The Air War

Six

There was a wayhouse west of Skiel that was more than it seemed — not one of those disapproved-of-but-tolerated places run by the Way Brothers, but a proper army place, a regular stopover for soldiers and messengers and Imperial officials. Since the place had found its new purpose, just before the war with the Lowlands started, hundreds of Wasp-kinden had passed through and never realized that it was a trap.

The trap had remained unsprung all those years, until now.

When the Empire had mounted its invasion of the Commonweal it had gained the attention of the Moth-kinden in a distant kind of way. Most of the Skryres, the arch-magicians who ruled the Moths, cared nothing for the newly ascendant Apt race, but there had been a few concerned enough about the future to begin planning. Commonweal slaves had flowed into the Empire by the thousand, and some were recruited by the Arcanum, and some had already been agents, willing to risk the brutal life of a slave out of loyalty to their shadowy masters.

Before the war, Xaraea had worked tirelessly to prepare a few fallback places like this, taking her masters’ vague mandates and making them into hard reality. It had been foreseen, for example, that the Moths might one day need to capture an Imperial officer of some standing.

Esmail had made good time from the mountains of Tharn. He had not travelled like this for many years, but the habit had not left him. He passed through the countryside — whether Lowlander or Alliance or Imperial — like a ghost, taking what he needed, sleeping unnoticed in sheds and barns and warehouses, or out under the stars. The spring was cool, but the mountains had been colder.

He rode on an army automotive for much of the way once he had crossed the Imperial border: nothing but a ghost, unseen, unsuspected, listening to the idle chatter of the Consortium merchants and their slaves. They spoke of prospects and ambitions, the fortunes of common enemies, the free men and the slaves exchanging banter with a familiarity that they would have curbed instantly had any officer come near. They spoke of home and families, too, and when they did, Esmail stopped listening.

He did not know whether the Moths would keep their promise, to preserve his wife and children. He did not even know if they were capable of it but, if they had the power, they were still a subtle and treacherous people. They would dredge up crimes of his ancestors a thousand years old and call any punishment they exacted on him mere justice.

No choice, though. Not with her turning up without warning like that. Had he known what was coming, he might have risked the cold and the hunters to try and get his family away, but he had never been a seer. His magical talents lay in other directions.

The wayhouse in question, like most of them, was owned and run by the Consortium. The Beetle-kinden lieutenant in charge never guessed that five of his slaves had been suborned. Indeed, he was daily impressed by their efficiency. They had lived to please him for years, and solely for this moment.

Three days ago, a Wasp-kinden officer had arrived to spend the night on his way to the capital, and been detained. The slaves had taken him before he had ever reached the wayhouse, ambushing him on the road, and had kept him in the storage shed ever since. The Beetle-kinden lieutenant, of course, never needed to go into the shed, such was the efficiency of his slaves.

Those same slaves would be gone on the morrow, and their master would never understand why.

It did not escape Esmail’s notice that the capture of this man — this man who would be so extraordinarily important to the Assassin Bug’s immediate future — had happened after Esmail had left the phalanstery. One thing the Moths were good at was timing, arranging for the conjunction of what should have been unpredictable events.

The slave that approached him was a lean old Grasshopper-kinden, tall and cadaverous, his grey hair just a fringe about the back of his head. The other conspirators were staying out of Esmail’s way, in case the Moths had made some mistake, and he ended up helping the Rekef with their inquiries.

It was midnight now. The Beetle lieutenant and his guests were all abed, as were the rest of the staff, as Esmail was led into the storage shed. There, as promised, was a gagged and bound Wasp-kinden, his pack beside him lying open to display a sheaf of documents.

Esmail knelt next to him, seeing the Wasp’s eyes flare with hatred at this newcomer — Just some nondescript halfbreed, was the man’s first thought, no doubt. The prisoner looked to be a few years short of thirty, but his clothes were finer than mere army-issue would account for, and he had a couple of rings and a torc that all spoke of good family. It was his face that interested Esmail the most, though: high cheekbones, straight, dark hair worn a little longer than army standard, blue eyes set in that pale skin the Wasps had. Not a bad face, all told, and it could have been the setting for a great many virtues. Instead of which, of course, it was crawling with so much hate and loathing that there was no room at all for fear.

