Dragonfly Falling

Fifteen

‘Explain to me why these machines are such a threat,’ demanded one of the Tarkesh tacticians, sounding irritable. He might even have been the king, for Totho found it difficult to distinguish Tark’s ruler, to whom he had been briefly introduced, from the other men on his staff. There were about a dozen of them, men and women, and they all had the same Tarkesh features that made them look like siblings. The king wore no special garments or insignia, just the same plate and chain armour as the others, even here in his war-room, and like them looked as though he was short on sleep. Totho supposed that, mentally, he kept saying, ‘I’m the king, I’m the king,’ but for outsiders it was impossible to tell.

‘It’s all to do with flight: Art flight and mechanical flight,’ he said, looking from face to face just to be sure. ‘I’m afraid I don’t fly any more than you, so can I ask my friend here to explain about Art flight?’

One of them nodded, one of the women, and Salma stepped forwards. Totho glanced around to see Parops standing to attention behind them, having persuaded the court to see them at all.

‘Your Majesty,’ Salma said tactfully, bowing to the correct Ant, ‘may I present myself as Prince Minor Salme Dien of the Dragonfly Commonweal, arrived here in common cause with your city-state at the behest of Master Stenwold Maker of the Great College.’

It sounded impressive, but he prompted no awed reaction from the assembled tacticians. Instead they just eyed him suspiciously.

‘The Wasps are not strong fliers,’ Salma continued. ‘With only the wings their Art can summon up, they cannot fly for long distances. They can just about get from their camp across your walls, but they could not simply circle over your city for hours, or even many minutes. Moreover, they could not gain enough height to get out of range of your crossbows without wholly exhausting themselves. You’ve seen that for yourselves, I’m sure.’

There were nods and a few hard smiles around the war table, and Salma thought, They actually think they’re winning!

‘I’m sure the Wasps have some who are better than that, probably scout squads of their best fliers, but not enough to make a difference. They also have their insect cavalry, and their machines. I forget what Totho called them.’

‘Heliopters,’ Totho supplied. ‘The problem is that they don’t fly very high either, and they’re very exposed to your artillery, because they’re big and slow and not as heavily armoured as you might think, because then they couldn’t get off the ground at all.’

‘We have seen such,’ one of the tacticians confirmed.

‘But their airships can fly much higher,’ Totho explained. ‘So high, in fact, that the only thing able to threaten them would be something else capable of flying that high. I don’t even know if your orthopters could do it but the Wasps obviously thought they could, which is why they mounted the night attack that saw most of them destroyed. At a great cost to the Wasps themselves, true, but now they can safely attack your city from the air. They can drop explosives on you, or even just rocks or leadshot. They can deploy their soldiers, as well, over any part of the city that they choose. Even though they can’t fly up high of their own accord they can glide down without much effort. I am afraid that the Wasps have brought a new kind of war to you.’

Though the tacticians did not exchange glances or confer, Totho sensed the flurry of thoughts passing between them. At last one of them spoke.

‘We must destroy them, then, on the ground.’

‘That would seem to be your best chance,’ Totho agreed.

‘An attempt at sallying out with any affordable force would meet with defeat almost immediately,’ another tactician warned. ‘A sally with sufficient force would merely leave the city wide open, and the potential casualties amongst our troops would be unacceptable.’

‘A covert attack would be the only solution,’ a third concluded, fixing Totho and Salma with a fierce stare. This, Totho realized, must be the King of Tark.

‘We will trust your analysis of the situation,’ the man continued. ‘You have information and perspective that we lack in this. We distrust new wars, and we see this distrust has brought us to this point. We must mount a swift strike tonight to destroy the airships. Then we must destroy the Wasps in the field before they can construct or import more of them.’

‘Your Majesty,’ said Salma, ‘I would go with your men, if I may?’ The tacticians studied him, narrow-eyed, and he shrugged. ‘For one, I can fly. I can see better in the darkness than your people. And I am a sworn enemy of the Wasps.’

‘We have favourable reports of your fighting in the recent attack.’ The King nodded. ‘You indeed have talents we lack. Very well. And your comrade?’

‘No-’ Salma started, but, ‘Yes,’ said Totho.

