The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Yes, both at the same time,’ Jodry agreed. ‘We didn’t think of that one when we gave the Aldanrael a bloody nose, eh?’

  At that point there was a polite knock, low down on the door, and then Arvi stepped in, with a brief bow towards the desk. ‘Master Drillen, I’m afraid there are visitors here for Master Maker.’

  ‘Tell them to wait,’ Stenwold growled, but Arvi, with an arch look indicating that he knew exactly who he took orders from, added, ‘It is Mistress Taki, and another gentleman who seems to have come straight from the airfield. It appears to be a matter of grave urgency.’

  The two Beetle statesmen exchanged glances, the tension in the room tightening by another twist.

  ‘Send them in,’ Jodry decided, and Arvi bowed again, and backed out.

  ‘You’ve had no word, of course, from your fellow over Exalsee ways?’ Jodry enquired lightly.

  Stenwold shook his head, tight-lipped. Word from Laszlo was long overdue.

  Arvi reappeared, magically bearing a tray with a fresh bottle of Jodry’s favourite vintage, together with an extra pair of bowls. He nearly lost the lot when Taki pushed in past him, and behind her came the awkward figure of a short, pasty-faced halfbreed.

  ‘This here’s Master Taxus,’ Taki announced to the room in general. She took a full bowl when offered it, explaining, ‘He’s got a message, top-secret urgent kind of business,’ and then she downed the wine in one gulp, apparently washing her hands of the matter.

  Stenwold eyed the newcomer, who stared balefully at him, and at practically everything else. ‘Word from Tark?’ he hazarded.

  The halfbreed nodded, reaching into his knee-length flying coat and bringing out a creased letter, folded and sealed in black. ‘All yours,’ he grunted.

  If you’ve come from Tark, tell me . . . But the letter was being thrust into Stenwold’s face, and it was plain that there would be nothing further from this Taxus until it was read. It must be some word, at least, about the Exalsee situation. Tark is not so far from them. Perhaps they’re seeking our aid, for when the Empire comes . . .

  He broke the seal with his thumb and folded the out letter, revealing a missive written in an economic hand.

  Master Maker

  You will recall me from when we stood off the Vekken together, inside your city. You will recall that I took my men to Malkan’s Stand and fought the Wasps alongside the Sarnesh and your own citizens. Later, you supported my people when we returned to our city, with the occupying forces fleeing before us.

  I betray my city in writing this. You must burn it when you have read it. Only because I trust you to do so have I gone so far against my instinct as to write this report to you.

  We have received an ambassador. She came from Seldis and presented our king and his Tacticians, myself included, with new developments in foreign affairs. A confederation of Spider Aristoi houses, spearheaded by the Aldanrael, has signed treaties with the Empire for mutual defence, she said. As a result of this, an Imperial army was already marching west towards my city. We were not their target, you understand. We were simply in the way, and reckoned by the Wasps as hostile. War was thus upon us.

  Our own orthopter scouts confirmed all she said. The Wasps were indeed coming, and with allies not marching under the black and gold. The Spider ambassador then made us what she called an offer and what I call an ultimatum.

  Master Maker, the city-state of Tark has yet to recover from the damage the Empire inflicted in its conquest during the last war. Much of our city is not even rebuilt. Our armies are under strength, and we have no stores, no resources.

  I am therefore bitterly sorry to tell you that the city-state of Tark has surrendered its independence. We have sworn ourselves as a satrapy to the Spiderlands. Spider-kinden Aristoi are already within our walls, quietly taking the reins whilst assuring us that nothing will change. The army that is now marching on your city will march straight past ours, and we will not raise a single blade against them. Our need to survive makes ingrates of us, and slaves also, I fear.

  I am sorry, Master Maker, that Tark has repaid you poorly for your support. My people must live. If I did not remember you so much as a friend, I could not even have gone against my people so far as to warn you. I wish that my duty was looser about my shoulders, so that I could do more.

  Forgive us.

  Parops.

  Stenwold looked up, feeling his fingers crumple and tear at the paper. Jodry was staring at him, and he wondered what expression his own face held just then.

