Dragonfly Falling (56 page)

‘I cannot vouch for the
Vekken, or the Empire,’ he said. ‘There will be no execution here. Even in
these exceptional times, the Assembly won’t break a habit of ten years just for
you. The irony is that you’d probably be exiled, eventually, but that currently
presents us with technical difficulties.’

Her fists were clenched,
and he saw the small claws there slide in and out of her knuckles. There was
more in her eyes than mere pleading, and he felt her Art stir there, the force
of it touch his mind, trying to turn him, to make him like her and pity her.
That Art was weak, though, sapped by her own despair, and he shrugged it off
almost effortlessly.

‘You know . . . I could
have easily killed you,’ she got out.

‘I’d guessed it. You
cannot spin that into an obligation.’

‘No.’

‘Do you regret not doing
it?’

She stared at him. She
was obviously at the very end of her leash, stripped of her strategies and
schemes, more and more transparent in her desperation. ‘No,’ she said, and he
wished that he could believe her.

He felt a sickening
lurch inside him at the thought of what he was going to do, all the perils and
unspeakable foolishness of it. Tisamon, for one, would never speak to him
again.

‘You’re being held here
to my order, and therefore I’m going to set you free,’ he said, speaking fast
so that he could get the words out before he changed his mind.

She was silence itself,
awaiting his next words.

‘What more do you want
me to say?’ he asked her. ‘You’re going free. No conditions. You’ve already been
questioned, and I have no more questions for you. I’m not even going to ask you
to go back to the Rekef and work against them on my behalf, even if you could.
I cannot know the truth of it now; I would not know the truth of it then. I . .
. just . . . You can walk out of here as soon as I tell the warden, and I’ll
tell him as soon as I leave.’ He got to his feet, feeling ill and sad. ‘Which
is now.’

‘Wait,’ she said. There
were tears in her eyes and he wondered dully if they were genuine.

‘I’m waiting.’

He could feel her Art
touching him again, feeling at the edges of his mind and trying to find a way
in. It must have been just instinct for her, her last defence, still trying to
sway him because she did not really believe what he said. She thought this was
a trap. Her lips moved but she said nothing.

‘No words,’ he said
tiredly. ‘No thanks, even. I’m sorry but I don’t even know if I could believe
that.’

He turned and walked
out, and then told the warden that she could go. As he reached the door he
looked back and saw her emerging cautiously from the cell, testing the first
steps of her freedom.

He left then, set off
for his house at last. He had probably made a mistake, and he hoped he would be
the only one to suffer for it. It had been lies and pretence, and he had been a
fool, as he still was, but for the few days that she had been with him she had
made him feel young, and made him happy.

Nothing he had done in
the defence of his city had sat well with him, the horrors of the naval assault
recurring over and over, but he found that, when he remembered that he had
freed her, the pawn of his enemies, he slept easily.

The next day the Vekken
came against the wall in force. During the night they had brought up their
remaining artillery, and the dawn saw great blocks of their infantry assembled
behind their siege engines. There were massive armoured ramming engines aimed,
three each, at the north and west gates, and both those walls already had a
full dozen automotive towers ready to bring the Ant soldiers to the very brink
of the walls.

The harbour mouth was
still blocked by the pair of ruined armourclads, and the buildings nearest the
wharves had been abandoned after the incendiary shelling from the Vekken
flagship. Stenwold had Fly messengers on the lookout who would fetch him if the
ships started moving again, but he could not meanwhile just sit idle. Against
Balkus’s protests he made his way over to Kymon on the west wall.

There had been some
fighting here the previous day. The Ants had made assaults at the gate, and one
of the siege towers stood at half-extension, a burned-out shell only ten yards
from the wall itself. The wall artillery had obviously been busy, and would be
still busier today.

Stenwold made his
hurried way along the line of the defenders. Most of them now had shields, he
saw, which he knew was a reaction to the crossbow casualties of the previous
day. The Ants had advanced far enough on one earlier assault that some of those
shields were the rectangular Vekken type the attackers used.

