The next morning Achaeos looked more pale and drawn than Che had ever seen him.
‘Still not sleeping?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘Sleeping, but dreaming.’ He sat down heavily beside her. ‘The Darakyon. Something troubles it. It . . . wants something of me, but I cannot make it out. The voices are confused.’
Che regarded him, worried. ‘And if you could, would you do so?’
He stared dully about the taverna’s common room, which was now mostly empty. ‘I must, for I owe a debt – and the things of the Darakyon are creditors I cannot ignore. But I cannot hear them clearly, and so I cannot act.’
Scuto and Sperra were already breakfasting. Neither of them looked much better than Achaeos did. I should feel as bad, Che knew. It had not sunk in, though, what might be happening to her own home. She wondered if the Vekken had reached the walls. That seemed very likely.
Be safe, Uncle Sten, she willed silently, for he would always forget that he was no soldier. She had visions of him striding along the walls of Collegium and waving a defiant blade at the Ant horde.
There had been Sarnesh soldiers assembling for two days now, forming up their expedition, their automotives, their artillery and supply train. They would go by rail about half of the way, but closer to the siege the Vekken were likely to have undermined the tracks, and the army would proceed on foot. Nobody could march like the Ant-kinden, though. They were tireless on campaign and they would send the Vekken back home stinging.
An officer came into the taverna that very moment and marched over to them, his chainmail clinking. He looked about the table and said, ‘Which one of you is named Sperra?’ An unnecessary question, because it was a Fly-kinden name, and she was the only Fly there.
She raised her hand timidly, and the Ant looked at the rest of them. ‘You must come with me. Your associates also. If any of these here claim not to be your associates, then they will be taken into custody pending investigation.’
‘Now wait a minute,’ Scuto started, rising.
‘We are all her associates,’ Che said. ‘What is going on, officer?’
The Ant had been staring at Scuto, more in horrified curiosity than anything else. ‘You are summoned to the Royal Court immediately. You must come with me.’
‘Why?’ Scuto demanded.
‘You do not question the commands of the Queen,’ the Ant snapped. ‘I don’t know what kinden you are, creature, but I will have your spikes filed blunt if you speak out of turn again.’
Scuto bared his snaggled yellow teeth at him, but said nothing. The officer stepped back, and one by one they filed past him. There was a squad of a dozen soldiers waiting just outside to escort them.
‘What on earth is going on?’ Che demanded in a hoarse whisper.
‘Nothing good,’ Achaeos said, before the officer again shouted for silence.
The Queen herself met them without any of her tacticians or staff. The belligerent officer had virtually pushed Scuto and the rest into her presence: just a single Ant-kinden woman standing at the end of a long table. Until Sperra whispered it, they took her for just another Ant in armour.
There was only one other there, a Fly-kinden man of middle years, wearing on his arm the badge of his guild, a figure-of-eight endlessly looping within a circle, which signified: Anywhere within the world.
The Queen of Sarn regarded them coolly, her gaze dwelling long enough on Scuto that he began to shuffle
Eventually he spoke up: ‘Listen, Your Highness—’
‘Your Majesty,’ Sperra hissed.
‘Your Majesty,’ he corrected himself. ‘What it is, I’m a Thorn Bug. No, you don’t normally get my kinden around these parts. Yes, there are others. No, it doesn’t hurt. Is that about it, Your Majesty, with all respect?’
The others held their breaths, but what would have seen Scuto dead by now if spoken to a Spider lady or Wasp officer passed without reproach here, for the Ant-kinden knew little of standing on ceremony.
‘Save the matter of how you fell in with a Beetle named Stenwold Maker,’ she said.
Scuto shrugged. ‘He got me set up in Helleron when there was no one else to turn to. He picked me out as being good for something, Your Majesty, and since then we’ve done a lot for each other. Is there news of him, if I might ask?’
‘Some of the last reports to come in from Collegium give his name as one of their . . .’ there followed a pause, in which some unseen aide was obviously briefing her, ‘. . . War Masters, we believe the term is.’
