Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Fly dropped from the window ledge, his wings flurrying him away as though a strong wind had caught him. Feeling sour and tired, the Beetle-kinden man began to dress himself, hauling on the hard-wearing leathers of an artificer.
He stumped downstairs to the door of his lodgings. The woman that ran the place, a boot-faced Ant and Beetle halfbreed, was inexplicably waiting ready for him in the obvious belief that he intended shirking payment of the bill. He had stayed at this place on and off for seven years, and yet she still would not trust him an inch or advance him a clay bit’s worth of credit.
‘I’ll be going for a while,’ he told her, after settling up. ‘Hold the room for me.’
‘Where to this time?’ Her tone suggested that only the congenitally mad would contemplate a life of travel for themselves.
‘No idea,’ he replied, confirming her in her conviction. Then he was out of the door, into the night, stamping across to the airfield.
There was a faint mist that had come in off the sea, and the great lamps delineating the airfield’s perimeter turned it into a shimmering, silver-red haze. Within it, the shapes of flying machines loomed like the relics of monsters: orthopters with wings folded upwards or back along their sleek lines; lumpen heliopters with their rotors drooping and still; aggressive-styled flyers with two or even three banks of fixed wings. Over them all loomed the grand hulks of the dirigibles, like a convoy of moons strung over the airfield, and the beached ship-hulls that were gondolas awaiting the inflation of their balloons.
The Beetle first went to the hull of his own airship and, with quiet practice, started the pumps that would see her own gasbag fill up. Then he perched in the vessel’s prow and watched, waiting for the inevitable, until he saw the promised Stenwold Maker. The old man had changed little since they had last done business: a bit leaner perhaps, but just as strung out with energy and tension. There were a couple of Fly-kinden and a few others clustered about him, but Maker always had possessed a strange taste in friends.
The Beetle aviator let himself down from his airship to the ground, aware that the time had come to put aside – for the night or for the tenday or who knew how long – his commerce and his freedom, and instead dance to Maker’s tune once more. A combination of guilt, remembrance and his personal honour meant that he never even thought of just walking away.
‘Master Maker,’ he acknowledged gruffly, when the man reached him. The Assembler’s straggling entourage, he noted, looked even more miscellaneous than usual.
‘Jons Allanbridge,’ Stenwold named him, with a slight smile. ‘It’s been a while since the war.’
‘Since the last one,’ Allanbridge agreed. ‘Not dead after all, then?’
‘Not for want of trying.’
The two Beetles clasped hands solemnly. Stenwold looked into the other man’s face and read enough to guess at secrets – at recent revisions to the man’s life that Allan-bridge was none too keen to bring to light.
‘Where do you trade these days, Jons?’ he asked, watching for a shadow to cross the man’s face. He had encountered this situation before: a trusted agent left to go wild, and who could know what you would find, when you went back? And Allanbridge had never been Stenwold’s man, precisely, just a patriotic free-trader willing to sail where Stenwold asked in return for a fair price and repairs to his vessel.
Allanbridge shrugged. ‘Since we’d visited there, I thought I’d have a crack at the Commonweal. Hard going, but I like a challenge.’ Something dark was hiding in his face that he wasn’t revealing, but for the moment Stenwold trusted that it was just the usual round of smuggling and contraband.
‘This isn’t the
Maiden
,’ Stenwold noted, looking up at the steadily expanding balloon. He had fond memories of Allanbridge’s previous craft.
‘With the war and all, I raised credit to trade up. Needed bigger cargo space, mostly,’ Allanbridge replied, sounding more enthusiastic. ‘She’s named the
Windlass
. Nice, eh?’
Stenwold nodded. ‘Getting ready to take her out, then?’
‘Just like old times, is it?’ Allanbridge gave a huge sigh. ‘Where to, Master Maker?’
‘Princep Salmae.’
The destination was obviously a surprise to the aviator. ‘That close? I thought you were going to say Shon Fhor or Capitas or Solarno or somesuch. That’s all you want me for? Princep Salmae’s a two-day trip at most.’
