Piss on my luck!
Fine last words for a pirate.
Then there was a flicker and the soldier was down, rolling on the ground with the spine of an arrow standing proud in him. The other Wasps suddenly had more to think about, whipping their snapbows around, but the trees were already echoing to the harsh snap! snap! of bolts clipping between the trees too fast to see. The two Wasps were on the ground in moments, and more fighting erupted all around. Laszlo had no eyes for it.
Liss was sitting with her back to a tree, breasts rising and falling as she fought for air, but she gripped his hand when he went to her, her palm still warm from her Art.
The skirmish went on for less than a minute and when a shadow fell over the two of them it was no Wasp but a long-faced Dragonfly-kinden woman wearing the buff coat of the Merchant Companies, a bow as tall as she was in one hand.
Laszlo identified the sash emblem, an Ant-kinden helm in profile.
‘Coldstone Company,’ he named it. ‘Collegium.’
The Dragonfly nodded suspiciously. Others were joining her now, a couple of Beetles, a handful more — Flies, a Moth with a shortbow in a holster at her waist.
‘Castre Gorenn, Commonweal Retaliatory Army, currently serving with the Coldstone,’ said the Dragonfly archer. ‘And what are you?’
‘Working for Ma- Stenwold Maker,’ Laszlo said, stumbling over the name in his hurry to present his credentials. ‘Please — your army’s close by?’
‘Not so very close,’ Castre Gorenn replied, still not trusting either of them an inch. ‘We’ll get you there sure enough, though. Collegium agents, Imperial agents — don’t really care — works either way for me.’
‘She’s hurt,’ Laszlo met Liss’s eyes. ‘Can you…’
Gorenn knelt to study Liss, and for a moment the Dragonfly’s easy expression turned grim at the sight of her, making something twist almost to breaking in Laszlo’s chest, but then the woman nodded.
‘I can fly with her, certainly. Nobody flies like me.’ With surprising delicacy the Dragonfly reached for Liss, who flinched and whimpered, but nevertheless held still as she was picked up like a child. ‘You’ve your own wings, to keep up?’
‘Of course.’
‘Of course, is it? Well, Master “Of Course”, there’ll be a couple of these newfangled snappers held on you the whole time, so you better keep your mind on what you’re doing.’
Thirty-Three
Eujen Leadswell lodged over a bookbinder’s in a well-appointed room that just about scraped a view of the College rooftops, and which he tended to forget was paid for by the stipend he received each moon from his parents, merchants in the beer trade. He was back late tonight, having spent the last hour wrangling with a Master of the social history faculty who had taken issue over his Student Company. Their meeting had not gone well. She had ordered him to dissolve the force, and he had outright refused, and now the matter would apparently go before the head of faculty, or possibly the administrator. Eujen rather suspected that the promised reprimand would arrive some time after the war finished, and at that late point he would be glad to receive it.
He stomped up the stairs to his room — he had his own outside door, more for the convenience of the bookbinder than Eujen’s — and shouldered his way in, feeling disgruntled and angry. A moment’s fiddling with the gaslamps turned up a rosy glow — and Averic.
Eujen started back with a choked-off cry of alarm, finding his friend standing in the darkness of his own room, unbidden and unlooked for. His first thought, and he was ashamed by it, was Wasp assassin.
And Averic’s manner, quite aside from this trespass, was not reassuring. The Wasp stared at Eujen as though he had never quite seen him before. The intruder’s hands were empty, open, hanging by his side, but Eujen was suddenly aware of the danger that Averic represented, simply by virtue of his kinden. Killing hands. No wonder, his traitor imagination informed him, they were feared so, having taken the advantage of their Art and become…
‘Averic?’ he asked, his voice creditably calm. For a moment, a silence stretched between them, and then the Great Ear began its monotonous wail outside, and they both looked to the window.
‘Here we go again,’ Eujen’s words came out automatically, disassociated from any part of the awkward space between him and the Wasp. And Averic’s followed: ‘They’re going to kill you.’
Eujen couldn’t quite understand what had been said, and just made a questioning grunt.
‘The Rekef — or Army Intelligence — the Empire wants to kill you.’
Then Eujen understood that the ‘you’ was singular, not plural. Not the Beetle-kinden, not the people of Collegium, but him.
But why…? But what…? ‘But how do you know?’
‘Because they told me to do it.’
The moment teetered between them, and every intellectual instinct but one demanded that Eujen flee or fight. The war was here in his room. The war had come to him. The man before him was not Averic. He, Eujen, had been wrong.
‘But you’re not going to,’ he said, and this time his voice finally shook, but he had cast the die. Live by the sword. All that time claiming that the Empire — that the Wasps — were redeemable, and he would trust it with his weight now, though the fall would kill him if he was wrong.
‘For you,’ Averic said simply, ‘I betray my people — my family, my kinden — for you.’
The first explosion struck five streets away and still made the windows rattle, both of them starting at the flash and the roar.
‘Eujen,’ Averic insisted. ‘There are Imperial killers in the city. They are going to be targeting people — we need to tell someone. They gave me some names, but there’ll be others. I made a list, everyone I could think of.’
Eujen had opened his mouth, trying to fit all that into his head, when the next bombs struck, one after the other, ten or twelve of them, killing all words, rattling the walls, each slightly quieter than the last as the barrage tracked across the city. Even as Eujen tried to reply, a further bombardment followed, the retorts overlapping so that it was plain that several of the Imperial machines were unleashing their fury all at once.
‘Eujen!’ Averic repeated, ‘We have to tell someone! The Speaker, Corog Breaker, anyone!’ The subtext was clear: Don’t let my choice be in vain.
But Eujen wore a strange expression as he turned from the window. He spoke several times before a gap in the explosions allowed his words out: ‘They’re not launching.’
‘What?’
‘None of our machines are in the sky. The Hiram Street airfield is in sight of here, and there’s nobody there. It’s completely empty. What’s going on?’
‘Eujen, we have to tell somebody. The Empire’s people will be working tonight.’ Averic almost shouted it, and at last the Beetle was with him.
‘Yes, yes you’re right. We have to…’ He grimaced. ‘Stenwold Maker. We have to find Stenwold Maker.’
When the Great Ear had started to sound, the men and women of Taki’s airfield already knew they would not be running straight for their machines. Corog Breaker had passed on the order, and Taki, Edmon and the others assumed that other fields would be launching, hunting out the incoming Farsphex raiders. Nobody asked questions. Everyone knew the drill. If — when — a detachment of the enemy fought past the loose blockade, everyone on duty would go rushing for the airstrip: another night’s savage work.
They waited tensely, knowing their moment would come. The Mynans joked, with that hard, calloused humour they had evolved. A couple of the Collegiates were still trying to persevere with their studies, bent close to the lamps with their books.
Then the first bomb hit the city, and they were up on their feet, within moments of each other, looking to Breaker, who stood at the door.
‘Not yet,’ the old man told them. ‘Specific orders tonight. Not our turn.’
The pilots’ barracks was sunk low into the earth — using a converted storeroom from when the airfield had serviced only civilian fliers. The small, high-up windows were close to ground level, and Taki had found a perch there, looking out at the dark city with Fly-kinden eyes that could unpick the night.