Dragonfly Falling (47 page)

But today at the depot
had come a messenger from a different direction.

‘Sperra, she . . .’
Scuto took a deep breath and tried to stop his voice shaking. ‘She was at the
palace, so she heard it right there, when the Queen did. Helleron has fallen.’

Che gaped at him.
‘Helleron fallen?’

‘A Wasp army turned up
at their doorstep. Not even the ones fighting Tark, but a whole other army.
They’ve put the city under martial law and commandeered the foundries. Helleron
is now part of the Empire.’

‘Hammer and tongs,’
whispered Che. She glanced at Achaeos. His face was closed, expressionless, and
she knew he would be thinking of his own mountain city, Helleron’s close neighbour.

‘They knew,’ he said.
‘This is the information the Arcanum had received. This is the threat to our
people that has made them join us.’ He bared his teeth, abruptly feral. ‘We
warned them that the Wasps would come. An army on the wing, come to Tharn to
finish what your people started. The final end of the Days of Lore.’

‘That isn’t fair,’ Che
protested.

‘Nothing’s fair,’ he
said bitterly.

‘But your people,
they’re magicians. They can see the future. They must have seen some way out of
this.’

Achaeos would not meet
her eyes. ‘You have more faith in them than I do.’

Che embraced him, and he
let himself be clasped to her, laid his head on her shoulder. She looked over
at Scuto’s dull countenance.

‘What does it mean?’ she
asked him. ‘What now?’

‘It changes everything,’
Plius said from behind. He finally had his pipe lit and now did not know what
to do with it.

Scuto shook his head. ‘I
don’t know,’ he said miserably. ‘I don’t know what to think. None of you
understand. Helleron . . . filthy place. Corrupt, hypocritical. But it was
my city
. I was born in the Empire, you understand, and
never stayed two nights in the same place till I was ten. Helleron was the only
place that ever took me in. And I had to fight for elbow room even there. I had
to break heads and cut throats in my time. But it had a place for me that I
could carve out. Founder’s Mark, even when the Wasps razed my place and
scattered my people, I was always going to go
back
.’

‘My home too,’ Sperra
said quietly. ‘More than Merro ever was.’

‘It’s all falling
apart,’ Scuto whispered. ‘Collegium under siege, Tark falling. Helleron taken.
Where next? What happens now? Can we ever pull it back from the edge?’

The question hung in the
air. Nobody had any answers.

Salma awoke because it
was cold, the night cloudless above, and he fought to recall where he was, and
then realized that he did not know.

Where
is this place?
The gloom of the tent of the Mercy’s Daughters had become
the dark of night, the stars visible above him. He lay on sandy ground with
only a thin blanket.

Where
is she?
Grief in Chains, or Aagen’s Joy, or . . . no, it was coming to
him.

They had been moving
him. Night, again, and it must have been earlier this same night – or last
night, was it? But he had been taken from the Daughters’ huge tent.

She had been there. He
recalled her face, her eyes, radiant. Moth eyes knew no darkness, but hers
could stare straight into the sun. She had touched his hand as they took him
out. She had said . . . what had she said?

He could not recall it.
It was stripped from him along with his health and his strength. The bandages
were still tight about his chest, the line of the wound, that she had sealed
with her fingers, pulled tautly as he moved, now secured with compresses and
surgical silk.

He looked around. There
was a scrap of waxing moon up there, enough for his eyes, and there was a fire
nearby. They were in a hollow but the warmth was fast leaching out from it, so
the cold had sunk into his bones. He made an attempt to crawl closer to the fire,
and found he could do that, just. He was capable of it.

He saw Nero, curled up
like a child, and indeed looking very like a child bundled in his cloak. A bald
child, yes, and to be frank an ugly one, but even his belligerent features
attained a kind of innocence in sleep.

Beyond Nero’s sleeping
form there were two Wasp soldiers in armour. Salma felt his world drop away
from him, and he was instinctively groping for a sword that was not there. He
sat up, too fast, and hissed in pain, and they looked over at him. One was
young, perhaps even younger than he was. The other was greying, forty at least
in age, a peer for Stenwold.

‘Easy there,’ the
younger one said. ‘How much do you remember?’

‘Who are you?’ Salma
demanded, although he knew he could make no demands that he could enforce.

‘My name is Adran,’ said
the younger of the soldiers. ‘This is Kalder.’