‘The quicker the better, though. She can carry all of us?’
‘And twice as many again. Get your people aboard and we’ll leave as soon as she’s fully up.’
Stenwold turned back to his followers: Laszlo and the sea-kinden. With the exception of the Fly, they were staring up at the growing gasbag with astounded awe. The hull itself was enough like a boat for them to recognize, and Stenwold could see that Allanbridge could make a water landing in the
Windlass
easily if he needed, but the balloon itself was immense, building-sized. They could never have seen anything like it before, he thought, until Paladrya murmured, ‘Medusoi of the sky.’ He looked again, and saw for a moment, in that burgeoning expanse of silk and heated gas, the bell and tendrils of Lyess’s translucent companion.
The sea-kinden’s reaction to the flight was surprising. At first the lifting sensation completely bewildered them: they looked ill, swaying and lurching in the
Windlass
’s cargo hold, as Allanbridge sent the airship bobbing over the spires of Collegium. They clutched at every available support, and at each other, and their footing skidded and slipped. They were so obviously unsure of what in the world was going on, that Stenwold led them up on to the deck, and showed them the land in all its midnight glory.
They stayed at the rail for a long time, and though he could not see their faces, Laszlo did, skipping around in the air before them, showing off shamelessly. They had looked threatened at first, he told Stenwold later, as though they could never have guessed that horizons could be so far away. Then dawn came up behind them, a few hours later, a pale radiance that their progress seemed for a while in danger of leaving behind, and then a slowly growing red, and finally the sea-kinden watched the sun come up over a landscape, for the first time.
Fel and Phylles wanted no part of it, after that. This was more than they needed to know, it became clear: the sooner they returned to the waves, the better, as far as they were concerned. They went back below to converse, and to pretend they were just in some submersible somewhere, rather than suspended impossibly over miles and miles of distant patchwork fields, above brown hills and the beige expanses of scrubby grazing land. Wys remained, though. She stood at the stern and faced into the sunrise, regarding the land with a seemingly proprietorial air. Stenwold wondered just what she and Tomasso had cooked up together when out of his surveillance, and whether either land or sea would survive their partnership.
Paladrya stayed close to Stenwold until well past noon, until the sun was beating down on them, when she shrouded herself in a hooded cloak to save her skin from blistering. Even Wys was driven below, by then, and Laszlo had tired of his aerobatics, so it was just the two Beetles and the Kerebroi woman left out in the open air. Only then did she approach the rail, looking down over an increasingly arid landscape. She seemed to have no fear of heights, so much so that Stenwold stayed within arm’s reach just in case she leant over too far. He supposed that she was used to depths, instead, where there was no such thing as falling.
He took the rail beside her, resting his elbows on it. She glanced his way, her cowl hiding all expression. ‘Tell me of your war,’ she said. ‘The war that my Aradocles must have been caught up in?’
So it was that Stenwold found himself recounting, in miniature, the story of the Wasp Empire and its invasion of the Lowlands, with particular attention to the history of Prince Minor Salme Dien, who had once been his student and had then become a warlord, a champion of the dispossessed, and had at last become a martyr, in whose name a city was being built.
Later still, after napping fitfully in the hold, he stood beside her to see the sun set over Lake Sideriti, staining its blue-green waters red. The city of Princep Salmae lay at the lake’s most northerly point, over to the west of Sarn. As the blood-tinted waters passed beneath them, Paladrya leant into him, not flirting, not even affectionate as such, but something comfortably comradely. He sensed her deep worry, her fear that the trail of Aradocles would dry up; that he would merely turn out to be one of the numberless and nameless who had given their lives to slow the Wasp advance.
After all, even Salma died, in the end.
