Dragonfly Falling (7 page)

The two soldiers then
stood back, clearly satisfied with their work. They could have been brothers to
each other, and, equally, to the men who had captured him: short, solidly built
types with flat, pallid faces and dark hair, dressed in hauberks of dark
chainmail.

There was a single door
to this room, and Salma eyed it as he waited for the interrogator to arrive, as
he must. This position was intended to be painful, he guessed, but he could
have stood on his toes for hours. His race owned a poise and balance that the
Ants had never known. Salma allowed himself to relax into it, recovering from
the knocks and scrapes of the last few minutes.

Lovely
fellows, these Tarkesh. Remind me why we’re on their side again?

Of course that was the
point. Nobody ever claimed the Lowlands were populated by paragons of virtue,
only that the Lowlands free were of more service to the world than the Lowlands
under imperial rule. This was doubly the case from Salma’s perspective, for if
the Lowlands fell it would open to attack the entire southern border of his own
nation, the Dragonfly Commonweal.

The door opened, at last,
and a woman came in, a sister to the soldiers’ fraternity. She might have been
some higher official than they but she wore chainmail just as they did, and
carried no badge of rank. He supposed that they sorted all that kind of thing
out in their heads, communicating it between their minds. Creeping in behind
her was a Fly-kinden girl, no more than fourteen, who sat down by the door with
scroll and poised pen. A scribe slave, Salma guessed.

‘Name,’ the interrogator
said. Her tone gave the word no hint of questioning, just a flat statement.

Salma decided to be
fancy. ‘Prince Minor Salme Dien of the Dragonfly Commonweal.’ The pen of the
scribe scratched the words down without hesitation.

The Ant woman, however,
looked unamused. ‘Do not play games with me. You must know that you are under
order of execution.’

‘Because you think I’m a
spy.’

‘You are a spy,’ she
told him. ‘There can be no other reason for your skulking about to the north of
our city where you were found. Tell us about your masters, then, their weapons
and their military capacity, their tactics and weaknesses, and you might be
allowed to serve Tark as a slave.’

‘I’m not with the
Wasps,’ he insisted.

She pursed her lips and
slipped something from her belt. It was a glove, he saw, with metal rivets studded
across the knuckles, and she drew it on without ceremony.

‘I am indeed a spy,
however,’ he said hurriedly and she raised an eyebrow, ‘but not for the Wasp
Empire. But I do know something about them, and I’m more than willing to reveal
to you all I know. They’re my enemies, too, and my people have fought them –
I’ve fought them myself, been their prisoner, even.’

She seemed not to have
registered most of what he said. ‘If not for the army currently beyond our
gates, then which other city are you spying for? Kes would seem most logical.’

Salma had to think a
moment before he recalled that Kes was yet another Ant city-state and the one
closest to Tark.

‘I’m not spying for any
of the Ant-kinden,’ he told her.

‘I fail to see any other
option. Who else would profit from this situation?’

He looked into her
bland, uninterested gaze. ‘I was sent here by Stenwold Maker: a Beetle-kinden,
a Master of the Great College. He has been working against the Wasps for years,
and he sent me and my companions just to observe and report back to him. His
only interest – our only interest, is in stopping the Empire.’

‘
We
will stop this Empire,’ she replied, with a curl of contempt. ‘Why should some
Beetle academic care?’

Salma knew that his next
words might not help him, would in fact hurt him, so he tried to find another
way of putting it, but he could not paint Stenwold as a Tarkesh sympathizer any
believable way.

‘Stenwold Maker firmly
believes that the Wasps will not be halted at the walls of Tark,’ he said
quietly, and waited.

One of the soldiers
actually strode forward to strike him for his insolence, but some unheard
command of the interrogator turned him back.

‘Explain yourself,’ she
said, still expressionless.

Salma took a deep
breath. ‘The Empire has been expanding rapidly for two generations,’ he said.
‘They have met Ant-kinden before, and triumphed over them. You have proof of
this, if you’ve even looked over your walls at the enemy. We ourselves saw
Ant-kinden amongst them before your scouts took us. Not as mercenaries or
allies, mind, but as slave-soldiers.’

She remained quiet for a
moment, and he wondered what was now passing between her and her kin. ‘They
have fought Ants, yes,’ she agreed at last. ‘They have not fought Tark.’

