so she hoped. Each time she made herself a threat, then vanished, she was drawing away their combined concentration, drawing them off her fellows, creating openings.
Or at least I hope that’s what I’m doing.
Abruptly she was in the midst of a fierce fight. Some half-dozen Stormreaders were all about her, one of them even punching a few holes in her tail before recognizing the shape of her hull. Edmon was there, and Franticze as well, and she reckoned she spotted Pendry Goswell and Corog Breaker amongst them too. She wheeled with them, and then the Farsphex were all about them, splitting off into pairs to take them on.
The two flights met like fists. At last there was no dodging away, no escape, and for the moment no reinforcements on either side. The Wasps had greater numbers, two to one, and their cursed linked minds to bring them to bear, but the Collegiates were following Franticze’s lead, and the Bee-kinden’s berserk fury seemed to have infected them all. Taki saw her Stormreader force one of the enemy almost into the rooftops, sticking to it as though she was about to ram, clinging so close that Wasp bolts were tearing impartially into both craft. Pendry Goswell came to her aid, still leading a pair of enemy, but Pendry had taken too many strikes to her engine casing, wings seizing in a sudden choke of gears. Even as she must have been pushing at the cockpit to kick her way out, even as her stilled Stormreader’s forward motion segued into a dive, the pursuing Farsphex’s weapons ripped her open — woman and orthopter both — in a shredding ruin of canvas, brass and blood.
Taki found a target, the two of them passing one another like lancers, her shots spattering across the Farsphex’s flank and the Imperial’s slamming into her undercarriage, her landing legs springing out in a tangled mess of broken metal. It turned but she was fleeter, even as another enemy orthopter was trying to dive on her. Taki’s sudden rush of speed threw off the new attacker’s aim, and she managed to catch her original target mid- turn, a brief second’s worth of glorious open shooting at its side and belly, a dozen shots punching home, so that the turn became a tilt, the tilt a fall. Even as she was dancing away, enemy bolts ripping the air about her, Franticze descended on the faltering Farsphex Taki had crippled, her rotaries smashing in the cockpit, shattering glass, gutting everything beyond.
More Farsphex were joining the fray, and more Stormreaders too, though fewer. Taki zigzagged her way through the aerial melee, trying both to find a target and to shake her pursuers at the same time. Nobody was free to relieve her, and she felt as though she would be dragging these two killers after her for the rest of her life — or until her springs lost enough tension that she would have to make a landing, which felt more imminent than she would like.
All around her the pride of Collegium’s aviation department and the most skilled of the Mynan refugees fought the elite of the Imperial Air Corps, no quarter given. Whirling, fleeting glimpses were all she had of the conflict. She had no idea of its overall shape or structure, simply latching from target to target and letting the enemy behind her continue to waste their ammunition. She saw Corog Breaker go down, with no time to see whether the old man managed to jump clear in time. She saw a Farsphex, burning, smash into the dome of the College philosophy department. She saw two Stormreaders attack each other, blinded by the night, strung too high on panic and desperation. Then, at last, the Imperial craft were pulling back, even their discipline left ragged by the night’s attrition. Taki was already flashing for Retreat! Retreat! but she had no idea who saw or followed her. She had a sense of other orders glittering across the sky, trying to call back some who were still chasing the enemy. Her own engine was dangerously loose now, and she would need all the power and control she could muster to get the Esca safely down without its shattered landing legs. She turned for home.
With morning came the count: they had downed all of seven Farsphex, while Collegiate losses stood at seventeen fallen Stormreaders, twelve pilots dead, one missing. Edmon brought her that last news: Franticze had not retreated. Franticze had hated the Wasps too much for that. She had gone after them as they fled across the sky, refusing to give up the fight, oblivious to the orders that Edmon had tried to give her.
The long-range patrols trying to track down the supposed enemy base, who were going out less and less frequently, found her at last: the shattered corpse of her Stormreader intermeshed with the bent frame of a Farsphex — and no survivors.
Twenty-Six
Whenever Seda dreamt, she was always there: the other, the twin, her sister and her rival. As she wrestled with her own sleeping mind, trying to recapture the ancient techniques that had allowed the Moth-kinden to parse the future through their nightmares, always there was that presence, sometimes near, sometimes far, but always there. Then the clarity of divination would fragment and crack, the stress of two kindred powers too much for such fragile visions to sustain.
She woke into rage and frustration yet again. I will destroy you! But there was a tinge of fear as well. She was the Empress of all the Wasps, and she was crowned the heir to yesterday’s lost magic but, so long as she must share the throne, she could not be easy in her mind, and every triumph, every victory would taste like ashes. She had lived in fear most of her life, in the shadow of her vengeful, petty-minded brother, but now she understood the fear that he himself had lived in, the power of his office exposing him to threats that would pass over the head of a lesser man.
I will not become Alvdan. And yet one ordinary Beetle-kinden girl, a child of wretched Collegium, was haunting her.
When Seda had been gifted — or cursed — with this inheritance, so too had this Cheerwell Maker. When Seda had gone to the ancient seat of power in Khanaphes and bullied the Masters there into making her their heir, so too had the ignorant, stupid girl also been crowned. Too late Seda had realized what she had created: an equal, an opposite, an enemy. All the power that she had worked so hard for had been divided between her and this witless Beetle. However great Seda had become, so too had Cheerwell Maker, if she only understood it. And Seda knew that the other girl would understand all too soon.
I tried to kill her. She should be dead. Yet the girl lived, and Seda felt her like a thorn, every minute. Worse, the Beetle was even now in the Commonweal, where surely magicians lived who would be teaching her their secrets, and although the Beetle had been made Seda’s peer, any new power she coaxed from the Dragonflies would make her stronger.
There was only one way out now: Seda must unearth powers that the girl had no claim to. I would rip out the heart of history if it would but serve me.
One of the old counterproductive superstitions that could still be found sometimes in some out-of-the-way parts of the Empire was the belief that, when twins were born, their father must kill one soon after the birth or else, when grown, each would destroy the other, neither able to countenance the existence of so close a mirror to themselves. It was a foolish belief, and the practice had been outlawed on pain of death — why deny the Empire its soldiers, after all? — but Seda understood it now. Even if the Beetle girl bore her no ill will, even if she went away and never returned to trouble Seda’s ambitions, the simple knowledge that there existed that other self, that counterpart, was to her unbearable.
I will never be free of her unless I destroy her, and to destroy her I must acquire strength.
Where is Gjegevey?
She kicked her way out of bed angrily, shouting for the servants, who entered reluctantly. Being a body servant to Empress Seda was an uncertain prospect. To the cringing women who dared present themselves, Seda shouted, ‘Get me Gjegevey, now!’ and they rushed out, grateful for an errand that took them away from their mistress almost immediately.
Seda stood naked in the centre of her bedchamber, quivering slightly from the dregs of the terror and revulsion the dream had left her with.
Something scraped — the husk of a metal sound seeming to come from a greater distance than her bedchamber would allow. When she looked round, an armoured figure stood statue-still in one corner, and she could not have said whether he was there before or not. Certainly, the servants had not noted him, but then Tisamon was very good at passing unseen, and his armour was no hindrance. The armour was him, as much the focus of his physical presence as anything else.
‘So, you’re back,’ she said, her tone carefully casual. ‘I trust General Roder appreciated your assistance.’
I want to kill him, came the stony rattle of his voice, more felt than heard.
