Dragonfly Falling

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  A skilled archer, Drephos estimated, could make five or even six accurate shots within a minute, a novice perhaps two or three. Their use was easy to learn, and in Helleron they were even easy to make. There were factories working day and night now to produce the quantity Drephos wanted. As soon as they were manufactured and tested they were handed to the waiting soldiers that Malkan had detailed to Drephos’ project. It took barely a day of constant practice for them to be smoothly loading and shooting as though they were born to it. The snapbow was a weapon for the common man, just as the crossbow had been, which had thrown off the shackles of old mystery centuries before.

  But all Totho could think about now was that armoured figure falling, some innocent Beetle man or woman who had caught the foreman’s ire. And then they had all been dropping, and the spears of the soldiers had stopped them fleeing, and in the end the last few had tried to rush towards the waiting line of artificers, giving Drephos his chance to see the damage of a point-blank shot.

  I did this. He, Totho, had brought this thing into the world. I have found my place here now. I have earned it.

  He clutched at his head. He felt as though that part of him he had always thought of as himself was dropping further and further away, slipping down some well or shaft, never to be seen again.

  He must flee. He must escape from Helleron.

  And do what? His own mocking voice in his head. And go where?

  I will find Che.

  Who is in the arms of her savage lover even now, and does not think of you.

  I don’t care. I love her.

  Fine way to show it, joining her enemies and sleeping with a Bee girl.

  His fingers knotted in his hair, unable to blot the thoughts out. I love Che! I always have!

  You cast-off. You sorry failure. All your life you have been nothing, despised and ignored. Now you have been offered something real: a place, a reason to live. Drephos understands you.

  He cannot. He doesn’t even know what love is.

  Of course he does. He loves with a passion you have never known. He loves his work. He loves progress. All the things you once professed.

  I am not like him.

  You are his heir in all things.

  He threshed on his bed, kicking at the blanket. The voice in his head was like a person there in the same room, calmly and patiently dismantling everything he had ever thought. It was all the worse because the thoughts came from nowhere save within him. This cold world that had opened up to him in Tark, when he had seen what war and artifice could really do, had become the world he must live in.

  I cannot go on, he insisted. The guilt will destroy me.

  Guilt? hissed the voice in his head. Do you not realize that you can let go of guilt now, and shame, and love? You have been clawing at them all this while, when there was a chance you would return to what you were, but you have taken the final step now. You can never be the man you used to be. Your hands have become true artificer’s hands, to build or destroy without conscience or remorse. You can let go of guilt, now, and relax. You are across the barrier of mere humanity and over the other side. It’s all meat now, expendable and replaceable meat.

  And Totho writhed and twisted, but had no answer to that.

  Thirty-One

  Master Graden had taken his own life.

  Stenwold sat in the War Council’s chamber with his head cradled in his hands and thought about that.

  They had put the sandbow, Graden’s much vaunted invention, up on the wall. The enemy crossbows had raked the battlements even then, and shafts had stuck into shields and sprung from stone, or punched screaming men and women off the edge of the wall. Kymon had been shouting for them to ready themselves for the strike. The tower engine had almost reached the height of the walls, with sixty Ant-kinden warriors waiting on its platform and more ascending from below. Another two towers were close by, the Ants hoping to swamp and then hold this section of the wall. Ant artillery was pounding at the wall emplacements which were returning shot, or scattering loads of scrap and broken stone into the Ant soldiers below.

  Graden had been so enthusiastic, running his apprentices ragged to get the sandbow into position, the great tube and its fan engine. Then he had told them to turn it on.

  The great engine had started, and the mountain of sand below the wall had begun to disappear. Once he had seen it work, Kymon had been shouting for those below to fetch more sand. Sand, grit, stones, anything.

  On the north wall the fighting had been fiercest, and the defenders had died in their droves to prevent the Ants keeping a foothold on the walls. It was guessed, because there were men in Collegium who were ready to count anything, that two of the city’s impromptu militia had died for every Ant casualty, quite the opposite of the normal balance of a siege.

