The Air War (25 page)

‘Do not think the Assembly will sit idle now that the Empire has made war on our allies!’ he declared, a pale Tarkesh Ant-kinden no doubt long renegade from his original city-state.
‘We’ve seen this before, have we not? Did not Master Maker warn of this the last time – and wasn’t he
right
? The Wasps cannot stand up against all the powers of the
Treaty of Gold, and so they make their excuses to divide us, as they always did. Do you think Sarn will sit idle? Or the Spiderlands? No! And when they march to relieve Myna, Collegium’s
brave soldiers shall go with them. We fought at Malkan’s Folly and we fought them from our own very walls. We’ll show them that our reach is as great as theirs. We’ll fight them
wherever they bring their armies.’ His grey sash and those of his followers showed an Ant-kinden helm in profile and the motto,
In Our Enemies’ Robes.

‘Come, then,’ he was saying. ‘Now the Assembly has given the Companies the right to recruit once more, who’ll stand beside Collegium’s allies? Who’ll march to
give the Empire a taste of its own fire? For if we don’t stop them in their tracks they’ll be at our walls again, and then
everyone
gets to fight. So who’ll sign here for
the Coldstone Company?’

Straessa watched the man’s audience with fascination, noticing Hallend there, who had been so vociferous about Averic at the Prowess Forum, and plenty of his fellows. Many here had been
amongst the worst to victimize the Wasp student, to decry the evils of the Empire. Yet they were regarding the Ant as though he had the plague, and was trying to give it away for free. When the
same man held out a snapbow for anyone to come and claim, she saw many of the most normally outspoken of them flinch away.

She slipped up behind Hallend’s little knot of followers, then loudly declared, ‘Why, which proud duellist here would not jump at the chance finally to take action against the Wasps,
eh?’ They jumped, indeed, and rounded on her, facing the cruelty of her smile. ‘Aren’t they incurable bigots and villains, each and every man of them?’ she went on.
‘Why, I hear they even dare send their sons to be students here, to soil our pristine educations with their filthy minds. Sign up! Sign up, I say. Now that the liberty of the world truly is
at stake, what red-blooded Collegiate would not?’

She wanted a battle, a real slanging match, as though the exchange of hot words would break the tension within the city like a storm, but instead she found Hallend’s face naked and
terrible. Guilt was there, and shame and fear, and she remembered then that he was not quite twenty and had never left the city, and there was a blot of horror and loss in his recent history which
was the last Day the Empire Came.

‘But . . .’ he managed to get out, ‘Eujen said . . . Eujen’s always saying, peace at any cost . . .’

Her sword had cleared its scabbard before anyone had seen her reach for it. ‘Wrong!’ she declared, aware that the Company snapbows were now drifting her way. ‘Make peace with
me, Hallend. Go on, I dare you.’ Her rapier point danced before his eyes, ‘Can you?’ She backed him up three steps, unsure why she had not been stopped yet. ‘It’s not
peace at any price; it’s a
lasting
peace. So it’s true, after all, that line of yours – not that they’re all evil, but that they need to be stopped. We can’t
reach a lasting peace while we preach war against them, but we certainly can’t while they’re
making
war against us. They won’t ever start to change their ways until they
respect us, and what they respect is strength. Come on, Hallend, you know I’m right.’ By the end her voice was tense and quiet, her eyes trying to hold Hallend’s, but his kept
sliding away.

And Hallend followed the route of his eyes, edging back from her as though she was mad, and in the end it was just her and the recruiting officer staring at one another.

Which was why, when she arrived late for her lunch with Gerethwy and Eujen, the first thing the latter said was, ‘What
is
that you’re wearing?’

She could only pluck at the grey sash with its device and words and shrug, ‘Somebody had to,’ she said.

That he was unfit to be a spy was proved to Laszlo when he almost went back to his own rooms to get a look at the Solarnese city hangars they overlooked, only darting away from
his window at the last moment to swing about a few streets’ worth of space before finding another rooftop to perch on. Aside from the unhappy corpse of Breighl, who could know what welcome
was awaiting him within those bloodied walls?

