Heirs of the Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Abruptly there was movement from behind Angved, with more hard and unsympathetic-looking guards arriving, and for a moment the engineer thought that he would just be hauled away again, his brief glimpse of this place just a mistake, punctuation on his road to some worse fate. The newcomers were delivering, however, rather than picking up, and someone slumped on to the bench next to Angved with a clink of chains.

  This newcomer had not been employed on factory duty. Angved would find out later that this was the difference between being blamed for the demise of a halfway secret and deniable desert skirmish and being blamed for the failure of a major invasion. He was thin enough to look starved, with a wild growth of beard and his hair matted and tangled. Between that and the dirt, it was hard to see much in his face save the creases and lines. Grime and harsh treatment went a fair way to bridging what was in reality a fifteen-year gap in their ages, and perhaps it was this that broke through Angved’s shell of self-absorption. For the first time since the Khanaphes business had gone sour, he found himself looking on someone else as a human being, a kindred spirit.

  The guards had stepped back to the door, and up at the high table the senior engineers were arguing again. A slim book was being passed back and forth, almost torn in half as they fought to point out various pages in it.

  Angved saw the newcomer looking at him, the eyes lurking in that overgrown face surprisingly sharp.

  ‘Varsec,’ the man told him, keeping his voice low enough not to drift over to the guards, ‘former captain.’

  ‘Angved, former lieutenant.’ It was a curious brotherhood, and if the other man had once held a higher rank, still he had fallen further.

  ‘Engineers?’ the other man pressed.

  Angved nodded. ‘You’re not?’

  Thin shoulders shrugged. ‘Have they worked out where the Aviation Corps fits yet?’ he asked wryly, to Angved’s surprise. The aviators were virtually independent of their parent artificers, a young, arrogant and elitist band. This man did not seem to fit the mould, but then a few beatings and a turn on the rack would take the shine off anyone’s pride.

  ‘And you’re here for . . .?’ Varsec wondered.

  ‘Khanaphes,’ Angved found himself answering without hesitation.

  ‘Ah, I didn’t hear much of that. Still, I’ve not been best placed to get the news recently.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Solarno.’

  Angved blinked. That was a matter of public record, even if the doomed Khanaphir expedition was not. The Empire had taken Solarno as part of a daring experiment, an invasion planned and spearheaded by the Aviation Corps. They had lost the city at around the same time that the big war had turned, when suddenly there were too many battles to fight, and too few armies, and when the Lowlands had pulled together and everything else fell apart. He understood then that Varsec must be the ranking survivor of the Solarnese force, just as he himself was the scapegoat for Khanaphes.

  He was about to pass a comment, his intended words surprising him by being solicitous rather than scathing, when something in Varsec’s pose alerted him. The men at the high table, those important engineering magnates, even the seated Rekef intruder, were looking back across the room. Their eyes fell on Varsec, and then on Angved, passing back and forth, finding each as unpalatable as the other, and yet they kept looking, snapping and growling at one another even as they did. The level of tension in the room, the bowstring-taut nerves of all those powerful men, was almost enough to taste. Words drifted across the room, odd snippets of hissed and urgent demands. ‘Are you sure . . .?’, ‘. . . the tests showed . . .’, ‘. . . would never let us do it . . .’, ‘. . . the Empress . . .’

  Angved swallowed, but one fragment of their conversation had lodged in his mind. The tests, they had said. My tests? Have they read my report? And the only conclusion he could come to: There is nothing else in the world that could have landed me in this room, save the results I handed in – the tests I conducted in the Nem desert. A little piece of side-business undertaken while the Rekef team and their Scorpion-kinden tools had been cracking open Khanaphes; a little experimentation with some of the local resources that had borne an unexpected yield. He had thought it might provide a useful nest egg to retire on, but now it might be the only thing that could save his life and career.

  He glanced at Varsec. The man wore an almost defiant expression as he looked at his superior officers, and Angved felt a leap of confidence in just seeing him. He is like me and, just like me, he’s found something that they need.

