Dragonfly Falling sota-2

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Tisamon nodded, conceding that point. For a moment the two of them watched Tynisa catching her opponent’s blade in hers and twisting it from his hand. The Mantis-kinden watching her wore expressions of loathing, but still they watched.

  ‘She can never be one of us. She can never be more than abomination,’ the Loquae reiterated. ‘Still, you have given her our skill, and she cannot be denied the badge.’ She sighed. ‘So, Tisamon, what do you want? I know you have not come here solely to flaunt your halfbreed daughter.’

  ‘I wish to speak to the elders,’ Tisamon said. ‘All of them. It is possible they will never hear a more important word spoken.’

  They gathered in the hall that was the only building there built even partly from stone aside from the smithy. Stones that had been laid in the Age of Lore centuries before rose to four feet, and wood often replaced made a broad and sloping roof from there on up, so that, to be upright, all but the smallest had to stand along the central line. The Mantis-kinden spent much of their lives outdoors, beneath the trees, and they were not builders.

  Nine of the Felyal elders had gathered there that night, seven women and two men. This was not all of them, but all of those who could be reached in such short time. Several of them wore the badge of the Weaponsmasters. Tynisa was kept outside, hunched by the door to hear, but barred from the council itself. She had not been perfunctorily slain, and she understood that she had reached the limit of Mantis acceptance thereby.

  ‘I am come to speak with you of the Wasp Empire,’ Tisamon began. ‘You have heard of them, surely, these Wasp-kinden from the east?’

  ‘We have,’ said one of the elders, the youngest of the women there, though still a dozen years Tisamon’s senior.

  ‘You may also have heard then that they have attacked the Ant city of Tark,’ Tisamon said.

  ‘Tark is fallen, this we have heard too,’ said one of the men. ‘Those fleeing its destruction have passed our Hold. We have not heard more yet of Merro or Egel but it is possible that these too have fallen.’

  This news shook Tisamon. ‘Then matters are worse than I had feared. They will come here.’

  ‘They have already come here,’ said the Loquae, who was an elder in her own right. ‘They have sent men to speak with us and make their peace.’

  ‘You must not believe them,’ Tisamon told them. ‘They will tell you that they only wish harm to others, perhaps even to our enemies, to the Spiderlands even, but they lie. They wish to conquer all of the Lowlands. They do not recognize allies or peers, only enemies and slaves.’

  ‘You have a good grasp of their talk,’ said the Loquae. ‘At least the talk of their second emissary. The first was slain on entering the Felyal, by one of our huntsmen who had no time for diplomacy.’

  There was the slightest murmur of amusement at this. It was a Mantis joke, Tynisa realized, for what it was worth.

  ‘And the second?’ Tisamon asked.

  ‘He spoke the same words you just put into his mouth. He told us we were warriors and so were his people. He offered us respect, admired our blades. All the while, our seers were looking into his thoughts. He was thinking, “Savages, living in trees and hunting wild beasts. Savages, and ripe for conquest.” When he was here his eyes could never be still for trying to guess our numbers and our strength.’

  ‘You slew him,’ Tisamon said.

  ‘We let him return to his people. He could not tell our strength and what report he might give of it would merely weaken their understanding of us,’ said one of the other elders.

  Tisamon took a deep breath, feeling in this strained diplomacy that he understood Stenwold a little. ‘You must not fall into the same error that he did,’ he told the elders. ‘The Wasps are rash and foolish, and they understand little, but they are strong, and there are more of them than anyone here can know. I have been into their Empire. I have seen how they storm cities. They have armies comprising more soldiers than there are women, men and children in all of Felyal. If they come here with swords and their Art-fire, then we will slay hundreds of them, and tens of hundreds, but they will still send more. They will burn the forest and bring close their engines of war, their flying machines, their artificer’s weapons. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘We understand, Tisamon,’ said the Loquae. ‘You tell us nothing we have not thought for ourselves.’

