Empire in Black and Gold

Seven

The airfield lay eastwards and seawards of Collegium, beyond its walls, although smaller airstrips had sprung up within the city wherever the rich magnates could find space for them. The earliest flying machines had been erratic things. The accepted way of getting them off the ground had been to launch them off the promontory beside the harbour, and hope the wind took them before the sea did. The science of aviation had advanced a little since then, of course.

Collegium boasted the largest airfield in all the Lowlands, with Helleron a close second. Beetles and artifice, Beetles and industry, they always went hand in hand. When Ant-kinden built fliers or automotives, they were intended for war. Beetles built them for all purposes, for freight, for exploration, for the sole sake of the mechanics, for simply travelling faster between two points.

Even so, air travel by anything other than Art-wings or a mount was a new thing to the Lowlands. The first reliable flier had been tested here four generations ago, but regular air travel was one generation old at best, and expensive too. Collegium’s airfield had some four dozen fliers arrayed across its hard-packed earth. Each was different, the individual peculiarities of inventor and smithy making their mark. Orthopters, heliopters, even a few fixed-wings, but towering over them was a pair of dirigibles with their inflated gasbags, and towering over them floated the Sky Without.

‘I’ve read all about her,’ Totho was saying. ‘She’s the first of a new generation of lighter-than-air fliers. Most of the others of her size use hot air, you see, which means half the weight you actually lift is due to the boilers and the burners.’

Tynisa, walking behind him, had never seen him so animated. He was a real hermit crab of a man, she mused. What emerged infrequently out of his shell was nothing you’d guess at from the outside.

‘But the Sky doesn’t use air at all,’ Totho went on. ‘The bag’s filled with precipitate of mordant aquillin, which is actually lighter than the air, and so you can free up so much more space for the freight and passengers, and the engines-’

‘Toth, will you take a moment to think about who you’re talking to here,’ Salma said to him. ‘Old news to Che, I’m sure, and, well. .’

Totho craned back at him. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘No, I don’t understand — not a word. You’re wasting your explanatory talents on me.’

‘Oh.’ Sudden comprehension came to Totho. ‘But even if you don’t, you must have seen-’

‘We don’t have air ships in the Commonweal, Toth,’ Salma said patiently. ‘Think about it. We don’t have artificers. We don’t have automotives or engine-mills or even crossbows in the Commonweal, now, do we?’

‘But. .’ Totho floundered for a second. ‘Amongst all of you?’

Salma grinned. ‘You ever see a Mantis mechanic, Toth?’

‘I. . No, of course not.’

‘You’ll not see one amongst the Dragonfly-kinden, either. Nor anyone from the Commonweal.’

‘Sorry, it’s just. . hard to grasp. Tynisa?’

She shook her head. ‘Sorry, Totho. All machinery bibble-babble to me.’

‘But you were brought up here in Collegium!’ he protested. ‘Surely. .’

‘Sorry. You ever see a Spider-kinden crossbow-woman? Being Apt to machines isn’t something you can just pick up. You’re born to it or you’re not.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Che patted Totho’s arm. ‘I was listening. Tell me.’ Privately, though, as Totho’s enthusiasm waxed again, she was considering what it must be like being Tynisa, or Salma, in Collegium. Or Doctor Nicrephos, or Piraeus, or any of them: all those who had lost out in the revolution, those centuries before.

She had seen Tynisa with a crossbow, once. It had been when they were both around twelve, and Tynisa had been determined to become good with it, as she had been with everything else she put her hand to. That day lingered in the memory because it was the first time Che had found something she herself could do, that her foster-sister could not.

But it’s not hard, she remembered saying patiently. You just point it at the target and pull the lever. And the staggering weight of her understanding that Tynisa just could not grasp the notion, could not understand that the action led to the result. She almost shot Stenwold when she finally clutched the weapon so hard she mistakenly triggered it, and she could not even begin to reload or re-cock it. It was not just that she had never been trained, or taught. It had all been there for her, if only she could adapt her mind to take it in.

