Dragonfly Falling (71 page)

‘We have to go in,’
Nicrephos insisted. ‘
Please
, Master Maker.’

‘Are we expecting
trouble here?’ Balkus hefted the nail-bow. ‘Want me to send Master Briskall a
warning shot?’

‘No!’ Stenwold snapped.
He did not understand why this whole venture felt like something criminal, but
maybe Doctor Nicrephos’s furtive manner was beginning to infect all of them. ‘I
am a Master of Collegium, therefore we’ll knock.’ He turned to say more to the
Moth, but the grey-skinned old scholar was wringing his hands and silently
baring his yellowed teeth.

‘Well if you want to do
things the hard way,’ Balkus muttered, ‘I’ll get them out of bed.’

The big Ant went up to
the reinforced door and his fist descended, a single booming thud that had the
door already swinging open on its hinges. The others crowded forwards
instinctively.

‘Oh—’ the big man said,
and then swept back one arm, knocking all three of them, even Stenwold, off his
feet. A second later there was a flash, and Balkus staggered back, tripped on
Stenwold and sprawled out in the street.

‘That was a Wasp sting!’
Arianna cried out. Nicrephos was desperately trying to get up.

‘Balkus?’ Stenwold
called in dismay.

The Ant sat up, a patch
of his chainmail now fused together over his chest. ‘Bastard!’ he shouted, and
unslung his nailbow.

‘They are trying to
steal it!’ Nicrephos shouted in alarm. ‘We must stop them! Please, Stenwold!’

‘All right!’ Stenwold
drew his sword, took a second to steel himself, and then flung himself in. The
expected bolt sizzled past him and he hit the floor awkwardly, trying to roll
away. A moment later the very floor seemed to shake as Balkus discharged his
nailbow three times through the doorway, and then moved in to take cover behind
a side-table whose exquisite vase he had just shattered. They were in an
entrance hall with a door at the far end, and another in each of the long side
walls. Stenwold saw movement ahead as the unknown Wasp drew back, and he took
advantage of this. All of a sudden he was no longer tired, no longer the War
Master, but just Stenwold Maker and free to make his own mistakes, with his own
life as the only stake.

The Wasp, out of uniform
in a long coat, reappeared with his hand spread, but Stenwold was already far
too close and moving too fast for that to work. He had knocked the arm up
before the man loosed his sting, and cannoned into him with enough force to
send them both sprawling. Stenwold had the better of the collision and already
had his sword stabbing down at his opponent. The Wasp twisted agilely out from
under him so that the point of the descending blade chipped the floor tiles,
but Stenwold managed a quick reverse and caught the man under the chin with his
pommel as he tried to rise, sending the Wasp reeling backwards.

‘Beware!’ he heard
Nicrephos croak. ‘Someone here has power!’

Stenwold smacked the
Wasp across the back of the head with his sword-hilt, sending him back to the
ground, and then something snaked past him and caught about his throat. Its
claw hooked sharply into his armpit, dragging him off balance.

A
grapple!
he realized, before seeing a stocky Fly-kinden across the room
holding the other end of the rope he was just about to pull. Trying to brace
himself, Stenwold got one hand on the rope about his neck, so that he was only
pulled off his feet and not strangled with it. Then Balkus burst in with the
others right behind him.

The rope tightened, the
barbed tines digging into him, and then the Fly had a shortsword drawn and was
flying straight towards him, even as Stenwold choked and tried desperately to
dislodge the hook. Balkus was . . .

Balkus was staring
strangely, his nailbow hanging loose in his hands. Stenwold shouted at him for
help, but his face had gone slack, utterly devoid of expression.

The Fly was abruptly
crouching on top of him, his sword clutched in both hands like an outsized
dagger. Stenwold groped for him, seeing only a careful concentration on the
man’s flat face. With one hand still on the entangling hook, Stenwold got his
other hand on one of the Fly’s wrists. For a moment the man was pushing down
against him, the tip of the sword descending until it touched Stenwold’s chest.

There was a woman
pointing at Balkus, a Moth woman. She was approaching him with a dagger in one
hand, but her other was directed at him, so that the power of her Art held him
immobile as she approached. She was speaking words that Stenwold could not hear
and the big Ant just stared back at her with a glazed expression. In the Moth
woman’s hand the dagger’s glistening blade was smeared with something black.
She was smiling all the while.

