Dragonfly Falling

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘I cannot vouch for the Vekken, or the Empire,’ he said. ‘There will be no execution here. Even in these exceptional times, the Assembly won’t break a habit of ten years just for you. The irony is that you’d probably be exiled, eventually, but that currently presents us with technical difficulties.’

  Her fists were clenched, and he saw the small claws there slide in and out of her knuckles. There was more in her eyes than mere pleading, and he felt her Art stir there, the force of it touch his mind, trying to turn him, to make him like her and pity her. That Art was weak, though, sapped by her own despair, and he shrugged it off almost effortlessly.

  ‘You know . . . I could have easily killed you,’ she got out.

  ‘I’d guessed it. You cannot spin that into an obligation.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you regret not doing it?’

  She stared at him. She was obviously at the very end of her leash, stripped of her strategies and schemes, more and more transparent in her desperation. ‘No,’ she said, and he wished that he could believe her.

  He felt a sickening lurch inside him at the thought of what he was going to do, all the perils and unspeakable foolishness of it. Tisamon, for one, would never speak to him again.

  ‘You’re being held here to my order, and therefore I’m going to set you free,’ he said, speaking fast so that he could get the words out before he changed his mind.

  She was silence itself, awaiting his next words.

  ‘What more do you want me to say?’ he asked her. ‘You’re going free. No conditions. You’ve already been questioned, and I have no more questions for you. I’m not even going to ask you to go back to the Rekef and work against them on my behalf, even if you could. I cannot know the truth of it now; I would not know the truth of it then. I . . . just . . . You can walk out of here as soon as I tell the warden, and I’ll tell him as soon as I leave.’ He got to his feet, feeling ill and sad. ‘Which is now.’

  ‘Wait,’ she said. There were tears in her eyes and he wondered dully if they were genuine.

  ‘I’m waiting.’

  He could feel her Art touching him again, feeling at the edges of his mind and trying to find a way in. It must have been just instinct for her, her last defence, still trying to sway him because she did not really believe what he said. She thought this was a trap. Her lips moved but she said nothing.

  ‘No words,’ he said tiredly. ‘No thanks, even. I’m sorry but I don’t even know if I could believe that.’

  He turned and walked out, and then told the warden that she could go. As he reached the door he looked back and saw her emerging cautiously from the cell, testing the first steps of her freedom.

  He left then, set off for his house at last. He had probably made a mistake, and he hoped he would be the only one to suffer for it. It had been lies and pretence, and he had been a fool, as he still was, but for the few days that she had been with him she had made him feel young, and made him happy.

  Nothing he had done in the defence of his city had sat well with him, the horrors of the naval assault recurring over and over, but he found that, when he remembered that he had freed her, the pawn of his enemies, he slept easily.

  The next day the Vekken came against the wall in force. During the night they had brought up their remaining artillery, and the dawn saw great blocks of their infantry assembled behind their siege engines. There were massive armoured ramming engines aimed, three each, at the north and west gates, and both those walls already had a full dozen automotive towers ready to bring the Ant soldiers to the very brink of the walls.

  The harbour mouth was still blocked by the pair of ruined armourclads, and the buildings nearest the wharves had been abandoned after the incendiary shelling from the Vekken flagship. Stenwold had Fly messengers on the lookout who would fetch him if the ships started moving again, but he could not meanwhile just sit idle. Against Balkus’s protests he made his way over to Kymon on the west wall.

  There had been some fighting here the previous day. The Ants had made assaults at the gate, and one of the siege towers stood at half-extension, a burned-out shell only ten yards from the wall itself. The wall artillery had obviously been busy, and would be still busier today.

  Stenwold made his hurried way along the line of the defenders. Most of them now had shields, he saw, which he knew was a reaction to the crossbow casualties of the previous day. The Ants had advanced far enough on one earlier assault that some of those shields were the rectangular Vekken type the attackers used.

