The Air War (15 page)

The two youths looked shaken, as well they might, but te Mosca’s admirable presence was calming them, and Arvi indicated to her, by a careful nod and a twitch of an eyebrow, that he would
give them all a moment to settle themselves before turning them out of doors. Her smile, in return, was small but elegant, and Arvi made careful adjustments to the mental list of eligibility that
he carried constantly in his mind. He considered whether offering a little warmed-over wine might be appropriate, but no doubt the students would want some too, in which case the only appropriate
offering would have to be an insultingly poor vintage. Associating with the student body at all, in fact, seemed to indicate a flaw, in this woman’s judgement. He frowned to himself and
annotated his list further.

At that moment a Beetle-kinden woman burst in, the doorman actually running after her in an attempt to restrain her.

‘I need to see the Speaker right now!’ she snapped, heedless of the other visitors. Even as Arvi rushed at her, hands up to implore discretion, she was saying, ‘No! Get out of
my way, you bloody functionary. That maniac Gripshod is going to blow up the whole
city
if somebody doesn’t stop him . . .’

Something in Arvi’s demeanour communicated itself because the woman turned round and saw a Wasp staring at her with some interest. She stuttered to a halt.

Arvi sighed, but this sort of thing was happening all the time. One could not get efficient enough door staff, and some day he would have to speak to the artifice department and get them to
automate the process somehow. He managed it all without Jodry ever knowing, shuffling the Beetle woman – a regular informant – into a side room, and then gently decanting te Mosca and
her charges onto the street with a kind word, ensuring by looks and manner that the woman understood how he was going out of his way and beyond the call of duty for her. Then he returned and gave
Jodry sufficient warning for him to receive his next guest in his customary fashion, even tweaking his master’s robes into a suitably picturesque dishevelment.

At last the informant was ushered in with whatever alarming news she had about Gripshod – and what a name
that
was to conjure with, Arvi thought – and he could now take a
moment for a sit-down and a fortifying sip of brandy from the flask he kept in a holster under his armpit.

Just as he was stowing the covert article away, another Fly-kinden burst in, this time so far ahead of the doorman that Arvi could only hear his running feet.

‘Need to see the Speaker,’ she got out. She was still wearing the light canvas overalls of an aviatrix, and Arvi guessed she had flown here straight from the airfield with the stink
and oil of the orthopter still on her hands.

‘Mistress te Schola,’ he greeted her, because this woman also taught at the Assembly – and she was a beauty, too, for all that she was Solarnese and therefore somewhat
eccentric of manner.

‘Taki,’ she corrected him absently, and only raised an eyebrow when he kissed her hand, a greeting he fervently hoped was appropriately Solarnese. ‘Look, seriously, I need to
see Drillen right now.’

She was still out of breath from the flight, her chestnut hair flattened by the imprint of the flying helm she had only just removed, tracking grease on to the carpets and with her clothes dirty
and unchanged for too long. Arvi almost proposed there and then. However, his spine was an iron rod of duty and he could only force out the reluctant words, ‘I’m afraid the Speaker is
in a meeting, but if you would wait . . .’

‘Get me Maker, then,’ she told him. ‘Stenwold Maker, the War Master.’

‘Alas, Master Maker is out of the city.’

Taki stared at him. ‘He’s
what
?’

‘He set out for Myna, I believe.’ Probably that was a state secret, but this woman was one of Maker’s associates, and anyway, in that moment, Arvi would have found it hard to
deny her anything.

‘But I was flying
over
Myna just now!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve flown from Capitas to Collegium and now I have to go most of the way
back
?’

‘I could perhaps inform the Speaker that you are here . . .’ Arvi stretched his duty to the snapping point.

‘Forget it. I need to get a night’s sleep, get my
Esca
rewound and tuned up, and I need to drop some sketches into the aeronautics department just as soon as I’ve
actually made them. Tell Drillen I’ve headed for Myna.’ And she was gone from the room and from Arvi’s life, as abruptly as she had appeared.

