The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘The Moth-kinden favour it.’

  ‘The Apt came with their revolutions,’ Seda murmured. ‘Uprisings in Pathis, in Myna. But it must be more than that. The Masters had already sealed themselves away in Khanaphes long before, and there was never a Commonweal revolution. The Spiders still hold their lands in thrall, but mostly without magic. Perhaps the Apt could take control of their own destiny because magic was not what it had once been, even then. And now . . .’ She hissed through her teeth. ‘But there are places where it has clung on, Gjegevey. We know there are. The power of the Darakyon touched me. It set me on this path, but it’s gone now, nothing but a stand of twisted trees. I refuse to believe that there is nowhere else.’

  ‘The Darakyon was an evil place, Majesty,’ Gjegevey whispered.

  She gave him a level look. ‘Evil is a word for those we wish our histories to damn. And, besides, where are all the magical places of sweetness and light, old man? Gone, if they were ever there. It would seem that which you term evil has at least one virtue: it abides.’ She closed her eyes briefly. ‘I have lived most of my life in fear. You know that. Now there is some small chance this unlooked for gift will give me control of my own destiny. What is morality against that?’

  ‘And the destiny of the Empire?’ he asked cautiously. ‘Or just your own?’

  ‘Do you honestly think they are not one and the same? Any other theories, old man?’

  She did not expect any, so he surprised her by saying, ‘Just the one: that the Inapt, ah, destroyed themselves.’

  She stared down at the page before her, with its dense recitals. ‘There are a lot of wars in these old histories,’ she allowed. ‘Or I thought perhaps they were not wars but some other meaning dressed up as war.’

  ‘There were a great many wars,’ Gjegevey confirmed, ‘but they were wars of a scale and a style that your kinden might not have recognized them as such. Conflicts lasting decades, centuries even. If artifice sends your wars on swift wasps’ wings, think of the old days as snails’ wars, slow grappling, histories of skirmishes and shifts, no less fierce but utterly alien. One could have lived all one’s life within such a war and not known it.’

  ‘Wars for what?’

  ‘For control. In the grand old days of magic, the elite few who understood it all fought wars to control the future, warring ideologies that spawned earthly battlefields. The Moths, they were the greatest, in the end, which is why it is their histories that you read now. By their own claims, they saved the world from a multitude of evils, so, perhaps they used up their magic, weakened themselves so greatly that their slaves could cast them off. But you know all this.’

  ‘I am not sure what I know,’ she replied, but his words crystallized a certainty within her. ‘Their great wars . . . the Coup of the Assassins, the Purge of the Mosquito-kinden.’

  ‘We record them as true.’ Gjegevey ventured a smile. ‘Of course we record many, hm, fantastical things as true, but those conflicts were real. There is evidence.’

  She remained silent a long time, after that, where he had expected her either to press for more details or to pass on to some other subject. She was not reading, either. The book beneath her hands passed unnoticed.

  At last she said, ‘Gjegevey . . . there were other conflicts.’

  ‘Many,’ he agreed, ‘and in all, ehm, probability many that even my people did not record. The past is a deep well, and in those days there were ways to drive an enemy to the very edge of oblivion, even . . .’ He stuttered to a halt, for she was staring at him intently.

  ‘Yes . . . ?’ she prompted.

  He shrugged as if to suggest he had been merely rambling, that she should pay no heed.

  Without looking, her quick hands turned pages until she was near the end of the book’s legible section. The pages there were water-marked, worm-eaten and frayed. ‘What is this, then? For, of all things in this overwritten textbook, this has no legend, no explanation. Just one symbol on a page, and yet I feel . . .’

  She stopped, for Gjegevey had drawn away. His face was always pale, and now discoloured by the lamplight, but she would swear that he had become even more ashen, and something leapt within her breast.

  ‘The Seal of the Worm,’ he whispered on the edge of hearing, as though against his will. She sensed him struggling with himself, read his mind, almost, seeing him weighing whether he could convince her that it was nothing, just some scholar’s idle sketch.