‘Do you know if the fighting has started yet, Your Majesty?’ Che burst out.
‘It seems certain. You four are his agents, then, in my city. You are the delegation sent to win us over to join your fight against the Wasps?’
‘We are, Your Majesty,’ Che confirmed.
‘Then consider us won, but in no way that you will appreciate,’ the Queen declared with heavy irony. ‘You have heard that the Empire is already in possession of Helleron. We believe they are coming here next.’
‘Here, Your Majesty?’ Scuto goggled. ‘To Sarn?’
‘At the moment,’ she said, ‘there is a running conflict between my artificers and those of the Empire. Mine are destroying the tracks of the Iron Road while theirs are replacing them. There will inevitably be a battle. Our agents inform us the Empire’s armies are mustering for a march on my city even now.’
They stared at her. The whole room seemed unutterably still.
‘You must understand what this means,’ she continued.
But they did not. They could not understand. Too much was happening too fast.
‘I cannot therefore send my soldiers to Collegium,’ she said, almost gently. ‘I must defend my own city, my own people.’
Che gasped. ‘But – Collegium cannot stand against the Vekken. Our citizens aren’t proper warriors. Your Majesty, please—’
‘It pains me to make this decision,’ the Queen interrupted, in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘Collegium has been our ally, and it is an alliance we have profited by. If I could be sure that I could hold the Wasps with half my soldiers, I would send the other half to your city without delay. I would maintain that my forces are the best equipped and best trained in all the Lowlands, but now the Lowlands have changed. It is not just that Vek is at the gates of Collegium, or that Helleron is in the hands of the Empire. News comes from Tark, at last, and all word states that the city has fallen. An Ant-kinden city. A city-state like mine. I cannot afford to wait for the Empire to come right up to my walls, lest my city suffer the same fate as Tark. My soldiers are trained for open battle, battle on the field. We shall meet them in the open, and then see if we are still the soldiers to put the world in awe.’
‘But what about Collegium?’ Che cried. ‘What about Stenwold?’
‘Do you know what a Lorn detachment is?’ the Queen asked them. Surprisingly, it was Sperra who had the answer.
‘It’s a suicide detail, Your Majesty.’
The Queen’s lips twitched. ‘That is not exactly how my people would describe it – but a desperate assignment, certainly. I will send a Lorn detachment to Collegium. Solidarity should demand more, but no more can I afford to give. Three battle automotives with crew, though I can ill spare them.’ She turned to the Fly messenger. ‘Master Frezzo?’
He stood forward. ‘Your Majesty?’ He looked pale, and when he risked a glance at Che she saw her own distress mirrored in his face.
‘It was you brought me the news of the Vekken army from Collegium,’ the Queen told him. ‘Now you must take this reply back, though one that I am loath to make. The Vekken will almost certainly be at the walls by the time you arrive.’
‘It will present no difficulty, Your Majesty,’ Frezzo said firmly. Che knew that he had the honour of his guild to uphold.
‘Then go,’ the Queen ordered him, and he saluted her and ran from the room. The ruler of Sarn turned back to Che and her companions. ‘You may stay here or you may leave,’ she told them
. ‘Save that there is no safe passage guaranteed to Collegium any more.’
‘Someone should go with the Lorn automotives,’ Scuto said.
‘It is your choice.’
‘Then it should be me,’ Che decided. ‘Stenwold is my uncle.’
‘You and Achaeos need to continue your work here,’ Scuto advised her. ‘It’s looking more important all the time. Stenwold’s going to need me, though. A War Master indeed? You know how he is, always forgetting himself and playing soldier.’
‘Scuto, no—’ started Sperra.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your Majesty, I’ll go. I’m an artificer and I never knew an automotive that couldn’t use another decent pair of hands.’
‘Scuto!’ Che reached for his arm but stopped just short of the spines.
