Dragonfly Falling Read online

  ‘Yes, Your Imperial Majesty.’

  ‘Remind us of our response, General.’

  ‘You agreed with him, praised him for his philosophy and then had him put to death, Your Majesty,’ replied General Maxin levelly.

  ‘We praise you for your memory, General, so pray continue.’

  ‘An alternative disposition of your sister has been suggested to me, Your Imperial Majesty,’ Maxin said, picking his way carefully. ‘She cannot be married, obviously, and she is not fit for office, so perhaps she should find some peace of mind in some secular body. Some philosophical order, Majesty, with no political aspirations.’

  Alvdan closed his eyes, trying to picture his sister in the robes of the Mercy’s Daughters or some such pack of hags. ‘Your suggestion is noted, General, and we will consider it,’ was all he would say, but it appealed to his sense of humour. Yes, a nice peaceful life of contemplation. How better to drive his little sister out of her mind?

  When he was done, and his advisers had no more advice to give, the servants repeated their rigmarole, but this time in reverse. Once he had stood up, his advisers began to sidle out of the room, leaving only General Maxin, who seemed to be taking an unaccountably long time to adjust his swordbelt.

  ‘General, we sense by your subtlety that you wish to speak to us.’

  ‘Some small diversion, Your Imperial Majesty, if you wish it.’

  ‘The Rekef are becoming entertainers now, are they, General?’

  ‘There is a man, Majesty, who has fallen into the hands of my agents. He is a most remarkable and unusual man and I thought that Your Majesty might welcome the chance to meet this individual. He is a slave, of course, and worse than just a slave, not fit to serve any useful purpose. In private he is full of strange words, though. Your Imperial Majesty’s education might never have another chance such as this.’

  Alvdan at last looked at Maxin directly, seeing a slight smile on the stocky old soldier’s face. Maxin had not advised his father, the late Emperor, but he had been wielding a knife on the night after Alvdan’s coronation, making sure that the next morning would be free from sibling dissent or disunity. He was not one for jokes.

  ‘Well, General, we are intrigued. Take us to this man.’

  The flight had been like something out of a fever dream, nightmarish, and unheard-of.

  Thalric had come to Asta expecting to be punished. He had anticipated encountering the grim face of Colonel Latvoc or even the pinched features of General Reiner, his superiors within the Rekef, because he had failed the Empire. There had been a mission to seize the rail automotive that the city of Helleron had called the Pride, which was then to have provided the spearhead of an invasion to sack Collegium and have any dreams of Lowlands unity die stillborn. Instead, motley renegades under the command of Stenwold Maker had destroyed the Pride and even managed somehow to cast suspicion of that destruction on the Wasp-kinden who had so stalwartly tried to save it.

  A small setback for the Empire, which must take by force, now, what might have been won by stealth. A great setback indeed for Captain Thalric of the Imperial Army, otherwise Major Thalric of the Rekef Outlander.

  And yet there had been no court martial for him to face in the staging town of Asta. It seemed that the race for the Lowlands was now on, and even a flawed blade like Thalric could be put to good use. There had been sealed orders already awaiting him: Board the Cloudfarer. Further instructions to follow.

  And the Cloudfarer itself: it was a piece of madness, and no Wasp artificer had made her. Some maverick Auxillian technologist had come up with that design and inflicted it upon him.

  It had no hull, or at least very little of one. Instead there was a reinforced wooden base, and a scaffold of struts that composed a kind of empty cage. There was a clockwork engine aft, which two men wound by pedalling furiously, and somewhat stubby wings that bore twin propellers. Thalric had boarded along with a pilot-engineer and Lieutenant te Berro, Fly-kinden agent of the Rekef, who was to brief him. Then the Cloudfarer had lifted off, a fragile lattice of wood shuddering up and up through the air under the impelling force of her propellers. Up and up, rising in as tight a spiral as her pilot could drag her into, until they were sailing across the clouds indeed, and higher. Then the pilot let go the struts to either side, and the Cloudfarer’s vast grey wings fell open left and right, above and below, and caught the wind. The vessel that had seemed some apprentice’s mistake was abruptly speeding over the world beneath it, soaring on swift winds westwards until they were casting across the Lowlands as high, it almost seemed, as the stars themselves sailed.

