The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8)

by Tchaikovsky, Adrian

  ‘I’m not going,’ Eujen snapped at him.

  ‘No?’ Raullo blinked, bewildered, then he goggled at the Antspider. ‘You, my favourite model, off to the wars?’

  Straessa’s gesture managed to indicate all the military motley she wore.

  The artist was abruptly transformed into overripe gravitas. ‘Then come back, and I shall sketch you. For you alone, I will sketch. And if you don’t . . . never, never again.’ He lurched, hands out to forestall any help, then slouched into Averic.

  A shout went up, from the head of the column, Marteus calling the lead squads to order.

  ‘Come back,’ Eujen echoed.

  ‘Do my best,’ she promised.

  Averic muttered something and took a step back, still encumbered by Raullo’s weight.

  ‘Keep the place in one piece until we see it again,’ Gerethwy called over to them, one hand raised in salute. ‘Come on, Sub, they’re starting to move.’

  Her calm snapped at that moment, and she lunged forward and threw her arms about Eujen before he could stop her, a brief, fierce embrace. ‘See you right here, I swear it,’ she hissed, and then she was running back for her own people. ‘Come on, ranks, you slipshod bastards! Oi, Gorenn! You, Commonweal Retaliation Army or whatever you call yourself! Just because you’ve got a bow’s no excuse for being out of position!’ She put some real fire into it, to burn away the tears that were threatening the corners of her eyes. By the time she had rejoined her maniple, they were in as neat a square as she could have wished, snapbows and pikes shouldered.

  ‘Mind if I march with you, dear?’

  The Antspider glanced down to see Sartaea te Mosca, Fly-kinden associate Master of the Inapt studies department, unarmed but hefting a pack about her shoulders that seemed far too large for her.

  ‘They reckon we might come across some dangerous inscriptions, or something?’ Straessa asked her.

  ‘Seconded to the faculty of medicine, dear one,’ te Mosca revealed. ‘All hands to the pumps, I think, is the Apt phrase for it.’

  ‘You’d better be able to keep up,’ Straessa told her mock-sternly, and then there was nothing for it – the squads in front were stuttering into motion, a brief confusion of soldiers trying to find the right foot.

  ‘And off we go!’ the Antspider snapped out, and a hundred soldiers heard her words, and set out to war.

  Averic watched them go, feeling paralysed, the words of the intelligence officer, Gesa, rattling about in his skull like dice. He was even glad for the wine-reeking burden of Raullo on his arm, because his new knowledge was surely written on his face in letters of shame and guilt, so that even Eujen, idealistic to a fault, would read them there.

  Traitor, went the cry, and it seemed to him that the blade was cutting both ways: traitor to Collegium for not telling them what he knew; traitor to his own people for harbouring even these eroding doubts. He had tried to stand with a foot in two worlds, and ended up in neither, merely a halfbreed of the mind.

  Then he saw her, marching past in the uniform of a Coldstone soldier: the same woman, Gesa the Wasp in halfbreed’s clothing, undetected and unremarked, seemingly just one more soldier. She was marching to war in Straessa’s own Company, one of the rush of recruits that had flocked to the army after the Felyal was burned. Averic felt himself shaking.

  There, she’s there! Wasp spy! Wasp spy right there! And yet no words came, no accusing finger. He watched Gesa march off, practically holding a knife to Straessa’s throat, and yet he teetered on the fence between betrayals, and did nothing and let her go.

  And, although he was expected now at the gates along with Jodry and the other prime movers of the war effort, Stenwold stood in Banjacs Gripshod’s house and tried to understand.

  The machine loomed before him, and he knew that what he could see was only part of it. Beneath his feet the cellar was packed with a battery of glass cells that crackled and roared with stolen lightning, years of painstaking generation hidden down there, lighting up the darkness. The shock that had killed Reyna Pullard had been only an iota of it, the merest spark. Banjacs had indeed been busy. He had enough power down there to wreck more of this city than the Wasp air force already had.

