Dragonfly Falling (59 page)

When they were finally
chased away, at least half their number struck down, Salma walked amongst his
own people to assess the damage. Two of Phalmes’s men were dead, and one of the
Fly-kinden youths. Others were wounded, and Sfayot and his daughters did what
they could with charms and herbs and bandages made from torn and boiled cloth.

Then Salma went to face
the headman.

‘We did not bring them
down on you,’ he said because, all through the fight, that had been his
thought, of what the villagers must surely believe.

‘I did not believe you
had,’ said the headman, a Beetle-kinden, like most of the villagers. There was
a cut across his balding scalp that one of his own people had bandaged. ‘Why
did you come here?’

Salma shrugged. He was
feeling haggard and worn down and his wound ached. ‘We saw your houses and we
were hungry.’

‘Take the food,’ the
headman said. ‘I have some money, too. We have done well here until the
troubles.’

Salma wanted to refuse,
but he thought of Phalmes and knew that he had at least that much
responsibility – even to bandits and deserters.

The dawn brought a sight
that made him shiver. Without ever discussing it, his followers had taken the
arms and armour of the slain bandits. The Fly-kinden had swords and daggers
now, and the Beetle-kinden farmwife had a crossbow. The three slaves had
covered their tunics with studded leather hauberks. Sfayot’s eldest daughter
had a short-hafted axe thrust through her belt. She had accounted for herself
well with slung stones, the previous night.

Phalmes approached Salma
and held a shortsword out to him, hilt first.

‘I saved this one,’ he
said. ‘I know a bit about swords and here’s a good one. Helleron-made, and they
know their business there.’

Salma accepted it
gratefully. The balance was good, better than the Wasp-kinden weapon he had
carried for so long. It felt good to have a proper sword in his hand again.

Two nights after the
village he dreamt of home: riding out of the elegant palace of Suon Ren in the
Principality of Roh, and seeing the landscape spread out before him in gentle
tiers that centuries of careful cultivation had made into a picture of perfect
beauty: the green and gold of the fields under the blue of the sky. It was
autumn, near harvest, and the cold breeze that was blowing promised an early
end to those warm days. The northern landscape revealed more snow on the
mountaintops than a tenday ago. The Lowlanders knew nothing like this in their
dry land of bronze and dun and yellow.

He had ridden out and
through the fields, and through the small villages built of golden wood that
stood safe within sight of the castle. On the horizon was the shadow of the
Gis’yaon Hold where he had guested twice with the Mantis-kinden, renewing the
bonds of fealty and solidarity between them and the Principality of Roh – and
through Roh to the Monarchy itself.

As he passed through
these villages, the people bowed to him in honour and respect, and his horse
tossed her head in reply.

Last winter the
predators had come down from the hills, and Salma had ridden out with Felipe
Shah to deal with them. The body of the Commonweal was groaning with parasites,
and those parasites were brigands. In its thousand-year history there had been
times of strength and times of recession, but never such a difficult time as
this. The Monarch’s realm was patchworked with rot like a blighted leaf. Some
roads were so preyed upon that even the Crown’s own messengers could not pass
safely. There were loyal principalities cut off from the court by lawless
lands. Some castles were the home only of robber barons who played at the prince
but were nothing more than bandits grown fat unopposed.

Where
now is that golden sound our strings once gave unto the dawn?
had sung
the old minstrel at Felipe’s court.

Where
now is the ancient blade for many years so boldly drawn?

The
mist of autumn leaves its tears,

The
weeping of the ending year,

Of
maidens for their husbands lost, of children into darkness born.

And Felipe and Salma and
their men had gone to fight, from horseback, from the air, with spear and
punch-sword and bow, because the principality was like a garden, and a gardener
had a duty to ensure the health of his charges.

Duty and responsibility,
of course. A duty to protect those in the principality who could not protect
themselves, because Salma was a Prince Minor of the Commonweal.

The next day, Phalmes
rode along next to Sfayot’s cart and spoke to Salma, although it was at
Sfayot’s eldest daughter that he looked most. Nero sat up beside Sfayot
himself, in between his occasional flights about the surrounding countryside.

