The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Leadswell opened his mouth, one hand making a half-gesture towards Padstock, which had her twitching to bring her snap-bow around. Jodry took a moment to adjust his mental picture of Padstock inviting Averic to his office. Did she read a little more into my instructions than I meant? Yes. Did I honestly think she would not, given who she is? Hmmm.

  ‘Averic, I understand that you are having a difficult time adjusting to our society.’ It was a neutral opening. ‘Reports of your academic record are mixed,’ because Jodry knew well that certain teachers at the College had war records and too many memories, ‘and the College bailiff’s office has a number of reports that mention your name,’ notably as the victim, although some of those bailiffs were similarly partisan.

  ‘Have you brought me here to expel me, Master Drillen?’ Averic asked quietly.

  ‘No doubt your friend Leadswell is about to insist that a vote of senior Masters is required for an expulsion, and I’ve not been amongst that number for a decade and more,’ Jodry corrected him, and caught an expression fleeting across the Wasp’s face: surprise. Of course, in the Empire, it was orders or nothing, and men lived or died by the whims of their superiors. That was what Jodry had always understood, and it was interesting to see it confirmed in these present circumstances. ‘Look, boy, I admit that, since the war, the student body has never been so diverse – Solarnese, Ancient Leaguers, Tseni, all manner of curios turning up at our gates looking for their accredits. Spies, some of them – but there is a school of thought saying that showing a spy that we are a benevolent, humanistic society that believes in equality and opportunity for all is by no means a wasted practice. It worked with Sarn, after all. However, and despite the recent alliance, no Vekken youth has applied to study here, and wisely so, for the wounds are still fresh from their most recent attempt to subjugate us. Not quite so fresh as the wounds your Second Army made when they camped outside our walls.’

  He looked from face to face: Leadswell’s dark features, Averic’s exotic pallor. Both were waiting for the strike, so that they could parry and riposte in kind.

  ‘I know a little about how matters work within the Empire. One central authority over corps, armies, Auxilians, slaves. A place for everyone, hm? So what am I to think? That you’re a renegade or you were sent? You’ll appreciate how the situation out east makes the question pertinent, and I’m not surprised that you find it hard to walk down a street in this city without being called out.’

  Leadswell opened his mouth again, but Averic just said, ‘I was sent, sir. But I was sent by my family. Do you think nobody in the Empire looks over at Collegium and wonders, What is their secret strength? But I am not a spy. There are those in the Empire who believe that the future may bring us to terms with the Lowlands – with Collegium therefore. What better adviser and ambassador than one who has studied with you? Would you not have some scion of yours serve in the Imperial army, if he could?’ The boy’s voice was careful: not fierce with sincerity, nor hesitant with doubt.

  ‘It’s a pleasant enough thought,’ Jodry allowed, bringing all his scrutiny to bear, but finding the Wasp’s features impossible to read. The boy’s hands were fists, he saw, clenched tight, but none of that made it to his face. ‘You must admit that the future you describe seems unlikely just now.’

  Averic shrugged. ‘I hope for better, sir. That the war between our peoples is not finished seems unarguable, but all wars eventually end. My family have made an investment. They are soldiers, as all our people are, but they are merchants also.’

  ‘Leadswell, I recall you from the end-of-year debates,’ Jodry noted. ‘You spoke very well in favour of just such a future as young Averic describes. You lost, however. The judges were unkind, perhaps.’

  Eujen Leadswell took a steadying breath, neither of them feeling it necessary to mention that Jodry had been one of those judges. ‘Master Drillen, you asked why I came. Do I fear for my friend under Collegium justice? No, for he has broken no laws. But any man may call him a spy, and I do not trust that the law would be swift enough to save him. You talk of our educating spies about our cultural superiority. Averic has been shown precious little of that, Master Drillen. What report do you think he would give of us if he returned home now?’

