Dragonfly Falling (75 page)

And there was no more to
think about, no regrets, no worries, just the savage, simple business of
putting his blade into as many Vekken as he could reach. It was turned by
shields, turned by armour or by other blades, but he did not let up, stabbing
and cutting with a fury, because this was
his
city
and these were
his
people and if Collegium fell,
then the whole world fell with it into a dark age that would make the Age of
Lore seem like enlightenment.

He was dimly aware that
Balkus was now beside him, the only other man in the front rank without a
shield. Balkus, with a shortsword in each hand, battering down Vekken shields
with brute force, always keeping an eye out for Stenwold, as if some mindlink
had joined them in their extremity, so that he could anticipate each blow even
as Stenwold registered it, putting a sword in the way to deflect it.

They were losing ground,
but not as swiftly as they should. The sheer savagery of the Collegiate charge
had shaken the attackers, put them back on the shifting stones. Ant faces were
impassive at best, but Stenwold thought he could see something like bafflement
within their eyes. They were soldiers, superior in every way to this mixed-race
rabble that confronted them, so how could they be held up for even a single
minute? They locked shields and pressed, but they were confronted with men and
women who were totally cornered now, nothing to lose and nowhere to go. They
died, of course, those defenders of Collegium. Tradesmen were run through,
merchants wearing ill-fitting armour were hacked down, labourers and militamen
fell with crossbow bolts buried deep. There was not one of them who went
easily, though, and even as they fell they dragged at their enemies, pulled
their swords down, hooked shields with their fingers. A thousand acts of final
bravery and defiance, shaking the Vekken advance, if only for a moment.

And seeing this
hesitation, Stenwold’s heart soared with pride in his city, and a lunging Ant
laid his arm open and he fell back, sword falling from his grasp. Balkus killed
the man who had wounded him that same instant, and already a shield was raised
to take his place, but Stenwold was reeling, being passed back through the
crowd until he was standing clear, with Arianna descending on him and swiftly
tearing a strip off her robe to bandage him.

‘I can fight!’ he
insisted, but she dug her fingers into the wound until he stood still enough
for her to finish. ‘I can fight!’ he said again, looking round for a sword.

‘War Master!’ someone
was shouting and, feeling dizzy, he turned to look. A man he felt he should
recognize was running towards him, waving his arms. ‘War Master!’

‘I’m here! What news?’
He could barely hear himself over the fighting behind him.

He knew this man – one
of his own soldiers from the harbour guard—

His heart sank and he
could have virtually mouthed the words along with the man: ‘War Master! The
harbour! They’re coming in at the harbour!’

Stenwold turned, torn by
doubt, seeing the line surge back and forward, the final throes of Collegium’s
defence. He was responsible for the harbour, though, and there were people
needed there.

He hoped that Balkus
would be enough for them. The big Ant was still standing, splashed with blood,
working himself into a frenzy.

‘Take me there!’ he
commanded, and the harbour man ran off, leaving him to lurch in his wake, with
Arianna holding his good arm to help him along.

The sight that met him
at the harbour was worse than he had feared, though, and worse than he had
dreamed possible. There were already two tugs dragging the drowned armourclad
out of the way, and beyond it the sea was full of ships, painted across with
dozens of sails.

The bulk of the Wasps
could retreat far faster than the Ants could follow, and they took flight down
the rail track towards their camp, their rail automotives and their massed
artillery. The sentinels and many of the armoured shield-men, however, could
not simply fly away. Faced with no choice, and with a fierce desperation that
left a lasting impression on their enemies, they stood their ground, holding up
the Ant advance still further so that their comrades could escape. In a tight
square of armoured men, surrounded on all sides by the implacable Sarnesh
soldiers, they fought on with bitter determination until every last man of them
was dead.

