Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1) Page 4

  And it had been a long time since he had last thrown a party, his College days, in fact. It had been a good three tendays since his last drunken stint with Tallway, even.

  “Me, the three of you,” he told the Workwell brothers. “Gryssa and Terant. Tallway. Lanzo’s family,” meaning their Fly-kinden watchers. “Can we fit all of that in here? All of that plus one more, maybe?”

  And the Ant-kinden could fold everything away, of course. They were used to a military life, of travelling compactly and usually on foot. There would be a party.

  He gave some of the money to Lanzo, to procure food, and more for Lanzo’s middle cousin, who could play the lyre quite well. He took Tallway’s recommendations regarding the pick of Collegium’s cheap-but-drinkable, although he made those purchases himself, as experience had taught him that Tallway could not be trusted to purchase alcohol without consuming the bulk of it before delivery.

  Three nights later they all came: the Spiders, the Grasshopper exile, the swarm of Fly-kinden. It was a confused and awkward gathering at first, but Tallway took the edge of that, regaling them with the kind of rambling story that she made most of her livelihood by, where even the digressions had digressions of their own. After that, when she had most of them laughing, and had even drawn a smile from Gryssa’s butchered face, tensions eased, and the motley outcasts’ assembly got to work on the wine.

  It was near to midnight when the knock came, at the door. Tallway was inexplicably succeeding in teaching the Workwell brothers some Commonwealer dance, and Lial had ended up sitting on the roof-edge with Terant, the big Spider-kinden, who said little but listened well. When Lial saw a diminutive figure approach the door, his words dried up and he felt his heart skip, but when one of the Ants opened up, the lamplight from inside illuminated only one of Lanzo’s brood, home late from whatever employment she had managed to scrounge. A moment later, though, Tallway had bounded up onto the roof, drink and her Art almost springing her over the edge before she could regain her balance. “Lial! Come see!” she exclaimed, grinning madly. Lial realised that the music had died down below, and the talk also. If Tallway hadn’t found whatever it was so hilarious, he would have been reaching for his knife.

  There were mixed expressions downstairs. Lanzo’s family seemed to share Tallway’s point of view but Gryssa was looking haughtily offended, and the Ant-kinden were, for once, openly bewildered.

  “What is it?” he asked the room at large. Tallway fished a pamphlet from a little stack that had presumably been brought in by the latecoming Fly-kinden.

  It was what they called a ‘polemic’, merry little satires usually put about to lampoon and ridicule the great and good. Lial started at the crude illustration on the frontpiece, and read out the title. “Big Beetle Learns to Fly,” he murmured.

  “It’s wonderful!” Tallway jostled him. “Look, I’m in it. I jump!”

  Lial flicked through the pages. The feeling that came over him took him way back, to when he was a child at school, with some calculation or piece of logic gone awry and the other children laughing at him. Someone was laughing at him. Possibly the whole city was laughing at him. His work, his great work, the death of his mentor and his lofty ideals, had been laid bare for the derision of the masses.

  What am I doing here? he wondered bitterly. I should have listened to Parrymill when I had the chance. He let the polemic’s few badly-printed pages flutter open, seeing little caricatures: a grasshopper, two spiders, some ants, and all through it the clumsy, foolish beetle who wanted to fly.

  He frowned. “So who’s ‘Small Helpful Beetle?’ Do they mean Lanzo?” It seemed unlikely that the anonymous author did. At that moment there came another knock at the door.

  Everyone turned, corpse-silent. Lial put down the polemic softly, as though even the sound of rustled paper would trigger some calamity, and lifted the latch.

  His hopes died immediately. A short and grubby figure was thrusting forwards a folded paper. No great confrontation, then: just another note.

  In a few days the Workshop will be Attacked. They will be Watchmen suborned by Parrymill. Be ready to Defend what you have Built.

  Lial swore, and he sensed the others changing the way they stood, from at ease to readied. When did I become their leader?

  He realised the messenger was still there and automatically fumbled in his pouch for a coin, but when he proffered the little ceramic bit, the Fly would not take it.

