I haven’t been able to find anything solid here to break out from, Che admitted. When I try to focus my strength, it’s just like fog.
He is like a swordsman fighting stronger opponents. He cannot afford to pitch his might directly against ours, but he is fast and skilled. He can deflect where he cannot block. There was a particularly expressive pause, and Che received the impression that Seda’s defenders were hard-pressed.
She delicately stepped back from her link with the Empress, seeking out Esmail instead. We need to distract Argastos, she told him. Can you reach him from where you are?
She thought she had lost him, but after a moment his voice came to her distantly. No. I am inside, as you are. I am just in. . a suite of abandoned rooms, not set for visitors. Or maybe the servants’ quarters that run all the way through an Arista’s house. But, no, I cannot find him.
Che took a step back, because Amnon was being forced to give ground, no matter how determinedly he tried to hold it.
Seda. . she relayed carefully, because it seemed fully possible that Argastos might seize on any incriminating thought the moment it had left her head.
Speak, the Empress snapped back, tensely.
I have it, Che revealed. I know how it can be done.
Thirty-Seven
The good merchants and artisans of Stockwell Street had been talking longer than Serena was happy with, at least twenty of their finest crammed into the backroom of the Helleren Patch taverna. The Fly-kinden had assumed they were moved by the leaflets she had handed them, and by now everyone seemed to know that the Empire was fighting a war on two fronts within the city. So rise up, she had said to them. Cast off your chains while you can! Drive the Empire out of Collegium.
And they had seemed to go for it, right then. There had been plenty of people around — workers, apprentices, refugees from more embattled districts of the city — and some of them had been armed, and she had thought, This is an army in the making. And then the local magnates, the men and women whom everyone would follow, had closeted themselves in the Helleren and. . and just talked. And were still talking, whilst Serena herself shuffled her feet, and Averic kept watch at the window. They were an odd pair to be out soliciting resistance to the Empire, she had to admit. She had assumed he would be doing the talking, denouncing his own people, telling of their atrocities in words that much more convincing coming from one of their own. Instead he just hung back, sullen and silent, and let poor Serena do all the talking.
And he haunted the window like last month’s cut flowers, staring out towards the conflict, towards the College library and his friends, and Serena was beginning to wish that they had sent her out with Gorenn the Dragonfly, because at least that long streak of exoticism had something appropriately harsh to say about the Empire.
What’s the matter, Averic? Wondering if you picked the right side? Which was a mean thing to think, but he was a Wasp, and it had been hard to accept him at the start.
Then she heard the door of the backroom open, and one of the local big men — maybe it was Vollery the plumber — was shouldering his way out, a slice of argument from within still to be heard as he shut the door.
‘You’re all set, then?’ Serena asked him brightly, in absolute defiance of his expression.
Vollery glanced about. ‘You’d better get going,’ he told her.
‘That’s fine. When can we expect you?’ She could read it all on his face — having been put there specifically for her to read — but yet she was cursed if she would accept it just like that.
‘We. . Just go now. It’s not going to happen,’ Vollery replied heavily.
‘You must be mistaken. It is happening.’ Our people are out there, fighting and dying right now, while you’ve made me wait for this?
‘No, it’s not.’ Vollery sighed, a tradesman confronted with something he couldn’t fix. ‘Some students have got some stupid idea that it’s not too late. It was too late as soon as the gate fell.’
‘It’s not just some students, it’s the Company,’ Serena insisted. ‘Averic, come over here. Tell him.’
But Averic barely glanced at her, and she ground her teeth in frustration.
‘Students,’ Vollery repeated, and she read so much into that one word: how it was not just the Wasps who had overlooked the existence of the Student Company, or at least failed to take it seriously. ‘Students, what do they know? They really think calculus and philosophy are going to get anyone out of this?’
‘They’re your own people, your sons and daughters, and they’re fighting for your freedom right now!’ Serena hissed.
Vollery’s expression turned hard. ‘My son died defending the gate,’ he said. ‘My daughter was raped by the Wasps on that first night.’
She stared at him, flinching in the face of his lack of expression. ‘Then surely you. .?’
‘What do you know?’ he asked her. ‘You understand nothing. Fly-kinden? You lot can always just leave, can’t you. And him? I’m sure there’s a place waiting for him back home, when he stops playing.’ And even that barb failed to hook Averic’s attention. ‘But me? I have a home here, and a trade. I have a wife and a daughter who need me. And I should take up a crossbow and fight the Empire’s armies on the say-so of some fool students who think they know anything?’
Serena opened her mouth and closed it, her words had unaccountably dried up.
‘Go,’ Vollery told her. ‘Go, and be thankful I care enough to come out and get rid of you before they finish debating whether to hand you over to the Wasps.’
‘We have to go,’ Averic declared. Serena looked between the two men for a moment, realizing that Averic had not been paying attention to a word Vollery had said, that his focus had been elsewhere entirely.
‘We’re going,’ she confirmed, already backing towards the taproom door, and a moment later she and Averic were out on the street.
‘It’s changed,’ he told her hollowly.
‘What has?’
‘The sound of the fighting. Come on.’ His wings flashed from his shoulders and he was in the air in an instant, leaving her to catch him up.
They had held the Light Airborne off with some success for most of the morning. The students had thrown a barricade across Albamarl Street and put snapbowmen at every window, and on the roofs, with more snipers dotted in buildings halfway to the College. When the Empire had dropped soldiers behind them, the Wasps had found themselves being shot at from every direction, and for hours now they had been driven off, over and over.
Word from the neighbouring streets had been encouraging. Everyone was holding their ground, and the Wasps did not seem to have the sheer manpower to force the issue. A bloody stalemate had gripped the streets around the College library.
Straessa was commanding the Albamarl barricade, for want of anyone better. Gerethwy, standing beside her, had a repeating snapbow leaning on the barricade as he fiddled awkwardly to fit a new tape of ammunition into its feeder. Since the last such device had blown his fingers off, she’d have thought he wouldn’t want to touch the thing, but apparently he had new plans. A bulky pack of machinery rested beside him, and he was murmuring an explanation of what it was that he intended doing with it.
‘There’s no reason for any of this barbaric spectacle,’ she caught him saying. ‘This is just sheer atavism. We’ve scarcely moved on from the Days of Lore. But devices like ratiocinators have shown us that there’s no limit to the tasks a machine can be set, which might have required a man to handle just a few years ago. Even fighting wars can be left to them, so long as we can work out sufficiently complex calculations fitting the task. .’