The Air War (26 page)

For just a moment, Lissart was not smiling. ‘Burned,’ she said shortly, but without the usual relish.

Garvan chose to ignore that. ‘Solarno is just about wrapped up, so I have orders for you.’ She recognized the look that came immediately to Lissart’s face. ‘New cover in
the Spiderlands. We need agents there who can talk their talk enough to fit in, but can handle a little sabotage when the time comes – meaning your speciality.’ She had assumed the
chance of setting something else alight would overcome that sullen, stubborn expression, but now the little woman was shaking her head.

‘Send me north, send me west, Major. Not the Spiderlands. Solarno’s as close as I go.’ The smile was back, but it was harder. ‘They’re too sharp there, and
there’s a colony of my kinden over at Firewater. The Solarno Spiders are backward, and I didn’t have to deal with them much either, but the real thing . . . not me, Major.’

Garvan nodded, all business. Inside she was unsurprised. She had not worked with Lissart before this Solarno operation, but the woman’s former handler had warned Garvan that the little
Firefly tended to forget she was the Empire’s to command.

‘We’ve already prepared a cover for you,’ she explained patiently. ‘You won’t need to be hobnobbing with the Aristoi, just their servants, keeping an eye on other
agents – nothing so different to here. Perhaps, in time, I can find you a place in the Lowlands. Believe me, that front will be moving fast. Maybe Collegium, when the Second takes up where it
left off. For now, though, you’re just what we need down south.’

‘No chance.’ Lissart folded her arms, leaning back on nothing at all as though there was a chair behind her.

‘Lissart,’ said Garvan, in her Major Garvan voice that had brought into line tougher nuts than this small firestarter, ‘I have orders. I don’t argue with orders, neither
do you.’

‘Major, let’s you and me make a deal,’ Lissart suggested. ‘Let’s put that “orders” business behind us for now. You get me a nice post in the Lowlands
– somewhere there’s action but not an actual war front – and I’ll play coy about you.’

Nothing registered in Garvan immediately. ‘Lissart, orders are orders. There’s no more to it than that. I need you on the
Shifting Gerontis
before dawn.’

‘I’m serious, Major. See me right, and I can be discretion itself about just how you make your face up every morning,
sister
.’

For an instant, Garvan thought she would die, her heart jumped so hard.
No, no, no
, but the Fly-looking woman was grinning full-strength again, delighted with her own cleverness.
‘What?’ she continued, as though it was just a game and not the sum total of Garvan’s life she had just disembowelled. ‘Fool all the Wasps you want, but you didn’t
think I wouldn’t be able to
tell
, did you?’

Garvan sat there like a statue for one second more, the shock charging back and forth in her head, looking for a way out, and then her left hand flew up, a bolt of golden fire lancing from the
palm.

It caught Lissart across the chest, knocking her flat onto the desk but doing nothing more than scorch her stolen clothes. She propped herself up on one elbow, actually laughing, ‘You
don’t think that’s any good against
me
?’

Garvan’s dagger tore into her side savagely, raising a gratifying scream from the other woman. Not a straight death blow, but perhaps a slow death anyway.
Agent Lissart lost doing her
duty at the Solarno hangars
; some part of her mind was already composing the report.

Fire exploded across the desk, Garvan’s coded notes and reports catching light instantly. The major recoiled across the room, flipping the desk over to keep the flames away. She had a
brief, smoke-blurred glimpse of Lissart’s small form lurching at the window, not flying out so much as just rolling over the sill for the two-storey drop to the ground. The room was on fire
now, leaping orange flames licking about the floor and walls, dancing about the window frame. Garvan cursed and made for the door, battering it open and stumbling down the stairs, beating at the
few embers that had landed on her tunic or in her hair.
Kill Lissart, protect the secret.
It was the only thing on her mind.

Laszlo dropped from the sky, diving steeply even as the small body plunged from the window, and there was nothing in his mind at all, no plan, no opinion. Only the necessity of
action consumed him.

She had been stabbed, he saw, her hands weltering red as they clutched at the wound. He was not surgeon enough to know if anything could be done, but he had seen people die from less. The sound
she was making was appalling, just a wordless sobbing whimper that yanked at him repeatedly, filling his ears.

