Empire in Black and Gold sota-1 Read online

  Salma’s smile widened a little, but lost its warmth. ‘I did wonder what you knew, when you took me as a pupil so easily.’

  The other three were staring at him dubiously, and he shook his head. ‘When I first came here, it had been only a year since the Twelve-Year War ended. Twelve years’ conflict between my people and the Wasp-kinden.’

  Their expressions had become intense as they tried to assimilate this, to stretch their minds around the periods of time involved.

  ‘The Wasps only stopped their march forward when they became overextended. There was a rebellion behind their lines, conquered people trying to cast off the yoke. The Wasps then offered us a chance at peace, and by that time we had no choice but to take the terms they gave. They demanded three border principalities. Over here, in extent, that’s from about Lake Sideriti right to the west coast, taking in all of Collegium and Vek along the way. The Wasps then turned round to crush the rebellions as we sat there with our Treaty of Pearl. We’re still waiting for them to come back. So that explains where their army has been, all those years. Not sitting idle, believe me.’ Salma sat back, watching them.

  ‘And my agents in Helleron, who keep an eye and ear open for me, lead me to believe that the Lowlands will be next to feel the rod,’ Stenwold finished. ‘If nothing else it will mean that, when the Wasps move on the Commonweal again, they’ll come at it from both east and south, and with Helleron’s foundries supplying their army.’

  ‘So what can we do?’ Che asked the question in all of their minds.

  Stenwold sagged. ‘I had hoped that this would go differently, but time’s a wheel that crushes better plans than mine. I’d wanted to take you. . take some of you with me to Helleron, to introduce you and gather a little information there. Once you were ready, and when I knew enough about the Wasp plans, I would put a question to you.’ He paused, aware that he was turning a page in their lives, and his, that could not be turned back. ‘I am putting the question to you now. Will you help me against the Wasp-kinden? I want you to be my agents in this. Think very carefully before you answer. Now, Totho.’

  The halfbreed had been very quiet, very still. He watched Stenwold warily as the old man pulled a scroll case from within his voluminous robe.

  ‘I had to fight for these, but they’re yours. I know that the Master Artificers have been stinting you, so I’ve made sure you’ve got everything that’s due to you. Your College accredits, Totho. As of now you’re confirmed as a journeyman artificer.’

  Haltingly, the youth took the case from him, not even daring to open it. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘I’m giving these to you now so that you’ll have them, whatever you decide,’ Stenwold explained awkwardly. ‘Just so you know I’m not a blackmailer.’ Though only I know all the things this business has had me do.

  ‘What would we need to do for you?’ Tynisa interrupted.

  ‘Difficult to say, right now,’ he admitted. ‘But go to Helleron and ask questions, meet my people there. Collect word as it comes in from the east, and find out what the Wasp foothold in Helleron amounts to. Sound simple enough? Then remember that the Wasp-kinden have agents as well, or can hire them. Our late-night guests were just such an example. You’ll need to keep a blade and a fallback escape plan handy.’ He grimaced. ‘As I said, this isn’t how I wanted it but right now, with what happened last night, I want you safely out of Collegium. Just now it’s more dangerous for you to be with me here, than alone in Helleron. So even if you don’t want to take me up on this suggestion, you should still leave the city.’ He looked from face to face. ‘Any thoughts yet?’

  Salma stretched luxuriously, making it all seem like some minor matter, barely worth his attention. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve already written to my Kin-obligate in the Commonweal. I’ll be a servant of two masters, Master Maker. Two masters with a common enemy.’

  ‘I can live with that, and you won’t be the first in that position,’ Stenwold said.

  ‘I want to help, too,’ Che added quickly. ‘I’ll do whatever you need me to.’

  Stenwold felt a stab of sadness. I had wanted to keep you from this. But he had no safe place to keep her now, and if the Wasps marched on the Lowlands there might be no such place anywhere.

  Tynisa still held her own counsel, but Stenwold saw Totho nod slowly, though not looking too happy about it.