  And it was so cold. Thalric was muffled in four cloaks and layers of woollens beneath, yet the chill air cut through it all, an invisible blade that lanced through the open structure of the Cloudfarer and put a rime of white frost on him, and painted his breath into white plumes before the wind whipped it away.

  They would reach Collegium faster than any messenger, eating up any lead that Stenwold had built, so that despite Thalric’s detour to Asta it was anyone’s guess who would arrive first. They were so high, up in the very icy roof of the sky, that no flying scout would spy them. Even telescopes might not pick out their silvery wings against the distant vault of the heavens.

  And as he suffered through this ordeal, from the cold and the wind, he hunched forward to catch te Berro’s fleeting words, for these were his instructions, his mission, and he would need to remember them.

  ‘You’re a lucky man,’ the Fly said, shouting over the gale. ‘Rekef can’t spare an operative of your experience simply for a disciplinary trial. Lowlands work to be done all over the place. You get a second chance. Don’t waste it.’ They had worked together before, Thalric and te Berro, and a measure of respect had grown between them.

  ‘We’ll put you down near Collegium,’ te Berro continued. ‘Make your own way in. Meet with your agents there. There can be no unity allowed for the Lowlands. There are two plans. The first is swifter than the second, but you are to enact both of them if possible. Even if the first succeeds, the second will also help the war effort.’

  And te Berro had explained to him then just what those plans were, and whilst the first was a commonplace enough piece of work, the second was a sharp one and the scale of it shook him a little.

  ‘It shall be done,’ he assured the Fly, as the Cloudfarer continued its swift, invisible passage over the Lowlands so far beneath them.

  *

  He walked into Collegium without mishap, entering at the slow time near noon when the city seemed to sleep a little. Collegium had white walls but the gates had stood open for twenty years, had only been closed even then because the Ants of Vek had harboured ambitions to annexe the Beetle city for themselves. There was a guard sitting by the gate, an old Beetle-kinden who was dozing a little himself. Collegium was not interested in keeping people out. If it had been, then he might not have needed to destroy it.

  Thalric had been granted a short enough time in the city when he was here last. Two days only and then he had been bundled onto a fixed-wing flier to go and catch Stenwold Maker on the airship Sky Without. At that thought he tried to discern where the airfield lay from here and see whether the great dirigible was moored there today, but the walls were too high, the buildings looming above him, for much of Collegium was three-storey, and the poorer districts were four or five. He knew that the Empire had much to learn here. The poor of Collegium cursed their lot and complained and envied, but they had never witnessed how the poor of Helleron lived, or the imperial poor, or the slaves of countless other cities.

  If we destroy Collegium, will we ever regain what is lost in the fires? Because it was not only a matter of writing down some secret taken from one of the countless books in the College library. This was a way of life, and it was a good thing to have and, like all good things, the Empire should have it. Imperial citizens should benefit from the knowledge of the men and women who had built this place.

  But the second plan that
te Berro had given him would kill all that, and he had his orders.

  The kernel of discontent that had been within him for a while now gave him a familiar kick, but he mastered it. If the Empire wanted things in such a way, the Empire would have it. He was loyal to the Empire.

  He stopped so suddenly in the street that a pair of men manhandling a trunk barged into him and swore at him before they passed on.

  What a heretical idea. Better keep that one hidden deep in one’s own thoughts. To even think that loyalty to the Empire, to the better future of the Empire, was not the same as loyalty to the Emperor’s edicts or to the Rekef’s plans, well, that sort of thinking would get a man on the interrogation table in a hurry. He had avoided a well-deserved reprimand for failing at Helleron and he wasn’t about to start playing host to that kind of thought now, that was just asking for trouble.

