Dragonfly Falling

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Parops stared at him. ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘It’s a loyalty thing, Parops. You should understand. Not to Tark, I admit: loyalty to my friends. I have always tried to be loyal to my friends. Because I travel a lot and have no certainties, and I never know when I’m going to need a friend, for a bed, for a meal, or to get me out of prison. And Stenwold and me, we go back twenty years.’

  ‘His two agents, or apprentices – the halfbreed and the other one?’

  ‘The Commonwealer, yes. I have to find out what happened to them. Probably they’re dead, but I have to know. Because Stenwold would want to know.’

  ‘They’ll catch you,’ Parops said. ‘You’ll end up a slave, or dead.’

  ‘They won’t catch me,’ Nero said, ‘because I’m not going skulking in like a thief. I’m just going to walk straight up to them: Nero the famous artist, perhaps you’ve heard of me? Happened to have a lot of black and yellow paint spare. Maybe you want a portrait. You know the stuff.’

  ‘They will kill you or enslave you,’ Parops said firmly.

  ‘You were going to kill me too, at one stage. I’m good at not being killed. I’ve done it all my life,’ Nero said. ‘I owe Stenwold, and he would want to know.’

  Parops shook his head but found he did not have the strength to argue. ‘So what is your suggestion for us? Is it as mad as that one?’

  ‘Madder,’ Nero said, giving the first smile anyone there had seen for a long time. In a low voice he explained his plan, and men around them began raising their heads as Parops’s mind put out the information.

  ‘We cannot do that. It would be—’

  ‘Suicide?’

  ‘Worse. We’d be slaves. My people would never agree to it,’ Parops stated.

  ‘Wouldn’t they? There’s an Empire coming this way, with armies to spare, and you’ve got seven-hundred-odd highly trained Ant warriors. So who would turn you away?’

  Parops just stared at him.

  ‘Will you at least think about it?’ Nero pressed.

  There was a moment when Parops did not even see him, when he was concentrating simply on the interchange of ideas flashing between his men, their rapid, silent debate of the concept, of Nero’s plan.

  ‘We will attempt it,’ said Parops finally. ‘What do we have to lose?’

  Twenty-Three

  He swam in those dark reaches, those vast abyssal reaches that no light had ever touched. No stars there were, and no lamps. There was only the void and the rushing of the wind, or the sucking of the current that sought to draw him downwards.

  He had fought free of those depths once already, and now he had no strength for any second struggle. There were monsters in those depths, trawling for ever through the vacant dark with their jaws agape. To fall between the needles of their teeth meant oblivion and surrender.

  Not death, because all was death here.

  In Collegium it had been the fashion, while he had been resident there, to paint death as a grey-skinned, balding Beetle man in plain robes, perhaps with a doctor’s bag but more often an artificer’s toolstrip and apron, like the man who came in, at the close of the day, to put out the lamps and still the workings of the machines.

  Amongst his own people, death was a swift insect, gleaming black, its wings a blur – too fast to be outrun and too agile to be avoided, the unplumbed void in which he swam was but the depth of a single facet of its darkly jewelled eyes.

  Amongst his own people they drew up short poems for a death, and carved its wings into the sides of tombs and cenotaphs, with head down and abdomen tapering towards the sky as it stooped towards its prey. They would paint death’s likeness as a shadow in the background, always in the upper right quarter of the scroll, when depicting some hero’s or great man’s last hours. In plays an actor, clad all in grey, would take the stage bearing a black-lacquered likeness of the insect, which he would make swoop or hover until the time came for it to alight.

  He himself could not fly, for his wings would not spark to life. The void hung heavy on him and it clawed at him, howling for him. He swam and struggled and fought, because a second’s stillness would see him whisked back to the monsters and the pit. He fought, but knew not why he fought. He had no memories, no thoughts, nothing but this haggard, desperate fight.

