The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The Fly was nodding, and for a moment Stenwold thought that it might truly be that simple, but then Gizmer’s lip curled, and he said, ‘Yeah, well I can’t help noticing whose city is on fire most nights.’ When Stenwold made to speak, he butted in, ‘Oh, yes, I see what you’re after. You’re all really nice over here, and I should be glad to drop everything and come and be a part of this wonderful thing you’ve got going on here.’

  Stenwold took a breath, adopting a philosophical expression. ‘I understand you were manacled into your ship. Am I not allowed to draw conclusions?’

  ‘Was to stop me falling out, wasn’t it?’ Gizmer spat, but this time he couldn’t meet Stenwold gaze. ‘So that was the Rekef,’ he conceded at last. ‘They don’t trust us, so what? But it was the Rekef, not my people.’

  ‘I don’t see that your people were doing much to stop it,’ Stenwold remarked mildly, feeling the conversation falling under his control once more. ‘But they’re the ones who you’re protecting.’

  Gizmer limped over to the barred shutters, turning his back on the Beetle. ‘But even if I had something to say that you could use, it wouldn’t be helping you kill the Rekef. It’d be my people.’

  ‘The Fly-kinden.’

  ‘No!’ Gizmer rounded on him furiously. ‘The aviators. The soldiers. My people. So forget it. You know, back there, I grumbled with the rest of them at what we had to put up with, what they made us do. Odd what it takes to make you realize you’re loyal after all, ain’t it?’ And when Stenwold tried to speak, the Fly almost shouted him down. ‘And you know what? Stuff your so-bloody-superior Lowlands. You know, I do have something to tell you, and use it how you will. I never told this, not even to my people. I’ve got a cousin lives with his kin in Helleron, right? He thought the way you seem to reckon I should, went looking for a better life. Every sixmonth or so I hear some word from him, whenever the messengers get through. I hear how it is, how he lives, working in the factories there, just like I did in Capitas before all this. In the Empire my kinden are citizens – not Wasps, but citizens still. We get rights. We get respect. I hear how my cousin lives – they work him like the worst slave in the world, only he has to find food, pay for a roof over his head. He gets nothing from them. When there’s no work, he starves. Slaves have it better.’

  ‘Collegium isn’t Helleron,’ Stenwold snapped, sounding harsh because he had harboured similar thoughts about that other Beetle city himself.

  ‘Lowlands is Lowlands,’ Gizmer shot back. ‘And what was it you said? I don’t see your people doing much to stop it, eh?’ He looked Stenwold in the eye, grinning. ‘Long live the Empress.’

  Stenwold hit him then, clumsily, without plan or purpose, sending the little man flying off his feet and into the wall, wings unable to catch him. A moment later the Beetle was standing over Gizmer as the Fly tried to get away from him, cradling his splinted arm. The surge of violent fury in Stenwold seemed to be the culmination of all the fires, the deaths, the homeless, the grieving – all the scars of his city. He felt the raw edge of the sheer physical pleasure that would come from the use of his fists, his feet, on this tiny outpost of the Empire.

  There was a thin thread of civilization that held him back for a moment, and some part of his mind was, even then, playing through what Jodry would say, what the Assembly might do. Nothing. They would do nothing. And Drillen might fret, but he was War Master Stenwold Maker and, in the final analysis, they would take what he said and not call him a liar to his face, not over just the death of a Fly.

  Abruptly the drive for violence ebbed from him, leaving a sour residue in its wake, and he realized that he did not care about the Assembly, let them censure as they would. It was not fear of public disapproval that stayed his hand, but the personal understanding that he himself might be wrong.

  I used to be so certain about things. Where did that go?

  He was abruptly aware that the guards had burst in, perhaps somehow assuming that it was Stenwold himself who had been assaulted. He turned to face the two Maker’s Own soldiers and Akkestrae, and found not a shred of condemnation on their faces.

  ‘I’m finished here,’ he told them.

  ‘What about him?’ Akkestrae asked, with a predatory look.

