The Air War

Twelve

Sartaea te Mosca was someone who could not help but play hostess wherever she ended up. It seemed an odd trait to bring with her from the severe Moth-kinden who had trained her in the ways of a seer, but the Antspider wondered if that was because they had treated her like a servant while she was there. Everyone knew a great deal about the standards of equality and the social hierarchy amongst Beetle-kinden of various cities, or the Wasps of the Empire, or even the Spiders, or so they told themselves. The Moth-kinden, for all they had ruled this quarter of the world some centuries back, were a stubborn mystery, and that was perhaps the one topic that te Mosca was never open about.

They were at Mummers’s studio again, and Raullo himself was having one of his bad days, meaning that it was past noon and he was still stuffed into the small alcove he slept in, sweating and twitching and turning over fitfully, a shabby curtain serving to partition his little space of despair from the rest of the room and fend off the sun’s encroachment. He had been angling for a big commission, the others knew, working night and day for it, repapering his walls with preliminary sketches and part-colour studies, but his patron had abruptly turned him down, or changed his mind, or even left the city. This last month it had been hard for an artist to make any kind of living. People were clinging to their money, waiting to see which way the future would jump. Besides, there was not as much money in Collegium as there used to be, after all the rebuilding following the last war. Nobody was going hungry, but everyone’s belt was just that little bit tighter these days. Art was a luxury that fewer people could afford, and Raullo was suffering from it.

It had been a few days since Eujen’s meeting with Jodry Drillen, and he had carried away from it not the humility that had perhaps been intended, but a deep-seated annoyance. Most galling had been the implication — as he perceived it — that his loyalty to his city was suspect. He had composed a long speech on the subject, going into some detail about how rattling sabres in the direction of the Empire — or anybody else — did not constitute loyalty. Eujen’s dedication to finding a future where there would be no need of war with the Empire — now that was loyalty, because it would provide far greater benefits for Collegium in the long term. The Makerist warmongering stance would only create a worsening spiral, a degenerating pattern of mutual hostility that would end… where? Where would it end? Eujen had demanded, and nobody had an answer for him. Of course, they had heard the speech twice by then.

‘If only I had contacts in the Empire,’ he would say sadly.

‘Then they could really call you traitor?’ Straessa needled him.

‘No! Then I could talk them round, influence them…’ Eujen’s hands clutched at the air.

The Antspider was herself not at all sure of that. The idea that there was a minority within the Empire who were whipping the rest to war rang false to her. The problem was the system as a whole, or so her talks with Averic seemed to suggest. Those who might see eye to eye with Eujen were the minority — Averic’s own family included, apparently — and, if the majority were to lurch into battle, those few would not be able to restrain them.

It had not been a month ago that Eujen had been claiming that war itself would not come. A tenday or so ago he had taken to stating that war would not come soon, that everyone’s excitement about the subject was premature. Since meeting Drillen, however, he had stopped saying even that.

And he would fight it, she knew, for all the good it would do him. He was doomed, and he knew he was doomed. The weight of history was rolling down on Eujen like the studded wheels of a great automotive, but he fought his battles regardless, because it was right. Of all his qualities, she loved him for that one. She herself came from a culture where doing what was right was a luxury that even the rich could seldom afford. Seeing the sheer, glowing naivety of someone like Eujen Leadswell, setting out to change the world, gave her an almost vertiginous feeling.

For ten minutes Eujen had been pacing now, watched anxiously by everyone except the sleeping Mummers, and Gerethwy, who was carefully annotating a schematic. Eventually, though, Eujen’s failure to conceive of some political master plan resulted in him rounding on them furiously, as though it was their fault. ‘And he’s not doing anything!’ he explained. ‘Jodry Drillen spends his time harassing students and listening to complaints about madmen like Gripshod, while we just slide onwards to…’ He would not utter the word ‘war’.

