Dragonfly Falling

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Dragonfly Falling

  Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. For reasons unclear even to himself he subsequently ended up in law and has worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds, where he now lives. Married, he is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor, has trained in stage-fighting, and keeps no exotic or dangerous pets of any kind, possibly excepting his son.

  Catch up with Adrian at www.shadowsoftheapt.com for further information about both himself and the insect-kinden, together with bonus material including short stories and artwork.

  ALSO BY ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY

  Empire in Black and Gold

  Blood of the Mantis

  (forthcoming in 2009)

  First published 2009 by Tor

  This electronic edition published 2009 by Tor

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-230-73959-8 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-230-73958-1 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-230-73960-4 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Adrian Czajkowski 2009

  The right of Adrian Czajkowski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  For Alex

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A very big thank you to everyone who’s encouraged and helped me over the last year, including Simon; Peter and the folks at Macmillan; Al, Andy, Emmy-Lou and Paul; the Deadliners writing group; and all the folks at Maelstrom and Curious Pastimes.

  Glossary

  Stenwold Maker Beetle-kinden spymaster and statesman

  Cheerwell ‘Che’ Maker his niece

  Tisamon Mantis-kinden Weaponsmaster

  Tynisa his halfbreed daughter, formerly Stenwold’s ward

  Salma (Prince Salme Dien) Dragonfly nobleman, agent of Stenwold

  Totho halfbreed artificer, agent of Stenwold

  Achaeos Moth-kinden magician

  Scuto Thorn Bug-kinden artificer, Stenwold’s lieutenant

  Sperra Fly-kinden, agent of Scuto

  Balkus Ant-kinden, agent of Scuto, renegade from the city of Sarn

  Thalric Wasp-kinden major in the Rekef

  Ulther Wasp-kinden governor of Myna, killed by Thalric

  Reiner Wasp-kinden general in the Rekef

  Te Berro Fly-kinden lieutenant in the Rekef

  Scyla Spider-kinden magician and spy

  Lineo Thadspar Beetle-kinden Speaker for the Assembly of Collegium

  Kymon of Kes Ant-kinden master of arms in Collegium

  Hokiak Scorpion-kinden black-marketeer in Myna

  Skrill halfbreed scout in Stenwold’s service

  Grief in Chains Butterfly-kinden dancer

  Places of import

  Asta Wasp-kinden staging post for the Lowlands campaign

  Collegium Beetle-kinden city, home of the Great College

  The Commonweal Dragonfly-kinden state north of the Lowlands, partly conquered by the Empire

  The Darakyon forest, formerly a Mantis stronghold, now haunted and avoided by all

  Helleron Beetle-kinden city, manufacturing heart of the Lowlands

  Myna Soldier Beetle-kinden city conquered by the Wasp Empire

  Sarn Ant-kinden city-state allied to Collegium

  Spiderlands Spider-kinden cities south of the Lowlands, believed rich and endless

  Tark Ant-kinden city-state in the eastern Lowlands

  Tharn Moth-kinden hold near Helleron

  Vek Ant-kinden city-state hostile to Collegium

  Organizations

  Arcanum the Moth-kinden secret service

  Assembly the elected ruling body of Collegium, meeting in the Amphiophos

  Fiefs competing criminal gangs in Helleron

  Great College in Collegium, the cultural heart of the Lowlands

  Prowess Forum duelling society in Collegium

  Rekef the Wasp imperial secret service

  For many years the Wasp Empire has been expanding, warring on its neighbours and enslaving them. Having concluded its Twelve-Year War against the Dragonfly Commonweal, the Wasps have now turned their eyes towards the divided Lowlands.

  Stenwold Maker realized the truth of the Empire’s power when it seized the distant city of Myna. Since then he has been sending out covert agents to track the progress of an enemy whose threat his fellow citizens will not recognize.

  Among these agents are his niece Cheerwell, his ward Tynisa, the exotic Dragonfly prince Salma, a humble half-breed artificer Totho . . . and staunchest of his allies is the terrifying Mantis warrior Tisamon.

  But can their efforts bring the Lowlands to their senses before it is all too late?

  One

  The morning was joyless for him, as mornings always were. He arose from silks and bee-fur and felt on his skin the insidious cold that these rooms only shook off for a scant month or two in the heart of summer.

  He wondered whether he could be accommodated somewhere else – as he had wondered countless times before – and knew that it would not do. It would be, in some unspecified way, disloyal. He was a prisoner of his own public image. Besides, these rooms had some advantages. No windows, for one. The sun came in through shafts set into the ceiling, three dozen of them and each too small for even the most limber Fly-kinden assassin to sneak through. He had been told that the effect of this fragmented light was beautiful, although he saw beauty in few things, and none at all in architecture.

