Jodry’s stock, rather for the little man’s private consumption, but he passed it to his master without comment. Jodry tipped it back, gagged at whatever was inside, and then choked over it for long enough that, on looking Stenwold in the face again, there was a measure of composure once more in his eyes.
Neither of them said it. Neither of them uttered the words, We did this. The thought travelled between them as though they had rented a mindlink from the Ants for the occasion.
Stenwold shook his head. ‘It could have been any night, Jodry. It would have come, sometime. The very inevitability of this, and all the other variants of this, was why we… why we made our decision.’
Jodry nodded wearily. ‘Banjacs’s house still stands,’ he said. ‘The College lost the Awlbright workshops and machine rooms, and they put a hole through the Prowess Forum roof, though that one didn’t go off. And the rest, Sten… the list of homes and shops and lives.’ He looked up, frowning. ‘What happened to your ear?’
In truth, Stenwold had almost forgotten, having just slapped some ointment on the wound — a pain worse than the original — to kill off the animicules before he left the house. ‘Assassin,’ he explained curtly. His own difficulties seemed trivial by comparison.
‘Someone assassinated your ear.’ Jodry managed a half-inch worth of weak smile. ‘Well that sounds as though the general warning we got was a good one.’ The smile was gone. ‘More paperwork, then. Who was attacked? Who did they get? I know poor Bola Stormall was shot dead outside her house. We sent soldiers off to guard everyone who seemed likely, but we couldn’t protect everyone.’
‘And they couldn’t attack everyone, either. And the men who came for me won’t be moving on down the list, for certain,’ Stenwold put in fiercely.
Jodry nodded wearily, unwilling to accept even that meagre victory, and then his eyes lit on something beyond Stenwold. Eujen Leadswell and the Wasp Averic had trailed after him to the devastation of the Amphiophos, and were now standing, humbled and aghast at the sight of the ruin.
‘They came to warn you, then,’ Jodry noted. ‘The Wasp boy guessed you’d be top of their list.’ For a moment it seemed that he might gloat, perhaps suggest that Stenwold take Averic off for an interrogation by the soldiers of the Maker’s Own. Seeing this diminished man before him, Stenwold would almost have preferred that.
And he could not honestly say to himself that a thorough questioning of Averic, as a potential enemy agent, had not occurred to him. He felt like two men inside: the rational Collegiate and the man who had fought the Empire most of his life. Both of them were eminently logical and consistent within their world views, entirely persuaded by their own arguments, and yet they did not seem to be on speaking terms with each other any more.
‘Get some rest,’ he told Jodry gruffly. ‘All this…’ A gesture at the scattered, pointless papers.
‘I know,’ the Speaker for the Assembly agreed miserably. ‘But I needed to do something. I couldn’t just let it…’
‘Go,’ Stenwold insisted, and then stalked over to his followers.
‘Well, you’ve done a service for the city,’ he forced himself to admit. ‘You have the thanks of the Assembly, or will have, once it can be assembled.’ He overdid his attempt at friendliness, and saw Eujen’s gaze cut through it with the cynicism of the young.
‘Perhaps you could repay us by answering one question, Master Maker. What happened last night? Where were our orthopters? The Empire raped us from the air.’
‘There were defenders.’ Stenwold strode past them, aware of them following him, as he knew they would. But he was heading for a stretch of rubble that had been picked over already, with no ears to overhear.
‘Where were they? Master Maker, we were on the streets all the way from my lodgings to your townhouse, with a stop at the College on the way, and precious little sign of anyone of ours in the air.’
‘Collegium is a large city.’ Stenwold turned to face him, feeling half the warrior, half the statesman, but wholly the combatant.
‘This was different,’ Eujen insisted, not letting go. ‘Different to all the other times. I swear to you I saw barely a Stormreader in the sky.’ The boy faced off against him, fists clenched.
‘Perhaps our orthopters were engaged elsewhere — on the attack perhaps?’
‘ Is that what happened, Master Maker?’
