The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8)

by Tchaikovsky, Adrian

  The war was in abeyance, so the tools of statesmanship were the telescope, the bribe, the secret identity and the coded missive. Every key city near the Imperial borders was the rightful prey of the spymaster just now, and every nation scattered its agents there, putting out trembling feelers for the first move of the enemy. Helleron, Myna, Seldis – all of them hotbeds of espionage after their own fashion. And, of course, Solarno.

  In Helleron the spies bribed magnates and hired criminals, and crept through slums. In Myna they played constant dodging games with the paranoia of the locals. Seldis had been a hotbed of Spider family politics since long before the war. Solarno, though, had gorgeous views of the lake, and a hundred eateries, theatres and fine wine. Spies must go where they were sent, but where they wanted to be posted was Solarno. Laszlo reckoned he had been well rewarded for saving the life of Stenwold Maker, Collegium’s greatest statesman.

  Spies came to Solarno to keep an eye on the government infighting, or to wheedle secrets from its artificers, but most of all they came to spy on other spies and, soon enough, their solid tradecraft was corrupted by the slower pace and higher standard of life there. Confronted with a city in which a day spent creeping about the backstreets was a day wasted, a fragile detente had slowly formed. Hence the Taverna te Remi, which was where the spies went to watch the other spies, sitting across tables from one another, asking veiled questions, playing games of chance and skill, trading information and favours, making deals.

  It was not as simple as that, of course, and there were certainly deep-cover agents in the city, especially from the Spider Aristoi houses, but if one of the te Remi regulars failed to show, it was a sure sign that they were up to something, and that in itself was valuable information. So it was that, this morning, Laszlo could cast his eyes across the taverna’s common room, note who was present, who absent, who was sitting with whom, and have material enough to compose a decent report for Stenwold Maker before being served his first drink.

  He waved an airy hand towards the taverner and beamed across the table at his fellows, almost daily companions for the last couple of months. Agents all, enemies and rivals, but friends of the moment. As a former pirate, Laszlo was well used to making the most of acquaintances before chance should set them at daggers drawn again.

  Taking up at least a third of the table was Breaghl the halfbreed, who claimed to be a freelancer willing to spy for anyone’s coin. He had Fly-kinden blood bulked out awkwardly by Solarnese Beetle heritage, and amongst themselves the others guessed that he was securely in the pay of the Chasme merchants, here to keep tabs on Solarnese innovation and steal any of it that was not securely nailed down. He had the locals’ sand-coloured skin but his features were lumpy and irregular, his hair receding without grace. He was half again the size of any of his companions – although still smaller than the average Solarnese – as well as a strong drinker, a weak gambler and a man who apparently made cowardice a matter of principle. He had let slip that the Fly in his parentage had been his mother and, reflecting on the eye-watering image of his birth, the others had taken to calling him ‘Painful’.

  Te Riel was neat, and looked weak and bookish when he wanted to, but Laszlo knew that inside his crisp and reserved clothes the man was solidly built enough. His manner was smooth and he was a Fly in early middle years, a seniority that he routinely tried to capitalize on. He insisted that he was an intelligencer for hire, but peculiarities of accent had led the others to conclude he was almost certainly Imperial. Laszlo considered him a prime rival, albeit not over anything so professional as espionage.

  The woman, and object of their rivalry, called herself te Liss, or sometimes just Liss, and Laszlo thought that he was probably in love with her. At least, it stabbed him somewhere close to the heart whenever she smiled at te Riel. In truth, all three of them were a little besotted with her, professional agents or not. She had a heart-shaped face with sly eyes and a constant air of mockery, and her hair was an explosion of red curls that Laszlo had never seen on a Fly before. She wore dark colours that marked her out against the usual local white, and professed to be a mercenary out of the Spiderlands, but the three men were quite sure she was in the pocket of one of the local parties, if they could only agree on which one.

  Laszlo himself had also claimed neutrality, but te Liss had told him, one stolen evening when he had her to himself, that they all knew he was an agent for the Aristoi, and that he should stop trying to hide it.

