Dragonfly Falling

Three

The Prowess Forum had never seen the like. This was no formal event, no meeting of teams from the duelling league, and yet the backsides of the onlookers were packed all the way up the stone steps that rose in tiers at every wall. The aficionados of the duel were crammed in shoulder to shoulder, from College masters through the ranks of students and professional bladesmen to the children who followed their favourites with the fanatical loyalty of Ants to their city.

The fighters stood ready in the circle, which had been scuffed by a hundred hundred feet in the past. Neither participant was new to it. They had faced each other before, and there was nothing the crowd liked better than a rematch of champions. The Master of Ceremonies, the old Ant-kinden Kymon of Kes, had tried to start the duel three times, but the crowd was refusing to quieten down for him.

To one side stood the acknowledged champion of the Prowess Forum. He was Mantis-kinden, as the very best of the best always were. They were born with blade-skill in their blood: it was the Ancestor Art of their nation. They came to the College sporadically, one or two in every year. When they fought they inevitably claimed the prize, and then mostly they left. Piraeus of Nethyon had stayed on, however, preferring the life of a champion of Collegium to anything his homeland might offer. He made his living in private duel and by hiring out his skills to any duelling house so desperate for victory as to show the bad form of buying in a champion. Nor had he been short of offers this last year, for winning had ousted taking part as the fashionable thing. Now many magnates of Collegium kept duelling teams to further their prestige.

But the crowd were here to see more than a haughty Mantis-kinden win yet another bout. Enough of them had gathered there to see his opponent. The less charitable said that they wanted to see her before some stroke dealt by Piraeus ruined her, for he was a misogynist at the best of times, and this match. The Mantis-kinden saved their utmost barbs of loathing for one target. Why they hated the Spider-kinden quite so much was lost in time, but they did, and they never forgot a grievance.

Like most Spider-kinden, she was beautiful. She was also unusual in that she was a daughter of Collegium, not some arrogant foreigner. The name on the lips of the crowd as she entered was ‘Tynisa’. Properly she was Tynisa Maker, but she was so obviously none of the old man’s blood that just the one name sufficed.

Piraeus was tall and lean, his face chiselled with distaste. The bruises he had given Tynisa when they had last met had healed, and it was obvious he was ready to gift her with another set. She was shorter than he and slighter, an eyecatching young woman with her fair hair bound into a looped braid and her green eyes dancing.

There was something in the way she stood that told the best of them this was going to be a new kind of contest. She did not stand like a Prowess duellist or like a Spider-kinden. In her time away from the city she had learned something new.

She had learned who she was and what blood ran in her veins, but only Tynisa and two spectators there knew it.

Kymon called for silence once more, striking the two practice swords together in a dull clatter of bronze-covered wood.

‘I shall not ask again!’ he bellowed. ‘Silence now, or this match shall not take place!’

At long last the crowd quieted, under threat of its entertainment being removed. Kymon nodded heavily and passed the swords out. They were, in the hands of these fighters, graceless things. Those two were meant for swords more slender and crafted of true steel.

‘Salute the book!’ Kymon directed, and they turned to the great icon carved at one wall of the forum and raised their blades.

‘Clock!’ barked the Master of Ceremonies and stepped back hurriedly. Neither of them moved even as the ponderous hands of the mechanical timepiece ground into motion. For a long moment, to the hushed anticipation of the crowd, they merely faced each other. Tynisa studied Piraeus’s face and knew that, while she was seeing just what she had seen before, he could tell how she had changed.

But he was proud, and he was a blur of motion as he now came for her, his ersatz blade swinging in tight arcs to trap her.

She gave before him, barely parrying, making the fighting-circle her world, backing around it so the darts and sweeps of his sword clove empty air. She thought he might get angry, since she had seen him provoked before, but he retained his icy calm and his moves became tighter and tighter, and she was going to have to do something soon.

In a sudden flurry she had taken his sword aside and in that instant she was on the offensive. She did not keep it long, but after that it was anybody’s. She and Piraeus circled, stopped, circled back. The air between them rattled with the clash of their blades. The audience were on the edge of their seats but the two combatants had forgotten them. Their world had contracted to that duelling ring. The Prowess Forum with its clock and book had ceased altogether to exist for them.

He never gave up pressing his attack, for he knew the natural order of things was for him to advance, his foe to give way before him. He tried and he tried to turn the fight back to that familiar territory. He had done it before when, not so very long ago, he had beaten her two strikes to none. Now she was holding him off, constantly turning his attacks into her own. Her guard was iron. He could not breach it, no more than she could break his.