  ‘War Master,’ some of them acknowledged him, to his discomfort. Others saluted, the fist-to-chest greeting of the city militia. They all seemed to know him.

  Out beyond the wall, without any signal that could be perceived, every Ant-kinden soldier suddenly started to march. The engines of the rams and towers growled across towards the defenders through the still air.

  ‘They’re coming in faster this time,’ Kymon said, striding up to him, and it did seem to Stenwold that the engines were making an almost risky pace of it, bouncing over the uneven ground. Close behind them the Ant soldiers were jogging solidly in their blocks.

  ‘Ready artillery!’ Kymon called, and the same call was taken up along the wall. ‘They’re going to rush us!’

  ‘Master Maker!’ someone was calling in a thin voice, and Stenwold turned to see a man he vaguely recognized from the College mechanics department.

  ‘Master Graden,’ he now recalled.

  ‘Master Maker, I must be allowed to mount my invention on the walls!’

  ‘This isn’t my area, Master Graden.’ But curiosity pressed him to add, ‘What invention?’

  ‘I call it my sand-bow,’ said Graden proudly. ‘It was made to clear debris from excavations, but I have redesigned it as a siege weapon.’

  ‘I’m not an artificer. Do you know what he’s talking about?’ Kymon growled.

  ‘Not so much,’ Stenwold admitted.

  Then the Ant artillery started shooting, and abruptly there were rocks and lead shot and ballista bolts falling towards the wall, and especially towards Collegium’s own emplacements. Stenwold, Kymon and Graden crouched under the battlements, feeling more than hearing as their wall engines returned the favour. Stenwold risked a look at the advancing forces and saw, almost in awe, that Kymon had been right. Behind the speeding engines, the Ant soldiers were no longer in solid blocks that would make such tempting targets for the artillery. Instead they were a vast mob, a loose-knit mob thousands strong, surging forwards behind their great machines.

  And they would be able to form up on command, he knew, each mind instantly finding its place amongst the others.

  ‘Can it hurt? His device?’ he shouted at Kymon over the noise.

  Kymon gave an angry shrug and then ran off down the line of his men, bellowing for them to stand ready, to raise their shields.

  ‘Get the cursed thing up here!’ Stenwold ordered Graden, and the artificer started gesturing down to where his apprentices were still waiting with his invention. It looked like nothing so much as a great snaking tube thrust through some kind of pumping engine.

  ‘What will it do?’ Stenwold asked. Another glance over the wall saw the Ants’ tower engines ratcheting up, unfolding and unfolding again in measured stages, with Ant soldiers thronging their platforms and more climbing after them. Crossbow quarrels started to rake the wall, springing back from shields and stone, or punching men and women from their feet and over the edge, down onto the roofs of the town.

  ‘It will blow sand in their faces!’ Graden said enthusiastically. ‘They won’t be able to see what they’re doing!’

  True enough, Stenwold saw that one end of the tube had a vast pile of sand by it. The other was being hauled onto the wall, with the great engine, the fan he supposed, hoisted precariously onto the walkway.

  The nearest tower was almost at the level of the wall-top as Graden’s apprentices wrestled the sandbow into place, and then the artificer called out for it to start.
All around them the defenders of Collegium, militia, tradesmen, students and scholars, braced themselves for the coming assault.

  Twenty-Nine

  Parosyal had white beaches, a sand that gleamed as brightly in the sun as the sun itself. Nothing on the mainland could match it, nor any other isle along the coast. A hundred Beetle scholars had written theories to explain it.

  There was only one safe harbour at Parosyal, Tisamon had explained, and she had understood that by ‘safe’ he was not referring to anchorage or the elements.

  Parosyal was a mystery, and one that history had ignored: the sacred isle of the Mantis-kinden. The slow march of years had seen Collegium scholars baffled by it, Kessen fleets avoid it, and opportunistic smugglers or relic-hunters disappear there, never to be seen again.

