The Air War

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.

Aarmon pointed and then, when no reaction was forthcoming, he said, ‘You,’ like an afterthought.

He was indicating Kiin, of course.

Pingge gasped, ‘No!’, but there was nothing for it. If this was some example to be made, crossed pikes or a stingshot to the head or some other warning to keep silent, there was nothing she could do. Captain Aarmon was waiting, his bleak stare fixed on his victim as though it could draw her to him on its own.

Kiin took a deep breath and, none too steady, stepped forward.

No windows in the room, Pingge thought miserably. Is that so nobody can see us here? So we can’t escape? She watched her friend weave her way through the other Flies until she was standing to attention before Aarmon, staring at his belt buckle, a delicate, fair-haired woman of three foot six before a big Wasp man topping six feet.

‘With me,’ he told her, and turned instantly, awaiting neither salute nor acknowledgement, leaving her to stumble mutely in his wake as he stalked from the room. Pingge saw the other Wasps stepping forwards, all at once now, selecting others from the Fly group. She cast a panicked stare back, trying to see what happened to Kiin, and caught a last glimpse of her friend as Kiin’s reluctant march carried her out through the door, tripping after Aarmon’s longer strides.

‘What is she?’ Esmail demanded. ‘What has happened to her?’

His informant shrank away from him, babbling something about not knowing what he meant, but he slammed the man back against the cellar wall, using Ostrec’s borrowed strength and violence. His life was at stake in a way that his briefing had never suggested. Someone was playing him for a fool.

The Empress was something more than a Wasp-kinden woman, more than the mere temporal ruler of a military state.

He had gone along after Colonel Harvang, dogging the obese man’s greasy steps until he stood amidst the great and the good of the Empire: the Rekef’s sole surviving general, another colonel, their chief artificer and some Beetle-kinden who was one of their leading merchants. Ostrec had been well placed, groomed to be Harvang’s aide, to run errands and messages between the great powers of the Empire, circumstances that bore all the fingerprints of Moth foretelling and calculation, but at a level far in excess of anything Esmail had worked with before.

So why had they not told him about the Empress? Because they did not know? Because they wanted his own, unbiased assessment?

He was not sure that he could possibly give an unbiased account of that. As she had drawn close, he had felt a pressure inside his skull, inexplicable here in the mechanistic Empire, reminiscent of times past when great Moth-kinden Skryres had turned their arts upon him. Then she had entered the room.

He was a past master at his trade, of keeping the inner man and the outer face separate, showing nothing of who and what he was and living the life of the other. When she strode in, though, he had not been able to keep still. The sheer sight and sense of her had shocked him like a spear through the chest.

She had glanced at him then, and he had fought, physically fought, to keep his wards and masks intact, because some primal part of him had been clamouring for him to fall to his knees and confess all.

Even now he could not say whether he had escaped undetected. He did not know what senses she had inherited, or what subtlety in using them. The Rekef might come for him any moment, turning on one seemingly of their own without the least stab of conscience. Even now she might have him dragged before her.

Power had radiated from her in waves, enough to blast aside his false face and leave him naked and terrified before her splendour. She had been as difficult to look at as the sun, for those first few moments, until his inner eyes had adjusted. Above her brow there had seemed a burning brand, a diadem of invisible but inescapable authority.

What his briefing had given him was the name of a well-placed servant who was also an Arcanum agent — an elderly Grasshopper who had served in Capitas for over a decade, feeding information back to the Moths in shreds and pieces for all that time. Any other spy would have been uncovered by now, but the old man was subtle, and the Moths had never acted on any of it, only hoarded it against the future, as they always did.

After dark, Esmail had left his room in the extensive complex that Harvang and his Rekef adherents called their own, stalking across the rooftops with a stealth that Ostrec the Wasp had never possessed, then hunting down his informant, a shadow with a Wasp’s shape, until he found the single cramped room that the Grasshopper shared with a half-dozen others.

The man’s name was Shoel Jhin, and he was a magician of very minor sorts, whose powers would no doubt have eroded during his long slavery here. Esmail himself was no great conjuror — the elements of his trade relied on control and elegance of manipulation rather than raw power — but he had a few magus’s tricks, and it was a simple matter to put his voice in Jhin’s mind and hiss out the man’s name until he awoke, starting and staring: then to call him out of the room, out of the servants’ block, until he met the old man face to face within the cold walls of a wine cellar.

