Dragonfly Falling (36 page)

‘It’s magnificent, Tactician,’
Thalric confirmed. Beside him, Daklan nodded appreciatively and added, ‘We’re
looking forward to seeing the army in action.’

The old woman gave them
an unfriendly look. ‘It has not been decided that you will accompany the army,
though Vek thanks you for your assistance and your encouragement.’ Her name was
Akalia, and she made no secret of the fact that she looked down on Wasps and
indeed anyone else not Ant-kinden and native-born to Vek.

‘But, Tactician . . .’
Daklan said hastily, ‘we have our own superiors to satisfy. They will want to
know when Collegium has met its deserved fate.’

‘Do you doubt us?’
Akalia asked. ‘Only the armies of Sarn have kept us from crushing that pack of
scholars long ago. We have your assurance that your own armies will intervene
to ensure Sarn cannot freely aid its allies, so that should be enough for you.’

Daklan exchanged glances
with Thalric. A few paces away, Lieutenant Haroc was waiting with his tablet
poised to record anything of importance that might be said here. In Thalric’s
opinion Akalia was right, and there was no need for him to witness firsthand
the death of Collegium. Or perhaps it was just that he did not want to see the
waste of such a place in the necessary cause of fulfilling the Emperor’s
ambition. Daklan was keen to be present for the culmination of his work here in
Vek, though. He was keen for Thalric to see it too, no doubt as a help towards
his own commendation.

‘Tactician,’ Daklan
pressed again, ‘imagine yourself in our place. I have no doubt that this mighty
force can level the walls of Collegium within days, but if I were to present
myself to my superior officers and tell them that I had not seen the fact with
my own eyes, they would punish me for failing in my duty, and rightly so.’

Akalia considered this,
or rather, Thalric realized, she discussed it with other Ant officers across
the city. At last she nodded briefly. ‘Very well, your delegation shall
accompany us, and it will do your people good to see the Ants of Vek in
action.’

Thalric left them then,
realizing Daklan would stay to butter up the tactician a little more. It was
remarkable how susceptible these people were to the most shallow flattery. He
guessed it was because they were used only to absolute sincerity from their own
kind. Thalric found himself so easily bored by them, which was an ironic
thought. Perhaps he could only feel at ease around those as deceitful as
himself.

He came down the stairs
within the wall, emerging into its shadow. He was feeling depressed about what
must now happen, and he wished that there was some other way, for Collegium was
a hard-grown flower that would not flourish again once uprooted. If the Empire
could have won its surrender then the world would have been richer.

But he could see how
this was needed, for the hotbed of radical ideas in Collegium was just too
dangerous to allow to go unchecked.

‘Major.’ A hoarse
whisper. He looked about and saw Lorica lurking against the wall. The halfbreed
translator beckoned him over, and he went, cautiously.

‘What is it?’ he asked
her.

‘You’ve a reputation for
being good to your subordinates, Major?’

‘Only if they do as
they’re supposed to,’ Thalric told her. ‘Why? What do you want?’

Lorica smiled. ‘I want
to give you a warning, Major.’

Thalric felt a familiar
feeling rise within him.
What does this remind me of?
His mind returned to Myna, with Rekef orders setting him at the throat of his
own people. He felt faintly sick even at the thought. ‘Warn me about what?’ he
asked her.

‘Lieutenant Haroc,
Major.’

‘Haroc? What is there to
say about Haroc?’

Almost theatrically,
Lorica glanced about her and back up the stairs, making sure they were not
observed. ‘You should know, sir . . . it means nothing, I’m sure, but you
should know: he has been with Major Daklan a very long time, and he’s no
scribe. His writing is poor, he has others transcribe it instead. He comes from
a different branch of the service.’

‘What branch is that?’
Thalric asked.

‘Your guess, Major, but
I wouldn’t trust him.’ She was looking earnestly into his face. ‘I’m no fool,
Major, and I know that, when the Vekken campaign’s done, there’ll be no use for
me here. Daklan will soon cast me off. He might even throw me to the soldiers
here. They’d love to have a halfbreed woman to abuse. You can change that,
Major.’