  ‘Every one of my kinden seeks to come here, once at least in a lifetime,’ Tisamon explained, and she knew he was confirming that she, too, was his kinden. ‘They come from Felyal, from Etheryon and Nethyon. From across the sea, even. From the Commonweal.’

  ‘That’s a long haul,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘This is our heart.’

  ‘But why?’ she asked. ‘Surely not . . . gods?’ She knew that, long ago, some ancient peoples had tried to make sense of the world by giving faces to the lightning and the sea. Perhaps some savages still did, in lands beyond known maps, but in these days nobody halfway civilized held that they were subject to the will of squabbling and fickle divinities. Achaeos had told her that the Moth-kinden believed in spirits, but ones that could be commanded, not ones that must be obeyed. And then of course there were the avatars of the kinden, the philosophical concepts that were the source of the Ancestor Art, but they were just ideas, aids to concentration. Nobody thought that they actually existed somewhere.

  ‘An ancient and inviolate communion,’ whispered Tisamon, and a shiver went through her. It was not the words themselves, but because she heard quite clearly some other voice saying that exact phrase to him, when he was younger even than she, and as some previous boat was approaching this same harbour.

  She felt sand scrape at the boat’s shallow draft. The vessel’s master, an old Beetle-kinden, called for any to disembark that were intending to.

  She took up her single canvas bag, slung her swordbelt over her shoulder, and splashed down into thigh-deep water.

  The bay of Parosyal held a single fishing village that was huddled between the water and the treeline, facing south across the endless roll of the ocean as though it had turned its back on the Lowlands and the march of history. The houses were constructed of wood and reeds, and built on stilts to clear the high tides. The villagers were a strange mixture that Tynisa had not been expecting.

  There were only half a dozen Mantids there, and they seemed mostly old, their hair silvered, and with lines on their faces. The other villagers comprised a whole gamut of the Lowlands population: quite a few Beetles, including one in the robes of a College scholar, some Fly-kinden, a few Kessen Ants. There were a surprising number of Moths passing back and forth between the huts and the boats, or conferring in small groups.

  No Spider-kinden, though, she had expected that.

  She set foot now on the sand of the beach, shaking a little water from her bare feet, and she was aware that many of them were staring at her. Staring at her, especially, in company with Tisamon. Her blood was mixed, but her face was her mother’s. In fathering her, Tisamon had dealt his own race the worst blow, having committed the ultimate sin against their age-old grievances.

  But she had expected worse than she received. Looks, yes, and a few glares even, but nothing more. Tisamon was standing in the centre of the little village now, watching a pair of young Moths put a small dinghy out onto the water. He was waiting for something, she could see.

  Where is it all? she asked herself, because surely this collection of hovels could not be it. This was not what all the fuss was about. And then she looked past the huts towards the wall of green that was the forest that covered most of Parosyal and she knew that was it.

  Tisamon’s stance changed, just slightly, alerting her to the approach of an ageless, white-eyed Moth-kinden man. His blank gaze flicked to Tynisa, but her appearance drew no change of expression to his face.

  ‘Your approach is known,’ he said softly to Tisamon. ‘Your purpose also.’ He looked to her again. ‘It is not for me to judge, but . . .’

  ‘The Isle will judge,’ Tisamon said firmly, but his glance at his daughter was suddenly undermined by uncertainty.

  ‘Indeed it will,’ said the Moth. ‘It always does. The Isle has never seen one such as her. We can none of us know what may be born, or what may die . . . even if she has made the proper preparations.’

  Tisamon’s look was to the dark between the trees. ‘It must be tonight. We have no time.’

  ‘Are you sure she is ready? She is very young.’

  ‘I was her age, when I came here to be judged.’

  The Moth shrugged. ‘The Isle will judge,’ he echoed, and then, ‘Tonight, as you wish.’

  *

  She had expected some grand ceremony: drums and torches and invocations. They had meanwhile taken up residence in one of the shacks, many of which seemed to be empty. Tisamon had set to sharpening his claw, over and over, and she knew it was because he was merely keeping his mind off what would happen.

