Dragonfly Falling

Twenty-Three

He swam in those dark reaches, those vast abyssal reaches that no light had ever touched. No stars there were, and no lamps. There was only the void and the rushing of the wind, or the sucking of the current that sought to draw him downwards.

He had fought free of those depths once already, and now he had no strength for any second struggle. There were monsters in those depths, trawling for ever through the vacant dark with their jaws agape. To fall between the needles of their teeth meant oblivion and surrender.

Not death, because all was death here.

In Collegium it had been the fashion, while he had been resident there, to paint death as a grey-skinned, balding Beetle man in plain robes, perhaps with a doctor’s bag but more often an artificer’s toolstrip and apron, like the man who came in, at the close of the day, to put out the lamps and still the workings of the machines.

Amongst his own people, death was a swift insect, gleaming black, its wings a blur — too fast to be outrun and too agile to be avoided, the unplumbed void in which he swam was but the depth of a single facet of its darkly jewelled eyes.

Amongst his own people they drew up short poems for a death, and carved its wings into the sides of tombs and cenotaphs, with head down and abdomen tapering towards the sky as it stooped towards its prey. They would paint death’s likeness as a shadow in the background, always in the upper right quarter of the scroll, when depicting some hero’s or great man’s last hours. In plays an actor, clad all in grey, would take the stage bearing a black-lacquered likeness of the insect, which he would make swoop or hover until the time came for it to alight.

He himself could not fly, for his wings would not spark to life. The void hung heavy on him and it clawed at him, howling for him. He swam and struggled and fought, because a second’s stillness would see him whisked back to the monsters and the pit. He fought, but knew not why he fought. He had no memories, no thoughts, nothing but this haggard, desperate fight.

And there seemed, for the faintest moment, something hard and distant there in the void, some great presence diminished almost to a star-speck by its separation from him: an insect, but not the death insect. Four glittering wings and eyes that saw everything, all at once: the source of his Art and his tribe; the archetype of his people. He was a spirit lost and that creature was his destination — where he would rejoin the past and be with his ancestors.

And he struck out for it, knowing only that it was right to do so. But it was so far and the void still dragged at him, and that tiny gnat-speck of light was receding and receding.

And then gone.

And with that spark dead, he finally gave up. The fight left him and he swam no more but let the wind catch him and draw him down into darkness.

But there was a light again. Above him there was a light, and it was swelling and growing. A soft light, that was at once pure white and many colours. A light like bright sunlight reflected on a pale wall, and for that reason as he saw it he recalled the sun. He had forgotten that such a thing existed, but now the thought of that once familiar sun surrounded and filled him, and he swam again. He caught the cruel current off-guard and slipped from its grasp. He swam and swam, up towards that lambent ceiling, towards that great spread of light that held back the void.

And he raised his hand to touch it, and his fingers broke the surface.

And he opened his eyes.

For a long time he just stared, trying to make the shapes he saw conform. He was looking upwards and it seemed bright to him but not as bright as it might. The oil lamp in the corner of his vision was burning clearly, not drowned in sunlight. He saw a ceiling, a real ceiling, but it sloped madly away from him.

He wanted to ask what he was doing there, but he could not grasp why he should be anywhere.

Who was he, again? Surely someone had mentioned it.

He reached back, and found his fingers stained with the murk of the void. Was that all? Had he been conceived in that no-place, and vomited forth into this? No, there must be more than that. He felt the weight of the memories penned there inside, and reached for them again.

One by one they fell back into his skull.

He was a child learning his letters, the elderly Grasshopper-kinden woman making their shapes in the earth with her stick, and he copying on his tablet.

He was at the court of the Felipes, competing in footraces and in the air, learning sword and bow, flirting with the middle daughter of the family. He had gained a reputation already.

News had come of the war. He waited with the two Felipe boys who were his closest companions. The oldest was in his armour. He was going to the front, by choice. None of it seemed real.

The ghost of his father, just the husk of a voice speaking in a darkened room, invisible save for perhaps a wisp of cobwebby substance above the head of the ancient Mantis mystic who was calling the shade forth. It had been so long since he saw the man.

He had been sent to Collegium to study and learn, but he had gone there to escape. The war, the misery, the very thought of that gold and black blot spreading like poison across the map.

