Dragonfly Falling (34 page)

‘I find your words
favourable,’ she said, and extended her hand into the darkness. When he kissed
it, she felt his sharp teeth scratch her skin.

I
cannot believe this.

And yet her life had
always been bound, not to her own world-view, but that of her brother. If his
beliefs led him to the conclusion that she presented a threat, her life would
be cut short on the instant. If his beliefs were that she was better off alive,
then she would live another day, but only each day at a time.
So why should what I believe matter, in this? When has it ever
mattered?

After Uctebri was done
with her she had considered his madness very carefully, while she sat before
the glass and repaired her face. This was a whole gaping abyss of madness, like
nothing she had ever experienced. Like all the other madness that had so far
dominated her wretched life she had to understand it, though. She needed to
speak to someone, and that could be no Wasp-kinden. It was not merely a matter
of trust, but because her own people could not have advised her, in this. She
was beyond all maps.

There was only one name,
an old slave of her father’s, that she could call upon, so she did so.

He came almost
timorously to her room: a lean, grey-skinned man with a long-skulled bald head,
his cheeks lined and his head banded with pale, slightly shiny stripes. He
always wore such an attitude of melancholy, as though the woes of all the world
had come to him. When she was a child he used to make her laugh, when once she
had still laughed.

‘May I enter, madam?’ he
asked, his voice quavering. Seda could not suppress a smile at his hesitancy.

‘I sent for you,
Gjegevey,’ she acknowledged, ‘so please come in.’

Her prison was a grand
one. She had her own chambers decorated with whatever she could get, whatever
she could cajole and plead for. There were threadbare tapestries blocking off
the blank stone of the walls. She had some plants arranged before the narrow
window, in Spider-kinden fashion. Two couches faced one another across a ragged
rug of uncertain origin. She had two rooms, this one for receiving guests and,
through a doorway guarded only by a hanging cloth, her bedroom. This was the
extent of the Empire that Alvdan had left to his sister. His other siblings had
fared worse.

The old Woodlouse-kinden
stooped to enter her room. He was hunchbacked and inclined forwards, but still
he was perilously tall. She knew that his people hailed from the north of the
Empire, and that beyond the imperial borders there were said to be whole tribes
of them living in giant forests, amongst trees that decayed for ever and yet
never fell. She could not imagine there being any other of his kinden than him.
How could such stilting awkwardness produce warriors, farmers or anything but
vague philosophers?

‘You are reckoned a wise
man, Gjegevey,’ she told him. He waved the compliment off dismissively.

‘You are, mmn, kind to
say it, madam.’

‘You play the doddering
old man, Gjegevey, and yet you have been an adviser to emperors since my
father’s days in power. No slave could survive so, without wisdom.’

He smiled, thin-lipped,
never dispelling the eternal sadness that his grey face lent him. ‘But there
are fools and, mnah, fools, madam.’ He pursed his lips appreciatively as she
poured him a beaker of wine. ‘I know my place, and it is this: that when there
is an, mmn, idea in the mind of all my peers, my fellow advisers, that none
wish to say, then I speak it. It may then be, mmm, dismantled and matters proceeded
with. If I were to ever voice an opinion that none could destroy then no doubt
I would be, hrm, killed on the spot. It is a delicate path for a man to walk,
but if one’s balance is accomplished, then one may tread for many years upon
it.’

‘Many years,’ she
agreed, passing him the beaker. He sipped and nodded, and she asked, ‘How old
are you, old man?’

‘I stopped counting at
the age of, mnn, one hundred and four, madam.’ The wistful smile came back at
her wide-eyed expression. ‘We are a long-lived people – longer-lived, in any
event, than your own. And I am not young, even for my kinden.’

‘I want to ask you
something. I cannot think of anyone else who might even offer an opinion,’ Seda
told him, inviting him to sit with a gesture. He perched precariously upon the
couch across from her, still sipping at his wine. ‘A fair vintage this year,’
he murmured, but his eyes were watching her keenly from within their wrinkles.

‘On magic, Gjegevey,’
she said.

‘Mmn . . . Ah.’

‘An interesting
response. Most would declare, without prompting, that there was no such thing,
that it was a nonsense even to raise the matter.’