Esmail leafed through the papers, wondering what he would be taking to Capitas. They were trivial stuff, the sort of humdrum logistics reports that nobody would bother a man of the captive’s rank and station with: coded messages therefore, but that would not pose a problem.

The captive’s expression said plainly, I will tell you nothing, but he had not quite understood his situation or his purpose here.

Esmail took a deep breath, feeling rusty and out of practice. His training was no suitable pursuit for a family man, and he had not been sad to set it aside, either. In the back of his mind, however, he had always known that he would be calling on these hard-learned skills once again. Spies never really retired, they said, and it was true, whether talking of a Rekef man or a Lowlander agent or… what Esmail was.

The Wasp’s was a good enough face, he reflected again, and he should be grateful for that. It would be more familiar to him than his own soon enough, seen in every mirror, distorted in every polished piece of armour. He felt its contours, the straight nose, the slightly hollow cheeks, the squared-off chin, that slight nick beneath one ear that was probably a trophy of shaving rather than a duel. The prisoner had gone very still, and when Esmail reopened his eyes — blue eyes now, not his natural dark ones — the Wasp was trading fear and shock for all the other expressions he was capable of.

But Esmail was not finished yet. Some initiates of his mystery had to resort to crude torture to perfect their guises, or perhaps they chose to do so, but he had been trained in the higher arts of the spy, and had had his education finished off by the Moths themselves.

He put his hands either side of the man’s face and bent his head forward until their foreheads were almost touching.

Who? he asked, and the helpless, uncontrolled answer came back, Ostrec.

My name is Ostrec, Esmail told himself, knowing that he would answer to that name as swiftly as to his own — more swiftly even — as long as he wore this stolen face. Show me all that is Ostrec. Family, friends, contacts, rank, passwords, codes, missions.

The Wasp arched and twisted, the old Grasshopper leaning on him to hold him down, and his life began to tumble into Esmail’s mind in fragments and pieces, never to be quite assembled, never to be a complete whole, but with luck enough for Esmail to wear Ostrec’s shoes. After the initial incredulous horror, the Wasp was fighting him, an Apt mind forced into an Inapt arena and finding what defences it could. Ostrec hid his thoughts from Esmail just as he would keep them off his face before a superior officer, forcing the spy to hunt him through the rooms of his own mind, beating down doors, creeping through keyholes.

Esmail was an old hand at this, and at last he had enough: there were gaps still, odd holes and voids in his internal picture of Ostrec, but he knew that he could scavenge nothing more from the picked-out interior of the Wasp’s brain. He nodded at the Grasshopper: not a cut throat, with all the mess that would make, but a narrow stiletto rammed into the ear, neat and lethal and swift. The body would be disposed of far from here, never to be found again, if the Moths’ agents were any good.

Esmail straightened up, waiting for his joints to creak, but of course he was younger now, stronger and more vital. He ran a hand across his face, and it felt entirely familiar to him, as though he had been wearing it his whole life. He had put on Ostrec as a man donned a coat, taking up the Wasp’s memories, prejudices and loyalties, holding them at a slight distance so as to remain Esmail, and yet having nothing of himself showing to the world that was not Ostrec. The dead man’s own mother would not have known otherwise.

They were building a railroad depot at Skiel, but it would not be finished for months, so Ostrec was travelling by horse, with Esmail letting his natural skill decline to the basic competence of the Wasp-kinden. Because he could, and because Ostrec would have done so, he imposed himself on Skiel’s governor enough for a change of mount, so that he could make up for lost time on his way to Capitas. A lamed horse left behind on the road had already been concocted to explain why he was behind schedule, should anybody care to ask. Esmail lived out Ostrec’s pasts and futures in his head, even waking from black and gold dreams in the morning, weaving a web of anticipation to cover whatever he should encounter in Capitas.

