The Air War (69 page)

Some consensus was reached, and Eujen spoke first. ‘Master Maker, Averic was approached by Imperial agents who tried to recruit him. They had a list of victims to kill tonight. We have
passed on details, best guesses as to targets. But you were surely top of the list. We tried to get here sooner. The streets . . .’ By the end of his speech he had recognized the corpse of
Janos Outwright and was staring at it in horrified fascination.

Thereby saving my life twice over.
But still the gracious words would not come. ‘I need to know everything they told you,’ he snapped at Averic, making the Wasp twitch.
‘Come with me, both of you.’ He stomped past them, heedless of the blood underfoot, collecting his sword. He was in
command
, he assured himself. The roar and crash from without
gave the lie to that thought, but he clung to it, building a self-righteous anger to defend himself, which led on to the words: ‘And Master Leadswell, I trust you have reconsidered your
stance on the Empire.’

He was so much the mighty engine of state, right then, that he had stepped onto the street outside before realizing that the two students were not simply pattering in his shadow. He looked back,
and the flash and gout of the next bomb showed Eujen Leadswell’s face all too clearly, standing motionless beside that small fragment of the Empire that had cast its lot in with Collegium
this night.

‘Master Maker,’ Leadswell stated, ‘when this is done, I will put myself forward at the Lots and get myself made Assembler, however long it takes. And when I do, I shall fight
you at every bloody turn.’

‘Let us hope you that have the opportunity. If the Wasps win I don’t imagine anyone will be casting Lots any time soon,’ Stenwold retorted instantly, even though part of him
was listening to his own words and shouting,
Give it a rest! Just unbend and put a hand out to them
. Except that putting a hand out meant friendship only in Collegium. To a Wasp it was a
prequel to killing.

Averic’s hand was out already, and Stenwold flinched, reaching for his snapbow. The Wasp was pointing, though, his face bloodless and horrified in the ruddy glare of flames.

Stenwold turned, without expectations, and the sight struck him like a blow. There was a colossal conflagration at the centre of the city. The Amphiophos was burning.

Reaching the Amphiophos was a nightmare journey through disintegrating streets, encountering the dispossessed, the grieving, the blank-faced Merchant Company soldiers who could
not help. The city’s familiar landmarks had been picked up and strewn like a child’s toys. Collegium was large and the enemy orthopters had been few, relatively speaking. The
Beetle-kinden would survive, but still the scale of the damage was daunting. An unopposed incursion finally served to show what the hard work of the Collegiate airmen and women had been achieving
as the nightly fruits of their failing defence.

The bombing was tailing off by the time Stenwold reached the first rubble foothills of the Amphiophos, and it was a bitter thought that only a shortage of bombs could be behind their
retreat.

They will come in greater numbers tomorrow. That is what this has all been about. If I am wrong about Banjacs’s machine, though . . . then I will have invited the end.
The thought
of that same end being inevitable sooner or later, if Banjacs failed, was not one to comfort him.

Like little ants whose nest has been kicked over.
That was the image that came to Stenwold as he set eyes on Collegium’s fallen heart of governance. Visible in the light of those
fires still blazing, the shell and rubble of the place was crawling with the living, and he knew they were searching for the dead. He saw clerks and Company soldiers, servants, cleaners, concerned
citizens, some still in nightshirts, all of them picking over the collapsed grandeur of the sprawling building. The Amphiophos’s heart was of ancient Moth construction, and succeeding
generations had re-edified it, adding wings and rooms, domes, gardens, spires and suites, but all with surprising taste, preserving the pre-revolution elegance of the original white stone, so that
the whole formed a bridge to a distant past that the Beetles had otherwise turned their backs on. From these halls the Moth-kinden had ruled their coastal city of Pathis, and the subject people who
would, in the end, overthrow them. From these same white halls the founding parents of Collegium had set their course: embracing not arms and grudges and feuding like their Ant neighbours, but
learning and tolerance and thought. The College and the Amphiophos, and the whole of Collegium sprang from that source, mind and heart.

