Dragonfly Falling

Forty-Three

She stood at the east end of Collegium docks, charred wood crunching beneath her feet, knowing there was all too little time to do what she must.

Down the line of the wharves they were already cutting out the worst of the damage, replacing it with good treated wood, sinking new piles for piers with machines she had never seen before and could not comprehend. These folk were nothing if not industrious, and there was building work like this going on all over the city, not just replacement but improvement.

Felise Mienn stared down into the water. Collegium was a deep-water port and it was black down there, a vertical drop providing enough draft for the bulkiest freighter. What secrets must be buried there, in the silt deep below: what forgotten bones and treasures?

Destrachis would be looking for her, she was aware, but perhaps he would not think of looking here until it was too late. She wished she had not made him speak up.

Thalric had been right when he asked her what came next. Her future, as she had been able to imagine it, ended with his death, so what could she do after that? Once he was dead nothing would have changed, the dead would not be revived, and she would have to turn away from a blank and pointless future to confront the past.

The past was a gnawing horror to her, and just as she had chased Thalric all across the Lowlands, so it had been chasing her.

What had been left unsaid? Destrachis could have spoken more — she could feel the shape of it, though her mind denied her the details. What else was left to know?

Far better not to know. If she stepped off here, the water would embrace her like a lover and draw her down. Her armour would fill with it and, even if her volatile mind changed yet again, there would be nothing she could do to resist. She would finally have taken her fate in her own hands. Let Thalric live, because he would not be able to hurt her any further.

Her reflection was faint in the water rippling below. She could see the outline of her shoulders, her draped cloak. Her face, though, was just a dark oval.

She stepped forwards to let her momentum topple her towards the sea.

Someone caught her cloak by its trailing edge and hauled her back. For a moment she was suspended ludicrously, at some bizarre angle, and then she felt rage at him, the wretched doctor her family had set on her, and her wings exploded from her back and she turned and stooped on him with claws bared.

She had lashed out at him three times before she realized this was not Destrachis. Instead it was the Mantis Tisamon who was dodging backwards, although a shallow line across his forehead bore witness to her first strike.

She froze instantly, and Tisamon fell back into a defensive stance, waiting for her. On the periphery of their attention, a dozen dockworkers were staring at them, unsure whether this was a fight to the death or just some kind of theatre.

‘Why?’ she demanded, as though he had done something terrible to her.

‘Because you are worth more than this,’ he replied.

‘You do not know that.’

‘I know. I have spoken with the Spider doctor and he has told me many things.’ The knowledge Tisamon had been given sat heavily on him, for the story Felise had choked out of Destrachis was but one half of it.

Her golden skin had turned pale now. ‘No, you cannot. ’

‘You understand what that means,’ he insisted, and though he had never stinted at cruelty before, he winced now. ‘You cannot wash it away with your own death. Nor can you blot out the knowledge by killing that Spider creature. You cannot even achieve it by killing Thalric — though that would be a service to everyone. I now know, and I would rather I did not, but I do know. To take that knowledge from the world you must kill me, before you cast your own life away.’ Destrachis’s conclusion of the tale was raw in Tisa-mon’s memory: how Felise, having awakened with the thought of Thalric’s death obsessive in her mind, had found herself barred up, with her room in her family’s house made into an asylum to protect her from herself.

And she had killed them, all the other doctors and, more than that, she had with her own hands made herself the last of her line. Her aunt, her cousins, all left dead at her hands, as she strode through her own house in blind fury wielding her husband’s sword.

He was poised to act, knowing his clawed gauntlet was his to call on the moment she drew blade.

Instead, she said, ‘I don’t wish to kill you. I don’t understand you. What is it you feel?’

Her face was all confusion, and that touched him. ‘I had a love, Felise Mienn, as you have had, and just as yours was taken, the Wasps took mine from me. We are alike, then, and so I think I understand you, perhaps even better than your Spider does. If you seek a purpose, then the Empire still stands and we must fight it. I would be honoured to fight beside you.’

Her stance softened noticeably, and at last he allowed himself to relax.

It was good to find a time and place when messengers were not currently seeking him out, or at least if they were they were not finding him. Now it was just Stenwold and Arianna dodging the public acclaim that so many other Assemblers were soaking up whether they had earned it or not.

