The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Show me what you have brought me here for,’ she ordered, and Gjegevey twitched and bowed, and went shuffling past the kneeling miners, with Seda in his wake and Tisamon following like a steel shadow. As her soldiers moved to accompany her, she held a hand up to halt them.

  ‘No further,’ she told them. ‘Await my return.’

  ‘But Majesty—’ began their captain.

  ‘Should I fear? These are my subjects.’ Her gesture encompassed the miners. In truth it was no great risk, for Tisamon would brook no harm to her, and she trusted his reflexes more than all the soldiers of the Empire. Still the captain hovered reluctantly, and she read strange things in the uppermost level of his mind. Not a concern for her wellbeing, not a devotion to his duty, but a need to know so that reports could be made. He was one of the new men, she realized.

  Well, your paymaster shall remain ignorant. ‘You will stay here,’ she ordered, and then turned and followed Gjegevey into the gloom of the mine.

  The lights of the Coretsy mine burned with green and blue flames leaping behind glass. Gjegevey had explained that more sophisticated lighting suffered too much from the salt that ate into machinery, so that much of the mine working was still done in ways that the Moth-kinden of old would have recognized. Even so, there were rails set into the floor, and she could hear the deep thump of pumps. Their path took them away from the sounds of machinery and picks. The miners no longer worked the gallery that Gjegevey was leading her to, nor had they for longer than any records showed.

  ‘And I can take it that it was not simply because they ran out of salt,’ Seda remarked drily.

  ‘Majesty we are, mn, surrounded by salt: the walls, the ceiling.’ He managed a wan smile. ‘Taste, if you, ah, do not believe me.’

  Two miners were waiting ahead by some manner of device, one of them a Beetle holding a spitting, greenish-purple lantern. The other, standing in his shadow, was a slender creature, pale-skinned, blank eyed: a Moth-kinden. Seda raised an eyebrow at Gjegevey, but he simply stepped onto a platform on the contraption, and she realized that it must be some manner of lift.

  When she had joined him – and reluctantly now, for this sort of travel did not suit her – the lamp was passed to Gjegevey. Once Tisamon was at her shoulder, some unseen signal sent their platform plummeting into darkness.

  ‘Yes, there are, hm, Moths here,’ his quiet voice said, as they descended. ‘They are the descendants of the overseers, the masters. They dwell entirely within the earth and seldom venture above. This is a place of power, just as you, ah, sought, but I will try to persuade you to look elsewhere. All the, hm, power that the salt and its traditions can muster is committed to what you are about to behold.’

  Without warning, the narrow shaft they had been dropping through was gone, the walls opening into a cavern so broad that the lantern light barely scraped its sides, glittering on them, dreamlike, with unnatural colours. Gjegevey held it out at the full length of his thin arm, tilted so that the light fell below them, even as the lift swung and jolted, swinging in a wide spiral as it slowed.

  Seda looked down. There, not quite directly beneath them, was what she had come to see. There was no mistaking it, for in the centre of the rock floor – no, the petrified salt of the floor – was a great disc of dark stone, easily ten feet across. It glistened as the light caught it, some peculiarity of its material making it seem wet. She saw the design that had been cut into it: a spiral of beads, each bead crossed through, and at its centre that three-pronged claw, or head.

  ‘The Seal of the Worm,’ she breathed.

  ‘None other,’ Gjegevey conceded softly. ‘Not the first and greatest of them, by any means, for that is lost to record, but a Seal nonetheless. Now, Majesty, your senses far exceed my own, both mundane and magical. You are, I am, mn, sure, quite alive to the invisible world. Would you now descend to step upon the seal?’

  Her eyes flashed. ‘Do you doubt my courage?’

  He shook his head and at that moment the lift touched down onto the greyish stone-like salt of the cavern floor. With a halting step he was out, and another had taken him past the rim of that circular carving, onto the face of the Seal itself. Looking back, he extended a hand. ‘Majesty?’

  She felt for Tisamon’s response and sensed, beyond his usual thorns of suspicion, a thread of fear. But of course Mantis-kinden had been virtually bred to defer to magicians, which was why they had been such valued servants to the Moths, and why the dead man was in her thrall now.

