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

“It should have flown. I checked the calculations myself.”

“I said it wouldn’t-”

“You?” Lial rounded on the little man. “What do you know about it?”

Scop put his hands on his hips, facing off Lial’s greater size without flinching. “Limner couldn’t fly. You can’t fly. Me? I can fly, and that cursed Mayfly was never going to get off the ground, and a nutshell for your calculations. Too heavy. Body too heavy for the engine, wings too heavy for the joints. I told him.” The halfbreed put down the broom and hooked a satchel from beneath the workbench.

Lial blinked in surprise and Scop nodded. “What? I knew only one of you’d be coming back. I’ve got work to find, to put bread on the table. Goodbye, Master Morless, and good luck.”

“Lial,” Lial said automatically. He had never got on with Scop, particularly, but seeing him in the doorway, pack over his shoulder, putting Limner’s life and death behind him, the Beetle felt sorry to see him go.

Scop nodded soberly. In those days a halfbreed had to go a long way to be on first name terms with a College man. “You’re really going to carry on the work?”

Lial nodded. In his mind there was very little else. When Limner had gone over the cliff, seven years of Lial’s life had gone with him.

The halfbreed made a noncommittal noise. “We’ll see,” was all he said, and then he was gone.

After that, Lial needed a drink and, rather than sit in the workshop – which he knew perfectly well he would not be able to keep up – and turn gradually more inward with each bowl he drained, he decided to seek out his mentor and instead get spectacularly drunk with her.

She was nobody’s idea of a good mentor, was Tallway. Lial didn’t know how many other students she actually had. Certainly she made more of a living telling unlikely stories around the tavernas than she did actually teaching. She claimed to be an Art tutor of high repute where she came from, and when she had first arrived in Collegium she had attracted a great many impressionable people who were led on by her exotic nature. It didn’t take them long to work out she was a sot.

Tallway was actually Taul We, but Collegium folk had little tolerance for trick names. She was the only individual of her kinden in the city, which seemed to suit her just fine. Freakishly tall, six foot four inches at the least, and angular every which way, she had a long, narrow face and sallow, unhealthy-looking skin. Her dark hair was tied messily back out of her eyes, usually with nothing fancier than a piece of string, accentuating her hollow eyes and hollow cheeks and a high, bony forehead. She stitched Beetle cast-offs into long coats and voluminous shirts and breeches cut to fit her gangling frame, which left her seeming always as if she had dressed in a hurry.

She was Grasshopper-kinden from the Commonweal, she said. Nobody disputed it, but then nobody could prove it, either. The Commoweal was not a welcoming place, and those Collegium merchants who had ventured the trip had come back, if they came back at all, chastised and empty-handed. A recent airship envoy from Goiter Parrymill’s cartel had been met with an armed warning and turned back at the highland border. The only commodity to come out of the Commonweal, it seemed, was Tallway.

Lial had originally stayed as her student for one reason only: flight. Beetle-kinden could sometimes develop the flying Art but, unlike most other insect-kinden, it did not come easily or naturally to them, and it had so far eluded Lial. One of the few pieces of information he had got out of Tallway was that her kinden were the same: they could fly, indeed she could fly, but it was a rare and difficult Art amongst them. That qualified her as a teacher, for none of the Beetle mentors in the city professed to have mastered the Art themselves.

So far his studies had born little fruit, and indeed with Tallway as a teacher it was hardly surprising. Half the time she was absent when he came for his lessons, and half the rest of the time she was already reeling drunk before he arrived. Whatever had driven her from her far-away home, it was soluble in strong spirits. Still, a drunken Tallway was at least entertaining, as her normal talent for spinning fictions grew grander and grander the more she took on board, until she would swear that she was the world’s greatest magician, the King of Sarn and the inventor of the double-reaction water-pump all at the same time. Despite his studies not progressing, Lial had grown fond of her. With Limner gone she was one of the few people he felt he could actually talk to.

In Collegium they drank wine, mostly from the local vineyards, and almost always watered. Drinking unwatered wine was for madmen and Mantids. And Tallway, when she deigned to drink anything so commonplace as wine. She was an expert in locating brands of alcohol that were as potent as they were obscure.

The stuff she foisted on Lial after Limner died was bitter on the tongue, sweet on the back of the throat and apparently some kind of nettle brandy. Where Tallway had got hold of a case of it, she wouldn’t say, but they got through a remarkable quantity, with Lial brooding evermore deeply, and Tallway becoming increasingly erratic. Some time after midnight she explained to him, in great and complex detail, how she was going to go home and show “him” just how wrong he’d been, to “knock down all his people” and to “puncture his drum”, whatever that meant. Lial did not try to ford the rushing torrent of her words lest he be swept away. Besides, almost everything that Tallway said was a lie, usually an obvious and entertaining one.