‘I’m going, te Riel. I’m going-’ but the man snagged his arm with the blood-slick hand that had been holding on to the knife hilt.
‘Not… please…’ There was a shuddering moment when Laszlo thought he had died, but the bloody grip remained. ‘Die with my own name, please… not te Riel…’
There was more, but it was just a whisper, barely words, certainly not a name. Then the man was dead, taking his secrets with him.
The hangars. Even with that thought, Laszlo was soaring up the well, spitting himself out into the open air and casting back for the city. The hangars — within sight of his own lodgings! And the war was being started right there, while he was elsewhere.
And Liss, his Liss, was somewhere in the middle of it. Someone had her. Someone was about to strike at Solarno. It was all coming together.
He had never flown faster, the buildings of Solarno rushing past beneath him, but he knew he would be too late.
Ten
It had all been like some strange kind of game although, because all the factory workers were being constantly appraised and tested, a game that was not in the least enjoyable.
Pingge had not seen Kiin for more than two days during the last two tendays, and that was what hurt most. They were being constantly reassigned to groups, randomly switched back and forth, so that they never became confortable with whoever they were working alongside. The tasks were the same, though, or at least variations on a common theme.
There was a device that the engineers called a ‘reticule’, and it appeared to be all important, although Pingge could not quite understand why. Her last twenty days had been spent in intensive training with it, however, so she had to assume that their faith was justified. It was intricate but hardly complex, perhaps a step above the weaving looms. Positioned above it, she could look down towards the floor of whatever warehouse or vault they had taken her to, adjusting the lenses for focus. There was a burden, too — sometimes a lead weight but mostly just a sack of flour. Pingge would be strapped into a harness with the reticule before her face, and the harness would be attached to a wire, and the wire would be strung between the walls. At the engineer’s word, she was released, to rush helter-skelter across the great vacant space, and there would always be a circle or some other symbol painted below.
It was a silly, simple game, really: release the burden so that it struck home on the symbol, allowing for momentum and using the distortion of the reticule’s lenses to spy out the ground ahead. Pingge had proved one of the better Fly-kinden at this charade, but mostly because she was able to relax into the business as a game, without fretting about the purpose behind it all.
A delegation of her comrades — she had not been amongst them — had gone to the engineers to point out that, as they were Fly — kinden, the whole business would be easier if they could guide the descent with their wings, but this apparently was besides the point. Those who could not keep their Art in check were slapped in ‘Fly-manacles’: leather strapping about the back and shoulders that stifled their wings entirely.
They were trained night and day, sometimes woken out of sleep as though the world was about to end, for just another session of shuttling to and fro. They trained under bright gaslamps, in daylight, at night, in dim underground caverns. They were kept without sleep for nights at a time. They were put on short rations. None of it seemed to have a pattern — no suggestion of punishment was ever implied, nor even of simple Wasp-kinden cruelty.
Although the groupings remained random, Pingge had started to see more recurring faces in the last eight days or so. Nobody wanted to ask what had happened to those people they no longer saw. The other questions could not be bottled, though: Why conscript Fly-kinden if you didn’t want them to fly?
Today was different. Instead of more training, with the wires overhead and the harnesses ready, Pingge found herself marched into a drill hall along with around forty other Fly-kinden, all of whose faces she recognized from her most recent sessions. She caught sight of Kiin immediately, and the pale Fly woman waved to her, entirely against Imperial protocol. At that moment there was a great deal of milling and jostling, and the guards didn’t seem to care.
‘I knew you’d be here,’ Pingge announced, as Kiin wriggled through the throng to get to her. ‘You always did have steady hands.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s obvious. We’re the best.’
Kiin looked about her, considering. ‘Best at what?’
‘At whatever this reticule business is,’ Pingge pointed out. ‘We’ve helped them test their new machine, whatever it is. Back to the factories for us now, I’d guess. I’m hoping for a bonus, myself. Keep the folks happy.’
The Fly beside them, a crop-haired, burly man called Gizmer, shook his head in dusgust, but Pingge ignored him blithely.
‘Have they had you in the airship yet?’ she pressed.
Kiin frowned at her, all the while plainly keeping a weather eye out for the authority figure that was surely on his way over. ‘Airship?’
‘They had us up on a pissy little airship — you remember the blow we had a few days back, the storm? We went kicking about in that, tearing about the sky fit to burst, and us in manacles, too. We took turns with the reticule, dropping stuff from way up — worked a treat, too. Those fiddly little lenses are much better when you’re higher up. Makes the game a lot harder.’
‘Game?’ Gizmer butted in, looking even more contemptuous.
‘Game, test, whatever,’ Pingge waved the distinction away, but Kiin interrupted her.
‘Pings, what exactly did you think they wanted you up there for?’
‘Testing their new toy, of course. They seemed happy, anyway. Everything in working order, time to go home.’ Perhaps only Kiin would notice the slight edge of tension to Pingge’s voice.
Or it’s top secret Engineering Corps business, and now they kill us.
Gizmer snorted. ‘Don’t you know anything?’ he hissed. ‘They’re not testing the machines. They’re training us.’
‘A lot you know!’ Pingge retorted, and at the same time Kiin said, ‘Why would they want Fly-kinden, though?’
At that moment, Wasps started coming in — not a few, but tens of them, a small group of officers led by the well-remembered figure of Major Varsec first, then a squad of engineers or soldiers or… something. These last marched in without words, without expressions, silently forming neat ranks facing the muddle of Fly-kinden.
Gizmer leant sideways and murmured, from the corner of his mouth, ‘Because we’re light, idiot, and for no other reason.’
A few ideas connected inside Pingge’s mind, but Varsec was already speaking. She had heard more about him since being co-opted for the reticule project. He had been the man to lose Solarno, most famously, but he seemed to have come out of it well, promoted and in charge of whatever was going on here — and elsewhere too. He seemed to have a dozen projects on the go and was forever being flown about the city and beyond.
‘Captain Aarmon,’ the major said, and the man front and centre of the Wasp formation took a step forward and saluted him. To Pingge — Imperial Fly-kinden became masters of reading Wasp attitudes at a young age — it seemed that there was a distance between these men that was more than of rank, a very complex relationship indeed.
‘Major.’ Aarmon’s voice was soft for a Wasp officer. He seemed to respect Varsec but it was not an active respect, more like that of a man for his ageing father than for his immediate superior. ‘These are the best?’
‘We have others in training, but these have shown the most facility,’ Varsec confirmed carefully, as if anxious not to displease his subordinate.
‘I told you!’ Pingge hissed.
