Dragonfly Falling

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The world was briefly a very painful and noisy place, and then dark, blessedly dark and quiet.

  He came to with the sense that little time had passed. There was an awful lot of noise nearby, but the pain in his chest and abdomen was too much for him to focus on it. Nero was kneeling beside him, asking over and over if he was all right.

  There should have been another blow coming from Cosgren, but there was nothing. Perhaps the beating had finished, in which case he had got away lightly, but Cosgren would still be free to pursue his tyranny unchecked.

  The sounds were screaming, he realized, and a man’s, not the child’s.

  ‘What’s going on, Nero?’

  Nero grimaced. ‘You . . . kind of cut him, Salma. Don’t look so confused. That’s what you meant, right?’

  ‘Cut him? What . . . ?’

  Nero took one of Salma’s hands and brought it before his face. The first thing he saw was that it was covered in blood. Then he saw the claw, a sickle-shaped thing that curved from his thumb. Even as he watched it retracted back until there was barely a sign of it. Curiously, he flexed it back and forth, and felt its companion on his other hand do the same.

  ‘I never had these before. When . . . ?’

  ‘I noticed them on you back in the tent of the Daughters,’ Nero told him. ‘I couldn’t remember then whether you’d had them before.’

  There was a sudden shifting around them, of people coming together. Salma turned over and forced himself to sit up. Cosgren was standing, one hand clapped to a face slick and red. His eye, his one remaining eye, was staring madly.

  ‘You little bastard.’ The voice was choked with pain.

  Salma saw a movement beside him, a glimmer of metal. The Roach man had drawn a thin-bladed knife, hiltless but sharp. They had all gathered around him, even the Fly gangsters. When Cosgren took a step forward, a flung stone bounced off his shoulder.

  Half weeping with the pain he stared at them: the Fly gang, the Beetle mother, the ex-slaves and the Roach family. By that time, Nero had his own long knife out, and was holding it casually by the tip, ready to throw.

  Cosgren snarled something – something about their not wanting his leadership, then let them starve – and he stumbled out away from them, off into the barren terrain.

  Tension began to leach out of the refugees. The Roach man knelt by Salma, offering him some water that he took gratefully. Behind their father, his two daughters stood, staring curiously.

  Salma glanced around at the others. The Flies had gone back into their exclusive huddle as though nothing had happened. The three slaves had drifted away as well, and he saw that they had found their own new hierarchy, with the Spider as their spokesman, as though they were still compelled to live within rules of obedience.

  He should feel weak after his exertions, he knew, but he felt stronger than he had in days.

  The next day there were bandits. A dozen rode in, half of them mounted two to a horse. Their leader, though it was little satisfaction to see, was wearing Cosgren’s leather coat.

  He was a Beetle himself, or nearly. His skin was a blue-black that Salma recognized from his recent travels. The refugees had been travelling at the wagon’s steady pace, most walking but Salma lying in the bed of dry grass it carried, staring up at skies that promised unwelcome rain before nightfall. Then the thunder of hoofs had come to them, and they had stopped dead, and most of them had looked to Salma.

  Am I riding here on the wagon because I am weak, or because I have become their leader now? They needed no leader – except perhaps in moments such as this. Salma got down, pleased to find his legs holding him without a tremor, and watched as the intruders’ eight horses made a very crude semicircle before the wagon. The draft-beetle hissed at them, swaying its jaws from side to side, but the bandit leader ignored it, looking over the ranks of the refugees.

  ‘Let’s keep it simple,’ he said. ‘These are troubled times, nobody’s where they wanted to be, everyone’s a victim, so on, so forth.’ He spoke with the accent Salma recalled, and refined enough that he seemed testament to his own words, a man not originally cut from this kind of crude cloth. ‘So let’s see what you’ve got. Let us just take our pick and then you can go on your way.’

  Salma looked over the bandit’s men. They were a motley band, but not as raggedly dressed as might be expected. These were not just desperate scavengers driven to robbery. Most had some kind of armour: leather jerkins and caps, padded arming jackets, even one hauberk of Ant-made chain. There were axes and swords amongst them, and a halfbreed at the back, who looked to have Mantis blood, had a bow ready-strung with an arrow nocked. Salma’s own army had some knives, some clubs, and the staff that Sfayot the Roach had cut for him.

