Dragonfly Falling (49 page)

‘Excellent.’ Drephos
turned to Totho. ‘You have had a chance to consider the plans?’

‘I have, sir.’ In the
freezing air that the
Cloudfarer
flew in, he had
been hunched close by the windbreak of the clockwork engine, scribbling his
alterations and additions.
All for Salma
he had
reflected.
I made this bargain, and now I must keep it.
But beyond those sentiments his busy mind had been concerned only with the
calculations, the mechanical principles.

‘Then let us unleash
them on Helleron,’ Drephos said eagerly. ‘It’s not often I have a whole city to
work for me. General Malkan, pray show me what you have for us.’

How
long I have wished to see the factories of Helleron
, was the ironic
thought as Totho entered one.
I had not thought it would be
like this.
He meant as an invader, an imperial artificer, but he also
meant as a master rather than a menial. As he and Drephos, and Drephos’s ragbag
of other picked artificers, came in, the factory work had been totally stilled.
A great crowd of workers were gathered there, the staff of three factories
waiting to receive their new orders. Malkan had been quick in providing Drephos
with whatever he should need and Totho knew that the general was one of a new
breed of Wasp officers. Malkan was not just a slave to maps and charts and the
slow movements of troop formations. He actually liked artificers and the way
they could win wars more efficiently, more quickly, than ever before. Drephos
was the Empire’s most gifted artificer on the western front, and Malkan was
keen to see that he was kept happy.

‘My name is
Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos,’ the half-breed announced, his voice ringing
from the gantry he stood on across the echoing factory floor. ‘You will refer
to me as Master, or Sir. Most importantly, you will do what you are instructed
without needless question, without debate, without retort. I want you to have
no illusions about your situation here.’ He cast his narrow gaze over them, the
working men and women of Helleron. He had his cowl thrown back leaving them no
doubts about what he was.

‘These men and women
with me,’ Drephos told the workers, ‘are my elite staff. You will address them
as ‘sir’ and do exactly what they instruct you. In my absence, they are my
voice.’

Totho could feel the
resentment boiling up from these hard-working men and women whose lives had
come under new management. It was not that this was a new factory owner telling
them what to do, nor even that he was a foreigner. What rankled with them was
that Drephos was a halfbreed and, worst of all, a Moth halfbreed, born partly
from that superstitious, primitive tribe that raided their mine-workings north
of the city. Here he was, claiming to be an artificer, and appalling chance had
placed him as their superior.

‘I myself will have no
illusions here. You hate and resent me,’ Drephos continued. ‘I, on the other
hand, have no feelings whatsoever concerning you, collectively or individually.
I wish you to think about precisely what that means. It means that if any one
of you comes to my notice in a way that displeases me, or any of my people
here, then that man or woman shall become my object lesson. Work hard and well
and you shall escape my notice, which shall be best for all concerned.’

They still stirred
rebelliously, and so he smiled at them lopsidedly. ‘You may have heard from
your leaders that some amicable arrangement has been reached between your
people and the Wasps of the Empire. It is not so. We own you. You work at our
command. I invite any of you here to dispute it.’

He signalled, and a
dozen Wasp soldiers came to attention. ‘Now get these people back to their
work,’ he said. ‘Bring all the foremen up here, though. I have one final thing
to say to them.’ He turned to Totho and the others, seeming very pleased with
himself.

‘Your comments?’

‘They will not serve you
willingly,’ Kaszaat said. ‘Not at first. Surly and angry, they are.’

‘It’s only natural,’
Drephos said, not a bit daunted. ‘They are a skilled workforce, though, and
only in Helleron is such skill so taken for granted. Nowhere else could you lay
hands on so many trained people. We must therefore ensure that their talents
are put entirely at our disposal.’ He turned again as two men and one woman
were brought up to the gantry. ‘Well now,’ he addressed them. ‘You are my
foremen, are you?’

Two of them merely
nodded but one of them was quicker on the uptake and said, ‘Yes, Master.’

