The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8)

by Tchaikovsky, Adrian

  Aarmon pointed and then, when no reaction was forthcoming, he said, ‘You,’ like an afterthought.

  He was indicating Kiin, of course.

  Pingge gasped, ‘No!’, but there was nothing for it. If this was some example to be made, crossed pikes or a stingshot to the head or some other warning to keep silent, there was nothing she could do. Captain Aarmon was waiting, his bleak stare fixed on his victim as though it could draw her to him on its own.

  Kiin took a deep breath and, none too steady, stepped forward.

  No windows in the room, Pingge thought miserably. Is that so nobody can see us here? So we can’t escape? She watched her friend weave her way through the other Flies until she was standing to attention before Aarmon, staring at his belt buckle, a delicate, fair-haired woman of three foot six before a big Wasp man topping six feet.

  ‘With me,’ he told her, and turned instantly, awaiting neither salute nor acknowledgement, leaving her to stumble mutely in his wake as he stalked from the room. Pingge saw the other Wasps stepping forwards, all at once now, selecting others from the Fly group. She cast a panicked stare back, trying to see what happened to Kiin, and caught a last glimpse of her friend as Kiin’s reluctant march carried her out through the door, tripping after Aarmon’s longer strides.

  ‘What is she?’ Esmail demanded. ‘What has happened to her?’

  His informant shrank away from him, babbling something about not knowing what he meant, but he slammed the man back against the cellar wall, using Ostrec’s borrowed strength and violence. His life was at stake in a way that his briefing had never suggested. Someone was playing him for a fool.

  The Empress was something more than a Wasp-kinden woman, more than the mere temporal ruler of a military state.

  He had gone along after Colonel Harvang, dogging the obese man’s greasy steps until he stood amidst the great and the good of the Empire: the Rekef’s sole surviving general, another colonel, their chief artificer and some Beetle-kinden who was one of their leading merchants. Ostrec had been well placed, groomed to be Harvang’s aide, to run errands and messages between the great powers of the Empire, circumstances that bore all the fingerprints of Moth foretelling and calculation, but at a level far in excess of anything Esmail had worked with before.

  So why had they not told him about the Empress? Because they did not know? Because they wanted his own, unbiased assessment?

  He was not sure that he could possibly give an unbiased account of that. As she had drawn close, he had felt a pressure inside his skull, inexplicable here in the mechanistic Empire, reminiscent of times past when great Moth-kinden Skryres had turned their arts upon him. Then she had entered the room.

  He was a past master at his trade, of keeping the inner man and the outer face separate, showing nothing of who and what he was and living the life of the other. When she strode in, though, he had not been able to keep still. The sheer sight and sense of her had shocked him like a spear through the chest.

  She had glanced at him then, and he had fought, physically fought, to keep his wards and masks intact, because some primal part of him had been clamouring for him to fall to his knees and confess all.

  Even now he could not say whether he had escaped undetected. He did not know what senses she had inherited, or what subtlety in using them. The Rekef might come for him any moment, turning on one seemingly of their own without the least stab of conscience. Even now she might have him dragged before her.

  Power had radiated from her in waves, enough to blast aside his false face and leave him naked and terrified before her splendour. She had been as difficult to look at as the sun, for those first few moments, until his inner eyes had adjusted. Above her brow there had seemed a burning brand, a diadem of invisible but inescapable authority.

  What his briefing had given him was the name of a well-placed servant who was also an Arcanum agent – an elderly Grasshopper who had served in Capitas for over a decade, feeding information back to the Moths in shreds and pieces for all that time. Any other spy would have been uncovered by now, but the old man was subtle, and the Moths had never acted on any of it, only hoarded it against the future, as they always did.

  After dark, Esmail had left his room in the extensive complex that Harvang and his Rekef adherents called their own, stalking across the rooftops with a stealth that Ostrec the Wasp had never possessed, then hunting down his informant, a shadow with a Wasp’s shape, until he found the single cramped room that the Grasshopper shared with a half-dozen others.