  Here, on the ground floor, were the controls: wheels and locks to direct the movement of that primal energy, as if it were something as tame and easily domesticated as steam. Even steam engines exploded once in a while, Stenwold reminded himself. Behind those crude-seeming controls spread the vast mechanical heart of the device, he knew, for Banjacs had shown him the designs, taken from a hidden drawer in the man’s desk that nobody had even guessed at. Stenwold himself had not been able to follow the details – his artificing was a decade out of date – but he was willing to bet that the best the College had to offer would have difficulties with Banjacs’s close script and his brilliant, cracked mind.

  All this time, working on a way out of our current predicament – that’s foresight even the Moths wouldn’t credit. And Banjacs made no secret that he despised a great deal of what Collegium was, or had become during his long life, most of all because it had not given him due adulation as a genius. Stenwold had steered him away from that topic more than once, for the old man practically foamed at the mouth once he got going. His list of names – the men and women who had held him back, not given him credit, or been preferred over him – was so long that Stenwold had not heard the end of it. Half of the man’s rivals and enemies were dead, long dead in some cases, but the old artificer had no intention of forgetting any one of them.

  The mechanisms of Banjacs’s machine did all that science could do to trap and channel and focus the unleashed lightning, which otherwise would have simply levelled several streets about his house, and probably turned him and his stone walls into some sort of matter that artificers had yet to discover or describe. Above them was a forest of great glass pipes, mirrors, refractors, prisms; a work of art cast in light and bound in bronze; a vast, clear, many-limbed entity frozen in mid-reach and about to burst the roof asunder.

  Stenwold surveyed it all, and knew that it was all for something – not just a madman’s insane assembly of parts, but a working machine, almost finished according to its creator, ready to . . . to do what?

  Banjacs claimed it would save the city but, if it was a weapon, there was no suggestion that it could even be aimed. The old man had been desperate to convince, spitting out sincerity and conviction. Stenwold had read no falsehood in him, but Banjacs was plainly partway mad, even if he was telling the truth – perhaps especially then – and Stenwold could not rule out the possibility that his machine would be more of a terror than the Wasps to the city Banjacs plainly felt betrayed by.

  Stenwold had called therefore for the College’s most theoretical artificers to come and take their best guess, but in the end the decision would rest on his shoulders as much as anyone’s, and they had so little time.

  By that evening the artificers’ reports were in. Stenwold had them on the table in front of him, sitting in a disused office in the Amphiophos. Words such as ‘colossal discharge of lightning energy’, ‘near-perfect light conductivity’ and ‘requiring flawless vertical channelling’ were underlined, alongside complex calculations comparing volumes of space with assessments of the stored power that Banjacs had accumulated. One artificer had even sketched a plan of the city in profile, lines and arcs above and around, to outline the potential for disaster.

  Or for victory.

  ‘Or for victory,’ Stenwold murmured, forcing his own thoughts into words, and at that moment Jodry came in, and stopped. Stenwold had not been entirely sure the man would even turn up when asked. Certainly he did not look best pleased to be alone in a room with Stenwold Maker.

  ‘So,’ said the Speaker for the Assembly. ‘Here you are. You were looked for, when the Companies departed. You might at least have been there for your Own.’

  ‘I offered to march with them. They turned me down.’ Stenwold bit back on his words. ‘No, wait, Jodry: this
isn’t what I wanted to talk about.’

  ‘What then?’ Jodry was still standing in the doorway, unwilling to commit to staying. ‘Some new way of treating prisoners? Should Spider-kinden and Wasps have to wear—’

  ‘Jodry!’ Stenwold snapped. ‘Listen, it’s nothing of that, I don’t want to open that wound right now. Time enough after – drag me before the Assembly, as you said. I’ll answer to anything you put before me, I swear. For the good of the city, though, I have something new and I need your help.’

  For a moment Jodry looked about to go, and Stenwold said, ‘For old times’ sake, Jodry, please.’

  The fat man gave a sigh every bit as big as himself, and stepped in, hauling a chair out and slumping into it. ‘Be quick.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can. Read these.’

  Jodry glanced down at the reports. ‘I’m no artificer.’

  ‘Neither am I, any more. The important parts are written in language plain enough for the Inapt, so just read.’

  And for almost twenty minutes, Jodry proceeded to read: first dismissively, then absorbedly, then with wide-eyed alarm. At the end he looked up at Stenwold and said, ‘Madness.’

  ‘And yet?’