But Stenwold was not a politician by choice. He was a soldier, an agent, a spymaster, all in one, and he played his own games that had never needed any public approval.

The game was at a halt, for now, the pieces patiently waiting. The Wasp army had not assaulted Sarn, or not according to the last messenger’s report. The Fourth was in no position to assault anything, so Merro and Egel were spared Wasp occupation. Teornis had sent messengers back to his family and its allies, urging them to strengthen the border, and with word of the Collegium concessions too, just to sweeten the pot. He was a likeable man, professionally so, though Stenwold was not sure whether to like him or not.

Achaeos had awakened at last, though still very weak. He had been frantic about something, not Che’s fate but something else, something he would not quite explain to Stenwold. He had begun asking for Tisamon, instead, but the Mantis was off somewhere on his own inscrutable errands. Stenwold had his own plans for Tisamon. The Mantis and his daughter would go with Thalric, to see if they could track down Che. Stenwold had no genuine trust in Thalric of the Rekef, but Tisamon and Tynisa would keep him in check if anyone could.

For now there was a pause, a heartfelt pause, in all that business, and he had brought Arianna to one of the best-kept secrets of the Amphiophos. Behind the domed building itself there was a garden, walled so high that it was always in the shade, and yet the artificer’s art, with glass and lenses, had funnelled the sun there, so that plants from all across the Lowlands thrived in a wild tangle that the gardeners daily needed to cut back. Here little pumps made water run as though a natural stream passed through, and there were statues that had been old when the Moths fled the city, and stone seats and, by tradition, nobody raised their voices or quarrelled here.

The rain was spotting down through the broad gaps between the glass but there was shelter enough amid the trees, and Stenwold took Arianna to a lichen-dusted seat, where she looked about her in astonishment.

‘I’d never even heard of this place,’ she said.

‘The Assembly prefer not to talk about it overmuch. A little selfishness, I think, that can at least be understood. I always thought this was the only worthwhile reward of belonging to their ranks, though I never had the time to appreciate it. And I won’t have any time again, I’m sure. Tomorrow the war begins anew for me.’

‘For me as well then,’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t ask it of you.’

‘And you wouldn’t have to. I’ll fight your war, Sten, even if all that means is being there for you when you need me.’

He looked at her and, out of habit, thought, But can I trust you? He realized though, that he did trust her, and the final piece of that had fallen into place not when she saved his life at the Briskall place, but when Balkus had accepted her. He decided that Balkus, that big, solid and unimaginative man, could see more clearly than Stenwold himself on this subject.

‘Stenwold,’ Arianna said, and when he turned to look at her, her eyes held a warning in them. ‘We’re being watched. I’m sure of it.’

He stood swiftly. ‘Some other Assembler, no doubt.’ But he did not believe that.

Then a voice came from amid the tangled undergrowth. ‘I could have put an arrow in your head, old man. Not that there’s much chance you’d notice.’

Stenwold reached for his sword and discovered that, yes, he still wore it at his waist, so familiar now that he donned it automatically. It slid easily from its scabbard. ‘How did you get in here?’

The sword was not all that was familiar. He knew the voice too, when it replied, ‘I got in here because I’m a Fly and your clumsy pack of kinden don’t even understand what ‘fly’ means.’

The speaker emerged: a bald-headed little man with his ugly face and knowing smile, and Stenwold said, ‘Nero?’ in tones of sheer disbelief.

‘It’s been a while, Sten. Who’s the lady?’

‘This is Arianna,’ and the awkward pause as he thought of how to introduce her obviously told Nero all he needed to know, for the mocking smile was even broader now. ‘And this is, Nero, the artist,’ Stenwold explained to her awkwardly.

Nero grinned at Stenwold. ‘You get bigger and fatter every time I see you.’

‘And you’re still ugly.’ Stenwold’s retort came without hesitation from twenty years away. ‘You’ve no idea how good it is to see you. Why are you here? Are you staying long?’

‘Just a messenger boy, me,’ Nero explained. ‘With a message from a friend of yours, though, and there’s a whole cartload of news, so you and your lady better sit back down and listen.’

