Adrian Tchaikovsky - War Master's Gate

Two tendays before.

Overlooking Collegium, and overlooking the sea, stood the old house on the cliffs.

It had been built two generations before as a retreat by a clique of philosophers, but its isolated location and the windswept nature of the surrounds had led to its abandonment a decade or so later, since when it had become the haunt of odd recluses, fugitives and perhaps spies. For the space of a few years, it had served as a wayhouse catering to just those sorts, and a few from Collegium who simply wished to get away from the crowd.

Some months ago, the Assembly had gifted the place to a new trading franchise, the Tidenfree Cartel, and placed a lamp atop its single tower. If ships’ captains had complained that the new lighthouse served no useful purpose, well, they were seldom listened to in the Assembly. And those who muttered that sometimes the lamp blinked and flashed, as if sending out messages across the sea. . well, seafarers were always telling tales.

Now Stenwold himself stood in the tower room below the lamp and stared out at the waves, the unquiet sea showing blue and grey in turns, cresting beneath a changing wind. He had taken refuge here many times since its most recent change of ownership. The Tidenfree Cartel were his creatures, in as much as they were anyone’s, and he was their patron, their supporter, their conspirator in the great secret. Only he and Jodry Drillen, Speaker for the Assembly, knew that those miraculous metals and machine parts that the Tidenfree crew imported to the city did not come from some obscure city of Spiderlands artificers, as the cover story went, but instead from beneath the sea itself.

‘They’ve cleared this place out good, now, haven’t they?’ A deep voice came from behind him. It was Tomasso, chief merchant of the Tidenfree Cartel and master of its single ship, of the same name. And a former pirate, of course, although to see him now, dressed respectably like a Collegiate citizen and wooed by a dozen mercantile concerns, one would never have known it. He was a burly Fly-kinden with a dark beard and a mischievous look to him, for all that he was close to Stenwold’s age. His eyes roamed the walls, finding only absences there, for his crew had already passed through the lighthouse and stripped it of everything when the Wasps had got close to the city.

‘The factora in the city is acceptable?’ Stenwold asked him.

‘Will do nicely until we chase the Jaspers away,’ Tomasso agreed. ‘This place started looking a bit exposed when their lads from the Second began setting up.’ He grimaced. ‘I’m no engineer, but you may have to pull the old place down. Gives too much of a vantage over the city.’

‘Not that the Imperial artillery needs that, nowadays, but yes, it’s been thought of. We’ve engines in the city that have calculated the range.’ Stenwold was still staring out to sea as though trying to divine the future from the surging waves. ‘She knows. .?’

‘. . Not to come here,’ Tomasso finished for him. ‘Or anywhere, right now. I hear Despard’s just back from down there, probably has letters for you even. But they know the score, the Sea-kinden. If the Wasps were coming by boat, your lad Aradocles would be sending up his monsters by the dozen, but I reckon the Spiders haven’t forgotten the last time.’

Stenwold nodded. The Spider-kinden — many of whom were now marching alongside the Wasp Second Army — had tried to send a fleet against Collegium, but Stenwold and Tomasso’s newfound friends beneath the waves had dissuaded them. The tentative, secretive arrangements put in place between land and sea that rested so much on Tomasso and his opposite number below had been bearing fruit and working better than anyone had anticipated. If the Wasps had not revived the war, a whole new age of enlightenment might be dawning. Instead of which, Stenwold’s city was scarred with bomb craters, his people turned into soldiers, and three dozen military decisions were currently prowling about the streets, waiting for him to return and put them out of their misery. Simply to avoid them, he had come out here, perhaps for the last time, to stare at the sea.

Paladrya, her name was. Every old man needed some romance in his life, and Stenwold’s was separated from him by a barrier neither of them could cross for long. The land was too harsh and hostile for her, the sea a place of nightmares for him. Even their letters were cast in foreign alphabets.

‘I hear the Wasp lads are keeping their distance, since you took the air from them,’ Tomasso noted. As a Fly-kinden, control of the air was something he thoroughly approved of, and the Collegiate orthopters were currently the undisputed masters of the skies above the city.

‘Still,’ Stenwold observed, ‘they’re not going away.’ At last he dragged his eyes away from the waves. ‘What will you do, if it comes to that?’

Tomasso shrugged easily. ‘The sea’s an open road. We’ll ship out when the time comes, and no hard feelings. You’re welcome to take a berth with us. We’ve space for you.’ Even as Stenwold opened his mouth, the Fly held his hands up. ‘I know, I know, your place is here — noble War Master and all that. I’m just saying, though. The crew wouldn’t begrudge the room if your Assembly decided to give you a kick.’

‘It’s kind of them,’ Stenwold allowed, and then a scuffle sounded from somewhere below and a younger Fly burst into the room.

‘Mar’Maker, there you are!’

‘Laszlo,’ Stenwold acknowledged him, abruptly tense. ‘What news?’

‘Oh, they need you right now back in the city, Mar’Maker. It’s not the Wasps but, from the look on half the faces there, it might as well be.’

Stenwold nodded heavily, knowing immediately who the Fly meant. ‘They’ve made good time then, but Ants always could march.’

‘There’s an automotive waiting to get you to the city, and I really think you should be there before this mob arrives. Otherwise someone’s going to do something stupid.’

‘Almost certainly right,’ Stenwold agreed, and then he was clumping down the stairs, with Laszlo buzzing at his shoulder.

At the west wall of Collegium, Jodry Drillen watched the approaching force, and all around him were the city’s Merchant Company soldiers, very pointedly not doing anything about it but plainly wishing that they could.

‘Brings back memories,’ someone could be heard to say, even as Stenwold stomped his way up the steps to the summit of the wall.

‘Where’s their representative?’ he demanded.

Jodry turned and inclined his head to indicate a silent, dark figure standing at the battlements, given a wide berth by the locals.

‘I hope you’re sure of what you’re doing, is all.’ The Speaker for the Assembly was still a fat man, but the stresses of recent events had made all that weight hang on him as though it was sloughing off, from the pouchy bags under his eyes to the way his clothes all seemed ill-fitting. He and Stenwold had clashed a few times during the Wasps’ last offensive, but now they were friends again, just about.

Stenwold made his way along the parapet to the Ant that stood alone there: short, ebony-skinned, and armoured against the world in a mail hauberk.

‘Termes,’ he named him, and the Ant nodded.

‘War Master.’

Together they looked out at the Vekken army.

The last time a force from that Ant city had come to Collegium, it had been for conquest, and the time before that, as well. The Ants had been the city’s enemies for most of Stenwold’s life, certainly far longer than the Wasps had. It was a matter of scale, though. Vek was only one city, the Empire was many. Stenwold had worked extremely hard to bring the Vekken to a point where they might consider their Beetle neighbours as something other than a threat or a prize. He had worked even harder to convince his own people that such a change of heart in their old foes was even possible. Now here were the fruits.