‘Well, yes, and it looks like they — whoever, as you say, they are — have kind of come to the same conclusion.’ She pitched him the incriminating scroll, because this news would be all over the city soon anyway, and because he would hear of it soon enough.
His eyes flicked over it, and the initial paragraphs had him so instantly exercised that she knew he would miss the other gems buried further in.
‘They can’t do this.’
‘It’s done.’
‘And you agree with it? You’ll do it?’ he demanded of her.
‘I’m going to do it.’ She shrugged. ‘Agree with it? Between orders like these and you deciding I’m Maker’s lackey, I’ve lost track of what I agree with.’
‘Conscription,’ Eujen hissed. ‘Not recruitment, conscription.’
Averic had taken the scroll and was reading assiduously. ‘“That all Collegiate citizens should play their part in the defence of their mother city,”’ he quoted, ‘“whether by artifice, feat of arms or such other aid.” And you get to go door to door, asking?’
‘While the Wasps are licking their wounds, this looks like our main assignment,’ the Antspider confirmed. The mood in the room had been calmed as if water had been thrown on a fire, the previous argument gone stone cold now that Eujen had something real to react against.
‘Which means forced conscription into the Companies, for whoever they choose? Anyone they can point at and claim isn’t pulling their weight,’ he stated. ‘Is this aimed at us?’
She had expected that. ‘No, Eujen, it’s not.’
‘Disband the students, then parcel them out between the formal Companies?’ he insisted.
‘No, Eujen, it is not,’ she repeated, more emphatically. ‘Just read the thing properly, would you?’
He snatched the paper back from Averic, but Eujen was already so full of objections that his eyes simply slid off the relevant words, despite the Wasp trying to point them out to him.
‘“All those of age not yet contributing to the defence shall be duly assigned between the Companies currently under arms,”’ Straessa quoted from memory, ‘“namely the Coldstone Company, Outwright’s Pike and Shot, Maker’s Own, Fealty Street Company. .”’ She inserted the appropriate pause, enjoying making him wait. ‘“. . and the Student Company.” Your people, Eujen.’
Eujen’s eyes danced from the written words to Straessa’s face, and back again. ‘What is this supposed to mean?’ he asked quietly.
‘It means congratulations, Chief Officer Leadswell,’ she told him. ‘It means that the next time Stenwold Maker and his shadowy conspiracy meet to decide the fate of the city, you’ll have a seat reserved for you. It also means, I’d guess, that those student citizens who haven’t already signed will end up under your jurisdiction, which by my reckoning means you’ve inherited a tremendous bagful of problems to keep you busy.’
‘They must be mad,’ he murmured.
‘There we agree, but it’s done now. Maybe Sten Maker reckons he needs a conscience. After all, you did your bit during the last scrap.’
He was staring at her as though he had received a death sentence or a court summons; as if it were he who would now be called to go off and fight when the Wasps returned, rather than she. He had always been a statesman in training, she knew: a man of powerful ideals and few compromises who was itching to shake up the Collegiate establishment once he was old enough and influential enough to win a seat on the Assembly. Abruptly, at the age most students were securing an apprenticeship, he found himself at the heart of government.
‘Well done, Eujen, you earned it — which is more than most Assemblers could say. Now you have to actually do it, rather than just talking a good fight.’
She had not meant the words to come out sounding like a jibe, but any antagonism washed over him without sticking.
‘Yes,’ he said, visibly shaken. ‘I suppose I do.’
Collegium’s pilots were led by a Solarnese Fly-kinden named te Schola Taki-Amre, a name that had been long forgotten by everyone else in favour of just ‘Taki’. She was young, as most of them were. In fact, following the great cost with which the Collegiates had repulsed the Imperial air force the last time, it seemed to most people that the city’s airmen and women were working to some bizarre backwards mathematics in which one could plot combat flight time against average age, and draw a line where one increased and the other only ever seemed to fall.
Taki had been flying against other pilots for years — over in now-occupied Solarno it had been a way of life — and she had become the leader of the pilots because they would accept nobody else. In their fast, fierce world, they had shaken off the steadying control of any land bound superiors. Stenwold Maker and his War Council might give them objectives and orders, but once in the air they recognized only their own. Taki was not the only one of them to consider that they had more in common with their airborne foes than with the people they left behind on the ground.
Now she was reporting to what passed for the Council — meaning whatever handful of luminaries could be convened at short notice to listen to her. In truth Eujen Leadswell did not know the half of it. Everyone in a position of importance was so busy actually fighting the war that citywide decisions were being made on the strength of whoever could find the time to turn up.
This time she found herself before Stenwold Maker himself, besides Remas Boltwright of the new-formed Fealty Street Company, some College woman she didn’t know, and Willem Reader of the aviation department, who was co-creator of the Stormreader orthopters that most of her pilots flew. No Jodry Drillen, no Padstock of the Maker’s Own, nor either of the two who had been promoted to fill dead men’s shoes for the unrepresented Merchant Companies. The other absent faces that came to Taki’s mind were of those already fallen in battle.
‘So, they’re back in business,’ she finished, setting it out in terms a landsman could understand. ‘We think there are around a dozen Farsphex with the Second now, which isn’t enough to cause us problems, however good they are, but there’ll be more.’
‘Any chance of catching them on the ground?’ Reader asked her.
‘They’ve kept a solid air watch since we knocked them back,’ Taki informed him. ‘My guess is that they won’t restart the advance until they’ve got more air cover, but I could be wrong. They’ve got enough now to at least slow us down, make each raid more costly and, whilst I could harry them all day and night in my Esca Magni, many of the other Stormreaders don’t have the same staying power. Any kind of serious resistance will cut down on our efficiency.’
‘What about the new pilots?’ the Beetle woman asked.
‘Fit for defence, if we need them, but I wouldn’t want to chance them against Farsphex unless I had to.’ Taki and the best of her pilots had been training up newcomers as fast as they could, but there was a limit to the number of prospective pilots Collegium could produce.
‘The Vekken have pilots they could lend us,’ Willem Reader mused. All eyes turned to him and he shrugged. ‘Desperate times?’
‘Not that desperate,’ Stenwold decided. ‘I’ve worked harder than any to bring the Vekken into our alliance and, believe me, there are still a great many people who don’t trust them even sitting outside our walls. Give them our best machines and there will be riots. And the first suggestion the Vekken get that we might turn on them. . well, it’ll confirm all their usual fears. So, no, not yet. We’ll make do with what we have. Taki, anything more?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice.’
Stenwold nodded and, seeing that nobody else had any more questions for her, she ducked out of the room.
Stenwold himself spent an hour in debate with that husk of a council, concerning the best steps they could take next, before he tasked everyone there with some aspect of the resulting plan and sent them off. After that he settled down to read through the petitions — not the usual civilian business, but proposals from anyone in the city who thought they could help the war. There were hundreds of amateur inventors in Collegium, and most of them had nothing useful to offer and were offering it with great force. Yet there might be hidden gold amongst the dross, and they could not pass up on anything that would give them an advantage. Their last clash with the Wasps had made it plain that the Imperial artificers had not been idle.