Read Online The Air War by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Free Book Online Page A

Beetle youth had a look of tremendous concentration on his face, as
though trying to catch out a street conjuror.
    ‘Clock,’ said the Master Armsman, and she hit her opponent on the arm, lightly this time for mercy’s sake.
    ‘Excuse me, Master Armsman!’ one of her rival’s team-mates piped up. ‘The Antspider’s cheating, Master.’
    Breaker’s eyes were flicking left and right like flies in a bottle. The Antspider held herself very still. Would the Armsman stoop to admitting he had not seen it? Would his dislike of her
– and, she had to admit, his preference for people actually playing the idiot game properly – overcome his oft-acknowledged pride?
    ‘Show me,’ he growled, and her stomach plunged.
    A minute later and it was all over.
    ‘I have stretched the rules of the Forum and of polite society to accommodate you misfits,’ Breaker was complaining, giving the word a venomous twist. ‘You arrive one man
short, I let you fight anyway, because you assure me he’s just on his way. Your sponsor is absent but I agree to accept her letter of commendation. But now I discover that you have found a
way to break the rules, despite every measure we take. The last time a team was actually disqualified from a contest, Miss Straessa, was in the early stages of the Twelve-year War, so you may have
some satisfaction in knowing that you have achieved at least a footnote in the histories of our duelling society. Do you have anything you wish to say about the matter? An apology would not be
amiss.’
    This is where my mouth is due to get me into trouble , considered Straessa, known by all as the Antspider. But she had dug a fair-sized well of trouble so far, so she might as well keep
digging till she struck something useful. ‘Why, yes, Master Breaker. Take him out and bury him. That boy’s three times dead by now.’ She directed the wooden sword at her opponent,
who started out of a conference with his friends and stared at her.
    ‘By the rules of the contest, one must stand at full extension, blade to blade, before the clock begins,’ Breaker told her sharply. ‘Your little tricks—’
    ‘Master, had I met him on the field, he’d be dead,’ she pointed out. ‘Do you think this game will help him if he joins the Merchant Companies? By rights I should be
allowed every trick I have. I should be allowed to jump him from the rooftops on his way to the Forum. Rules, yes, but you know I won.’ Her smile was feral. ‘And you know what else? I
killed him exactly the same way, three times. Cheating or not, what sort of swordsmanship is that?’
    Corog Breaker regarded her, and she was surprised to see something other than hostility in his face: understanding, she realized, even agreement. Soldier and artificer, he had fought in the war,
and against the Vekken before that when they had come to lay siege to Collegium. Of course, he knew she was right and that this anachronism would not see anyone safe through the next conflict,
whenever that might be.
    Neither rhetoric nor reality was going to win this contest, though. He was already shaking his head, and she turned to her fellows, Eujen and Gerethwy, holding her hands wide to show that she
had done what she could, which was mostly to make a bad situation worse. Play to your strengths, that’s what I say. Still, many of the spectators were discussing her technique, and she
reckoned that she might cover the month’s rent by teaching a little fencing in the evenings, after this. It was the Spider part of her nature: Losing with flair is something better than
winning without.
    They had called their team ‘the Dregs’, and Eujen Leadswell was their tenuous link with the general populace, being Beetle-kinden born and bred in Collegium, a young son of a
brewer-turned-soldier, and a figure of notorious energy in the debating chamber. Gerethwy, on the other hand, seven feet tall, robed and hooded, had been put in the world purely to make honest
halfbreeds