worked for that incentive more than for pay, but she was a wild and whimsical creature, always at the fullest extent of her leash.
‘You’re out safely, then,’ Garvan remarked, a neutral opening. ‘Report.’
‘Nobody’s flying anything out of those hangars any time soon.’ Lissart set herself down on the ramshackle desk, which creaked under even her minimal weight. ‘I got a count of the machines. One missing, out on some errand or other, but your boys were making with the noisy outside, so I reckoned it was time.’
‘Not my boys,’ Garvan noted. She loathed joint operations, and this one had been more knife-edge than most, because coordinating with Intelligence’s current business partner in this part of the world had been a nightmare of conflicting standards — the Empire’s and Garvan’s own high ones contrasted with the apparently random ones she had been forced to work within. ‘How did the Scorpions get on, anyway?’
‘When everything went up, they all legged it.’ Lissart’s grin grew even wider, if that was possible, until Garvan wondered if the top of her head was going to fall off. ‘You should have got yourself over there. Was a beautiful sight, I can tell you. Phwoosh! ’ Her arms described the majesty of the explosions. Lissart was a cracked enough creature at the best of times, but once things started catching fire, she became a regular madwoman. Garvan didn’t know whether that was a personal trait or one that applied to all of her pyromaniac kinden.
‘Some of us had other business to tie up.’ It was true: Garvan had not been short of visitors earlier that night, enough to strain her feigned identity here, but that was not an issue any more. ‘How’s your cover identity?’
For just a moment, Lissart was not smiling. ‘Burned,’ she said shortly, but without the usual relish.
Garvan chose to ignore that. ‘Solarno is just about wrapped up, so I have orders for you.’ She recognized the look that came immediately to Lissart’s face. ‘New cover in the Spiderlands. We need agents there who can talk their talk enough to fit in, but can handle a little sabotage when the time comes — meaning your speciality.’ She had assumed the chance of setting something else alight would overcome that sullen, stubborn expression, but now the little woman was shaking her head.
‘Send me north, send me west, Major. Not the Spiderlands. Solarno’s as close as I go.’ The smile was back, but it was harder. ‘They’re too sharp there, and there’s a colony of my kinden over at Firewater. The Solarno Spiders are backward, and I didn’t have to deal with them much either, but the real thing… not me, Major.’
Garvan nodded, all business. Inside she was unsurprised. She had not worked with Lissart before this Solarno operation, but the woman’s former handler had warned Garvan that the little Firefly tended to forget she was the Empire’s to command.
‘We’ve already prepared a cover for you,’ she explained patiently. ‘You won’t need to be hobnobbing with the Aristoi, just their servants, keeping an eye on other agents — nothing so different to here. Perhaps, in time, I can find you a place in the Lowlands. Believe me, that front will be moving fast. Maybe Collegium, when the Second takes up where it left off. For now, though, you’re just what we need down south.’
‘No chance.’ Lissart folded her arms, leaning back on nothing at all as though there was a chair behind her.
‘Lissart,’ said Garvan, in her Major Garvan voice that had brought into line tougher nuts than this small firestarter, ‘I have orders. I don’t argue with orders, neither do you.’
‘Major, let’s you and me make a deal,’ Lissart suggested. ‘Let’s put that “orders” business behind us for now. You get me a nice post in the Lowlands — somewhere there’s action but not an actual war front — and I’ll play coy about you.’
Nothing registered in Garvan immediately. ‘Lissart, orders are orders. There’s no more to it than that. I need you on the Shifting Gerontis before dawn.’
‘I’m serious, Major. See me right, and I can be discretion itself about just how you make your face up every morning, sister.’
For an instant, Garvan thought she would die, her heart jumped so hard. No, no, no, but the Fly-looking woman was grinning full-strength again, delighted with her own cleverness. ‘What?’ she continued, as though it was just a game and not the sum total of Garvan’s life she had just disembowelled. ‘Fool all the Wasps you want, but you didn’t think I wouldn’t be able to tell, did you?’