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted at last, reluctantly, ‘you have found the edges of a hole that the Moths have eaten through history in order to erase an ancient foe. But, Majesty, hear me. If you ever valued my counsel, if you ever thought me wise, look no further in that direction, I beg you.’ His voice had changed, lost its vague mannerisms, become like a sword. She actually drew back from him, from this new, changed creature.

  On the page before her, the symbol, a crooked spiral hatched with a hundred tiny lines, seemed to writhe.

  ‘I shall consider the matter,’ she said, and knew it to be at least a partial acquiescence. She closed the book. She had read enough for one day.

  Esmail planned his route carefully so that he had some distance between himself and the Imperial Museum, when he first came in sight of it, viewing it down a long gas-lit avenue lined with grand buildings, factora and offices of the various divisions of the Wasp administration. The museum itself was almost finished, its shape an awkward compromise between aesthetic and functional. The usual ziggurat shape the Wasps preferred – stone copies of the hill forts their ancestors had lived in – had been expanded outward in wings, to allow sufficient space within for all the anticipated exhibits.

  A shadow fell on his heart as he saw it. That was the only way he could describe the sensation to himself. He had not seen the building before, his path had not brought him here, but not until now did he realize that some part of him had been avoiding it.

  Power. In a city of the Apt, the sense was weak, but someone had been eroding away at the heavy hand of disbelief that held the rest of the city in thrall. Esmail was willing to bet that there would be little of the new to be found, within those walls – no complex artifice in the lighting, no machines, no Imperial efficiency – just hall after hall devoted to the subjugated, and so many of them Inapt. The vast bulk of Capitas’s populace would be blind and deaf to it, but Esmail could almost see a brooding cloud hanging over the place. Power indeed, and of no sort that was healthy to be around.

  Although, now I consider it, is any of it healthy? The Dragonfly-kinden, perhaps, but is that why their magic has atrophied so much, even by modern standards, until their great and ancient state is nothing but an eggshell ready for crushing? The Moths know: the light of the sun is for the Apt. We cannot bear its touch any more. We need doubt and fear and shadows. That is where the magic endures.

  Doubt and fear and shadows practically shrouded the Imperial Museum.

  Still, a summons from the Empress could not be ignored. I must trust to my skills. Beginning the long walk towards that looming edifice, he shored up the walls of his mind like a lord looking over the defences of his fortress, ensuring that the inner Esmail and the outer Ostrec were in alignment, so that everything he did, everything he thought, would he filtered only through that stolen persona.

  If she suspects . . . But he was counting on her not being able to apply her great power with the precision that piercing his mask would require.

  All too soon, the great doorway of the museum stood before him. There were no guards, which he knew must be unusual. He guessed that, for nights such as this when the Empress was in residence, the fewer witnesses the better.

  He shivered, but it was Ostrec’s shiver as well. A little nervousness here would not be out of place, save only that it would not simply be acting.

  He went inside.

  The entrance hall was devoted to the Wasps’ own savage past, which they had contrived to make appear as ancient as the crumbling cities of the Nem. Esmail knew well that three generations
back the Wasps had been living that savagery; indeed, they had barely tamed it even now, and the North-Empire still had its share of feuding hill tribes chafing at Capitas’s leash. Here were the ranked spears and tattered banners of the tribes that Seda’s grandfather had subjugated along the road to Empire. Here was the old armour, just leather and wood and chitin, but the banded construction presaging the shape of things to come. The impression was one of fecund and violent exuberance. The Wasps may have distanced themselves from that past, but they romanticized it as well. Stories set in those days of the fierce and the free were all the rage, just now.

