Dragonfly Falling sota-2

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Totho had not slept well simply because his dreams were troubled with small modifications, innovations and tinkerings, by which this entire process could be made more efficient.

  In the day he had a limited run of the camp, because Kaszaat watched over him and there were always guards within shout. He made no attempt to escape, however. He had nowhere to go. It would be simpler if they killed me, he thought, but made no attempt to provoke that. Sometimes Drephos would call upon him, and then he would be put to the test, examined on his artifice, or shown again the map table, given some lecture on the order of battle. The very artifice of war, of supply and strategy, in itself held a keen interest for the Colonel-Auxillian.

  Drephos rearranged the blocks on the rough sketch of the city, heedless of the damage he was doing to the tactical situation. Everything would have to be moved soon enough to represent the latest advance.

  ‘You see, the Ants don’t give ground lightly,’ he explained to Totho. ‘They fall back and regroup, as good soldiers should, and then they press forward again. And toe-to-toe they’re better than the imperial soldiers, make no mistake. That mindlink their Art gives them is a wonderful advantage. Some Wasps have it, true, and the Empire has specialist squads, but not enough to make a difference. Especially as our men at the front are the light airborne, and they can’t possibly hold off heavy Ant infantry. So what do we do?’

  ‘I am. not a tactician, sir,’ said Totho cautiously.

  ‘A good artificer must become one, or at least become familiar with that trade. You must know how your creations are being used, how to best put them to work. Remember, any army officer, given half the chance, will waste any advantage you give him. Kaszaat, explain.’

  The Bee-kinden woman glanced at the table, and then looked up at Totho with a bright, challenging look in her eyes. ‘When the Ants engage, we target their soldiers directly. In order to use their superior discipline they must stand close, solid formations. Then the airships take them. It is the best time. Our forces are more mobile. Most at least can avoid the fire.’

  ‘Most?’ Totho asked weakly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Drephos asked, mocking him. ‘I thought these Wasps are your enemies. If their own officers care nothing for their lives, why should we?’

  Memories of the bright orange flares, the incendiaries flowering over Tark in all their deadly wonder, lit up Totho’s mind, and he shivered.

  ‘Are you going to. wipe them all out, destroy Tark?’

  Totho had begun to believe it. The fighting had been fierce. The Ants had ambushed the Wasp airborne a dozen times, killing scores of them in each engagement before themselves being wiped out or driven back. The fiery rain over the city continued relentlessly, relieved only by nightfall or when the airships had to return to the gantries for rearming and refuelling.

  Though the Ants had tried, they could not adapt to this new warfare. They had been fighting the same set-piece war against their neighbours for centuries. Now the Empire had reinvented the word: ‘war’ no longer meant what they thought.

  ‘That may be necessary,’ Drephos said, evidently none too interested. ‘But unless the Tarkesh are very different from the Ants of Maynes, it will not be. You see, they are a pleasingly logical breed, Ant-kinden, and there is an inevitable conclusion bearing down on them: that if they wish to save anything of their people, anything at all, then they must lay down their arms and accept what treatment the Empire gives them. A third of their city is already in ruins, and it will mean years to rebuild what these few days have taken from them. They will realize, eventually, that their destiny as slaves offers them more of a future than their destiny as martyrs. Then they will surrender. Because they are a rational people — an Apt people — they understand the numbers, you see.’

  Totho was feeling very cold all over. The logic was icy and unassailable. ‘But they are soldiers — every one of them. Surely. ’

  ‘They are soldiers who cannot fight back. They will eventually realize this. Their civic pride will be heated and cooled, heated and cooled, until it is at last thrust into the waters one time too many, and it breaks. A month to take Maynes?’ Drephos clenched his gauntleted hand. ‘Now I have given them Tark in a tenday. For that, they will give me whatever they want. Including you.’

  ‘I cannot-’

  ‘You cannot accept it, of course. You would rather be returned to their hands, to be questioned as they call it, or tortured, as I would say. You would rather be a menial slave than an artificer. Morality is not something that has overly plagued me, but I respect it in others. It is your choice, but delay a little before you make it. Once that decision is made you cannot change your mind.’

