The Air War (24 page)

All those dark faces
, he thought, for they were mostly Beetles, with a scattering of other kinden thrown in, mostly at the College end. He tried to picture a similar gathering of his own
people, but found that the thought only oppressed him. He felt that he had more in common, under the skin, with these mercantile, machine-minded folk than with his own warlike kinden.

He cleared his throat. They were rapt. The unspoken tension and worry in the room sang in his ears.

When he had first read his orders in Bellowern’s office he had demanded of Bellowern, ‘When did this happen?’

‘Probably happening even as we speak, my dear ambassador,’ had come the reply. ‘Now just do your job. I have appointments later.’

‘And what do I say to Stenwold Maker?’ Aagen had demanded, as his last line of defence, for he knew that even Bellowern was leery of clashing head-on with the War Master.

But the Beetle had been unflappable. ‘Why, haven’t you heard? Master Maker’s out of the city on some sort of clandestine business.’ A chuckle. ‘My agents think
he’s gone to Myna.’

And that had been that.

‘The words of the Empress, Her Imperial Majesty Seda the First,’ Aagen began, falling back on his battlefield voice despite the quiet, for the reassurance it gave him. ‘Be it
known that the Empire has suffered, both before and after its unification, from incursions and raids from neighbouring states thinking to take advantage of our internal division.’ He was
surprised at how steady his tones were. ‘Be it also known that the Empire’s protectorates within the Commonweal, known as the Principalities, have also come under assault by the forces
of these same aggressive neighbours. After attempting every manner of reconciliation and being met only with contempt, it is the sad duty of a state to defend itself by any means. So it is that the
difficult decision has been made, by the Empress acting under the advice of her court, that the Empire is henceforth at war with the self-styled Three-city Alliance, which war shall be prosecuted
by all means until the borders of the Empire are secure, and the liberty of its allies is won.’ He paused then, waiting for the uproar, and indeed there was a murmur building, but not the
grand outcry he had half expected.

‘The Empress wishes it known,’ he continued more quietly, ‘that this is no breach of the Treaty of Gold, but the simple need of any state to defend its own. The Empire does not
consider that this conflict need involve any other city. However,’ and Bellowern had actually written it that way, stage-managing the speech through the weapons of punctuation, ‘should
any other power declare for the Alliance, or aid them in any way, then the Empire will regard such interference as an act of war, and the perpetrators as enemies of the Empress and the Wasp people,
and the Empire shall not rest until such enemies are rendered incapable of threatening the Empire’s security and peace of mind.’

When he rolled the scroll up again it was the loudest sound in the entire grand chamber.

He was expected to return to the ambassadorial quarters for debriefing after that, leaving the talk to build into a panicked babble in his absence. Instead, he headed straight for an airfield,
where a blocky old Imperial heliopter sat waiting for him.

Shortly thereafter he had left the city, and the post of ambassador, behind him, and Honory Bellowern would rant and storm and cuff the servants, jolted from his mild-mannered act for once by
this shock desertion. Aagen did not care. He had learned too much, travelled too far from the lieutenant he had once been. With the sense that behind him the world was cracking apart, he was
fleeing to the only person who really mattered to him any more.

Banjacs Gripshod knew what people said about him. He was bitterly aware that his name had passed into Collegiate legend as a byword for bad artifice, so that students
characterized a catastrophically failed experiment as ‘banjacsed’, without really understanding where the word had come from. It had been thirty years since he had been dismissed
ignominiously from the Great College, and not a day had passed without his feeling keenly just how badly he had been treated.

He was old now, probably one of the oldest Beetle-kinden in the city, and most of those who did remember that there was a man behind the myth assumed he was dead. His own family, nephews and
nieces and subsequent generations, would have nothing to do with him, preferring to dote on his younger brother, Berjek, historian and now apparently some manner of diplomat.

Trivialities, Banjacs knew. None of it mattered. Only his work, his grand work.

