The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  A bolt of fire streaked past from behind him – almost directly through the space he had occupied a moment before – and caught the closer Wasp right in the eyes, sending him backwards, screaming and clawing at his face. A snapbow bolt zipped past Laszlo like an angry insect, and he let his wings spring him high over the trees for a little cover, before coming down close enough for his weapon to do any good, if it would only work.

  He loosed, and something struck him on the temple, something else carving a bloody line across his hand and almost up to his elbow. He found himself flat on his back, the world spinning about him. They got me! Was that a grenade?

  He was being shaken. ‘Get up!’ Liss was hissing, dragging at his shoulder. ‘Get moving!’ She held her other arm about her, as though trying to keep her guts in.

  Laszlo stumbled to his feet, seeing the soldier lying dead before him, armour holed where the snapbow bolt had gone in. He still clutched the grip of the little weapon, but precious little more of it. Its air battery had exploded, he realized, and there was his luck back again because that could have taken his arm off.

  Then more Wasps came pelting through the trees, three at least: two on the ground and one in flight. Pushing Liss ahead of him, Laszlo tried to run, dagger clearing his belt. She made a game try of it but she was slowing already, her breaths coming in gasps of pain. Cheers, luck, nice knowing you.

  Laszlo brandished his little blade and tried to put fire in his expression, anything to buy Lissart a moment’s time. The airborne Wasp was almost on them, snapbow slung and hand extended.

  Piss on my luck!

  Fine last words for a pirate.

  Then there was a flicker and the soldier was down, rolling on the ground with the spine of an arrow standing proud in him. The other Wasps suddenly had more to think about, whipping their snapbows around, but the trees were already echoing to the harsh snap! snap! of bolts clipping between the trees too fast to see. The two Wasps were on the ground in moments, and more fighting erupted all around. Laszlo had no eyes for it.

  Liss was sitting with her back to a tree, breasts rising and falling as she fought for air, but she gripped his hand when he went to her, her palm still warm from her Art.

  The skirmish went on for less than a minute and when a shadow fell over the two of them it was no Wasp but a long-faced Dragonfly-kinden woman wearing the buff coat of the Merchant Companies, a bow as tall as she was in one hand.

  Laszlo identified the sash emblem, an Ant-kinden helm in profile.

  ‘Coldstone Company,’ he named it. ‘Collegium.’

  The Dragonfly nodded suspiciously. Others were joining her now, a couple of Beetles, a handful more – Flies, a Moth with a shortbow in a holster at her waist.

  ‘Castre Gorenn, Commonweal Retaliatory Army, currently serving with the Coldstone,’ said the Dragonfly archer. ‘And what are you?’

  ‘Working for Ma— Stenwold Maker,’ Laszlo said, stumbling over the name in his hurry to present his credentials. ‘Please – your army’s close by?’

  ‘Not so very close,’ Castre Gorenn replied, still not trusting either of them an inch. ‘We’ll get you there sure enough, though. Collegium agents, Imperial agents – don’t really care – works either way for me.’

  ‘She’s hurt,’ Laszlo met Liss’s eyes. ‘Can you . . .’

  Gorenn knelt to study Liss, and for a moment the Dragonfly’s easy expression turned grim at the sight of her, making something twist almost to breaking in Laszlo’s chest, but then the woman nodded.

  ‘I can fly with her, certainly. Nobody flies like me.’ With surprising delicacy the Dragonfly reached for Liss, who flinched and whimpered, but nevertheless held still as she was picked up like a child. ‘You’ve your own wings, to keep up?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Of course, is it? Well, Master “Of Course”, there’ll be a couple of these newfangled snappers held on you the whole time, so you better keep your mind on what you’re doing.’

  Thirty-Three

  Eujen Leadswell lodged over a bookbinder’s in a well-appointed room that just about scraped a view of the College rooftops, and which he tended to forget was paid for by the stipend he received each moon from his parents, merchants in the beer trade. He was back late tonight, having spent the last hour wrangling with a Master of the social history faculty who had taken issue over his Student Company. Their meeting had not gone well. She had ordered him to dissolve the force, and he had outright refused, and now the matter would apparently go before the head of faculty, or possibly the administrator. Eujen rather suspected that the promised reprimand would arrive some time after the war finished, and at that late point he would be glad to receive it.

