The Air War

Forty-Two

Returning to their city, the army of Collegium met a hero’s welcome. Most of them did not know what to do with it.

There were enough that just accepted what they were given — waving back, kissing the girls or boys that presented themselves, acknowledging the heartfelt thanks of the populace, but Straessa’s face remained set tight, and she saw the same look all about her.

This is a sham, she thought. We lost. If that battle had been an apprentice piece or a student dissertation, they’d have kicked us onto the street. Strong start, lacking discipline in the middle, and chaotic finish failing to prove what you set out to. All in all, shows a lack of preparation. There was fear in her heart still, from this lesson taught. They’re better soldiers, and they have a better army. We accomplished nothing save get more sons and daughters of Collegium killed.

Behind the automotive in which she rode marched the Mynans, Kymene at their head. The woman’s grim expression mirrored Straessa’s thoughts exactly.

So what the pits is everyone cheering for, eh?

And then, as she had got that far in her thoughts, she realized that many of them were not. Those at the front were the enthusiastic ones, but even then she recognized a strain in their eyes, a desperation to make this procession something worthy of celebration. They cheered and they waved, trying to find familiar faces in the exhausted ranks, and those that flung themselves forward for an embrace were those that had found one, rather than simply carried away on the tide of victory.

On all sides loomed the buildings of Collegium, the gaps and rubble like missing teeth, as raw and unfamiliar as if they’d come home to some other city altogether.

There were surprisingly few officers left, the individual commands hopelessly intermingled, When her people had formed up raggedly in front of the wreck of the Amphiophos, Straessa sought out Kymene, as did various other officers and sub-officers. She found out then that Marteus had indeed been killed just before the battle, and Elder Padstock wounded during it, though not severely. In the interim, Collegium’s army was looking to a Mynan fugitive for leadership.

Kymene appeared as though she had been awake for a tenday, watching her new subordinates through red eyes as a surgeon re-bound her injured arm.

‘Go find your people,’ she advised. ‘Go show them you’re alive. Take that opportunity.’ She coughed, grimacing as it jarred her injury. ‘Keep your weapons to hand, though, and your uniforms. Don’t get so drunk you can’t fight.’ She did not need to say, They are still out there.

That evening took Straessa, eventually, to the run-down study from which te Mosca had taught Inapt studies not so long ago. There, she glanced from face to face and realized how lucky she herself had been.

Gerethwy was there, his hand bandaged so heavily that the loss of two fingers was barely noticeable, and his calm due more to the herbal philtres they had given him than to his usual demeanour. In that he matched Raullo Mummers, who had drunk himself comatose before Straessa even arrived. The homeless artist’s face was gaunt and ravaged, finding no rest even in sleep.

Sartaea te Mosca herself, the eternal hostess, arrived late, appearing only after she had done all she could in the infirmaries. She turned up at her own door with a bloodied apron under one arm, ready for washing pending the morrow. Collegium had few Inapt doctors, so she insisted on treating patients of certain kinden when she could. The regular surgeons muttered and snorted, but her results spoke for themselves. As she arrived, Straessa found her a drink, and the Fly woman slumped down on the floor with it.

Eujen and Averic arrived together, wearing the sashes of the Student Company, having been busy since the army’s return. While the regular soldiers rested, it had been the youthful Students who had manned the walls and kept watch on the skies. The aviators had continued to harry the Second Army, driving it further and further, and even now they were flying out into the night, showing the Empire all that Collegium had learned from the Wasps about modern warfare. Still, as each modified Stormreader could carry only one or two bombs, and as the city’s stocks of munitions were fast drying up, there was a limit to the amount of pressure they could keep up. An hour before, though, word had come to the Students that they could stand down. The Empire’s forces were sufficiently far off, and in sufficient disarray, that no attack could be expected tonight.

The Antspider and Eujen eyed each other, probing the wedge between them that time and war had hammered in.

‘You’ve been keeping the place tidy while I was gone, then.’ Such flippancy was all she had left to her. Her hand’s idle gesture encompassed the bomb-scarred city outside the shutters. Seeing his face, noticing the gulf between them only increase rather than close, she felt a sudden panic, more severe than anything she had experienced on the field. What did I say? Why have the rules changed?