  ‘I’ll go, sir,’ he said simply, and Stenwold wondered if it was the accredits just received that had made up his mind. Or maybe it was the lure of Helleron’s machines and factories, or something else.

  ‘Tynisa?’

  She smiled at him. ‘Uncle Sten, there are things you aren’t telling us.’

  And he thought, Blood will out, because she had seen through him just as sweetly. He was playing a blindfold game that all Spiders knew in their hearts from their earliest years. Here she was in his city, raised amongst his own resolutely practical kind, yet she could still have been a Spider-kinden princess.

  ‘And some of it I will tell you, if and when you agree, and some of it is not safe yet for you to know.’ And let them brood on why that is.

  Tynisa was still looking at him keenly, considering carefully. ‘And you’re going to join us in Helleron?’

  ‘As soon as I can. When I have closed my business here.’

  Her smile changed from the penetrating to the blithe. ‘Why not, then? Let’s all go.’ He wondered how much she had guessed at. Still, he now had their agreement, although he wondered if any of them had given it for the right reason. He was not even sure he would know what that right reason was.

  ‘So what’s the plan, Uncle Sten?’ Tynisa prompted him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘before all this blew up I made arrangements for four of us to take the rail as far as Sarn, and go overland from there to Helleron. Sound good?’

  ‘If there’s no other way of travelling,’ Salma said. The idea of the rail automotive obviously did not sit well with him.

  ‘As it happens, there is,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘If all of this was happening a month from now, we’d have the Iron Road to take us direct to Helleron, and damn the expense. However, the promised last hundredweight of track is slow to be laid, and we need to shift promptly. Because of this, by midday you four will be on board the Sky Without, which is leaving for Helleron today.’

  ‘The Sky Without being some manner of flying boat, as I recall,’ Salma remarked.

  ‘An airship,’ Totho breathed. ‘Very new. Very large.’

  Salma grimaced. ‘Even better.’

  ‘I will send one of the Messengers Guild to Helleron. It’s about the only way to cover the distance before the Sky does. I’ll let my people know you’re coming. They should be meeting you at Benevolence Square, which is close on the airfield. My chief ally in Helleron goes by the name of Scuto, but the man you’ll meet will be Bolwyn.’

  ‘Well, Bolwyn’s a good Beetle name. Is Scuto maybe Fly-kinden then?’ Tynisa asked.

  ‘I’ll. . let Bolwyn introduce you,’ said Stenwold non-committally. From inside his robes he fished out a square of folded paper. ‘Here. Keep this safe. This is Bolwyn.’

  It was a portrait, a pencil sketch done with a minimum of lines and shading, but still giving a clear picture of a heavy-jawed middle-aged Beetle-kinden man. The signature, in spiky writing at its foot, read ‘NERO’.

  ‘Any questions?’ Stenwold asked, after they had each taken a turn examining the portrait.

  ‘Yes, what about you?’ Che asked.

  He smiled at her fondly. ‘You’re worried about me?’

  ‘I am, Uncle Sten, yes.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you be?’ he said. ‘A man past his prime, like me? Too great at the waist, too small of strength. A historian better suited to books than the blade. That’s what you think, is it?’

  ‘Well-’

  ‘Because that’s what the Wasps think too, I hope.’ Stenwold put on a smile for their benefit, but inside he was thinking, That Thalric, though. I can’t se
e him falling for it. ‘I’ll be with you in Helleron before you know it,’ he assured them.

  He took a good look at them, though, before they all left the taverna by the back entrance. His last agents. His ward, his niece. His chips were on the table now, and he had nothing held back. It was win-all or lose-all on this hand.

  I wish I had Tisamon here. Stenwold used to fear nothing when walking in Tisamon’s shadow.

  He tipped the Merraia’s owner handsomely for use of the room, and more for telling skewed stories later, about who had come in and who had left where. Those four young people had walked in free and innocent but left with his mark on them. He could make a list of those others who had taken that mark to early graves. Not a great list, true, but he had no more of them he could afford to lose.

  He hurried off into the brightening morning light, wondering just how many eyes were fixed on him, how many of the busy crowd were marking his steps.