And the thought came to Tynisa, If these were live blades, I’d have killed him by now. Her own Mantis blood was rising in her and she saw Piraeus then as his own kind would. Look at this coward playing with children. He was all skill and poise, but the pride of his heritage had died within him.

So let’s call it real. And she gave her blood full rein. The orderly, calculated exchange of the Prowess Forum fell in pieces around them. She cut straight through, his blade passing inches from her face, and the point of hers rammed into his stomach.

He doubled over, hit the ground shoulder-first, and it took all of her will’s work to hold back a second strike that would have broken his neck in lieu of opening his throat. She stepped back carefully with the slight, sad thought that she could not return to this place. Her skills, once made here, had been reforged in blood, in the outside world. The reflexes and instincts honed between life and death were not tame beasts for her to teach tricks to.

Piraeus was slowly getting up, trying to catch his breath. She waited for him, motionless, and amongst the crowd not a word, not a fidget.

He lunged at her, as swift a move as they had yet seen, and it would have caught her if she had been a mere duellist. She had moved before her eyes had registered his strike, the point of his sword missing by inches. She struck him a numbing rap to the elbow that sent the blade tumbling from his hand.

After she had left, with the crowd baying her name, standing on the seats and cheering, few had eyes to watch Piraeus stand up again. His face was thunderous as he rubbed his injured arm. He made to leave by another door but a voice stopped him. The doors to the Prowess Forum were left open always, and there was another Mantis-kinden lounging there, a man older than he in an arming jacket of green.

‘An interesting fight.’

Piraeus narrowed his eyes. ‘The fight isn’t over.’

‘Yes it is.’ The older man pushed himself off the wall, and Piraeus noticed that he had a claw over his right hand, a glove of metal and leather with a blade that jutted a foot and a half from the fingers. It was the weapon of choice for Mantids from the old days, and Piraeus recognized the stranger’s sword-and-circle brooch a moment later.

‘Weaponsmaster,’ he stated, and it was obvious he had never met one before.

‘We live yet,’ the man acknowledged. ‘You’re not going after her, Piraeus.’

‘She’s a Spider.’ Piraeus’s face twisted. ‘I’ll have her in the next pass, don’t you worry, and I’ll have her with steel.’

‘No, you won’t.’

The young duellist shook his head, missing something, he knew. ‘Are you protecting her? She’s Spider-blood. She’s our enemy.’

‘She’s my blood, boy,’ the old man said, and let that sink in.

Piraeus’s look of bafflement slowly decayed into horror. ‘But she-’

‘What, boy? You’ve a problem with me? Want to call me out, I’ll wager?’

‘I don’t even know who you are.’

‘I am Tisamon, and I earned this badge and this claw, and she is of my blood. You should keep that in mind before you say anything else.’

The name bit into the youth’s memory, Tisamon saw. Piraeus had heard of him, even it was just through Collegium’s duelling circles. There had been a time when Tisamon, too, had played with his skills just like this young man.

‘So it would be unwise of you to take this further with Tynisa,’ he said. ‘Lick your wounds and learn from them, but if you come after her with a real blade in your hands-’

‘You’ll be there,’ spat Piraeus, disgusted.

Tisamon smiled slightly. ‘I won’t need to be. She will.’

‘Why all the hurry?’ Che complained. Almost as soon as she had left the Prowess Forum, hastening to congratulate Tynisa, she had run into one of her uncle’s agents. The big Ant called Balkus, who in Helleron had seemed just a part of that city’s gritty tapestry, looked woefully out of place amidst the understated order of Collegium.

‘If you move quick, they can’t follow you so easily,’ was all he said, so Che was forced to jog after him.

It was strange to be back after seeing what she had seen. Collegium, with its peace, its petty one-upmanship, its learning, all seemed like a mummer’s show where the backcloth could be torn down at any moment to reveal the chaos behind. She knew that Stenwold wanted to speak before the Assembly, who were currently snubbing him, but he had not let his plans wait on them. He had not told her what they were, either, or what role she might play in them. Instead he had closeted himself away with Scuto, or else he had gone on rambling and random hikes about the city with Balkus or Tisamon watching over him. It was probably all to confuse their watchers but it served to confuse Che just as well.

