Adrian Tchaikovsky - War Master's Gate

‘We want to know what’s going on,’ she ventured.

‘Doesn’t everyone?’ As he spoke, she became aware of a faint murmur of voices from inside the taverna. She leant closer to eavesdrop, but abruptly Oski rose before her, wings flickering.

‘So let’s go and discuss,’ he said, a little too loudly. ‘I’ll wager I’ve got something for your pilots to chew on.’

‘Oski, what is going on?’ she asked, not moving.

‘Nothing, Captain. Engineering Corps business, therefore none of yours.’ He was right up close to her, forcing her to step back out of instinct, for fighting room.

‘Major-’

‘Bergild,’ he told her. ‘Never you mind. Not your concern. You know what your lads want to hear? About how Sarn kicked the arse of the Eighth Army all of a sudden. About how our pissing relief column, Collegiate governor and all, is now stuck out at Malkan’s Stand to keep the Ants pinned down. Meaning we’re not going anywhere, and Tynan’s acting governor — which you can be sure he’s just mad about.’

And that was what her people wanted to know about and, of course, if a superior officer said it was none of her business, then that was true. Yet something in his manner, some furtive guilt, had communicated itself to her, so as she stepped aside with him, she was already detailing one of her pilots to get a glass and keep a more distant eye on the derelict taverna.

She was not disappointed. A half-hour later, as she saw it through her man’s eyes, a unusual half-dozen crept out of the place, one by one, and headed off in separate ways. She recognized Ernain the Bee-kinden, and there was a Beetle there, and another couple of Flies, and all of them in uniform, though she suspected few were actually attached to the Second. The last one out was a Grasshopper-kinden, though, and that set the seal on her suspicions, because she was sure enough that the Engineers weren’t recruiting from the Inapt these days.

A conspiracy , she decided, but that thought she kept to herself.

Sartaea te Mosca

Nobody was entirely sure who had dared go to General Tynan and ask if they could resume lectures at the College. Had it been someone possessed of great courage, or with a keen eye as to the mood of the reclusive acting-governor? Or had it simply been one of those academics so wrapped up in their studies that the perils of the world beyond their books failed to register?

But General Tynan had taken a moment away from his introspection to give the proposal the nod, and a tenday later there were students cautiously creeping into the College’s halls once again.

Of course, things were not the same. How could they be? Even with Tynan himself practically a recluse, Collegium had a new administration. All the Consortium factors and clerks and bureaucrats that the Empire had sent to take over the running of Collegium had arrived on schedule, and the Imperial machine had long experience of taking conquered cities in hand with brutal efficiency. What had not arrived, of course, was the garrison that had been due to take the weight of Collegium off Tynan’s shoulders. Instead it — and the colonel originally awarded the governorship — had been diverted in order to counter any move by the Sarnesh, and to reinforce the surviving strength of the Eighth Army, and so Tynan had been denied his chance to march away towards Vek and leave this city he plainly detested behind him.

The classes were now smaller: this was te Mosca’s unavoidable observation as she moved through the College. There were missing faces — dead or fled — and everyone was quieter. Where before those students out of lectures had been raucous in their debate and merriment, now they went about their business with a soft step and whispered voice, because nobody wanted to be noticed any more.

Faced with Tynan’s unexpected acquiescence, the administration beneath him had done their best to stamp the entire venture with black and gold. Every class would include an observer, nominally there to allow the Imperials to understand their new subjects better. In some classes, indeed, this unwanted new addition was very attentive indeed, more so even than the students themselves. When the College Masters gathered together behind closed doors, those who taught artifice agonized at the fact that they must either cripple their own teaching, or pass Collegium’s mechanical knowledge piecemeal to the Engineering Corps. Teachers of social history had a worse time. One of them had simply disappeared early on, after forgetting herself during her lectures. The only sort of philosophy and political theory that the Empire would tolerate was its own.

Other observers seemed to be simple soldiers drafted in to make up the numbers, especially for such subjects as the Empire plainly had no use for and considered trivial. Their impact on classes was disconcertingly random — some simply knocked off for a drink at the start, or sat there and read, or just stared into space. Others took too much of an interest, such as the sergeant who had decided he was an art critic and used his sting to torch an entire class’s life-painting efforts.

One of the Living Sciences lectures on anatomy had supposedly been commandeered by a Wasp who displayed a knowledge of the human body, its breaking points and tolerances, far in excess of the lecturer himself.

But Sartaea te Mosca, Associate Master and teacher of Inapt studies, was lucky, and she had pushed that luck a very long way indeed. After all, she was teaching a subject that the Wasp-kinden could not understand and did not care about. So far, her observer had been a Wasp soldier who had plainly been bored to tears by her ramblings, so usually just fell asleep.

And, all the while, she and her students spoke treachery. They spoke in the language of the Moths, who used the same words as everyone else but employed them very differently. They conferred about events within Collegium as though they were dry old histories, nicknamed living men and women with the monikers of ancient heroes. At first her class had been the usual handful of awkward Inapt and clueless Apt, but by now she was ‘teaching’ to a score of the city’s finest, who came and mastered the conventions and the subterfuge they employed because nowhere else could they talk freely under the noses of their oppressors.

Sartaea te Mosca had never dreamt that her insignificant little class might ever provide so much of a service to the world.

She stepped into her classroom now — still the same cramped, high-ceilinged room as before, although it was getting difficult to fit everybody in these days — and she halted.

The expected bored Wasp soldier was not there. Instead, she faced a lean Moth-kinden man in grey robes, who looked at her with disdain.

‘You are the lecturer in “Inapt studies”, called te Mosca?’ he inquired.

‘Yes, that’s me.’ Sartaea had been trained by Moths, accepted into their halls because she had some magical talent, and yet never truly made welcome because that talent was not great. This man’s arch and penetrating scrutiny brought those cold and unhappy days back to her with a vengeance. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I have been sent to Collegium from Tharn to assist our allies in the Empire with matters that Wasps themselves might not quite comprehend,’ he said, pointedly offering her no name. ‘I will be sitting in on your teaching, although what could possibly pass for true learning in a den of the Apt such as this eludes me. Perhaps you will surprise me. Perhaps your students are all budding magicians. We shall see.’ His blank, white eyes seemed to see into every corner of her. ‘I look forward to your words, te Mosca. And, rest assured, I shall be reporting to the administration on your fitness to teach.’