‘Lieutenant Kalder,’ the
older man rumbled in a particularly deep voice. ‘We’re still in the army, boy.’

‘You’re Salma, right?’
Adran nodded absently. ‘So what do you remember?’

Salma acknowledged the
point. ‘Assume I remember nothing.’

‘Then you’re out,’ Adran
told him. ‘They got you out.’

‘They?’

‘The halfbreed artificer
did it,’ said Lieutenant Kalder. ‘Arranged for it, anyway. He’s got some pull,
that one, for all that he’s just a piebald bastard.’

‘Halfbreed?’
Totho?
And it came back to him then, what Totho had done
for him, the price that had been paid for Salma’s life and liberty. So the
artificer Kalder meant was the other one, the man who had wanted to keep Totho
as his slave.

‘So why are you . . . ?
What are you going to do with us?’

‘You don’t need to
worry,’ Adran said, but Salma shook his head.

‘What is going on? I see
Wasp soldiers before me. Look at me, I’m in no position to cause you any
trouble, so at least tell me the truth.’

Adran and Kalder
exchanged looks.

‘You probably think
we’re all monsters in the Empire,’ said the younger man.

Thinking of Aagen, Salma
said, ‘Not necessarily, but until proved otherwise.’

‘Right.’ Adran poked at
the fire. ‘Have you heard of the Broken Sword?’ Kalder started to speak, but
Adran continued, ‘He might have done, if he was in the Twelve-Year War.’

‘He’s too young for
that,’ Kalder objected.

‘I’ve never heard of any
Broken Sword,’ Salma told them.

‘It’s . . . We’re a
group within the Empire, who don’t altogether agree with what it’s doing. Don’t
get me wrong. I’m proud to be Wasp-kinden. But things are changing, and never
for the better. We’ve always fought. We’re a martial people, just like the
Ant-kinden or the Soldier Beetles of Myna. Back before the unification and the
Empire, though . . . we might have lived in hill-forts and stolen each other’s
daughters and cattle, but it was different then. It was . . . natural, almost.’
His halting way of exploring what he was trying to say reminded Salma
unbearably of Totho.

‘The Empire, though,
it’s wrong. The way it works now, the way it has to keep expanding, further and
further, just to stop everything collapsing. You might not realize it, but
every Wasp-kinden freeman past thirteen is in the army, and has a rank, and can
be sent hundreds of miles away from home because the Emperor wants to bring
some foreign city under his control. Nobody gets to choose otherwise. And then
there are all the Auxillians, who have it even worse.’

‘The people you go and
fight don’t exactly have a good time of it either,’ Salma said weakly.

‘No, they don’t,’ agreed
Adran. He had a tremendous sincerity about him, and that in turn reminded Salma
of Che, when she was on some moral mission or other. What Adran was saying
really
mattered
to him.

‘The Empire imposes its
will on dozens of other kinden, and it destroys them by making them behave like
us. And that’s wrong. It’s evil, in fact, and by making us do its work, it
makes all of us evil.’ He glanced at Kalder. ‘Or that’s what I think, anyway.’

The expression on the
older man’s face said so clearly,
These young soldiers
today
that Salma had to smile. ‘As for me,’ Kalder took over, ‘I just
got sick of it. I fought your lot, right? And before that it was putting down
insurrections amongst the Hornet tribes. And before that I was a sergeant
fighting the Bees at Szar. And I did garrison duty at Jerez even before that. I
had a family, once, but I haven’t seen them more than six months in twenty
years. And now we’ve just taken Tark, and no sooner have the fires burned out
than they’re marching us out again, the bastards, for some other forsaken
place. It never ends. They just grind you down and abandon you when you drop.
So what the Broken Sword is really about – rather than what it means to
idealists like young Adran here – is men like me, soldiers who just want the
fighting to stop. We want to go home to our wives, our farms. But even if we
could, some of us, we wouldn’t, now, because by staying put we get to help
others who think the same way, help them to get out and away. And it’s not just
Wasp-kinden. Soldiers are soldiers, whether they’re imperial, Auxillian, or
whichever poor bastards we might be fighting.’

‘But what if they find
out?’

‘Then they take us apart
an inch of skin at a time,’ Kalder said. ‘Because the Empire, the Rekef
especially, hates none more than quitters like us.’