In the darkness that she could now dismiss with a thought it had been remarkably easy to break away from the Wasp camp. With Totho watching, she had simply tiptoed past the occasional Wasp sentry, invisible in her uniform to men who saw Auxillians merely as slaves — ubiquitous and acceptable. When she had got in sight of the camp’s perimeter she had waited carefully until nobody was looking her way, then simply taken off, let her wings lift her high, over the ring of torches and sentries and out into the night.

Totho watched her leave and was torn, when she flew, between relief and guilt. His night’s work was not done, though. He turned and went back to the farmhouse, opened up the hatch and returned to the cellar with his shuttered lantern. He would replace the bars, close the tumblers of the locks. Give them something to wonder about.

He was just getting down to the task when a voice intervened: ‘Well now, what have we here?’

He turned, flicking the lantern shutters wider, but he already knew who he would see: the emotionless face of Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos, flashing pale and mottled from within the confines of his cowl.

‘A good artificer makes his plans carefully in advance,’ Drephos reproached him. ‘He does not need to come back and finish up, Totho.’

‘How.?’

‘I watched. Perhaps you forget that for me it is never dark. I watched and saw quite clearly. You came out with the girl, you let her loose. I watched because I thought it likely you might do so. Kaszaat warned me that you were acting strangely, and she was right. And so I came to see what else you might have been up to down here.’ He raised an enquiring eyebrow and moved closer. ‘So, what else have you done?’

‘Nothing,’ Totho stammered. Drephos was still advancing on him, but he knew he himself was the stronger, and the master artificer was not even armed.

‘She. she was my past, and I found I could not cut it loose so easily.’

Drephos laid his gauntleted hand on Totho’s shoulder. ‘And what else have you done? How else have you betrayed me?’ His voice was very soft, not angry, not even sad.

‘I swear-’

Drephos gripped him by the shoulder and Totho cried out in pain as the narrow fingers dug like pincers into his flesh. His entire arm was instantly locked, so he grasped Drephos’s wrist with his other hand and tried to pry it free. To his horror there was no movement at all, only an inexorable tightening of Drephos’s grasp.

‘What else, Totho?’ Drephos asked, as he still struggled and tugged. ‘Is there an explosive, perhaps? An incendiary planted? Or were you to kill me? Kill the general? Tell me, Totho. I won’t be angry, I promise.’

Totho was now whimpering, feeling the bones of his shoulder grind. Unable to shift those imprisoning fingers he slammed his hand up against Drephos’s elbow as hard as he could.

He struck metal, as hard and solid as any armour. With ragged breath he dragged at the sleeve of the man’s robe, until the shoulder seam gave way and he bared Drephos’s entire arm.

It was metal, all of it, not just armoured but an arm entirely of metal, and he could only guess at the delicacy of the mechanisms within that gave it life. Even in the extremity of his pain, something stirred in him at the sight, the artificer’s instinct in him that could never quite be denied.

‘It was a savage accident,’ Drephos explained conversationally. ‘And worse was having to devise this replacement one-handed. But I see you like it. I’m glad.’

He pushed, and Totho, all strength gone from him, fell back against the wooden bars. ‘Tell me what you have done,’ Drephos said. ‘I am a Moth, at least partly, and I can read it from your face. What is it you have done?’

‘I gave her the plans,’ Totho gasped, all resistance ebbing out of him. ‘The plans for the snapbow.’

Drephos stared at him for a second. And he laughed. Laughed and laughed and let go his grip so that Totho slid down the bars to the floor. And still Drephos laughed and laughed as his apprentice looked up at him, bewildered.

‘Oh that’s good!’ Drephos got out. ‘That’s very good. And I suppose you thought it was young love that made you do it, or nostalgia, or any of those other things that we’ll soon breed out of you! My dear boy, you gave her the plans, did you? Why that’s excellent!’

‘What do you mean?’ Totho demanded. His shoulder was still agony, but at least he could move the arm. Nothing was broken.

‘Don’t you understand?’ Drephos crouched before him. ‘What will they do with the plans? Why, they’ll build snapbows of their own. Can you imagine the look on Malkan’s face when he finds out they have his new secret weapon?’