The Ants re-formed their
lines, their shield-lined formations, with some of them that had sustained
heavy casualties breaking up to form new groups. Others near the back began to
move the wounded out. Two automotives had been smashed before the leadshotters
had been silenced, and a third had ground to a halt with artificers hurriedly
prying armour off to get at its engine. The Sarnesh went about reassembling
their battle order with the minimum of fuss, with calm deliberation. The Wasps
were allowed to fall back, to exhaust themselves in the panic of flight. The
Ants would follow at their own inexorable pace.

The warriors of the
Ancient League were another matter. They had not stopped when the Sarnesh had
redrawn their lines. They harried the Wasp-kinden mercilessly, chasing them in
the air, raking them with arrow-shot. It seemed at first that they might
continue their hunt all the way to Helleron. Che, trying to focus her telescope
on the nimble figures in green and grey, abruptly overshot them. There was
nothing but black and gold now in her field of view. She took the glass away,
trying to see what was going on.

The Mantids and their
allies were now falling back, surging to meet up with the plodding Sarnesh
lines. Beyond them the Wasps were making a new stand, rallying into another
wall of shields and ready airborne. Behind them . . .

She felt just then that
things had started to tip, although she could not have said why. She was no
tactician, but something spoke inside her.

A rail automotive had
pulled in to the broken end of the rails in a great plume of steam. More Wasp
soldiers were rushing out of it, hurrying forwards to join the battle.
Reinforcements from Helleron, she saw, but something new had communicated
itself to her. She could not be sure what.

There were Ants all
around. One word to them would be a word to the whole army. She had no words,
though. She had nothing she could warn them of.

Still.
‘You should take care,’ she said to the nearest Ant surgeon, ‘your people at
the front.’

He was washing blood
from his hands and he stared at her as if she were mad. Out on the field,
transport automotives were removing the bulk of the wounded. The worst would be
treated here, the rest removed to Sarn. The surgeons were hard pressed to keep
the pace.

‘The Queen is consulting
with her tacticians,’ the surgeon said suddenly, and Che realized that she had
been heard after all. The man’s eyes unfocused for a moment, and then he said.
‘We will press ahead. We must destroy them, drive them until they can fly no
more, and then wipe them out. We must break their siege engines in order to
protect our walls.’ He nodded. ‘It will be a long, hard fight.’ She realized
the last words were his, and the rest had been the Queen’s.

During the first clash
of the battle the Wasps had been able to bring forward more of their siege
train, another batch of leadshotters and a few of the smaller catapults that
could be wheeled out intact rather than needing assembly on the spot. The
Sarnesh automotives would have a harder time of it from now on. Even as Che
watched, the first artillery engines began to discharge, their shot mostly
flying wide or short, and the Sarnesh advance continued with the same patient
progress, the wide sweeping wings of scattered Mantids and Moths surging a
little ahead of it.

The next batch of the
wounded had now arrived, and she gave up her watching, went to do what good she
could with bandages and needle. It unnerved her, tending these wounded Ants.
They did not curse or scream, because each was taking strength from all the
others, from their suffusing solidarity. Somehow a show of pain would have been
more reassuring to her. All around her the Ant surgeons worked in skilled
communion, linked with each other and with their patients. It made Che feel
clumsy and awkward. They even gave her the least of the wounded to tend.

There was a moment – she
remembered it well later – when all the soldiers around them stopped, just for
half a second, all at once, and she knew that out on the battlefield something
new had happened. She tied off the wrapping on the man she had been working
with, and took up her glass again.

The Ant advance had
stopped as they tried to work out what had happened. The fresh Wasp troops from
the rail automotive had formed a double line ahead of them, but at a range that
a heavy crossbow would find stretching. They had loosed some manner of weapon,
though. The rattle of missiles had struck all the way along the Ant line, short
darts like nailbow bolts that had bounced from shields or got stuck in armour,
although a few unlucky soldiers had been injured in the face. Beside them, a
few of the lightly-armoured Mantids had fallen.