Persistent myth related that the crossbow was the first tool of the revolution. Almost certainly there had been something else, something less warlike and more practical. The crossbow was what won the battles, though. Any fool could pick up a crossbow and kill a man with it, any Beetle-kinden, or Ant, anyone Apt. Bows were an art-form, crossbows but a moment in the learning, in the making. The world had been turned upside down within a generation by men and women armed with the crossbow and the pulley, the hand-pump and the watermill. All the old masters of the Lowlands had been unthroned, their slaves prising mastery of the world from their impotent hands. There were a few exceptions, as always. She had heard of itinerant Beetle scholars going native deep in the forests of the Mantids, propitiating spirits and painting their faces, and fifty years ago there had even been a Moth artificer at Collegium, brilliant and half-mad. The old races of the superstitious night were waning, though. Only the Spider-kinden held on to their power, and that because they could play the younger races like a musical instrument. The world belonged to the Apt: Beetles, Ants, and most Fly-kinden these days, the races of the bright sun that drove out the shadows.

And also the Wasps: an entire Empire of the Apt. That was not a comforting thought.

‘Salma,’ Che began. Nobody was going to like this question, and she knew the answer would be less popular still. ‘Your people fought the Wasps for twelve years?’

‘They did,’ he confirmed.

‘How. . Don’t take this the wrong way, but how did they hold out for twelve years, with no artificers, no machines or modern weapons?’

He laughed at that, although his laugh was hollow. ‘We are archers without peer, Che, and the Wasp-kinden are clumsy in the air when we fight them. We are quick and skilled and stealthy by turns.’ Something lively went out of his voice. ‘But, most of all, we sent our soldiers against them in wave after wave after wave. We sold each inch of Commonweal land to them for ten times its weight in blood, mostly. That is what we did when the Wasp Empire came.’ He had suddenly stopped walking and they turned back to him, Che desperately wishing she had some way of taking her question back, of not hearing the answer.

He was still smiling at them and that was the worst part. It was Salma’s couldn’t-care-less smile that they all knew well, and it clung on even when he said, ‘At the battle of Shan Real the ground was so soaked in blood that their machines sunk in and could not be moved, and we flew over them and shot them as they tried to climb out.’

‘You were there?’ Che said. The other two were leaving this particular pitfall conversation to her, and quite right too.

‘No, I wasn’t there. I was too young, and far away,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘I do apologize, really. Tasteless stuff this early in the morning. Sometimes you. . Low-landers, though, you just don’t understand how things are.’

‘I know, we’re all barbarians really,’ said Tynisa wryly, ‘scratching ourselves in public and sleeping in the same room as the dirigibles.’

His smile regained its stability. ‘Bunch of savages, the lot of you,’ he agreed. ‘Now let’s get on board this wretched flying machine before Totho explodes with impatience, shall we?’

The designer had fitted three decks into the gondola of the Sky Without, although without allowing much headroom on any of them. Relieved of the machinery that a hot-air dirigible required, the staterooms took up the top tier, where the view was marginally grander. Below that were the common room, the kitchen and the cramped crew quarters, and below that again those areas of the ship that the passengers would prefer not to see: freight storage holds and the mechanics’ walkways that led to the ship’s three engines.

As soon as his companions were ensconced in the common room, Totho made his apologies and found his way below with unerring instinct. He remembered when the Sky Without had been originally commissioned, designed in Collegium the same year as Totho had begun his studies, and with its major parts cast in the foundries at Helleron and then hauled at a snail’s pace overland during the best part of eleven months. The Sky was now due to make the return journey in a little over a tenday because, for such a gargantuan vessel, she was fast.

Up on an exposed gantry Totho found the secret of that speed soon enough. Out from the body of the gondola, but still in the shadow of the airbag, two engineers were testing the starboard steering propeller. They glanced at him as he climbed hand over hand up to them, and one of them said, ‘No passengers here. Go back to the decks.’

‘Excuse me, but. .’ It was the first time he’d been able to say it. ‘I’m an artificer from the College and I just wanted to have a look at the engines here.’

The effect was all he could have wished for. Their closed faces opened up instantly, and the fact that he was a halfbreed, which had caused their noses to wrinkle a moment before, was now forgotten.

