Dragonfly Falling sota-2

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She knew that a life of slavery could be bad, and she knew equally that there were worse fates by far.

  There was a rattle at the hatch above, chilling her heart, because her water bowl was still half-full.

  There had been pitch-darkness in the cellar before, which would have been a terror to her if her Art had not penetrated it and allowed her to see. The sheet of sunlight that now splashed down the stone steps was a harsh glare at first, and she shaded her eyes. She heard sandalled feet descending and forced herself to look.

  A Wasp soldier was peering doubtfully at her, by the bluish light of a mineral-fuel lantern.

  ‘This is her,’ he said, to someone standing above him, and then came all the way down to the cellar floor to make room.

  The man following took the stairs awkwardly, limping and holding to the wall. He wore no Wasp uniform, being swathed instead in a hooded robe, and he seemed to need no lantern when he peered at her.

  ‘Just one prisoner,’ he said tiredly. ‘Well the intelligencers will suffer more than I. And she will be theirs, I suspect, unless I press my claim on Malkan. You say she had some tools on her?’

  ‘Only a few, sir,’ the soldier below him said, ‘not a full artificer’s set, but she is a Beetle, sir. They’re reckoned good with machines.’

  ‘Not without proper tools, they’re not,’ grumbled the hooded man. ‘She’s probably a worthless slave or something. Or did I hear that the Sarnesh keep no slaves?’ He glanced up at a third man who was standing higher on the steps, and obviously saw him shake his head. To Che this last imperial was just a slouching silhouette.

  ‘You don’t want her, then?’ the soldier pressed, and Che felt her throat go dry. She had little idea of what they were talking about, but she feared what any Wasp intelligencer might do with her.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ she got out. ‘I am a scholar of the College. I know history, politics, economics-’

  ‘Are you an artificer?’ asked the robed man sharply, as though speaking to an idiot child.

  ‘I have studied mechanics a little. ’ She was crippled with honesty even at this moment.

  For a moment he studied her. ‘No. Let them rack her for answers. I won’t deprive General Malkan of her.’ With halting steps he turned round and made his way back up towards the sunlight.

  It was only when they had gone, and taken most of her hope with them, that she realized that they had not all been strangers.

  Why here? It seemed impossible. The sight of her echoed in his mind. Che, down below behind the timber bars.

  Oh, Totho could string a sequence of events together, surely. The horror of speculation was wondering what he did not know. Whose bodies now lay amongst the Sarnesh dead on the battlefield? Stenwold perhaps? Tynisa?

  Perhaps the Moth Achaeos had perished too.

  That thought sent an ugly little thrill through him. If Achaeos was dead.

  But Che would be dead all too soon, once they had finished cutting and twisting her flesh. General Malkan’s interrogators would undoubtedly want to know everything she could tell them about Sarn, in preparation for his next campaign.

  Totho stood and watched Drephos in conversation with one of Malkan’s officers. The general himself was conducting any communications through intermediaries at the moment. That was, Totho had realized eventually, because he was embarrassed. Anyone with eyes could see that Drephos had turned the battle for him, turned the iron tide at the point when Malkan’s men were at their weakest. Drephos had broken the Ant advance and given the Wasps new heart.

  Or rather, Totho thought wryly, I did, and nobody knows.

  How happy he was for that, and it was not that Drephos had snatched the praise from him, but Totho had hidden away from it, for he had witnessed as closely as he cared the monstrous effects that his inventions had on meat and metal.

  Amongst primitive peoples, like the Mantis-kinden, contracts and agreements were sealed with a drop of blood. Well, his contract with Drephos and the Empire was well and truly sealed. He was wading in it, up to his waist already, and with further still to go. And here was Che, suddenly come like his conscience to remind him of all that he had betrayed.

  It would serve her right. He hardened his heart. She had never taken the time to think about what she was getting into. Or perhaps it would be a form of justice on Stenwold for sending his own niece into the tempest. Or on the wretched Moth for luring her from safety into this dangerous place. Justice for someone, surely. And that would make some sense of it all.