‘War Master,’ some of
them acknowledged him, to his discomfort. Others saluted, the fist-to-chest
greeting of the city militia. They all seemed to know him.

Out beyond the wall,
without any signal that could be perceived, every Ant-kinden soldier suddenly
started to march. The engines of the rams and towers growled across towards the
defenders through the still air.

‘They’re coming in
faster this time,’ Kymon said, striding up to him, and it did seem to Stenwold
that the engines were making an almost risky pace of it, bouncing over the
uneven ground. Close behind them the Ant soldiers were jogging solidly in their
blocks.

‘Ready artillery!’ Kymon
called, and the same call was taken up along the wall. ‘They’re going to rush
us!’

‘Master Maker!’ someone
was calling in a thin voice, and Stenwold turned to see a man he vaguely
recognized from the College mechanics department.

‘Master Graden,’ he now
recalled.

‘Master Maker, I must be
allowed to mount my invention on the walls!’

‘This isn’t my area,
Master Graden.’ But curiosity pressed him to add, ‘What invention?’

‘I call it my sand-bow,’
said Graden proudly. ‘It was made to clear debris from excavations, but I have
redesigned it as a siege weapon.’

‘I’m not an artificer.
Do you know what he’s talking about?’ Kymon growled.

‘Not so much,’ Stenwold
admitted.

Then the Ant artillery
started shooting, and abruptly there were rocks and lead shot and ballista
bolts falling towards the wall, and especially towards Collegium’s own
emplacements. Stenwold, Kymon and Graden crouched under the battlements,
feeling more than hearing as their wall engines returned the favour. Stenwold
risked a look at the advancing forces and saw, almost in awe, that Kymon had
been right. Behind the speeding engines, the Ant soldiers were no longer in solid
blocks that would make such tempting targets for the artillery. Instead they
were a vast mob, a loose-knit mob thousands strong, surging forwards behind
their great machines.

And they would be able
to form up on command, he knew, each mind instantly finding its place amongst
the others.

‘Can it hurt? His
device?’ he shouted at Kymon over the noise.

Kymon gave an angry
shrug and then ran off down the line of his men, bellowing for them to stand
ready, to raise their shields.

‘Get the cursed thing up
here!’ Stenwold ordered Graden, and the artificer started gesturing down to
where his apprentices were still waiting with his invention. It looked like
nothing so much as a great snaking tube thrust through some kind of pumping
engine.

‘What will it do?’ Stenwold
asked. Another glance over the wall saw the Ants’ tower engines ratcheting up,
unfolding and unfolding again in measured stages, with Ant soldiers thronging
their platforms and more climbing after them. Crossbow quarrels started to rake
the wall, springing back from shields and stone, or punching men and women from
their feet and over the edge, down onto the roofs of the town.

‘It will blow sand in
their faces!’ Graden said enthusiastically. ‘They won’t be able to see what
they’re doing!’

True enough, Stenwold
saw that one end of the tube had a vast pile of sand by it. The other was being
hauled onto the wall, with the great engine, the fan he supposed, hoisted
precariously onto the walkway.

The nearest tower was
almost at the level of the wall-top as Graden’s apprentices wrestled the
sandbow into place, and then the artificer called out for it to start. All
around them the defenders of Collegium, militia, tradesmen, students and
scholars, braced themselves for the coming assault.

Parosyal had white
beaches, a sand that gleamed as brightly in the sun as the sun itself. Nothing
on the mainland could match it, nor any other isle along the coast. A hundred
Beetle scholars had written theories to explain it.

There was only one safe
harbour at Parosyal, Tisamon had explained, and she had understood that by
‘safe’ he was not referring to anchorage or the elements.

Parosyal was a mystery,
and one that history had ignored: the sacred isle of the Mantis-kinden. The
slow march of years had seen Collegium scholars baffled by it, Kessen fleets
avoid it, and opportunistic smugglers or relic-hunters disappear there, never
to be seen again.

‘Every one of my kinden
seeks to come here, once at least in a lifetime,’ Tisamon explained, and she
knew he was confirming that she, too, was his kinden. ‘They come from Felyal,
from Etheryon and Nethyon. From across the sea, even. From the Commonweal.’