One of the new wings was still standing, its windows just jagged empty sockets, but the interior merely singed rather than gutted. The rest had been laid waste. Domes had cracked like eggshells,
often one wall and a section of curved roof still tottering, the rest fallen amidst a devastation of tapestries and murals and mosaics and art, and of lives too. The western end was still on fire,
the water crews fighting to beat down the flames. The rest . . . Stenwold had never seen such a wasteland, not even in Myna. The attack on that city had been brutal but swift, but Collegium had
been pounded and pounded, night after night, and now . . .

The expressions on the faces of those around him were haggard and gaunt with grief and incredulity, thoughts retreating deep inwards as the hands worked, shifting stones, searching for survivors
or for simple confirmation of mortality. There were sobs from a few, but most simply forced themselves to it like automatons, building up a head of grief that would strike them the moment they
rested.

In the midst of all this, he found Jodry.

The Speaker for the Assembly came shambling out from between roofless walls, his formal robes torn and soot stained, skin disfigured with bruises. There was a gash on his scalp that had been
clumsily, hastily dressed. He stumbled and tripped over the fallen stones, hugging to him a burden that Stenwold could not identify for a moment, and then realized was a mass of papers bundled
together awkwardly, charred and ripped and sodden in turn.

Jodry dumped them to the ground, and Stenwold saw that there was already a couple of other similar mounds, a meagre harvest of scrolls and books that were now in too poor a state to be sold in a
Helleron street market.

‘Jodry,’ he called, and the man looked up, eyes bloodshot with the smoke, haunted by knowledge.

‘Sten.’ The fat man’s voice was the ghost of its former self.

‘What are you . . . ?’ For a moment Stenwold wondered if the Speaker had gone mad.

‘The records, Sten. The minutes, laws, Assembly debates . . . our government, Sten.’ Jodry gestured helplessly at the ruined papers, even as his secretary, Arvi, staggered out with
another pile, looking as battered and begrimed as his master.

‘But these . . .’ Stenwold crouched to begin leafing through the nearest pile. Loose pages from manifests, transcripts, judgements, accounts, but nothing connecting to its
neighbours, nothing complete or whole, each pile almost whimsical in its juxtaposition, books compiled by idiots for illiterates.

‘It’s all we have. It’s Collegium,’ Jodry whispered. ‘It just needs . . . sorting out and filing, Sten . . .’

‘Jodry, for the world’s sake, sit down. Get something to drink. Arvi, surely you can . . . ?’

Wearily, the Fly reached into his tunic and produced a flask. Stenwold had the impression that it was not from Jodry’s stock, rather for the little man’s private consumption, but he
passed it to his master without comment. Jodry tipped it back, gagged at whatever was inside, and then choked over it for long enough that, on looking Stenwold in the face again, there was a
measure of composure once more in his eyes.

Neither of them said it. Neither of them uttered the words,
We did this
. The thought travelled between them as though they had rented a mindlink from the Ants for the occasion.

Stenwold shook his head. ‘It could have been any night, Jodry. It would have come, sometime. The very inevitability of
this
, and all the other variants of
this
, was why we .
. . why we made our decision.’

Jodry nodded wearily. ‘Banjacs’s house still stands,’ he said. ‘The College lost the Awlbright workshops and machine rooms, and they put a hole through the Prowess Forum
roof, though that one didn’t go off. And the rest, Sten . . . the list of homes and shops and lives.’ He looked up, frowning. ‘What happened to your ear?’

In truth, Stenwold had almost forgotten, having just slapped some ointment on the wound – a pain worse than the original – to kill off the animicules before he left the house.
‘Assassin,’ he explained curtly. His own difficulties seemed trivial by comparison.

‘Someone assassinated your ear.’ Jodry managed a half-inch worth of weak smile. ‘Well that sounds as though the general warning we got was a good one.’ The smile was
gone. ‘More paperwork, then. Who was attacked? Who did they get? I know poor Bola Stormall was shot dead outside her house. We sent soldiers off to guard everyone who seemed likely, but we
couldn’t protect everyone.’

‘And they couldn’t attack everyone, either. And the men who came for me won’t be moving on down the list, for certain,’ Stenwold put in fiercely.

