Dragonfly Falling (4 page)

Parops nodded again, and
Nero felt a shiver as he realized that his words would be at large in the city
now, darting from mind to mind, perhaps even reaching the Royal Court itself.

‘There are still some
foreigners leaving by the west gate,’ the Ant said carefully. ‘In fact there
are still foreigners coming
in
by the west gate –
mostly slavers hunting a late sale. It’s probably time you made your move.’

‘I’ll stay a little
while,’ Nero said casually.

‘I get the impression
that when these fellows draw sword they’re not going to care what kinden you
are, if you’re found inside the walls.’

‘More than likely true,’
Nero admitted.

Parops at last turned
from the window and his obsessive scrutiny of the near future.

‘Why are you here,
Nero?’ he asked. ‘Your race is hardly renowned for its staying power in the
fray. You run further to live longer, isn’t that it? So why haven’t you done
what any sensible human being would do, and run while you can?’

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.’

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.