Heirs of the Blade

Eight

The Wasp-kinden were a young race, but they had developed their own art forms nonetheless. Spider-kinden merchants making the long trek to Capitas were favourably impressed by the degree to which they had advanced the art of the pit-fight. Scorpion chieftains arriving with their strings of human goods admired the Wasps’ ability to control and manage so many slaves. Many foreigners of all kinden were struck by the delicacy and care with which the Wasps ordered and categorized their prisoners, although their unfavourable critiques were usually coloured by their own position on the wrong side of the bars.

There were professionals, former Consortium clerks or retired Slave-Corps officers, whose sole business was to find prisoners a fitting place of durance – either until their eventual fate was decided or enacted, or because that imprisonment represented that fate. Cells, mines, shackles, the quick mercy of the blood-fights – or as one of a small but mysterious number who were sent to the palace and simply… disappeared.

Many prisoners laboured, too. Often this was not even as a result of a sentence, just a good use of resources that would otherwise be sitting idle while being fed for free. There were the parched-dry quarries of Shalk, the winding mines of the Delves, logging camps, fields, masons’ yards, each penitent fitted to his interim fate with a master’s expertise as delicate as that of a matchmaker.

Then there were the factories, which were always hungry but seldom fed with the bodies of prisoners. Most of the workers were slaves or citizens, and all of them were not just Apt, but artificers of some mean grade or other. The vast machine-noisy halls were operated day and night, and if it was possible they were run even while errant machines were being fixed. Fingers and toes were a cheap currency in those chattering, clattering rooms, but it was better work than the mines, less dangerous than the army. The free workers there held themselves to be a curious aristocracy, standing together against the bureaucrats, the taskmasters, and the grafters of the Empire. They might only be churning out standard-issue breeches by the hundred, but where, as they pointed out, would an army be without its trousers?

Sometimes an artificer fell from grace, and then the factories were always waiting. Even murderers, even traitors, if they had a spark of mechanical skill, would be chained to the machines and put to work while waiting for sentence. A little knowledge was too precious to waste.

Angved hated it. It was fair to say that he was being unreasonable, given all the other ways a prisoner could be spending his time, but even so… He had been a lieutenant in the Engineering Corps – an officer! – and now a burly slaver came each morning to chain him up in front of all these others, as even the slaves were not chained, and he worked at the most menial, repetitive tasks, and risked his hide between the teeth of the looms if they jammed, and he had to bear the mockery of the rest of the workforce, because he had been better than them, and had failed.

He had never been a high-flier. Past forty now, his hair greying, and when he was young he had thought he would be a major by this age, perhaps with some comfortable teaching post. Then there had been a string of poor decisions, the wrong horses backed, unavoidable failures that had drawn the ire of his superiors. He had never made captain, whilst the declining quality of his assignments had eventually ensured that he never would. Then had come the bastard Rekef with their make-or-break plan for Khanaphes, and he had seen it as a desperate chance to regain his place on the ladder, for all that it would probably have ended with a knife in his back had all gone according to plan.

All had most definitely not gone according to plan.

With the exception of two old women who ran the kitchen, the other factory hands were not Wasps. They had a curious two-tier organization, two separate tribes side by side yet passing through one another as though existing in fractionally shifted worlds. The Beetle-kinden, and the bulk of the slaves – Ants, Bees, even some halfbreeds who were inexplicably not despised by their comrades as Angved would have anticipated – worked at one level of detail, whilst a host of Fly-kinden men and women were busy in amongst them, passing under and over and sometimes even through the machines, trusting to their small size, delicate fingers and quick reflexes to preserve them from injury. The only fifth wheel in the factory was Angved himself, the size of a normal kinden – by his standards – and yet put to the most menial jobs during both shifts, by specific decree.

For a man formerly of the Engineers, it was pure gall, insulting, demoralizing, as good as receiving a beating any day. It showed that the clerks who had assigned him here knew their business.

He had made his pleas. He had shown them his findings. Still, they had been dead set on his excruciation and then a public execution, on general principle. Then it had all been dropped. There had been one night when he was dragged before a triumvirate of hooded men – Rekef for sure – and they talked amongst themselves about him, and he understood that the Khanaphes expedition was now an embarrassment best removed from history entirely, and him along with it.

But he had lived on for another night, in fear, and then another, and then a quiet, lean man had come and explained to him how he had best forget the name of that desert city, unless someone should mention it to him first.

A tenday later, and the factory had got him. Since then he had been here, the butt of every joke, hearing the snickering of slaves, the laughter of women – Fly-kinden women no less – wasting his training in the manufacturing of the banal and the commonplace. Only one thought kept him sane, for, while he would not converse with his fellows there, he overheard their copious gossip. As he eked his days out amongst the menials of the machine world, one fact went round and round in his head.