  “Lial Morless,” he said instead, and Lial blinked, looking again, seeing not a bulky Fly, but a man of mixed blood, Fly and Beetle both, wrapped in a threadbare long-coat, and with a woollen cap on his head, but no less familiar for all of that.

  “Scop?” he said hoarsely. It had been a good year since Cutmold Limner’s forge-hand had walked out, and his path and Lial’s had never crossed since then. Or so Lial had believed.

  “Lial,” Scop said, and walked in, looking from face to face, seeing offence and uncertainty and, in Tallway’s case, barely-contained giggling.

  “We have preparations to make,” he told them all, and Lial felt his briefly assumed leadership evaporate in the face of the halfbreed’s utter certainty.

  “You’ve done well,” Scop said. As if the Ant-kinden mindlink had briefly expanded to include everyone except him and Lial, all the others had returned to the wine and the food with a will, and given over the roof for more private matters. Lial watched with a mixture of bafflement and resentment as the halfbreed studied the lines of the half-completed flying machine.

  “You know,” Scop added after a moment, “when I left Limner’s place, I didn’t think you meant what you said. I thought it was any apprentice’s mad dream, that it would be forgotten in a tenday, and you’d find another position and end up somewhere comfortable and unambitious, like most artificers in this city. When I heard you’d got as far as shopping for silk, I knew I was wrong. I’m glad of that. This is good work.”

  He was not the man Lial remembered: Limner’s deferential, humble forge hand. Scop was filled with an iron purpose. “How did you find out?” Lial demanded of him. “What business is this of yours?”

  Scop turned to him, and the lanterns cast his face without sympathy in it. “I found out because by then I’d got myself new work, Lial, a new master.”

  “Who?”

  “Goiter Parrymill.”

  Lial stared at him. Each time he tried to assemble the pieces, the picture made less sense. “He hired you? Because you used to work for...?”

  “He has no idea who I am. He’s never met me. His steward hired me, because Parrymill’s such a tight bastard that he can’t ever keep decent staff, respectable staff, not for the filthy jobs: only foreigners and debtors, and halfbreeds. I’m the man that shines the shoes of his better servants, Lial. I’m the man that cleans out his privy. And because I’m mixed-blood, the other servants take advantage of me. I do all sorts of other people’s’ jobs, when the steward’s not looking. I go everywhere in Parrymill’s townhouse. I read all his letters. I don’t think they realise I can.” The speech was delivered in flat, hard words that had a lot of pent-up anger beaten into them. “When Parrymill was warned not to deal with a fallen Spider Arista, I passed her onto you. When the other servants were taking Parrymill’s goods to be fixed by Ant-kinden, because the housekeeping monies were pitiful and the Ants were cheap, I passed them onto you too. And when Parrymill got worried enough about you to commission a report on your machine, well, you know the rest.”

  Lial shook his head. There was no real affection for him in Scop’s eyes, only the pride of a smith who has made a sword that will slay emperors. “Is this just to get at Parrymill for the work he makes you do?” he tried. “Why are you doing all of this?”

  “Why are you?” Scop turned on him.

  “Because I was Cutmold Limner’s apprentice, and he had a dream!” Lial shouted at him. “And that means something!”

  “Yes, it does,” Scop confirmed. “And I was his forge hand, Lial.” He used the p
ersonal name as if he were hammering in nails with it. “Think, for a moment, what I am now. Ten years around machines, and I know as much as most who have their College accredits, but I’m the man who cleans the privies because nobody wants a halfbreed artificer. Limner was different. He didn’t care about the blood. For that, I’ll make you fly.”

  Lial had nothing to say to that. From below came the sounds of Tallway launching into another tangled tale. “The money for the party...” he managed weakly.

  “Some of what I’d saved. I never did have much of a taste for indulging myself. The rest went on the polemics.”

  A jolt of undirected rage went through Lial at the very mention. “You...? But why do all that, just to knock us all down...?”

  Scop shook his head. “Lial, the polemics are all over the city by now. Collegium loves a good satire with a few funny drawings. Everyone knows, Lial. This isn’t some secret that Parrymill can do away with and throw a cloak over. Whether they’re laughing at you or not, people are waiting for you to try your wings.”

