Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Air War

Corog Breaker stared at her without any love. ‘Play the point again,’ he directed, but now she didn’t like his tone. He was sounding like a man looking out for something specific, which might be bad news. Still, retaining an unassailable confidence in the face of bad odds had got her this far, and it might get her much further if she didn’t acknowledge the chasm yawning at her feet.

‘Distance,’ Breaker snapped, and she lined up with her opponent, their blades touching at the very tips. The Beetle youth had a look of tremendous concentration on his face, as though trying to catch out a street conjuror.

‘Clock,’ said the Master Armsman, and she hit her opponent on the arm, lightly this time for mercy’s sake.

‘Excuse me, Master Armsman!’ one of her rival’s team-mates piped up. ‘The Antspider’s cheating, Master.’

Breaker’s eyes were flicking left and right like flies in a bottle. The Antspider held herself very still. Would the Armsman stoop to admitting he had not seen it? Would his dislike of her — and, she had to admit, his preference for people actually playing the idiot game properly — overcome his oft-acknowledged pride?

‘Show me,’ he growled, and her stomach plunged.

A minute later and it was all over.

‘I have stretched the rules of the Forum and of polite society to accommodate you misfits,’ Breaker was complaining, giving the word a venomous twist. ‘You arrive one man short, I let you fight anyway, because you assure me he’s just on his way. Your sponsor is absent but I agree to accept her letter of commendation. But now I discover that you have found a way to break the rules, despite every measure we take. The last time a team was actually disqualified from a contest, Miss Straessa, was in the early stages of the Twelve-year War, so you may have some satisfaction in knowing that you have achieved at least a footnote in the histories of our duelling society. Do you have anything you wish to say about the matter? An apology would not be amiss.’

This is where my mouth is due to get me into trouble, considered Straessa, known by all as the Antspider. But she had dug a fair-sized well of trouble so far, so she might as well keep digging till she struck something useful. ‘Why, yes, Master Breaker. Take him out and bury him. That boy’s three times dead by now.’ She directed the wooden sword at her opponent, who started out of a conference with his friends and stared at her.

‘By the rules of the contest, one must stand at full extension, blade to blade, before the clock begins,’ Breaker told her sharply. ‘Your little tricks-’

‘Master, had I met him on the field, he’d be dead,’ she pointed out. ‘Do you think this game will help him if he joins the Merchant Companies? By rights I should be allowed every trick I have. I should be allowed to jump him from the rooftops on his way to the Forum. Rules, yes, but you know I won.’ Her smile was feral. ‘And you know what else? I killed him exactly the same way, three times. Cheating or not, what sort of swordsmanship is that?’

Corog Breaker regarded her, and she was surprised to see something other than hostility in his face: understanding, she realized, even agreement. Soldier and artificer, he had fought in the war, and against the Vekken before that when they had come to lay siege to Collegium. Of course, he knew she was right and that this anachronism would not see anyone safe through the next conflict, whenever that might be.

Neither rhetoric nor reality was going to win this contest, though. He was already shaking his head, and she turned to her fellows, Eujen and Gerethwy, holding her hands wide to show that she had done what she could, which was mostly to make a bad situation worse. Play to your strengths, that’s what I say. Still, many of the spectators were discussing her technique, and she reckoned that she might cover the month’s rent by teaching a little fencing in the evenings, after this. It was the Spider part of her nature: Losing with flair is something better than winning without.

They had called their team ‘the Dregs’, and Eujen Leadswell was their tenuous link with the general populace, being Beetle-kinden born and bred in Collegium, a young son of a brewer-turned-soldier, and a figure of notorious energy in the debating chamber. Gerethwy, on the other hand, seven feet tall, robed and hooded, had been put in the world purely to make honest halfbreeds like the Antspider feel normal.

‘You!’ Breaker suddenly spat out, the word shot through with loathing. ‘Out!’

And then there’s that: a pale young man had just appeared in the doorway, late and yet still managing to pick his moment.

‘What does that think it’s doing?’ Corog Breaker, veteran and conservative, had been given a target for his temper.

Is it me again? Do I get to do my usual grand job of salvaging the situation? the Antspider was thinking. But Eujen was already standing up to receive the brunt of Corog’s wrath. ‘Master Breaker, this is our fourth.’

‘I will not have it in the Forum.’ Breaker’s voice came out dangerously low.

‘Master Breaker, Averic has been accepted as a student of the College,’ Eujen pressed on, all formal politeness.

‘I’ll not have a Wasp in the Forum.’

‘What authority have you?’ Eujen Leadswell managed, in the face of Breaker’s wrath.

‘I am Master Armsman of the College,’ Breaker thundered. ‘If I say he’s not to set foot on these tiles, he’s banned. Bring your complaints to the Masters, do. Let’s see how many of them have any cursed sympathy with you. Or don’t you think they were up on the walls doing their piece when that lad’s Empire came?’ The last words saw Breaker’s face rammed close to Eujen’s. ‘Just you think, boy, about what your choice of friends says about you.’

With that, Breaker had clearly had enough. He stormed out, choosing the doorway that Averic had been hovering in, forcing the young Wasp to back out quickly to avoid being knocked aside. The brief quiet that Breaker had been speaking into degenerated almost instantly into a storm of gossip, much of it derogatory and aimed at the Dregs.

Eujen looked over at Averic. The young Wasp had his fixed smile on, the one he used whenever his kinden became an issue. He had not taken one step forward.

‘Leadswell!’ It was one of the opposing team, a burly man named Hallend, shouldering his way through the crowd that was already breaking into clumps spread out across the fighting ring. ‘What were you thinking, bringing one of them? You think that they understand any kind of fighting but the real thing?’

‘You think he’d beat you to death with a wooden sword?’ Eujen asked witheringly.

‘I think I know his lot’s temper,’ Hallend spat back. ‘And if not now, then later — a knife in some dark alley, or that sting of his. We all know how they like to win. I lost an uncle to his kind in the war,’ Hallend persisted. ‘My parents fought his people to keep our city free. And now their spies are walking about in daylight, students at the College.’

‘My father died in the Vekken siege,’ Eujen snapped, ‘and now the Vekken are our new great friends and allies. How was that achieved, save that Maker’s party reached out to them? Two generations ago we counted Sarn a great threat to our north, but then we went to them with open hands.’ He gave Hallend the chance to draw breath for a rebuttal, and then spoke over him fiercely. ‘But every Makerist agitator in the Assembly tells us there must be war with the Empire. We must not trade with the Empire. We must be on our guard against the Empire’s spies. Is there some moral difference between Vek and the Wasps? No, it is just the fact that the Empire is far away, and so the Makerists can rail at it with impunity. It is because the Empire is large, and so they see too great an effort in converting it to our philosophies, so they do not try. It is because the Empire seems set to last, and it is convenient for some men to have a strong enemy abroad. What other tyrannies are hidden at home when all eyes look over the wall for an army? What taxes, what confiscations, what laws are passed? Does the Empire hate us more than Vek has hated us? No. Is the Empire the unrelenting, irredeemable evil that the Makerists paint it? No. The distinction is not one of morality but one of convenience.’