This newcomer had not been employed on factory duty. Angved would find out later that this was the difference between being blamed for the demise of a halfway secret and deniable desert skirmish and being blamed for the failure of a major invasion. He was thin enough to look starved, with a wild growth of beard and his hair matted and tangled. Between that and the dirt, it was hard to see much in his face save the creases and lines. Grime and harsh treatment went a fair way to bridging what was in reality a fifteen-year gap in their ages, and perhaps it was this that broke through Angved’s shell of self-absorption. For the first time since the Khanaphes business had gone sour, he found himself looking on someone else as a human being, a kindred spirit.
The guards had stepped back to the door, and up at the high table the senior engineers were arguing again. A slim book was being passed back and forth, almost torn in half as they fought to point out various pages in it.
Angved saw the newcomer looking at him, the eyes lurking in that overgrown face surprisingly sharp.
‘Varsec,’ the man told him, keeping his voice low enough not to drift over to the guards, ‘former captain.’
‘Angved, former lieutenant.’ It was a curious brotherhood, and if the other man had once held a higher rank, still he had fallen further.
‘Engineers?’ the other man pressed.
Angved nodded. ‘You’re not?’
Thin shoulders shrugged. ‘Have they worked out where the Aviation Corps fits yet?’ he asked wryly, to Angved’s surprise. The aviators were virtually independent of their parent artificers, a young, arrogant and elitist band. This man did not seem to fit the mould, but then a few beatings and a turn on the rack would take the shine off anyone’s pride.
‘And you’re here for…?’ Varsec wondered.
‘Khanaphes,’ Angved found himself answering without hesitation.
‘Ah, I didn’t hear much of that. Still, I’ve not been best placed to get the news recently.’
‘You?’
‘Solarno.’
Angved blinked. That was a matter of public record, even if the doomed Khanaphir expedition was not. The Empire had taken Solarno as part of a daring experiment, an invasion planned and spearheaded by the Aviation Corps. They had lost the city at around the same time that the big war had turned, when suddenly there were too many battles to fight, and too few armies, and when the Lowlands had pulled together and everything else fell apart. He understood then that Varsec must be the ranking survivor of the Solarnese force, just as he himself was the scapegoat for Khanaphes.
He was about to pass a comment, his intended words surprising him by being solicitous rather than scathing, when something in Varsec’s pose alerted him. The men at the high table, those important engineering magnates, even the seated Rekef intruder, were looking back across the room. Their eyes fell on Varsec, and then on Angved, passing back and forth, finding each as unpalatable as the other, and yet they kept looking, snapping and growling at one another even as they did. The level of tension in the room, the bowstring-taut nerves of all those powerful men, was almost enough to taste. Words drifted across the room, odd snippets of hissed and urgent demands. ‘Are you sure…?’, ‘… the tests showed…’, ‘… would never let us do it…’, ‘… the Empress…’
Angved swallowed, but one fragment of their conversation had lodged in his mind. The tests, they had said. My tests? Have they read my report? And the only conclusion he could come to: There is nothing else in the world that could have landed me in this room, save the results I handed in – the tests I conducted in the Nem desert. A little piece of side-business undertaken while the Rekef team and their Scorpion-kinden tools had been cracking open Khanaphes; a little experimentation with some of the local resources that had borne an unexpected yield. He had thought it might provide a useful nest egg to retire on, but now it might be the only thing that could save his life and career.
He glanced at Varsec. The man wore an almost defiant expression as he looked at his superior officers, and Angved felt a leap of confidence in just seeing him. He is like me and, just like me, he’s found something that they need.
Then the talking was done. In the end it was Colonel Lien who finished it. Lean and stone-bald, and yet barely Angved’s senior for all that, he spoke quietly and with purpose, and all the others listened. He even cut the Rekef man off with a sharp gesture when an interruption was threatened. We are decided, Lien’s stance said, and nobody challenged him on it.
He was the first to leave, stepping down from the dais and striding towards the door. He slowed, though, as he neared the two prisoners: grey-haired Angved and the raggedly hirsute Varsec. His calculating eyes flicked between them, and on his face the distaste could not quite edge out something more thoughtful. On a younger, less cynical man it might have been hope.
After that, the guards dragged Angved out, but not back to the factory. He learned soon enough that the Engineers had their own cells beneath Severn Hill, windowless and comfortless save for a pallet bed and the constant glare of gaslight. Angved had reckoned that he’d had enough of the sun out in the desert, but spending a day sealed underground did away with any such illusion.
When he awoke, stiff and aching from the hard bed, he found his jailers had already been and gone. They had left him some water, a jug of weak beer, and some stew that had at least seen some meat around the time it was cooked. Luxury it was not, but nor was it food to waste on anyone facing a death sentence. More important than that, though, they had left him a book. It was slim, densely typeset and printed in the manner of all Engineering Corps texts, but certainly nothing on the standard syllabus. It was something new.
He looked at the title page, holding it up to the hissing lamp.
Towards an Efficient Mechanized Air Force, its Design and Deployment. Beneath that was stamped the name and rank of the author: Varsec, Captain, Southern Expeditionary Aviation Corps.
For a moment Angved was quite blank as to why he might have been passed this document, but some helpful clerk had already thought of that, and a stub of black tape marked out a particular page towards the end of the book. The section there dealt with key problems that the author, Varsec, had not been able to solve. Angved had to read it three times before the pieces clicked into exquisite place in his mind, and it was all he could do to stop himself whooping in the narrow confines of his cell.
He read, from start to finish despite the poor light, devouring Varsec’s words voraciously, poring over the diagrams, the carefully printed sketches and schematics depicting wings, streamlined bodies, joints and couplings. He skipped only those sections that dealt with Varsec’s mooted reorganization of the Aviation Corps, for that interested him not in the slightest. He had eyes only for the technical specifications.
At the end of it, he put the book down and just stared at the wall, his mind’s eye painting it with all the wonderful colours of the future.
Stab me, he thought, but we’ll take down every last living one of them. The Lowlands won’t know what’s hit it.
Nine
Khanaphes, city of a hundred thousand years – or, at least, old enough that calendars failed to have any relevance. Even the ancient, opaque system of the Moth-kinden, with its animal years marching in erratic and seemingly random procession, was nevertheless younger than this ancient city. The Collegiate dating system, so popular now, had yet to reach the year 550. Perhaps Khanaphes possessed its own calendar, but if so it was locked in the ubiquitous, impenetrable carvings that were incised on every wall and every stone surface. The locals themselves did not count the years. Time for them was the year’s cycle: the flooding and the growing and the harvest, year without end, lives lived in annual segments that followed precisely the footprints that parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors had trodden. The Khanaphir had no use for time’s progressive arrow.