The Air War

Fourteen

General Brugan was afraid.

The world feared the Empire, and the Empire feared the Rekef, which in turn feared its lord and master, Brugan himself. His subordinates would not have believed that he himself might twitch and turn through sleepless nights, or wake suddenly from terrible, all-too-plausible dreams. General Brugan feared, too, and what he was afraid of was the Empress.

And yet he was drawn to her — fear becoming somehow an attracting quality. She was beautiful, and she had a fire no other woman possessed, and there were moments, gazing on her in daylight, when he loved her so much that he would give himself up to that fire and burn on it, agony and ecstasy together.

He had made her, he knew. He had been the first man of any influence to cast his lot behind her treasonous campaign. When she had assumed the throne, it had been by his hand, and he had looked to be rewarded.

The Empire had never been ruled by a woman before — she had needed a man beside her to reassure the traditionalists. In the end she had taken a regent, a former Rekef man, and former traitor, Thalric by name. The wretch had taken the place that Brugan had prepared for himself, but at the time Brugan had told himself that there was nevertheless time for all things to come to pass.

Thalric had gone from puppet — token male to sit beside the throne — to a companion of the Imperial bedchamber, and only through his own reaction to that knowledge had Brugan realized that his feelings towards Empress Seda were more than simply ambitious. He discovered that his intention to control the Empress had become one of possessing her. Then Thalric had deserted again during the Rekef operation in Khanaphes, which was a disappointment to Brugan only because of the effort he himself had invested in seeing Thalric left dead and buried under the ruin of an entire civilization. Still, with the upstart bastard out of the way, he had thought perhaps the Empress would take a more suitable partner.

By then, Seda’s charm and acumen had worked sufficient wonders to ensure that she no longer needed a token regent, but her hungers were no less fierce, and Brugan could still recall the cold satisfaction he had felt when she had invited him into her bed.

Could still recall… or perhaps say: Was unable to forget.

He lived two separate lives now. He was an Apt man, rational and sensible, who during the day could look at Seda and know that all he was seeing was her extraordinary charisma, her force of personality that twisted people around to her way of thinking. What else could it be? She was simply a natural leader, gifted beyond her years, well educated and advised.

After dark, however, the dreadful certainty would grow on him that, yes, she was all these things but she was more. Then she would send for him, and his feet would walk him to the Imperial chambers, desire and hunger making a slave of him. He would drink with her, the salt red wine, and in the antechamber would lie the ruin of some slave or servant, or some courtier who had misspoken or plotted against the crown. He had stopped looking now, since the first time he had recognized a victim. He was a general of the Rekef, inured to death and torture, but the expressions on those exsanguinated faces, the contortions of their pale limbs, affected him somewhere subconscious and primal. There had been a time when his kinden had lived in huts and feared the dark for good reason.

But he needed her, though. It was not love any more. His loins and his heart were chained to her, leaping at her least command. The base man in him was enslaved, while the Rekef general railed. He could not live in such a manner. He needed to redress the balance in their relationship and — just as to get rid of Thalric he had engineered the sacking of a city — so, to take back the reins of his private life, he needed to recreate the Empire’s hierarchy with himself at the top, the power behind the throne, just as it always should have been.

There were too many close to the throne now who were beyond his influence. The Empress chose advisers that Brugan did not know, or she bought loyalty with favour and promotions, or sought the counsel of foreigners such as all those Moths and other mystic rabble who had become so common at court recently. Brugan had been elbowed further and further away from the commanding position he had intended for himself.

He had the Rekef, though, and he had others too, who felt they were owed more for the work they had put into bringing Seda’s Empire about. This would be no different from any other large-scale intrigue he had been involved in. Had he not masterminded her accession to the throne? Taking the substance of her power from her should be easier than plotting in the shadow of her paranoid brother.

Whenever he made such promises to himself, something twisted inside him and fear roamed the hinterlands of his mind, raising its jaws to the moon and rattling its wings. Seda was not just a sharp young girl, it howled. She knew things, saw things, She had a power over people — himself included — that was neither Art nor skill but something else. The fact that she drank blood, he could have put down to the casual cruelty appropriate to the Imperial throne, could perhaps even have made of it a virtue, symbolic of the Empire’s own thirst for conquest. Some traitor part of his mind whispered that it was no mere whim of hers, or even a simple crazed need — a little madness did not necessarily make for a worse Empress — and that she drank blood because it gave her power somehow, that it fuelled her as surely as Nemean mineral oil fuelled the Air Corps’ new orthopters.

