The Air War (5 page)

Solarno was unique in its position. The Exalsee was not the Lowlands, for those cities had been forced into an uneasy union by the war, and had come out the stronger for it, ready to lock
shields the moment the Empire even glanced their way. Although fighters from several Exalsee cities had assisted in the liberation – in the air and on the ground – there was no such
unity to be found here. Exalsee rivalries ran deep, and any brief alliances were affairs of convenience only. Solarno was one city standing alone, on the southern border of the most powerful Apt
state the world had ever known.

But the Solarnese were proud, and they were inventive. Unlike many of the cities the Empire had preyed on, they were every bit as technically adept as the Wasps and the Lowlanders, and perhaps
more so. Specifically, faced with the aerial predation of hostile Dragonfly-kinden neighbours, they had pushed the science of aeronautics much further than had either Capitas or Collegium.

The old system of a rabble of individual pilots – skilled but disorganized – that had served to defeat the Imperial air force in the liberation had been seen as insufficient, and in
a rare moment of cooperation the two current leading parties and over half the local Spider-kinden Aristoi families had thrown a great deal of money at Solarno’s artificers, refining their
techniques to produce a standing civic-defence force of flying machines. Three Crystal Standard leaders had been indicted for collaborating with the Wasps, and the grounds of their confiscated
mansions – which just happened to neighbour one another – had been converted into the city’s first municipal hangar. Solarnese pilots were now vying for the privilege of serving
their city – not just a family or faction – by flying a Firebug. Solarno had turned to face the Empire with open defiance:
Touch us if you dare.

The Empire itself had reasserted control of its various rebel provinces now, and everyone could feel the eyes of the Empress roving the map, looking for her next meal. Solarno’s fierce
little show was to demonstrate just how indigestible it had become.

The war was in abeyance, so the tools of statesmanship were the telescope, the bribe, the secret identity and the coded missive. Every key city near the Imperial borders was the rightful prey of
the spymaster just now, and every nation scattered its agents there, putting out trembling feelers for the first move of the enemy. Helleron, Myna, Seldis – all of them hotbeds of espionage
after their own fashion. And, of course, Solarno.

In Helleron the spies bribed magnates and hired criminals, and crept through slums. In Myna they played constant dodging games with the paranoia of the locals. Seldis had been a hotbed of Spider
family politics since long before the war. Solarno, though, had gorgeous views of the lake, and a hundred eateries, theatres and fine wine. Spies must go where they were sent, but where they
wanted
to be posted was Solarno. Laszlo reckoned he had been well rewarded for saving the life of Stenwold Maker, Collegium’s greatest statesman.

Spies came to Solarno to keep an eye on the government infighting, or to wheedle secrets from its artificers, but most of all they came to spy on other spies and, soon enough, their solid
tradecraft was corrupted by the slower pace and higher standard of life there. Confronted with a city in which a day spent creeping about the backstreets was a day wasted, a fragile detente had
slowly formed. Hence the Taverna te Remi, which was where the spies went to watch the other spies, sitting across tables from one another, asking veiled questions, playing games of chance and
skill, trading information and favours, making deals.

It was not as simple as that, of course, and there were certainly deep-cover agents in the city, especially from the Spider Aristoi houses, but if one of the te Remi regulars failed to show, it
was a sure sign that they were up to something, and that in itself was valuable information. So it was that, this morning, Laszlo could cast his eyes across the taverna’s common room, note
who was present, who absent, who was sitting with whom, and have material enough to compose a decent report for Stenwold Maker before being served his first drink.

He waved an airy hand towards the taverner and beamed across the table at his fellows, almost daily companions for the last couple of months. Agents all, enemies and rivals, but friends of the
moment. As a former pirate, Laszlo was well used to making the most of acquaintances before chance should set them at daggers drawn again.