  And Gjegevey had dared to walk there, so her choice was either to match him or have him killed. She wondered if he appreciated the position he had put her in.

  She was ready for a great deal as she stepped onto that great coin of inscribed stone, reaching out for the lessons in magic that must surely be buried beneath it. But instead she found . . . absence, nothing, a faint aftertaste of power about the edge of the disc, but nothing more. Her reaction must have shown in her face, for Gjegevey was nodding.

  ‘The great war against the Worm was different, as you divined; different enough to draw my people into it. There were two reasons that we took up arms that single time. One was that our own kin, our cousins, were threatened, already in the Worm’s shadow, but even for that reason we might not have stirred. We were slow to anger, even when we, ah, possessed the might to make that anger felt. The truth was the nature of our enemy, or so I deduce. The war with the Worm broke us as a power in the world, humbled us and reduced us. Our records from that time and before are, hm, incomplete.’ His voice betrayed a scholar’s horror. ‘Our very culture suffered wounds; some records were lost, whilst others, hm . . . our libraries hold the knowledge but will not, ah, disclose it, the pain is still too great.’

  ‘The nature of your enemy?’ Seda echoed sceptically. ‘They were wicked magicians, like the Mosquitos? Deceivers like the Assassins? Perhaps they were simply a great and conquering empire?’ She smiled, but with a touch of steel.

  ‘We wrote that they did not seek to plunder or to conquer, nor to control, nor even achieve such mundane ends as to, ah, kill or to enslave. The Worm had one intent in those days: to make all others like itself in all ways.’

  ‘If this is a thinly veiled attack on some point of Imperial foreign policy, then you are being far too elaborate. I am quite sure your people find our Auxillians and subject cities distasteful. No doubt this is why we have an Empire and they do not.’ But Seda’s vitriol was automatic, even defensive. Something in Gjegevey’s words had struck an uneasy chord within her, some inner understanding that must have accompanied her Inaptitude.

  ‘Your slave cities cannot be compared to it,’ Gjegevey told her, somehow managing to stress that word without in the least condemning it. ‘The Worm killed and enslaved, of course, but our writings say that the Worm’s true goal was to simply, mn, overwrite all other cultures, to obliterate all trace of any otherness, and to leave behind nothing but the Worm. I cannot say how this was accomplished, save that it sufficiently provoked my kin that we went to war and paid a great cost: the very future of our kinden as a great people. The Moths and the Mosquitos recovered. We, mn, never did.’

  ‘The Mosquito-kinden fought for the Worm?’ Seda queried.

  ‘No, Majesty, they fought alongside us against it.’

  That was a sobering thought, and Seda stared down at the great stone Seal beneath her feet. It still made no sense. An age of magic such as she could barely conceive of, and a grand war between magical powers of which this was a relic, and yet . . . nothing but a vacuum, an absence beneath her.

  She felt that she was on the very brink of the truth. ‘So what happened. What do we stand on?’

  ‘This is all that is left of the Worm. When the Moths had defeated their armies and chased them back to their lairs, there was a, mn, choice. The realm of the Worm was beneath the ground, of course, and extended how far, ahm, no one could say. The Moths had no fear of darkness, but the atrocities that the Worm surely committed within its own halls gave pause
to everyone. Whatever obscenity produced that kinden and had made them into the thing we called the Worm lay within that realm, and, hm, in the end the Moths had paid too much already to relish further fight. Instead they fell back on their strengths and devised a ritual.’ The old man’s gaunt face twisted into a painful smile. ‘You know of the great rituals of the Moths, hm? You owe your current status to one of them.’

  ‘The Darakyon,’ she reflected, barely breathing the word: the power of a failed ritual that had destroyed a Mantis-kinden hold, twisted an entire forest and liberated her from her former ignorance.

  ‘Bear in mind, then, that the Darakyon was the result of a ritual undertaken after the Apt had begun to rise, in the, mm, grey dawn that was bringing an end to the Moth-kinden’s world. Back during the War of the Worm, they had real power and, at that war’s end, they had the will to use it. They could not simply destroy their enemies, or they would have done so before, and spared us all the war. But with their victories to fuel them, their foot, hm, symbolically on the neck of their enemy, they sealed up the entrances to the Worm’s underground domain, and they banished the Worm.’

