The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Nothing registered in Garvan immediately. ‘Lissart, orders are orders. There’s no more to it than that. I need you on the Shifting Gerontis before dawn.’

  ‘I’m serious, Major. See me right, and I can be discretion itself about just how you make your face up every morning, sister.’

  For an instant, Garvan thought she would die, her heart jumped so hard. No, no, no, but the Fly-looking woman was grinning full-strength again, delighted with her own cleverness. ‘What?’ she continued, as though it was just a game and not the sum total of Garvan’s life she had just disembowelled. ‘Fool all the Wasps you want, but you didn’t think I wouldn’t be able to tell, did you?’

  Garvan sat there like a statue for one second more, the shock charging back and forth in her head, looking for a way out, and then her left hand flew up, a bolt of golden fire lancing from the palm.

  It caught Lissart across the chest, knocking her flat onto the desk but doing nothing more than scorch her stolen clothes. She propped herself up on one elbow, actually laughing, ‘You don’t think that’s any good against me?’

  Garvan’s dagger tore into her side savagely, raising a gratifying scream from the other woman. Not a straight death blow, but perhaps a slow death anyway. Agent Lissart lost doing her duty at the Solarno hangars; some part of her mind was already composing the report.

  Fire exploded across the desk, Garvan’s coded notes and reports catching light instantly. The major recoiled across the room, flipping the desk over to keep the flames away. She had a brief, smoke-blurred glimpse of Lissart’s small form lurching at the window, not flying out so much as just rolling over the sill for the two-storey drop to the ground. The room was on fire now, leaping orange flames licking about the floor and walls, dancing about the window frame. Garvan cursed and made for the door, battering it open and stumbling down the stairs, beating at the few embers that had landed on her tunic or in her hair. Kill Lissart, protect the secret. It was the only thing on her mind.

  Laszlo dropped from the sky, diving steeply even as the small body plunged from the window, and there was nothing in his mind at all, no plan, no opinion. Only the necessity of action consumed him.

  She had been stabbed, he saw, her hands weltering red as they clutched at the wound. He was not surgeon enough to know if anything could be done, but he had seen people die from less. The sound she was making was appalling, just a wordless sobbing whimper that yanked at him repeatedly, filling his ears.

  She should not have been able to move, but she kicked away from the wall of the house, even as flames crackled above and embers ghosted down over them both. She was trying to get away, still. Whoever had knifed her must be coming.

  Who it was, how many there were . . . Laszlo could not risk a fight, but the alternative almost seemed worse.

  He grabbed her, too panicked to be gentle, one hand about her body, under her arm, the other clasped over her mouth. She writhed away when he touched her, not a human reaction but that of an animal in pain. She burned the hangars. She sold out Solarno, She tried to kill me. But all he wanted to do was get her somewhere safe.

  He hauled her up, and she bucked in his arms, screaming against his palm, but her own hands still clasped tightly to her rent side.

  Too heavy to fly, but he gave his wings their head anyway, kicking backwards too fast across the street and down a rubbish-strewn alley with the bleeding girl in his arms, always at the point of falling, his Art catching him from moment to moment.

  He dropped and froze, clutching her to him, trying to stifle her weeping. Someone was there, and he could see them clearly – a lean Wasp with sword drawn and hand ready to sting, and when had he last seen just a single Wasp? There might be a dozen within easy shout.

  ‘Quiet, quiet,’ he whispered in Liss’s ear, and she whipped her head about to look at him, cracking him across the nose. The expression in her eyes was fractured, shards of everything in there: guilt, pain, fear of him, terror of dying, but he told himself he could read something else there that looked on him more kindly. If the Wasps want her dead, we need her alive. But that was a fiction for the report he would have to make some day. I want her alive was the whole truth.

  ‘Lissart!’ the Wasp yelled, voice surprisingly high, and then went off in the wrong direction, blind as all his kind at night. Laszlo took his chance and bundled Liss – Lissart? – up in his arms. He had to take his hand from her mouth to do it, but there was no screaming, only a gasping, retching sound that made him sick to the stomach.