‘Is that what you wish
me to say, madam?’

‘If I had wished such an
opinion,’ she said, ‘I would not have called you over to speak to me. You are
an educated man, and you were educated by your own folk before you ever fell
into imperial hands. So tell me about magic.’

‘A curious matter,
madam,’ he said. ‘I find myself, mmn, reluctant—’

‘Tell me nothing you
would not wish repeated. But do not stay from telling me just because such a
revelation might not be believed,’ she directed. ‘Magic, Gjegevey?’

‘Ah, well, my own people
have uncommon views,’ he told her. ‘Most uncommon. I will, ahmn, share them
with you, but I would not expect you to share them – if you understand – with
me.’ At her impatient gesture he went on. ‘You did not know, I believe, that
many of my kinden are Apt. We study, hrm, mechanics and the physical principles
of the world, although in truth we build little, and that must be from wood in
the main, metal being hard to come by in our homeland.’

‘I did not know that,’
she admitted. ‘And so, I would guess, that you cannot help me.’

‘Ah,’ he said, pedantic
as a librarian. ‘Ah, but yet many of my kinden are
not
Apt and have no gift for machines, and yet follow, hrhm, other paths, the
physical principles of the world and so forth and so on, that some might call
magic. And so you see, we are in something of a unique position, my kinden. For
we are not surging forwards into the, ahm, progress of the world of artifice,
nor are we clinging grimly to the darkness of the Days of Lore. We are . . . in
balance, I suppose one might say. And these two halves of our culture, they are
not two halves at all, for each tries to share its insights with the other, and
just occasionally, ahemhem, some gifted man or woman of our kind can understand
the both. And so I can confirm to you, within the beliefs and the experiments
of my kinden at least, that magic is very real.’

‘So why do
we
not believe in it?’ she asked. ‘If it is so real, prove
it to me.’ Behind her challenging words, though, excitement was building.

‘Ah, but it is an
interesting thing, that these things can so seldom be proved. If I were to
perform some piece of, hrmf, magic for you, here in this room, you would claim
a thousand ways it could have been done. Indeed, those ways might be
exceedingly unlikely, but you would cling to them rather than accept the, mmn,
the chance that magic, the eternal inexplicable, might be the true agent, and
if you were strong enough in yourself, unafraid, unthreatened, here in your own
chambers, well perhaps there would be no magic worked at all. It is a
subjective force, you see, whereas the physical laws of the artificers are
objective. A gear-train will turn without faith, but magic may not. And so,
when your people demand, mmn, proof, there is none, but when you have forgotten
and dismissed it, then magic creeps back into the gaps where you do not look
for it.’

She had a hundred more
questions, a thousand, but she bit back on them. It would not do to trust this
man too much. ‘Tell me, though, Gjegevey,’ she said, thinking hard. She must
know no more than her brother would expect her to know, but her brother, if
Maxin’s spies reported this conversation, would expect her to ask about
Uctebri. ‘Are you aware that, as well as your magic, the Mosquito-kinden are
real?’

He regarded her for a
second solemnly and raised a hairless brow quizzically. ‘The Mosquito-kinden,
madam? You must think me very, hmm, credulous.’ And yet as he spoke he nodded
once, holding her eye.

So,
he believes us overheard, though not overseen.
‘So some myths are really
no more than myths,’ she said, feigning disappointment. She had heard that the
Spider-kinden had some Art by which they could spin strands of web from their
fingers, that they formed these into words and shapes of secret import, while
all the time talking about mundane things. She wished she had some similar
skill.

‘Alas so, madam,’
Gjegevey said. ‘However, let me alleviate your sorrow at this discovery. Shall
I, mmm, show you a little harmless magic?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You
can do this?’

‘I would not like to put
your hopes too high, and it is some long time since I attempted any such thing.
However . . .’ He looked down at his hands, grey and long-fingered, and clasped
them together, and when he pulled them apart . . . something came with them,
something stretching and twisting between his fingers, flashing and flaring
with colours.

It
is a trick
, she thought instantly.
Some chemical or
such.
It was pretty enough, for a piece of foolery, and the old man was
staring at her so very seriously. She opened her mouth to say something
properly polite, and his voice came to her, very clear, without his lips moving
or her ears hearing it, the words forming of their own accord in her mind.

