‘What about Taki?’ Stenwold asked softly.
‘Conscious now,’ Corog said curtly. ‘Possibly concussed. Confined to bed under protest while our engineers patch up her machine.’
‘Ah, well, then,’ Jodry said, with false heartiness. ‘To happier matters: what about our prize? Stormall?’
Bola Stormall started on hearing her name. ‘Still on fire,’ she got out, and took a swallow of tea. ‘Willem had it brought to the workshop, but he’s letting it burn.’
‘A little, ah, wasteful?’ Jodry pressed.
‘We put most of it out, and I’ve got a lot of broken pieces to pick over — but Willem has a pack of artificers and chemists who reckon they can get something out of the rest, so we’ve left it to burn,’ Stormall visibly sagged even as she spoke. ‘We already know their big trick, the fixed-to-mobile-wing business, from that Taki woman. Which, of course, gives them enough range that we’ve still not found their airfield, I understand.’
‘We’re still looking,’ Corog growled. ‘We think they must move it around.’
‘Nobody’s criticizing you, Corog,’ Jodry said, raising his hands placatingly. ‘Next?’
‘My men are still holding Banjacs Gripshod under house arrest, which is starting to get tiresome,’ Janos Outwright thrust in, before Jodry could continue. ‘He says he wants to fight the Wasps, too. Why not let him, rather that than waste people keeping him indoors, especially given the death machine or whatever that takes up half his house?’
Jodry made placating gestures. ‘I’ll deal with it,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak to him myself. Whatever. Now, next on the agenda — by which I mean the list I have inside my head — news from Sarn.’
Nobody had been given the opportunity to sound out the Sarnesh messenger before the meeting. The young Ant had turned up at the gate only moments before and been ushered into this august company without introductions. It was a misstep that Jodry would not have made under normal circumstances.
The Ant-kinden looked as weary as they all felt, but he stood up stiffly to deliver his report. ‘Sarn sends to its allies in Collegium the news that the fortress at Malkan’s Folly has fallen to the Imperial Eighth Army, which has now continued its advance towards Sarn. The Empire has deployed various new weapons, the nature of which are not wholly understood. Sarn is not in a position to tender any substantial aid to Collegium in its time of trouble.’
The Collegiates absorbed this.
‘New weapons?’ Stenwold prompted. ‘You mean their orthopters? The artillery and the automotives we saw at Myna?’
‘No, Master Maker, we do not,’ the Sarnesh told him, and for a moment there was a slight uncertainty in the Ant’s level tone. ‘Some weapon was used to clear the survivors of the fortress garrison from the underground bunkers. Those that escaped make a… disturbing report. A new weapon, its nature unknown.’ The Ant spoke the words with his eyes fixed straight ahead, and Stenwold wondered what mental images he had inherited from those who had escaped the doomed fortress.
‘Well, the upshot of that is clear enough, anyway,’ Jodry rumbled. ‘We’re on our own. What else? Other business?’
‘Yes,’ Stenwold said flatly, as the Ant sat down. ‘Corog, may we take it that the ground damage from yesterday’s attack was similarly precise?’
‘They knew what they were doing,’ Breaker confirmed. ‘Several workshops were damaged, all of them contributing to our war preparations in some way. The packing plant on Stoner Street that was turning out rations is gutted entirely. Plus a number of private residences, probably simply bad luck, for the most part. The worst blow was the fuel depot. We’re lucky that our fliers are all clockwork, but we were relying on the fuel for our automotives, for when the Second get closer. Nobody knows if we can refine more in time.’
Stenwold nodded because all this was preamble, and he had already put plans in motion to deal with the problem. ‘I have sent to certain
… allies of mine who may be able to procure a supply,’ he said carefully, catching Jodry’s eye. ‘I’m not sure if it’s possible, but they have a sample of what we lack and, if they can produce it, they will.’ The Sea-kinden, his little secret, had some remarkable Art to produce both raw materials and finished goods, but mineral oil fuels might yet be beyond them.
There were plenty of questions about that, of course, but he waved them away. ‘Meanwhile we have a more pressing problem. It’s plain the Empire has spies aplenty in Collegium, despite all we’ve done in the past to thin their ranks. They’re feeding the Imperial air force information, telling them where to strike. So we need to take action.’