  But in the deepest recesses of his mind the idea turned over, and waited for another off-guard moment.

  There had been Rekef agents before him in Collegium, of course. Whilst the Inlander branch of the Empire’s secret service purged the disloyal at home, the Outlander had been seeding the cities of the Lowlands with spies and informants. Thalric had made contact with them when he was here last but their networks were four years old. Thalric sent Fly messengers across the city with innocuous letters into which codewords had been dropped like poison into wine. Those men and women the Rekef had infiltrated into this city had been making everyday lives for themselves. Now that was to end. He was calling them up.

  He met with them in a low sailors’ taverna near enough to the docks for them to hear the creak of rigging through the windows. It was a place where people would forget who it was that met with who, or what business might have been done there – and that was just as well, too. They made an ill-assorted quartet.

  The most senior was a lieutenant in the Rekef, and when Thalric had needed a pair of assassins to catch Stenwold Maker in his home he had gone to Lieutenant Graf, trueblood Wasp-kinden, who was working here as a procurer for the blades trade. That, in local parlance, meant that he made introductions between fighting men and prospective patrons, and it put Thalric’s operation here on a sound footing straight off. Graf was a lean man, his face marred by a ragged sword-scar from brow to chin that Thalric knew for a duelling mark from the man’s days in the Arms-Brethren. The eye traversed by that scar was a dark marble of glass.

  The other three were all unranked on the Rekef books, mere agents. Hofi was a Fly-kinden who cut the hair of the rich and shaved the mighty, and Arianna was a Spider and a student of the College. The fourth man, Scadran the halfbreed, worked as a dockhand, catching all the rumours going in and out from both ways down the coast. Wasp blood adulterated with Beetle and Ant, his heavy features displayed the worst of all three to Thalric’s eyes, but he was a big man, a brawler. That might be useful, in the end.

  He had them at a corner table, drawn far enough from the others that low voices would not carry. They had come in plain garb and armed and they looked at him expectantly. If he sent them out into the city to kill that very night, they would be ready.

  ‘Tell me about Stenwold Maker,’ he said.

  Lieutenant Graf glanced at the others and then spoke. ‘He arrived the day before you, sir. Quite a tail of followers, too.’

  ‘Was there a Mantis-kinden with them?’ Thalric asked. His mind returned abruptly to the night battle at the engine works at Helleron that had seen the Pride destroyed. There had been a Mantis there, making bloody work of every man who came against him – until Thalric had burned him. Tisamon, Scyla’s reports had named him, and his daughter had been Tynisa. Tynisa, who had very nearly done for Thalric when he came to finish the matter. In his heart he had hoped that the man had died from his wound, but Graf’s next words surprised him not at all.

  ‘Yes, sir, his name is Tisamon. I’ve learned he was a student at the College many years ago, at the same time as Maker. Even from back then, he had a reputation.’

  ‘And well deserved,’ Thalric confirmed. ‘What movements?’

  ‘Maker’s settling his men in. He’s applied to speak before the Assembly, but that’s likely to take a few days. He’s not exactly popular. A maverick, they think, and he leaves his College duties too often. They’ll stall him with bureaucracy for a while, maybe even a tenday, before they let him in. A slap on the wrist.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘Many of the others are now at the College,’ Arianna said. ‘Some are in the infirmary, in fact. They brought some wounded with them from Helleron. There’s a monstrous little wretch with them, though, some spiky kinden I’ve never seen before, and he’s been going about the factories a lot, the engine yards and the rail depot.’

  ‘That would be Scuto,’ Thalric explained, ‘Stenwold’s deputy from Helleron. He’s an artificer, I understand, so some of that might just be professional curiosity.’ Thalric remembered his one meeting with Stenwold Maker, a few brave words over a shared drink: two men in the same work on opposite sides, but common ground nonetheless; they were two soldiers who had suffered the same privations under different flags.

  And now I stalk him to his lair, and I must destroy him. Because I must believe he would do the same to me, I shall feel nothing.

