The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8)

by Tchaikovsky, Adrian

  Getting from Eujen’s lodgings to the College had been easy, although they had not realized it at the time. Collegium was under the hammer, but only the first few tentative beats, like a smith feeling out the flaws in his material. Eujen found people to pass his warning on to, to scribble down the names that Averic had come up with, so as to send word to everyone they could think of: Beware assassins. Too late, too early, false alarm? They could not tell. No doubt even assassins would find an aerial bombardment an impediment to easy movement.

  When they set off for Stenwold Maker’s house, however, they realized that what they had taken for a downpour had only been a shower. Now the skies opened and the bloody deluge came. Looking up into a sky whose occupancy should have been contested by the fragile valour of the Stormreaders, they could see the Imperial orthopters plainly by moonlight, taking their own time over their runs, circling and bombing, and then pulling out to circle again. For a moment the two of them, Wasp and Beetle, just stared up into that blistering sky, at what the war between their kinden had come to.

  Then a bomb dropped a street away: the thunderous, glass-breaking sound followed immediately by the killing blossom of an incendiary igniting. Eujen made to run towards the impact, but Averic dragged at his arm, shouting at him.

  ‘Stenwold Maker! We have to get to him!’

  ‘You fly to him, then!’ Eujen said desperately, his imagination filling in everything that must be happening just over the rooftops.

  ‘Not without you! I won’t leave you,’ Averic insisted. ‘Besides, he’d probably kill me.’

  Almost certainly true, Eujen realized, and wrenched himself free of the grip of his instincts. ‘Then let’s go!’ he decided, as the next close blast savaged them with shards of stone, spraying the street with debris. He caught Averic’s eyes, found there a mutual understanding that simply getting across the city was going to kill them, odds-on, and then they were running off down the street. At first they tried to watch the skies, to divine safety and danger by the movement of the Farsphex, but there were too many, and from all angles, and any incoming machine might release its load at any time. Eujen was no more able to make sense of them than he would a Moth prophecy.

  In the end, the two of them just ran.

  Sometimes soldiers tried to stop them, ordering them off the streets into whatever dubious safety might be found. The homemade sashes of the Student Company let them pass on, as kindred spirits with important business. Nobody seemed to care that they were, by any daylit estimation, merely pretend soldiers. On the streets of Collegium that night, they were just as able to help as the professionals, meaning not at all.

  The world seemed to detonate all around them – a determined bombing run coming unlooked-for from behind, smashing houses only two streets away – now one street. They fell into a doorway under a hail of splinters and broken bricks, the fierce wash of fire baking them as an apothecary’s workshop across the way erupted into coloured ribbons of flame.

  And still the defenders of Collegium were absent, the skies surrendered. Sabotage? Treachery? Have they murdered all our pilots? Staring upwards at that hostile sky, Eujen could only think, Is it the end, right now? Are Straessa and the others dead already, or simply irrelevant? Will the Empire even need to bring its armies, after this?

  It seemed like the city’s final night. Certainly it seemed that it could be Eujen’s.

  When Stenwold returned to his townhouse that evening, before the Ear sounded, he found a letter awaiting him.

  He knew it at once, and it must have been delivered by one of the Fly-kinden privateers with whom he had a highly sensitive arrangement, and who represented Collegium’s trade contacts with the Sea-kinden, of whose existence the bulk of the Beetle-kinden had yet to learn.

  It came on leathery parchment that they wove from seaweed somehow, so it would dry out and fragment within a few days. It would not relate to the closely guarded trade between the land and sea that had given Collegium its improved clockwork. This letter would be strictly personal.

  This night of all nights. He dearly needed his mind taken away from what he and Jodry had done, the self-destructive trap they had baited for the Imperial air force – and here it was, just as ordered.

  He unfolded the unsealed note, noticing the thick paper start to crack at the seams. The writing within was clumsy and childlike, the letters ill-formed. Just as he himself struggled to create the awkward glyphs that made up the Sea-kinden script, so Paladrya of Hermatyre wrestled determinedly with the alphabet of the land.

