Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Air War

Esmail, the man she had come to see, was no Wasp, and — despite Salthric’s words — Xaraea was unconvinced that the Broken Sword truly knew what his heritage was.

Salthric guided her to a doorway hung with a curtain, in the Moth style. For a moment he just glowered at her, then he stalked off, leaving her alone.

Perhaps he hopes Esmail will kill me, she considered. It was certainly a possibility.

She pushed aside the curtain and went in. There were two rooms beyond, square boxes of stone one after the other, and Esmail stood in the archway between them, ready to fight her if necessary.

Xaraea smiled, for she saw her path clearly now. They taught cruelty early, in the Arcanum.

He was a lean, poised man with a gaunt face and a high forehead, eyes deep as wells, dark enough to defeat even a Moth’s sight. His mouth was a narrow line. Not a Wasp, and yet most would find it hard to say quite what kinden he was. Some halfbreed, perhaps, save that he bore none of the signs of crossed heredity. His hair was the colour of iron, his skin a tan that could have been inherent or just the work of the sun. His hands were empty, no weapon in sight, but he was only a moment away from killing her. He would always, she suspected, be a moment from killing her, or anyone he met, for it was his blood and his nature. Right now he was ready to kill her because he was defending something. Esmail was not alone.

There was a woman behind him, a Dragonfly-kinden from the Commonweal, and Xaraea wondered idly what her history must have been to bring her here and in this company. At their feet clustered the children. The eldest was a girl of perhaps five, and looking very like her mother. The younger two could have been two or three, surely born together and yet how different! One boy was as much a Dragonfly as his mother, but the other had his father’s features, his father’s entire kinden — as unlike his siblings as a total stranger.

‘Ah, look,’ Xaraea said sweetly. ‘One has bred true. Another generation secure, hm?’

Esmail’s eyes looked loathing at her, but he was scared. Not scared of her but of what she represented, the same threat that had cowed Salthric. Esmail had lived in peace here because Xaraea’s people had arranged and permitted it: not the Moths, not Tharn, nor even the Arcanum, but that small section of it that she served. Skryres loved their secrets, and some of those secrets were men.

It was a strange quirk of Esmail’s kinden that their offspring were always true-bred, following one parent or the other. If not for that, they would have died out centuries ago, for they had been near-exterminated and the few survivors scattered across the world. The chances of a suitable pair of them meeting and raising children was tiny, and yet the kinden itself clung on through a precarious chain of mixed-kinden matings like Esmail’s.

‘We call on you,’ Xaraea told him. ‘The time has come for you to go out into the world once more, Assassin Bug.’

Oh, there had been a war: one of the bad old wars the Mantis bards sang of, full of blood and dark magic. Hundreds of years before the Apt arose, the Assassin Bug-kinden had launched their campaign to rule the known world by stealth and murder, and the Moths had met them and cast them down. How ironic now that this man would serve the destroyers of his own people.

And he would serve. He would serve because he had too much to lose if he disobeyed.

‘Terms?’ Esmail’s voice was accentless, precise. Of course, his voice could be anything he wanted it to be. He was no ordinary killer. Even amongst his rare and deadly kind, he was special.

Xaraea herself did not know, of course. She drew the sealed scroll from within her robe, orders intended for Esmail’s eyes only. Her masters did not want to risk some scrying enemy finding that knowledge inside her mind later. All that she did know, she explained to Esmail: ‘You are to go into the Empire. An identity will be arranged for you. From there on, do whatever you are instructed to do.’ Preparing his way had been her own hard work and that of her agents within the Imperial borders. Her masters might be the greater magicians, but she was a modern intelligencer, and she had been successful amongst the Apt, where more sorcerously gifted spies had failed.

She saw his hands twitch on the scroll. Killing hands, of course. All of his kind possessed Art that killed. On this mission, though, it would be his other talents — his arcane training — that would count. Back in the mists of history, when his kind had been common, men of his particular skills had formed a secret elite amongst his kinden, just as the Skryres were to the Moths. She suspected that he was now unique.

He did not break the seal. He did not want to expose his wife or his children to whatever task was required of him. He knew also that it would make no difference. Xaraea was not giving him a choice.

‘Look after my family while I’m gone,’ he told her.

Xaraea saw the Dragonfly woman’s face go very still, her hand tightening on his arm. Even the children were silent, staring up at their parents, or wide-eyed at the Moth.

We all know that you might be ‘gone’ for good, the Moth thought. Such was the taint of his heritage that she could not think of that as a bad thing, for all that he was now her instrument.

‘Now go,’ Esmail told her flatly. ‘If I’m to leave here, I’ll make the most of what time I have.’

She took a breath, preparing to remind him of his place, of who served whom, but his eyes flashed with sudden danger.

He will do what he is told, she assured herself, but it was more than she was capable of to stay there with that threat hanging over her.

There was precious little welcome for Xaraea anywhere within the phalanstery, but she had accomplished what she had come to do, and so she took her leave of Salthric and the other deserters swiftly. If there were sorcerous eyes searching for her, then it was best they did not pinpoint her presence there.

It was a long walk to Tharn, and the wind was showing no sign of dropping. She might try to fly high, to rise above it all, but there was no guarantee she would not simply be swept miles off course and dropped somewhere hostile once she was too tired to keep to the air. Instead she took the high paths on foot again, putting her shoulder to the wind and pressing on.

Her only stroke of luck was that she had put well over an hour’s progress between her and the phananstery before they found her. If they wanted to work out where she was travelling from, there were too many paths, too much of the mountain to cover. They would not be able to retrace her footsteps.

‘Xaraea!’

She had not noticed them before their leader called her name. Names were power, of course, and by using hers, he was demonstrating his superiority. Needless to say, she could not have named him in return. He was a lean old Moth wrapped in the elaborate folds of his robe, the sunlight glinting on his metal skullcap. He must have been eighty years, if he was a day, but that was perhaps not so old amongst her people, and especially not for a great magician. She recognized him as a Skryre, but not one of her masters. She was willing to bet he was their fellow within the Arcanum, though. The knife at your back is always keener than the sword before you.

He had not come alone. Flanking him was a younger pair: a man and a woman in tunics of the same drab hue, each with an arrow nocked to their showbows. Behind them, in armour of dark leather bands, was the pale-faced figure of a Mantis-kinden, a sharp-featured man whose gauntlet sported a metal talon folded back along his arm.

‘You have been missed in Tharn. I wonder where you have been in such inclement weather,’ the Skryre addressed her but, when she opened her mouth for a reply, simply held up a hand. ‘Save the lies. Let us assume they have been spoken and dispensed with. I will know where your masters sent you.’