Nobody understood artifice like he did, or at least nobody in Collegium. There were no like minds. Those engineers and mechanics to whom he had attempted to expound his theories had backed away
from him as though he carried a plague. He had scoured the city for like minds, and found only technological pygmies. The journals he read were likewise a waste of wood pulp, ignorant men writing
on small matters. Trivial,
trivial
! Was all of Collegiate artifice come to this?

He had once obtained a few brief papers by the Imperial artificer Dariandrephos. The man had shown promise. That was the best that Banjacs would say – more promise, anyway, than the
doubting, naysaying
small minds
of his own people, who had cast him out, laughed at him, declared him mad and then mostly forgotten him.

He would show them, though. That was his maxim. There would come a time when the whole of Collegium would sit up and acknowledge the genius of Banjacs Gripshod.

The family at least had money: being cut off from the College had not denied him his research, only freed him from its constraints. If the masters back then had been men of vision, then a little
devastation could have been overlooked. So he had destroyed one of their precious workshops. Did they not understand that innovation mandated
risk
? It had cost him years of rebuilding inside
his own townhouse to reconstruct the equipment that the College had denied him.

He had grown used to being alone in the world, surrounded by people who could not share his vision. His time was growing short, though. He carried more than eighty years on his spare frame, and
his patchy hair and beard were white against the dark of his skin. He could no longer fetch and carry as he once had, and a succession of assistants had been hired, tried, argued with and dismissed
over the last few years, each one departing to spread the word that old Banjacs was madder than ever.

His current assistant was Reyna Pullard, and she was different, he realized. He had railed at the difficulties of working alone. Now he wished to be more alone than he was. She was an efficient
worker, he had to admit. Her understanding of engineering was rudimentary by his standards, perfectly acceptable by the atrophied lights of the College. She kept his workshops clean – he had
three of them, two taking up the wings of the house, and the special central chamber that reached all the way from cellar to central skylight – and she obeyed instructions without all the
vexing questions that most of his prior assistants were prone to. He should have been delighted.

He had made a mistake, though. He had let her into the cellar, and since then he had lived in an agony of worry because he had misjudged her. He had always been misjudging people, back when he
still had much to do with the rest of humanity, but long abstinence from company had blurred the memories. He had forgotten they were not crisp and clean like machines.

The cellar laboratory had taken some ingenuity to design, mostly because it had required practically coring the old family townhouse, removing an ascending column of floors and ceilings all the
way up to the special round skylight that Banjacs had designed and had had installed. The machinery he had painstakingly constructed filled almost half the available height in a great reaching
flurry of bronze and leaded glass, the transparent tubes like colossal organ pipes, the globes of the capacity chargers, the awesome spinning wheels of the accumulators. Beneath the laboratory
floor was still more: the differential vats, seething with corrosion, that stored his life’s work.

It was all locked away, even the skylight capped, and Banjacs had made sure that his assistants could busy themselves in the other two workshops without even suspecting the house’s main
secret. He had thought Reyna Pullard might be different, though. She had been so accommodating, not complaining about the hours or the pay or the conditions. He had thought to find in her a kindred
spirit driven by the same dreams.

Standing on the circular gantry that ran around the laboratory wall at what was ground level outside, he now looked down at her. She was cleaning the charger globes, which always attracted dust
and soot from everywhere else in the room: just a solidly built Beetle woman of twenty-five or thirty, and nothing in her manner or actions should have raised his suspicions, but he knew . . . he
knew
.

She was betraying him. After she had seen the cellar laboratory, something had changed in her. He was not skilled at reading people, but he had registered it nonetheless: it was unmistakable.
Then she had been absent, just once or twice, but he had not believed her excuses. Banjacs knew he had enemies. He could not have necessarily said who they were, or perhaps their identity changed
from day to day, simply remembered faces and imagined fears from years before. That he had enemies, though, was a point of faith for him, and now he knew that Reyna Pullard was their servant. She
was telling them his secrets. She would sabotage his machine. She was working for
them
.

