Something in Arvi’s demeanour communicated itself because the woman turned round and saw a Wasp staring at her with some interest. She stuttered to a halt.
Arvi sighed, but this sort of thing was happening all the time. One could not get efficient enough door staff, and some day he would have to speak to the artifice department and get them to automate the process somehow. He managed it all without Jodry ever knowing, shuffling the Beetle woman — a regular informant — into a side room, and then gently decanting te Mosca and her charges onto the street with a kind word, ensuring by looks and manner that the woman understood how he was going out of his way and beyond the call of duty for her. Then he returned and gave Jodry sufficient warning for him to receive his next guest in his customary fashion, even tweaking his master’s robes into a suitably picturesque dishevelment.
At last the informant was ushered in with whatever alarming news she had about Gripshod — and what a name that was to conjure with, Arvi thought — and he could now take a moment for a sit-down and a fortifying sip of brandy from the flask he kept in a holster under his armpit.
Just as he was stowing the covert article away, another Fly-kinden burst in, this time so far ahead of the doorman that Arvi could only hear his running feet.
‘Need to see the Speaker,’ she got out. She was still wearing the light canvas overalls of an aviatrix, and Arvi guessed she had flown here straight from the airfield with the stink and oil of the orthopter still on her hands.
‘Mistress te Schola,’ he greeted her, because this woman also taught at the Assembly — and she was a beauty, too, for all that she was Solarnese and therefore somewhat eccentric of manner.
‘Taki,’ she corrected him absently, and only raised an eyebrow when he kissed her hand, a greeting he fervently hoped was appropriately Solarnese. ‘Look, seriously, I need to see Drillen right now.’
She was still out of breath from the flight, her chestnut hair flattened by the imprint of the flying helm she had only just removed, tracking grease on to the carpets and with her clothes dirty and unchanged for too long. Arvi almost proposed there and then. However, his spine was an iron rod of duty and he could only force out the reluctant words, ‘I’m afraid the Speaker is in a meeting, but if you would wait…’
‘Get me Maker, then,’ she told him. ‘Stenwold Maker, the War Master.’
‘Alas, Master Maker is out of the city.’
Taki stared at him. ‘He’s what?’
‘He set out for Myna, I believe.’ Probably that was a state secret, but this woman was one of Maker’s associates, and anyway, in that moment, Arvi would have found it hard to deny her anything.
‘But I was flying over Myna just now!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve flown from Capitas to Collegium and now I have to go most of the way back?’
‘I could perhaps inform the Speaker that you are here…’ Arvi stretched his duty to the snapping point.
‘Forget it. I need to get a night’s sleep, get my Esca rewound and tuned up, and I need to drop some sketches into the aeronautics department just as soon as I’ve actually made them. Tell Drillen I’ve headed for Myna.’ And she was gone from the room and from Arvi’s life, as abruptly as she had appeared.
Eight
To anyone observing Stenwold — which meant a dozen others in the Sontaken ’s passenger hold — he would seem to be composing a coded missive, a curiously blatant piece of espionage, as he sat there with papers spread about him. On one sheet were some sparse notes in plain script, on another a laboriously translated piece made of baffling symbols. The other pages comprised his lexicon, a book of all those familiar words that he had been able to scratch down the glyphs for. At least a couple aboard the Sontaken must recognize him, and several were staring and whispering, no doubt imagining the infamous War Master compiling secret orders to his minions.
In fact, he was writing a letter to a woman, as delicate and awkward a piece of wordsmithing as ever went into a student’s love poem.
This was not a love letter, of course. He was too old for that sort of thing and so was she, and neither of them were in love. If there had been anything as fiery and fierce as love between them, then surely they would not be so utterly separated now, living amongst different kinden in different worlds. Stenwold’s days as a lover had come and gone when he was a College student, and left no marks or traces behind. Even his dalliance with Arianna, the Spider-kinden girl who had deserted from the Rekef for him, had not quite been love, after all — her ambition, his hubris, and a passion born of war overwhelming any fear of danger. She had betrayed him, later, then died trying to save him. It had not been a happy business. He still missed her, but he knew full well it had not been love.
The Sontaken was a new design of airship, a streamlined canopy above, some powerful outrigger engines and a newly designed system of stabilizers meant that the little vessel could make the Collegium to Helleron run in four days of mild discomfort, when it had once been the boast of the great Sky Without to make the same trip in ten. Four days sitting in the same place without bureaucracy demanding his time was a luxury to Stenwold, which was why he had started abandoning the city for his clifftop refuge, where he could look out over the sea and brood, and shudder.
He had been to places few other landborn had ever seen, but he would never go back. That sunless, alien abyss offered no life for one such as him, just as his parched and dusty world was a terrible place for the woman he now wrote to.
He consulted his lexicon once again, but he had found another gap in his knowledge, another word he did not know the sigil for, nor any cognate of it. If he could have simply written to her, with all the Collegiate eloquence at his command, then things might have been different. Perhaps he could have baited the hook sufficiently to draw her up to shore again. The Sea-kinden spoke the same words that he did, but their writing was utterly different, each word a picture. Each time the sea-traders returned with more gold and more intricate clockwork, he learned another few dozen signs from them to add to his book, but even now he could write only the most halting and awkward things and, besides, what could he say? Not mawkish talk of feelings, certainly. He was Stenwold Maker, middle-aged and calloused by time and loss, and he could not open himself wide enough to admit that kind of youthful foolishness. And besides, they were both too solemn and set in their ways, and they both had responsibilities.
So instead he wrote about duty, to the wretched extent that he could. After all, he had his duty to Collegium, and she had hers to her new leader, the boy Aradocles. Perhaps even the differences of land and sea might not have sufficed to separate them had they not both been so busy.
Her name was Paladrya, this woman he did not love. Her letters came back to him, sometimes, infrequently, partly in her confident pictograms, partly in crude letters that he had a hard time deciphering. He could ask the Sea-kinden who brought them to translate, of course, or to write down for him what he wanted to say in return, but his words were for Paladrya alone, for all that they were of such everyday things. He did not want to share them with anybody else.
Without ever really thinking about it, he had disclosed such things to her that the Assembly might have exiled him for treason. When he thought of her, when he painstakingly fumbled out those complex glyphs, he had no secrets.
He sensed a change in the Sontaken ’s progress, felt his stomach shift with a gradual loss of height, and knew that they were now coming in to Helleron. He would secure transport to Myna there, but first he would meet up with an old friend. The business of the world was pressing on him again. Stenwold gathered up his papers and stowed them back in the pack at his belt, ready for the next rare opportunity for contemplation.
He was far from the sea here but, as he listened to the wind whistling past the hull outside, to the drone of the engines changing pitch, he thought he heard breakers for a moment, on a distant shore.
Helleron was as he remembered it, save that perhaps there was now more of it. The city’s innards sprawled in mounds and tangles of ghettos, factories, slums and tenements, all beneath the pall of smoke and soot that arose from the belching throats of a thousand chimneys. The grander houses of the magnates themselves were mostly located on higher ground, and where they could hope to remain upwind of the industry for as much of the time as possible.
Helleron to Myna was not the most reliable journey, as the newly freed Three-city Alliance was not rich enough to make a good export market, nor particularly trusting of where Helleren sympathies lay. The factory-city had rolled over quickly enough when the Empire had reached it the first time, and there was no suggestion that the
