War Master's Gate (87 page)

Organizations and Things

Continue reading for an
exclusive short story set in
the world of the Apt from
Adrian Tchaikovsky.

It was the storm that tipped the balance. Everything else could be accounted for as just bad luck. By Sergeant Corver’s estimation, bad luck was his lot in life, as if by
a decree of the Emperor himself. The storm, though: that was through the other side of his luck and into a whole different country.

Bad enough to be on this little airship in the first place, let alone without clear orders to tell any of them where they were going. Worse still to be under the command of a slimy,
self-interested creature like Captain Ordan of the Rekef Outlander, roped into some secret mission. Worse even than that to be in this piss-pot defenceless little craft headed westwards of that
north–south line that the Empire’s armies had drawn across the Lowlands, on one side, ‘ours’, and on the far side – the side the airship was flying over –
‘theirs’. Sandric, the pilot, had been keeping up a steady, wretched muttering for hours now, waiting for the dots of Sarnesh orthopters to appear. Then the sky had gone from blue to
grey, from grey to a thunderous, angrier grey, the wind had picked up, and Corver’s luck had simply taken the day off.
You don’t need me any more
, it had told him.
You’re now so thoroughly pissed on that I can’t possibly make things worse.

There had been an abortive conversation between Sandric and Captain Ordan with the pilot insisting that they needed to set down, and Ordan pulling rank: ‘This is enemy territory! What do
you think we’ll see if we set down here?’

Well, quite
, had been Corver’s unspoken thought.
And so where the pits are we going?

A day before he had been sitting in the quartermaster’s tent, dicing with an off-duty engineer and the duty sergeant, when Ordan had commandeered him to load an airship. The loading had
been of a single metal-bound chest, and Corver had commandeered Vrant, one of his regular squad – and even then the two of them had struggled. It was noticeable that the two other soldiers
following Ordan like his shadow had not lifted a finger to help, neither had the shifty little Fly-kinden in a Consortium greatcoat, who was either the captain’s secretary or his overage
catamite. By the time the chest was ensconced in the back alcove of the cabin that made up most of the airship’s below-decks, Ordan had given Sandric orders to lift off, and Corver and Vrant
had simply never been allowed off the ship, unwillingly seconded to the Rekef Outlander.

Sandric had become increasing panicked as the wind picked up – meaning as the wind picked up the airship and started throwing it about the sky. There was no way he could hold a course, the
pilot had insisted. They could end up anywhere. Ordan had shouted at him to do his job. That was really just the final brick in the tower of suspicions Corver had about Ordan – a piece of
mental construction finished behind time, far too late to do any good. By then it was plain that not only did Ordan have no idea about flying airships, but also that his plan appeared to be mostly
to do with moving
away
rather than specifically
towards.
Away, in this case, from the camp of General Malkan’s Seventh Army.

There had been a shake-up in the Rekef – everyone had heard the rumours. They said there were purges going on. Corver, like any sane man, had as little to do with the Empire’s secret
police as possible, but his luck, once again his luck, had found a way to get him stuck right in there with them.

Ordan had retreated to the rear of the cabin as the wooden walls around them began creaking and shuddering, the gondola jumping like a puppet as the battered balloon pulled its strings. The
engine kept chugging, but its propellers might as well not have been there. They had all become the wind’s playthings, despite Sandric’s best efforts.

Behind Ordan: the chest in its alcove, shifting against the ropes that held it there, ready to become the sort of missile suitable for siege warfare the moment its restraints broke. To either
side of the chest, Lucen and Tarvoc, Ordan’s two silent accomplices, ensuring that nobody as untrustworthy as a sergeant of the Seventh Army should so much as get a look in. The wretched
little Fly, Sterro by name, was clinging on for dear life somewhere, looking pasty and about to throw up, whilst Sandric held futilely to the controls and pretended he had some influence on where
they were going. Corver and Vrant were left to their own devices.

Corver’s own devices took him to Sandric’s shoulder, peering through the glass of the ports at the sky ahead and the land beneath. ‘Stab me,’ was his immediate reaction.
‘Should there be all that
green
down there?’

‘No, no there should not,’ Sandric spat back, any other words lost in the instinctive whimper as the airship took another battering, every part of it creaking and straining and
trying to break free from the rest. Corver tried to picture what the land west of the Seventh’s camp looked like – a sergeant didn’t get to see the campaign maps, but he knew that
there was the city of Sarn there somewhere, and north of that . . .

He felt cold all over: the Mantis forest, the name of which he could not recall, but he had enough jagged memories of their kinden from the Twelve-year War. For a moment he was clinging to the
back of Sandric’s seat, seeing the dark between the trees, hearing the whoops of the Mantids and the screams of their victims, of Corver’s own men . . .

Then something struck the airship hard, making it lurch far more than the mere wind could account for, and Sandric let out a high, panicked cry. Fleetingly the gondola and balloon were in
serious dispute as to which of them should be above the other.

