And the Cloudfarer itself: it was a piece of madness, and no Wasp artificer had made her. Some maverick Auxillian technologist had come up with that design and inflicted it upon him.
It had no hull, or at least very little of one. Instead there was a reinforced wooden base, and a scaffold of struts that composed a kind of empty cage. There was a clockwork engine aft, which two men wound by pedalling furiously, and somewhat stubby wings that bore twin propellers. Thalric had boarded along with a pilot-engineer and Lieutenant te Berro, Fly-kinden agent of the Rekef, who was to brief him. Then the Cloudfarer had lifted off, a fragile lattice of wood shuddering up and up through the air under the impelling force of her propellers. Up and up, rising in as tight a spiral as her pilot could drag her into, until they were sailing across the clouds indeed, and higher. Then the pilot let go the struts to either side, and the Cloudfarer’s vast grey wings fell open left and right, above and below, and caught the wind. The vessel that had seemed some apprentice’s mistake was abruptly speeding over the world beneath it, soaring on swift winds westwards until they were casting across the Lowlands as high, it almost seemed, as the stars themselves sailed.
And it was so cold. Thalric was muffled in four cloaks and layers of woollens beneath, yet the chill air cut through it all, an invisible blade that lanced through the open structure of the Cloudfarer and put a rime of white frost on him, and painted his breath into white plumes before the wind whipped it away.
They would reach Collegium faster than any messenger, eating up any lead that Stenwold had built, so that despite Thalric’s detour to Asta it was anyone’s guess who would arrive first. They were so high, up in the very icy roof of the sky, that no flying scout would spy them. Even telescopes might not pick out their silvery wings against the distant vault of the heavens.
And as he suffered through this ordeal, from the cold and the wind, he hunched forward to catch te Berro’s fleeting words, for these were his instructions, his mission, and he would need to remember them.
‘You’re a lucky man,’ the Fly said, shouting over the gale. ‘Rekef can’t spare an operative of your experience simply for a disciplinary trial. Lowlands work to be done all over the place. You get a second chance. Don’t waste it.’ They had worked together before, Thalric and te Berro, and a measure of respect had grown between them.
‘We’ll put you down near Collegium,’ te Berro continued. ‘Make your own way in. Meet with your agents there. There can be no unity allowed for the Lowlands. There are two plans. The first is swifter than the second, but you are to enact both of them if possible. Even if the first succeeds, the second will also help the war effort.’
And te Berro had explained to him then just what those plans were, and whilst the first was a commonplace enough piece of work, the second was a sharp one and the scale of it shook him a little.
‘It shall be done,’ he assured the Fly, as the Cloudfarer continued its swift, invisible passage over the Lowlands so far beneath them.
*
He walked into Collegium without mishap, entering at the slow time near noon when the city seemed to sleep a little. Collegium had white walls but the gates had stood open for twenty years, had only been closed even then because the Ants of Vek had harboured ambitions to annexe the Beetle city for themselves. There was a guard sitting by the gate, an old Beetle-kinden who was dozing a little himself. Collegium was not interested in keeping people out. If it had been, then he might not have needed to destroy it.
Thalric had been granted a short enough time in the city when he was here last. Two days only and then he had been bundled onto a fixed-wing flier to go and catch Stenwold Maker on the airship Sky Without. At that thought he tried to discern where the airfield lay from here and see whether the great dirigible was moored there today, but the walls were too high, the buildings looming above him, for much of Collegium was three-storey, and the poorer districts were four or five. He knew that the Empire had much to learn here. The poor of Collegium cursed their lot and complained and envied, but they had never witnessed how the poor of Helleron lived, or the imperial poor, or the slaves of countless other cities.
If we destroy Collegium, will we ever regain what is lost in the fires? Because it was not only a matter of writing down some secret taken from one of the countless books in the College library. This was a way of life, and it was a good thing to have and, like all good things, the Empire should have it. Imperial citizens should benefit from the knowledge of the men and women who had built this place.
But the second plan that te Berro had given him would kill all that, and he had his orders.
The kernel of discontent that had been within him for a while now gave him a familiar kick, but he mastered it. If the Empire wanted things in such a way, the Empire would have it. He was loyal to the Empire.
He stopped so suddenly in the street that a pair of men manhandling a trunk barged into him and swore at him before they passed on.
What a heretical idea. Better keep that one hidden deep in one’s own thoughts. To even think that loyalty to the Empire, to the better future of the Empire, was not the same as loyalty to the Emperor’s edicts or to the Rekef’s plans, well, that sort of thinking would get a man on the interrogation table in a hurry. He had avoided a well-deserved reprimand for failing at Helleron and he wasn’t about to start playing host to that kind of thought now, that was just asking for trouble.
But in the deepest recesses of his mind the idea turned over, and waited for another off-guard moment.
There had been Rekef agents before him in Collegium, of course. Whilst the Inlander branch of the Empire’s secret service purged the disloyal at home, the Outlander had been seeding the cities of the Lowlands with spies and informants. Thalric had made contact with them when he was here last but their networks were four years old. Thalric sent Fly messengers across the city with innocuous letters into which codewords had been dropped like poison into wine. Those men and women the Rekef had infiltrated into this city had been making everyday lives for themselves. Now that was to end. He was calling them up.
He met with them in a low sailors’ taverna near enough to the docks for them to hear the creak of rigging through the windows. It was a place where people would forget who it was that met with who, or what business might have been done there — and that was just as well, too. They made an ill-assorted quartet.
The most senior was a lieutenant in the Rekef, and when Thalric had needed a pair of assassins to catch Stenwold Maker in his home he had gone to Lieutenant Graf, trueblood Wasp-kinden, who was working here as a procurer for the blades trade. That, in local parlance, meant that he made introductions between fighting men and prospective patrons, and it put Thalric’s operation here on a sound footing straight off. Graf was a lean man, his face marred by a ragged sword-scar from brow to chin that Thalric knew for a duelling mark from the man’s days in the Arms-Brethren. The eye traversed by that scar was a dark marble of glass.
The other three were all unranked on the Rekef books, mere agents. Hofi was a Fly-kinden who cut the hair of the rich and shaved the mighty, and Arianna was a Spider and a student of the College. The fourth man, Scadran the halfbreed, worked as a dockhand, catching all the rumours going in and out from both ways down the coast. Wasp blood adulterated with Beetle and Ant, his heavy features displayed the worst of all three to Thalric’s eyes, but he was a big man, a brawler. That might be useful, in the end.