  On the west wall, where Kymon commanded, the numbers had favoured the city much more. Master Graden had saved the lives of hundreds of his fellows. Those Ants that had gained the walls were shaken by what they had seen, and their legendary discipline bent and broke before the defenders. Stenwold himself had sent one man hurtling over the edge.

  In the retreat, when the Ants conceded the day, the sandbow had been destroyed by artillery fire before it could be brought down from the walls, its casing smashed by lead shot, and two of Graden’s apprentices had been killed.

  And, a day later, Graden had quietly mixed a solution of vitriolic aquilate and drunk the lot, and died quickly if not painlessly. It was not the deaths of his apprentices, however, that had driven him to it, but the sight of what he himself had wrought with his artificer’s mind and his own two hands.

  It was an image that would stay with Stenwold until his last days, as with so much he had seen lately. Nobody on the west wall would ever forget those Ant soldiers with the flesh pared from their bones, faces blasted into skulls in the instant that the sandbow loosed, or the armour and weapons ground into unbearable shiny perfection, the mechanisms of the siege tower whittled to uselessness, the entire host of organic and inorganic detritus that was all that was left after the arc of the sandbow passed across them.

  Graden had been shouting at them to turn it off, even as Ant crossbow bolts rattled on the stones near him, but Kymon had taken charge of it, and had it aimed at the next-nearest tower, and thus saved the wall.

  It was two days later: two days of desperate fighting on the wall-tops. The shutters over the gates were bent, holding, but never to open properly again. Artillery had cracked the north and west walls but they still stood. The Vekken flagship had almost razed the docklands, burning the wharves and the piers, the warehouses and the merchants’ offices. Collegium would never be the same again.

  Today they had come by air. Vekken orthopters flapping thunderously over the walls as their artillery started launching once again, dropping explosives on the men on the wall, masking the oncoming rush of the infantry. The aerial battle had been as bloody as any other. Stenwold had stood impotently and watched as the Ant fliers had duelled laboriously with Collegium’s own, that were more numerous and more varied. The Ant machines had flamethrowers and repeating ballistae, and of course they never lost track of their comrades in the confusion of the skies. The defenders had been joined by a swarm of aid from the city: Fly-kinden saboteurs, Joyless Greatly’s cadre of one-man orthopters, clumsy Beetle-kinden in leaden flight, Mantis warriors attacking the armoured machines with bows and spears. Because he was War Master now, Stenwold had forced himself to watch, and he had no excuse to turn his head when Fly-kinden men and women were turned into blazing torches by the Ant weapons, or when flying machines spiralled from the sky to explode in the streets of his city.

  It had made him ill. He had barely eaten these last days. He felt that he had brought this down on them, for all he knew that it would have happened anyway, whether Wasps or Vekken.

  Joyless Greatly was dead. He had died in the fighting that day, unseen and uncounted until a reckoning could be made later, just one more mote falling from the sky.
He had been a genius artificer and a pilot without equal, and the thought that he had died as he would have wished was no counterbalance to the loss that Collegium had suffered in his death. Joyless Greatly was dead, and Graden had killed himself, and Cabre the Fly artificer had died defending the last remaining harbour tower, even after she had so narrowly escaped from the other. Hundreds on hundreds of other people of Collegium had fallen in the air and on the walls or out over the sea.

  And now Stenwold sat with his head in his hands after the War Council had adjourned, and there was a long-faced Beetle youth waiting to see him.

  ‘What is it?’ he demanded at last, because this young man was another of the lives in his hands and he had no right to ignore him.

  ‘Master Maker – excuse me, War Master, you should see this. In fact, you have to.’

  Stenwold stood up, seeing that the youth was torn between emotions, unable to know what to think next. Stenwold had seen him before, but could not place him.

  ‘Take me, then,’ he said, and the young man darted off.

