Adrian Tchaikovsky - War Master's Gate

Behind them, he saw his city as if for the first time: the newest subject state of the Wasp Empire, the furthest encroachment of the Black and Gold, despite all the blood and tears that had gone into keeping it free.

He raised a fist in the air. ‘Liberty!’ he cried.

As they reached the landward end of the pier, he took one step back, and let the water take him.

The Antspider

They had kept her imprisoned for more than a day, with a little brackish water but no food at all. The pain in her eye, where a sword-guard had been rammed into her face, had fallen into its own stubborn, unvarying rhythm, fading until she almost forgot about it, then flaring up just as she did. She had not dared to take the matted cloth from it to see. . to see if there was anything to see.

Her hand felt better: if she did not move it, then it was almost painless. The Imperial surgeon in charge of fixing her up enough to be worth torturing had done his job well there, at least.

Sometimes, soldiers passed by, and she found herself flinching away from them, despite herself, pain from her eye and hand stabbing at her together.

There was almost no light down here, and it was damp, and sometimes she could hear cries and begging from above, where the interrogators plied their trade.

She had discovered in herself a terrible fear of yet more pain and, although she tried to shrug it off flippantly and find some quip or dismissive remark to distance herself from it, she could not.

When at last she heard heavy footsteps descending to her cellar, and saw the sway of a lamp as one of her jailers approached, she shrank back into the corner they had penned her in, hearing her own breath grow ragged, and hating herself for it.

The lamp was hung up on the wall, to cast its uncompromising light across them both, and she saw that General Tynan himself had come to give her the bad news.

‘Your friends failed,’ he told her, ‘but you knew that.’ She could not fathom his expression, for none of the pieces seemed to fit together to make the man she had seen before.

‘There’s peace in Collegium tonight,’ he said. ‘First time in a while. We won. We won it all. We beat all of them.’ He sat down heavily across from her, the light gleaming on his bald head. He looked anything but triumphant. ‘What d’you think about that, eh?’ He yelled it without warning, as though the Wasp victory was a crime and she was somehow responsible.

She had shrunk away from that yell, but now she turned her wide eye back to him and found him still staring at her, apparently wanting an answer.

Something surfaced in her that had been buried for too long. ‘Should I be saying hooray for the Empire?’ she whispered, her voice hoarse.

‘Hooray,’ Tynan echoed, and put his head in his hands. With a sudden lurching of perspective, she realized that he was the sort of pure clear drunk that even Collegiate students seldom aspired to, and comfortable enough with it that he had been walking straight and speaking without slurring his words.

‘I killed her,’ he stated, without qualification. ‘I followed my orders. What else was I supposed to do? You can’t go against the throne. Who would obey a general who hadn’t obeyed his own orders, eh?’ Looking up again, his reddened eyes challenged her. ‘I couldn’t have just walked away, could I? I couldn’t have just said no.’

And then, losing focus on her. ‘I thought she was going to kill me, when she summoned me back to Capitas. When she said she was giving me my Second back, I felt so proud. .’

Straessa was now completely lost, unsure even how many women the general was talking about, whether he was claiming to have killed the Empress herself, or any of it.

‘When we were at the walls the first time,’ he rambled on, ‘I captured Stenwold Maker. You remember that? I had his woman, and he walked out to save her from the pikes, gave himself to me. I had him in my hands. And then the orders came to head for home, but I could have had him shot. I could have rid the world of Stenwold Maker!’ A theatrical gesture, as though he had an audience of thousands. ‘But I let him go — and you know why? I liked him. I respected him. He had the sort of courage a Wasp should have. . and that I’ve seen a good few officers lack! He abandoned his city, put himself in the jaws of the trap, just to save his woman pain. She betrayed him later, he told me. And she died for it.’

Tynan reached around, fumbling at his belt, and she thought he was going for a weapon — absurd, as he could have stung her through the bars with ease. Then there was a flask in his hand and he knocked back a long swig of it, and held it out to her as if she was just another soldier he was drinking with.

She took it with her uninjured hand and drank from it cautiously, recognizing a fiery brandy that sent a jab of pain down her parched throat.

She handed it back, shaking only a little.

‘And now we find,’ Tynan remarked, ‘that I am not as brave as Stenwold Maker. That I would not walk away from my city to save my woman. That is what we learn.’ He drained the flask and threw it away, so that it clattered on the steps. ‘Tell me about him.’

Straessa started. ‘What?’

‘Your man, the one I killed. What was he, to you?’

She took a moment trying to collect her thoughts but they were scattered all about her head, defying order. ‘He was a fool who meant well,’ she said at last. ‘He never knew how to keep his mouth shut. He once almost got killed by Stenwold Maker. His best friend was a Wasp. He wanted there to be peace, and the fact that he hadn’t the faintest idea how to make that happen hurt him more than anything — more than almost anything.’ Her voice remained level only through a great exercise of will. ‘He would have been the best Speaker the Assembly ever had,’ she went on. ‘He could have healed the whole world.’

General Tynan, master of the Gears, stared past the bars at her. ‘And when he was on the point of death, you came here for me, rather than staying by him,’ he observed.

She nodded, but at that point could not trust herself to speak.

‘Then we neither of us have the courage we should have had,’ was his verdict, and next a great sigh. ‘And now I have orders still: every Spider in Collegium who’s still alive and hasn’t fled, every Spider must die. The Empress, she now hates Spiders so much, and nobody can tell me why, not even her creature Vrakir. I have my orders.’ And he stood up abruptly. ‘Not one Spider must remain alive in Collegium.’

‘I see,’ Straessa acknowledged.

‘But perhaps half a Spider, nobody will miss.’

When he unlocked the bars, fumbling messily with the keys and then lifting the whole cage section away with more strength than she would have credited him with, she was not sure what to do. Here was General Tynan, the man she had come to kill. Here he was, drunk and off-balance, and surely he had a knife somewhere she could snatch. She could cut the head off the whole Second Army.

But the injured parts of her cringed away at the thought of it, and besides, We neither of us have the courage we should have had. And how true.

She tried to slip past him, not trusting her luck to bear her weight another moment, ready for the inevitable reversal. And he seized her wrist — her bad hand — dragging her back with a screech of pain.

In that moment, all her defiance was overwritten by a desperate begging need to live, and to be free from pain, and nothing else was real to her but that.

He tried to stuff something into her broken fingers, obviously not understanding why she was writhing and twisting in his grip, but at last she grabbed at it with her good hand, finding an untidy fold of papers.