Dragonfly Falling sota-2 Read online

  Nero shrugged. Partly it was due to his friendship with Parops, of course, but there was another reason, and it was such a personal, trivial thing that he was ashamed to admit it. ‘I’ve never witnessed a war,’ he said. ‘I’ve put a few skirmishes under my belt, over the years, but never a war. Not really. I did a study once, the Battle of the Gears at the Collegium gates, you know, and shall we say critical reception was lukewarm. That’s because it was beyond my experience, and I couldn’t capture it. And so that’s my reason, as good as any other — and it’s a poor one, I know.’

  ‘You are quite mad,’ Parops told him.

  ‘Probably. However, my own kinden are very good at squeaking out at the last minute, and there are still a few grains of sands in the glass. You never know, perhaps I’ll reclaim my heritage after all.’

  ‘Don’t leave it too long,’ Parops warned, and then some fresh word came to him, invisible through the crowded air of the city. ‘They have taken the ambassadors in, at last,’ he announced.

  When Skrill came running back she was ducking low amidst the sprays of man-high sword-grass. Her progress involved a series of sudden dashes across less covered ground, moving with her long legs at a speed Salma knew he himself could not have matched. Then she would freeze into immobility, hunched under cover, an arrow already fitted to her bowstring. He and Totho were dug in together beneath one of the great knots of grass that arched over them with its narrow, sharp-edged fronds. They watched Skrill’s punctuated progress impatiently.

  Then she had flung herself to a halt beside them, bowling into them in a flurry of loose earth. She was a strange creature, halfbreed of Mynan Soldier Beetle and something else, and with no manners or education to recommend her, but she had led them flawlessly to within sight of the Wasp army as if she knew every inch of the terrain.

  ‘What did you see?’ Totho asked her.

  ‘Did you see her — or the Daughters?’ Salma interrupted.

  She gave him a wide-eyed, mocking look. ‘Did you perchance not notice those many thousand soldiers out there, Your Lordship? Wherever your glittery lady is, she ain’t paradin’ herself about their camp, now, is she? So no, I din’t happen to meet her and invite her over here for a pint and a chat.’ She shook her head, one hand coming up to tug at her pointed ears as though trying to make them longer. ‘I didn’t even get close to the camp because they got a thousand men on sentry duty, or that’s like it looked to me. A whole ring of them, and earthworks, palisade, even little lookie-outie towers. And the sky! Don’t even get me started. If you was thinkin’ about just swanning in with those wings of yours you best put that candle right out. They got men circlin’ and circlin’ like flies on a tenday-dead corpse. They plainly reckon the Ants’ll give ’em grief — and why not? I would, if I was runnin’ things at Tark Hall.’

  ‘Ants are too straight for that, aren’t they?’ Totho asked. ‘I thought they’d just line up and fight.’

  ‘Don’t believe it, Beetle-boy,’ she told him. ‘Ants’ll play the dirty tricks same as anyone. They do war, Beetlie, and war means day and night work. Nobody ever won a war just by fighting fair.’

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ Totho said, for the nicknames she used were starting to gall him. ‘I’m no more a Beetle than you are a. a whatever it is you are, or aren’t.’

  ‘Am I a Beetle? No. Is His Lordship a Beetle? No. Then you get to be Beetle-boy unless we can get a better Beetle than you,’ she told him without sympathy.

  ‘Will the pair of you be-’ Salma had started to hiss, and then the Wasps were in sight, skimming at just a man’s height and touching the tops of the sword-grass as they came. In that same moment they had clearly spotted the three spies.

  There were half a dozen of them, light airborne out merely on a scouting mission, but Wasps were a pugnacious lot and never ones to shirk a fight. Their leader shouted an order and two of them broke off, arrowing back towards their camp. The others sped towards Salma with swords drawn and palms outstretched to unleash their energy stings.

  Skrill shot one straight off, leaping up with her sudden speed and loosing an arrow that split the second oncomer’s eye. The Wasp flier recoiled in the air and then dropped from sight amidst the tall grass.