Salma goggled at him, wrong-footed for once, and Totho felt obscurely proud of that. ‘I may not be the fighter that Salma here is,’ he said, ‘but I am an artificer of the College, and destroying the airships is an artificer’s work.’

‘You must stay always with our people,’ the King warned him. ‘They will know each other’s minds, but not yours. You must not stray from them.’

‘I will do what is asked of me,’ Totho confirmed, and realized Salma was still staring at him, shaking his head slightly. ‘I have one other request for Your Majesty, though.’

‘What request is this?’ The King and his staff were all suspicion again.

‘There was a halfbreed scout captured with us, when your soldiers took us in,’ Totho explained. ‘Her name is Skrill. Please let her out of the city when we start on our sally, so that she can head for Collegium and inform Master Maker what’s happening here. He is trying to organize an army against the Wasps, I think, and he may be able to help, so he needs to know exactly what’s going on here.’

There was a long silence between the tacticians then, as they passed their narrow thoughts back and forth, trying for a consensus. Eventually, the King nodded slowly.

‘It shall be so,’ he said.

‘Would you mind explaining to me just exactly what you’re doing?’ Salma demanded, once they were back in their rooms in Parops’s slightly skewed tower.

‘I don’t mind at all,’ said Totho. ‘If you don’t mind answering the same question first.’

‘I am going out to fight,’ Salma said, ‘because I have been trained to fight, and because the Wasps are the enemies of my people, and most of all because I know how to look after myself-’

‘That’s not it at all,’ said Totho. He now felt drained and miserable. The prospect of tonight’s activities oppressed him, and he sensed that he had been robbed of choice from the moment he had set foot in Tark. My last real choice was to leave Che to the Moth. And what a good choice that had been.

‘What’s not it?’ and even to Totho, who had no great ear for such things, Salma sounded evasive.

‘You don’t care about Tark. No, that’s unfair — but you sold yourself long to the Ants. You can fight, but you’re no good at destroying airships.’

‘The Moths of Tharn can destroy mine-workings. I witnessed that in Helleron.’

‘Because they’ve practised, they’ve learned particular things by rote. That’s not the same,’ Totho said. ‘But here you are charging out to fight thirty thousand Wasp-kinden, and you don’t care about Tark enough to do that. You’re looking for her, the dancing girl.’

Salma was quiet for a long time before finally getting his words in order. ‘You know, Toth, I really do underestimate you sometimes.’

‘All the time,’ said the artificer. ‘Everyone does. You’ve not spoken of her, barely mentioned her, since the Ants caught us. I knew, though — I knew you hadn’t forgotten. I never saw her but I hope she’s worth it.’

‘I dream about her,’ Salma said, surprising him. ‘I can’t put her out of my mind. Whenever I’m active, doing something, I’m all right, but then in the pauses she comes back to me. I didn’t even know her for long, and yet. here I am.’ He gave Totho a solemn look. ‘I suppose that we’re not so very different in that, since you’re in love with Che.’

Totho nodded glumly. ‘Since almost the moment I met her. Only, Stenwold doesn’t much like the idea. I even got the courage to ask his blessing, back in Myna, and he didn’t say anything much, but his face. you could tell. And then that cursed Moth, he just turns up from nowhere as though he’s her best friend in the world. And as soon as we got the two of you from the prison he was all over her. You must have seen it.’

‘I did,’ Salma admitted. ‘I had other things on my mind, but I saw it.’

‘And she. she liked him, I could tell. But it’s like Tynisa and the boys from the College. They go to her because she’s. graceful and. elegant. and sometimes she leads them on. But I can’t believe that creature feels anything for Che. and I tried to tell her how I felt, but she didn’t understand, and it all became. I just couldn’t stand. ’ He found that he was sniffling now and wiped his eyes and his nose furiously. ‘And so I just left, put a note by her pillow and left. I. I feel gutted, literally gutted, Salma. Like my insides have been ripped out of me. I’m just hollow. And now all this. all the killing, the destruction. You know how I’ve always wanted to design weapons?’

‘I didn’t, but go on.’

‘I should feel that it’s wrong — after I’ve seen what those weapons can do. And yet. and yet people would still kill each other with sticks and stones if they didn’t have anything else. With their bare hands even. And it would be pointless, so pointless. I. I almost think that only the weapons make it all worth anything. At least something is learning from the whole bloody business. The people remain the same, killing and dying and dying and killing, but at least the weapons get better.’

