The Air War (18 page)

‘Breighl?’ he said uncertainly. ‘
Painful?
What are you doing here.’

‘The game’s up, Laszlo, or whoever you are.’ There was nothing left in the halfbreed of the man that Laszlo had drunk with, gambled with and mocked. The hand not directing a
sword at him was at belt-level, half inside his coat, and Laszlo guessed at one of the little local crossbows there, already tensioned and loaded.

‘What’s going on, Painful?’ Laszlo let himself relax, wings vanishing from his back but ready to be called at a moment’s notice. He had not reloaded the spent sleevebow,
but its companion was still charged, and he reckoned his reactions were better than Breighl’s at a pinch. ‘How did you find this place?’

Breighl gave him a disdainful smile. ‘You were followed here tendays ago. You’re nowhere near as good as you think you are.’

‘Where’s te Liss?’ Laszlo demanded, because he had assumed they had got his address from the girl, but now hope flared in him again.

‘So you
are
working with her, then,’ Breighl noted, with infinite regret. ‘We’ll pick her up, don’t you mind about that. You’re under arrest, Laszlo.
You’re a foreign national working against the Cortas. The order to bring you in doesn’t specify that you have to still be breathing but, for old times’ sake, I’ll give you a
chance.’

‘I’m not working against the Cortas.’

‘Laszlo, you’re working for the Spiderlands Aristoi, we
know
that. Don’t piss me about.’

All this time and he really believed that?
Laszlo felt almost hurt. ‘Look, if you must know, I’m working out of Collegium, and you surely see that they, of all people,
don’t want the Empire in here—’

‘The
Empire
?’ Breighl abruptly had the crossbow out and aimed at him, and Laszlo re-evaluated just who likely had the quicker reflexes. ‘You think we’re worried
about the
Empire
now? So they have some troops up north, past Toek? So what? They’re worried about what we’re worried about, Laszlo. We
know
there’s a fleet of ships
on the Exalsee
even now
, out of Mavralis. We know that a dozen Aristoi families have finally decided they can’t let Solarno remain independent any more. Don’t take us for idiots.
We know your employers think this is all a game, but to us it isn’t!’ Abruptly he was shouting, the crossbow shaking wildly, making Laszlo flinch.

‘Believe me, Breighl, I have some really poor history with the Spiderlands. I’m
not
with them!’ Laszlo insisted. To his astonishment – almost his embarrassment
– there were tears in the halfbreed’s eyes.

‘Oh, I know, the Spiders think everyone else is a fool, and so do their agents. Nobody’s as smart as them. Even the Solarnese Aristoi think it’s all so pissing
clever
,
but we Solarnese don’t
want
to end up as the toys of the Spiderlands, just another cursed satrapy city, a pawn in their games. This is
my
city, Laszlo! I’m going to do
anything I can to stop your filthy scheming mistresses get their hands on it, and if the first move in that is to put a bolt through your brain, then so be it!’

He jabbed the crossbow towards Laszlo for emphasis, and it went off.

Laszlo was already lurching to one side, an Art-sense unique to Fly-kinden warning him of it even before the string slipped. The bolt ploughed into the wall behind him, then he was going for the
other man, not with the sleevebow, that would take a moment to aim in which Breighl’s sword could bat it aside, but with a dagger. Laszlo was the veteran of countless dockside brawls,
skirmishes between pirates and the contested boardings of a score of ships, and in close quarters there was no weapon greater than a simple six–inch blade.

Breighl’s sword gave him reach but it was an advantage that Laszlo countered instantly, a rush of speed from his wings getting him within knife range, in the hope that a single blow might
take the man down and clear the way to the window. The halfbreed was no stranger to this sort of fight either, and he was already lunging for Laszlo’s dagger wrist, his crossbow spinning
away. For a moment he had a grip, sword drawn back outside the Fly’s reach, ready to stab, but Laszlo’s wings threw him into a backwards somersault so that he could kick Breighl in the
face, the man’s grip loosening before he could dislocate Laszlo’s shoulder. The Fly came down at the far end of the room, for all the little space that gave him, and was already
launching back at his opponent, his wings just a flickering blur.