  There was no sign of Seda or any other living soul, and he passed on between the serried ranks of barbarism into the next chamber. Here, guttering lamps lit the spoils of the Twelve-year War. The walls were sheathed in screens and tapestries and woven silk depicting idylls of the Commonweal, and now the hill-tribe savagery gave way to simple tragedy: ranks and ranks of enamelled armour, the chitin and fine mail of Dragonfly princes and nobles, their bright colours muted in the dim light. Here were their incomparable bows, their narrow-headed spears, their long-hafted swords. Here – and Esmail paused, despite himself, to study it – was a map of some engagement or other, with tiny wooden soldiers standing in their battalions, demonstrating the invincibility of the Imperial war machine. A plaque explained that every single figure on both sides had been carved by Commonweal slave artisans. Esmail nodded: it fitted what he understood of the Empire and its cruel poetry. It fitted the Commonweal, too, for the slaves had plainly poured into those tiny symbols of their own defeat all the artistry and skill that they would have expended on a tribute to their own lords and ladies. For a moment he had a sudden rending sense of loss, wondering where his wife was, whether their children were safe, whether he would ever see them again.

  When he looked up, she was there, the Empress Seda, flanked by two Mantis-kinden women in Imperial colours, clawed gauntlets ready to hand.

  ‘Ah, Estrec,’ she said, and the blood froze in his veins. She knows. She’s unmasked me already. For a moment he was in mad turmoil within his mind, and only the automatic mettle of his long training kept Ostrec’s face and form in place. He could not vouch for his expression, but Ostrec himself, discovered unexpectedly by his Empress in that place, would have lost something of his composure too.

  She does not know, he insisted to himself. Seda approached him, smiling, her eyes seeming to pierce wherever they rested.

  ‘You must wonder why I show such interest in you, a lowly quartermaster major,’ she murmured.

  She does not know. He read her expression, as much as he dared, like stealing glimpses at the sun. If she was playing a double game, he could see none of it there. Sweating despite the cool of the night, he forced himself back into his role. And Ostrec would react how . . . ?

  Ostrec would assume she had called him here because he was young and handsome and strong. The real Ostrec saw women as having a simple outlook on the world. He would look at Seda and smile, oblivious to all the occult strength that Esmail could feel radiating from her.

  Esmail produced that same smile: lean, a little predatory and horribly out of place. It was the hardest thing he had done.

  ‘You interest me, Ostrec,’ she told him, using the right name this time, and he saw that she did not realize how she had misspoken before. It was no simple mistake, though. He was willing to bet that Seda did not make simple mistakes. To his awe and horror, he realized that some deep part of her, some subconscious monitor, really had pierced his disguise and seen him, even somehow divined his name. Give Seda another few years and she would learn to listen to that inner voice, and be even more dangerous and indomitable than she already was. For now, though, a lifetime of being deaf and blind to the magical world still chained her. For now.

  And this is why the Moths sent me to kill her now.

  ‘I am honoured,’ he let Ostrec reply. ‘Your Majesty, tell me what I might to do please you.’ Esmail was calmer now, feeling out the limits of his situation, feeling three layers of Ostrec rub against one another inside his mind: the man’s private thoughts, the pawn in Brugan’s covert game and the public face that he was projecting to Seda.

  ‘I collect people who interest me,’ she told him, and abruptly turned away, not at all the reaction Ostrec had been expecting, ‘if they prove to be truly interesting, if they do not disappoint.’ She was striding off, away from the relics of the Twelve-year War, her bodyguards gliding silently along with her. Esmail started Ostrec’s feet on the same path, managing the hesitation and little stumble that he knew the man would make after being so wrong-footed.

  The Empress paused a moment, gazing into a side-chamber as he caught her up. He risked a glance and saw a work in progress, statues still in open crates and great slabs of stone faced with hundreds of little sigils. Khanaphes, he realized. Of course, the Empire had added the ancient city to its holdings recently, and here were the spoils already. This museum was the Empire in miniature, a tally of its conquests.

  ‘What do you see?’ Seda asked him. ‘What does Khanaphes mean to you, Ostrec?’

  ‘Your latest triumph,’ he hazarded, but he felt the ground beneath his feet suddenly uncertain. If they do not disappoint, she had said, and he felt on the verge of disappointing her. We come back to this: Why Ostrec? What has she seen in him, to summon him here?

  ‘Does Khanaphes speak to you?’ she asked him. ‘What does it say?’