Salma tried to shrug,
but couldn’t. ‘Whatever. Perhaps. Maybe you’ll just kick the dung out of them
and they’ll go limping back east dragging their dead with them. If that
happens, no one will be happier than I. But Stenwold fears otherwise. What else
can I say?’

He knew that there was
now a mental debate going on. The soldiers were in on it too, for he could see
the interrogator’s eyes flicking between them. Perhaps in time the whole city
would be arguing the merits.

Then the interrogator
turned and left him without warning, her slave scribe hurriedly following. The
soldiers hoisted him off the hook, and it was downwards all the way from there,
back to the pitch-darkness of his cell.

Some time later, the
extent of which he found impossible to judge, he heard them coming for him once
more. On seeing there was light, Salma hid his eyes quickly behind his bound
hands, in case they tried the same trick again.

‘Come out here!’ one of
his guards barked roughly.

‘Not if you’re going to
blind me again.’

He heard them coming
into the cell and backed off, finally dropping his hands. The time had almost
come for an escape attempt, he was thinking, however doomed to failure.

‘Now calm there! No need
to turn this into a diplomatic incident!’ It was not an Ant voice, not even a
Tarkesh accent. The leading soldier stepped to one side to reveal the ugliest
Fly-kinden Salma had ever seen. Bald and broken-nosed, the little man looked
him up and down critically.

‘I see our hosts here
have been their usual warm-hearted selves,’ he said.

‘Are you a prisoner,
too?’

‘I’m your ticket out of
here, son.’

Salma’s eyes narrowed.
‘You’re a slave-buyer?’

The Fly laughed loudly
at that. ‘If I had that kind of money I wouldn’t be where I am now. No, I’m
your secret guardian, boy, and I’m getting you free. Or at least as free as anyone
around here is right now.’ Something glinted in his hands, and with a single
twitch he had cut the bonds about Salma’s wrists. ‘Come on, let’s get you out
of here.’

He turned and left and,
keeping a suspicious eye on the guard, Salma followed. The Fly might be small
but he walked fast, so Salma had to jog to keep up with him.

‘Who are you?’ he
demanded.

‘I’ve never liked
repeating myself, so just let me get us safely into this room up here and I’ll
spill all.’

Without warning the Fly
took a sharp left and pattered up a flight of stairs. Salma, following, found
himself in an antechamber with two of the familiar high-up windows and, more
importantly, with Totho and Skrill.

He almost knocked the
Fly over in his haste to get over to them. Skrill looked decidedly weary, while
Totho had a fistful of bruises about his face and a split lip.

‘What’s going on?’ Salma
hissed.

Totho shook his head. ‘I
think this fellow here is about to explain.’

Then Salma saw there was
another Ant in the room, a man of middle years who was regarding the three of
them dubiously.

The Fly jabbed a finger
towards him. ‘First,’ he said, ‘this is Commander Parops, into whose custody
you’re now being put.’

‘I thought you said we
were free,’ said Salma.

‘You are but, just so
you know, this is the man who gets it in the neck if you turn out to be
something other than what you claim you are.’ As the Fly was explaining, the
Ant officer gave him a wry look.

‘So who’s you then,
little feller?’ Skrill interrupted.

The Fly gave her a
crooked smile. ‘My folks called me Nero on that most auspicious day whereon I
was born – and that’s all the name I’ve ever needed.’

‘I know that name . . .’
Totho said, and paused, trying to bring it to mind. Then: ‘Are you an . . . do
you draw pictures?’

‘No, I do not draw
pictures, I am in fact a particularly talented artist,’ Nero said, somewhat
sharply. ‘More than that, I’m an old drinking pal of Stenwold Maker, and when
Parops told me that was a name being passed along the grapevine, I decided I
had better spring you, if only to see what kind of kiddies ol’ Sten’s using
these days.’

‘Well, Master Maker sent
us here to witness what happened when the Wasps attacked Tark,’ Totho
explained. ‘We need to get out of the city and find a decent vantage point.’

Nero and Parops
exchanged glances. ‘Son,’ the Fly said, ‘you’ve got yourself the best vantage
you’re ever likely to get. You’re inside the city, the siege’s already started
and nobody’s getting in or out.’