‘What? What is it?’ Captain Ordan was demanding, shouting over the gale.

The face that Sandric turned back on him was white with dread. ‘There’s something on the canopy, sir!’ The entire airship lurched again, drunkenly. ‘We’ve got to
get it off, whatever it is!’

Ordan blinked at him for a moment, then jabbed a finger at Vrant. ‘You! Get out there and see what’s going on.’

For a moment Corver thought that Vrant wouldn’t do it – not through fear of the weather or the unknown but just because Vrant was like that, but then the big soldier stomped over to
the side hatch, braced himself and unlatched it. He had to lean into it with some force to push it open, but then the wind caught it and slammed it out against the hull, its invisible claws rushing
into the cabin and whipping every loose thing about the enclosed space, dragging at everyone, the great void of the sky hungry for them to join it. Vrant bared his teeth, and then bundled himself
through the hatchway.

He was a bad soldier, Vrant. In a fight, under pressure, none better, but without something to focus his attention on he was first in line for any disciplinary charge you cared
to name. Half his military career had been spent undoing all the good the other half had won through hard fighting and bravery. Men like Ordan, Rekef men with big mouths and no backbone, got right
up his nose.

We will have a reckoning when I’m done with this
, he promised himself, and hauled his body onto the top of the gondola, his Art wings a constant blur as they fought to counter the
tug and push of the wind. The balloon was a great bloated moon immediately above him, impossible to see what was supposed to be wrong with it from here. For a moment he couldn’t even work out
how to go about this – taking flight would be a sure recipe for ending up miles from the airship. Then he spotted that some of the lines holding the canopy to the gondola were made into rope
ladders, presumably for some arcane engineer business not normally carried out in the teeth of a pox-rotten
storm
.

I am going to kill Captain Ordan with my bare hands.

He set to climbing, with the same bloody-minded stubbornness with which he approached most things. Immediately the wind tried to snatch him, but he was a strong man, and his angry thoughts made
him stronger. One hand, one foot at a time, and he ascended, bouncing and dancing with the strumming ropes like a webbed fly with the spider coming. He did not look up, or anywhere except at the
rope ladder itself, closed his ears to the storm, brought to the task the single-minded vigour he normally reserved for thwarting his superiors. At first he was climbing half-upside down, up the
underside of the balloon, but then he was righting himself, creeping over the curve, feeling the wind only stronger as it sought to brush him off the great rounded expanse of the canopy.

Right then, what—

But as he lifted his head it was immediately obvious what. They had a new passenger, hitching a belligerent lift atop the balloon. Vrant, not a man prone to fear, felt it touch him nonetheless,
before angrily shaking it off.

There was a praying mantis twenty feet long lying along the top of the balloon, the weight of the beast deforming the silk into a sagging bowl-shape. Its legs were spread wide, claw-feet digging
for purchase, and it stared right back at Vrant with more self-possession than he himself could muster just then. The huge, glittering eyes that made up so much of its triangular head kept a steady
hunter’s gaze on him, even as its slender antennae were lashed about like whips by the wind.

Its wing-cases were part-folded, the wings themselves protruding unevenly from underneath, and he guessed that the storm had caught it in mid-flight, cast it through the air until this unhappy
meeting of aircraft and insect.

But it was staring at him like a man stares, with that shock of contact, consciousness to consciousness, that Vrant had only ever known looking into the eyes of another human being. Impossible:
it was only an animal, no matter how dangerous, but as it clung to the balloon, shifting its spread-eagled pose slightly as the wind howled, it watched Vrant with a calmly malign intelligence.

‘Pits with you,’ he snarled, and shot it: holding tight with his left, he whipped his right hand up, palm outwards, spitting a bolt of golden fire straight into the thing’s
face. He had an instant’s image of one huge eye caved in, a scorched ruin. In the next moment, rather than rearing up or going for him, the great insect just flung its wings wide open, as if
readier to trust the storm than his sting.

But he thought, in that moment, of the way it had looked at him, the depths of understanding that gaze had spoken of.

The wind grabbed at the mantis immediately, the wings like sails hauling it back along the balloon’s sagging length and away, and the insect’s barbed forearms, which had been dug
into the silk, unseamed half the canopy as it left.

Abruptly the motion of the airship was not a valiant struggle against the hostile elements, but a lurching, shuddering descent, barely slower than falling, towards the great, grim green
beneath.

At the end of all the screaming and shouting and wild plummeting, Corver’s head was ringing hard enough that there was a blur at the edges of everything he looked at,
whilst some part of the gondola’s inner hull had fetched him a crack to the ribs hard enough that just drawing breath seemed a privilege reserved for higher ranks. He was wedged near the
pilot’s seat, bracing himself as best he could against the curve of the hull and waiting for the next lurch to send him the length of the cabin. The inevitability of it, the sudden
dislodgement, the bone-breaking impact, crowded his mind and monopolized his attention. Only slowly did he become aware that the much-abused airship was no longer moving.