The memories began to come more quickly now.

He was duelling with a Spider-kinden girl with fair hair and a sharp tongue, and he beat her because he had been fighting since he was eight, but he knew she was the better-

He was lying awake beside the sleeping daughter of a rich merchant, listening to her father’s key turn unexpectedly in the lock-

He was seeing the march of the athletes before the Games with the imperial banner raised high at the rear-

He was watching the great grey bulk of the Sky Without, trying to work out why it didn’t just fall-

He was leaping from a flying machine to fight the Wasps, and someone nearly putting a crossbow bolt between his shoulder blades by mistake-

He was running through Helleron after a betrayal, trying to keep hold of a Beetle girl with dyed white hair-

Faster and faster the memories came. He was shaking. They poured into him like acid.

More betrayal — he was fighting Wasp soldiers, while her cousin looked on-

He was taken. He was chained-

Her — and she danced for them, for the slaves and the slavers — and they were all free in that moment-

He was breaking free from the cell — the faces of his friends-

His name-

He was Salme Dien, Prince Minor of the Dragonfly Commonweal, but in the Lowlands they called him Salma, because they were all barbarians and could not speak properly.

But the memories were not done with him.

He was coming to Tark with Skrill and Totho, all their names suddenly coming to him at last.

He was making fierce love to Basila in the close and almost windowless room of the tower.

The bloody devastation of the siege, and he was duelling with a Wasp officer while the city burned and the wall fell.

He was attacking the Wasp camp. He was grappling with a Wasp soldier. The blade went into his stomach, all the way up to the hilt.

All the way up to the hilt.

And the pain of it came back to him, and he relived that moment, the searing, burning agony, and the knowledge, the sure knowledge that it had killed him. All the way up to the hilt, and the point emerging through his back. His own blade driving into the man, almost as an afterthought because, what did it matter when his world had stopped? The pain of it flooded through him, and he gasped and arched back, and then he really was living it again because the wound across his belly tore open stitch after stitch, and he screamed-

And the void rushed up for him again, the void that had only been waiting in the shadows all this time. The hungry void reached out for him.

Someone plunged their hands into his wound and for a second the pain, which could never get worse, was much, much worse.

And then it was gone. There was something searing and burning through him, but it was distant, like thunder over far hills. And there was light.

He opened his eyes again, but it was still too bright after so long in darkness. He could not look at it.

The same hands were held to his wound, their warmth leaching into him, and he felt — it could be nothing else — the edges of the wound knit again, the blood cease to spill across his skin, and he felt the ruptured organs find peace and start to heal once more.

It was Ancestor Art, but he had never known anything like it before. He forced his eyes open, forced them to stare into the heart of the sun.

He thought he had gone blind, but it was just the sight of her. She stood over him like stained glass and crystal and glowed with her own pure light, and stared into his face with featureless, unreadable white eyes.

He was weeping, but he did not know it, looking up into the face of the woman who had once been Grief in Chains, and then Aagen’s Joy, and so many others in her time.

After they had lain together, they slept awhile. Partway through the night, she had woken and made to go, and Totho had caught her arm and held her there. For a moment he did not speak and she waited patiently, sitting on the edge of the folding bed they had given him in exchange for his straw mattress: the two artificers in darkness, the halfbreed and the Bee.

He had known, when she had come to him, that it was wrong, but she had been so forthright, so open. No wiles, no subtlety, merely an artificer’s practical seduction. Kaszaat, in stained coveralls, with smears of oil still on her hands, unbuckling her toolstrip belt in this partitioned space of tent they had given him.

And no woman before had ever offered herself to him. Seeing her there, inexplicably there, he had cursed his memories. He had cursed Cheerwell Maker for running off with Achaeos, and then he reached out for what he could have.

Now, too dark for him to see her deep brown skin, the curves of her body that was lean and compact with the workaday strength of her trade, he asked her, ‘Did Drephos make you do this?’

‘I am no slave,’ she said. ‘Drephos does not make me.’

‘But you are a soldier. You have a rank. He is your. superior, or whatever it is you would say.’ He did not hold his breath against her answer. He had no illusions.

