The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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  Summary

  The last war against the Wasp-kinden ended in a draw. The demise of the Emperor, ostensibly at the hands of the Mantis Tisamon, forced a recall of the Imperial armies, and the Empress Seda has since been occupied in retaking provinces of her empire from the various traitor governors who sprang up in the wake of her brother’s death.

  Collegium has fallen out with its erstwhile allies in the Spiderlands, but Stenwold Maker has secret, new allies beneath the waves, having established tentative diplomatic links with the Sea-kinden, a civilization that most of his people are not even aware of.

  Seda and her Empire have not been idle, though. The traitor governors are defeated now, and the Imperial engineers, men such as the aviator Varsec, have been devising new ways of making war. Seda herself has other needs. The unnatural death of her brother rendered her Inapt and gave her access to a magic fuelled by blood, and she has forced even more power out of the shadowy Masters of Khanaphes since conquering that ancient city.

  The time has come for her and her Empire to look outwards to the wider world once again.

  Principal Cast

  In Collegium

  Assemblers and City Leaders

  Jodry Drillen, Speaker for the Assembly

  Stenwold Maker, War Master

  Corog Breaker, Master Armsman

  Marteus, chief officer, Coldstone Company

  Elder Padstock, chief officer, Maker’s Own

  Janos Outwright, chief officer, Outwright’s Pike and Shot

  Helmess Broiler, Assembler, alleged Imperial sympathizer

  Students of the College and Associates

  Straessa (‘the Antspider’), duellist

  Eujen Leadswell, agitator

  Gerethwy, Woodlouse scholar

  Averic, Wasp-kinden scholar

  Sartaea te Mosca, teacher of Inapt studies

  Raullo Mummers, artist

  Castre Gorenn, Dragonfly exile

  Imperial Embassy

  Aagen, ambassador

  Honory Bellowern, Aagen’s adviser

  Also in the City

  Te Schola Taki-Amre (‘Taki’), pilot

  Banjacs Gripshod, master artificer

  Berjek Gripshod, historian and diplomat

  Praeda Rakespear, artificer and diplomat

  Amnon, former First Soldier of Khanaphes

  Willem Reader, artificer

  Bola Stormall, artificer

  Arvi, Jodry Drillen’s secretary

  In the Empire

  Imperial Court

  Seda I, Empress

  Brugan, Rekef general

  Harvang, Rekef colonel

  Vecter, Rekef colonel

  Gjegevey, Woodlouse adviser

  Esmail/Ostrec, agent

  Lien, general of Engineers

  Knowles Bellowern, Consortium magnate

  Second Army (‘The Gears’)

  General Tynan

  Colonel Mittoc, Engineers

  Colonel Cherten, Army Intelligence

  Imperial Air Corps

  Varsec, colonel of Engineers

  Aarmon, captain, pilot

  Scain, pilot

  Nishaana, pilot

  Eighth Army

  General Roder

  Colonel Ferric, Engineers

  Fly-kinden from the Factories

  Pingge

  Kiin

  Gizmer

  Elsewhere

  In Solarno

  Laszlo, agent of Stenwold Maker

  Lissart (‘te Liss’), agent

  Te Riel, agent

  ‘Painful’ Breighl, agent

  Garvan, Imperial Army Intelligence

  In Myna

  Kymene, Mynan leader

  Edmon, pilot

  Franticze, Szaren pilot

  Aldanrael

  Mycella of the Aldanrael, Lady-Martial

  Jadis of the Melisandyr, officer of the camp

  Morkaris, mercenary adjutant

  Iron Glove

  Dariandrephos (‘Drephos’), the Colonel-Auxillian, master artificer

  Totho, artificer

  Contents

  Part One: The Calm

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Part Two: The Storm

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Part One

  The Calm

  One

  Nobody built cities with aviators in mind, and that was a cursed shame, in Taki’s opinion. That those cities had generally been planned before flying machines had been thought of was a poor excuse. She had taken her Esca Magni over to Princep Salma to have a nosy around, seeing a great blank grid of streets where the buildings themselves were still nothing but plots or foundations. A glorious opportunity, she had thought, to get the place properly designed for flight, but no, they had all sorts of ideas about how the place should look, and had set aside one dirty field on the outskirts for any luckless pilots who happened to come calling.

  Backward thinking, that’s the problem, she told herself. Now Solarno, her beautiful city beside the Exalsee, had at least made a game try at adapting itself to aviation. There were a dozen private airfields, and the city itself was set into a rolling hillside so that all a flier had to do to get airborne was simply pitch off the edge. The houses immediately beneath such jump-off points were always up for sale, she recalled. She couldn’t imagine why.

