The Air War (19 page)

Pingge had not seen Kiin for more than two days during the last two tendays, and that was what hurt most. They were being constantly reassigned to groups, randomly switched back and forth, so
that they never became confortable with whoever they were working alongside. The tasks were the same, though, or at least variations on a common theme.

There was a device that the engineers called a ‘reticule’, and it appeared to be all important, although Pingge could not quite understand why. Her last twenty days had been spent in
intensive training with it, however, so she had to assume that their faith was justified. It was intricate but hardly complex, perhaps a step above the weaving looms. Positioned above it, she could
look down towards the floor of whatever warehouse or vault they had taken her to, adjusting the lenses for focus. There was a burden, too – sometimes a lead weight but mostly just a sack of
flour. Pingge would be strapped into a harness with the reticule before her face, and the harness would be attached to a wire, and the wire would be strung between the walls. At the
engineer’s word, she was released, to rush helter-skelter across the great vacant space, and there would always be a circle or some other symbol painted below.

It was a silly, simple game, really: release the burden so that it struck home on the symbol, allowing for momentum and using the distortion of the reticule’s lenses to spy out the ground
ahead. Pingge had proved one of the better Fly-kinden at this charade, but mostly because she was able to relax into the business as a game, without fretting about the purpose behind it all.

A delegation of her comrades – she had not been amongst them – had gone to the engineers to point out that, as they were
Fly
-kinden, the whole business would be easier if they
could guide the descent with their wings, but this apparently was besides the point. Those who could not keep their Art in check were slapped in ‘Fly-manacles’: leather strapping about
the back and shoulders that stifled their wings entirely.

They were trained night and day, sometimes woken out of sleep as though the world was about to end, for just another session of shuttling to and fro. They trained under bright gaslamps, in
daylight, at night, in dim underground caverns. They were kept without sleep for nights at a time. They were put on short rations. None of it seemed to have a pattern – no suggestion of
punishment was ever implied, nor even of simple Wasp-kinden cruelty.

Although the groupings remained random, Pingge had started to see more recurring faces in the last eight days or so. Nobody wanted to ask what had happened to those people they no longer saw.
The other questions could not be bottled, though:
Why conscript Fly-kinden if you didn’t want them to fly?

Today was different. Instead of more training, with the wires overhead and the harnesses ready, Pingge found herself marched into a drill hall along with around forty other Fly-kinden, all of
whose faces she recognized from her most recent sessions. She caught sight of Kiin immediately, and the pale Fly woman waved to her, entirely against Imperial protocol. At that moment there was a
great deal of milling and jostling, and the guards didn’t seem to care.

‘I knew you’d be here,’ Pingge announced, as Kiin wriggled through the throng to get to her. ‘You always did have steady hands.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It’s obvious. We’re the best.’

Kiin looked about her, considering. ‘Best at what?’

‘At whatever this reticule business is,’ Pingge pointed out. ‘We’ve helped them test their new machine, whatever it is. Back to the factories for us now, I’d guess.
I’m hoping for a bonus, myself. Keep the folks happy.’

The Fly beside them, a crop-haired, burly man called Gizmer, shook his head in dusgust, but Pingge ignored him blithely.

‘Have they had you in the airship yet?’ she pressed.

Kiin frowned at her, all the while plainly keeping a weather eye out for the authority figure that was surely on his way over. ‘Airship?’

‘They had us up on a pissy little airship – you remember the blow we had a few days back, the storm? We went kicking about in that, tearing about the sky fit to burst, and us in
manacles, too. We took turns with the reticule, dropping stuff from way up – worked a treat, too. Those fiddly little lenses are much better when you’re higher up. Makes the game a lot
harder.’

‘Game?’ Gizmer butted in, looking even more contemptuous.

‘Game, test, whatever,’ Pingge waved the distinction away, but Kiin interrupted her.

‘Pings, what exactly did you think they wanted you up there
for
?’

‘Testing their new toy, of course. They seemed happy, anyway. Everything in working order, time to go home.’ Perhaps only Kiin would notice the slight edge of tension to
Pingge’s voice.