‘Did you ever hear about
the Mercers?’ Salma asked.

‘How could I not?’
Phalmes said. ‘While fighting in the Commonweal, you got to hear a lot about
the cursed Mercers.’

‘And?’

‘And what? I could never
work them out. Your people, your peasantry, seemed to worship everything they
did, but the pissing
Mercers
weren’t averse to
cutting throats when it came to it. Nobody wanted to fight them. At least there
weren’t so many of them.’

‘Thousands, really, but
you would have seen few enough’ Salma said. ‘They do more than fight invaders,
though. In fact that’s barely what they do at all. They protect the Commonweal,
and that means mostly from its own worst impulses. They go wherever brigands
have made the roads unsafe, where princes are cruellest to their subjects, or
have rejected the wisdom of the Monarch. And they work against invaders, and
their agents, but they defend the Commonweal first and foremost. They are
heroes.’

Phalmes shrugged. ‘Well,
you asked me what I knew about them. So what of it?’

Salma smiled slightly. ‘Where
will you be in five years, Phalmes?’

‘In an unmarked grave,
probably,’ replied the ex-bandit. ‘Possibly the same in just five days. It’s an
uncertain time. I’d prefer to go . . .’

‘Home?’

‘Myna, yes. But I can’t
see that happening.’ A shadow crossed his face, and Sfayot’s eldest inched
forward to look at him more closely. ‘Ever,’ he added. ‘Even if Kymene starts a
revolution, the Wasps will only put it down within a month, or even a year, and
what difference would that make? And then everything will just be worse. So, if
I do live out five years? Who knows? I don’t feel that I myself have much of a
choice in the matter.’

‘And if I gave you a
choice?’ Salma said.

Phalmes frowned at him.
‘Meaning what?’

‘I’m a prince,’ Salma
reminded him.

‘Good for you, Your
Worship. So what?’

‘In the Lowlands they
don’t understand it. In the Empire too I’d guess. I’d almost forgotten it
myself, but I am a prince and that still means something, wherever I am.’

The messenger brought
Totho to a long practice hall attached to one of Drephos’ newly commandeered
factories. There were targets of wood fixed to the far wall down a long arcade,
scuffed and scratched and painted with range-markers.

The master artificer was
there already, along with his entire cadre of followers and a few Wasp soldiers
as well. Totho found himself the last to arrive. There was no resentment,
though, only a barely concealed excitement about them. Totho sought out Kaszaat
but her expression conveyed a warning.

Drephos was smiling, as
lopsided as ever. He had his hood fully back, with no cares about his malign
features amongst his own people. In his hands was the snapbow.

Totho had originally
called it an airlock bow in his designs but, after the sound that it made, the
term snapbow had stuck, from the artificer’s old habit of calling any kind of
ranged weapon a ‘bow’ of some sort, despite the lack of arms or string. This
was the tweaked and adjusted article, perhaps destined to undergo another
iteration, perhaps to be presented as finished. Each of Drephos’s artificers
had been given a chance to make further changes and test them. The last day or
so had already seen a dozen separate prototypes tried and forgotten.

Now Drephos proffered
the weapon and he took it, feeling how light it was, a sleek and deadly-feeling
creation, like a predatory animal that found its prey by sight from on high.
The curved butt fitted to his shoulder and armpit to steady it, and he was able
to look down the slender length of the barrel, using a groove in the folded
crank of the air battery itself to correct his aim.

‘Any complaints, Totho?’
Drephos asked him.

‘It’s beautiful,
Master,’ Totho said, wonderingly.

‘You have the best of
them, as is only fitting,’ Drephos said. At his gesture the big Mole
Cricket-kinden began handing out the others, until all the artificers had a
newly finished snapbow in their hands.

‘We are almost at the
end of our stretch of road with this device,’ Drephos told them all. ‘Next will
be the training sergeants. General Malkan is preparing to march, but he is
leaving me two thousand men here and every factory in Helleron if I need it.
When we walk out from here, if we are satisfied, this entire city will be
devoted to your invention. It’s a rare privilege.’

