Adrian Tchaikovsky - War Master's Gate

‘How many?’ he asked.

‘Eight hundred,’ Termes told him. ‘That was thought reasonable.’

Not enough for an invasion, but enough to be useful. The Vekken had considered their gesture seriously. They had no love for the Wasps and they knew that, if Collegium fell, the Empire would be outside their gates soon enough.

‘They’ll camp. .?’

‘Outside the city,’ Termes confirmed. He did not say, As we did last time , but Stenwold almost heard the echo of the words.

‘There are boats from Tsen on their way, I’m told.’

‘We are aware of that.’ Termes’s face revealed nothing. Tsen was another Ant city, further west still, and no friend of Vek’s save that both cities now found themselves friends of Collegium. ‘We suggest they stay on the water. We will keep to the land.’

‘It might be for the best.’ Stenwold nodded and returned to Jodry’s side. ‘We’ll need them, if the worst comes to the worst,’ he pointed out, watching the immaculately disciplined Ants break their column and begin to pitch camp tactfully outside artillery range. But, then, the Vekken would have no fond memories of the effectiveness of Collegiate artillery.

‘We’ve Sarnesh in the city also,’ Jodry informed him. ‘I thought it best not to invite them up onto the wall. More Ants around than we know what to do with, these days.’

‘A messenger?’

‘More than that — a full-blown tactician, as I understand it. I think our northern neighbours want to make a move. After this business at Malkan’s Folly, I think the Sarnesh are starting to hate the Wasps more even than you do, Sten.’

There were still plenty of soldiers left on the walls as Jodry and Stenwold descended. They had not been posted there, and each would have given some humdrum excuse for his presence, but they were keeping an eye on the Vekken, and no mistake. It took no great leap of imagination to envisage those enemies of recent memory being in league with the Wasps, forming part of some grand betrayal. Stenwold could only hope that he had done his work well enough or, at worst, that the Vekken also hated the Wasps more than they hated their traditional foes.

The customary place to meet with foreign dignitaries was the Amphiophos, of course, but where those hallowed halls of white stone had once stood was now just one of the city’s many new scars, bombarded by the Imperial air force into a warren of rubble and broken walls. Instead, a lecture hall at the College served, and it was there that Stenwold and Jodry, and a handful of other Beetle-kinden who had become Collegium’s de facto high command, met with Milus of Sarn.

The Sarnesh tactician looked close to Stenwold’s own years, belonging to that generation that, on all sides, was determining the course of the war. He had a small staff with him: three close-featured Ants of his own city and a pale Fly-kinden girl with gleaming red hair.

‘You’re making a mistake, of course,’ Milus told the Beetles, even as they came in through the door.

‘You mean the Vekken?’ Stenwold looked him straight in the eye.

‘I do, and you’ll regret it in time. For now. . who knows? The times are certainly unprecedented.’ He made a grand gesture with his hands, just one shade from being spontaneous. Ants had little use for body language or expressions amongst themselves, which made them both hard to read and hard to relate to, but Milus had obviously learned a stock of conversational tools for occasions such as this. The fact that he was not making more capital out of the Vekken arrival was also telling. Here was a new sort of Sarnesh leader.

‘Tactician,’ Jodry addressed him, ‘you have us here, the best of us. I assume you don’t want the full Assembly convened? It’s been a while since we last did that, and we’re short of somewhere to put them. It’s just the War Council making most of the key decisions at the moment.’

Milus nodded approvingly. ‘I have official business to discuss but, before that, I want to give you my personal congratulations. You’ll be well aware that, while my people value our friends in Collegium for many reasons, your martial prowess has never been one of them. Yet you’ve scored more victories against the Empire than we have, of late, and I hear their Second Army is still hiding from your orthopters. Well done. Sarn takes great heart from your successes.’ It was a prepared speech, but it was not what one expected, from Ant-kinden, and the Collegiates exchanged glances, reconsidering.

‘You’re kind,’ Jodry spoke for them. ‘We’re left in the same position as you, though, with an army on our doorstep that is just not attacking yet. Do we take it that your presence here indicates a shift in Sarnesh tactics?’

‘We’re gathering our forces and we’ll strike soon. Why the Eighth is just sitting there at the wrong end of the Nethyon, we don’t know, but we intend to throw everything we have at them — our soldiers, our machines, our allies and all the tricks we can come up with,’ Milus announced, raising a hand to forestall any comment. ‘And I realize that you will not be able to lend substantial aid to us, just as we could not aid you. We each have our own worries, right now. However, I invite you to send some of your people to our councils, so that at least you know what we intend.’

‘You will be directing this assault yourself, Tactician?’ Stenwold asked him.

‘I will.’

‘You did not need to come in person simply to invite us to your conference.’

Milus smiled, with that same slight edge of formality. ‘But I did to offer my plaudits, War Master. Some things can only be said in one’s own voice.’

‘So, aren’t we the fast mover?’

The red-haired Fly-kinden woman froze in the midst of unpacking her satchel, kneeling on the bed the Collegiates had found for her at the College. For a second she was motionless, and Laszlo recognized that coiled-spring quality to her, ready for betrayal, for fight or flight.

Then she glanced up at the window where he was crouching. ‘If the Sarnesh were to come in now, they’d shoot you. I don’t care what you are in Collegium, to the Sarnesh an intruder’s still an intruder.’

He swung his legs in and perched on the window sill. ‘Te Liss,’ he named her. ‘Otherwise Lissart, or is there another name for you now?’

For a moment she just stared at him, acknowledging no past acquaintance, a hair’s breadth away from violence — and he knew full well how dangerous she was. Then the very corner of her mouth twitched, and she said, ‘Alisse, special adviser to Tactician Milus on matters of the Inapt. On account of how he doesn’t trust Moths, and Mantids are rotten advisers. It’s a long story.’

‘It can’t be that long. We were with the army only a month ago,’ Laszlo pointed out. ‘You must have already had a fallback in Sarn planned out somehow. But you never said.’ He was aware how he was drinking her in but, then, she spent so little time staying in one place, acting civilly or even being trustworthy, that he wanted to make the most of her.

‘I have lots of fallbacks. It’s a spy thing. Stop staring at me like that.’ She was trying to be flippant, and Laszlo had certainly planned to appear cool and witty and blithely unconcerned. After she left him, with the Collegiate army just about to clash with the Wasp Second, he had gone a long way towards convincing himself that this little infatuation of his was done with. There had been work to do, after all, and he was not the kind of fool to waste time mooning over some girl. Especially when that girl had been a Wasp agent when he first met her, and something of a madwoman — and, beyond all of that, not a true Fly at all but someone who could shoot fire out of her hands. Best left well alone, best forgotten. He had worked hard to tell himself that.