Dragonfly Falling (60 page)

Drephos had been
ecstatic, declaring the test a complete success. Even at the range they were
firing, the bolts had not scrupled to pierce plate armour or punch through
rings of chainmail. Only the Spider-kinden silk armour had at all slowed them
down, the fine cloth twisting about the spinning missiles and preventing them
penetrating. They spun, of course, because of the spiral grooving Totho had
instituted on the inside of the snapbow barrels, giving the weapons greater
range and accuracy. It had been an innovation that Scuto had made to Balkus’s
nailbow, he recalled.

A skilled archer,
Drephos estimated, could make five or even six accurate shots within a minute,
a novice perhaps two or three. Their use was easy to learn, and in Helleron
they were even easy to make. There were factories working day and night now to
produce the quantity Drephos wanted. As soon as they were manufactured and
tested they were handed to the waiting soldiers that Malkan had detailed to
Drephos’ project. It took barely a day of constant practice for them to be
smoothly loading and shooting as though they were born to it. The snapbow was a
weapon for the common man, just as the crossbow had been, which had thrown off
the shackles of old mystery centuries before.

But all Totho could
think about now was that armoured figure falling, some innocent Beetle man or
woman who had caught the foreman’s ire. And then they had all been dropping,
and the spears of the soldiers had stopped them fleeing, and in the end the
last few had tried to rush towards the waiting line of artificers, giving
Drephos his chance to see the damage of a point-blank shot.

I
did this.
He, Totho, had brought this thing into the world.
I have found my place here now. I have earned it.

He clutched at his head.
He felt as though that part of him he had always thought of as himself was
dropping further and further away, slipping down some well or shaft, never to
be seen again.

He must flee. He must
escape from Helleron.

And
do what?
His own mocking voice in his head.
And go
where?

I will find Che.

Who
is in the arms of her savage lover even now, and does not think of you.

I don’t care. I love
her.

Fine
way to show it, joining her enemies and sleeping with a Bee girl.

His fingers knotted in
his hair, unable to blot the thoughts out.
I love Che! I
always have!

You
cast-off. You sorry failure. All your life you have been nothing, despised and
ignored. Now you have been offered something real: a place, a reason to live.
Drephos understands you.

He cannot. He doesn’t
even know what love is.

Of
course he does. He loves with a passion you have never known. He loves his
work. He loves progress. All the things you once professed.

I am not like him.

You
are his heir in all things.

He threshed on his bed,
kicking at the blanket. The voice in his head was like a person there in the
same room, calmly and patiently dismantling everything he had ever thought. It
was all the worse because the thoughts came from nowhere save within him. This
cold world that had opened up to him in Tark, when he had seen what war and
artifice could really do, had become the world he must live in.

I
cannot go on
, he insisted.
The guilt will destroy
me.

Guilt?
hissed the voice in his head.
Do you not realize that you
can let go of guilt now, and shame, and love? You have been clawing at them all
this while, when there was a chance you would return to what you were, but you
have taken the final step now. You can never be the man you used to be. Your
hands have become true artificer’s hands, to build or destroy without
conscience or remorse. You can let go of guilt, now, and relax. You are across
the barrier of mere humanity and over the other side. It’s all meat now,
expendable and replaceable meat.

And Totho writhed and
twisted, but had no answer to that.

Master Graden had taken
his own life.

Stenwold sat in the War
Council’s chamber with his head cradled in his hands and thought about that.

They had put the
sandbow, Graden’s much vaunted invention, up on the wall. The enemy crossbows
had raked the battlements even then, and shafts had stuck into shields and
sprung from stone, or punched screaming men and women off the edge of the wall.
Kymon had been shouting for them to ready themselves for the strike. The tower
engine had almost reached the height of the walls, with sixty Ant-kinden
warriors waiting on its platform and more ascending from below. Another two
towers were close by, the Ants hoping to swamp and then hold this section of
the wall. Ant artillery was pounding at the wall emplacements which were
returning shot, or scattering loads of scrap and broken stone into the Ant
soldiers below.