  ‘That we were more like his people than he had thought,’ Jodry snapped, nipping the oratory in the bud. ‘Do you envy the lot of an Imperial’s life – and I mean that of our kinden there, who do well enough as the Empire goes? Do you think it is some grand lie that suggests the Empire is a cruel regime that makes cities into slaves and slaves into corpses?’

  ‘I think that it is our duty as Collegiate men to do all we can to change the Empire, Master Drillen,’ Leadswell shot right back, and Padstock tensed, for the lad was abruptly leaning over Jodry’s desk towards him, all awe at the office of Speaker forgotten. ‘But I think that if we treat them as nothing but a threat, then we shall create our own future. Also, I know him. He is my friend. I choose to trust him. He is no spy.’

  Averic’s face was very set, but Jodry wondered if he detected some suppressed emotion there, even if only the eyes were a party to it. ‘And when the Empire comes to us with armies and not with words?’ he asked. ‘How will you meet them, then?’

  Leadswell stepped back, his face bitterly displaying the thought, So, you think I’m a traitor, too. ‘As I did last time they came, Master Drillen. When Tynan’s Second was at our gates, I was loading artillery on the wall.’

  ‘And you?’ Jodry’s gaze swept towards Averic, meeting that lack of expression head on. Before the Wasp’s silence became awkward, Arvi opened the door with another Fly accompanying him, a woman in a grey robe that was decidedly not Collegium standard.

  ‘Mistress te Mosca,’ Jodry observed. He had wanted this interview but, now it was cut short, he found that he was relieved. For Leadswell is right, of course, from a certain point of view – right and yet too late. That ship sailed before the Wasps put us to the siege the last time.

  ‘Master Drillen.’ Sartaea te Mosca was not a full Master of the College, but a mere associate. Still, she had been hired to head a department left vacant, and one that nobody else wanted. She taught Inapt studies, as the College preferred to refer to the mysticism and flummery that surrounded the ways of the old Moth-kinden. She was a young lecturer, but a few decades amongst the Moths at Dorax had given her a curiously ageless air, which in Jodry’s experience persisted even after she had downed close on her bodyweight in imported spirits. She had also taken a keen interest in Averic and Leadswell and all their little clique, and was sociable enough to have garnered a certain fondness amongst the College Masters.

  ‘Mistress te Mosca,’ Jodry repeated. ‘These two lads appear to have found their way to my study. Would you perhaps ensure they reach their lodgings?’

  She studied him, testing her Moth-taught inscrutability against his professional regard, and breaking first, into a slight, submissive smile. ‘I’d be delighted to, Master Speaker.’

  She turned to go, the two students lagging behind, and Jodry tapped his pen on the desk for their attention. ‘One more thing, young Leadswell. I know it is always a fine thing to imagine yourself the rebel, fighting for a grand cause against the ignorance and prejudice of many. Believe me, Stenwold Maker traded on that for decades, and you might want to think about that. However, I trust that in your social history classes they still teach the rivers hypothesis? That no society travels all one way, dances to a single tune, but there are mingled flows, so on, so forth? Did you see the play The Officer’s Mistress?’

  Leadswell frowned at him, shaking his head, knowing the trap was there, but unable to see where Jodry was going with this.

  ‘Too late now, then. It closed after four nights. Full houses, too. A grand shame. Set during the war, don’t you know? Some piece of business about the Empire in the second and fourth acts.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Master Drillen,’ Leadswell admitted.

  ‘The theatre owner brought the curtain dow
n,’ Jodry explained gently. ‘Not healthy, you see, to be associated with something that’s making fun of the Empire, for all that the commons rush to laugh. After all, you never know who your patrons might be next year. You never know who’s making a list right now. You might want to think about that.’

  Arvi would, left to his own devices, have escorted the two students from Drillen’s chambers coldly and without ceremony, to let them know just what the establishment of the Assembly thought of them, as interpreted by himself, the Speaker’s secretary. However, they were accompanied by Sartaea te Mosca, who was a Fly-kinden teaching at the College, and Arvi had an entirely intentional double standard when it came to his own people. Those who had made enough of themselves to become respectable always found a friendly reception at the Speaker’s offices. Besides, Arvi was now, in his own estimation, sufficiently advanced in society to start casting around for his own dynasty, and attractive and influential Fly women were always worth keeping on the right side of.