The streets of Princep Salmae were picked out unevenly with braziers of burning coals, and Stenwold received the impression of an ordered pattern of buildings, save that most of the buildings were missing and only the pattern itself remained. He had already heard a little about the place: rather than simply start a camp or a village by the lakeside, Salma’s surrogate nation had begun with grand ideas. They had measured and paced out all the districts of their perfect city, conferred and voted on what their eventual home should contain, and how it should function. Even to Stenwold, used to Collegium’s brand of participatory government, it seemed impossible that anything functional would emerge from such a system – and yet here was Princep Salmae, in outline. Perhaps a quarter of it was built: simple wooden structures in a melange of styles. Even in the twilight, he recognized Commonweal rooftops, Collegiate Beetle designs, plain Ant-kinden dwellings, and other part-built structures that were either in some style he didn’t know or something unique to the architect’s imagination. Still, most of the city was nothing more than demarcated plots, with a host of ordered tents showing the greater part of the population still waiting patiently for permanent housing. The lake-shore was littered with dozens of small boats, and towards this sketch-city’s eastern edge there was a space set aside for an airfield, dotted with a few flying machines. Jons Allan-bridge brought the
Windlass
down there with scrupulous care, as Paladrya went below to rouse the other sea-kinden.
Stenwold was first down the ladder, seeing a pair of women approach with the evident air of officials. They were white-haired, though not old, and for a moment he could not place them. Then he recognized them as Roach-kinden, a wandering breed not so often seen in the Lowlands, though commonly found in points north and east. They obviously recognized his name, when he gave it, and seemed more curious than officious.
‘I have an old friend at your palace, I think,’ he told them, ‘who I’d be glad to speak to on a matter of urgency.’ It seemed the simplest way of starting his hunt here. ‘Do you know Balkus the Ant-kinden? He led me to believe he was the commander of the palace guard, or some such.’
They knew Balkus, certainly, and he was well liked, Stenwold could see.
‘But he is not here,’ one of them informed him.
‘He’s at the palace, then?’
She shook her head. ‘He is not in Princep. He has gone to the Folly.’
Stenwold frowned at her, aware of the sea-kinden crowding behind him now, and suddenly understood. ‘Mal-kan’s Folly?’
‘Even so, Master,’ the other Roach-kinden said.
That made matters more difficult. The Folly was a fortress the Sarnesh were building on the site of the battle where General Malkan and the Imperial Seventh Army had been defeated during the war. Stenwold had heard the boasts: it was the most modern and formidable piece of fortification ever seen, designed with every ounce of Sarnesh ingenuity to make it impossible for another Wasp army to march on their city. Stenwold had often planned to go and witness the construction. It was inconvenient that Balkus had meanwhile taken to the same idea.
He asked if they knew when the Ant would be back. They did not, but said the man had only left recently.
Stenwold waited until the two of them had gone, before hissing tiredly between his teeth. ‘In the morning we apply to the palace,’ he suggested. ‘For now, we should sleep on the
Windlass.
I’d rather not wander about a strange city at night looking for lodgings.’
He was about to turn for the rope ladder when one of the other machines on the field caught his notice. He frowned, thinking
Surely not
, and walked slowly towards it, squinting in the dying light. It was a big, boxy vehicle, with three sets of rotors drooping from its top, and it looked remarkably familiar except that it was
here
, in this city that had been born as a result of the Empire’s tyrannies.
But it was just what he had thought. Closer, he saw the dark and light stripes that sunlight would reveal as black and gold. It was an Imperial heliopter sitting open and bold on the airfield at Princep Salmae.
What is the Empire doing here? What is going on?
The mute machine gave him no answers, so eventually Stenwold retreated to the
Windlass
, where he would enjoy precious little sleep from worrying.
Teornis had his Fly-kinden pilot take the orthopter once around Princep Salmae’s perimeter, his Spider-kinden eyes making out the streets and vacant lots with ease in the moonlight. He wondered if Maker had arrived already. It had taken Helmess Broiler long enough to arrange this flying machine that it was entirely possible.
‘What do you make of it?’ he asked Forman Sands. The halfbreed killer had been unexpectedly good company on the journey, proving well-read and well-spoken. Teornis had watched with amusement as the man’s loyalties smoothly segued from being Helmess’s man to being the Spider lord’s follower, all without a jot of conscience.