  Twenty-One

  There was a rapid hammering on the door of his room and Stenwold pushed himself from his bed and went to answer it. For the first time in a long while he had been doing nothing except stare at the ceiling and brood. No plans, no action or mental juggling of his contacts and agents. He felt depressed, powerless, now that he had finally gone before the Assembly. It was all out of his hands.

  He opened the door on Tynisa, who looked agitated. Her sword was already drawn, he saw with a sinking heart.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You had better get your gear together,’ she told him. ‘Arm yourself and go out the back way.’

  ‘Is it the Wasps?’

  ‘No,’ she told him. ‘Your own people.’

  She was off down the stairs, but he bellowed after her, ‘What do you mean, my people?’ He stomped out, barefooted, and wearing nothing but a tunic.

  ‘Balkus has just got in,’ she told him, halfway down. ‘He says there’s a squad of Collegium’s militia on its way here with one of the Assemblers.’

  ‘Well that’s what we’re waiting for, isn’t it?’ Stenwold demanded.

  ‘We want word from them, not a whole armed guard. Why would they bring a guard here, if not to arrest you?’

  ‘I won’t believe it.’

  ‘Believe it!’ she yelled at him. ‘You have to leave, now!’

  ‘I won’t!’ He clenched his fists before him. ‘This is my city, and if they will not help me, then there is nothing I can do on my own. I do not value my freedom so very much. Even imprisoned by the Assembly, I may be able to talk them round. I will not leave, Tynisa. But you should go — you and Balkus.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ she told him. ‘Will you at least arm yourself? If things have gone really badly, they may not be coming just to arrest you.’

  ‘I won’t believe it,’ he said again, but he turned back to his room and took up his baldric, slinging it over his shoulder. The weight of the sword was a comforting burden at his hip.

  Balkus and Tynisa were waiting for him below with rapier and nailbow at the ready, as strange a pair of honour guards as he had ever known. He stood between them with hand to sword-hilt and awaited his fate.

  Tynisa met them at the door. There were a dozen Collegium guardsmen in chainmail and breastplates, looking uncomfortable and awkward, and in their midst a grey-haired old man in formal robes. After a moment’s pause she recognized him as the Speaker for the Assembly, Lineo Thadspar. She supposed this was meant to be an honour, to be personally arrested by the top man.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked him. She had the rapier in her hand but was hidden behind the door. Her tone made the guardsmen tense and she saw a few lay hands on their sword-hilts or mace-hafts.

  ‘Excuse me, what do you want, Master Gownsman Speaker Thadspar?’ she corrected, realizing that she had not been helping the situation.

  ‘I had rather hoped to speak with Master Maker, my child,’ Thadspar said, seeming utterly unperturbed.

  ‘Then your men can wait in the street, Master Thadspar. I trust that will be agreeable.’

  He smiled benignly. ‘I can think of no reason why I should need them.’ One of his men tugged at his sleeve worriedly but Thadspar waved him away. ‘I shall be quite safe. Trust must start somewhere, after all. Now, my
child, would you convey me in?’

  She stepped back, managing to scabbard her sword without showing the men outside that it had been drawn. Thadspar noticed, though, and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘There have been all manner of affronts done on the streets of Collegium in recent days,’ he said mildly. ‘Some of which I rather think you were involved in, my dear child. We will have to sort through them at some point. After all, Collegium is a city under the rule of law, yet.’

  ‘Any blood I have shed I can account for,’ she told him. ‘And don’t call me that — I am not your child.’

  ‘I suppose you aren’t.’ A smile crinkled his face. ‘There was some considerable debate, at the time, as to whose child you were. Stenwold was mute on the matter, of course, but as you grew it seemed clear enough to me whose you were. By the time you were twelve years, there were few who recalled Atryssa — but I did, and I knew.’

  Caught off-guard, Tynisa paused. ‘You knew my mother?’

  ‘I taught her logic and rhetoric for a year. She was an impatient student, a strange trait for a Spider-kinden woman.’