  Seven

  The airfield lay eastwards and seawards of Collegium, beyond its walls, although smaller airstrips had sprung up within the city wherever the rich magnates could find space for them. The earliest flying machines had been erratic things. The accepted way of getting them off the ground had been to launch them off the promontory beside the harbour, and hope the wind took them before the sea did. The science of aviation had advanced a little since then, of course.

  Collegium boasted the largest airfield in all the Lowlands, with Helleron a close second. Beetles and artifice, Beetles and industry, they always went hand in hand. When Ant-kinden built fliers or automotives, they were intended for war. Beetles built them for all purposes, for freight, for exploration, for the sole sake of the mechanics, for simply travelling faster between two points.

  Even so, air travel by anything other than Art-wings or a mount was a new thing to the Lowlands. The first reliable flier had been tested here four generations ago, but regular air travel was one generation old at best, and expensive too. Collegium’s airfield had some four dozen fliers arrayed across its hard-packed earth. Each was different, the individual peculiarities of inventor and smithy making their mark. Orthopters, heliopters, even a few fixed-wings, but towering over them was a pair of dirigibles with their inflated gasbags, and towering over them floated the Sky Without.

  ‘I’ve read all about her,’ Totho was saying. ‘She’s the first of a new generation of lighter-than-air fliers. Most of the others of her size use hot air, you see, which means half the weight you actually lift is due to the boilers and the burners.’

  Tynisa, walking behind him, had never seen him so animated. He was a real hermit crab of a man, she mused. What emerged infrequently out of his shell was nothing you’d guess at from the outside.

  ‘But the Sky doesn’t use air at all,’ Totho went on. ‘The bag’s filled with precipitate of mordant aquillin, which is actually lighter than the air, and so you can free up so much more space for the freight and passengers, and the engines-’

  ‘Toth, will you take a moment to think about who you’re talking to here,’ Salma said to him. ‘Old news to Che, I’m sure, and, well. .’

  Totho craned back at him. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No, I don’t understand — not a word. You’re wasting your explanatory talents on me.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sudden comprehension came to Totho. ‘But even if you don’t, you must have seen-’

  ‘We don’t have air ships in the Commonweal, Toth,’ Salma said patiently. ‘Think about it. We don’t have artificers. We don’t have automotives or engine-mills or even crossbows in the Commonweal, now, do we?’

  ‘But. .’ Totho floundered for a second. ‘Amongst all of you?’

  Salma grinned. ‘You ever see a Mantis mechanic, Toth?’

  ‘I. . No, of course not.’

  ‘You’ll not see one amongst the Dragonfly-kinden, either. Nor anyone from the Commonweal.’

  ‘Sorry, it’s just. . hard to grasp. Tynisa?’

  She shook her head. ‘Sorry, Totho. All machinery bibble-babble to me.’

  ‘But you were brought up here in Collegium!’ he protested. ‘Surely. .’

  ‘Sorry. You ever see a Spider-kinden crossbow-woman? Being Apt to machines isn’t something you can just pick up. You’re born to it or you’re not.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Che patted Totho’s arm. ‘I was listening. Tell me.’ Privately, though, as Totho’s enthusiasm waxed again, she was considering what it must be like being Tynisa, or Salma, in Collegium. Or Doctor Nicrephos, or Piraeus, or any of them: all those who had lost out in the revolution, those centuries before.

  She had seen Tynisa with a crossbow, once. It had been when they were both around twelve, and Tynisa had been determined to become good with it, as she had been with everything else she put her hand to. That day lingered in the memory because it was the first time Che had found something she herself could do, that her foster-sister could not.

  But it’s not hard, she remembered saying patiently. You just point it at the target and pull the lever. And the staggering weight of her understanding that Tynisa just could not grasp the notion, could not understand that the action led to the result. She almost shot Stenwold when she finally clutched the weapon so hard she mistakenly triggered it, and she could not even begin to reload or re-cock it. It was not just that she had never been trained, or taught. It had all been there for her, if only she could adapt her mind to take it in.