‘Your man,’ the
Dragonfly woman declared, ‘is late.’

The old Scorpion-kinden
scratched his sunken chest with a thumb-claw. ‘First off, lady, he ain’t my
man. He’s just this fellow what fitted your call. Second off, he ain’t late –
not in this business anyway. We ain’t all got clocks and motors.’

She stalked up to him,
her cloak swirling. The four of his heavies that he had stationed about the
room went tense. He held up his hand, the one with the broken claw, to calm
them.

‘Do you know what
happens if you betray me, Hokiak?’ she asked.

Hokiak put on an easy
smile that was a nightmare of jutting gums. ‘Don’t bandy threats, lady. I ain’t
got this old by being scared of ’em.’ With measured unconcern he took up his
walking stick and hobbled away from her, pointedly showing her his back if she
wanted to take the opportunity. Inwardly, he waited for the blow and sighed
raggedly when it did not come.

This
one’s trouble
, he decided. Hokiak had taken on a lifetime of trouble,
from his half-forgotten youth as a Dry-claw raider to his current station as a
black-marketeer in the occupied city of Myna. He had made a living out of
trouble, more money than he could ever spend now. If this trouble-woman did
kill him, it was not as though she would be cutting many years off his life.

But she was a mad one,
no doubt about it. He could smile casually at her but he avoided her eyes. They
burned, and there were fires there that would be raging when the world went
cold.

Dragonfly-kinden. He
didn’t know many of them. They had to go off the path of virtue early to become
wicked enough to end up in his business. Otherwise they were all peace and
light as far as he knew.
So where’d this waste-blasted
woman come from?

She was tall, almost as
tall as he had been when he could still stand straight and without need for a
cane. She kept herself cloaked but there was armour beneath it, and a blade
that seemed always in one hidden hand. But she had money and, when she had
talked to him, the money seemed to outweigh that drawn and hungry sword.

Now he wasn’t too sure.
He was going to be in real trouble if his contact didn’t show, and equally so
if the Empire had got wind of this deal and sent along more than he could
handle. Either way he guessed that her first move would be to stick him for it,
his fault or no.

Risk,
risk, risk.
He used to say he was getting too old for pranks like this,
but then he
had
got too old for it, and still not
given up the habit.

He hobbled back across
his backroom’s width, cane bending under his weight at each step. Propping it
against a table he took his clay pipe out and filled it, trusting that his age
would excuse any shaking of his hands. He had dealt with murderers, fugitives,
revolutionaries, professional traitors and imperial Rekef, but
this
woman, now, she gave him the shudders.

She called herself
Felise Mienn and, apart from the name of her mark, that was all he knew.

At last a Fly-kinden boy
dashed in, making everyone start.

‘He’s here, Master
Hokiak,’ the boy blurted out.

‘How many’s he got,
boy?’

‘Got three. Three and
hisself.’

‘Then get out of here,’
Hokiak advised him. As the boy dashed off again he looked about him at his
other lads. They were regulars of his and three were Soldier Beetle locals:
blue-grey-skinned and tough, wearing breastplates that had the old pre-conquest
red and black painted out. The fourth was an innocent-looking Fly-kinden who
could puncture a man’s eyeball with a thrown blade at twenty paces. They all
looked ready, relaxed. In contrast, Felise Mienn seemed to be shaking very
slightly and very fast. Hokiak decided that discretion was a good trait in an
old man, and poled himself behind the vacant bar counter.

The men who stepped in
were also locals, less well armoured but with swords at their belts and one
with a crossbow, its string drawn, hanging loose in his hand. They inspected
the room suspiciously, and then stepped aside for their patron.

After all the tension he
was an anticlimax: a plump Beetle-kinden with a harrowed expression who looked
as soft as they made them. He wore a cloak but the clothes beneath it were of
imperial cut and colour.

‘Draywain,’ Hokiak
greeted him from behind the bar. In a moment’s inspiration he added, ‘Fancy a
drink?’

‘Never mind the wretched
drinks. Where’s the money?’ Draywain demanded. He was some manner of Imperial
Consortium clerk, Hokiak gathered. He had been quite the big man under the
previous governor but, since that man’s mysterious death, the former
favourites, those who had survived him, had been having a hard time of it.
Sometimes a fatal time.