Then he held his arms out, hugging her to him. ‘I know…’ she heard him say, ‘I know such things.’ But he would not disclose them, the revelations of the last few days: Imperial assassins, Stenwold Maker’s ruinous game of chance with the city, Banjacs’s death and incidental triumph, all of it sealed in his mind.

Outside, across the city, the citizens of Collegium sat in the shadow of one question: Will they be back? Would the Empire — so vast and inexorable and hungry, so often rebuffed and yet seemingly never defeated — would it return for them? They tried to tell themselves that Collegium’s freedom was assured; everybody said so, but nobody believed it.

Somewhere else, Laszlo was still trying to find some trace of his vanished Lissart, not knowing whether she was alive or dead, hunting for any rumour that a flame-haired not-quite-Fly girl might have made it safely to the city.

In the College infirmary, lying amongst so many others, Amnon awoke in pain and grief but alive despite it all. They told him that they had found him crawling back towards the Collegium lines, trailing blood, but he remembered none of it.

In his townhouse, the windows boarded up since the glass was blown in, Jodry Drillen slept at his desk, jowl pressed into a half-drafted agenda for the next meeting of the Assembly, wherever that might actually take place. His Fly-kinden secretary, Arvi, glanced in, crept over to remove Jodry’s empty bottle and bowl, then tiptoed from the room.

In the hushed chambers allotted to the College librarians, the artificer Willem Reader, co-designer of the Stormreaders that had helped save Collegium, looked in on his sleeping wife and daughter, and thought about the future.

Kymene walked amongst her people with a quiet word here, clasping a shoulder there, giving them heart, giving them hope. Far from home, fighting under another city’s flag, they thought only about freedom.

And Stenwold, out on the walls and looking eastwards, brooded on the Empire, as did so many other people.

The Second Army was slowly cohering, preparing the most defensible camp that it could after having left its travelling walls behind it, spreading its fires wide to mitigate the next attack. General Tynan was counting his losses.

Between the fighting itself and the disastrous retreat, he had lost some one in six of his soldiers. This engagement, which the more level heads of Collegium were already characterizing as a draw, was the most crushing defeat the Second had ever suffered.

There was a wing of Spearflights on the way to them from Solarno, the reliable old workhorses of the Imperial air force. They were better than nothing but no match for Collegium’s machines. There was already a fresh class of the Aviation Corps training in Capitas, with new-built Farsphex and all their other advantages, but nobody knew what had happened to their predecessors. Some catastrophe, some secret Beetle weapon, had swept the sky clear of them, and they were no more.

And General Tynan made fitful plans and growled at his subordinates, or calmed himself in Mycella’s company as he waited, always waited, for word from the Empress.

Then, tendays after the battle, and even as fresh Stormreader forays were forcing the Second to move camp further east still, a Fly-kinden woman flew up to the camp’s sentries and demanded to be taken to the general himself.

On the southern coast of the Exalsee sat Chasme, the pirate artificing town that had been a thorn in the side of respectable Solarno for generations. Selling its services to all bidders, producing orthopters and pilots, weapons and the men to use them, it had danced a fine line between the other cities that ringed the great lake, useful to each in turn whilst being a venomous annoyance to the others, but never so much to bring about its own destruction.

In recent years, Chasme had changed, though, and while the people of Solarno might have thought they hated it for its piracy, now they found it all the more loathsome for its honest competition. Chasme was one man’s town. He had made it a power on the Exalsee, and was working on making it a power in the wider world. His name was Dariandrephos, known as Drephos to his one confidante and as the Colonel-Auxillian to the Empire, and he commanded the Iron Glove trading cartel.

Here the Sentinels had been born, both their physical frames, their ratiocinator-guided mechanisms and the spun-steel metallurgy that made them light enough to move. Here the greatshotters had been built and tested and refined. Drephos and his second-in-command, Totho, were nothing if not prolific in their industry, and such was their reputation for rewarding genius that even proud Solarnese artificers crept cap in hand to them, begging for the chance to serve them.

