Dragonfly Falling sota-2

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And they would be able to form up on command, he knew, each mind instantly finding its place amongst the others.

  ‘Can it hurt? His device?’ he shouted at Kymon over the noise.

  Kymon gave an angry shrug and then ran off down the line of his men, bellowing for them to stand ready, to raise their shields.

  ‘Get the cursed thing up here!’ Stenwold ordered Graden, and the artificer started gesturing down to where his apprentices were still waiting with his invention. It looked like nothing so much as a great snaking tube thrust through some kind of pumping engine.

  ‘What will it do?’ Stenwold asked. Another glance over the wall saw the Ants’ tower engines ratcheting up, unfolding and unfolding again in measured stages, with Ant soldiers thronging their platforms and more climbing after them. Crossbow quarrels started to rake the wall, springing back from shields and stone, or punching men and women from their feet and over the edge, down onto the roofs of the town.

  ‘It will blow sand in their faces!’ Graden said enthusiastically. ‘They won’t be able to see what they’re doing!’

  True enough, Stenwold saw that one end of the tube had a vast pile of sand by it. The other was being hauled onto the wall, with the great engine, the fan he supposed, hoisted precariously onto the walkway.

  The nearest tower was almost at the level of the wall-top as Graden’s apprentices wrestled the sandbow into place, and then the artificer called out for it to start. All around them the defenders of Collegium, militia, tradesmen, students and scholars, braced themselves for the coming assault.

  Twenty-Nine

  Parosyal had white beaches, a sand that gleamed as brightly in the sun as the sun itself. Nothing on the mainland could match it, nor any other isle along the coast. A hundred Beetle scholars had written theories to explain it.

  There was only one safe harbour at Parosyal, Tisamon had explained, and she had understood that by ‘safe’ he was not referring to anchorage or the elements.

  Parosyal was a mystery, and one that history had ignored: the sacred isle of the Mantis-kinden. The slow march of years had seen Collegium scholars baffled by it, Kessen fleets avoid it, and opportunistic smugglers or relic-hunters disappear there, never to be seen again.

  ‘Every one of my kinden seeks to come here, once at least in a lifetime,’ Tisamon explained, and she knew he was confirming that she, too, was his kinden. ‘They come from Felyal, from Etheryon and Nethyon. From across the sea, even. From the Commonweal.’

  ‘That’s a long haul,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘This is our heart.’

  ‘But why?’ she asked. ‘Surely not. gods?’ She knew that, long ago, some ancient peoples had tried to make sense of the world by giving faces to the lightning and the sea. Perhaps some savages still did, in lands beyond known maps, but in these days nobody halfway civilized held that they were subject to the will of squabbling and fickle divinities. Achaeos had told her that the Moth-kinden believed in spirits, but ones that could be commanded, not ones that must be obeyed. And then of course there were the avatars of the kinden, the philosophical concepts that were the source of the Ancestor Art, but they were just ideas, aids to concentration. Nobody thought that they actually existed somewhere.

  ‘An ancient and inviolate communion,’ whispered Tisamon, and a shiver went through her. It was not the words themselves, but because she heard quite clearly some other voice saying that exact phrase to him, when he was younger even than she, and as some previous boat was approaching this same harbour.

  She felt sand scrape at the boat’s shallow draft. The vessel’s master, an old Beetle-kinden, called for any to disembark that were intending to.

  She took up her single canvas bag, slung her swordbelt over her shoulder, and splashed down into thigh-deep water.

  The bay of Parosyal held a single fishing village that was huddled between the water and the treeline, facing south across the endless roll of the ocean as though it had turned its back on the Lowlands and the march of history. The houses were constructed of wood and reeds, and built on stilts to clear the high tides. The villagers were a strange mixture that Tynisa had not been expecting.

