The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She woke into rage and frustration yet again. I will destroy you! But there was a tinge of fear as well. She was the Empress of all the Wasps, and she was crowned the heir to yesterday’s lost magic but, so long as she must share the throne, she could not be easy in her mind, and every triumph, every victory would taste like ashes. She had lived in fear most of her life, in the shadow of her vengeful, petty-minded brother, but now she understood the fear that he himself had lived in, the power of his office exposing him to threats that would pass over the head of a lesser man.

  I will not become Alvdan. And yet one ordinary Beetle-kinden girl, a child of wretched Collegium, was haunting her.

  When Seda had been gifted – or cursed – with this inheritance, so too had this Cheerwell Maker. When Seda had gone to the ancient seat of power in Khanaphes and bullied the Masters there into making her their heir, so too had the ignorant, stupid girl also been crowned. Too late Seda had realized what she had created: an equal, an opposite, an enemy. All the power that she had worked so hard for had been divided between her and this witless Beetle. However great Seda had become, so too had Cheerwell Maker, if she only understood it. And Seda knew that the other girl would understand all too soon.

  I tried to kill her. She should be dead. Yet the girl lived, and Seda felt her like a thorn, every minute. Worse, the Beetle was even now in the Commonweal, where surely magicians lived who would be teaching her their secrets, and although the Beetle had been made Seda’s peer, any new power she coaxed from the Dragonflies would make her stronger.

  There was only one way out now: Seda must unearth powers that the girl had no claim to. I would rip out the heart of history if it would but serve me.

  One of the old counterproductive superstitions that could still be found sometimes in some out-of-the-way parts of the Empire was the belief that, when twins were born, their father must kill one soon after the birth or else, when grown, each would destroy the other, neither able to countenance the existence of so close a mirror to themselves. It was a foolish belief, and the practice had been outlawed on pain of death – why deny the Empire its soldiers, after all? – but Seda understood it now. Even if the Beetle girl bore her no ill will, even if she went away and never returned to trouble Seda’s ambitions, the simple knowledge that there existed that other self, that counterpart, was to her unbearable.

  I will never be free of her unless I destroy her, and to destroy her I must acquire strength.

  Where is Gjegevey?

  She kicked her way out of bed angrily, shouting for the servants, who entered reluctantly. Being a body servant to Empress Seda was an uncertain prospect. To the cringing women who dared present themselves, Seda shouted, ‘Get me Gjegevey, now!’ and they rushed out, grateful for an errand that took them away from their mistress almost immediately.

  Seda stood naked in the centre of her bedchamber, quivering slightly from the dregs of the terror and revulsion the dream had left her with.

  Something scraped – the husk of a metal sound seeming to come from a greater distance than her bedchamber would allow. When she looked round, an armoured figure stood statue-still in one corner, and she could not have said whether he was there before or not. Certainly, the servants had not noted him, but then Tisamon was very good at passing unseen, and his armour was no hindrance. The armour was him, as much the focus of his physical presence as anything else.

  ‘So, you’re back,’ she said, her tone carefully casual. ‘I trust General Roder appreciated your assistance.’

  I want to kill him, came the stony rattle of his voice, more felt than heard.

  ‘Of course you do. Sometimes I envy how simple your desires are, how easily satisfied. She stepped towards him like a dancer, feeling the chill of his dead eyes on her bare skin. ‘You would kill us all – all of my kinden – I know.’ For in life he had hated Wasps, which made her taming of him all the sweeter.

  Not you. Never you. She stood well within his reach now, and his bladed gauntlet was donned. A single swift strike, far faster than she could react to, and she would follow her brother and Uctebri into the final dark. She reached out and touched the elegant lines of his mail, following the contours of his carapace. Oh, he was bound to her, and eagerly he followed her commands, but it was not a soldier’s loyalty that moved him, nor a slavish obedience, but something stronger and weaker than either. The closest word language had for it was love, but what could such a dreadful thing as this revenant make of that idea? She had bound him by holding his blade that was a part of him through the mysteries of the Weaponsmasters. She had bound him by feeding him blood, and she continued to do so, to keep him strong and close. All that was just the foundation, though, preliminaries that had allowed her to open negotiations with his will. She had bound him after that with promises to the heart of his Inapt nature – Inapt by kinden, and Inapt by his very existence now – that she and only she might bring back the old days when magic, and his people, were strong.

