Imperial issue during the Twelve-year War with the Commonweal. For Taki the Capitas night was mild, spring already well under way, but it seemed that winter still clung to this man. Or perhaps the coat was simply to hide what was beneath, for one of his shoulders was higher than the other and there was a terrible lopsidedness to all of him, inherent in the very way he stood. His gait, as he stepped onto the street, had been an uneven limp, with one leg stiff as a stilt.
She approached cautiously because, if he was like that, what would his reaction to her be? Had this all been a trap, a plan for revenge? Even crippled as he was, he could still sting.
She coughed to draw his attention, ready to trust to her wings at a moment’s notice.
His face, as it turned to her, was shiny with burn scars. ‘Bella Taki?’ came a coarse voice. There was no hatred or hostility in it.
‘Sieur Axrad,’ she named him, and then, ‘Lieutenant Axrad, I mean.’ She approached cautiously, less from fear of him than a reluctance to see what she had made of him. He had been the Empire’s pre-eminent pilot in Solarno and, when she had flown during the liberation, it had been against him. His Spearflight had crashed and mangled into her Esca Volenti. She had assumed he had died.
It was a long time later when his first letter reached her, a halting missive reintroducing himself, stiffly offering his congratulations on her victory over him.
They had exchanged a few letters since, and she had read, between his words, that he was lonely. The Empire might be a fierce and Apt state, but it lacked the pilot’s society of Solarno, that exclusive and peerless fraternity of those who could. Axrad had more in common with her than with his own.
His face was blank as he gazed at her, but after a while she noticed that his eyes looked as though they should be smiling, and realized that the burn had left him without much range of expression.
‘Come with me,’ he rasped, and went limping off without another word, leaving her to patter after him, still not convinced that it wasn’t all a trap.
He took her to a Capitas drinking den — not like the place that Reader and the other foreigners had been guided into, but the real thing. It was in the cellar of a squat, square house, almost twice the size of the cramped ground floor above. Everyone else there was Wasp-kinden, and all men, some of them in uniform. All were drinking, and most of them seemed to be there for nothing else, save for one huddle playing cards on the floor. There were a few tables available, and she saw that Axrad was known because they cleared one for him. By the way he levered himself painfully into a chair it was plain that sitting on the floor would not have been possible for him.
There was no other chair. She sat on the table, close to him and keenly aware of the baleful looks she was getting: wrong kinden, wrong gender, wrong nationality. Still, nobody had bolted out of the door to tell the Rekef, just yet.
‘So, how…?’ She could not ask the question, stupid as it was. She knew from his letters that he was bitter and frustrated. She had known he was unable to fly, although he had not been clear, in his writing, just why. Asking him how he was getting on now would be sheer insult. ‘Still “lieutenant”, though?’
His nod was jerky. ‘Don’t assume that I asked you here to catch up on old times,’ he told her. ‘Though I’d like to. They’re all I have. But I wouldn’t call Collegium and Solarno’s greatest pilot all this way just to indulge me.’ He sounded like an old, old man, and moved like one too. He was probably only a few years her senior. ‘You wonder if I’ve lured you here for the Rekef?’ Without needing an answer he went on, ‘I wonder if you’ve come here as a pilot or a spy. Are you here with your Stenwold Maker’s blessing?’ His eyes were still mobile and young, as he probed her face.
‘No, and for two reasons,’ she told him. ‘One, he’s so twitchy about your lot he’d try to stop me coming at all. Two, if he couldn’t stop me he’d give me all sorts of other rubbish to be doing here that would get me arrested or killed, or both. So, no, just me. The pilot.’
‘I will tell the pilot things that the spy would kill for. I was a pilot, Bella Taki. I was a pilot. ’
She stared at him: of course he had been a pilot, but she saw his hand clamp on the table rim, the fingers white and shaking with all the emotion his mute face could not show.