  There were only half a dozen Mantids there, and they seemed mostly old, their hair silvered, and with lines on their faces. The other villagers comprised a whole gamut of the Lowlands population: quite a few Beetles, including one in the robes of a College scholar, some Fly-kinden, a few Kessen Ants. There were a surprising number of Moths passing back and forth between the huts and the boats, or conferring in small groups.

  No Spider-kinden, though, she had expected that.

  She set foot now on the sand of the beach, shaking a little water from her bare feet, and she was aware that many of them were staring at her. Staring at her, especially, in company with Tisamon. Her blood was mixed, but her face was her mother’s. In fathering her, Tisamon had dealt his own race the worst blow, having committed the ultimate sin against their age-old grievances.

  But she had expected worse than she received. Looks, yes, and a few glares even, but nothing more. Tisamon was standing in the centre of the little village now, watching a pair of young Moths put a small dinghy out onto the water. He was waiting for something, she could see.

  Where is it all? she asked herself, because surely this collection of hovels could not be it. This was not what all the fuss was about. And then she looked past the huts towards the wall of green that was the forest that covered most of Parosyal and she knew that was it.

  Tisamon’s stance changed, just slightly, alerting her to the approach of an ageless, white-eyed Moth-kinden man. His blank gaze flicked to Tynisa, but her appearance drew no change of expression to his face.

  ‘Your approach is known,’ he said softly to Tisamon. ‘Your purpose also.’ He looked to her again. ‘It is not for me to judge, but. ’

  ‘The Isle will judge,’ Tisamon said firmly, but his glance at his daughter was suddenly undermined by uncertainty.

  ‘Indeed it will,’ said the Moth. ‘It always does. The Isle has never seen one such as her. We can none of us know what may be born, or what may die. even if she has made the proper preparations.’

  Tisamon’s look was to the dark between the trees. ‘It must be tonight. We have no time.’

  ‘Are you sure she is ready? She is very young.’

  ‘I was her age, when I came here to be judged.’

  The Moth shrugged. ‘The Isle will judge,’ he echoed, and then, ‘Tonight, as you wish.’

  *

  She had expected some grand ceremony: drums and torches and invocations. They had meanwhile taken up residence in one of the shacks, many of which seemed to be empty. Tisamon had set to sharpening his claw, over and over, and she knew it was because he was merely keeping his mind off what would happen.

  He could not tell her, she knew, for it was forbidden. Mantis-kinden seemed to live their lives in cages of air, held back at every turn by their own traditions. Tisamon had broken free from that cage once, but he would bend no more bars of it now, not here.

  He was worried about her, she realized. He had tested her as fiercely as he could, killed her a hundred times in practice duel, measured her skill and her will to fight against his own. He believed in her, but she was his daughter and he worried. She, in her turn, could not ask him for reassurance, could not even speak to him lest he hear her voice shake. That was pride, she realized, a refusal to bend to the common demands of being human. It was Mantis pride.

  Out there, in the village’s centre, they were brewing something in a small iron pot hung over a beach fire. The Moth that Tisamon had spoken to and an older Moth woman were talking to one another in soft voices. Are they casting spells? Is this magic? But Tynisa did not believe in magic, for all that it seemed to turn the wheels of Tisamon’s life. Che, poor credulous Che, believed in more magic than Tynisa could ever allow into her world.

  Tisamon looked up. The sky above the island had now graded into dusk, into darkness. Tynisa had
barely noticed.

  ‘It is time,’ the Mantis said. He looked her over, noting her rapier, her dagger, her arming jacket. He had told her to be ready for war.

  When the time came to drink, she baulked at first. Whatever they had boiled up over the beach fire was thick and rotten-smelling. They waited patiently. They would not force her. If she did not drink, she would fall at the first challenge.

  She took the warm clay cup from them, suppressing a revulsion that seemed more than rational, some deep abhorrence that she could not account for or place.