  For a long while Lial looked at the little halfbreed. He searched his heart and realised that, in the last ten minutes, he had become afraid of Scop. He abruptly had no idea what the man might not be capable of.

  “Which leads us to my most recent note. You’ve not forgotten, I trust?” Scop prompted.

  In a few days the workshop will be attacked, Lial remembered. “They’re really going to come here...?”

  “Parrymill’s terrified that you might reduce the value of his airship empire by three parts in a hundred,” Scop confirmed, “and for that he’s gone to a watch officer friend of his and told him about the dangerous treasons that you’re plotting with all manner of foreigners. You’ll get a couple of nights in the cells before they decide it was all a mistake, but in the meantime the machine will be destroyed, your charts and notes confiscated, everything wrecked..”

  “Then what do we do?” Lial asked, and as he said it he realised that he had given in at last. He had accepted Scop’s authority over him, accepted that every success of the last year was a gift of the halfbreed’s hand. “Look at them down there: renegade Sarnesh, rogue Spider-kinden. They’d all face exile if they so much as raised a hand to a watchman.”

  “You have perhaps three days, and the nights that go with them,” Scop said. “Thanks to the polemic the city is watching, and I hope that may stay Parrymill’s hand long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?” demanded Lial.

  “Finish the machine,” Scop told him.

  The city watch of Collegium was not comprised of redeployed army men, as in Ant cities, nor was it the foreign mercenaries and house guard of the Spiderlands or the partisan, privately hired militia of Helleron. Collegium’s watch was engaged by the Assembly on behalf of the city, and for the most part did its duty well enough. Human nature was a rock on which many good intentions had foundered, though, and so enter Maxel Rodder, fifty years of plodding watch officer, whose priorities were for the comfort of his anticipated retirement. If so much of a man as Goiter Parrymill assured him that the Workwell workshop was a nest of crime and double-dealing then he needed no further prompting, and so it was that he and a half-dozen watchmen marched through the streets of Collegium towards Shallowacre.

  The influx of outlanders was a common topic of debate in those years, being brought before the Assembly at least once a month. In time, and especially after the settling of matters with Sarn, calmer heads would prevail, but at that moment there were many Beetles in Collegium who fretted about the number of other kinden on their streets, and what they might be up to. So it was that a watch officer like Rodder could feel justified in utilising a heavy hand against, say, a gang of rogue Sarnesh who had irked one of the great and good.

  He was preceded into Shallowacre by a flurry of Fly-kinden children, scooting ahead of him at gutter-height, but that was a common-enough thing, Fly-kinden being forever curious for spectacle, and so he paid it no heed. Instead he spotted the Ant workshop ahead and slowed his pace, deciding that his years merited the ‘awful majesty of the law’ approach, rather than the more exerting ‘catch them at it’ rush that younger men might have tried.

  Indeed, the Ant-kinden appeared to be waiting for him. At the back of his mind had been a worry that Ant-kinden were habitually violent and of poor judgment, and that this might actually turn ugly. His men had come weighed down with chainmail, helm and breastplate, and they had maces, crossbows and round shields. Greater than those was the partisan aegis of Collegium law, which would look extremely narrowly on any foreigner that raised a hand against its own. Still, that would be poor solace for the man who ended up with an Ant dagger in his eye.

  However, the scene that met him was as peaceable as any in the city. The three near-identical Ants stood, as if on parade, before a workshop whose small dimensions were utterly crammed with worktables and pieces of disassembled artifice. Rodder had been briefed by Master Parrymill as to what he was looking for: plans, part-complete mechanisms of some kind of flying automotive, and of course the item itself, which he knew to be above on the roof. He had anticipated sweeping in, confiscating everything that looked pertinent, and sorting it out later. Seeing the true state of things, he realised that he should have brought a score more men just to carry everything out.

  “Where are the plans for the flying machine?” he demanded of the Ants, optimistically. They stared at him without expression. Rodder was aware that a crowd was slowly accumulating, other residents and artisans of Shallowacre taking in a free piece of street theatre.