  ‘There is no such underground domain,’ Seda declared, but her voice shook slightly, because, after all, they were some way underground already, and she was acutely aware that Tisamon seemed to be refusing to step on the Seal. ‘Any such realm would have been uncovered through some mine or landslip, or this Worm finding some other way out. It cannot be so easy.’

  ‘Banished,’ Gjegevey repeated. ‘Not buried but banished. All their power, their armed force, even the wretches that they fed on – the other lightless cultures of the under-earth, my own, ah, kin included – all of them, banished and gone. Sent elsewhere, forever. So, no, hem, there is no underground domain of the Worm beneath our feet, but there was, once.’

  Seda stared at him, as the greenish lantern began to gutter. ‘But . . . where?’

  ‘Away,’ was all Gjegevey would say. ‘Just as there was a world within the Shadow Box, curving away and closed off from the real world that we know, so there is a far greater world where the Worm rules, or perhaps was unthroned there by those other luckless kinden who were exiled with it through no fault of theirs. Perhaps my own, mn, kinden have risen to a greatness there that we have been, hm, denied under the sun. But I fear that, Majesty, if you were to exercise your power and somehow undo the Seal, then you would find the Worm, and nothing but the Worm, patient and bitter, and that is why I ask you to, hm, pursue this no longer, seek this no more. Let the Seal of the Worm lie. Yes, there may be, hm, power to be gleaned there, but the lessons of history are clear. Do not wake it. Do not bring it back.’

  She stared at him for a long time, still feeling that absence beneath her. His story was impossible, save that nothing else could account for that inexplicable lack that she felt, the echo of what had been. I will not fear. But she did fear – not the dread of that Beetle girl usurper or the tedious concerns of state, but a fear of the dark, and of what the dark had once hidden.

  ‘Find me something else, then,’ she snapped, and Gjegevey bobbed his head eagerly and gratefully.

  ‘I will, I will,’ he assured her. ‘Rely on me, Majesty. You shall have what you seek.’ His gratitude at having his counsel followed was abject and instant.

  Twenty-Seven

  Jodry was late, keeping them waiting almost an hour before he heaved his frame into view, sweating from the modest flight of steps leading to this out-of-the-way room in the College. Another meeting, yet another day in the attempts of the Collegiate government of academics and merchants to understand and master the war.

  The written rule was still that a full complement of appointed experts and representatives was required to carry any significant motion, but in truth that ideal had barely survived the start of the conflict. The people called to these meetings were also those whose hard work was directing the defence, and by now most simply stayed away, without even the time to read the subsequent minutes. The key decisions were passed on directly by messenger. Collegium was evolving a chain of command, whether it wanted one or not.

  So, here was Stenwold Maker, spymaster-turned-spy-hunter. Here was Janos Outwright, Chief Officer of Outwright’s Pike and Shot, and nominally in charge of the city gates. Here was Jodry Drillen, the Speaker, even now sinking into his chair, with his man Arvi bustling up behind him with a flask of something restorative. Here was a tall, lean Mantis-kinden woman, a stranger to most of them and looking as though she would rather be slitting throats than talking across a table. That she had sat waiting for an hour showed her to be something more than a savage killer, however, as did the sash she wore, displaying the wheel of Outwright’s Merchant Company.

  ‘Jodry,’ Stenwold acknowledged his arrival gratefully, then indicated the woman. ‘This is Akkestrae, the—’

  ‘She’s the spokeswoman for the Collegiate Mantids. Yes, I remember.’ Jodry knocked back the contents of the flask, coughed violently, and gasped for breath. ‘Where’s Dulci Broadster?’ referring to one of the College’s social history masters.

  ‘Too busy with the refugee business to come and actually talk about it,’ Stenwold informed him. It was a complaint more and more familiar as the war escalated. ‘It’s just us, Jodry. We’ll have to do.’

  ‘But what can we . . . ?’ Jodry looked at the walls as though expecting more advisers to creep out from between the brickwork. ‘Is anything we agree here even valid?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stenwold said tiredly. ‘I’m sure your man can round up an extra voice if you think one more would give us any authority. Or we can swear in Akkestrae for the day, if you prefer. Let’s just get this done. The Felyal, Jodry . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ Jodry took a moment to compose himself. ‘So, tell me what happened?’