‘Che, listen to me,’ Scuto insisted. ‘Stenwold is going to need to know what’s going on here, and I don’t just mean what that messenger can tell him. What’s going on with your work – stuff I wouldn’t trust to paper. I’m our best bet. I’ll be a good hand on the automotives, and I’m tough as a bastard. Remember the Pride, when it went up? Think you’d be standing here if my hide weren’t between you and that mess? And yet here I am, healthy as anything.’
‘You had better bloody be right about that,’ Sperra hissed. ‘Nobody as ugly as you was meant to be a hero.’
Salma opened his eyes to sunlight, and for a brief moment he thought it was her.
Then he recalled. The Broken Sword. Himself being smuggled out of the Wasp camp. He was about to sit up hurriedly, but remembered his wounds and eased himself up with care. The injuries tugged less than before, and he felt stronger. Looking around he saw Nero sitting close.
The Fly nodded to him. ‘You’re looking better than you have for a while.’
‘Where are we now?’ Propping himself up with one arm was about all he could manage, however improved he might look. Salma looked around, seeing a scrubby hollow and a dozen or so other people. There were a few feeble fires going, and an earth mound that smelled like bread, and that he realized must therefore be a scratch-built oven. ‘What’s going on, Nero? Who are these people?’
‘They’re on the run, like us,’ Nero said. He pointed out a mismatched trio in Ant-style tunics: a Spider, a Fly and a Kessen Ant. ‘They’re slaves who got out from the city before it surrendered—’
‘Tark surrendered?’
Nero grimaced. ‘I suppose you never heard. You never saw, either. The Wasps . . . they just took the city apart from the air, like your friend said they would do, until the Ants knew there was nothing for it but to give up, or to see Tark rubbed from the map. That’s how they deal with Ant-kinden, apparently. Anyway, those three were lucky enough to make a run for it, and now they’ve got nothing – just like the rest of us. As for them—’ He indicated the woman tending the oven, who had three small children holding close to her skirt. ‘They used to farm at a waterhole on the Dryclaw edge. Now Tark’s gone, though, the Scorpions are raiding unchecked, and there are dozens of little farmsteads, and whole villages, that are getting attacked and left burnt out. She thinks her husband might be alive, but he’s a slave of the Scorpions if he is, and being dead might be better.’
There were half a dozen young Fly-kinden sitting close together at the lip of the hollow, staring suspiciously at all the others. ‘They were slaves of the Wasps,’ Scuto identified them. ‘I get the impression they were a gang of some kind, probably from Seldis. They sell off their criminals down Seldis way. Anyway, they’re completely lost. They know the Wasps are going to take Merro and Egel, and they don’t want to go back to the Spiderlands in a hurry, and so they’re pretending they’re not part of our troupe here, but they’re sticking around all the same. And the gentleman and ladies behind you . . .’
Salma made the laborious effort of turning himself over to look. There was a covered cart there, he now saw, and a bearded man seated on the footboard was carving something in wood. A girl of around twelve was stretched out across the back of their draft-animal, which was a big, low-bodied beetle with fierce-looking jaws. Another girl of nearly Salma’s age was nearby, picking over the halfhearted bushes for berries. They were all white-haired and tan-skinned, and they wore loose clothes of earth-tones and greens. The older girl sensed Salma’s attention and glanced his way. She had a heart-shaped face and bright eyes, and she smiled timidly at him.
‘Roach-kinden,’ Salma identified them. ‘I didn’t think you had them in the Lowlands, but they roam all over the Commonweal.’
‘And the Empire too, although the Wasps really hate them,’ Nero agreed. ‘Oh they’re not seen much, but I hear they come south past Dorax from the Commonweal into Etheryon, and even down the Helleron–Tark road and west towards Felyal. The Mantis-kinden seem to tolerate them, or so I understand. These poor fools were found by the Wasp army as they were travelling, and a pack of scouts decided to do a little free-range looting. They don’t know what happened to the rest of their family.’