The Sky had three engines, but the big central one, mounted in cast iron over the stern, was just a standard oil-burning propeller that gave the ship her speed. Totho was far more interested in the guiding props set out on pontoons. They were something quite new, quite different. He watched with fascination as the two engineers hauled chains and levers to bring heavy, dull-looking blocks into place around the propeller vanes, and saw the blades start to spin, first slowly and then faster and faster, all with no more sound than a faint hum. Soon the speed was enough to tug and swing the Sky about as she hung still anchored to the airfield. The engineers then exchanged a few satisfied words and began changing the configuration of the blocks to reverse the angle and direction of the blades.

Magnets, all done with magnets, the cutting edge of the artificer’s trade. This took the sort of precision engineering that would not have been possible ten years earlier, but magnetic force could do almost anything with metal components. A few years ago one of the College Masters had produced the first magnetic crossbow, simple induction sending an all-metal bolt further and faster than any tensioned string. Totho had coveted that weapon, or any of the expensive copies that trickled into the arms market afterwards, but the price had been vastly beyond his wildest dreams.

‘You’d better go within now,’ said one of the engineers. ‘I reckon the master’s going to have us aloft any moment.’

But before Totho could ask to remain, to watch the airfield and Collegium dwindle, the scrubby countryside become like a tattered map, the other engineer put in, ‘No chance. Always someone that has to pitch up late. You’d think it’d be different on a ship as swish as this, but look.’

And Totho looked, and there, practically beneath his feet, were the Wasps.

There were a half-dozen of them, a couple in gold-edged tunics that passed for civilian dress, but the rest in their banded armour, and they were stepping onto the winch-platform to be lifted aboard.

A jolt of alarm went through him, and he nearly lost his grip on the gantry, but a moment later he was going handover-hand as fast as he dared towards the far end hatch. His Ancestor Art came to his aid, making his feet sure, his hands cling tight, but still he knew that he would not get to the others before the Wasps had seen them. When he finally made the common room, the Wasps were just entering, and he was able to see, in all the detail he could have wished, his companions’ reactions. Che twitched and stared at them helplessly and, though Salma’s smile did not slip, even Totho could see how tense he was. Tynisa, however, seemed all ease as she reclined back in her seat, even sending the Wasp leader a smile of invitation. After that, Che’s evident panic went unnoticed.

The Wasps were clearly searching. They were foreigners here, and doing their best to be restrained, but from the way their soldiers passed about the common room it was clear that they were looking intently at every face. The other passengers frowned at them or ignored them. They were mostly Beetle-kinden merchants whose business activities were strung between Collegium and Helleron, and the bustling Wasp soldiers attracted a lot of comment on how outlanders did not know how to behave. Of the other passengers, a well-dressed Spider with his small entourage fixed them with a narrow look that did not invite questioning, and the trio of card-playing Fly-kinden remained hunched over their drinks and bets and did their best to remain undisturbed. In the corner a Fly musician picked at a dulcimer, making a great show of ignoring everyone else.

The leader of the Wasps, a tall and lean man with a face that smiled both readily and shallowly, stopped by the table that Tynisa and the others had picked out. Across the common room Totho hung back in the shadows, trying to envisage some desperate rescue he could assay. There were just a few words exchanged, though, with Tynisa, and then the man moved on. Totho saw one of his soldiers come to him and point very obviously at Salma in his finery, but the officer had a harsh word for that kind of talk, whatever it was, and the soldier slunk back, his barbed fists clenched.

As soon as the way was clear Totho made a hasty journey of it over to their table. ‘What happened?’ he demanded. ‘Why didn’t they-?’

‘They didn’t because we weren’t looking as guilty as a rich Fly, which is exactly the way you’re looking right now,’ Tynisa reproached him. ‘Sit down, Toth.’

Totho did so, hands folded together in his lap. ‘So what-?’

‘We think they must be looking for Uncle Sten,’ Che explained. ‘They certainly had a very good look at all those traders over there, all Beetles and all around his age. They’ll have his description, but obviously not ours. Uncle Sten must have done his best to make sure there was nothing linking him to us. He must even have got someone else to make the bookings.’

‘But one of them was. . pointing at Salma.’

‘Must be a veteran,’ Salma said carelessly.

