The Air War by Adrian Tchaikovsky Page A

narrow stiletto rammed into the ear, neat and lethal and
swift. The body would be disposed of far from here, never to be found again, if the Moths’ agents were any good.
    Esmail straightened up, waiting for his joints to creak, but of course he was younger now, stronger and more vital. He ran a hand across his face, and it felt entirely familiar to him, as though
he had been wearing it his whole life. He had put on Ostrec as a man donned a coat, taking up the Wasp’s memories, prejudices and loyalties, holding them at a slight distance so as to remain
Esmail, and yet having nothing of himself showing to the world that was not Ostrec. The dead man’s own mother would not have known otherwise.
    They were building a railroad depot at Skiel, but it would not be finished for months, so Ostrec was travelling by horse, with Esmail letting his natural skill decline to the basic competence of
the Wasp-kinden. Because he could, and because Ostrec would have done so, he imposed himself on Skiel’s governor enough for a change of mount, so that he could make up for lost time on his
way to Capitas. A lamed horse left behind on the road had already been concocted to explain why he was behind schedule, should anybody care to ask. Esmail lived out Ostrec’s pasts and futures
in his head, even waking from black and gold dreams in the morning, weaving a web of anticipation to cover whatever he should encounter in Capitas.
    The Moth Skryres had chosen well with this man. They could not have known the precise details of the victim they were offering up to Esmail, but their divinations had guided their hands to
someone perfectly suited to the task at hand. Outwardly he was a lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps, but his Rekef rank was major, and he had spent the war travelling between armies and
conducting purges of other Rekef men who had backed the wrong general. He had spent a lot of time in Capitas since, and been rewarded for his successes. He was returning now after digging out
– and Esmail was startled to discover it – a cell of the Broken Sword that had established itself near the Mynan border. In the coded papers in his pack were confessions extracted on
the artificers’ tables that implicated another three Broken Sword groups, for Ostrec had been a thorough man. Esmail knew that he should leave the entire business as it was, for meddling
would only endanger his role and his mission. One night out from Skiel, though, he rewrote one page of the report, in Ostrec’s handwriting and using Ostrec’s codes, omitting all mention
of such discoveries. He owed the Sword that much, and he had his own family to think about.
    He had seen Capitas in Ostrec’s head, but the Wasp, a wellborn native, had a very skewed picture of it: all politics and hidden rooms, brothels, clandestine meetings, the houses of the
wealthy. Seeing it with his own eyes, for all they had taken on Ostrec’s lighter colours, Esmail was taken aback. So large! And so foreign. The sky over Capitas buzzed with tiny
machines, and the roads into it likewise; then he drew nearer, and the city only grew, and perhaps the machines were not so tiny, and then another shift of perspective, and yet another, until he
realized that the stepped pyramids that dominated Capitas were far grander than he had thought, the surrounding crush of flat buildings far wider, everything about the place bloated and expanded
beyond reason, and heaving with more human beings than he had ever seen before in one place.
    Only Ostrec saved his composure, for, to the stolen Ostrec in his head, it was a sight of no great consequence: just another view of his home city which was commonplace to him. Guiding his horse
between the stinking, grinding, rattling and stomping – automotives , Ostrec knew them to be – Esmail could only cling to his borrowed memories, using the Wasp’s jaded
recollections to cut the looming threat of the city down to size.
    Ostrec knew his way around,