  His people had been building these ziggurats as symbols of their leaders’ power since for ever, but the style of building that had reached its apex here in the great palace at Capitas had ove
rreached itself. The northern hill-tribes, left behind by the sword of progress, still had their stepped pyramids atop the mounds of their hill forts. The design had changed little, only the scale, so that he, who ought to expect all things as he wanted, was entombed in a grotesque, overgrown edifice which never truly warmed at its core.

  He slung on a gown, trimmed with the fur of three hundred moths. There were guards stationed outside his door, he knew, and they were for his own protection, but he felt sometimes that they were really his jailers, and that the servants now entering were merely here to torment him. He could have them killed at a word, of course, and he needed to give no reason for it, but he had tried to amuse himself in such capricious ways before and found no real joy in it. What was the point in having the wretches killed, when there were always yet more, an inexhaustible legion of them, world without end? What a depressing prospect: that a man could wade neck-deep in the blood of his servants, and there would still be men and women ready to enter his service more numerous than the motes of dust dancing in the shafts of sunlight from above.

  His father had taken no joy in the rank and power that was his. His father had run through life, never taking time to stop, to look, to think. He had been born with a sword in his hand, if you believed the stories, and with destiny like an invisible crown about his brow. The man in the fur-lined gown knew what that felt like. It felt like a vice around the forehead forbidding him rest or peace.

  His father had died eight years ago. No assassin’s blade, no poison, no battle wound or lancing arrow. He had just fallen ill, all of a sudden, and a tenday later he just stopped, like a clock, and neither doctor nor artificer could wind him up again. His father had died, and in the tenday before, and the tenday after, all of his father’s children bar two, all of this man’s siblings bar one, had died also. They had died by public execution or covert murder, for good reason or for no reason other than that the succession, his succession, must be undisputed. He was the eldest son, but he knew that the right of primogeniture ran thin where lordly ambitions were concerned. He had spared one sister only, the youngest. She had been eight years old then, and something had failed in him when they presented him with the death warrant to sign. She was sixteen now, and she looked at him always with the carefully bland adoration of a subject, but he feared the thoughts that swam behind that gaze, feared them enough to wake, sweat-sodden, when even dreaming of them.

  And the order lay before him still, to have her removed, the one other remaining member of his bloodline. As soon as he had a true-blood son of his own it would be done. He would take no pleasure in it, no more than he would take in the fathering. He understood his own father’s life now, whose shadow he raced to outreach. Yet how envied he was! How his generals and courtiers and advisers cursed their luck, that he should sit where he did, and not they. Yet they could not know that, from the seat of a throne, the whole weighty ziggurat of state was turned on its point, and the entire hegemony’s weight from the broad base of the numberless slaves, through the subject peoples and all the ranks of the army to the generals, was balanced solely upon him. He represented their hope and their inspiration, and their expectations were loaded upon him.

  The servants who washed and dressed him were all of the true race. At the heart of a culture built on slavery there were few outlander slaves permitted in the palace, for who among them could be trusted? Besides, even the most menial tasks were counted an honour when performed for him. Of foreign slaves, there were only a handful of advisers, sages, artificers and others whose skills recommended them beyond the lowly stain of their blood, and though they were slaves they lived like princes while they were still of use to him.

  His advisers, yes. He was to speak with his advisers later. Before that there were matters of state to attend to. Always the chains of office dragged him down.

  Robed now as befitted his station, his brow bound with gold and ebony, His Imperial Majesty Alvdan the Second, lord of the Wasp Empire, prepared to reascend his throne.

  *

  The Emperor kept many advisers and every tenday he met with them all, a chance for them to speak on whatever subject they felt would best serve himself and his Empire. It was his father’s custom too, a part of that clamorous, ever-running life of his that had taken him early to his grave as the Empire’s greatest slave and not its master. This generation’s Alvdan would gladly have done without it, but it was as much a part of the Emperor as were the throne and the crown and he could not cut it from him.

  The individual advisers were another matter. Each ten-day the faces might be different, some removed by his own orders, others by his loyal men of the Rekef. Some of his advisers were Rekef themselves, but he was pleased to note that this was no shield against either his displeasure or that of his subordinates.

  Some of the advisers were slaves, another long tradition, for the Empire always made the best use of its resources. Scholarly men from conquered cities were often dragged to Capitas simply for the contents of their minds. Some prospered, as much as any slave could in this Empire, and better than many free men did. Others failed and fell. There were always more.