  Then the talking was done. In the end it was Colonel Lien who finished it. Lean and stone-bald, and yet barely Angved’s senior for all that, he spoke quietly and with purpose, and all the others listened. He even cut the Rekef man off with a sharp gesture when an interruption was threatened. We are decided, Lien’s stance said, and nobody challenged him on it.

  He was the first to leave, stepping down from the dais and striding towards the door. He slowed, though, as he neared the two prisoners: grey-haired Angved and the raggedly hirsute Varsec. His calculating eyes flicked between them, and on his face the distaste could not quite edge out something more thoughtful. On a younger, less cynical man it might have been hope.

  After that, the guards dragged Angved out, but not back to the factory. He learned soon enough that the Engineers had their own cells beneath Severn Hill, windowless and comfortless save for a pallet bed and the constant glare of gaslight. Angved had reckoned that he’d had enough of the sun out in the desert, but spending a day sealed underground did away with any such illusion.

  When he awoke, stiff and aching from the hard bed, he found his jailers had already been and gone. They had left him some water, a jug of weak beer, and some stew that had at least seen some meat around the time it was cooked. Luxury it was not, but nor was it food to waste on anyone facing a death sentence. More important than that, though, they had left him a book. It was slim, densely typeset and printed in the manner of all Engineering Corps texts, but certainly nothing on the standard syllabus. It was something new.

  He looked at the title page, holding it up to the hissing lamp.

  Towards an Efficient Mechanized Air Force, its Design and Deployment. Beneath that was stamped the name and rank of the author: Varsec, Captain, Southern Expeditionary Aviation Corps.

  For a moment Angved was quite blank as to why he might have been passed this document, but some helpful clerk had already thought of that, and a stub of black tape marked out a particular page towards the end of the book. The section there dealt with key problems that the author, Varsec, had not been able to solve. Angved had to read it three times before the pieces clicked into exquisite place in his mind, and it was all he could do to stop himself whooping in the narrow confines of his cell.

  He read, from start to finish despite the poor light, devouring Varsec’s words voraciously, poring over the diagrams, the carefully printed sketches and schematics depicting wings, streamlined bodies, joints and couplings. He skipped only those sections that dealt with Varsec’s mooted reorganization of the Aviation Corps, for that interested him not in the slightest. He had eyes only for the technical specifications.

  At the end of it, he put the book down and just stared at the wall, his mind’s eye painting it with all the wonderful colours of the future.

  Stab me, he thought, but we’ll take down every last living one of them. The Lowlands won’t know what’s hit it.

  Nine

  Khanaphes, city of a hundred thousand years – or, at least, old enough that calendars failed to have any relevance. Even the ancient, opaque system of the Moth-kinden, with its animal years marching in erratic and seemingly random procession, was nevertheless younger than this ancient city. The Collegiate dating system, so popular now, had yet to reach the year 550. Perhaps Khanaphes possessed its own calendar, but if so it was locked in the ubiquitous, impenetrable carvings that were incised on every wall and every stone surface. The locals themselves did not count the years. Time
for them was the year’s cycle: the flooding and the growing and the harvest, year without end, lives lived in annual segments that followed precisely the footprints that parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors had trodden. The Khanaphir had no use for time’s progressive arrow.

  But that had changed.

  The Khanaphir themselves, those solid, shaven-headed Beetle-kinden, were doing their best to pretend that they still possessed that unbroken line back into the deepest past. All of them, farmers, traders, clerks, soldiers and artisans, they were desperately mumming the lives that they remembered from only a year or so before, casting themselves in the grand mystery play of eternal Khanaphes. It was a lie, though, for change had come to Khanaphes with two swift dagger strikes: the first to wound and the second even now poised above them, ready to kill.

  The Many of Nem, the wild Scorpion-kinden, had always been their enemies, and the Khanaphir had fought them since time out of mind, as part of their eternal rote. When they had come last, though, the Scorpions had brought new weapons, allegedly gifted to them by the Wasp Empire, and with these they had knocked holes in Khanaphes’s walls and rampaged through half the city. That they had been driven away at last did not go far towards disguising the damage they had done or the appalling number of the city’s people they had slain.