  ‘It’s Master Tseitus, War Master,’ the youth explained, and Stenwold placed him then: an apprentice of the Ant-kinden artificer.

  ‘What does he want?’ Stenwold asked.

  ‘He has . . . he . . . I’m sorry, Master Maker—’

  Stenwold stopped him. ‘Just tell me. It has been a long day. I have no time.’

  ‘He made me promise to say nothing, Master Maker,’ the youth blurted. ‘But now he’s gone and—’

  ‘Gone?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘Gone where?’

  ‘You have to come and see!’ And they were off again, and the youth was definitely heading for the blasted wastes of the docks.

  ‘He was desperate to do something,’ the youth explained. ‘The bombardment was all around here. So he took her out.’

  ‘Her? What? You mean the submersible?’

  ‘An hour ago, Master, only we didn’t know if there was enough air . . . enough range . . . We never had a chance to properly test her.’

  What he had to show Stenwold was an empty pool with access to the harbour. A lack of submersible.

  ‘What has he done?’ Stenwold asked, and the apprentice spread his hands miserably.

  It became apparent the next morning, when Stenwold was dragged from his bed by an excited messenger who pulled him all the way back to the charred docks.

  The Vekken flagship was sinking. It was sinking slowly, but by the dawn a full half of it was below the waves, despite all the pumps the Ants could lay on it. Supply ships and tugs were taking on men and material as fast as they could, but the vast vessel itself was foundering, slipping beneath the waves, heeling over well to one side so that the water was grasping at the closest of its great catapults that had wreaked so much damage across the harbourside of Collegium.

  Of Tseitus and his submersible there was no sign. Whether he simply had not had the stocks of air, or had been destroyed by the Ants, or whether he had become locked to the metal hull of his victim and gone with it to the bottom, it was impossible to say.

  Doctor Nicrephos was an old man, and very badly in fear for his life. He had listened for days now to the stories from the wall, about the patience and gradual Ant advance, the implacable faces of the Vekken, the diminishing resources of the city. He had lived in Collegium for twenty-five years. He knew no other home. For twenty of those years he had been the College’s least regarded master, clutching to the very periphery of academia, teaching the philosophy and theory of the Days of Lore to a handful of uninterested and uncomprehending students each year. Magic, in other words: something in which Collegium, as a whole, did not believe. There had always been calls to remove his class from the curriculum. It was an embarrassment, they said. There were always those Beetle scholars who believed that the past should stay buried, and that it was an insult to the intelligence of their people that a shabby old fraud like Doctor Nicrephos should be given his tiny room and his pittance stipend.

  And yet it had never happened. There was too much inertia in the College, and he still had a few friends who would speak up for him. He had clung on, year in, year out, in this nest he had made for himself, and expected to die in office and then never be replaced. For a man who did not love the company of his own kinden, that would have been enough. His business was the past. He had no care for posterity.

  And now it was all falling down. He would suffer the same fate as all the others if the Vekken breached the wall, either put to the sword or sold into slavery, and who would buy such a threadbare thing as he?

  But he could not take up arms and walk the wall. He was barely strong enough to fly and his eyes were weak save when the room was darkest. There was something he could do, however, or there might be something: to gather his pitiful philosophy with both hands and make a weapon of it, and brace himself for the inevitable disappointment. He had been a seer of Dorax once, but throughout his years of teaching it had been a rare thing to even attempt to pluck at the world’s weave. He feared that, after so long, true magic was beyond him.

  ‘Close the curtains,’ he said, and one of his students did so, drawing the patched blinds to cover the falling sun. He had four in his class now: one other Moth who had likewise found his home society unbearable, a cynical but gifted Spider girl, a dysfunctional Beetle youth who could never sit still, and a Fly who came every tenday but never seemed to learn anything. He would need them all now, for whatever faint help they could give.