  ‘Who’s died?’ Taki asked, not quite flippant, but not solemn either.

  ‘The Aldanrael have taken Tark,’ Stenwold said flatly. ‘This was . . . an old friend sending me all the warning he could. You’re right, they’ll be coming up the coast like before.’ He was about to say more when his eyes fell on Taxus. ‘You . . . can at least take a message back to Parops?’

  ‘Back?’ the halfbreed demanded. ‘What makes you think I’m going back?’

  ‘Well, you . . .’ Stenwold frowned. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Maker – Master Maker, if that’s how it’s done – I don’t know just what you read there, but if you know we’ve got Spiders up where it hurts, then you know Tark’s not your friend any more, and your mate that wrote that, he’s not either, as soon as the ink dried. Ordering me on this fool’s errand was the last thing he did before he became your enemy.’

  He left a pause for what he plainly considered an obvious conclusion, and none of them there managed to leap to it.

  ‘I see. I know how it is. Mixed blood, miscegenation, I know.’ He scowled at the lot of them. ‘Up here,’ and he jabbed at his temples, ‘I’m Ant-kinden. Where it counts, I’m one of them. Now, having delivered some sort of secret business into the hands of Tark’s enemies, you think I can go back there?’

  And Stenwold did understand. He had known other Ant-kinden, in his time, who had turned their backs on their cities for their cities’ own good. Sometimes being a renegade and an exile was a badge of honour. ‘Parops ordered you . . .’ he murmured.

  ‘I volunteered,’ Taxus said shortly. ‘I knew what he was about, so I agreed. It needed to be done.’ He faced them down, the Flies, the Beetles, all of them: just under five feet of pugnacious attitude.

  ‘So what will you do now?’ Stenwold asked him.

  ‘Depends. If you’ll trust me for it, I’d rather like to fight some Wasps.’

  Stenwold glanced at Taki, who was looking thoughtful.

  ‘We need every pilot we can get, Master Maker,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll make sure someone’s keeping an eye on him, but – we have so many unblooded fliers and so few who’ve actually flown for real. I saw him come in. His craft’s a piece of flotsam but he’s good with the sticks.’

  ‘He’s your responsibility,’ Stenwold told her. ‘Put him with the Mynans. Get him familiar with the Stormreaders. Soon enough you’ll all be shipping out to fight – although whether it’s north to Myna or east down the coast is anyone’s guess just now.’

  Being a parasite was a precarious existence, but Lissart, even injured, was obviously well used to it.

  She had the pair of them ensconced within the Spider-kinden baggage train the day before the combined army left Solarno, and since then she and Laszlo had almost been travelling in style, Liss spending the days rocking gently in a wagon, cushioned amidst the supplies, whilst Laszlo ran errands and faced off against other Fly-kinden.

  ‘To think that the only reason I’m in this fix is that I didn’t want to go work amongst Spiders,’ Liss remarked to him one night, as they lay close together in the wagon, surrounded by the whispering breath of sleepers. Her smile, just visible in the starlight, was wistful, so Laszlo kissed it gently. When he pulled away, her expression was the usual: happy, glad to have him there, and yet her eyes demanding to know, Are you mad? Don’t you know how untrustworthy I am yet? He knew, of course. He was in the jaws of the enemy here, a step away from exposure at every moment. Each day seemed a weir
d dream-run, sailing through treacherous waters without chart or compass, and yet he was alive and unrevealed each dusk, and so was she. The danger that she would betray him seemed only a small voice amongst all the clamouring perils that surrounded him.

  They had been aided by the Spider army’s structure, for although the lady of the Aldanrael was their leader, few of the actual soldiers were sworn to her family. Instead there seemed to be a typically piecemeal construction about the Spiderland forces: a number of mercenary bands and Satrapy forces from several different cities, together with Spider-kinden units donated by various different Aristoi houses, few of whom seemed to be actual friends of the Lady-Martial Mycella. Two figures strode through this chaos and made some kind of order from it. One was Jadis of the Melisandyr, some small family that remained closely loyal to the Aldanrael, whose force of personality and – on one occasion – lethal response to an attempted assassination, kept the other Spiders under Mycella’s orders. Lissart had determined to avoid his notice at all costs. He looked, she said, like someone who remembered the names and faces of any who served under him.

