The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Breighl’s sword gave him reach but it was an advantage that Laszlo countered instantly, a rush of speed from his wings getting him within knife range, in the hope that a single blow might take the man down and clear the way to the window. The halfbreed was no stranger to this sort of fight either, and he was already lunging for Laszlo’s dagger wrist, his crossbow spinning away. For a moment he had a grip, sword drawn back outside the Fly’s reach, ready to stab, but Laszlo’s wings threw him into a backwards somersault so that he could kick Breighl in the face, the man’s grip loosening before he could dislocate Laszlo’s shoulder. The Fly came down at the far end of the room, for all the little space that gave him, and was already launching back at his opponent, his wings just a flickering blur.

  Breighl stumbled back against the window, sword outstretched to let Laszlo run himself through, but the Fly slipped past the blade, the point shearing through his coat, his shoulder striking the man in the chest in an attempt to send him toppling out of the window. He got the back of Breighl’s other hand about the head for his trouble, before the halfbreed managed to steady himself with a flurry of his wings. The sword drove down for Laszlo again, the Fly earthbound for a moment and down on one knee with the force of the punch.

  Breighl was bigger and stronger and almost as fast, and there was really no other way to do it. Laszlo slammed into the man’s legs, not to knock him off balance but because Breighl could not stab straight down the line of his own body with much force. Laszlo’s upflung arm got in the way of the strike, the blade slicing open the tough canvas of his coat sleeve and raking a line of red, but Laszlo was too close for proper sword work. Even as Breighl kicked at him, he rammed the dagger into the halfbreed’s groin.

  The first stroke cut shallowly, deflected by the cuirass’s armour plates, and Breighl jerked away desperately, forcing himself half out of the window. Laszlo was beyond regrets then – they were not a currency a pirate could spend too often – and he followed, clawing his way up the halfbreed’s chest and slamming the bloodied dagger into the man’s throat.

  Breighl died without a cry, hanging half out over the street, his blood an explosive mist that showered down below. Laszlo hauled him in with all his strength, letting the man’s last convulsive shudder tilt his body into the room.

  Didn’t want that. Didn’t want to do that. He had been a factor for the Bloodfly crew, after all, their friendly merchant face at each port they traded with. He was seldom called on to kill people he knew. Oh, waste it, Breighl, couldn’t you be slow enough to let me out of the window?

  He hauled his coat off. It was torn and cut, and there was a swathe of Breighl’s blood across it. The cut on his arm was, in contrast, inconsequential.

  Her lodgings, and if she’s not there . . . He found he was still reeling, his heart refusing to slow, his head seeming to ring to the echo of some vast, unheard sound. Numbly, his hands recharged the spent sleevebow, slipping another bolt into the breech. His shock at killing Breighl had become a crawling dread for Liss’s fate. If things had gone this wrong this fast, then the list of bad things that might happen to her was endless. His only consolation was that Breighl’s people had plainly not tracked her down yet.

  He kicked off from the windowsill, coursing over the city for te Liss’s little place out by the Venador street market, hope and fear fighting over him.

  She drew on her bedroom wall. It had seemed endearing, but at the same time he knew the sketches must hold hidden meanings for her shadowy contacts. The entire bare expanse of plaster over her bed was strewn with overlapping scrawls of trees, flowers, veined wings in scholarly detail, childlike abstracts of people standing, running, fighting.

  When she had finally let him in there, after his confession that he had tailed her, she had pointed out one little corner, a blank space just above her pillow. ‘That’s for you, just you,’ she had told him. Nothing more had needed to be said. Even then they had both known how they lived in an uncertain world.

  Now he hung by her window, feeling the rough wood where the shutters had been wrenched off. The room itself had been turned over, furniture broken, her mattress ripped open so that twists of rag carpeted the floor like an early crop of dying mayflies.

  That small space had now been filled, a rough, hasty image: a tall building with jagged rays. He stared at it blankly for a moment before matching it to a landmark. The Solarnese coast was gentle, but to the immediate west of the city there were rocks, a jagged out-thrusting of them that was probably man-made, from distant ages past, some forgotten seawall or ancient pier.