  His council, thus gathered, would be the usual tedious mix. There would be one or two Woodlouse-kinden with their long and mournful grey faces, professing wisdom and counselling caution; there would be several Beetles, merchants or artificers; perhaps some oddity, like a Spider-kinden from the far south, a blank-eyed Moth or similar; and the locals, of course: Wasp-kinden from the Rekef, from the army, diplomats, Consortium factors, members of high-placed families and even maverick adventurers. And they would all have counsel to offer, and it would serve them more often than not if he followed it.

  His progress into the room was measured in servants who opened the doors for him, swept the floor before his feet, removed his outer robe and the weight of the crown. Others were serving him wine and sweetmeats even as he sat down, food and drink foretasted by yet more invisible underlings.

  His advisers sat on either side of him in a shallow crescent of lower seats. The idea was that the Emperor should look straight ahead, and only hear the words of wisdom that tinkled in his ears, without being in any way swayed by the identity of the speaker. Ideologically brilliant, of course, though practically useless, since he had an ear keen enough to identify any of the speakers from a single uttered word. Instead, all they gained for themselves were stiff necks as everyone craned around to look at whoever spoke.

  I could change this. He was, after all, the Emperor. He could have them sitting around a table like off-duty soldiers on a gambling spree, or kneeling before him like supplicants, or hanging on wires from the ceiling if he so wanted. Not a day went by without some petty detail of the imperial bureaucracy throwing thorns beneath his feet, yet he always found a reason not to thrust his hand into the works of the machine: it would be bad for morale; it had worked thus far; it was for a good reason, or why would they do it like that?

  And in his worst dreams he heard the true reason for his own reticence, for at each change he implemented, each branch he hacked from the tradition-tree, they would all doubtless murmur, He’s not the man his father was.

  He had sired a legion of short-lived bastards and no true-blood sons, and perhaps that was why: the burden of the imperial inheritance that he did not want to pass to any child of his. Still, that problematic situation was looming closer each year. The imperial succession was a matter he had forbidden his advisers to speak on, but he felt the weight of it on him nonetheless.

  The assembled advisers shuffled in their seats, waiting for his gesture to begin, and he gave it, listening without interest as the first few inconsequential-seeming matters were brought before him. A famine in the East-Empire, so perhaps some artificers should be sent to teach the ignorant savages something approaching modern agriculture. A lazy gesture signalled his assent. A proposal for games to celebrate the first victory over the Lowlands, whenever it happened. He ruled against that, judging it too soon. Another proposal, thi
s from the sad-faced Woodlouse-kinden Gjegevey, who had a sufficient balance of wisdom and acumen to have served Alvdan’s father for the last nine years of his reign and yet survived the purges that had accompanied the coronation.

  ‘It might be possible to proceed more gently in our invasion plans,’ the soft-voiced old man said. He was a freakish specimen, as all his people were: a whole head taller than any reasonable man, and with his grey skin marked by pale bands up over his brow and down his back. His eyes were lost in a nest of wrinkles. ‘These Lowlanders have much knowledge of, mmn, mechanics, philosophy, mm, logistics . . . that we might benefit from. A, hrm, gentle hand . . .’

  Alvdan sat back and let the debate run, hearing the military argue about the risk inherent in relying on a slow conquest, while the Rekef insisted that foreigners could not be trusted and the Consortium pressed for a swift assault that would see their Lowland trading rivals crushed. All self-interest, of course, but not necessarily bad for the Empire. He held up a hand and they fell silent.

  ‘We have faith in our generals,’ was all he said, and that was that.

  Before speaking, the next speaker paused long enough that Alvdan had a chance to steel himself for the words to come.

  ‘Your Imperial Majesty.’ General Maxin, whose frown could set the entire Rekef trembling, began carefully. ‘There remains the matter of your sister.’

  ‘Does there?’ Alvdan stared straight ahead with a tight-lipped smile that he knew must chill them all.

  ‘There are those who would—’

  ‘We know, General. Our dear sister has a faction, a party, but she has it whether she wishes it or not. They would put her on this seat of mine because they think she would love them for it. So she must be put to death like all the others. Are you going to counsel us now about the place of mercy in imperial doctrine, or lack of it?’

  He heard nothing, but in the corner of his eye caught a motion that was Maxin shaking his head.

  ‘Do you remember General Scarad?’ the Emperor continued. ‘I believe he was the last man to counsel us about mercy. An unwise trait in a ruler of men, he claimed.’