Dragonfly Falling sota-2

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘But for now you’ll put her into the city’s service?’

  ‘This city is my life, Master Maker. And if there might be any funding, in the future, for my project-?‘

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Stenwold said hurriedly. ‘Let us just save the city first, and then I cannot imagine that the Assembly will not reward its saviours. Your submersible boat, what can it do?’

  ‘Go beneath the waters,’ repeated Tseitus, and then after a brief, awkward pause, ‘Drill into the hulls of their ships. Attach devices that others here may devise. Is there some explosive that may work underwater?’

  ‘I haven’t-’ Stenwold started but, as though summoned magically by the concept, one of the other artificers was already raising a hand.

  At dusk, Akalia called for the Vekken artillery to be stilled. There was no sense wasting their ammunition in speculative and inaccurate night-time shooting. By the last light, her spotters had confirmed some light damage to the west wall where she had been heaping most of her missiles: some ragged holes punched in the crenellations, and a few patches that might repay a barrage over the next few days and even open up the whole wall. And once the wall was down in even one place her real assault could begin.

  There had not been a single answering shot. It had been somewhat vexing the way most of the artillery positions atop the wall had been protected from her own, but it made little enough difference if they were content to hide behind their walls until she battered them down.

  There would be casualties to the Collegium artillery when the assault went in, but no war was without casualties and her men understood that.

  They cannot have the range to match us, one of her commanders had suggested. She could only shrug at him. For whatever reason, though, the Collegium artillery had remained silent.

  Her commanders had secured the camps, in the highly unlikely event that the Beetle-kinden were planning some kind of night raid, and so finally she retired to her tent. The Wasp-kinden Daklan wished to speak with her, she knew. She had considered letting the foreigner stew but decided that, as matters were progressing so well, it would do her good to remind him of the superiority of those he was allying his Empire to.

  ‘Commander Daklan,’ she addressed him, and then looked to the other man. ‘And it is Commander Thalric, is it not?’

  ‘It is, Tactician,’ Thalric said. It pleased Akalia that he did not try to deny the Ant rank. In her mind she was doing him more honour than he deserved.

  ‘And you are pleased with what you have seen, so far?’ she asked the two Wasps. ‘Your vengeance against Collegium will soon be accomplished, will it not?’

  ‘Indeed, Tactician,’ said the other one, Daklan.

  ‘One might wonder what the foolish Beetles have done, to inflame such a far-off enemy,’ she said, her eyes narrowing.

  ‘You know the Beetle-kinden, how they can never leave well enough alone,’ Daklan said quickly. ‘The Empire has its actions focused east of here, as you know, and it seemed likely to us that Collegium would interfere in some way.’

  ‘They are a pack of meddling old men,’ Akalia agreed derisively. ‘Look at what they have done to Sarn, and in so short a time. They’ve gelded an entire city with their absurd ideas!’

  ‘True, and well put,’ Daklan concurred. She sneered at his ingratiating manner, but it was fitting, she supposed. It was certain that they feared her and wished her to think well of them.

  ‘Tell me, Tactician,’ said the other one, Thalric. ‘How do you consider that first bombardment? It seemed to be a little. unorthodox to me.’ Daklan glanced at him sharply, perhaps because this was something they had agreed to leave unsaid, but Akalia shrugged. ‘You are imprecise with your words, Commander Thalric. With us Ant-kinden you must say what you mean. What do you mean?’

  Thalric was ignoring Daklan’s frown. ‘Their wall artillery, Tactician.’

  ‘That was curious,’ she agreed. ‘I have asked my artificers for possible causes. It may be that they have let their artillery become useless with age, although that seems unlikely even for Collegium. However, they are not a valorous race. Perhaps their engineers did not dare take to the walls to man them under our shot.’

  ‘Perhaps that is it,’ Thalric said, but she could see a look on his face that she did not like.

  ‘You are here only on sufferance,’ she reminded them. ‘I shall have no impertinence from you foreigners.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Daklan said quickly. ‘We are merely. unused to such a great display of artillery. Our wars work in different ways.’ She saw Thalric’s face twitch at that sentiment, but she could not read his reaction.

  ‘You are dismissed,’ she told them suddenly. It was late, anyway, and she would need a rested night, to command on the morrow. She must consider what to do with these Wasp-kinden, too. Perhaps it might be best if they became casualties of war. She watched them walk away, a tension between them, men who would be arguing as soon as they were out of her sight. Another divided and chaotic kinden, then. When the time came they would be no match for the perfect order of Vek.

  Akalia went straight to her tent and had a slave unbuckle her armour. Then she fell asleep in anticipation of the morning’s work.

  She was awakened instantly by the first crash and sat bolt-upright, feeling the ground shake beneath her. Her entire camp was awake, but for a terrifying moment nobody knew what was going on.

  Sentries report! Her mind snapped out, but there was no answer amongst the babble of replies. Her sentries knew of no attack, and yet the camps were under attack. Men were dying, snuffed out instantly, but very few of them. Instead she was hearing a waxing tide of alarm from her engineers, from her artificers.

  What is going on? she demanded of them, sensing them rush about in the darkness, that clouded, moonless pitch-darkness. Fires were being lit, men were rushing into formations with still no idea of what was going on. One unit of a hundred men was abruptly half its number down, a great rock having found them in the night, crushing the heart from their battle order.

  Report! she demanded once more. I will have executions for this. It is intolerable.

