Adrian Tchaikovsky: War Master's Gate

Stenwold Makerwas once a lone voice of resistance to the Wasp Empire in his home city of Collegium. Now he is an elder statesman, the man who rallied the Lowlands against Imperial ambitions, and they give him the title ‘War Master’. With the aid of Collegium’s aviators and technological prowess he has driven the Empire back from his city’s gates and smashed its air power, but the battle is a long way from won. The Eighth Army is still threatening Sarn to the north, and the Second Army, though thrown back, has not admitted defeat. Moreover, half the Lowlands remains in the possession of the Empire and its Spider allies. Stenwold has risked and lost a great deal to get to this point, compromising his morality and alienating his allies, and still the might of the Empire seems unstoppable.

General Tynan, commanding the Second Army, sees things very differently. Mauled by Collegium’s air superiority, he is caught between the prospect of an advance into a fight that will butcher thousands of his soldiers and the immutability of his orders, which forbid a retreat. A decent man, a hero to his people, a loyal and obedient soldier, he has wished more than once that he had killed Stenwold Maker when the man was in his grasp. Twice now he has been at the gates of Collegium with his army, known as ‘the Gears’, and twice those gears have been thrown into reverse. Once, the death of the Emperor called him back, and perhaps there is no shame in that, but this second time he has been roundly beaten. His one compensation is that he can at least share the sting of it with his co-commander, the Spider-kinden Mycella of the Aldanrael, an uneasy ally now become Tynan’s closest confidant.

Cheerwell Maker, known as ‘Che’ and niece to Stenwold, has not seen her home for a long time. During the last war with the Empire — the one that ended with the Emperor’s death at the hands of the Mantis Tisamon — she was involved peripherally in a grand magical ritual that changed her. Once she was Apt, a child of the machine age who scoffed at magic. Now the workings of artifice are denied her, but in their place she has inherited a world of arcane wonder and terror. That path led her to the ancient, crumbling state of the Commonweal to rescue her foster-sister Tynisa from her father Tisamon’s cruel ghost. With the ghost driven out, and Tynisa’s duelling injuries healed, Che is coming home. She travels with Tynisa, the renegade Wasp Thalric, who was the Empress’s lover before he became Che’s, and a halfbreed necromancer named Maure.

Empress Sedais the first woman to rule the fiercely patriarchal Wasp Empire and temporally the most powerful individual in the known world. Seda has a secret, however: the world her fellow Wasps know is just a facade stretched over a magic-shadowed past of unknown depths. Instrumental in the same ritual that unmade Che Maker, she suffered the same curse, becoming a creature of the hidden world of the Inapt. Unlike Che, however, she seized her new nature and forced it to obey and serve her, just as she did with the Empire itself. Only too late did she discover that, linked inextricably to Che, in making herself the heir apparent to the magical world she was setting the Beetle girl on the same throne. Now, seeing Che as the one true threat to her power, she seeks a source of magical strength that she may claim alone in order to destroy her rival. Her first step was to take the ghost of Tisamon, freshly driven from Tynisa’s mind, and raise it as her unliving bodyguard.

Straessa, called ‘the Antspider’ for her mixed blood, cares nothing for magic or for the designs of a distant Empress. Even the doings of closer generals and war masters concern her less than surviving the war with skin and friends intact. Not long ago she was just a student at Collegium’s Great College, and her decision to enlist in the Coldstone Company is one that has engendered occasional second thoughts, not least when she was facing the Second Army in a disastrous land battle that only the Collegiate air power was able to turn around. Her relationship with the scholar Eujen Leadswell has suffered, as he disapproves of her military ambitions whilst simultaneously forming his own unauthorized ‘Student Company’ in an attempt, she suspects, to prove to her that he can be a soldier too. He should not be a soldier, in her assessment, and neither should their friends the artificer Gerethwy or the rogue Wasp Averic, but, with the Second Army still out there, soldiers are what Collegium needs.

He had never seen the sea, but the vast expanse of green beneath him was what he imagined the sea to be like.

Back home in the Empire there were no forests like this. The Wasps had no use for them: such places were grown to harbour sedition and inferior kinden. Trees in the Empire behaved themselves, planted in neat rows ready for axe and saw.

For Hanto, this endless wind-rolled canopy reminded him only of the war in the Commonweal; he was just old enough to have seen the last years of it. There had been so much wasted land up in the north, untilled and uncut. There had been forests like this, where the Mantis-kinden lurked, against which the armies of the Emperor had broken when they first marched forth.

Only the first time, though. After that, they had destroyed each knot of stubborn resistance with fire and the sword, with the ingenuity of war machines and the cunning infiltration of the Pioneers. And that was where Hanto came in.

He had been barely more than a boy, in that war. Now, he was a veteran, and the army had called him up to take on this new challenge.

He had been flying for too long, letting that unrelieved green ocean pass beneath him, and now he let himself drop, coming down lightly in the top reaches of the canopy, still without any useful intelligence to bring back to his masters. Crouched in the branches, beneath the shadow of the leaves, he scanned the ground far below with his strung shortbow at the ready. Not a snapbow, not for Hanto: he was of that minority of Fly-kinden, the Inapt. Crossbows and all the other paraphernalia of the modern war were a closed book to him. His early life had been a hard one, all taunts and closed doors, but there were compensations. A place like this, an old place, an Inapt place that had preserved its secrets for centuries — his Apt comrades would never get this far, not for all their craft. Stealth here was a matter of blending in, and any of the Apt would stand out by a thousand years of hostile progress.

Not that Hanto was feeling particularly welcome right now. This was a bad place, he knew it in his bones. This was a magic place. All his life he had laughed at the idea, and always a little louder than his fellows, to cover the fact that he knew full well it was real. His mother had whispered it to him from his youngest days, to beware a place like this. He wished he had the option, but the Eighth Army desperately needed an eye within these trees.

The precise military situation was somewhat confused to Hanto — intelligence that a scout could never quite get hold of always concerned the doings of his own side. General Roder’s proud Eighth had made fierce and fleet time on its westward march. Myna had been beaten into submission by superior technology, Helleron had opened its legs like a whore, and the Sarnesh fortress at Malkan’s Stand had been reduced to rubble. Roder had fast been writing himself into the history books as one of the most successful generals the Empire had ever known.