They’ve gone to Khanaphes.

The Empire had taken Khanaphes as easily as he had known it must, having seen the city’s primitive defences first hand. But why would the Empress stretch her reach so far, and for so little gain, unless. ..

After he had returned from there, he had cast his die. He had given his report, his numbers, the results of his tests. He had supposed them since burned, lost, misfiled, sitting in an unread stack of trivia on some uneducated Rekef thug’s desk. But what if an artificer had got hold of them, after all? What if something Angved had said had penetrated as far as the Engineering Corps?

They’ve gone to Khanaphes.

Of all the world, he had no wish to return to that cursed city, but nowhere else would rescue him from this humiliating penance, and he still had enough frustrated ambition to overcome his fears and his memories.

They’ve gone to Khanaphes.

It became his mantra, his hope. And one day, after tendays and tendays of wretched picking at the factory machines, they came for him as well.

They came halfway through the working day: serious, solid men in uniform, who muscled into the factory without a word and struck his chains off in a manner that made it clear that being shackled to an automated loom would be luxury compared to where he was going next. The rest of the workforce had gone quiet and diligent immediately, their chatter and gossip killed in an instant.

When they hauled him out of that place, he had assumed it would be to the interrogation table for sure, since their grim manner suggested nothing else. They always claimed that doctors and artificers broke first, for every junior machine-hand ended up running the tables for the Rekef questioners once or twice, and, after that, little imagination was needed to proceed through all the ways a body could be broken beyond any engineer’s repair.

They hustled him across the city until he recognized the district. It was a home away from home for him, the workshops and familiar halls of the Engineering Corps in the little quarter of the city they had made their own. It did not look so welcoming now, for nobody met his eyes. Nobody would admit to knowing this old washed-out former lieutenant who had somehow managed to bring so much wrath down upon his own shoulders.

A moment later and he was inside the Severn Hill, a squat ziggurat named after the Corps’ first colonel. Rather than the well-lit debating rooms and the grand hall, however, he was hauled downstairs, away from the sun, into the tunnels beneath.

A tribunal, he realized. He was not sure, just then, if he might not have preferred the Rekef and its interrogation tables. Every engineer knew of the tribunals, although nobody ever formally spread the information. They were not admitted to by the Corps, internally or externally, but apprentice artificers whispered the rumours one to another. They were the Corps’ own internal disciplinaries, for engineers who had betrayed the Corps to some other branch of the services. All nonsense, of course, for any such rivalry between the different wings of the army’s support corps would be damaging to the Empire, and thus never tolerated. And yet it was true, and it happened, and the Engineers looked after their own no less than did the Rekef or the Slave Corps or the Consortium. They were a young elite, the artificers of the Empire, and ruthless in keeping their secrets.

He found himself, at last, in an eight-sided chamber that he guessed must lie beneath the very centre of Severn Hill. The ceiling was a casual marvel, a piece of mechanical elegance that he realized must only ever be seen by the condemned and their judges. From a mosaic setting of geometric patterns set out in thumbnail-sized blue and green tiles depended a veritable orrery of lamps, circling one another in complex, perfect patterns to the gentle ticking of its clockwork. From a professional point of view it was admirable, but it peopled the scene below it with disturbing, circling shadows, and the blue-green of the ceiling reflected a gloomy, undersea radiance on to everything there.

There was a high dais to one side of the room, a long table set out upon it which was scattered with scrolls and papers, and at least one map that looked – from the brief glimpse Angved caught of it – to be a chart of the Lowlands. Angved himself was not destined for that table, of course. There were three rows of benches on the far side of the room, and they dumped him on one without a word and left him there, abruptly forgotten and abandoned.

Surreptitiously, he peered at the high table, trying to work out what was going on. There were a half-dozen men there, conferring in hushed voices but with a fair amount of animation, showing that, whatever was at stake, they had a great deal invested in it. Another man sat back, listening but not contributing, and displaying an indefinable air of wrongness. Not one of us, Angved realized, although he was not sure if he himself still counted as one of the Corps. The seated man was Rekef, though: he’d bet his life on it. An observer from the secret service – Outlander probably – brought to the secret heart of the Engineers’ little dominion. What is going on here?

The arguing men were four Wasps and two Beetles. After his eyes had adapted to the light, Angved could place at least half of them, and from that he guessed they must all be very senior engineers indeed. In the centre of the knot was Colonel Lien, his gaunt face looking as bitter as ever with the knowledge that his inferior rank was all the authority the Engineering Corps could muster. They had never been granted a generalship, and the others would all be mere majors.

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.