Or it’s top secret Engineering Corps business, and now they kill us.

Gizmer snorted. ‘Don’t you know
anything
?’ he hissed. ‘They’re not testing the machines. They’re training
us
.’

‘A lot you know!’ Pingge retorted, and at the same time Kiin said, ‘Why would they want Fly-kinden, though?’

At that moment, Wasps started coming in – not a few, but tens of them, a small group of officers led by the well-remembered figure of Major Varsec first, then a squad of engineers or
soldiers or . . . something. These last marched in without words, without expressions, silently forming neat ranks facing the muddle of Fly-kinden.

Gizmer leant sideways and murmured, from the corner of his mouth, ‘Because we’re
light
, idiot, and for no other reason.’

A few ideas connected inside Pingge’s mind, but Varsec was already speaking. She had heard more about him since being co-opted for the reticule project. He had been the man to lose
Solarno, most famously, but he seemed to have come out of it well, promoted and in charge of whatever was going on here – and elsewhere too. He seemed to have a dozen projects on the go and
was forever being flown about the city and beyond.

‘Captain Aarmon,’ the major said, and the man front and centre of the Wasp formation took a step forward and saluted him. To Pingge – Imperial Fly-kinden became masters of
reading Wasp attitudes at a young age – it seemed that there was a distance between these men that was more than of rank, a very complex relationship indeed.

‘Major.’ Aarmon’s voice was soft for a Wasp officer. He seemed to respect Varsec but it was not an active respect, more like that of a man for his ageing father than for his
immediate superior. ‘These are the best?’

‘We have others in training, but these have shown the most facility,’ Varsec confirmed carefully, as if anxious not to displease his subordinate.

‘I told you!’ Pingge hissed.

‘What makes you think,’ Gizmer grated, ‘that you
want
to be the best right now?’

Kiin’s lips were moving silently, and Pingge realized that she was counting. After that, the conclusion was inevitable.

Forty of them
, she saw, if she discounted Varsec and a couple of engineers plainly not part of Aarmon’s people.
Forty of us.

Varsec gave a nod and stepped back, giving the floor over to Aarmon. He was a pale, broad-shouldered Wasp with a shaved head and oddly flat eyes, as though he was not using them in the normal
way but looking out of them as one would through a window.

‘Reticule-men, attention!’ one of Varsec’s aides snapped, and the Fly-kinden automatically shuffled and elbowed their way into rough ranks, a mockery of the perfect Wasp grid
facing them. This was part of their daily routine, and they ordered themselves without needing to think about it.

Aarmon stepped forward, casting those lifeless eyes over them, looking from face to face – and looking down, of course: in size they were like children to him and to all of his fellows. He
seemed to be assessing them by some incalculable criterion. All the while, his comrades stood absolutely motionless, not a fidget, not a word, not even an expression exchanged. Pingge had seen
Wasps on parade before, and she knew all the little ways soldiers had of communicating one to another under the eyes of the drill sergeant. There was none of it here. It was a display to make a
disciplinarian weep, presented here in a windowless hall for an audience of one major and a rabble of Fly-kinden.

Aarmon pointed and then, when no reaction was forthcoming, he said, ‘You,’ like an afterthought.

He was indicating Kiin, of course.

Pingge gasped, ‘No!’, but there was nothing for it. If this was some example to be made, crossed pikes or a stingshot to the head or some other warning to keep silent, there was
nothing she could do. Captain Aarmon was waiting, his bleak stare fixed on his victim as though it could draw her to him on its own.

Kiin took a deep breath and, none too steady, stepped forward.

No windows in the room
, Pingge thought miserably.
Is that so nobody can see us here? So we can’t escape?
She watched her friend weave her way through the other Flies until
she was standing to attention before Aarmon, staring at his belt buckle, a delicate, fair-haired woman of three foot six before a big Wasp man topping six feet.

‘With me,’ he told her, and turned instantly, awaiting neither salute nor acknowledgement, leaving her to stumble mutely in his wake as he stalked from the room. Pingge saw the other
Wasps stepping forwards, all at once now, selecting others from the Fly group. She cast a panicked stare back, trying to see what happened to Kiin, and caught a last glimpse of her friend as
Kiin’s reluctant march carried her out through the door, tripping after Aarmon’s longer strides.