To anyone observing Stenwold – which meant a dozen others in the
Sontaken
’s passenger hold – he would seem to be composing a coded missive, a curiously
blatant piece of espionage, as he sat there with papers spread about him. On one sheet were some sparse notes in plain script, on another a laboriously translated piece made of baffling symbols.
The other pages comprised his lexicon, a book of all those familiar words that he had been able to scratch down the glyphs for. At least a couple aboard the
Sontaken
must recognize him, and
several were staring and whispering, no doubt imagining the infamous War Master compiling secret orders to his minions.

In fact, he was writing a letter to a woman, as delicate and awkward a piece of wordsmithing as ever went into a student’s love poem.

This was not a love letter, of course. He was too old for that sort of thing and so was she, and neither of them were in
love
. If there had been anything as fiery and fierce as love
between them, then surely they would not be so utterly separated now, living amongst different kinden in different worlds. Stenwold’s days as a lover had come and gone when he was a College
student, and left no marks or traces behind. Even his dalliance with Arianna, the Spider-kinden girl who had deserted from the Rekef for him, had not quite been
love
, after all – her
ambition, his hubris, and a passion born of war overwhelming any fear of danger. She had betrayed him, later, then died trying to save him. It had not been a happy business. He still missed her,
but he knew full well it had not been love.

The
Sontaken
was a new design of airship, a streamlined canopy above, some powerful outrigger engines and a newly designed system of stabilizers meant that the little vessel could make
the Collegium to Helleron run in four days of mild discomfort, when it had once been the boast of the great
Sky Without
to make the same trip in ten. Four days sitting in the same place
without bureaucracy demanding his time was a luxury to Stenwold, which was why he had started abandoning the city for his clifftop refuge, where he could look out over the sea and brood, and
shudder.

He had been to places few other landborn had ever seen, but he would never go back. That sunless, alien abyss offered no life for one such as him, just as his parched and dusty world was a
terrible place for the woman he now wrote to.

He consulted his lexicon once again, but he had found another gap in his knowledge, another word he did not know the sigil for, nor any cognate of it. If he could have simply written to her,
with all the Collegiate eloquence at his command, then things might have been different. Perhaps he could have baited the hook sufficiently to draw her up to shore again. The Sea-kinden spoke the
same words that he did, but their writing was utterly different, each word a picture. Each time the sea-traders returned with more gold and more intricate clockwork, he learned another few dozen
signs from them to add to his book, but even now he could write only the most halting and awkward things and, besides, what could he say? Not mawkish talk of feelings, certainly. He was Stenwold
Maker, middle-aged and calloused by time and loss, and he could not open himself wide enough to admit that kind of youthful foolishness. And besides, they were both too solemn and set in their
ways, and they both had responsibilities.

So instead he wrote about duty, to the wretched extent that he could. After all, he had his duty to Collegium, and she had hers to her new leader, the boy Aradocles. Perhaps even the differences
of land and sea might not have sufficed to separate them had they not both been so
busy
.

Her name was Paladrya, this woman he did not love. Her letters came back to him, sometimes, infrequently, partly in her confident pictograms, partly in crude letters that he had a hard time
deciphering. He could ask the Sea-kinden who brought them to translate, of course, or to write down for him what he wanted to say in return, but his words were for Paladrya alone, for all that they
were of such everyday things. He did not want to share them with anybody else.

Without ever really thinking about it, he had disclosed such things to her that the Assembly might have exiled him for treason. When he thought of her, when he painstakingly fumbled out those
complex glyphs, he had no secrets.

He sensed a change in the
Sontaken
’s progress, felt his stomach shift with a gradual loss of height, and knew that they were now coming in to Helleron. He would secure transport to
Myna there, but first he would meet up with an old friend. The business of the world was pressing on him again. Stenwold gathered up his papers and stowed them back in the pack at his belt, ready
for the next rare opportunity for contemplation.

He was far from the sea here but, as he listened to the wind whistling past the hull outside, to the drone of the engines changing pitch, he thought he heard breakers for a moment, on a distant
shore.

Helleron was as he remembered it, save that perhaps there was now more of it. The city’s innards sprawled in mounds and tangles of ghettos, factories, slums and
tenements, all beneath the pall of smoke and soot that arose from the belching throats of a thousand chimneys. The grander houses of the magnates themselves were mostly located on higher ground,
and where they could hope to remain upwind of the industry for as much of the time as possible.