But Brugan was a rational man, believing in the physical world, and when he turned the lamps up high he could banish such subversive speculation and continue drawing up his list of who must disappear, who must see the inside of an interrogation room before being politely asked to change their allegiance, or who must be awarded a key post. It was a simple thing for a man of his abilities to turn poacher and devise just the sort of treason the Rekef Inlander was supposed to guard against.

Tonight. It must start tonight. She had not called for him, and the lamps were bright, and he had sent out a summons to those that he considered his allies, men who would cling to the hem of his cloak as he elevated himself, who were wronged or ambitious or just plain greedy, but men who, most of all, were his.

It held an odd mirror to the gathering that the Empress had presided over earlier, such was Esmail’s first impression. Many of the faces were the same: there was General Brugan, and there, as if to balance Harvang’s gross physicality, was the pinpoint neatness of Colonel Vecter, who had also brought along a couple of aides. Knowles Bellowern of the Consortium was there, too, the only non-Wasp and looking wholly unsettled by the business, whatever was going on. There was no Colonel Lien of the Engineers, no army generals — they were out in the field after all — but another half-dozen had taken their place, men younger than Brugan but old enough to have chosen a side and invested their power in a particular way of life. Ostrec’s memories allowed Esmail to recognize many of them by sight: Rekef mostly, but with a couple from the Consortium and one who was a steward at the palace.

They took their places soberly. Brugan had not called them to his offices within the palace, the heart of the Rekef, but to this anonymous townhouse owned by some mid-ranking Wasp family who were conveniently absent. The visitors had retired to one of the inner rooms and, at Brugan’s nod, the windows had been twice covered, with shutters and then with felt, so that the room became close and uncomfortable and dark.

Esmail was not concerned about the dark. From behind Ostrec’s blank face he was able to read a great deal from those around him. Harvang was chewing at something distractedly, for comfort more than sustenance. Vecter cleaned his spectacles briskly, the small, sure movements of his hands revealing his anxiety. People shuffled, glanced at the door or at each other. Knowles Bellowern had a pipe in his hand, the scent of tallum pollen fragrant from it, but he kept it unlit.

Ostrec would have felt alarmed, Esmail discovered. He would have shown none of it, but Harvang’s deputy had been a sharp enough man to know that this gathering, in this place, portended nothing good. Oh, opportunity perhaps, but these men were not natural allies, and Ostrec was not a major player himself. All too easy to be crushed between the wheels.

‘You know me,’ Brugan began. ‘My interests are the Empire’s interests. I am the benchmark of loyalty, the defender of the throne. As my predecessor, Rekef himself, served the first Emperor, so I have served the third, and now I serve our first Empress.’ He was not looking at any of them directly, but staring down at the floor. Esmail exhumed Ostrec’s memories and saw that this was not the fierce and forthright Brugan that the man remembered.

‘I have sounded you all out at one time or another,’ the Rekef general continued quietly. ‘You may not have realized it. A conversation, hidden watchers, an investigation into your finances or your associations. No man reaches your high stations without being vetted, and you all know people who failed that test. It is my job, as leader of the Rekef Inlander, to ensure the purity of purpose of those in office. The Empire must be led by those who will best serve it.’

He was skirting the point, and they all knew it. Looking covertly from face to face, Esmail saw that most of them there knew already what that point would be. The tension between the men gathered there was almost audible.

‘Empress Seda, the only living kin of our beloved Emperor Alvdan the Second, is but a girl,’ Brugan said softly. ‘She has proved that she is fit to rule, and there is none left who denies her that. Yet still she may be misled. She may fall into undesirable company, give her ear to those who do not have her best interests at heart. We are patriots; we know full well the demands of Empire. When we see foreigners and slaves gain influence with the very crown and forget their place, then does it not befit us to act? It does.’ His answer to his own rhetoric came slightly too quickly, as if fearing a dissenting voice. ‘I have brought you here tonight because I trust you to do what is right. The Empress must be protected.’ On that word, something almost broke in his voice, and everyone there contrived to ignore it.

What does he know? For it was evident that something had dented Brugan’s Apt composure sufficiently hard that he could no longer entirely blot out the truth. This was no mere coup, therefore. This was the head of the Rekef trying to master and control something he could not understand. And yet, and yet… hearing Brugan talk, Esmail could sense the huge contradictions in the man, his thoughts, his feelings.