  ‘Beginning to wonder if your mistress had called you up,’ te Riel observed, apparently oblivious to Laszlo’s aerobatic entrance. ‘Hung over?’

  ‘Perhaps he was out all night watching over the Firebug hangars,’ Liss suggested. ‘One of us should be getting on with some work here, after all. For myself, I can’t be bothered, honestly.’ It was bad form, amongst the agents of the Exalsee, to be seen to be working.

  ‘As though that’s worth the effort,’ Breighl grunted. ‘After all, they’ll practically guide you around during the day, they’re so proud of the place.’ It was true. The Solarnese were not shy about showing off their new toys – after all, there was no point in having a deterrent if the other side remained ignorant of it.

  Liss cocked her head to one side, eyes twinkling. ‘I did come into possession of a little roster: flights in, flights out, day and night. Cost me dear, too.’

  ‘Hardly, given that you work for them,’ Breighl remarked sourly.

  ‘Me? Why would you think such a thing?’ Her smile disarmed him, as it always did. Of the three of them, the halfbreed was the unhappiest, for he was as smitten with her as the rest and yet knew he had no chance with her.

  ‘Who do I owe, I wonder? Who do I want to owe me?’ te Liss’s eyes roved about the table. ‘Dice for it, perhaps? Or will the Empire stump up some coin to keep me off the streets?’ She raised her eyebrows at te Riel.

  He controlled his momentary scowl. ‘What the Empire will do, I can only guess. I’m more than happy to keep you off the streets, Bella.’

  ‘Hover-fly. Your round, hover-fly,’ Laszlo told him.

  ‘Don’t call me that.’ Their needling him about the Empire was the only thing that got a rise out of te Riel, and the more he denied it, the more they believed it.

  ‘Brandy, was it?’ Laszlo kept on. ‘Pick a good year.’ Everyone knew the best brandy was Wasp-export.

  Te Riel stood, turning the angry motion into a curt wave at one of the taverna staff. ‘If you truly thought I was Rekef you’d not be so free with me.’ He had said it before, and it was the unconscious stress he put on ‘Rekef’, that sudden passion, that had decided the others about his allegiance.

  ‘I see Lorchis isn’t in his seat by the corner yet,’ Breighl observed, changing the subject as naturally as he could. ‘And no sign of Raedhed either.’

  A fresh bottle came, not brandy but local sweet wine, and they got to discussing their peers, presences and absences and speculation, trading gems of information that spies in other cities would have had to shadow and lurk and burgle for and still end up with nothing more reliable at the end of it.

  The Empire was out there, a formless shadow on the northern horizon, a vast storm-front that could head south at any time. There were Aristoi families, just the far side of the Exalsee, that had designs on Solarno, and probably on the wider world. There were Ants whose only plan for defending their sovereignty was the systematic beating down of their neighbours. There was a Beetle spymaster who had readied himself so much for the next Wasp attack that he might just end up precipitating it. Laszlo knew it, and everyone in the Taverna te Remi knew it.

  But Liss was sneaking him a grin, even though she was hanging on to te Riel’s arm. Her expression seemed to say that she was forced to pander to the Imperial, with his ready money and his arrogant manner, but they both knew who she would rather be touching.

  The spring was warm, the promised summer hotter. The prospect of war, always alluded to but never spoken of outright, seemed a long way away just no
w.

  She had left on te Riel’s arm that day, but two days later towards nightfall she dropped into Laszlo’s lodgings, where he was keeping a desultory eye on the civic hangars. Letters of introduction from some Fly aviatrix in Collegium had secured Laszlo a small third-storey room within sight of the city’s upper classes, and this place was more than most foreign agents could have boasted. Besides, small and high up only meant that it was perfect for a Fly-kinden.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ she warned him, even as she flitted in through his window. He was lying on his side, stripped to the waist in the evening’s muggy heat, trying to balance his telescope so that it would support itself while he looked through it.

  ‘Top-secret orders come through at last?’ he asked her drily.

  ‘Breighl wants me to go to the theatre with him.’

