The lamp was out. He could not guess why, but only because there were too many options, crosses and double-crosses, or even the Solarnese themselves trying to thwart the Spider fleet that Breighl had spoken of. Laszlo landed on the top rail, finding the glass of the great lamp smashed, the whole place reeking of oil. Not good, not good at all. He could not call out her name, however much he wanted to. Anyone might be here now and, if it was not her, then it would be nobody that wanted to see poor Laszlo.
He crouched on the very rail, the wooden gantry beneath him jagged with broken glass, listening into the quiet of the night, eyes closed so that he could make his ears his only world. The wash of the waters below, he heard, and sounds from the city close at hand: engines, shouting, the drone of an orthopter.
Someone moved, not out on the gantry itself but within the lighthouse. He heard a slow scrape, metal on wood, and a hiss of breath.
He had his dagger out again and, after a moment, he took one of the sleevebows in his other hand. Inching about the railing he found the door that would let the lighthouse custodian out to clean and refill the lamp — and found it standing open. The darkness hung heavy inside, but he trusted to his Fly eyes and let his wings glide him inside, touching down in silence at the head of the spiral stairs.
Again came that gasp of breath, ragged enough to bring back too many memories of fights gone sour, of shipmates lost despite all the surgeons could do, and now it was more than he had the willpower for not to call out, ‘Liss?’
Don’t be Liss. Don’t be Liss. There had been death in that sound, as sure as death ever was. The stairs wound about the hollow interior, simple wooden slats pegged into the stone, each bolted to the next with steel struts. There was no guard-rail, and the central well of the lighthouse tower was a yawning abyss. Laszlo called for his wings and stepped into the void without hesitation, sleevebow trained down as he descended, knowing how vulnerable he would be but unable simply to creep down like some ground-bound Beetle.
He spotted the body halfway down: small, Fly-kinden. No cascade of curls, nothing of Liss — a man, in fact. He was going to set down a dozen steps above, but then he recognized the casualty and ended up right beside him.
‘Te Riel,’
Someone had put a long knife into te Riel’s gut and left him. There were other wounds: a cut-open palm and a spread of blood across his shoulder, but the stomach blow had finished it. The man was shaking, curled about the weapon that was still buried in him, one hand on the hilt but without the strength of body or mind to pull it out and hasten his own end. The other arm was hooked about a step, keeping him from a final fall. Fly-kinden were masters of the air, but the wound had stripped all that off him at the last.
‘Laszlo.’ A voice so low that Laszlo had to stoop down, almost ear to mouth, to hear it. ‘Liss.’
Just for you, she said. It hurt a little, knowing that she had been saving that little space on her wall for te Riel as well, but not as much as it had hurt te Riel himself.
‘I don’t know where she is, if she’s not here.’ He put a hand on the dying man’s shoulder, feeling it already cold despite the man’s tenacious hold on life. ‘Help me. Tell me. I know you liked her too.’
The awful sound of te Riel laughing would stay with Laszlo for a long time, each bark of it echoed by an agonized indrawing of breath. ‘Gone. Gone,’ then something indistinct, and then, clear as day, ‘the hangars. Going to blow up the hangars. ’
‘The Empire?’ Laszlo remembered who he was speaking to. ‘Your lot?’
‘Not,’ te Riel wheezed out. ‘Not mine… trying to get out from under… Laszlo, the hangars! All the… Solarnese have… going up…’
‘I’m going, te Riel. I’m going-’ but the man snagged his arm with the blood-slick hand that had been holding on to the knife hilt.
‘Not… please…’ There was a shuddering moment when Laszlo thought he had died, but the bloody grip remained. ‘Die with my own name, please… not te Riel…’
There was more, but it was just a whisper, barely words, certainly not a name. Then the man was dead, taking his secrets with him.
The hangars. Even with that thought, Laszlo was soaring up the well, spitting himself out into the open air and casting back for the city. The hangars — within sight of his own lodgings! And the war was being started right there, while he was elsewhere.
And Liss, his Liss, was somewhere in the middle of it. Someone had her. Someone was about to strike at Solarno. It was all coming together.
He had never flown faster, the buildings of Solarno rushing past beneath him, but he knew he would be too late.
Ten
It had all been like some strange kind of game although, because all the factory workers were being constantly appraised and tested, a game that was not in the least enjoyable.
Pingge had not seen Kiin for more than two days during the last two tendays, and that was what hurt most. They were being constantly reassigned to groups, randomly switched back and forth, so that they never became confortable with whoever they were working alongside. The tasks were the same, though, or at least variations on a common theme.
There was a device that the engineers called a ‘reticule’, and it appeared to be all important, although Pingge could not quite understand why. Her last twenty days had been spent in intensive training with it, however, so she had to assume that their faith was justified. It was intricate but hardly complex, perhaps a step above the weaving looms. Positioned above it, she could look down towards the floor of whatever warehouse or vault they had taken her to, adjusting the lenses for focus. There was a burden, too — sometimes a lead weight but mostly just a sack of flour. Pingge would be strapped into a harness with the reticule before her face, and the harness would be attached to a wire, and the wire would be strung between the walls. At the engineer’s word, she was released, to rush helter-skelter across the great vacant space, and there would always be a circle or some other symbol painted below.
It was a silly, simple game, really: release the burden so that it struck home on the symbol, allowing for momentum and using the distortion of the reticule’s lenses to spy out the ground ahead. Pingge had proved one of the better Fly-kinden at this charade, but mostly because she was able to relax into the business as a game, without fretting about the purpose behind it all.
A delegation of her comrades — she had not been amongst them — had gone to the engineers to point out that, as they were Fly — kinden, the whole business would be easier if they could guide the descent with their wings, but this apparently was besides the point. Those who could not keep their Art in check were slapped in ‘Fly-manacles’: leather strapping about the back and shoulders that stifled their wings entirely.
They were trained night and day, sometimes woken out of sleep as though the world was about to end, for just another session of shuttling to and fro. They trained under bright gaslamps, in daylight, at night, in dim underground caverns. They were kept without sleep for nights at a time. They were put on short rations. None of it seemed to have a pattern — no suggestion of punishment was ever implied, nor even of simple Wasp-kinden cruelty.
Although the groupings remained random, Pingge had started to see more recurring faces in the last eight days or so. Nobody wanted to ask what had happened to those people they no longer saw. The other questions could not be bottled, though: Why conscript Fly-kinden if you didn’t want them to fly?