  ‘Totho?’

  He looked up sharply, seeing Kaszaat walking towards him with concern in her eyes.

  ‘You’re brooding more than usual. What’s wrong?’

  Now here was a woman worth his attention, he told himself. Not too proud to lie with a halfbreed. And she obviously cared about him.

  Because Drephos told her to.

  ‘Totho, what’s wrong?’

  She reached out, and he flinched away without thinking.

  The look of hurt on her face could have been genuine, and he realized how much he had been poisoned by Drephos, by the Empire, so that he would never be able to be sure with her — or with anyone else — what was real and what was feigned. He had been adopted into a world where everything was weighed in objective scales, valued coldly and then put to work. His credit here was his artificer’s skill and, though he had valued that more than anything, he found it was short measure for his whole life. He was now merely a pair of hands to make, a mind to create: not Totho of Collegium but some working annexe to Drephos’s ambition.

  And is that so bad? Because he had lived his entire life, surely, on similar terms. He had worked with the debased currency that his mixed blood could buy him. He had worked twice as hard as his peers, getting half as far. Men with less talent at their graduation than he had possessed from the start had walked straight from the College into prestigious positions of wealth and respect, whereas he, with only real skill to his name, had been accorded nothing. Even amongst Che and Stenwold and the rest he had been the fifth wheel that nobody really needed.

  Well, at least here he was needed, and if he was to be valued merely as a commodity, at least Drephos had placed that value high enough to spare Salma’s life in exchange.

  But that deal was done, and he had nothing left to barter for Che. I cannot save her.

  A simple thing to say, and surprisingly easy.

  I cannot just let her die, without a word.

  And there was the barb that now caught him. Must he plunge a blade into his own guts by revealing to her what he had become? Or instead live with that emptiness inside him, that lack of a final meeting with her before the end? Or do I merely want her to see that at last I’ve made something of my life?

  He clenched his fists, and his mind conjured up the last throes of the doomed Sarnesh charge, bright blood springing from sheared metal as the bolts drove home.

  I am become the destroyer. What can I not do? What limits me now?

  Che heard the hatch move, but no sun flooded in. Clearly night had come and she had not realized.

  One man only, this time, with a covered lantern giving out a fickle light, but her eyes saw him well enough.

  She could not be sure of his identity until he had stopped. It was a young man, broad-shouldered and sturdy-framed and marked by mixed blood, and she did not quite know him. She saw the trappings: a toolbelt such as he had always wanted and could never afford, black and gold clothes, a sword and a rank badge. She recognized none of that. It was only when he stood in the cellar, on the other side of the bars, that she was sure.

  ‘Totho.?’ Her voice emerged in a quaver, not quite believing what she saw. ‘Is it you? It can’t be you.’

  He stared at her, and his features were harder than she remembered. Still, there had been harsh times for both of them since they last parted.

  ‘Totho, don’t just stand there. You have to let me out. You must know what they’ll do to me.’

  His face
tightened further. ‘I don’t have the keys,’ he muttered, and continued to stare.

  ‘Totho. what are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘You went off to Tark. why are you wearing that. uniform?’

  ‘Because it is mine,’ he stated, and she began to feel her brief surge of hope draining away.

  ‘You mean. how long?’

  He realized that she was seeing their history together unravel backwards, trying to recast him as a spy during all that time, because poor Che didn’t realize that people changed.

  ‘Since Tark,’ he said. He found it mattered to him that she knew she had already cast him off before he had found his new calling.

  ‘But why?’ she said, still trying to whisper but her indignation getting the better of her. ‘They’re the enemy, Totho! They’re monsters!’

  He felt his anger grow in him. ‘I did it to save Salma,’ he snapped, ‘because otherwise they would have killed him. Or don’t you think that was worth it? Perhaps I should have just died alongside him.’

  ‘But that’s. ’ She gaped at him. ‘But you’re free,’ she said, still determinedly marching up the wrong street. ‘You could run, surely, run to Collegium and tell them what happened here.’