  As quick as she could, she drank it. The liquid was shockingly sweet, both cloying and choking, and she fought herself to swallow by sheer willpower. The reaction in her gut doubled her over and she reached for Tisamon for his support, but he was out of arm’s length already. You are on your own from here.

  Tynisa regained her balance, wiped her mouth. Her stomach twisted sourly, and the two Moth-kinden seemed to shift and blur in her vision.

  ‘What.?’ she began to ask, but they were already heading for the forest, so she stumbled after them, the ground suddenly unpredictable. Tisamon was still near, but too far to take strength from him. He did not even look at her.

  The forest verge loomed dark. The Moths had vanished, either into it or just away. She glanced once more at Tisamon, but he would give her no clues. When she stepped forward she felt the shadows as a physical barrier that she had to put her shoulder to and force aside.

  He was with her when she stepped between the trees. He was with her but, as she forged her way through the trees, he fell away and fell away, until she could not find him anywhere near her. There was motion, though, all around. In the darkness that her eyes could half-pierce, that motion showed her path to her. The rushing of others on either side kept her straight. She caught glimpses. They were Mantis-kinden, keeping pace with her, guiding her. They ran through the trees easily while she struggled to keep up. They were always overtaking her, passing on into the heart of the wood, whilst more were always rushing up from behind. She saw them in her mind: young, old, men, women, familiarly or strangely dressed, or naked and clad only in the shadows of the trees.

  Real? Or has their drug done this to me? She had no way of differentiating, for everything she saw looked real to her. Her normal judgement had been stripped from her.

  They were herding her. She ran and ran, deeper and deeper, and knowing herself led like a beast, or hunted like one. She could not be sure.

  And at last she was afraid.

  It had taken its time, that fear, stalked her all the way into the denseness of this forest, for which there had to be some other word. Jungle was that word, Tynisa realized, for this piece of another place and time that was hidden away on the island of Parosyal.

  It was dark now, and so dark between the trees, beneath the knotted and tangled canopy, that even her eyes could not penetrate it. She felt her way by touch as much as sight, and still went on, knowing only that she was being led.

  She had lost sight of the ones leading her, or they had gone ahead or gone out of her mind. She was alone, and yet she could sense they were still there. She was totally at their mercy, lost in this torturous place.

  When had the night grown so dark? She wondered if there was ever day in here. She had to force her way through the trees at times, through gaps a Fly would fight to negotiate, and at others there was a great cathedral of space about her, a cavern of twisted boughs and green air.

  This was no natural place, and surely no place for her. She knew now that this had been a dreadful mistake. On whose part? On Tisamon’s, for certain, and he had gone. She had lost sight of him.

  Because she was on her own now. He had told her as much. This she must do alone. He could not be there to hold her hand.

  Father!

  But what a man to have as a father — cold as ice, distant, bloody-handed. No, Stenwold was her father, in all but the blood. Stenwold the civilized, city-dwelling, scholar and philosopher. Stenwold the kind, the understanding. She had been raised in Collegium, studied in the white halls of the College itself. What madness had brought her here, into this maze of green and black?

  She stumbled down a dip, splashed through a stream, took a second to look about her, but it was still no use. She had the sense of things moving, urging her on, but nothing came clearly to her eyes.

  If she stopped now, she would be lost for ever. They would never find her bones.

  The madness that brought her here was one she carried with her. It was the madness that took her when she drew a blade in anger. A cold madness like her father’s. Because she loved it: not killing for its own sake but killing to prove her skill. Killing to prove her victory. Blood? She was steeped in it.

  With that same thought came the faintest glimpse of one of her escorts, a brief shadow between the trees, and she knew it was not human at all.

  She rushed forwards to keep pace, struggling up the steep bank that the stream had cut, hauling herself up by the hanging roots it had exposed.

  And she was there — and she saw the idol.

  An idol? There was no other word for it. A worm-eaten thing of wood, taller than she was by at least two feet, with two bent arms outstretched from it, a great cruciform monument so worn by time that no detail of it could be made out clearly. Even the trees had been cleared from around it, or perhaps they had never taken root there.

