Dragonfly Falling (79 page)

Thadspar had been
intending to speak but the crowd just would not be silent, continuing to
thunder its approval for the saviours of the city. A junior artificer had
hurried forward and passed Thadspar a speaking horn, but there was not a device
invented that would have made his voice clear over that joyous throng, and so
he waited. Stenwold, who had always taken the old man for a shrewd politician,
saw tears in his eyes.

Back in a guest suite,
and under heavy guard, was Thalric – Major Thalric of the Rekef – who had
limped into the city with Stenwold’s name on his lips. Major Thalric, who had
nowhere else to go, by his own story, and so had finally come here.

‘What would I do with
you?’ Stenwold had asked him sharply. ‘We are enemies, you and I.’ He could not
rid himself of what this man had been ready to do to his niece Che, when she
had been in his clutches.

‘I have only enemies
left in the world,’ Thalric had admitted. He was a man fighting to control his
circumstances, not drowning but not swimming either. The next adverse wave
could swallow him. ‘The fact that I am sitting here talking to you shows that
you are less my enemy than those I once called friends. As for what I can do
for you, I know something about what the Empire may do next. I know a great
deal more than you about how the Empire does things.’

‘And how can I trust
you?’

‘You’ll never know if
you can,’ the Wasp had said, ‘and I’m sure that little traitress on your arm
will urge you to put me to death but, really, will you ever have a better
chance?’

Stenwold frowned, now,
in retrospect. He did not want this, to be here at the focus of all this cheer
and attention. Instead he needed to deal with Thalric and make his decision. He
hated unfinished business.

Still, if he put those
nagging thoughts aside, just for a moment, there was some strange satisfaction
in finding himself here in a jubilant scene that would surely be recorded in
history books to come. The saviours of Collegium, the defiers of Vek. Thadspar
stood with the other surviving members of the War Council, fewer than might
have been expected, and a handful of other citizens who had led the defence:
militia officers, stalwart merchants and artisans, and College artificers, even
Master Hornwhill, who had been so very reluctant for his inventions to be used
at all. Balkus stood shoulder to shoulder with the Tarkesh commander, Parops,
and beside them was the slighter, rangier form of Dariaxes, with his constant
copper smile. Then there was Teornis of the Aldanrael, dressed as soldier-gone-fop
in a gold breastplate, jewelled gorget and a helmet adorned with glittering
wings. His expression was one of modest contentment, which drew attention to
him far more than waving and grinning ever could. There were others, too, of
his own company: Scorpion, Fly, Dragonfly, Spider. The steps before the
Amphiophos were crowded today.

At last the crowd had
quieted enough for Thadspar to be heard, and he left it another beat before he
spoke.

‘Citizens of Collegium,
this day shall be recounted to our children so that it never be forgotten,’ he
said, his voice booming metallically from the horn. ‘To teach them, we must
learn many lessons ourselves. We might learn from this that we are strong in
ourselves, for it is true. Most important, we may learn that we are strong in
our friends – you see those around me, do you not? There is not one man or
woman standing before you who has not earned their place on these steps but, in
truth, if all who had earned such a place were given it, then we would need
steps that spanned our whole city! I see those before me who have shed blood
for their city. I see the peaceable citizens who took up the sword and the
crossbow without fear or complaint. This victory belongs to every one of us.

‘But look again at these
who stand beside me, familiar faces and strangers both. Our true celebration
must not be for the destruction of the Vekken who, but for their misguided
envy, should not even have been our enemies. Instead, it should be for this
alliance, this company you see before you. When else, in all the years this
city has stood, known as Collegium of the Beetles or even as Pathis of the
Moths so long before, has such a band of allies been ranged together? You see
here Ants from the city-states of Sarn and Tark who have fought side by side
for Collegium. You see lords of the Spiderlands, and the allies they have
brought with them whose faces have never been seen in our community before.