‘Master,’ Drephos
echoed. ‘Such a versatile word, is it not?’ They looked at him blankly, and he
elaborated. ‘Amongst your kinden, of course, it is a great term of respect.
Your College scholars, your magnates, the great among you, are called
‘Masters’. Among the Wasp-kinden it is any man who owns a slave, and therefore
has rights of life or death over that slave.’ His smile was thin and
hard-edged. ‘So it will now be the choice of you and your workers just what
interpretation we shall apply to that word. Do I make myself understood?’

He had, and they nodded
unhappily, and murmured the title for him.

‘I am anticipating
troublemakers,’ he told them. ‘The lazy, the impertinent, the disobedient, the
talentless.’

‘Oh no, Master,’ said
the woman amongst them. ‘We’ll be sure of that. No slackers in our houses. No
backtalk either.’

‘You misunderstand me,’
said Drephos. ‘I am
anticipating
them. There are
such in any body of workers, perhaps a dozen in every factory.’

The foremen were
exchanging glances, approaching the point of denying it and then drawing back.

‘I am
anticipating
,’ Drephos explained happily, ‘that they will
be singled out by you there, and reported to my soldiers. I am anticipating
that my guards will have some three dozen such malcontents brought to me within
the
first five days
of work here. Choose those who
contribute least, or stir up trouble, or whom you personally dislike, whatever
you will, but I will be very unhappy if my anticipations are not borne out.’

The two men nodded
slowly now, looking as miserable as Totho had seen anyone in a long time, but
the woman said, ‘Excuse me, Master, but . . . what shall be done with them,
once your guardsmen have them?’

‘They will be allowed to
participate in other parts of the creative process,’ Drephos told her. She
paled a little at that, and then the soldiers began ushering all three away.

‘Some promise there, I
think,’ Drephos mused, glancing back at his cadre of artificers. Besides
Kaszaat and Totho there were two Beetle-kinden that must surely be twin brother
and sister, a halfbreed that looked to mingle Wasp and Beetle blood, and a
hulking nine-foot Mole Cricket whose weight made the whole gantry creak.

‘Master Drephos . . .’
Totho started, feeling deeply uneasy about it all.

‘Ah, Totho,’ Drephos
said. He was clearly in a fine mood today. ‘You have seen the prototype?’

‘I have, Master Drephos,
but . . .’

‘What do you think?’
Drephos began descending the stairs to the factory floor where the workers were
being given their new machining projects, designs and specifications for
unfamiliar parts and pieces.

‘The new loading
mechanism seems to work very smoothly,’ Totho said, drawn from his original
intent by the need to discuss the finer aspects of the technical work. ‘It will
need to be machined very exactly on the finished version, though. There will be
little room for error, to avoid jamming.’

‘That would be a problem
anywhere else,’ Drephos agreed, ‘but here in Helleron the skills and the
equipment have come together in glad harmony. In the Empire we would have had
to compromise, but the Emperor’s generals have made their plans as if they had
my very wishes in mind, because Helleron is ours, and here we are.’

‘Aside from that, I
think we may have to redesign the grooving within the barrel, or at least test
variations of spacing and angle.’

‘Granted,’ Drephos said.
‘Test it then. Conclusions in two days. By then we should be ready for the
spiralling lathe work on the first batch.’

‘First
batch
, Master?’ Totho enquired.

‘You weren’t thinking of
making just
one
of them, surely?’ Drephos grinned at
him, teeth flashing in his motley-coloured face. ‘Like a showpiece? A museum
curiosity? What do you think these factories are for, Totho?’

‘All for . . . you can’t
mean it, surely?’ Totho felt weak, stumbling on the stairs so that Kaszaat had
to reach out and grab his arm to steady him.

‘Explain to Master Totho
how we do things,’ Drephos flung the words over his shoulder.

Kaszaat was grinning,
and most of the others smiled at least a little, their newest colleague still
learning how things were done.

‘One project at a time
is the rule,’ Kaszaat explained. ‘When we really get to work, when the war
effort calls, all resources are devoted to one project. This time you’re the
lucky one. It’s
your
project. Three factories,
hundreds of workers, all of us, all concentrated on your devices.’

The thought made his
head swim. It was all happening far too fast for him.