‘He made a suggestion,’ she said after a pause, ‘but that was not the first time the thought came to me. When one placed above you asks of you something, to go to a man you are interested in already, it is by command? Or it is of free will?’ She made to leave again but he held her still.

‘Wait,’ he said, and then, ‘Please.’ She settled again, and then he felt her hand brush its way up his arm, trace his shoulder and then rest against his cheek.

He wanted to ask Why? but he could not disentangle his motive for the question. Self-pity — or was he seeking a compliment? The latter was another thing his life had been mostly empty of. Totho the halfbreed! Who would have thought it would take capture and imprisonment to bring this fulfilment to him?

He had not realized, until he grappled with her, that he was no longer the awkward, slightly gangling boy he had been at the College. He had not noticed how he had filled out, broad across the shoulders and strong. His Ant blood had made him strong, just as his Beetle-kinden side had allowed him to endure. Kaszaat had seemed small within his arms.

She settled down beside him again and he felt the warmth of her back pressing into his chest and belly. It struck him, and the thought surprised him, that she must feel even more alone than he did. Her city was so far, she had said, and she did not expect she would see it again. She must have been alone now for a long time, with only Wasps and Drephos for company. Perhaps in coming to him she was reaching out for the only contact that might not be a betrayal.

And if Totho accepted Drephos’s hand, that proffered gauntlet, would this become a betrayal for her, as if he was no more than a Wasp in truth?

He put an arm about her, his breath catching as it brushed beneath her breasts.

‘Once woken, I cannot sleep,’ she informed him, although she mumbled it sleepily enough. ‘You must talk to me, amuse me.’

So he talked to her. He told her of Collegium, and the Great College. He told her of the workshops there, and the Masters in their white robes. He spoke of the Prowess Forum, and he even spoke of Stenwold Maker, Tynisa and the Mantis Weaponsmaster, Tisamon. Of Cheerwell Maker he spoke not one word.

She left him before dawn, dressing herself in darkness. She explained that she had duties to attend to but he suspected that she did not want their liaison to be common knowledge. She feared the Wasps, more than anything, and she did not want them to think that she was free for the taking.

He dressed himself as the sun rose, in his artificer’s leathers, only hesitating as he began to buckle on the toolstrip that Drephos had returned to him. He was no artificer here, not yet. He was a prisoner of the Empire. If he emerged from this tent with his tools ready for use, would that suggest he had committed himself to the betrayal they were urging on him?

For it would be a betrayal of the cruellest kind. They were asking him to design weapons, as had been his dream throughout College. At Collegium his creations would have been graded and discarded. Anything made for the Wasps would be used.

They would be used on his own people.

But they would be used.

Something visceral rose up in him, thrilling at the very thought of the work: to undertake the work for the sake of the work, and never ask who it might be for.

When he did emerge there was a messenger waiting. It was strange to see Fly-kinden running errands just as they did back home. Amidst the Wasp army there was a whole cadre of them buzzing backwards and forwards wearing the gold and black of the imperial standard.

‘A message for you from the Colonel-Auxillian.’ The Fly was very young, perhaps only fifteen or so. ‘He’d like to see you in his tent.’

A chill went through Totho as he thought, Perhaps he will force a choice from me now, and if I refuse, as I must, surely I must, then I will be a prisoner indeed, and they will extract from me everything I know about the Lowlands and Collegium.

He went nonetheless, because he had no choice and no options.

He found Drephos lying back on the very chair that Totho himself had been secured to, when he first regained consciousness after the raid. It was a complex thing, that chair, and now it moved smoothly, the panels of the back pushing in and out with metal fingers, steam venting from the sides. Drephos had explained earlier how he suffered from particular back pains, so had been forced to devise his own relief. His first love remained the artifice of war but he was not slow in attending to his own comforts.

Kaszaat waited at the rear of the tent but did not meet Totho’s gaze.

Drephos opened one eye, and made a signal to the Fly, who darted outside again. The chair made a particularly complex sound and he groaned.

‘Bear with me,’ he said. ‘I am particularly out of sorts this morning.’

The man was not well, and indeed was not entirely whole. He limped when he walked and the arm he kept hidden behind metal must be injured in some way. Totho wondered which of his own inventions had turned on him, or whether this had been the work of his imperial masters.