With a supreme effort
Stenwold halted the sword’s further descent, locking his own arm and pushing up
against the smaller man’s wrist whilst still hauling at the hook with his free
hand. The Fly-kinden’s teeth were bared in a snarl and he was remarkably strong
for one of his small kind. Suddenly he grinned and simply took up the sword one-handed,
leaving Stenwold clutching the useless wrist of an empty hand. Stenwold yanked
at it furiously, putting the man off his stroke so that the sword just clipped
his ear, but then the Fly’s wings flashed out to steady him, and he drew the
blade back for one final strike.

Arianna’s knife flashed,
and the Fly-kinden arched backwards, the weapon spinning from his hands. She
struck again and again in fierce desperation as he screamed and bucked,
knocking himself off Stenwold’s chest. For a moment he was scrabbling about on
the floor to retrieve his dropped sword, his back now a welter of red, and then
finally she drove her blade into his side up to the hilt with a cry of
revulsion.

Stenwold was aware of
Doctor Nicrephos shouting something, and he felt a wave of cold surge through
him that had every hair on his body standing on end. The Moth woman cursed in
frustration, and lunged her dagger forwards just as Balkus snapped out of his
trance. It was a hasty blow she delivered that skittered harmlessly from his
mail, and in automatic response the nailbow boomed, sending her flying
backwards with a bloody hole punched all the way through her.

‘Stenwold!’ the old Moth
cried. ‘Help me!’ Stenwold staggered to his feet, looking around for the old
man. For a brief moment he saw Doctor Nicrephos wrestling with a shadowy
figure, and then a blade flashed and the Moth was reeling back, his robe
bloodied. Stenwold had a brief glimpse of a Spider-kinden man – no, a
Spider-kinden woman? It was impossible in that moment to tell. He roared out a
challenge, and Balkus shot another bolt at the same time, but the Spider dodged
nimbly, running for the open door with something under his – or her – arm. As
Stenwold charged, she – it was definitely a she – turned and flung something at
him that struck him in the chest and instantly he was falling, tangled and
stuck in strands of fine, sticky silk. A moment later, the Wasp-kinden man was
running after the Spider, slipping through the door just before Balkus’ nailbow
destroyed the doorframe in three separate places.

Arianna crouched by him,
her eyes wide. ‘Who was that?’ she gasped. ‘What is going on?’
Only Doctor Nicrephos knew that
, Stenwold thought
painfully, for he could still see the old man from where he lay, and there was
no doubt that the Moth was dead.
As for who that was,
though . . . surely it can’t be . . .
It could
not
be, he decided. It must be some other of the same order, for Achaeos had sworn
that he had killed the face-shifting spy who had plagued them in Helleron.

A
spy in Helleron. A spy in Myna. Now a spy in Collegium.
The coincidence
was there already, so how much further for it to have all been the work of one
man – or one woman? And how difficult was it for a master of disguise to play
dead?

Arianna was patiently
disentangling him from the Art-made web, and after a moment Balkus joined them,
slotting a fresh magazine into his nailbow.

‘Any idea what they got
away with?’ he asked.

‘None,’ said Stenwold
helplessly. ‘And no understanding of this at all.’ He took a good long time to
recover his breath, leaning back against a wall of Briskall’s entrance hall,
staring mournfully at the body of Doctor Nicrephos, whose last desperate
request had cost the old man his life – and achieved nothing. Arianna crouched
beside him protectively, her head on his shoulder. She had saved his life, he
realized. He had hardly noted it in all the confusion, but the Fly-kinden would
have had him if she had not stabbed the man first. Spiders played deep games,
but he allowed himself to hope that this was it, this was all, and at last the
womanly concern she presented to him was the Arianna that really was.

He was unspeakably
grateful for her company at that bleak moment.

There was the dead Moth
woman to consider, as well. This mixed bag of raiders had all the hallmarks of
a mercenary team. The presence of a Wasp did not guarantee they were imperial,
nor did it seem likely they were Vekken.

It was all rather more
than he could disentangle.

He heard Balkus’s
clumping tread, and then the big Ant was back with yet another body slung over
his shoulder. As he lowered it to the floor Stenwold saw an elderly
Beetle-kinden who had been killed by a single knife-blow to the back of the
neck.