Salma gave him a doubtful look. ‘I don’t think Che would like to hear that.’

‘No, I’m sure she wouldn’t.’ Totho rubbed at his face, as if trying to erase some unseen stain.

Salma decided to come to the point. ‘Listen, Toth, when Skrill makes her move, you should go with her. Get out of here and get back to Stenwold. The Ants have artificers enough. Go back to Stenwold. And to Che, even.’

But Totho was shaking his head. ‘You haven’t thought it through, Salma. Sorry, but you haven’t. What am I supposed to say to her? Yes, I left you on an ill-planned mission that seemed certain to see you dead. Yes, I just ran, at that point, and made sure that my skin stayed whole. That, you see, would look particularly impressive. Che likes you. You and she went through a lot together. When you decided to come here on this fool’s mission she was furious, and it was because she was frightened for you. She doesn’t like me half as much, I think, nor would she have shed as many tears for me. So if I go back with that story, that I left you to your fate, how could I look her in the face? I know it’s not practical, and I’m supposed to be a practical man, but that’s how it is.’

‘Then don’t leave, just stay here. Stay in the city and wait,’ Salma said. ‘You don’t need to go tonight.’

‘It makes no difference, because I’d still be in the same position. Anyway I don’t think you’ll be coming back here afterwards.’

‘You can’t think I’d just grab Grief and abandon you here.’

‘No,’ Totho said, ‘that isn’t what I think at all.’

‘Then. ’ Salma thought about it. ‘Oh, I see.’

‘This is a fool’s mission, and these Ants are fools. They didn’t understand a word of what you said, or what I said. They have no concept of an enemy that is so much stronger than they are. Their mission tonight will not succeed.’

‘I thought in Collegium they didn’t believe in destiny.’

‘We believe in the odds, Salma,’ Totho said, ‘and I do not believe that we will win, tonight. I really do not believe that we will survive.’ He sounded distant, almost trancelike.

‘Well if you believe that,’ Salma told him, ‘then the question is back on the table. Why are you coming with me? Or is that why? Is that it?’

‘I do not have that courage, or that cowardice, whatever it is,’ Totho said, ‘to turn the blade upon myself. But I have. nothing left, Salma. I have nothing left. And so I’ll let the Wasps do it instead, if it’s all right with you. And if I can help you out, or even help the bloody ignorant Tarkesh, then that’s good too. But I am turning into something strange that I do not like. And so I think it best that I go with you tonight, and best of all if I do not return.’

Salma had no reply for that, trying to see through the clouds hanging about this man to the student he had once known. Totho had always been gloomy, it was true. He had always been shielding his halfbreed nature against the world — and then there had been his infatuation with Che, which had not helped. Tark had been the forge, though, that had taken the decent ingredients of the man and botched them into something flawed and strangely made.

We can win, tonight, Salma told himself. His own race were slow to admit to the impossible, and the histories of the Commonweal were rife with accounts of one man standing off a hundred, of bridges held by a mere handful, of one assassination bringing down an army or a principality.

We can win, he thought again, trying to convince himself, but in that moment he felt very far from home and the things he knew, surrounded by hard stone and jagged metal, and afraid.

‘So how do we get outside the walls without the Wasps spotting us?’ Salma asked.

Their leader was Basila, who had interrogated him when he first came to Tark, and then bedded him shortly afterwards. Now she was attired in dark cloth over metal-reinforced leathers, hooded and with a scarf ready to cover her lower face. Both her blade and her exposed skin were blacked.

‘Do you think the Wasp-kinden are the only people who have ideas?’ she asked contemptuously. ‘We are ready for this possibility.’

Salma had accepted an arming jacket from them, and a better-balanced sword, but they had no bows in the whole of the city. For Totho they had found artificers’ leathers and another repeating crossbow, not as fine as Scuto’s had been, but a serviceable machine nonetheless.

‘Follow, and you will see.’ Basila led the way, and the two of them fell in with her dozen Ant soldiers all clad as she was. Skrill hopped along at the back, her arm still bound up, looking nervous.

‘Listen, Your Highness,’ she said. ‘I ain’t sure about this.’

‘Just get to Stenwold,’ Totho insisted. ‘Tell him what’s going on.’

‘And what if the Wasps see me?’