‘You have a visitor,’ Drephos announced, although Totho could barely hear him over the chair and he had to repeat himself.

‘A visitor?’ Totho looked blank.

Drephos signalled to Kaszaat, who stepped over to the chair and drew the pressure from the boiler, sending steam venting out in hot clouds that forced Totho to stand well back. From that swiftly dispersing mist, Drephos finally emerged, pulling his hood up to shadow his blemished features.

‘But look, here he is now.’ The master artificer pointed, and Totho followed his finger to see a small figure being hustled in by a pair of Wasp soldiers. It was a Fly-kinden man, bald and lumpy-faced.

‘Nero!’ Totho exclaimed, noticing the Fly was not bound but neither was he free, for the soldiers were keeping a very close eye on him. He smiled grimly as he saw Totho, but there were mottled bruises across one side of his face and one eye was swollen almost shut.

‘Morning to you,’ he said. ‘And I’m glad to see you. Apparently you may be in a position to vouch for me.’

Drephos interrupted. ‘Who is this man, Totho?’

‘He’s a friend,’ Totho began, and then realized that this was imprecise. ‘He’s an old friend of. a College Master who was a good friend to me.’ Sudden inspiration struck. ‘He’s an artist, in fact, and I think he’s quite well known. We met in Tark,’ he added lamely.

‘You think he’s quite a well-known one?’ Drephos sounded amused. ‘How well known can he be, if you only think it?’

‘I don’t know about art,’ said Totho stubbornly. ‘And I don’t know why he’s here, either.’ He turned to the Fly-kinden. ‘Were you captured in the assault?’

‘Not exactly.’ Nero’s wan smile remained. ‘I came here to find out what had happened to you, as a matter of fact.’

‘Something which the soldiers who captured him did not quite understand,’ Drephos explained. ‘However, he kept repeating your name and eventually word came through to me.’

‘Since when the quality of hospitality around here has definitely improved,’ Nero put in, rubbing his wrists for emphasis. ‘Well, here’s a decent sight. You came through without a scratch, it seems.’

‘Without more than a lump,’ Totho confirmed. ‘But why did you come here? They could easily have killed you.’

Nero shrugged off the risks of it, but the gesture was unconvincing. He had not wanted to come, Totho could sense, yet he had been forced to, and by what other than his own conscience? ‘My old friend Sten, you see, we go way back,’ he said, sounding almost embarrassed about it. ‘We’ve been through a lot, him and me, what with the College and all.’ He glanced at Drephos. ‘Stop me if this is getting too sentimental or unmilitary for you.’

‘Say all you want, Master Nero. Knowledge is never wasted,’ said the Colonel-Auxillian.

‘Well then, there was a caper that Stenwold and the others went in for, a long time ago, pretty much the last — the second to last, really — that we did together back then. It’s history now, but it involved these fellows.’ He jerked a thumb back at the Wasp soldiers nearby. ‘And it was too hot for me. I bugged out of there quick enough, told him it wasn’t for me. I missed the fun, and then things went sour. Lost one good friend, and another died soon after. And I never forgot how I left them to it, because I didn’t like the odds. I know people think my kinden are a spineless bunch, and mostly they’re right, but it still didn’t sit well. Then, when you and the lad there turned up in Tark, I told myself I’d look after you, keep you on track. And a right job I made of that, too. So here I am still trying to put things right.’

‘You didn’t have to come,’ Totho reproved him. ‘I’m. holding out fine.’ He took a deep breath. ‘And Salma is. well, he didn’t make it.’

Nero looked up at Drephos. ‘Shall I say it, or is it going to get me shot?’

‘Say all you wish,’ Drephos told him. ‘I have only refrained from mentioning it because I assumed you would prefer to break the news yourself.’

Nero nodded, his mere expression making it plain he did not trust Drephos one inch.

‘The thing is, lad,’ he said, ‘Salma’s still here. He made it, all right — though only just. He’s alive and here in the camp.’

Salma was asleep when Totho came to see him. Nero and the others kept their distance, even Drephos, as he went to kneel at his friend’s bed.