  The two youths looked shaken, as well they might, but te Mosca’s admirable presence was calming them, and Arvi indicated to her, by a careful nod and a twitch of an eyebrow, that he would give them all a moment to settle themselves before turning them out of doors. Her smile, in return, was small but elegant, and Arvi made careful adjustments to the mental list of eligibility that he carried constantly in his mind. He considered whether offering a little warmed-over wine might be appropriate, but no doubt the students would want some too, in which case the only appropriate offering would have to be an insultingly poor vintage. Associating with the student body at all, in fact, seemed to indicate a flaw, in this woman’s judgement. He frowned to himself and annotated his list further.

  At that moment a Beetle-kinden woman burst in, the doorman actually running after her in an attempt to restrain her.

  ‘I need to see the Speaker right now!’ she snapped, heedless of the other visitors. Even as Arvi rushed at her, hands up to implore discretion, she was saying, ‘No! Get out of my way, you bloody functionary. That maniac Gripshod is going to blow up the whole city if somebody doesn’t stop him . . .’

  Something in Arvi’s demeanour communicated itself because the woman turned round and saw a Wasp staring at her with some interest. She stuttered to a halt.

  Arvi sighed, but this sort of thing was happening all the time. One could not get efficient enough door staff, and some day he would have to speak to the artifice department and get them to automate the process somehow. He managed it all without Jodry ever knowing, shuffling the Beetle woman – a regular informant – into a side room, and then gently decanting te Mosca and her charges onto the street with a kind word, ensuring by looks and manner that the woman understood how he was going out of his way and beyond the call of duty for her. Then he returned and gave Jodry sufficient warning for him to receive his next guest in his customary fashion, even tweaking his master’s robes into a suitably picturesque dishevelment.

  At last the informant was ushered in with whatever alarming news she had about Gripshod – and what a name that was to conjure with, Arvi thought – and he could now take a moment for a sit-down and a fortifying sip of brandy from the flask he kept in a holster under his armpit.

  Just as he was stowing the covert article away, another Fly-kinden burst in, this time so far ahead of the doorman that Arvi could only hear his running feet.

  ‘Need to see the Speaker,’ she got out. She was still wearing the light canvas overalls of an aviatrix, and Arvi guessed she had flown here straight from the airfield with the stink and oil of the orthopter still on her hands.

  ‘Mistress te Schola,’ he greeted her, because this woman also taught at the Assembly – and she was a beauty, too, for all that she was Solarnese and therefore somewhat eccentric of manner.

  ‘Taki,’ she corrected him absently, and only raised an eyebrow when he kissed her hand, a greeting he fervently hoped was appropriately Solarnese. ‘Look, seriously, I need to see Drillen right now.’

  She was still out of breath from the flight, her chestnut hair flattened by the imprint of the flying helm she had only just removed, tracking grease on to the carpets and with her clothes dirty and unchanged for too long. Arvi almost proposed there and then. However, his spine was an iron rod of duty and he could only force out the reluctant words, ‘I’m afraid the Speaker is in a meeting, but if you would wait . . .’

  ‘Get me Maker, then,’ she told him. ‘Stenwold Maker, the War Master.’

  ‘Alas, Master Maker is out of the city.’

  Taki stared at him. ‘He’s what?’

  ‘He set out for Myna, I believe.’ Probably that was a state secret, but this woman was one of Maker’s associates, and anyway, in that moment, Arvi would have found it hard to deny her anything.

  ‘But I was flying over Myna just now!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve flown from Capitas to Collegium and now I have to go most of the way back?’

  ‘I could perhaps inform the Speaker that you are here . . .’ Arvi stretched his duty to the snapping point.