  She had flown into a lot of cities in her time, especially after the Wasp Empire’s crawling tide of conquest had encompassed her home, driving her thence all the way along the western coast to Collegium. This, however, was a new experience for her, and her heart caught in her mouth at the sheer daring of it.

  But she lived for daring. Wha
t else was a pilot for, after all?

  The Esca Magni was handling beautifully today. The new clockwork was as smooth as butter, measuring out its prodigious stored power with an unprecedented ease and response. It broke her heart to admit it, but her previous machine, the nimble and much-mourned Esca Volenti, could not have matched her new Magni for speed, distance or agility in the air. If there was a machine to challenge her in any contest, she had yet to find it, though the Collegium artificers were constantly nipping at her heels to provide one.

  The thought still caught in her like a hook: recalling her poor faithful Volenti’s brutal fate. It had been during the retaking of Solarno, her band of mercenaries and air-pirates against the Empire’s new-fledged air force. She had duelled their best pilot – dragon-fighting, they called it around the Exalsee, after the fierce aerial battles the Dragonfly-kinden loved. He had been very good and, although she would not acknowledge him as her better, he had met her and met her, time and again, even though his black-and-yellow striped Spearflight had not been equal to her Volenti.

  And at the last, with her machine torn and mauled and its rotary piercers jammed, she had taken advantage of his fixation on her, and baited him in too close, leaping from the cockpit before their two fliers crashed and tangled, removing herself from the fight. She had watched, her own wings ablur, as the conjoined machines tumbled and fell – and felt as though she had killed her best friend.

  The Esca Magni was some consolation after that. The original design had sprung from the best of Collegium artifice and her own unparalleled understanding of the simple business of flying, and never had there been a more demanding mistress for the artificers than te Schola Taki-Amre, known as Taki to her friends. Even a month ago, she had still been making minute changes to perfect the new flier’s handling. The Esca Magni, as originally built, had surpassed the Volenti by a small but measurable degree – and there had been a great deal of measuring, for the Collegium Beetles were fond of that.

  Then had come the new clockwork – or the ‘New Clockwork’, to reflect the reverent way that the artificers talked about it. It involved some mad innovation in metallurgy from somewhere across the sea, some Spiderlands place or other, and it was not exactly common but there was a steady supply of the improved spring steel seeping into Collegium. An artificer called Gainer had begun using it for some boat he was working on, and shortly afterwards one of Taki’s mechanic disciples had brought it to her attention.

  The level of precision required to take full advantage of the New Clockwork was formidable, but at around the same time, and apparently from the same source, Collegium began to see machine parts crafted to a frightening exactness, perfect in every tooth no matter how small. The resulting engines were lighter, smaller and considerably more powerful than anything anyone had seen before, and Taki had kicked an awful lot of shins in the College – and got up the noses of a great many ground-bound Beetle-kinden – before she secured a supply for the flying machines. Thankfully, by then, she had her supporters: her students and a ragbag of Collegiates who shared her passion for the air.

  She had run the Esca Magni through a lot of paces since then: distance trips and mock-duels, up and down the coast, hops over to Sarn and Princep, even back to her old home of Solarno to show off to those of her friends that were still among the living. This journey was different, though.

  She had thought to make it in one long leg, gliding where she could, hitching a ride in the high air currents and testing the New Clockwork to its logical conclusion. She had made good progress at first, but eventually minute changes in the engine’s ticking and a sluggishness in the controls had convinced her that reality was going to fall considerably short of her ambitions – and that was without any hard weather or, most demanding of all, actual air combat. She resolved to try and kick her tame artificers into working on something even better.

  She put down in Helleron, and paid for the use of a winding engine to re-tension her flier. She felt bitterly disappointed about having to break her journey, for all that it gave her the chance to eat something that hadn’t been dried half to death.

  Taki was the first recorded pilot ever to make the trip from Collegium to Helleron in a single journey in a heavier-than-air machine, but she had failed in her original plan, therefore it still seemed like second prize.

  She had managed the flight from Helleron to here in another single bound although, had the political situation been tenser, she would have expected to have to fight her way past half the cities that had glided past below her. She had worried about her navigation as well, and whether she would even recognize her target when she saw it, but her charts and her compass were in agreement, and the view could have been nowhere else on earth.

  Capitas, the heart of the Wasp Empire.

  This city had not been built with aviators in mind, either, but at least it was planned out by an Apt kinden that could fly, and so she spotted a half-dozen open spaces that looked to be ideal for landing her Esca, and several large fields outside the city as well, mostly attended by louring barracks and presumably given over to the innumerable soldiers of the Imperial army.