Only a very slight rise and fall of Salma’s chest betrayed the life within him. His once-golden skin was now leaden pale, his cheeks sunken and his lips shrivelled like an old man’s. It was hard to see here the laughing, smiling fighter, the nobleman from a far foreign land, who had once brightened the austere halls of the Great College.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Totho murmured quietly, so as not to wake him. He was acutely aware of all the others nearby, two hundred laid out in this tent alone. All casualties of the war, in one way or another. Most were Wasps, but there were others too: Bee-kinden like Kaszaat, ruddy-skinned Ants, even a couple of Fly messengers who had not flown swiftly enough. Many there, he saw, carried terrible burns caused by the incendiaries, and the Wasp officers’ lack of concern for their own men.

Totho returned to Drephos and the others. There was a woman now standing there with them, a severe-looking Wasp-kinden who was scowling at the master artificer.

‘Totho,’ Drephos said, ‘this gentle lady is Norsa, the Eldest of Mercy’s Daughters in this camp. Norsa, this young man was a companion of the Commonwealer lying over there.’

Norsa turned a stern eye on Totho, who tried to face up to it. ‘He will live,’ she said flatly. ‘He will recover, now, although at first only she kept him with us at all.’ She pointed and Totho followed her extended finger to see a robed woman passing along the line of beds, bearing a basin of water. Her eyes were white, and her skin glowed through a rainbow of colours. Totho had never seen her before but, from Salma’s words, he knew who this must be.

‘So he found her, at last,’ he murmured. ‘Thank you for aiding him, lady. I realize he is your enemy.’

‘I have no enemies,’ Norsa replied sharply. ‘Mercy’s Daughters give aid to whoever they will, however the Empire may take issue with us. Suffice to say that the imperial army knows your friend is here.’

Totho’s stomach lurched with the thought and he turned to Drephos. ‘Then you must have known!’

Totho caught a sardonic smile from under the hood. ‘Norsa here holds me to blame for the injuries done to many of these men. I hear no news from her Daughters, and I heard none from any other quarter. Just be grateful that Master Nero himself thought to look here.’

‘But when he recovers,’ Totho said, ‘they’ll. ’

Drephos finished for him grimly. ‘Take him? Question him? Torture him and then enslave or kill him? Yes, they will, for that is their way. A waste of healing, in my opinion.’

‘I do not even recognize that sentiment,’ Norsa snapped at him, ‘although if you were the patient I might make an exception, Colonel-Auxillian.’

Totho glanced from Drephos to Nero, and then back across the room to the unconscious Salma, and realized that some part of his mind had a plan and a decision already prepared for him.

‘Colonel Drephos,’ he said, although he had found his thought already. ‘I need to speak with you. I think you know what about.’

*

Salma drifted in and out of wakefulness. Sometimes he recalled who he was, where he was, and sometimes he did not, perhaps blessedly. He existed in a blurred greyness that was pulled taut between the light of Grief in Chains and the darkness of the void that was still hungry for him.

On one occasion he opened his eyes and found himself looking straight into the face of the man on the next bed. He was a Wasp-kinden with his head bandaged low so as to cover one eye, the wrappings crisp and clean, having just been changed. When he saw Salma looking at him, the other man grinned weakly.

‘You,’ he said, in a voice just loud enough for Salma to hear, ‘are so cursed lucky.’

Salma tried to make a sound, but nothing audible came out. In truth he did not feel so very lucky.

‘You should be dead,’ the soldier continued, his whispering voice obviously the best he could manage. ‘I saw you drop. You were fighting like a maniac but someone got you, and you fell, and that should have been the end of you. I was behind. I saw the point come clean through you, you bastard. She came for you, though, and you were dead, even then, but she came for you as though she knew what had been going on. She ran out and lit the place up and put her hands on you. And you stopped bleeding, right there and then.’ He coughed, a wretched, scratchy sound. ‘And she’s been with you every day, using her Art to keep you alive. I don’t know what you mean to her but you’re a lucky bastard, so you are.’

Salma tried to speak again, and this time a distant croak emerged, quieter even than the wounded soldier’s. ‘I came here for her.’

The man’s one eye studied him for a minute, before he said, ‘Well she’s certainly worth that.’

