‘No!’ For a moment Jodry and his secretary stared at one another, Arvi patiently waiting for an explanation for his employer’s outburst. Jodry wanted to say, A cellar, a vault, anywhere sheltered from the sky tonight, but he could not, not even to his secretary, whatever bond of trust existed between them.
Competing shames warred in him then, and one won out. ‘Bring the bottle,’ he decided. ‘Bring the soldiers. We’ll go there together. A good night to clear my desk.’ And, as Arvi ducked down into the cellar, Jodry looked out of the window at the Imperial air force tearing into the city, and thought about his legacy.
Getting from Eujen’s lodgings to the College had been easy, although they had not realized it at the time. Collegium was under the hammer, but only the first few tentative beats, like a smith feeling out the flaws in his material. Eujen found people to pass his warning on to, to scribble down the names that Averic had come up with, so as to send word to everyone they could think of: Beware assassins. Too late, too early, false alarm? They could not tell. No doubt even assassins would find an aerial bombardment an impediment to easy movement.
When they set off for Stenwold Maker’s house, however, they realized that what they had taken for a downpour had only been a shower. Now the skies opened and the bloody deluge came. Looking up into a sky whose occupancy should have been contested by the fragile valour of the Stormreaders, they could see the Imperial orthopters plainly by moonlight, taking their own time over their runs, circling and bombing, and then pulling out to circle again. For a moment the two of them, Wasp and Beetle, just stared up into that blistering sky, at what the war between their kinden had come to.
Then a bomb dropped a street away: the thunderous, glass-breaking sound followed immediately by the killing blossom of an incendiary igniting. Eujen made to run towards the impact, but Averic dragged at his arm, shouting at him.
‘Stenwold Maker! We have to get to him!’
‘You fly to him, then!’ Eujen said desperately, his imagination filling in everything that must be happening just over the rooftops.
‘Not without you! I won’t leave you,’ Averic insisted. ‘Besides, he’d probably kill me.’
Almost certainly true, Eujen realized, and wrenched himself free of the grip of his instincts. ‘Then let’s go!’ he decided, as the next close blast savaged them with shards of stone, spraying the street with debris. He caught Averic’s eyes, found there a mutual understanding that simply getting across the city was going to kill them, odds-on, and then they were running off down the street. At first they tried to watch the skies, to divine safety and danger by the movement of the Farsphex, but there were too many, and from all angles, and any incoming machine might release its load at any time. Eujen was no more able to make sense of them than he would a Moth prophecy.
In the end, the two of them just ran.
Sometimes soldiers tried to stop them, ordering them off the streets into whatever dubious safety might be found. The homemade sashes of the Student Company let them pass on, as kindred spirits with important business. Nobody seemed to care that they were, by any daylit estimation, merely pretend soldiers. On the streets of Collegium that night, they were just as able to help as the professionals, meaning not at all.
The world seemed to detonate all around them — a determined bombing run coming unlooked-for from behind, smashing houses only two streets away — now one street. They fell into a doorway under a hail of splinters and broken bricks, the fierce wash of fire baking them as an apothecary’s workshop across the way erupted into coloured ribbons of flame.
And still the defenders of Collegium were absent, the skies surrendered. Sabotage? Treachery? Have they murdered all our pilots? Staring upwards at that hostile sky, Eujen could only think, Is it the end, right now? Are Straessa and the others dead already, or simply irrelevant? Will the Empire even need to bring its armies, after this?
It seemed like the city’s final night. Certainly it seemed that it could be Eujen’s.
When Stenwold returned to his townhouse that evening, before the Ear sounded, he found a letter awaiting him.
He knew it at once, and it must have been delivered by one of the Fly-kinden privateers with whom he had a highly sensitive arrangement, and who represented Collegium’s trade contacts with the Sea-kinden, of whose existence the bulk of the Beetle-kinden had yet to learn.
It came on leathery parchment that they wove from seaweed somehow, so it would dry out and fragment within a few days. It would not relate to the closely guarded trade between the land and sea that had given Collegium its improved clockwork. This letter would be strictly personal.
This night of all nights. He dearly needed his mind taken away from what he and Jodry had done, the self-destructive trap they had baited for the Imperial air force — and here it was, just as ordered.
He unfolded the unsealed note, noticing the thick paper start to crack at the seams. The writing within was clumsy and childlike, the letters ill-formed. Just as he himself struggled to create the awkward glyphs that made up the Sea-kinden script, so Paladrya of Hermatyre wrestled determinedly with the alphabet of the land.
She was his Regret. Beetle-kinden were not supposed to have Regrets. Such foibles were for the Inapt in their stories of themselves. Spider-kinden had Regrets, where their webs of loyalties grew tangled. Stenwold’s friend, the Mantis Tisamon, had practically lived all his life in one Regret or another. Beetles were supposed to be more prosaic. In the isolation of his own home, though, Stenwold read the Sea-kinden’s letter, and relaxed enough to feel that lingering sadness at how the world had managed to separate him from such a remarkable woman.
Stenwold… he began to read, although he had to translate each word from the truly outlandish, phonetic spelling that Paladrya was prone to.
I am sending regards of the Edmir to your city
I am sending my own to you also your letters are much improved
I understand you fight with the colony of the wasps and that there is much fear the fly-kinden send word that blood will be shed soon
I am also afraid for you stenwold, I would be with you, if I could perhaps soon the edmir will no longer need any advice
I fear the land nothing would bring me to it but you the flies say I should wait until the war is done that you would not want me with you when you fight you know you have not left my thoughts since hermatyre is always open to you. distance only increases my heart when I think of you, and widens my mind.
This would be poetry, he knew, if she had written in her own script, and if he could have read it freely. As it was, it left him bitter at the vagaries of fate, and unsure how much she intended to say, or what was in his reading only.
Maybe, after all this is over and Jodry has me indicted, going back to the sea will be the best option for me. The old fear rose in him of the dark and hungry water, but it seemed less immediate, now, more amenable to negotiation.
For a long time Stenwold stared at the letter, and then he began to work on a reply, less concerned with content than clarity of expression, submerging himself in the scholarly. When the Great Ear sounded, even when the bombs began to fall, he hunkered down and concentrated, as though he was truly an academic again and the sounds outside only the noisy distractions of students. Time and again, he chased away the thoughts, What if I die tonight; what if Banjacs does? Can this be salvaged, or will the sacrifice of so many come to nothing? But the queasy feeling grew within him, the uncertainty of the gamble he and Jodry had taken, until he could no longer palm off his mind with Sea-kinden calligraphy, but only stare out of the window and realize that the war hung on tonight and tomorrow, and any misjudgement could lose everything for his people.