‘But Gripshod is the ambassador to Khanaphes, isn’t he?’ te Mosca asked him. ‘Surely that could be relevant?’

‘If only! It’s not even that Gripshod — it’s the artificer one, his brother.’

‘Banjacs Gripshod is still alive?’ Gerethwy raised his head.

‘ Banjacs Gripshod?’ Straessa asked incredulously. ‘Unfortunate name for an artificer…’

‘No, no,’ Gerethwy waved the idea away. ‘Artificers say that about a thing because of old Gripshod. Something of a legend, if you talk to the older artificing staff. I thought he must be dead, the way everyone talks about him-’ Then he was cut off by a hammering on the door.

‘He’s not in,’ the Antspider said, with a gesture towards Mummers, because they had all come to the immediate conclusion that one of the artist’s creditors was trying his luck, but then came a voice calling ‘Mistress te Mosca, are you within?’ With a worried glance at the others, the Fly woman flitted over to the door and unbolted it.

A young Beetle-kinden man was revealed, whom they recognized vaguely as one of the College’s older students researching something in such and such department. The post-accredit students often found casual employment with the College Masters and the Assembly as a way of making ends meet.

‘Mistress te Mosca, you’re called to the Assembly. All the Masters are,’ he announced, slightly out of breath.

‘But I don’t even have a seat on the Assembly,’ Sartaea protested. ‘Really, I’m not a full Master of the College. I don’t feel that I should be involved in-’

‘All College staff, they said,’ the student interrupted. ‘Please, Mistress. The Imperial ambassador has asked for special dispensation to speak to the city.’

A dead silence fell across the studio, each and everyone there staring at the messenger. In the echo of that sudden quiet, Raullo Mummers hooked back the curtain of his alcove and looked out, blinking and unshaven, as though the news’ sheer significance had been enough to slap him into immediate wakefulness.

‘I see,’ said Sartaea te Mosca, with considerable self-possession. ‘Well, then, I suppose I should go and listen to what the ambassador has to say.’

The Imperial ambassador was named Aagen, and he was a complex man who had only ever wanted a simple life. He had been an engineer, once, just a lieutenant whose life was mostly shouting at other engineers to get things fixed and machines into the air or on the road. He had even been well liked. One of the people who had liked him had ended up sleeping with the Empress, albeit briefly, and in his brief moment of power he had got Aagen sent to Collegium as an ambassador. It had been intended as a reward.

True, Aagen had enjoyed his time here, up until now. The Beetles knew a great deal about artificing, and they were remarkably open about it, even to a Wasp, when that Wasp displayed the same childlike enthusiasm for the craft that they did. He had lived here a few years now, and had not done too badly from it.

Right now, he would take it all back to be a lowly lieutenant again, as he stood before the Assembly of Collegium, although the lowly lieutenant he had once been would have seen this task merely as a duty and blithely ignored the wider repercussions. The Aagen of today, Ambassador Aagen, could not close his eyes so easily.

He had fallen in love, that was the problem. Long before being posted here he had fallen in love with a dancing slave, and loved her enough to free her and send her out of his life. After that, nothing about the Empire or the rest of the world had ever looked quite the same to him.

He had been greeted just after dawn by Honory Bellowern, Beetle-kinden, Imperial diplomat and the man who held Aagen’s leash. The portly, avuncular man had beamed at him. ‘Big day today, ambassador.’ Aagen’s heart had sunk in direct proportion to the man’s cheer.

Bellowern had held out a scroll neatly tied with black tape, his habit for official Imperial statements. It had taken a few moments of blank staring before Aagen had been able to accept it from him.

‘I’ve made all the arrangements. Of course the Speaker will make time for the words of the Empress,’ Bellowern had explained happily. ‘In fact, I rather think that there will be more people there to hear you than have turned up since… oh, the last war, let’s say.’

