The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He saw two halfbreeds, unescorted and out of uniform, and under normal circumstances that would have been enough for him to have them arrested first, and work out what was going on later. There were certain individuals in Imperial lore who were sufficiently notorious for their description to filter down as far as sergeants, however.

  One of the two newcomers was nothing much to look at: a young man who looked as though he had Beetle and Ant blood in him, solidly built and with a brooding expression on his dark face. Like his companion, he wore dark artificer’s leathers, with a surcoat over that displaying a grey open gauntlet on a grey field, the device standing clear from its surrounds by some trick of the cloth. The resemblance between them ended there. The other man was taller, standing awkwardly with a curiously lopsided posture. His face was mottled, grey on pale, and his eyes were all white and pupil, with no visible iris. His features themselves were lean and severe and somehow gave the impression of deformity for no concrete reason. One of his hands was gauntleted in steel, and it was by this, more than anything else, that the sergeant knew him.

  He was a bright man, that sergeant: being faced by a figure who was renowned as genius, traitor and dead, all at once, gave him pause for thought. At last he compromised on, ‘You have papers, of course, sir,’ as neutral a challenge as a Wasp had ever made.

  The pale halfbreed smiled slightly, and his associate reached into one of a score of pouches and brought out a crumpled document with a seal on it. The Empress’s seal, the sergeant noted. This dog-eared and maltreated piece of paper had once been in her own hands.

  A moment’s reading had confirmed either the best or the worst. Yes, this was the infamous Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos. Yes, he had never been a deserter, after all, nor dead, but had been released from his official duties by the Empress, a pleasant fiction given that he had surely abandoned his post before she had ever assumed the throne. Yes, he had every business being here. After the rest, the sergeant could have guessed that. After all, there had been a contingent of the mercenary Iron Glove artificers working alongside the reforming Eighth for the last month.

  ‘Welcome to Malek Camp, sir.’

  ‘You’ll go far, sergeant.’ Drephos, as those closest to him called him, cast his gaze about, seeing the ragged bustle of a more than usually chaotic Imperial camp: several thousand soldiers and their slaves and supporters and – most importantly – their machines. ‘Two questions. Where are my men, and where is your Major . . . ?’ He snapped the fingers of his armoured hand with a hollow click.

  ‘Ferric,’ the other halfbreed filled in for him.

  ‘You’ll find them both together up on the rise south of camp,’ the sergeant replied, and promptly detailed a reluctant soldier to lead the way, and thereby get both halfbreeds well away from him.

  Major Ferric was presiding over a grand assembly of what must have been most of Malek Camp’s cooking staff, and the smell of some kind of stew came clearly to Totho as he and Drephos ascended. All around them, artificers were working, both Imperial engineers and the men of the Iron Glove, but Major Ferric was distinguishing himself by not getting in the way and instead making sure everyone got fed.

  He was a heavily built, broad-shouldered Wasp with a face dominated by a broken nose that had never been reset properly. He had sharp eyes, though, spotting his visitors as soon as they stepped within the white light of the working lamps, and Totho saw his eyebrows lift.

  ‘Colonel-Auxillian!’ Ferric called, without leaving his post by the cooking fires. ‘Over here.’

  It was hardly proper protocol, but Drephos was an odd man in that way, sometimes making the Wasp-kinden jump through hoops for his amusement, other times heedless of any and all degrees of rank and priority. He made a quick path over to Ferric in his slightly lurching stride, Totho tagging along at his heels.

  ‘Glad to see you made it, Colonel.’ Ferric gave him a casual salute. ‘You won’t remember, but I was with you and the Sixth during the Twelve-year War. Pleasure to work with you again, sir.’

  Drephos nodded, plainly not recalling the man at all, but then most other people were not a particularly important part of his world. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘Well, sir, your men and mine are working to get the great-shotters up and ready, because I have a feeling we’re due to get orders to kick over the ant’s nest some time soon, and these beasts of yours take a lot of calibration. As there’s not a great deal I can personally contribute, and as my lads are all pulling double shifts to make up the time, I reckon the best employment for me is making sure there’s hot food for everyone.’