  He leant on it now, grateful that it would disguise how weak he really was. ‘So what do you imagine we have?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you think that we all had time to pack, before we were driven out, before we escaped.’ Salma planted his staff in the ground, firmly enough. ‘If you’re slavers then we will fight you, and you can sell our corpses for whatever they’ll bring you. But if it’s goods you want, we have none. Less than none. Come down here and see for yourself.’

  ‘We’re not slavers,’ the bandit leader replied. ‘Too many of us have been on the wrong end of that market to risk trying to sell there.’ He smiled, teeth flashing in his dark face. ‘Commonwealer, aren’t you? I’ve known enough of your kind in my time.’ He swung off his horse, and Salma heard the clatter of a scale-mail cuirass beneath Cosgren’s coat. Without needing orders, two of his fellows got down off the horse they shared, and the three of them walked past Salma to peer into the wagon.

  ‘You’re slaves yourselves?’ Salma asked. As his fellows prodded through the grass in the bed of the wagon, the leader turned back to say, ‘Some of us.’

  Salma had spotted the colours of that scale-mail, then, and the design of the sword the man bore. ‘You’re an Auxillian,’ he said.

  For a long moment the bandit leader regarded him fixedly, until at last he said, ‘So?’

  ‘There are no friends to the Empire here,’ Salma explained. ‘I was a prisoner in Myna myself, once.’

  ‘There’s nothing but the wagon,’ one of the bandits said. ‘And even that’s nothing you could borrow money on.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the Roach Sfayot. ‘But we have nothing, no goods. No food, even, until we stop for the evening and forage.’

  ‘You have women,’ the bandit leader noted. ‘Roach-kinden, isn’t it?’

  Sfayot regarded him narrowly, waiting.

  ‘You sing, dance? Anything? Only I remember your lot as being musical.’

  Sfayot nodded slowly.

  ‘Well then we’ll deal,’ the bandit leader decided. ‘We have a commodity for trade: safe passage on this road. In return, you’ll trade us some entertainment. And we’ll break our bread together, or whatever you can find. And then we’ll decide what we’re going to do with you.’

  Twenty-Eight

  The morning began bright and cloudless, and Stenwold had the dubious pleasure of being able to see it. Balkus had kicked at his door an hour before dawn, and then carried on kicking until Stenwold had arisen.

  Now he was in his temporary base in the harbourmaster’s office, the harbourmaster himself having taken ship at the first word of the Vekken advance. Around him were his artificers, his messengers, and a fair quantity of others whose purpose and disposition he had no ideas about. Balkus stood at his shoulder like some personification of war, his nailbow in plain view, and Stenwold tried to imagine what would happen when the naval attack actually took place.

  The harbour at Collegium had been designed to be defended. There was a stubby sea-wall sheltering it, and the two towers flanking the harbour entrance held some serviceable artillery, if not particularly up to date. There was a chain slung between these towers, currently hanging well below any ship’s draft, that would serve when raised to prevent a vessel crossing that gateway, or that was th
e theory. Defence had been a priority in the minds of the architects, certainly, but they had lived two centuries ago, and had never heard of armourclads, or even of ships that moved by the power of engines rather than under sail or with banks of oars. Since then, defence had been a long way from anyone’s mind right up until the Vekken had turned up with a fleet.

  Out-thought by Ant-kinden, he cursed to himself, trying to find some gem of an idea that might save the day. If the Vekken could land their troops, those superbly efficient paragons of Ant-kinden training, then the docks would be lost in half an hour, and the city in just a day.

  ‘They’re moving!’

  The shout roused Stenwold from his ruminations. He rushed over to the expansive window of the harbourmaster’s office and saw that the funnels of the armourclads had now started to fume in earnest. Four smaller vessels were beginning to make headway towards the harbour, whilst the huge flagship had begun to come around with ponderous but irresistible motion. The small ships of the fleet began to tack around it, some by engine power and a few by sail.

  ‘Is the artillery ready?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘Where’s Cabre?’