Now he stared down at that lined face, the sallow skin bagged and creased with care and age. ‘You’re a poor spy or a lax one. Don’t you realize there was something missing from your reports?’

‘I tell what I tell. What they tell you is another matter,’ Jhin wheezed.

Ostrec wanted to beat him for his insubordination. Esmail could feel rage emanating from the image of the man he kept in his head, the source of his mimicry. ‘I came here to spy on a Wasp, one of the Apt,’ he said, in more measured tones. ‘An Empress, yes, and we all know the power that attaches to such symbols, but it’s not a power that she should be able to tap. I’ve never…’ He stopped, shaking his head. ‘I have never felt such a presence.’

Shoel Jhin was watching him, beady eyes nesting in wrinkles examining the spy’s false face. ‘Help you, they said. Educate you, no. They tell you what they tell you. Not my place, not my place at all.’

Esmail still held the man by his collar but now he let go, stepping back, suppressing Ostrec’s borrowed anger. It occurred to him that the old man did not know who he was, not really — oh, a spy, yes, and one of that very select and mercurial order, but no more than that. Just some Moth, probably, was Jhin’s guess.

Esmail stepped back from him. ‘Tell me,’ he urged softly.

Jhin actually cackled a little. ‘Not my place,’ he repeated, and made to walk past him.

He stopped, for Esmail had fixed him with a look, Ostrec’s pale eyes holding an expression neither Wasp nor Moth ever had. Esmail let the mask slip slightly, letting out some sense of what hid behind: the villain of ages, the murderer-kinden, the lost race.

The old Grasshopper stayed very still, on the brink of a revelation he plainly had no wish for. ‘You… you…’ he whispered. The assassins, the killers of the old times, but no, but surely no — they’re gone, all of them, and the Moths were ever their enemies… Esmail could all but read the thoughts coursing through the old man’s head.

‘They send who they send,’ he said, pointedly.

Shoel Jhin bared his yellowed teeth. ‘You think it will help, even that?’ he started to say, but Esmail hissed out, ‘Just tell me!’ forcing the man back with his stare until Jhin’s shoulderblades were against the cold wall again.

‘The Emperor… Alvdan…’

‘He died, yes,’ Esmail confirmed. And the circumstances of that seem confused, as well — far more going on than some Mantis slave getting lucky but, as with every other damned thing, the Moths never tell the whole story, even to their own agents.

‘She changed, after he died.’

‘She became Empress. That’s liable to change you,’ Esmail pointed out impatiently. ‘Give me specifics.’

Jhin closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. ‘The Emperor’s death.. a Mantis Weaponsmaster and a Mosquito-kinden Sarcad. You know these traditions? Shadow and blood. The Emperor died to magic, the first man in five hundred years to die in such a particular way. But it all went wrong. The power, the greatest ritual since the Days of Lore, all on her shoulders: the inheritrix of two traditions. Changed her? Oh it changed her all right, and she knew it full well. She must have learned too much from that Mosquito…’ Jhin’s eyes shone with an unhealthy light. ‘They began disappearing, soon after the coronation. Servants, mostly, some prisoners, some of the Wasps even. Nobody knew or nobody was telling, but I could feel it through the walls sometimes. The blood, the power.’

‘She’s Inapt,’ Esmail concluded. ‘She’s a magician even.’ Untutored, unskilled, newly come to some semblance of power? ‘No, that’s not it.’

Now it was him who was discomfited, by Jhin’s gaze. ‘So last year she went to Khanaphes. You know that city?’

An old name, old enough to make the clash between the Moths and Esmail’s people look like recent history. Khanaphes. There had been power there, but the Moths did not speak of the place much, which told Esmail volumes. Older and more powerful than their kinden, then. Their seniors, already gone senile and into decline as the Moths were climbing up. But not decayed quite enough, for the Empress Seda had gone there, added that backwater to her Empire, and there…

‘What?’ he demanded. ‘What did she do?’

But Jhin was grinning now. ‘She was crowned. Can you not see the mark on her? She was made their heir, and if she is crude with her power, just you wait and see! Don’t you understand? She’ll bring it all back, turn back the glass and give us everything we’ve lost.’

‘You’re mad,’ Esmail snapped at him.

‘Me? You’re the one who’s going to try and stop her!’ And abruptly Shoel Jhin had a blade out, a wretched little knife that a servant might palm while passing through the kitchens. He was ancient, arthritic, no conceivable threat to Esmail or Ostrec, but he was laughing even as he lunged.