  He could not tell her, she knew, for it was forbidden. Mantis-kinden seemed to live their lives in cages of air, held back at every turn by their own traditions. Tisamon had broken free from that cage once, but he would bend no more bars of it now, not here.

  He was worried about her, she realized. He had tested her as fiercely as he could, killed her a hundred times in practice duel, measured her skill and her will to fight against his own. He believed in her, but she was his daughter and he worried. She, in her turn, could not ask him for reassurance, could not even speak to him lest he hear her voice shake. That was pride, she realized, a refusal to bend to the common demands of being human. It was Mantis pride.

  Out there, in the village’s centre, they were brewing something in a small iron pot hung over a beach fire. The Moth that Tisamon had spoken to and an older Moth woman were talking to one another in soft voices. Are they casting spells? Is this magic? But Tynisa did not believe in magic, for all that it seemed to turn the wheels of Tisamon’s life. Che, poor credulous Che, believed in more magic than Tynisa could ever allow into her world.

  Tisamon looked up. The sky above the island had now graded into dusk, into darkness. Tynisa had barely noticed.

  ‘It is time,’ the Mantis said. He looked her over, noting her rapier, her dagger, her arming jacket. He had told her to be ready for war.

  When the time came to drink, she baulked at first. Whatever they had boiled up over the beach fire was thick and rotten-smelling. They waited patiently. They would not force her. If she did not drink, she would fall at the first challenge.

  She took the warm clay cup from them, suppressing a revulsion that seemed more than rational, some deep abhorrence that she could not account for or place.

  As quick as she could, she drank it. The liquid was shockingly sweet, both cloying and choking, and she fought herself to swallow by sheer willpower. The reaction in her gut doubled her over and she reached for Tisamon for his support, but he was out of arm’s length already. You are on your own from here.

  Tynisa regained her balance, wiped her mouth. Her stomach twisted sourly, and the two Moth-kinden seemed to shift and blur in her vision.

  ‘What . . . ?’ she began to ask, but they were already heading for the forest, so she stumbled after them, the ground suddenly unpredictable. Tisamon was still near, but too far to take strength from him. He did not even look at her.

  The forest verge loomed dark. The Moths had vanished, either into it or just away. She glanced once more at Tisamon, but he would give her no clues. When she stepped forward she felt the shadows as a physical barrier that she had to put her shoulder to a
nd force aside.

  He was with her when she stepped between the trees. He was with her but, as she forged her way through the trees, he fell away and fell away, until she could not find him anywhere near her. There was motion, though, all around. In the darkness that her eyes could half-pierce, that motion showed her path to her. The rushing of others on either side kept her straight. She caught glimpses. They were Mantis-kinden, keeping pace with her, guiding her. They ran through the trees easily while she struggled to keep up. They were always overtaking her, passing on into the heart of the wood, whilst more were always rushing up from behind. She saw them in her mind: young, old, men, women, familiarly or strangely dressed, or naked and clad only in the shadows of the trees.

  Real? Or has their drug done this to me? She had no way of differentiating, for everything she saw looked real to her. Her normal judgement had been stripped from her.

  They were herding her. She ran and ran, deeper and deeper, and knowing herself led like a beast, or hunted like one. She could not be sure.

  And at last she was afraid.

  It had taken its time, that fear, stalked her all the way into the denseness of this forest, for which there had to be some other word. Jungle was that word, Tynisa realized, for this piece of another place and time that was hidden away on the island of Parosyal.

  It was dark now, and so dark between the trees, beneath the knotted and tangled canopy, that even her eyes could not penetrate it. She felt her way by touch as much as sight, and still went on, knowing only that she was being led.

  She had lost sight of the ones leading her, or they had gone ahead or gone out of her mind. She was alone, and yet she could sense they were still there. She was totally at their mercy, lost in this torturous place.