  There was a squat lighthouse there, to warn off midnight shipping.

  Laszlo hurled himself back from the window, well aware that his arrival might have been noticed by any number of watchers. He led any followers a merry chase, and only a Dragonfly, or another of his own kinden, could have hoped to keep up, as he went looping about the mansions of the wealthy, darting through the warrens of the poor, circling in a far arc across the water and then inland again, and all the while with no sense of pursuit, before bolting at last for the lighthouse – and Liss.

  The lamp was out. He could not guess why, but only because there were too many options, crosses and double-crosses, or even the Solarnese themselves trying to thwart the Spider fleet that Breighl had spoken of. Laszlo landed on the top rail, finding the glass of the great lamp smashed, the whole place reeking of oil. Not good, not good at all. He could not call out her name, however much he wanted to. Anyone might be here now and, if it was not her, then it would be nobody that wanted to see poor Laszlo.

  He crouched on the very rail, the wooden gantry beneath him jagged with broken glass, listening into the quiet of the night, eyes closed so that he could make his ears his only world. The wash of the waters below, he heard, and sounds from the city close at hand: engines, shouting, the drone of an orthopter.

  Someone moved, not out on the gantry itself but within the lighthouse. He heard a slow scrape, metal on wood, and a hiss of breath.

  He had his dagger out again and, after a moment, he took one of the sleevebows in his other hand. Inching about the railing he found the door that would let the lighthouse custodian out to clean and refill the lamp – and found it standing open. The darkness hung heavy inside, but he trusted to his Fly eyes and let his wings glide him inside, touching down in silence at the head of the spiral stairs.

  Again came that gasp of breath, ragged enough to bring back too many memories of fights gone sour, of shipmates lost despite all the surgeons could do, and now it was more than he had the willpower for not to call out, ‘Liss?’

  Don’t be Liss. Don’t be Liss. There had been death in that sound, as sure as death ever was. The stairs wound about the hollow interior, simple wooden slats pegged into the stone, each bolted to the next with steel struts. There was no guard-rail, and the central well of the lighthouse tower was a yawning abyss. Laszlo called for his wings and stepped into the void without hesitation, sleevebow trained down as he descended, knowing how vulnerable he would be but unable simply to creep down like some ground-bound Beetle.

  He spotted the body halfway down: small, Fly-kinden. No cascade of curls, nothing of Liss – a man, in fact. He was going to set down a dozen steps above, but then he recognized the casualty and ended up right beside him.

  ‘Te Riel,’

  Someone had put a long knife into te Riel’s gut and left him. There were other wounds: a cut-open palm and a spread of blood across his shoulder, but the stomach blow had finished it. The man was shaking, curled about the weapon that was still buried in him, one hand on the hilt but without the strength of body or mind to pull it out and hasten his own end. The other arm was hooked about a step, keeping him from a final fall. Fly-kinden were masters of the air, but the wound had stripped all that off him at the last.

  ‘Laszlo.’ A voice so low that Laszlo had to stoop down, almost ear to mouth, to hear it. ‘Liss.’

  Just for you, she said. It hurt a little, knowing that she had bee
n saving that little space on her wall for te Riel as well, but not as much as it had hurt te Riel himself.

  ‘I don’t know where she is, if she’s not here.’ He put a hand on the dying man’s shoulder, feeling it already cold despite the man’s tenacious hold on life. ‘Help me. Tell me. I know you liked her too.’

  The awful sound of te Riel laughing would stay with Laszlo for a long time, each bark of it echoed by an agonized indrawing of breath. ‘Gone. Gone,’ then something indistinct, and then, clear as day, ‘the hangars. Going to blow up the hangars.’

  ‘The Empire?’ Laszlo remembered who he was speaking to. ‘Your lot?’

  ‘Not,’ te Riel wheezed out. ‘Not mine . . . trying to get out from under . . . Laszlo, the hangars! All the . . . Solarnese have . . . going up . . .’

