The Air War sota-8

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And Stenwold did understand. He had known other Ant-kinden, in his time, who had turned their backs on their cities for their cities’ own good. Sometimes being a renegade and an exile was a badge of honour. ‘Parops ordered you…’ he murmured.

  ‘I volunteered,’ Taxus said shortly. ‘I knew what he was about, so I agreed. It needed to be done.’ He faced them down, the Flies, the Beetles, all of them: just under five feet of pugnacious attitude.

  ‘So what will you do now?’ Stenwold asked him.

  ‘Depends. If you’ll trust me for it, I’d rather like to fight some Wasps.’

  Stenwold glanced at Taki, who was looking thoughtful.

  ‘We need every pilot we can get, Master Maker,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll make sure someone’s keeping an eye on him, but — we have so many unblooded fliers and so few who’ve actually flown for real. I saw him come in. His craft’s a piece of flotsam but he’s good with the sticks.’

  ‘He’s your responsibility,’ Stenwold told her. ‘Put him with the Mynans. Get him familiar with the Stormreaders. Soon enough you’ll all be shipping out to fight — although whether it’s north to Myna or east down the coast is anyone’s guess just now.’

  Being a parasite was a precarious existence, but Lissart, even injured, was obviously well used to it.

  She had the pair of them ensconced within the Spider-kinden baggage train the day before the combined army left Solarno, and since then she and Laszlo had almost been travelling in style, Liss spending the days rocking gently in a wagon, cushioned amidst the supplies, whilst Laszlo ran errands and faced off against other Fly-kinden.

  ‘To think that the only reason I’m in this fix is that I didn’t want to go work amongst Spiders,’ Liss remarked to him one night, as they lay close together in the wagon, surrounded by the whispering breath of sleepers. Her smile, just visible in the starlight, was wistful, so Laszlo kissed it gently. When he pulled away, her expression was the usual: happy, glad to have him there, and yet her eyes demanding to know, Are you mad? Don’t you know how untrustworthy I am yet? He knew, of course. He was in the jaws of the enemy here, a step away from exposure at every moment. Each day seemed a weird dream-run, sailing through treacherous waters without chart or compass, and yet he was alive and unrevealed each dusk, and so was she. The danger that she would betray him seemed only a small voice amongst all the clamouring perils that surrounded him.

  They had been aided by the Spider army’s structure, for although the lady of the Aldanrael was their leader, few of the actual soldiers were sworn to her family. Instead there seemed to be a typically piecemeal construction about the Spiderland forces: a number of mercenary bands and Satrapy forces from several different cities, together with Spider-kinden units donated by various different Aristoi houses, few of whom seemed to be actual friends of the Lady-Martial Mycella. Two figures strode through this chaos and made some kind of order from it. One was Jadis of the Melisandyr, some small family that remained closely loyal to the Aldanrael, whose force of personality and — on one occasion — lethal response to an attempted assassination, kept the other Spiders under Mycella’s orders. Lissart had determined to avoid his notice at all costs. He looked, she said, like someone who remembered the names and faces of any who served under him.

  Instead, they had inveigled their way into the camp of Morkaris, the mercenary adjutant. There was less discipline amongst the mercenaries, and also less jockeying for position between underlings. In their baggage train of clerks, entertainers, whores and factotums, individuals changed allegiance all the time, with few hard feelings. Everyone was in it for the money, and personal honour was less of a barrier. Laszlo had quickly identified a formidable Fly-kinden matron named Drasse as the woman to cosy up to, and after running errands for the woman for a day, he had found himself and Liss safely under her protection. Liss herself could charm the stripes off a Rekef colonel, when she wanted to, and soon Drasse had found her a berth on the wagon, and some medicine besides.

  The wagon was a stroke of luck they had not known that they needed, for the army was not what either of them had expected. General Tynan and the Lady-Martial Mycella were moving fast.