And at last Stenwold recognized the tone behind the challenge: a plea for reassurance. Not a political opponent, this, but a Collegiate citizen whose home was at stake: a student barely grown, wearing the sash of an invented Company, playing at soldiers in a real war.
But I can’t tell him. I certainly can’t tell the Wasp. The secrecy is the entire point. He stared at Averic, gaunt and silent at Eujen’s shoulder. He would not meet Stenwold’s eyes, but there was something there to be confronted nonetheless: the fact that these two, that the Wasp in particular, had saved lives last night — Stenwold’s included.
The choices spread before him like a fan opening. Walk away: these two could stir up trouble, but they could force no answers from him. Counter-attack: why not have the Wasp answer some questions — he knew more than he had told, for all that his information had served to the good. Surrender: but Stenwold had spent too much of his life fighting for that, hadn’t he?
He stared at the two of them, the spymaster and the soldier in him trying to draw up a harsh word, a put- down that would set the impertinent boy in his place and simplify his own life again. I don’t need this. Haven’t I enough to worry about?
In that second, glowering into Eujen’s angry, hurt gaze, he saw himself as Jodry had come to see him: a man going too fast downhill, driven by his obsessions, unwilling to let go of his grudges; old, and set in his ways the way old men get. He saw Eujen, too, the young intellectual with a cause that he was willing to fight for no matter what the institution thought. When did we change places? Wasn’t I standing on his side of the line, last time I looked?
He sat down suddenly, rubble shifting beneath him, sensing Eujen’s instinctive lurch forward to assist him. Have they not earned some answers — even the Wasp? Some small part of the truth, at least?
‘Tomorrow,’ he told them. ‘I have no answers for you now, but tomorrow… I will send for you, and I will take you to where all of this will make sense.’ Or if it does not, then we are lost, and who cares what you think then?
‘We knew something was wrong from about ten minutes in,’ Aarmon reported wearily. They were in Tynan’s tent, though the general was elsewhere, readying the troops for the first engagement with the Collegiate foot. Instead, the intelligencer Colonel Cherten was taking centre stage, sitting on Tynan’s camp stool with borrowed authority, as the same pilot delegation stood before him: Aarmon, Scain, Nishaana, with Kiin, Pingge and Tiadro as their diminutive shadows.
‘They met us closer to the city than usual, and with less force, but the efficiency of their first response is variable. We assumed the balance of their machines would come from some unexpected angle. They never came. Instead we broke their formation and chased them all the way to the city. There was some scattered resistance after that, mostly individual orthopters, and their ballistae batteries, of course, but…’ A small gesture of the hand, barely opening the fingers. ‘Where were their machines? Where were their pilots? Colonel, we know them by now, the best of them, those that have survived this long fighting against us. No names, but I could identify at least a dozen, maybe a score of their aviators. None of them was in the sky over Collegium last night. I even sent a few machines back-’
‘Against orders,’ Cherten noted with a crisp smile.
‘Sir, when we’re in the air, the only orders that count are mine.’ Aarmon was a bigger man than Cherten, and amongst friends, and for a moment the chain of command strained and creaked between them, the intelligence officer off balance for a second before forcing an easy smile to his face, waving the comment off.
‘Continue.’
‘I had assumed the Collegiates had finally realized that they were losing, night after night, and had committed their air power against the army here, hoping to do enough damage to make taking the city on the ground impossible. I sent machines back to give that warning, and to rouse those who were off shift.’ He gestured towards Scain, who had served as the messenger. ‘But they never came here. Our entire reserve sat in their Farsphex and waited, but they never came at all. Can I ask about our intelligence operation in Collegium, sir?’
Cherten frowned, because that was a taboo question from anyone outside Army Intelligence. Pingge was well aware that Cherten was reckoned to be a Rekef agent placed within Intelligence, information obtained from some channel of gossip of the pilots most recently out of Capitas. Whatever games the Rekef was playing with its junior cousin right now, the pilots had no idea, save that any such internal division did not bode well.