  Tynisa would have asked him more, but they had come to the doorway of Stenwold’s parlour. Stenwold himself was seated behind the table, waiting with all apparent calm, but Balkus loomed at his shoulder with his nailbow not quite directed at Thadspar.

  ‘Master Maker,’ the old man said, and ‘Master Thadspar,’ Stenwold acknowledged formally, followed by, ‘Will you sit?’

  Thadspar sat gratefully as Tynisa fetched a jug of wine and a couple of bowls. Balkus was still eyeing the old man suspiciously, as though he might be some kind of assassin in cunning disguise.

  Stenwold himself poured the wine. ‘I take it you’ve not come here to discuss next year’s curriculum, Master Thadspar.’

  Thadspar shook his head. ‘You have caused us all a great deal of trouble, Stenwold, and I really rather wish that you had never come back to Collegium to lay this business before us. We will all have a great deal to regret before this is over.’

  ‘So you have come here to do something you regret,’ Stenwold suggested. ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘You heard Master Bellowern speak, of course,’ Thadspar continued.

  ‘Yes, he spoke well.’

  ‘And he reminded us of who we are. He reminded us that Collegium is a centre of thought, of peace, and of law. You would now make us into some desperate mercenary company, springing about the Lowlands in search of a war that is not ours. That was his main point, I think.’

  Stenwold nodded, watching him through hooded eyes.

  ‘We have been deliberating ever since, it seems,’ the old man said. ‘Every member of the Assembly had some contribution to make, and most of it nonsense, of course. Some were for the Wasps, saying that here was a people we could learn from. Some were for you, echoing your assessment of the evils of their Empire. Some others were for you for entirely the wrong reasons, in my view. They were advocating the purity of the Lowlands and the fight against any outside influence, malign or beneficial. And some, no doubt, were for the Empire for the wrong reasons as well, because of personal profits to be made, or perhaps even in return for some prior arrangement.’

  ‘Bribes, do you think?’

  ‘I cannot think otherwise. If even a lowly market trader thinks to grease some Assembler’s palm to favour his suit, then why not an Empire? That seems to be the way of the world. However, I know a good number of the Assembly who would not take bribes, and I suppose we should hold that up as virtue, in this grimy world.’

  ‘Master Thadspar-’

  ‘Stenwold, I think after your performance today you have earned the right to call me Lineo.’

  ‘Well, then, you came here for a reason, Lineo,’ Stenwold said. ‘You came here with soldiers, I am told. I am wholly at your disposal.’

  Lineo Thadspar sighed. ‘So it is come to this at last, has it? Stenwold, you have set in motion a machine that no lever can stop or even slow. More, you have gone about it in an entirely reprehensible manner. You have been agitating amongst the students, you have been brawling in the streets. You have gone out and found an ugly, violent piece of the world, and — hammer and tongs! — you have transplanted it here, where it does not belong.’ He grimaced, showing teeth that were white, even and artificial. ‘This situation gives me no pleasure, Stenwold, and I regret that I have lived to see it.’

  Stenwold nodded, still waiting.

  ‘The Assembly of Collegium concurs with you. It is our duty to resist the Wasp Empire.’

  The words, spoken in that tired, dry voice, meant nothing at first. Only as he passed back over them did Stenwold understand what had just been said.

  ‘We have no right to set ourselves up as guardians of the Lowlands,’ Thadspar continued, ‘but it seems that is what we have become. All through Master Bellowern’s speech, his telling us who we were and what we stood for, many of us began to wonder just where he derived his mandate, to limit and define us in such ways. We had slept, I think, for many years, and he was now telling us to turn over and continue slumbering, while meanwhile you were shouting at us to wake up. And in the end, the picture of Collegium that Master Bellowern drew was not entirely to our liking. We have always regarded ourselves as the paragon of the Lowlands, looking down on the Ant-kinden and the others because they lack our moral sensibility. We pride ourselves in how well we treat our poor, our halfbreeds, the disadvantaged of all kinds. And yet we have thereby devised for ourselves a mantle that is heavy with responsibilities. If we truly stand for what we believe is good, the betterment of others, the raising up of the weak and the lowly, then we must take a stand against those with opposing philosophies. In Collegium, we are of a unique calling. There are members from all the Lowlander kinden amongst even our ruling body. Our perspective is broad. We are not the richest of merchants, and yet our inventions keep Helleron’s forges busy. We are not great soldiers, and yet we have conquered Sarn with our creed, and won a friend there. We are Collegium, College and Town both, but what are we, if we do not speak out against things we know are wrong?’ He shook his head. ‘We have therefore informed Master Bellowern that we consider the Empire to have broken the Treaty of Iron by marching on Tark. We were never party to that travesty they made the Council of Helleron sign. We have made our stand.’