Breighl dead. Te Riel dead.
The dread was mounting higher inside his chest, threatening to choke him.
Time to be gone. Time to be long gone.
He could feel death approaching like a
shadow in the water, vast and swift and inexorable.

What’s a spy supposed to do in this position?
He knew that hanging on in this suddenly murderous city would gain vital intelligence for Sten Maker, if Laszlo could only live long
enough to pass it on. So many of the familiar faces had gone already, though, and some that had lingered now plainly regretted it.
I should be gone.
It was not spycraft that kept him here,
and his loyalty to Maker only went so far, despite all they’d shared.
Liss, te Liss, don’t be dead. We can get out together. It’s not too late.

It hurt to think of her: each time like touching a broken tooth. He had never realized, as he drank with her or joked with her, even when he slept with her, that she had wormed her way into his
heart so deeply. Only now, with no idea whether she was even still alive, did he recognize how far inside his defences she had pierced.

Then shouting broke out at the hangars, and he skipped across two rooftops to look.

There was a broad landing field before the hangar mouth, although all the Firebug orthopters were safely within caverns specially dug out of the rock by acid and engines. The lamps that gave
onto this open space were harsh and uncompromising, the bright white glare of some chemical reaction that burned flamelessly with a constant hiss and crackle; open fire was not something anybody
wanted close to all that fuel-powered machinery.

For some reason the great metal doors were already partly open, but there were more guards there than Laszlo had ever seen before, at least thirty of the city militia, so te Riel’s warning
had plainly been one among many. They were under attack.

Or not quite yet, but it looked as though the fighting would start off any moment, for a large band of Scorpion-kinden had just rolled on to the scene, a mismatched two score of hulking villains
in a ragbag of armour, most of them armed with great-swords or long axes or halberds. They outnumbered the militia, though not by so very many, and they were likely the better warriors fighting one
on one. As against that, the Solarnese had a fair stock of their little crossbows to hand. Alarmed challenges rang into the night.

Scorpions could mean the Empire or the Spiderlands, or pretty much anyone else, for they were inveterate mercenaries. However, getting a mob like this into the city – in twos and threes
perhaps – and then organizing them was a feat in itself.

The Scorpions were shouting back, generic insults about Solarnese manhood and their mothers. They were plainly not about to commit themselves just yet, and more militia would surely be on the
way even now to reinforce the defenders.
So what are they hoping to accomplish . . .
and Laszlo swore to himself because he should have thought of watching out for whoever was using this as
a distraction, and he had become too absorbed in the mummery itself.

Too late now, surely – whoever it was, they must be inside. He looked anyway, though, his sharp eyes raking the darkness where the hissing lamps left off, and he was rewarded by the sight
of a small figure slipping by and into the hangar, on foot and cloaked, but he knew her.

But who’s she chasing? What’s the Empire’s plan?

Blow it sky high
, came the instant thought and, try as she might, Liss could not stop that. She was Inapt. The only thing she could do with a bomb would be to set it off
inadvertently.

I, however . . .
and, with that thought, Laszlo was airborne, streaking down towards the hangars.

Liss had crept in, of course, because the Solarnese were more than used to airborne subterfuge. Laszlo was spotted immediately. Some of the militia loosed their crossbows at him, and he lurched
sideways in the air as they did, trusting to his instincts to keep him out of the path of their bolts. Others, because they had been keeping their weapons trained, their fingers on the triggers,
loosed at the Scorpions by reflex, just one or two, but it was enough.

Even as another dozen militia arrived, wondering what all the noise was about, the Scorpions charged. It was an ill-thought-out piece of theatre but one that Laszlo took full advantage of, by
darting past the militia towards the hangar mouth.

The first blast came just as he dipped down to enter, and the hot breath of it caught him and tried to throw him out into the night again. He fought it furiously, seeing a lazy wash of fire roll
out of the opening. He might have been screaming Liss’s name.

He fell to the ground, feeling his hair and clothes on the point of smouldering. Another explosion roared at the far end of the hangar, tongues of flame licking out, and a dozen separate fires
inside illuminating the compact shapes of the fliers. He saw Solarnese mechanics running past, beating at themselves. Others were helplessly trying to drag one of the machines out, loyalty to their
trade taken to the point of suicide. Laszlo dashed past them, the air about him gusting hot and hotter, searching in the dark and the leaping orange light of the place for Liss.