Was she herself under surveillance? With the thought she began scanning the faces, but Collegium was a diverse city and the native Beetle-kinden played host to people from all over the Lowlands and beyond. Even here, making her rapid progress down the Haldrian Way that led to the metal market, she could pick out every kinden that called the Lowlands home, together with a mix of halfbreeds, and a few others that might be other kinden entirely, from distant lands. Any one of them could be an imperial agent, and she knew it was more likely to be some innocuous-looking Beetle wood-seller than that Wasp-kinden man on the street corner perusing a bookseller’s discounted stock.

It was a strange feeling, exciting and uneasy, to think that she could be important enough to be watched.

Balkus abruptly turned into the shop beside the bookseller and, when she moved to follow him, he signalled for her to continue on down the Haldrian. With no idea of where she was going, she kept wandering, with less and less enthusiasm, through the bustle until he caught up with her again.

‘Wanted to see if we were being followed,’ he explained, his thoughts obviously on the same tracks as hers.

‘And were we?’

‘No bloody idea,’ he admitted. ‘I’m not so good at all the sneak stuff. A fighter, me.’

And he was. She had seen enough evidence of that. The voice of his nailbow, spitting its powder-charged bolts with a sound like thunder, remained with her from the battle around the great railway engine called the Pride.

‘Here,’ he said at last and ducked into a little taverna that seemed mostly deserted. The owner, a greying Beetle-kinden, nodded cheerily to him, and did not object when he hurried Che into a back room. She had a brief glimpse of a Fly-kinden in a broad-brimmed hat, sitting apparently asleep at one table, who was one of her uncle’s men here. He had one eye still slightly open, enough to watch the door.

‘So what is going on?’ she demanded, and fortuitously it was Stenwold himself beyond the door to answer her questions.

She was reminded of the Taverna Merraia, where she and her friends had been briefed by Stenwold the first time, then sent off at short notice to Helleron and the first step in a course of events that had brought her betrayal, slavery, love, and the stain of a dead man’s blood on her hands.

Balkus sat down by the door and unslung his nailbow, taking up a filthy rag in a vain effort to clean it out. Stenwold sat at a table with a mess of papers strewn across it. Beside him was thorny Scuto and Sperra, a young Fly-kinden woman who was still recovering from the injuries she received during the Pride battle. Across the table sat Achaeos, and Che went over to him instantly. She was aware, as she was still always aware, of their eyes on her as she hugged him. They certainly made an odd pair. Partly it was that she was broader than he was, and not so much shorter, for the Moths were a slight kinden, but mostly it was because Moths generally resented Beetles, despised them and loathed them for their invasive technologies and their crass profiteering. In truth, Achaeos was no different, for he had fought her race over the mines at Helleron. He would make an exception for her, though, having already done many things and travelled a great many miles specifically for her sake.

‘We move within the next hour,’ Stenwold announced. ‘They’ve been watching me close enough but we’re in the clear here, and when we leave it’ll be underground. By the time they pick me up again, we’ll be in business.’

‘You’ve a plan,’ Achaeos observed.

‘We’ve always got a plan,’ Scuto agreed. ‘And just like before, last minute’s best.’

‘When we leave here, Scuto is taking the rail to Sarn,’ Stenwold explained. ‘I will see the Collegium Assembly soon enough, and if I have to tattoo the threat of the Wasp Empire on every Assembler’s forehead to get my point across, I’ll do it. But Collegium cannot stand alone. Sarn has been our ally now for just a little while, but the Ants of Sarn have proved themselves faithful before. They came to relieve the siege when Vek had us invested. We need them to rally to our flag now too. Scuto, you’ve still got your contacts in Sarn, yes?’

‘Oh they’ve been quiet enough.’ Scuto’s grotesque, thorn-pocked face wrinkled. ‘A decent shout in the earhole’ll get ’em moving, don’t you worry.’

‘Then you’re to go shout at them. I need you talking to the Royal Court at Sarn, or at least to someone within it. Tell them about Tark. Tell them about Myna and Maynes. Tell them about the Empire, most of all.’

‘They ain’t going to want to see me,’ Scuto said. ‘Ain’t nobody wants to see me. I’ll get a mouthpiece, though. I’ll get your message through.’

‘Good man. Take Balkus and Sperra to help you.’

Balkus cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, Master Maker, but you might just notice my skin-shade here.’

Stenwold looked at him blankly, seeing only a Sarnesh Ant, larger than most, and wearing a glum expression at that moment. Then he recalled another such: Marius, who had died at Myna. They had both been considered renegades, and if an Ant turned from his city there was no easy way of going back.

