The Air War (11 page)

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 protégé 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.