Breighl stumbled back against the window, sword outstretched to let Laszlo run himself through, but the Fly slipped past the blade, the point shearing through his coat, his shoulder striking the
man in the chest in an attempt to send him toppling out of the window. He got the back of Breighl’s other hand about the head for his trouble, before the halfbreed managed to steady himself
with a flurry of his wings. The sword drove down for Laszlo again, the Fly earthbound for a moment and down on one knee with the force of the punch.

Breighl was bigger and stronger and almost as fast, and there was really no other way to do it. Laszlo slammed into the man’s legs, not to knock him off balance but because Breighl could
not stab straight down the line of his own body with much force. Laszlo’s upflung arm got in the way of the strike, the blade slicing open the tough canvas of his coat sleeve and raking a
line of red, but Laszlo was too close for proper sword work. Even as Breighl kicked at him, he rammed the dagger into the halfbreed’s groin.

The first stroke cut shallowly, deflected by the cuirass’s armour plates, and Breighl jerked away desperately, forcing himself half out of the window. Laszlo was beyond regrets then
– they were not a currency a pirate could spend too often – and he followed, clawing his way up the halfbreed’s chest and slamming the bloodied dagger into the man’s
throat.

Breighl died without a cry, hanging half out over the street, his blood an explosive mist that showered down below. Laszlo hauled him in with all his strength, letting the man’s last
convulsive shudder tilt his body into the room.

Didn’t want that. Didn’t want to do that.
He had been a factor for the
Bloodfly
crew, after all, their friendly merchant face at each port they traded with. He was
seldom called on to kill people he knew.
Oh, waste it, Breighl, couldn’t you be slow enough to let me out of the window?

He hauled his coat off. It was torn and cut, and there was a swathe of Breighl’s blood across it. The cut on his arm was, in contrast, inconsequential.

Her lodgings, and if she’s not there . . .
He found he was still reeling, his heart refusing to slow, his head seeming to ring to the echo of some vast, unheard sound. Numbly, his
hands recharged the spent sleevebow, slipping another bolt into the breech. His shock at killing Breighl had become a crawling dread for Liss’s fate. If things had gone
this
wrong
this
fast, then the list of bad things that might happen to her was endless. His only consolation was that Breighl’s people had plainly not tracked her down yet.

He kicked off from the windowsill, coursing over the city for te Liss’s little place out by the Venador street market, hope and fear fighting over him.

She drew on her bedroom wall. It had seemed endearing, but at the same time he knew the sketches must hold hidden meanings for her shadowy contacts. The entire bare expanse of plaster over her
bed was strewn with overlapping scrawls of trees, flowers, veined wings in scholarly detail, childlike abstracts of people standing, running, fighting.

When she had finally let him in there, after his confession that he had tailed her, she had pointed out one little corner, a blank space just above her pillow. ‘That’s for you, just
you,’ she had told him. Nothing more had needed to be said. Even then they had both known how they lived in an uncertain world.

Now he hung by her window, feeling the rough wood where the shutters had been wrenched off. The room itself had been turned over, furniture broken, her mattress ripped open so that twists of rag
carpeted the floor like an early crop of dying mayflies.

That small space had now been filled, a rough, hasty image: a tall building with jagged rays. He stared at it blankly for a moment before matching it to a landmark. The Solarnese coast was
gentle, but to the immediate west of the city there were rocks, a jagged out-thrusting of them that was probably man-made, from distant ages past, some forgotten seawall or ancient pier.

There was a squat lighthouse there, to warn off midnight shipping.

Laszlo hurled himself back from the window, well aware that his arrival might have been noticed by any number of watchers. He led any followers a merry chase, and only a Dragonfly, or another of
his own kinden, could have hoped to keep up, as he went looping about the mansions of the wealthy, darting through the warrens of the poor, circling in a far arc across the water and then inland
again, and all the while with no sense of pursuit, before bolting at last for the lighthouse – and Liss.

The lamp was out. He could not guess why, but only because there were too many options, crosses and double-crosses, or even the Solarnese themselves trying to thwart the Spider fleet that
Breighl had spoken of. Laszlo landed on the top rail, finding the glass of the great lamp smashed, the whole place reeking of oil.
Not good, not good at all.
He could not call out her name,
however much he wanted to. Anyone might be here now and, if it was not her, then it would be nobody that wanted to see poor Laszlo.