  Still, had the city been left to its own devices, the old timeless cloak might have fallen across it once more. History is insistent, though, and now it had its hooks into Khanaphes. It was not long after the attack of the Many that the Empire had arrived.

  Word had come to Collegium swiftly, following on the heels of the scholarly visitors who had become caught up in the fighting with the Nem. Scarcely had they returned home than some of them were embarking again, finding the first airship back east, bound for Solarno and the Exalsee and, from there, to Khanaphes.

  Or not quite Khanaphes. Word had come that the Imperial hold on the city was tight, as always the case with a new addition to the Empire. The harbour was crawling with black and gold, and any ships that docked were subjected to a rigorous search. Still, there were plenty of convenient places to hide on a merchantman, and Praeda and Amnon might have risked it had they managed to find a ship’s captain willing to chance his cargo being confiscated by the Wasps’ Consortium.

  Praeda Rakespear was a College scholar, an artificer and architect, young and keen-minded and mostly fed up with Collegium’s hidebound attitudes these days, whether it was towards foreign policy or the advancement of female academics. Back in Collegium, she had cultivated a reputation as possessing armour that was proof against any man’s advances. The presence of Amnon at her side was testimony to the only time that armour had been breached.

  Amnon was Khanaphir, although he was now wearing Lowlander clothes. He was huge, massive-shouldered, tall and broad, and yet swift and precise with it, a true warrior’s warrior. In Khanaphes he had been their First Soldier, who led their armies and organized the city’s military forces. He had been exiled, too, which was just one of the topics that he and Praeda had not got around to discussing.

  Their transport was a Solarnese ship, low and single-masted, that crept up the coast of the Sunroad sea until the desert had given way to the marshy delta of the Jamail. The vessel’s master, a lean woman, with grey hair shading to white and her sand-coloured face sun-weathered, had her two-man crew set a fire on an islet there, settling down to wait for the unnamed parties she was to meet. Praeda and Amnon knew little of her business, save that the protocols she was following had been put in place in case business went bad – and Imperial invasions certainly counted as that.

  ‘You did something like this when the Scorpions attacked?’ Praeda dared to ask.

  The master nodded briefly. ‘He showed up then, sure enough, with bags all packed,’ was all she would say.

  ‘This friend of yours, he can help us into the city?’ Praeda pressed.

  ‘If he’s going back there.’ The ship’s master shrugged. ‘If he thinks it’s worth the candle.’

  They waited a day before the marsh people came to investigate the fires, unconcerned by the crossbows the three mariners lifted against them. They were slight Mantis-kinden with grey-green skins, silent and staring, but the master offered them some token that looked just like a red stone to Praeda. They accepted it from her, in the manner of a contract concluded, and vanished into the thronging green again.

  ‘Now we’re running out of time,’ the master had declared. ‘Half a day more and we’ll have to catch the tide, so come along with us, or stay on your own.’

  ‘And your friend?’ Praeda asked her, but the woman shook her head, lips pressed together.

  The friend never showed, and the master abandoned her hopes brusquely, as though it was nothing of any particular import. Nobody mentioned the Empire, even though it was the prime culprit in the man’s absence. Only as the little ship cast off, turning back for Porta Rabi, did Praeda see the Solarnese woman’s shoulders slump and her ramrod posture collapse. Their last view of the woman, as her vessel tacked swiftly away, might have been of her weeping.

  ‘Well,’ Praeda said soberly. ‘We’re on your ground, so what now?’

  Amnon considered slowly. ‘We cannot travel the marshes, not so far from the city. The shipmaster’s token will be no good to us now. We must reach the desert and then take the long road to the Jamail.’

  ‘But surely the marsh-kinden will know you – you were First Soldier. They’re hardly going to sell you to the Ministers or the Empire, are they? Can’t they help us?’