  He stomped up the stairs to his room – he had his own outside door, more for the convenience of the bookbinder than Eujen’s – and shouldered his way in, feeling disgruntled and angry. A moment’s fiddling with the gaslamps turned up a rosy glow – and Averic.

  Eujen started back with a choked-off cry of alarm, finding his friend standing in the darkness of his own room, unbidden and unlooked for. His first thought, and he was ashamed by it, was Wasp assassin.

  And Averic’s manner, quite aside from this trespass, was not reassuring. The Wasp stared at Eujen as though he had never quite seen him before. The intruder’s hands were empty, open, hanging by his side, but Eujen was suddenly aware of the danger that Averic represented, simply by virtue of his kinden. Killing hands. No wonder, his traitor imagination informed him, they were feared so, having taken the advantage of their Art and become . . .

  ‘Averic?’ he asked, his voice creditably calm. For a moment, a silence stretched between them, and then the Great Ear began its monotonous wail outside, and they both looked to the window.

  ‘Here we go again,’ Eujen’s words came out automatically, disassociated from any part of the awkward space between him and the Wasp. And Averic’s followed: ‘They’re going to kill you.’

  Eujen couldn’t quite understand what had been said, and just made a questioning grunt.

  ‘The Rekef – or Army Intelligence – the Empire wants to kill you.’

  Then Eujen understood that the ‘you’ was singular, not plural. Not the Beetle-kinden, not the people of Collegium, but him.

  But why . . . ? But what . . . ? ‘But how do you know?’

  ‘Because they told me to do it.’

  The moment teetered between them, and every intellectual instinct but one demanded that Eujen flee or fight. The war was here in his room. The war had come to him. The man before him was not Averic. He, Eujen, had been wrong.

  ‘But you’re not going to,’ he said, and this time his voice finally shook, but he had cast the die. Live by the sword. All that time claiming that the Empire – that the Wasps – were redeemable, and he would trust it with his weight now, though the fall would kill him if he was wrong.

  ‘For you,’ Averic said simply, ‘I betray my people – my family, my kinden – for you.’

  The first explosion struck five streets away and still made the windows rattle, both of them starting at the flash and the roar.

  ‘Eujen,’ Averic insisted. ‘There are Imperial killers in the city. They are going to be targeting people – we need to tell someone. They gave me some names, but there’ll be others. I made a list, everyone I could think of.’

  Eujen had opened his mouth, trying to fit all that into his head, when the next bombs struck, one after the other, ten or twelve of them, killing all words, rattling the walls, each slightly quieter than the last as the barrage tracked across the city. Even as Eujen tried to reply, a further bombardment followed, the retorts overlapping so that it was plain that several of the Imperial machines were unleashing their fury all at once.

  ‘Eujen!’ Averic repeated, ‘We have to tell someone! The Speaker, Corog Breaker, anyone!’ The subtext was clear: Don’t let my choice be in vain.

  But Eujen wore a strange expression as he turned from the window. He spoke several times before
a gap in the explosions allowed his words out: ‘They’re not launching.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘None of our machines are in the sky. The Hiram Street airfield is in sight of here, and there’s nobody there. It’s completely empty. What’s going on?’

  ‘Eujen, we have to tell somebody. The Empire’s people will be working tonight.’ Averic almost shouted it, and at last the Beetle was with him.

  ‘Yes, yes you’re right. We have to . . .’ He grimaced. ‘Stenwold Maker. We have to find Stenwold Maker.’

  When the Great Ear had started to sound, the men and women of Taki’s airfield already knew they would not be running straight for their machines. Corog Breaker had passed on the order, and Taki, Edmon and the others assumed that other fields would be launching, hunting out the incoming Farsphex raiders. Nobody asked questions. Everyone knew the drill. If – when – a detachment of the enemy fought past the loose blockade, everyone on duty would go rushing for the airstrip: another night’s savage work.

  They waited tensely, knowing their moment would come. The Mynans joked, with that hard, calloused humour they had evolved. A couple of the Collegiates were still trying to persevere with their studies, bent close to the lamps with their books.