‘You’ve identified these spies?’ Stormall asked him hopefully.
Stenwold shook his head. ‘We are the victims of our own open society, and the industry that they prey on can hardly be kept a secret. We need to take a sterner line. I want every Wasp-kinden in the city under lock and key by tomorrow evening, first for questioning and then exile.’
There was a pause as the others considered this. Raking the table, Stenwold caught as many eyes as possible. You know I’m right, he thought, as though he was an Ant and could place the words in their minds.
‘Stenwold, you do know that most of their people will just be Beetle-kinden, or Flies — no shortage of either in the Empire,’ Jodry remarked mildly.
Stenwold shrugged. ‘The Wasps don’t trust “lesser races” as much as you think. Somewhere there will be a Wasp holding their leashes. We can cut the head off the Rekef operation in Collegium by this single step. We need to deny them every advantage we can.’
His gaze was fixed on Jodry now, but the Speaker for the Assembly was not discomfited.
‘Oh, no, I don’t think so,’ the fat Beetle replied, and then managed a wan smile. ‘That’s not the Collegiate way, Sten.’ He looked brightly about the table. ‘Any other business?’
‘I want a vote,’ Stenwold demanded flatly.
Jodry went quite still. ‘Now, come on, Sten.’
‘We are Collegium, and we are ruled by the vote, so let us vote, those of us here.’ Stenwold looked about the table, judging and measuring. ‘I say that our city will be safer if we rid it of Wasp-kinden. I say that questioning those same Wasps may even lead us to this cursed airfield. We can’t afford to ignore the opportunity. Put it to the vote.’
‘Stenwold, we cannot simply have people arrested — some of them citizens, even — without cause.’
‘We have cause,’ Stenwold retorted more sharply. ‘The Empire has given us that cause.’ He tried to make a sort of ghastly joke of it. ‘Are you worried this will cost you at the next Lots?’
‘No, Stenwold, I am not,’ Jodry snapped. Abruptly he heaved himself to his feet, jowls quivering. ‘I do, however, refuse to be the Speaker who opens that door.’
‘Then we can take it that you vote against.’ Stenwold was standing too, and the rest of the table just stared, seeing these two gears of state, which had run smoothly together for so long, abruptly clashing teeth. ‘I vote for.’ He turned to Corog Breaker. ‘You?’
‘For,’ Breaker said bluntly.
The merchant beside him looked from Stenwold to Jodry. ‘I abstain.’
Several others followed his lead, with one for and one against before the matter came to Bola Stormall, the aviation artificer.
‘War Master, I have followed your lead for a long time,’ she said, although there was no warmth in her voice. ‘I flew against Vek. I crewed on the Triumph when the Wasps came here last. I’ve worked to your plan now and, between me and Willem and Taki, we’ve got our orthopters off the ground. I will not be part of this.’
‘Bola-’ Stenwold started, but she held him off with a single gesture.
‘Do not, Stenwold,’ she warned. ‘I have relatives in Helleron who told me what life was like there under the Empire, during the last war, the imprisonment and disappearances.’
‘Yes,’ retorted Stenwold. ‘The Wasps torture people and impale them on spears. I’m talking only about arr
est and exile. You can’t compare-’
‘The rule of just law makes us who we are, and I am not the only one who has been wondering if we might have made more ground with the Wasps had we not painted them as irredeemable villains.’
Makerist, Stenwold heard the word, from his memories. ‘You’ve been listening to students too much,’ he told her.
‘Well, perhaps they’re actually learning something useful for a change,’ she retorted. ‘Besides, you’ve heard yourself that half the army marching along the coast is Spider-kinden. There are perhaps two dozen Wasps at most within the city, but there are hundreds of Spiders, entire generations of them. Will you round them up as well, adults and old women and children, when the spying doesn’t stop? And what then?’
Stenwold stared at her, feeling his will strike hers, hammer to hammer. ‘That’s not what I’m proposing-’
‘-today,’ she finished for him. ‘Against, Stenwold.’
He took a deep breath. It doesn’t matter, he told himself, because now there were the three Merchant Company officers. ‘Elder?’
‘For.’ Elder Padstock of the Maker’s Own Company, her vote never in question.
‘Janos?’