  ‘I have your orders,’ he addressed the foursome. ‘We’ll need armed men, Lieutenant – and craft from the rest of you. Stenwold Maker is not long for this world.’

  Two

  To live in an Ant-kinden city was to understand silence, and he had spent time in a few. There was the silence of everyday tasks which meant that one heard only the slaves cluttering about, whispering to one another. There was the silence of the drilling field where there were marching feet and the clink of armour but never a raised voice or a shouted command: five hundred soldiers, perhaps, in perfect formation and perfect order. There was the silence after dark when families sat together with closed lips, while the slaves stayed huddled in their garrets or outbuildings.

  Then there was this silence, this new silence. It was the silence of a city full of people who knew that the enemy, in its thousands, was camped before their gate.

  Nero hurried through this silence bundled in his cloak. All around him the city of Tark was pacing along at its usual speed. At the sparse little stalls local merchants handed over goods wordlessly, receiving exactly the correct money in return. Children ran in the street or played martial games and only the youngest, eight years old or less, ever laughed or called out. Men and women stood in small groups on street corners and said nothing. There was an edge to them all and, in that unimaginable field extending between their minds, there was a single topic of unheard conversation.

  It was once different, of course, in the foreigners’ quarter where he was lodging. A tenday ago it had been a riotous bloom of colour, penned in by the Ant militia but shaped by countless hands into a hundred little homes away from home. Now there was a hush over that quarter as well because all but the most stubbornly entrenched residents had fled.

  And I should have gone with them.

  He had been in Tark a year, not long enough to put down roots, but at the same time perhaps the longest he had spent anywhere since Collegium.

  What keeps me here?

  Guilt, he decided. Guilt because he knew this day would come, when the gold and black horde would pour into the Lowlands, and he had done nothing. He had walked away, once the knives were out, and not looked back.

  He attracted little notice from the locals, for he was well known in this part of the city, which meant in any part, given that the local opinion of him could be passed mind to mind as easily as passing a bottle in a taverna. They looked down on him because he was a foreigner, and a Fly-kinden, and an itinerant artist. On the other hand he had friends here and he stayed out of trouble, and therefore he was tolerated. Not that staying out of trouble was an infallible recipe: three tendays before, a house had been robbed beyond the foreigners’ quarter. The militia, unable to track down th
e culprit, had simply hanged three foreigners at random. Visitors, they were saying, were there only on sufferance and were expected to police themselves.

  He was an ugly little man, quite bald and with a knuckly face: a heavy brow and broken nose combined with a pugnacious chin to make a profile as lumpy as a clenched fist. Fly-kinden were seldom the most pleasant race to look at, and his appearance was distinctly nasty. If he had been of any other kin he would have hulked and intimidated his way through life, but no amount of belligerent features could salvage him from being only four feet from his sandals to the top of his hairless head.

  His name was Nero and he had made a living for the last twenty years as an artist of such calibre that his name and his work could open select doors all across the Lowlands. In his own mind that was just a sideline. In a land where most people never saw much beyond their own city’s walls, unless for commercial purposes, he was a seasoned traveller. He rolled from city to city by whatever road his feet preferred, imposed on the hospitality of whoever would take him in, and did whatever he wanted.

  Which brought him back to the present, because he now wanted, if his continuing presence was anything to go by, to be involved in a siege and bloody war. He himself was unclear on this point, but so far he had not felt inclined to leave, and shortly he suspected that he would not be able to do so without being shot out of the sky by the Wasp light airborne.

  Ahead of him the city wall of Tark was a grand pale jigsaw puzzle of great stones, adorned with its murder holes, its crenellations, passages and engines of destruction. In its shadow the Ant-kinden were calm. This wall had withstood sieges before when their own kin of other cities had come to fight against them, just as Tarkesh armies had been repulsed by the walls of those kinfolk in Kes or Sarn.

  Nero knew that the army now outside was not composed of Ant-kinden, and would not fight like them. Whenever he had that thought, he had a terrible itching to be gone, and yet here he still was.