‘Yes, I can,’ he agreed.
He looked at her, trying to see beyond the bloodline. She should not be
unattractive, he supposed, but the mixture of her heritage was stamped on every
feature, nothing quite as it should be. Still, it did not diminish her usefulness
nor, he now supposed, her loyalty.

‘I always have uses for
good agents, Lorica,’ he told her. ‘Stay true to me and you’ll be rewarded.’

Totho was well enough to
walk about the next day, but the Wasps kept a close eye on him. He gathered
that Drephos was busy with his Colonel-Auxillian duties, whatever they were.
The halfbreed artificer seemed to have carved out a strange niche for himself
within the imperial army. Totho could see in their faces that the Wasps looked
down on him, and yet they deferred to him, and it was not just patronizing.
They clearly feared him. Totho did not know yet whether that was fear of the
man’s own vengeance or what he could call down on them from the higher ranks.

Totho’s only real
contact had been with Drephos’s female assistant. Her name was Kaszaat, and she
came from the city of Szar, far to the north, near where the border of the
Commonweal had stretched before the Twelve-Year War redrew all the maps in the
Empire’s favour. She was Bee-kinden, he discovered.

‘Are you . . . Drephos’s
slave?’ he asked her, in truth having assumed it.

She gave him a cold
look. She was perhaps five years his senior and had not made up her mind about
him, whether he was a man or a boy, or to be spoken freely to. ‘I am not a
slave,’ she said sharply. ‘I am an artificer.’

‘I have not seen many
women here . . . I didn’t mean . . .’ He had seen precisely two other women
and, from the way they had been treated, realized they were being kept as
slaves and for one purpose only. ‘Does that mean you’re . . . part of their
army?’

‘There is no other way,’
she confirmed. ‘Drephos is colonel of the Auxillians and I am a sergeant. So I
can tell the common soldiers what to do.’

‘Does that work?’ he
asked, wide-eyed.

She was about to snap at
him again, but in the end she smiled a little, understanding his point.
‘Sometimes, but they do not like it. I am a woman, after all. And inferior of
race they claim. They would have the same problem with you, for you are
mixed-blooded. But you, too, shall have rank, and so they must obey you, in the
last.’

‘I . . .’ He hung his
head. ‘I cannot join up with Drephos. The Wasps are conquerors, tyrants . . .
They’re evil.’

‘No such thing,’ she
said briskly. ‘There is no good, no evil, only men who do this thing or that
thing. And the Wasps, yes, they do terrible things, things more terrible than
you will have ever witnessed. And they do this because they can. And yet anyone
else who could, they would do these same things. And so the Wasps are not
special, not evil. They are just the strongest. There will come a day when it
is no longer so, and then terrible things shall be done back to them, perhaps
by those they have conquered.’

‘Like your people?’ he
asked, and her eyes narrowed, all of a sudden.

‘Foolish words!’ she
told him, but her eyes warned:
dangerous words
.

He occupied a
sectioned-off area of a tent, with a straw mattress and a lamp. There were
soldiers beyond, always watching him. Totho might just possibly have crept out,
but then he would be right in the middle of a camp full of Wasps. If he tried
to escape they would kill him.

Salma would have tried,
of course, taking to the air the instant he was outside. He could have seen his
way in the dark and outpaced any Wasp airborne sent after him. And of course,
Salma was dead.

There was a hollow
sinking in Totho’s chest, each time he remembered that. He had let Salma die.
It had been his own idea to come out here, that idea the Ants had so naïvely
taken up. It was almost as though he had killed Salma with his own hands.

‘I cannot ever join with
the Empire,’ he replied at last, not emphatically but hopelessly. ‘I have lost
too much to them.’

Her hand moved so fast
he jerked back, expecting to be slapped, but instead she caught his left ear in
a pincer grip and dragged his head down to face her. He twisted with pain and
surprise, goggling at her foolishly.