The squat little Assembler looked from Maker to Jodry, his moustache quivering. ‘I, in all conscience…’ He had taken on his current mantle as one of a line of stunts intended to garner the popularity of the masses, and to ensure his own continuing good fortune. Now he looked as though he bitterly regretted it. ‘Abstain, I abstain.’
Stenwold nodded equably, because that didn’t matter either. ‘Marteus?’ he asked, with finality.
‘There is a Wasp-kinden in my Company,’ the renegade Tarkesh said quietly.
Stenwold blinked at him.
‘He has lived here for more than ten years. He’s a mason,’ Marteus continued, ‘and he wants to fight the Empire more than anyone. Of course, I can understand that. If those sanctimonious turds from Tark were at the gates, well, I’d be first in line to throw them back, as you can imagine.’ He met Stenwold’s eyes readily. ‘Of course, by these lights, you’d have locked me up by that point. A man’s not his kinden, and a man’s not his city-state.’
A delicate span of silence held the room for a few seconds, before Jodry said, quietly and without acrimony, ‘Even for and against: the vote is not carried. Stenwold, I’m sure that you will continue to use all conventional measures to deal with the spies we undoubtedly have, spotting who’s being too nosy, working out how they’re exporting this intelligence of theirs. We have all faith in you. Any other business?’
Nobody had any more to say.
That night, Taki woke abruptly out of a dream in which she was being chased through the streets of Collegium by the Tarkesh halfbreed Taxus and, no matter where she flew, he always appeared ahead of her, as preternaturally knowledgeable as the Imperial pilots.
Waking, she gasped, clutching for the sudden understanding that had shocked her out of sleep. One of the medical orderlies, some Beetle-kinden student volunteer, was hurrying over, and she realized that she most have shouted aloud.
She swung her legs out of bed before the Beetle got to her, but a sudden wave of dizziness prevented her making a quick escape.
‘Back into bed, please, Mistress Taki,’ the young man insisted. ‘Not until Doctor Findwell gives you the nod.’
‘Get off me!’ she snapped. ‘I need to speak to Stenwold.’ She made to kick off and take to the air, but a moment later realized that she really wasn’t ready for that after all, as the world swam and shuddered before her eyes. ‘Get me the War Master,’ she insisted. ‘Or get a message to him. Get me pen and paper, anything. I’ve worked it out. I know how they’re doing it. I know the secret of the Empire’s pilots.’
She was already staggering determinedly away, ready to rouse the whole Assembly if need be. ‘And get me Taxus!’ she shouted over her shoulder. ‘I need to shake his cursed hand!’
They told her that Taxus had not come back from his last flight over the city, that the Wasps had caught and killed him in spite of all his idiosyncrasies. It was in a more sober mood that she finally passed on her revelation to Stenwold Maker.
Twenty-Four
‘Te Pelle? I didn’t know her much,’ Pingge said. ‘That’s two of us dead.’
Kiin nodded. She looked worn out, and had only slept for a handful of hours since her return from the second mission over Collegium. The flight had been a mixed squad, half of them Aarmon’s originals, half from the new trainees, but Kiin reported that all the pilots had worked together with the same effortless coordination as before.
Pingge and Gizmer had stolen away from the main body of the bombardiers, now holing up in a store cupboard for a serious discussion of what had happened. It had taken some persuasion for Gizmer to accept Sergeant Kiin into their counsels. Since her promotion he had kept a suspicious eye on her, as though expecting her to metamorphose into a Wasp at any moment. Still, the fact that she actually had first-hand knowledge of what had happened was enough to twist his arm. Gossip was always better for a little fresh information.
‘The pilot was… Bresner, I think. One of the newer ones.’
They considered this information. Te Pelle had been a somewhat haughty girl, not a factory-line worker but an overseer, and of decent family, who had not taken well to being drafted simply for her artificer’s skills. Still, the woman had been one of them, and that should be enough.
‘Aarmon said something odd,’ Kiin added uncertainly.
‘He actually spoke?’ Pingge asked her. ‘Other than to give an order?’
‘He said she had done well — no, not like that. He said that Bresner had said that te Pelle had done well. Even when they were getting shot up, she got the bombs away, blew up the fuel store, right on the mark.’
‘He said that Bresner said?’ Pingge frowned.