The Moth Skryres had chosen well with this man. They could not have known the precise details of the victim they were offering up to Esmail, but their divinations had guided their hands to someone perfectly suited to the task at hand. Outwardly he was a lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps, but his Rekef rank was major, and he had spent the war travelling between armies and conducting purges of other Rekef men who had backed the wrong general. He had spent a lot of time in Capitas since, and been rewarded for his successes. He was returning now after digging out — and Esmail was startled to discover it — a cell of the Broken Sword that had established itself near the Mynan border. In the coded papers in his pack were confessions extracted on the artificers’ tables that implicated another three Broken Sword groups, for Ostrec had been a thorough man. Esmail knew that he should leave the entire business as it was, for meddling would only endanger his role and his mission. One night out from Skiel, though, he rewrote one page of the report, in Ostrec’s handwriting and using Ostrec’s codes, omitting all mention of such discoveries. He owed the Sword that much, and he had his own family to think about.

He had seen Capitas in Ostrec’s head, but the Wasp, a wellborn native, had a very skewed picture of it: all politics and hidden rooms, brothels, clandestine meetings, the houses of the wealthy. Seeing it with his own eyes, for all they had taken on Ostrec’s lighter colours, Esmail was taken aback. So large! And so foreign. The sky over Capitas buzzed with tiny machines, and the roads into it likewise; then he drew nearer, and the city only grew, and perhaps the machines were not so tiny, and then another shift of perspective, and yet another, until he realized that the stepped pyramids that dominated Capitas were far grander than he had thought, the surrounding crush of flat buildings far wider, everything about the place bloated and expanded beyond reason, and heaving with more human beings than he had ever seen before in one place.

Only Ostrec saved his composure, for, to the stolen Ostrec in his head, it was a sight of no great consequence: just another view of his home city which was commonplace to him. Guiding his horse between the stinking, grinding, rattling and stomping — automotives, Ostrec knew them to be — Esmail could only cling to his borrowed memories, using the Wasp’s jaded recollections to cut the looming threat of the city down to size.

Ostrec knew his way around, too. He had superiors waiting for his reports, and even if his parents had been on their deathbeds, that duty would have come first. It had not been loyalty with him, but ambition, for Ostrec knew who his future depended on. So it was that Esmail guided his horse to the stable yard of the Quartermaster Corps, leaving it unhobbled there without a word, knowing that the slaves would scurry out to take care of everything and that he, as a Wasp of some import, did not need to spare the animal another thought.

Once Lieutenant Ostrec of the Quartermaster Corps had paid his minimal respects — to superior officers who, Esmail could see, were well aware that he lived a double life that made him dangerous to offend — it was time for him to attend his real masters. There were not so very many Rekef colonels in the world, perhaps a half-dozen at the utmost after all the infighting, and only half of those were in Capitas at one time. The hand holding Ostrec’s leash belonged to a corpulent, jowl-faced monster of a man named Harvang, who had tiptoed his decaying bulk through the web of Rekef politics, taking each general’s orders in turn, whilst reporting on the other two to General Brugan, the eventual victor. Now Brugan was sole general of the Rekef, and Harvang had been tentatively rewarded, becoming a kind of secretary and doorkeeper to the great man. Examining this arrangement, and how Ostrec felt about it, Esmail found that he agreed with his borrowed identity that Brugan was keeping Harvang at arm’s length and in sight, just in case the man’s treachery had one more turn to it.

Harvang was at dinner, but from Ostrec’s pilfered experience this was generally the case at any time of day. When he saw his protege stride in, though, the fat man lurched to his feet.

‘Where the pits have you been?’ Spittle streaked the air between them. Even as Esmail opened Ostrec’s mouth to reply, his words were being waved away. ‘Never mind. Hungry? Sit. Eat. Brugan has me hopping to him every cu’sed moment this last tenday. All manner of stupid Outlander business. Could have used you yesterday.’

Esmail picked at a plate of crabs in wine, watching as this huge hulk of a man paced ponderously back and forth. A neutral ‘Sir?’ was what Ostrec’s experience recommended.

‘Had to bring some cu’sed tyro scribe with me. Stuff not fit for a junior’s ears. Have to have them cut off, eh? Need someone taking notes who won’t end up signing his own death warrant.’ The light tone always suggested that Harvang was about to laugh, and yet he never did. Esmail had to force himself not to stare at the man’s teeth, like black and brown grave markers cramming his cavern of a mouth.