Anyone signing up on this ship will regret the voyage, he considered, and it was only a shame that he must play Ostrec’s role here, and become a part of this business for mean ambition. Looking about the room he confirmed that, Brugan’s lofty words aside, every man there was considering how he himself might best profit from the Empire, most especially an Empire where Seda’s power was considerably curtailed.

‘There are two paired weapons available to us,’ Brugan elaborated. ‘It is our duty to remove those close to the throne who are unfit to sully it with their touch. I have some names for the list, and I have no doubt that each of you may have more.’ The first incentive to treason: a free hand to dispose of their rivals, or at least those rivals not present in this room. ‘At the same time,’ Brugan went on, ‘we will install our own people close to the Empress: as her counsellors, in her retinue of servants, everywhere she goes. When she seeks advice and aid, it must be to us she turns, no matter whose face she finds. We are the heart of the Empire, after all. Where will she find sounder counsel than ours?’

His gaze pinpointed each of them in turn, seeing how they bore up to the weight of his plan. Esmail decided that one, perhaps two of the people in this room would be found wanting — and shortly thereafter found dead, or not found at all. The extent of Brugan’s treason, however he might dress it up, was such that no faint hearts could be allowed to go on beating once they knew of his schemes.

‘Go make your lists,’ the Rekef general instructed them. ‘Men to frighten, men to blackmail and control, men to be made to disappear. We must cut out the rot, and if a little healthy flesh goes with it, well, many a surgeon has made the same decision. Beyond that, give me names of those that I should bring into the Empress’s company, as her immediate retinue. The position is not without risk, but we will need such people in place.’ He paused a moment, and then looked directly at Esmail. ‘She’s asked after your aide, Harvang.’

Even as Brugan said it, Esmail was thinking back to that unknown Moth Skryre who had set him on this path and was wondering, How much did you know, back then? Did you even foresee this? The conclusion was inescapable. What surprised him more were the corpulent colonel’s murmured words as he stepped forward. ‘You think you’re up to this, Ostrec? She’s quite mad, they say. Mad, and with the power of life and death over all of us. You understand the stakes?’ The almost parental concern was grotesque on the man’s face.

‘I’m equal to the task, sir. Don’t worry about me,’ said Esmail in Ostrec’s voice.

‘Well then, my man here will do us proud,’ Harvang spoke out. ‘Besides, he’s a fair-looking youngster. You never know, the Empress might be looking for some companionship.’ His leer was vile.

Esmail braced himself. It was impossible to tell whether Harvang had simply not registered Brugan’s own conflicting feelings about Seda — which were screamingly obvious to Esmail himself — or whether the fat man might be playing Brugan deliberately, engaged in some power game of his own against his superior who, of course, could not admit his emotional position. Whatever the reason, and Esmail was alarmed that he could simply not tell, there was a moment’s blank silence between Brugan and Harvang before the former nodded briefly.

‘I’ll see that he’s sent for,’ the general noted, and Esmail could only hope that Harvang’s games weren’t about to get him killed.

Of course, death at the hands of a jealous General Brugan might be the least of his worries. The Empress’s sheer magical might had already rattled him, and now he was going to meet it head-on. His own magic was one of subterfuge only, distraction, misdirection and disguise. He had a great deal of skill but relatively little power. He would not wish to go before a Skryre of the Moths, for example, or a Spider-kinden Manipula, and ply his trade. They would quickly sniff the magic on him, and have the training and experience to unravel his little spells and look on his true face. The Empress, though: if she had a fraction of their skill then she would crack his deceptions like a snail shell. He could only hope that he could deflect and divert all that thundering strength, preserving his masks in the teeth of the gale.

There was more business, and Ostrec’s ears took it all in, the anatomy of Brugan’s fifth column being discussed in summary detail. Esmail himself barely registered it, storing it for later. He was more concerned with planning ahead for when he himself should meet Seda’s cool stare.

He was frightened, and he would defy anyone with a little knowledge of the old ways not to be. There was something else there, too, though. The servant, Shoel Jhin, had spoken of a return to the Days of Lore, a resurgence of magic. Esmail had marked him down for mad, but if there was even the slightest chance of such a thing, if even one part in a hundred of the way the world used to be could be transplanted into the present, then what was going on here was bigger than the games of Skryres, and perhaps Esmail’s instructions did not mean so much any more. After all, he was beyond scrutiny now, beyond interference. What if the Empress was better fitted to be his mistress than the Moths of Tharn were to give him orders?

