depending on how suspicious their minds were. None of them knew that she had been corresponding sporadically, secretly, with the Wasp capital for over a season. Not even Stenwold Maker was aware of that. In fact, he probably topped the list of people Taki had no intention of telling.
Capitas saw itself as the heart of Aptitude, and it was keenly aware of the longer pedigrees of Collegium and Helleron. Taki had a vague understanding that there had been some changes here in the Empire since that woman took over, but they had held no interest for her until now. Capitas was hosting a grand exhibition of aviation, and notables from the entire known world had been invited. After all, the war was the past, as everyone knew.
Her face abruptly set, Taki slung her Esca Magni past the long flank of an ascending airship, seeing the square ports all the way down the side of its hull. She knew what they were for. The Starnest, which had been the linchpin of the Solarno invasion, had been three times as long, but it had used the same method for dispersing its complement of soldiers across the city: the Wasps simply throwing themselves out of the hatches and gliding down on their Art-fed wings.
But the airships, even the great war-dreadnoughts, had a shamefaced and sheepish air: the Starnest had been unseamed and had fallen from the sky; the Collegiate Triumph had burned. The age of the airship as a great tool of war was done. The air now belonged to the heavy fliers.
Ahead she saw one of the city’s parks, which had been converted to an airstrip. There was precious little space there, but she reckoned she could touch down the Esca without too much jockeying.
A score of different fliers had landed in haphazard rows, most of them looking completely unfamiliar to her. Even as she slowed and banked, achieving a jittery hover over the field, she found herself facing a solid rank of black and gold. One entire edge was composed of a line of Spearflights hunched beneath their folded wings. For a moment she was inclined to touch down in front of them, just to show them how cursed daring she really was, but something in the uniform discipline of their positioning broke her resolve, and she hauled back and had the Esca Magni circle a little, as nonchalantly as she could manage, looking for other lodgings. Capitas was a city dominated by ziggurats, the characteristic form of Wasp architecture. Some were grand and some were squat, and all were surrounded by lower buildings with flat roofs. After a pass around the field, Taki spotted a rather inviting prospect that was probably some mid-ranking official’s little kingdom, and she slid the Esca through the air, folding down the craft’s three legs so that they ghosted across the stone, the entire flying machine poised momentarily, almost still in the air, the tilt of its wings exactly cancelling out her lateral movement, before she let herself drop, with the legs bowing to catch the strain.
Even as she hopped out, a man had already scrambled up onto the roof through a hatch, a lean Dragonfly- kinden wearing a simple tunic — a house slave, she realized. He stared at the flying machine perched on his master’s roof, and she saw a very small smile twitch at his face because here… here was something that he could not possible be blamed for.
She let her wings carry her down the tiered facade of the building and was immediately surrounded by soldiers. They came from all sides, and some dropped from the air onto the building behind her, between her and the Esca. Cursing herself for being too caught up in her daring to keep a basic watch out for trouble, she was reaching for her little knife by instinct, in the face of their stings. Or perhaps she would leap back and try for the sky, trusting that she was swifter and more nimble than they.
She stopped herself, calmed herself. Yes, they were Wasps, but she was already within their city. The protocols were somewhat different.
‘Is this how you treat your guests here, sieurs?’ she demanded, muscling up to the nearest of them as though they were not twice her size. It took physical effort to hold the light smile on her face, because her heart was hammering in her chest and her instincts were screaming at her.
One of the soldiers stepped forward, their sergeant or something. ‘Is this how you think guests are supposed to behave?’ he demanded, seeing only a lesser kinden — and a woman to boot — but a foreigner and yet not a slave, and so outside of the hierarchy he was used to.
‘What?’ she asked brightly. ‘Don’t tell me these nice flat roofs aren’t meant for landing on?’