‘Need rest? You’ve until the fifth hour. Eat, sleep, stick one up a whore, just be here and ready for the general by then.’ Without warning Harvang had turned on his heel and was retreating from the room, burrowing deeper into his offices like a beast into its hole. The meal, a fair-sized banquet by Esmail’s standards, was abandoned without a second thought. Harvang’s servants must eat well, and perhaps that helped make up for everything else they endured.

The fifth hour came, and Ostrec had already presented himself, early as was his custom with superiors. Harvang emerged from his rooms, wiping grease from his hands, but his uniform tunic was spotless: severe gold-edged black offset by the glitter of a few war decorations. The Rekef did not give itself medals, but Harvang had been a capable army officer before the years had so bloated him.

Their destination was the palace. Ostrec kept to Harvang’s heels briskly, but behind his new face Esmail was suddenly wary. He was too much in the thick of it, too fast. Only a day in Capitas and already going before the general of the Rekef? Was he discovered, somehow? Or had the old Moths wrought better than they knew? A glance around Capitas’s streets gave him some comfort, for it seemed that everyone was in the same state of agitation. There were soldiers and clerks and slave and goods wagons all around, and every one of them furthering the manifest destiny of the Empire. Esmail had passed through Helleron a few times, that churning hub of commerce, and he had not imagined that two such huge cities could be so different. Helleron was a puppet worked by a thousand different competing hands, its wheels working against themselves often as not. Capitas perhaps lacked the perfect smoothness of an Ant city-state, but it had the same unity of direction, and on a scale no Ant had ever dreamt of.

I’m here none too soon, he realized. Every single human being around him, every machine, all of it was the war effort. He was watching the little stones that brought the avalanche.

Official Consortium records listed the place as Factory Nine, Capitas, but its residents referred to it as the Colonel Valrec Street Place, after the thoroughfare that ran between their place of work and the tenements that most of them lived in. Capitas itself was not the centre of heavy industry that might be found to the west, in Sonn, but there was still a sizeable factory district: a large paperworks, the main Imperial mint, and various factory lines churning out uniforms and the sundry small items an army might need: pens, packs, boots, weighing scales, buckles, harness, all the tiny but essential pieces of a military machine.

Factory Nine made trousers mostly, although the machines there could be configured for all manner of cloth goods. Its complement per shift was eighty-seven artificers, two overseers, one foreman and five cleaning staff, the latter being Commonweal slaves and the only Inapt that the place had any use for.

Pingge and Kiin were part of the early shift, arriving every morning three hours before dawn to take over the constant motion of the machines, stepping into the weary shoes of the late shift with a fluid ease born of long practice, so that their mechanical charges need never know that the hands that tended them had changed.

They were both Fly-kinden — as were a little over half the workers, because they could get into the small spaces around the machines and hover over them, and had quick fingers, and the reflexes to avoid losing them to the teeth and shuttles of the automatic looms when things went wrong. They might not keep the army marching, as they said to one another, but they kept it from marching bare-arsed, and that was surely all the Empire could ask of them.

The pair entered the factory chattering, a constant patter of banter and gossip that kept them sane through the long stretches of tedium, and stopped only when some mischance of the machines made their job briefly and dangerously interesting. They were deft, skilled, trained hastily by their instructors and then patiently by years of experience, so that they could deal with almost any problem without having to commit the cardinal sin of shutting the machines down. They were the artificers of small things.

Pingge and Kiin had worked here together, side by side, for eight years. They were of an age, although Kiin was very pale, with hair she dyed fair like a Spider-kinden. She still had a trace of accent from the East-Empire her family had come from, having earned or bribed their way to a travel permit, and gone to seek their fortunes in the capital. Pingge was tanned and more robust, laughing louder, daring more, always a step away from drawing the ire of their overseers. There were rules of conduct in the Empire’s factories: indeed they were written on the wall for all to see. That the machines should run, that the factory should be productive, Pingge and the rest held to be a sacred duty. All the rest of it, about silence and deference and proper place, could go hang as far as they were concerned. They were artificers, after all, and not just slaves or common labourers. So long as they made quota they felt it was no business of anyone’s — no, not the Empress herself — how they went about their lives.