‘Farsphex,’ was all he said, as he showed it to her.

The Wasp pilot who had been assigned to Pingge was named Scain, and he was the most cadaverous of his kinden that she had ever met: a lean, gangling creature who seemed ill-suited to be any sort of soldier, let alone someone trusted with some top-secret Imperial plan. Like his commander, Aarmon, he spoke very little, although his voice betrayed the remnants of a North-Empire accent, the suggestion of an upbringing amongst the hill tribes, which made his current technically sophisticated post even more of a mystery, of course.

The Farsphex, however, was all technical sophistication. Pingge was no aviatrix, but she had a grasp of technology that went a little beyond what was strictly necessary for a factory worker, and she knew she was looking at something different, even if she could not quite work out what was unusual. Before her was a long-bodied orthopter, the wings folded at an angle back along its curved body, the enclosed cockpit sitting over a pair of what she guessed were the rotary piercers she had heard of, brought into the Empire’s arsenal after the original Solarno campaign. The Farsphex was a big machine, half as long again as the Spearflights that had been shoved to the back of the hangar, and its belly seemed overlarge, pregnant with some manner of machinery, or something. More, she could see that there was something odd about its wings, just by looking at it. The designers had managed to give it an air of elegance, despite all that, but it was plainly a different breed to the older orthopters standing nearby.

She took a few cautious steps closer, then glanced back at Scain.

‘Go ahead,’ he nodded briefly, and she let her wings flurry her up to the curving top of the machine’s hull. Thoughtfully, she touched the blade of one of the twin propellers there. Pingge would be the first to admit that her knowledge of aviation was limited, but she hadn’t thought orthopters needed those.

Scain stalked over to the flier’s side, running his hand along it in a gesture that said far more than the words he used. She thought that he would open the cockpit, but instead he popped a hatch in the Farsphex’s side.

‘See,’ he said, pointing. She hung her head over the opening, looking upside down into the cramped interior. There was a brief crawlspace that would take Scain to the pilot’s seat, but immediately inside the hatch was room for someone else, though only someone small because there, on a hinged arm, was a reticule. It was the same toy that she had been training with all this time, but seeing it in this unfamiliar setting sent a chill down her spine.

‘In,’ Scain directed, and he went squirming into the orthop-ter’s innards, all elbows and knees as he wriggled through the crawlspace, then contorted himself to get into his seat.

She hesitated at the hatch’s mouth, until another preremptory ‘In!’ from Scain forced her hand. A moment later she was sitting before the reticule, just as she had so often before, but the walls of the Farsphex’s hull crushed in on her from all sides. Below her, the machine was missing a good area of floor, enough for her to slip through if she was careless, allowing the reticule’s impartial eyes to view the terrain below. At the moment, all its angles and mirrors served only to give her eyepiece a good close view of the hangar floor ahead of the machine’s nose.

The hatch was shut from outside with a slam, making her jump. All at once she was enclosed by darkness, but Fly-kinden were used to that, from the interconnected underground communities they favoured, or the cramped tenements they were shunted into in the cities.

‘Sir, what’s going on now?’ she asked, giving her voice all proper deference.

‘Test flight,’ Scain told her. ‘Live one.’ A moment later and he was reaching back down the crawlspace to tug at her sleeve, making her jump. ‘Wear this.’

It was a shackle, a metal band attached to the hull by a chain. She stared at Scain wordlessly, and he clipped it about her ankle, turning the key awkwardly, one-handed in the confined space.

‘What…? Sir?’ she got out, her voice tight.

‘Stop you falling out.’ It was perhaps the longest single sentence he had said to her, and all it told her was that he was a bad liar. For a moment she looked him in the eyes, under the poor light that came up from the aperture. Instead of staring her down, as a member of the superior race should do, he just shrugged and looked away, plainly feeling a little guilt.

So they don’t trust us. It was a bitter thought. ‘I’m an Imperial citizen, you know,’ she complained, before she could stop herself. ‘I know about duty. It’s not as though I’ll just desert through the… the whatever this hole’s called, the moment we’re in the air. I have family in the city.’

Scain just shrugged, twisting his way back into the cockpit. Pingge stared at the shackle unhappily, but in the back of her mind she thought of Gizmer and some of the others who were perhaps less diligent servants of the Empire.

She wondered how Kiin was getting on. She would not trade Scain for Aarmon, certainly: the leader of the new pilots scared her.

