Dragonfly Falling sota-2

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Arianna’s knife flashed, and the Fly-kinden arched backwards, the weapon spinning from his hands. She struck again and again in fierce desperation as he screamed and bucked, knocking himself off Stenwold’s chest. For a moment he was scrabbling about on the floor to retrieve his dropped sword, his back now a welter of red, and then finally she drove her blade into his side up to the hilt with a cry of revulsion.

  Stenwold was aware of Doctor Nicrephos shouting something, and he felt a wave of cold surge through him that had every hair on his body standing on end. The Moth woman cursed in frustration, and lunged her dagger forwards just as Balkus snapped out of his trance. It was a hasty blow she delivered that skittered harmlessly from his mail, and in automatic response the nailbow boomed, sending her flying backwards with a bloody hole punched all the way through her.

  ‘Stenwold!’ the old Moth cried. ‘Help me!’ Stenwold staggered to his feet, looking around for the old man. For a brief moment he saw Doctor Nicrephos wrestling with a shadowy figure, and then a blade flashed and the Moth was reeling back, his robe bloodied. Stenwold had a brief glimpse of a Spider-kinden man — no, a Spider-kinden woman? It was impossible in that moment to tell. He roared out a challenge, and Balkus shot another bolt at the same time, but the Spider dodged nimbly, running for the open door with something under his — or her — arm. As Stenwold charged, she — it was definitely a she — turned and flung something at him that struck him in the chest and instantly he was falling, tangled and stuck in strands of fine, sticky silk. A moment later, the Wasp-kinden man was running after the Spider, slipping through the door just before Balkus’ nailbow destroyed the doorframe in three separate places.

  Arianna crouched by him, her eyes wide. ‘Who was that?’ she gasped. ‘What is going on?’ Only Doctor Nicrephos knew that, Stenwold thought painfully, for he could still see the old man from where he lay, and there was no doubt that the Moth was dead. As for who that was, though. surely it can’t be. It could not be, he decided. It must be some other of the same order, for Achaeos had sworn that he had killed the face-shifting spy who had plagued them in Helleron.

  A spy in Helleron. A spy in Myna. Now a spy in Collegium. The coincidence was there already, so how much further for it to have all been the work of one man — or one woman? And how difficult was it for a master of disguise to play dead?

  Arianna was patiently disentangling him from the Art-made web, and after a moment Balkus joined them, slotting a fresh magazine into his nailbow.

  ‘Any idea what they got away with?’ he asked.

  ‘None,’ said Stenwold helplessly. ‘And no understanding of this at all.’ He took a good long time to recover his breath, leaning back against a wall of Briskall’s entrance hall, staring mournfully at the body of Doctor Nicrephos, whose last desperate request had cost the old man his life — and achieved nothing. Arianna crouched beside him protectively, her head on his shoulder. She had saved his life, he realized. He had hardly noted it in all the confusion, but the Fly-kinden would have had him if she had not stabbed the man first. Spiders played deep games, but he allowed himself to hope that this was it, this was all, and at last the womanly concern she presented to him was the Arianna that really was.

  He was unspeakably grateful for her company at that bleak moment.

  There was the dead Moth woman to consider, as well. This mixed bag of raiders had all the hallmarks of a mercenary team. The presence of a Wasp did not guarantee they were imperial, nor did it seem likely they were Vekken.

  It was all rather more than he could disentangle.

  He heard Balkus’s clumping tread, and then the big Ant was back with yet another body slung over his shoulder. As he lowered it to the floor Stenwold saw an elderly Beetle-kinden who had been killed by a single knife-blow to the back of the neck.

  ‘Master Briskall was at home then,’ Stenwold said weakly. ‘What else did you see through there?’

  Balkus shrugged. ‘Bit of a mystery, Master Maker. There’s a nice big lock on this door, and all manner of stuff behind it that any thief would go out of his mind to steal. Some of it’s in locked cages or behind glass, but there’s plenty there just for the grabbing, only they didn’t.’