  The entire Imperial contingent travelled by automotive, as did their supplies, ammunition and the disassembled pieces of such machines that could not move under their own power, including considerable quantities of artillery. Wasp soldiers sat inside and on top of great wheeled transporters that belched smoke and steam, and ground up the miles mercilessly without ever tiring. Their Spider allies slowed them down a little, but far less than might be expected. The Apt amongst them, and the unluckier of the Inapt, were in similar conveyances, a motley fleet of various walkers, rollers and tracks dredged from every vehicle foundry from Chasme to Fort Tamaris. The rest had either brought mounts — an equally varied menagerie of horses, beetles, spiders and crickets — or travelled in wagons pulled almost universally by strong hauling beetles. Travelling alongside the supplies was a luxury, as it meant that Liss was not forever jostling elbows with dozens of others.

  They had swarmed past Tark not long ago, and Laszlo had only teased out the fact of the city’s surrender in retrospect: not surrender to the Empire as conquerors, but a subtler and perhaps more permanent concession. Tark had become part of the Spiderlands, its king sworn to the Aldanrael as a vassal. Already the city was crawling with Spiders taking census of Mycella’s new gains.

  Liss told him that Spider-kinden maps had always been ambitious, when it came to the Lowlands. Most of them marked out large sections of the coast as already being under Spider control. It seemed that Mycella was rapidly making that fiction a reality.

  They had coursed on south past the hills of Merro and Egel, two interlinked Fly-kinden warrens whose loyalties in the past had been a feather for every wind. Nobody had shown any great surprise when the leading families of both had assured everyone concerned that, of course, they had always been part of the Spiderlands. The richly dressed little magnates had put up a very convincing display of confusion that anyone should even have to ask. Mycella had received their declarations of fealty and loyalty with appropriate magnanimity.

  But this was different. The army had barely slowed for the Fly-kinden, but now Laszlo found himself at the coast, the dangerous forest of the Felyal at his back and looking out at the fortified island of Kes.

  The Ant-kinden of Kes had a chequered history recently. The last time the Wasps had sent an army down the coast, the Ants had declared themselves uninterested, hiding behind their walls and their fleet, and saving the Empire the considerable effort of investing their island in siege. There had been much speculation amongst the followers of the current army — the Grand Army, as the Spider contingent was calling it, at least — as to whether Kes would represent the first genuine military engagement of this war.

  The Ants had certainly not been keen to come out with either violence or diplomacy, but a telescope turned towards their island revealed that every artillery emplacement was manned, and the ships in the harbour were fully crewed.

  General Tynan had not ordered his aviators into action, as many had anticipated. Instead he had apparently decided to take defensive measures against any Kessen attack by setting up his own artillery at the cliff edge. The engines that his engineers assembled, however, were of a scale that Laszlo had never seen before, enormous leadshotters that seemed to point more at the sky than anything else. He had surmised that they would drop rocks down on any Kessen ships that sallied forth from the Ants’ harbour.

  The preliminary shelling of Kes had then lasted three hours, with the greatshotters finding their precise mark after only twenty minutes, to the great exuberance of Tynan’s Colonel Mittoc. After that point the dozen engines had spoken in a constant ground-shaking thunder, pounding solidly at their targets, cracking walls and sinking ships, launching flame-canisters over the docks and the city. The artillery on the Kessen walls had, of course, only a fraction of their range. There was no retaliation.

&n
bsp; After the greatshotters had finally fallen silent, though remaining a menacing silhouette on the cliff for any Kessen observer, a small vessel had put out from the harbour.

  An hour later, the entire population of Kes had understood that it, too, was become a satrapy of the Spiderlands. Spider ships were already coasting in, summoned by who knew what signal of Mycella. Soldiers and assessors were disembarking at the Kessen docks that no hostile force had ever taken.

  ‘We will come back,’ Tynan had told the Ant-kinden diplomats and, through them, their king. ‘If you rise up against our allies, then our engines shall never pause until your island city is just a stump of rock in the sea. We might have bombarded you until you begged me to send over my slavers. Think on how much more fortunate you are that the Lady Mycella wants you for her own.’

  Laszlo had found a place quite close to the negotiations. He had heard the words plainly.

  The army was moving again the very next day. The Imperial Second was known as ‘the Gears’, and General Tynan was not going to let them stop turning for anything, it appeared.

  That night, however, Laszlo had decided that the time had come to risk everything. He had not told Liss what he was doing, in case she tried to stop him, or in case she pointed out what a stupid thing he had resolved on. Instead, while she slept, he skipped out from the wagon and flew away.