‘Then run,’ Salma said. ‘I’ve seen how you run. You’ve a turn of speed a horse would envy. Wasps tire fast once in the air, most of them. So run and keep running, and hope.’

‘Hope,’ she echoed, without much of it in her voice.

They entered one of the city barracks, and almost immediately were heading underground, down into rounded tunnels that the insect colony must have dug under Tarkesh orders.

Nero and Parops had been there to see them off, like a mismatched pair of mourners. Parops had just clasped Salma’s hand and wished him luck. There had been little enough hope in his eyes either.

Underground, Salma had no way of keeping track of where they were heading. The Ants seemed to be finding their way simply by touch, for it was so dark that even his keen eyes could make nothing of it. Often they heard the scratchings and skitterings of insects as they scurried out of their way ahead.

‘Here,’ Basila’s voice came to him, and Salma knew they had stopped when he ran into the back of the man preceding him.

A lantern glowed into life, the dimmest of faint glows. There were two Ant-kinden waiting for them there who had probably even been guiding Basila in with their minds’ voices. They carried shovels, and Salma now saw that the tunnel ceiling had a shaft dug into it, with metal bars serving for handholds.

‘We have these radiating in every direction from the city,’ Basila told him. ‘The Wasps have no watch near this one, yet it is close enough to their camp to strike there before we are seen. The Wasps have little light beyond their camp, and we know they do not see well in the dark, no more than we do. These men and I, we have stayed in darkness below the ground since the plan was conceived, making our eyes fitter for this moment.’

One of the Ant engineers was now crawling up the shaft, legs straddling the gap at a painful-looking angle. He began to dig up at the earth above, showering dirt down on them.

‘The earth left is shored up, enough to bear the weight of a man,’ Basila told them, ‘but we will be digging through in minutes. Then we begin.’

She and her team bore their swords, together with little crossbows that were double-strung to give them the power of a normal bow whilst being small enough to shoot one-handed. They had little wheel-locks set above the handle to tension the sprung steel arms.

The Ants waited in silence as the engineer above them dug towards the surface. Totho and Salma exchanged glances, but at this stage neither had anything to say.

Then the lamp was extinguished, and Salma realized the man digging above them must be nearly through. He put a hand to his sword, made sure it was loose enough in its scabbard.

There was a final rattle of earth and the engineer came back down, and went past them with his colleague and, without a word, off into the dark tunnels. Basila was ascending already, hand over hand in a perfect rhythm that all her team picked up, each man climbing with his hands almost under the boots of the man before, and yet not one slip, not one hand trodden on, until they were all above and it was time for Salma and Totho to follow them with far less assurance.

Basila looked between them. ‘From now on,’ she instructed in a low voice, ‘there is no more speaking. I will hear nothing from you, nor you from me. Watch what we do and follow it. No more than that.’

They nodded. Salma drew his sword, painted with weaponblack, and Totho put a magazine into the top of his repeating crossbow. Skrill clasped both of them on the shoulder, a weak gesture intended for what comfort it could give, and then she was off into the night, swathed in her cloak, following the long road to Collegium.

The Wasp camp was lit by picket lamps, a ring of them, twenty yards out from its furthest-flung tent and spaced widely. There were some sentries standing a little in front of them, mere silhouettes to the approaching raiders, and yet others who patrolled along the whole perimeter. Beyond the lamps, after an interval stretch of clear ground, the tents of the camp itself started. Now it was dark there was little activity within.

Grief in Chains is somewhere in one of those tents. Or ‘Aagen’s Joy’, as she had last called herself. Something twisted sourly inside him at that thought.

He saw that several of the Ants had gone, and he moved to ask Basila, but remembered at the last moment that he should not speak.

It was going to be a long night.

There was a sentry out there. Salma wondered at first why they had not attempted to sneak through between the widely spaced guards, but guessed that then the chances of detection would be doubled. The Wasps would know precisely their own perimeter and would leave no gaps.

Another sentry was moving past him now, and Salma watched his progress. The man should probably have been beyond the lights and looking out, but he was walking within them, and so unable to see a thing of the night, but obviously too sullen about his tedious duty to care.