Now, Aagen looked out at that sea of faces and knew that Bellowern had not been exaggerating. Surely the entire Assembly had jostled its way into the great amphitheatre of the Amphiophos, and there were plenty standing at the back, too: senior scholars, Assembly clerks, servants. They were all unnaturally quiet. He had sat here before and listened to members of this politic host shout themselves hoarse, while two-score separate conversations were carried on all around them. Now they just listened gravely, finally finding the decorum and dignity that their office should have always borne, and never had until now.

All those dark faces, he thought, for they were mostly Beetles, with a scattering of other kinden thrown in, mostly at the College end. He tried to picture a similar gathering of his own people, but found that the thought only oppressed him. He felt that he had more in common, under the skin, with these mercantile, machine-minded folk than with his own warlike kinden.

He cleared his throat. They were rapt. The unspoken tension and worry in the room sang in his ears.

When he had first read his orders in Bellowern’s office he had demanded of Bellowern, ‘When did this happen?’

‘Probably happening even as we speak, my dear ambassador,’ had come the reply. ‘Now just do your job. I have appointments later.’

‘And what do I say to Stenwold Maker?’ Aagen had demanded, as his last line of defence, for he knew that even Bellowern was leery of clashing head-on with the War Master.

But the Beetle had been unflappable. ‘Why, haven’t you heard? Master Maker’s out of the city on some sort of clandestine business.’ A chuckle. ‘My agents think he’s gone to Myna.’

And that had been that.

‘The words of the Empress, Her Imperial Majesty Seda the First,’ Aagen began, falling back on his battlefield voice despite the quiet, for the reassurance it gave him. ‘Be it known that the Empire has suffered, both before and after its unification, from incursions and raids from neighbouring states thinking to take advantage of our internal division.’ He was surprised at how steady his tones were. ‘Be it also known that the Empire’s protectorates within the Commonweal, known as the Principalities, have also come under assault by the forces of these same aggressive neighbours. After attempting every manner of reconciliation and being met only with contempt, it is the sad duty of a state to defend itself by any means. So it is that the difficult decision has been made, by the Empress acting under the advice of her court, that the Empire is henceforth at war with the self-styled Three-city Alliance, which war shall be prosecuted by all means until the borders of the Empire are secure, and the liberty of its allies is won.’ He paused then, waiting for the uproar, and indeed there was a murmur building, but not the grand outcry he had half expected.

‘The Empress wishes it known,’ he continued more quietly, ‘that this is no breach of the Treaty of Gold, but the simple need of any state to defend its own. The Empire does not consider that this conflict need involve any other city. However,’ and Bellowern had actually written it that way, stage-managing the speech through the weapons of punctuation, ‘should any other power declare for the Alliance, or aid them in any way, then the Empire will regard such interference as an act of war, and the perpetrators as enemies of the Empress and the Wasp people, and the Empire shall not rest until such enemies are rendered incapable of threatening the Empire’s security and peace of mind.’

When he rolled the scroll up again it was the loudest sound in the entire grand chamber.

He was expected to return to the ambassadorial quarters for debriefing after that, leaving the talk to build into a panicked babble in his absence. Instead, he headed straight for an airfield, where a blocky old Imperial heliopter sat waiting for him.

Shortly thereafter he had left the city, and the post of ambassador, behind him, and Honory Bellowern would rant and storm and cuff the servants, jolted from his mild-mannered act for once by this shock desertion. Aagen did not care. He had learned too much, travelled too far from the lieutenant he had once been. With the sense that behind him the world was cracking apart, he was fleeing to the only person who really mattered to him any more.

Banjacs Gripshod knew what people said about him. He was bitterly aware that his name had passed into Collegiate legend as a byword for bad artifice, so that students characterized a catastrophically failed experiment as ‘banjacsed’, without really understanding where the word had come from. It had been thirty years since he had been dismissed ignominiously from the Great College, and not a day had passed without his feeling keenly just how badly he had been treated.

