Dragonfly Falling (9 page)

‘I’m no judge,’ the
Dragonfly admitted. ‘They’re like people who put big metal things together.
That’s about my limit.’

‘It’s an odd thing,’
said Nero, ‘but the best imperial artificers, in my experience, are Auxillians:
slave-soldiers or experts from the subject-races. True Wasps always prefer to
be proper warriors, which is more about the fighting and less the tinkering
around. I’ve had a good look out there and a lot of the big toys are in hands
other than the Wasps’.’

‘Can they be turned?’
Totho asked immediately. ‘They’re slaves, after all. If they turn on their
masters, with our help, they could escape into the Lowlands—’

Salma was shaking his
head and Nero chuckled. ‘You’d assume, with all their experience as
slave-owners, that the Wasps would have spotted that one, boy. Which is exactly
why they have. Any funny business from those poor bastards down there, and their
families will get to know about it in the worst way. And, besides, if some
platoon of Bee-kinden, hundreds of miles from home, does decide to go it alone,
you think they’ll be welcomed any, in Tark? Or anywhere else? And home for them
is now within the Empire’s borders, so any man jumping ship will never get to
see it again.’

Salma nodded. ‘I should
tell you something, I think, at this point.’

Nero and Parops
exchanged glances. ‘Go on, boy, don’t hold it in,’ the Fly-kinden prompted.

Salma’s smile turned
wry. ‘I didn’t come here just for Stenwold’s war, or even my own people’s war.
Not just to fight the Wasps, anyway.’

Totho nodded,
remembering. Salma had barely mentioned the lure that had drawn him on this
errand, which had originally been Skrill’s errand alone. Totho had almost
forgotten that himself, amidst the catalogue of his own woes.

‘Don’t keep us in
suspense,’ Nero said.

‘A woman, I’m afraid.’
Salma smiled brightly. ‘I came here after a woman.’

‘A Wasp woman?’ Parops
asked.

‘No, but I’m told she’s
with the camp. With some order of theirs, the . . . Grace’s Daughters, is it?
No, Mercy’s Daughters.’

‘Never heard of them.’
Nero said. ‘So what about it?’

‘I will be leaving Tark
at some point,’ Salma said, ‘whether your monarch approves or not. Because
she’s out there somewhere and I have to find her.’

Nero’s glance met that
of Parops. ‘Must be wonderful, to be young,’ the Fly grumbled. ‘I almost
remember it, a decade of making a fool of myself and getting slapped by women.
Marvellous, it was. Your mind seems set, boy.’

‘I mean what I say.’

‘Then at least choose
your moment,’ Parops said. ‘Work with the city and let us get to trust you.
Because there will be a sortie sooner or later. We’re not just going to sit
here and watch them ruin our walls, you realize.’

‘Forgive me, but so far
your city doesn’t seem interested in working with any of us,’ Totho pointed
out.

‘That was then,’ Parops
told him, taking the jug from Skrill and taking a swig from it. ‘Now you are,
nominally, on our side, and people want you to talk to them.’

Salma’s grin broadened.
‘Now that’s unfair. There was a delightful Ant-kinden lady earlier who wanted
nothing more than for me to talk to her.’

And at that there was a
rap on the door and, when Nero opened it, she was standing right there, the Ant
interrogator, staring straight at Salma.

Alder made a point of
not wearing armour. Not only should there be some privileges for a general, but
he hated being fussed over by slaves and servants, for with one arm he was
unable to secure the buckles.

The largest tent in the
Wasp encampment was not his living quarters but his map room. If assassins
chose to head for it at night in search of generals to kill then that was
entirely agreeable with him. He had sent a call out to his officers to join
him, and if he had known that an Ant tower commander had dubbed them
‘tacticians’ he would have found it highly amusing. The term might just fit
himself but, as far as planning this siege went, his was a perilously lonely
position.

He was a man made for and
unmade by war: lean and grey, though athletic still. He remembered a time when
the title ‘General’ was reserved for men commanding armies. Now back at the
imperial court there were generals of this and that who had never even taken
the field. In his mind he preserved the purity of the position.