  ‘You have absolutely no idea what happened here.’ He felt she was trivializing the sacrifice he had made, and suddenly he was on fire with it. He had never impressed her as a companion, as a warrior, most certainly not as a prospective lover, for all that she had once been life and breath to him. ‘Do you want to know,’ he asked her, voice shaking slightly, ‘what happened here?’

  ‘I don’t understand, Totho.’

  ‘I happened here, Che. That’s the simplest thing. Those dead Ants out there — I killed them. When the city of Sarn falls it is I who will break it. When this army or another like it is at the gates of Collegium, it will be me, do you understand? When the Lowlands becomes just the western wing of the Empire, then by rights my name should be on the maps.’

  She was backing away from the wooden bars. ‘Totho?’

  ‘All my doing, Che.’ As she retreated so he had moved up to the bars himself, gripping them as though he were the prisoner here. ‘What your uncle dismissed as a toy back in Collegium, they have made into a weapon here. You remember how I always wanted to make weapons? Well now it’s happened, and my weapons win wars.’

  Backing against the far wall of her cell, she stared and saw him at last, as not friend, nor lover, but enemy.

  ‘You?’

  ‘All me.’ Now he had her attention, his lust for recognition was leaching out of him, leaving only a hollow bitterness. ‘So I can’t just walk away from this, Che. I have become this. I have paid in blood, and none of it my own.’

  ‘Oh, Totho. ’

  He waited for her condemnation that he surely deserved, the last gasp of her defiance before the interrogators pried it out of her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ And the expression on her face told him, beyond any shadow or suspicion, that her concern was purely for him, for her lost friend.

  Something was building in him, that hurt worse than burning, but he clamped down on it. He was Drephos’s apprentice. There was no emotion he could not master. ‘Stop saying that.’ He heard his voice shake. ‘I’ve found my place now. There’s nothing to be sorry for. Feel sorry for yourself. You know what they’ll do to you.’ In his mind arose the words, from the depths of his own soul. What they will do to her is nothing, compared to what they have done to me.

  She was moving back to the bars now, and one hand slightly extended, as if to touch his own. He suddenly felt that, if he was to feel her skin on his, he might die. He stumbled backwards, until he felt the incline of the steps behind him.

  ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘Everything’s over.’ He tried to suppress the next words, but they forced themselves out anyway. ‘I’m sorry, Che. I’m sorry it turned out like this.’

  She was standing at the bars when he left her, and the lantern’s last shine glinted on the tracks down her face, and he thought they would be the only tears ever shed for him.

  And where is the damned box? was the thought of Uctebri the Sarcad, stalking the bounds of his comfortable cell. It had gone wrong. Not irretrievably wrong, but wrong nonetheless.

  He had been at pains to keep his antennae out, groping around for the Shadow Box’s location. It had mouldered in Collegium for a long time, but the Darakyon itself was becoming restive. It had sensed his interest and there was always the chance that it would find some champion for its cause. Reaching so far into the Lowlands is dangerous, his own people would have told him, had he cared to consult them. The Moth-kinden have not forgotten us.

  No, that was true. In some decaying archive of Tharn or Dorax would be found the name of the Mosquito-kinden, and the time when the Moths broke them, hunted them down, and tried their best to wipe his entire kinden from history. These days the Moths had other matters on their minds, though, so a clever old man might stretch his arm as far as Collegium and cause no alarm, sound no warnings, especially if that old man was working through an Empire blinded to the magical world by its own Aptitude.

  But the Empire itself was being coy. They had not sent some squad of soldiers or Rekef men to retrieve the box. The political situation, the distances, had all militated against that strategy. Instead they had hired hunters.

  And one of those hunters knows too much. Uctebri had felt the touch of her mind, just briefly. Someone with training, with a gift for sly magic, was now in possession of his prize. In that brief contact of minds the acrid taste of betrayal was in his mouth. She will not bring it to me. She recognizes its value.