  ‘From what I hear, they’re burning it, all of it,’ Stenwold said grimly. ‘What Tynan’s Second started in the last war, they’re finishing up in this. They must be losing I don’t know how many days in order to eradicate the place, burning out every hold, killing everyone they can get their hands on, sacking every logging camp and village. Perversely, that’s actually bought us time. Tactically, it seems insane, but—’

  ‘But you insist on saying that this Tynan is your enemy,’ Akkestrae interrupted. ‘The Spiders have done this. Out ancient enemies have had their revenge.’

  Normally this would be taken as the usual Mantis rhetoric, but this time her assertion seemed no more than the simple truth. The Felyal had forever been a predator on Spider shipping, a constant thorn in the side of any Spider-kinden that ventured along the Lowlands’ south coast. No more, it seemed.

  ‘The refugees are still coming in, and Janos’s people are still recording accounts,’ Stenwold added. ‘There was an attack on the Wasp camp, apparently, by just about everyone from the Felyal who would take up a sword, plus a hundred or so itinerant Mynans who somehow ended up there.’ He paused, teeth bared unhappily. ‘They were expecting help from us.’

  ‘Then they should have asked for it. How were we supposed to know?’ Jodry demanded.

  ‘Well, arguably we should have had people there at the Felyal, because we knew the Second would be marching through there,’ Stenwold said wearily. ‘However, they did ask. Moreover, they were told we were coming. They believed, when they attacked the Wasps, that Collegium would pitch in.’

  Jodry stared. ‘What?’

  ‘The messengers they sent to Collegium plainly never arrived. The messages of support they received were false. They’ve been played for fools, and so have we. Our best chance to delay the Second has been lost, and it sounds as though only Spider-kinden grudges have bought us any time at all. For now, we have hundreds of people seeking shelter within our walls – not just Mantids but all those who were making their living around the Felyal, and we’re starting to get the first runners from other villages along the way, too.’ He gestured to Akkestrae. ‘As you see, the Mantis-kinden still want to fight, and we’re convincing them to
sign up and work with us, rather than just taking off on their own the moment a Spider standard clears the horizon. But, well . . . I’ve failed the city, Jodry, starting from ten years ago. I’ve just not been ready for this.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Jodry asked, although something in his tone suggested he already knew.

  ‘Wasp spies, Jodry. I’ve been hunting Wasp spies in this city for at least ten years, and I’ve been good at it,’ Stenwold reported tiredly. ‘With that mob we cleared out when the Spider fleet was on its way, we probably did just about strip the Rekef of its presence in our city, so I thought I had achieved something. But I was never looking for Spider-kinden, agents of the Aristoi. Even when I knew that the Aldanrael had turned against us, that their agents were watching our merchantmen put out so that they could signal their pirates to attack, I never quite understood what that meant, for a war. The Spiders are subtle, and have had a long time to hide. I am doing what I can, but I don’t know if I can unearth their agents in time to do any good.’

  ‘More,’ Akkestrae snapped, ‘of those refugees you allow within your walls, some will be spies – of the Spiders perhaps, of your Empire, even. If they have no agents in your city, then hiding some Beetles or Flies within those hundreds will be easy. You are compromised by your own kindness.’

  Jodry met her glare levelly. ‘What do you expect us to do? Take these frightened, dispossessed people and put them in camps outside our walls? Only let in those with family inside the city?’

  ‘Yes,’ the Mantis said simply. ‘Better that than let your enemy in and welcome her with open arms. Trust none but my kinden. Only we can be relied on for our loyalties. Only we will not be in the pay of the enemy.’

  ‘We can’t do that.’ Jodry gave a shuddering sigh. ‘Stenwold, you’ll just have to do what you can. Put your own people in amongst the refugees. I think they’re all being sent off to the same district, to hostels there. Collegium cannot turn away from those in need, especiaslly not from our own people – but perhaps the genuine refugees can pick out the fakes; I don’t know. Just do something, Sten. Make up your lost ground.’