  He was a sailor by training: he knew the seas and, more, he knew how sailors thought. Kes was not just a military power: it lived on trade, and there would be those sea-traders who would want to avoid the reach of the Aldanrael, for whatever reason.

  Three times he let his wings carry him off the cliff, scouring the seas for sight of a sail, battling gusting wind and sudden squalls of rain before clawing his way back to land, before his strength failed. On the third venture, pushing himself further, risking more, he was lucky. A little Beetle-kinden steamer was out there on the waves, stolidly making its way towards Kes. He dropped down on to its deck, sending its crew scrabbling for swords and crossbows, and demanded, between gasping breaths, to speak to their master.

  He had only moments to explain himself, but the news that the Aldanrael held Kes soon had the Collegiate skipper’s full attention. Every Beetle-kinden sailor knew how the Spiders’ tame pirates had been preying on the sea trade until Stenwold Maker put a stop to it.

  The ragged message Laszlo delivered was wild, out of order, everything he could dredge from his mind about Solarno, Tark, Merro, Kes. He could only hope that it was enough, and would reach Stenwold in time to do some good.

  Then, after a wistful thought about simply remaining on board, he took wing again and returned, dodging sentries and searchlamps, to get back to Liss’s side. He could not leave her, and there would be more to learn and to report on, before he was done.

  He slept not at all that night, holding Liss close to him, feeling the terrible fragility of her and, beyond the wagon’s cloth walls, the commensurate fragility of everything else.

  Twenty

  ‘You must do something to control your Mynans,’ Jodry said, around a mouthful of honeybread. Although most of his face was engaged in eating, his eyebrows contrived to glare at Stenwold meaningfully.

  ‘They’re not my Mynans.’ Stenwold had no appetite, as he stood by the window of Jodry’s office and stared out at the city, trying desperately to calculate rates of advance. He had received a message by ship from Laszlo, at last, which meant that he could at least assure the man’s extended family of rogues and pirates that he was still alive. The contents of the message more than offset the relief, though, for General Tynan’s Second and his Spider allies were practically tearing up the coast towards Collegium.

  At the same time, he had received word that the Eighth Army, which had taken Myna, was already past Helleron, meaning all chance of stoppering the bottle on the Empire was already gone while the Assembly debated and the Merchant Companies recruited. The Sarnesh had sent ambassadors to Collegium, but not to debate. Malkan’s Folly was manned and ready for the Empire, with a Sarnesh army already mustering in the city to mount an attack as soon as the Eighth got bogged down in besieging the fortress. The Sarnesh had told the Assembly, somewhat patronizingly, that this was a soldier’s war, and real soldiers would deal with it.

  And then there were the Mynans…

  ‘Well, you brought them here,’ Jodry pointed out.

  ‘Speak to Kymene.’

  ‘ You speak to her. She scares the sandals off me,’ Jodry muttered. ‘Looks at me like she’s trying to work out what possible good I am. Murderer’s eyes, that one.’

  ‘Her city’s back under the black and gold,’ Stenwold pointed out, somewhat testily. ‘It’s not a situation to inspire levity.’

  ‘But if she wants to work with us to liberate the place, she has to work with us, and so do that rabble of pilots you pulled in, and all their soldiers who’ve turned up at our gates. Little Mistress Aviator’s been training our fliers to work together: formations, tactics, all that sort of thing. She seems to think that’s all very important. Now your Mynans are on the scene and, yes, they have more flying experience than our lads and lasses, what with all that scrapping about on the border over the last year, but they won’t do what they’re told, and Mistress Taki, for reasons of her own, won’t tell them either, and our own pilots are frankly scared of being in the air with them because nobody knows what they’ll do next. And while we’re trying to train them to work alongside our people, they’re trying to wing off to hunt Wasps that, frankly, aren’t even here yet. Either they’re flying off without orders or authorization, or they’re bullying our ground crew into keeping their personal Stormreaders wound and ready, as if the Empire’s already at the gates.’

  ‘Jodry, if you’d seen Myna, you wouldn’t want to be caught unprepared either, believe me.’