  The Colonel-Auxillian – although his continuing right to that rank was somewhat in dispute – stared at him briefly, and then nodded in grudging approval. ‘These men are all engineers?’

  ‘Two-thirds of the engineers I have,’ Ferric confirmed, ‘and the rest are sleeping.’

  ‘A great deal of this work is menial. Why haven’t you commandeered help from the rest of the army?’

  ‘Ah, well, sir.’ Ferric shrugged, pragmatically. ‘Colonel Erveg, now, he’s a traditionalist. He doesn’t much hold with advances in engineering. He says they took Myna without all these toys last time, and he’ll do it again just the same, soon as orders come through.’

  Drephos exchanged a look with Totho, rolling his eyes at the foolishness of the world with special reference to the Imperial command. ‘Well, then, we should change that.’

  ‘He won’t want to listen to you, sir. Colonel-Auxillian won’t cut anything with him.’

  At Drephos’s impatient gesture Totho pulled out another creased paper bearing a set of seals.

  ‘Rejoice, then,’ Dariandrephos noted wryly, ‘Colonel Ferric.’ He handed the commission over to the startled officer. ‘I have been requested to make sure that the “toys” the Empire has purchased from the Iron Glove cartel are put to their best use. To that end, the Eighth Army, which this force will soon be a part of, requires a chief engineer. You seem capable, so I bestow the honour on you. Now, sir, perhaps you might send a runner for this Colonel Erveg.’

  Major – Colonel – Ferric took his promotion in his stride, offering just another waggle of the eyebrows to indicate this sudden jump in his fortunes. Nonetheless he had a Fly-kinden in the air a moment later, off to wake up the man who, a moment ago, had been in sole charge of Malek Camp.

  In the meantime, Totho had rounded up the chief of the Iron Glove men there. ‘Tell me you’ve got at least one of the Sentinels up and running.’

  ‘Only one.’ The artificer, a squat Bee-kinden from the far shores of the Exalsee, shrugged his powerful shoulders. ‘Got it in a shed down the hill. Not had the time to get any of the others into order.’

  ‘Take a crew, then, and go get it started up,’ Totho directed. ‘Bring it right here. We’re about to change some priorities.’ He looked up at the towering greatshotters, their brass-bound steel barrels angled as though to shoot down the moon, the metal wrapped in an intricate mesh of spider silk and wire to stop it bursting asunder. Soon, he knew, these huge weapons would speak their thunder for the first time.

  Myna. But then he had no fond memories of the place, in all honesty, and even the unfond ones had been so long ago that he could not bring himself to feel any strong emotion about what would shortly happen to it.

  Nine

  Stenwold had sent Laszlo to Solarno because he needed an agent there, also because it was a reward for Laszlo’s previous efforts, and because there was some logic to sending a man who had been on ships most of his life to a city on the shores of a vast lake. Arriving with Stenwold’s orders in his mind, and the white-walled vista of the city before him, Laszlo had expected many things.

  He had not expected to start to care about it all. He had not expected the spying game to get so personal, friendships and rivalries and muddied allegiances. He had not expected to become infatuated with a girl who might be working for anyone or nobody at all.

  She had said she wo
uld meet him. Solarno was drawn tight as a wire. The Cortas were ordering arrests, exiling random foreigners, searching ships. Nobody went to the Taverna te Remi any more. The place had closed down three days before and its owner had either disappeared or been disappeared. The casual detente between the Solarnese agents had broken at last, like ice at the end of winter. And, of course, it could not have lasted, but Laszlo had loved it while it had. There had been a feeling there that people of his newfound trade could deal with each other in a civilized manner.

  Now they were at each other’s throats, and Solarno had become a dangerous place to stay. They remembered the Imperial boot there. Before the war they had been a big fish, and the Exalsee a small pond compared to the world beyond. Now the Empire and the Spiderlands and the Lowlander powers were moving out there in the darkness: great slabs of plans grinding into place, fit to crush little cities to dust. And Solarno was not even the biggest fish around the Exalsee any more.

  It was time to get out.

  She had said she would meet him, had te Liss. The night after the Taverna te Remi’s closing they had made their pact. To the pits with loyalties and whatever wretched, desperate espionage Solarno was still a stage for. They were getting out.

