Behind Stenwold’s opponent, the Collegiate swordsman was being forced back by his own adversary, before tripping over the body of another artificer who had fallen to a snapbow bolt. His enemy reared above him, sword drawn back, and then Eujen appeared beside him, face fixed in a horrified expression, and rammed a blade through the spy’s ribs.
Stenwold pushed forwards again, realizing, after the initial surprise, that he was the better duellist — perhaps the best swordsman in the room for all that it said about the rest of them. ‘Leadswell! Get to Banjacs!’ he yelled. The Beetle boy looked at him briefly, and went sprinting over to the old inventor’s motionless form.
Averic’s wings had carried him up to a gantry, and the burn-scarred man stood below him, raging up at him. ‘You traitor! You coward filth! Can’t even fight? A shame to your own people, curse you!’ Abandoning his comrades to the fight, he found a shaking stairway leading up and took it three steps at a time, only to find the Wasp already balanced on the rail, ready to glide down.
Banjacs was plainly gone beyond anything that Eujen could do for him. The old man’s ragged form was so thin that it seemed he had died long before, dried out and desiccated until only this husk remained. And yet, as Eujen knelt beside him, those piercing eyes flew open, and the old man took a hacking breath that sprayed more blood over his robes.
‘My machine!’ he whispered, reaching out for it as if trying to encompass the entire radiant edifice with a clutch of a single hand. ‘Take me — take me…’ And, with the last dregs of a Beetle’s bloodyminded endurance, he began lurching across the floor on hands and elbows, a slick red slug’s trail behind him and his legs limp and useless.
Eujen caught his rasping plea, ‘Help me make it work. ’
A snapbow in his hand, a second man came at Stenwold, shouting for his fellow to get clear. The weapons were not meant for such close quarters, and the War Master ducked away from a blow to lash his blade at the barrel, knocking it up and away. Then the snapbowman was down, sitting with hands smeared red as they pressed at a stomach wound, and one of the two Company soldiers huddled in the doorway was fumblingly trying to reload her bow even though her breastplate had a puncture hole above her left breast.
And the burn-scarred man looked back towards his people and must have seen almost none of them left now, and that this desperate gambit had failed. ‘Traitor,’ he repeated, almost a whisper. His expression revealed bitter bewilderment, at why this Wasp had turned so far from his people, and why the boy would not now even finish the job. Looking into Averic’s eyes, perhaps he sought some grand answer, some hint of a greater plan, something to justify the waste and the failure.
‘I’m sorry,’ Averic said, and those two words plainly showed the burned man how Collegium had taken him, body and mind, and corroded all the hard edge of the Empire.
The Beetle spy rushed him, surely without any great hope of achieving anything, because by that time he had nowhere to go and nothing to accomplish. Instead of simply flitting out of reach, Averic’s hands came up by instinct and, even as the Wasp kicked back from the railing, his Art flashed and seared, and what fell from the balcony was just a singed corpse.
The swordsman artificer — the only one of the three still living — dropped his blade with a harsh clang. In the doorway, the soldier leant back with a groan, pulling weakly at the straps of her breastplate until Stenwold hurried over to help her.
And, before the lambent majesty of the machine, Eujen propped Banjacs up, the old man’s ashen face borrowing a radiance from the great assembly of glass above him. There were no words, but a trembling thrust of the inventor’s hands picked out a bronze lever from amidst the chaos of dials and wheels, and Eujen hoisted him higher until he could seize on it.
Banjacs summoned some last strength then, from some inner well or perhaps from the unseen source of all Beetle Art. He shrugged himself free of Eujen’s grip, and let his own weight pull down the lever.
Forty-One
What are they doing?
The question flashed at Aarmon from all sides as the battlefield in the air disintegrated. Everywhere the Collegiate orthopters were breaking away, even braving the Imperial shot to ditch in the streets of their city. Aarmon’s aviators reported the enemy pilots scrambling from their machines and simply running, leaving the downed Stormreaders as sitting targets for bolt or bomb. Several orthopters were clipped from the sky in their frantic attempts to get clear.
Aarmon put the Farsphex through two more tight turns, swinging wild of the line his target was taking but dragging his craft back on course with a sure hand, pushing his skill and his machine’s tolerances to their limits but feeling his quarry start to tire, the panic of the chase in her throat. She was trying to get free, too — she tried to reach the ground again and again, but he was waiting for her each time, as his cohorts hedged her in on either side.
They know they’ve lost. They’re hoping to preserve their air strength for the siege, came the offering from one of his pilots.
They’re out of power, their clockwork’s run down, from another.
Other speculations kept battering at his mind, when he needed all his concentration to stay with her, his prize.
How he knew it was a she he could not say, but this enemy pilot he knew intimately, through a bond as close as that he shared with his comrades. Her orthopter was different, a slighter, nimbler piece of elegance than the admittedly admirable Collegiate standard, and her style was impeccable: a fierce, thrilling blend of excellence and inspiration that took possession of the sky wherever she flew.
She had been responsible for more deaths amongst his fellows than any other Collegiate pilot, her unique ship putting that knowledge beyond doubt. He had sought her out, and sought her out, night after night in the frenzied chaos of their aerial engagements. Now here she was, fleeing him in broad daylight.
It is not revenge; the thought passed through his mind and he knew it had gone out to his fellows, that Scain would be mouthing it even now. It was not hatred that moved him, either, or a desire for conquest. He remembered, when he was a boy, watching the hunting wasps take their prey on the wing, and feeling that moment where the destinies of predator and prey intersected, as though by consensus, each to its role. The dream of living that moment had taken him through the Light Airborne, and into the Aviation Corps when that new institution had formed. Not vengeance nor spite, but perfection.
His comrades were still engaging the enemy, of whom fewer and fewer were left to engage. Two-thirds of the surviving Collegiate force had reached the ground, or died trying, and the rest would plainly join them if the Wasps allowed them the opportunity. Still shifting his craft through the impossibly tight and dancing turns that his opponent sped into, he felt a clutching sensation inside him. A trap. But what? They had control of the skies, with the Second on its way, and what could Collegium do about it?
Commence bombing as soon as you’re free to do so, he ordered. Let’s see if we can’t sting them into the air again.
Then he saw something flash in the heart of the city: a tall house capped with a dome, nothing out of the ordinary save for a circular skylight that Lightning leapt and flashed from there, darting and reaching for the vault of sky above. And Aarmon’s mind said, Weapon.
He had a fraction of a second to realize, out of all his flight, that it was he whose course could be twisted to pass by that sparking roof, and he broke his pursuit off instantly, with only a moment’s regret, for sentiment was something he could suddenly not afford to indulge.
‘Sergeant!’ he snapped back towards Kiin, ‘Ready bombs, target domed house dead ahead.’
He hauled the Farsphex about, wings pausing for a moment in their beat, to let it hang and slew in the air, then regaining their pace as he slung his craft towards his mark.
A moment later the first impact rattled against them, and he knew, without needing confirmation, that his former prey had rounded on him; one of those precise dancing-step turns putting her on his tail the moment he abandoned the chase.
Get her off me! He sent to his fellows, because the roof ahead was spitting and flashing like a miniature
