Dragonfly Falling (40 page)

‘Looks that way,’ Skrill
agreed, and then added, ‘Sorry,’ a little later.

‘Hammer and tongs, what
have I done?’ Stenwold whispered. He heard a sound at the door, the clink of
metal, and then Balkus opened it, peering in respectfully.

‘Master Maker?’ he
began.

‘A moment,’ Stenwold
told him, and the big Ant hovered in the doorway as he turned to Skrill again.
‘Where are you for now?’

‘Well, excuse me, Master
Maker, but I hear you got all kind of trouble coming down on you here. I’m for
home, which is a wasting long ways from here. This ain’t my fight. I’m sorry.’

‘I can ask no more of
you. I’ll see you’re paid, and supplied as well.’

She nodded, her narrow
face unhappy. ‘I liked your boys, Master Maker. Salma especially. He was quite
something. I’m sorry it looks like they’re gone.’

Stenwold said nothing,
and she stood up and slipped out past Balkus.

‘Are you . . . all
right?’ the Ant asked cautiously.

Stenwold shook his head
slowly. ‘Another two of my own sent to their deaths. Attacking the Wasp camp!
What were they thinking?’

‘They knew the risks,’
Balkus said philosophically. ‘I’m sure they knew what they were getting into.’

‘But they weren’t sent
there as soldiers. They were just . . .’

‘Spies,’ Balkus filled
in. ‘Better they went as soldiers. That’s why I’d never do spy work for Scuto,
only strong-arming and the like. Soldiers live rough and die clean, and if
they’re captured, there’s a respect between us men who live with the sword. If
they went like soldiers, on the attack, then that’s for the best, because spies
who get captured don’t get any mercy. Everyone hates spies.’

Stenwold shook his head.
He wished, fervently wished, that he had a friend left, that he could talk to.
Balkus was a loyal man, but blunt and simple of outlook, and Stenwold needed to
sit with an old friend, and drink and vent his woes. He had nobody though. Che
and Scuto were still north in Sarn. Tisamon, who he could have leant on, was
heading east and taking Tynisa with him. He was being left alone here, and the
weight of Collegium’s woes lay on his shoulders.

‘What did you want to
tell me?’ he asked finally. ‘You had a message.’

Balkus nodded. ‘Just a
little one,’ he said with a dour smile. ‘They’ve sighted the Vekken army. Some
of your village folk have come in telling of it. Everything’s about to spark
off around here.’

Greenwise Artector
shuffled nervously, finding his lips dry, and aware of a knotting in his
stomach. He had come out here in his very finest, his robes embroidered with
Spider silk and gold thread, with a jewelled gorget tucked up against his
lowest chin. Around him were a dozen others who had done their best to make a
good first impression. Some had armour on, either ornately ceremonial or
gleamingly functional steel. Many also wore ornamented swords at their belts.
They were no soldiers and nobody could mistake them for it. These were the
thirteen great Magnates of Helleron who made up its ruling council.

They had chosen for
their podium a raised dais in one of the better market places beyond the city
proper. It had seen its share of meat, whether the ham of poor actors or the
subdued tread of slaves. Now it bore a nobler burden. Twelve men and one woman,
none of them young and none of them slender. The wood had never groaned as much
when the slaves were herded across it.

Behind the dais stood
their retinues: a segregated rabble of guards and servants. Greenwise glanced
back at his own followers, noting in the front rank one in particular.

And they were coming
now. A change in the way his fellow magnates stood drew his attention to the
front again. Three men approached, a spokesman and two of those common soldiers
in their black-and-gold banded armour.

Behind them, off beyond
the final tents of the extended city and onto the farmland eastwards, there
were rather more than three, of course.

The man flanked by the
soldiers was surprisingly young, surely only in his late twenties. Greenwise
guessed at first he must be no more than a junior officer or a herald or some
such, but there was something in his bearing that gave the lie to that. He had
golden-red hair and a bright, open face full of edged smiles. No doubt he was
the very darling of the Wasp-kinden womenfolk.

‘Are we all assembled?’
he enquired, clapping his hands together. Although the city’s councillors were
raised above him he showed no sign of discomfort. By that demeanour he made it
seem that, rather than seeking an audience, he had driven them up there as a
wild beast might drive a man up a tree.

