despite the war, you know.’ The Fly shrugged. ‘We now think it’s not that. We think they’ve played us.’
‘Why? Our orders are to kill Stenwold Maker above all others-’
‘Good. Fine. He’s there now with this man, Banjacs Gripshod. So’s your Wasp boy. You need to get out your knives and get moving.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘We don’t know,’ the Fly hissed, ‘but the patterns are all wrong. It’s something important, and it’s at Gripshod’s place it’s happening. It’s…’ The difficulty of explaining screwed the little man’s face up. ‘We have our methods. We look for patterns, feel for the connections between people. But patterns can be deceptive — look at them from a different vantage, you might see something entirely other. That’s what’s happened here. It wasn’t about the murder after all. It’s all about the war. Whatever they’re doing there in that house is vital, and you need to stop it. I swear on my mistress’s honour you do.’
The burn-scarred man stared at him levelly. He had memorized all sorts of places in the city, the dwellings of potential victims amongst them. Part of him was already working out which streets to lead his people down to so as get to Banjacs Gripshod’s place as soon as possible. ‘And you’ll help, will you?’
The Fly spread his hands. ‘That is not a part of our mystery,’ he said, with a tired smile. ‘Besides, surely you won’t need us?’
She was gone when Laszlo returned, her sleeping roll disordered, her few personal possessions just smaller absences about her larger one. None of the surgeons or nurses could tell him just when she had slipped out, and he could not know whether she had been feigning her injury, or fooling herself, or whether she had simply been that desperate to be rid of him.
Lissart had vanished, abandoned him after all they had been through. Laszlo could only stare in utter disbelief, and then argue with everyone around him because there were few enough casualties yet for the doctors that surely one of them must have noticed a badly wounded Fly or not-quite-Fly woman pack up her things and leave.
But none of them had. Her tradecraft had been her pass in the end. She was gone.
He wasted a great deal of time then, by dashing about the outside of the tent, making sudden rushes in this direction, then in that, as if he would find her just a few paces away, pausing for breath and clutching her wound, waiting for him. First, though, before all that furious, undirected, futile action, he just stood and hurt. Laszlo the pirate, grinning factor for the Tidenfree crew, a girl in every port so long as he had the coin, and he was hurting for her, for his lost te Liss. He had never felt such a tearing before. In its wake, he felt that he would never quite see the world in the same way.
After all that, all the futile battering at the windowpanes of fate, he returned to where she had slept and there found her message.
It was tucked into her discarded bedroll, and anyone could have found it, but nobody else would have understood.
She is here. I can’t stay.
She is painted brown and disguised as a Beetle soldier-woman.
Look for me in another place.
Laszlo felt his heart leap at that last line. We’ll meet again. I’ll find her or she’ll find me. And then the first two lines took on meaning and his eyes widened.
She could mean only one thing: the Wasp agent who had dealt Lissart such a wound in the first place, she was here in the camp.
He glanced about him. There were Beetle women everywhere, of course there were. But he had already seen the Wasp spy — seen her come after Lissart to finish her off. He calmed himself, unhinged his memories, sorting through them for that night that was surely engraved on his mind.
A moment later and he was outside the infirmary tent and peering about him, from face to face. There was a spy in the camp, up to unknowable mischief, and only he could find her.
In her fragmentary and barely remembered dream she was in the air, in a storm, the high winds battering at the framework of the Esca Volenti until every part of the loyal machine seemed on the point of coming away from every other. In the midst of wrestling with controls that were suddenly unresponsive in her grip, she was yanked from sleep, shaken into abrupt and uncomprehending wakefulness, unsure of where she was or why.
‘Taki! Mistress Taki!’ someone was shouting. Mistress? But of course, that was how the Collegiates talked, not knowing any better, and what was that dreadful noise?
She sat bolt upright, slapping away the Beetle girl who had woken her. The Ear! ‘How long did you let me sleep?’
In a moment she was out of her bunk, standing barefoot on the cold floor, in just her shift. She felt leadenly tired, disoriented, as though she had gone to bed only a moment before.
‘Mistress Taki, they’re coming!’ The girl — Taki could not recall her real name but identified her as ‘Still-too- fat-to-be-a-pilot’, one of the newer recruits — was a study in wide-eyed panic.
Taki cursed, dragging on her canvas overalls and snagging her chitin and leather helm from the floor. ‘You should have woken me an hour ago at least,’ she snapped, storming up out of the underground barracks into the common room… and stopping.
Broad, glorious daylight sang through the high windows.
‘Right,’ she said, to nobody in particular. A score of pilots were looking at her expectantly, most of their field’s complement.
‘Where’s Corog? Master Breaker, I mean. Where’s everyone else?’ she demanded, striving to clear her head.
‘Out on the field with their machines,’ someone told her, and another put in, ‘The Mynans want to take off, but we’ve no orders.. ’
‘ Orders? ’ Taki demanded. ‘Just go, morons! Get into the air!’ And she herself led the charge, wings skimming her up and out to the airfield, darting for the open cockpit of the Esca Magni. She saw the rest of the pilots all around, some arguing with ground crew, others already in their machines, wings warming up slowly. Edmon gave her a nod, before bringing his hatch down.
‘Hold! Nobody take to the air!’ Corog Breaker was rushing across the field, waving his arms like a man trying to catch a departing airship. ‘I’ll have the hide off anyone that dares fly!’
Edmon rammed his hatch up again, staring at the old man with disgust. ‘No,’ he shouted back, ‘this time we fly. This time we fight the Wasps, even if your people won’t. Who’s with me, eh?’
There was a lot of shouting then from Mynans and Collegiates both, and Edmon had clearly carried the vote.
‘You just listen to me!’ Corog Breaker still had a fine old voice, when he needed to use it. ‘Yes, we fight! But you listen here, special orders from Stenwold Maker. Nobody gets aloft until they’ve heard them.’
Edmon scowled belligerently, but waited.
‘Just listen, because you have to get this right,’ Corog urged them all. ‘We’re not bearding them beyond the walls this time. We let them come to us.’ As the murmur of discontent started up again he raised his arms to quieten them. ‘Oh, we fight. When they come over the city, we hold them, but it’s more than that. We need to concentrate them, as much as we can. Engage, take the bastards down if you can, but bring all of them over the city’s heart.’ He glanced back at the scroll he was clutching, breath catching from the run, trying himself to assimilate the instructions. ‘Now listen,’ he continued. ‘The Ear is going to sound again, you understand. You have to listen for it. During the fight, the Ear will sound, and that’s your signal.’
‘Signal for what, Corog?’ Taki asked him.
The old Master Armsman’s expression was openly baffled. ‘Get out of the sky. Land as soon as you can, on roofs, in the street, crash if you have to. Just get out of the sky. You have to hold them, keep them off the city, until the artificers and Stenwold Maker reckon we’ve got our best shot. Then you down your machines as soon as the Ear sounds, and…’
‘And what?’ Taki pressed.
‘If you’re still in the sky right then, you’ll find out the hard way,’ was all that he would say. ‘Now get in your fliers. If your regular machine’s with the artificers for the ground-attack refit, get yourself in a spare one. If there’s none left, cheer us on.’ A proportion of the Stormreaders were being modified following some new requirement from Stenwold Maker or the Speaker or someone: some were still in the workshop being fitted out.
