Stenwold pushed forwards again, realizing, after the initial surprise, that he was the better duellist — perhaps the best swordsman in the room for all that it said about the rest of them. ‘Leadswell! Get to Banjacs!’ he yelled. The Beetle boy looked at him briefly, and went sprinting over to the old inventor’s motionless form.
Averic’s wings had carried him up to a gantry, and the burn-scarred man stood below him, raging up at him. ‘You traitor! You coward filth! Can’t even fight? A shame to your own people, curse you!’ Abandoning his comrades to the fight, he found a shaking stairway leading up and took it three steps at a time, only to find the Wasp already balanced on the rail, ready to glide down.
Banjacs was plainly gone beyond anything that Eujen could do for him. The old man’s ragged form was so thin that it seemed he had died long before, dried out and desiccated until only this husk remained. And yet, as Eujen knelt beside him, those piercing eyes flew open, and the old man took a hacking breath that sprayed more blood over his robes.
‘My machine!’ he whispered, reaching out for it as if trying to encompass the entire radiant edifice with a clutch of a single hand. ‘Take me — take me…’ And, with the last dregs of a Beetle’s bloodyminded endurance, he began lurching across the floor on hands and elbows, a slick red slug’s trail behind him and his legs limp and useless.
Eujen caught his rasping plea, ‘Help me make it work. ’
A snapbow in his hand, a second man came at Stenwold, shouting for his fellow to get clear. The weapons were not meant for such close quarters, and the War Master ducked away from a blow to lash his blade at the barrel, knocking it up and away. Then the snapbowman was down, sitting with hands smeared red as they pressed at a stomach wound, and one of the two Company soldiers huddled in the doorway was fumblingly trying to reload her bow even though her breastplate had a puncture hole above her left breast.
And the burn-scarred man looked back towards his people and must have seen almost none of them left now, and that this desperate gambit had failed. ‘Traitor,’ he repeated, almost a whisper. His expression revealed bitter bewilderment, at why this Wasp had turned so far from his people, and why the boy would not now even finish the job. Looking into Averic’s eyes, perhaps he sought some grand answer, some hint of a greater plan, something to justify the waste and the failure.
‘I’m sorry,’ Averic said, and those two words plainly showed the burned man how Collegium had taken him, body and mind, and corroded all the hard edge of the Empire.
The Beetle spy rushed him, surely without any great hope of achieving anything, because by that time he had nowhere to go and nothing to accomplish. Instead of simply flitting out of reach, Averic’s hands came up by instinct and, even as the Wasp kicked back from the railing, his Art flashed and seared, and what fell from the balcony was just a singed corpse.
The swordsman artificer — the only one of the three still living — dropped his blade with a harsh clang. In the doorway, the soldier leant back with a groan, pulling weakly at the straps of her breastplate until Stenwold hurried over to help her.
And, before the lambent majesty of the machine, Eujen propped Banjacs up, the old man’s ashen face borrowing a radiance from the great assembly of glass above him. There were no words, but a trembling thrust of the inventor’s hands picked out a bronze lever from amidst the chaos of dials and wheels, and Eujen hoisted him higher until he could seize on it.
Banjacs summoned some last strength then, from some inner well or perhaps from the unseen source of all Beetle Art. He shrugged himself free of Eujen’s grip, and let his own weight pull down the lever.
Forty-One
What are they doing?
The question flashed at Aarmon from all sides as the battlefield in the air disintegrated. Everywhere the Collegiate orthopters were breaking away, even braving the Imperial shot to ditch in the streets of their city. Aarmon’s aviators reported the enemy pilots scrambling from their machines and simply running, leaving the downed Stormreaders as sitting targets for bolt or bomb. Several orthopters were clipped from the sky in their frantic attempts to get clear.