‘But we’re safe,’ Adran
broke in. ‘We’re scouting, you see. Or that’s what they think. Drephos the
artificer, he arranged for people to be looking the other way, but it was the
Daughters’ Eldest, Norsa, who knew who we were and called us. The Daughters and
the Broken Sword see eye to eye, and Norsa’s a favourite of the general.’

‘We can take you another
day out from here,’ Kalder added. ‘After that you and your Fly friend are on
your own. You’ll be far enough from the army to be as safe as anyone can be,
but I don’t know where you can go next.’

‘If we were closer to
home then we’d have safe-houses, Wayhouses and the like,’ Adran said. ‘We’re at
the edge of the Empire, though. Just don’t head south and don’t head east.’

‘Or north,’ Kalder said
slowly, ‘from what I hear. So I suppose you don’t have many options.’

The scout touched down
virtually on the bonnet of the transport automotive, startling the driver, who
cursed him. The scout made no reply but caught his balance quickly and saluted
General Alder.

‘Report on the soldiers
ahead, sir.’

Alder rose from a
cramped conference he had been having with Major Grigan of the engineers and
Colonel Carvoc, in the narrow space right behind the driver and ahead of the
freight.

‘Tell me,’ he demanded.
He had been informed earlier that an advance scout had spotted a force about
two hundred strong encamped right in the path of the Fourth Army, and maybe it
was about time someone told him what they intended. ‘It’s the Tarkesh
fugitives, yes?’

‘No, sir. I’ve made
contact with them, sir,’ the scout reported.

Alder’s one hand grasped
a strut to keep him standing as the automotive lurched over some difficult
ground. All around him, before and behind, the mighty strength of the Imperial
Fourth Army was on the move. There were automotives and pack animals, horses,
giant beetles and even desert scorpions, all moving in great columns that
probably still stretched most of the way back to Tark. The infantry marched in
shifting blocks, while the officers and artificers rode. Sometimes heliopters
thundered overhead, sweeping the terrain to watch for ambushes, and a multitude
of the light airborne performed the same function, squads of them jumping
forwards half a mile and then waiting for the army to catch up.

‘Tell me what’s going
on, soldier,’ Alder demanded. The scout saluted him again.

‘It’s an embassy, sir.’

‘You spoke with them?’

‘They hailed me as I
passed over, sir, so it seemed reasonable.’

The man had a sergeant’s
tabs on his shoulders, and presumably had been picked out from the crowd for
some quality or other. Alder now hoped it was his sound judgement.

‘Imperial intelligence
says the Kessen won’t meet us in the field,’ Alder said. ‘So what’s going on?’

‘It isn’t the Kessen,
sir. There are Ant-kinden amongst them, but they’re mercenaries. It’s the
Spider-kinden, sir. Or at least, some Spider-kinden and their retinue.’

Alder’s expression did
not change but inside he felt uneasy. The Empire’s stretching borderlands had
only touched near the Spiderlands in the last year, and had no established
relations. The Scorpion-kinden of the Dryclaw normally acted as go-betweens in
any trade the Consortium conducted with the wealth of the Spiders. It was
fabled, that wealth, though probably entirely fabulous. Certainly it was unsubstantiated
at least. In fact, as he considered it, Alder realized that he knew almost
nothing for certain about the Spider-kinden holdings situated south of the
Lowlands. They were rich. They were clever. Their lands extended on beyond
imperial maps. That was the imperial reservoir of knowledge on the subject.

‘This could get ugly,’
he murmured.

‘They want to speak with
you, sir,’ the scout reported.

‘No doubt. You are
dismissed, soldier.’ As the scout’s wings ignited into life and he kicked off
from the automotive, Alder was already gesturing to a Fly-kinden messenger.

‘Get me Major Maan,’ he
instructed, because he urgently needed to know imperial policy regarding the
Spiders, and it was an ill-kept secret that Maan was Rekef Inlander. ‘And get
me any Scorpion-kinden we’ve still got with us. I want to talk to them.’

After two hours in
further conference he felt no wiser. Major Maan had simply emphasized that all
travellers’ reports confirmed that the Spiderlands were very extensive, that
they were varied in geography and peoples, and that the chief interest of their
rulers seemed to be in conspiring against one another. The Lowlands had never
presented a threat to the Spiders, as the Lowlanders were also notably
self-involved and divided. There was a brisk trade along the Seldis road to
Tark, Merro and Helleron, but beyond that it was remarkable how little reliable
information could be found.