He was old now, probably one of the oldest Beetle-kinden in the city, and most of those who did remember that there was a man behind the myth assumed he was dead. His own family, nephews and nieces and subsequent generations, would have nothing to do with him, preferring to dote on his younger brother, Berjek, historian and now apparently some manner of diplomat.

Trivialities, Banjacs knew. None of it mattered. Only his work, his grand work.

Nobody understood artifice like he did, or at least nobody in Collegium. There were no like minds. Those engineers and mechanics to whom he had attempted to expound his theories had backed away from him as though he carried a plague. He had scoured the city for like minds, and found only technological pygmies. The journals he read were likewise a waste of wood pulp, ignorant men writing on small matters. Trivial, trivial! Was all of Collegiate artifice come to this?

He had once obtained a few brief papers by the Imperial artificer Dariandrephos. The man had shown promise. That was the best that Banjacs would say — more promise, anyway, than the doubting, naysaying small minds of his own people, who had cast him out, laughed at him, declared him mad and then mostly forgotten him.

He would show them, though. That was his maxim. There would come a time when the whole of Collegium would sit up and acknowledge the genius of Banjacs Gripshod.

The family at least had money: being cut off from the College had not denied him his research, only freed him from its constraints. If the masters back then had been men of vision, then a little devastation could have been overlooked. So he had destroyed one of their precious workshops. Did they not understand that innovation mandated risk? It had cost him years of rebuilding inside his own townhouse to reconstruct the equipment that the College had denied him.

He had grown used to being alone in the world, surrounded by people who could not share his vision. His time was growing short, though. He carried more than eighty years on his spare frame, and his patchy hair and beard were white against the dark of his skin. He could no longer fetch and carry as he once had, and a succession of assistants had been hired, tried, argued with and dismissed over the last few years, each one departing to spread the word that old Banjacs was madder than ever.

His current assistant was Reyna Pullard, and she was different, he realized. He had railed at the difficulties of working alone. Now he wished to be more alone than he was. She was an efficient worker, he had to admit. Her understanding of engineering was rudimentary by his standards, perfectly acceptable by the atrophied lights of the College. She kept his workshops clean — he had three of them, two taking up the wings of the house, and the special central chamber that reached all the way from cellar to central skylight — and she obeyed instructions without all the vexing questions that most of his prior assistants were prone to. He should have been delighted.

He had made a mistake, though. He had let her into the cellar, and since then he had lived in an agony of worry because he had misjudged her. He had always been misjudging people, back when he still had much to do with the rest of humanity, but long abstinence from company had blurred the memories. He had forgotten they were not crisp and clean like machines.

The cellar laboratory had taken some ingenuity to design, mostly because it had required practically coring the old family townhouse, removing an ascending column of floors and ceilings all the way up to the special round skylight that Banjacs had designed and had had installed. The machinery he had painstakingly constructed filled almost half the available height in a great reaching flurry of bronze and leaded glass, the transparent tubes like colossal organ pipes, the globes of the capacity chargers, the awesome spinning wheels of the accumulators. Beneath the laboratory floor was still more: the differential vats, seething with corrosion, that stored his life’s work.

It was all locked away, even the skylight capped, and Banjacs had made sure that his assistants could busy themselves in the other two workshops without even suspecting the house’s main secret. He had thought Reyna Pullard might be different, though. She had been so accommodating, not complaining about the hours or the pay or the conditions. He had thought to find in her a kindred spirit driven by the same dreams.

Standing on the circular gantry that ran around the laboratory wall at what was ground level outside, he now looked down at her. She was cleaning the charger globes, which always attracted dust and soot from everywhere else in the room: just a solidly built Beetle woman of twenty-five or thirty, and nothing in her manner or actions should have raised his suspicions, but he knew… he knew.