  ‘Gone to get the artillery ready,’ said one of the soldiers with him. ‘It’s in hand, Master Maker. All you need to do is sit here and watch.’

  ‘No,’ muttered Stenwold, because he had to do something, and yet what was there to do? ‘Master Greatly, is he . . . ?’

  ‘He said that he was ready, although I don’t believe a word of it,’ said one of his artificers, the man with the underwater explosives. ‘He did say you could go and watch the launch if you wanted.’

  ‘Yes, I do want,’ Stenwold decided. He looked around for Balkus. ‘Where’s . . . ?’

  There was a dull thump from quite close by, and he felt the floorboards shudder. For a mad second he was two decades younger and in the city of Myna, with the Wasps’ ramming engine at the gates.

  ‘What was that?’ he demanded, but nobody knew, so he rushed to the window and saw three buildings away a warehouse burning merrily, its front staved in.

  ‘Sabotage!’ someone shouted and, even in the moment that Stenwold was wondering coolly who would sabotage a warehouse, a second missile was lobbed from the great Vekken flagship. It flew in a shallow, burning arc, and it seemed impossible that it would not just drop into the water, but their range was accurate, and in the next moment another of the dockside buildings had exploded.

  Most of the Collegium dockside was wood, Stenwold realized dully, and then, They must be sighting for our artillery. There was only a brief stretch of sea-wall at Collegium, but the two stubby towers that projected were already launching flaming ballista bolts and catapult stones towards the approaching armourclads, sizing up the distance. The siege engines on the Vekken flagship must be enormous, though, the entire vessel a floating siege platform. Collegium’s harbour defences could not hope to match the range.

  Something flashed overhead, and Stenwold saw a heliopter cornering madly through the smoke. It was a civilian machine, some merchant’s prized cargo carrier, but its pilot was putting it through manoeuvres its designer had never anticipated. Behind it barrelled a sleek fixed-wing flier, propellers buzzing, and then a heavy Helleron-made orthopter painted clumsily with a golden scarab device. The airfield had begun to launch its defences. He should go and see how Master Greatly was doing.

  And someone called, ‘Look out!’

  He turned, idiotically, towards the window, just in time to see the whole wall in front of him explode. The incendiary blast hurled him away in a raking of splinters, knocking everyone else off their feet. He hit his own map-table, smashed it with his weight, and a wall of heat passed over him. He could hear himself shouting out some order, but he had no idea what.

  Then he was being helped to his feet, and for a moment he could not see, and his face and shoulder were one mass of pain.

  ‘What’s . . . ? Who’s . . . ?’

  ‘Steady there.’ The voice was Balkus’s but there was a lot of other noise, too – the crackling of flames, the cries of the wounded. He let Balkus guide him blindly away and prop him against a wall.

  ‘Now hold still,’ the Ant said. People kept running past, jostling him, and he felt stabs of pain as Balkus plucked the worst of the splinters from him. He wiped his face, feeling blood slick on his hand. The injured were still being hauled from the harbourmaster’s office, even as the room burned.

  ‘Is everyone . . . ?’ he started, and then realized: ‘The fleet! Is the chain up?’

  ‘No idea,’ Balkus said, and Stenwold staggered away, thumping down the stairs with blood seeping into his eyes again, and Balkus trying to keep up. From somewhere there was another explosion, another flaming missile from the Vekken flagship.

  He staggered out into the clearer air, that was nevertheless blotched and stinking with smoke, onto the flat open quayside. Ahead of him was the calm stretch of the harbour, and the two stubby walls with their artillery towers, with the great open space of water between them.

  Only it was open no longer, for the first ships of the Vekken navy were fast crowding into it. Three of the armourclads were powering forwards, and he could hear above all of it the thump of their heavy engines. To either side of them, wooden craft knifed through the water, coursing ahead of the cumbersome metal-hulled vessels, their catapults and ballistae launching up at the harbour towers.

  The towers were loosing back, however and Stenwold saw one skiff swamped by a direct hit from a leadshotter, its wooden hull simply folding in the middle, the mast toppling sideways. The men that fell from its sides were armoured Vekken soldiers, as were most of the crews of the approaching navy, and Stenwold thought they must be mad to dare a sea assault.