  The man’s name was Shoel Jhin, and he was a magician of very minor sorts, whose powers would no doubt have eroded during his long slavery here. Esmail himself was no great conjuror – the elements of his trade relied on control and elegance of manipulation rather than raw power – but he had a few magus’s tricks, and it was a simple matter to put his voice in Jhin’s mind and hiss out the man’s name until he awoke, starting and staring: then to call him out of the room, out of the servants’ block, until he met the old man face to face within the cold walls of a wine cellar.

  Now he stared down at that lined face, the sallow skin bagged and creased with care and age. ‘You’re a poor spy or a lax one. Don’t you realize there was something missing from your reports?’

  ‘I tell what I tell. What they tell you is another matter,’ Jhin wheezed.

  Ostrec wanted to beat him for his insubordination. Esmail could feel rage emanating from the image of the man he kept in his head, the source of his mimicry. ‘I came here to spy on a Wasp, one of the Apt,’ he said, in more measured tones. ‘An Empress, yes, and we all know the power that attaches to such symbols, but it’s not a power that she should be able to tap. I’ve never . . .’ He stopped, shaking his head. ‘I have never felt such a presence.’

  Shoel Jhin was watching him, beady eyes nesting in wrinkles examining the spy’s false face. ‘Help you, they said. Educate you, no. They tell you what they tell you. Not my place, not my place at all.’

  Esmail still held the man by his collar but now he let go, stepping back, suppressing Ostrec’s borrowed anger. It occurred to him that the old man did not know who he was, not really – oh, a spy, yes, and one of that very select and mercurial order, but no more than that. Just some Moth, probably, was Jhin’s guess.

  Esmail stepped back from him. ‘Tell me,’ he urged softly.

  Jhin actually cackled a little. ‘Not my place,’ he repeated, and made to walk past him.

  He stopped, for Esmail had fixed him with a look, Ostrec’s pale eyes holding an expression neither Wasp nor Moth ever had. Esmail let the mask slip slightly, letting out some sense of what hid behind: the villain of ages, the murderer-kinden, the lost race.

  The old Grasshopper stayed very still, on the brink of a revelation he plainly had no wish for. ‘You . . . you . . .’ he whispered. The assassins, the killers of the old times, but no, but surely no – they’re gone, all of them, and the Moths were ever their enemies . . . Esmail could all but read the thoughts coursing through the old man’s head.

  ‘They send who they send,’ he said, pointedly.

  Shoel Jhin bared his yellowed teeth. ‘You think it will help, even that?’ he started to say, but Esmail hissed out, ‘Just tell me!’ forcing the man back with his stare until Jhin’s shoulderblades were against the cold wall again.

  ‘The Emperor . . . Alvdan . . .’

  ‘He died, yes,’ Esmail confirmed. And the circumstances of that seem confused, as well – far more going on than some Mantis slave getting lucky but, as with every other damned thing, the Moths never tell the whole story, even to their own agents.

  ‘She changed, after he died.’

  ‘She became Empress. That’s liable to change you,’ Esmail pointed out impatiently. ‘Give me specifics.’

  Jhin closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. ‘The Emperor’s death . . . a Mantis Weaponsmaster and a Mosquito-kinden Sarcad. You know these traditions? Shadow and blood. The Emperor died to magic, the first man in five hundre
d years to die in such a particular way. But it all went wrong. The power, the greatest ritual since the Days of Lore, all on her shoulders: the inheritrix of two traditions. Changed her? Oh it changed her all right, and she knew it full well. She must have learned too much from that Mosquito . . .’ Jhin’s eyes shone with an unhealthy light. ‘They began disappearing, soon after the coronation. Servants, mostly, some prisoners, some of the Wasps even. Nobody knew or nobody was telling, but I could feel it through the walls sometimes. The blood, the power.’

  ‘She’s Inapt,’ Esmail concluded. ‘She’s a magician even.’ Untutored, unskilled, newly come to some semblance of power? ‘No, that’s not it.’