She was betraying him. After she had seen the cellar laboratory, something had changed in her. He was not skilled at reading people, but he had registered it nonetheless: it was unmistakable. Then she had been absent, just once or twice, but he had not believed her excuses. Banjacs knew he had enemies. He could not have necessarily said who they were, or perhaps their identity changed from day to day, simply remembered faces and imagined fears from years before. That he had enemies, though, was a point of faith for him, and now he knew that Reyna Pullard was their servant. She was telling them his secrets. She would sabotage his machine. She was working for them.

And there was a storm coming, Banjacs knew. He felt it within himself, as though it was the only thing still keeping him alive. There was a storm coming, and he was the only man who understood.

He was going to show the city, he was certain, but his enemies would do their best to stop him. It was his world against theirs. What was he to do?

Reyna Pullard continued with her work brightly and efficiently, and the sight of her sickened him. Betrayed! Betrayed! rattled about in his head, so that he could barely think. He had to act now. Another day, another hour even, and she would act on her treacherous thoughts, and then all his years of work would have been for nothing. He would be lost — and his city would be lost. There was a storm coming, and he would be needed. All those years ago he had looked into the future as if he had been a Moth-kinden. He had known the path that history — artifice — would take, and now that moment was almost upon him. He could not allow anything to stand in his way.

He had seen her making notes, taking measurements. He knew she was passing his secrets on to… it didn’t matter who. She was a spy. She was the enemy.

His hand tightened on the lever.

The machine was not ready yet. The great accumulator wheels were barely turning, and the skylight was closed off. Still, it was a very grand machine, colossal power penned into every bolt and bulb of it, the greatest lightning engine ever made. It was dangerous, he knew. The device that had destroyed the College’s workshop had been a fraction of the size.

Accidents happened.

Not taking his eyes off Reyna Pullard, he threw the switch.

For the next few days after Aagen’s speech, Collegium was foreign to itself, a place haunted by a spectre that everyone had been talking about before, but that now must not be named, lest the naming call it closer; superstition hung about the city as if the Moths were back in charge. Business deals were broken off, or hurried to a conclusion. Buyers demurred or paid over the odds, whilst sellers hoarded or let go their goods for a song. Some even spoke of leaving the city, but where was there to go? Collegium was where people came to in times like these.

Straessa the Antspider had just finished a one-to-one with te Mosca regarding her progress in Inapt studies. The little Fly-kinden taught a measure of the histories of the Moth-kinden — or their myths, as the two were often inseparable — and Straessa was sharp enough that she could crib during the tenday before and produce accomplished essays as a result, especially if she could confer with Gerethwy, whose facility with the subject was as notable as his prowess with artifice. What Straessa could not master was the rest of the course, the curious hints and paradoxes and platitudes that were supposed to go some way towards explaining the Moths’ belief in magic. Gerethwy again could set it all down effortlessly, but this time Straessa could not follow him. Her Spider blood was mute on the subject.

Now, crossing the crumbling quad that housed te Mosca’s rooms, along with some two or three other departments that nobody thought much of, she became aware of some shouting coming from the square beyond, the big Appellant’s Muster quadrangle that hosted most of the modern history departments.

She was ready for anything, for there had been a great deal of shouting in parts of Collegium of late and, at the same time, a great deal of conspicuous quiet. There had been rallies protesting against the Empire, and the few Wasps in the city had been staying indoors — especially when the rumour surfaced that someone had murdered the Imperial ambassador after his speech and disposed of his body in the bay. Averic had turned up one day with a black eye and a cracked rib, yet not a dent in his fanatical self-control.

But Straessa remembered what Eujen had reported of the Speaker’s words, representing the other side of the coin, and it was obvious to her now. Whilst they shouted, all the students and impoverished patriots and the immigrants who had given their loyalty wholehearted to their new home, there were plenty of the better-heeled quietly stepping back from the situation, withdrawing their support from those who spoke out, choosing their trading partners wisely. Those who had too much invested in Collegium just to run off and seek refuge in Sarn were quietly preparing for the worst.