The spy slipped aside without effort, striking back barehanded along the length of the old man’s arm, his fingers shearing into the slave’s rib-cage, then ripping his heart apart at a touch. He could have stopped himself, but he made a considered judgement, in the fraction of a second given to him, that nothing more of value would come from Shoel Jhin.

Turned, he reflected thoughtfully. An Arcanum agent turned, and by the woman’s mere being. I am in a bad place, and I have not been told what I need to know in order to survive.

Still, that was all a part of the profession. The mystery of his trade included all such situations as this. He would watch. He would learn. He would put himself through the paces of Ostrec’s life, and await opportunity.

He disposed of the body carefully and removed every spot of Shoel Jhin’s blood from himself before returning to Ostrec’s rooms.

In the morning the summons came: not from the throne but the next best thing: he and Colonel Harvang were called before General Brugan.

Once upon a time there had been a princess, and she had lived in fear…

Seda smiled at the thought, although the expression was a little tight, a little forced. Fear of her brother, yes. Fear of the Rekef general, Maxin, who had waited with a knife, ready for the order to end Seda’s life. It would be far too easy to say that her brother had been mad. He had perhaps been too sane, instead. He had seen the world very clearly indeed, and his place within it, and had recoiled from both. Most of all, he had feared death, and that was a perfectly rational thing to fear. He had lived under the shadow of the throne that he was a tenant of and a slave to, all too aware that the Empire needed the office and not the man. Indeed, her brother Alvdan had possessed few personal qualities of any real value. For that reason he had ensured that only Seda, of all his family, had survived his coronation, and that any bastards he happened to sire were put to death. He had been terrified of becoming obsolete.

He had been given a chance at immortality by the Mosquito magician, Uctebri the Sarcad, but it had been a false chance. The Mosquito had engineered his death at the hands of some magical puppet, but then Uctebri himself had been slain by the Mantis slave Tisamon, who had been hacked to death before the vacant throne by the Emperor’s furious soldiers. The ritual that Uctebri had raised, which would have made Seda his creature and given him control of the Empire, had earthed in her, stolen her Aptitude, gifted her with an expanded understanding of the world — and won her a throne.

She had been so frightened, after that, of what she had become. The world had become a distorted place where nothing worked the way she remembered. Her own mind had owned to dark cravings and lusts. Fear? She had eaten and drunk it, and slept in its company every night.

Well, we all must pass our trials. It was a part of every magical tradition, in fact. No neophyte could become a true magician without being tested, and the core of the test was to establish control over the self, without which any other form of power was but an empty shell. If only her brother had understood that.

Her chambers were as richly furnished as the Empire’s vast wealth could afford, with gold and gems, silks and furs in extravagant profusion. She had a hundred servants within earshot to attend to her every need. Some had already been busy tonight.

Her bedchamber was swathed in drapes of red and gold and deep, smouldering purple, centring on the great pillared bed. She slept alone tonight, since her current partner was recuperating. Fear again: all the Empire feared him as much as it feared her, perhaps more, but he feared her like no other thing on earth — feared and yet hungered for her, with a desire he could not stem. It amused her, but some part of her was disappointed in him. He had possessed such promise. He should have been stronger. He should have been strong enough to fight me, some small part of her whispered, to destroy me. Someone must..

Her original consort, the renegade Thalric, had been stronger, more secure in himself. She had never quite broken him, and he had fled her before she could manage it. Her thoughts still turned to him sometimes. One day you will be mine again.

In the room beyond her bedchamber lay what would seem, to the uninitiated, to be a scene of torture, the victim still fresh on the slab, pale and withered. Her appetites had been born of the powers that had transformed her. Mosquito magic was rooted in blood, physically and symbolically. She sipped at her goblet now, sampling the salt liquid as though it was a vintage, its colour smearing the red of her lips.

All around her, the Empire was on the move. Her orders had seen to that. She could not claim all the credit, though. If I went before them and preached peace, I would have another civil war on my hands. All the magic in the world could not prevent it. Her people needed to grow, and so they needed to conquer. The Consortium demanded the wealth of the Empire’s neighbours and control over their trade. Her philosophers set out their proofs that the way of the Empire was superior to that of its enemies, and that by bringing them to heel the cause of civilization would be advanced. Her armies grew sullen and restless and apt to mutiny now that the Empire’s internal conflict was done. There were a thousand reasons to go to war.