‘What
is
she?’ Esmail demanded. ‘What has happened to her?’

His informant shrank away from him, babbling something about not knowing what he meant, but he slammed the man back against the cellar wall, using Ostrec’s borrowed strength and violence.
His life was at stake in a way that his briefing had never suggested. Someone was playing him for a fool.

The Empress was something more than a Wasp-kinden woman, more than the mere temporal ruler of a military state.

He had gone along after Colonel Harvang, dogging the obese man’s greasy steps until he stood amidst the great and the good of the Empire: the Rekef’s sole surviving general, another
colonel, their chief artificer and some Beetle-kinden who was one of their leading merchants. Ostrec had been well placed, groomed to be Harvang’s aide, to run errands and messages between
the great powers of the Empire, circumstances that bore all the fingerprints of Moth foretelling and calculation, but at a level far in excess of anything Esmail had worked with before.

So why had they not told him about the Empress? Because they did not know? Because they wanted his own, unbiased assessment?

He was not sure that he could possibly give an unbiased account of
that.
As she had drawn close, he had felt a pressure inside his skull, inexplicable here in the mechanistic Empire,
reminiscent of times past when great Moth-kinden Skryres had turned their arts upon him. Then she had entered the room.

He was a past master at his trade, of keeping the inner man and the outer face separate, showing nothing of who and what he was and living the life of the other. When she strode in, though, he
had not been able to keep still. The sheer sight and sense of her had shocked him like a spear through the chest.

She had glanced at him then, and he had fought, physically fought, to keep his wards and masks intact, because some primal part of him had been clamouring for him to fall to his knees and
confess all.

Even now he could not say whether he had escaped undetected. He did not know what senses she had inherited, or what subtlety in using them. The Rekef might come for him any moment, turning on
one seemingly of their own without the least stab of conscience. Even now she might have him dragged before her.

Power had radiated from her in waves, enough to blast aside his false face and leave him naked and terrified before her splendour. She had been as difficult to look at as the sun, for those
first few moments, until his inner eyes had adjusted. Above her brow there had seemed a burning brand, a diadem of invisible but inescapable authority.

What his briefing
had
given him was the name of a well-placed servant who was also an Arcanum agent – an elderly Grasshopper who had served in Capitas for over a decade, feeding
information back to the Moths in shreds and pieces for all that time. Any other spy would have been uncovered by now, but the old man was subtle, and the Moths had never acted on any of it, only
hoarded it against the future, as they always did.

After dark, Esmail had left his room in the extensive complex that Harvang and his Rekef adherents called their own, stalking across the rooftops with a stealth that Ostrec the Wasp had never
possessed, then hunting down his informant, a shadow with a Wasp’s shape, until he found the single cramped room that the Grasshopper shared with a half-dozen others.

The man’s name was Shoel Jhin, and he was a magician of very minor sorts, whose powers would no doubt have eroded during his long slavery here. Esmail himself was no great conjuror –
the elements of his trade relied on control and elegance of manipulation rather than raw power – but he had a few magus’s tricks, and it was a simple matter to put his voice in
Jhin’s mind and hiss out the man’s name until he awoke, starting and staring: then to call him out of the room, out of the servants’ block, until he met the old man face to face
within the cold walls of a wine cellar.

Now he stared down at that lined face, the sallow skin bagged and creased with care and age. ‘You’re a poor spy or a lax one. Don’t you realize there was something missing from
your reports?’

‘I tell what I tell. What
they
tell you is another matter,’ Jhin wheezed.

Ostrec wanted to beat him for his insubordination. Esmail could feel rage emanating from the image of the man he kept in his head, the source of his mimicry. ‘I came here to spy on a Wasp,
one of the Apt,’ he said, in more measured tones. ‘An Empress, yes, and we all know the power that attaches to such symbols, but it’s not a power that she should be able to
tap.
I’ve never . . .’ He stopped, shaking his head. ‘I have never felt such a presence.’