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

But by that time Tallway had located another bottle, and was far more interested in its contents than Lial’s fears.

Some tendays went by and the airship trade picked up, and Goiter Parrymill was more concerned with his own business than with Lial’s. Clifftops was still a year off, and Lial was keeping his head down. Still, he and the Ant brothers had got past the theoretical, and had begun making parts and pieces, just one at a time at first, and then a few together, hinges and gear trains. The Ants made a clockwork motor of their own design, that was as light and compact as they could get it, and then tested the motor until they destroyed it, and then started again, experimenting with how much they could punch and cut from the gears, and precisely where, without sacrificing the all-important strength. Lial remembered all too well the way the gears on Limner’s Mayfly had gone. His flier would be lighter, half the weight or even less, but he would be in it, and he only had the one life to risk. Clifftops was still over a year away and he had no intention of angling for a spectacular public death the way that Limner had. A test flight, which meant that of course he had to build the wretched machine, and where could that be accomplished within the cramped confines of the Workwell place? In the end it was the Ants themselves who had the solution. They were used to a city that neither liked them nor trusted them. When they had a problem they solved it themselves rather than going to others for help. When there was no space left inside they took everything up to the roof. Like most buildings in Collegium, their workshop had a flat top, where Lial and Tallway had already spent a few hazy evenings watching the sunset and talking philosophy. Now the roof became an extension of the workshop, cluttered with pieces, with the frame of the machine beginning to sketch itself out in disjointed rods and spars. The numerous children of a neighbouring Fly-kinden baker were paid a meagre stipend to keep watch over the whole and warn of thieves or vandals.

None of this escaped Goiter Parrymill’s attention for long. Once the skeletal frame of wood and hollowed metal started to monopolise the Workwell roof, people began to talk, and Parrymill had a man who went to look at the place every month, and whose usually barren reports were suddenly ignited by the spectral shape taking piecemeal life over the little businesses of Shallowacre.

Sulle, when he called her, was decidedly put out.

“Turlo said so. It won’t fly. On that basis, let him build a hundred of them.”

But Parrymill was troubled. “I want Turlo to take another look.”

Sulle had her miniscule hands on her hips, utterly out of patience. “Goiter, you’re a leading magnate of the city, and Morless is a fool apprentice, so how is it that you’re looking more and more the fool, and making him into some great and important threat to life and freedom? Turlo’s expensive –”

“I’ll pay. I don’t care,” Parrymill growled, cutting her off. “If you can’t see the danger you’re in, then too bad. I was an artificer before I was a merchant, Sulle. I have a sense for these things.” He turned to glower at her, but her steel stare was a match for him.

“Tell me,” she said flatly. “Give me the missing piece.”

Parrymill’s face sagged. “When I was at the College, there was a band of us wanted to gain the skies. Airships. Airships won out, and every one of us is a rich man in his own right now, and not just a rich man’s hired tinker. But we looked at the problem all ways. We did our calculations. There is no reason why a heavy self-powered flyer shouldn’t work. And then we looked at the numbers and we wrote a great big paper saying how heavier-than-air flight just wasn’t feasible. We knew we could put an airship up right then, you see, and corner the market, own the sky. We couldn’t have put a heavy flier up. Ten years of development and research and we could have done so, but by then we’d be just one among many. The mechanics of it said one thing, but the money said another.”

“You pulled the wool over on the whole College?” Sulle said, half-impressed and half-derisive.

“Did we?” came Parrymill’s bitter response. “Then why Clifftops? Why Limner, and a half-dozen before him I could name that still tried their hand at it. Every year I’m having to bring my influence to bear to discourage someone else. Every year a new challenger!” His face, just then, was a man driven to guilty treason. “It can be done. It will be done. If not Morless then some other. But I’d go be a fisherman before I let Limner’s apprentice take my empire from me. Get me Turlo. Tell him to take another look.”

Sulle sighed, but nodded.

Two nights later Turlo found the Fly children keeping watch, and paid them somewhat more coin than their regular wage to render him invisible to their eyes, on the proviso that he didn’t break anything or steal anything, for they had an odd remnant honesty about them. He pored over the half-built machine for over an hour, making notes and sketches. He was assisted by the advanced stage of the project, which had come on with almost prescient leaps and bounds since he had last viewed it. The winged construction he was examining seemed on the very point of metaphorphosis into a complete and finished form. In his artificier’s soul, which was as pure as any College master’s, he professed himself impressed.

The report he left with Parrymill was exhaustive, but on the front page he had written three emphatic words. It will fly.

When the next message arrived, Lial was half-expecting it. He had gone some months now without contact