‘That’s a long haul,’
she said.

He nodded. ‘This is our
heart.’

‘But why?’ she asked.
‘Surely not . . . gods?’ She knew that, long ago, some ancient peoples had
tried to make sense of the world by giving faces to the lightning and the sea.
Perhaps some savages still did, in lands beyond known maps, but in these days
nobody halfway civilized held that they were subject to the will of squabbling
and fickle divinities. Achaeos had told her that the Moth-kinden believed in
spirits, but ones that could be commanded, not ones that must be obeyed. And
then of course there were the avatars of the kinden, the philosophical concepts
that were the source of the Ancestor Art, but they were just
ideas
, aids to concentration. Nobody thought that they
actually
existed
somewhere.

‘An ancient and
inviolate communion,’ whispered Tisamon, and a shiver went through her. It was
not the words themselves, but because she heard quite clearly some other voice
saying that exact phrase to him, when he was younger even than she, and as some
previous boat was approaching this same harbour.

She felt sand scrape at
the boat’s shallow draft. The vessel’s master, an old Beetle-kinden, called for
any to disembark that were intending to.

She took up her single
canvas bag, slung her swordbelt over her shoulder, and splashed down into
thigh-deep water.

The bay of Parosyal held
a single fishing village that was huddled between the water and the treeline,
facing south across the endless roll of the ocean as though it had turned its
back on the Lowlands and the march of history. The houses were constructed of
wood and reeds, and built on stilts to clear the high tides. The villagers were
a strange mixture that Tynisa had not been expecting.

There were only half a
dozen Mantids there, and they seemed mostly old, their hair silvered, and with
lines on their faces. The other villagers comprised a whole gamut of the
Lowlands population: quite a few Beetles, including one in the robes of a
College scholar, some Fly-kinden, a few Kessen Ants. There were a surprising
number of Moths passing back and forth between the huts and the boats, or
conferring in small groups.

No Spider-kinden,
though, she had expected that.

She set foot now on the
sand of the beach, shaking a little water from her bare feet, and she was aware
that many of them were staring at her. Staring at her, especially, in company
with Tisamon. Her blood was mixed, but her face was her mother’s. In fathering
her, Tisamon had dealt his own race the worst blow, having committed the
ultimate sin against their age-old grievances.

But she had expected
worse than she received. Looks, yes, and a few glares even, but nothing more.
Tisamon was standing in the centre of the little village now, watching a pair
of young Moths put a small dinghy out onto the water. He was waiting for
something, she could see.

Where
is it all?
she asked herself, because surely this collection of hovels
could not be
it
. This was not what all the fuss was
about. And then she looked past the huts towards the wall of green that was the
forest that covered most of Parosyal and she knew
that
was it.

Tisamon’s stance
changed, just slightly, alerting her to the approach of an ageless, white-eyed
Moth-kinden man. His blank gaze flicked to Tynisa, but her appearance drew no
change of expression to his face.

‘Your approach is
known,’ he said softly to Tisamon. ‘Your purpose also.’ He looked to her again.
‘It is not for me to judge, but . . .’

‘The Isle will judge,’
Tisamon said firmly, but his glance at his daughter was suddenly undermined by
uncertainty.

‘Indeed it will,’ said
the Moth. ‘It always does. The Isle has never seen one such as her. We can none
of us know what may be born, or what may die . . . even if she has made the
proper preparations.’

Tisamon’s look was to
the dark between the trees. ‘It must be tonight. We have no time.’

‘Are you sure she is
ready? She is very young.’

‘I was her age, when I
came here to be judged.’

The Moth shrugged. ‘The
Isle will judge,’ he echoed, and then, ‘Tonight, as you wish.’

*

She had expected some
grand ceremony: drums and torches and invocations. They had meanwhile taken up
residence in one of the shacks, many of which seemed to be empty. Tisamon had
set to sharpening his claw, over and over, and she knew it was because he was
merely keeping his mind off what would happen.