‘I had better start my
testing,’ he said. The other artificers were already fanning out across the
factory, each heading to his or her own task. Kaszaat was about to go as well,
when Totho caught her arm.

‘Tonight I . . . Could I
talk . . . come to talk to you, tonight? I need . . . I just need . . .’

‘You just need someone,’
her smile was ambiguous, ‘and I can be that someone. Perhaps I need a someone
also, sometimes.’

‘The gates are sealed,’
said Lineo Thadspar. He looked older than ever.

‘Did the last train get
away?’ Stenwold asked him.

‘No, they were too long
in loading it.’ The Speaker of the Assembly sat down at a War Council that was
greatly different in constitution to the first one. As the Vekken army had
neared there had been many who had decided that war was, after all, not for
them, and others had surfaced in whom an undreamt-of martial fervour had been
kindled. The stone seats were lined with College Masters, artificers and city
magnates who had found in themselves the means to greet the hour. And that hour
had now come.

‘They were still leaving
by the western gate until an hour gone, but the Vekken are just outside
artillery range of the walls on all sides now, and anyone leaving would fall
straight into their hands,’ reported Waybright, one of the survivors of the
original council. ‘They have not totally encircled us, but they have set up
regularly spaced camps.’

‘They’ll want you to try
to attack them at the gaps, to see them as divided,’ Balkus said seriously.
Nobody had exactly invited him here, but he went where Stenwold went, and
unlike most there he had experience of Ant war firsthand. ‘But we – the
Ant-kinden – we’re never divided. You should remember that.’

‘We’re in no position to
attack them, in any event,’ Lineo Thadspar said.

‘Precisely how strong
are these gates?’ Kymon asked. He had a rough map of the city before him and he
traced its boundaries with a stylus. ‘This is a weak city against force of
arms. The walls are pierced all over. You have a river, the rail line, the
harbour. The gates themselves, how strong are they?’

‘We learned a few tricks
after our last clash with the Vekken,’ Thadspar said.

‘Likewise the Vekken,’
Stenwold cautioned.

‘That’s true, but I hope
we’ve learned faster than they. It is, after all, what we are supposed to be
good at, here at the College.’ Thadspar leant over Kymon’s map. ‘Our gates have
secondary shutters that slide down from within the wall. My own father’s
design, as it happens. They are of dense wood plated with bronze, and they
should withstand a hefty strike from any ram or engine you care to name. There
is a grille that has been lowered where the river meets the city and, while
they may eventually break through it, they will at least not surprise us by
assaulting that way. We have gates across the rail arch, too, and I have
engineers buttressing them even now. The harbour . . . has certain defences.
What is their naval strength, anyone?’

‘Nine armourclads, plus
one really big one,’ someone reported from the back. ‘And two dozen
wooden-hulled warships. Plus four dozen small vessels and half a dozen very
large barges that they’re holding back. Supply ships, I suppose.’

‘They will attack the harbour
soon,’ Kymon cautioned. ‘I myself have been given the west wall to command. Who
has the south?’

‘I do,’ Stenwold
confirmed. He could feel the tension in the room slowly screwing tight, the
image in everyone’s heads of Ant-kinden in perfect step making their
encampments around their city of scholars. ‘I’m open to any suggestions.’

‘What about the supply
situation on our side?’ Way-bright asked. ‘We’ve had people leaving in droves
these last few days, and yet there have never been so many within our walls.
All the satellite villages west of here have emptied, some of the people have
come here with nothing but the clothes on their backs.’

‘We have always
husbanded our harvests well,’ Thadspar said. ‘We will ration what we have, and
we need hold only until the Sarnesh arrive to relieve us.’

‘Masters,’ Stenwold
said, ‘I will now say something we have all thought, to ourselves. The Vekken
were defeated last time because the Sarnesh relieved us, although we held them
for tendays before that happened. The Vekken know this. Even they are not so
blinded by pride and greed that they will have forgotten.’ He looked around at
them, face by face, and so few of them would meet his gaze.

Kymon did. ‘You’re
saying that the Vekken believe Sarn will not aid us. Or that even Sarn’s aid
cannot tip the balance.’