  So he had chosen this place – a dockside dive that catered for sailors, and few of them native Solarnese. It was one of the first places he had made contacts, drawing on his past.

  Dusk, they had agreed, but he had come early to avoid any surprises. He had thought she might do so as well. Now he sat hunched at a table with a pair of other Fly-kinden, setting down cards grimly, heedless of strategy, calling every bluff and playing every hand, and watching the door and windows always. He was winning, to the disgust and annoyance of his fellows.

  He saw them immediately as they came in: not Liss, but he had been expecting them anyway. They were dressed in long coats and scarves, a grab-bag of kinden and halfbreeds, but they did not walk like sailors and too many of them looked his way straight off. Some small part of him realized he had been betrayed right then. Some other part of him knew she had been caught, and they had ripped it out of her. The rest of him was already moving. Quick exits were a common event here, and they kept all the shutters thrown back for that very reason. Why else would he frequent the place?

  In a moment he was standing on the table, even as the newcomers made for him. He saw glints of metal: knives and a couple of the little crossbows that the Solarnese liked. They did not look like men with capture on their minds.

  Stenwold Maker had been a grateful friend and a generous employer. Laszlo whipped out from within his own coat the parting gifts the Beetle spymaster had given him. The cut-down little snapbows had only recently made it to the markets, and at a ruinous price, but they were already starting to be known as ‘sleevebows’ by criminals and spies both, although they were still a little large for any Fly’s sleeves. Good models would hold their charge for hours without losing any power and, though they lacked the accuracy of a full-sized snapbow, Laszlo was unlikely to be more than five yards from anyone he intended to shoot. They were curved and elegant as spider fangs, and barely six inches long.

  These men were not professionals, nor used to working together. Some of them leapt back immediately, seeking cover, a couple charged at him, and one loosed a crossbow bolt, in startled reflex, that went into the shoulder of a compatriot. Laszlo grinned and kicked off into the air, his Art wings humming about his shoulder in a flicker of light.

  Someone grabbed for his ankle. He looked down at one of his fellow gamblers, already reaching towards his belt for . . . Laszlo never found out what for.

  In Solarno he had played the quiet man, but his family had been pirates for generations, after all, and they would be so again. He felt a stab of reluctance, but none of it reached his reaction time as he shot the man through the chest, the harsh snap of his weapon barely registering in the commotion as the regular patrons rushed for the door or took off through the windows.

  It was enough confusion. Free of the dead man’s grip Laszlo dodged through the nearest window himself, darting around another fleeing drinker, one weapon now discharged and the other hunting for targets.

  Have they got her? Can I rescue her? If the first answer was yes, the second would likely be no – which didn’t mean he wouldn’t try. Stupid, stupid, but her face was clear in his mind, a beacon. He could not say he loved her – was there ever a more treacherous foundation to build love on? – but she had hooks in him that he could not tear out, and the thought of her in pain, in fear, or worse, tore at parts of him he had not known he possessed.

  If she was free, where would she go? If, hypothetically, she was free and she wanted to keep to their pact, and knew the dockside place was compromised, then where?

  She was the only person who knew where he lodged, that place near the hangars that Maker had secured for him somehow. He was not supposed to know where she lodged, but some very determined shadowing had uncovered it – and he had always thought, wished, hoped, that he had done so only because she secretly wished him to know. He had confessed the spying to her later, and she had been mock-outraged yet plainly delighted, her real motivation layered into unreadability.

  But, if they were hunting her, she would hardly stay home and wait for a boot to kick her door in.

  He was cornering across the city even as he thought about it, heading for his own room, hoping against hope that he would find her waiting for him there. And let her be a dozen times an enemy of Collegium if only she’s still alive!

  He kept the shutters of his lodgings barred from the inside – too much of an invitation, otherwise, in a city filled with his own kinden – but there was a trick to them, one loose bar that could be prised open enough to flick the bar off its rests. He could have installed a lock, but he had worked out early on that Liss was Inapt, a rare thing in a Solarnese Fly-kinden, so he had been planning ahead in a vague and opportunistic way. He had considered that, when the game turned sour, she might come here and seek sanctuary.