  She brought her flier in low as she neared, knowing that every city provided a free updraught for the canny flier. She was determined not to end up somewhere on the outskirts: that would be a failure of daring. Besides, the city looked rather flat and, while that detracted from its scenic value, it was a gift to a pilot coming in low.

  She revised her assessment of the place very quickly, because she was still coming in low – dangerously low now – and she had not quite reached the sprawling outskirts. Right, so it’s just a little bigger than I thought. She pulled up on the stick, inching a little more height, and then the first suburbs of Capitas were speeding beneath her, close enough that she caught the pale flash of faces peering up. And we’ll see how good that cursed invitation was, too. The spectre of a dozen combat Spearflights lifting straight up from one of the airfields loomed large in her mind.

  The sheer number of aircraft she saw was proof positive that she was not here on false pretences, however. Every airfield was cluttered with them, and the sky above Capitas was lumpy with airships and spotter balloons.

  When the invitation had arrived, her fellow aviators at the College had thought it was a hoax or a trap, depending on how suspicious their minds were. None of them knew that she had been corresponding sporadically, secretly, with the Wasp capital for over a season. Not even Stenwold Maker was aware of that. In fact, he probably topped the list of people Taki had no intention of telling.

  Capitas saw itself as the heart of Aptitude, and it was keenly aware of the longer pedigrees of Collegium and Helleron. Taki had a vague understanding that there had been some changes here in the Empire since that woman took over, but they had held no interest for her until now. Capitas was hosting a grand exhibition of aviation, and notables from the entire known world had been invited. After all, the war was the past, as everyone knew.

  Her face abruptly set, Taki slung her Esca Magni past the long flank of an ascending airship, seeing the square ports all the way down the side of its hull. She knew what they were for. The Starnest, which had been the linchpin of the Solarno invasion, had been three times as long, but it had used the same method for dispersing its complement of soldiers across the city: the Wasps simply throwing themselves out of the hatches and gliding down on their Art-fed wings.

  But the airships, even the great war-dreadnoughts, had a shamefaced and sheepish air: the Starnest had been unseamed and had fallen from the sky; the Collegiate Triumph had burned. The age of the airship as a great tool of war was done. The air now belonged to the heavy fliers.

  Ahead she saw one of the city’s parks, which had been converted to an airstrip. There was precious little space there, but she reckoned she could touch down the Esca without too much jockeying.

  A score of different fliers had landed in haphazard rows, most of them looking completely unfamiliar to her. Even as she slowed a
nd banked, achieving a jittery hover over the field, she found herself facing a solid rank of black and gold. One entire edge was composed of a line of Spearflights hunched beneath their folded wings. For a moment she was inclined to touch down in front of them, just to show them how cursed daring she really was, but something in the uniform discipline of their positioning broke her resolve, and she hauled back and had the Esca Magni circle a little, as nonchalantly as she could manage, looking for other lodgings. Capitas was a city dominated by ziggurats, the characteristic form of Wasp architecture. Some were grand and some were squat, and all were surrounded by lower buildings with flat roofs. After a pass around the field, Taki spotted a rather inviting prospect that was probably some mid-ranking official’s little kingdom, and she slid the Esca through the air, folding down the craft’s three legs so that they ghosted across the stone, the entire flying machine poised momentarily, almost still in the air, the tilt of its wings exactly cancelling out her lateral movement, before she let herself drop, with the legs bowing to catch the strain.

  Even as she hopped out, a man had already scrambled up onto the roof through a hatch, a lean Dragonfly-kinden wearing a simple tunic – a house slave, she realized. He stared at the flying machine perched on his master’s roof, and she saw a very small smile twitch at his face because here . . . here was something that he could not possible be blamed for.

  She let her wings carry her down the tiered facade of the building and was immediately surrounded by soldiers. They came from all sides, and some dropped from the air onto the building behind her, between her and the Esca. Cursing herself for being too caught up in her daring to keep a basic watch out for trouble, she was reaching for her little knife by instinct, in the face of their stings. Or perhaps she would leap back and try for the sky, trusting that she was swifter and more nimble than they.

  She stopped herself, calmed herself. Yes, they were Wasps, but she was already within their city. The protocols were somewhat different.

  ‘Is this how you treat your guests here, sieurs?’ she demanded, muscling up to the nearest of them as though they were not twice her size. It took physical effort to hold the light smile on her face, because her heart was hammering in her chest and her instincts were screaming at her.