The Empire had represented a great well of gold to the Iron Glove and, better still, it had given Drephos and Totho the chance to have their inventions used, which was worth more than all the riches of the world. Now, unheralded, a new Wasp delegation had come to visit them.

Drephos kept no audience chambers, so he chased apprentices out of one of the forges and had the great hammers and wheels stilled, and there he awaited his visitors, with Totho standing at his metal shoulder. He wore only his plain robe, and a leather apron over it, as though he had been surprised while working on some personal project. His mottled grey face, its features subtly distorted, held a mocking smile. Totho wore the hardwearing canvas of a Collegiate artificer and the closed expression of any halfbreed who has grown up in a city not enamoured of his kind.

The delegation was small, no great Imperial pomp but a practical-looking Wasp colonel, unusual in his beard and tied-back hair. With him came a handful of soldiers and a Consortium factor, and a single Fly-kinden woman in the uniform of the Aviation Corps.

Drephos had gone quite still on seeing the colonel, and the two men studied each other, both of them the Empire’s failures and both dealing with the rejection in different ways. Drephos had made himself a new empire here on the Exalsee, whereas this man had fought hard, under the threat of a death sentence, to win himself another chance.

‘Varsec, is it not?’ Drephos asked.

‘That is correct, Colonel-Auxillian.’ Imperial colonels were forceful and aggressive and ambitious, but this man — young for a colonel — seemed to have an edge of desperation about him.

‘They call you the father of the Imperial Aviation Corps,’ Drephos noted. ‘Your results speak for themselves. Impressive.’

‘You have heard the news from Collegium,’ Varsec stated.

‘News travels fast, especially when my own people were able to carry it up the coast and past your Second Army, wherever that might be now.’ The Colonel-Auxillian was picking his words with care, observing as fine a line as Chasme had ever walked.

‘Then you know why I am here.’ Varsec spread his hands bitterly. ‘I am…’ He gave a glance back at the other Wasps. The soldiers stood silently, whilst the Consortium man seemed to be making a mental manifest of everything that he saw. ‘I am on a knife-edge. My corps has suffered a terrible defeat.’

‘However did you convince them not to make an example of you?’ Drephos murmured.

‘I am still doing so, day to day.’ And, without visibly changing at all, the guards behind Varsec assumed a different aspect: not escorts but jailers.

‘And you need to fortify your Corps against whatever happened, and you need to do so now — ready for the next engagement of the war. And so you come here, to the Empire’s bastard son.’ It was not clear whether he meant himself or Chasme and the Iron Glove. ‘But I was under the impression that what happened to your Farsphex was not understood.’

‘Pingge, step forwards,’ Varsec beckoned, and the Fly-kinden woman did so. ‘Pingge flew in the assault on Collegium. She is the sole survivor. She saw it all.’

The Fly spoke at length, sometimes faltering with emotion, but pushing herself on. Whatever she had been before, there was a steely determination to her now. It demanded revenge — revenge for all the friends and comrades lost over Collegium. As she made her report, describing Collegium’s new weapon, Drephos became more and more focused, his iris-less eyes gleaming, gesturing for Totho to bring him pen and paper.

And, when she had finished, Drephos turned to confer with Totho, his guests utterly forgotten, the two artificers muttering together as excitedly as two young students. The Colonel-Auxillian even got as far as sketching three or four figures, before remembering that he had an audience, and at last he said, ‘Why, yes, I believe I see the problem.’ He was striving for calm now, but it was plain that Pingge’s news had inspired him.

‘And your price?’ Varsec pressed.

‘Can be negotiated with your factor there but’ — Drephos’s tone made it clear that this was the real prize — ‘I will have to see the full schematics for your orthopters, of course.’ Varsec’s great triumph of mechanics had been denied to Drephos’s insatiable curiosity until now.

But Varsec had thought that far ahead. ‘Of course. I have them here,’ he said, without a pause. ‘But it must be soon — even now.’ Here was a man in whose future loomed the crossed pikes of the executioner.

Drephos smiled, seldom a pleasant sight. ‘It is an invitation I extend to few, Colonel Varsec, but will you join us, then? For I see what must be done, and we had better get to work.’