  Then the first bomb hit the city, and they were up on their feet, within moments of each other, looking to Breaker, who stood at the door.

  ‘Not yet,’ the old man told them. ‘Specific orders tonight. Not our turn.’

  The pilots’ barracks was sunk low into the earth – using a converted storeroom from when the airfield had serviced only civilian fliers. The small, high-up windows were close to ground level, and Taki had found a perch there, looking out at the dark city with Fly-kinden eyes that could unpick the night.

  Who’s launching? she wondered, for she knew plenty of the pilots from other fields, and wanted to watch out for them. She had seen machines put out from Sarse Way, no more than a few, but the other airfields were further and she could not expect to spot every Stormreader they put in the air.

  Another sequence of explosions rocked them, closer and then further as the Farsphex passed by. In its echo they heard more, further off still, but a constant pounding. One of the Collegiate pilots, a girl of no more than eighteen, swore into the moment’s quiet that followed.

  ‘Our turn now, eh?’ Edmon suggested, shifting from foot to foot and eyeing the door.

  ‘Not yet. Hold fast,’ Corog advised implacably.

  Taki was peering up, craning her neck to see the skies. She could pick out the Farsphex clearly, if only for the way they reflected the ground fires they were starting. They seemed to be taking their time tonight, giving the city a virtuoso performance. She blinked into a long bloom of fire that must have taken out that little street three roads away where there had been a taverna and a bakery and a . . . Even as she thought it, another sequence of precise explosions rocked its way closer, so that she saw nearby roofs shudder and crack. A Farsphex passed overhead, almost leisurely. Unopposed.

  ‘Sieur – Master Breaker,’ she called down. ‘Who’s out there for the defence?’ And when no answer came: ‘I can’t see any of ours up there, Corog. We need to put more wings in the air.’

  They were all looking at Breaker now, as the rolling thunder of the bombardment went on and on.

  ‘I have orders,’ declared Corog Breaker. ‘We’re not going out.’

  ‘What do you mean, we’re not going out?’ demanded Edmon, after a pause to digest this statement. A close strike swallowed half his words but his meaning came through.

  ‘Orders,’ Corog repeated. ‘We’re sitting tight. We’re not going out tonight at all. Someone else’s problem.’

  ‘Corog, there’s none of ours up there,’ Taki insisted. ‘Orders don’t survive contact with the enemy, Corog. Let’s go.’ She hopped down and headed for the door, because it was all so obvious. Somebody had tried to be clever in the Amphiophos, and now it was up to the pilots to clear up the mess.

  She was half-flying as she reached him, so that Corog’s hand, intended just to stop her, almost swatted her to the ground, her feet skidding as they touched down. ‘Corog—?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Edmon’s eyes darted from Corog to the window, red-lit, moment to moment, with the flash of the bombs.

  ‘Orders!’ the old Beetle snapped. ‘Nobody goes out tonight. Specific orders, right from the top.’

  ‘Then they’re the wrong orders!’ Edmon shouted into his face. ‘It’s a Rekef trick. Let me past.’ He pushed, but Corog pushed back. Outside the barrack room, the pair of Merchant Company soldiers on guard were paying close attention.

  ‘I got this from Master Maker himself,’ Corog snapped. The next blast was so close that they all ducked, dust filtering from the stonework of the ceiling.

  ‘Then he’s mad! You’re mad!’ Edmon’s face was sheer bewilderment. ‘Let us through, you stupid old man. We want to defend your city, even if you don’t.’

  Probably only Taki saw the tears glinting in Corog’s eyes. ‘And what the piss do Mynans know about actually defending a city?’

  Edmon punched him in the face, a furious haymaker that he must have thought would floor Corog straight away. The old man was tough, even for a resilient kinden, and he came swinging straight back . . . and a moment later everyone was brawling. It was Corog and the two soldiers against Edmon’s Mynan airmen, and the local pilots pitching in on both sides, apparently at random. Taki staggered back, because being a Fly-kinden in a brawl in an enclosed space was never a good idea, fleeing back to the high window, wondering if she should just squeeze herself through it.

  Out on the empty airfield, fire was walking towards her, beautiful and terrible, as an Imperial flier passed overhead.