And there was a storm coming, Banjacs knew. He felt it within himself, as though it was the only thing still keeping him alive. There was a storm coming, and he was the only man who
understood.

He was going to show the city, he was certain, but his enemies would do their best to stop him. It was his world against theirs. What was he to do?

Reyna Pullard continued with her work brightly and efficiently, and the sight of her sickened him.
Betrayed! Betrayed!
rattled about in his head, so that he could barely think. He had to
act now. Another day, another hour even, and she would act on her treacherous thoughts, and then all his years of work would have been for nothing. He would be lost – and his city would be
lost. There was a storm coming, and he would be needed. All those years ago he had looked into the future as if he had been a Moth-kinden. He had known the path that history – artifice
– would take, and now that moment was almost upon him. He could not
allow
anything to stand in his way.

He had seen her making notes, taking measurements. He knew she was passing his secrets on to . . . it didn’t matter who. She was a spy. She was the enemy.

His hand tightened on the lever.

The machine was not ready yet. The great accumulator wheels were barely turning, and the skylight was closed off. Still, it was a very grand machine, colossal power penned into every bolt and
bulb of it, the greatest lightning engine ever made. It was dangerous, he knew. The device that had destroyed the College’s workshop had been a fraction of the size.

Accidents happened.

Not taking his eyes off Reyna Pullard, he threw the switch.

For the next few days after Aagen’s speech, Collegium was foreign to itself, a place haunted by a spectre that everyone had been talking about before, but that now must
not be named, lest the naming call it closer; superstition hung about the city as if the Moths were back in charge. Business deals were broken off, or hurried to a conclusion. Buyers demurred or
paid over the odds, whilst sellers hoarded or let go their goods for a song. Some even spoke of leaving the city, but where was there to go? Collegium was where people
came
to in times like
these.

Straessa the Antspider had just finished a one-to-one with te Mosca regarding her progress in Inapt studies. The little Fly-kinden taught a measure of the histories of the Moth-kinden – or
their myths, as the two were often inseparable – and Straessa was sharp enough that she could crib during the tenday before and produce accomplished essays as a result, especially if she
could confer with Gerethwy, whose facility with the subject was as notable as his prowess with artifice. What Straessa could not master was the rest of the course, the curious hints and paradoxes
and platitudes that were supposed to go some way towards explaining the Moths’ belief in magic. Gerethwy again could set it all down effortlessly, but this time Straessa could not follow him.
Her Spider blood was mute on the subject.

Now, crossing the crumbling quad that housed te Mosca’s rooms, along with some two or three other departments that nobody thought much of, she became aware of some shouting coming from the
square beyond, the big Appellant’s Muster quadrangle that hosted most of the modern history departments.

She was ready for anything, for there had been a great deal of shouting in parts of Collegium of late and, at the same time, a great deal of conspicuous quiet. There had been rallies protesting
against the Empire, and the few Wasps in the city had been staying indoors – especially when the rumour surfaced that someone had murdered the Imperial ambassador after his speech and
disposed of his body in the bay. Averic had turned up one day with a black eye and a cracked rib, yet not a dent in his fanatical self-control.

But Straessa remembered what Eujen had reported of the Speaker’s words, representing the other side of the coin, and it was obvious to her now. Whilst they shouted, all the students and
impoverished patriots and the immigrants who had given their loyalty wholehearted to their new home, there were plenty of the better-heeled quietly stepping back from the situation, withdrawing
their support from those who spoke out, choosing their trading partners wisely. Those who had too much invested in Collegium just to run off and seek refuge in Sarn were quietly preparing for the
worst.

The disturbance at Appellant’s Muster quad was something else again, though. When she arrived there she saw a dozen Beetle-kinden, dressed in the buff coats and breastplates of the
Merchant Companies, standing idle with snapbow and pike while their chief called out to a scattering of students.