Graden had been so
enthusiastic, running his apprentices ragged to get the sandbow into position,
the great tube and its fan engine. Then he had told them to turn it on.

The great engine had
started, and the mountain of sand below the wall had begun to disappear. Once
he had seen it work, Kymon had been shouting for those below to fetch more
sand. Sand, grit, stones, anything.

On the north wall the
fighting had been fiercest, and the defenders had died in their droves to
prevent the Ants keeping a foothold on the walls. It was guessed, because there
were men in Collegium who were ready to count anything, that two of the city’s
impromptu militia had died for every Ant casualty, quite the opposite of the
normal balance of a siege.

On the west wall, where
Kymon commanded, the numbers had favoured the city much more. Master Graden had
saved the lives of hundreds of his fellows. Those Ants that had gained the
walls were shaken by what they had seen, and their legendary discipline bent
and broke before the defenders. Stenwold himself had sent one man hurtling over
the edge.

In the retreat, when the
Ants conceded the day, the sandbow had been destroyed by artillery fire before
it could be brought down from the walls, its casing smashed by lead shot, and
two of Graden’s apprentices had been killed.

And, a day later, Graden
had quietly mixed a solution of vitriolic aquilate and drunk the lot, and died
quickly if not painlessly. It was not the deaths of his apprentices, however,
that had driven him to it, but the sight of what he himself had wrought with
his artificer’s mind and his own two hands.

It was an image that
would stay with Stenwold until his last days, as with so much he had seen
lately. Nobody on the west wall would ever forget those Ant soldiers with the
flesh pared from their bones, faces blasted into skulls in the instant that the
sandbow loosed, or the armour and weapons ground into unbearable shiny
perfection, the mechanisms of the siege tower whittled to uselessness, the
entire host of organic and inorganic detritus that was all that was left after
the arc of the sandbow passed across them.

Graden had been shouting
at them to turn it off, even as Ant crossbow bolts rattled on the stones near
him, but Kymon had taken charge of it, and had it aimed at the next-nearest
tower, and thus saved the wall.

It was two days later:
two days of desperate fighting on the wall-tops. The shutters over the gates
were bent, holding, but never to open properly again. Artillery had cracked the
north and west walls but they still stood. The Vekken flagship had almost razed
the docklands, burning the wharves and the piers, the warehouses and the
merchants’ offices. Collegium would never be the same again.

Today they had come by
air. Vekken orthopters flapping thunderously over the walls as their artillery
started launching once again, dropping explosives on the men on the wall,
masking the oncoming rush of the infantry. The aerial battle had been as bloody
as any other. Stenwold had stood impotently and watched as the Ant fliers had
duelled laboriously with Collegium’s own, that were more numerous and more
varied. The Ant machines had flamethrowers and repeating ballistae, and of
course they never lost track of their comrades in the confusion of the skies.
The defenders had been joined by a swarm of aid from the city: Fly-kinden saboteurs,
Joyless Greatly’s cadre of one-man orthopters, clumsy Beetle-kinden in leaden
flight, Mantis warriors attacking the armoured machines with bows and spears.
Because he was War Master now, Stenwold had forced himself to watch, and he had
no excuse to turn his head when Fly-kinden men and women were turned into
blazing torches by the Ant weapons, or when flying machines spiralled from the
sky to explode in the streets of his city.

It had made him ill. He
had barely eaten these last days. He felt that he had brought this down on
them, for all he knew that it would have happened anyway, whether Wasps or
Vekken.