Or at least, that had been their sentiment until today. The foreman was absent, for a start, which they would have assumed meant he was sick almost to death, but then one of the overseers was missing too and, short of a city-wide plague, that was unthinkable. The remaining overseer, a stooped Beetle-kinden man a few years from retiring, was plainly worried enough that he just let them get on with matters. Had the machines been less of a inviolable trust — a symbol of the elevation of their status, however meagre — then things might have been let slide, and Consortium clerks might have been knocking on the door a tenday later, demanding to know where their trousers had got to.

The talk was slow to start up, but soon the familiar chatter of the machines soothed their nerves, and the comments began to fly, pitched over and under and beneath the constant hammering of the mechanisms, passing from ear to ear in ripples of hearsay and defamation.

‘… and she’s not been sleeping in a cold bed these last three nights, despite her man being posted to Shalk…’

‘… ask me, they put something in the water, never known a man less able to…’

‘… came in and stomped about the place and then had his dinner and went out, and never did look in the cupboard…’

‘… all that talk about flying the length and breadth of the city to bring me a bag of flour and he…’

‘… got sick, and her with three children at home, and what can you do…?’

‘… roach of a housing-master changed her to a smaller room again, all that talk of supporting the troops and it’s still bribe money doing the talking…’

Each train of chatter came down the line to Pingge, or was started by her, and Kiin added nothing, passing it on, her mouth pressed into a careful line to hide the smile, because you never knew who might walk in, and sometimes the Consortium clerks or army quartermasters took offence, and the foreman was forced to make some show of discipline, not that he was even here…

Then abruptly the foreman was there, the broad, stomping Beetle man entering hurriedly with the missing Fly-kinden overseer, and with a stranger in tow: a Wasp-kinden, a sharp young knife of a man looking altogether too keenly down the lines of the machines. Wasps actually visiting the factory almost always meant trouble for someone, but with luck it was trouble that the foreman’s bulk would absorb.

They remained near the door, which let in only a pre-dawn greyness, not enough to rival the lamps. The echoing noise all around masked what they were saying, but it was quickly evident that they had brought an argument in with them. The foreman was shaking his head until his jowls quivered, making quick, angry gestures towards the workers. They caught some notion of quotas, of penalties.

‘They’re going to raise us,’ Pingge observed, meaning that the quota would go up. ‘Bound to happen.’

Kiin nodded. Life would get harder in direct proportion to the new requirements, but they had lived through it before. The trick was to come out the other side with all your fingers still on your hands.

The foreman had made some particularly angry point, and abruptly the Wasp had a palm to the man’s forehead, freezing the Beetle into immobility, face now utterly still, almost expressionless save for a slight frown of concentration, no more than the girls might show, watching the repetitive round of their machines.

Abruptly Pingge fell quiet, and a peculiar focus had come over all the workers, bent over their machines as though oblivious, dearly not wanting to become involved.

The Wasp had to ask three times, louder and louder, before they heard him. ‘Stop the machines!’

It was unthinkable, unheard of, but now the Fly overseer had gone to the Big Lever, the one they never used unless the end of the world was only a yammer of the looms away, and had dragged it down with all the force of his wings and bodyweight.

One by one the great machines fell silent, stopped in mid leap, ruining an entire batch. It was a disaster. Nobody could think what the matter might be. Did the Empire no longer need trousers?

The silence that now fell on Factory Nine had never been known in living memory. The Wasp strode down the line unhurriedly, eyes sharp. He was not quite in uniform, or not any specific uniform, although a lieutenant’s rank badge was pinned carelessly to the sleeveless robe he wore over his tunic.

‘All of them women, really?’ he called back to the foreman.

Pingge exchanged an uneasy glance with Kiin, because there were indeed a few men working there, Beetle-kinden and a couple of halfbreed slaves; but of the Fly- kinden, yes, women all.

