The Air War (52 page)

So she concentrated only on the mechanisms and the movements, the calm exercise of her skill, and desperately hoped that the after-effects of the Chneuma would not bring her dreams.

Castre Gorenn dropped from the sky almost into the midst of the Antspider’s detachment, nearly getting herself spitted on a pike. The Dragonfly-kinden had turned up at
Collegium’s gates claiming to be the Commonweal Retaliatory Force, and demanding to sign up with the city’s defenders. Marteus had assigned her to the Antspider because Straessa was, to
quote, ‘Sub-officer in charge of freaks’. Since then Gorenn had refused to use Collegiate weapons or tactics, roving about with her longbow behind the formations of pike and shot. Only
her speed and accuracy with the weapon had given the Antspider any hope that this woman would be useful at all.

Now, however, she was proving her worth, if only because Straessa had few Fly-kinden to call on for quick scouting and messaging, and Gorenn could fly as fast and see as well as they could.

‘Whole street gone up that way,’ the Dragonfly reported. ‘Thropters just gone overhead, probably coming back soon.’

‘
Which
street?’ the Antspider demanded.

‘A street. The one over there. Five streets between us and it.’ Because to Castre Gorenn the idea of naming streets – of having a city that was big enough to need it –
was wholly new. There were no Flies about, though, and Straessa was trying to sort out her mental map of the city even as she and her followers began to run, the pattering of their boots eclipsed
as Gerethwy got the pumping engine under way, clack-clacking on its four clockwork legs.

We’re on Fen Way, now crossing Parthell, next is Worry Lane, then the Broads, then . . .
but the Antspider’s mind was already racing ahead, because these were familiar names,
not so far from the College. She could name tavernas and chop houses, a music hall she had been to, closer and closer to . . .

She doubled her speed abruptly, heedless of the heft of her Company-issue breastplate, leaving the rest of them behind in a clatter of pikes and snapbows. ‘Gerethwy!’ she was
shouting, as though only he mattered, but he was busy guiding the pumping engine, and surely they’d need the pumping engine . . .

She burst on to Wallender Street, skidding on the uneven paving, a blast of heat striking her as though it were a fist.
No, no, no –
there was the Wall Taverna, tongues of flame
roaring from the sockets of its windows, that brightly coloured awning she knew so well already nothing more than floating, embering scraps of cloth, and the chairs and tables like bright skeletons
within the crackling interior. That was the tenement next to it, four storeys converted to five, where all the Fly-kinden had lived: the factory workers and the rail-side workers and the musicians
who had practised late evenings out on the roof. And now the same little people were frantically darting in and out with whatever possessions they could salvage, or being driven back by the fire
and the smoke.

Castre Gorenn was already touching down next to her, a bow in her hand as though she could
fight
any of this. Her long, golden face was cast in ruby by the leaping flames.

There, beyond the tenement, blazing like a pyre, was Raullo Mummers’s studio, and the apartments above it, all leaping with gorging fire, the artist’s circular window blazing forth
like a raging eye. The Antspider tried to yell some order, at who she knew not, but all that came out was a choked sob as she rushed forward, heedless of the heat. Elsewhere in the city, other
bombs were falling, and not so far away, but she barely registered them.

The street was clogged with people, hurt and frightened, panicking about those they could not find, milling and screaming and shouting at each other. Straessa passed from face to face, grabbing
out to spin people so that the fire could light up their features, shouldering her way through the crowd. She was trying to shout out names, but nothing coherent would emerge. Then she stood before
the building itself, and the fire shouted right back at her, roaring and consuming, gutting everything down to the bare stone. The Empire’s incendiaries burned as no natural fire could have
done.

Can there be anyone inside there?
She braced herself, but there couldn’t, of course. It was impossible. Nothing could have lived and yet, and yet—

Gorenn grabbed her as she pushed forwards, the roasting air like a physical barrier. For a moment she was wrestling with the Dragonfly, then thrusting her away, not to the ground but upwards, as
Gorenn’s wings flashed to regain her balance. Then someone else had hold of Straessa, trying to manhandle her away, shouting something meaningless over and over, and the Antspider punched the
newcomer in the shoulder, and then had her sword out because she couldn’t just stand there – she had to do something, surely, or who else would?