Aarmon put the Farsphex through two more tight turns, swinging wild of the line his target was taking but dragging his craft back on course with a sure hand, pushing his skill and his machine’s tolerances to their limits but feeling his quarry start to tire, the panic of the chase in her throat. She was trying to get free, too — she tried to reach the ground again and again, but he was waiting for her each time, as his cohorts hedged her in on either side.
They know they’ve lost. They’re hoping to preserve their air strength for the siege, came the offering from one of his pilots.
They’re out of power, their clockwork’s run down, from another.
Other speculations kept battering at his mind, when he needed all his concentration to stay with her, his prize.
How he knew it was a she he could not say, but this enemy pilot he knew intimately, through a bond as close as that he shared with his comrades. Her orthopter was different, a slighter, nimbler piece of elegance than the admittedly admirable Collegiate standard, and her style was impeccable: a fierce, thrilling blend of excellence and inspiration that took possession of the sky wherever she flew.
She had been responsible for more deaths amongst his fellows than any other Collegiate pilot, her unique ship putting that knowledge beyond doubt. He had sought her out, and sought her out, night after night in the frenzied chaos of their aerial engagements. Now here she was, fleeing him in broad daylight.
It is not revenge; the thought passed through his mind and he knew it had gone out to his fellows, that Scain would be mouthing it even now. It was not hatred that moved him, either, or a desire for conquest. He remembered, when he was a boy, watching the hunting wasps take their prey on the wing, and feeling that moment where the destinies of predator and prey intersected, as though by consensus, each to its role. The dream of living that moment had taken him through the Light Airborne, and into the Aviation Corps when that new institution had formed. Not vengeance nor spite, but perfection.
His comrades were still engaging the enemy, of whom fewer and fewer were left to engage. Two-thirds of the surviving Collegiate force had reached the ground, or died trying, and the rest would plainly join them if the Wasps allowed them the opportunity. Still shifting his craft through the impossibly tight and dancing turns that his opponent sped into, he felt a clutching sensation inside him. A trap. But what? They had control of the skies, with the Second on its way, and what could Collegium do about it?
Commence bombing as soon as you’re free to do so, he ordered. Let’s see if we can’t sting them into the air again.
Then he saw something flash in the heart of the city: a tall house capped with a dome, nothing out of the ordinary save for a circular skylight that Lightning leapt and flashed from there, darting and reaching for the vault of sky above. And Aarmon’s mind said, Weapon.
He had a fraction of a second to realize, out of all his flight, that it was he whose course could be twisted to pass by that sparking roof, and he broke his pursuit off instantly, with only a moment’s regret, for sentiment was something he could suddenly not afford to indulge.
‘Sergeant!’ he snapped back towards Kiin, ‘Ready bombs, target domed house dead ahead.’
He hauled the Farsphex about, wings pausing for a moment in their beat, to let it hang and slew in the air, then regaining their pace as he slung his craft towards his mark.
A moment later the first impact rattled against them, and he knew, without needing confirmation, that his former prey had rounded on him; one of those precise dancing-step turns putting her on his tail the moment he abandoned the chase.
Get her off me! He sent to his fellows, because the roof ahead was spitting and flashing like a miniature storm now, and he knew that there could be only one chance.
Taki felt the absence of pursuit as a physical void behind her, freedom from shackles, and her instant thought was to fi
nd a place to put down. She was surely in that seconds-long limbo that must come just before whatever storm Stenwold Maker would now unleash on their enemies. And yet… and yet…
And yet the Collegiate pilots had ceded the skies to the Empire, and nothing had happened. No great stroke of genius from the War Master had manifested itself.
The ground screamed out for her, but she was a thing of the air first and foremost, and she flipped the Esca about for one last glance at her erstwhile pursuer.
She picked him out immediately, taking a recklessly straight course so that she found herself following him by sheer fighting pilot’s instinct, and ahead she saw a bright flare and spray of pure white light. A bomb? No, that’s something he’s aiming for. He’s on an attack run.
She was already flying in his wake and she saw the whole picture, stitched into whole cloth partly from her guesses at Maker’s plan, partly just from the Wasp’s reaction.