  She was his Regret. Beetle-kinden were not supposed to have Regrets. Such foibles were for the Inapt in their stories of themselves. Spider-kinden had Regrets, where their webs of loyalties grew tangled. Stenwold’s friend, the Mantis Tisamon, had practically lived all his life in one Regret or another. Beetles were supposed to be more prosaic. In the isolation of his own home, though, Stenwold read the Sea-kinden’s letter, and relaxed enough to feel that lingering sadness at how the world had managed to separate him from such a remarkable woman.

  Stenwold . . . he began to read, although he had to translate each word from the truly outlandish, phonetic spelling that Paladrya was prone to.

  I am sending regards of the Edmir to your city

  I am sending my own to you also

  your letters are much improved

  I understand you fight with the colony of the wasps and that there is much fear

  the fly-kinden send word that blood will be shed soon

  I am also afraid for you

  stenwold, I would be with you, if I could

  perhaps soon the edmir will no longer need any advice

  I fear the land

  nothing would bring me to it but you

  the flies say I should wait until the war is done

  that you would not want me with you when you fight

  you know you have not left my thoughts since

  hermatyre is always open to you.

  distance only increases my heart when I think of you, and widens my mind.

  This would be poetry, he knew, if she had written in her own script, and if he could have read it freely. As it was, it left him bitter at the vagaries of fate, and unsure how much she intended to say, or what was in his reading only.

  Maybe, after all this is over and Jodry has me indicted, going back to the sea will be the best option for me. The old fear rose in him of the dark and hungry water, but it seemed less immediate, now, more amenable to negotiation.

  For a long time Stenwold stared at the letter, and then he began to work on a reply, less concerned with content than clarity of expression, submerging himself in the scholarly. When the Great Ear sounded, even when the bombs began to fall, he hunkered down and concentrated, as though he was truly an academic again and the sounds outside only the noisy distractions of students. Time and again, he chased away the thoughts, What if I die tonight; what if Banjacs does? Can this be salvaged, or will the sacrifice of so many come to nothing? But the queasy feeling grew within him, the uncertainty of the gamble he and Jodry had taken, until he could no longer palm off his mind with Sea-kinden calligraphy, but only stare out of the window and realize that the war hung on tonight and tomorrow, and any misjudgement could lose everything for his people.

  There was a knock at the door. He finally put the letter down.

  He was not sure who he expected, but Janos Outwright was not the man. The portly little moustachioed Beetle, in pristine uniform with his own wheel of pikes and snapbows proudly displayed, beamed at Stenwold with his usual self-importance. There were two more of Outwright’s Pike and Shot standing behind him.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Stenwold demanded.

  ‘Nothing yet, apparently,’ Janos said pleasantly, although the crash and crump of the bombs nearly swallowed up his words. ‘Can we come in?’

  When he had got under cover, with his men, and when Stenwold grudgingly found some mediocre wine for them, Janos deigned to explain further. ‘All very baffling, b
ut there was rumour that the Empire was going to take a poke at some of the great and good, with you as top of the list. Soon as word came, I decided that you merited the finest in guardianship, so here I am.’

  ‘Word from where?’

  ‘Some student,’ Janos said airily and then, just as Stenwold was preparing a brusque reply, ‘that Wasp one, apparently, though I didn’t hear it direct from him.’

  ‘The . . . ?’ Stenwold tried to summon the Wasp youth’s name to mind, but couldn’t. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Running around warning people, like I said.’ Janos sipped his wine and made a great show of appreciation. ‘You can arrest him tomorrow for it, if you want. Everything seems a bit busy tonight for that sort of thing.’ He waggled his eyebrows, as though the detonations so close by outside were just high spirits.

  Stenwold did not even hear the next knock, but Janos plainly did. He went strolling over to the door as though he owned the place.

  They shot him dead right on Stenwold’s doorstep, a snapbow bolt making a ruin of his throat above his gleaming breastplate and scarring the wall beyond, barely slowed. Then they were shouldering in: a half-dozen burly Beetle men, armoured piece-meal with leather and canvas and chitin plate, with knives and swords and two snapbows leading the charge.