  Salma had no time to string his own bow. As the three remaining soldiers launched the golden lightning of their stings he let his wings take him straight upwards, his shortsword — stolen Wasp-make itself — clearing its scabbard.

  Skrill had already dashed to one side but Totho had no option but to cast himself to the ground and hope. He felt one sting lash across his pack as though he had been punched there by a strong man. Then he was up with a magazine slotted into his crossbow.

  One of the men had skimmed upwards in pursuit of Salma and it struck Totho how they seemed nimbler in the air than most Wasps, obviously hand-picked as scouts. He raised his bow and loosed.

  The man coming for him jinked aside and the bolt sped past him. Totho saw the man’s face split into a grin in the knowledge that there would be no reloading of such a cumbersome weapon as a crossbow in time. By then Totho was racking back the lever and shooting again and again, seeing surprise and dismay splash across those same features. The man dodged the second shot but not the third, nor the fourth or fifth, and he ploughed dead into the earth six feet away. They were a race of builders and artificers, the Wasps, but for all their numbers and ingenuity they were behind the Lowlands yet in craft.

  He heard a shout nearby and saw Skrill fighting furiously with another enemy, sword to sword. She was swift, her blade lunging and darting like a living thing, but her opponent was a professional, and the metal plates of his armour kept turning aside her blows. Totho knew he couldn’t risk a shot in their direction and drew his own blade, breaking cover to run to her aid.

  Above them Salma dived and spun in a deadly aerial ballet with his opponent. For them, distance was all: too close and they would foul each other, too far and the Wasp would have more chance to use his sting. Amidst their aerobatics their swords flashed rarely, each seeking a second’s opening to strike against side or back.

  Salma was Dragonfly-kinden, born to the air, and his race prided themselves on their grace and control while on the wing. The Wasp, for his part, was as fleet and nimble as his kind ever were, but there was a distance even so. Salma had abruptly cut away, seeming to falter in the air, allowing the Wasp to draw up to shoot at him. In that same moment Salma reversed his motion, wings powering him forwards. The man tried to angle down to face him head-on, sword sweeping in a broad parry, but Salma was through his guard on the instant, driving the blade between the Wasp’s ribs where his armour left off, and then using the pull of the man’s heavy descent to drag the steel from his corpse.

  He touched down, looking around for more enemies just in time to see Totho and Skrill finish off the last Wasp scout together.

  ‘Get your kit together!’ Skrill urged him. ‘There’ll be more!’

  Salma scooped up his satchel, seeing Totho shoulder the big canvas bag that held his tools and belongings. I travel very light these days, the Dragonfly thought wryly, but of course, being captured and stripped of your possessions would do that to a man. He had only what the Mynan resistance had been able to find for him.

  Skrill’s kitbag was already strapped on her back, a position it never left save when she was using it as a lumpy pillow. She pelted past him even as he and Totho were collecting their gear, and they ran after her, knowing it was vain to try to catch up.

  The Wasp armies had yet to invest the city of Tark in siege. But for us the war has already started.

  He remembered his talk with Aagen, the Wasp artificer whose information had originally sent him south to Tark — the same who had been given the Butterfly dancer named Grief in Chains and then released her with the name Aagen’s Joy. Salma had now killed another Wasp, his first since then. There had been no hesitation at the time. After all, the man had been trying to kill him.

  And yes, the Wasp had been
another human being with all a man’s hopes and aspirations, and now snuffed out by eighteen inches of steel. But also, there had been enough Dragonfly dead during the Twelve-Year War to make the numbers now massed outside Tark pale into insignificance. Amongst them, his own father and three cousins, including his favourite, Felipe Daless. Not just kinden but kin: blood that called out for a levelling of the scales; three principalities of the Dragonfly Commonweal that groaned under the boot of the Empire.

  He hardened his heart. There would be more blood spilled before the end of this, and some of it could easily be his own.

  Skrill had stopped ahead, waiting for them. Totho blundered up to her.

  ‘And how did they find us?’ he demanded.

  ‘Scouts, Beetle-boy. What do you think they were doing?’

  ‘They followed you.’