A moment later she felt the engine turn over and fire, sounding as loud as any factory machine. The Farsphex jolted and swayed as it was pushed out into the open air by the ground crew, and then Scain made a kind of hissing sound and the wings were abruptly unleashed, clapping down towards the ground and springing the machine into the air at a sickening angle.

She would get used to it all in time, save that part: every time her machine — she would grow possessive of it very soon — took to the air there would be that stomach-lurching moment when she nearly sent her lunch down through the aperture. Somewhere amidst all the trade-offs that had gone into the Farsphex’s finely tuned design, a graceful takeoff had been judged expendable.

A moment later the city roofs were rushing past, and then were gone, their speed being far greater than she had anticipated; the rhythm of their flight was steady rather than the furious beat of an orthopter’s wings.

‘Ready!’ It was Scain’s voice, and she guessed she had already missed hearing the word once, against the engine’s racket. For a moment she did not know what he meant, but then her training took over and she had her eye against the reticule.

They were heading out across farmland now, towards a broken-backed range of hills north-west of the city. The eyepiece showed her a magnification of the view she might have if she were clinging beneath the orthopter’s sharp nose, flanked by the rotary piercers.

‘What targets?’ she called forward, forgetting her ‘sir’. Even as she asked, she spotted a plume of smoke, a fire set out on one of the hilltops. The wheeling, unsteady view of the reticule showed her several others rising beyond it.

She fumbled the first one, failing to get the trigger switch released, despite a faultless record in training. Scain said nothing, but guided the flier towards their next target.

‘Remember your navigation?’ he called back, his voice sounding a little taut as he concentrated on the steering, and she realized this was as much a test for him as for her.

‘Probably, sir.’ She had her tongue between her lips as she focused, a habit from childhood, watching the smoking target draw nearer as Scain swung towards it.

‘We’ll be flying nights as well; you’ll need to direct me to the target. Bear that in mind.’ The words seemed to exhaust him and he hunched over the stick.

And away! And she got it right this time, and felt something solid clunk directly below her seat, something leaving the belly of the flier. And that ought to be spot on the mark, she decided, hoping that she would get to go back over the same ground herself to see how she’d There was a crack and a bang from behind them and she would have feared something onboard had exploded had the sound not been so distant. She was so rattled that she missed the next target entirely. ‘What was that?’

‘ Live flight,’ Scain stressed. ‘Real bombs.’

Pingge missed the target following that as well, because she could not make her fingers move on the trigger, even though she had the reticule lined up on it perfectly. Bombs, she was thinking numbly, but of course bombs. What else? And who but a Fly-kinden would fit in here with the reticule, and who else would have the eyes for that night-flying Scain said about. Oh, someone has been thinking long and hard about this.

And: What about the farmers that live down there? Did they clear them out? Did they even warn them that the air force would be blowing them up today?

And: They’re going to make me drop bombs on people, real people. For a moment she felt ill, thinking of all that training, when it had been a game.

But Scain shouted at her, and she flicked the trigger seconds-perfect and sent another bomb spiralling away from the undercarriage, imagining it obliterating the bonfire target that some uncomprehending slave had set out.

Her name. What he had shouted was her name. She had not realized that he actually knew it.

It changed things, somehow. The Imperial high command didn’t know her name, and it thought she needed to be chained to the hull to stop her flying off in terror. Right then she didn’t give a bent pin for the Empress or her generals, but she didn’t want to let Scain down.

She got the next three bombs off, all within tolerance of their marks, and then the Wasp was turning them round, not heading for the city but for somewhere else.

‘Good,’ was all he said, but she felt a curious bond with him: who else was there, after all, but Scain and herself in this hollow shell in the upper air?

He brought them down at an airstrip a few miles outside Capitas, and there he unlocked the shackle, and showed her how to open the hatch from within. She dropped out onto the packed dirt of the strip, and the first thing she saw was another dozen Farsphex arranged in a rough line, with hers on the end. There was a scattering of the new pilots and their Fly-kinden henchmen and henchwomen around, and she could hear the drone of other machines still in the air.

A curiously proprietorial feeling came over her, regarding it all. This was more than the factory, where she had been just a small part of a humdrum machine, a tiny ball bearing helping the Empire on its way. This was special, and she and her fellows had become an elite. Looking about her at the busy airstrip she could feel herself and Kiin and all the others help build the future right then, right there. In that moment all of her qualms about whoever might be below the bombs she was preparing to drop were banished.