The foreman shrugged. ‘As you see, sir.’ He had not quite recovered from being a second away from death.

‘You, you, you.’ The finger stabbed out, selecting prey. ‘You, you and you, with me now.’ The last two at his finger’s end had been Pingge and Kiin.

For a moment nobody moved. Pingge’s eyes were on the foreman, whose face was a picture of misery. Losing his workforce — but not just for the day, she read there. Losing a half-dozen skilled workers for good. She felt a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach, her instincts crying for her to fly, seek the sky and get out of the city. But of course that was out of the question. She had family here and, besides, where was there to go?

‘Move!’ the Wasp lieutenant snapped, and the half-dozen were reluctantly leaving their stations, gathering in a fearful huddle close to him, but not too close. Pingge squeezed Kiin’s hand for mutual courage, as the Wasp turned on his heel and marched out.

Rekef, he must be Rekef, she thought. What have we done? It seemed impossible that anything anybody had done in Factory Nine could possibly have brought down the wrath of the Rekef Inlander. Was somebody using the machines for something else? Something subversive. Or maybe it was some other factory? You hear all sorts about Factory Five down on General Malik Street. The idea that the Rekef would just round up and shoot a few random factory girls because someone somewhere had done something wrong seemed entirely plausible. You heard about it happening all the time, in the next city, in the neighbouring district, on some other street.

They kept within six feet of the Wasp’s heels, and not one of them made a break for it. In retrospect that was what surprised Pingge the most.

Within two streets they had picked up company, another little gaggle of Fly-kinden, mostly women still but also a couple of men. Soon there were more than a score of them, pattering behind a few striding Wasp-kinden like orphans behind a matron, the occasional straggler flying to keep up.

‘But where are we going?’ whispered Kiin, the first words anyone had dared utter.

Pingge frowned. There were maybe a dozen places across the city that you emphatically Did Not Go because the Rekef worked there, but they were nowhere near those. Instead, this looked like…

‘Severn Hill,’ she said abruptly, and loud enough to draw an angry frown from one of the Wasps.

The Fly-kinden milled and clustered, and slowed noticeably until the Wasps shouted at them to keep up. Severn Hill was Engineering Corps territory, and that raised an entirely different spectre: not execution or torture perhaps, but everyone knew the Engineers got through a steady supply of slaves in testing their inventions. Perhaps they had run short of slaves?

Severn Hill itself was a grand ziggurat, the outside bustling with a few hundred Wasp artificers who spared the straggling Fly-kinden not a glance. The air was loud with strange mechanisms, not the familiar patter of the looms, and the drone of flying machines was a constant background noise as they shuttled to and from a pair of nearby airfields.

‘In,’ snapped the lieutenant, and they entered the shadow of the ziggurat, were hustled down low-ceilinged corridors until they were disgorged into a square, windowless room over-lit by the rearing flames of gas lamps.

There was a man there, another Wasp but a strange-looking one, bearded like a Spider-kinden and with a slightly manic look in his eyes, and yet with a major’s badge at his collar. He regarded them from the far side of a vast desk, the top of which was entirely invisible beneath a clutter of papers.

‘As requested, Major Varsec,’ the lieutenant reported. ‘All the Consortium would spare us at this time. All factory artificers, and used to handling machines.’

The major regarded them coolly. ‘Do you think Captain Aarmon will take to them?’ he asked, smiling slightly.

Pingge saw the lieutenant twitch at the question, for all it was plainly rhetorical. Whoever ‘Captain Aarmon’ was, he was not well liked.

‘Take them to the new machines,’ Major Varsec ordered. ‘Let’s see who has the knack of it.’ He stood abruptly, looking them over as though they had become soldiers. ‘Your old work is done. They’ll manage without you. You’re in the Engineers now, and you’re mine.’

This audience chamber was much too grand just for waiting in. Abandoned there, General Tynan stood at near attention, suspecting eyes peering at him from every wall. He was deep within the palace, some part of it beyond the known haunt of soldiers, sycophants and foreign diplomats.