  ‘We interrupted them?’ Stenwold suggested.

  ‘That Spider had something with her when she ran off,’ Balkus pointed out, and he had obviously made his mind up about the sex of the escapee. ‘There’s one thing gone, something square and about so big.’ His hands made a shape no more than six inches to each side. ‘It was just out on a stand, though — nothing this old boy wanted locked away.’

  ‘Just an opportunistic grab, maybe,’ Stenwold suggested, but an odd thought came to him: Or something Master Briskall did not know the value of.

  The three of them then carried the bodies of Briskall and Doctor Nicrephos to the nearest infirmary, although they were both beyond all healing. Stenwold told a reliable-looking soldier about the other bodies, and advised that Briskall’s house should be secured against thieves. Then the three of them returned to Stenwold’s home, to find a messenger waiting on his doorstep with even worse news.

  Scyla realized, as she left, that her only regret was that Gaved had escaped. She worked alone for preference, so she had taken no joy in the company the Empire had forced on her.

  And she had no intention of sharing a reward with anyone. If this box was so important, then the Wasps would just have to pay the full amount to her alone.

  Within a street she had taken on the guise of a portly Beetle woman, easy enough to do under cover of darkness, and was heading towards the nearest city wall. Getting through the Vekken lines would be harder, but she was adept at her craft.

  Though heavily carved, the box was otherwise as unassuming as she had been told, but she had been given no time yet to make a detailed examination. If she could find out what was so special about it, then maybe she could raise the asking price. The Empire had a lot of money to throw around, and with a thousand faces at her disposal she had no worries about making enemies. Perhaps she should even impersonate Gaved? Now that would be amusing.

  She guessed that Gaved would now be circling the streets looking for her, but between her disguise and his pitiful Wasp eyes, he had no chance at all. He would give up in the end and get himself out of the city before dawn, heading back to the imperial masters he constantly disavowed but would never quite escape.

  Some part of the back of her mind was aware that those who had originally taught her would despair at her behaviour. Theirs was a noble and ancient calling of spies, and now she was a mere profiteer prostituting the gifts they had awakened in her just for spite and for gold. She had long ago lost sight of any higher goals she might have had, any lasting achievement she could make. Now it was just the getting and the gaining and, most especially, the joy of outwitting — making bigger fools of all the fools out there, who looked no further than another’s face.

  She reached the city wall and stood close to it, seeing no one around, no airborne shape hovering above. Calling on her Art she swiftly scaled the stonework, hands and booted feet clinging easily to its smooth stone. Flat against it, near the top, she waited as a sentry passed by, with eyes only for the Vekken camp beyond. She crawled onto the walkway and the battlements and, like a shadow, face downwards, to the earth below.

  Now came the real challenge. She could have crept from darkness to darkness, and thus avoided the Vekken lanterns, but she wanted to complete her victory. She wanted to fool a whole army.

  She focused her concentration and changed her face and form, taking on the obsidian hue of a Vekken Ant, even down to the dark chainmail and helm. Ants could not be fooled by mere appearances amongst their own kind, though, and she stretched her powers and gifts, feeling tensions and strains within her mind as she worked with it, reaching out towards something that was a distant and foreign concept, an ideal, a mere idea, but something that was the fount of Ant-kinden Art.

  And the night was full of voices. She heard the rapidly
passed reports of sentries, the chatter of artificers working on the artillery, questions from officers, and the complaints of a few who simply could not get to sleep, and she walked into it and, when she was seen, she simply greeted them, mind to mind, as any Ant would. If they had asked her questions it might have been difficult, in an army where any stranger could be identified so quickly, but it never even occurred to them to be suspicious, for she was doing the impossible, counterfeiting them so well that they could not conceive that she was not one of them.

  Blithely and openly, she walked straight through the Vekken camp and out into the night.