‘Salma?’

He had been asleep, or at least drifting somewhere else, but there was a new voice now, and it carried his name to him.

‘Salma, you have to wake up now.’

It was not her voice and he did not want to wake up. When he had opened his eyes last, she had been standing there, staring at him. Expression was hard to fathom from those dancing colours, from those eyes, but his heart had leapt painfully just to see her.

He had found her. She had found him. In this mad, war-struck world, they had found each other.

She had sat down at the edge of his bed and, although it was a flimsy folding piece that should have tipped immediately, she barely moved it, making him doubt his senses. He had reached out, though, and she had taken his cold hand in both her warm ones, warm like the sun on a summer’s day.

‘Why are you here?’ she had asked him. ‘Why did you come?’

‘I couldn’t stay away, knowing that you were here,’ was his whisper. ‘Aagen. I spoke to Aagen.’

‘Did you-?’

‘No. We parted on good terms.’ His voice was strengthening, as though healing energies were passing through her hands and into him. Perhaps they were, either by Ancestor Art or by plain magic.

‘You should not have come.’

The ghost of his old smile appeared briefly. ‘Why?’

‘You are hurt. You were already in the hands of death when I found you. All I have done since barely kept you with me.’

‘But I am with you.’ He was staring at her face. She was beautiful and it was not merely the ordinary human beauty of Tynisa. She was Butterfly-kinden and they were beautiful with the timeless perfection of a sunset or a spring day. He yearned for her even though she was already there right beside him.

She had shaken her head. ‘Then I myself have done this to you. I never intended this.’

‘No-’ But something had come to mind, something the Moth-kinden man had said, or that Che had claimed on his behalf. ‘They said. did you enchant me? Is this. what I feel now, just glamour?’

Her hand had touched his face and he felt a warmth flooding there, and also peace and safety. ‘I put a spell on you,’ she had confirmed. ‘We were penned there as slaves, before the great machines of the Wasps, and I saw your face and knew you were a good man. I needed the help of a good man so I put a spell on you, that still held strong when we were taken by their devices to the city of the slaves. But then you needed help yourself, and I took my spell away. I have no spell on you now.’

Staring at her, he had not known what to think, because his heart still reached for her and he wanted to touch her, to stroke that rainbow skin.

‘Then I must love you,’ he had said in wonderment, and realized that all this while some part of him had believed Che’s claim that it was no more than a spell that made him act this way. Now he discovered it was him, nothing but his own heart.

‘Salma! Please wake up!’

He snapped from the reverie — and saw she was not here. Instead there was a man standing by his bed, and it took Salma rather too long to recognize his face.

‘Totho.?’

‘Yes, Salma, it’s me.’

‘What. what in the world are you wearing?’

Salma registered the tunic Totho now wore, black, and edged with strips of black and gold. It was crossed with two leather belts, one for his tools and the other serving as a baldric for his sword.

‘Listen to me, Salma, because we don’t have much time,’ said Totho. ‘You have to listen and understand what I’m saying. I’m getting you out.’

‘Out?’

‘Out of here. Because the girl might have saved your life, but you’re still not safe. In fact if you stay here you’ll certainly die. The Wasps are just waiting until you’re well enough to interrogate.’ Totho gave a brief bark of laughter in which the strain he was under emerged clear enough. ‘What a world! They’re waiting for your wound to heal so they can tear you apart. You know how much they hate your kinden. Half of their men here fought in your Twelve-Year War.’

‘So be it,’ said Salma tiredly.

‘No! Not so be it! Aren’t you listening, Salma? I’ve bought you out. There’s a man, an artificer here, and he wants my service, and he says he can get you out of here.’

‘You trust him?’

‘Enough for this, at least. You remember Nero? Nero’s going with you. He’ll look after you until you’re strong again.’

‘I can’t leave, Totho.’

Totho glowered at him. ‘It’s the girl? That dancing girl? Listen, Salma, they are going to kill you, as slowly as they can. Would she want that? Because she won’t be able to stop them. This nursing order of hers might get to choose whose wounds it heals, but it’s got no such say over the fit and well. I’ve paid the asking price, Salma. I’ve sold myself just to buy you life.’