‘And more than this, I
look into your faces, and I see Fly-kinden, Mantis, even Moth. And more, I see
in my mind all the faces of those who cannot be with us, who have been cut down
in this war, and they were many, and of all kinden, and this day is also
theirs. We must never forget all those who gave everything for us. Where you
stand now there shall be a memorial carved, and I wish every one of you to
bring us the names of those you knew who fell, and each one shall have its
place. The gate of the west wall, whose shutters, I am informed, can never rise
again, shall never be reopened, and a new gate will be built where the Vekken
made their breach. In this way, by including it into the very structure of our
city, we shall never forget our friends, or our victory.’

Thadspar accepted a bowl
of wine from a servant, drained it, and handed it back, pausing a moment before
continuing.

‘Many of you will have
heard that in the east a new power is brewing,’ he told the crowd. ‘They are
Wasp-kinden, and they call themselves an Empire. You may even have heard that
they have taken the city of Tark for their personal possession, and we know
this is true. Their forces even now threaten Sarn.

‘We have never seen
their like before. Some of you may know that War Master Stenwold Maker has been
warning of their power for many years, and I say now, as Speaker for the Assembly,
that it is to our shame that we did not heed him sooner. The Wasps wish to see
us destroyed, and why? Why us? Look upon these men and women ranged beside me,
and that is your answer. All of us, standing here, we are the Lowlands entire,
and to conquer the Lowlands, their Empire must first conquer us!

‘We have won a battle,’
Thadspar told them finally. ‘We still must fight a war.’

Stenwold thought that he
should feel triumphant, that his warnings had finally been heeded, that
Collegium was at last committed openly to opposing the Empire. Instead he just
felt tired, heading back with Balkus and Arianna to speak once again to Thalric
– to interpret the foreign script of his prisoner’s face and try to master its
grammar.

‘Good speech,’ Balkus
rumbled beside him. ‘Of course, I’m not really Sarnesh any more. I did wonder
why they wanted me up there.’

Stenwold was about to
reply when he saw a young Beetle waiting to see him as he approached Thalric’s
suite.

‘Master Maker!’ he got
out. ‘There’s someone to see you. Says it’s urgent!’

Then a Fly-kinden had
bolted past him, virtually bouncing off from Stenwold before she had come to a
halt.

‘What’s—’ Stenwold
started, but Balkus got out, ‘Sperra!’

Stenwold stared at her,
seeing a thin and grubby Fly woman who looked as though she had neither eaten
nor slept for days.

‘But you were in Sarn .
. .’ he said stupidly.

Balkus knelt quickly
towards her, and Sperra leant against him gratefully. She looked half-dead with
exhaustion.

‘The Sarnesh have fought
the Wasps . . . field battle,’ she got out. ‘They lost, pulled out . . . when
the train got us back to Sarn we had news from here that the Vekken had been
turned. I got on a train to get here right away – didn’t stop for anything. I
brought the Moth-boy. He got himself hurt. They put him in a Wayhouse hospice
nearby.’

Something in her manner,
in the words left unsaid, had crept up on Stenwold, and now he said softly,
‘Slow down now. What about Cheerwell?’

‘Master Maker, I’m
sorry,’ she said. ‘Che was supposed to be in the last automotive off the field,
only . . . it never made it back to the city. I’m so sorry.’

It was the greatest
magic, from the very ebbing shores of the Days of Lore.

Here, within these
close-knit tree trunks, treading ancient paths through the forest, they came on
a moonless night. Tramping lines of grey-robed figures made their unfaltering
way through the pitch-dark with their heads bowed. There was a sense of
desperation about them, of tattered pride held up like a standard. How much had
already been lost, to have brought them to this state?

Watch
closely, little acolyte.

There were lamps ahead,
though dim: wicker baskets crowded with fireflies lending an underwater
radiance to the tree boles, and not even touching the shadows between them. Figures
waited there, tall and stark. There was black metal there, scale armour,
spearheads. This grove was sacred, and the idol to their Art that they kept
here was a mere stump, the relic of a thousand years of rot and busy agents of
decay. Around it the Mantis-kinden stood, like statues themselves, and with
some were the great hunched forms of their insect siblings, their killing arms
folded as if in silent contemplation.