  ‘I can’t see that he’d know much, in any event.’ That knife-edge of control was still there: another jab, another nudge, and he could see himself lashing out again, seeking some salve for himself by striking at the Empire in any way he could. ‘Leave him. Just hold him here.’

  ‘And feed him?’ the Mantis asked. ‘War Master, there will come a time when food is precious.’ The two Merchant Company soldiers stared with loathing at Gizmer as the Fly got to his feet, leaning against the wall for purchase. They would have been out on the streets most nights, Stenwold guessed. They had seen the full horrors of the aerial raids.

  ‘Just . . .’ and Stenwold shook his head and pushed past them, his main intent to put distance between himself and Gizmer, and not to reflect too much on what had just happened.

  There was a sharp snapping sound that brought him up short.

  When he turned, one of the soldiers was slipping a fresh bolt into the breach of his snapbow. The Fly-kinden lay in a crumpled heap against the wall.

  ‘He was going for you,’ the soldier said, quite matter of factly. ‘Rushing you. I thought he had a knife.’ The words were spoken as if in rehearsal.

  ‘He . . .’ Stenwold looked at the other two, unnameable feelings roiling inside him. The second soldier looked shaken, but was saying nothing. Akkestrae met his gaze with a slight raising of the eyebrows, as though not sure why he was bothering himself about the matter.

  ‘To die in battle is better than to live in chains,’ was all she said.

  ‘Would he have thought that?’ Stenwold demanded.

  ‘Plainly he did.’ There was no getting past her Mantis reserve.

  Stenwold turned on the man who had loosed the shot, a Beetle youth who looked barely twenty and wholly unrepentant. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Jons Padstock, War Master,’ the soldier reported smartly. ‘Maker’s Own Company.’

  Padstock . . . and now that the name was out, Stenwold could detect the familiarity in the lad’s features. Her son, of course. And Elder Padstock, chief officer of the Maker’s Own, was his fanatic supporter, and no doubt she had steeped her family in the same doctrine.

  But what can I do? He could have the youth arrested. At a time of war, he could have one of his own soldiers hauled before the Assembly for the murder of an enemy combatant, knowing all the while that Jons Padstock had done what he did out of hard loyalty to Collegium, to Stenwold himself. And some traitor part of Stenwold’s mind was glad that the decision had been taken from his hands, even pleased with the result. And this is war. Things happen in war that we would not countenance in peace.

  It was no answer, but he had no answers. He turned away from them and stomped off down the corridor, unwilling to stay there and look his own weakness in the eye.

  Twenty-Eight

  Helmess Broiler was under scrutiny, he knew.

  He was a well-to-do merchant magnate of Collegium, an Assembler, and also an avowed political foe of Stenwold Maker and Jodry Drillen. More than that, he had been taking the pay of the Empire for years, starting way back when nobody but Maker ever imagined that the Wasps would get to this point. And by the time the Imperial Second did come ravening up the coast during the last war, Broiler’s existing misdeeds had been enough for the Empire to keep him squarely under its thumb, their man in Collegium.

  Stenwold knew all this, as had been brought forcibly to Helmess’s attention not so long ago. Helmess himself was only alive and free because Stenwold had a use for him back then, and because it was convenient for Maker to know just who the Empire’s current man was, rather than have to hunt down the next one. Since the bombing had started, Helmess had been under observation, with Maker’s spies, both hidden and in plain sight, watching for his methods of smuggl
ing information to the city’s enemies. It was a waste of time for all concerned because Helmess no longer had any such methods at his disposal. Since the last piece of business, when the Empire’s agents had been apprehended neatly before they could take advantage of the oncoming Spider armada – which itself had come to nothing, with the abominable Maker turning them away with apparently nothing more than a harsh word or two – the Empire had ceased to include Helmess Broiler in its plans, squarely blaming him for the failure. Fair enough in a way, because Broiler had given Maker the information that saw the Imperial agents arrested, but it rankled nonetheless because the Empire didn’t know that.

