Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1), Adrian Tchaikovsky [13 ebook reader .txt] 📗

was unclear what had transpired, but then it became apparent that several of them were in some way attached to one another, and that at least one of the watch remained stuck halfway up. What had seemed originally to be dust covering them was revealed as strands of silken web, of a particularly adhesive kind, and precious minutes were wasted in the watchmen disentangling themselves.

“We do not use the stairs,” the Ant repeated. “We believe there is a spider.” His hands indicated a beast of variable but alarming size.

After that there was nothing for it: Rodder and his men went up with maces at the ready, using lighter-flames to burn through such webs as they found, and cautiously at that because a fair proportion of Shallowacre was flammable. Their ascent to the roof of the Workwell workshop became as difficult and painstaking as mountaineering.

But at last, because he was nothing if not determined, Rodder cleared the roof, and there he saw it.

It was an unlovely thing. Even silk stretched over a skeleton of wood and steel can be ugly, and this machine was a triumph of practicality over aesthetics. The front end looked too broad and heavy, angular and lumpy like a spider’s cocooned victim, cupped about the single bare seat and the few sticks that served as the vessel’s meagre controls. The back end tapered off into a two-pronged rudder, seeming too fragile. The ribbed wings themselves were half-closed, up and back, at an unnatural angle. Nothing that flew in life would have held itself so.

There were three people up on the roof, Rodder saw. A small Fly – no, some Fly halfbreed – and some lanky, sallow foreign woman were watching him as he clambered out into the air. The third was a Beetle-kinden man, and he was working at the machine.

At that moment Rodder saw how he had been made a fool of, what all the stalling had been for. The Beetle was not mending it, or building it. He was winding it, priming an engine.

“Right, you bastard, you’re under arrest!” Rodder shouted. “You stop that right now.”

The artificer stopped, indeed, straightening up and looking back at Rodder. Then, in one movement, he had swung himself over the side and was sitting in the machine.

Rodder lunged for him, even as his watchmen were pulling themselves up onto the roof. The artificer was reaching for the controls, but Rodder reckoned that if he could get a hand onto any part of that unwieldy looking machine then it wasn’t going anywhere.

Lial swore, seeing the watch officer lunge. The lever that engaged the clockwork was stiff. He hauled on it. The man’s hand clawed for the unnamed flier’s hull.

He heard a whoop from Tallway, who had been reeling drunk from before dawn, and a moment later the watch officer was receding backwards at twice the speed, because the Grasshopper-kinden had kicked him hard enough to put the imprint of her bare foot in the steel of his breastplate.

He struck the rest of his men, knocking at least one back down the stairs, and then they had to help him get his armour off, because the dent was stopping him drawing breath, and Tallway turned to Lial and grinned like a maniac.

The lever slipped free at last, and the wings slammed down with a clap like thunder. Tallway and Scop leapt into the air with their own Art wings, and one of the watchmen ended up hanging off the edge of the building, which further inconvenienced his fellows.

The machine leapt skywards with a drunken lurch that Tallway would have been proud of, the rhythm of the engine’s gears rattling every spar. The wings were thundering, a blur of silk, and Lial heard the engine complaining. In his mind was the fatal sound of Cutmold Limner’s own machine, when the gears had come apart.

The nose tilted downwards. He had spent evenings arguing with the Workwells about that nose, the precise distribution of weight. On the ground they had been able to balance the machine on a point but, with the wings flailing, the weight was constantly shifting forwards and back, and abruptly the flier was pitching and dropping.

And Lial took a deep breath, bracing his knees against the hull, and opened his own wings.

It had been last night. It was the reason that Tallway was even more sodden than usual. Looking at his creation, knowing that on the morrow he would fly or fail, Lial had been struck by a sudden moment of utter revelation. The sky was his now, the limitations of artifice had failed to hold him back and, in that moment, the shackles of Art had likewise given way.

And the flying machine was as light as they could possibly construe, and its own wings were doing their best. All it needed was a little extra lift.

Lial felt some part of him that he had never owned to before wrench and strain, and his Art guttered and waxed, the shimmering of his wings there one moment, gone the next, but the nose came up; the nose was up and he was skimming the rooftops of Shallowacre before casting himself and his machine over Collegium, startling Fly-kinden with the beat of his artificial wings, and with such a clatter of engine that every citizen below looked up.

By the time he reached the better parts of the city he could feel the engine winding down, and when he came in to land it was at a glide, the wings barely moving. He landed before the gates to the Great College, though, with a hundred scholars and students as his witnesses.

The next year at Clifftops Lial brought his machine, but there were already two manned competitors waiting to contest with him. Two years later, manned, heavier-than-air fliers were sufficiently commonplace that the College officials brought the competition to an end.

Lial himself became one of the youngest ever College Masters. Although his precise influence on the matter is unknown, during his tenure the first