The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8) by Adrian Tchaikovsky Read Free Book Online

them asked awkward questions. Take good
weather where you find it , as Laszlo’s old sailing master used to say.
    They would talk often of te Riel and Breighl, or of other agents, the individual personalities of the Solarnese intelligencing crowd, but nothing of the causes, the nations and powers. We are
living in the moment between one wave and the next. Long may it last.
    She did not make the theatre that night.
    Later, close to midnight, there was a crash from outside, a shattering of glass, and Laszlo leapt from the bed, whipping a knife from his discarded belt without thinking. A moment’s pause
and he heard drunken laughter outside, and someone else cursing – just late revellers bound for home. He looked for Liss’s sleeping form and found her already halfway to the window. The
blade in her hand was hiltless with a weighted pommel, perfect for throwing. For a moment they faced each other, armed and deadly, waiting to see if something had changed.
    Liss breathed out a shuddering sigh, casting her weapon aside. She sat on the bed, looking abruptly tired and human, not the grinning little tease who kept three men on their toes at the Taverna
te Remi. ‘Laszlo . . .’ she began.
    He was beside her on the instant, and she leant into his embrace gratefully, even though he only remembered to drop his dagger a moment later.
    ‘It wasn’t—’ he started, but she just shook her head. War. It wasn’t war.

Three
    In the last days of spring, the high paths of the mountain were still treacherous with snow. When she walked, she skidded and slipped, clinging to the slick rock face with both
hands for purchase. When she flew, the wind made a plaything of her, whirling her about the stone as though she was flying through a maze of knives and bludgeons.
    She was Moth-kinden, though, and this was her home. The peaks around Tharn had been a stronghold of her people for thousands of years. One of the last few since the Apt had driven them from the
Lowland cities.
    Grey-skinned, grey-robed, her eyes featureless white, her hair a sheet of black falling past her shoulders: a monochrome woman, a shadow or a ghost, slipping silently at midday through the high
passes, unnoticed.
    She hoped unnoticed. She had a great deal of practice in passing unseen past living eyes, but she was no great magician – certainly as her people measured such things – and if the
eyes that were seeking her belonged to her own kinden, then no amount of stealth and secrecy might suffice to hide her.
    Her name was Xaraea, and she was a woman of fragmented loyalties. Loyal to her kinden, of course, or at least to those that called Tharn their home, or to their secret service, the shadowy
Arcanum that could evoke the same fear as the Imperial Rekef in the right circles. But even that was not quite true, for the Arcanum had been riven with factions and rivalries since long before
some barbarian Wasp chief ever thought of building an Empire. She was loyal to a handful of Skryres – the high magicians of the Moths – who were her superiors in her chapter of the
Arcanum, men and women of implacable, unquestioned authority whose names she did not even know.
    There was a sudden flurry of white, not fresh but blown from above, and she crouched, drawing her cloak about her, displaying stone colours against the stone. Moth eyes could still be blinded by
snow, so she remained huddled, looking over her shoulder and waiting to see if the passing of the gust revealed any untoward movement behind her.
    She had done good work during the war, had contributed to the costly victory that had seen the Empire driven out of Tharn. The price had been high, though, and the architects of that freedom had
found themselves under attack from their enemies within the city, and even from those who formerly had not been their enemies. Xaraea knew that her masters were on the defensive on the home front,
but she knew also that their main focus had not wavered. As they