The walls were hung with tapestries showing interlacing Spider-kinden arabesques, gold and red and black, that did strange things to the eye. There was daylight from shafts in the ceiling and there was a flaring white glare from chemical burners on the walls, but the tapestries ate it all and smouldered sullenly, holding on to a darkness that the room should have been rid of. The rugs beneath his feet were from Vesserett, he guessed, woven bee-fur now slightly threadbare from too many marching boots. The furniture — a long table alongside one wall, and the single seat at the far end of the room — was local work but very fine, ornate black wood with gilded highlights, some slave craftsman’s masterpieces.

It put him off his stride: not a cell, but a long way from freedom. Where now for General Tynan of the inexorable Second Army?

There was the sound of bootsteps behind him, and he shifted to one side as another man was led in. They exchanged glances, reading a great deal into one another’s presence.

‘General Roder,’ Tynan noted, and the other man nodded.

Roder had been only a colonel when Tynan had last seen him, but then the Eighth had gone up against the Spider-kinden at Seldis, and a lucky assassin had attempted to throw it into disarray by killing its leader, a practice that the Imperial rank structure was there to blunt. He made a young general, did Roder, a solid, soldierly man more than ten years Tynan’s junior but showing every sign that he would be just as bald soon enough, his dark hair on the retreat from his forehead. The left side of his face was stiff and expressionless courtesy of a failed poisoning attempt.

We are two of a kind. Tynan did not need to say it. Roder had hauled the Eighth Army off the Spiders’ doorstep when the Emperor had died, just as the Second had come hotfoot from investing Collegium. They were both men who had missed out on their chance to be the great heroes, failing the Empire by serving their new Empress.

Roder gathered himself to say something, but at that point everyone else trooped in, judge and jury and all.

I could have asked for some of these faces to have fallen from favour during the infighting, Tynan considered, but there was a certain class of man who never seemed to misstep, clinging to power like a leech.

He knew General Brugan, of course, and would reluctantly admit that he was glad the Rekef had ended up in that man’s hands rather than those of either of his late rivals. Still, it was a rare army officer who had any love for the Rekef Inlander, and generals had as much — or more — to fear from a purge than common soldiers. Brugan, at least, could pass for a fighting man, still strong and fit even though he was greying. The lancing gaze of his piercing grey eyes was often all he needed to draw confessions from the fearful, and obedience from his underlings.

To his left was Colonel Vecter, who had served with Brugan in the East-Empire before the war: a deceptively scholarly looking man with neatly parted hair and spectacles, a skilled artificer who was a constant innovator of the interrogation machines. On Brugan’s right was Colonel Harvang, as though some magician had taken two whole men, swept some small quality of discipline one way to make Vecter, and then shovelled all the fat and sloth and idleness the other. In straining tunic, the gross colonel was chewing constantly at some piece of gristle, with some smug young major at his heels — to feed him sweetmeats, no doubt.

There were more: lean, bald Colonel Lien of the Engineers had stolen a general’s rank badge from somewhere, and was looking insufferably pleased about it, whilst Knowles Bellowern’s dark Beetle face held an expression of mild indifference, masking the fact that the Consortium colonel was one of the richest men in the Empire and head of a powerful and ambitious dynasty. Tynan looked on them all without love.

Well, at least we know where we are. But he was wrong about that. Despite the two former generals being faced with as imposing a clique of power-mongers as they had ever seen in one place before, everyone there was still waiting. There could be only one person able to bring these dignitaries together and force them to fidget and shuffle at her pleasure.

Tynan was ready for her when she swept into the room: the Empress Seda the First, whose throne he and Roder had saved by abandoning their respective campaigns, at her command. He had never actually met the woman before. His fall from grace had been too immediate, his army disbanded, his soldiers redeployed. He had thought it merely due to his failure, at the time. In retrospect he had realized that it was simple mistrust. A general with an army, in those turbulent days of secession and civil war, might have been just a little too tempted to try for the throne himself.