  Now it was him who was discomfited, by Jhin’s gaze. ‘So last year she went to Khanaphes. You know that city?’

  An old name, old enough to make the clash between the Moths and Esmail’s people look like recent history. Khanaphes. There had been power there, but the Moths did not speak of the place much, which told Esmail volumes. Older and more powerful than their kinden, then. Their seniors, already gone senile and into decline as the Moths were climbing up. But not decayed quite enough, for the Empress Seda had gone there, added that backwater to her Empire, and there . . .

  ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘What did she do?’

  But Jhin was grinning now. ‘She was crowned. Can you not see the mark on her? She was made their heir, and if she is crude with her power, just you wait and see! Don’t you understand? She’ll bring it all back, turn back the glass and give us everything we’ve lost.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Esmail snapped at him.

  ‘Me? You’re the one who’s going to try and stop her!’ And abruptly Shoel Jhin had a blade out, a wretched little knife that a servant might palm while passing through the kitchens. He was ancient, arthritic, no conceivable threat to Esmail or Ostrec, but he was laughing even as he lunged.

  The spy slipped aside without effort, striking back barehanded along the length of the old man’s arm, his fingers shearing into the slave’s rib-cage, then ripping his heart apart at a touch. He could have stopped himself, but he made a considered judgement, in the fraction of a second given to him, that nothing more of value would come from Shoel Jhin.

  Turned, he reflected thoughtfully. An Arcanum agent turned, and by the woman’s mere being. I am in a bad place, and I have not been told what I need to know in order to survive.

  Still, that was all a part of the profession. The mystery of his trade included all such situations as this. He would watch. He would learn. He would put himself through the paces of Ostrec’s life, and await opportunity.

  He disposed of the body carefully and removed every spot of Shoel Jhin’s blood from himself before returning to Ostrec’s rooms.

  In the morning the summons came: not from the throne but the next best thing: he and Colonel Harvang were called before General Brugan.

  Once upon a time there had been a princess, and she had lived in fear . . .

  Seda smiled at the thought, although the expression was a little tight, a little forced. Fear of her brother, yes. Fear of the Rekef general, Maxin, who had waited with a knife, ready for the order to end Seda’s life. It would be far too easy to say that her brother had been mad. He had perhaps been too sane, instead. He had seen the world very clearly indeed, and his place within it, and had recoiled from both. Most of all, he had feared death, and that was a perfectly rational thing to fear. He had lived under the shadow of the throne that he was a tenant of and a slave to, all too aware that the Empire needed the office and not the man. Indeed, her brother Alvdan had possessed few personal qualities of any real value. For that reason he had ensured that only Seda, of all his family, had survived his coronation, and that any bastards he happened to sire were put to death. He had been terrified of becoming obsolete.

  He had been given a chance at immortality by the Mosquito magician, Uctebri the Sarcad, but it had been a false chance. The Mosquito had engineered his death at the hands of some magical puppet, but then Uctebri himself had been slain by the Mantis slave Tisamon, who had been hacked to death before the vacant throne by the Emperor’s furious soldiers. The ritual that Uctebri had raised, which would have made Seda his creature and given him control of the Empire, had earthed in her, stolen her Aptitude, gifted her with an expanded understanding of the world – and won her a throne.

  She had been so frightened, after that, of what she had become. The world had become a distorted place where nothing worked the way she remembered. Her own mind had owned to dark cravings and lusts. Fear? She had eaten and drunk it, and slept in its company every night.

  Well, we all must pass our trials. It was a part of every magical tradition, in fact. No neophyte could become a true magician without being tested, and the core of the test was to establish control over the self, without which any other form of power was but an empty shell. If only her brother had understood that.

  Her chambers were as richly furnished as the Empire’s vast wealth could afford, with gold and gems, silks and furs in extravagant profusion. She had a hundred servants within earshot to attend to her every need. Some had already been busy tonight.

