Dragonfly Falling

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  On one occasion a short, dark woman of a kinden Che did not recognize came down and stared at her with hostile eyes for some time, before returning up to the sunlight without uttering a word.

  Then the bustle of the camp quieted at last and the conversation she could make out from above was that of sentries only, so she knew it must be night again – and she had survived another day.

  I will resist. I will fight. I will fly. But she knew she would do none of these things. She had not that kind of strength.

  I wish I could have seen Salma once more. Last time she had been behind bars, he had been there with her, providing her with a source of resilience to draw on, and she was not enough on her own, she realized.

  There was a rough sound as the hatch opened, but for a long while nobody entered. Then she caught the faintest gleam of a shuttered lantern and Totho, still in Wasp uniform, came stomping down the steps. As before, he simply stopped and stared at her.

  ‘I’m still here,’ she said unnecessarily.

  ‘Do you want to talk?’ he asked. A sharp reply came to her tongue, but she realized that, yes, she did. Another human voice, in whatever circumstances.

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  ‘We’ve . . . grown up, at last, don’t you think?’ He seated himself on the lowest step, right across the room from her, but the stone walls carried his voice perfectly.

  ‘Is that what this is?’ They had hatched out of the College, with its protective walls, and into a harsher world than they had dreamed of. ‘I’m not fond of it.’

  ‘It’s about making choices,’ he said. ‘Or . . . that’s how I see it.’

  ‘You’ve made your choice, clearly’ she said, too quickly, and instantly regretted it. She saw a shadow pass across his face, and for a moment he seemed about to rise and go, but in the end it all washed past him, just as with the Totho she knew of old.

  ‘Do you know where the others are now?’ he asked.

  ‘Is this some kind of interrogation?’

  His lip curled. ‘Do you think the Empire gives a bent cog where a few graduates of the College are?’

  ‘They were all still in Collegium, when I left: I mean Stenwold and Tynisa, and Tisamon. Scuto must be back there by now, though he came to Sarn with us at first.’ She was about to name Achaeos too, but decided better of it.

  ‘I’d give a lot to be back there, with none of this having happened.’ He frowned. ‘But on the other hand . . .’

  ‘What, Totho?’ she demanded. ‘What do you have here, amongst these monsters?’

  ‘A purpose,’ he said, and after a pause, ‘Che, back then . . . did you ever . . . could you have, if I had been . . . bolder . . . could you have loved me, ever?’

  ‘I always loved you,’ she said simply. ‘But not as you mean, not as you wanted. I’m sorry, Totho. I wish I could say something else. I wish I could lie to you about that, but . . . I owe you the truth. You were always my friend, and maybe I took you for granted, but . . . not that.’

  He sat for a long time as the minutes of the night passed them by, his hands clasped together, without any expression she could interpret, until at last, without a word, he turned and went back up.

  She sagged away from the bars, wondering if a lie, even a forced and obvious one, might have bought her something more.

  Then he was back, with something slung over his shoulder. He dumped it – a sack, she now saw – on the cellar floor, and went over to the bars. He looked only at the lock. The Wasps had made a hurried job of these cells, and the door was a section of heavy lattice that could be lifted out, secured by bars merely padlocked into place, nothing too complicated.

  He opened the shutters on his lantern and took some rods from his toolstrip, crouching down by the first lock. It had been a matter of constant dismay to the College masters how many of their students learned to pick locks, until no Master’s office, private chamber or strongbox was safe from the pranks of their young scholars. Totho had never been the prankish kind, but he made up for that with his understanding.

  ‘The problem is, Master Drephos looks at people and sees meat,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Something to test machines on. Life has no value for him, and I could come to appreciate that. See the world like that, and you don’t get hurt all the time. I hurt all the time, you see, because I haven’t let go. Let go of you.’

  The first lock sprang open, and he stood to attend to the second.

  ‘You see,’ he went on, ‘it doesn’t matter what you feel about me. Because I can’t seem to shake myself free of you. I don’t think any Spider temptress, any cursed charlatan-magician or Butterfly dancer could have her hooks in as deep as yours are in me. Because I still love you, despite everything, and you came just at the right time to destroy my life one last time.’

  And the second lock came free, and he lifted out the lattice with a grunt of effort. Not knowing what to say, she slipped out of her cage.

  ‘Can you get yourself out of the camp?’ he asked. ‘I can’t help you there but in the sack I’ve put food and water, and a uniform, too. Mostly they’ll just see another Auxillian, but you’ll have to creep past the sentries, and if they catch you . . . well.’

  ‘I won’t reveal who freed me,’ she said hurriedly.

  ‘You will once they ask hard enough.’ His face was bleak.

  ‘Are they watching the skies?’

  ‘No, not so much. They’re expecting Sarnesh heading down the rail line, if anything.’

  ‘Then I’ll fly out,’ she said, and saw his surprise. ‘But you . . . you can get past them, can’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Totho, you have to come with me.’

  ‘No,’ he said. There was no give in him. ‘Once you are gone, I have no further ties. I will die, if they find me out, or I will live on here as Drephos’s apprentice, devising newer and better ways of turning men into meat.’

  ‘Totho, you’re mad! You have to come with me back to Collegium!’

  ‘Collegium has nothing to interest me any more. Not unless I come to it with an army,’ he told her.

  She felt her blood turn to ice, looking into that so-familiar face and seeing only a stranger.

  ‘But because I do seem to be a traitor by nature, I have still one betrayal left to make. Or perhaps you will see it as one last act of loyalty – to you and Stenwold.’

  ‘Totho—’

  ‘Listen.’ He reached into his tunic and produced a scroll, rolled up and then pressed flat. ‘If you do manage to escape, you must take this to Stenwold. Or maybe to Sarn.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The design for my snapbow,’ he said. ‘The weapon that broke the Sarnesh.’

  She took it hesitantly, as though it might burn her. ‘You realize what you’re doing,’ she said softly. ‘You know what this means.’

  ‘It means I am giving the Lowlands a chance,’ he said. ‘A small chance and no more. You’d better change clothes, Che. You don’t have as much time as you think.’

  He watched her as she changed, and she wondered if he was considering some other future in which she donned this uniform for real, and stayed with him just as she had pleaded for him to go with her.

  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 l
ooking 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 un
derstand 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.