  Greatest of all, though, she had bound him by understanding the razor edges of his true nature, seeing where they would bend and twist until he was a weapon that would fit her hand only. Passion and death made up the essence of Tisamon. He had been a hero fit for all the old Mantis romances, tragic and doomed and bloody-handed. So it was that what he felt for her was something like love and, if she handled him poorly, if she took a false step in toying with his bitter feelings, he might kill her despite – because of – all the chains of magic that linked them.

  And if I take him to my bed? The thought was irresistible. It was possible, she suspected, but the old stories were full of those who had been lured to lie with a ghost, and had found only death. The fools in the tales were all in love themselves, though, and Seda had no such vulnerability. The thought only excited her, and it would bind the revenant to her all the more thoroughly, for good or for ill.

  She nearly gave in to the temptation there and then, because there was a challenge that she could meet with her eyes open – not like the sly, sneaking threat that the Beetle girl posed. But, no, she had summoned Gjegevey, after all, and if the old man walked in on that it might kill him. She smirked at the thought, for a moment just a Wasp girl of good family treasuring a risqué thought. Then her main purpose returned to her, the lurking presence of the other, and her need to secure some source of strength that Cheerwell Maker could not touch. Gjegevey was being coy with her, she knew, holding back information because he thought he knew what was best for her. She would have to disabuse him of that notion.

  If only she could simply send Tisamon after the wretched Beetle girl, but she knew that would only lose her his services, for the Maker girl had already driven off the revenant before. Unless Seda was close to prevent it, she would do so again, or banish him, or even wrest control of him from Seda’s hands. Such tools as the Mantis ghost were best used against more mundane enemies. Any work of magic was vulnerable to a magician, just as (she supposed) any mechanical weapon would fall prey to the enemy’s artificers, could they but get hold of it.

  There was an almost inaudible scratch at the door, Gjegevey announcing his presence. She shrugged into a robe to spare his stammers, and called for him to enter.

  He shuffled in, hunched and grey-skinned, old but sufficiently distant from Wasp-kinden humanity that it was impossible to date him. He wore a robe of Imperial hues today, halved black and gold like an Auxillian’s uniform.

  ‘It’s time,’ she told him, as soon as he had closed the door behind him.

  ‘Ah, Majesty?’ Always the vague old man, but she had known him too long to be fooled. He was as keen as a knife behind the wrinkles and the rheumy eyes.

  ‘The Seal of the Worm, you called it,’ she told him, ‘and to me that said power. Something the Moths kept to themselves, all those years ago, almost completely excised from those writings that they let out into the wider world. They didn’t think that my people would conquer their roost at Tharn, though, and seize some few of their precious scrolls. The Seal of the
Worm, Gjegevey.’ Her hand traced the spiral that she remembered, crooking into a claw for the tridentine blot that had formed the centrepiece.

  The old man was silent for a moment, still only a step inside the door. ‘Majesty,’ he said at last, his voice soft and steady, ‘you know I am your loyal servant, and have been for perhaps longer than any other. Trust my wisdom on this: you do not want to meddle with it. There is no victory to be had over the Worm. There will be other secrets, but not this one. Trust me, your Majesty.’

  Seda nodded as though considering this, and then: ‘Kill him,’ she said and, without pausing for breath, ‘Stop!’

  In that eyeblink Tisamon had travelled almost all the way across the room towards Gjegevey, claw upraised. Her last word brought the Mantis to a halt perhaps a foot beyond striking distance. Seda watched Gjegevey’s face, the eyes gone wide, the jaw slack, staring at the tip of Tisamon’s metal claw glinting in the morning light. Not so old, then, that death does not hold a little terror for him. Well, it was a lesson he had to learn.