  Instead, they had inveigled their way into the camp of Morkaris, the mercenary adjutant. There was less discipline amongst the mercenaries, and also less jockeying for position between underlings. In their baggage train of clerks, entertainers, whores and factotums, individuals changed allegiance all the time, with few hard feelings. Everyone was in it for the money, and personal honour was less of a barrier. Laszlo had quickly identified a formidable Fly-kinden matron named Drasse as the woman to cosy up to, and after running errands for the woman for a day, he had found himself and Liss safely under her protection. Liss herself could charm the stripes off a Rekef colonel, when she wanted to, and soon Drasse had found her a berth on the wagon, and some medicine besides.

  The wagon was a stroke of luck they had not known that they needed, for the army was not what either of them had expected. General Tynan and the Lady-Martial Mycella were moving fast.

  The entire Imperial contingent travelled by automotive, as did their supplies, ammunition and the disassembled pieces of such machines that could not move under their own power, including considerable quantities of artillery. Wasp soldiers sat inside and on top of great wheeled transporters that belched smoke and steam, and ground up the miles mercilessly without ever tiring. Their Spider allies slowed them down a little, but far less than might be expected. The Apt amongst them, and the unluckier of the Inapt, were in similar conveyances, a motley fleet of various walkers, rollers and tracks dredged from every vehicle foundry from Chasme to Fort Tamaris. The rest had either brought mounts – an equally varied menagerie of horses, beetles, spiders and crickets – or travelled in wagons pulled almost universally by strong hauling beetles. Travelling alongside the supplies was a luxury, as it meant that Liss was not forever jostling elbows with dozens of others.

  They had swarmed past Tark not long ago, and Laszlo had only teased out the fact of the city’s surrender in retrospect: not surrender to the Empire as conquerors, but a subtler and perhaps more permanent concession. Tark had become part of the Spiderlands, its king sworn to the Aldanrael as a vassal. Already the city was crawling with Spiders taking census of Mycella’s new gains.

  Liss told him that Spider-kinden maps had always been ambitious, when it came to the Lowlands. Most of them marked out large sections of the coast as already being under Spider control. It seemed that Mycella was rapidly making that fiction a reality.

  They had coursed on south past the hills of Merro and Egel, two interlinked Fly-kinden warrens whose loyalties in the past had been a feather for every wind. Nobody had shown any great surprise when the leading families of both had assured everyone concerned that, of course, they had always been part of the Spiderlands. The richly dressed little magnates had put up a very convincing display of confusion that anyone should even have to ask. Mycella had received their declarations of fealty and loyalty with appropriate magnanimity.

  But this was different. The army had barely slowed for the Fly-kinden, but now Laszlo found himself at the coast, the dangerous forest of the Felyal at his back and looking out at the fortified island of Kes.

  The Ant-kinden of Kes had a chequered history recently. The last time the Wasps had sent an army down the coast, the Ants had declared themselves uninterested, hiding behind their walls and their fleet, and saving the Empire the considerable effort of investing their island in siege. There had been much speculation amongst the followers of the current army – the Grand Army, as the Spider contingent was calling it, at least – as to whether Kes would represent the first genuine military engagement of this war.

  The Ants had certainly not been keen to come out with either violence or diplomacy, but a telescope turned towards their island revealed that every artillery emplacement was manned, and the ships in the harbour were fully crewed.

  General Tynan had not ordered his aviators into action, as many had anticipated. Instead he had apparently decided to take defensive measures against any Kessen attack by setting up his own artillery at the cliff edge. The engines that his engineers assembled, however, were of a scale that Laszlo had never seen before, enormous leadshotters that seemed to point more at the sky than anything else. He had surmised that they would drop rocks down on any Kessen ships that sallied forth from the Ants’ harbour.