  She got out his name somewhere in there, he was sure of it.

  He ran, wings flashing in and out as needed to keep himself on his feet. She was a dead weight in his arms, but he was pelting downhill for the docks and for an old deck surgeon whose acquaintance he had made. Halfway there, Lissart got an arm about his neck, strength enough still to hold on to him, however weakly. Her eyes were open, locked on his face.

  He got into sight of the bay, and skidded to a painful halt in spite of himself. ‘Oh mother,’ he heard himself say.

  The docks were a chaos of running and shouting – militia and Solarnese citizens dashing back and forth without plan. The waters of the Exalsee beyond held a host of sails, tall and pale in the moonlight. It was not the armada that had recently come against Collegium, but Laszlo knew a Spider-kinden fleet when he saw one.

  Breighl was right; it’s not the Wasps . . .

  Two of the ships were already moored, with Spider soldiers spilling unopposed onto the quays with bows and spears. Laszlo had no time for any of it. His feet took up again towards the surgeon’s door, even though the old Bee-kinden might already have fled. He had no other option just now. Lissart laughed then, a wrenched and strangled sound. She clutched him tight with one arm, but the other pointed up and past his shoulder. Even as she did, he registered the sound: distant engines coming closer, and that would awake Solarno far quicker than any panic at the docks.

  He got to the surgeon’s door and kicked at it furiously, until the squat, dark old mariner threw it open, an axe in one hand to repel boarders, To his credit, despite the fleet, despite what else was surely coming, when he saw Lissart he took her from Laszlo with practised care and carried her inside.

  Only then did Laszlo turn. The Wasp orthopters were hard to see as they scattered across the sky over Solarno, but they were escorting a handful of airships which caught the moonlight well enough. There were some Solarnese fliers up there too, the free pilots, but with the Firebugs burning there would be no unified civic response. The Solarnese government was no doubt already breaking into arguing factions even as their city was invaded from north and south. Solarno was about to become a battleground.

  Fourteen

  General Brugan was afraid.

  The world feared the Empire, and the Empire feared the Rekef, which in turn feared its lord and master, Brugan himself. His subordinates would not have believed that he himself might twitch and turn through sleepless nights, or wake suddenly from terrible, all-too-plausible dreams. General Brugan feared, too, and what he was afraid of was the Empress.

  And yet he was drawn to her – fear becoming somehow an attracting quality. She was beautiful, and she had a fire no other woman possessed, and there were moments, gazing on her in daylight, when he loved her so much that he would give himself up to that fire and burn on it, agony and ecstasy together.

  He had made her, he knew. He had been the first man of any influence to cast his lot behind her treasonous campaign. When she had assumed the throne, it had been by his hand, and he had looked to be rewarded.

  The Empire had never been ruled by a woman before – she had needed a man beside her to reassure the traditionalists. In the end she had taken a regent, a former Rekef man, and former traitor, Thalric by name. The wretch had taken the place that Brugan had prepared for himself, but at the time Brugan had told himself that there was nevertheless time for all things to come to pass.

  Thalric had gone from puppet – token male to sit beside the
throne – to a companion of the Imperial bedchamber, and only through his own reaction to that knowledge had Brugan realized that his feelings towards Empress Seda were more than simply ambitious. He discovered that his intention to control the Empress had become one of possessing her. Then Thalric had deserted again during the Rekef operation in Khanaphes, which was a disappointment to Brugan only because of the effort he himself had invested in seeing Thalric left dead and buried under the ruin of an entire civilization. Still, with the upstart bastard out of the way, he had thought perhaps the Empress would take a more suitable partner.

  By then, Seda’s charm and acumen had worked sufficient wonders to ensure that she no longer needed a token regent, but her hungers were no less fierce, and Brugan could still recall the cold satisfaction he had felt when she had invited him into her bed.

  Could still recall . . . or perhaps say: Was unable to forget.