  ‘We are going to embark on a ritual,’ he told them, when they were all seated on the floor of his room. Between the walls and his desk there was so little room that their knees were all touching in their circle. ‘This ritual is to attack the Vekken army in ways that the material and mundane defences of this city are incapable of. Precisely what effect we can manifest I am unsure but, as I have taught you, the power of magic stems from darkness, fear, uncertainty, ill luck. All those gaps between the lighted parts of the world.’

  ‘All things that can’t be tested,’ said the fidgeting Beetle youth. ‘That can’t be proved.’

  ‘That is so,’ Doctor Nicrephos agreed, ‘and very close to the heart of the mystery.’

  ‘Doctor, is this going to work? I mean, really?’ asked the Spider girl. She cared, he knew, more for her politics and her rumours than for her studies.

  ‘Yes, Doctor, because I was thinking about finding myself a sword and going onto the wall,’ the Fly added. ‘I don’t see we can do any good here.’

  ‘But that is the very attitude you must banish, if we are to do good,’ Nicrephos insisted. ‘Belief is what you require. If you go into this without belief then, yes, we will fail. You must open your minds to the possibility, allow room for that uncertainty.’

  That they looked doubtful was an understatement. With no other option, though, he pressed on. ‘Listen to me, close your eyes, all of you.’

  With poor grace, they did so.

  ‘I require your help, your thoughts, your strength in this. It is a great magic that I intend, that I could not manage on my own. I want you to bend your thoughts on the Vekken camps. Many of you must have seen them from the walls, or from the air. Think of all the Vekken soldiers, hundreds and hundreds of them, with their tents all in lines so very exact, and inside those tents their palettes laid out just so. Imagine them going to sleep there at night, all at the same time, like some great machine. But they are not machines. They are men and women as we are. They have minds, although those minds bleed into one another. I want you to imagine that mind as though you could see it, the mind of all the Ant-kinden there, like a great fog hanging about their camp.’

  He could see it himself, in his mind’s eye, a great shining jelly-like creature that squatted in and about all those orderly tents, the minds of all the Ant-kinden, touching and connecting.

  ‘We are going to insert something in that mind,’ he went on, after he had given them a good long chance to picture it. ‘We are going to put something dark in it. There are always area
s of the mind that are ready to accept darkness. These Ants love certainty and order, and so they must fear doubt and chaos. You must think of all the doubt and chaos that you can, imagine taking it from your own minds and placing it within that great lattice-mind of the Vekken. All your fears, all your worries, all your pains and guilt, you must dredge these up for me and project them into the mind of the Ants.’

  He stopped talking, feeling the pull of concentration build up between them. He was straining now, his heart knocking in his chest. It was so very long since he had done anything like this, and it was like trying to gather a great thing and push it up a steep slope. His students were little help, doubtful, embarrassed, reluctant to look at the darkness within themselves, and more than that, there was the great and overarching ceiling that was Collegium, city of progress and science, of merchants and scholars and artificers, and a hundred thousand people who did not believe.

  It was no good, he realized. He had not the strength to force his own will out of the city, let alone onto the Ants. He was too old and had been too long amongst these people.

  Now his one chance to aid in the defence of his home was faltering. His students were beginning to shuffle as the silence dragged.

  He called out, in his mind, If there is some power that hears me, please help me, for I have not the strength! I will promise what you ask, but help me, please!

  He heard one of them, the Spider girl, draw her breath in hurriedly, and then there was a sudden pain in his skull that made him arch his back and choke. It was cold, pure cold, reaching along his spine and prying its way into his eyes. He felt tears start and freeze on his cheeks. Something had grasped him with thorned hands that thrust into his mind.

  And, despite all this pain he heard the words in his mind, a monstrous, mournful chorus that said: What is this that calls? What is this that begs of us?

  I am Doctor Nicrephos of Collegium, he said desperately, because the pain and the pressure combined were on the point of stopping his heart. If you have strength then lend it to me, for my city is under threat and I would send my thoughts onto our enemy. Please, if you know any pity, lend me your strength!