‘We should be all right now. We’ll just keep our heads down by staying in our stateroom,’ said Che.

‘Why?’ Tynisa countered. ‘If they’re not looking for us, they’re not.’

The floor beneath them, indeed the walls around them and the ceiling above them, flexed a little, and began to vibrate gently. Just at the edge of hearing there was the heavy, cavernous sound of the main engine. The Sky Without was now underway.

‘It’s going to be a long trip,’ said Salma, rubbing at his forehead, the vibrations obviously bothering him.

‘And I’m certainly not going to spend it in hiding,’ Tynisa replied firmly. ‘In fact, I’m going to start, right away, what we’ll all be doing in Helleron. If we’re spies, let’s be spies.’

Che’s face twisted. ‘I’m not sure. .’

‘What did you have in mind?’ interrupted Salma.

‘That Wasp officer seemed like the talking type,’ Tynisa said idly. ‘You could see it in his face. He’s been posted down here, miles away from anywhere he knows, with nothing but a pack of dull blades for company. I think he’d be glad of a little diversion.’

‘But. . he’s the enemy!’ hissed Che.

Tynisa laughed at the horror on her face. ‘I’ve got his measure, Che. I can keep him strung out until we reach Helleron, and anyway, he looks the type who likes to impress. How better to impress a lady than to boast about the size of your empire?’

After she had left them, Salma leant over to Totho and said, ‘I assume you’re going to burrow right into this vessel’s organs, or whatever they’re called.’

‘Engines,’ Totho corrected. ‘But yes, I had thought. .’

‘I may not know much about this boat-thing, but I see how you might get to see a great many places on board by simply going where the servants go. So go keep an eye on her, if you can.’

Totho looked over at Tynisa, who was now approaching the Wasp officer. ‘Depends where she decides to go, but I’ll try.’

His name was Halrad and it was easier than Tynisa had imagined. Here was a captain who should, in his opinion, have already been a major, which she gathered was a higher rank. He considered himself a clever man, a strategist and a sophisticate, and he was annoyed at being dragged away from Collegium before he could fully learn and understand it. He had wanted to see the Games and watch the (undoubted) victories of the Wasp-kinden team (the Wasp race as he put it). He disliked and disdained his underlings, who were never far from him, and she could see clearly how they disliked him right back. In short he felt misused and under-appreciated and within a brief while, she could play him like a kite in a good breeze.

The captain was interesting company, she could not deny: not so much for himself, but for what he was. At first she had thought of him as just like any of the self-important grandees of Collegium she had met with, for where was the difference between this soldier and an Ant commander or Beetle officer of the watch? To begin with, she thought she had the measure of his type. As their conversation progressed, however, as he opened up and they drifted from the common room towards his chambers, she sensed a jag of iron there. He spoke a lot of the world, the Empire, his family’s status back home, his future plans. The word he spoke most was ‘mine’. Tynisa was already quite used to her beaus boasting of their material possessions, their clothes, their investments and their property, but Halrad spoke exactly the same way about people, about cities, about concepts. He spoke in proprietary terms about literally everything, and when he said ‘my future’ he did not mean just the future in store for him, but the future that he would eventually own and control. In this way, she realized, he spoke for his entire people. He was the Empire in microcosm and she was fascinated.

And then they drank wine: he more than he realized and herself less than he thought. She asked him how he liked the Lowlands. ‘Potential,’ he decided. ‘You have many things here that we do not.’ His meaning, even in the words left unspoken, was clear. Some of those things would be cast aside by the Wasps, others possessed. Possessed as he possessed his rank and the soldiers who obeyed him because of it. Possessed as he had villas now in two conquered cities, and possessed the slaves who served in them.

Tynisa herself had not grown up, as most Spider-kinden would, with slaves at her beck and call. Beetle-kinden were resolutely proud about not keeping slaves: the trade was immoral, they said, and besides, paid servants worked harder. Even so, she knew that her own heritage was built on slaves’ backs, that Ants still bred slaves in their cities, that the concept of slavery was hardly new. She would certainly not have wished Halrad for a master, and he seemed milder than most of his breed. One night, deep in his cups, he told her about a rebellion in Myna, the same town Stenwold had named. His slaves, he explained, had been implicated in the revolt. He had to have them killed, he said casually, but there were always other slaves available. Ants and Spiders would kill their slaves for the same reason, she was sure, but they would at least have been executing those they considered human beings. For Halrad it was just casting aside a piece of broken property, nothing more sentimental than that.