The disturbance at Appellant’s Muster quad was something else again, though. When she arrived there she saw a dozen Beetle-kinden, dressed in the buff coats and breastplates of the Merchant Companies, standing idle with snapbow and pike while their chief called out to a scattering of students.

‘Do not think the Assembly will sit idle now that the Empire has made war on our allies!’ he declared, a pale Tarkesh Ant-kinden no doubt long renegade from his original city-state. ‘We’ve seen this before, have we not? Did not Master Maker warn of this the last time — and wasn’t he right? The Wasps cannot stand up against all the powers of the Treaty of Gold, and so they make their excuses to divide us, as they always did. Do you think Sarn will sit idle? Or the Spiderlands? No! And when they march to relieve Myna, Collegium’s brave soldiers shall go with them. We fought at Malkan’s Folly and we fought them from our own very walls. We’ll show them that our reach is as great as theirs. We’ll fight them wherever they bring their armies.’ His grey sash and those of his followers showed an Ant-kinden helm in profile and the motto, In Our Enemies’ Robes.

‘Come, then,’ he was saying. ‘Now the Assembly has given the Companies the right to recruit once more, who’ll stand beside Collegium’s allies? Who’ll march to give the Empire a taste of its own fire? For if we don’t stop them in their tracks they’ll be at our walls again, and then everyone gets to fight. So who’ll sign here for the Coldstone Company?’

Straessa watched the man’s audience with fascination, noticing Hallend there, who had been so vociferous about Averic at the Prowess Forum, and plenty of his fellows. Many here had been amongst the worst to victimize the Wasp student, to decry the evils of the Empire. Yet they were regarding the Ant as though he had the plague, and was trying to give it away for free. When the same man held out a snapbow for anyone to come and claim, she saw many of the most normally outspoken of them flinch away.

She slipped up behind Hallend’s little knot of followers, then loudly declared, ‘Why, which proud duellist here would not jump at the chance finally to take action against the Wasps, eh?’ They jumped, indeed, and rounded on her, facing the cruelty of her smile. ‘Aren’t they incurable bigots and villains, each and every man of them?’ she went on. ‘Why, I hear they even dare send their sons to be students here, to soil our pristine educations with their filthy minds. Sign up! Sign up, I say. Now that the liberty of the world truly is at stake, what red-blooded Collegiate would not?’

She wanted a battle, a real slanging match, as though the exchange of hot words would break the tension within the city like a storm, but instead she found Hallend’s face naked and terrible. Guilt was there, and shame and fear, and she remembered then that he was not quite twenty and had never left the city, and there was a blot of horror and loss in his recent history which was the last Day the Empire Came.

‘But…’ he managed to get out, ‘Eujen said… Eujen’s always saying, peace at any cost…’

Her sword had cleared its scabbard before anyone had seen her reach for it. ‘Wrong!’ she declared, aware that the Company snapbows were now drifting her way. ‘Make peace with me, Hallend. Go on, I dare you.’ Her rapier point danced before his eyes, ‘Can you?’ She backed him up three steps, unsure why she had not been stopped yet. ‘It’s not peace at any price; it’s a lasting peace. So it’s true, after all, that line of yours — not that they’re all evil, but that they need to be stopped. We can’t reach a lasting peace while we preach war against them, but we certainly can’t while they’re making war against us. They won’t ever start to change their ways until they respect us, and what they respect is strength. Come on, Hallend, you know I’m right.’ By the end her voice was tense and quiet, her eyes trying to hold Hallend’s, but his kept sliding away.

And Hallend followed the route of his eyes, edging back from her as though she was mad, and in the end it was just her and the recruiting officer staring at one another.

Which was why, when she arrived late for her lunch with Gerethwy and Eujen, the first thing the latter said was, ‘What is that you’re wearing?’

She could only pluck at the grey sash with its device and words and shrug, ‘Somebody had to,’ she said.