  Her bedchamber was swathed in drapes of red and gold and deep, smouldering purple, centring on the great pillared bed. She slept alone tonight, since her current partner was recuperating. Fear again: all the Empire feared him as much as it feared her, perhaps more, but he feared her like no other thing on earth – feared and yet hungered for her, with a desire he could not stem. It amused her, but some part of her was disappointed in him. He had possessed such promise. He should have been stronger. He should have been strong enough to fight me, some small part of her whispered, to destroy me. Someone must . . .

  Her original consort, the renegade Thalric, had been stronger, more secure in himself. She had never quite broken him, and he had fled her before she could manage it. Her thoughts still turned to him sometimes. One day you will be mine again.

  In the room beyond her bedchamber lay what would seem, to the uninitiated, to be a scene of torture, the victim still fresh on the slab, pale and withered. Her appetites had been born of the powers that had transformed her. Mosquito magic was rooted in blood, physically and symbolically. She sipped at her goblet now, sampling the salt liquid as though it was a vintage, its colour smearing the red of her lips.

  All around her, the Empire was on the move. Her orders had seen to that. She could not claim all the credit, though. If I went before them and preached peace, I would have another civil war on my hands. All the magic in the world could not prevent it. Her people needed to grow, and so they needed to conquer. The Consortium demanded the wealth of the Empire’s neighbours and control over their trade. Her philosophers set out their proofs that the way of the Empire was superior to that of its enemies, and that by bringing them to heel the cause of civilization would be advanced. Her armies grew sullen and restless and apt to mutiny now that the Empire’s internal conflict was done. There were a thousand reasons to go to war.

  And she was proud. She would not deny that she felt a fierce love for her people and their relentless energy, the strength of their will. They had come so far, and they still had so far to go. Oh, certainly, the thinkers of Collegium, the merchants of Helleron, the artificers of the Exalsee – all of these had something to contribute to the world, but they would do so beneath a black and gold banner, in time.

  She had her own reasons for conquest, though. She was Inapt. She was a magician. She had gone to Khanaphes and demanded the blessing of the ancient Masters there. She had planted her flag in a new arena, on whose sands the champions of other kinden had been fighting and dying for millennia.

  Magic was not the force it once had been, atrophied and wan since the Apt revolution had overthrown or remade the old Inapt hierarchies. The Moths were now hermits in their mountain fastnesses, the Dragonflies a sprawling monarchy decaying from within, the Mantis-kinden warriors entering their twilight days, the Spiders setting aside their greater powers to
rule their satrapies of slaves by manipulation and suggestion. The very Masters of Khanaphes themselves hid in the tombs they had built for themselves and there dreamt of a distant future. Only the Moths had ever sought to recreate the long-gone Days of Lore, and their attempts had ended in catastrophe.

  Being reborn in blood and shadow, empowered by the might of Uctebri, by the breaking of the Shadow Box that had been the result of that failed Moth ritual, she had inherited a measure of power. Being crowned by the Masters of Khanaphes had made her a player in the old, old game of magic. Her raw strength as a magician – unearned, undeserved but undeniable – was a match for any that might challenge her, but now she found that it was not enough.

  For, above and beyond the remnants of the old Inapt powers, there was always the other.

  ‘Tisamon,’ she called, and the faintest grating of metal announced that he was with her.

  Mere strength would not bow the magical world to her will, nor would all the armed might of her armies. She could obliterate whole Inapt kinden if she wanted, and it would avail her nought if she had not exacted their recognition, their fealty, first.

  He was her greatest triumph to date, Tisamon. Her court knew him only as the captain of her bodyguard – those half-dozen Mantis-kinden sent to her by the Moths of Tharn as a gift, who now served her with a selfless loyalty that the Tharen had never intended. They had originally been six, now they were seven, but it was unhealthy to comment on it, just as it was unhealthy for the overly informed to note that their new captain bore the same name as the Mantis slave that had figured so prominently in the former Emperor’s death.