‘Master Briskall
was
at home then,’ Stenwold said weakly. ‘What else did
you see through there?’

Balkus shrugged. ‘Bit of
a mystery, Master Maker. There’s a nice big lock on this door, and all manner
of stuff behind it that any thief would go out of his mind to steal. Some of
it’s in locked cages or behind glass, but there’s plenty there just for the
grabbing, only they didn’t.’

‘We interrupted them?’
Stenwold suggested.

‘That Spider had
something with her when she ran off,’ Balkus pointed out, and he had obviously
made his mind up about the sex of the escapee. ‘There’s one thing gone,
something square and about so big.’ His hands made a shape no more than six
inches to each side. ‘It was just out on a stand, though – nothing this old boy
wanted locked away.’

‘Just an opportunistic
grab, maybe,’ Stenwold suggested, but an odd thought came to him:
Or something Master Briskall did not know the value of.

The three of them then
carried the bodies of Briskall and Doctor Nicrephos to the nearest infirmary,
although they were both beyond all healing. Stenwold told a reliable-looking soldier
about the other bodies, and advised that Briskall’s house should be secured
against thieves. Then the three of them returned to Stenwold’s home, to find a
messenger waiting on his doorstep with even worse news.

Scyla realized, as she
left, that her only regret was that Gaved had escaped. She worked alone for
preference, so she had taken no joy in the company the Empire had forced on
her.

And she had no intention
of sharing a reward with anyone. If this box was so important, then the Wasps
would just have to pay the full amount to her alone.

Within a street she had
taken on the guise of a portly Beetle woman, easy enough to do under cover of
darkness, and was heading towards the nearest city wall. Getting through the
Vekken lines would be harder, but she was adept at her craft.

Though heavily carved,
the box was otherwise as unassuming as she had been told, but she had been
given no time yet to make a detailed examination. If she could find out what
was so special about it, then maybe she could raise the asking price. The
Empire had a lot of money to throw around, and with a thousand faces at her
disposal she had no worries about making enemies. Perhaps she should even
impersonate Gaved? Now that would be amusing.

She guessed that Gaved
would now be circling the streets looking for her, but between her disguise and
his pitiful Wasp eyes, he had no chance at all. He would give up in the end and
get himself out of the city before dawn, heading back to the imperial masters
he constantly disavowed but would never quite escape.

Some part of the back of
her mind was aware that those who had originally taught her would despair at
her behaviour. Theirs was a noble and ancient calling of spies, and now she was
a mere profiteer prostituting the gifts they had awakened in her just for spite
and for gold. She had long ago lost sight of any higher goals she might have
had, any lasting achievement she could make. Now it was just the getting and
the gaining and, most especially, the joy of outwitting – making bigger fools
of all the fools out there, who looked no further than another’s face.

She reached the city
wall and stood close to it, seeing no one around, no airborne shape hovering
above. Calling on her Art she swiftly scaled the stonework, hands and booted
feet clinging easily to its smooth stone. Flat against it, near the top, she
waited as a sentry passed by, with eyes only for the Vekken camp beyond. She
crawled onto the walkway and the battlements and, like a shadow, face
downwards, to the earth below.

Now came the real
challenge. She could have crept from darkness to darkness, and thus avoided the
Vekken lanterns, but she wanted to complete her victory. She wanted to fool a
whole army.

She focused her
concentration and changed her face and form, taking on the obsidian hue of a
Vekken Ant, even down to the dark chainmail and helm. Ants could not be fooled
by mere appearances amongst their own kind, though, and she stretched her
powers and gifts, feeling tensions and strains within her mind as she worked
with it, reaching out towards something that was a distant and foreign concept,
an ideal, a mere idea, but something that was the fount of Ant-kinden Art.

And the night was full
of voices. She heard the rapidly passed reports of sentries, the chatter of
artificers working on the artillery, questions from officers, and the
complaints of a few who simply could not get to sleep, and she walked into it
and, when she was seen, she simply greeted them, mind to mind, as any Ant
would. If they had asked her questions it might have been difficult, in an army
where any stranger could be identified so quickly, but it never even occurred
to them to be suspicious, for she was doing the impossible, counterfeiting them
so well that they could not conceive that she was not one of them.