  He flurried down out of the darkening sky and came to sudden rest beside the window, clinging to the wall with his Art.

  The bar was undisturbed, and she could not have picked the door lock. She had not been here. He almost turned away then, but the thought came that she could have left a message for him, detailing some other rendezvous, and so he hopped the bar himself and swung in, heading for the door, looking for that slip of folded paper that might give him hope.

  There was nothing, but when he turned back for the window, there was a man there, a shortsword in his hand.

  He was bigger than Laszlo by a foot or so, but small by most people’s standards. He wore a long coat; beneath it was a white cuirass plated with steel, Solarnese militia issue. His face was bleak and hostile, and it was that, rather than the dusk, that gave Laszlo a moment’s blinking pause before recognizing him.

  ‘Breighl?’ he said uncertainly. ‘Painful? What are you doing here.’

  ‘The game’s up, Laszlo, or whoever you are.’ There was nothing left in the halfbreed of the man that Laszlo had drunk with, gambled with and mocked. The hand not directing a sword at him was at belt-level, half inside his coat, and Laszlo guessed at one of the little local crossbows there, already tensioned and loaded.

  ‘What’s going on, Painful?’ Laszlo let himself relax, wings vanishing from his back but ready to be called at a moment’s notice. He had not reloaded the spent sleevebow, but its companion was still charged, and he reckoned his reactions were better than Breighl’s at a pinch. ‘How did you find this place?’

  Breighl gave him a disdainful smile. ‘You were followed here tendays ago. You’re nowhere near as good as you think you are.’

  ‘Where’s te Liss?’ Laszlo demanded, because he had assumed they had got his address from the girl, but now hope flared in him again.

  ‘So you are working with her, then,’ Breighl noted, with infinite regret. ‘We’ll pick her up, don’t you mind about that. You’re under arr
est, Laszlo. You’re a foreign national working against the Cortas. The order to bring you in doesn’t specify that you have to still be breathing but, for old times’ sake, I’ll give you a chance.’

  ‘I’m not working against the Cortas.’

  ‘Laszlo, you’re working for the Spiderlands Aristoi, we know that. Don’t piss me about.’

  All this time and he really believed that? Laszlo felt almost hurt. ‘Look, if you must know, I’m working out of Collegium, and you surely see that they, of all people, don’t want the Empire in here—’

  ‘The Empire?’ Breighl abruptly had the crossbow out and aimed at him, and Laszlo re-evaluated just who likely had the quicker reflexes. ‘You think we’re worried about the Empire now? So they have some troops up north, past Toek? So what? They’re worried about what we’re worried about, Laszlo. We know there’s a fleet of ships on the Exalsee even now, out of Mavralis. We know that a dozen Aristoi families have finally decided they can’t let Solarno remain independent any more. Don’t take us for idiots. We know your employers think this is all a game, but to us it isn’t!’ Abruptly he was shouting, the crossbow shaking wildly, making Laszlo flinch.

  ‘Believe me, Breighl, I have some really poor history with the Spiderlands. I’m not with them!’ Laszlo insisted. To his astonishment – almost his embarrassment – there were tears in the halfbreed’s eyes.

  ‘Oh, I know, the Spiders think everyone else is a fool, and so do their agents. Nobody’s as smart as them. Even the Solarnese Aristoi think it’s all so pissing clever, but we Solarnese don’t want to end up as the toys of the Spiderlands, just another cursed satrapy city, a pawn in their games. This is my city, Laszlo! I’m going to do anything I can to stop your filthy scheming mistresses get their hands on it, and if the first move in that is to put a bolt through your brain, then so be it!’

  He jabbed the crossbow towards Laszlo for emphasis, and it went off.

  Laszlo was already lurching to one side, an Art-sense unique to Fly-kinden warning him of it even before the string slipped. The bolt ploughed into the wall behind him, then he was going for the other man, not with the sleevebow, that would take a moment to aim in which Breighl’s sword could bat it aside, but with a dagger. Laszlo was the veteran of countless dockside brawls, skirmishes between pirates and the contested boardings of a score of ships, and in close quarters there was no weapon greater than a simple six–inch blade.