‘I’m sorry,’ Taki heard him say, watching Edmon watch him in turn. ‘We don’t fly tonight. We watch, and we take it like a whore, but nobody flies.’
Outside, the assault on the city went on and on. It seemed impossible that the Empire had brought so many bombs.
‘Master Drillen,’ Arvi’s light voice came from the far side of the door.
Jodry shuddered. ‘Go away.’ He tried to bellow the words, but they came out merely as a rasp. He was into his third bottle, now, produce of his own family’s vineyards that had been growing superior grapes since before the revolution.
‘I have made you some tea, Master Drillen,’ came those respectful but inexorable tones.
‘Don’t want tea.’ Jodry’s first bottle had seen him move out of his offices at the Amphiophos. His initial way of dealing with the knowledge of what tonight must bring had been to remain at his post: Speaker for the city even in the face of annihilation. He had lasted less than an hour, leaving before the bombs had started to fall, and let them all think him a coward for it. Even now there would be a skeleton crew at the heart of Collegium’s governance, clerks and servants and a few diligent Assemblers, but Jodry himself could not stay. Every moment he had spent there, once the Great Ear had sounded, he had been clutching at his desk, gritting his teeth, forcibly restraining himself from leaping to his feet and pelting down the corridors of state shouting, ‘Get out! Get out of here! Out of the city! Tonight nothing will stay their hands!’
Or something like that. And, once the Imperial fliers began bombarding the city, he knew that he would not be able to restrain himself at all, that it would all come out, and then it would all be in vain.
He had gone home, to add shame to guilt.
‘Master-’ A particularly close blast rattled the shutters and briefly silenced even Arvi. ‘Are you well?’
At last Jodry shambled over and unbolted the door, flinging it open to glower down at the Fly-kinden, his eyes wild and red-rimmed. To Arvi’s credit, Jodry’s secretary displayed no emotion at all.
‘What do you want?’ Jodry demanded. ‘Have you nothing better to do tonight?’
At that, the Fly did blink. ‘There has been a warning that Wasp assassins may be on the prowl, master, targeting our leadership, you included. I took liberties with your name in dispatching some of Outwright’s Pike and Shot, just in case. The caution originates in the student body, master, so I suspect it to be nonsense, but even so.. ’
The thought of Wasp assassins tracking him down seemed almost like natural justice. ‘Good, whatever,’ Jodry grunted. ‘Arvi, you’re my secretary, so why are you even here? Have you nowhere, nobody, on a night like this?’ The crash of the bombs punctuated his words.
‘Master?’ At last the little man seemed perplexed. ‘Alas, I have not been fortunate enough to… No, master.’
‘Go home, Arvi,’ Jodry told him. ‘No, bring me more wine, then go home. Another bottle of the Dark Rose 525.’
Arvi’s eyes drifted to the cadavers of Jodry’s earlier drinking, but he just nodded. ‘It seems to be a tumultuous night, master.’
‘I shall make you head of the faculty of understatement at the College,’ Jodry declared, the humour laboured and failing. ‘Go home, find a cellar and hide.’
‘There is some filing at your office that requires attention, then-’
‘No!’ For a moment Jodry and his secretary stared at one another, Arvi patiently waiting for an explanation for his employer’s outburst. Jodry wanted to say, A cellar, a vault, anywhere sheltered from the sky tonight, but he could not, not even to his secretary, whatever bond of trust existed between them.
Competing shames warred in him then, and one won out. ‘Bring the bottle,’ he decided. ‘Bring the soldiers. We’ll go there together. A good night to clear my desk.’ And, as Arvi ducked down into the cellar, Jodry looked out of the window at the Imperial air force tearing into the city, and thought about his legacy.
Getting from Eujen’s lodgings to the College had been easy, although they had not realized it at the time. Collegium was under the hammer, but only the first few tentative beats, like a smith feeling out the flaws in his material. Eujen found people to pass his warning on to, to scribble down the names that Averic had come up with, so as to send word to everyone they could think of: Beware assassins. Too late, too early, false alarm? They could not tell. No doubt even assassins would find an aerial bombardment an impediment to easy movement.
When they set off for Stenwold Maker’s house, however, they realized that what they had taken for a downpour had only been a shower. Now the skies opened and the bloody deluge came. Looking up into a sky whose occupancy should have been contested by the fragile valour of the Stormreaders, they could see the Imperial orthopters plainly by moonlight, taking their own time over their runs, circling and bombing, and then pulling out to circle again. For a moment the two of them, Wasp and Beetle, just stared up into that blistering sky, at what the war between their kinden had come to.
Then a bomb dropped a street away: the thunderous, glass-breaking sound followed immediately by the killing blossom of an incendiary igniting. Eujen made to run towards the impact, but Averic dragged at his arm, shouting at him.
‘Stenwold Maker! We have to get to him!’
‘You fly to him, then!’ Eujen said desperately, his imagination filling in everything that must be happening just over the rooftops.
‘Not without you! I won’t leave you,’ Averic insisted. ‘Besides, he’d probably kill me.’
Almost certainly true, Eujen realized, and wrenched himself free of the grip of his instincts. ‘Then let’s go!’ he decided, as the next close blast savaged them with shards of stone, spraying the street with debris. He caught Averic’s eyes, found there a mutual understanding that simply getting across the city was going to kill them, odds- on, and then they were running off down the street. At first they tried to watch the skies, to divine safety and danger by the movement of the Farsphex, but there were too many, and from all angles, and any incoming machine might release its load at any time. Eujen was no more able to make sense of them than he would a Moth prophecy.
In the end, the two of them just ran.
Sometimes soldiers tried to stop them, ordering them off the streets into whatever dubious safety might be found. The homemade sashes of the Student Company let them pass on, as kindred spirits with important business. Nobody seemed to care that they were, by any daylit estimation, merely pretend soldiers. On the streets of Collegium that night, they were just as able to help as the professionals, meaning not at all.
The world seemed to detonate all around them — a determined bombing run coming unlooked-for from behind, smashing houses only two streets away — now one street. They fell into a doorway under a hail of splinters and broken bricks, the fierce wash of fire baking them as an apothecary’s workshop across the way erupted into coloured ribbons of flame.
And still the defenders of Collegium were absent, the skies surrendered. Sabotage? Treachery? Have they murdered all our pilots? Staring upwards at that hostile sky, Eujen could only think, Is it the end, right now? Are Straessa and the others dead already, or simply irrelevant? Will the Empire even need to bring its armies, after this?
It seemed like the city’s final night. Certainly it seemed that it could be Eujen’s.
When Stenwold returned to his townhouse that evening, before the Ear sounded, he found a letter awaiting him.
He knew it at once, and it must have been delivered by one of the Fly-kinden privateers with whom he had a highly sensitive arrangement, and who represented Collegium’s trade contacts with the Sea-kinden, of whose existence the bulk of the Beetle-kinden had yet to learn.
It came on leathery parchment that they wove from seaweed somehow, so it would dry out and fragment within a few days. It would not relate to the closely guarded trade between the land and sea that had given Collegium its improved clockwork. This letter would be strictly personal.
This night of all nights. He dearly needed his mind taken away from what he and Jodry had done, the self- destructive trap they had baited for the Imperial air force — and here it was, just as ordered.
He unfolded the unsealed note, noticing the thick paper start to crack at the seams. The writing within was clumsy and childlike, the letters ill-formed. Just as he himself struggled to create the awkward glyphs that made up the Sea-kinden script, so Paladrya of Hermatyre wrestled determinedly with the alphabet of the land.
She was his Regret. Beetle-kinden were not supposed to have Regrets. Such foibles were for the Inapt in