  And there seemed, for the faintest moment, something hard and distant there in the void, some great presence diminished almost to a star-speck by its separation from him: an insect, but not the death insect. Four glittering wings and eyes that saw everything, all at once: the source of his Art and his tribe; the archetype of his people. He was a spirit lost and that creature was his destination – where he would rejoin the past and be with his ancestors.

  And he struck out for it, knowing only that it was right to do so. But it was so far and the void still dragged at him, and that tiny gnat-speck of light was receding and receding.

  And then gone.

  And with that spark dead, he finally gave up. The fight left him and he swam no more but let the wind catch him and draw him down into darkness.

  But there was a light again. Above him there was a light, and it was swelling and growing. A soft light, that was at once pure white and many colours. A light like bright sunlight reflected on a pale wall, and for that reason as he saw it he recalled the sun. He had forgotten that such a thing existed, but now the thought of that once familiar sun surrounded and filled him, and he swam again. He caught the cruel current off-guard and slipped from its grasp. He swam and swam, up towards that lambent ceiling, towards that great spread of light that held back the void.

  And he raised his hand to touch it, and his fingers broke the surface.

  And he opened his eyes.

  For a long time he just stared, trying to make the shapes he saw conform. He was looking upwards and it seemed bright to him but not as bright as it might. The oil lamp in the corner of his vision was burning clearly, not drowned in sunlight. He saw a ceiling, a real ceiling, but it sloped madly away from him.

  He wanted to ask what he was doing there, but he could not grasp why he should be anywhere.

  Who was he, again? Surely someone had mentioned it.

  He reached back, and found his fingers stained with the murk of the void. Was that all? Had he been conceived in that no-place, and vomited forth into this? No, there must be more than that. He felt the weight of the memories penned there inside, and reached for them again.

  One by one they fell back into his skull.

  He was a child learning his letters, the elderly Grasshopper-kinden woman making their shapes in the earth with her stick, and he copying on his tablet.

  He was at the court of the Felipes, competing in footraces and in the air, learning sword and bow, flirting with the middle daughter of the family. He had gained a reputation already.

  News had come of the war. He waited with the two Felipe boys who were his closest companions. The oldest was in his armour. He was going to the front, by choice. None of it seemed real.

  The ghost of his father, just the husk of a voice speaking in a darkened room, invisible save for perhaps a wisp of cobwebby substance above the head of the ancient Mantis mystic who was calling the shade forth. It had been so long since he saw the man.

  He had been sent to Collegium to study and learn, but he had gone there to escape. The war, the misery, the very thought of that gold and black blot spreading like poison across the map.

  The memories began to come more quickly now.

  He was duelling with a Spider-kinden girl with fair hair and a sharp tongue, and he beat her because he had been fighting since he was eight, but he knew she was the better—

  He was lying awake beside the sleeping daughter of a rich merchant, listening to her father’s key turn unexpectedly in the lock—

  He was seeing the march of the athletes before the Games with the imperial banner raised high at the rear—

  He was watching the great grey bulk of the Sky Without, trying to work out why it didn’t j
ust fall—

  He was leaping from a flying machine to fight the Wasps, and someone nearly putting a crossbow bolt between his shoulder blades by mistake—

  He was running through Helleron after a betrayal, trying to keep hold of a Beetle girl with dyed white hair—

  Faster and faster the memories came. He was shaking. They poured into him like acid.

  More betrayal – he was fighting Wasp soldiers, while her cousin looked on—

  He was taken. He was chained—

  Her – and she danced for them, for the slaves and the slavers – and they were all free in that moment—

  He was breaking free from the cell – the faces of his friends—

  His name—

  He was Salme Dien, Prince Minor of the Dragonfly Commonweal, but in the Lowlands they called him Salma, because they were all barbarians and could not speak properly.

  But the memories were not done with him.

  He was coming to Tark with Skrill and Totho, all their names suddenly coming to him at last.

  He was making fierce love to Basila in the close and almost windowless room of the tower.