Joyless Greatly was
dead. He had died in the fighting that day, unseen and uncounted until a
reckoning could be made later, just one more mote falling from the sky. He had
been a genius artificer and a pilot without equal, and the thought that he had
died as he would have wished was no counterbalance to the loss that Collegium
had suffered in his death. Joyless Greatly was dead, and Graden had killed
himself, and Cabre the Fly artificer had died defending the last remaining
harbour tower, even after she had so narrowly escaped from the other. Hundreds
on hundreds of other people of Collegium had fallen in the air and on the walls
or out over the sea.

And now Stenwold sat
with his head in his hands after the War Council had adjourned, and there was a
long-faced Beetle youth waiting to see him.

‘What is it?’ he
demanded at last, because this young man was another of the lives in his hands
and he had no right to ignore him.

‘Master Maker – excuse
me, War Master, you should see this. In fact, you have to.’

Stenwold stood up,
seeing that the youth was torn between emotions, unable to know what to think
next. Stenwold had seen him before, but could not place him.

‘Take me, then,’ he
said, and the young man darted off.

‘It’s Master Tseitus,
War Master,’ the youth explained, and Stenwold placed him then: an apprentice
of the Ant-kinden artificer.

‘What does he want?’
Stenwold asked.

‘He has . . . he . . .
I’m sorry, Master Maker—’

Stenwold stopped him.
‘Just tell me. It has been a long day. I have no time.’

‘He made me promise to
say nothing, Master Maker,’ the youth blurted. ‘But now he’s gone and—’

‘Gone?’ Stenwold
demanded. ‘Gone where?’

‘You have to come and
see!’ And they were off again, and the youth was definitely heading for the
blasted wastes of the docks.

‘He was desperate to do
something,’ the youth explained. ‘The bombardment was all around here. So he
took her out.’

‘Her? What? You mean the
submersible?’

‘An hour ago, Master,
only we didn’t know if there was enough air . . . enough range . . . We never
had a chance to properly test her.’

What he had to show
Stenwold was an empty pool with access to the harbour. A lack of submersible.

‘What has he done?’
Stenwold asked, and the apprentice spread his hands miserably.

It became apparent the
next morning, when Stenwold was dragged from his bed by an excited messenger
who pulled him all the way back to the charred docks.

The Vekken flagship was
sinking. It was sinking slowly, but by the dawn a full half of it was below the
waves, despite all the pumps the Ants could lay on it. Supply ships and tugs
were taking on men and material as fast as they could, but the vast vessel
itself was foundering, slipping beneath the waves, heeling over well to one
side so that the water was grasping at the closest of its great catapults that
had wreaked so much damage across the harbourside of Collegium.

Of Tseitus and his
submersible there was no sign. Whether he simply had not had the stocks of air,
or had been destroyed by the Ants, or whether he had become locked to the metal
hull of his victim and gone with it to the bottom, it was impossible to say.

Doctor Nicrephos was an
old man, and very badly in fear for his life. He had listened for days now to
the stories from the wall, about the patience and gradual Ant advance, the
implacable faces of the Vekken, the diminishing resources of the city. He had
lived in Collegium for twenty-five years. He knew no other home. For twenty of
those years he had been the College’s least regarded master, clutching to the
very periphery of academia, teaching the philosophy and theory of the Days of
Lore to a handful of uninterested and uncomprehending students each year.
Magic, in other words: something in which Collegium, as a whole, did not
believe. There had always been calls to remove his class from the curriculum.
It was an embarrassment, they said. There were always those Beetle scholars who
believed that the past should stay buried, and that it was an insult to the
intelligence of their people that a shabby old fraud like Doctor Nicrephos
should be given his tiny room and his pittance stipend.

And yet it had never
happened. There was too much inertia in the College, and he still had a few
friends who would speak up for him. He had clung on, year in, year out, in this
nest he had made for himself, and expected to die in office and then never be
replaced. For a man who did not love the company of his own kinden, that would
have been enough. His business was the past. He had no care for posterity.

And now it was all
falling down. He would suffer the same fate as all the others if the Vekken
breached the wall, either put to the sword or sold into slavery, and who would
buy such a threadbare thing as he?