  ‘And they will come here,’ Tisamon went on, yet the emotional response he had been expecting was not evident. ‘They can tolerate no land that has not felt the stamp of their heel. We hate the Spider-kinden for many ancient reasons, but amongst those causes we hate them because they seek to control, and because they live off the sweat of their slaves. The Wasps have a lust to conquer and rule that the Lowlands have never confronted before, and they hold more slaves, and more wretched ones, than any Spider Aristoi. And when they come here, despite all our skill and speed, they will sweep Felyal away as if it had never been. You must understand how we cannot ignore them. We must act.’

  ‘Must we so?’ said the oldest of the elders, a woman whose silver hair fell past her waist, and whose face was lined deeply as the very old of other kinden were, and not simply become taut and gaunt as most Mantis became with the years. ‘We know all of this already, Tisamon, and yet we ask ourselves if we should resist. For what would be the good? We cannot hold back time any longer. It has been five hundred years since the Days of Lore and the greatness of our race. We have dwindled and withered since, and become a pale ghost of the warriors we once were. Look at us now with unclouded eyes, and you will see a dying people.’ She paused and eyed him before continuing.

  ‘Where once we were sovereign and unchallenged, now we become adulterated with every generation. Our young men set sail not for sacred Parosyal but for the harbours of Kes to sell themselves as mercenaries. They turn their backs on their homes for the touted wonders of Collegium, the grimy wealth of Helleron. The Beetles cut wood at the edge of our forests and poison us with their gold, which buys those parts of us we cannot sell. Their peddlers visit our Holds and bewitch our young with their toys and their gauds, and they take their gold back from us again, without ever returning to us what we sold. We are become their shadows, become the savages that they take us for. Each generation is less than the last, until soon we shall be nothing but beggars sitting before their tables, bartering thousand-year skills for what crumbs they deign to give us. Faced with that, Tisamon, can you not see that a good clean death at the hands of warriors might be preferable. Let the Wasp-kinden destroy us, and finish the work that all the years have been doing. At least we can then die as the brave die.’

  Tisamon knelt before them with head bowed, and Tynisa, craning her head around the doorpost, thought he was defeated. She felt the weight of their words herself, and she did not even belong to these people. Tisamon had one shot left, though.

  ‘I shall take a boat east along the coast,’ he announced.

  ‘For what purpose?’ asked the Loquae.

  ‘To see their army, and discover whether it is at Merro or Egel, or elsewhere,’ he said. ‘To see, that is all.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘Then I shall return,’ he said. ‘I will have a plan, by then, a proposal. Will you hear it?’

  ‘We can do no less,’ she said, ‘though we shall likely do no more. I imagine you will do what you think is right.’ Her eyes narrowed at the thought of where Tisamon’s judgement had led him in the past.

  Thirty-Three

  They made camp that evening in a half-burned Wayhouse, which seemed to Salma like a physical mirror to his own thoughts of late. There were a dozen charred corpses within that they hauled out and burned properly outside. It seemed likely that the destruction was Wasp work, for the Way Brothers kept rest-houses all over the Lowlands, and they turned nobody away and maintained only peace within their walls. Many a bandit had used them as a place of refuge, so they were seldom robbed or attacked by thieves either. The Wasps obviously had no such traditions, and Salma
found it easy to imagine a scouting or foraging party descending on the place, killing, looting and then setting a half-hearted fire as they left. There was a Wasp army on the long road to Sarn, north of them, and Wasp soldiers were neither the most disciplined nor the most restrained.

  It had pushed him to a decision, and before dusk he had lit some torches, and then stood on Sfayot’s wagon to address his followers.

  They had gained well over four dozen since the defence of the village, so that Salma now had to pause before matching a name to a face for many of them. There were villagers that had actually followed after them, stout young men and women looking for something more than subsistence farming. Then there was the Fly-kinden engineer, and her whole extended family, who had fled Helleron before the Wasps seized it; the five Sarnesh crossbowmen who must have been deserters from some mercenary company; a lean old Spider-kinden archer and hunter who went on ahead each morning to stalk game; a Moth woman with a haunted face who had not given her name or said a single word to anyone since joining them.