  The bloody devastation of the siege, and he was duelling with a Wasp officer while the city burned and the wall fell.

  He was attacking the Wasp camp. He was grappling with a Wasp soldier. The blade went into his stomach, all the way up to the hilt.

  All the way up to the hilt.

  And the pain of it came back to him, and he relived that moment, the searing, burning agony, and the knowledge, the sure knowledge that it had killed him. All the way up to the hilt, and the point emerging through his back. His own blade driving into the man, almost as an afterthought because, what did it matter when his world had stopped? The pain of it flooded through him, and he gasped and arched back, and then he really was living it again because the wound across his belly tore open stitch after stitch, and he screamed—

  And the void rushed up for him again, the void that had only been waiting in the shadows all this time. The hungry void reached out for him.

  Someone plunged their hands into his wound and for a second the pain, which could never get worse, was much, much worse.

  And then it was gone. There was something searing and burning through him, but it was distant, like thunder over far hills. And there was light.

  He opened his eyes again, but it was still too bright after so long in darkness. He could not look at it.

  The same hands were held to his wound, their warmth leaching into him, and he felt – it could be nothing else – the edges of the wound knit again, the blood cease to spill across his skin, and he felt the ruptured organs find peace and start to heal once more.

  It was Ancestor Art, but he had never known anything like it before. He forced his eyes open, forced them to stare into the heart of the sun.

  He thought he had gone blind, but it was just the sight of her. She stood over him like stained glass and crystal and glowed with her own pure light, and stared into his face with featureless, unreadable white eyes.

  He was weeping, but he did not know it, looking up into the face of the woman who had once been Grief in Chains, and then Aagen’s Joy, and so many others in her time.

  After they had lain together, they slept awhile. Partway through the night, she had woken and made to go, and Totho had caught her arm and held her there. For a moment he did not speak and she waited patiently, sitting on the edge of the folding bed they had given him in exchange for his straw mattress: the two artificers in darkness, the halfbreed and the Bee.

  He had known, when she had come to him, that it was wrong, but she had been so forthright, so open. No wiles, no subtlety, merely an artificer’s practical seduction. Kaszaat, in stained coveralls, with smears of oil still on her hands, unbuckling her toolstrip belt in this partitioned space of tent they had given him.

  And no woman before had ever offered herself to him. Seeing her there, inexplicably there, he had cursed his memories. He had cursed Cheerwell Maker for running off with Achaeos, and then he reached out for what he could have.

  Now, too dark for him to see her deep brown skin, the curves of her body that was lean and compact with the workaday strength of her trade, he asked her, ‘Did Drephos make you do this?’

  ‘I am no slave,’ she said. ‘Drephos does not make me.’

  ‘But you are a soldier. You have a rank. He is your . . . superior, or whatever it is you would say.’ He did not hold his breath against her answer. He had no illusions.

  ‘He made a suggestion,’ she said after a pause, ‘but that was not the first time the thought came to me. When one placed above you asks of you something, to go to a man you are interested in already, it is by command? Or it is of free will?’ She made to leave again but he held her still.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, and then, ‘Please.’ She settled again, and then he felt her hand brush its way up his arm, trace his shoulder and then rest against his cheek.

  He wanted to ask Why? but he could not disentangle his motive for the question. Self-pity – or was he seeking a compliment? The latter was another thing his life had been mostly empty of. Totho the halfbreed! Who would have thought it would take capture and imprisonment to bring this fulfilment to him?

  He had not realized, until he grappled with her, that he was no longer the awkward, slightly gangling boy he had been at the College. He had not noticed how he had filled out, broad across the shoulders and strong. His Ant blood had made him strong, just as his Beetle-kinden side had allowed him to endure. Kaszaat had seemed small within his arms.

