place to place and with too much chance of their injuries being linked to the insurrection. They, and an escort, were going to join Tomasso’s mercenaries. Word had been sent to the bearded Fly’s mercantile contacts to smuggle them out of the city, posing as guards or servants, hidden within goods wagons, stowed away on ships. Tomasso had been working hard since his return to the city.

For Stenwold himself there were other plans.

The stretchers were coming out now. Tomasso had a quick word with the first bearers, to ensure they knew where they were going. It was not far but they must hurry, he was saying. The Wasps would-

Even as he was saying it, the Wasps had discovered them — a dozen of them bundling hurriedly from a side-street and stumbling to a halt at this sudden exodus of students. Stenwold felt the snapbow kick in his hands and a man in the centre of the squad went down, and then a handful of students were shooting too. But it only takes one Wasp to raise the alarm! And the last of the wounded was only just being brought out of Living Sciences.

Then the reason for the Wasps’ initial hurry caught up with them: a handful of Spider-kinden, led by a lean man in black armour, ploughed into them and cut down two or three in those first moments. The Wasps scattered, some trying for the sky, but a couple of Spiders carried bows and, between them and the students, the entire squad was accounted for.

‘Morkaris!’ Tomasso called over. ‘Still alive?’

The armoured Spider eyed him bleakly. ‘There are more coming,’ he said. ‘We are the last. I hope you’ve spent our lives wisely.’ He glanced at the last stretcher rounding the corner, at the handful of students even now backing away, about to run for their hiding places.

‘Curse you all, Wasps and Flies and Beetles!’ Morkaris declared, but a wild exaltation seemed to have taken hold of his expression, and a moment later he brandished his axe high in the air and went charging back the way he had come, his meagre handful of followers right behind him.

‘Laszlo, pay attention, boy,’ Tomasso barked. ‘Get your wings up, and get off with you — the Tidenfree ’s out past the sea wall, waiting for my word, so you go tell them we’re on our way.’

‘Right, Skipper.’ And Laszlo was airborne in an instant, darting away at roof level.

‘Come now, Master Maker.’ Tomasso turned to Stenwold. ‘The rest are trusting to their luck, so we must trust to ours.’ He regarded Stenwold doubtfully. ‘You’re up for a brisk run, Maker?’

No! ‘Going to have to be,’ Stenwold replied curtly, and then Tomasso was off, half running and half in the air, leaving the Beetle War Master to lurch after him.

He was not up for even a brisk walk, so Tomasso had to keep returning to him, and Stenwold began to see the first spark of worry in the man’s eye, fearing that he had miscalculated, ignorant of how badly Stenwold had been hurt. From the College to the docks proved a long haul, especially while avoiding all the city’s biggest thoroughfares.

Tomasso had plotted their course in advance, leading Stenwold from Life Sciences to the river, and then through the rundown and unregarded streets that led along its course towards the sea. The Collegium river trade had been killed off almost entirely by the rails and the airships, and those parts of the city that had once relied on it had been dying for decades. There were plenty of shadowed places for Stenwold to fight for breath.

Sometimes they saw Wasps in the air above them, and once a Farsphex, and there were the occasional patrols on the ground too, and all the while they had to stop to rest more and more frequently.

Stenwold never knew whether the Wasps had spotted them from the air — a Fly and a Beetle out in daylight was surely not the most suspicious sight in Collegium that day — or whether one of the riverside locals had recognized his face and betrayed his own city’s War Master, but, as they neared the docks, there seemed to be more and more of the Light Airborne overhead, until their progress was a punctuated series of hops and dashes from cover to cover — more and more suspicious by the minute until, if any Imperial did see them, he would guess instantly that they were fugitives. Tomasso was cursing now, under his breath but Stenwold could hear him. He had obviously intended to be out of the city by now.

‘You go to the ship,’ Stenwold told him. ‘It’s not as if I can’t find the docks myself. You get going.’

‘Not a chance, Maker. I made a promise I’d see this through, and I’ve been paid for it. When I give my word, I see it’s kept.’

They were holed up no more than three streets from the docks by now, ducked into a storage shed that held nothing but scrap metal.

Then there was a hollow knocking sound that both of them recognized at once: the discharge of a leadshotter.

Tomasso was out of the shed immediately, with Stenwold lurching in his wake. There seemed little doubt about what the Wasps might be shooting at.

Stenwold shambled along the river’s course for another warehouse-length before following Tomasso’s abrupt left turn, cutting eastward for the main sea docks. There were fliers overhead, and shouting from somewhere behind. A noose was drawing tight, and he wondered if they had specific orders to keep him alive, or whether he was just some faceless fugitive to them.

Sooner than expected, he lurched out within sight of the docks, his lungs hammering with the strain and his head swimming with nausea. Whatever good work the Instar had done, he thought he might be undoing it with all this exertion. He staggered forwards again, then stumbled almost instantly to one knee, the world spinning about him.

Hands found his arm, hauling him upright. Tomasso was shouting in his ear: ‘Almost there, Maker. Don’t you give up here, you fat old bastard. Come on!’

Tisamon, in Myna , came the thought from somewhere, and it gave Stenwold a sudden new lease of strength, able to push himself to his feet and weave towards the sea and the piers and. .

And no ship. The docks were empty.

Behind the sea wall? For that had been the Tidenfree ’s trick before, and what Wasp would think to look there, that even the Collegiate Port Authority had contrived to overlook.

Except there was a Wasp leadshotter positioned out on the sea wall already. And, even as he spotted it, an exhalation of smoke burst from it, with the sound following like thunder soon after.

Out across the harbour, out on the open sea, a tiny ship was riding, forced well out of artillery range.

‘Tomasso!’ he gasped.

‘I see it. Just keep going, you fool!’

There were Wasps coming now — not many, not just yet, but a dozen was more than enough. Stenwold found he no longer even had his snapbow. He had abandoned it some time during their trek.

‘I understand.’ And he was still running, forcing himself forwards one stride at a time, onto a pier now, a ramshackle old one with a storage hut at the far end, a place he had gone to before.

‘Good!’ Tomasso cried — and then he was abruptly no longer at Stenwold’s side. His small body spun under the snapbow bolt’s impact and then he was gone, knocked off the pier into the water. Two more bolts fell past Stenwold, like errant drops of rain.

And Stenwold had run out of places to go.

He stopped there, with the heels of his boots at the furthest edge of the pier, and watched as the Wasps feathered down out of a clear sky. Some of them must have known who he was, and communicated it to the rest, because the shooting had stopped now. They were just advancing across the docks, snapbows levelled.