Kiin nodded, wide-eyed. ‘His last message, somehow.’
Gizmer looked from one to the other and grinned, unexpectedly. ‘You surprise me, the pair of you. You hadn’t worked that out?’ He cackled at their expressions. ‘Come on, now, look at our lords and masters, eh? Pride of the Air Corps, only not one of them’s a pilot by training save for our Captain Aarmon. The rest are just Light Airborne or artificers, Consortium men, all sorts. By basic inclination we’re more fit for the job than they are. So didn’t you ever wonder why?’
‘I assumed they’d had some test, some latent gift for it, or.. ’ Pingge scowled at him. ‘So tell us, big mouth.’
‘They have an Art,’ Kiin put in, spoiling Gizmer’s moment.
He nodded grudgingly. ‘Worked it out, then?’
‘I’d thought… I wasn’t sure until you put it that way. They have a mindlink.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Pingge said, straight away.
‘What else then, eh?’ Gizmer pressed.
‘But the Rekef… the generals… Who knows?’ Pingge’s voice had descended to a whisper. Everyone knew that the Wasp-kinden sometimes manifested the same Art that enabled Ants to speak mind to mind, but it was rare. More than that, it was dangerous. Back in the reign of Alvric, First Emperor of the Wasps, there had been troubles, perhaps an attempted coup. The Rekef, then led by the same man who had given the service his name, had flexed its muscles for the first time. Anyone suspected of the mindlink had been hunted down, except for those wretched traitors who had thrown their lot in with the hunters. The Rekef Inlander had chosen its first battlefield: it could not countenance a hidden, unified fifth column within the Empire: the danger to the Emperor’s rule was too great to ignore. Hundreds were arrested, tortured for the names of any others they knew, then strung on the crossed pikes. It had been a forging time in the Empire’s history. A great many traditions had been born.
After that, anyone who developed the Art kept quiet about it, and tried never to use it in case some fellow pariah betrayed them. Yet it continued to manifest itself, that part of the Wasps’ collective soul refusing to be ignored.
‘They all know,’ Gizmer stated. ‘It’s a secret but not a conspiracy. Times change. There’s a book out there that I snuck a look at — top-secret air tactics and everything. Colonel Varsec’s work, all of it. He sets out the Farsphex design in it, but he also sets out the new pilots too. He said they used mindlinked troops to coordinate the taking of Solarno, apparently. So people have been thinking for a while, only it took Varsec to shift the idea over to pilots. No bloody wonder our lot have become the wonders of the air, eh, if they’re all inside each other’s minds. No wonder we get such a ragbag of recruits, too — women and all. They must have mindlinkers scouting every city in the Empire for more of the same.’
‘That’s…’ Pingge shivered. ‘So they could be talking to each other all the time, and we’d never know.’
Gizmer gave her a patronizing look. ‘They’re Wasps, so what does it matter? It’s not as though they’d be running everything by us otherwise, eh?’
The door to the store cupboard was abruptly thrown open, and the three of them jumped guiltily, expecting the stern, pale face of Aarmon. Instead it was just one of the newer Fly recruits.
‘Sergeant, been looking all over for you!’ the girl squeaked. ‘Everyone’s to assemble. New orders come in.’
The three of them exchanged looks.
‘Don’t like the sound of that,’ Gizmer muttered, and then they set off, half-running, half-flying, to join their fellows.
They met in the barracks common room that Gizmer had dubbed ‘the wasteland’ because, aside from formal times such as this, neither Fly-kinden nor Wasps spent any time there. A quick head count suggested that just about everyone was there from both camps. Pingge pushed her way into a mob of other Flies, not wanting to be at the back, nor to end up where she might be picked out by Aarmon, who was standing on a table to look them all over. It really was everyone here, she realized, including the trainees, because she could spot the female Wasp recruits interspersed amongst the men. That had been an arrangement that everyone had thought would go badly wrong, and in fact there had been one incident, when an engineer — an outsider serving as ground crew — had tried to rape one of the Wasp girls. What happened next only really made sense to Pingge now with the benefit of what Gizmer had told her. The assaulted woman had not even cried out, but Aarmon and another two pilots had appeared almost immediately. They had stung the rapist to death without sparing a moment for his panicky denials.
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