  She settled down beside him again and he felt the warmth of her back pressing into his chest and belly. It struck him, and the thought surprised him, that she must feel even more alone than he did. Her city was so far, she had said, and she did not expect she would see it again. She must have been alone now for a long time, with only Wasps and Drephos for company. Perhaps in coming to him she was reaching out for the only contact that might not be a betrayal.

  And if Totho accepted Drephos’s hand, that proffered gauntlet, would this become a betrayal for her, as if he was no more than a Wasp in truth?

  He put an arm about her, his breath catching as it brushed beneath her breasts.

  ‘Once woken, I cannot sleep,’ she informed him, although she mumbled it sleepily enough. ‘You must talk to me, amuse me.’

  So he talked to her. He told her of Collegium, and the Great College. He told her of the workshops there, and the Masters in their white robes. He spoke of the Prowess Forum, and he even spoke of Stenwold Maker, Tynisa and the Mantis Weaponsmaster, Tisamon. Of Cheerwell Maker he spoke not one word.

  She left him before dawn, dressing herself in darkness. She explained that she had duties to attend to but he suspected that she did not want their liaison to be common knowledge. She feared the Wasps, more than anything, and she did not want them to think that she was free for the taking.

  He dressed himself as the sun rose, in his artificer’s leathers, only hesitating as he began to buckle on the toolstrip that Drephos had returned to him. He was no artificer here, not yet. He was a prisoner of the Empire. If he emerged from this tent with his tools ready for use, would that suggest he had committed himself to the betrayal they were urging on him?

  For it would be a betrayal of the cruellest kind. They were asking him to design weapons, as had been his dream throughout College. At Collegium his creations would have been graded and discarded. Anything made for the Wasps would be used.

  They would be used on his own people.

  But they would be used.

  Something visceral rose up in him, thrilling at the very thought of the work: to undertake the work for the sake of the work, and never ask who it might be for.

  When he did emerge there was a messenger waiting. It was strange to see Fly-kinden running errands just as they did back home. Amidst the Wasp army there was a whole cadre of them buzzing backwards and forwards wearing the gold and black of the imperial standard.
>
  ‘A message for you from the Colonel-Auxillian.’ The Fly was very young, perhaps only fifteen or so. ‘He’d like to see you in his tent.’

  A chill went through Totho as he thought, Perhaps he will force a choice from me now, and if I refuse, as I must, surely I must, then I will be a prisoner indeed, and they will extract from me everything I know about the Lowlands and Collegium.

  He went nonetheless, because he had no choice and no options.

  He found Drephos lying back on the very chair that Totho himself had been secured to, when he first regained consciousness after the raid. It was a complex thing, that chair, and now it moved smoothly, the panels of the back pushing in and out with metal fingers, steam venting from the sides. Drephos had explained earlier how he suffered from particular back pains, so had been forced to devise his own relief. His first love remained the artifice of war but he was not slow in attending to his own comforts.

  Kaszaat waited at the rear of the tent but did not meet Totho’s gaze.

  Drephos opened one eye, and made a signal to the Fly, who darted outside again. The chair made a particularly complex sound and he groaned.

  ‘Bear with me,’ he said. ‘I am particularly out of sorts this morning.’

  The man was not well, and indeed was not entirely whole. He limped when he walked and the arm he kept hidden behind metal must be injured in some way. Totho wondered which of his own inventions had turned on him, or whether this had been the work of his imperial masters.

  ‘You have a visitor,’ Drephos announced, although Totho could barely hear him over the chair and he had to repeat himself.

  ‘A visitor?’ Totho looked blank.

  Drephos signalled to Kaszaat, who stepped over to the chair and drew the pressure from the boiler, sending steam venting out in hot clouds that forced Totho to stand well back. From that swiftly dispersing mist, Drephos finally emerged, pulling his hood up to shadow his blemished features.

  ‘But look, here he is now.’ The master artificer pointed, and Totho followed his finger to see a small figure being hustled in by a pair of Wasp soldiers. It was a Fly-kinden man, bald and lumpy-faced.