  ‘You take them words back, or we’re lookin’ to have a disagreement right here,’ she said hotly. ‘Nobody asked you to link with us.’

  Totho swallowed whatever words he had been going to utter and, after a moment’s thought, said, ‘Well it’s just as well I did, or you’d have been spitted right back there. What do you think of that?’

  ‘Will the pair of you be quiet?’ Salma grumbled without much hope.

  ‘I was playing with him,’ Skrill said. ‘I was-’ Suddenly she fell silent, turning away from Totho with her hand plucking an arrow from her quiver.

  ‘Put the bow down! Put the swords down! Put the crossbow down!’ barked a voice from somewhere within the grass. There was an uncertain pause, and then a bolt spat out of a nearby thicket, ploughing the earth at Totho’s feet. Even as they watched men began emerging in a crescent formation in front of them, swathed in cloaks of woven grass and reeds, but all with crossbows levelled. For a moment Salma thought it was the Wasps that had them, but they were Ants — Tarkesh Ants — with their pale faces smeared with dirt and green dye. Beneath the cloaks they wore armour of boiled leather and darkened metal.

  ‘Weapons down!’ shouted their leader. ‘Or I shoot the lad with the crossbow. This is your last chance.’

  Totho dropped the bow quickly enough, and his sword as well. Salma did the same, trying to gauge his chances of taking to the air. He counted ten Ants in all, and they would be in each other’s minds. The least wrong move and they all would see it. Salma did not rate his chances of dodging so many bolts.

  Skrill gave a hiss of annoyance and placed her bow on the ground, replacing the arrow in her quiver.

  ‘What in blazes have we here?’ the Ant officer asked, aloud for their benefit. ‘A bag of halfbreeds, it would seem.’

  Salma could only guess at the silent thoughts going meanwhile between him and his men.

  ‘We’re not with that army out there,’ he said hastily. ‘In fact, we’re from Collegium.’

  ‘I can’t see a crew like yours fitting in anywhere outside a freakshow,’ the Ant officer replied levelly. ‘But what you are right now, lad, is prisoners. You come along with me, and anyone who does any tricks gets a bolt up the arse, and no mistake. There’re folk in the city just waiting to speak to folk like you.’

  ‘We’re not your enemies,’ Salma tried again. He tried a smile, but the officer was having none of it.

  ‘You might be all sorts, lad, but I think you’re spies looking to get inside the city. Looks like you got your wish too, doesn’t it, although not in the way you might prefer.’

  Three

  The Prowess Forum had never seen the like. This was no formal event, no meeting of teams from the duelling league, and yet the backsides of the onlookers were packed all the way up the stone steps that rose in tiers at every wall. The aficionados of the duel were crammed in shoulder to shoulder, from College masters through the ranks of students and professional bladesmen to the children who followed their favourites with the fanatical loyalty of Ants to their city.

  The fighters stood ready in the circle, which had been scuffed by a hundred hundred feet in the past. Neither participant was new to it. They had faced each other before, and there was nothing the crowd liked better than a rematch of champions. The Master of Ceremonies, the old Ant-kinden Kymon of Kes, had tried to start the duel three times, but the crowd was refusing to quieten down for him.

  To one side stood the acknowledged champion of the Prowess Forum. He was Mantis-kinden, as the very best of the best always were. They were born with blade-skill in their blood: it was the Ancestor Art of their nation. They came to the College sporadically, one or two in every year. When they fought they inevitably claimed the prize, and then mostly they left. Piraeus of Nethyon had stayed on, however, preferring the life of a champion of Collegium to anything his homeland might offer. He made his living in private duel and by hiring out his skills to any duelling house so desperate for victory as to show the bad form of buying in a champion. Nor had he been short of offers this last year, for winning had ousted taking part as the fashionable thing. Now many magnates of Collegium kept duelling teams to further their prestige.

  But the crowd were here to see more than a haughty Mantis-kinden win yet another bout. Enough of them had gathered there to see his opponent. The less charitable said that they wanted to see her before some stroke dealt by Piraeus ruined her, for he was a misogynist at the best of times, and this match. The Mantis-kinden saved their utmost barbs of loathing for one target. Why they hated the Spider-kinden quite so much was lost in time, but they did, and they never forgot a grievance.

