War Master's Gate (86 page)

He had not put brush to canvas since his studio burned, save that one crude sketch for Eujen’s doomed pamphlet. His life had been contained there, in the sum accumulation of his sketches,
roughs and drafts curling and cindering from the walls in the wake of the incendiary. His entire career had burned, quite separate from this lumpen body of his that Eujen had dragged from the
building. Apart from that, when he reached into himself for that piece of him from which inspiration grew, he found only a cracked, charred void.

Last night, though, he had dreamt: the first dream he could recall since the fires. He had woken shouting, fighting against the thin blanket, seeing it all ablaze, his careful linework, his life
studies, his friends.

He had dreamt of Gerethwy and Averic, of Straessa and Eujen. But his dreams had given them all over to the flames. He had abandoned them there and fled the building, only to find the city
outside roasting on the same pyre.

Now he stood with a canvas before him, in the poor light of the garret room, holding a brush in his hand. He had begged these meagre materials, drained the city of any residual goodwill it might
hold for him, because there was a new flame lit in that burnt-out core of him – and it hurt, and it seared him, and he had to get it out.

He took some black paint up on his brush and set to work.

What he made of the canvas was not art, at least not any art that he recognized. Collegiate patrons had always known what they liked: imitate life, capture the truth of a likeness or a
landscape, and the plaudits would follow. Everyone knew that.

What Raullo created that day was something even he would barely own to. It was a horror of jagged shapes, the black of shadow, the red of leaping flames, twisted faces merging half into fallen
walls, and the press of rushing human forms. Not what life looked like, but how it felt.

When it was done, he felt that he had vomited something up, purged himself painfully of a corruption that would only well up again in time.

He took it down to show the landlord, and the man and his daughter both stared at it for a long time.

‘I can’t look at it,’ his landlord admitted at last, still staring. ‘What is it?’

Raullo could only shrug.

‘Take it away,’ the man insisted, but he stopped Raullo when the artist tried to leave. ‘Hammer and tongs, what have you done?’

He hung it up in the taverna’s taproom two days later. He claimed he could not stop thinking about it. He even bought Raullo more canvas, without being asked.

Two days later the landlord knocked at the door of the garret. ‘Mummers, come out. There’s someone here.’ His voice sounded strained.

Raullo put his head round the door blearily – late rising and wine were two habits, at least, that had survived the ending of the war. ‘What is it?’

‘Someone wants to see you.’ There was a warning note in the taverner’s tone. ‘He wants to buy your painting.’

The taproom was silent, when Raullo descended. Those few drinkers still present would not look at him.

‘You are the artist?’ The man at the bar had been staring at his painting, but now he turned. The captain’s rank badge on his uniform flashed as it caught the sun.

‘Yes, sir,’ Raullo breathed raggedly. Everyone knew the correct way to address Wasps these days.

‘How much?’ the Wasp asked him. And Raullo was about to refuse to sell, or say something even more rash, but he looked the man in the face and saw what he had missed the first time:
that gaunt, hollow expression about the eyes. Here was a man, of no matter what kinden, who had seen enough of what the artist had seen to understand.

Raullo named a sum.

Eujen Leadswell

When he awoke, there was a hand in his that he knew.

She screamed when he squeezed it, for all that it was a faint and pitiful motion, and was across the room from him, shaking and choking, staring at him as though . . .

As though I’ve come back from the dead.

The eyepatch suits her.
Such a random thought, at such a moment.

Later on she would tell him everything: how they were now in the Sarnesh Foreigners’ Quarter, which was thronging with Collegiate expatriates and Mynan exiles, all agitating to take back
their own and each other’s cities; how Castre Gorenn was now calling herself the Collegiate Retaliatory Army, and she wasn’t the only one. She would tell him how the Mantids of the
forest – the Netheryon it was now – had suffered some kind of radical change of policy, and were now negotiating with the Sarnesh high command.

She would explain how the Sarnesh had chased off the Imperial Eighth, but got a bloody nose in the bargain, and how a new force of Wasps appearing from Helleron had led to a complex chess game
between the Ants and the Empire which neither side was ready to bring to an endgame, especially now that fighting had erupted between the Wasps and the Spiders down along the Silk Road. Seldis was
ablaze, they said.

And about the raids, of course: villages not far from Sarn that had been found empty, with not a witness, not a body, only disturbed earth – so that people were talking about some terrible
new Imperial weapon, save that some scouts had found Wasp camps similarly deserted.

And, at last, she would tell him that he had been lost to the world for almost three tendays, while the Instar fought against the injury within him, although she would never tell him how she had
despaired, back in Collegium, and had abandoned him. And she would tell him of Averic, and Gerethwy, and all their other friends who had not left Collegium. And she would tell him that Stenwold
Maker himself was believed dead, though nobody would admit to having seen a corpse. There would come a time for all these revelations.

But, for now . . .

‘Hello, the Antspider.’ His voice sounded faint in his own ears.

‘Hello, Chief Officer Eujen.’ Her smile seemed the most fragile thing he had ever seen, himself included. ‘Where the pits have you been, eh?’

The Others

Across the Lowlands and the Empire and beyond, cracks had begun to show.

Tiny fissures, hairline fractures in stone, like the unexpected gap that those students had crossed to escape the doomed College. But they were deep. Look down into that sliver of abyss, and
there might be distant lights, movement.

Sometimes the cracks were more than that, chasms rupturing wide into caves, the earth abruptly hollow . . . and then things came out.

They took the living and the dead. They left no bodies. They cared nothing for Empire or Lowlands, Apt or Inapt.

They had been away a long time, but they had not forgotten.

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