The sound the interfering man uttered resolved itself into ‘Straessa!’ and his face into Eujen’s, smoke-smeared, with a livid bruise at one temple. Heedless of her blade he
gripped her by her arms. ‘You can’t!’ he was insisting. ‘It’s too late!’

‘How can you
say
that?’ she shrieked at him. ‘Raullo . . . he’s—’

‘He’s out, I got him out!’ Eujen insisted. ‘He’s over there, just look!’

At last he got through to her, but she had almost to wrench her eyes off the hungry blaze, hunting the crowd until she spotted the crumpled form. The artist huddled against a wall on the
street’s far side, shoulders shaking, his hands before him, fingers crooked into claws. There was a small figure beside him, barely a grey shadow – the Fly te Mosca, trying to comfort
him. There was not comfort enough to be had. Raullo’s entire world was burning, feeding the flames with his history, the sketches he had layered his walls with.

When Straessa looked away, her detachment were already there at hand, Gerethwy detailing them to start clearing the street. The pumping engine rattled to itself as he directed it – but not
at the studio or the taverna or the tenement. The jet of water shot out onto the workshop beside the doomed Wall Taverna, whose shutters were just starting to catch fire. For those buildings
already alight, their little engine could do nothing but waste what precious water they had.

‘Eujen, help get these people out of here,’ she snapped. ‘Get them off the streets. Get them into the College cellars.’

She saw the outrage on his face, his eyes taking in her breastplate, her buff coat, all the trappings of her office. Rhetoric welled up inside him, and she wished she had not spoken, but then in
an instant his anger was gone.

‘I’m deputized, am I?’ he asked, and she barely caught the words.

‘Please.’

But he was already nodding, heading towards Raullo and te Mosca, waving his arms at them, and at everyone, shooing them as though they were sheep.

Then the next Farsphex barrelled overhead, low enough for its underside to reflect the firelight, and Gorenn had an arrow to her bow, trying to aim even as the flying machine flashed past.

Someone shouted a warning. It might have been Straessa herself.

The bomb hit a building on the side of Wallender Street that was as yet untouched, striking its roof off-centre. Beetles knew how to build solidly in stone, but not even Ants would have made
their everyday homes proof against bombardment. The sheer impact cracked the house’s facade, and then half the upper storey’s front was sloughing away in a great sheet of bricks, into
the street, onto the crowd. A moment later the incendiary itself touched off, gouting a broad sheet of searing orange across the sky overhead, dropping flaming chemical gobbets impartially on
everything and everyone below.

Raullo was standing now, raising his hands after the orthopter as though he had some Art that would call it back, enact vengeance on it. His mouth was open and screaming, his face contorted by
grief and rage, even as te Mosca frantically stripped away his burning tunic. His invective, his howling, whatever sound he made, was lost utterly in the chorus of pain and panic on all sides.

‘Get these bloody people off the streets!’ Straessa shouted, and it was just as well that her followers were already engaged in just that, because nobody could have heard her.

Another flying machine dashed overhead, but Straessa saw enough of it: the two wings, the more compact frame.
One of ours, thank Providence.

‘Pump’s out of water!’ Gerethwy communicated by yelling in her ear. ‘We’re doing nothing here! If there was more wind we’d be dead already!’

People were starting to move at last, the able doing what they could to support the wounded. The faces all around the Antspider were marked not with hatred, or even with simple shock, but with
incomprehension: men and women and children who could not understand what the world had become.

Taki skipped her refitted
Esca Magni
through the dark air, straining her eyes for the swift movement that would indicate the Farsphex. Had someone told her a tenday ago
that she would enter this battle then she would have been exultant. She was no Moth, but her eyes were far better than any Wasp’s at night. She would have vaulted into the darkness with the
intention of picking every single enemy from the sky.