  ‘I value you, old man,’ Seda said lightly. ‘You were my friend when I had no friends. You say rightly that you were my first supporter. I treasure your advice and your company, but you must never forget,’ and now the steel entered her tone, ‘you are my servant, my slave if I decided to enforce that status upon you, and I am the Empress of all the Wasps. I will brook no divided loyalties, even if that other mistress you serve is only your idea of what is best for me. Counsel me, advise me, but do not take me for a child. Do not seek to protect me from the world, and most certainly do not seek to protect it from me. Do you understand?’

  He nodded, swallowing. ‘I congratulate your Majesty on your, ah, reflexes,’ he murmured, just a dry whisper, no doubt calculating what a small fraction of a second’s delay in her countermanding order would have accomplished. Tisamon had not moved throughout the exchange.

  ‘There was a war,’ she prompted him. ‘I have gleaned that much. But there were many wars, and they blur into one another. Mosquitos, Assassin Bugs, Spiders – the Moths were always fighting someone. And they never simply write as historians. Everything is metaphor. Except that I can see the gap, the hole they have made, as they censored their own past. The Seal of the Worm is all that is left.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gjegevey agreed heavily. ‘The Seal of the Worm is all that is left.’ He gave the words such strange weight that Seda paused for a moment, abandoning her rhetoric.

  ‘When we were in Khanaphes together, I saw the embassies there. The ancient Masters had entertained ambassadors from all the great powers of their day, and their Beetle servants had maintained that lost past even to the present day.’

  Gjegevey nodded glumly, and his eyes flicked to the uplifted blade again. ‘Majesty, may I, ah . . .’

  ‘Stand down, Tisamon.’

  There was a notable moment of reluctance before the armoured figure lowered its arm and stood back, freezing once again into that brooding Mantis stillness. She would have to have a slave or a prisoner brought up, she knew, for he hated being denied his ration of blood.

  ‘I saw statues of Moths there,’ Seda continued. ‘Spiders, Dragonflies, Mantis-kinden even. And your people, Gjegevey, ranked as equals. My own kinden were housed in a building that had two of your cousins displayed in stone at the door, and I was given to understand that this was because, when those likenesses were carved, the lands that would become my Empire were yours. Is this true?’

  Again that mournful nod and, when her expression hinted at exasperation, he spoke. ‘You have guessed it all or, hm, most of it, I think. Yes, my people had their great days. Yes, there was a, mn, a war that came that we could not stay out of. Yes, after that war we were no longer great, nor have we, ah, ever been so again. The will to change the world was gone from us, hm, after that. We had used it all up in the fight against the Worm.’

  ‘Worm-kinden,’ she mocked.

  ‘Ah, no, you know better than that, from your stolen Moth scrolls, from your deciphering of their writings. But the term, the insult, was how they were known from the war, for to the Moths there was ever power in names.’

  ‘Gjegevey, the Moths had many enemies,’ she told him, and his long face twisted, foreseeing what was coming. ‘The Mosquitos were the greatest threat to their power that they write openly of – or at least as openly as they ever do – and I see that conflict was underway before this . . . before whatever it was that resulted in the Seal of the Worm. But your own people . . . ?’

  ‘No,’ Gjegevey whispered, ‘we took no part.’

  ‘The blood-drinkers, Gjegevey, practitioners of a magic that you yourself have decried. I don’t hold the Moths out as paragons of virtue, but surely . . .’ She was watching him through narrowed eyes.

  ‘We took no part,’ he repeated.

  ‘So what was it that brought your . . . warriors? Did your people even possess such? What brought you into the war against the Worm?’

  ‘Yes, we had warriors,’ Gjegevey murmured, so quietly that she could barely hear. ‘Our, hm, our Sentinels had mail that was the envy of the world, and we fought. You do not believe me, with only my example before you, but we fought.’ Before she could press her questions, he looked up, eyes abruptly sharp. ‘Would you see, Majesty?’

  She stared at him, and Tisamon quivered slightly, responding to her frustration.

  ‘The Seal of the Worm, Majesty,’ Gjegevey went on, a strange tone to his voice. ‘Or one of them. I can take you to it.’