  Janos saved Stenwold’s life even so – both by being the man to answer the door and by bringing two Merchant Company regulars along with him. They were caught off guard, by surprise, and yet both managed to get a shot off, killing a snapbowman and a swordsman, and wounding one of the men behind as the bolt passed right through his comrade.

  Then it was blade work. One of the soldiers got his sword clear, receiving a couple of strikes that his mail fended off. The second Merchant Company man had barely dropped his discharged snapbow when a dagger was rammed into his groin and he collapsed.

  Stenwold had no weapons on him. Shouting for the sole remaining defender to hold, somehow, he rushed for the stairs. A snapbow bolt ploughed past his head into the wall, an opportunistic shot spoiled by the jostle of the melee inside the doorway.

  Stenwold usually wore his sword, but not in his own house, and he had left it by the door – as unattainable now as if he had dropped it in the street. Upstairs, though, he had the collected works of a life lived at war with the Empire, if he only had time to deploy them.

  There was a choking cry from below, and he guessed that the sole remaining soldier had fallen to superior numbers. Stenwold threw himself into his bedroom, flipping open a drawer of his bedside cabinet, and then hurled himself over the bed, clutching for what was mounted on the wall there. He heard feet thundering up the stairs.

  The weight of the piercer fell into his hands, and he checked the weapon every tenday, keeping the monstrous instrument charged and loaded. It had saved his life more than once, a firepowder-charged bolt-thrower with four arm’s-length spears in its barrels.

  Then the attackers were spilling in, or that was how he read the situation as he pulled the trigger. The first man had time to skid off his feet, falling flat on his back, and the third was still partway up the stairs, recharging his snapbow, so the luckless second man took three of the four bolts dead on, enough to render the bulk of him unrecognizable as human.

  The piercer was useless now, and Stenwold leapt for the drawer even as the first man was lunging for him. A shortsword gashed his arm and then he had the little two-barrel snapbow out and tried to bring it to bear. For a moment he and the killer wrestled, each trying to wrench the weapon out of the other’s hand, Then there was a shout, and Stenwold’s opponent flung himself backwards. The snapbowman in the doorway had his weapon loaded and was frantically charging it.

  Stenwold loosed, taking the swordsman in the chest with one barrel, not a tactical decision so much as sheer reflex. He had no time to take the other man, for there was a sizzling flash – a sound and sight odious and familiar to Stenwold from twenty years of personal war.

  The third man’s snapbow discharged, the snap sounding a moment after the flare, but the wielder was already falling forwards, punched from behind, his weapon’s mouth jerking up. Stenwold felt a searing claw rake the side of his face, shooting pain through his head, but he was still standing afterwards, his right ear torn so that he could not tell what of the thunder came from outside, and what from within his head.

  A Wasp appeared at the door and Stenwold made a strangled sound and jabbed the little snapbow forwards, There was a flicker of wings as the new arrival fell back, dragging the door closed after him, the bolt holing the wood effortlessly.

  Trying to work out what was real, Stenwold stood in his own bedroom, three men in various extremities of death decorating his floor, his own blood flowing freely down the side of his neck and pooling at his collar. His hands, those past masters of necessity, found fresh bolts in the drawer, reloading and recharging the snapbow even as his mind reeled.

  From downstairs, an uncertain voice called up, ‘Master Maker?’ He felt he should recognize it, but no name sprang to mind.

  Stenwold took the bedside cabinet and moved it over to the door, kicking the dead snapbowman clear of its opening arc. His head was still ringing, and the house itself rang, too, the bombardment continuous and close. For a moment Stenwold balanced himself, one foot on the cabinet, a hand on the door, before flinging the door wide and kicking the cabinet out as hard as he could. He heard it reach the stairs, with surprised oaths from below.