Greenwise glanced about
him, because there was no spokesman in Helleron’s council. All were equal and as
such none would trust the role to anyone else. One of his fellows was already
stepping forward, though, a corpulent and balding man called Scordrey.

‘Young man,’ Scordrey
said ponderously, ‘we are the Magnate Council of the great city of Helleron.
Kindly give us the honour of your name and explain the purpose of . . . that
presence.’ He waved a thick hand in the direction of the army to the east, as
though it could all be dismissed so easily.

‘My apologies,’ said the
young man, smiling up at them. ‘By the grace of His Imperial Majesty, I am
General Malkan of the Imperial Seventh Army, also known as the Winged Furies.’
He had an odd way of speaking, self-aware and grinningly apologetic, that
Greenwise saw instantly for a device. ‘I have come to you with a message and a
proposal from my master. A choice, if you will.’

‘Now, look here . . .
General, is it?’ Scordrey started, with the obvious intention of working
towards delivering an insult. Greenwise stepped in quickly. ‘We are disturbed,
General, that you appear to have brought a sizeable force to our gates,’ he
said. ‘You must know that we of Helleron are not drawn into the wars of
others.’

General Malkan’s smile
did not diminish. ‘Forgive me, Masters Magnate, but I am unfamiliar with your
local customs in that regard. You’ll find that we of the Empire tend to carry
our own customs with us wherever we go. And, to correct you on one small point,
we are not at your gates. You have no gates.’

‘Just what do you mean?’
Scordrey rumbled.

‘Shall I be plain,
gentlemen? I am a man of honour and fairness. I pride myself on it. I would not
dream of taking advantage of your good natures, just because I have been able
to bring twenty-five thousand armed men to within striking distance of your
homes without your taking up arms. I will, in the interests of equity, withdraw
my men eastwards just as far as they can march before nightfall. Tomorrow, of
course, we will return. I trust that will give you sufficient time to prepare
yourself for any unpleasantness that might then occur.’

‘This is unspeakable!’
Scordrey bellowed.

‘And yet I have spoken
it.’ Malkan’s smile was now painful to behold.

‘Unthinkable!’ echoed
another of the magnates. ‘We have no interest in your wars.’

‘We have always traded
with your Empire,’ added the only female member of the council. She was named
Halewright and she had made her fortune in the silk trade. The Spider-kinden
always paid better prices to women.

‘General!’ said
Greenwise, loud enough to quiet the rest momentarily. ‘You mentioned a choice?’

Malkan gave him a little
bow. He was practically dancing with his own cleverness, Greenwise saw sourly.
He was a general, he had said. Greenwise did not know whether, in the Empire,
that station could be attained by good family alone, or whether Malkan would
have genuinely earned that rank in his few years of service. He suspected the
latter, unfortunately.

‘The Emperor, His
Imperial Majesty Alvdan, second of that name, has no wish to force or coerce
the great and the good of Helleron,’ the general confirmed. ‘So he offers you
this ultimatum – my error, sirs, this
choice
. When
we return tomorrow you shall agree to make Helleron a city of the Empire; you
shall make its manufacturing facilities available for the demands of the
imperial war effort; you shall place its commercial affairs into the hands of
the Consortium of the Honest; you shall submit to imperial governance and an
imperial garrison. If all these things are agreed to, without conditions,
without the lawyerly quibbles that I am sure you are so fond of, then His
Imperial Majesty shall see no reason to disrupt further the everyday business
of this admirable city of yours. You magnates yourselves shall form the
advisory council to the imperial governor, and you shall be permitted entry
into the Consortium of the Honest along with such of your factors as you should
wish to so honour. You shall, in short, continue to hold the reins of this
city’s trade so long as you conform to the requests of the governor and the
Emperor.’

The magnates of Helleron
stared at him, quite aghast. Greenwise looked from face to face and saw that no
other one of them was going to say it.

‘We have heard no choice
as yet, General Malkan,’ he pointed out.