  ‘Stenwold, what’s proposed here . . . Even if we had the time and resources to build something like this, I’m not sure that—’

  ‘We already have one, or as good as,’ Stenwold told him. ‘It’s built, Jodry.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous. Where . . . ?’ Jodry’s face greyed with sudden realization. ‘Founder’s Mark, this? This is Banjacs Gripshod’s device?’ At Stenwold’s nod, he returned to the reports. ‘And it does . . . ?’ For a moment he was very still, not seeing anything outside his own head. ‘Stenwold, what are you proposing?’

  ‘That we can’t go on like this. That was what Taki said to me. We need to win the air war, or we won’t be able to win the war at all. And we’ve tried it all, Jodry – you know we have. We’re turning out pilots and orthopters as fast as we can, we’ve applied every innovation our artificers have come up with, yet we’re losing. Losing machines and losing the city.’

  ‘But, Stenwold, you’ve seen what they’ve written here. This isn’t just a bow to aim at the enemy: this is a bomb. Once we release all that lightning he’s got stored away, it’s not as though we can keep popping away at them whenever they show themselves.’ In the shadow of Banjacs’s machine, and all that it implied, Jodry’s animosity had drained away.

  ‘I know, Jodry. That’s why I need you. I . . .’ Stenwold rubbed at his eyes, tired beyond belief, but sick at himself even beyond that. ‘You don’t like my ideas, I know. Well, I have one more for you to hate, Jodry. The worst one of them all, the most terrible . . . Let’s get Taki in here.’

  ‘You scare me, Stenwold,’ Jodry said quietly, and he looked as if he meant it.

  ‘Not as much as I frighten myself.’

  Taki did not want to be there at all, and she made that plain. She wanted to be in bed or, if that was not an option, she wanted to be in with her fellow pilots waiting for the inevitable sound of the Great Ear amplifying the engine drone of approaching Farsphex.

  ‘We’ll be quick,’ Stenwold told her, and she glanced between him and Jodry, noting how they were on the same side again, and plainly disliking the idea from base instinct.

  ‘The Wasp orthopters are coming every night now,’ Jodry started and, before any sharp retort, ‘and I don’t need to tell you that, obviously. We all know how the proximity of the Second is allowing them to land and rest up within easy reach of the city. Does that mean we’re facing all their airpower every night?’

  Stenwold guessed Jodry already knew the answer, but Taki was plainly relieved to be asked a sensible question. ‘No, sieur, in fact I’d guess that we see about a third of their pilots each night. We’re getting to recognize a fair number of them by the way they fly – the veterans mostly. They add new blood just like we do. They’re taking it easy, rotating their aviators, giving themselves time to rest so that they stay sharp when they fight us. We’ve bought Collegium that, at least. I think that, when the Second start their artillery assault, we’ll get a much more sustained air attack.’ She managed the words without a tremor.

  ‘And can we hold that off?’ Jodry asked, the patient lecturer.

  ‘No, sieur, we cannot. But we’ll try.’

  ‘They’re holding back at the moment, though?’ Jodry pressed, and a twitch of irritation showed on the Fly-kinden’s face.

  ‘That’s what I said, sieur.’

  ‘And . . .’ Even though he knew the question was coming, Stenwold felt a lurch in his stomach as Jodry spoke the words, ‘If our aerial resistance decreased, they’d be in a position to take advantage, I imagine.’

  Taki just glanced from Stenwold to Jodry and then back, looking unhappy and uncertain.

  ‘After all, if they committed even two-thirds of their strength, they could cause appalling damage in a single night.’ Jodry was almost whispering now.

  ‘Are you . . . you’re sending us off to . . . ?’ Taki frowned. ‘We’re going to attack the Second while they’re over the city? Sieur – Stenwold, Jodry, listen. We are holding them at bay. We’re showing them we can bite, just enough that they’re wary of putting their hand into our mouth. You can’t take us away from defending the city! Take advantage? They’ll flatten every building in the place! What have we been fighting and dying for, if not to stop that happening?’

  ‘And yet we can’t stop that happening,’ Stenwold said flatly. ‘We can only stave it off.’

  ‘Then we stave it off!’ she snapped. ‘What are you . . . this isn’t even my city! What are you thinking?’

  ‘Thank you, Mistress Taki,’ Jodry said heavily.