  ‘You’d rather have orders?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘And I’m not suggesting that Painful feels that way about you, but some orders, hm? From whoever you really work for?’

  Laszlo shrugged. ‘Nice just to take stock, sometimes.’

  She had been poised in the open window all this time, and now she darted over to the bed, landing demurely beside him. Laszlo was lean and strong, for a Fly, having spent much of his life wrestling with sails and lines, and she put a hand on his arm with a mischievous expression. ‘Stories, stories,’ she murmured, for it was his bad arm, the one he had broken, and the mottling of injury was still to be seen.

  ‘You’ve seen mine, do I get to see yours?’ he asked her gamely.

  A snort was all that got him, and a change of subject. ‘Anything to drink? If I’m going to sit through three hours of Spider opera, I need a lining to my stomach. Brain, too, probably.’

  He had a bucket of water in the lee of the window, where the sun never quite chased the shadows away, and the bottle he extracted from it was still cool. He was quite aware that this was not what Stenwold Maker had sent him here for, and that a proper spy would probably know all sorts of ways to seduce te Liss and get her talking. He could only imagine te Riel trying and – in his mind’s eye – abjectly failing. With Laszlo himself, however, she seemed more than willing to be seduced, and by unspoken accord neither of them asked awkward questions. Take good weather where you find it, as Laszlo’s old sailing master used to say.

  They would talk often of te Riel and Breighl, or of other agents, the individual personalities of the Solarnese intelligencing crowd, but nothing of the causes, the nations and powers. We are living in the moment between one wave and the next. Long may it last.

  She did not make the theatre that night.

  Later, close to midnight, there was a crash from outside, a shattering of glass, and Laszlo leapt from the bed, whipping a knife from his discarded belt without thinking. A moment’s pause and he heard drunken laughter outside, and someone else cursing – just late revellers bound for home. He looked for Liss’s sleeping form and found her already halfway to the window. The blade in her hand was hiltless with a weighted pommel, perfect for throwing. For a moment they faced each other, armed and deadly, waiting to see if something had changed.

  Liss breathed out a shuddering sigh, casting her weapon aside. She sat on the bed, looking abruptly tired and human, not the grinning little tease who kept three men on their toes at the Taverna te Remi. ‘Laszlo . . .’ she began.

  He was beside her on the instant, and she leant into his embrace gratefully, even though he only remembered to drop his dagger a moment later.

  ‘It wasn’t—’ he started, but she just shook her head. War. It wasn’t war.

  Three

  In the last days of spring, the high paths of the mountain were still treacherous with snow. When she walked, she skidded and slipped, clinging to the slick rock face with both hands for purchase. When she flew, the wind made a plaything of her, whirling her about the stone as though she was flying through a maze of knives and bludgeons.

  She was Moth-kinden, though, and this was her home. The peaks around Tharn had been a stronghold of her people for thousands of years. One of the last few since the Apt had driven them from the Lowland cities.

  Grey-skinned, grey-robed, her eyes featureless white, her hair a sheet of black falling past her shoulders: a monochrome woman, a shadow or a ghost, slipping silently at midday through the high passes, unnoticed.

  She hoped unnoticed. She had a great deal of practice in passing unseen past living eyes, but she was no great magician – certainly as her people measured such things – and if the eyes that were seeking her belonged to her own kinden, then no amount of stealth and secrecy might suffice to hide her.

  Her name was Xaraea, and she was a woman of fragmented loyalties. Loyal to her kinden, of course, or at least to those that called Tharn their home, or to their secret service, the shadowy Arcanum that could evoke the same fear as the Imperial Rekef in the right circles. But even that was not quite true, for the Arcanum had been riven with factions and rivalries since long before some barbarian Wasp chief ever thought of building an Empire. She was loyal to a handful of Skryres – the high magicians of the Moths – who were her superiors in her chapter of the Arcanum, men and women of implacable, unquestioned authority whose names she did not even know.

  There was a sudden flurry of white, not fresh but blown from above, and she crouched, drawing her cloak about her, displaying stone colours against the stone. Moth eyes could still be blinded by snow, so she remained huddled, looking over her shoulder and waiting to see if the passing of the gust revealed any untoward movement behind her.