‘I suppose you won’t be going back to Sarn any time soon,’ Stenwold admitted. Marius had left Sarn because all those years ago his superiors would not listen when he warned them about the Wasps. Yet he had left to better serve his city, while Balkus, Stenwold was sure, had left for less noble motives. The outcome was the same.

‘I’ll be good just with Sperra,’ Scuto said. ‘I ain’t no greenhouse flower, chief. You up for a trip, Sperra?’

The little Fly-kinden nodded wearily.

‘You up to go speak to a Queen for me?’ Scuto pressed.

‘Not on your life,’ she said.

‘Sure, you’ll come round to it,’ Balkus told her. ‘Now for me, I’ll stay right here and look after the chief. That sound like a good plan? I’m a handy fellow to have around.’

‘Might not be a bad idea,’ Scuto agreed. Stenwold looked from him to Balkus and back again.

‘I’m going to have Tisamon and Tynisa right here should I need them, but. fair enough. Another pair of hands and eyes won’t go amiss.’ He looked over at his niece and her lover. ‘Che and Achaeos, you’re going to Sarn as well, but for different reasons.’

Che put on a stern expression. ‘You wouldn’t be trying to keep me safe again, would you? Because that didn’t work so well the last time you tried it.’

Stenwold’s smile was bleak. ‘The Wasps are invading the Lowlands, niece, so there isn’t anywhere that’s safe any more. Scuto and I operated out of Sarn for a while, way back, and we had some unlikely misadventures that owed nothing to the Empire. Specifically, we had a fairly heated run-in with a band of fellows called the Arcanum.’

Achaeos hissed at the word. ‘What kind of run-in?’ he demanded.

‘They fought with us at Helleron, didn’t they?’ asked Che. ‘They’re the Moth army or something?’

‘A secret society of sorts,’ Stenwold explained. ‘But mostly they’re spies and agents for Achaeos’s people. All a misunderstanding, the trouble we had then, but it’s left us knowing a little about them that should be useful. Between what Scuto can furnish you with and the fact of having Achaeos on our side, I think we can hope to make contact.’

‘You want us to convince the Arcanum to fight on our side?’ Achaeos asked, in a tone of voice that suggested it could not be done.

‘I want you to do whatever you can. Your people in Dorax have been left alone more than those in your own city, and that makes them, I think, less leery of outsiders,’ Stenwold said. ‘We still get a steady trickle of them at the College, at least, and they send the odd ambassador to Sarn. I’m hoping that they will at least consider lending us some aid. I know we can’t expect armies from them, but even a little information would be useful. Will you do it?’

Achaeos looked to Che. ‘And you?’

‘I’ll do whatever I have to,’ she said. ‘I’ve met with your people before. These Arcanum can’t be worse than the Skryres at Tharn.’

His face wrinkled at that reference, but he turned back to Stenwold. ‘I cannot promise anything, but what can be done will be done.’

Stenwold had chosen that same taverna because it had possessed an underground exit leading to the river, from way back when the temperance drive was running riot in the Assembly and the wine-duty had been sky-high. He now watched Scuto and Che, Achaeos and Sperra disappearing down it, to make their way to the rail station as swiftly as possible. At the same time another man of his, dressed in a spiky wooden harness and swathed in a cloak, would be poking about the automotive works located along the Foundry West Way. Stenwold and Scuto had discovered a long time ago that difference could provide a disguise in itself if, like Scuto, you were so different that the difference was all people saw.

Tisamon and Tynisa would be back at the College by now, unaware that the wheels of the plan were turning already. He had lied to Che in the taverna’s back room. Sarn was by no means safe, but he had a feeling it would be safer than Collegium over these next few days. He would get to see the Assembly sooner or later, and put his case to them, though the Wasps no doubt had men bribed there to speak against him. At this late hour nobody could predict whether the old men and women of Collegium might recover the wisdom of their predecessors. For this reason, he knew, the Wasps would be looking to stop him making his speech.

With Balkus lumbering behind him he set off back for the College. The big Ant was something of a mystery to him, being Scuto’s man, not Stenwold’s own. He knew him for a mercenary and yet the man had asked for no payment. That was either a happy turn of events or a suspicious one.

‘Tell me, Balkus, what’s in it for you?’ he asked boldly.

‘Don’t trust me, is it?’