  Right now, Helmess was living a somewhat fraught life. His double loyalties – if he had any loyalties to anything aside from his own best interests – were not public knowledge, but there was an odour about him, nonetheless, of a man in disfavour with those in power. That meant he had few visitors, and fewer opportunities to profit. The Merchant Company soldiers troubled him at his house, tramping through his rooms occasionally for no reason other than to annoy him, and Maker’s watchers were looking constantly for heliograph flashes, message-bearing insects and hand signals out of the window, or however they might think he would inform the Empire of whatever knowledge he was supposed to possess. The rare guests at his house were searched aggressively for messages when they left, and probably followed subsequently themselves.

  Two nights ago, an Imperial bomb had even landed outside his townhouse during a tense half-hour when the Farsphex seemed to be trying to attack Collegium society from the top down by targeting large houses. He had lost part of his wall, leaving that entire corner of the structure dangerously unsound. Needless to say, nobody was remotely bothered, or called to give their condolences, and he had to send his staff into the city to pay ruinously high prices to secure workmen to impart at least a stopgap stability to his home. By this time, any thought that he might still be on the Empire’s books was long gone, and the Empire itself seemed to be rather trying to wipe him out of existence altogether. Certainly his contact – or perhaps his handler – Honory Bellowern had got out of the city without a parting word immediately after the first aerial raid.

  When the foreman of the work crew insisted on sorting out payment face to face, Helmess resigned himself to being robbed in broad daylight, possibly to being insulted as well. He received the man in his study, noting a lean Beetle with a badly burned face, the scars looking recent. Of course, that was quite the fashionable look in Collegium just then.

  ‘All right, then, what ludicrous figure–?’ he began, and the foreman said, ‘Send your servants out, Master Broiler.’

  Helmess made another few false starts at the same sentence, feeling the world realign itself around him vertiginously. After a pause, he nodded, waving his retainers away.

  ‘Can I hope, at least, that you’ve made a genuine job of repairing the house?’ he enquired, fighting for calm.

  ‘Oh, the lads are all the real deal, if not exactly masters.’ The burn-scarred Beetle sat down across the desk from him, with casual insolence. ‘I was lucky. There weren’t many people keen to do your dirty work – it was easy to get the contract. I’d probably find a choosier crew to go over the work in a month or so, if I were you. Now, let’s get this done with. You’ve a list?’

  ‘A list?’ For a moment, cut off for so long, Helmess didn’t know what he meant. Then old conversations came back to him, words shared with the Imperial diplomat Honory Bellowern (when he was still rattling around in the embassy, minus one ambassador, and pointedly not enquiring after Helmess’s health). Of course there was a list: the list of the key people, the influential, the anti-Imperial, all those that might serve as rallying points to resistance. In long bitter nights of wondering where it had all gone wrong, adding names to that list had become a mean-spirited joy for Helmess Broiler.

  ‘You came in with the refugees,’ Helmess guessed. ‘Fake burns from the Felyal rather than from the incendiaries here.’

  ‘I don’t do fake,’ the man told him. His eyes were very calm, Helmess saw, without in any way being calming. There was a fanatic immobility to those eyes, and he fought away an image of this man applying a blazing branch to his own skin, without so much as a flinch.

  ‘I had thought there was some investigation, quarantine or something, Maker’s work,’ Broiler deftly opened the shallow hidden drawer in his desk, and leafed through the few papers there.

  ‘Good thinking that came too late,’ the spy told him. ‘I’d already got clear of the rest. Now I’m at large in the city, just another Beetle. I helped the fire crews last night.’

  ‘The Rekef—’ Helmess started and, when the man raised a cautioning hand, ‘If you’re worried about being overheard, that ship has sailed.’

  ‘Piss on the Rekef,’ the burned agent said levelly. ‘They’ve fallen over their own feet each time they’ve tackled this city. Army Intelligence gets a go.’ He watched for a reaction and saw none. ‘We’re not so fancy as the Rekef,’ went on the man who had crept in pretending to be a refugee and was already establishing himself in the city of his enemies. ‘We’ll go at this like soldiers.’ He looked down at the list Helmess handed to him. ‘You don’t do this by halves.’