And then he was past, trudging on his way and, even as the patrolling soldier passed the next light, a man rose up out of the night and shot the stationary sentry in the throat. In fact two bolts hit him, the second striking beneath one eye, and he toppled without a word. Quickly a pair of Ants materialized to grab him and then dragged him back to their main group.

Salma heard steps approach behind them, and turned to see a tall Spider-kinden in a short tunic approaching. He looked profoundly unhappy.

‘You understand your task?’ Basila whispered to him, and the man nodded. Salma realized he must be a slave of Tark. He was taller than most Ants, though, and slave work had broadened his Spider-kinden physique, so when he started to don the dead Wasp’s armour Salma understood. A missing sentry would raise questions. Still, as he and the others dashed through the ring of light into the darker shadows of the camp, Salma wondered what they had promised him to make a slave do such a thing. Did they offer him freedom or had he a family under threat? Salma would never know.

The camp was vast, and even at night there were plenty of lone figures moving about it. Many were soldiers, some were slaves of the Wasps or perhaps Auxillians. Basila’s little band moved in a series of stops and starts, far more quietly than Salma would have expected. Each tent shadow offered sanctuary, and the dim lights of the sleeping camp were enough for them to find their way. Even Totho seemed to be managing some kind of stealth.

They were making their way gradually around the periphery of the tents, where the least nocturnal activity was. There were lamps glowing through the walls of some of the tents, and low voices talking inside. Salma heard the rattle of dice from one and someone humming an unfamiliar song inside another. These barracks-tents would be carpeted with Wasp soldiers, he guessed. Perhaps others would house the Ant-kinden the Empire had suborned or those giants who last night had carved through Tark’s city wall. It would be best, Salma thought, if none of those great creatures were met with tonight.

Miraculously, they had not been spotted. By the ring of lights there were sentries staring outwards, just as their Spider-kinden decoy would now be staring outwards, but the lamps would blind them to what was going on in their own camp.

There was a scuffle ahead but it was over before Salma had a chance to see. A Wasp-kinden had walked within arm’s reach of them and paused, casting a bemused glance into the shadows. Basila and another had grabbed him, stopped his mouth and stabbed him into silence. They stowed the body under the eaves of a tent and carried on.

There were lights all over the airfield, so Salma could see the monstrously pale and bloated ghosts that were the airship balloons. They were floating high already, straining at their steel cables, ready to fly at the dawn, no doubt. Totho had tried to explain them to him, how they were not just hot air but some complicated-sounding alchemical air that was better, and which did not need to be hot before it could lift them. Salma had understood none of it.

The Ant-kinden had explosives, he knew. The plan called for them to creep aboard each of the airships and plant them with decreasing fuse lengths, so that they would all explode more or less simultaneously and give the Wasps no warning of their intent. Again, Salma had to take all this on faith as it was beyond his understanding.

They paused again, but this time the shadow they borrowed was cast by one of the heliopters, its squared-off side as high and broad as a poor man’s house in Helleron. There was movement and noise from just the other side, the rattle of metal on metal and the occasional curse as some Wasp-kinden artificer worked into the night to get the machine in his charge back into the air. Salma shuffled forwards until he was almost beside Basila, seeing now the broad, well-lit expanse of the field the Wasps had cleared for their flying machines. They had a dozen great lamps to enable the artificers to work, so there were precious few shadows from this point on, just an overlapping plain of harsh artificial light.

The artificers were out in force, and other personnel, too. There were scattered soldiers, men checking the tension of the airship lines, and others counting off stacks of equipment piled beside the aircraft hulls.

Salma realized there were too many people here for the plan to work: they would be spotted the moment they left the heliopter’s shadow.

Basila was waiting motionless and he wondered if she was simply hoping for all those people to go away. If that did not happen, as it would not, would they be found here at dawn by the Wasps, still patiently waiting by this downed heliopter?

Totho touched his shoulder and made a motion of counting on his fingers, then a gesture around at their companions.

He tallied heads quickly and sure enough they were a man short.

A moment later something went Whoomp! a distance away, but still within the camp, and there was a flash of flame. A second’s eerie silence and then the shouting started.

Most of the soldiers took off immediately, running towards the disturbance, and a surprising number of the artificers too, just going to see what the fuss was about.

Basila already had her crossbow in her hand, and Salma actually saw her counting off the seconds: two. three. four. and then she was off, running into the light and letting the bolt fly at the nearest man.