  ‘Forget it. I need to get a night’s sleep, get my Esca rewound and tuned up, and I need to drop some sketches into the aeronautics department just as soon as I’ve actually made them. Tell Drillen I’ve headed for Myna.’ And she was gone from the room and from Arvi’s life, as abruptly as she had appeared.

  Eight

  To anyone observing Stenwold – which meant a dozen others in the Sontaken’s passenger hold – he would seem to be composing a coded missive, a curiously blatant piece of espionage, as he sat there with papers spread about him. On one sheet were some sparse notes in plain script, on another a laboriously translated piece made of baffling symbols. The other pages comprised his lexicon, a book of all those familiar words that he had been able to scratch down the glyphs for. At least a couple aboard the Sontaken must recognize him, and several were staring and whispering, no doubt imagining the infamous War Master compiling secret orders to his minions.

  In fact, he was writing a letter to a woman, as delicate and awkward a piece of wordsmithing as ever went into a student’s love poem.

  This was not a love letter, of course. He was too old for that sort of thing and so was she, and neither of them were in love. If there had been anything as fiery and fierce as love between them, then surely they would not be so utterly separated now, living amongst different kinden in different worlds. Stenwold’s days as a lover had come and gone when he was a College student, and left no marks or traces behind. Even his dalliance with Arianna, the Spider-kinden girl who had deserted from the Rekef for him, had not quite been love, after all – her ambition, his hubris, and a passion born of war overwhelming any fear of danger. She had betrayed him, later, then died trying to save him. It had not been a happy business. He still missed her, but he knew full well it had not been love.

  The Sontaken was a new design of airship, a streamlined canopy above, some powerful outrigger engines and a newly designed system of stabilizers meant that the little vessel could make the Collegium to Helleron run in four days of mild discomfort, when it had once been the boast of the great Sky Without to make the same trip in ten. Four days sitting in the same place without bureaucracy demanding his time was a luxury to Stenwold, which was why he had started abandoning the city for his clifftop refuge, where he could look out over the sea and brood, and shudder.

  He had been to places few other landborn had ever seen, but he would never go back. That sunless, alien abyss offered no life for one such as him, just as his parched and dusty world was a terrible place for the woman he now wrote to.

  He consulted his lexicon once again, but he had found another gap in his knowledge, another word he did not know the sigil for, nor any cognate of it. If he could have simply written to her, with all the Collegiate eloquence at his command, then things might have been different. Perhaps he could have baited the hook sufficiently to draw her up to shore again. The Sea-kinden spoke the same words that he did, but their writing was utterly different,
each word a picture. Each time the sea-traders returned with more gold and more intricate clockwork, he learned another few dozen signs from them to add to his book, but even now he could write only the most halting and awkward things and, besides, what could he say? Not mawkish talk of feelings, certainly. He was Stenwold Maker, middle-aged and calloused by time and loss, and he could not open himself wide enough to admit that kind of youthful foolishness. And besides, they were both too solemn and set in their ways, and they both had responsibilities.

  So instead he wrote about duty, to the wretched extent that he could. After all, he had his duty to Collegium, and she had hers to her new leader, the boy Aradocles. Perhaps even the differences of land and sea might not have sufficed to separate them had they not both been so busy.

  Her name was Paladrya, this woman he did not love. Her letters came back to him, sometimes, infrequently, partly in her confident pictograms, partly in crude letters that he had a hard time deciphering. He could ask the Sea-kinden who brought them to translate, of course, or to write down for him what he wanted to say in return, but his words were for Paladrya alone, for all that they were of such everyday things. He did not want to share them with anybody else.

  Without ever really thinking about it, he had disclosed such things to her that the Assembly might have exiled him for treason. When he thought of her, when he painstakingly fumbled out those complex glyphs, he had no secrets.

  He sensed a change in the Sontaken’s progress, felt his stomach shift with a gradual loss of height, and knew that they were now coming in to Helleron. He would secure transport to Myna there, but first he would meet up with an old friend. The business of the world was pressing on him again. Stenwold gathered up his papers and stowed them back in the pack at his belt, ready for the next rare opportunity for contemplation.