Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

There was nobody else at the camp either disobedient enough or venturesome enough to go treasure hunting, and their nocturnal visitor remained conspicuous by its absence, although Angved himself set up a searchlight for the night watch, just in case.

Subsequently it took them a single day to get the drill working, and a day after that to start the pumps. The machinery was designed to work in primitive conditions, sandstorms included, it being solid Beetle-kinden workmanship from Sonn that could survive being dragged all over the world by rough and ready Imperial soldiers. They were soon packing barrels with the mineral oil that generations of Scorpions had used for lighting lamps. Angved remembered them explaining its properties to him: wood was hard to come by, but the oil welled up in numerous places around the desert. If ignited, it would burn for days.

He had never come across mineral oil that would burn so steadily, in the quantities the Scorpions decanted into the bowls of their lamps. He had performed his tests and that simple artificer’s inquisitiveness had led inexorably to this current pumping operation – and the similar stations that would soon be set up across the Nem.

He sent a messenger back to Khanaphes, and a few days later the first airship appeared, sailing serenely across the disc of the glaring sun, then scudding sideways in the crosswind as it tacked lower. Angved had the filled barrels ready for collection, and the airship crew and his own off-duty soldiers made quick work of hoisting them on board the vessel, which sagged a fraction lower in the sky with each additional load. The pilot brought news, too, together with supplies for the men and even three Dragonfly-kinden slave girls. The visit made a pleasant change from the brisk orders and hard looks that Angved had grown used to.

With evening coming on, he and Varsec stood outside his tent and watched the airship leave with its first consignment. The pumps were still going and everyone would have to learn to live with their noise, but the two engineers themselves were used to that sort of privation.

‘There goes the future,’ Angved observed, holding up a bottle to the fading light. It was good Imperial brandy, and the label denoted a vintage that he had only heard of, never been able to afford. ‘If I were a more suspicious man, I’d think Colonel Lien was trying to poison us both with this.’ The bottle had been marked for the two majors’ personal attention.

Varsec smiled and shook his head. ‘ General Lien hates the pair of us, as upstarts and troublemakers,’ he mused, ‘but he also knows full well that he needs us. Besides, the Empress knows our names, Angved. We can’t just be made to vanish so someone else takes credit for our work. And Lien knows that I could have written how the Aviation Corps shouldn’t be subject to the Engineers, but I was loyal enough not to. This is him saying that so long as we keep to our side of the deal, he’ll keep his, Major Angved.’

‘Why, thank you, Major Varsec.’ Angved plucked from his toolstrip something that had not been particularly intended for extracting corks from bottles, but which artificers had been using for that purpose for two generations. The brandy was darker than blood, rich and smoky on the tongue, burning at the back of the throat.

‘They’re training the new pilots,’ Varsec observed softly, once he had taken a first sip.

Angved remembered that other proposition to be found in Varsec’s little book, regarding the sort of man they would need at the controls of one of his revolutionary new fliers. ‘I didn’t think they’d go for it,’ he said, his tone hushed. ‘You’ve put yourself out of a job, you know. Didn’t you use to be an aviator yourself?’

‘For me, it was never the flying, just the fact of us having the machines. I’ll not miss it,’ Varsec replied, although there was a touch of regret in his voice. ‘Still, there will be plenty of jobs for the old batch of pilots – civilian roles, support roles. It’s just that for our new type of air combat, we need the new type of men.’

His proposals had shocked Angved, visionary to the point of lunacy. ‘It’s going to be a very different place by the time we get home.’

‘It was always going to be,’ Varsec said philosophically. ‘The only difference is that we will have made it so. The future, Angved – we’re making the future right here, you and I. Even if nobody remembers our names, and the historians jabber on about how General Lien and Empress Seda revolutionized the world, it will be us, only us, behind it all.’ He raised his bowl, and clinked it against Angved’s own. ‘The future,’ he repeated.

‘Our future,’ Angved agreed.

He sipped his brandy. Life was good.

She heard the footsteps. She was still awake past midnight, on this night of all nights. How had she known? There was no explaining it, but a premonition had needled her and jabbed her, and filled her stomach with sinking dread – a premonition that the end of her little world was coming.

She was Seda, youngest daughter of the Wasp Emperor, a child of eight years old.

The footsteps were in no hurry. There was shouting elsewhere in the palace, but the man, that death-handed man, idled down the corridor towards their door. She sat up in her bed. Distantly, someone was cursing. Distantly, there was weeping, fighting. Slave sounds usually, but somehow she knew that it was free men and women who now wept and fought, on this particular night.

She slipped out of her bed, shivering, her bare feet cold on the stone. It was always cold here, the sun’s fleeting warmth stolen away as quickly as it came, but there was a deeper cold now, and it came with those footsteps.

She knew who was approaching and what he intended. She knew what had happened: the terrible event that had hung in the balance for three days, and now was done.

Father? But he was dead, of course. His death had brought the footsteps.

Eight years old and intelligent enough to know what had occurred, and what must follow. For a moment she considered the window, but she had no Art to climb or fly with.

Stripped of any options, she hunched down at her own bedside, hearing the footsteps stop at the door of her room.

In the bed across from hers, her brother Tarvec stirred, but slept on.

She retreated and retreated, but the only place to go was beneath the bed. When she had been very young, she had believed, after a vivid nightmare, that a creature dwelt there – red-eyed and its mouthparts honed into a long, hollow stiletto – waiting for her to sleep so that it could drink her blood. Now the space beneath the bed became her refuge, for the monsters were already abroad.

The door opened. There had been guards posted outside. Perhaps they still stood there, but they made no attempt to hinder the footsteps coming into the room.

Tap, tap, tap. Army-issue boots approached the side of her bed, and she pictured him staring at the thrown-back blanket. She tried not to breathe, tried to summon up some of the hiding Art that some of the lesser kinden practised. Go away. There is nothing for you here.

Then he was crouching, and she could not but open her eyes and look into his face. It was not a bad face, in itself: a Wasp-kinden man with receding, greying hair. A soldier, like so many others. An officer. Her father’s friend.

But not today. She pressed herself back against the wall, as far from him as she could get, and jabbed an empty palm out towards him, as though she possessed the stinging Art that had made her people the greatest kinden in the world. She was only eight, though, and not so very precocious as all that. The intruder’s face merely twisted in dry humour.

She heard Tarvec stirring, sitting up, her brother asking, ‘Maxin, what-?’