Seda was absurdly young — years younger than any of them, even than Harvang’s protege. A frail and slender girl, and as beautiful as nature’s gifts and Spider cosmetics could make her, and when she entered the room she held all their attention utterly captive. Tynan, older and wiser than most, saw from the corners of his eyes just how she affected them: Bellowern’s moistened lips, Vecter removing his spectacles to clean them, an unnameable, hungry expression nakedly apparent on General Brugan’s face. Harvang’s young follower started noticeably, flinching away the moment she entered the room.

She was slim and delicate, but her presence filled every inch of space there, forcing itself on them.

‘General Tynan,’ she acknowledged, and his name on her lips jolted something within him, despite himself. ‘General Roder.’ Her smile was painful to behold, like looking at the sun.

General Brugan cleared his throat. ‘It has so pleased Her Imperial Majesty Seda the First to summon you to her presence,’ he began, but the Empress had taken her seat by then, and now waved him to silence with a brief gesture. Tynan had heard many theories about the precise balance of power at court, and many of them claimed that Brugan, lord of the Rekef, held the reins, and that the Empress was his puppet.

Oh, not true at all, he understood now. For a moment, examining her, he found himself locking eyes with the woman. The sense of power was palpable: the entire might of the Empire balanced on her shoulders.

‘Enough formalities,’ she said softly. ‘You must have known this day would come. Since being removed from your commands you have waited faithfully for our call, and whatever fate it should summon you to. Unlike others with guiltier consciences, you have not gathered your riches and tried to flee our borders. Well, then, the Empire has called. It requires its heroes once again.’

‘Heroes?’ Roder burst out, raising angry scowls from all three Rekef men and a raised eyebrow from Bellowern of the Consortium. Even facing the Empress’s cool regard, the former general could not keep the words in, though: ‘But we failed!’

Tynan had not realized that the man had taken it so seriously, but his failure to capture Seldis was writ large on his half-paralysed face.

‘You obeyed. In the final analysis, what else is there for a soldier?’ Seda asked him, forgiving his outburst implicitly. ‘Who could blame you for following orders?’ Hanging in the air was the common knowledge that there were plenty who had been blamed for just that, at the throne’s convenience, but apparently this was not one of those cases. ‘No,’ Seda continued, ‘you are heroes, for you are the Empire’s generals who were never defeated.’

Tynan risked a sidelong glance at Roder, and caught the man looking back at him. Well, there’s a novel turn of phrase.

‘You must know that our Empire is under threat,’ Seda informed them earnestly. ‘Collegium will not raise a flag against us directly, but their agents have worked against our reunification, their weapons flood into hands of the Three-city Alliance, our closest enemies. They would have war, if only others will fight us in their stead. We see what they mean plain enough. General Tynan.’

He snapped to attention without thinking about it, for a moment just the parade-ground lieutenant he had once been.

Seda smiled to see it. ‘We are re-forming the Second Army, your beloved “Gears”, along with some elements of the Fifth. You are hereby restored to your position, and we send you south to meet up with your men. You carried the war to the gates of Collegium once before, General. Now you will fulfil your destiny and make that city ours.’

‘Majesty,’ Roder addressed her, voice hoarse with emotion, ‘I shall take Seldis for you. I shall take the whole Spiderlands, if you ask it.’

She turned her benevolent regard on him. ‘No, no, General, that is in hand. General Brugan and his Rekef tell me that arrangements have already been made for the Spiders, starting with a timely resolution to the Solarno situation. I have other tasks for you. We have been gathering troops near the Mynan border for some time now, in order to fend off their raids and skirmishes. The bulk of your old Eighth is marching to join them even now, along with some new toys for the Engineers. You will return our rebellious neighbours to the Imperial fold, General Roder: first Myna, Szar and Maynes, and then on to Helleron.’

She looked about brightly. ‘Colonel Bellowern has made the logistical arrangements personally, and General Lien and his associates will ensure you lack for nothing in the field of artifice, and of course the Rekef Outlander is already working to smooth your way. The Empire has too long been sick and at the mercy of its enemies. Now we look to you all to put the world to rights, to restore us to our proper place in the world.’ Abruptly her eyes were steel, and there were fluttering banners of black and gold in her voice, and a thousand marching feet, and great engines. ‘You know your duty, all of you, for your love of the Empire, and for me.’