  By dawn she was far from the Vekken camp, back to the easy guise of a Spider-kinden man of younger years. When she had first called up this face he could have been her twin. Now he was a decade younger than she was.

  The local people around here, solid farmers all, had heard about the siege of Collegium but had no idea what to do about it. They were simply awaiting the outcome, and if that meant Vekken soldiers coming down the road then they would take it as it came. Even the Vekken needed farmers to till the land, and Scyla suspected life as Vekken slaves would not change their rural ways so very much.

  She found a barn where two placid draft-beetles were stabled, and climbed up to the hayloft. It was time to examine her prize.

  Nothing but a box carved in wood — that was her first impression. The carvings were strange, though. They drew the eye in a way that seemed to ignore the angles and corners of the thing, as though whatever they truly encompassed had no real edges at all, and they led on and led on, and as she turned the thing over in her hands she could see no end or beginning to them, coiling and twining traceries of thorny vines and ragged-edged leaves that overlapped and overlapped and only emphasized the depths of the spaces in between them, depths that seemed, by some trick of light and shadow, to fall into recesses far further than the small box itself could readily accommodate.

  In her intense concentration she did not notice the light wane within the stable, or hear the increasingly uncomfortable shuffling of the big insects below.

  But how remarkable, she thought, that those lines split apart again and again, and yet whatever path she followed only turned and twisted, while all the others flourished with leaves, and carved insects, beetles and grubs and woodlice and other things that dwelled within rotten wood. Over and over she turned it, trying to unravel the essential mystery. A box it was, and light enough that it must be hollow, and yet there was no lid, no catch, no way of working her way into it, save to follow, follow, follow the carved patterns laid over and under one another, round and round the seemingly endless sides of the box.

  There was a flickering within her mind, like shadows when the candle flame is blown, a flickering and a dancing, and at last she looked up, and saw shadows moving of their own accord across the walls of the barn, shadows that her eyes picked out of the darkness. Warrior shadows, with spined arms and stalking gait, the shadows of great clawed insects, forelimbs clasped in solemn prayer, robed men raising daggers to a shadow moon, and ever the interlacing, clutching branches of the encroaching trees. Shadows overlapping with yet more shadows, so that whatever was being enacted around her and within her mind was lost, save for the emotions that flooded and coursed through her, beyond her beck and call, as wild and furious as a storm tide: rage, betrayal, loss, a seething sense of bottomless hatred.

  She was aware that she was holding her breath, and that seemed only wise because these shadows — or some at least — were Mantis-kinden who had no love for her kind, and she felt that she had no disguise sufficient to cloud their eyes to what she really was.

  But too little, too late, for one such shadow had turned to her, if shadows could turn. There were no eyes, but as it gazed on her she was aware of a shadow thing part woman, part insect, part twining plant, but also the very shape that hate might take if some alchemist could distil it and then make it flesh.

  She had a sense that this unfolding of power — this long-denied awakening that she had provoked — was not going unheard, and just as the things from the box stretched their serrated limbs, so distant minds that had been searching for this moment were sparked into wakefulness. The imperial contract, she thought, and in her mind was the instant image of a pale, emaciated man with bulbous red eyes, the skin above his forehead shifting with blood. One long-nailed hand was reaching for her, his face cast into a covetous scowl.

  And she gasped in shock, and it was gone, they were all gone, and the sun was shining back through the hayloft hatch, and the beetles below were straining at their tethers, clawing at the walls, with oily foam welling between their mandibles, causing enough ruckus to bring the farmer. She ducked out of the hatch and climbed down the outside wall.

  She was no true magician, no seer, but her people had their women and men of magic, just as the Moths did, and she had learnt a lot from them back when she was young and willing enough to subjugate herself to others. She had no idea what this box truly was, but she realized that it was powerful. The magic trapped within it, from the Days of Lore for sure, was of an order she had never encountered before. She had no idea what the pragmatic Wasp Empire could want with it, but one thing was clear: she was being offered only a pitiful fraction of the true value of the thing. More, the Empire, ignorant as it was, would never come forward with a fitting price.