  And yet here they came, and the chain was still nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Raise it!’ he shouted, with no hope of being heard across that expanse of water, amongst such commotion. ‘The chain! Raise the chain!’

  Beside him Balkus was slotting a magazine into his nailbow, which at this distance was as futile as Stenwold’s own shouting. By the time the weapon would mean anything, it would be too late.

  And then Stenwold saw a gleam in the water as something was cranked up from the seabed: the great spiked chain that closed off the harbour mouth. There were engines three storeys high in the paired towers to drag the great weight of metal through the water, but they were engines fifty years old. Here it came, though, and Stenwold ground his teeth in agony as it seemed that the powering armourclads would be past it before it was up in place. They were bigger ships than he had thought, though, and further away, but the fleetest of the wooden vessels now surged forwards, trying to cross the barrier before it was finally raised.

  The chain caught the ship before a quarter of its length had passed, and it abruptly began rising with it in a splintering of wood. The spikes on the chain were busy rotating, each set in opposition to the next one, chewing and biting into the vessel’s hull even as its bows were lifted entirely out of the water. Then the craft began to tip, spilling men out, even as its engine mindlessly pushed it further over the chain. A moment later it slid back, entirely heeling onto its side, to lie awash in the water directly in the path of the armourclads.

  ‘Nice work!’ Balkus exclaimed. Stenwold shook his head.

  ‘They didn’t even have armourclads when that chain was made. There’s no telling whether it will stop them.’

  Out there, the cargo heliopter he had seen earlier was veering over the armourclads, and he saw it rock under the impact of artillery fire, half falling from the sky and then clawing its way back up. The Helleron orthopter was turning on its wingtip, and a man at its hatch was simply tipping a crateful of grenades out to scatter over ships and sea alike, exploding in bright flashes wherever they struck wood or metal. A moment later one of the flier’s flapping wings was on fire, the orthopter’s turn pitching into a dive. Stenwold looked away.

  ‘Master Maker!’ Stenwold turned at his name to see Joyless Greatly
and a group of other Beetle-kinden lumbering towards him. They lumbered because they were wearing some sort of ugly-looking armour, great bronze blocks bolted to their chests, and man-length shields on their backs.

  ‘Ready for action, Master Maker.’ Greatly was grinning madly.

  ‘You said you had orthopters!’ Stenwold shouted at him. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘We’re wearing them, Master Maker.’ Joyless Greatly turned briefly, and Stenwold saw now that his back resembled a beetle’s, with curved and rigid wingcases, elytra that almost brushed the stone of the quay.

  The block weighting his chest was an engine, Stenwold realized, and it must have been a real triumph of artifice to make it that small. There were explosives hanging from it, too, on quick-release catches. The expression on Greatly’s face was quite insane.

  ‘Good luck,’ Stenwold wished him – these being insane times.

  Greatly gripped a ring on his engine and yanked at it, twice and then three times, and suddenly it shouted into life. Stenwold fell back as the wingcases on his back opened up, revealing translucent wings beneath, and then both wings and cases were powering up, first slowly but gradually threshing themselves into a blur.

  And Joyless Greatly was airborne, his feet leaving the quay and, beyond him, the score of his cadre were up as well.

  Beetles flew like stones, so the saying went, but Greatly had overcome both nature and Art. His wings sang through the air and sent him hurtling out across the water, utterly fearless and weaving for height, until he became just a dangling dot heading towards the oncoming bulks of the armourclads, which had reached the chain.

  The sky above them was busy now, as the airfield sent out its fliers one after another to attack the encroaching fleet. Airships wobbled slowly overhead and dropped explosives and grenades or simply stones and crates, while orthopters swooped with ponderous dignity. There were fixed-wings making their rapid passes over the oblivious ships and loosing their ballistae, or with their pilots simply leaning out with crossbows. Stenwold felt his stomach lurch at the thought, but there were men and women out there, Fly-kinden mostly, but a Moth here, a Mantis there, even a clumsy Beetle-kinden, all darting with Art-given wings, shooting at the Ant sailors and soldiers and being shot at in turn. The air that Joyless Greatly and his men were entering was a frenzy of crossbow bolts and artillery, of sudden fiery explosions and scattershot.