  To Seda it always seemed that for her to leave Capitas was like having to set in motion an avalanche. Her word was law, her mere whim the driving force behind all the lives around her, but even she could not make these things happen fast. The Imperial bureaucracy gathered pace around her, sending advance scouts and guards, forming her entourage, requisitioning vehicles and in all other ways ensuring that her course was as smooth as possible, if not as swift.

  At the edge of her notice was the fact that many of the faces – those that shuffled the deck of her staff and set out the new patterns required to get her where she wanted to go – had changed recently. The palace seemed to have suffered some subtle catastrophe, and the men brought in to replace the fallen or lost all had a certain look, almost a taste to them.

  But she told herself she would come back to that. She would first see what it was that Gjegevey wished to show her, and she would judge him on it, and if this escapade turned out to be one more attempt merely to turn her aside, then she would deal with the old man once and for all. Not without regret, it was true, but she could not allow herself to be manipulated, not any more. She had lived through enough of that before her brother died.

  The salt mine at Coretsy had changed hands a few times in the Empire’s history, being sufficiently far north and east from Myna that the Beetle-kinden there had not been able to prevent the Wasps walking in and taking it over when the winds of politics and war had blown that way. Recently the Mynans had reclaimed it as part of their sovereign territory, under the acclaimed Treaty of Gold, but as the Mynans were currently not even holding on to Myna, their control over the mine had also lapsed. Still, it was a surprising and risky move for the Empress, so the number of Wasp soldiers that descended upon the tiny community outnumbered the entire local population several times over.

  Alighting from her airship – a small, swift craft that had flown with a half-dozen Spearflights to escort it – Seda saw only a handful of buildings raised in a style that recalled somewhat the low, half-underground dwellings of Bee-kinden, but with rounded roofs, so that from overhead they might be mistaken for little hills. The entry to the mine itself could have swallowed any of the buildings easily, and drew the eye away from such meagre dwellings. The gaping portal was set into a hillside, a maw twelve feet high sloping down into the earth.

  Coretsy was thronging with her soldiers, but there was a welcoming committee of locals there too, who stood out by virtue of most of them being twice as tall as the Wasps. Mole Crickets, she saw
, and should have expected as much, for they were the best miners, and the Empire shipped them in wherever hard work needed to be done. About waist level to the pitch-skinned giants clustered a knot of others, mostly Beetle-kinden, though they looked subtly different to the sophisticated Capitas breed Seda was used to seeing.

  ‘So, this is who gets condemned to the salt mines, is it?’ she asked Gjegevey as she strode out from under the airship’s shadow, the old man hobbling after her, with Tisamon’s metal silence bringing up the rear.

  ‘Ah, no, your Majesty,’ the Woodlouse-kinden corrected her almost urgently. ‘They are, hm, not slaves, nor are they sent nor forced, ah . . .’ He was losing his breath, unable to keep up with her confident stride, and she found herself suddenly face to face with the delegation of locals. There was a fraction of a pause, very obvious to her, before they knelt, not quite in unison. The Mole Crickets amongst them were still taller than her, even in obeisance.

  There was a commonality about them, she noticed, the Beetles and the Crickets. It was as though they had been glazed in the same kiln. A film of white had settled on them, into the creases of their lined faces, in the folds of their clothes. Salt.

  ‘These mines have been worked for . . . a, hm, long time. More than Myna and the, hem, Empire has claimed them over the years. Mosquitos, yes. Moth-kinden, certainly,’ Gjegevey huffed, catching up. ‘These men are of mining families; their ancestors served the Moths a thousand years ago, hm, no doubt. It is a proud calling. A mystery.’

  Seda was about to respond with some flippant rejoinder calculated to restore her place at the heart of the universe, but another look at these men gave her pause. They had a gravity, a history to them that Gjegevey’s words only scratched the surface of. Beetles and Mole Crickets, yes, but there was a scent of the Old Times about them such as she had never known from the Apt. She had thought that working in a salt mine would be a punishing experience, something that destroyed men, but the miners before her seemed hardened, preserved almost, few of them young and yet all of them strong.