  He glanced at Nero, who nodded encouragingly, though the Fly did not know what he was going to say.

  Salma was not entirely sure of that himself. What scared him was that they were now all listening, waiting for it. He looked from face to face: at the Fly gangers still clustered together, the escaped slaves, the bandits, their leader Phalmes with his arm about Sfayot’s eldest. The pair had slept together the night after the defence of the village, but Sfayot himself had not seemed to mind. ‘He’s strong that one, in lots of ways,’ the Roach-kinden had said of Phalmes. ‘She could do worse for a while.’

  ‘You’ve followed me this far,’ Salma began to address them. ‘I didn’t ask you to. I didn’t ask to be your guide or your leader, but here we are, all of us, and it seems to me we cannot go on like this. We cannot just drift aimlessly and finally end up beached somewhere not of our choosing. We need direction. Thus far you have looked to me for that. So from now, if you will let me, I will accept the mantle you have offered. I will offer you leadership, purpose and direction. Let me tell you what direction I would be taking you, though. Then you may not wish to continue with me, but we will see.’

  He left a pause there. How did this come about? He had no answer but, as he said, here they all were.

  ‘Sfayot,’ Salma indicated, and the Roach-kinden man nodded. ‘If we came across more of your family, you would want to help them wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ the Roach said. ‘No question.’

  ‘Of course,’ Salma echoed, ‘because they’re your family. We all understand that. So tell me. ’ He looked over at the Fly youths and singled one out. ‘Chefre, if we ran into more of your gang, you’d want to look after them, surely?’

  She nodded cautiously, saying nothing. They were close-mouthed, that lot.

  ‘You would,’ Salma confirmed, ‘because there are ties and obligations. That is what makes us who we are. And Phalmes, I have spoken to you. I feel I know you. You cannot escape who you are or where you come from. If we met a Mynan on the road, a man of your city, you would aid him. You would have done so even before you fell in with us. Can you deny it?’

  ‘I cannot, nor would I,’ Phalmes said clearly, though wondering where this was going.

  ‘Family,’ Salma stressed for them. ‘Family is family, whether it’s blood, or brotherhood, or citizenship, or even kinden. And we look after our family, and they look after us. I used to think that family was a Commonweal thing, and that only my kinden really understood it. But that was just because I did not understand what held the Lowlands together. Family.’

  He paused, bracing himself for the mental leap he would have to make.

  ‘We are all part of the largest family in the Lowlands, and it is a family that grows larger every day. It was never small, but it has never been as large as it is now. That family is the dispossessed, the victims, the cast aside, the ill-used. Look at us all, from different lands and different cities, different trades and races, and yet we are all family, and there are thousands of brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, children who are our family, and who now need our help. Our help against the men who would do this to them.’ His sweeping gesture took in the burned Wayhouse, the cremation pyre. ‘They are our enemies. Let us become theirs.’

  ‘Just what are you talking about?’ Phalmes demanded. ‘We can’t exactly take on a Wasp army!’

  ‘Can’t we?’ Salma said, and the certainty in his voice shook them. ‘We can attack their scouts, take their supplies, aid their victims. We can strip the land so they go hungry. We can nip at them and draw a tiny bead of blood, a hundred ways. We can force them to change their plans, because of us: divide their forces, hesitate, falter. Or that is what we shall do if you follow me. We can take the war to them, without ever meeting them on the battlefield.’

  Some of them were aghast at the idea, some were keen, most were simply bewildered. ‘I shall give you tonight to consider all I’ve said,’ he told them. ‘Anyone who wishes to find their own path is free to do so. Those who are still with me in the morning will have cast their lots in with me. In the Commonweal there are men called Mercers who ride the roads and keep them safe. Those who stay with me shall become my new Mercers.’

  And he turned from them and headed for the Wayhouse. The others had made their camp in and around the broken building, and those that wished to go could do so without feeling that he was watching them.

  Salma slept easily that night. He had met the burden of his responsibility, and his conscience was clear.