  ‘I’m going, te Riel. I’m going—’ but the man snagged his arm with the blood-slick hand that had been holding on to the knife hilt.

  ‘Not . . . please . . .’ There was a shuddering moment when Laszlo thought he had died, but the bloody grip remained. ‘Die with my own name, please . . . not te Riel . . .’

  There was more, but it was just a whisper, barely words, certainly not a name. Then the man was dead, taking his secrets with him.

  The hangars. Even with that thought, Laszlo was soaring up the well, spitting himself out into the open air and casting back for the city. The hangars – within sight of his own lodgings! And the war was being started right there, while he was elsewhere.

  And Liss, his Liss, was somewhere in the middle of it. Someone had her. Someone was about to strike at Solarno. It was all coming together.

  He had never flown faster, the buildings of Solarno rushing past beneath him, but he knew he would be too late.

  Ten

  It had all been like some strange kind of game although, because all the factory workers were being constantly appraised and tested, a game that was not in the least enjoyable.

  Pingge had not seen Kiin for more than two days during the last two tendays, and that was what hurt most. They were being constantly reassigned to groups, randomly switched back and forth, so that they never became confortable with whoever they were working alongside. The tasks were the same, though, or at least variations on a common theme.

  There was a device that the engineers called a ‘reticule’, and it appeared to be all important, although Pingge could not quite understand why. Her last twenty days had been spent in intensive training with it, however, so she had to assume that their faith was justified. It was intricate but hardly complex, perhaps a step above the weaving looms. Positioned above it, she could look down towards the floor of whatever warehouse or vault they had taken her to, adjusting the lenses for focus. There was a burden, too – sometimes a lead weight but mostly just a sack of flour. Pingge would be strapped into a harness with the reticule before her face, and the harness would be attached to a wire, and the wire would be strung between the walls. At the engineer’s word, she was released, to rush helter-skelter across the great vacant space, and there would always be a circle or some other symbol painted below.

  It was a silly, simple game, really: release the burden so that it struck home on the symbol, allowing for momentum and using the distortion of the reticule’s lenses to spy out the ground ahead. Pingge had proved one of the better Fly-kinden at this charade, but mostly because she was able to relax into the business as a game, without fretting about the purpose behind it all.

  A delegation of her comrades – she had not been amongst them – had gone to the engineers to point out that, as they were Fly-kinden, the whole business would be easier if they could guide the descent with their wings, but this apparently was besides the point. Those who could not keep their Art in check were slapped in ‘Fly-manacles’: leather strapping about the back and shoulders that stifled their wings entirely.

  They were trained night and day, sometimes woken out of sleep as though the world was about to end, for just another session of shuttling to and fro. They trained under bright gaslamps, in daylight, at night, in dim underground caverns. They were kept without sleep for nights at a time. They were put on short rations. None of it seemed to have a pattern – no suggestion of punishment was ever implied, nor even of simple Wasp-kinden cruelty.

  Although the groupings remained random, Pingge had started to see more recurring faces in the last eight days or so. Nobody wanted to ask what had happened to those people they no longer saw. The other questions could not be bottled, though: Why conscript Fly-kinden if you didn’t want them to fly?

  Today was different. Instead of more training, with the wires overhead and the harnesses ready, Pingge found herself marched into a drill hall along with around forty other Fly-kinden, all of whose faces she recognized from her most recent sessions. She caught sight of Kiin immediately, and the pale Fly woman waved to her, entirely against Imperial protocol. At that moment there was a great deal of milling and jostling, and the guards didn’t seem to care.

  ‘I knew you’d be here,’ Pingge announced, as Kiin wriggled through the throng to get to her. ‘You always did have steady hands.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s obvious. We’re the best.’

  Kiin looked about her, considering. ‘Best at what?’

  ‘At whatever this reticule business is,’ Pingge pointed out. ‘We’ve helped them test their new machine, whatever it is. Back to the factories for us now, I’d guess. I’m hoping for a bonus, myself. Keep the folks happy.’

  The Fly beside them, a crop-haired, burly man called Gizmer, shook his head in dusgust, but Pingge ignored him blithely.