  The preliminary shelling of Kes had then lasted three hours, with the greatshotters finding their precise mark after only twenty minutes, to the great exuberance of Tynan’s Colonel Mittoc. After that point the dozen engines had spoken in a constant ground-shaking thunder, pounding solidly at their targets, cracking walls and sinking ships, launching flame-canisters over the docks and the city. The artillery on the Kessen walls had, of course, only a fraction of their range. There was no retaliation.

  After the greatshotters had finally fallen silent, though remaining a menacing silhouette on the cliff for any Kessen observer, a small vessel had put out from the harbour.

  An hour later, the entire population of Kes had understood that it, too, was become a satrapy of the Spiderlands. Spider ships were already coasting in, summoned by who knew what signal of Mycella. Soldiers and assessors were disembarking at the Kessen docks that no hostile force had ever taken.

  ‘We will come back,’ Tynan had told the Ant-kinden diplomats and, through them, their king. ‘If you rise up against our allies, then our engines shall never pause until your island city is just a stump of rock in the sea. We might have bombarded you until you begged me to send over my slavers. Think on how much more fortunate you are that the Lady Mycella wants you for her own.’

  Laszlo had found a place quite close to the negotiations. He had heard the words plainly.

  The army was moving again the very next day. The Imperial Second was known as ‘the Gears’, and General Tynan was not going to let them stop turning for anything, it appeared.

  That night, however, Laszlo had decided that the time had come to risk everything. He had not told Liss what he was doing, in case she tried to stop him, or in case she pointed out what a stupid thing he had resolved on. Instead, while she slept, he skipped out from the wagon and flew away.

  He was a sailor by training: he knew the seas and, more, he knew how sailors thought. Kes was not just a military power: it lived on trade, and there would be those sea-traders who would want to avoid the reach of the Aldanrael, for whatever reason.

  Three times he let his wings carry him off the cliff, scouring the seas for sight of a sail, battling gusting wind and sudden squalls of rain before clawing his way back to land, before his strength failed. On the third venture, pushing himself further, risking more, he was lucky. A little Beetle-kinden steamer was out there on the waves, stolidly making its way towards Kes. He dropped down on to its deck, sending its crew scrabbling for swords and crossbows, and demanded, between gasping breaths, to speak to their master.

  He had only moments to explain himself, but the news that the Aldanrael held Kes soon had th
e Collegiate skipper’s full attention. Every Beetle-kinden sailor knew how the Spiders’ tame pirates had been preying on the sea trade until Stenwold Maker put a stop to it.

  The ragged message Laszlo delivered was wild, out of order, everything he could dredge from his mind about Solarno, Tark, Merro, Kes. He could only hope that it was enough, and would reach Stenwold in time to do some good.

  Then, after a wistful thought about simply remaining on board, he took wing again and returned, dodging sentries and searchlamps, to get back to Liss’s side. He could not leave her, and there would be more to learn and to report on, before he was done.

  He slept not at all that night, holding Liss close to him, feeling the terrible fragility of her and, beyond the wagon’s cloth walls, the commensurate fragility of everything else.

  Twenty

  ‘You must do something to control your Mynans,’ Jodry said, around a mouthful of honeybread. Although most of his face was engaged in eating, his eyebrows contrived to glare at Stenwold meaningfully.

  ‘They’re not my Mynans.’ Stenwold had no appetite, as he stood by the window of Jodry’s office and stared out at the city, trying desperately to calculate rates of advance. He had received a message by ship from Laszlo, at last, which meant that he could at least assure the man’s extended family of rogues and pirates that he was still alive. The contents of the message more than offset the relief, though, for General Tynan’s Second and his Spider allies were practically tearing up the coast towards Collegium.

  At the same time, he had received word that the Eighth Army, which had taken Myna, was already past Helleron, meaning all chance of stoppering the bottle on the Empire was already gone while the Assembly debated and the Merchant Companies recruited. The Sarnesh had sent ambassadors to Collegium, but not to debate. Malkan’s Folly was manned and ready for the Empire, with a Sarnesh army already mustering in the city to mount an attack as soon as the Eighth got bogged down in besieging the fortress. The Sarnesh had told the Assembly, somewhat patronizingly, that this was a soldier’s war, and real soldiers would deal with it.