‘Refugees,’ Salma whispered, and he remembered how it had been during the Twelve-Year War. As the Wasps advanced they had displaced hundreds, even thousands, onto the roads of the Commonweal, to be preyed on by bandits or descend to thievery to feed themselves. The Commonweal’s rulers had done their best but there had been the war to fight as well, and the scale of the exodus had been unthinkable.
And now it seemed certain that it would happen here as well.
‘What can we do for them?’ he asked, and Nero laughed harshly.
‘Do? You can’t even stand, boy. What do you expect to do?’
Salma stared at him, and then slowly forced himself up to his knees. His head swam briefly, but he pressed his hands flat on the earth for balance. Whilst Nero looked on uncertainly, he rose slowly, first one foot beneath him, then the next, and then, forcing his legs to obey him, he raised himself upright. Pain shot through him from his wound, but he clenched his teeth and ignored it.
Now he was standing. Nero had stood up, too, hands ludicrously spread to catch a man twice his size.
‘I . . . can . . . stand,’ Salma got out, though he had to fight to keep his vision in focus. He knew that he might topple any minute, and placed a hand on Nero’s shoulder to steady himself. ‘Tomorrow, or the next day, I will walk,’ he said. ‘And then I shall be ready to act.’
A man called Cosgren joined the refugees a day or so later. He was a Beetle-kinden, but huge – the largest Salma had ever seen, and monstrously broad across the chest and shoulders. For the first day he was with them he was quiet enough, watching his travelling companions carefully and even fetching wood for a fire. The next day he waited until they were all awake and then addressed them: ‘Right, look at you. You don’t know the first thing about where you’re going, do you? So it’s going to be like this. I’m in charge. And because I’m in charge, I’ll get us to somewhere, but you all better do what I say, and that means I get what I want.’
The Fly-kinden youths huddled closer and looked at him rebelliously. They all had their hair cropped short to their skulls in androgynous fashion, and they carried weapons of a sort, if only sticks and stones. Cosgren must have weighed more than all of them put together, though, and eventually they let their gazes drop sullenly.
Cosgren’s rule lasted almost peaceably for that same day. He took what food they had, with the pretence that he would distribute it, but everyone knew, and nobody said, that his own capacious belly would be filled first.
And then, at dusk, he wandered over to the wagon and the three Roach-kinden.
‘Old man,’ he began. The father of the two girls eyed him cautiously. He was not so very old, not really, but his white hair and beard made him look it.
‘You hear me?’ Cosgren demanded. ‘Then say so.’
‘I hear you,’ said the Roach. His voice was surprisingly soft.
‘I’m going to make your life easier, old man. I’m going to take your daughter off your hands.’
‘My life’s easy enou
gh, and I thank you for your kind offer,’ the Roach said.
Cosgren smiled, and a moment later he had knocked the man down with a simple motion, almost thoughtless.
‘I’ll give her more than you can,’ Cosgren said, grinning down at him. ‘You, girl, come here – unless you want your old dad to get hurt some more.’
He was, Salma realized, speaking to the younger of the two girls, not that it would have mattered either way.
Salma was on his feet, without quite realizing how he had got there, and Nero hurried over to him, telling him to be careful.
‘You’re in no state,’ the Fly said. ‘Just wait a moment . . . there are ways . . .’
‘I know.’ Salma approached Cosgren’s lumped back with dragging steps. ‘You there!’ he called, and the big man swung on him.
‘You get back in line, boy. Don’t want those wounds opened up again, do you?’
‘No,’ Salma said. He felt the line of his life stretched taut here, a moment of dread and then peace. In this wasteland between wars, in this meaningless brawl, and why not? Why not indeed? He had been given his moment, reunited with Grief in Chains, and then it had passed him by, and here he was. ‘I’m going to stop you,’ he told Cosgren, conversationally.
For a second the big Beetle did not quite know what to make of it, this drawn-looking invalid threatening him with . . . what? With nothing. Then he grinned.
‘A lesson for boys that won’t do what they’re told,’ he said, and he picked Salma up effortlessly, huge hands agony about his ribs, and Salma poked him in the face.
Dragonfly Falling Page 39