  Like most Spider-kinden, she was beautiful. She was also unusual in that she was a daughter of Collegium, not some arrogant foreigner. The name on the lips of the crowd as she entered was ‘Tynisa’. Properly she was Tynisa Maker, but she was so obviously none of the old man’s blood that just the one name sufficed.

  Piraeus was tall and lean, his face chiselled with distaste. The bruises he had given Tynisa when they had last met had healed, and it was obvious he was ready to gift her with another set. She was shorter than he and slighter, an eyecatching young woman with her fair hair bound into a looped braid and her green eyes dancing.

  There was something in the way she stood that told the best of them this was going to be a new kind of contest. She did not stand like a Prowess duellist or like a Spider-kinden. In her time away from the city she had learned something new.

  She had learned who she was and what blood ran in her veins, but only Tynisa and two spectators there knew it.

  Kymon called for silence once more, striking the two practice swords together in a dull clatter of bronze-covered wood.

  ‘I shall not ask again!’ he bellowed. ‘Silence now, or this match shall not take place!’

  At long last the crowd quieted, under threat of its entertainment being removed. Kymon nodded heavily and passed the swords out. They were, in the hands of these fighters, graceless things. Those two were meant for swords more slender and crafted of true steel.

  ‘Salute the book!’ Kymon directed, and they turned to the great icon carved at one wall of the forum and raised their blades.

  ‘Clock!’ barked the Master of Ceremonies and stepped back hurriedly. Neither of them moved even as the ponderous hands of the mechanical timepiece ground into motion. For a long moment, to the hushed anticipation of the crowd, they merely faced each other. Tynisa studied Piraeus’s face and knew that, while she was seeing just what she had seen before, he could tell how she had changed.

  But he was proud, and he was a blur of motion as he now came for her, his ersatz blade swinging in tight arcs to trap her.

  She gave before him, barely parrying, making the fighting-circle her world, backing around it so the darts and sweeps of his sword clove empty air. She thought he might get angry, since she had seen him provoked before, but he retained his icy calm and his moves became tighter and tighter, and she was going to have to do something soon.

  In a sudden flurry she had taken his sword aside and in that instant she was on the offensive. She did not keep it long, but after that it was anybody’s. She
and Piraeus circled, stopped, circled back. The air between them rattled with the clash of their blades. The audience were on the edge of their seats but the two combatants had forgotten them. Their world had contracted to that duelling ring. The Prowess Forum with its clock and book had ceased altogether to exist for them.

  He never gave up pressing his attack, for he knew the natural order of things was for him to advance, his foe to give way before him. He tried and he tried to turn the fight back to that familiar territory. He had done it before when, not so very long ago, he had beaten her two strikes to none. Now she was holding him off, constantly turning his attacks into her own. Her guard was iron. He could not breach it, no more than she could break his.

  And the thought came to Tynisa, If these were live blades, I’d have killed him by now. Her own Mantis blood was rising in her and she saw Piraeus then as his own kind would. Look at this coward playing with children. He was all skill and poise, but the pride of his heritage had died within him.

  So let’s call it real. And she gave her blood full rein. The orderly, calculated exchange of the Prowess Forum fell in pieces around them. She cut straight through, his blade passing inches from her face, and the point of hers rammed into his stomach.

  He doubled over, hit the ground shoulder-first, and it took all of her will’s work to hold back a second strike that would have broken his neck in lieu of opening his throat. She stepped back carefully with the slight, sad thought that she could not return to this place. Her skills, once made here, had been reforged in blood, in the outside world. The reflexes and instincts honed between life and death were not tame beasts for her to teach tricks to.

  Piraeus was slowly getting up, trying to catch his breath. She waited for him, motionless, and amongst the crowd not a word, not a fidget.

  He lunged at her, as swift a move as they had yet seen, and it would have caught her if she had been a mere duellist. She had moved before her eyes had registered his strike, the point of his sword missing by inches. She struck him a numbing rap to the elbow that sent the blade tumbling from his hand.