Jodry nodded wearily, unwilling to accept even that meagre victory, and then his eyes lit on something beyond Stenwold. Eujen Leadswell and the Wasp Averic had trailed after him to the
devastation of the Amphiophos, and were now standing, humbled and aghast at the sight of the ruin.

‘They came to warn you, then,’ Jodry noted. ‘The Wasp boy guessed you’d be top of their list.’ For a moment it seemed that he might gloat, perhaps suggest that
Stenwold take Averic off for an interrogation by the soldiers of the Maker’s Own. Seeing this diminished man before him, Stenwold would almost have preferred that.

And he could not honestly say to himself that a thorough questioning of Averic, as a potential enemy agent, had not occurred to him. He felt like two men inside: the rational Collegiate and the
man who had fought the Empire most of his life. Both of them were eminently logical and consistent within their world views, entirely persuaded by their own arguments, and yet they did not seem to
be on speaking terms with each other any more.

‘Get some rest,’ he told Jodry gruffly. ‘All this . . .’ A gesture at the scattered, pointless papers.

‘I know,’ the Speaker for the Assembly agreed miserably. ‘But I needed to do something. I couldn’t just let it . . .’

‘Go,’ Stenwold insisted, and then stalked over to his followers.

‘Well, you’ve done a service for the city,’ he forced himself to admit. ‘You have the thanks of the Assembly, or will have, once it can be assembled.’ He overdid
his attempt at friendliness, and saw Eujen’s gaze cut through it with the cynicism of the young.

‘Perhaps you could repay us by answering one question, Master Maker. What happened last night? Where were our orthopters? The Empire raped us from the air.’

‘There were defenders.’ Stenwold strode past them, aware of them following him, as he knew they would. But he was heading for a stretch of rubble that had been picked over already,
with no ears to overhear.

‘Where were they? Master Maker, we were on the streets all the way from my lodgings to your townhouse, with a stop at the College on the way, and precious little sign of anyone of ours in
the air.’

‘Collegium is a large city.’ Stenwold turned to face him, feeling half the warrior, half the statesman, but wholly the combatant.

‘This was different,’ Eujen insisted, not letting go. ‘Different to all the other times. I swear to you I saw barely a Stormreader in the sky.’ The boy faced off against
him, fists clenched.

‘Perhaps our orthopters were engaged elsewhere – on the attack perhaps?’

‘
Is
that what happened, Master Maker?’

And at last Stenwold recognized the tone behind the challenge: a plea for reassurance. Not a political opponent, this, but a Collegiate citizen whose home was at stake: a student barely grown,
wearing the sash of an invented Company, playing at soldiers in a real war.

But I can’t tell him. I certainly can’t tell the Wasp. The secrecy is the entire point.
He stared at Averic, gaunt and silent at Eujen’s shoulder. He would not meet
Stenwold’s eyes, but there was something there to be confronted nonetheless: the fact that these two, that the Wasp in particular, had saved lives last night – Stenwold’s
included.

The choices spread before him like a fan opening. Walk away: these two could stir up trouble, but they could force no answers from him. Counter-attack: why not have the Wasp answer some
questions – he knew more than he had told, for all that his information had served to the good. Surrender: but Stenwold had spent too much of his life fighting for that, hadn’t he?

He stared at the two of them, the spymaster and the soldier in him trying to draw up a harsh word, a put-down that would set the impertinent boy in his place and simplify his own life again.
I don’t need this. Haven’t I enough to worry about?

In that second, glowering into Eujen’s angry, hurt gaze, he saw himself as Jodry had come to see him: a man going too fast downhill, driven by his obsessions, unwilling to let go of his
grudges;
old
, and set in his ways the way old men get. He saw Eujen, too, the young intellectual with a cause that he was willing to fight for no matter what the institution thought.
When
did we change places? Wasn’t I standing on his side of the line, last time I looked?

He sat down suddenly, rubble shifting beneath him, sensing Eujen’s instinctive lurch forward to assist him.
Have they not earned some answers – even the Wasp? Some small part of
the truth, at least?

‘Tomorrow,’ he told them. ‘I have no answers for you now, but tomorrow . . . I will send for you, and I will take you to where all of this will make sense.’
Or if it
does not, then we are lost, and who cares what you think then?