‘This is just to spite the generals?’ Totho asked, baffled.

‘But what will the generals do, Totho, when that comes to pass? Who will they come to, and what will they ask?’

‘They’ll come to you,’ said Totho slowly, ‘and they’ll ask you to. ’

‘Build them something even better!’ Drephos crowed. ‘And the science advances one more step. Oh, you may have thought you had all kinds of airy motives, Totho, but in your heart you’re an artificer. You’re a man of progress just like I am. How hard would it have been for me, myself, to get that weapon into the hands of the enemy? Just think how much time you’ve saved me. The war goes on, Totho, back and forth, year to year, and how much better for us two that it does. If the Empire ever wins outright then will it continue to let us use its foundries and its workshops? Will it lend us further resources for our work?’ He then took Totho by the unhurt shoulder and hauled him to his feet. ‘Do you bind yourself to me, boy, truly? Once before I thought I’d read truth in your face, but I can be deceived.’

One last chance, Totho realized, for him to stand against the bloody flood, to reject the metal and choose the meat — to do something Che would be proud of.

‘I am yours,’ he said soberly. ‘I bind myself to you.’

Che had set off walking away from the camp and not stopped until dawn began to colour the eastern sky. She discovered she had been heading a little east of south. It occurred to her that she had no idea where she was, and that the food and water Totho had scavenged for her would not last for very long. The one building she came across was a barren shack that was possibly once some rich man’s hunting lodge, but it had been picked bare already.

She now had a problem, and realized that she should have fled the camp westwards along the rail line, which would have led her infallibly to the gates of Sarn and to safety. Instead, she would have to work her way northwards as best she could, and hope to encounter the rails again. Northwards and westwards, then, so that she did not simply walk straight back into the Wasp camp. And, even so, they would have scouts out, so she would camp out during the height of the day, and then walk all night, trusting to her Art to keep her eyes sharp.

For now, she simply trudged on until the sun became too hot, and then she rested, and in the evening she trudged on again, looking always for a sign of the rails ahead of her, like the cut or rise of the railside bankings. But the rugged, scrubby terrain went on endlessly, punctuated only by knots of trees wherever water had gathered beneath the earth, or the ravaged plots of ploughed farmland when the ground became fertile enough. She found no buildings that had not been systematically sacked and burned, which told her she was still too near to the Wasp camp, wherever it was, for comfort.

Towards dusk, she found a stream that had cut a channel through the land, capable of hiding her from enemy eyes. It was cooler, too, and edged with green that was a welcome change from the drylands that extended between Helleron and the woods of Etheryon. Its course ran too straight to be natural, and the land either side was flat and had obviously once known the plough, but she could not tell how long ago, or whose hands had refashioned the soil here.

She was still heading along the channel when she heard something buzz overhead like a very fast-moving insect. There had been a knife amongst Totho’s gifts and she seized it in her hand, trying to crouch into some kind of martial position, but she could see no one, certainly nobody in black and gold armour.

She was just thinking that perhaps it was an insect after all, when something struck the side of her head in a blaze of pain and she dropped face-first into the stream.

When Che recovered, she found her wrists and ankles bound with strips of cloth torn from her own clothing — not the uniform tunic she still wore, but her real clothes that had been in the sack, and were now spread out with the rest of its contents around an almost smokeless fire. A low, wide tent had been pitched beside a pool that the stream flowed into, and then out of, on its artificial course.

Some bandit or wanderer, she guessed. I can promise a reward. I can probably make them be reasonable.

And then she heard a footstep and turned, and almost cried out in dismay, for he was a Wasp — not in uniform, but a Wasp with a scarred face, in a long leather coat, coming with a string of fish in one hand and eyeing her speculatively.

It had been something as commonplace as a slingshot that had brought her down, a stone aimed at her from the undergrowth.

His name was Gaved and he was obviously no ordinary Wasp as Che was used to them. No uniform and no rank, and he had all the marks of a loner about him. When she eventually questioned him about what he did, he told her he hunted men and women for a living.

‘And now I’ve caught you,’ he said, ‘a nice, plump deserter. Well, it’s about time my luck changed. I was robbed by a bastard Spider-kinden and I’m still on his trail, but I reckon I can now make some pocket money by returning you to your masters.’