‘Did I forget the other
option? What a fool I am,’ Malkan said merrily. ‘If you wish, of course, you
are perfectly entitled to reject these demands and meet us with armed force. I
am sure this city can dredge up a fair number of mercenaries and malcontents at
short notice. If, however, I am met with a less than friendly reception
tomorrow then I have orders to take this city by force. It would make me
unhappy if that should come to pass. To assuage my unhappiness I should be
forced to ensure that every one of you that I see before me now would be taken
and executed in some suitably complex manner. Your families, your business
associates, your servants and employees would all then be seized by our slave
corps and sent to the most distant corners of the Empire to die in misery and
degradation. Before that I would have to see to it that your wives and
daughters, even your mothers if still alive, would suffer beneath the bodies of
my men, and that your sons were mutilated in the machines of my artificers. I
would destroy you so utterly that none would ever dare speak your names. I
would remove you from the face of the world, and reshape your city entirely to
my wish. Have I made myself clear concerning the precise options you must
choose between?’

Greenwise silently
watched the three Wasps leave.
Just three
, he
thought. There were a dozen men with crossbows in the retinues assembled behind
him. They could have stretched General Malkan headlong on the ground and his
bodyguards too, but nobody had any illusions about the consequences of that.

He looked around at his
own men, who were uncertain and unhappy, and beckoned to a Fly-kinden lad in
the fore. Around him the conversation, the inevitable murmur of conversation,
had started. He heard one man say, almost apologetically, how he had been
trading with the Empire, and they had always settled their accounts admirably.

‘A military presence
would mean that we would not need to worry about . . .’ started Scordrey, and
tailed off because they had never had to worry about anything, until General
Malkan and his twenty-five thousand.

‘The Consortium of the
Honest have always seemed sound merchantmen,’ said Halewright slowly.

‘We would be able to
expand our business into eastern markets much more easily,’ another added.

Greenwise turned to the
Fly-kinden, stooping to speak quietly to him. ‘Are you in any doubt,’ he said,
‘about the response of the Council of Helleron to that general tomorrow?’

The diminutive
Fly-kinden always seemed younger than they were, and this one looked barely
fourteen, but the world of cynicism in his voice surprised even Greenwise.
‘Master Artector, no, sir.’

Greenwise nodded. ‘Then
you must fly to Collegium, by whatever means you can, and tell the Assembler
Stenwold Maker that Helleron has fallen to the Empire, and without a single
blow being struck.’

‘I am gone, sir.’ The
Fly-kinden took wing instantly, hovered for a second, and then darted off
across the city. Nobody paid him any notice, and there were similar messengers
lifting from the ground all around to their masters’ orders.

And Greenwise Artector
turned his attention back to his peers, and to their slow and patient
rationalization of the decision they had already made. The decision he, too,
had made, for he was no hero, and he had his own lucrative business to
safeguard.

Parops’s mind, like his
city, was on fire. It was a clearing house for a thousand voices: his own
calling to his men, keeping them in order; the soldiers with him, relaying
their positions from every side; the watchers looking out for the next bomb to
fall from the distantly circling airships; the civilians fleeing their homes;
the civilians trapped in their homes and who could not escape. Tark was built
of stone, but when the bombs exploded overhead they deluged streets in fiery
rain that scorched in through shutters and doors, flooded the rooms beyond, and
burned and burned. The substance being used was stickier than oil and it clung
to walls, to armour and especially to flesh. It did not keep burning for long
but even water would not kill it.

Through this constant
cacophony the order came to him to fall back immediately. He knew that two
score of his soldiers were busy trying to free trapped civilians but he passed
the call on, leaden-hearted. Orders were reaching him directly from the Royal
Court now, the King’s own voice issued them. Even Parops, who thought further
and wider than most of his kin, would not dare ignore a royal command.

Fall
back to Fourteenth-Twenty-ninth!
he instructed his detachment, slinging
his shield up on his back. Just then another incendiary charge struck, only two
streets away, igniting at barely over roof level, and he felt its impact
amongst the men of Officer Juvian, heard the exclamations of fear and horror as
it consumed the officer himself and two dozen of his men, scorching the street
clean of them. Tears shone bright on Parops’s face, but he had his duty. As an
Ant-kinden of Tark, he would never shirk it.