  He lived two separate lives now. He was an Apt man, rational and sensible, who during the day could look at Seda and know that all he was seeing was her extraordinary charisma, her force of personality that twisted people around to her way of thinking. What else could it be? She was simply a natural leader, gifted beyond her years, well educated and advised.

  After dark, however, the dreadful certainty would grow on him that, yes, she was all these things but she was more. Then she would send for him, and his feet would walk him to the Imperial chambers, desire and hunger making a slave of him. He would drink with her, the salt red wine, and in the antechamber would lie the ruin of some slave or servant, or some courtier who had misspoken or plotted against the crown. He had stopped looking now, since the first time he had recognized a victim. He was a general of the Rekef, inured to death and torture, but the expressions on those exsanguinated faces, the contortions of their pale limbs, affected him somewhere subconscious and primal. There had been a time when his kinden had lived in huts and feared the dark for good reason.

  But he needed her, though. It was not love any more. His loins and his heart were chained to her, leaping at her least command. The base man in him was enslaved, while the Rekef general railed. He could not live in such a manner. He needed to redress the balance in their relationship and – just as to get rid of Thalric he had engineered the sacking of a city – so, to take back the reins of his private life, he needed to recreate the Empire’s hierarchy with himself at the top, the power behind the throne, just as it always should have been.

  There were too many close to the throne now who were beyond his influence. The Empress chose advisers that Brugan did not know, or she bought loyalty with favour and promotions, or sought the counsel of foreigners such as all those Moths and other mystic rabble who had become so common at court recently. Brugan had been elbowed further and further away from the commanding position he had intended for himself.

  He had the Rekef, though, and he had others too, who felt they were owed more for the work they had put into bringing Seda’s Empire about. This would be no different from any other large-scale intrigue he had been involved in. Had he not masterminded her accession to the throne? Taking the substance of her power from her should be easier than plotting in the shadow of her paranoid brother.

  Whenever he made such promises to himself, something twisted inside him and fear roamed the hinterlands of his mind, raising its jaws to the moon and rattling its wings. Seda was not just a sharp young girl, it howled. She knew things, saw things, She had a power over people – himself included – that was neither Art nor skill but something else. The fact that she drank blood, he could have put down to the casual cruelty appropriate to the Imperial throne, could perhaps even have made of it a virtue, symbolic of the Empire’s own thirst for conquest. Some traitor part of his mind whispered that it was no mere whim of hers, or even a simple crazed need – a little madness did not necessarily make for a worse Empress – and that she drank blood because it gave her power somehow, that it fuelled her as surely as Nemean mineral oil fuelled the Air Corps’ new orthopters.

  But Brugan was a rational man, believing in the physical world, and when he turned the lamps up high he could banish such subversive speculation and continue drawing up his list of who must disappear, who must see the inside of an interrogation room before being politely asked to change their allegiance, or who must be awarded a key post. It was a simple thing for a man of his abilities to turn poacher and devise just the sort of treason the Rekef Inlander was supposed to guard against.

  Tonight. It must start tonight. She had not called for him, and the lamps were bright, and he had sent out a summons to those that he considered his allies, men who would cling to the hem of his cloak as he elevated himself, who were wronged or ambitious or just plain greedy, but men who, most of all, were his.

  It held an odd mirror to the gathering that the Empress had presided over earlier, such was Esmail’s first impression. Many of the faces were the same: there was General Brugan, and there, as if to balance Harvang’s gross physicality, was the pinpoint neatness of Colonel Vecter, who had also brought along a couple of aides. Knowles Bellowern of the Consortium was there, too, the only non-Wasp and looking wholly unsettled by the business, whatever was going on. There was no Colonel Lien of the Engineers, no army generals – they were out in the field after all – but another half-dozen had taken their place, men younger than Brugan but old enough to have chosen a side and invested their power in a particular way of life. Ostrec’s memories allowed Esmail to recognize many of them by sight: Rekef mostly, but with a couple from the Consortium and one who was a steward at the palace.