Helleron to Myna was not the most reliable journey, as the newly freed Three-city Alliance was not rich enough to make a good export market, nor particularly trusting of where Helleren
sympathies lay. The factory-city had rolled over quickly enough when the Empire had reached it the first time, and there was no suggestion that the magnates would put up much more of a fight should
the Wasps come again. Whether this was just due to the legendary neutrality of the city, or whether there was something deeper working in those cluttered and grimy streets, was something that
Stenwold was hoping to uncover.

He had secured passage on a freight fixed-wing that was making a quick round-trip to Myna, and that only because he had chartered it and paid for its cargo himself. He had a few hours, though,
and furtive messages had brought him to an eating house in a moderately affluent part of town, a street of prosperous artisans and middling shopkeepers, not amongst the great and the good nor yet
in the gutter. In Helleron, the distance between the heights of luxury and the depths of despair could be very small indeed.

Stenwold recognized him immediately, but then the man’s bodyguards did rather draw the eye. Greenwise Artector was a man too grand for this sort of place, and it showed even though he had
dressed down. Turning up with a couple of Ant-kinden at his shoulders, who pointedly took a table near the door and stared at every other patron as though they were all assassins, could not help
but make an impression, and Greenwise was well known enough that word would soon spread. By that time, however, he and Stenwold would have concluded their business, and the idea was that people
would remember the great and wealthy merchant but not the hooded man in the artificer’s canvas whom he spoke to.

Greenwise Artector had never quite been Stenwold’s friend, but he had been a covert supporter for years. The two of them saw eye to eye on the problem of the Empire, and Artector had done
a lot of good hidden work when Helleron had seen Imperial occupation. His information had been vital in fuelling the anti-Imperial resistance.

He looked thinner than Stenwold recalled, the clothes hanging off him a little, clearly tailored for more expansive days. The expensive cosmetics that smoothed out the signs of age and wear on
his dark face no longer quite hid the worry around his eyes.

‘Sten,’ he said. ‘Just like old times.’

‘The wheel has rather come full circle,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘At least this time round, Collegium will be ready.’ There had been moments, before the war, when it had
seemed his home city would simply ignore the entire situation, turn its back on the Imperial advance until the Wasps had reached their very doorstep, and it was too late. ‘Where will Helleron
be?’

‘Officially?’ Greenwise grimaced. ‘We are proud of our neutrality. We bow to no man. Listen to most of the magnates and you’d never realize we had an Imperial governor
not that long ago, and that our factories were given over to their war effort.’

‘Unofficially?’

‘There are a lot of Imperial dignitaries turning up at the airfields, Consortium merchants mostly. They turn up for a desultory bit of trade, and end up staying on to dine and chat with
this magnate or that. More than half the Council plays host to them, and they talk about lucrative contracts, but there’s more going on. I have a few servants here and there that take my
coin. Occupation terms for Helleron are already drafted, or as good as. The Empire’s diplomats are getting clever, and everyone’s going to end up subscribing to the same convenient lie:
Helleron will get to keep its autonomy, so long as it does everything the Empire tells it.’

Stenwold nodded soberly, and then they paused while the wine arrived. The nervous waiter’s insistence that it was on the house told them that they had only a short interval before all the
spies caught up with them.

‘Nothing there to surprise me,’ the War Master noted. ‘Greenwise, what do you hear from Myna in the last few days?’

‘I’d not go to Myna for all the gold in the mint,’ the magnate told him straight off. Seeing Stenwold’s expression, he nodded grimly. ‘But, as that’s where
you’re going now, nothing good, Sten. The Empire’s had troops at the border for months now, on manoeuvres if you can believe it. Myna – the whole Alliance – is strung like a
bow, ready to loose at any moment. I hear there have been a dozen separate border incidents in the last two months, crossing both ways, and that’s not to mention the Principalities throwing
their lot in with the Empire, which means the Alliance are all over
that
border, too. The Wasp diplomats are complaining loudly that the Mynans can’t let go and will keep pushing them
until there’s another war. Or, to translate, the Wasps will use that logic as their excuse to bring one about. It’s all firepowder over that ways, Sten. One spark will set it all
off.’