Without even glancing around, still presenting his broad back to the theoretical knife, Stenwold shrugged. ‘It’s not a trusting business.’

‘That it’s not,’ the man agreed. ‘Look, I’m no hero, right? I plied my trade from Helleron down to Everis, and I must have signed on with everyone from crooks to Aristoi at one time or another. It’s a fine stretch of land thataways, so between Helleron and the Spiders there’s always work for a man like me. Wasps will change all that. A man like me under their shadow is either a slave waiting for the chains or he gets slapped with rank and papers and made to do their dirty work for them. If I’d wanted that I’d have stayed in Sarn.’

‘There are always frontiers,’ Stenwold pointed out. The white spires of the College were visible ahead now. ‘You could have just moved on.’

‘You’re trying to get rid of me?’

‘I’m curious, Balkus. If I’m going to rely on you, I need to know you. I know Scuto trusts you. So that’s a good start.’

‘Yeah, well.’ Stenwold heard an awkwardness in the Ant’s voice. ‘Scutes and me go way back. We used to take turns bailing each other out. This is. what, almost before you knew him. And some of the lads and lasses with him, they were fellows of mine, and a lot of them are just ash and dirt now. And you get to wondering how it’s going to be, you know.’

‘I do,’ Stenwold agreed. ‘Well don’t think you’re not appreciated. I saw you fight before the Pride. You did good work there.’

‘So did you, and your niece and a whole lot of them,’ Balkus agreed. ‘And some that didn’t leave that field alive either.’

They passed by the twin statues of Logic and Reason that adorned the east gate of the College. Stenwold paused a moment to rest a hand on Logic, carved as a female Beetle of mature years wielding a metal rod marked with the gradations of an artificer’s rule. The Great College was where learning was to be had here for the youth of all kinden and, while the rich paid their way, there were scholarships for the poor as well. The Moths might keep their secrets in the dark of their mountain fastnesses, but here learning was light to be spread to all corners of the world. There was nowhere else like it, and there never had been. And now the Wasps wanted to destroy it.

At the gates he turned to the Ant-kinden. ‘I have work for you. An opportunity.’

‘Name it,’ Balkus told him, and Stenwold did. From the man’s expression the duties outlined did not suit him, and it was a test, in a way, to see whether he would accept it. In the end he nodded, perhaps just because Ant-kinden were bred to take orders. With a final grimace and a shake of his head Balkus set off, heading away from the College.

Stenwold saw knots of students point him out as he entered. He was aware that, all unsought, he had a reputation within these grounds. He was considered a freethinker, apparently: he dared to teach that which the orthodox Masters of the College would not touch. He had been warning of the Wasp Empire for a decade now, and this very year they had finally come to the Lowlands. First they had competed at the Great Games, taking a pointedly diplomatic second place in any contest they chanced their hand at. Now the news was seeping in of armies on the move, the drums of war sounding from the east. Stenwold the panic-monger had become Stenwold the prophet.

There was a far greater murmur now as he crossed the College grounds, and all of a sudden he realized what it must mean. Concrete report must have come to Collegium that Tark had been attacked, that the invasion had actually started. He turned to look at all those young faces, and he saw hope and fear, doubt and admiration, all mixed in. Seeing him stop, many of them approached him, calling out questions.

‘Master Maker, where will the Empire go when Tark throws them back?’

‘Master Maker, how do they fight? Do they use auto-motives?’

‘What happens if they smash down the walls of Tark?’

This last question silenced them. It was something most of them had never considered, for a dozen Ant-kinden expeditions had been turned back by that city’s defences. The political balance of the Lowlands had been stagnant for generations. Change, on such a scale, was unthinkable.

‘If they take the city of Tark,’ Stenwold said, speaking quietly enough, but the silence hanging over the students was eerie, ‘they will come west.’ He knew that his words would be taken as truth by them, simply because he spoke them, but he knew that they were indeed true and so did not care. The girl who had asked the question pushed forward from her fellows.

‘But they can’t, surely? What do they want?’

He tried to place her. She had attended some of his history classes earlier that year. ‘Power. Control. Their Empire is like a spinning top that must keep moving lest it falls.’

‘But can’t we do anything?’ she asked. She was a young Spider-kinden, pretty without the cutting beauty that some of them possessed.

Achaeos’s words recurred to him. ‘What can be done, will be done,’ he said, and in that moment he placed her — placed her name, Arianna. A promising student, one with a lot of potential.