For a moment she could not read him, and she was ready for him to give his next order: it was the blessing of opposing a military group, rather than just some band of rogues, that they would considerately tip you off by having to instruct each other when to kill you. Then she marked an extremely grudging smile, fighting for purchase at the corner of his mouth — not unlike the slave’s, in fact — and she guessed that whoever owned this house, he was both well known and not popular.
‘You’re here for the exhibition?’ the soldier asked her gruffly, and yet a certain degree of tension had ebbed away.
By way of reply, Taki gestured towards the Esca Magni. ‘I’m come from Collegium — aviation department of the Great College.’
This did not produce the sort of automatic respect that most College Masters always assumed it would. ‘You have papers?’ the soldier enquired.
She blinked. ‘What, you mean like College accredits? Only, I’m sort of an honorary assistant scholar, and…’
‘Papers. Visitor’s papers.’
That seemed too much even for a military bureaucracy. ‘I’ve only just arrived,’ she pointed out.
He took in a deep breath and she saw, with an involuntary spark of sympathy, that the people who had organized the Imperial Air Exhibition — their merchant Consortium and engineers — were not the people who were having to put a great deal of it into practice. She wondered how many obstinate, ignorant, irreverent foreigners these soldiers had so far rounded up.
‘Fly-kinden,’ the soldier addressed her, ‘anywhere between the Three Cities and here could have drawn up papers for you. Most of your fellows procured theirs in Sonn or Shalk.’
She folded her arms and tossed her head back, a minuscule study in pride. ‘That would require me to come down to land somewhere between Helleron and Capitas.’
His expression remained wholly unimpressed, and she realized that he had little understanding of either the distances or the technical feat involved in her journey. She was just a foreigner who was making his life difficult, an invader in the Empire’s heart, and yet he couldn’t do anything about it. She was sure he wanted to kill her or enslave her, or take her prisoner and lock her up. His entire world view was based on that shortlist of responses towards strangers. That he was restraining himself now indicated why he had made sergeant, she suspected.
‘Show me where to go to get these papers, then,’ she suggested, somewhat more meekly, and at last she was behaving as he expected, and shortly thereafter some Consortium clerk had drawn up her visitor’s pass, cautioning her to keep it about her person at all times or she might not be so lucky next time. She bit back a sarcastic jibe about Imperial hospitality, because the truth was that this was Imperial hospitality, the best there had ever been. A hundred or so aviators and several hundred more pedestrians had come from across the Apt world to their capital, absentmindedly breaking their laws, offending their sense of racial superiority and threatening their security, and the Wasps were somehow allowing them to do so without ordering a general massacre. Yet.
Her papers stuffed in the inside pocket of her tunic, Taki strode out into the city of her enemies — or at least they had been her enemies not so very long ago, and would be again soon enough, most likely. She was a striking woman of her kinden, small and slender, her chestnut hair falling past her shoulders. In her pilot’s overalls of canvas, a pilot’s helm of chitin over leather dangling from her belt beside her flying goggles, she would have looked foreign anywhere outside Solarno, but most especially here. Still, there were a great many foreigners being tolerated in Capitas during these few days of the exhibition. The city had gone to some lengths to accommodate them, and still it was an unwelcoming place.
Any other city, and Taki would have looked for wayhouses, tavernas, chop houses, all the necessaries that accompanied trade and travellers. The citizens of the Empire still traded and travelled, of course, although perhaps not quite so much of either as most others, but they were never out of place, not in any Imperial city. It was a humbling, disturbing thought, but everyone in the Empire had their place assigned to them, like it or not. When one of them journeyed to somewhere else within the Empress’s realm they would stay at their Consortium’s factora, or the local garrison barracks, or in guest chambers prepared by the governor. Their way was pre-paved, both easier and less free. Along the road there were inns, although they were regulated and administered by the civic governors. In the cities there were only homes away from home. Anyone left to wander the streets without fitting into this great pattern would soon be obligingly found a place by the Slave Corps.
There were neighbourhoods of Capitas that had been turned into impromptu inns, she found. Canvas had