  She had done good work during the war, had contributed to the costly victory that had seen the Empire driven out of Tharn. The price had been high, though, and the architects of that freedom had found themselves under attack from their enemies within the city, and even from those who formerly had not been their enemies. Xaraea knew that her masters were on the defensive on the home front, but she knew also that their main focus had not wavered. As they wrestled with rival factions, in fierce debates that she would never be admitted to, they never lost sight of the enemy without. The Empire could come back at any time.

  Xaraea had the sense that other factions were considering the Empire, too. She knew well that there was a surprisingly large Tharen diplomatic delegation at the Empress’s court. Wheels were in motion, and hers was the frustration of every intelligencer: that she could not know everything all at once. Sometimes she wondered if she knew anything at all.

  Her orders still rang in her ears, though: clear, simple words from a cunning old man normally given to riddles and circumlocution. On no account must you be discovered. Nobody must know of what you have done. Implicit in the words was the knowledge that those he was warning her about were not foreign agents but others of her own people.

  The phalanstery loomed before her without warning. It had been carved from the rock by her people long ago as a retreat, austere and understated, just a doorway and some narrow slits of windows cut into a span of rock that barely seemed the work of human hands. The door was new, though, crafted of heavy wood bound with metal, and with the look of being cut down from something larger. How the current occupants had hauled it all the way up here was beyond her, but then they were likely to feel the cold more than her mountain-loving kinden.

  About to reach for the iron ring set into the door’s surface, she had a sudden moment of suspicion, looking about her in every direction. But she knew that, if she had been followed here, such caution came too late, and she had failed.

  The place was a well-guarded secret, its very existence buried deep within the great libraries in the heart of the mountain, lost in plain sight as only the Moths could conceal their lore. Her masters had installed the current residents here a generation ago, and helped them become self-sufficient, teaching them all that the Moths knew about growing crops in the thin soil of the high fields. Those who lived here owed a great debt to her masters, and she had come to collect on it.

 
The door swung open, and she looked into the face of a Wasp-kinden.

  She had been properly briefed and she did not even flinch. Fully three-quarters of the phalanstery’s residents were Wasps, and almost all of them former soldiers. That was essentially what this place was all about.

  Perhaps he saw something in her face indicating the purpose behind her visit, for he hesitated before stepping back and letting her in. He wore a long robe, brown like a Way Brother’s, belted but without the sword that must have travelled with him most of his life. The calluses on his hands were born of the rake and hoe now.

  ‘Your name?’ she demanded of him. Names had power, everyone knew, except the Apt, and therefore perhaps the names of the Apt had no power after all. Still, old habits died hard.

  ‘Salthric,’ he told her flatly, not hostile but not welcoming either. ‘We were not expecting visitors.’

  I should hope not. ‘Never mind that. I am here to see one of your people. Who must I speak to? Who is your . . . commanding officer.’ She pronounced the Wasp-kinden words precisely, and saw them strike him like a blow.

  ‘You may speak with me,’ Salthric said firmly. ‘I am Father here.’ In the Empire, his order organized itself into cells, brothers under the hand of a Father. She sneered inwardly at the patriarchy of it, but the Broken Sword cult was almost exclusively male. It was well known that the Empire did not tolerate societies, philosophical orders or sects within its hierarchy. No two masters: that was the Imperial creed. In reality a fair few were diplomatically overlooked, such as the Mercy’s Daughters, who trailed the armies and brought succour to the injured, or the Arms Brothers duelling societies that had such clandestine popularity amongst the Imperial officers. Of all the sects that the Empire hated, however, and rooted out wherever it was found, the Broken Sword was the most reviled. Its very existence was anathema to the Empire, for it dared to speak against war, the Empire’s lifeblood. Its members were mostly soldiers who had seen too much, done too much, lost too many friends, gone too long without seeing their families or homes. Most of them worked secretly within the Empire, within the very army, but one of their projects was to smuggle out those who had simply had too much of war, and this phalanstery in the mountains of Tharn was one such destination.