‘If it’s money you want, if you get me to Collegium. ’

‘Girl, I’ve just come from Collegium. I’m not even sure it’s still standing by now.’

‘It is, the. ’

‘And anyway,’ he said, speaking over her, ‘I’ve got no wish to retrace my steps, not with my Spider friend still out there hoping to claim my share of the loot. So, if it’s all right with you I’ll just hand you in and go about my business.’

‘They’ll kill me.’

‘They’ll whip you, certainly,’ he said unsympathetically. ‘Maybe they’ll kill you too, if they want to make an example, but probably you’ll just get a whipping, an Auxillian abandoning her post. Why not tell them you got lost?’

‘I’m not a deserter,’ she protested. ‘I’m not an Auxillian.’ She fell silent, knowing that whatever she said could only make her position worse. The same understanding was in his eyes, too.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘A man’s got to make a living, and it’s not easy sometimes.’

He had taken her into his tent, come nightfall, with the fire left to burn itself out by the opening, and she had assumed he would take advantage of her. Instead he just made sure she was tied too tight to escape, and then lay down at whatever distance from her the tent would allow. She realized that in some perverse feeling of concern he had brought her inside to keep her warm.

‘Please,’ she addressed his back. ‘I promise you more money than the Wasps will pay. Just take me to Sarn. Sarn can’t be too far out of your way.’

‘Don’t make me gag you,’ was his only reply.

Gaved woke with the dawn, as he always did. It was good to be travelling alone and in the wilds. It had been fun going along with Phin for a time, but in the end other people tended to crowd him.

And yet here I am, so self-sufficient I’m doing the Empire’s work still. The cursed Spider, Scylis, had seen right through his vaunted independence, and he could do without some mercenary telling him things he already knew.

He remembered his last sight of Phin, sprawled dead with a nailbow shot straight through her. She had deserved better than that, but then so did most people who died.

The girl was awake and staring at him and obviously about to start pleading for her life again. That would only depress him. ‘I’m going out to water the place,’ he told her, ‘but I’ll be watching, and if you make a move it won’t be a stone this time, but a sting, you understand?’

She nodded, and he went outside into the growing sunlight, smiling to greet it, as he always did. Then the smile slipped and he growled, ‘Who in the wastes are all of you?’

Che watched the Wasp re-enter, with an odd expression on his face. He had a small knife in one hand, and she opened her mouth to scream, but he said, just above a whisper, ‘Now I’m going to cut you free. No sudden moves, all right?’

The knife sawed through the bonds at her ankles, and then at her wrists, and a moment later he backed out of the tent again, and she saw a flash of reflected sunlight as he cast the knife point-first into the ground.

She crawled cautiously out after him and saw that they were not alone, that there were at least a dozen other people crouching or standing around the tent. They had swords and bows and crossbows, and they came from all kinden, and they distinctly had the look of the bandit about them.

‘Well,’ Gaved said. ‘I suppose she’s yours now.’

‘Don’t move, Wasp. We’ve not done with you,’ said one of the bandits — and a moment later Che was running forward, throwing herself into his arms with a cry of joy, because under the grime and the tarnished cuirass and the rough clothing was none other than Prince Salme Dien, who she thought she would never see again.

‘Salma! How can you be here? How can it be you?’

‘I had some help in finding you,’ he replied, embracing her gently, and glanced back towards one of his own people who was muffled in a cloak. Then the hood was pushed back to reveal that the face beneath was bright and rainbow-hued.

‘You found her?’

‘And then she found me,’ Salma confirmed. He looked at Gaved the Wasp. ‘Did this man hurt you?’

Gaved visibly tensed, knowing that her answer would seal his fate.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing like that at all.’

‘Then pack up your tent, Master Wasp. You’re coming with us.’ He turned again to his followers. ‘Phalmes?’

A tough-looking Mynan stepped forwards. ‘Yes, chief?’

‘We’re heading back for camp, and then I want a messenger sent to Collegium.’

Che then thought about the plans that Totho had given her, the plans still concealed inside her tunic.

The war was far from over.