  Rodder was no artificer, but he was a Collegium Beetle and had a good idea what he was looking for. Searching through the Workwell’s piled junk would be the work of a tenday, though, and Parrymill had stressed the urgency of the task. “The roof,” he snapped, and did his best to shoulder past the Ants to the stairs. The Ants themselves, the model of civic obedience, stepped meekly aside. The clutter of their workshop did not. There was not space for an armoured Beetle-kinden to make any headway at all, and for a moment Rodder was stalled by sheer logistics.

  He ordered the Ants to clear a path to the stairs. They looked at him blankly, as if to say ‘whyever for?’ He told them to get the workbenches out of the way. They began painstakingly unloading the tables, piece by piece. Nothing of them indicated defiance. There was not the slightest rough edge that Rodder could use as a trigger for justifiable arrest or persecution. He was acutely aware of the several dozen spectators, a good half of whom, given Shallowacre’s low rents, were also foreigners.

  But on the other hand, Parrymill would be waiting for his report. With a snarl of frustration Maxel Rodder took hold of the nearest workbench and upended it, spilling parts and tools, papers and piecework across the floor. “Clear that up, you Ant bastard,” he snapped, halfway hoping for some supporting murmur from the crowd. Instead the silence behind him was stony. Still, he was committed now, and forged ahead to the foot of the stairs, flinging everything out of his way.

  He was just about to ascend, his men after him, when one of the Ants spoke up.

  “Excuse me, but we do not use the stairs. Possibly they are unsafe,” one of the Workwells informed him.

  “I know you work on the roof,” Rodder levelled at him. The man shrugged.

  “We go up the outside wall if we need to. Our Art, you understand.”

  “Likely,” snorted Rodder, and went up the stairs on the double.

  The growing crowd of onlookers was treated to a brief but memorable duet for metal armour and cursing, and Rodder and most of his men reappeared at the bottom of the stairs. For a moment it was unclear what had transpired, but then it became apparent that several of them were in some way attached to one another, and that at least one of the watch remained stuck halfway up. What had seemed originally to be dust covering them was revealed as strands of silken web, of a particularly adhesive kind, and precious minutes were wasted in the watchmen disentangling themselves.

  “We do not
use the stairs,” the Ant repeated. “We believe there is a spider.” His hands indicated a beast of variable but alarming size.

  After that there was nothing for it: Rodder and his men went up with maces at the ready, using lighter-flames to burn through such webs as they found, and cautiously at that because a fair proportion of Shallowacre was flammable. Their ascent to the roof of the Workwell workshop became as difficult and painstaking as mountaineering.

  But at last, because he was nothing if not determined, Rodder cleared the roof, and there he saw it.

  It was an unlovely thing. Even silk stretched over a skeleton of wood and steel can be ugly, and this machine was a triumph of practicality over aesthetics. The front end looked too broad and heavy, angular and lumpy like a spider’s cocooned victim, cupped about the single bare seat and the few sticks that served as the vessel’s meagre controls. The back end tapered off into a two-pronged rudder, seeming too fragile. The ribbed wings themselves were half-closed, up and back, at an unnatural angle. Nothing that flew in life would have held itself so.

  There were three people up on the roof, Rodder saw. A small Fly – no, some Fly halfbreed – and some lanky, sallow foreign woman were watching him as he clambered out into the air. The third was a Beetle-kinden man, and he was working at the machine.

  At that moment Rodder saw how he had been made a fool of, what all the stalling had been for. The Beetle was not mending it, or building it. He was winding it, priming an engine.

  “Right, you bastard, you’re under arrest!” Rodder shouted. “You stop that right now.”

  The artificer stopped, indeed, straightening up and looking back at Rodder. Then, in one movement, he had swung himself over the side and was sitting in the machine.

  Rodder lunged for him, even as his watchmen were pulling themselves up onto the roof. The artificer was reaching for the controls, but Rodder reckoned that if he could get a hand onto any part of that unwieldy looking machine then it wasn’t going anywhere.

  Lial swore, seeing the watch officer lunge. The lever that engaged the clockwork was stiff. He hauled on it. The man’s hand clawed for the unnamed flier’s hull.