  ‘I assure you, those names—’

  ‘We’ll take it under advisement.’ There were plenty of names on that list that simply represented Helmess’s personal dislikes, and the other man was openly sneering as his eyes flicked down it. ‘We have other lists, you can be sure. We’ll cross-reference. Your continued loyalty will be noted, I’m sure.’

  Helmess raised an eyebrow, still holding to his composure by his fingernails. ‘I take it this means bloodshed. May I assume that Stenwold Maker’s name will top everybody’s list?’

  The agent rose abruptly, rolling up the list tightly, then leaning against the chair back to remove his sandal. The crumpled scroll found a new home in its hollow sole. ‘You just sit tight, Master Broiler. The Second’s on its way, our glorious Gears, and this time they’ll chew this city up a treat. I’m to tell you that you’ll be remembered when the time comes, and that’s straight from my chief here in the city. As for the list, you just keep an ear open and you’ll hear the news. Now, we’ve haggled enough about that slipshod piece of negligence we did on your house, so hand over the coin for my lads and I’ll be on my happy way.’

  Once the man – not even a name, this time, see how they regard me? – had gone, Helmess remained at his desk, staring at the scratched wood of its surface. You’ll be remembered when the time comes, he considered. As promises went it was not reassuring.

  ‘I trust our intelligence was useful?’ The voice of Mycella of the Aldanrael drifted from behind the curtain, along with the steam. General Tynan, who had expected to find her waiting for him, glanced about at the handful of Fly-kinden servants. None of them seemed to find it unusual that their lady was receiving an Imperial general while still in her bath. He was acutely aware of his own appearance – as rough, unshaven and unwashed as any of his soldiers. The Spider-kinden seemed to be able to transport civilization around as though it were a boxable commodity, to be dipped into at need.

  ‘I would have preferred to know more about it beforehand,’ he grumbled, just to keep his mind focused.

  ‘And am I to believe the Empire has no secrets from its allies?’ came her amused response. ‘In matters of espionage, especially, it is best to keep one’s cards close.’

  Servants – male servants – stepped behind the curtain bearing towels and robes. Tynan shook his head. The Imperial line had always been that Spiders were a decadent people, but out there in the dark there were thousands of their warriors living in the same muddy fields as the Wasps, eating the same food, soldiers no more nor less than their Imperial counterparts. They had fought in the Felyal with less discipline but an equal spirit, and they had spilt blood, their own and their enemies’, to bring the Mantis-kinden to heel. True, their mercenaries had been in the forefront of th
e fighting, but the Spiders themselves had not stinted. Many was the Spider-kinden warrior, maid or man, now buried on Mantis soil to prove it.

  The friction that had plagued the army since leaving Solarno was mostly gone now, as more and more of the Wasps began to see things the same way. It was awkward, since the Empire had no ready category for free allies – meaning something less than Imperial but more than Auxillian. The men of the Second were having to expand their world view to accommodate the Aldanrael troops. The fighting in the Felyal had cemented it, though, and the two forces had begun to work together, shielding each other’s weak points.

  Mycella stepped barefoot from behind the curtain, her hair glistening wet and her body swathed in a silk robe of pale green printed with twining white leaves. Tynan felt a tug within him that he fought down. Her Art, of course. He told himself it was her Art, at least, because that gave him something to fight against. Beyond that emotional reaction was a purely physical one, a gathering lust that he thought time had extinguished, but was now rising spectacularly from the grave. The look she gave him suggested that she was well aware of it.

  ‘In truth, my intelligence network in Collegium is operating by itself, as intended. I have no convenient way of reaching them with new orders. However, we believe in autonomy in our senior agents. Once they had confirmed the Aldranrael’s diplomatic position with the Empire, they have been improvising most successfully, providing you with information for your aerial forces, and infiltrating the Felyal alongside those who were returning there to rebuild. A shame they could not give us warning of the attack on our camp, I know, but I suspect they felt it best not to risk their cover. So, secret from both of us, in a way, but they have sufficed to get your own agents into the enemy city.’

  ‘Let us hope so.’ Tynan could not dispute anything she had said, but the speed and elegance of the Spider agents had been daunting. Let us hope they don’t turn on us one day. ‘I trust your people are ready for the next leg of the march?’