Empire in Black and Gold

Salma grimaced. ‘Even better.’

‘I will send one of the Messengers Guild to Helleron. It’s about the only way to cover the distance before the Sky does. I’ll let my people know you’re coming. They should be meeting you at Benevolence Square, which is close on the airfield. My chief ally in Helleron goes by the name of Scuto, but the man you’ll meet will be Bolwyn.’

‘Well, Bolwyn’s a good Beetle name. Is Scuto maybe Fly-kinden then?’ Tynisa asked.

‘I’ll. . let Bolwyn introduce you,’ said Stenwold non-committally. From inside his robes he fished out a square of folded paper. ‘Here. Keep this safe. This is Bolwyn.’

It was a portrait, a pencil sketch done with a minimum of lines and shading, but still giving a clear picture of a heavy-jawed middle-aged Beetle-kinden man. The signature, in spiky writing at its foot, read ‘NERO’.

‘Any questions?’ Stenwold asked, after they had each taken a turn examining the portrait.

‘Yes, what about you?’ Che asked.

He smiled at her fondly. ‘You’re worried about me?’

‘I am, Uncle Sten, yes.’

‘Why shouldn’t you be?’ he said. ‘A man past his prime, like me? Too great at the waist, too small of strength. A historian better suited to books than the blade. That’s what you think, is it?’

‘Well-’

‘Because that’s what the Wasps think too, I hope.’ Stenwold put on a smile for their benefit, but inside he was thinking, That Thalric, though. I can’t see him falling for it. ‘I’ll be with you in Helleron before you know it,’ he assured them.

He took a good look at them, though, before they all left the taverna by the back entrance. His last agents. His ward, his niece. His chips were on the table now, and he had nothing held back. It was win-all or lose-all on this hand.

I wish I had Tisamon here. Stenwold used to fear nothing when walking in Tisamon’s shadow.

He tipped the Merraia’s owner handsomely for use of the room, and more for telling skewed stories later, about who had come in and who had left where. Those four young people had walked in free and innocent but left with his mark on them. He could make a list of those others who had taken that mark to early graves. Not a great list, true, but he had no more of them he could afford to lose.

He hurried off into the brightening morning light, wondering just how many eyes were fixed on him, how many of the busy crowd were marking his steps.

Seven

The airfield lay eastwards and seawards of Collegium, beyond its walls, although smaller airstrips had sprung up within the city wherever the rich magnates could find space for them. The earliest flying machines had been erratic things. The accepted way of getting them off the ground had been to launch them off the promontory beside the harbour, and hope the wind took them before the sea did. The science of aviation had advanced a little since then, of course.

Collegium boasted the largest airfield in all the Lowlands, with Helleron a close second. Beetles and artifice, Beetles and industry, they always went hand in hand. When Ant-kinden built fliers or automotives, they were intended for war. Beetles built them for all purposes, for freight, for exploration, for the sole sake of the mechanics, for simply travelling faster between two points.

Even so, air travel by anything other than Art-wings or a mount was a new thing to the Lowlands. The first reliable flier had been tested here four generations ago, but regular air travel was one generation old at best, and expensive too. Collegium’s airfield had some four dozen fliers arrayed across its hard-packed earth. Each was different, the individual peculiarities of inventor and smithy making their mark. Orthopters, heliopters, even a few fixed-wings, but towering over them was a pair of dirigibles with their inflated gasbags, and towering over them floated the Sky Without.

‘I’ve read all about her,’ Totho was saying. ‘She’s the first of a new generation of lighter-than-air fliers. Most of the others of her size use hot air, you see, which means half the weight you actually lift is due to the boilers and the burners.’

Tynisa, walking behind him, had never seen him so animated. He was a real hermit crab of a man, she mused. What emerged infrequently out of his shell was nothing you’d guess at from the outside.

‘But the Sky doesn’t use air at all,’ Totho went on. ‘The bag’s filled with precipitate of mordant aquillin, which is actually lighter than the air, and so you can free up so much more space for the freight and passengers, and the engines-’

‘Toth, will you take a moment to think about who you’re talking to here,’ Salma said to him. ‘Old news to Che, I’m sure, and, well. .’

Totho craned back at him. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘No, I don’t understand — not a word. You’re wasting your explanatory talents on me.’

‘Oh.’ Sudden comprehension came to Totho. ‘But even if you don’t, you must have seen-’

‘We don’t have air ships in the Commonweal, Toth,’ Salma said patiently. ‘Think about it. We don’t have artificers. We don’t have automotives or engine-mills or even crossbows in the Commonweal, now, do we?’

‘But. .’ Totho floundered for a second. ‘Amongst all of you?’

Salma grinned. ‘You ever see a Mantis mechanic, Toth?’

‘I. . No, of course not.’

‘You’ll not see one amongst the Dragonfly-kinden, either. Nor anyone from the Commonweal.’

‘Sorry, it’s just. . hard to grasp. Tynisa?’

She shook her head. ‘Sorry, Totho. All machinery bibble-babble to me.’

‘But you were brought up here in Collegium!’ he protested. ‘Surely. .’

‘Sorry. You ever see a Spider-kinden crossbow-woman? Being Apt to machines isn’t something you can just pick up. You’re born to it or you’re not.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Che patted Totho’s arm. ‘I was listening. Tell me.’ Privately, though, as Totho’s enthusiasm waxed again, she was considering what it must be like being Tynisa, or Salma, in Collegium. Or Doctor Nicrephos, or Piraeus, or any of them: all those who had lost out in the revolution, those centuries before.

She had seen Tynisa with a crossbow, once. It had been when they were both around twelve, and Tynisa had been determined to become good with it, as she had been with everything else she put her hand to. That day lingered in the memory because it was the first time Che had found something she herself could do, that her foster-sister could not.

But it’s not hard, she remembered saying patiently. You just point it at the target and pull the lever. And the staggering weight of her understanding that Tynisa just could not grasp the notion, could not understand that the action led to the result. She almost shot Stenwold when she finally clutched the weapon so hard she mistakenly triggered it, and she could not even begin to reload or re-cock it. It was not just that she had never been trained, or taught. It had all been there for her, if only she could adapt her mind to take it in.

Persistent myth related that the crossbow was the first tool of the revolution. Almost certainly there had been something else, something less warlike and more practical. The crossbow was what won the battles, though. Any fool could pick up a crossbow and kill a man with it, any Beetle-kinden, or Ant, anyone Apt. Bows were an art-form, crossbows but a moment in the learning, in the making. The world had been turned upside down within a generation by men and women armed with the crossbow and the pulley, the hand-pump and the watermill. All the old masters of the Lowlands had been unthroned, their slaves prising mastery of the world from their impotent hands. There were a few exceptions, as always. She had heard of itinerant Beetle scholars going native deep in the forests of the Mantids, propitiating spirits and painting their faces,