They were now five days and five nights into the Sky Without’s voyage, passing over rivers, hills, bandits and badlands with the ponderous grace of an aging matron. He had wanted to sleep with Tynisa, of course, but she was adept at putting that off: the effect of the drink, the lateness of the hour, and her own ineluctable talent for finding good cause to slip away. She kept him lusting, but even so, she was beginning to feel herself come under his proprietary aegis, realizing that she herself was, in his eyes, already his. That could cause problems later, unfortunately.

She had not ventured anything so crass as, ‘So what are your plans?’ but she had always kept a deft hand on the tiller of the conversation. She knew that he had been sent to find a certain man, a Beetle-kinden from the College, and that Halrad had already dismissed this mission as futile, blaming his superiors for the waste of time, for sending him too soon back to grimy Helleron. He assured her that the Wasps were in Collegium simply because it had been marked for them as the cultural centre of the Lowlands. In matters of learning and understanding, everyone looked to Collegium, and the Wasps wished to understand. He never completed this thought with, ‘. . because we are going to invade you,’ but it was there on his face, shining like a star, when he thought he had so cleverly hidden it.

Stenwold had been right in all particulars, and he had escaped the net as well. She found she was impressed and now she wondered, how much of her own string-pulling was inherent in her blood, how much she might have picked up, unknowing, from her foster-father.

Salma had been waiting, knowing it would happen. It could have happened anywhere, even in the common room. He knew they were not subtle, and that they had made plans the moment they had seen him.

In the event, it was a corridor on the stateroom deck, two of them suddenly blocking his path. They still wore their armour, with metal plates alternating in black and gold from throat to knee, tapering down from the waist. These were the light airborne, and his eye quickly noted each place where they were exposed: arms, legs, sides, face. These Wasps were equipped strictly for speed and flight.

Yet, they were bigger than he was, and there were two of them.

‘Didn’t think we’d see your kind here, Wealer,’ the first one began.

Salma raised an eyebrow politely.

‘On the run? Sinking ship? Is that it?’ the soldier pressed on. His comrade said nothing, just watched him. His fists were barbed, two bony hooks curving from their backs.

Salma just smiled. He had only his under-robe on, but he keenly felt the weight of his sheathed sword inside it. He was poised, taut as wire within, yet outside he seemed without a care.

‘Or maybe he’s a spy,’ the soldier said to his comrade. ‘Wealer spy, where he’s not wanted.’

‘Never wanted,’ the other man said.

‘Don’t think it’ll do them much good,’ the first said. ‘Spies or no spies, we’re coming back here, Wealer.’ He stepped in close, trying to bulk out as large as he could before Salma, but the Dragonfly stayed put, his smile one of utter unconcern.

‘I myself killed a lot of your kind,’ the soldier continued, low and slow. ‘Not proper war, though. Your lot don’t even know how to fight a proper war. Ants, Bees, even Flies put up a better fight.’

Still smiling, Salma glanced brightly from him to his colleague. ‘Sorry, gentlemen, do you have a point?’

‘Yes we’ve got a point!’ the soldier snapped. ‘Our point is, that if you think this is far enough to run, think again! We’re coming, Wealer. We’re coming to your lands and we’re coming here too!’

There was a silence then, in which Salma’s smile only broadened. It was quiet enough to hear a scuff of feet from behind, as the two Beetle merchants who had appeared in the doorway of their stateroom backed off a little, staring.

The soldier who had been speaking backed away from Salma instantly, teeth bared and fists clenched so hard the knuckles were white. The other just went for him, though — scoring the barbs on his hands through the air where Salma had just been. The Dragonfly was already two steps further back and turned side on, waiting. He had not drawn his blade, but his hands were up, palms out and ready. He saw a flicker in his opponent’s eyes: clearly he had seen Dragonflies fight unarmed before.