  ‘Oh, I know, but then you don’t have to listen to Corog Breaker moaning about how it’s impossible to get them even to march in step.’

  ‘Why would they…? What’s Corog Breaker got to do with it?’ Stenwold pictured the Master Armsman of the Prowess Forum. ‘He’s a pilot?’

  ‘Well actually he is a pilot, thankfully, but mostly he’s a disciplinarian,’ Jodry said primly. ‘And he’s trying to make your Mynans part of a team.’

  ‘They’re not-’

  ‘They are. I’m making them yours. You’re now official liaison with the Mynan exiles. I, as Speaker, command this. There, it’s done.’

  Stenwold looked at him as mutinously, no doubt, as the Mynan pilots were even now looking at Corog Breaker. The man’s logic was faultless, however. ‘Do you have any idea how much else I have to do?’ he complained, somewhat wretchedly. ‘The committees, the engagements, the planning? I’d forgotten how this city runs its wars on bureaucracy.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ the Speaker’s calm slipped a little, ‘Stenwold the martyr. You’ll never know the problems of yours that I’ve solved without your ever hearing of them, because you were in Myna or off mooning over that Sea-kinden woman of yours. But now you’re the War Master, whether you like it or not. During peacetime I could keep you on a long leash because you’d done good work for the city, sterling work, and you’d earned the right to thumb your nose at our committees and our paperwork. Now it’s war again, and you yourself proposed the vote, and you will not simply stride about in a breastplate and leave all the organization to me. I need you, and Collegium needs you. And that means at all hours…’ Jodry’s words ground to a halt, for Stenwold was no longer listening to him. ‘What?’

  ‘Quiet,’ Stenwold told him, already at the window and throwing the shutters open.

  Jodry goggled at him. ‘Stenwold, what-?’

  ‘You hear it?’

  ‘I don’t…’ Jodry lapsed into silence, and the two men waited. In the air was a distant, ever-increasing drone. ‘They’re training in the Stormreaders…?’

  ‘Clockwork engines don’t sound like that,’ Stenwold said quietly, as the sound built — still far off but
not as far as it had been a moment ago. The buzz of engines on the air: many engines.

  A moment later and Stenwold was bolting from the room, the door slamming open as he shouldered into it, leaving Jodry staring after him, his mouth working soundlessly.

  ‘Advance! Advance! Forward! Form shooting lines, two… no.. ’ Chief Officer Marteus swore under his breath, holding on to his calm by the slenderest of threads. ‘Two lines, one shooting over the other. You — Fly-kinden — get to the front. What’s the point of you standing there when the Beetle kneeling in front of you’s still taller?’

  The shooting line had dissolved into chaos, and Marteus felt that same anger rising in him that had seem him leave Tark so ignominiously, years before. It had served him well enough when the Vekken had come to Coldstone Street, or when the Wasps’ Light Airborne were jumping the walls, but training his new recruits was rubbing his temper raw, and any moment now he was going to explode in a wholly unprofessional manner.

  ‘Back to where you were!’ he snapped at them, seeing the motley squad of a score and ten new-minted soldiers stumble and jostle their way across the square. People were watching, he was well aware, lolling out of windows to chuckle — people who didn’t have the guts to enlist themselves, but were content simply to criticize and laugh.

  ‘Now, forward! At the trot, come on!’ This time they managed it, and stopped approximately when he ordered. ‘Shooting line, loose!’ he bellowed hoarsely, hearing the ragged chorus of retorts from their snapbows — charged but not loaded. ‘Now charge, and loose again!’

  That was hoping for too much. Half of them managed a decent turn of speed with the weapons, even miming slotting the bolt in. The others were still fumbling as the first half were shooting. ‘No!’ Marteus roared. ‘No! Stop!’ His voice was failing. Ant-kinden did not have to shout at one another. The old days of service in his home city were suddenly an unexpected source of nostalgia. ‘You shoot as one. Individual shots kill individual soldiers. Shoot together and you stop their advance dead. Ask the Sarnesh — it’s what smashed their line at the Battle of the Rails, and it’s what stopped the Jaspers dead at Malkan’s Folly, eh? Back to where you were.’