The
Mosquito your brother keeps, I know of him. Do not trust him. He is very old
and wise.

She stared at his face,
mouth open. Something lurched inside her. She had the horrible feeling that, in
dealing with Uctebri the Sarcad, in coming to an agreement with him, she had
stepped slightly out of the world she knew, into a world where things like this
could happen.

He
is wise, madam, but he is powerful. What he seeks to do is for himself, and not
for your brother.
Gjegevey’s tired old eyes suddenly flashed, throwing
briefly into the air the cunning he kept hidden behind them.
And you, Your Highness, may yet find a way to benefit from it.
Only do not trust him. Do not trust him unless you have no other choice.

It was almost true that
you could never get a decent spy placed in an Ant city. Ants were fanatically
loyal or else they were outcasts with no civic standing. The best any spymaster
could do was place a few men in the foreigners’ quarter or suborn a few slaves.
Even the slaves of the Ants tended to acquire something of their masters’ civic
pride, though. It seemed incredible to Thalric but, after a generation or so,
those born into such captivity seemed to believe that a slave in their city was
better than a freeman elsewhere.

He had made good time
along the coast to Vek, paying a Collegium sailing master over the odds to
catch the wind night and day and thus get him there by the second dawn, so that
the rising sun glittered against the great grey seawall that sheltered Vek
Anchorage as he arrived. He saw the spidery shapes of trebuchets and ballistae
positioned upon it, while reports from the delegation had mentioned that there
were fire-projectors built into the wall itself.

Behind the sea-wall, his
boat was towed the length of the stone-lined canal until it reached the city
proper. Docked, and his transport paid for, Thalric made his way through the
subdued streets of the foreigners’ quarter, following the map he had memorized
a tenday earlier. The imperial delegation had made a favourable impression on
the Vekken Royal Court, he understood, and a two-storey building had been
cleared of a consortium of Beetle importers and assigned for their use. He saw
it ahead of him now, the typically spare Ant architecture of flat roof,
unadorned walls and small, defensible windows, with a pair of Wasp soldiers
standing guard outside. They crossed lances before him, but they could see his
race and thus it was just a formality.

‘Captain Thalric to see
Captain Daklan,’ he announced, and they let him through. His name would be
familiar, and on being relayed would be translated as
Major
Thalric of the Rekef.

Inside, they had slaves
offer him fruit and some brackish local wine. He barely had time to taste
either before they came for him.

Captain Daklan of the
army, who was also Major Daklan of the Rekef Outlander, was a short,
broad-shouldered man a few years Thalric’s junior. His dark hair was receding
and he had a lined face and a mobile mouth that made him look humorous and
easygoing, which was in fact anything but the case. He had entered with two
others, a taller Wasp in a uniform tunic who had a writing tablet crooked in
his arm, and a strange-looking woman. She must have been close to Thalric’s age,
and she was a halfbreed, her dark skin swirled in strange patterns of grey and
white like water-damaged cloth. The effect was disturbing and intriguing at
once.

‘Major Thalric,’ Daklan
said, giving him a cursory salute. ‘How is Collegium?’

‘Owed a beating,’
Thalric said, heartfelt. A slave came in with more wine, some bread and honey,
and he topped up his bowl again. ‘How do we stand
here
,
Major?’

‘Well enough. I’ve heard
of some of your own exploits, Thalric,’ Daklan said. ‘Helleron was a botch,
wasn’t it?’

Thalric frowned at him,
caught with a slice of bread halfway to his mouth. ‘Are you authorized to
question me about my past operations, Major Daklan?’

Daklan gave him a narrow
look. ‘Just interested. Word spreads.’

‘Then it is your job to
stop it doing so, not spread it further,’ Thalric said. ‘We have enough to
concern us here in Vek.’ His orders had put him at the head of this operation,
but Daklan was obviously an officer who chafed under anyone else’s control.
Thalric took a chair and sat down, taking his time to finish the bread,
smearing it thickly with honey, making Daklan wait. The scribe with the tablet
remained impassive but the woman looked very slightly amused at the deliberate
delay. Daklan meanwhile shuffled from one foot to the other.