  She knew places she could take it where a proper buyer might be found. Once word was out, then there was still gold enough within Moth haunts, still collectors of the arcane, rogue Skryres, Spider manipuli, all willing to bid for what she possessed. To the wastes with the Wasps. She would go find her own buyers and name her own price.

  She did not stop to ask herself where this thought of betrayal, so natural to her, had first sparked, and whether the idea was really hers at all.

  Thirty-Six

  They were three days out of Sarn, moving at the speed of the slowest automotive. The Queen was unwilling to let the Wasps bring the place of battle any closer than their current camp, and Che read from this that the Queen wanted the battlefield to stay as far away from her city as she could get it. She supposed that this was to protect the farmland and villages on which Sarn relied, but another thought suggested that Sarn’s ruler was already planning where to make her next stand, if her army lost the contest here.

  Che and Sperra had been packed in with the rest of the non-combatants. This was Sarn’s trade-off for doing things Collegium’s way. In exchange for the mechanization and the superior weaponry, they had inherited a baggage train of foreign artificers and support staff doing jobs that would normally have been done by Ant-kinden soldiers.

  She had seen little of Achaeos since the journey began. He was liaising between the various Mantis and Moth leaders of the newly formed and fragile Ancient League. Che understood that the League itself was still settling, and that neither of the kinden concerned came easily to placing their sovereignty under the leadership of others, even others of their own kind. Achaeos was worried about the battle, she knew, and whether things might go badly wrong even without the Wasps’ intervention.

  And then the train itself was abruptly slowing, with an unmistakable forward-lurching as the brakes were applied.

  ‘Perhaps it’s a broken line,’ Sperra suggested, but there were Ants in the carriage with them that had stood up instantly and, as soon as the train was at rest, were flinging the doors open and ordering everyone to get out as quickly as possible. That was when Che realized that they had sighted the enemy.

  It was really tremendously civilized, she supposed. The Wasps had arrived by train too, as though this were merely some polite meeting of diplomats. The Queen of Sarn had sent a big block of crossbowmen and nailbowmen out to screen the army from airborne attack, but the rest of her men were pitching tents methodically, checking the engines of the automotives or fitting the wings on the fliers.

  ‘What about the Wasps?’ Che wondered.

  ‘Too late in the day for a battle,’ an Ant
told her. ‘If they come for us, we’ll be able to form up in time, but there’s no sense in just waiting.’

  Of course they would be able to simply stop what they were doing, all at once, and begin to fight, for a single order could mobilize the entire Ant army. Che realized this was a luxury the Wasps did not have, so their soldiers must be currently preparing for a possible attack, and would have to stand ready at least until nightfall. Their tents were already pitched, though. Moth scouts reported that they had arrived at this point — where the rails gave out — some days ago, and had been steadily reinforcing their numbers ever since. She tried to get a better view of them, but they remained just a black stain on the horizon, further down the gleaming and interrupted metal line.

  Achaeos suddenly dropped out of the sky beside her, making Che jump.

  ‘You should witness this,’ he told her. ‘The Queen and Scelae are having their first command conference. I think we should be there, too, in case they have a falling out.’

  The three of them rushed through the Ant camp towards the Queen’s tent. The guards barred them momentarily, but then the word obviously came to let them pass. They did not even need to demand admittance before they were being ushered inside.

  Within the barely furnished tent was a single table, with one map pinned upon it. Behind stood a handful of tacticians gathered up about their Queen, a clutch of sibling-similar Ant-kinden wearing partial plate-mail but with no other sign of rank or precedence. On the near side of the table were Scelae in her scaled armour, and a single grey-robed Moth-kinden. The way they looked at the Sarnesh was more adversarial than allied.