‘No longer,’ he said at last, his eyes alarmingly wide. ‘This? Oh, this.’ He made such an offhand gesture, dismissing the ruining of his body as though it was a shaving scar. ‘But, even if I were whole, nothing for me. Men who were my equal, the best in the aviation corps — denied the new machines, sidelined, even taken from combat duty and reduced to supply runs, civilian freight or sent in old Spearflights to terrify the savages in the most backward part of the Empire. Or made to teach. They had me teaching.’
She didn’t want to confess that she had been doing exactly the same at Collegium. Secretly she agreed that it was a poor second to actually flying, but she owed the College a great deal.
‘Teaching the junior pilots I knew from before we went to Solarno, though? No,’ he spat out. ‘Listen, Bella Taki, we don’t have much time. Listen to me. They have me teaching clerks and slavers, factory overseers, men plucked from the Consortium or the Light Airborne — oh, lots of the Light Airborne. Have they any flying experience? No, almost without exception: clueless, hopeless, and yet they are the new pilots, the next generation of combat fliers rushed through training, hours and days in Spearflights and whatever else is to hand, More training in a few months than most trainees get in a year.’ His voice sank lower. ‘And there’s something wrong with them,’ he whispered. ‘They sit there… like machines. They watch, they learn. Not a twitch, not a shared joke with their classmates: men of all ages, all backgrounds, and yet… by the end, I had begun to fear them.’ His hand was shaking again. ‘Then one of their own — he had been a pilot, the only one that had been — took over the teaching. I was no longer required. I have been cast away. All the men I knew, the Empire’s pilots, are being displaced by these… freaks.’
‘Well, it doesn’t sound as though the Lowlands or Solarno have much to worry about, then,’ Taki tried, dismissively, but Axrad’s eyes flared, and he had her by the wrist before she could pull away.
‘I’ll show you,’ he threatened, lurching to his feet. In actual fact there was pitifully little strength in that grip, but there was a warmth to his palm that frightened her, because one sting and he could take her hand off.
As he hauled her out of the drinking den, the looks on the faces of the other Wasp men were mostly approving. At last she was being taught her place, apparently.
Axrad started stomping haltingly away, and he could not hold her, his fingers weakening and loosening his grip after only a few steps. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said again, less of a threat now. He did not even look back to see if she was following.
She wanted very much to return to the other foreigners now. She wanted Axrad to come along with her and talk about old times. Her daring had abandoned her without warning. Still, to go now would be to show fear in front of another pilot, for all that he would never fly again. She was the greatest pilot that either Solarno or Collegium had ever known. She had bested the Empire’s own best. This is what she told herself whenever she met life’s obstacles. If she fled now, she would never quite recover that iron self-confidence.
Axrad was making surprisingly quick progress, his hoarse breath showing that he was pushing himself painfully to do it. She kept pace without difficulty, could have gone twice as fast without resorting to her wings but, even so, his grim determination scared her. Here was a different man to the earnest pilot she had met in Solarno.
Crashing in flames and becoming a burned cripple will do that.
‘Axrad,’ she did not want to raise the issue but it was unavoidable, ‘you should hate me.’
‘For Solarno?’ he panted. ‘You were the last person to treat me as an equal. As someone who mattered. I save my hate for others.’
He took a sharp turn, hissing with sudden pain, and they were at the edge of an airfield, a narrow strip easy to overlook, since the city was strewn with more inviting spots. With a start she realized that they were towards the edge of the city here. They had come further than she thought. Beyond the strip lay a rabble of small houses and two or three big sheds — no, hangars that had been storage sheds not so long ago.
This can’t be a secret airstrip. We’re right in the capital. We’re surrounded by buildings. And yet she guessed that the locals kept their mouths shut and, besides, it was night. The Wasps were not a nocturnal people. They did things by day for preference. Night was for stealth and subterfuge.
‘They call them Farsphex,’ the Wasp breathed, and then stared down at her as though he had forgotten she was with him. ‘Hide yourself,’ he snapped. ‘Just watch.’
She blinked at him, then flitted up to the roof of the nearest building, but the flat roof made her feel exposed, so she darted down again, finding a narrow alley that had been fenced off where it met the airstrip. With a little scrambling and balancing she had found a roost tucked into the shadows where the fence met the alley wall. By