  When he awoke it seemed very quiet beyond the drape. He knew what that must mean. He rose and dressed slowly, then took up his staff. Finally, he pushed the drape aside with the point of the staff and went out into the stark dawn light.

  They were all there. Not one of them had gone. More, they had been joined by someone new.

  She was there, radiant with her own light even in the sunlight, glowing with rainbows, and gazing only at him. Grief in Chains and Aagen’s Joy — and who knew what other names she had gone by — had come for him.

  He could only imagine how it had seemed to Phalmes and the others, this vision striding in with the first rays of dawn — a sorceress, a mirage, and here for Salma only. It must have seemed like a sign for them, the final augur in his favour.

  As she approached him now, he felt blinded by her beauty. Her lightest touch on his arm thrilled him. ‘I’ve found you at last,’ she said.

  ‘How?’ he asked.

  ‘You came so far for me,’ she whispered. ‘How could I do any less for the one I love?’

  Food was arriving, in cartloads, in baskets, in handfuls. Men and women who had tilled their own land, or the land of those that had owned them, were heading out now daily to reap vacant fields. Children swarmed through abandoned orchards like locusts. Farmhouses were raided with the thoroughness of the truly hungry. When they found the hastily abandoned country seats of the rich in their isolated estates, they climbed the walls and broke down the gates, coming back with armfuls of expensive delicacies or coal for the fires. Traders and peddlers threshed and ground, while artisans built the clay ovens to make bread. Hunters came back dragging their kills or driving errant livestock.

  Nobody was eating well but nobody was starving, and Salma could have asked for no more.

  ‘So what’s your next move, lad?’ Nero asked him.

  ‘Our next move is to move, then to keep moving,’ Salma said. ‘Otherwise we’ll exhaust what’s around us. We’re still just scavenging, though on a greater scale. The bulk of these non-combatants need to find sanctuary, and Sarn or Collegium remain our best chances.’ He watched the woman Grief in Chains as she moved through the people. She spoke to few of them, barely even acknowledged them, but her shining presence changed them as she passed. Just looking at her brought a smile to Salma’s lips, and he knew it would remain the same however dark the times became.

  She called herself ‘Prized of Dragons’ now.

&nb
sp; ‘News has been short from westwards,’ Nero reminded him. ‘And that army north of us can only be heading for Sarn.’

  Salma nodded. ‘And yet what option do we have?’ He looked at his hands. It was something Stenwold did, when he had difficult decisions to make. ‘Sfayot! Phalmes! I need to speak to you!’ he called out.

  The Roach and the Mynan came over, and it was clear that both of them had been expecting something from him for a while.

  ‘We’re moving, tomorrow,’ Salma informed them. ‘Sfayot, you must take the needy onwards, at your own pace, gathering and foraging as you go.’

  ‘Of course,’ the Roach agreed.

  ‘If scouts from the Empire spot you, they’ll see no more than refugees on the move.’

  ‘And we can defend ourselves, if we have to,’ Sfayot added. ‘And I take it you two will be campaigning, yes?’

  ‘It’s about time we drew our swords,’ Phalmes agreed. ‘Where are we bound?’

  ‘I want to see what’s happening north of us. We’ll probe the Wasp army, see what we can learn, and what good we can do,’ Salma explained. ‘But information first, action later.’

  Phalmes nodded, his expression suggesting that he had no doubt about the latter. ‘And your girl?’

  Salma faltered for a moment. ‘I had thought she would stay with Sfayot.’

  ‘She can close wounds with her bare hands,’ Phalmes pointed out. ‘We’ve all seen it, and Butterfly-kinden Art is like nothing else. Besides, after all the ground she’s covered, do you think she’ll agree to stay behind?’

  ‘True,’ Salma realized, knowing that he had no right to hide her away while he put himself in danger.

  ‘As for you,’ Salma turned to Nero, ‘I have a special task.’

  ‘I’m one of your soldiers now, am I?’ the Fly asked.

  ‘As good as, yes,’ said Salma. ‘But I want you to go to Collegium.’

  Nero nodded slowly. ‘It’s been a while, but I can still find my way there.’