  Then he went after it, standing at the balcony rail with his snapbow levelled. ‘Weapons down!’ he yelled, murder in his voice,

  There was a Beetle youth below him, also the Wasp, both with their hands held in sight, the Wasps’ clenched into fists. They wore some sort of Company sash, and the Beetle looked like a student. They both looked like students.

  Eujen Leadswell and Averic, his errant memory recalled, and further reminded him that the snapbowman dead behind him had the charring of a Wasp sting in his back. There was a short-sword at Eujen’s feet that had blood on it, too, and that other body at the foot of the stairs had presumably supplied the blood.

  For a moment Stenwold simply stood there, trapped in the moment, weapon levelled and listening to the sound of his city being destroyed, until chains of logic fell into place, and he jammed the snapbow in his belt.

  Nine dead men downstairs, and Stenwold was shaken now to think how he might have been one more. Step by step, he stomped his way down the stairs. ‘What’s going on? Why are you here?’ he demanded. He could not find it within himself to thank them – not these two.

  They exchanged nervous glances, guilty almost. He felt the screw turn within him at the unfairness, given what they had done, but he could not stoop. He found his pride would not let him.

  Some consensus was reached, and Eujen spoke first. ‘Master Maker, Averic was approached by Imperial agents who tried to recruit him. They had a list of victims to kill tonight. We have passed on details, best guesses as to targets. But you were surely top of the list. We tried to get here sooner. The streets . . .’ By the end of his speech he had recognized the corpse of Janos Outwright and was staring at it in horrified fascination.

  Thereby saving my life twice over. But still the gracious words would not come. ‘I need to know everything they told you,’ he snapped at Averic, making the Wasp twitch. ‘Come with me, both of you.’ He stomped past them, heedless of the blood underfoot, collecting his sword. He was in command, he assured himself. The roar and crash from without gave the lie to that thought, but he clung to it, building a self-righteous anger to defend himself, which led on to the words: ‘And Master Leadswell, I trust you have reconsidered your stance on the Empire.’

  He was so much the mighty engine of state, right then, that he had stepped onto the street outside before realizing that the two students were not simply pattering in his shadow. He looked back, and the flash and gout of the next bomb showed Eujen Leadswell’s face all too clearly, standing motionless beside that small fragment of the Empire that had ca
st its lot in with Collegium this night.

  ‘Master Maker,’ Leadswell stated, ‘when this is done, I will put myself forward at the Lots and get myself made Assembler, however long it takes. And when I do, I shall fight you at every bloody turn.’

  ‘Let us hope you that have the opportunity. If the Wasps win I don’t imagine anyone will be casting Lots any time soon,’ Stenwold retorted instantly, even though part of him was listening to his own words and shouting, Give it a rest! Just unbend and put a hand out to them. Except that putting a hand out meant friendship only in Collegium. To a Wasp it was a prequel to killing.

  Averic’s hand was out already, and Stenwold flinched, reaching for his snapbow. The Wasp was pointing, though, his face bloodless and horrified in the ruddy glare of flames.

  Stenwold turned, without expectations, and the sight struck him like a blow. There was a colossal conflagration at the centre of the city. The Amphiophos was burning.

  Thirty-Four

  Reaching the Amphiophos was a nightmare journey through disintegrating streets, encountering the dispossessed, the grieving, the blank-faced Merchant Company soldiers who could not help. The city’s familiar landmarks had been picked up and strewn like a child’s toys. Collegium was large and the enemy orthopters had been few, relatively speaking. The Beetle-kinden would survive, but still the scale of the damage was daunting. An unopposed incursion finally served to show what the hard work of the Collegiate airmen and women had been achieving as the nightly fruits of their failing defence.

  The bombing was tailing off by the time Stenwold reached the first rubble foothills of the Amphiophos, and it was a bitter thought that only a shortage of bombs could be behind their retreat.

  They will come in greater numbers tomorrow. That is what this has all been about. If I am wrong about Banjacs’s machine, though . . . then I will have invited the end. The thought of that same end being inevitable sooner or later, if Banjacs failed, was not one to comfort him.