  This was it. She was at the heart of the Mantis dream, the centre of the island, the centre of the forest, of the kinden’s heartwood.

  She approached the looming thing slowly, stepping over the lumped ridges of roots, feeling movement in the trees all around. They were watching her, and waiting. What was she to do? What was she to make of this. thing?

  Close now, almost within arm’s reach. She had never believed in magic but something coursed from this crude and decaying image, some distant thunder beyond hearing, a tide that washed over her, lifting her and dragging at her.

  She put out a hand to it. Would it be sacrilege or reverence, to touch this thing? What light the revenant moon could give her was shy of it, but her eyes hoarded the pale radiance against the darkness and she drew her hand back sharply. The idol was crawling with decay and rot. Worms and centipedes coursed through its crumbling wooden flesh. Beetles swarmed at its base, and their fat white grubs, finger-long, put their heads into the night air and wove about, idiot-blind. It was festering with voracious life, perishing even as she watched it. She saw then where new wood had been added as the thing fell apart, making good and making good but never replacing the dark and rotten heart of the effigy, so that whatever was jointed in was simply further prey for the rot, over and over, decade after decade.

  And she saw that was the point, that the thing before her, a dead image, was also a living thing, a festering, fecund thing, life consuming death and death consuming life.

  She took her knife from her belt. She had seen gouges where the thing’s breast would be, if the angled spars that jutted from it were arms. This was the test, was it? She raised the blade.

  She felt the power, that invisible tide, as it rose to a peak about her. Above her thunder rumbled in a clear sky.

  And she stabbed down.

  She did not believe in magic, but lightning seared across the stars in the moment that her knife bit into the worm-eaten wood — and she saw the second idol, the glare of the lighting burned it on her eyes: the tall, thin upright, the two hooked arms.

  The flash had blinded her, but she sensed it move ever so slightly, swaying side to side, and she froze.

  Not an image, but the original. Even without sight, she saw it in her mind. That triangular head eight feet from the ground, vast eyes and razoring mandibles, and the arms, those spined and grasping arms. An insect larger than a horse, easily capable of snatching her in its forelimbs and crushing her dead, scissoring into her with its jaws. They killed humans, in the remote places where they still lived. They killed even people who came hunting them with bows and spears. E
veryone knew this.

  Was she supposed to kill it now? She blinked furiously, seeing only shapes, blurs, and she felt it move again, swaying slightly, fixing her with its vast, all-seeing eyes.

  And she stood still and waited, the knife useless in her hand.

  It was close. She could see the shifting motion as its arms flexed on either side of her. She was almost within its embrace.

  Sister.

  The voice came like a stab of pain in her skull.

  Sister.

  She could see enough now, the towering, swaying mantis before her. The voice seared through her, but she knew it was some latent Art awakening, just for this moment. The Speech — she had heard of this: Art little seen these days, but to command the creatures of one’s kinden was known. To hear their simple animal voices and to order them. but not this-

  Sister, you have come far.

  They were not human words. Some other intelligence was prying into her skull, forcing itself upon her, and her poor mind was forming the words as best it could.

  You have come to prove yourself.

  Had she? She had forgotten why she had come.

  Turn, sister, the voice speared into her mind, and she turned and saw him there.

  He was just a moving shape in the darkness, leading with the tip of a blade splashed pale silver by the moon. Her rapier had cleared its scabbard even as she saw him, and she felt the shock of contact, real as real, heard the scrape and clatter as the metal met.

  He drove her before him, lancing and slashing in dazzling, half-seen patterns, a shadow-shape that she could not pin down. Her body knew the dance, though, or at least her sword did. Even as she felt the rapier vibrate with her parries, it was as though she was feeling its history, all the swift patterns it had ever moved through, as though the fight she was engaged in was running along grooves worn deep by centuries of use.