  His smile was fond. ‘Your people have such a belief that other kinden are just like you beneath the surface. Your logic is like bad wine, Praeda: it does not travel. You know a little of our histories?’

  ‘I know what you tell yourselves about your histories, but I don’t accept it as the truth. History never is,’ she replied defensively.

  ‘Then just this: the marsh people are pacted to us – rather, to Khanaphes.’ That self-correction was hasty and awkward. ‘Sworn to send their people to serve us, but in return we leave them their ancient ways. Stray from the river, stray into the delta, and you enter their domain and they will hunt you. They are very skilled in the hunt.’

  They followed the borderlands of the marsh, where the ground was still damp but firm enough to walk on, where the riot of ferns and cycads and arthrophytes gave way to long, lush grass and thornbushes. A day and a half of muggy heat it took them, resting up beneath what shelter they could find during the hottest hours, pressing on after dark to make up the time. They encountered the marsh-kinden just once, when they had camped past midnight in a stand of cypress trees. The Mantis-kinden came padding up, five of them, to investigate Amnon’s fire, but they seemed to recognize that they were beyond their boundaries. Instead, they regarded the travellers solemnly, until Amnon offered them some of the fish he was cooking. Hesitantly they came forward, three women and two men, slight enough almost to be children. Those of their kin that Praeda had seen in Khanaphes went about as shaven-headed as the locals, but these had white hair, worn long and braided back, then twined and knotted in intricate patterns.

  One of them reached out to touch Amnon’s stubbled scalp. The rest kept stealing glances at Praeda’s own head of long, dark hair. Such a small thing, but so important here. Shaving the head signified submission to the will of the mythical Masters of Khanaphes, the invisible lords of the city in whose ghostly name the Ministers governed. Praeda’s professional academic opinion was that they were long extinct, merely a convenient rod with which to keep the people of the city in line.

  Amnon spoke with the marsh-kinden, trying to coax some news from them, but they would admit to no knowledge of recent developments within the city itself. If the pickings of their hunts had been richer, with refugees fleeing from the Empire’s advance falling into their hands, they made no mention of it.

  How did the fight go? Praeda wondered. The magnificent army of the Khanaphir had been devastated by a Scorpi
on-kinden host armed only with obsolete Imperial cast-offs. How would they have coped when the Empire itself stood before their gates, rather than merely by proxy?

  Towards the end of the next day the two of them had put the huge swathe of the delta behind them, and could now see the farmland lining the Jamail extending northwards along the river’s course. Khanaphes itself appeared brilliant in the sunlight, its stones fairly glowing. Praeda could make out those walls that had served it so poorly in the fighting, and beyond them the greater edifices of the city government. Nothing seemed to be on fire or even smouldering.

  ‘They’ll have guards on the gates,’ she said, recalling all she knew of the Empire. ‘They’ll be searching all the people coming in and going out. Anyone slightly suspicious will get thrown behind bars, interrogated, fined, made to disappear. In fact, a fair few people who aren’t suspicious, too, just to spread fear. Fear keeps people in line, especially the fear of arbitrary punishment. Nobody wants to be noticed, when that kind of regime’s in place. Nobody causes trouble when they don’t know for sure where the lines are drawn. So no doubt there’s some secret back way into the city, that only the First Soldiers know about?’

  Amnon regarded her quizzically. ‘Why would anyone devise such a thing?’

  ‘But you have a plan,’ Praeda insisted. ‘If we just walk in, well . . .’ She swallowed, tilted her chin up. ‘I’ll shave my head. Then we’ll be locals. Will that be enough?’

  ‘Perhaps. As you say, I have a plan.’

  Before dusk they had trekked through a mile of farmland, tracing an erratic path of roads and irrigation dykes to reach one specific farmhouse out of dozens. There were a few Khanaphir about, who watched them arrive, more of caution in their eyes than curiosity. At the door, a broad-shouldered old man met them, nodding at Amnon as though he was a tax collector.