  Persistent myth related that the crossbow was the first tool of the revolution. Almost certainly there had been something else, something less warlike and more practical. The crossbow was what won the battles, though. Any fool could pick up a crossbow and kill a man with it, any Beetle-kinden, or Ant, anyone Apt. Bows were an art-form, crossbows but a moment in the learning, in the making. The world had been turned upside down within a generation by men and women armed with the crossbow and the pulley, the hand-pump and the watermill. All the old masters of the Lowlands had been unthroned, their slaves prising mastery of the world from their impotent hands. There were a few exceptions, as always. She had heard of itinerant Beetle scholars going native deep in the forests of the Mantids, propitiating spirits and painting their faces, and fifty years ago there had even been a Moth artificer at Collegium, brilliant and half-mad. The old races of the superstitious night were waning, though. Only the Spider-kinden held on to their power, and that because they could play the younger races like a musical instrument. The world belonged to the Apt: Beetles, Ants, and most Fly-kinden these days, the races of the bright sun that drove out the shadows.

  And also the Wasps: an entire Empire of the Apt. That was not a comforting thought.

  ‘Salma,’ Che began. Nobody was going to like this question, and she knew the answer would be less popular still. ‘Your people fought the Wasps for twelve years?’

  ‘They did,’ he confirmed.

  ‘How. . Don’t take this the wrong way, but how did they hold out for twelve years, with no artificers, no machines or modern weapons?’

  He laughed at that, although his laugh was hollow. ‘We are archers without peer, Che, and the Wasp-kinden are clumsy in the air when we fight them. We are quick and skilled and stealthy by turns.’ Something lively went out of his voice. ‘But, most of all, we sent our soldiers against them in wave after wave after wave. We sold each inch of Commonweal land to them for ten times its weight in blood, mostly. That is what we did when the Wasp Empire came.’ He had suddenly stopped walking and they turned back to him, Che desperately wishing she had some way of taking her question back, of not hearing the answer.

  He was still smiling at them and that was the worst part. It was Salma’s couldn’t-care-less smile that they all knew well, and it clung on even when he said, ‘At the battle of Shan Real the ground was so soaked in blood that their machines sunk in and could not be moved, and we flew over them and shot them as they tried to climb out.’

  ‘You were there?’ Che said. The other two were leaving this particular pitfall conversat
ion to her, and quite right too.

  ‘No, I wasn’t there. I was too young, and far away,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘I do apologize, really. Tasteless stuff this early in the morning. Sometimes you. . Low-landers, though, you just don’t understand how things are.’

  ‘I know, we’re all barbarians really,’ said Tynisa wryly, ‘scratching ourselves in public and sleeping in the same room as the dirigibles.’

  His smile regained its stability. ‘Bunch of savages, the lot of you,’ he agreed. ‘Now let’s get on board this wretched flying machine before Totho explodes with impatience, shall we?’

  The designer had fitted three decks into the gondola of the Sky Without, although without allowing much headroom on any of them. Relieved of the machinery that a hot-air dirigible required, the staterooms took up the top tier, where the view was marginally grander. Below that were the common room, the kitchen and the cramped crew quarters, and below that again those areas of the ship that the passengers would prefer not to see: freight storage holds and the mechanics’ walkways that led to the ship’s three engines.

  As soon as his companions were ensconced in the common room, Totho made his apologies and found his way below with unerring instinct. He remembered when the Sky Without had been originally commissioned, designed in Collegium the same year as Totho had begun his studies, and with its major parts cast in the foundries at Helleron and then hauled at a snail’s pace overland during the best part of eleven months. The Sky was now due to make the return journey in a little over a tenday because, for such a gargantuan vessel, she was fast.

  Up on an exposed gantry Totho found the secret of that speed soon enough. Out from the body of the gondola, but still in the shadow of the airbag, two engineers were testing the starboard steering propeller. They glanced at him as he climbed hand over hand up to them, and one of them said, ‘No passengers here. Go back to the decks.’