Dragonfly Falling (3 page)

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.’

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 the 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.

Parops was of unusual
character for an Ant, especially an officer. His friendship with Nero had begun
on rocky ground when the universal grapevine had informed him that the woman
picked out as his mate was sitting nude before the Fly’s easel, and he was a
joke across the city before he had stormed across to remonstrate. Ant pairings
were a strange business, though, made for the convenience of the city and the
furtherance of children, and they lacked the personal investment, the
jealousies and passions, of other kinden. In truth, after their coupling was
achieved, the two of them had grown bored of one another. Nero had been one of
a line of diversions she had taken up.

And of course Parops had
been expected to kill the Fly on the spot, both by his mate and the city at
large. Not from rage, for Ants were rarely given to it, but for the affront to
his racial, civic and personal dignity. Instead, he had passed most of the night
up on the roof by Nero’s side, looking out over the city and talking about
other places.

Parops was a wild
eccentric by Ant standards, which meant that he entertained unusual thoughts
occasionally. His natural intelligence had brought him just so far up the
ladder of rank and he knew that he would never receive further promotion. In
the opinion of his superiors he was not wholly sound. So here he was, a tower
commander on the walls of Tark, a position considered more bureaucratic than
military until now. Now he stood at the arrowslit window of his study and
looked down over the chequer-board of the Wasp army. The late sunlight played
on his bleached skin.

‘How are the
negotiations going?’ Nero enquired, for a Wasp embassy had been admitted to the
city earlier that day. While Parops was not privy to their debate, news of its
progress loomed large in the collective mind of the city, silently passed from
neighbour to neighbour in rippling waves of information.

‘Still keeping them
waiting,’ the Ant explained.

‘It’s their
prerogative,’ Nero allowed. ‘So what are they doing meanwhile?’

‘There are some
Spider-kinden slavers left in the city,’ Parops said, ‘and some of them have
Scorpion-kinden on their staff. It seems that the Scorpions and the Wasps go
way back, mostly in the same trade, so we have people paying the Scorpions for
their recollections. The Royal Court is busy putting the picture together.’

‘How seriously are they
taking it?’

‘There are thirty
thousand soldiers at our gates,’ Parops pointed out.

‘Yes, but you know how
politics goes. Everyone’s city is the greatest, and everyone’s soldiers are
invincible, at least until they get vinced.’

Parops nodded. ‘They’re
taking it seriously, plentifully seriously. They’ve gone to the tunnels and
spoken to the nest-queen herself, woken up the flying brood. They’re putting in
readiness every machine that can take to the air. Everyone who can pilot a
flier or handle artillery is getting marching orders, and it’s crossbows for
everyone else. It’s a flying enemy we face, and that much we understand. It’s
something new.’

And Ants did not like
new things, Nero reflected, but at least the complacency had gone. The ant nest
beneath the city, which produced domesticated insects that laboured for their
human namesakes, was a valuable resource. To utilize the winged males and
females as mounts of war would kill off an entire generation of them, a tragedy
of economics which meant they were only brought out in the worst of
emergencies. The Royal Court of Tark had finally conceded that this was nothing
less.

‘You’ve had some
dealings with these Wasps,’ Parops noted.

‘As few as I could but,
yes, a long time ago.’

‘Tell me about the other
kinden they have in their army. Have they formed an alliance against us?’

‘The Wasp Empire doesn’t
do alliances,’ Nero said with a harsh laugh. ‘Those are slaves.’

‘They arm their slaves?’
The Ants of Tark, as with Ant-kinden almost everywhere, kept slaves for the
menial work and would not dream of putting so much as a large knife in their
hands. It was not so much for fear of rebellion as pride in their own martial
skills.

‘It’s more complicated
than that. They deal in very large armies, and they swell their ranks with the
conquered – Auxillians, they call them. They enslave whole cities, you see.
Then they ship out fighters to some part of their Empire remote from their
homes, and set them to it. It’s as though here you got sent out to . . .
Collegium or Vek, or somewhere. I imagine sometimes it doesn’t work, but mostly
the men sent out there will have family back home and they’ll know that if they
run, or turn on their masters, then their kin will suffer. And so they fight.
They’ll either be skilled help, artificers and the like, or just bow-fodder,
first into the breach. It can’t be much of a prospect.’