  ‘Have they had you in the airship yet?’ she pressed.

  Kiin frowned at her, all the while plainly keeping a weather eye out for the authority figure that was surely on his way over. ‘Airship?’

  ‘They had us up on a pissy little airship – you remember the blow we had a few days back, the storm? We went kicking about in that, tearing about the sky fit to burst, and us in manacles, too. We took turns with the reticule, dropping stuff from way up – worked a treat, too. Those fiddly little lenses are much better when you’re higher up. Makes the game a lot harder.’

  ‘Game?’ Gizmer butted in, looking even more contemptuous.

  ‘Game, test, whatever,’ Pingge waved the distinction away, but Kiin interrupted her.

  ‘Pings, what exactly did you think they wanted you up there for?’

  ‘Testing their new toy, of course. They seemed happy, anyway. Everything in working order, time to go home.’ Perhaps only Kiin would notice the slight edge of tension to Pingge’s voice.

  Or it’s top secret Engineering Corps business, and now they kill us.

  Gizmer snorted. ‘Don’t you know anything?’ he hissed. ‘They’re not testing the machines. They’re training us.’

  ‘A lot you know!’ Pingge retorted, and at the same time Kiin said, ‘Why would they want Fly-kinden, though?’

  At that moment, Wasps started coming in – not a few, but tens of them, a small group of officers led by the well-remembered figure of Major Varsec first, then a squad of engineers or soldiers or . . . something. These last marched in without words, without expressions, silently forming neat ranks facing the muddle of Fly-kinden.

  Gizmer leant sideways and murmured, from the corner of his mouth, ‘Because we’re light, idiot, and for no other reason.’

  A few ideas connected inside Pingge’s mind, but Varsec was already speaking. She had heard more about him since being co-opted for the reticule project. He had been the man to lose Solarno, most famously, but he seemed to have come out of it well, promoted and in charge of whatever was going on here – and elsewhere too. He seemed to have a dozen projects on the go and was forever being flown about the city and beyond.

  ‘Captain Aarmon,’ the major said, and the man front and centre of the Wasp formation took a step forward and saluted him. To Pingge – Imperial Fly-kinden became masters of reading Wasp attitudes at
a young age – it seemed that there was a distance between these men that was more than of rank, a very complex relationship indeed.

  ‘Major.’ Aarmon’s voice was soft for a Wasp officer. He seemed to respect Varsec but it was not an active respect, more like that of a man for his ageing father than for his immediate superior. ‘These are the best?’

  ‘We have others in training, but these have shown the most facility,’ Varsec confirmed carefully, as if anxious not to displease his subordinate.

  ‘I told you!’ Pingge hissed.

  ‘What makes you think,’ Gizmer grated, ‘that you want to be the best right now?’

  Kiin’s lips were moving silently, and Pingge realized that she was counting. After that, the conclusion was inevitable.

  Forty of them, she saw, if she discounted Varsec and a couple of engineers plainly not part of Aarmon’s people. Forty of us.

  Varsec gave a nod and stepped back, giving the floor over to Aarmon. He was a pale, broad-shouldered Wasp with a shaved head and oddly flat eyes, as though he was not using them in the normal way but looking out of them as one would through a window.

  ‘Reticule-men, attention!’ one of Varsec’s aides snapped, and the Fly-kinden automatically shuffled and elbowed their way into rough ranks, a mockery of the perfect Wasp grid facing them. This was part of their daily routine, and they ordered themselves without needing to think about it.

  Aarmon stepped forward, casting those lifeless eyes over them, looking from face to face – and looking down, of course: in size they were like children to him and to all of his fellows. He seemed to be assessing them by some incalculable criterion. All the while, his comrades stood absolutely motionless, not a fidget, not a word, not even an expression exchanged. Pingge had seen Wasps on parade before, and she knew all the little ways soldiers had of communicating one to another under the eyes of the drill sergeant. There was none of it here. It was a display to make a disciplinarian weep, presented here in a windowless hall for an audience of one major and a rabble of Fly-kinden.