  ‘But this is marvellous, Lineo,’ Stenwold said, but the old man shook his head.

  ‘It is terrible, Stenwold. It means a change that we will never put right. We will look back in future years, if we are so fortunate as to see them, and recognize the moment that you stepped before the Assembly as the beginning of the end of a world, just as the revolution was the end of the reign of the mystics. We have just made history, Stenwold, and I find that I prefer to teach it than to create it.’ Thadspar sighed, sipped at the wine that he had not, until that point, touched. ‘I should tell you, however, there are some conditions attached to this.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘First, as I mentioned to your delightful ward, there has been an embarrassing number of bodies turning up in certain rougher quarters of the city, and I rather think that you yourself may in some way be responsible. If it was you killing Wasp-kinden agents, in self-defence or defence of the city, then all well and good, but our poor guardsmen are going frantic over the matter. I would rather appreciate some clarification in due course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Stenwold assured him.

  ‘And second, Stenwold. Collegium is going to war. I know that is a very dramatic way of putting it but it is nevertheless true. We are putting ourselves in opposition to the Wasp-kinden and their Empire and, whether it is by words or deeds, that means war. To prosecute this war the Assembly requires a division of labour, and so it has been agreed to appoint certain men and women Masters — War Masters, I suppose, would be the rather unpleasant-sounding term. We have precious few volunteers, and many only willing to put forward the names of others, but, as you have brought this plague down on us, almost everyone i
s most especially agreed that you should do your fair share. The Assembly wishes to make you a War Master, and if you will not take the post and thus stand by your principles, then I doubt anyone else will.’

  ‘Then I accept, of course,’ Stenwold said, ‘and I’ll do whatever I can. I have some recommendations for others, as well.’

  ‘In good time,’ Thadspar said. ‘This is quite enough history for one day. My hands are rubbed raw with the making of it.’ He drained the bowl, and then poured himself another, looking older now than Stenwold had ever seen him. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘when the Wasp-kinden came to join in the games, I was delighted: a delegation from a savage nation coming to pay its respects. I foresaw Wasp students at the College and Wasp traders in the market. I saw the Lowlands expanded, by a manageable degree, to embrace seven kinden rather than six.’ He rubbed at his forehead, stretching the lines furrowed there. ‘Why could it not have been as it then appeared, Stenwold? How much easier life would have been.’

  Stenwold was about to say something consoling, when they heard the door slam open and both men jumped to their feet, the aged Thadspar just as swift as Stenwold. Into the room came a bundle of visitors, but Tisamon was at their head. He was dragging a girl and Stenwold’s heart leapt, to his own great embarrassment, to see it was Arianna. At the rear followed three or four of Thadspar’s guardsmen, who had obviously been trying to stop Tisamon barging in, with so little success that he had barely noticed them.

  ‘Tell them!’ Tisamon snapped and, whipping out his arm, threw Arianna forwards. He had no doubt intended to cast her at Stenwold’s feet, but instead Stenwold found himself stepping forwards to catch her. For a second, the entire room was still, with Arianna trembling against his chest and Thadspar blinking at the Mantis-kinden.

  ‘Master Tisamon of Felyal, if I recall a face,’ the old man said. ‘Please calm yourselves,’ he added, for the benefit of his guards. ‘I don’t believe anyone is in danger of immediate harm here. Is that the case, Master Tisamon?’