She should not have been able to move, but she kicked away from the wall of the house, even as flames crackled above and embers ghosted down over them both. She was trying to get away, still.
Whoever had knifed her must be coming.

Who it was, how many there were . . . Laszlo could not risk a fight, but the alternative almost seemed worse.

He grabbed her, too panicked to be gentle, one hand about her body, under her arm, the other clasped over her mouth. She writhed away when he touched her, not a human reaction but that of an
animal in pain.
She burned the hangars. She sold out Solarno, She tried to kill me.
But all he wanted to do was get her somewhere safe.

He hauled her up, and she bucked in his arms, screaming against his palm, but her own hands still clasped tightly to her rent side.

Too heavy to fly, but he gave his wings their head anyway, kicking backwards too fast across the street and down a rubbish-strewn alley with the bleeding girl in his arms, always at the point of
falling, his Art catching him from moment to moment.

He dropped and froze, clutching her to him, trying to stifle her weeping. Someone was there, and he could see them clearly – a lean Wasp with sword drawn and hand ready to sting, and when
had he last seen just a
single
Wasp? There might be a dozen within easy shout.

‘Quiet, quiet,’ he whispered in Liss’s ear, and she whipped her head about to look at him, cracking him across the nose. The expression in her eyes was fractured, shards of
everything in there: guilt, pain, fear of him, terror of dying, but he told himself he could read something else there that looked on him more kindly.
If the Wasps want her dead, we need her
alive
. But that was a fiction for the report he would have to make some day.
I want her alive
was the whole truth.

‘Lissart!’ the Wasp yelled, voice surprisingly high, and then went off in the wrong direction, blind as all his kind at night. Laszlo took his chance and bundled Liss –
Lissart? – up in his arms. He had to take his hand from her mouth to do it, but there was no screaming, only a gasping, retching sound that made him sick to the stomach.

She got out his name somewhere in there, he was sure of it.

He ran, wings flashing in and out as needed to keep himself on his feet. She was a dead weight in his arms, but he was pelting downhill for the docks and for an old deck surgeon whose
acquaintance he had made. Halfway there, Lissart got an arm about his neck, strength enough still to hold on to him, however weakly. Her eyes were open, locked on his face.

He got into sight of the bay, and skidded to a painful halt in spite of himself. ‘Oh mother,’ he heard himself say.

The docks were a chaos of running and shouting – militia and Solarnese citizens dashing back and forth without plan. The waters of the Exalsee beyond held a host of sails, tall and pale in
the moonlight. It was not the armada that had recently come against Collegium, but Laszlo knew a Spider-kinden fleet when he saw one.

Breighl was right; it’s not the Wasps
. . .

Two of the ships were already moored, with Spider soldiers spilling unopposed onto the quays with bows and spears. Laszlo had no time for any of it. His feet took up again towards the
surgeon’s door, even though the old Bee-kinden might already have fled. He had no other option just now. Lissart laughed then, a wrenched and strangled sound. She clutched him tight with one
arm, but the other pointed up and past his shoulder. Even as she did, he registered the sound: distant engines coming closer, and that would awake Solarno far quicker than any panic at the
docks.

He got to the surgeon’s door and kicked at it furiously, until the squat, dark old mariner threw it open, an axe in one hand to repel boarders, To his credit, despite the fleet, despite
what else was surely coming, when he saw Lissart he took her from Laszlo with practised care and carried her inside.

Only then did Laszlo turn. The Wasp orthopters were hard to see as they scattered across the sky over Solarno, but they were escorting a handful of airships which caught the moonlight well
enough. There were some Solarnese fliers up there too, the free pilots, but with the Firebugs burning there would be no unified civic response. The Solarnese government was no doubt already
breaking into arguing factions even as their city was invaded from north and south. Solarno was about to become a battleground.

General Brugan was afraid.

The world feared the Empire, and the Empire feared the Rekef, which in turn feared its lord and master, Brugan himself. His subordinates would not have believed that he himself might twitch and
turn through sleepless nights, or wake suddenly from terrible, all-too-plausible dreams. General Brugan feared, too, and what he was afraid of was the Empress.