‘You know nothing,’
Kaszaat hissed. ‘So your people, who are not even truly your people, may fall
to the Wasps. But they are no warriors. Most likely they will surrender, and be
spared. My people
fought
the Wasps, year to year,
for three years, through all our farms and forts and villages and to the gates
of our city of Szar. We are loyal. We would die for our Queen. My father, my
mother, uncles, aunts, all gave their lives. Flying into battle. Running into
battle. Crossbow, pike and axe. Fight and then fight again. Over and over the
Wasps stormed our walls. They must take Szar. It is the gateway to the
Commonweal. They did many things. They stood up our fallen on stakes and spears.
They poisoned our water. They butchered whole villages to make us surrender.
Then they won. Our Queen was stolen away. She is made to be a slave-wife, a
concubine to their Emperor. So we became them, and must take their orders and
be their soldiers. They rule Szar now, and kill anyone who even speaks against
them. They take our men for their armies, and spend our lives like water pissed
on dry sand. They cripple us with their taxes. They take everything we have,
everything we make or grow. We work in their factories. We make their weapons
and armour. We mend their machines. We fight and die for them in places like
this Tark, which we did not even know exists, and so many of us, so many of us
shall never see our families and the walls of our beloved city again.’ She was
staring into his eyes, from just inches away. He looked for tears but saw not
one.

‘And I work for Drephos,
because it is better than not. Because of all the masters in the Empire he is
best, because I am an artificer and he treats me as an artificer – not as a
woman, not as a slave. So do not tell me how
you
hurt so very badly, and cannot work for the Wasps. Because you know
nothing
, Totho of Collegium. You have no understanding.’

And she released him and
spun away, about to leave his little partitioned room then pausing at the door,
as if thinking better of it. She did not turn round, though, and he wondered
whether she had said more than she meant. He put a hand to his aching ear.

‘You’re right,’ he
admitted. ‘I suppose I’ve . . . Well, in Collegium even a halfbreed can train
as an artificer. I can’t imagine . . . however did Drephos manage it?’

‘He once escaped the
Empire, he told me once,’ she said, turning back to him. ‘To where, I do not
know, but when he had learned, he came back to them, because . . .’

‘Because where else
could he truly ply his trade?’ Totho realized.

A Fly-kinden messenger
put his head about the partition just then, muttering something to Kaszaat.

‘He has sent for you,’
she told Totho. ‘There is something he wishes you to see.’

She followed the Fly
outside, and Totho felt he had no option but to follow.

He had clearly lost all
track of time, for he had expected early morning and yet it was dusk already,
making him wonder how long he had slept, how many hours were missing.

He already felt a
traitor to himself and to his friends. They were treating him here like some
honoured guest, instead of Totho the halfbreed. He should have been put in
chains, as Che had been.

Or killed, as Salma had
been.

The Fly led them to a
roughly built gantry that made a tottering tower twenty feet, at least, in
height, but close to he saw the joints were solid, the structure thrown up
hurriedly but with a kind of stubborn care. He guessed then that it had been
Kaszaat’s people who had been put to work here. It was not the hands of
untrained soldiers that had constructed this.

‘Up there.’ Pointing,
the Fly lifted a little from the ground for emphasis, and craning back Totho
could see that there was someone robed and hooded standing at the gantry’s
narrow apex. Drephos, of course.

Kaszaat had already
begun climbing and Totho fell in behind her, letting his Art free to fix his
hands as he needed, so that he had no fear of falling. When he was most of the
way up there came a flash from far off, but he did not look up or remark on it,
concentrating instead on the climb itself until he had reached the top.

There was little room
for three of them there and he was uncomfortably aware that he was likely the
only one of them who could not fly. Drephos put a steadying hand on him, the
metal gauntlet heavy on his shoulder. The other bare hand was already pointing.

‘I brought you here to
witness some artifice in motion, Totho,’ Drephos explained. ‘So watch and
learn.’

Totho looked up and
found the Colonel-Auxillian was pointing towards the city of Tark.

It was now under attack
in seemingly the most sedate, detached way possible. High above the city the
slow and stately airships swam like ponderous fish. Parts of the city were
burning and, as he watched, something blossomed into fiery life above the
rooftops, falling like a flaming teardrop until it impacted amongst Tark’s
streets. He had foreseen this event himself, but never realized how accurate he
had been. Like spilling burning oil onto a map, he had said, and here was the
map aflame in front of his eyes. Another missile bloomed into vision in the dim
air between the zeppelins and the ground, lower this time, and he heard, like
the surf of a winter sea, the roar of it striking.