He was of good family,
in fact. That had taken him to a captaincy. After that each rung of the ladder
had been hard-won, climbed under enemy shot, and slick with blood. His face had
a rosette of shiny burn-scar across nose and right cheek. His right arm had
been amputated by a field surgeon who had not expected him to live.

That surgeon still
received, at each year’s end, twenty-five gold Imperials from the amputee’s
personal coffers. General Alder remembered the competent and the skilled.

So
why
, he asked himself,
am I left with these misfits
as my command staff?
He lowered himself into one of the four folding
chairs, watching his staff file in. The Officer of the Camp was Colonel Carvoc,
an excellent administrator though an almost untried soldier, now seating
himself to the general’s left. His armour was polished and unblemished. To
Alder’s right came the Officer of the Field, Colonel Edric. Edric was a man of
strange appetites and humours. An officer of matchless family, he spent his
time amongst the hill-tribe savages that passed for shock troops in this army.
He always went into battle, by his own tradition, in their third wave. He even
wore their armour, and a chieftain’s helm with a four-inch wasp sting as a crest.
With coarse gold armbands and a mantle of ragged hide, he looked every inch a
tribal headman and not at all an imperial colonel.

The fourth chair
remained empty, but Alder’s third and most problematical colonel was usually
late and kept his own timetable. The general’s hand itched to strike the man
every time he saw him, but some talents were precious enough for him to suffer
a little insolence.
For now at least.

The others were
assembling in a semicircle before those seats: field brigade majors, the head
of the Engineering Corps, the local Rekef observer posing as military
intelligence. Behind them were the Auxillian captains from Maynes and Szar,
their heads bowed, hoping not to be singled out.

Still Alder waited,
whilst Colonel Edric fidgeted and played with the chinstrap of his helm.

His missing colonel
remained absent, but
she
came at last. He had not
ordered her to attend. Supposedly he could not, although he could have had her
marched into his tent or out of the camp any time he wished. Instead, he kept a
civil accord with her because an officer who was seen to drive away any of the
Mercy’s Daughters was an officer soon disliked by the men.

‘Norsa,’ he said,
although he had greeted none of the others.

‘General.’ Norsa was an
elderly Wasp-kinden woman in pale lemon robes, walking with the aid of a plain
staff. Alder’s respect for her was based in part on that staff and the limp it
aided, which had been gained in battle, retrieving the wounded.

‘Colonel Edric. The
morale amongst your . . . adherents?’ Alder asked.

‘Ready to make a second
pass on your word, General,’ Edric confirmed.

‘I suppose we should be
grateful that they’re all so stupid,’ Alder said, noticing the sudden crease in
Edric’s forehead.
The fool believes it. He’s gone native.
In that case it was an illness that time would soon cure.

‘Major Grigan. We lost
three engines, I counted.’

The Engineering Corps
major nodded, not meeting Alder’s eyes. ‘We can retrieve parts, and we have
enough spares in the train to construct six new from the pieces.’

‘Your estimation of
their defences?’

Grigan looked unhappy.
‘Maybe we could go against them again tomorrow. Don’t think we made too much
impression. Can’t be sure, sir.’

‘I want your opinion,
Major,’ Alder said sternly.

‘But he doesn’t have
one, General,’ snipped out a new voice, sharp and sardonic. Here was the errant
colonel at last and, despite the man’s usefulness, Alder always preferred a
meeting where he did not appear.

‘Drephos,’ Alder
acknowledged him.

‘He prefers to defer to
my opinions, since my judgment is sounder.’ The newcomer swept past Grigan with
a staggering disrespect for a man of his heritage. He wore an officer’s
breastplate over dark and decidedly non-uniform robes. A cowl hid his face.
‘General, the normal engines just won’t dent those walls.’

‘Well, Colonel-Auxillian
Drephos, just what do you suggest?’

‘I have some toys I’m
longing to set on the place,’ Drephos’s voice rose from within the cowl,
rippling with amusement, ‘but I’ll need the cover of a full assault to do so.
Specifically, throw enough men at those emplacements atop the towers, as their
crews are too skilled for my liking.’

‘Well we wouldn’t want
to see any of your toys broken,’ Alder said.