He spotted her, for she was beyond hiding. She stood surrounded by fires, bright and alive in their glow. The picture would stay with him for all his days: Liss, the flames, the stacked barrels
of mineral oil that was meant to fuel the Solarnese air force.

She stretched out a hand almost playfully and it was wreathed in fire instantly. Laszlo screamed, because he had not taken it all in, and he could not. It was beyond his understanding.

Like a hunting dragonfly flown from the wrist, the flames leapt from her to one of the Firebugs, and instantly the silk of its wings was ablaze, turning to cinders and setting the wood of its
body alight. A moment later, Liss herself was engulfed, even as Laszlo tried to fight his way towards her, yelling her name until the fumes choked him.

But when the flames dispersed, she was still there, her clothes burned away from her but her skin still perfect, rosy with energy. Naked and beautiful, she turned and saw him, and smiled as the
world caught fire all around.

He wanted her then, despite anything. The jolt that went through him as their eyes met was one of pure unfettered desire.

She blew him a kiss, and he felt the distinct heat of it against his face, then the barrels blew.

The force of the explosion caught up his small frame and threw him end over end out of the hangar.

Elsewhere in Solarno, Major Garvan awaited the report of her key agent. From the open window of her miserable garret she had heard the great explosions rolling across the
rooftops like thunder, and she knew that the plan she had painstakingly put together had finally paid off. Yet another triumph for careful, patient Army Intelligence, and no sign yet of the Rekef
swanning in to steal the glory. Oh, surely, by the time the final word had been passed by General Brugan to the Empress, no doubt the Rekef Outlander would be the ones holding the reins, but
Garvan’s own superiors, the army colonels who decided her future, would know the truth.

She stood and checked her appearance in the mirror on the back of her door, cautious as always. Unlike so many of her peers, victory had never been an excuse for carelessness. Far too many
operations went wrong just as everything seemed to be safely in hand.

There was a flurry of wings and she went to sit behind her battered old desk, all business. Despite the pauper’s life she led, compared to their own profligacy and waste, she never let her
agents forget who was in control. And especially this one, whose mercurial nature almost outweighed her considerable usefulness.

Grinning from ear to ear, Lissart squeezed in through the narrow window wearing clothes made for a someone noticeably bigger. By looks just a Fly-kinden girl with unusual red hair, she was of
course another kinden entirely, a vagrant visitor to the Empire from foreign lands. Intelligence work challenged her, and Garvan knew she worked for that incentive more than for pay, but she was a
wild and whimsical creature, always at the fullest extent of her leash.

‘You’re out safely, then,’ Garvan remarked, a neutral opening. ‘Report.’

‘Nobody’s flying anything out of those hangars any time soon.’ Lissart set herself down on the ramshackle desk, which creaked under even her minimal weight. ‘I got a
count of the machines. One missing, out on some errand or other, but your boys were making with the noisy outside, so I reckoned it was time.’

‘Not
my
boys,’ Garvan noted. She loathed joint operations, and this one had been more knife-edge than most, because coordinating with Intelligence’s current business
partner in this part of the world had been a nightmare of conflicting standards – the Empire’s and Garvan’s own high ones contrasted with the apparently random ones she had been
forced to work within. ‘How did the Scorpions get on, anyway?’

‘When everything went up, they all legged it.’ Lissart’s grin grew even wider, if that was possible, until Garvan wondered if the top of her head was going to fall off.
‘You should have got yourself over there. Was a beautiful sight, I can tell you.
Phwoosh!
’ Her arms described the majesty of the explosions. Lissart was a cracked enough creature
at the best of times, but once things started catching fire, she became a regular madwoman. Garvan didn’t know whether that was a personal trait or one that applied to all of her pyromaniac
kinden.

‘Some of us had other business to tie up.’ It was true: Garvan had not been short of visitors earlier that night, enough to strain her feigned identity here, but that was not an
issue any more. ‘How’s your cover identity?’