  ‘We can hold them!’ the little pilot insisted. ‘Listen to me: we’re doing our best—!’

  ‘Nobody doubts you, any of you. You’ve worked wonders,’ Jodry assured her, but his voice offered no comfort. ‘That’s all, thank you. You can go.’

  When Taki had gone, shaking with bewilderment and injured pride, he gazed at Stenwold across the table.

  ‘We can’t do this.’

  ‘What we can’t do is tell anyone – anyone – what we are going to do. We give the orders to the pilots only on the night itself, and on the day after I will do everything in my power to bottle any word up. Secrecy is paramount, Jodry. The knowledge will be ours to bear,’ Stenwold told him. ‘Yours and mine. No other.’

  ‘I am not strong enough,’ Jodry protested, but then: ‘I will try.’

  Thirty-One

  Gjegevey had been told that the Great College of Collegium, that city of revolution which had thrown off its Moth-kinden overlords almost five and a half centuries earlier, maintained an Inapt studies department where the intrepid could still go to learn about the old ways, the ancient times and magic. The Wasps, of course, had nothing of the sort. To them the past was dead, the present and the future the only prizes worth studying.

  Seda herself had gathered a piecemeal library of old Moth and Dragonfly texts, and Gjegevey had sent members of her staff across the city to the collections of veteran officers and Consortium magnates, confiscating anything that might be of use. And he had read, and read. He was looking for anything that the Empress might accept as a substitute for the lure of the Worm. The Lowlands, after all, had a rich history of magic, for all that it was buried under so many years of Aptitude. There must be some survival there, some fount of power that the Moths jealously guarded, some other knot of old time, such as the Darakyon forest had been before it was laid to rest.

  He would have given anything for even an hour’s communion with his own people’s great library, where such secrets were certainly held. He had even considered asking Seda for permission to return home for just that. Prudence had warned him off the idea, though. He was not one of his own people any more. For all that he had come to this city as their spy, disguised as a slave, now he was far more Seda’s slave, with no disguise needed. He
suspected that he would not even be allowed into his people’s strongholds, and if he was . . . would the Empire itself be far away? Gjegevey’s Woodlouse-kinden lived on the Wasps’ very border, only their inhospitable rotting terrain and outsiders’ perception that they had nothing worth taking had kept them free from overlords, taxes and levies. If Seda ever found out what a wealth of knowledge they had hoarded in those swamps, then she would indeed have something other than the Worm to aim for.

  So he had rooted and grubbed through ancient histories of the Lowlands, cracking, flaking parchments and vellums, dust-laden books and faded scrolls. As Seda had complained, the Moths never wrote anything the simple way, and the Dragonflies were just as bad in their own fashion, but he had bookmarks and notes now, signalling the possibility of survivals and hidden caches. Yet he needed help.

  The knock sounded, as expected, for the man would have been too curious to stay away. At Gjegevey’s invitation, he entered the cluttered little storeroom that the Woodlouse had made his own, even as Gjegevey turned up the wick on a lamp to let the man see. Up until then, the crooked old Woodlouse had been reading in utter darkness, as comfortable with the pitch black as a Moth.

  ‘Ambassador Tegrec, thank you for, ah, joining me.’

  The newcomer was a Wasp-kinden but robed in the Moth style. He had once been an army major who had schemed his way into being made the governor of the Moth city of Tharn which the Wasps had taken over almost as an afterthought, owing to its proximity to Helleron. Covertly, as Gjegevey knew, he had also been a magician, Inapt as Seda was, although Tegrec had been so from birth. In Tharn he had turned his coat and aided the Moths in performing the ritual that had driven out their conquerors, as well as inflicting madness and death upon many of the locals, as Gjegevey understood. Despite his treason, he had been permitted to return to Capitas as the Moths’ own ambassador. His position in the Empress’s court was an uncertain one, both a diplomat from a neutral power – if the Moths even counted as such – and one of the Inapt who had in recent times found a tenuous new home in the Empress’s shadow. He entered the room cautiously, as he did every room in the palace, not sitting down when Gjegevey offered the solitary free chair. In appearance he was a soft man, without a soldier’s hard physique, but if he could live alongside the Moths, his mind must be sharp as a dagger.