‘Not when they’re going
to win your war for you.’ With his halting tread Drephos took up the final
seat, on the other side of Colonel Carvoc. ‘We all know the plan, General,’ he
continued. ‘And the first part of the plan is to knock a few holes in those
walls of theirs. Give me the cover of a full assault and I’ll work my masterpiece.
Stand back and watch me.’

‘A full assault will
cost thousands of lives,’ Carvoc noted, ‘and it will be difficult to sustain it
for long.’

‘Don’t think I’ll need
all that long. Mine are exquisitely clever toys,’ Drephos said, delighted with
his own genius as usual. ‘I’d suggest that you start by putting your usual
tedious engines up front, give them something to aim at. While you’re at it,
give the archers on the inside something to think about. We all know
Ant-kinden: if it works, they won’t change it. Which always means they only try
to mend something
after
it breaks. And if something
breaks messily and finally enough, well, we artificers know that sometimes
things just can’t be fixed.’

Salma awoke as she
slipped from his bed. There was wan light spilling sullenly from the two slit
windows up near the ceiling, and it caught the paleness of her skin. He had
never known skin so pale, like alabaster with ashen shadows. In that grim,
colourless light she seemed to glow, picked out from all the surrounding room.

Her name, he recalled,
was Basila. Her second interrogation had been gentler than the first, and the
third, after the hours of night, gentler still. He had not believed, quite,
that these Ant-kinden even possessed a concept for the soft arts, as his people
called the intimate act. They seemed all edges and planes and cold
practicality. There had been heat aplenty, though, until he wondered just how
many women across the city he was making love to simultaneously. She was
stronger than he was, and fierce, constantly wresting control from him, an
officer commandeering a civilian. For a man used to casually seducing women, it
had been quite an experience.

He watched, eyes half
open, as she pulled on her tunic and breeches. She was lacing her sandals
before she noticed his watching attention.

‘You might as well
sleep,’ she said.

‘I’m awake now. It’s
dawn already?’

‘It is. I have duties.’

He watched as she
shrugged on her chainmail, twisting for the side-buckles from long practice. He
knew, or at least suspected, that they would not lie together again, that it
had been merely curiosity that had drawn her to him. For his part it had been,
at least, a way of showing the world and this city that his destiny had not
escaped entirely from his own grasp.

Back in Collegium his
liaisons had been the titillation and scandal of the Great College, scandal
most particularly among those he had passed over or those who would have
indulged in the same liaisons if they had dared. The strait-laced of Collegium
would not have believed it, but Salma’s own kinden had a strict morality of
coupling. It divided the world of the preferred gender into two parts, not
based on race or social standing or anything other than the subjective feelings
of the individual concerned: sleep where you wish, amongst those who mean
little to you, and amongst those to whom you mean little. Amuse yourself as you
will, but with those close to you, those who love you or those you love, bestow
your affections only where they are sincerely meant.

He had never elaborated
on this creed for Collegium, for there it would not have been understood. He
had never lain with Tynisa who had, he knew, wanted it. Particularly he had
never lain with Cheerwell, who would have agreed, for all the wrong reasons, if
he had asked.

Basila buckled on her
sword and, seeing Salma smiling at her, ventured a small one of her own.

‘Off to a hard day’s
beating people?’ he asked, and her smile slipped. He assumed it was annoyance
at him, but then she said, ‘It is dawn. The enemy is advancing on the walls.’

He dressed as fast as he
could, his belongings having been returned to him. He took up the stolen Wasp
sword without even buckling on a scabbard. Basila was now gone to join her unit
or await prisoners or whatever she had to do. She had left him to cower here
behind doors like the slaves of Tark and await his fate, and that cut deep.

He found Totho emerging
from the next-door room just as he left. For a second he had time to wonder
whether the halfbreed artificer had heard anything of the previous night’s
activities, before recalling that Basila, of course, had been silent
throughout.

So
Totho heard nothing but the whole city knows we did it.
He had to grin
privately at that.

‘What’s going on?’ Totho
asked sleepily.

‘The Wasps are attacking.
Get your sword and bow.’