Garvan sat there like a statue for one second more, the shock charging back and forth in her head, looking for a way out, and then her left hand flew up, a bolt of golden fire lancing from the palm.
It caught Lissart across the chest, knocking her flat onto the desk but doing nothing more than scorch her stolen clothes. She propped herself up on one elbow, actually laughing, ‘You don’t think that’s any good against me?’
Garvan’s dagger tore into her side savagely, raising a gratifying scream from the other woman. Not a straight death blow, but perhaps a slow death anyway. Agent Lissart lost doing her duty at the Solarno hangars; some part of her mind was already composing the report.
Fire exploded across the desk, Garvan’s coded notes and reports catching light instantly. The major recoiled across the room, flipping the desk over to keep the flames away. She had a brief, smoke-blurred glimpse of Lissart’s small form lurching at the window, not flying out so much as just rolling over the sill for the two-storey drop to the ground. The room was on fire now, leaping orange flames licking about the floor and walls, dancing about the window frame. Garvan cursed and made for the door, battering it open and stumbling down the stairs, beating at the few embers that had landed on her tunic or in her hair. Kill Lissart, protect the secret. It was the only thing on her mind.
Laszlo dropped from the sky, diving steeply even as the small body plunged from the window, and there was nothing in his mind at all, no plan, no opinion. Only the necessity of action consumed him.
She had been stabbed, he saw, her hands weltering red as they clutched at the wound. He was not surgeon enough to know if anything could be done, but he had seen people die from less. The sound she was making was appalling, just a wordless sobbing whimper that yanked at him repeatedly, filling his ears.
She should not have been able to move, but she kicked away from the wall of the house, even as flames crackled above and embers ghosted down over them both. She was trying to get away, still. Whoever had knifed her must be coming.
Who it was, how many there were… Laszlo could not risk a fight, but the alternative almost seemed worse.
He grabbed her, too panicked to be gentle, one hand about her body, under her arm, the other clasped over her mouth. She writhed away when he touched her, not a human reaction but that of an animal in pain. She burned the hangars. She sold out Solarno, She tried to kill me. But all he wanted to do was get her somewhere safe.
He hauled her up, and she bucked in his arms, screaming against his palm, but her own hands still clasped tightly to her rent side.
Too heavy to fly, but he gave his wings their head anyway, kicking backwards too fast across the street and down a rubbish-strewn alley with the bleeding girl in his arms, always at the point of falling, his Art catching him from moment to moment.
He dropped and froze, clutching her to him, trying to stifle her weeping. Someone was there, and he could see them clearly — a lean Wasp with sword drawn and hand ready to sting, and when had he last seen just a single Wasp? There might be a dozen within easy shout.
‘Quiet, quiet,’ he whispered in Liss’s ear, and she whipped her head about to look at him, cracking him across the nose. The expression in her eyes was fractured, shards of everything in there: guilt, pain, fear of him, terror of dying, but he told himself he could read something else there that looked on him more kindly. If the Wasps want her dead, we need her alive. But that was a fiction for the report he would have to make some day. I want her alive was the whole truth.
‘Lissart!’ the Wasp yelled, voice surprisingly high, and then went off in the wrong direction, blind as all his kind at night. Laszlo took his chance and bundled Liss — Lissart? — up in his arms. He had to take his hand from her mouth to do it, but there was no screaming, only a gasping, retching sound that made him sick to the stomach.
She got out his name somewhere in there, he was sure of it.
He ran, wings flashing in and out as needed to keep himself on his feet. She was a dead weight in his arms, but he was pelting downhill for the docks and for an old deck surgeon whose acquaintance he had made. Halfway there, Lissart got an arm about his neck, strength enough still to hold on to him, however weakly. Her eyes were open, locked on his face.
He got into sight of the bay, and skidded to a painful halt in spite of himself. ‘Oh mother,’ he heard himself