He crouched on the very rail, the wooden gantry beneath him jagged with broken glass, listening into the quiet of the night, eyes closed so that he could make his ears his only world. The wash
of the waters below, he heard, and sounds from the city close at hand: engines, shouting, the drone of an orthopter.

Someone moved, not out on the gantry itself but within the lighthouse. He heard a slow scrape, metal on wood, and a hiss of breath.

He had his dagger out again and, after a moment, he took one of the sleevebows in his other hand. Inching about the railing he found the door that would let the lighthouse custodian out to clean
and refill the lamp – and found it standing open. The darkness hung heavy inside, but he trusted to his Fly eyes and let his wings glide him inside, touching down in silence at the head of
the spiral stairs.

Again came that gasp of breath, ragged enough to bring back too many memories of fights gone sour, of shipmates lost despite all the surgeons could do, and now it was more than he had the
willpower for not to call out, ‘Liss?’

Don’t be Liss. Don’t be Liss.
There had been death in that sound, as sure as death ever was. The stairs wound about the hollow interior, simple wooden slats pegged into the
stone, each bolted to the next with steel struts. There was no guard-rail, and the central well of the lighthouse tower was a yawning abyss. Laszlo called for his wings and stepped into the void
without hesitation, sleevebow trained down as he descended, knowing how vulnerable he would be but unable simply to creep down like some ground-bound Beetle.

He spotted the body halfway down: small, Fly-kinden. No cascade of curls, nothing of Liss – a man, in fact. He was going to set down a dozen steps above, but then he recognized the
casualty and ended up right beside him.

‘Te Riel,’

Someone had put a long knife into te Riel’s gut and left him. There were other wounds: a cut-open palm and a spread of blood across his shoulder, but the stomach blow had finished it. The
man was shaking, curled about the weapon that was still buried in him, one hand on the hilt but without the strength of body or mind to pull it out and hasten his own end. The other arm was hooked
about a step, keeping him from a final fall. Fly-kinden were masters of the air, but the wound had stripped all that off him at the last.

‘Laszlo.’ A voice so low that Laszlo had to stoop down, almost ear to mouth, to hear it. ‘Liss.’

Just for you, she said.
It hurt a little, knowing that she had been saving that little space on her wall for te Riel as well, but not as much as it had hurt te Riel himself.

‘I don’t know where she is, if she’s not here.’ He put a hand on the dying man’s shoulder, feeling it already cold despite the man’s tenacious hold on life.
‘Help me. Tell me. I know you liked her too.’

The awful sound of te Riel laughing would stay with Laszlo for a long time, each bark of it echoed by an agonized indrawing of breath. ‘Gone. Gone,’ then something indistinct, and
then, clear as day, ‘the
hangars
. Going to blow up the
hangars.
’

‘The Empire?’ Laszlo remembered who he was speaking to. ‘Your lot?’

‘Not,’ te Riel wheezed out. ‘Not mine . . . trying to get out from under . . . Laszlo, the hangars! All the . . . Solarnese have . . . going up . . .’

‘I’m going, te Riel. I’m going—’ but the man snagged his arm with the blood-slick hand that had been holding on to the knife hilt.

‘Not . . . please . . .’ There was a shuddering moment when Laszlo thought he had died, but the bloody grip remained. ‘Die with my own name, please . . . not te Riel . .
.’

There was more, but it was just a whisper, barely words, certainly not a name. Then the man was dead, taking his secrets with him.

The hangars.
Even with that thought, Laszlo was soaring up the well, spitting himself out into the open air and casting back for the city.
The hangars
– within sight of his
own lodgings! And the war was being started right there, while he was elsewhere.

And Liss, his Liss, was somewhere in the middle of it. Someone had her. Someone was about to strike at Solarno. It was all coming together.

He had never flown faster, the buildings of Solarno rushing past beneath him, but he knew he would be too late.

It had all been like some strange kind of game although, because all the factory workers were being constantly appraised and tested, a game that was not in the least
enjoyable.