And yet he was drawn to her – fear becoming somehow an attracting quality. She was beautiful, and she had a fire no other woman possessed, and there were moments, gazing on her in
daylight, when he loved her so much that he would give himself up to that fire and burn on it, agony and ecstasy together.

He had made her, he knew. He had been the first man of any influence to cast his lot behind her treasonous campaign. When she had assumed the throne, it had been by his hand, and he had looked
to be rewarded.

The Empire had never been ruled by a woman before – she had needed a man beside her to reassure the traditionalists. In the end she had taken a regent, a former Rekef man, and former
traitor, Thalric by name. The wretch had taken the place that Brugan had prepared for himself, but at the time Brugan had told himself that there was nevertheless time for all things to come to
pass.

Thalric had gone from puppet – token male to sit beside the throne – to a companion of the Imperial bedchamber, and only through his own reaction to that knowledge had Brugan
realized that his feelings towards Empress Seda were more than simply ambitious. He discovered that his intention to control the Empress had become one of possessing her. Then Thalric had deserted
again during the Rekef operation in Khanaphes, which was a disappointment to Brugan only because of the effort he himself had invested in seeing Thalric left dead and buried under the ruin of an
entire civilization. Still, with the upstart bastard out of the way, he had thought perhaps the Empress would take a more suitable partner.

By then, Seda’s charm and acumen had worked sufficient wonders to ensure that she no longer needed a token regent, but her hungers were no less fierce, and Brugan could still recall the
cold satisfaction he had felt when she had invited him into her bed.

Could still recall
. . . or perhaps say:
Was unable to forget.

He lived two separate lives now. He was an Apt man, rational and sensible, who during the day could look at Seda and know that all he was seeing was her extraordinary charisma, her force of
personality that twisted people around to her way of thinking. What else could it be? She was simply a natural leader, gifted beyond her years, well educated and advised.

After dark, however, the dreadful certainty would grow on him that, yes, she was all these things but she was more. Then she would send for him, and his feet would walk him to the Imperial
chambers, desire and hunger making a slave of him. He would drink with her, the salt red wine, and in the antechamber would lie the ruin of some slave or servant, or some courtier who had misspoken
or plotted against the crown. He had stopped looking now, since the first time he had recognized a victim. He was a general of the Rekef, inured to death and torture, but the expressions on those
exsanguinated faces, the contortions of their pale limbs, affected him somewhere subconscious and primal. There had been a time when his kinden had lived in huts and feared the dark for good
reason.

But he needed her, though. It was not love any more. His loins and his heart were chained to her, leaping at her least command. The base man in him was enslaved, while the Rekef general railed.
He could not live in such a manner. He needed to redress the balance in their relationship and – just as to get rid of Thalric he had engineered the sacking of a city – so, to take back
the reins of his private life, he needed to recreate the Empire’s hierarchy with himself at the top, the power behind the throne, just as it always should have been.

There were too many close to the throne now who were beyond his influence. The Empress chose advisers that Brugan did not know, or she bought loyalty with favour and promotions, or sought the
counsel of foreigners such as all those Moths and other mystic rabble who had become so common at court recently. Brugan had been elbowed further and further away from the commanding position he
had intended for himself.

He had the Rekef, though, and he had others too, who felt they were owed more for the work they had put into bringing Seda’s Empire about. This would be no different from any other
large-scale intrigue he had been involved in. Had he not masterminded her accession to the throne? Taking the substance of her power from her should be easier than plotting in the shadow of her
paranoid brother.

Whenever he made such promises to himself, something twisted inside him and fear roamed the hinterlands of his mind, raising its jaws to the moon and rattling its wings. Seda was not just a
sharp young girl, it howled. She
knew
things,
saw
things, She had a power over people – himself included – that was neither Art nor skill but something else. The fact that
she drank blood, he could have put down to the casual cruelty appropriate to the Imperial throne, could perhaps even have made of it a virtue, symbolic of the Empire’s own thirst for
conquest. Some traitor part of his mind whispered that it was no mere whim of hers, or even a simple crazed need – a little madness did not necessarily make for a worse Empress – and
that she drank blood because it gave her
power
somehow, that it fuelled her as surely as Nemean mineral oil fuelled the Air Corps’ new orthopters.