  Then the word came rushing through the army like wildfire. Their artillery was being destroyed.

  How? she demanded. How are they attacking us? It must be men, some stealthy team sent out, but even as she thought that, the ground shook once again.

  And the impossible answer came back, They are shooting from the walls.

  For a moment she could not think. She had no answers, and none of her officers had any answers, and so the entire army was paralysed by indecision. The ground shook again, and once more, and the artificers’ minds passed on to her the sound of smashed wood and crushed metal.

  At last the only remaining course came to her. Move the artillery back. Disassemble it if it cannot be moved!

  On the walls of Collegium the artillery had either been winched back up or uncovered, and now the artificers of the most learned city in the Lowlands practised their art. All day they had taken their measurements and worked out their angles. Men used to the classroom and the lectern had crouched behind battlements and scribbled their calculations. Some of them had died, crushed by shot, raked by stone splinters. Now the fruits of those labours were borne on the air by the engines of Collegium. The night was almost moonless, and small specks of fire were all that was revealed to them of the Vekken encampment, but the engineers and artificers of Collegium held lamps by their sheets of calculations and adjusted their angle and elevation by minute degrees.

  And the catapults and ballistae, leadshotters and trebuchets of the Collegium walls spoke together, flinging hundredweights of stone and metal at the invaders.

  Some of them missed, of course, either by chance or bad calculation, but all around the city the Vekken army was awoken by the sound of its own siege emplacements being destroyed: trebuchets splintering under blindly targeted rocks, and leadshotters ripped apart by explosive-headed ballista bolts. The thinking men and mathematicians of C
ollegium, carefully and without passion, set about undoing any gains that the Vekken army had made during the previous day.

  When dawn came, it was clear that more than three-quarters of the artillery the Vekken had so carefully placed the previous day had been smashed beyond hope of repair, and although the invading army had more to bring forward, it seemed any chance of simply knocking down Collegium’s walls had been dealt a fatal blow.

  Twenty-Seven

  In his dream Achaeos was deep within the Darakyon: not on the outskirts, where he had taken Che to show her the darkness of the old world, but in the heart of it, where he had been just that once before. He was there, in the crawling, twisted heart of the shadow-forest, whose inhabitants he had impudently demanded aid from — whose inhabitants had arisen to his call, but not at his command. The cold of their touch as they had then rifled through his mind was still burned on his memory like a brand. And in return for showing him the way to where Cheerwell was imprisoned, they had exacted a price.

  He owed them, and such debts were always honoured, and seldom repaid happily.

  In his dream, Achaeos stood surrounded by the knotted and gnarled trunks of the Darakyon’s tortured trees, and he had seen, with the night-piercing eyes of his kinden, the things that dwelt under their shadow. Never had he more wanted to experience the blindness, the darkness, that other kinden complained of. These denizens had been Mantis-kinden once, he knew. Something of that remained, but it was overwritten in a heavy hand by crawling thorns, by pieces of darkly gleaming carapace, by the spines of killing arms, by rough bark and tangling vines and glittering compound eyes.

  They were legion, the things of the Darakyon, and they stared at him mutely. Their whisper-voice — pieced together from all the cold, dry sounds of the forest — was silent. There was a message, though, in their wordless scrutiny of him. He sensed reproach. He had disappointed them.

  In his dream he cried out to them, demanding to know what it was he had done, or had not done, and still they stared, and their meaning decayed from mere dissatisfaction to despair. No words yet, but he heard them clearly still, from the very way they stood: Why have you forsaken us? Why have you failed us?

  ‘What must I do?’ he demanded of them. ‘Tell me what has gone wrong.’

  Overhead, in the gaps between the twining branches, the sky flashed with lightning, back and forth: the night riven over and over with golden fire, yet never a rumble of thunder to be heard.

  They pointed, each and every one of them, fingers and claws and crooked twigs dragging his attention towards one tree, that seemed the same as all the rest, and he strained his eyes to see their meaning.

  Something bloomed on the shrivelled bark of that trunk, and at first he thought it was a flower, a dark flower that shone wetly as the lightning danced. Then it quivered and ran, thick and flowing, down the tree’s length, and he saw that it was blood. Of all the horrors of the Darakyon he recalled, this was new — this was unique to his dreaming.

  Achaeos opened his mouth to question, but he saw now that all the trees, every tree in the forest’s dark heart, and then all the trees beyond, were bleeding, the stuff welling up from invisible wounds and coating the trunks, pooling and oozing on the forest floor. Overhead the bright lightning lashed back and forth, gold on black, gold on black.

  He stepped back as that encroaching red tide reached him, but it was rolling forth on all sides, and the things of the Darakyon were melting into it, still regarding him with an air of betrayal.

  ‘What?’ he called out to them, and it seemed that his Art-made wings opened without him willing them, so that he was lifted high into the stormy sky, seeing the Lowlands spread beneath him: the Lowlands and then the Empire and the Commonweal and beyond. The stain spread out from the Darakyon, the tide of blood heedless of boundaries and city walls: Helleron and Tharn were gone, Asta and Myna. Now, across the map that was so impossibly presented to him, fresh wounds appeared in the face of the world — Capitas, Collegium, Shon Fhor, Seldis — cities drowned in blood that arose in fountainheads from the depths of the earth, and in those wounds there were crawling things like maggots, long twining many-legged things that should never have been allowed back into the light.

  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?’
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  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-’