A moment later, she let fly with her rotary piercers, seeing at least a scatter of hits reaching the enemy and knowing that the sky was full of his friends.
The sky was full of her friends, too, those who had not been able to get clear. The sky was about to become a very dangerous place, probably a fatal one. She could only hope that enough of the defenders had managed to touch the ground before now, and that there was someone left who could lead them.
At least I’ll end in the air. And she loosed again, her twinned weapons hammering, feeling the vibration coming to her through her feet. Her enemy was trying to dodge her, but at the same time was committed to his own attack. If she could nudge him just a little way, he would lose his chance.
He would have just the one chance, that much she had guessed.
Then she felt the impact of shot punching into her own hull, and she knew that one of the Wasp’s friends was on her, and close, so she was abruptly in the same trap as her enemy, caught by her own dedication to her offensive. Her pitiful twists and lurches — all she could allow herself, without losing her line — shrugged off some of the incoming bolts, but she felt a punishing rain against her poor Esca ’s shell, the tail riddled and shot striking around the gears of the engine, against the pistons of the wings, whose silk spans were instantly peppered with holes, each one a tiny wound bleeding away her machine’s grace in the air.
Then there was another Collegiate craft coming in from ahead of her, and she thought, No! Don’t help me! Just take my target! But she had no mindlink, as the Wasps did, and the Mynan-painted Stormreader — it was Edmon’s own — flashed past the Farsphex she was chasing, two more Imperial orthopters in hot pursuit of him, his rotaries ablaze with bolts as he came to her rescue. For a fragment of a second, Taki saw them all like flies in a web, locked into their individual destinies, each devoted to their chosen attack, and each defenceless as the price of that devotion.
Edmon’s shot must have rattled the pilot behind her, at least temporarily, for she felt no further impact on her hull, but she saw a hail of sparks and broken wood and metal as his own machine suffered for it under the weapons of his shadows. She did not know, then, whether the damage to his machine was so great that he could not pull away, or whether Edmon chose his path, simply trusting that, whatever she was about, it had to be done and so her pursuer had to be stopped.
Edmon flew so close over her that he blotted out the sky for a blurred second, their wings close to touching, and she neither felt nor heard the impact as he rammed his craft into the vessel behind her, but it echoed in her all the same.
Aarmon cried out in shock in that same instant, a light winking out in his mind. None of his fellows was able to take up the attack, to drag the little Collegiate pilot from his tail, her shot already punching through his craft’s hull.
The building ahead, its crown alive with searing argent fire, was in his sights.
‘Kiin!’ he shouted, and a blistering salvo of shot ripped through the cabin behind him. He heard the Fly-kinden woman shout — not in pain but in rage.
‘Reticule’s smashed!’ the words came to him. ‘Sir-!’
‘Do it by hand!’ he called. ‘I have faith in you.’
And their time was up. He was still in the air and over the target, so surely…
Bolts scythed through the back and top of his vessel. He felt one wing go still instantly, all connection to the engine severed. He heard Kiin’s scream — brief and agonized, cut short almost as as soon as it started.
‘ Kiin! ’
The sky was filled with light.
The sky filled with light for Taki, too.
One moment she was in hot pursuit of the Farsphex, and a moment later she was fighting blindly with every part of the Esca ’s controls, wheeling madly across an unseen roofscape. The gears stuck and stuttered, the wing joints seemed to freeze, falling out of phase, every moving part on the cusp of being welded to its neighbour. And Taki cringed, shrinking into her seat, waiting for the flesh-searing fire that must surely follow.
But the Esca coughed and rattled, and kept on flying, and she could see again, albeit with a great negative blotch before her eyes that was already fading. She nearly died anyway, finding herself pitching downwards in a wild whirl before she could drag the stubborn stick back and get herself level. Then she was still airborne and alive, and as intact as her last skirmish with the enemy had left her.
