Eujen’s expression was familiar to Stenwold, because he himself had worn it when this idea had first been revealed to him. If he had not had artificers go over the plans, he would not have believed it for a moment. He could see the student putting the pieces together steadily, and soon the boy would come to understand the chaos of the previous night, even if Stenwold suspected he would never condone it.
Banjacs was already nodding: the old artificer had fully understood the absence of Stormreaders the previous night, without ever having to be told, and had accepted the decision automatically. After all, it would give his machine a more suitable testing ground. ‘When the machines of our enemies have fully gathered over us, we shall annihilate them in a moment.’
Something was dawning on Eujen’s face, his mouth opening but the words slow to emerge, but even as he began, ‘Master Maker,’ in a strangled tone, Banjacs interrupted, hushing him.
‘Stop! That sound is wrong! Cease work, you morons!’ the old man bellowed at some of the College’s most eminent artificers. ‘What… what is making that sound?’ He cast about, as though trying to sniff out the noise.
Stenwold could hear it too, something entirely discordant. Not now! Don’t let the bastard machine go wrong now… It was a great buzzing drone and, in the midst of all this artifice gone mad, it seemed curiously familiar.
‘Master Maker,’ said Eujen, his face frozen, all condemnation vanished from it. ‘It’s the Ear.’
Stenwold blinked, his mind taking a moment to catch up on what the boy was saying. The Ear was sounding. The Great Ear, their warning mechanism, was calling out the city’s pain, as it had during so many nights before. But outside, the sky was light, the sun still high over the west.
The enemy were coming. The enemy were coming now.
‘Banjacs!’ Stenwold bellowed. ‘Get it working — all of it. Get it ready to loose!’
Banjacs goggled at him, hands describing the mess, the missing panels, all the little tasks the artificers were still engaged in.
‘Just work!’ Stenwold almost screamed at him. They were coming, all of them, the air-storm that he had called down upon his people, and he was not ready. The Empire had out-thought him, in the end. In his mind he was calculating time and action, plans, orders… ‘Messenger!’
As if from nowhere, a Fly-kinden in Company sash dropped down beside him, a snapbow seeming over large in his hands.
‘Listen carefully: I need this taken to every airfield word for word.’ Stenwold felt out of breath, his heart painful in his chest. ‘Tell them this: they are to engage the enemy…’
The Beetle-kinden man with the burn scar, Army Intelligence’s senior man in Collegium, had spent that day counting up the cost of the night’s work. That matters had not gone according to plan was an understatement. The modest number of agents under his command had accounted for a mere handful of targets. Some teams had been cut down. Others had found their subjects too well defended.
The aggrieved feeling hung heavy on him that he was labouring under someone else’s errors, but he himself had felt that the Wasp boy was securely under the Imperial colours, as had Garvan, his superior. After all, Averic was a Wasp and of good family, and there was a natural order to the world that the burned man had learned long ago. Wasps were the Empire. That the boy might have spat in the face of his proud heritage, rejected his own and betrayed his people to Collegium was repugnant to the Beetle with the burn scar. The irony was lost on him.
He still had a small but respectable team working with him, thanks to the prudence that Army Intelligence instilled in its people. Instead of Rekef men raised in a climate of fear and terrified of the consequences of failure, most of his people had simply weighed up the odds and not chanced carrying out attacks. That meant they were still on hand for the night to come.
He had been waiting for contact from the Spider agents in the city, an uncertain prospect, but a lean Fly-kinden man had found them in the early evening in the working man’s taverna they were holed up in. The building was missing most of a wall, and all the windows had been smashed, but the landlord was still serving.
They adjourned to an enclosed backroom, after slinging the landlord a few coins. The burned man expected the Fly to waste time and mince words, weaving a web of allusions and hints, as seemed the Spider way, but instead the report was brutally direct.
‘Things have changed. You have a new priority target.’
The Beetle bristled. ‘You’re not in a position to dictate that.’
‘What if we told you that we’d overlooked something until now. Earlier, we’d report that to your general. Now there’s no time and we’re reporting it to you.’
The burned man sat back, considering. ‘What is it?’
‘There was a man — he’s on your list, but far down it — who’s an artificer. There had been some official interest in him recently, but there was a murder; we thought it was just internal Collegiate business carrying on despite the war, you know.’ The Fly shrugged. ‘We now think it’s not that. We think they’ve played us.’
‘Why? Our orders are to kill Stenwold Maker above all others-’
‘Good. Fine. He’s there now with this man, Banjacs Gripshod. So’s your Wasp boy. You need to get out your knives and get moving.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘We don’t know,’ the Fly hissed, ‘but the patterns are all wrong. It’s something important, and it’s at Gripshod’s place it’s happening. It’s…’ The difficulty of explaining screwed the little man’s face up. ‘We have our methods. We look for patterns, feel for the connections between people. But patterns can be deceptive — look at them from a different vantage, you might see something entirely other. That’s what’s happened here. It wasn’t about the murder after all. It’s all about the war. Whatever they’re doing there in that house is vital, and you need to stop it. I swear on my mistress’s honour you do.’
The burn-scarred man stared at him levelly. He had memorized all sorts of places in the city, the dwellings of potential victims amongst them. Part of him was already working out which streets to lead his people down to so as get to Banjacs Gripshod’s place as soon as possible. ‘And you’ll help, will you?’
The Fly spread his hands. ‘That is not a part of our mystery,’ he said, with a tired smile. ‘Besides, surely you won’t need us?’
She was gone when Laszlo returned, her sleeping roll disordered, her few personal possessions just smaller absences about her larger one. None of the surgeons or nurses could tell him just when she had slipped out, and he could not know whether she had been feigning her injury, or fooling herself, or whether she had simply been that desperate to be rid of him.
Lissart had vanished, abandoned him after all they had been through. Laszlo could only stare in utter disbelief, and then argue with everyone around him because there were few enough casualties yet for the doctors that surely one of them must have noticed a badly wounded Fly or not-quite-Fly woman pack up her things and leave.
But none of them had. Her tradecraft had been her pass in the end. She was gone.
He wasted a great deal of time then, by dashing about the outside of the tent, making sudden rushes in this direction, then in that, as if he would find her just a few paces away, pausing for breath and clutching her wound, waiting for him. First, though, before all that furious, undirected, futile action, he just stood and hurt. Laszlo the pirate, grinning factor for the Tidenfree crew, a girl in every port so long as he had the coin, and he was hurting for her, for his lost te Liss. He had never felt such a tearing before. In its wake, he felt that he would never quite see the world in the same way.
After all that, all the futile battering at the windowpanes of fate, he returned to where she had slept and there found her message.