Even so the Wasp would have tried his luck, but his comrade, so talkative before, was now dragging him away. They had seriously broken orders, Salma guessed, but then he had heard it from a hundred throats that the one thing one could do so easily with the Wasp-kinden was provoke them.

Those engineers were a pragmatic lot. Where the metal met, as the saying went, there was little room for politics. When Totho had convinced them that he knew his trade they had let him in readily, his birth notwithstanding. He had always known how mechanics and engineers, all the grades and trades of artificers, kept an occult and inward society hidden away from laymen. This was his first taste of it: a dozen grimy, cursing men and women who regarded their human cargo as no more than freight that complained, and the airship’s master and crew as mere ornament, but who themselves worked every hour each day sent, and kept the Sky Without aloft as surely as if they were carrying it on their shoulders.

For these few days he was one of them, and for the first time in his life nobody was looking askance at him because of his heredity — or being pointedly virtuous in ignoring it. If he could fix a piston, weld a joint and clear a fuel line then he was one of the elite, with the privileges and responsibilities that earned him. They were not all Beetle-kinden there, after all. A renegade Ant was lord of the main engine, having grown tired of war machines. There was a brace of Fly troubleshooters whose small frames and delicate fingers could fit into places the larger folk could not reach. There was another halfbreed, too, her ancestry being like his, Beetle and Ant conjoined. Her Ant parent had come from pale-skinned Tark, though, so she and Totho looked less like each other than anyone else on board.

A tenday into the voyage, with Helleron close on the horizon, Totho and a handful of the other engineers were called to the very belly of the ship, where he had never ventured before. Here, between the freight holds, gaped an open wound in the Sky Without’s underside. A broad rectangle of open sky was being winched open, with the dusty countryside appearing in a dun haze, far below, as they slowly lowered the Sky’s huge loading ramp into empty space.

‘What’s happening?’ Totho asked.

‘Incoming,’ explained an engineer. ‘New visitors, messengers probably. Look, there she is.’

Squinting, Totho made out a dark dot that closed, even as he watched, until he could identify it as a fixed-wing flier. Fixed-wings were new, quite the fastest things in the sky but expensive to build and easy to break. Totho watched its approach with interest. He had seen the design before, two stacked wings set back of the mid-point, the hull itself curving forwards and down like a hunched insect’s body, with stabilizing vanes like a box-kite thrust forward. The single propeller engine, the drone of which came to them even at this distance, was fixed at the back, below a mounted ballista.

The hull of the fixed-wing was dark wood, and it was only as the craft was jockeying for position, trying to match speeds with the Sky Without, that Totho noticed the hurried repainting that had taken place: gold and black in ragged bars across the sides and the wings.

The flier swayed and darted, trying to meet up with the sloping runway the loading ramp had now been turned into. The engineer next to Totho swore. ‘Bloody stupid, bringing a flying machine in like that. Had one once, an idiot who decided the best way to make the hatch was to come in at full speed. Went through three walls, punched out of the bows and dropped like a stone ’cos he’s shorn his wings off doing it.’

At last the pilot managed the task, wings wobbling uncertainly, and the moving plane rolled up into the hold with the crew hauling the ramp closed as soon as it did. It was left sitting on the closed hatch with its propeller slowing gradually.

There were five Wasp soldiers in total packed into the flier, but one was very obviously in charge. He was standing up even as the engineers secured the ropes and clasps that ensured the loading ramp stayed closed.

The Wasp leader surveyed them all coldly, his gaze passing over Totho as easily as the rest. To him they were clearly all menials.

‘Send a runner to Captain Halrad,’ he ordered them, ‘and tell him that Captain Thalric wants his company.’

The chief engineer folded her arms. ‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t hear you. Did you say you wanted to speak with the ship’s master?’ Her tone was profoundly unimpressed. If this Thalric had four armed soldiers at his back, she didn’t even seem to have noticed.

The Wasp officer regarded her narrowly, and then mustered a tight smile. ‘Of course that is what I meant,’ he said, stepping out onto the Sky’s deck. ‘Shall I bring my men along, or would it be possible for them to be billeted with their compatriots?’

Totho stepped back as the arrangements were made. As soon as it was possible, without catching the Wasps’ notice, he was out of the hangar and running.