  Again Ostrec’s glib answer welled up within him, but he fought it down, very conscious that those would be the wrong words. She collects people who interest her. What most interests the Empress of the Wasps these days?

  Magic . . .

  Esmail felt something lurch within him, his balance momentarily failing. ‘I feel power,’ he said, conscious that his chance to answer had almost passed. ‘Old power, but power nonetheless. I cannot explain it.’ It was not what Ostrec would have said. He was improvising, because what Seda had seen within Ostrec was Esmail.

  His skills hid him well. Even a skilled Skryre, if caught unawares, might not be able to penetrate his guises. Still, there was a taint about him, the inescapable bleedings of magic. Seda had looked on Ostrec and seen a dimension to him that normal Wasp-kinden lacked. He was aware that he was on very dangerous ground now. He had no idea what a woman in her position might do with the man she took him for. There must be a few Wasps around with a little of the old blood in them, from half-breedings generations back, or perhaps even survivals from ancient days when the Wasps, too, were Inapt and had some rough type of magician amongst them. From her manner he guessed now that she had gone through this charade before. What had been the outcome? Or had they all disappointed her before? Was all this just some elaborate prequel to a bloodletting?

  She led him on, and they continued through all the memorabilia of the Empire’s triumphs, all the detritus of its subject races: tapestries, statues, pottery and art, and always the arms and armour of the defeated, still holed and dented and scorched where the Wasp-kinden had enforced their superiority.

  When she stopped he had slowed already, because ahead he sensed what must be her destination. Again he wondered that there could be such power at all, here within the city of the Apt, but he knew it was solely through Seda’s own doing, and that she must feed it regularly. The sense of the place ahead was not strong in comparison with the sources of the Moth-kinden power he was used to, but it was flowering in such hostile soil here. Its character was disconcerting and unwholesome, a mingling of the shadow-stuff the Moths liked with something even darker. He thought he could scent the faint copper smell of blood upon the air.

  Seeing him react, Seda smiled. ‘And they said you were cocky,’ she murmured.

  He had a stab of panic, thinking that he had dropped his mask somehow, but he saw that his hesitation and solemnity here were exactly what she would expect of Ostrec – if Ostrec had been what she took him for. In responding as he was, he was confirming himself as an object of intere
st rather than a disappointment.

  She turned, and stepped into the next hall, past a curtain that one of her guard had drawn aside. For a moment his instincts warred within him: he knew he must not step within, and yet he knew that it was death to turn aside now, a more certain death but perhaps a cleaner one.

  But he wanted to know. He wanted to see. He stepped inside.

  The walls of the small, windowless chamber had been covered with dead vines and branches, nailed up everywhere to form an ersatz grove, a cage of withered wood. A few dim lanterns hidden amongst the twisted, interlacing boughs provided the only light Seda allowed within.

  No arms and armour here, no exhibits, nothing for public edification. Instead there was only one piece of history in the room, and it was not the Empire’s. Eight feet tall and formed of rotting, insect-infested wood, it was an effigy, a crude mantis shape: a single warped upright reaching almost to the ceiling, with two crooked arms. Esmail knew the pattern well. Wherever the Mantis-kinden made their homes, somewhere, in the darkest inner glade furthest from foreign eyes, there would be some nasty piece of work like this. Where Seda might have acquired such a ritual figure, he did not know, but he knew that the ancient Mantis traditions fed them with death and blood, and those traditions had not been overly encouraged by that race’s Moth masters. It would seem that Seda had resurrected the practice, and from that he guessed that she had probably secured the loyalty of her bodyguards until death and perhaps beyond.

  Then there was movement all around. The criss-crossing of the branches, the overwhelming presence of the idol, had blinded him to the fact that the room was already occupied.

  Conspirators, he thought immediately, contrasting them with Brugan’s fellow plotters, but he knew in a moment there was a better word. There were four of them here, all Wasp-kinden men and nothing special – none of them looked like high-ranking officers, although perhaps not simple soldiers either. He mentally labelled them – slaver, two sergeants and a Consortium clerk – without much justification.