Now she knew what she knew, now she understood the secret of the Imperial discipline, she recognized that the conflict was going to be horribly uneven the other way. The Sarnesh had proved, in
the last war, that a large army could manoeuvre swiftly and quietly in the dark to the fatal surprise of its enemies if it was only linked mind to mind. What one saw, all saw, each man aware of the
next in a way that no outsider could appreciate; all at the same pace, nobody stepping on anyone else’s feet, perfect coordination making up for any lack of light. Now the Empire had that
weapon, too, and it was deployed over the rooftops of Collegium. There would be no surprising any of them, unless Taki could somehow surprise
all
of them, and they would always know which
way to turn, and where their allies were. They would find her, too, comparing their mental maps, triangulating, hunting her down.

She had no idea even how many Collegiate orthopters were in the air. The aviators were getting themselves off the ground the moment they could, scattering out across the city in the desperate
hope of fending off some of the terror that was raining down.

She saw a trio of Farsphex pass before her, but their formation broke even as she accelerated towards them, and with a chill she guessed some
other
enemy had seen her, someone she had not
spotted. She let off a brief spray of rotary shot and was already pulling out of her attack, reaching for height. The attacking Farsphex was a brief, blurred presence to her left, already levelling
out in response, and she knew, from years of accrued instinct, that there would be at least one more moving in on her. She was hauling left, coming out on a wingtip and almost directly over the
Wasp who had just passed her. The original three were long gone, turning into their next bombing run.

She broke off, scattering in the opposite direction, expecting the enemy to retreat and continue to cover the bombers, but they stayed with her, and she understood. The game had become something
more familiar, but no more comforting. The Imperials had changed their tactics, as she knew they would. She was a priority now. She was the target.

Stripping Collegium of its air defences was a necessary preliminary for taking the city, and the Second Army was marching ever closer. It all made perfect tactical sense, textbook stuff. But, of
course, Taki
was
the air defences, and abruptly it was all a great deal closer to home.

She spun and danced over Collegium, confident that she was faster and nimbler, but they were working in perfect tandem, driving her between them, taking turns to fix wings for a sudden burst of
speed before reverting to orthopter flight when she tried to out-dance them.

Time for desperate measures
. She released a chute, but unevenly, the sudden drag slewing her machine about in the air, moments from flipping end over end in a total loss of control, but
then she had stabilized, momentarily flying backwards, cutting the chute free to billow off into the night, then letting the
Esca
’s wings stabilize her, trigger down and raking the two
oncoming Farsphex with her rotaries, close enough for her to see the sparks as her bolts hit home.

She saw one of the leftmost craft’s porthole windows shatter, the brief image of the pilot flinching away. Then she was passing between them, canted right so that their wingtips did not
clash, intent on getting some clear air around her.

Even as the first hole was shot through her wing, she was pulling left and up, dragging the
Esca
into a tight turn as another Farsphex stooped towards her from the clouds. She could
imagine the other two arcing back towards her, in their minds the precise and exacting picture of where she was relative to their comrade. She fled flat out, putting as much distance between her
and them as possible, the new attacker right behind her, keeping up a steady stream of shot that flashed and glittered about her, whichever way she turned.

There was a flash of light ahead of her – a pattern of on and off, and then again. Her mind translated the code automatically:
Evade! Evade!

Her stomach lurched horribly, taking a fraction of a second to appreciate just what that meant. She could not go up – that would cut a course right through the scythe of bolts the Farsphex
was training on her. Instead she dropped for the streets, skimming roofs and then lower even than that, skittering along a street just above head height, then wrenching the
Esca
into a
broad, burning city square, spinning the little orthopter on its wing in the firelight to see the sequel.

Two Stormreaders came blazing in at the Farsphex, their line already taking them through the same air that Taki would have been occupying if she had been a second slower in reacting to their
signal, and still on a collision course with the Imperial flier, which was shooting right back at them. She registered Mynans – less by the livery than their flying style – and then the
Wasp pilot’s nerve broke, or perhaps he had taken too many hits, for he was pulling away.