  Taki dropped to the floor, crying ‘Watch out!’ but nobody could possibly have heard her.

  When the tail end of the strike hit, flames erupted through all the windows facing the airfield, and the thunder of it battered every ear, knocking many of them off their feet. The silence that followed made Taki wonder if she had been struck deaf.

  Corog was still standing resolutely at the door, one eye already swelling up after Edmon’s blow.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Taki heard him say, watching Edmon watch him in turn. ‘We don’t fly tonight. We watch, and we take it like a whore, but nobody flies.’

  Outside, the assault on the city went on and on. It seemed impossible that the Empire had brought so many bombs.

  ‘Master Drillen,’ Arvi’s light voice came from the far side of the door.

  Jodry shuddered. ‘Go away.’ He tried to bellow the words, but they came out merely as a rasp. He was into his third bottle, now, produce of his own family’s vineyards that had been growing superior grapes since before the revolution.

  ‘I have made you some tea, Master Drillen,’ came those respectful but inexorable tones.

  ‘Don’t want tea.’ Jodry’s first bottle had seen him move out of his offices at the Amphiophos. His initial way of dealing with the knowledge of what tonight must bring had been to remain at his post: Speaker for the city even in the face of annihilation. He had lasted less than an hour, leaving before the bombs had started to fall, and let them all think him a coward for it. Even now there would be a skeleton crew at the heart of Collegium’s governance, clerks and servants and a few diligent Assemblers, but Jodry himself could not stay. Every moment he had spent there, once the Great Ear had sounded, he had been clutching at his desk, gritting his teeth, forcibly restraining himself from leaping to his feet and pelting down the corridors of state shouting, ‘Get out! Get out of here! Out of the city! Tonight nothing will stay their hands!’

  Or something like that. And, once the Imperial fliers began bombarding the city, he knew that he would not be able to restrain himself at all, that it would all come out, and then it would all be in vain.

  He had gone home, to add shame to guilt.

  ‘Master—’ A particularly close blast rattled the shutters and briefly
silenced even Arvi. ‘Are you well?’

  At last Jodry shambled over and unbolted the door, flinging it open to glower down at the Fly-kinden, his eyes wild and red-rimmed. To Arvi’s credit, Jodry’s secretary displayed no emotion at all.

  ‘What do you want?’ Jodry demanded. ‘Have you nothing better to do tonight?’

  At that, the Fly did blink. ‘There has been a warning that Wasp assassins may be on the prowl, master, targeting our leadership, you included. I took liberties with your name in dispatching some of Outwright’s Pike and Shot, just in case. The caution originates in the student body, master, so I suspect it to be nonsense, but even so . . .’

  The thought of Wasp assassins tracking him down seemed almost like natural justice. ‘Good, whatever,’ Jodry grunted. ‘Arvi, you’re my secretary, so why are you even here? Have you nowhere, nobody, on a night like this?’ The crash of the bombs punctuated his words.

  ‘Master?’ At last the little man seemed perplexed. ‘Alas, I have not been fortunate enough to . . . No, master.’

  ‘Go home, Arvi,’ Jodry told him. ‘No, bring me more wine, then go home. Another bottle of the Dark Rose 525.’

  Arvi’s eyes drifted to the cadavers of Jodry’s earlier drinking, but he just nodded. ‘It seems to be a tumultuous night, master.’

  ‘I shall make you head of the faculty of understatement at the College,’ Jodry declared, the humour laboured and failing. ‘Go home, find a cellar and hide.’

  ‘There is some filing at your office that requires attention, then—’

  ‘No!’ For a moment Jodry and his secretary stared at one another, Arvi patiently waiting for an explanation for his employer’s outburst. Jodry wanted to say, A cellar, a vault, anywhere sheltered from the sky tonight, but he could not, not even to his secretary, whatever bond of trust existed between them.

  Competing shames warred in him then, and one won out. ‘Bring the bottle,’ he decided. ‘Bring the soldiers. We’ll go there together. A good night to clear my desk.’ And, as Arvi ducked down into the cellar, Jodry looked out of the window at the Imperial air force tearing into the city, and thought about his legacy.