And all about her the sky was dotted with orthopters, and most of them were the Empire’s — all still there. Only the fading skein of sparks crawling about every part of her machine told that anything had happened at all.
Oh, you stupid bastard, Maker. It didn’t work.
Then came the first explosion, a Farsphex simply erupting from within, and she stared and stared, as the sky over Collegium played host to a new and fleeting constellation.
And, on the ground, Stenwold Maker and his fellows rushed out of Banjacs’s house to stare upwards. The fierce, pale light of the lightning engine behind them was momentarily the god of all shadows, brighter than the sun, and the its charge was gone, hurled impartially into the heavens that were thronging with flying machines.
It was invisible the moment Banjacs’s engine discharged it, and yet every sense screamed with it, a moment of monumental wrongness when each hair stood on end, and the sky seemed to bend and boom with energies never meant to have been chained by the hand of man.
In the next breath, it had all been for nothing, and Stenwold felt his heart almost stop with the unfairness, the bitter knowledge of a defeat that his own actions had made so much worse.
Then Eujen was yelling and pointing, and he saw the first explosion: one of his enemies ripping apart as though old Banjacs’s ghost was up there tearing the machine asunder with invisible hands.
And another. And more, and Stenwold stared up as the skies caught fire over his city.
Scain screamed.
Pingge could not make out the words. He seemed to have gone mad, wrenching at the stick and yet taking them only in circles. But outside…
She saw the sudden bloom of flame as a nearby Farsphex went up, fragments of hull and wing forming momentary silhouettes against the blast.
‘Aarmon!’ Scain cried out, and Pingge thought, Kiin! knowing that her friend of so many years was dead.
Something blew in the engine behind and above her, and she shrieked. Scain was wrestling with his straps, finding them stubborn.
There was no time.
‘Scain!’ she shrilled, and he was turning back towards her, mad desperation in his tear-streaked face. Even as another shudder rocked them, he had his hand extended back, not seeking help but palm held outwards to sting.
She screamed at him. She saw that he was going to kill her in some Wasp idea of mercy. She felt the searing heat as his Art discharged, and then the fuel tank ruptured and the blast picked her up.
In that last moment, unable to get himself free, the fire of his sting had cracked her chain apart, and she was flung bodily from the Farsphex, out past the ballista — the bolts behi
nd her popping and cracking like fireworks — out into the open air, borne away on the vanguard of the explosion.
Her last sight of Scain was a pale face seen through the cockpit’s faceted window, before the flames came.
Taki guided her battered Esca through a slow, spiralling descent — in truth the absolute best the machine was capable of just then, while watching the other Collegiate pilots still aloft follow her down. She had, she confessed to herself, no idea what had just happened, and no leap of inspiration could conquer the gap. Apt as she was, it seemed to her as though some great sorcerer of old had waved a hand, invoking an untold power simply to rid the sky of the enemy, leaving herself and her fellows intact.
Only later would she learn that Banjacs’s machine had not worked as intended, that the grand obliteration had never come, that even a genius’s calculations could harbour errors. Later scholars would suggest that, to fulfil his dream, ten times the charge of raw lightning energy would have been needed, and its backwash would have flash-cooked every living thing in Collegium. As it was, although the Stormreaders that had flown through that particular storm would need refitting, countless small components slightly deformed or melted as the lightning had leapt about them on its way to repatriation with the sky above, they had all landed safely, their pilots shocked and shaky, but alive.
For the Farsphex, however, the residual sparks of that same discharge had, within a varying number of seconds, coursed through the fuel tank and turned all that volatile and devastatingly efficient mineral oil into an instantly detonating bomb.
The Collegiate pilots, those who had reached the ground before then, and those only just now touching down, looked up into a sky that they had won, and around them at a city their path to victory had scarred almost beyond recognition. Even then the messengers were being sent out from Stenwold Maker and Jodry Drillen to tell them their work was not yet done, that the College artificers were waiting for them to complete emergency modifications to the Stormreaders, that the war was still going on.
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