Watch
closely, little neophyte.

In solemn procession the
robed men and women wound their way between the trunks to them. Night was all
around them, yet a dawn had come to the world that no shadows could resist.
This was the end of the Days of Lore, and across the Lowlands their dominion
was shrinking by the day. Their ancient cities were overthrown: Pathis, Tir
Amec, Shalarna and Amirra had fallen as the slaves rebelled, and not all their
craft, not all the killing steel of their Mantis soldiers, could stem that
tide. The slaves, the dull-witted and the ugly, the graceless and the leaden, had
cast them off. They had made themselves armour and terrifying new weapons, and
they had declared themselves free.

Pathis,
Tir Amec, Shalarna, Amirra.

And Achaeos’s mind
called up the counterparts: Collegium, Tark, Sarn and Myna. And how many more
had been the haunts of his own Moth people, that none now even remembered?

And when unity was most
needed there had been schism. Centuries of strife had held the Moth-kinden
together. They had raised armies against the Centipede-kinden who had erupted
from the earth. They had staved off or defeated the machinations of all the
other sorcerous powers: Spiders and Mosquitoes, the sly Assassin Bugs and the
ancient buried kingdoms of the Slugs. The revolt of the slaves had struck at
their very being, and they had flown to pieces. Some counselled peace, some
retreat and isolation. Factions and parties grew, and when blades were raised
they fell brother on brother, and all the while the inexorable tide of history
was sweeping them aside, leaving little sign that they had ever existed.

You
have seen some of our stones in Collegium that still stand, and the sewers at
Myna that the Mole Crickets built for us. What else remains?

And so this. At last,
this. This last attempt to summon the guttering forces of the old magic that
the Moths had once lived and breathed – this most ambitious of all rituals.
They were renegades, of course. Even those in Tharn or Dorax who advocated war and
bloody retribution would have nothing to do with this. These outcasts had vowed
to risk anything, to use up all the credit their kinden had amassed. They had
come to the Mantis-kinden with stories of revenge, and the warrior-race had
listened to them. Thus they had come here.

To
Darakyon.

To
the
Darakyon, Achaeos thought. The Darakyon is a forest. ‘Darakyon’ alone would be
a Mantis hold, and there is no such hold there.

But
there was.

Here was the hold of
Darakyon, seen in brief glimpses in the darkness between the trees, and here
was its heart, its idol, once as sacred as that of Parosyal, a place of
pilgrimage, of reverence.

They were gathered about
it now, those robed shadows, and the Mantis-kinden stood proud and strong,
their beast-allies beside them, and waited for the might of the Days of Lore to
smite the unbelievers, to fragment their minds and terrorize them.

It was the darkest and
the greatest magic ever plotted, to put a shadow on the Lowlands that would
last a hundred years, to shatter the spirits of the people of the daylight and
drag them down into slavery. A spell to taint the whole world and wash away the
revolution, even down to the ideas that had fermented it. A spell that would
sicken the world to their children’s children’s children, or for ever.

It was the greatest
magic, the darkest magic, and it went so terribly wrong.

I do
not want to see this
, Achaeos pressed, but the whispering chorus of
voices was unmoved.

You
could not understand, little seerling, so we must show you.

And he watched, without
a head to turn aside, without eyes to close, as the ritual reached its bloody
peak and the magic began to tear apart. He saw the deed that wiped the hold of
Darakyon from all maps and made the forest of that name into the place of dread
that even the lumberjacks of Helleron or the Empire would not approach, and he
screamed, but chill hands held him and forced him to see it all, every moment
of its demise.

And he saw what was done
to the men and women of Darakyon, and how they were made to linger beyond time
in that place, forever hating, forever vengeful and in pain.

But most of all he saw
what they made of the rotten idol, and all the unfathomable power and evil that
their ritual released. He saw it, small and deeply carved and potent beyond the
dreams of Skryres, and knew that it was abroad in the world again, a tool for
whatever evil hand should find it.