‘No!’ The effort racked Salma with pain, and he knew that everyone down the length of the hospital tent would be staring. ‘Totho, no-’

‘This way you survive, and live free, and I. live too. It’s not so bad. I won’t be a slave, quite. And who knows what could happen?’ And it’s not as if I had much to go back to, Totho added to himself. And this way, Che won’t detest me any more than she already does, because at least I won’t have left you to die, Salma.

‘Totho, you can’t do this,’ Salma said urgently, feeling himself worn out just by the effort of this conversation. ‘I’m not worth your doing this-’

‘Shut up!’ Totho snapped, shocking him into silence. ‘Shut up, Salma, because I have already done this. I have put on their colours and apprenticed myself to these monsters, and I have done it for you, and if you tell me now that you’re not worth it, just what have I done all that for?’ His fists were tightly clenched and Salma saw him anew then: not the shy, awkward youth always tagging along behind Che, but the man that same youth had forged into.

It came for all of us, Salma thought. We are all grown now. Che, when the Wasps enslaved her and put her before their torture machines. Tynisa when she discovered her birthright. To me on the point of a sword. and to Totho here and now. We have put childish things behind us, and look at the world we have grown into.

There were streaks of moisture on Totho’s face but he was putting on an angry mask to hide the despair.

I have no right to play the martyr here, nor have I the strength.

‘I’m sorry, Totho,’ he said softly. ‘I hope you find that you have done the right thing.’

Totho had assumed that the Imperial Fourth Army would be splitting, some to be led west by General Alder and others staying to secure the half-ruined city of Tark. Garrison duty was beneath the Barbs, though, and a new force had come tramping out of the desert following its Scorpion guides. A garrison force, Totho understood, was different to a field army. It contained more auxillians, for one, usually around one man in two, and many of the Wasp-kinden included were veterans who had now earned an easier assignment than open battle. All this he learned from Kaszaat. The garrison was commanded by a governor who was usually also a colonel in the imperial army. Running a garrison was less prestigious than commanding a field army, but having a whole city at one’s disposal, she explained, was an unparalleled opportunity for acquiring both power and wealth. More than one general had willingly taken the demotion.

General Alder was not that kind of soldier, however. He was already busy organizing the Fourth to move westwards. Expecting no answer, Totho had enquired of Drephos, and was surprised when the artificer had told him that the plan was very simple.

‘The Fly-kinden settlements of Egel and Merro will be invited to avail themselves of imperial protection. There seems little doubt, given the timorous and pragmatic character of the race, that they will accept. Then the army will proceed on to the island city-state, Kes.’

Totho knew that the garrison force had resupplied the Fourth with more than just rations and ammunition. Two dozen battle heliopters had been assembled on the airfield by the camp, with four hulking carrier heliopters — monstrously clumsy machines that could each hold three hundred men in the open cage of its belly. ‘These are just to draw out Kes’s airpower,’ he guessed.

‘Quite,’ Drephos confirmed. ‘We have a few soldiers who could fly all the way from the mainland, but most of them would tire halfway and drop into the sea. So we will ship them over in droves, to die over Kes and to destroy its flying machines and its riding insects and whatever else shall come against them. Then the airships will drop incendiaries upon the Kessen navy, which I believe is formidable, and drop rockbreaker explosives on its sea-wall and its artillery. After that, the city itself will burn and we will begin landing our forces. I estimate that it will take General Alder three times as long to take Kes as it did to take Tark, partly because the city is naturally more defensible, and partly because I shall not be there with him.’

Totho nodded. That seemed only reasonable.

‘We shall shortly be embarking on our own journey, however,’ Drephos continued, ‘so we shall see none of it. I have faith that General Alder will prove his usual mixture of military efficiency and imaginative bankruptcy.’ He went striding with his uneven gait back towards his tent. ‘First, though, I have something I would like your opinion on, Totho.’

Totho hurried after him. He was forever surprised to find himself so free just to run around. It seemed the black and yellow that he wore was a shield against persecution, for all that he earned plenty of disparaging looks from the Wasps.