The Sarnesh started
their march again, the automotives grinding solidly along beside them. Wasp
artillery-shot was falling sporadically about them, and another of the armoured
vehicles was brought to a halt when a stone shattered its left track. The
advance was undaunted, though between the officers at the leading edge of the
Sarnesh army a quick analysis was taking place of what new weapons the Wasps
possessed and how they might work.

The twin archer lines of
the Wasps suddenly sprang forward in a flurry of wings, covering ten yards in a
great flying leap. It was a chaotic display, obviously unpractised. For a
moment they were everywhere, in utter confusion, and then they were struggling
to get themselves in place as the other troops, who had so recently fled, moved
forwards again to back them up.

As one the Ant soldiers
picked up their pace. The leading officers could see more of the weapons now,
and they seemed to be firepowder bows of some sort, like nailbows, but there
had been no smoke and no sound other than a distant crackle when they had
loosed.

Drephos had driven him
hard in order to be here now. It was only because the foundries of Helleron
were so well supplied, so easily turned to any mechanical endeavour, that it
had worked at all. Totho had been working day and night, and forcing his
workforce through the same punishing schedule. Towards the end he had allowed
them three or four hours of sleep at most. How they had hated him, the
halfbreed that fate had set over them, and now Dre-phos’s right-hand man.

The factories were still
working now, of course, but Totho had left them to the care of other hands.
Drephos had come to him one day, after his life had become just a murderous
round of unceasing manufacture, and told him, ‘It’s time.’

‘Time for what?’ Totho
had asked dully.

‘Time for the real test,
Totho.’ The master artificer had earlier been radiant with enthusiasm, eagerly
rubbing his disparate hands together. ‘The soldiers have practised. They are
passable, and the efficiency of your invention easily makes up for the
deficiency in their training. We are ready to take your gifts to General
Malkan.’

‘You want me to go with
you?’

‘Are you going to tell
me you don’t deserve it?’ Drephos had asked him. ‘Totho, I am very proud of
you. I made absolutely the right decision when I took you in. The least I can
do is let you witness your creations in action.’

Which
means the warfront.
Totho had opened his mouth, and a host of words had
thronged there, as he stood looking into Drephos’s expectant face.
I don’t want to go to war. I don’t want to see my work killing
other people.
But he had remembered Drephos’s words about hypocrisy.
I am a weaponsmith. I owe it to my victims to be there. As a
personal service.

‘I’ll go pack, Master,’
he had said, and Drephos’s answering smile had actually cheered him.

The rail journey would
have been intolerable had he not been so tired. They had crammed every soldier
they could into the pirated carriages, their kit, their supplies and
disassembled war engines, spare parts for fliers. It had been a mobile war
waiting ready to be deployed. Drephos and Totho had been given no more space
than the soldiers, huddling shoulder to shoulder with bad-tempered Wasp
artificers and officers. It would have been intolerable if Totho had not slept
through almost all the journey, awaking with an artificer’s senses only when
the automotive began to slow.

There had been a great
deal of babble at that point and when Totho had asked what was going on, a
gesture from Drephos had silenced him. The master artificer was already on his
feet, armoured hand clutching a leather strap to steady himself and listening
hard.

‘The battle’s just begun,’
he had announced. ‘We cut matters a little fine.’ Pitching his voice higher to
carry across the crowded carriage he had called out, ‘Now, listen, I have
orders! I want a messenger to bring General Malkan to me instantly. I want all
the snapbowmen ready to engage immediately. I want them drawn up in ranks
beside the rails, loaded weapons to hand. Pass the word back!’

Although the entire
journey had been a protracted grumble about Drephos and his presumption, when
he did give an order the officers moved briskly. The automotive ground to a
screeching halt and began spilling Wasp-kinden from every door, doing their
best to find their places. Totho could see the bulk of Malkan’s army trying to
re-form, evidently severely bloodied by the Sarnesh troops.
It’s exactly like the stories
, he thought,
arriving just in the nick of time to save the day.