And she was proud. She would not deny that she felt a fierce love for her people and their relentless energy, the strength of their will. They had come so far, and they still had so far to go. Oh, certainly, the thinkers of Collegium, the merchants of Helleron, the artificers of the Exalsee — all of these had something to contribute to the world, but they would do so beneath a black and gold banner, in time.

She had her own reasons for conquest, though. She was Inapt. She was a magician. She had gone to Khanaphes and demanded the blessing of the ancient Masters there. She had planted her flag in a new arena, on whose sands the champions of other kinden had been fighting and dying for millennia.

Magic was not the force it once had been, atrophied and wan since the Apt revolution had overthrown or remade the old Inapt hierarchies. The Moths were now hermits in their mountain fastnesses, the Dragonflies a sprawling monarchy decaying from within, the Mantis-kinden warriors entering their twilight days, the Spiders setting aside their greater powers to rule their satrapies of slaves by manipulation and suggestion. The very Masters of Khanaphes themselves hid in the tombs they had built for themselves and there dreamt of a distant future. Only the Moths had ever sought to recreate the long-gone Days of Lore, and their attempts had ended in catastrophe.

Being reborn in blood and shadow, empowered by the might of Uctebri, by the breaking of the Shadow Box that had been the result of that failed Moth ritual, she had inherited a measure of power. Being crowned by the Masters of Khanaphes had made her a player in the old, old game of magic. Her raw strength as a magician — unearned, undeserved but undeniable — was a match for any that might challenge her, but now she found that it was not enough.

For, above and beyond the remnants of the old Inapt powers, there was always the other.

‘Tisamon,’ she called, and the faintest grating of metal announced that he was with her.

Mere strength would not bow the magical world to her will, nor would all the armed might of her armies. She could obliterate whole Inapt kinden if she wanted, and it would avail her nought if she had not exacted their recognition, their fealty, first.

He was her greatest triumph to date, Tisamon. Her court knew him only as the captain of her bodyguard — those half-dozen Mantis-kinden sent to her by the Moths of Tharn as a gift, who now served her with a selfless loyalty that the Tharen had never intended. They had originally been six, now they were seven, but it was unhealthy to comment on it, just as it was unhealthy for the overly informed to note that their new captain bore the same name as the Mantis slave that had figured so prominently in the former Emperor’s death.

What the old Inapt powers had lost in strength they had preserved in skill and application. All the power in the world was useless without precision. The Moths could use the little they had with a finesse that would outmanoeuvre her brute force. As her Empire needed to grow and develop, so did she.

She had called to him, to Tisamon, using his discarded blade as a focus, spilling the blood of a bastard cousin, building him a body of ancient Mantis armour. It had been her first true ritual, the greatest exercise of her nascent authority. She had sought out his ghost and bound it inside the metal, and exacted its oath. Now that tall figure of mail stepped towards her, halting at her elbow, not quite touching, and she felt the faint, cool breath from within his helm. And would any of those old powers have dared do what I have, to bring him back so? She had cast down the gauntlet, in her own mind at least.

She would not live in fear again, and for that she must become greater, more fearsome, than all others. Her armies and their machines would make her so in the world of the Apt, and she would hunt down the power of the Inapt, the relics of their lost world, and take everything to herself. Only then would she be safe. Only then could she be herself, and live free, and not fear. There will come a time when I am free and do not fear. I promise it. There will be an end to it. I am not my brother.

She glanced over her shoulder into the visor of Tisamon’s helm, into the darkness beyond. When first she had called him, there had been nothing but night within, but the more she employed him, the more blood she had given him and — most of all — the more she had thought of him, the more real he had become. Now, she lifted the faceplate, and saw those pale, dim features that no lamp could light: severe, handsome in a cold and arrogant way, but his eyes were for her, only for her. He was a man who had lived and died for love, but that meant other things to Mantis-kinden. Now he gave her what jagged love he had left, and it was an icy and barbed thing indeed.

But he was deadly and savage and hers, and sometimes she wondered what it would feel like to kiss those dead lips. Would I be mad then, truly, if it comes to that? Surely a woman in my position could be excused some madness.

She passed him the goblet — there was plenty more, after all, and the future held so many exciting new vintages: Mynan, Solarnese, Collegiate…

‘I shall have work for you soon,’ she whispered, and she felt his anticipation like a tension in the air. He was death and she was his mistress, and the world would soon know all the fear that she denied in herself.