Taking up at least a third of the table was Breaghl the halfbreed, who claimed to be a freelancer willing to spy for anyone’s coin. He had Fly-kinden blood bulked out awkwardly by
Solarnese Beetle heritage, and amongst themselves the others guessed that he was securely in the pay of the Chasme merchants, here to keep tabs on Solarnese innovation and steal any of it that was
not securely nailed down. He had the locals’ sand-coloured skin but his features were lumpy and irregular, his hair receding without grace. He was half again the size of any of his companions
– although still smaller than the average Solarnese – as well as a strong drinker, a weak gambler and a man who apparently made cowardice a matter of principle. He had let slip that the
Fly in his parentage had been his mother and, reflecting on the eye-watering image of his birth, the others had taken to calling him ‘Painful’.

Te Riel was neat, and looked weak and bookish when he wanted to, but Laszlo knew that inside his crisp and reserved clothes the man was solidly built enough. His manner was smooth and he was a
Fly in early middle years, a seniority that he routinely tried to capitalize on. He insisted that he was an intelligencer for hire, but peculiarities of accent had led the others to conclude he was
almost certainly Imperial. Laszlo considered him a prime rival, albeit not over anything so professional as espionage.

The woman, and object of their rivalry, called herself te Liss, or sometimes just Liss, and Laszlo thought that he was probably in love with her. At least, it stabbed him somewhere close to the
heart whenever she smiled at te Riel. In truth, all three of them were a little besotted with her, professional agents or not. She had a heart-shaped face with sly eyes and a constant air of
mockery, and her hair was an explosion of red curls that Laszlo had never seen on a Fly before. She wore dark colours that marked her out against the usual local white, and professed to be a
mercenary out of the Spiderlands, but the three men were quite sure she was in the pocket of one of the local parties, if they could only agree on which one.

Laszlo himself had also claimed neutrality, but te Liss had told him, one stolen evening when he had her to himself, that they all knew he was an agent for the Aristoi, and that he should stop
trying to hide it.

‘Beginning to wonder if your mistress had called you up,’ te Riel observed, apparently oblivious to Laszlo’s aerobatic entrance. ‘Hung over?’

‘Perhaps he was out all night watching over the Firebug hangars,’ Liss suggested. ‘One of us should be getting on with some work here, after all. For myself, I can’t be
bothered, honestly.’ It was bad form, amongst the agents of the Exalsee, to be seen to be
working.

‘As though that’s worth the effort,’ Breighl grunted. ‘After all, they’ll practically guide you around during the day, they’re so proud of the place.’
It was true. The Solarnese were not shy about showing off their new toys – after all, there was no point in having a deterrent if the other side remained ignorant of it.

Liss cocked her head to one side, eyes twinkling. ‘I did come into possession of a little roster: flights in, flights out, day and night. Cost me dear, too.’

‘Hardly, given that you
work
for them,’ Breighl remarked sourly.

‘Me? Why would you think such a thing?’ Her smile disarmed him, as it always did. Of the three of them, the halfbreed was the unhappiest, for he was as smitten with her as the rest
and yet knew he had no chance with her.

‘Who do I owe, I wonder? Who do I want to owe me?’ te Liss’s eyes roved about the table. ‘Dice for it, perhaps? Or will the Empire stump up some coin to keep me off the
streets?’ She raised her eyebrows at te Riel.

He controlled his momentary scowl. ‘What the Empire will do, I can only guess. I’m more than happy to keep you off the streets, Bella.’

‘Hover-fly. Your round, hover-fly,’ Laszlo told him.

‘Don’t call me that.’ Their needling him about the Empire was the only thing that got a rise out of te Riel, and the more he denied it, the more they believed it.

‘Brandy, was it?’ Laszlo kept on. ‘Pick a good year.’ Everyone knew the best brandy was Wasp-export.

Te Riel stood, turning the angry motion into a curt wave at one of the taverna staff. ‘If you truly thought I was Rekef you’d not be so free with me.’ He had said it before,
and it was the unconscious stress he put on ‘Rekef’, that sudden passion, that had decided the others about his allegiance.

‘I see Lorchis isn’t in his seat by the corner yet,’ Breighl observed, changing the subject as naturally as he could. ‘And no sign of Raedhed either.’

A fresh bottle came, not brandy but local sweet wine, and they got to discussing their peers, presences and absences and speculation, trading gems of information that spies in other cities would
have had to shadow and lurk and burgle for and still end up with nothing more reliable at the end of it.