‘I understand, Master.’
There was something he was missing, he knew, some underlying tension he could
not account for. He glanced at Kaszaat and saw that she alone of them was not
smiling. ‘We’re here for the final tests?’ he asked.

‘We are,’ Drephos said,
and signalled to the soldiers. One of them went to the far end of the range and
pulled a door open.

There were two dozen
people behind the door, and they were pushed out onto the range quite quickly
by Wasp soldiers, who closed the doors and stood nearby, hands open and ready.
Totho frowned. Afterwards it would appal him that it took him so long to work
out what was going on.

They were Beetle-kinden,
mostly, with a few halfbreeds or Flies, and they looked as though they were
going to a costume party all dressed like warriors. Some wore leather cuirasses
or long coats, others had banded mail, or breastplates, or chain hauberks in
the Ant style. There was even Spider-made silk armour and a suit of full
sentinel plate that the wearer could hardly move in. None of them was armed.

‘What . . . what’s going
on?’ Totho asked.

‘We are going to test
your invention,’ Drephos explained, ‘and you should have the honour of going
first.’

He knew even then, but
he said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You have made a machine
for killing people, Totho,’ Drephos said gently. ‘How else can it be tested?’

It was a long time with
him staring at those confused men and women before he said, ‘But I can’t just .
. . shoot at them. They’re . . .’

‘Troublemakers,’ Drephos
said crisply. ‘The lazy, the malcontents, the unskilled, the grumblers – all
those picked for me by my foremen, though fewer than I had hoped. Still, it
will have to be a sufficient sample for this test, because we have little
time.’

‘But they’re
people!
’ Totho said.

‘Are they any more
people than the soldiers your weapons will be used against? Did you think you
could bring such a weapon into the world and keep your hands clean?’ Drephos
asked him. ‘I hate hypocrisy, Totho, and I will not tolerate it. Too many of
our trade are ashamed of what they do, and try to distance themselves. You must
be proud of what you are. War and death are the gearwheels of artifice,
remember? This is meat, useless and replaceable meat, no more.’ His gauntleted
hand fell on Totho’s shoulder paternally. ‘You have made this beautiful device.
You must be the first to give it purpose. Now load it.’

His hands trembling,
Totho thumbed back the slot at the breech of the weapon and slipped a
finger-length bolt into place, the missile’s presence closing the slot
automatically. He remembered a sleepless night designing that very mechanism,
with Kaszaat breathing gently beside him. He was thinking,
I
will not do it. I will not do it
, but his fingers completed the
now-familiar task with a minimum of fuss.

‘Charge it,’ Drephos
said quietly. Totho’s hand was already on the crank, and five quick ratchets of
it pressurized the air in the battery.

‘Ready your bow,’
Drephos said, and slowly he raised the snapbow, feeling its snug and
comfortable fit against his shoulder.
I will not do it
,
his mind sang again.

‘Shoot,’ Drephos said,
and Totho was frozen, his fingers on the release lever. ‘Shoot!’ the master
artificer said again, but he could not. He was shaking, his aim veering. The
range of targets at the far end of the hall had not yet realized what was going
on.

‘This is a test, Totho,
a test to see whether what I purchased was worth the price. Remember our
bargain. Your friend is alive and free, and in return you are
mine
.’ And on that word his metal hand clenched on Totho’s
shoulder like tongs, and Totho pressed the trigger.

The explosive snap of
the release of air echoed down the length of the hall. He had been aiming,
perhaps unconsciously, at the most heavily armoured target, the man (or was it
a woman?) in the heavy sentinel plate. Now he saw the clumsy figure fall
backwards. He could hope that just the impact against the metal might have
knocked it over, but there was no movement, and he thought he saw a clean hole
had been thrust through the steel.

‘Loose at will,’ Drephos
decided, quite satisfied, and all around them the artificers loaded and
shouldered their weapons.

Totho lay sleepless in
the dark and he shook. His mind’s eye was glutted with the work of those few
seconds, the ears still ringing with the discrete ‘snap-snap-snap’ as his
inventions – the work of his own mind and hands – had gone about their purpose.