In his tent, Drephos had assembled a little workshop of the most delicate tools Totho had ever seen. There was a grinder for machining metal, a casting ladle and a set of wax moulds, and everything he needed to replace parts and help maintain his devices in the field. Turning, Drephos had something in his hands, long and wrapped in dark cloth, and for once he seemed almost hesitant.

‘You are a gifted artificer, Totho,’ he said. ‘That is, of course, why I plucked you from captivity.’

‘At least you hope I am, sir,’ Totho said.

‘I do not recognize hope. Instead I calculate. I gather information,’ said Drephos. ‘You had on your person certain devices which I guessed were of your own invention, and schematics to incorporate them into a larger plan. A plan that you have never, I would guess, been able to undertake.’

Totho stared at the bundle in his arms and found himself abruptly short of breath. ‘Never. ’ he began, then his mouth was sand-dry, all of a sudden. ‘What have you done?’

‘While you were with your friend, yesterday, and while Kaszaat was making the arrangements for his liberation, I had time to myself, the first spare hour I have had since this siege began. Time weighs heavily on my hands and I hate to be idle, so I took out your plans and did what I could. The results are. imperfect. The facilities here are limited. However, I hope it meets with your approval.’

‘My.? My approval?’ Totho stared into the man’s blotched face. ‘But, Colonel-Auxillian.?’

‘No rank, please, not amongst my cadre at least,’ said Drephos. A hard look came into his eyes as they flicked towards the tent-flap. ‘Let those outside bandy such words about between themselves. Though we wear their colours we are none of theirs. Indeed, we are greater than them. We are artificers. Call me “Master” if you wish it, as you would your teachers at Collegium, but we are the elite here, and we are above their petty grades and distinctions. And I seek your approval, Totho, because it is your invention — therefore your triumph.’

His bare hand whipped the cloth away, and there lay Totho’s long-held dream. It was rough, as Drephos said. His air battery possessed a coarse grip now, and a long tube extended from it. Much of what he had planned was absent, because he had not included it on his drawings, but it was still there in his head, and the prototype could be improved.

‘Does it work?’ he asked, and Drephos nodded.

‘You’ll have the chance to test it, of course, and to improve on it. As I said, we have a journey to make. We are going to Helleron, Totho.’ He held the device out, and Totho took it, wonderingly.

‘Helleron, Master Drephos?’

Drephos was already striding past him. ‘Where else should an artificer go when he wishes to work?’

‘But Helleron is-’

‘Ours, Totho.’ Drephos was now outside, and Totho hurried to join him.

‘How?’

‘General Alder is about to move west along the coast, but I had word yesterday that General Malkan and the Seventh Army were moving on Helleron. They should be there by now. By the time we arrive the city shall fly the imperial flag. Imagine it, Totho! The industrial might of Helleron, all the forges, the foundries, the factories! What could we not do there?’ He stopped, abruptly rueful. ‘If I were pureblood Wasp-kinden I would have them make me governor. Perhaps I shall anyway. Perhaps Malkan can be prevailed upon. Still, we must do what we can with what we are given.’

And they stepped out again into sight of the airfield and found it had received a visitor, in that short space of time. The most beautiful flying machine Totho had ever seen was roosting in one corner, well away from the gross bulk of the heliopters. An open lattice of light wooden struts, with twin propellers and immaculately folded wings, it was such a work of light and shadow that it seemed hardly there at all, even in broad daylight, He saw Kaszaat inside it already, checking the clockwork engine that crouched aft. She was wearing heavy robes, he saw, despite the warmth of the day.

‘We’re going to fly to Helleron in that?’ he asked Drephos.

‘I want to waste as little time travelling as possible. Whatever I have here, I will have sent on. Helleron will have to provide in the meantime, and no doubt it shall do so splendidly.’ He reached the flier and ran his metal hand along the imaginary line that would define its flank. ‘My beautiful Cloudfarer, back at last from running the errands of others. She has been ill-treated, but that shall change, for none can fly her as I can.’ He was actually smiling, genuine gladness making his face seem something quite alien. Totho realized that all his other smiles had been just in mockery or pretence.

‘We shall be in Helleron in two days, three at the most.

Do you believe that?’

‘It hardly seems possible, Master Drephos.’

And the smiled broadened, and lost its warmth. ‘But we are artificers, Totho. We shall make it possible.’