The Empire was out there, a formless shadow on the northern horizon, a vast storm-front that could head south at any time. There were Aristoi families, just the far side of the Exalsee, that had
designs on Solarno, and probably on the wider world. There were Ants whose only plan for defending their sovereignty was the systematic beating down of their neighbours. There was a Beetle
spymaster who had readied himself so much for the next Wasp attack that he might just end up precipitating it. Laszlo knew it, and everyone in the Taverna te Remi knew it.

But Liss was sneaking him a grin, even though she was hanging on to te Riel’s arm. Her expression seemed to say that she was forced to pander to the Imperial, with his ready money and his
arrogant manner, but they both knew who she would rather be touching.

The spring was warm, the promised summer hotter. The prospect of war, always alluded to but never spoken of outright, seemed a long way away just now.

She had left on te Riel’s arm that day, but two days later towards nightfall she dropped into Laszlo’s lodgings, where he was keeping a desultory eye on the civic
hangars. Letters of introduction from some Fly aviatrix in Collegium had secured Laszlo a small third-storey room within sight of the city’s upper classes, and this place was more than most
foreign agents could have boasted. Besides, small and high up only meant that it was perfect for a Fly-kinden.

‘I can’t stay,’ she warned him, even as she flitted in through his window. He was lying on his side, stripped to the waist in the evening’s muggy heat, trying to balance
his telescope so that it would support itself while he looked through it.

‘Top-secret orders come through at last?’ he asked her drily.

‘Breighl wants me to go to the theatre with him.’

‘You’d rather have orders?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘And I’m not suggesting that Painful feels that way about you, but some
orders
, hm? From whoever you really work
for?’

Laszlo shrugged. ‘Nice just to take stock, sometimes.’

She had been poised in the open window all this time, and now she darted over to the bed, landing demurely beside him. Laszlo was lean and strong, for a Fly, having spent much of his life
wrestling with sails and lines, and she put a hand on his arm with a mischievous expression. ‘Stories, stories,’ she murmured, for it was his bad arm, the one he had broken, and the
mottling of injury was still to be seen.

‘You’ve seen mine, do I get to see yours?’ he asked her gamely.

A snort was all that got him, and a change of subject. ‘Anything to drink? If I’m going to sit through three hours of Spider opera, I need a lining to my stomach. Brain, too,
probably.’

He had a bucket of water in the lee of the window, where the sun never quite chased the shadows away, and the bottle he extracted from it was still cool. He was quite aware that this was not
what Stenwold Maker had sent him here for, and that a proper spy would probably know all sorts of ways to seduce te Liss and get her talking. He could only imagine te Riel trying and – in his
mind’s eye – abjectly failing. With Laszlo himself, however, she seemed more than willing to be seduced, and by unspoken accord neither of them asked awkward questions.
Take good
weather where you find it
, as Laszlo’s old sailing master used to say.

They would talk often of te Riel and Breighl, or of other agents, the individual personalities of the Solarnese intelligencing crowd, but nothing of the causes, the nations and powers.
We are
living in the moment between one wave and the next. Long may it last.

She did not make the theatre that night.

Later, close to midnight, there was a crash from outside, a shattering of glass, and Laszlo leapt from the bed, whipping a knife from his discarded belt without thinking. A moment’s pause
and he heard drunken laughter outside, and someone else cursing – just late revellers bound for home. He looked for Liss’s sleeping form and found her already halfway to the window. The
blade in her hand was hiltless with a weighted pommel, perfect for throwing. For a moment they faced each other, armed and deadly, waiting to see if something had changed.

Liss breathed out a shuddering sigh, casting her weapon aside. She sat on the bed, looking abruptly tired and human, not the grinning little tease who kept three men on their toes at the Taverna
te Remi. ‘Laszlo . . .’ she began.

He was beside her on the instant, and she leant into his embrace gratefully, even though he only remembered to drop his dagger a moment later.

‘It wasn’t—’ he started, but she just shook her head.
War. It wasn’t war.