  They took their places soberly. Brugan had not called them to his offices within the palace, the heart of the Rekef, but to this anonymous townhouse owned by some mid-ranking Wasp family who were conveniently absent. The visitors had retired to one of the inner rooms and, at Brugan’s nod, the windows had been twice covered, with shutters and then with felt, so that the room became close and uncomfortable and dark.

  Esmail was not concerned about the dark. From behind Ostrec’s blank face he was able to read a great deal from those around him. Harvang was chewing at something distractedly, for comfort more than sustenance. Vecter cleaned his spectacles briskly, the small, sure movements of his hands revealing his anxiety. People shuffled, glanced at the door or at each other. Knowles Bellowern had a pipe in his hand, the scent of tallum pollen fragrant from it, but he kept it unlit.

  Ostrec would have felt alarmed, Esmail discovered. He would have shown none of it, but Harvang’s deputy had been a sharp enough man to know that this gathering, in this place, portended nothing good. Oh, opportunity perhaps, but these men were not natural allies, and Ostrec was not a major player himself. All too easy to be crushed between the wheels.

  ‘You know me,’ Brugan began. ‘My interests are the Empire’s interests. I am the benchmark of loyalty, the defender of the throne. As my predecessor, Rekef himself, served the first Emperor, so I have served the third, and now I serve our first Empress.’ He was not looking at any of them directly, but staring down at the floor. Esmail exhumed Ostrec’s memories and saw that this was not the fierce and forthright Brugan that the man remembered.

  ‘I have sounded you all out at one time or another,’ the Rekef general continued quietly. ‘You may not have realized it. A conversation, hidden watchers, an investigation into your finances or your associations. No man reaches your high stations without being vetted, and you all know people who failed that test. It is my job, as leader of the Rekef Inlander, to ensure the purity of purpose of those in office. The Empire must be led by those who will best serve it.’

  He was skirting the point, and they all knew it. Looking covertly from face to face, Esmail saw that most of them there knew already what that point would be. The tension between the men gathered there was almost audible.

  ‘Empress Seda, the only living kin of our beloved Emperor Alvdan the Second, is but a girl,’ Brugan said softly. ‘She has proved that she is fit to rule, and there is none left
who denies her that. Yet still she may be misled. She may fall into undesirable company, give her ear to those who do not have her best interests at heart. We are patriots; we know full well the demands of Empire. When we see foreigners and slaves gain influence with the very crown and forget their place, then does it not befit us to act? It does.’ His answer to his own rhetoric came slightly too quickly, as if fearing a dissenting voice. ‘I have brought you here tonight because I trust you to do what is right. The Empress must be protected.’ On that word, something almost broke in his voice, and everyone there contrived to ignore it.

  What does he know? For it was evident that something had dented Brugan’s Apt composure sufficiently hard that he could no longer entirely blot out the truth. This was no mere coup, therefore. This was the head of the Rekef trying to master and control something he could not understand. And yet, and yet . . . hearing Brugan talk, Esmail could sense the huge contradictions in the man, his thoughts, his feelings.

  Anyone signing up on this ship will regret the voyage, he considered, and it was only a shame that he must play Ostrec’s role here, and become a part of this business for mean ambition. Looking about the room he confirmed that, Brugan’s lofty words aside, every man there was considering how he himself might best profit from the Empire, most especially an Empire where Seda’s power was considerably curtailed.

  ‘There are two paired weapons available to us,’ Brugan elaborated. ‘It is our duty to remove those close to the throne who are unfit to sully it with their touch. I have some names for the list, and I have no doubt that each of you may have more.’ The first incentive to treason: a free hand to dispose of their rivals, or at least those rivals not present in this room. ‘At the same time,’ Brugan went on, ‘we will install our own people close to the Empress: as her counsellors, in her retinue of servants, everywhere she goes. When she seeks advice and aid, it must be to us she turns, no matter whose face she finds. We are the heart of the Empire, after all. Where will she find sounder counsel than ours?’