The clear light of morning uncovered a scene of ruin encompassing a score of Helleron’s streets, a blot of rubble, broken earth and the shattered remains of lives that straddled the border between the close-packed tenements of the poor and the grand townhouses of the rich.
The militia were out in force now, picking over the rubble, but old habits died hard and the money that turned all the wheels of the city took disasters in its stride. Far more men were engaged in recovering the property of magnates than were searching for the bodies of factory workers or their families.
What few bodies remained, at least. There had been plenty of eyewitnesses to testify that this had been no mere earthquake. An intelligence had been at work, a human face to the catastrophe.
‘An attack,’ murmured Colonel Nessen of the Consortium. He was a lean, hungry-looking man, adviser to the Helleren Council of Thirteen and de facto Imperial governor, an authority unchallenged so long as he allowed the magnates to retain their illusions by not formally assuming the title.
‘Who from?’ Scordrey demanded. The merchant, one of the most powerful in Helleron, had been elsewhere in the city when the earth had broken open. Only servants had died in his house. Already he was speaking about rebuilding, and about clearing away all those fallen tenements, putting the space to some more wholesome use than simply housing the poor.
‘Enemies of the Empire; enemies of Helleron,’ Nessen prompted. As a Consortium man he was a merchant first, of course, but he had a soldier’s basic training and rank badge, and he found the gap between his perspective and that of the Beetle beside him widening even as they spoke.
‘Such as who? The Lowlanders are all engaged by your forces, and this isn’t exactly the sort of thing Collegium or Sarn would do. Or do you think the Spiders accomplished this somehow? Or the Moths? Some of my fellows have been saying it was the Moths, but we both know that the scale of this thing is beyond the ability of any human agency.’
‘It wasn’t the Moths,’ Nessen replied tonelessly. He knew it was not the Moths, because a very shaken ambassador from Tharn had sought him out under the Moths’ rather tenuous alliance with the Empire and had stated that a similar incursion had occurred into the deepest levels of Tharn itself. The Moth had not said who the attackers were, but Nessen recognized fear when he saw it.
‘It was an earthquake.’
‘We have reports—’
‘Looters brawling in the wreckage!’ Scordrey declared stridently.
Nessen honestly could not have said whether the man was trying to convince himself or whether he had already succeeded. The Wasp turned away in disgust and headed back to the house the Empire had rented for him.
He got a messenger off to Capitas, asking for . . . He had not known what to ask for. He had only reported, and left it to wiser heads to work out what response could possibly be made to the patently impossible.
Back behind closed doors, he retired to his room to stare at the walls and turn over all the things Scordrey had said, and what Nessen had heard the man’s peers say. Their response to the tragedy had been ‘highly personal’, as his report had stated. They had been apoplectic over the damage to their property. The loss of life throughout the wider city seemed barely to have touched them. Their general feelings seemed to be summed up as: There are plenty more.
Nessen was not a soft man, but he was one who abhorred waste. He had come to see Helleron as his city, and its workers as something akin to his slaves. It was an eye-opening thought to realize that this meant he was more concerned for their well-being than were their own leaders.
He gave his orders, sending a detachment of Light Airborne and a couple of spare Engineers to go and help look for survivors in the poorer districts. He felt it was a valid investment of resources – not sympathy for the bereaved and the injured so much as that the mess offended him.
He had expected his house guests to question him closely about what had happened, for they had picked a tumultuous time to overnight in Helleron. There were two officers travelling with a dozen of the Engineers and a score of soldiers, and they had come to Helleron on the heels of top-priority orders to three of the city’s chemical works. The seal of the Empress had been all over their business, and Nessen was wise enough to ensure that, when they had turned up the evening before, everything had been ready for them. The canisters had already been taken from the factories and loaded onto the visitors’ airship, and he understood that they would be setting off back east shortly afterwards, bound for some destination he sensed it would be unhealthy to enquire into. Under other circumstances he would be curious and would use his contacts back at the capital to indulge that curiosity, but his lead visitor wore the armour of the Red Watch, and Nessen was astute enough to know when to leave well alone.
He knew that he was not the only one to find this new corps, with its apparent absolute mandate from the throne, to be intrusive, unbalancing and bad for business. Similarly, he knew that anyone saying so would be looking to end up on the crossed pikes in short order. Best to get them out of my city as fast as possible.
So perhaps it was a good thing that the Red Watch man had reacted the way he had when he had been told of the night’s upheavaclass="underline" not horror or alarm, nor even surprise. Whatever had laid waste to so much of the city, the Red Watch man clearly knew what was behind it, and he wasn’t telling anyone as lowly as a mere governor-colonel.
The other man, the little halfbreed officer who stood in the Red Watch’s shadow, had been concerned only for their chemical cargo, some foul sort of stuff that Nessen’s contacts suggested was being churned out at three or four other locations as well as Helleron.
Another thing that it’s unwise to enquire further about. Nessen was uncomfortably aware that more and more of his life was falling into that category. Something was going badly wrong, back home. Or perhaps it had always been going wrong, and only now was it visible. Now it had gone too far to stop.
After that was all dealt with, after he had patrolled the wounds that Helleron had suffered overnight and seen off the Red Watch with his airship full of reagents, Colonel Nessen finally found that he had time for other apparently urgent business.
After all, he told himself, how important can it be, if they trust the news to such a messenger?
What appeared before him in his townhouse wore a uniform, but was no soldier of which he had ever seen the like before. One of Nessen’s slaves poured the colonel some wine while Nessen shook his head at this apparition. Yes, there were signs that things were not well at home, but this . . .
‘What’s the sour look for, woman?’ he demanded.
‘Colonel, I have been waiting for over four hours.’ His visitor was a Wasp-kinden woman got up in the leathers of the Air Corps, on this day of all days. ‘I have come with urgent word from General Tynan of the Second, sir, for your eyes only.’
He stared at her levelly. ‘And for this urgent word he sends me a woman.’
‘No, sir, for this word he sends you his best pilot and the officer in charge of his aerial forces.’
‘Well, listen, woman, whatever your name was—’
‘Captain Bergild, sir. May I deliver this into your hands?’
Nessen felt that he had gone through quite enough today, above and beyond the requirements of a Consortium colonel. To hear that sort of insolence from this . . . whatever this even was, was too much. ‘I never picked Tynan as a man with a sense of humour,’ he snapped, snatching the scroll from her hands and breaking the seal.