  But she could not hide it, not a thing of that power, now that it had been awakened. He could sense her moving about, with that appallingly powerful treasure in her hands. Her deceits would hide her exact whereabouts, but he could have drawn a circle on a map and known for sure that she was within it.

  He heard movement outside, knew before the man even entered that it was the Emperor. The ruler of the Wasps was in an ugly mood.

  ‘Your Imperial Majesty, you honour me with your presence.’ Uctebri the Sarcad bowed sinuously as the Emperor marched into his new suite of rooms.

  ‘We demand to know what progress you have made,’ snarled Alvdan the Second. General Maxin had come in behind him, but stood at the door as though he was no more than a guard. Alvdan had found himself relying more and more on that man recently, what with troubles in the Lowlands and similar. He reserved his own main attention for this, though: the Mosquito’s ritual that would elevate him beyond the misery of his father and his grandfather, and remove from him the one blight that had constantly mocked his reign and stolen his joy.

  The matter of his succession: which potential traitor, from a nest of venomous things, should he take to his bosom, or even breed himself? His successor, the heir that would stand like an executioner beside his throne as soon as the child was born or the decision made. But if Uctebri’s ritual should achieve its impossible end, he need never worry about his successor again, because he would need none. He would live for ever.

  He was impatient to start.

  ‘Your Imperial Majesty, it wants but the time, the most auspicious date.’ The Mosquito glanced between the Emperor and General Maxin. ‘And the box, of course. We must have the box. Gifts such as you seek must be had only with the correct materials.’

  ‘It is coming,’ the Emperor said. ‘Our agents carry it to us even now.’

  ‘I hesitate to correct His Majesty in his proclamation,’ said Uctebri, turning to the nearest wall to make another few chalk scratches.

  ‘You are not to use your sarcasm on us, creature,’ Alvdan snapped. ‘Explain yourself.’

  ‘I am naturally concerned at the progress of this most puissant gem, Great Majesty, but my arts have told me that all is not well. Your agents have miscarried, have been suborned or have turned traitor, for the box is no longer being fetched here.’

  ‘Gener
al?’ Alvdan demanded, suddenly unsure. This news was as impossible as the mooted ritual, but he had already accepted that as possible, and so how could he feel sure that this creature could not know?

  ‘In truth, Your Imperial Majesty,’ Maxin said slowly, ‘I had expected before now to hear from my agents.’

  ‘But this is not good enough,’ Alvdan reproached him angrily. ‘If we must possess this thing then we will have it. Uctebri, where is it now? Your arts have surely furnished you with that knowledge?’ He tried to make his tone mocking, but his uncertainty sounded through it.

  ‘It has gone into the lawless lands around Lake Limnia, where the Skater-kinden live and where many things are lost and found — or change hands. My arts, alas, can be no more exact.’

  ‘You have heard,’ Alvdan turned to General Maxin. ‘Send your hunters there. Stop at nothing. Obliterate every cursed Skater if you have to.’

  ‘As you wish, Your Majesty,’ replied Maxin.

  ‘And, Worshipful Majesty, if I might ask. ’ Uctebri began softly.

  ‘What is it? Speak.’

  ‘I require the opportunity to further examine your sister in closer detail.’

  Alvdan smiled. ‘Oh, as close as you wish, monster. Of all the things I have to give you, she is least precious by far. I give her to you for whatever you need.’

  The Mosquito’s answering smile contained a hard edge that promised those words would not be forgotten.

  Forty-Two

  Thalric loosed his sting at her even as she came into the room, and Stenwold assumed it was over then, an absurd anticlimax. The impact rocked her back, but the crackling energy just scattered from her glittering armour, leaving black marks like soot. Then she was on him.

  He had the table between them and Stenwold saw him try to get up quickly, and tumble backwards over the chair, face suddenly twisting in agony as his unhealed wound racked him with pain. With a single downward swing Felise cut the table in two, shearing the wood across the grain in a way Stenwold would not have thought possible.

  Thalric had lurched to his feet, and his hands spat fire again, but she turned, shielding her face with her pauldron and, although she had to brace herself against it, again the crackling blast just danced off her mail.